国際会議(英文)
第1セッション
The Kosovo Conflict: The Role of International Organizations and Security Structures1
by Victor-Yves Ghebali
In March 1989, the large autonomy enjoyed hitherto by the province of Kosovo within the Yugoslav Federation was abolished, forcefully and unlawfully, by the leadership of Serbia without triggering any significant reaction from the international community. Two basic reasons had to be accounted for that lack of reaction. First, at the time, very few outside experts realized that end of Kosovo's autonomy (and also of Voivodina's) represented the starting point of the disintegrative process of the Yugoslav Federation. Second, the Kosovo issue was generally perceived as a purely internal Yugoslav matter. However, three years later, in autumn 1992, the international community began to address the Kosovo issue in the framework of the management of the Yugoslav armed conflicts. Accordingly, a number of international institutions―in particular the UN, the OSCE, the European Union, NATO and the Contact Group―were called to bring, separately or in bilateral or multilateral co-operation, a direct contribution. From 1992 to nowadays, their intervention took four successive forms: preventive diplomacy, mediation/conciliation, military coercion and peace-building. Before analyzing each of those rubrics, it would be relevant to examine the specific nature of the Kosovo conflict.
The Nature of the Conflict
The Kosovo conflict can be approached from three complementary perspectives:
historical, legal and anthropological.
History
Ethnic Albanians and Serbs are sharply divided over a historical debate revolving around a question to which nobody is in a position to give an irrefutable answer: who first populated the challenged territory? The Albanians consider themselves as the direct off-springs of the Illyrians―the indigenous inhabitants of Kosovo who allegedly populated the territory several centuries before the arrival of the Slavic tribes in the Balkans. The Serbs reject that thesis as pure fallacy and argue that Kosovo was an empty territory when they occupied it: the Albanians tribes (which according to them were then entrenched in the surrounding mountains) only arrived in Kosovo after the Turkish conquest and also after the 1690 mass exodus of the Serbs to Austria-Hungary.
International Law
Kosovo offers a paradigmatic illustration of the opposition between the principle of self-determination of peoples and the principle of territorial integrity of States. After the disintegration of the Yugoslav Federation, the ethnic Albanians gradually came to the conclusion that independence, on the basis of the principle of self-determination of peoples, would be the only fair solution. The leadership of the rump Yugoslavia adamantly rejected that claim on the ground that positive international law does not recognize to national minorities a right to secession and that, according to a standard United Nations practice, only peoples living under colonial domination or other forms of domination (foreign occupation, racial discrimination apartheid-type situation) are entitled to exercise the right of self-determination.
