A Bolivian Secession?

With all this talk of Kosovo (and Transnistria), I would be remiss not to note the following. According to CNN:

Tensions were rising in Bolivia on Saturday as members of the country’s four highest natural gas-producing regions declared autonomy from the central government.

Thousands waved the Santa Cruz region’s green-and-white flags in the streets as council members of the Santa Cruz, Tarija, Beni and Pando districts made the public announcement.

The officials displayed a green-bound document containing a set of statutes paving the way to a permanent separation from the Bolivian government.

Council representatives vowed to legitimize the so-called autonomy statutes through a referendum that would legally separate the natural-gas rich districts from President Evo Morales’ government.

The move also aims to separate the states from Bolivia’s new constitution, which calls for, among other things, a heavier taxation on the four regions to help finance more social programs.

Morales argues that what is going on here is that the economic elites are trying to frustrate the new redistributive constitution.

How does this implicate international law, if at all? Grabs at autonomy or attempted secession are, first and foremost, issues that come under domestic law. They are domestic political problems. They become internationalized if there is some new question of international legality, such as a new entitiy seeking recognition as a sovereign state (in which case there are rules for recognition or non-recognition), the establishment of an armed insurgency (in which case there are the laws of armed conflict), a threat to international peace and security, etc. And of course there exists, regardless as to the existence of any secessionist movement, the application of international law as regards to the monitoring and enforcement of human rights norms.

Short of that, though, the disposition of this specific issue is an internal Bolivian question. For one thing, it is unclear whether these regions are really seeking to form a new state or simply immunize themselves from Morales’ tax policies (through “autonomy”) but remain within the Bolivian state. Contrast this with Kosovo, which was internationalized due to a humanitarian crisis (and a controversial NATO intervention and subsequent international occupation) or with the situation in Moldova, where Transnistria is seeking state recognition (thus bringing international law into play) and the Russians have refused to remove their troops from Moldovan soil (implicating the now-denounced Conventional Forces Europe treaty as well as various norms of international law).

This leads me to think that the situation in Bolivia as described by the CNN report is, for the time being at least, basically a domestic matter that has not transformed into an issue of international law. As the International Commission of Jurists recognized in the Aaland Islands Case, international law does not always have a role to play in such national questions (although in that case, they found, it did).

Stay tuned.