Splinter, Splinter, Little State

By GEORGE J. CHURCH

The convoluted plot twists and bravura posturing might seem reminiscent of a comic opera. Certainly the so-called Dniester Republic (pop. 600,000) is among the miniest of ministates, proclaimed by ethnic Russians and Ukrainians seceding from a secession. Its citizens refused to stay in the new nation of Moldova (pop. 4.4 million), a former Soviet republic that broke away from Moscow last August, because the majority ethnic Romanians were making noises about uniting with their brethren across the border.

But in little more than a week the story has turned into a blood-soaked tragedy with ominous international implications. As many as 500 people have been killed in savage fighting between Moldova's Romanians and Slavs, and tens of thousands of refugees have fled across the border into Ukraine. Worse, Russian-controlled units of the former Soviet army have been caught up in the battle. Russian President Boris Yeltsin has warned that Moscow may intervene to protect its soldiers and ethnics. That could set a precedent for further interventions on behalf of 25 million Russians living in the Baltic states, the Central Asian republics and other parts of the old Soviet Union, as some of Yeltsin's nationalist opponents are already demanding. At week's end an international conference in Istanbul arranged a cease-fire, but there is serious doubt it will hold.

What is happening in Moldova is of global concern for another reason too. It is a not at all untypical example of one of the two main trends vying to shape the post-cold war world. One is the move toward uniting once jealous sovereignties in economic groupings that also have political ties, like the 12-nation European Community. The contrasting trend is toward splitting up existing states into smaller ethnic nations, some of which then go on to divide amoeba-like into ever smaller pieces. Moldova conceivably might split in three: the Gagauz, a 150,000-member clan of Turkish Muslims, have proclaimed autonomy and appealed to Turkey for protection.

Of the two 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.

Not even long-established multiethnic states seem to be immune from breakup. For 74 years Czechoslovakia achieved a mostly peaceful accommodation between Slovaks and Czechs. As recently as 1989 they were solidly united in the "velvet revolution" against communist rule. But now, driven by discontent with their economic lag, the Slovaks have won Czech agreement to effect a "velvet divorce," splitting up peacefully by Sept. 30 into two countries. Both sides are having second thoughts and talking about forming some sort of confederation. But ethnic separatism may be a genie difficult to cram back into the bottle. Says Slovak leader Vladimir Meciar: "We probably will not be able to prevent a breakup."

The thought that self-determination might be the wave of the future makes leaders of the established powers shudder. To them, it threatens instability on a horrendous scale. Secessions often have touched off savage neighbor-vs.- neighbor wars, like those in Moldova; in Georgia, where South Ossetians have been fighting to break away and join ethnic brethren across the border in Russia; and of course in Yugoslavia and in the enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh, caught in a violent tug-of-war between Armenia and Azerbaijan. Even peaceful secessions could spawn a slew of mininations, unable to support themselves economically and dependent on aid from richer nations for survival. At a recent international conference French President Francois Mitterrand worried out loud "whether in the future every tribal group will dispose of its own laws to the exclusion of any common law?" and immediately answered himself, "You can sense how impossible that would be."

Less impossible than irresistible, comes the reply from some political scientists. They view the turmoil as the necessary pain attending the birth of a genuinely new world order no longer dominated by large nation-states but composed mainly of regional associations of smaller countries. It is possible too to see the move toward self-determination as a net gain for liberty. In any case, the day seems to be past when rebellious people can be forced to remain in a state they want no part of. Since resistance to a breakup is usually futile, say many experts, the task for international bodies such as the U.N. is to guide the upheavals into peaceful channels.

That, however, is a mammoth job that would begin very late if it started today. The idea that every group with a common ancestry, language, history and culture should have its own state and write its own laws goes back more than a century. The principle of self-determination got a big boost from Woodrow Wilson at the end of World War I, and in 1945 was written into the Charter of the U.N.

In the Third World the 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 in which guerrilla groups are seeking independence.

The biggest impulse to the recent explosion, however, has been the end of the cold war. "The reason why the ethnic rivalries and aspirations surfaced so suddenly in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe is that till recently communism kept them in a time warp," says Oxford history professor Robert O'Neill. Tensions burst forth with explosive fury as soon as the lid of dictatorship was lifted.

By now the movement has begun feeding on itself. In the former Soviet Union, for example, the success of Latvians, Ukrainians, Armenians, Georgians and Tajik, among others, in breaking free from Moscow has encouraged separatist movements inside Russia. Tatars, Chechen, Ingush and Yakut are demanding either greater autonomy within the Russian Federation or full independence. In many areas, though, ethnic groups are so thoroughly mixed that it is impossible to draw neat border lines between their respective turfs. Any attempt to do so only creates new minority problems: a Serb minority in Croatia, for example, instead of a Croat minority in a Serb-dominated Yugoslavia. That leads at best to severe tensions, at worst to savage wars between peoples who once lived in peace.

Yugoslavia, says a U.S. State Department official, is the horrible example of "self-determination gone mad." He and others accuse Serbia of adopting a poisonous nationalism that demands ethnic purity at home, enforced by deporting "foreigners" if necessary, and conquest of any lands -- portions ) of Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina, for example -- to which one's brethren have migrated. Once that spirit takes hold, says the official, "anything becomes justifiable in the name of your kind: expulsion, devastation, murder."

Yugoslavia also provides an example of how badly the international community has been fumbling in managing self-determination. The U.S. and the European Community tried to keep the so-called nation together long after that had become impossible. Then they split over whether to recognize the independence of Slovenia and Croatia. The U.N. sent peacekeeping forces far too late and, by making clear that it would not allow its soldiers to become involved in any fighting, effectively signaled Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic that nobody would seriously try to stop his efforts to create a Greater Serbia.

But then how should the international community cope with a trend that is both irresistible and extremely dangerous? Thoughtful diplomats and academic analysts offer four general guidelines:

1) Do whatever is possible through preachment, aid and sanctions to encourage the spread of democracy. The most destructive ethnic explosions usually have occurred under repressive regimes. In contrast, secession movements in Quebec and Scotland have generally concentrated on peaceful persuasion. Democratic Canada and Britain have given Quebecois and Scots nonviolent ways in which to voice their angers and aspirations.

2) Grant a large measure of self-government to dissident ethnic groups. Democracy alone may not satisfy ethnics who suspect that their representatives in a national legislature will be constantly outvoted on such matters as where and how tax money should be spent. The presence of 22 Kurds out of a total of 450 members in the Turkish parliament has not prevented Kurdish terrorists seeking autonomy from turning southeastern Turkey into a land of fear.

3) Develop a set of principles to govern when new states should be given diplomatic recognition, and what they must do to qualify for admission into international bodies. Robert Badinter, president of the French Constitutional Council and head of the E.C. Arbitration Commission on Yugoslavia, suggests that new states must establish democratic institutions, accept international covenants on human rights, pledge to respect existing frontiers and guarantee respectful treatment of their own ethnic and/or religious minorities.

4) Work out rules for determining when international intervention is necessary to prevent ethnic bloodshed, and develop mechanisms to carry it out. The old idea was that outsiders had no business interfering with anything a government might do within its borders to its own people. That principle has been shattered within the past 13 months by two events: the dispatch of a U.N. force to northern Iraq to protect Kurds from massacre by Saddam Hussein's forces (the Kurds have since set up what amounts to an autonomous zone there); and the arrival, however tardy, of the U.N. peacekeeping force in Croatia while the Croats were still fighting to break free from Belgrade.

But 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, and U.N. Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali has called for the creation of a standing U.N. force.

None of this can happen too soon. Demands for ethnic self-determination could soon cause fearsome violence in many more parts of the world. China gives the outside world the impression of being a monolith, yet it contains 55 ethnic minorities numbering perhaps 80 million people, many of whom are bitterly discontented. New violence already has broken out in Tibet, according to reports reaching London. In Europe there are feelings of repression and aspirations toward autonomy, if not independence, among Hungarians in Romania, Turks in Bulgaria and Poles in Lithuania, among others. In Afghanistan civil war could yet pit southern Pashtun against northern Uzbek and Tajik in a conflict that could spill over into neighboring Pakistan and the formerly Soviet republics of Uzbekistan and Tajikistan.

All this adds up to a crazy quilt of ethnic ambition. The task ahead is to ensure that the quilt is not forced into service as a shroud.

With reporting by James Carney/Moscow, William Mader/London and J.F.O. McAllister/Washington