http://www.thejakartapost.com/detailgeneral.asp?fileid=20070518105956&irec=16
Push at UN for Kosovo independence could bolster secessionist demands around the world BRUSSELS (AP): From the jungles of Indonesia to Spain's Basque country, separatists of the world are drawing hope from the approach of UN-approved independence of Kosovo. "The Kosovo precedent will be important for us," said Igor Smirnov, leader of the Trans-Dniester region that seeks to break away from Moldova. He maintains that his tiny enclave has an even better case for independence than Kosovo. Another hopeful Kosovo-watcher is Iraqi Kurdistan. "It's important that Kosovo achieves independence through a UN Security Council resolution because that will establish a legal principlewhich will also some day apply to Kurdistan," said Mahmoud Othman, a senior Kurdish member of the Iraqi parliament. The United States and European Union, which are backing a UN plan to grant "supervised independence" to the predominantly ethnic Albanian province of Serbia, dismiss suggestions that it would encourage separatist movements elsewhere. But the plan is strongly opposed by Serbia and Russia, which will settle at most for wide local autonomy. Russian President Vladimir Putin warned in February that independence for Kosovo would be taken as a precedent by others, including pro-Russian breakaway provinces in the ex-Soviet republics of Georgia and Moldova. This issue has become a major irritant in the already strained relations between the West and a resurgent Russia. The latest attempt to defuse tensions foundered this week after Putin and U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice failed to find common ground. Kosovo also figures in Russia's wider dispute with the EU, jeopardizing plans to create a "strategicpartnership" between Moscow and Brussels. The author of the Kosovo plan, former Finnish President Martti Ahtisaari, said he did not believe a precedent would be set by granting the province independence. "No two problem areas are thesame," he said. But in some of the four dozen territories around the world aspiring to break free, Kosovo's future looks set to have far-reaching effects - especially if separation is engineered through a Security Council resolution. "Kosovo's independence would certainly have broad and destabilizing consequences for many other secessionist conflicts," warned Bruno Coppieters, head of the Political Sciences Department at Brussels Free University. In Indonesia, it could have a powerful impact on the two separatist-minded provinces of Aceh and West Papua, said Damien Kingsbury, a key adviser to the separatist Free Aceh Movement. Indonesia, which has already lost East Timor, "is always sensitive about issues affecting territorial integrity, so it will be very worried," Kingsbury said
