Monks march for a free Tibet

After last year’s monk-led protests in Burma/Myanmar , monks from monasteries outside Lhasa were on the march in Tibet. Coinciding with the 49^th anniversary of the 1959 uprising that forced the Dalai Lama into exile, protests began last Monday, when roughly 400 monks set out to march the 5 miles from Drepung Loseling Monastery to Lhasa’s city center to protest rules restricting religious practices and requiring “patriotic education” in the monastery: i.e., monks must “study government propaganda and write denunciations of the Dalai Lama.” The marchers had made it about halfway when police arrested 50 or 60 of them and the rest promptly turned the march into a sit-in, in which 100 more monks from Drepung joined. As the Drepung monks were agreeing to return to their monastery on Tuesday morning, a dozen or so monks from the Sera Monastery waving a Tibetan flag (at right) began a pro-independence rally outside Tibet’s most sacred temple, the Jokhang, in the center of Lhasa. Arrests there sparked further protest that day, as a reported 500-600 monks stormed from the Sera Monastery demanding the release of their brethren—and independence for Tibet. On Wednesday, monks from the Ganden Monastery held their own protest, which was followed on Thursday by what are apparently the largest anti-Chinese protests to be held since the 1987 and 1988 protests by monks from the Drepung and Sera monastery. While those protests ended in bloodshed, Chinese forces seemed to be more restrained on Thursday, thanks to the upcoming Olympic games in Beijing. On Friday, however, violence erupted. Reports as to how it began or evolved conflict depending on whether the reporter is ethnic Tibetan or Chinese, but it would appear that monks from the Ramoche Temple set out to protest Chinese treatment of monks who had demonstrated earlier in the week. The Ramoche monks were joined by ethnic Tibetans, who began burning shops and cars, including military vehicles. The Dalai Lama asked both sides to avoid violence but otherwise supported the protesters, and thousands of Buddhist sympathizers in Nepal and India hit the streets to show their support. On Saturday, as Chinese authorities reported they had regained control in Lhasa, clashes broke out in the city of Xiahe, Gansu Province, where small protests had begun the day before and escalated to involve perhaps as many as 4000 Buddhist monks and Tibetans calling for the Dalai Lama’s return to Tibet. Chinese authorities say they haven’t fired on the crowds, but witnesses report the opposite, claiming at least 30 deaths, if not 100.

Secession & ethnicity in Kosovo

Following on my post last week about the legality of Kosovo’s declaration of independence, readers interested in this subject might want to take a look at these views of the legality debate from our colleagues at Opinio Juris. And to balance those relatively secession-friendly outlooks, consider this skeptical assessment of the legality of unilateral secession, written in the context of the Quebec Secession case.
In considering these questions, I am troubled by the history of deliberate manipulation of ethnic populations in Kosovo in light of the role that Kosovo's current ethnic composition plays in assessments of its independence claim. Of course, the Serbian attempt at ethnic cleansing of the Albanian population from Kosovo was one of the reasons for NATO’s intervention and UN administration of the province. But under the UN administration, other efforts at manipulation have continued. On the one hand, periodic riots and attacks on Serbian enclaves by Albanians have pushed out most of the few Serbs who stayed after 1999. On the other hand, Serbia has provided considerable support to the Serbian enclaves to persuade the Serbs there to remain within Kosovo. When a claim to self-determination depends on an ethnic group's claim to be a people in possession of a territory, there are strong and dangerous incentives for all concerned to try to shape the ethnic composition of that territory, and certainly those have been at work here.

(credit for 2005 map of Kosovo ethnic makeup, based on data from the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe)

Kosovo's independence: Does legality matter?

Serbia, Spain, and other states opposed to the independence of Kosovo argue that its unilateral declaration of statehood is illegal under international law. (Prior posts here, here, and here; map credit.)
Those supporting Kosovo’s independence, including the United States, don’t seem to disagree. Rather than arguing that Kosovo’s declaration can be reconciled with principles of territorial integrity, they contend that Kosovo is “sui generis” and therefore “does not set a precedent.” In other words, no, it isn’t legal, but not to worry, it won’t happen again.
Certainly Kosovo is in some ways unique. Those making the sui generis argument point to the break-up of Yugoslavia, Security Council Resolution 1244 (1999), and the long period of UN administration as distinguishing features. Basing a claim to independence on UN intervention is in some ways reassuring, as any nascent polity receiving such intervention must have considerable international support. It is in other ways disturbing, suggesting that the decisive factor in determining the legitimacy of claims to sovereignty is not the freely expressed will of the people but the will of the international community -- not self-determination but UN-determination.
In any event, there are a lot of independence-seekers in the world who are hoping that they too are sui generis, and it won’t be long before they begin to put the question to the test. The New York Times reports that South Ossetia and Abkhazia, independence-seeking regions in Georgia, have indicated that they will ask for recognition from Russia, which has long supported them, based on the Kosovo (non-)precedent. (map credit)