Moscow, Russia -- The emergency discussion at the G8 summit of yet another Middle Eastern crisis will barely help resolve it. Even with less chronic crises, once a war has broken out it is extremely hard to stop it. If the world's powerful leaders paid more attention to crises as they built up, bloody violence may be avoided and the need to use force to separate warring sides would be diminished.
Take Kosovo for example. The separatist urge in this territory was building up for about a decade, but as long as the movement was peaceful, the West would not pay heed. Then it became too late. Ultimately the NATO invasion resulted in a peculiar UN protectorate in Kosovo.
Today the West is facing a choice of either keeping Kosovo statehood indefinitely suspended or declaring its independence in full defiance of Serbian sovereignty. Much as I abhor the crimes of Slobodan Milosevic and his regime, there is no way to legally justify a de-jure separation of Kosovo against the will of the Serbian people.
President Putin made it clear that should Kosovo be declared independent. This may be used as a precedent to unfreeze the situation around the unrecognized quasi-states - South Ossetia and Abkhasia in the territory of Georgia and Transdniestria in Moldova - that had been formed as byproducts of the collapse of the USSR.
The West wouldn't admit that Kosovo is in any way a precedent for those territories. Last week a high-ranking US State Department official told a Russian journalist in Moscow that the two situations have nothing in common. Punkt. He may well be candid and fully believe what he says, but so may Putin. I am no great fan of my president or the current regime in Russia (nor do I have any sympathy for the extreme nationalist cause in Serbia), but drawing the parallel between Kosovo and the three unrecognized republics is not meaningless. At any rate ignoring the way Russia sees it appears dangerously irresponsible. The situation in Kosovo may once again become the cause of a crisis, this time outside the former Yugoslavia. If South Ossetia, Abkhasia and Trandniestria are unfrozen, Nagorno-Karbakh, the disputed territory between Azerbaijan and Armenia may follow suit.
The G8 countries should thoroughly discuss the status of Kosovo, as well as the whole issue of the inherent conflict between the inviolability of frontiers and the right of nations to self-determination, lest another bloody crisis disrupt the agenda of a future G8 summit.
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