The “Serbian” Claim to South Ossetia
Lee on Aug 10 2008 at 10:31 am | Filed under: Foreign affairs, Lee's Page
The point has been made more than once that the Russian incursion into South Ossetia is ideologically motivated as a retaliatory gesture for Kosovo independence. Wu Wei makes a fine point about why this is not plausible if so:
The Kosovo Albanians had had 10 years of oppression by Slobodan Milosovic in Yugoslavia before it broke up, and there had been wars provoked by him in Croatia and Bosnia, with charges of genocide generally accepted now. So people knew exactly what he was planning when he started driving Albanians out of Kosovo. And there were something like 2 million Albanians driven out of Kosovo across the border into Albania and Macedonia. Without the bombing he would not have stopped.
Bigger is not better, and war is never right. But Saakashvili, with all his faults is not Milosovic.
(Wu Wei)
True in the immediate, but there’s an underlying historical dissonance to the Russian claim as well. Kosovo is after all, the Serbian ethnic homeland. The churches of the old Serbian kings are still the dominant architectural element of the ancient towns in that country and Serbia has hereditary claims to these southern lands which predate written records. The loss of them is just as ancient a grievance, given that their uprising against the Ottomans in 1690s is what sent them north.
The key difference here is that any South Ossetian claim to Russian identification is as young as 1801 at the earliest. As for the ethnically Russian emigrees, that mostly goes back to the 20th century. These are not comparable claims for Russian territorial identity upon the land.
One Response to “The “Serbian” Claim to South Ossetia”
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Kosovo is similar to Georgia but, North Mitrovica is similar to South Ossetia.
As the United States Institute for Peace says, “No solution for Kosovo can last without a solution for Mitrovica.”
http://www.usip.org/pubs/usipeace_briefings/2006/0724_mitrovica.html
Serbs number only 130,000 of Kosovo’s nearly two million population. Half of Kosovo’s Serbs live in North Mitrovica and its hinterland up to the border of Serbia proper.