Canada could wait for UN consensus on Kosovo

Foreign Affairs Minister Maxime Bernier has said only that the government is watching the situation and will announce a position "once our assessment is complete."

For the minority Conservative government, it's a no-win issue, the Canadian Press reports.

"Whichever way they go, they will lose something," said Pierre Martin, a professor of political science at the University of Montreal who has written on Kosovo.

To recognize a unilateral declaration of independence would allow Quebec separatists to claim that they could leave Canada the same way, with a one-sided declaration. It would also provoke anger among Canada's small but vocal Serbian ethnic community.

To refuse flatly to recognize Kosovo's independence would fly in the face of the United States and much of the European Union, which have extended recognition.

Canada acted quickly in the 1990s to recognize the independence of Bosnia, with unintended consequences, said Edith Klein, a resident fellow at the University of Toronto's Centre for Russian and Eastern European Studies.

"My opinion is that ... the Canadian government doesn't want to make the kind of decision it made in Bosnia," she said. "The decision to recognize Bosnia actually sort of enhanced the ethnic cleansing process."

"It's a very difficult question," said Aurel Braun, an Eastern European expert at the University of Toronto.

"There will be a reaction no matter what Canada does. Recognition will make a lot of people unhappy and delayed or non-recognition makes people unhappy."

He said postponing that decision might be a solution.

"It's not that everybody's doing it, so we must absolutely do it ourselves," he said. "It is not necessarily such a bad thing that we should deliberate and consider this carefully."

Martin said it might be best for the government to put the question on the back burner and watch what the international community as a whole does.

"They might just hide behind rhetorical shield of waiting for some sort of United Nations consensus," he said. "That would be a safe position to retract into".

"What difference would it make if they do it today or tomorrow? It's not going to change much."

The situation on the ground in the breakaway province isn't going to change because Canada says "yea or nay". The United States will likely nod to Canada's touchy Quebec situation and say nothing. Russia is unlikely to be upset by a non-decision.

"Sometimes in politics, not taking a position or postponing it is probably, from the point of view of the federal government, a smart thing to do," Martin concluded.

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