Kosovo's unilateral declaration of independence on Feb. 17 has provoked a spate of articles and comments relating it to Canada - in particular, to a hypothetical act of that kind by Quebec. The knee-jerk reaction of the Parti Québécois, the Bloc Québécois and their supporters is that any such declaration by any entity anywhere, followed by some countries' recognition, is a precedent for an enacting of unilateral secession by a vote of the National Assembly of Quebec. That is nonsense unsupported by international law.
Daniel Turp, the PQ's international relations critic, said in a CBC-TV interview, "A people decides to become a country and other countries recognize that fact. And in this case what is special is that Serbia is against [the] independence of one of its component parts, and the United States, France [and] other countries ignore this objection. So if one day Quebec decides to become a country and Canada objects ... we'll remind other countries that an objection of a state should not have precedence over the will of the people."
Instead of likening Quebec to Kosovo, Mr. Turp ought to have looked at how Montenegro, another part of the former Yugoslavia, became independent in 2006 - with some real influence from Canadian experience.
Canada has wisely chosen to wait and think before recognizing Kosovo, because there are good arguments on both sides. But whatever Ottawa decides, no such recognition would be a precedent that could be used for the independence of Quebec.
Quebec separatists do themselves a grave disservice in drawing any analogy between Quebec and Kosovo. The ethnic conflicts in the Balkans go back a thousand years, and the way Yugoslavia broke up is like nothing that Canada has ever known.
In the mid-1990s, Serbian forces massacred several thousand ethnic Albanian Muslim Kosovars. NATO - with Canada's full support - intervened to stop the ethnic cleansing, bombed Belgrade, sent troops, including Canadians, to Kosovo, expelled the Serbian army from that province and removed the Serbian authorities. Slobodan Milosevic, the former Serbian president, was jailed and sent for trial as a war criminal in The Hague before the International Criminal Court. For the past nine years, Kosovo has been governed as a United Nations protectorate, while 90 per cent of the people enthusiastically supported their elected officials in their drive for independence. Independence was declared in accordance with a plan prepared under UN auspices by the former Finnish president, Martti Ahtisaari.
In contrast, no Canadian death squads have massacred thousands of Quebeckers. Nor has NATO bombed Ottawa after a declaration of war on Canada. NATO troops have not occupied Quebec for nine years, nor has its government been under UN control for almost a decade. And ninety per cent of Quebeckers have not supported a government dedicated to achieving independence after years of violence and subjugation.
YES MEANS YES AND NO MEANS NO
In the absence of such improbable circumstances, the only way for a Canadian province to secede and achieve its independence is in accordance with Canadian constitutional law and international law.
I was involved as an adviser to Jean Chrétien, when he was the minister of justice at the time of the first Quebec referendum in 1980, and when he was the prime minister at the time of the 1995 referendum. In both cases the Quebec government asked deliberately ambiguous questions in order to get a "Yes" majority for separation. After the fact, Canadians learned that the PQ government of Jacques Parizeau was prepared in 1995, if they won by even the narrowest majority on an unclear question, to declare independence unilaterally, if necessary, and then seek international recognition of the new country of Quebec. Both times, Quebeckers voted "No," on unclear questions.
