When to break up nations?

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=10259437

The
EU, UN, and other relevant parties are considering granting autonomy to
the Kosovo region of Serbia. Of course this would serve to separate
hostile ethnicities after the brutalities last decade, but I am not
sure if there is a proper way to go about slicing up nations. And even
if there was a sound approach, do we have the prudent, objective
leaders and diplomats to execute the plan properly without causing new
tensions?

I
guess it’s like affirmative action and “victor’s justice” – how do you
assist an underprivileged group at the expense of another group that
may or may not be responsible for the other’s situation? The last time
this issue came up was the case of East Timor splitting from Indonesia
due to similar ethnic injustice concerns. The UN did step in and grant
the Timorese their own nation, but it has been anything but smooth
sailing since. Of course a previously impoverished, stateless people
can’t suddenly learn to govern overnight, and clashes for power among
rival gangs and factions ensued, leading many observers to conclude
that Timor was a failed state from birth, or at least destined for
civil war. UN advisors, peacekeepers, and many resources were deployed
to assist the infant nation’s development, but obviously they have not
achieved the desired results.

http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2006-05-26-easttimor_x.htm

It’s
a big responsibility to redraw borders and tell people where to live. I
guess in the old times, nations in the aftermath of war would sit down
at the table and decide who would get what land as part of the peace
agreement, and the locals just had to accept it. But how do we do the
same thing today? When is there “enough” ethnic cleansing or injustice
to warrant international intervention or redress? Obviously the UN is
overstretched and can’t, won’t, and shouldn’t send peacekeepers to
every global flashpoint. And as much as the UN would like to do
something about the humanitarian crises in occupied Palestine, Sudan,
and Iraq, they can’t because the situation is too dangerous to risk
personnel, and often times the occupying military will not grant them
access. And let’s not delude ourselves into trusting the UN to be a
competent, effective organization 100% of the time. Although there are
many methods, strategies, and schools of thought regarding
international relations and conflict resolution, it’s definitely and
imprecise science. With numerous nations involved in UN missions, each
with competing priorities, too many chefs may spoil the meal. I guess
this is the by-product of democracy and cooperation, but surely it’s
much better than not talking at all, as Bush is doing with Iran.

Another
consequence is a loss of respect and legitimacy for NATO, the UN, and
other international bodies after the outrage and botched efforts in
Korea, Yugoslavia, Congo, Rwanda, Somalia, Palestine, Timor, and more
recently Lebanon/Iraq/Afghanistan. I think many poor peoples and
victims of war around the world don’t trust the UN/NATO and may even be
hostile to them, assuming they are agents of Western imperialism with
ulterior motives. And let’s be honest; NATO and the EU wouldn’t give a
crap about the suffering Bosnians/Kosovars if it wasn’t happening on
their back porch and disrupting commerce and stability. Heck, some
studies have suggested that ethnic cleansing in Kosovo actually
INCREASED due to NATO bombings (which did much less damage to Serb
infrastructure/materiel than was boasted), and NATO was aware a priori
that this outcome would happen. Former NATO commander Wesley Clark
attested to as much and apologized for the Kosovo situation.

Many
nations are distancing themselves or even shunning the World Bank and
IMF, also cynically viewed as exploitative usurers after fiascos such
as African debt relief, the Asian market collapse, and Wolfowitz.
Granted that any place where the UN grudgingly decides to send
aid/troops is already FUBAR, the organization has had a dismal track
record of making a difference for the better. Of course the UN is much
better at responding to disease or natural disasters, such as the
earthquake in Pakistan or the tsunami in the Indian Ocean (which was
probably one of their finest hours). Still criticism arose from the UN
responses, and some people never got the help they were promised. I
guess you can’t please everyone, it’s hard to fight through ponderous
UN bureaucracy to get stuff done quickly, and the burden of unrealistic
expectations is on them to magically “fix everything”. In the case of
the AIDS epidemic or Asian tsunami, the world was definitely better off
with the UN’s help than without. But I’m not so sure about
“peacekeeping operations” and nation building, where they may do more
harm than good. It’s a hard job to begin with, and virtually impossible
if the locals don’t trust the intervening parties, as we know from our
struggles in Vietnam and Iraq.

So
what to do about it? We can’t just sit idly by as peoples butcher each
other. But we do no good by imposing our Western will upon them and
force them to conform to our “standards of behavior”. Maybe there is a
middle ground. Even if the locals do give us full authority to redraw
maps and transfer populations around, we are so bad at it that we will
probably cause as many future divisions as we solve (i.e. the land-grab
and fighting in Israel-Palestine, post-communism Yugoslavia/USSR, the
DMZ in Korea, and warlords in Somalia). The role of the UN in conflict
resolution has become so convoluted that in their current mission to
southern Lebanon, can you believe that accused terrorists Hizbullah,
and not the Lebanese military, is the only group the UN peacekeepers
really trust to protect them from Al Qaeda-linked Sunni militants?

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=10305632

Although
the Biden solution to partition Iraq into three semi-autonomous ethnic
zones is attractive, I also worry that similar side-effects may emerge
down the road. Bluntly separating people (like the Berlin Wall) is only
a stopgap measure if you don’t address the root causes of why the
people are upset. Say the UN does grant Kosovo autonomy (and the
Kosovar Albanians may prematurely declare it anyway if the official
negotiations stall, which might lead to renewed fighting), and all of a
sudden Kosovar Albanians are vengefully persecuting the Serb minority
within their new borders, then what? Say other Albanian minorities in
neighboring nations rise up and demand their independence too? And what
about Serbia that is the big loser in the deal? Many Serbs never hurt
anyone, so why are they punished for what their bad leaders did a
decade ago (and very few war crimes have even made it to trial)? How do
they get compensated? The same scenario can play out for any stateless
minority such as the Basques, Corsicans, Sikhs, Tamils, Tibetans, or
Kurds. Deciding which people get a state and which don’t (i.e. Jews and
Palestinians) really opens up Pandora’s Box. But hopefully we have a
lot of smart, dedicated people trying to resolve these issues fairly,
though as I said before – we can’t foolishly expect the UN to make all
the problems disappear before our eyes.

Disgruntled
peoples around the world might just have to accept that they need to
live peacefully in heterogeneous nations and find a way to compromise
on differences, because we can’t just divide up the world into a bunch
of ethnic mini-states. Plus I’m sure an ethnically pure state will have
as many conflicts and issues as a diverse one, and there is no such
thing as “ethnic purity” really (Hitler wanted the Third Reich to be
totally Aryan yet he may have had some Jewish ancestry). You can’t just
defer problems forever with stopgap measures like barriers and
peacekeepers. Eventually a just solution has to be achieved if there is
enough political will and urgency. Eventually different groups have to
realize that they can’t have it all at the expense of others, and
sometime when you give a little you get a lot back. Wishful thinking
huh?

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good
fences make good neighbors? i don't think so! problem with fences and
borders is there is always something there to lob a egg over. the wall
in palestine, the walls going up in bagdhad, the wall in berlin, the
wall between the US and mexico, they all create separations of people
so they can then demonize the faceless people on the other side. also,
if you read chomsky about timor, you would realize that the real
problem with being an outsider who comes in and puts up walls between
conflicting groups is that we almost always give one side weaponry,
like we did with the indonesians and like we're doing with israel and
gaza. i would think the conflicts would be greatly reduced between two
factioning sides if we didn't always give people arms. it turns a fire
into a raging inferno.

--------------

Yes
completely. It's totally hypocritical for us to talk about peace and
freedom when we're the #1 or #2 arms exporter in the world. We thrive
on conflict, even if it puts Americans in mortal danger. We make war
where it doesn't need to be! As you said, Indonesia is a bad case of
the Nixon and Ford admins supporting ethnic cleansing. At least
Indonesia is gradually reforming these days, though every election is a
question mark and there are plenty of seperatist groups. Recently
the bad news out of Palestine got me so frustrated with the status quo
so I had to vent. I know Africans, Cambodians, and Native Americans
have suffered horribly over the years, but to me Palestinians are the
hardest luck case. Screwed over by their leaders and everyone else.
Deprived of life, liberty, homes, and DIGNITY. Of course it's never
justified to blow up a cafe full of innocents no matter your grievance
(unless you're an extremist Jew in postwar Palestine fighting for the
creation of Israel apparently), but you can understand why people go to
these lengths. Jews, Christians, and Palestinians were coexisting
peacefully in the Holy Land for decades, but all of a sudden you dangle
in front of their noses this notion of "exclusive national homeland"
and they go bonkers and don't want to share the land as UN 181
declared. Why can't extremist Muslims accept non-believers or different
believers? Why do Jews have to only have a Jewish-majority nation? Why
does France need a "ministry of French identity"? Why do we have such
schizophrenic immigration laws? Usually when race/ethnicity merges with
national identity, bad things happen (like Nazi Germany). As you said,
maybe there is this human compulsion to segregate and compartmentalize
each other, like dogs pissing on fences to mark territory to keep out
rivals. ------------- http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/6681457.stm

Whoops,
this doesn't help the whole UN peacekeeping mission credibility issue.
But I doubt much will happen since Pakistan is the top provider of
troops to the UN, and I doubt Secretary General Moon wants to rub them
the wrong way. Besides, only the home nation can discipline its
peacekeepers; the UN has no teeth in that regard.