By Colum Lynch
Scholars say the US-led intervention in the Balkans, while perhaps morally defensible, has set a dangerous precedent that may embolden other independence-minded peoples to press for statehood. It also has prompted other brutalized ethnic minorities to complain that the United States is practicing a double standard. ''We feel like the orphans of history,'' said Bakhtiar Amin, an ethnic Kurd and human rights advocate for what has been described as the world's largest stateless ethnic group. ''No nation is willing to help us.''
There are ample examples of ethnic minorities enduring even crueler treatment than the Kosovars for aspiring to create their own states. And brutal ethnic cleansing campaigns from Turkey to Rwanda, where more than half a million were murdered by the former government in 1994, have failed to trigger foreign intervention.
''Consistency is not always a necessary requirement to project power,'' said Clovis Maksoud, a specialist on the Middle East at American University in Washington. ''You have the world's only superpower saying, `I, the United States, am the leader of the world'' on the one hand, ''but I'm not the global policeman.'' The political calculus used to make that distinction is often influenced by matters of race, power politics, and a need to preserve American credibility, specialists said.
In Africa, where mass killings are taking place from Sierra Leone to the Congo, the United States has steered clear of military intervention. In Chechnya, Russia faced little official criticism from the United States as its troops killed tens of thousands of rebels and civilians in an effort to quash their drive for independence.
Turkey, a member of the military alliance bombing Serbs, has killed tens of thousands of Kurds and burned more than 3,000 Kurdish villages over the last decade without serious political repercussions in Washington, according to human rights advocates. Even the Serbs, the villains of the current Balkan crisis, have been victims of ethnic cleansing. In 1995, Croatian forces drove more than 150,000 Serbs from the province of Krajina.
While former US ambassador Peter Galbraith protested the action at the time by climbing a tractor ferrying refugees to the border, NATO airplanes were never called in to save the Serbs. ''You can't devise hard and fast rules; it is the sum of circumstances,'' said Galbraith. ''We don't intervene in Chechnya because Russia has nuclear weapons and it's a major power. And NATO won't intervene in Kashmir or East Timor.''
Galbraith challenged the notion that NATO's support for the Kosovar Albanians would spur other independence movements. ''This is a European issue and the possibility of further Balkanization is finite,'' he said. ''The Basques and the Flemings and the Walloons are not going to secede.''
A spokesman for the Pakistan mission to the United Nations, Salman Abbasy, said NATO's intervention in Yugoslavia was sure ''to promote'' similar action by other powerful countries. When the Pakistani government sought to put down a secessionist movement by a breakaway province of East Pakistan in 1971, India invaded on the grounds that it was seeking to prevent the flow of refugees and halt a humanitarian crisis. Before they left, they had created a new state: Bangladesh. In the case of Kosovo, US officials said they have been driven to war by a mix of humanitarian concerns and a desire to prevent the war from spreading.
While Washington maintains that it opposes Kosovo's independence, State Department spokesman James P. Rubin has hinted that it may be inevitable, given the diminishing prospect that the Serbs and Kosovars ''can begin to live together.'' David Phillips, a political analyst at Columbia University, said that international law contains a built-in tension pitting the rights of sovereign states against self-determination movements. And it has dogged American presidents from Woodrow Wilson to Bill Clinton.
Throughout the Cold War, Washington's position was colored by broader strategic concerns. The United States continued to provide military and political support to its Cold War ally, Indonesia, despite its brutal suppression of independence seekers in East Timor. With the end of the Cold War, Washington has changed its tune.
Phillips cautioned that ''other groups should not take heart from NATO intervention and presume support from the international community for self determination movements. We are not backing independence movements; we are using force to back diplomacy.''
