Editorial comment.

• Author: Ayres, Philip
• Position: Editorial
• Pages: 4(2)

The curse of Kosovo

Georgia's military incursion into the effectively autonomous, and unwillingly Georgian, provinces of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, where Russian peacekeepers, according to international agreement and the desire of those provinces' people, were stationed, and the subsequent and predictable Russian military incursion to drive out the Georgian Government forces--all this provides much food for a properly historical analysis. Yet there has been next to nothing in the media (or at least our media) about the nature of the problem when viewed from a longer-term perspective, and there is little room here in which to introduce such a perspective. In a nutshell, then.

We need to go back to the Helsinki Accords of 1975. These accords, and the associated Council for Security and Co-operation in Europe (CSCE, now OSCE), were the product of Western Europe's security angst, and the equally strong, perhaps stronger, desire of the USSR for a firm recognition of existing borders between states (states in the sense of countries). The Soviet Union signed these accords because they guaranteed the permanence of the borders of Eastern Europe. Up until 1975, West German government publications, for example, regularly referred to what we then called East...