Word: secessionists
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...State Council, affairs of state continue nonstop. Seven days a week, from 8:30 a.m. until well after midnight, Shevardnadze is on the job, working the battery of telephones on his desk beneath a silver icon of the madonna and child. On Monday fighting broke out again in the secessionist region of Abkhazia. On Tuesday Russian forces killed several Georgian guardsmen in the Abkhazian capital. Wednesday, hard-line nationalists attempted to open a new front in eastern Georgia. On Thursday Shevardnadze flew to Moscow to negotiate another Abkhazian cease-fire. The endless string of crises has set back his goal...
Following the lead of French President Francois Mitterrand, Bush pledged to send "whatever it takes," including U.S. fighter bombers and helicopter gunships, to protect food shipments to besieged civilians in secessionist Bosnia-Herzegovina. At a dinner of foreign ministers in Munich, Secretary of State James Baker told France's Roland Dumas that the U.S. was ready to make other major concessions to win a trade agreement if France would make deep and rapid cuts in farm subsidies. Would Paris reciprocate? "No," Dumas replied. But what, Baker asked, if France got all the concessions it wanted? Dumas repeated, coldly...
...trends, the one toward what is usually called self-determination might now be the stronger. All over the world, ethnic movements are demanding and frequently getting their own turf, sometimes though not always complete with flag, army, currency and United Nations seat. The secessionist groups range in size from the 50 million citizens of Ukraine to 30,000 Ainu, descendants of the aboriginal inhabitants of northern Japan. They demand "exclusive possession" of two or three small islands in the southern Kuriles -- also claimed by Moscow and Tokyo -- where they can cluster and preserve their culture...
...dissolution of Western empires gave birth to many new states whose borders had been drawn for the convenience of colonial administrators and enclosed peoples who had never got along with each other. Jockeying among varied ethnic-religious groups for pieces of the old imperial turf has been igniting secessionist wars ever since. Possibly the deadliest one within the past decade has been the insurrection of Hindu Tamil groups against the Buddhist Sinhalese in Sri Lanka. The Washington-based Carnegie Endowment for International Peace counts, among many others, six separate conflicts in India and three each in Burma and Indonesia...
...since the U.N. neither can nor should butt into every secessionist dispute around the world, some standard is needed to judge when intervention is justified. One often heard suggestion is that intervention is defensible whenever a civil war threatens to send floods of refugees across international frontiers. Established powers also need to work out in advance how to organize and finance an intervention force, rather than repeatedly reinventing the wheel. NATO foreign ministers, meeting in Norway last month, approved for the first time the formation of a force that could be used outside the territory of the alliance states...