Today, Kosovo has declared its independence. The declaration was
met with much jubilation by the majority ethnic Albanians but with
consternation among the minority Serbians in the province and those in the the Serbian republic for whom Kosovo was a cultural and spiritual homeland.
In essence, Kosovo has seceded from Serbia,
keeping with a global trend that has seen 33 new countries created through
secession or mergers since 1990. Most of these countries were created from the
disintegration of the former USSR
and Yugoslavia,
often after processes that included painful and/or bloody conflict. With the
exception of Eritrea
in Africa, the rest of the countries created through secession
and merging in this period have been in Europe and Asia.
Looking further back, the history of Europe is replete
with examples of secession and irredentism. The creation of modern day Italy
and Germany in
the second half of the 19th century as well as the demise of the Austria-Hungary
and Ottoman empires at the beginning of the 20th century are but historical
examples of these processes.
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So, what has been the inspiration for all this? Since the French
revolution, humanity has striven to unchain itself from the shackles of
domination - class, race, gender, economic and religious. This war has been fought in the political arena, first through the
civil route of representational democracy but where this did not work, people
resorted to non-violent protest, violent protest and ultimately to war to force
a civil settlement. Along the way, individual leaders' aspirations and those of
groups that perceive themselves as being dominated have been confused,
hijacked, subverted, and thwarted, in some cases extinguished. Still, the
groups outlived individual leaders and where the issues behind the perceived
dominance were not addressed, the conflict would be postponed but not done away
with.
Kosovo, like Croatia,
Slovenia, Macedonia,
Serbia,
Bosnia-Herzegovina and Montenegro
before it, has unchained itself from Serbian dominance. East Timor
in 2002 unchained itself from Indonesia.
The former USSR
republics broke away from the dominance of Russia
and there are still groups within Russia
and former Soviet states like Georgia
that are fighting to break away.
We know of other ongoing separatist conflicts
- the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka
and the Basques in Spain.
Other conflicts have been diffused through the offer of greater autonomy to
special regions as the United Kingdom
did to assuage the resentments against dominance that the people of Northern
Ireland, the Scots and the Welsh had against
the English. In fact, in Northern Ireland
it turned into a religious conflict between pro-monarchist Protestants and
pro-republican Catholics that is still a thorny issue. In Scotland,the Scots
diplomatically push for more and more autonomy to date. (Interestingly, some
had intimated that Gordon Brown, a Scot, would not be accepted as prime
minister of Britain
by the English).
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Scottish Parliament
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In other efforts to temper tensions, many powerful modern
day states have come up with systems of governance that not only give their
regions a voice in central government but which have also devolved substantial
powers to these regions as is the case in USA, Canada, Australia and Germany.
This brings me back to my Africa. The
continent where we have 54 countries most of which are ethnically diverse
nation states put together during the partition of Africa
by European states. To serve their brutal exploitation of the colonies, the
colonial masters put up highly centralized structures such as the provincial
administration system in British colonies and prefectures in Belgian and French
colonies which were headed by central government appointees. On departing, the
colonial masters ensured that they left their surrogates in power under
structures that continued to concentrate power at the centre. Probably this was
done in this way to ensure that there were fewer obstacles to the continued plunder
of the continent under neo-colonialism.
The new African leaders were only to happy to keep this
arrangement as they further weakened any form of local representative
government. They plundered their nations wealth with the help of their
capitalist or socialist patrons while excluding a large portion of their
countries from the wealth and decision making processes of their countries.
So here comes my question. Why is it that the democratic
western countries have never been supportive of secessionist movements in Africa
to create more ethnically/culturally/linguistically homogeneous states as they
have done in Europe for centuries? One fallacy that has
been used by both the west and African despots is that such countries would not
be viable as states. I disagree, and can point to just a few cases where broken
parts would be still be viable - Sudan,
the DRC and Nigeria.
The conflicts in these countries over the years could easily have been reduced
if they were split and they would still maintain huge populations, landmass (Sudan
and DRC in particular) and substantial natural resources. Moreover, there are
many tiny countries in Europe that do not have natural
resources but which have made great strides in terms of human development.
But it need not get to that. While maintaining its
integrity, a country can invest in the devolution of powers and resources to
the regions with elected regional governments. It is true that few leaders in Africa
have seen it fit to have such systems in their countries, preferring instead
the extraordinary cost of the tension and alienation that come with feelings of
domination. But increasingly, conflicts over the sharing of resources and power
have been persuasive in demonstrating that this, spreading out power and
resources, is the only way that countries can hold together. So countries like South
Africa and Nigeria
have developed strong devolved governments. Sudan
after years of conflict between the north and the south has one and war in Ivory
Coast has pushed them into one as has been
the case in the DRC.
My native Kenya,
at the moment in the throes of our most serious post independence crisis, still
has a highly centralized government. Feelings of ethnic suspicion, exclusion
and dominance, be they real or perceived have finally led to the peeling off of
the thin veneer of national unity that has held shakily for almost forty four
years. Anti-devolutionists insist that devolution will lead to ethnic strife
and the ethnic cleansing of regions. But we are, already, living in a country
where ethnic strife has been intermittent but common enough under the current
constitution. Clearly, centralised government does not then in any way preclude
ethnic conflict.
The second argument of the anti-devolutionists in Kenya
is that while the rest of the world is moving towards integrating,
devolutionists are seeking fragmentation. I see no evidence of political
integration in any region in the world that is merging the sovereign identities
of countries. If anything as I have outlined earlier, self-determination is the
spirit of our times and more countries in Europe are
fighting for and getting their sovereign identities. There is definitely more
economic integration but only where the citizens of sovereign states agree to
it. Hence the EU expands as an economic bloc but has made little headway in
political integration.
Should Kenya
and other African countries explore devolution as a tool to bring stability and
cohesion in their unitary states or shall we wait until separatism knocks on
our doors?
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Secondly, and this is something Majimboists seem not able to understand. Unless we devolve peacefully, some regions are not just going to be broke, but destitute. Regions like mine, Western Province, cannot survive on their own, hubris aside, they simply cannot. The fact that the business people and capital are concentrated in specific ethnicities points at this glaring interdependence we have. Nyanza is for example so dependent on other regions of the country, Luo Nyanza to be specific, that its citizens should simply not even ever speak of Majimbo. Even re-building Kisumu (which by the way Kibaki had campaigned for as East Africa Community HeadQuarters, and which was one of the Millenium Goals Cities, cannot happen without outside help, without specifically the aid of those Indians, Kikuyus and Kisiis who were chased away.
I am not at all unsympathetic to calls for greater devolution, but they cannot be on the lines of self-determination, they cannot be on ethnic lines, and they cannot be based on these made up feelings of marginalisation. I will quote from Godfrey Munira, here
We need to devolve, but there must be no threats attached. Inducements would be much more persuasive. If Majimbo comes to Luo Nyanza and Western Kenya as a sort of victory over the oppressive Kikuyu, how then can those Kikuyu be employed in the development of these regions? I am told that the people of the Rift Valley are now subsisting on goat meat, with no shops left open? That scratch cards are now trading at 3 times their normal retail price? Like Amir and others have said, we must stick together, not just as a middle class fantasy, but because our very survival depends on it.