Push at U.N. for Kosovo independence could bolster secessionist demands around the world

"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 U.N. Security Council resolution because that will establish a legal principle which 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 U.N. 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 "strategic partnership" 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 the same," 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.

The U.S. and EU insist Kosovo is a special case because it has been a ward of the international community since a U.N. administration was set up in 1999. That followed a brief aerial war during which NATO ejected Serb forces accused of mounting a campaign of ethnic cleansing against the 2 million ethnic Albanian inhabitants.

"A new Security Council resolution would clearly specify that this was a unique case not applicable to other regions," Assistant U.S. Secretary of State Daniel Fried said in a recent interview.

Fried said the Bush administration intends to sponsor the new resolution, based on Ahtisaari's plan. "Kosovo will be independent one way or the other," he said.

While the European Union also insists Kosovo is no precedent, some of its member states have their own restive regions to contend with — Catalonia and the Basque country in Spain, Flanders in Belgium, Hungarian nationalists in Slovakia and Cyprus' breakaway Turkish Republic.

A parliamentary spokesman for the Basque Nationalist Party, the main party in the regional government of northern Spain's Basque region, sees the Kosovo plan as "a very positive development."

"We think this could be a very good precedent, and someday we could aspire to something similar," said Josu Erkoreka.

Othman, the Kurd, said it is inaccurate to argue Kosovo is somehow special.

"Just like Kosovo, Iraqi Kurdistan has also been under international protection (since the 1991 Gulf War). There is no difference," he said in a telephone interview from Baghdad.

Any move by Iraq's Kurdish provinces to break free would create a major political headache for Washington and invite armed intervention from neighboring Turkey, which has its own restless Kurdish minority.

Tim Judah, a London-based Balkan analyst and author, said the Security Council ideally should grant Kosovo independence but simultaneously repudiate unilateral secessions elsewhere.

But he expects that "whatever the Security Council does may nonetheless encourage some secessionist groups somewhere." The Associated Press

/The International Herald Tribune/