It's good news, and bad news. It's good news in the sense that Kosovo deserves their independence, because they've suffered a lot. Bad news in the sense that this will encourage other separatist movements throughout the world, who will no doubt use this event as an opportunity to express their desire for independence, as well. This, obviously, is a threat to those countries who wants to keep these separatist groups from succeeding in their goals.
And yes, I admit, the USA is not exactly innocent when it comes to war crimes. It would be hypocritical..
just to name a few examples:
- the bombings in Hiroshima and Nagasaki
- under Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard Nixon during the Vietnam War, they've secretly ordered the bombings of Laos and Cambodia, respectively, which killed innocent lives.
At one way or another, each country has been guilty of something, and the USA is not an exception. Foreign policy is nasty, dirty, and is hardly based on morals.....the primary intent of foreign policy is to secure national self-interests, sometimes at the expense of morality.
In World War I, Ottoman Turkey, under the orders of the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), otherwise known as the "Young turks", in 1915, rounded up Armenians and executed them at gunpoint. While it can be argued that the Armenians were cooperating with the enemy of Turkey (the Russians in the north east), the counter-argument is that it's an intended genocide. To this day, Turkey has denied this event.
One of the premises of why most Western countries are supporting Kosovo's independence is the fact that they've suffered genocide and they deserve to become independent. But in context, it's actually much more complicated.
I'm using Turkey and USA as an example because some of the posters above, including myself, were apparently in disagreement of some of the issues, and it needs clarifying.
In light of what has happened during World War I, and President Woodrow Wilson's "Fourteen Points", in which he argued and supported for national "self-determination", the notion of "nationalism" virtually spread like wildfire. Soon, a lot of separatist movement throughout the world were aiming at declaring independence.
And given the fact that Turkey and the USA is not exactly innocent when it comes to war crimes, the idea that we are supporting Kosovo, may seem to some people, as hypocritical, and that's a legitimate argument.
Turkey today, still has some unresolved issues between them and the Armenian people. And much more recently, they are involved in putting down the PKK Kurdish rebel forces (not to be confused with the non-separatist Kurdish general population, of whom does not identify or recognize the PKK movement).
Likewise, the USA still has a lot of unresolved issues, as well....but slowly we are trying to make things better.
And just because Turkey and the USA have these unresolved issues in the past should not preclude us from supporting Kosovo.
All countries have been guilty of some things in the past, and that is a fact about foreign politics. We have a choice: we can repent all we want, or we can do something about it, by learning from the mistakes and making our future dealings with other countries more moral and just. And I think now that we have international laws put in place to prevent further crimes to humanity, things will only get better.
