In my most recent blog post, I discussed proposals by civic leaders in South Miami, Florida, that the Sunshine State divide in two.  But this week Douglas MacKinnon, a former White House aide, has been promoting an upcoming book which has other plans for Florida: joining South Carolina and Georgia in a new independent republic based on traditional values.  This is in response to what MacKinnon sees as a takeover by gays and lesbians and their erosion of the soul of our republic.  Not only that, but the new nation would be called Reagan, named, naturally after Ronald Reagan (shown below).


No, no, that’s the wrong picture.  This is Ron Reagan, Jr. No, I mean Ron’s dad, the Gipper.


There, that’s better.

MacKinnon, a conservative Republican columnist who served as speechwriter to both Reagan and President George H. W. Bush (Sr.), explained his views in a radio interview this week, with a strong focus on how modern America has accepted homosexuality as part of the norm. “If you happen to make a donation in favor of traditional marriage, you can lose your job,” he said.  “If you happen to refuse to bake a cake for a gay couple because it goes against your religious beliefs, you can be driven out of business.”  So, according to MacKinnon’s forthcoming book, The Secessionist States of America: The Blueprint for Creating a Traditional Values Country . . . Now, some of the more conservative states should secede so that citizens can grow up in a country where they won’t be forced to bake cakes for gay people.


In the interview, MacKinnon explained his thought process: “We look at what states would be viable in terms of doing something like this.  In fact, what states would provide sort of the new landmass for a new republic dedicated to traditional values.  And the consensus was that the three best states in the union would be South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida.”  The otherwise obvious choice of the frequently secessionist-minded Texas is not on the list, he said, because “there have been a number of incursions into Texas and other places from some of the folks in Mexico.”


MacKinnon isn’t the only person promoting a Civil War do-over.  The League of the South and the New Confederacy are two fringe groups advancing the secession of the Southern states.  The League, which is classified as a racist hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center (S.P.L.C.) (see a recent article from this blog about its new paramilitary arm), differs slightly from the New Confederacy in which set of states should secede, but their idea is the same: to return to traditional values, including, it is hard not to infer, segregation.  Meanwhile, an organization called Christian Exodus has been trying since the early 2000s to convince enough conservative Christians to move to South Carolina so that it can become an even more conservative-dominated state, reserving the right to secede if necessary to implement God’s law.  A group called Third Palmetto Republic advocates South Carolinian secession for similar reasons, with rhetoric focusing squarely on President Barack Obama.

The League of the South

It is natural to think of the name Reagan when thinking of a revived Southern confederacy.  After the Texan Democrat Lyndon B. Johnson pushed through civil-rights legislation in the 1960s, his Republican successor, Richard Nixon, exploited the anger of traditionally-Democratic white Southern voters with his “Southern strategy,” appealing to “Negrophobe whites,” in his words.  (As Nixon put it at one point, in a conversation about African-Americans captured on tape in 1971 and unsealed by the National Archives in 1999, “I have the greatest affection for them, but I know they’re not going to make it for 500 years.  They aren’t.  You know it, too.  The Mexicans are a different cup of tea.  They have a heritage.  At the present time they steal, they’re dishonest, but they do have some concept of family life.  They don’t live like a bunch of dogs, which the Negroes do live like.”)

Candidate Richard Nixon, pictured here just moments before a vigorous hand-scrubbing

Reagan completed that strategy by almost single-handedly turning the entire South into a Republican-dominated region, sweeping away the century-old phenomenon of the “Dixiecrats.”  When Reagan launched his presidential campaign in 1980, he did so with a speech on “states’ rights” in Philadelphia, Mississippi, an obscure hamlet whose only significance was that it was the site of a grisly Ku Klux Klan triple murder in the Civil Rights era—crimes authorities in Mississippi (as is their “right,” the argument seems to be) refused to investigate until Johnson sent the meddling Feds in.  And in Southern whistlestops (this was long before YouTube began magnifying tiny local micromessaging soundbites to a global audience) Reagan railed against “strapping young bucks” spending food stamps on “T-bone steaks or booze and cigarettes.”  But MacKinnon insists he himself is no racist.

Reagan in Mississippi in 1980. (I believe that is Lee Atwater, one of the openly-racist architects of the “Southern strategy,” to his immediate left.)

Nor is the idea of naming a geographical entity after Reagan new.  The monniker has been proposed for the inland Southern California state some Republicans (as discussed in an article in this blog) want to carve out of the heartland near where Reagan’s original conservative base dwelt when he was governor of California—and also for South Dakota, a state which has long been irked by its obscure place in alphabetical order, as well as in the population-density rankings.  (Renaming itself Reagan, though, will not fix that problem as much as another proposal, to become simply Dakota.)

Another possible “State of Reagan,” including, of course, Orange County

But MacKinnon’s proposal would not be a State of Reagan but a Reagan Republic or Reagan Confederacy.  (A loose federal structure is an idea common to all neo-Confederate movements.)  Another possibility, then, would be Reagania, but that would have the disadvantage of having the word gay in it.


Look for MacKinnon’s book soon.  It can be grouped with Chuck Thompson’s left-wing book Better Off without ’Em: A Northern Manifesto for Southern Secession as fringe-of-the-fringe bookends to our divided red-and-white America.

Kremlin authorities are still baffled by an apparent Internet prank on October 7th which declared Astrakhan Oblast was declaring independence from the Russian Federation as the “Lower Volga People’s Republic.”

Astrakhan is thought of as the southernmost extent of ethnic-Russian settlement and is in an historically and ethnically volatile neighborhood.

The announcement (pictured at the top of this article) appeared for about two hours on the website of the oblast’s legislature. It read, in part, “The short-sighted and criminal policies of the federal authorities have put the country on the brink of catastrophe.  The authorities have fully discredited themselves, having lost the huge amount of trust given to them.”  The declaration was purported to be co-signed by several oblast officials, including Governor Aleksandr A. Zhilkin, the Duma (parliament) chairman Aleksandr B. Klykanov, the local F.S.B. (state security, erstwhile K.G.B.) head Yuri V. Selyshev, and one Igor Ivanovich Strelkov, identified as “Commander of the People’s Militia.”  (This, coincidentally or not, is the name of a colonel and former F.S.B. agent who earlier this year became a prominent paramilitary leader in the Donetsk People’s Republic rebellion.)


The name of the Lower Volga People’s Republic republic echoes those of the two Kremlin-backed rebel governments which unilaterally seceded from Ukraine earlier this year after the Russian invasion and annexation of Crimea: the Donetsk People’s Republic and Lugansk People’s Republic.  (Three other declared republics, the Kharkov People’s Republic in Ukraine’s northeast and so-called people’s republics in Odessa and Transcarpathia oblasts in western Ukraine, were never backed by any “facts on the ground” in the form of physical secession.)  These “people’s republics” have less to do with actual state socialism or the rights of workers, as their names suggest, and more to do with recalling the symbols of a lost past when Ukraine was ruled from Moscow.  In fact, they are run by undemocratic paramilitary juntas, with strings probably pulled from the Kremlin.

Aleksandr Zhilkin, Astrakhan’s governor, was not amused.

Probably, the Lower Volga declaration evoked the Ukrainian rebel republics as a satirical observation of the fact that President Vladimir Putin advocates federalism and balkanization in Ukraine while tightening central control over regional governments at home in Russia.  But Astrakhan Oblast sits in a region with a separatist past.  Comprising the Volga River delta the oblast’s capital is Astrakhan, sometimes called the southernmost outpost of the Russian world.  To its east is the former Soviet republic of Kazakhstan.  (Kazakhs make up 16% of the oblast population, and Volga Tatars another 7%; nearly all the rest are ethnic Russians.)  To its southwest is the Republic of Kalmykia, a member of the Russian Federation populated by Asiatic people following Tibetan Buddhism who after the collapse of the Soviet Union nearly seceded under the leadership of their charismatic president, Kirsan Ilyumzhinov, a chess grandmaster and self-described U.F.O. contactee who boasted of psychic powers and chummed around with dictators like Moammar al-Qaddafi and Saddam Hussein.  Just past Kalmykia and the Terek steppes is the volatile Caucasus region, where nearly every one of the dozens of separate indigenous ethnic groups has some form of separatist rebellion brewing.  Across the Caspian Sea to the east are the Russian-populated Transcaspia region in Kazakhstan, where Cossacks have occasionally itched to secede from Kazakhstan and join Russia, and just beyond that the separatist Republic of Karakalpakstan within independent Uzbekistan.  Just upriver from Astrakhan is the former territory of the Volga German People’s Republic, which flourished before Soviet feelings toward its ethnic Germans soured with Adolf Hitler’s violation of his non-aggression pact with Josef Stalin.  (Both Leonid Brezhnev and Mikhail Gorbachev proposed restoring the republic until local Germanophobe Russians rose up against the idea.)

Coat-of-arms of the erstwhile Kuban People’s Republic

More to the point, perhaps, just to the southwest of Astrakhan is Krasnodar Krai, a mostly ethnic-Russian and ethnic-Ukrainian republic between Crimea and the Caucasus on the Black Sea, which includes Sochi, site of this year’s Winter Olympics.  It is here that Russian authorities last month jailed a leftist activist named Darya Polyudova for holding a rally asking for more autonomy for Krasnodar Krai.  Though she wasn’t asking for independence, she was arrested under a new law brought into force this year which makes the advocacy of separatism a crime.  This August (as reported on at the time in this blog) the Kremlin also cracked down on autonomy activists in Siberia, who, like Polyudova, were in fact asking for nothing more than the autonomy guaranteed regions in the Russian constitution—rights which Putin has systematically eroded into almost nothing.  Timed to coincide with the Siberian “day of action” that ended with police round-ups were autonomy rallies (reported on at the time in this blog) in Kaliningrad (Russia’s westernmost point, a formerly-German exclave wedged between Poland and Lithuania on the Baltic Sea), Yekaterinburg in Sverdlovsk Oblast (Boris Yeltsin’s home region, which attempted secession too after the Soviet collapse), and Krasnodar.  In Krasnodar, the August rally organizers were calling for the reestablishment of the Kuban Republic, a Menshevik (anti-Bolshevik) “people’s republic” which flourished briefly in the area during the Russian Civil War that followed the 1917 Communist revolution.

The autonomy activist Darya Polyudova is being held by the F.S.B. on separatism charges.

Police arrested Polyudova and other activists on “hooliganism” charges at that August rally, after alleged pro-Kremlin provocateurs incited a brawl.  Her family knew nothing of her whereabouts and waited in vain for her release when her one-month sentence ran out.  Then, the Public Monitoring Commission, a prisoners’ rights group in the area, located Polyudova a few days later in a Federal Security Service (F.S.B.—erstwhile K.G.B.) lock-up where she had been transferred.  Two other activists, Vyacheslav Martynov and Pyotr Lyubchenkov, have sought political asylum in Ukraine.  Polyudov’s group still advocates for “residents of Kuban whose rights are being violated, including the rights of ethnic Ukrainians.”  (Needless to say, this is not a very comfortable point in history to be an ethnic Ukrainian living in Russia proper.)

Some Cossack hosts formed brief-lived republics during the Russian Civil War (shown here in relation to Astrakhan).

After the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991, many thought it was ethnic minorities like Chechens and Tatars that might be the undoing of what was left of the Russian empire.  But with those populations mostly beaten down by war and repression, it is ordinary Russians in the provinces who are today challenging Putin to live up to the “Federation” part of “Russian Federation.”

Current flag of Astrakhan Oblast

[For those who are wondering, yes, this blog is tied in with my forthcoming book, a sort of encyclopedic atlas to be published by Auslander and Fox under the title Let’s Split! A Complete Guide to Separatist Movements and Aspirant Nations, from Abkhazia to Zanzibar.  (That is shorter than the previous working title.)  The book, which contains dozens of maps and over 500 flags, will be on shelves and available on Amazon in February 2015.  I will be keeping readers posted of further publication news.  Meanwhile, please “like” the book (even though you haven’t read it yet) on Facebook and see this special announcement for more information on the book.]

Strange things are happening in Europe, as the West’s political landscape shifts in the wake of the war in Ukraine.  In the latest head-scratcher, a prominent academic historian and separatist libertarian activist in northern Italy is praising the Kremlin-backed rebels in eastern Ukraine, saying the “people’s republics” of Donetsk and Luhansk are legitimate states whose election results this week ought to be respected.


Paolo Bernardini, a Genoa-born professor of history at the University of Insubrica in Como, is known in academic circles for prolific work on the history of Jewry in Europe.  In politics, he is better known as co-founder of Veneto Independence (Indipendenza Veneta), a group seeking to separate the autonomous Veneto region—including its capital, Venice—from the Italian Republic and restore the historic Most Serene Republic of Venice, as outlined in Bernardini’s 2011 book Minima Libertaria.  For centuries, the republic was the premier naval power in the Mediterranean.  Many Venetian regionalists assert its absorption into the unified Kingdom of Italy in the mid nineteenth century was illegitimate.



Speaking a few days ago to Russia’s state-controlled news agency R.I.A. Novosti, Bernardini said, “The real and effective independence of the D.P.R. [Donetsk People’s Republic] and the L.P.R. [Luhansk People’s Republic] may create a new balance of power in the former [sic] Ukraine, and peaceful relations among the various parts of the region, including the D.P.R., L.P.R., Crimea, and what will be left of Ukraine.  A number of small states in fiscal competition one with the other would re-launch a region full of economic potential.”  Of course, this view ignores the fact that President Vladimir Putin’s not-very-covert military invasion of Ukraine has destabilized the entire world order and ushered in a new Cold War, with everyone wondering how far he will go in swallowing up his neighbor, which was ruled from Moscow for centuries until it gained independence with the implosion of the Soviet Union in 1991.  The D.P.R. and L.P.R. were declared independent states this spring by shady right-wing paramilitary rebel armies financed, supplied, and even staffed by the Russian military, with the overt desire for eventual annexation to the Russian Federation, along the lines of Crimea, which Russia had brutally invaded and annexed weeks earlier.  Western European countries and the United States have offered only token resistance to Putin’s expansion.  Ukraine is not in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), so NATO member states are not obligated to defend it.

This week’s voting in Donetsk. The peace signs do not seem to be intended ironically.

Another Veneto Independence leader, Alessio Morosin, told R.I.A. Novosti that the European Union (E.U.) “would be foolish to impose new sanctions against Russia for the sole reason that it [Russia] officially recognizes the November 2 elections,” as E.U. leaders have promised.   “There are no precedents in international practice,” Morosin added: “the threat of using sanctions against a state to change its political course, foreign and domestic policy is unacceptable.”  Morosin was silent on the question of  whether Russia is by the same token allowed to use military force to change Ukraine’s political course.  At the time of the Soviet collapse, Ukraine surrendered to Moscow the nuclear arsenal on its territory in exchange for recognition of its borders, including Crimea and the southeast, an agreement Putin now declares invalid because Ukraine’s government is now different—a highly eccentric reading of international law (which, if applied to Russia, would require the return of Sakhalin to Japan and Tuva to China).

Venetist demonstrators fly the Catalan flag as well to show their—at times far too indiscriminate—support for separatists abroad.

The relationship between northern Italian separatism and Putin’s neo-Soviet imperialism is not new.  A strong theme in the European Parliament elections earlier this year, in which far-right separatist and xenophobic parties in western and central Europe made an unexpectedly strong showing (see recent article from this blog), was some parties’ infatuation with Putin’s style of muscular, aggressive, unapologetic nationalism.  Putin’s annexation of Crimea won praise from groups as disparate as Belgium’s Flemish-nationalist Vlaams Belang party, France’s Nazi-sympathizing National Front (Front nationale), and, yes, Italy’s xenophobic, anti-E.U. Northern League (Lega Nord) (see a recent discussion of them in this blog).  A reporter described a recent Lega Nord rally in Milan (pictured below) as oriented less toward an independent Padania (i.e. northern Italy) and more toward backing Putin, condemning the international sanctions against Russia, and praising Putin’s denigration of “invading” Muslims, a large theme of Lega Nord’s anti-immigrant rhetoric.  This shows what a dim memory the ideological divides of the Cold War have become.  Who would imagine that western Europe’s goose-stepping fascist fringe would be standing up for “people’s republics” in the Ukrainian rust belt?  But in true fascist style, it’s not about political economy: it’s about nationalism and aggression, two things the far right respects no matter what flavor they comes in.

A separatist rally in northern Italy morphs into a saint’s procession for beloved fellow Muslim-basher Vladimir Putin.

For the most part, non–Lega Nord separatist parties in northern Italy had once occupied another part of the political spectrum (as discussed in an article in this blog; see also this article).  Those movements based in Venice, including the ideologies of “Venetism” and “Serenissimism” (the latter referring to Republic of Venice revanchists), defined themselves in opposition to the Lega Nord founder Umberto Bossi’s intolerance and jingoism, adding their own streak of American (or, in truth, Austrian) style classical-liberal libertarianism.  To make analogies with politics in the U.S., Lega Nord was Pat Buchanan while the Venetists were Ron Paul.  But Venetists are now shifting to the right, despite the fact that Lega Nord is still trying to relegitimize itself in the wake of the Euro crisis, which ejected the party from its role as Silvio Berlusconi’s junior coalition partner and ushered in a corruption scandal, and despite the fact that informal referenda in Veneto earlier this year showed that Venetist separatism could appeal to a majority of Venetians without the appeals to xenophobia and bigotry typical of Lega Nord.

Lega Nord, Republic of Venice, and Russian flags mingle at a League rally in Milan (along with flags of the former Duchy of Milan, also used by the “eco-nationalist” Insubria movement).

Of course, the Kremlin and its state propaganda organs have been having a field day with the support they are receiving from western European third-, fourth-, and fifth-party politics.  The independence movements in Scotland and Catalonia have been touted by Russia as Exhibit A in its case for the West’s hypocrisy concerning “separatism.”  If Scots should be allowed to choose whether or not to secede, then why not Crimea’s ethnic-Russian majority? (or so the argument goes).  And the far-right xenophobic political party in Hungary, Jobbik, has openly backed the idea that ethnic Hungarians just over the border in Ukraine’s Transcarpathia (Zakarpattia) oblast should be offered “protection” from the “oppression” of the new Ukrainian government, just as the Kremlin is supposedly “protecting” ethnic Russians in the east and Crimea (as discussed in this blog; see also an article here).

Hungary’s Jobbik political party has all the trappings.

Even more bizarrely, in September the separatist parliament of Spain’s autonomous Basque Country region announced that it was recognizing the sovereignty of the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic (N.K.R.), the unrecognized puppet state which newly independent Armenia slashed out of Azerbaijan’s soft western flank when Communism collapsed, after a pitiless campaign of ethnic cleansing of Azeris and Kurds.  Armenia, a close Russian ally, had essentially been doing the same thing for decades in Azerbaijan that Russia started doing this year in Ukraine—and few outside Russia and its puppet states (and, to their shame, many in the U.S. Armenian-American community) backs the N.K.R.  But now the Basques, despite their legacy of leftism and resistance against Francisco Franco’s fascism, are jumping on Putin’s imperialist bandwagon as well.  Strange bedfellows indeed.

The Basque parliament now recognizes the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic.

Why is all this happening now?  Well, it’s easy to blame Putin’s propaganda machine, but some blame must be shared by the western European political establishment.  Though the U.K. showed itself to be an enlightened democratic nation by allowing the people of Scotland to choose independence, it still pushed strenuously—and, in the end, successfully—to convince Scots to stay in the U.K.  Spain, on the other hand, has drawn a line in the sand forbidding Catalonia, the Basques, or any other nation within its kingdom from holding similar referenda.  Nor do Germany, with respect to Bavaria; Belgium, with respect to Flanders; or Italy, with respect to Padania or Veneto, take anything like a British approach to regionalist movements.  In fact, the E.U. and NATO establishments are quite panicked at the idea that regions within European countries might be allowed to—horrors!—choose who governs them.  Well, who does allow such a thing?  In some very blinkered views, Russia does, with its support for eastern and southern regions’ secession from Ukraine.  Never mind that elections in Donetsk, Luhansk, and Crimea are messy and crooked, without international observers; never mind that the movements were spearheaded by provocateurs from Russia and are in fact a mere step on the road to absorption into the heavily centralized Russian Federation, which grants regions far less autonomy than Ukraine does.  And never mind that in Russia even openly voicing support for any kind of autonomy or separatism is illegal, as activists in Siberia and in the Steppes just east of Ukraine have been finding out in the form of prison terms (as discussed recently in this blog).  And never mind the city of Grozny, capital of Russia’s Chechen Republic, which Putin leveled, murdering tens of thousands of civilians, in a war to prevent the Chechen majority’s desire for independence.  Indeed, never mind any of that—and western European far-right separatists are not being reminded of it, either, as they go online and read glowing reports of their own movements in Russia’s slick and deceptive English-language media.

Grozny in 1995.  This is how Putin reacts to separatists when they’re not Russians.

Because western European governments have for the most part turned their backs on the legitimate aspirations of their own ethnic minorities, those groups are now seeking validation and succor, and perhaps even funding, elsewhere—the Kremlin of Vladimir Putin, the most anti-separatist tyrant of all.  For the E.U. and the leaders of Spain, the U.K., and Italy, this should be a wake-up call.  Western European governments who want to show the world that they are more democratic than Putin’s Russia (which they are), it’s time to put your money where your mouth is on the question of ethnic autonomy.  Spain, I’m looking at you.


[For those who are wondering, yes, this blog is tied in with my forthcoming book, a sort of encyclopedic atlas to be published by Auslander and Fox under the title Let’s Split! A Complete Guide to Separatist Movements and Aspirant Nations, from Abkhazia to Zanzibar.  (That is shorter than the previous working title.)  The book, which contains dozens of maps and over 500 flags, will be on shelves and available on Amazon in February 2015.  I will be keeping readers posted of further publication news.  Meanwhile, please “like” the book (even though you haven’t read it yet) on Facebook and see this special announcement for more information on the book.]

An unexpected chain of events over the past several weeks has put independence for the Danish possession of Greenland back on the table and may determine the future of energy politics in the Arctic, and in the European Union (E.U.)


Aleqa Hammond, the accommodationist prime minister of Greenland, who is cold (pardon the expression) to the idea of independence, saw her political career implode in the last days of September after a financial scandal uncovered over 100,000 Danish krone spent on her and her family’s travel expenses and hotel mini-bar tabs.  Hammond’s socialist pro-independence party Siumut (Inuktitut for “Forward”) had up to that point been sitting at the top of the heap.  It garnered 43% of votes in the 2013 parliamentary elections and formed a coalition with the far-left separatist Inuit Party and with the premier unionist party, Attasut (“Solidarity,” also translatable as “Union”), each of those having pulled in just over 6%.

Aleqa Hammond

All eyes are now on the elections scheduled for November 28th.  But in the wake of the Hammond scandal, Siumut’s popularity has dropped.  The lastest polls of Greenland’s tiny electorate (about 40,000 people, mostly Inuit (Eskiimo), scattered over an area the size of half the E.U.) show a healthy but still lower 36.5% support, with the far more boldly pro-independence Inuit Ataqatigiit party surging at 44.4%.  That close to a majority, it would need to make deals with anti-independence parties to form a government.  Meanwhile, Attasut, which is a Liberal party in the big-L, European sense, is registering only 6.8% in the polls, down from more than 8% in 2013.  So Hammond has now pushed Siumut, a socialist party which has sat precariously on the fence on the independence question, out of the running, and a firmly pro-independence coalition is set to take office.

Together for the time being: the flags of Greenland and Denmark

Hammond is Greenland’s first female prime minister, and her likely successor, Sara Olsvig, would be the second.  (As a point of interest to anthropologists, she would become the second world leader to take office this year who has a background in anthropology, with degrees from the Universities of Greenland and Copenhagen.  The other is Ashraf Ghani, a Columbia University alumnus who is now president of Afghanistan.  What with Barack Obama’s mother having been an anthropologist as well, is this now a trend?)

Sara Olsvig—Greenland’s next prime minister?

Not only is Greenlandic independence now likely to be back on the table, but the corruption scandal also represents a close call for separatists alarmed by Hammond’s plans to bring Greenland into the E.U.  Greenland is not in the trade bloc, though its parent country, the Kingdom of Denmark, is.

A remaining questions is whether the current crisis will seem like a deep enough financial or corruption scandal that foreign investment will be affected.  This is what many in the E.U. would like Greenlandic voters to think.  This matters because the promise of foreign investment is one of the key planks in Inuit Ataqatigiit’s pro-independence platform.  So how financial markets on the European continent react and how E.U. leaders react may determine how confident Greenlanders feel when they go to the polls on the 28th, and what kind of a mandate the new government will feel it has to push for separation.


There is quite a bit at stake.  As northern latitudes warm and the Arctic Ocean becomes more and more of an open sea, the oil and, especially, natural-gas resources under the water will increasingly be the focus of a mad geopolitical scramble over the next century.  Without energy, Greenland—currently dependent on fishing (hardly reliable), Danish aid (slightly humiliating), and tourism (really?)—would be a much less viable state.  Russia controls by far the greatest part of the Arctic (see map above), owning nearly half of its circular coastline.  Canada, the world’s second-largest country, has the next biggest piece, while the United States (by virtue of Alaska), Norway, and Denmark (by virtue of Greenland) have smaller pie slices of roughly equal size.

E.U. member-states are shown in blue.  Blue and blue-circled territories overseas are in the E.U.  Overseas territories of E.U. member-states which lie outside the E.U. are in green.

The E.U. would like to be a major player in the development of the Arctic, naturally, but, inconveniently, Norway is not in the Union (Norwegians have always had too much North Sea oil to feel that they needed to be) and Greenlanders, as they eye independence, go back and forth as to whether they want to join.  Greenland is one of a small number of dependent territories of E.U. member states which are not in the E.U.  Others (see map above) include the Isle of Man and Jersey and Guernsey, which are technically independent but in free association with the United Kingdom; Denmark’s Faroe Islands (which also have an independence movement); France’s Pacific possessions New Caledonia, French Polynesia, and Wallis and Futuna; the Netherlands’ Caribbean possessions such as Aruba and Curaçao; and most of the U.K.’s island territories abroad.  Other overseas possessions are in the E.U., however, such as the U.K.’s Gibraltar and Falkland Islands, Spain’s Canary Islands and its African-mainland enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla, and French possessions like Réunion and the large and valuable French Guiana, where the European space program is based.  Greenland has always debated whether it should stay in the former group or join the latter one—and, indeed, whether an independent Greenland would benefit from E.U. membership on its own.

Russia has planted a flag under the sea at the North Pole ...

Would it be granted it?  Surely.  That it is in fact in North America will be no problem, since Brussels already kindly overlooks the fact that one of its member states, Cyprus, is (sshhh) in Asia.  And the huge expenses involved in running Greenland’s infrastructure would be more than made up for by the energy potential, which would strengthen western Europe’s hand mightily in what everyone agrees is a looming and burgeoning geopolitical struggle with Russia for energy resources.  With Greenland and a warming Arctic, the E.U. hopes it would not be dependent on an increasingly anti-Western Russia to keep its houses and businesses warm through the winter.

... but under international law, the reality is slightly more complicated.

But there is an irony here.  As many European colonial powers shed their overseas territories in the 1960s and ’70s, many of them were careful not to pull up stakes until they had put governments and agreements in place to guarantee parent-countries’ corporations’ access to the former colonies’ resources.  The pro-British governments installed in Iraq and Libya as the British withdrew are examples of this, and their inequities and abuses led directly to the rise of the dictatorships of Saddam Hussein and Moammar al-Qaddafi, respectively.  Likewise, the Dutch tolerated a pro–Shell Oil dictatorship in newly independent Indonesia, while Spain’s attempt to leave the former Spanish Sahara’s oil open to Spanish corporate exploitation, which set the stage for the ongoing dispute over that territory between the semi-recognized Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic (S.A.D.R.) and the new colonial master there, Morocco.  (Portugal, by contrast, tended to take its ball and go straight home, leaving colonies like Angola, Mozambique, and East Timor ravaged by decades of civil war.)  So E.U. shakers and movers in Paris, London, Madrid, and Amsterdam would very much like to see Denmark extract some concessions of this sort from Greenland as part of negotiations for independence, so that Greenland’s future energy supply can be moved into, and moved around in, the E.U. free-trade area without tariff or political disruption.  And here’s the irony: Denmark, a far more progressive, egalitarian-minded state which has never depended on colonies for its considerable prosperity, is much more likely to be a benevolent version of Portugal and let a newly independent Greenland do whatever it likes with its resources, including handing them over to non-E.U. contractors—like, say, the Chinese, who are all over Greenland right now like mud on a pig, waiting for the gold rush to start.

Greenlanders say: we may want your investment, but don’t plant your flag just yet.

Greenland must decide whether it is ready to bank on an energy still in its infancy as a guarantor of viability as an independent state.  If it does go it alone, Greenland will not need either Denmark or the E.U.  Russians, Chinese, and Americans will also be lining up to set up business there.  Economists and analysts on the Continent are already warning Greenland not to be too rash and hoping that the recent political troubles will make voters fret about investment.  No fretting is necessary.  Greenland’s voters should plug their ears, look at the facts, and make up their own minds.

Eventually, Greenlanders will sort it all out.

[For those who are wondering, yes, this blog is tied in with my forthcoming book, a sort of encyclopedic atlas to be published by Auslander and Fox under the title Let’s Split! A Complete Guide to Separatist Movements and Aspirant Nations, from Abkhazia to Zanzibar.  (That is shorter than the previous working title.)  The book, which contains dozens of maps and over 500 flags, will be on shelves and available on Amazon in February 2015.  I will be keeping readers posted of further publication news.  Meanwhile, please “like” the book (even though you haven’t read it yet) on Facebook and see this special announcement for more information on the book.]

The city of Mubi after Boko Haram paid it a visit about a year ago.  Now it controls it completely.

Boko Haram, according to news reports, controls four of Adamawa’s twelve local government areas (L.G.A.s)—as subdivisions of Nigerian states are called.  These L.G.A.s are all adjacent and bunched in the northern tip of Adamawa.  They are Madagali, Michika, Mubi North, and Mubi South—including, of course, the city of Mubi.  Boko Haram roadblocks and checkpoints have been set up along the borders of the quasi-statelet, and the Nigerian government and military have no presence there.  The group has announced its aim to take over all of Adamawa, a state of nearly 4 million people roughly the size of Maryland or Taiwan.

In this map, Borno State local government areas controlled by Boko Haram are circled in red.

Already, Boko Haram was reported to control an astounding one-third of the twenty-four L.G.A.s in Borno State.  Borno is the much larger and more populous state to the north of Adamawa where Nigeria, Chad, Niger, and Cameroon meet at Lake Chad.  It is here, in late August, that Boko Haram declared the city of Gwoza, which it had captured, to be the kernel of the new caliphate.  It also at that time already controlled Gulak, in the current northern-Adamawa statelet, and a string of towns spilling across southern Borno into Yobe State as well.  Borno, with over 5 million people, is about the size of Ireland.  In addition to Gwoza, then, Boko Haram now also controls the Borno L.G.A.s of Gamboru-Ngala, Kala-Balge, Marte, Dikwa, Bama, and Askira-Uba, as well as part of Konduga (see map above).  Observers expect the group to make a grab soon for Maiduguri, the Borno capital, which has over 1 million people and which is already nearly surrounded by Boko Haram territories.

One map showing Boko Haram–controlled areas in northern Nigeria, from John Campbell’s excellent blog. Other clear and informative maps of de facto Boko Haram territories can be found at the useful Political Geography Now blog.

One wonders if that is the point at which Nigeria will bring the full force of its military to combat the Boko Haram threat, or the point at which the international community will regard what is happening in northern Nigeria as a crisis as serious as that in Iraq and Syria with Islamic State.

Every northern Nigerian’s nightmare is to wake up in the morning and see something like this roll into town.

[For those who are wondering, yes, this blog is tied in with my forthcoming book, a sort of encyclopedic atlas to be published by Auslander and Fox under the title Let’s Split! A Complete Guide to Separatist Movements and Aspirant Nations, from Abkhazia to Zanzibar.  (That is shorter than the previous working title.)  The book, which contains dozens of maps and over 500 flags, will be on shelves and available on Amazon in February 2015.  I will be keeping readers posted of further publication news.  Meanwhile, please “like” the book (even though you haven’t read it yet) on Facebook and see this special announcement for more information on the book.]

EUROPE


Pro-West Party Wins in Moldova; Kremlin Sends “Humanitarian” Convoy to Transnistria.  In the formerly-Soviet Republic of Moldova, parliamentary elections on November 30th handed a victory to parties favoring closer integration with the European Union (E.U.), rather than with the Russian Federation.  But the pro-E.U. coalition still snagged only 41.4% of the vote, with the pro-Kremlin Socialist Party winning 21.6% and other pro-eastern parties racking up nearly as much as that.  The pro-Brussels Liberal Democratic Party came in second, behind the Socialists, but will be able to build form a government with smaller coalition partners.  Another pro-Moscow party, Patria, was, just before the election, embroiled in a scandal over illegal campaign funds from abroad, and its chairman, Renato Usatii, has fled to Russia; this caused many Patria voters to defect to the Socialists at the last minute.  The election and its aftermath are being watched closely because Moldova’s situation is so similar to that of its eastern neighbor, war-torn Ukraine.  Moldova’s pro-Moscow eastern border region of Transnistria declared itself independent in 1990 after the fall of Communism.  Though that conflict has remained frozen, and Transnistria is diplomatically unrecognized, the situation is reminiscent of the situation with this year’s Russian invasions of ethnic-Russian-majority areas in Ukraine such as Crimea and the Donbas.  Transnistrians have openly asked to be annexed to Russia, while Russia has tried to bully Moldova into scaling down its engagement with the E.U. and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).  Now, on the morning of December 6th, the latest reports indicate that Russia’s warnings to the Moldovan government over its reaffirmed path, may be more than bluster: the first of a new 60-truck convoy of “humanitarian aid” has arrived in Transnistria.  If it is like similar convoys crossing from Russia into the self-styled Donetsk People’s Republic and Luhansk People’s Republic, then “humanitarian aid” is likely to include surface-to-air missiles, land mines, and grenade-launchers.

Transnistria or bust: the “humanitarian” convoy

Donbas Rebel Leaders Scoff at New E.U. Sanctions List; Fighting Continues.  In Ukraine’s rebel-ruled ethnic-Russian-majority southeastern Donbas region, the foreign minister of the self-proclaimed, Russia-backed Donetsk People’s Republic (D.P.R.), Aleksandr Kofman, scoffed at new lists of sanctions targets released by the European Union (E.U.) which focused on leaders of the D.P.R. and its sister rebel quasi-state, the Luhansk People’s Republic (L.P.R.). “The very fact they impose sanctions on the person whose job is the normalisation of relations with the entire world, including Europe,” said Kofman, painting the D.P.R. and L.P.R. rebel governments as voices of reason and moderation, “indicates the E.U. is not interested in that normalisation.”  Meanwhile, shelling continued around Donetsk, and the Pyatigorsk host of Cossacks was one of several groups bringing convoys of “humanitarian aid” from Russia into the rebel republics.



20 Dead as Terrorists Battle Russian Federal Police in Chechen Capital.  A street battle between Russian police and Islamist militants left twenty people dead over the night of December 4th and 5th in Grozny, the capital of Russia’s Chechen Republic in the North Caucasus region.  The violence occurred shortly before Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, delivered his state-of-the-nation speech from Moscow.  The dead included nine militants and ten police.  Chechnya’s Putin-appointed, mildly-Islamist president, Ramzan Kadyrov, played down the incident, saying, “When this all started, I flew home, organized a special operation, killed the devils, held a meeting, gathered the staff needed to restore the damaged building and made it back in time to listen to the address of our national leader.”  Putin implied that Western powers were behind the attack, in an attempt to dismember Russia.  (Chechnya fought two bloody wars for independence after the fall of Communism, inviting a level of civilian massacre by Putin not seen in Europe since the Second World War.)  But before long a video posted on the pro-Islamist Kavkaz Center website claimed responsibility for the attack on behalf of Aslan Byutukayev, a.k.a. “Emir Khamzat” of the Caucasus Emirate movement, a salafist terrorist group whose aims are broadly shared by Islamic State, which is battling Russia’s ally, Syria, not far away to the southeast.

The scene in Grozny

Belarus President Questions Kaliningrad Exclave’s Russianness during Visit.  The republic of Belarus, in the past a lock-step ally of President Vladimir Putin’s Russian Federation, became wary of its giant eastern neighbor and former ruler this year after Putin’s military invasions of eastern Ukraine.  But was Belarus’s skittish dictator, Aleksandr Lukashenka, fearful of Russia annexing Belarus too, or was he merely jealous, wishing he could flex his irredentist muscles as well?  That question is being raised after comments Lukashenka made during a visit to Kaliningrad Oblast, a former part of Germany’s Pomerania region, wedged between Poland and Lithuania on the Baltic Sea, which is part of Russia today because of the reallocation of some German territories in the treaties that ended the Second World War.  While meeting this week with the oblast’s governor, Nikolai Tsukanov, and discussing trade, Lukashenka said, “Some of our enemies, including those in Russia and Belarus, say that Lukashenka wants the Kaliningrad Oblast to be a part of Belarus.  Believe me, I do not have such plans.  But we have a good tradition from the Soviet Union that Belarus has always supported Kaliningrad Oblast.  We have never considered you to be an alien region.  Perhaps, it doesn’t matter what country the Kaliningrad Oblast will belong to.”  Perhaps, indeed, that extends to countries that no longer exist: in August, residents of Kaliningrad, formerly Königsberg, staged autonomy rallies in the city and waved flags of Prussia (as reported at the time in this blog).

Prussian flags on display in Kaliningrad

Catalonia’s Radical Left Says Mas’s 18-Month “Roadmap to Secession” Too Slow. The leader of the Republican Left of Catalonia (Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya, or E.R.C.), the radical separatist party that holds the balance of power in the ruling coalition in Spain’s secessionist autonomous region of Catalonia, spoke out about the Catalan president Artur Mas’s 18-month “roadmap to secession,” saying it was a step forward but too slow.  The E.R.C. leader, Oriol Junqueras, told an interviewer, “We have to shorten the period of uncertainty as much as possible.  In Scotland’s case, the process was slower because the government in London was willing to negotiate, but here it is already clear that Madrid doesn’t want to negotiate anything.”

The E.R.C.’s Junqueras doesn’t want to wait for Catalan independence.

UKIP Slammed for Linking Scots to Nazis; HIV Activists Fight Farage’s Bullshit with Bullshit. In the United Kingdom, the head of the anti-Brussels, pro-unionist United Kingdom Independence Party’s Scottish delegation, Arthur Misty Thackeray (no, that’s not his stripper name), drew hostile responses recently for a volatile rant in which he repeatedly compared the ruling separatist Scottish National Party (S.N.P.) to Nazi Germany.  His harshest invective was reserved for Scotland’s new First Minister (i.e., premier), Nicola Sturgeon, and the S.N.P.’s party newspaper.  “The Scottish Nationalist movement is in danger of returning to its 1930s fascist roots,” Thackeray said, adding, “First we had cybernats and street thugs trying to intimidate their way to independence, then Sturgeon at Nuremburg-style rallies and now this McPravda propaganda sheet.  Scotland doesn’t need Neverendum politics, just everyone to accept that the majority of Scots voted to remain forever in the Union, and said No means No.”  Meanwhile, comments by UKIP’s bombastic chairman, Nigel Farage, about people with H.I.V. has prompted a more pungent criticism.  After Farage told Newsweek that restricting entry to the U.K. by “quality” immigrants should mean, for example, “people who do not have H.I.V.—that’s a good start,” activists from the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT-UP) responded to Farage’s “bullshit” by leaving a giant mound of actual bullshit outside UKIP’s headquarters on December 1st, which is World AIDS Day.  Farage describes himself as a libertarian, but in his crusade against the European Union (E.U.), he reserves his fiercest invective for one of the E.U. principles that is in full accord with libertarian principles: the free movement of people (a blind spot he shares with most libertarians in the United States).  But, just to assure people that Farage’s anti-AIDS anger is not personal, he clarified that in general, “I do not think people with life-threatening diseases should be treated by our National Health Service.”

Merry Christmas, UKIP

Police Injured, Military Vehicles Burned in Corsican Separatist Protest. Two police were injured in clashes on December 3rd with hundreds of young separatist demonstrators in Corsica, a large Mediterranean island controlled by France.  The rally had been organized by the pro-independence organization Separatist Youth (Ghjuventù Indipendentista).  Chanted slogans included “A nostra terra ùn hè à vende” (“Our land is not for sale”) and “Statu francese assassinu” (“Murderous French State”).  Store windows were smashed and two military trucks were set on fire with Molotov cocktails.  Police used tear gas to disperse the crowd but were less successful in making arrests.  According to one student organizer, Petru Vesperini, “We sent out a global call to Corsican youth, calling for protest against the current situation in Corsica, which is characterized by a disproportionate wave of repression, anti-Corsican racism, and the denial of democracy by the French government.”

Street battles in Corsica

Northern League Leader Plans January Summit with Putin. The leader of northern Italy’s far-right separatist Northern League (Lega Nord), Matteo Salvini, will meet in January with Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin.  Ostensibly, they will discuss economic issues, but the summit is telling in light of the fact that, since Putin’s illegal invasion and annexation of Crimea earlier this year and his crackdown on the beleaguered indigenous Muslim minority there, right-wing separatist parties in western Europe have rallied behind the Russian autocrat.  Like Belgium’s Flemish Interest (Vlaams Belang) party and the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP), Lega Nord is increasingly shifting away from straight-out constitutional and geopolitical aims (which are decidedly not in accord with Putin’s style of governing) and toward a vote-grubbing form of virulent anti-gay, anti-immigrant, and anti-Muslim bigotry (which are hallmarks of Putin’s rule).  (See a recent article from this blog for more on the Italian xenophobic separatist right’s infatuation with Putin.)

Northern Italian separatists and their hero

Indian and Seborgan flags adorn Prince Marcello I’s induction of S. P. Singh Oberoi.

BITS OF ASIA THAT LIKE TO PRETEND THEY’RE PART OF EUROPE

NATO, Georgia, Others Condemn New Russian–Abkhazian Treaty. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) is joining the international chorus condemning Russia’s November 24th treaty with the self-styled Republic of Abkhazia, which only a handful of nations recognize as sovereign.  James Appathurai, NATO’s point man on South Caucasus affairs, points out that the deal, which sets in motion a merger of sorts of the two nations’ militaries, raises tensions in the region, especially amid expectations that Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, will annex the puppet state, along with the Republic of South Ossetia, another rebel region of the Republic of Georgia it recognized diplomatically after the 2008 Russian–Georgian War, in the same way it did Ukraine’s Crimea republic earlier this year.  Speaking on December 4th, Appathurai said, “NATO Secretary General expressed extreme concern over the signing of the so-called treaty between Russia and Abkhazia.  There are grounds for concern in relation to South Ossetia.  This so-called agreement is yet another violation of the territorial integrity of Georgia.”



MIDDLE EAST

Kurds Come Out Ahead in Major Agreement with Baghdad over Oil and Budget. The Republic of Iraq and the Kurdistan Regional Government (K.R.G.) reached a key agreement on oil and finances on December 1st, after three days of negotiations.  In the agreement, the Kurdistan Region will receive 17% of the national budget and will receive 550,000 barrels of Kurdish oil per year.  The autonomous region, which openly hankers for independence while it holds its own against Islamic State militants better than the central government can, contains nearly a quarter of Iraq’s population but unofficially controls more territory than that, including the strategic city of Kirkuk, the vicinity of which will produce 300,000 of the 550,000 barrels to be paid in tribute to the state.



Increasingly Militant Turkmens, Christians Boycott Kurdish Parliament.  But in a further political fragmenting of Iraq’s far north, Turkmen and Christian members of the Kurdistan Regional Government’s parliament declared this week they would be boycotting the body’s session out of a feeling of exclusion from its institutions, in particular the Referendum Commission which will decide if and when to hold a plebiscite on secession from Iraq.  In Iraqi Kurdistan, Turkmens and Christians have formed their own independent militias, and Christians in particular have been the victims of ethnic cleansing by Islamic State (a.k.a. ISIS).  Meanwhile, the embattled self-declared quasi-state in Syrian Kurdistan is far more inclusive, with power-sharing between Kurdish, Arab, Turkmen, Assyrian (Christian), and even Chechen communities in the region.  Also this week, Iraq’s Assyrian Democratic Movement announced the formation of special militias designed specifically to protect and retake Assyrian territories from ISIS.  The militias, called Nineveh Plains Protection Units, are currently holding territories in non-ISIS-held parts of Nineveh province, the Assyrian heartland.  David W. Lazar, an Iraqi native, who runs the American Mesopotamian Organization, said that his group is involved in directing funding from the Assyrian diaspora in the United States to the Protection Units, but he refused to answer questions about whether U.S. military or intelligence personnel are playing a role.

Nineveh Plains Protection Units

ISIS Anbar Emir Killed in U.S. Airstrike in Iraq.  The al-Arabiya news service reported the death, from a United States airstrike, of a senior commander in the Islamic State organization (a.k.a. ISIS).  The commander, Senan Meted, was known as “emir” of western Anbar province, in Iraq.  He was killed on November 26th in the town of Hit, in Anbar.

ISIS—taking losses but still on the march

French Parliament 5th in Europe to Recognize Palestine; Belgium Next in Line.  The lower house of France’s parliament approved on December 2nd a resolution urging the government to recognize the State of Palestine, in a vote of 339-151.  This non-binding vote—only the executive can grant diplomatic recognition—follows similar ones in the parliaments of Sweden, Spain, Ireland, and the United Kingdom over the past several weeks, and Belgium and the European Parliament are planning to take up the issue soon as well.  But the French government, like the United States and U.K. governments, remains a committed ally of Israel—despite considerable popular opposition in those countries, especially France and, to a lesser extent, the U.K.  Serge Cwajgenbaum, secretary general of the European Jewish Congress, reacted with alarm to the French vote, calling it pandering to pander to the Muslim vote.  He also attempted to whip up fear over repercussions, saying, “Such votes can have negative consequences for the Middle East peace process because it can radicalize people, while pushing Palestinians to abandon the negotiating table in favor of seeking recognitions.  ...  I can’t exclude the possibility that there can be repercussions of the vote on the Jewish community,” he added, “as criticism of Israel can be construed by some extremists as an excuse for incitement against Jews.”  In 2012, the United Nations General Assembly voted 138 to 9 to admit Palestine as an “observer state” (as reported at the time in this blog), but full membership is barred by the Security Council veto wielded by Israel’s only ally, the U.S.



South Yemenis Hold Mass Rallies on Independence Day, Defying Authorities.  Southern Yemeni secessionists held demonstrations in the former capital, Aden, on November 29th to mark the 47th anniversary of Yemen’s independence from the United Kingdom, at which point it was partitioned into two states.  (The two reunified in 1991, and many southerners would like to reestablish a separate South Yemen.)  But central-government authorities prevented many leaders from attending the rallies, including Hassan Ba’oum, “spiritual leader” of al-Hirak, as the main southern—and predominantly Sunni Arab—secessionist movement is known.  Police attacks on demonstrators killed at least one and injured four others.  With the country in turmoil after this fall’s virtual coup d’état in the capital, Sana, by Shiite Arabs from the northern mountains called Houthis, even Islamist parties and the usually unionist socialist party which ruled South Yemen during the Cold War are directing most of their criticism at the central government and saying that al-Hirak has a point.  Meanwhile, the Houthis signed a cease-fire and a prisoner-release agreement with one salafist Islamist party in Yemen, the Islah party.

Yemen’s map is complicated.

AFRICA

Nigerian Military Claims All of Adamawa Wrested from Boko Haram “Caliphate.”  The military in Nigeriaannounced on December 5th that its forces had recaptured the town of Mubi, in Adamawa State, from the Islamist terrorist group Boko Haram, which had held it since October.  The military claims that this now frees all of Adamawa from Boko Haram control.  The terrorists had renamed Mubi “Madinatul Islam” (as reported at the time in this blog) and were running it as the capital of their newly declared “caliphate” in northern Nigeria, on the model of the “Islamic State” entity in Syria and Iraq (as reported at the time in this blog).  It is unclear how much territory the group still holds in neighboring Borno State. 

Soon refugees from Adamawa such as these may be able to return home.

Former Somali Parliament Speaker Sworn In as South-Western State President. In Baidoa, in southern Somalia, Sharif Hassan Sheikh Adanwas inaugurated on December 3rd as president of the Interim South-Western Administration (I.S.W.A.), designed to ease into existence an autonomous South-Western State of Somalia, on the model of autonomous regions like Puntland, Galdmudug, and Jubaland.  These regions so far function mostly as independent states, with little governing from Mogadishu.  Adan, a former national finance minister, was elected on November 17th.  He was best known for being involved in a power struggle with President Sheikh Sharif Sheikh Ahmed in 2010 when he was speaker of Somalia’s parliament.  But the Federal Republic of Somalia’s president, Hassan Sheikh Mohamud, was on hand for the inauguration.

Adan, new president of Somalia’s Interim South-Western Administration

Barotse Separatist Leader Nabbed by Zambian Police, to Be Tried for Treason. Authorities in Zambia on December 5th arrestedMombotwa Afumba, chairman of the monarchist movement Linyungandambo, which aims for the independence of Barotseland, a kingdom which agreed to be part of the Republic of Zambia when British rule ended in 1964 on condition of autonomous status, which has never been granted.  Afumba, whom the movement regards as Administrator-General of Barotseland, was arrested in Sesheke, near Mwandi Palace, residence of the senior chief Inyambo Yeta, of the separatist Barotse Royal Establishment (B.R.E.).  Afumba had made the mistake of recently crossing over the border from Namibia, where he has been spending most of his time since a crackdown three years ago.  Part of the traditional Barotse (a.k.a. Lozi) kingdom lies in Angola and Namibia.  Afumba has been moved to Mongu, the administrative center of Western (formerly Barotseland) Province, where he is expected to be tried for treason.

Mombotwa Afumba, now to be tried for treason

ASIA

Taiwan Pro-Independence Party Wollops KMT Establishment in Local Races.  In local elections in the Republic of China (Taiwan) on November 29th, the ruling Nationalist party, the Kuomintang (KMT), suffered severe setbacks.  From fourteen of the country’s 22 counties and county-level municipalities, the KMT now controls only six.  It yielded seven to the Democratic People’s Party (D.P.P.), which favors defying Beijing by formalizing the island’s decades-long de facto independence from mainland China.  As a result, Taiwan’s premier, Jiang Yi-huah, resigned, and its president, Ma Ying-jeou, quit his chairmanship of the party.  The mayoralty of Taipei, the capital, was won by Ko Wen-je, a trauma surgeon and political novice who ran as an independent but supports the D.P.P. favors formal independence.  Already, the KMT’s hold on power has been tenuous: it controls only a slight majority, 65, of the national parliament’s 113 seats, and at this rate they won’t survive the 2016 elections.  The repercussions of these changes have yet to be felt, but so far the Communist government in Beijing, which still claims Taiwan is its own, is downplaying its significance.

Cute puppy dogs, Jake & Elwood, independence from Beijing— Taipei’s mayor-elect Ko Wen-je knows what voters like.

15 Killed in Uyghur Violence in Xinjiang. In China, authorities reported that on November 28th fifteen people were killed and fourteen injured in an attack by members of the Uyghur minority in a public market in the Uyghur-majority Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region.  The incident occurred in Shache County, where nearly 100 people had been killed in reportedly similar violence in July.  The assailants in the latest attack were reported to be armed with explosives, knives, and a vehicle.  But Uyghur diaspora activists dispute the government account of such atrocities, claiming they are exaggerated and nonexistent and are being concocted as a pretext for repression of Uyghur culture and the ethnic group’s Muslim faith.


Baloch Separatists Claim Responsibility for Killing 2 Pakistani Soldiers.  Two separate attacks on November 30th which killed two members of Pakistan’s Frontier Corps and wounded several others were the work of the Baloch Liberation Army (B.L.A.), according to a B.L.A. statement.  A B.L.A. spokesman, Jeand Baloch, said, “Our Sarmachars [freedom fighters] attacked the security forces’ convoy with R.P.G. and other automatic weapons killing at least two soldiers including a Subedar and injuring several others.”  The two attacks occurred in the Tump and Panjgur regions of Balochistan, a vast province covering nearly half of Pakistan’s territory, which has been fighting for independence for decades.

Don’t fuck with the Baloch Liberation Army, okay?

OCEANIA

Papuans Wave Banned Flag, Stage Demonstration in Jakarta on “Independence Day.” Hundreds of members of tribal ethnic minorities from eastern Indonesia’s West Papua region staged protests in the national capital, Jakarta, on December 1st, demanding a referendum on independence for Irian Jaya and West Papua provinces, on the island of New Guinea, as a separate Republic of West Papua.  The protests were marking the 53rd anniversary of the region’s declaration of independence from the Netherlands in 1961, when Indonesia was not yet fully established.  Papuans were promised, then denied, a referendum at that time, and Indonesia annexed the territory with the tacit approval of the United States and United Nations.  At this week’s rallies, some raised the Morning Star flag, the display of which is illegal in Indonesia.

Papuans rally for freedom in Jakarta.

NORTH AMERICA

Greenland’s Narrowly Reelected Ruling Party Shuns Separatists in New Coalition. Against expectations, elections on November 28th in Greenlandhanded the governing socialist party, Siumut, a narrow victory, with a 34.3% share of votes, despite the party’s near collapse from a financial scandal and despite its moderate stance on the question of independence from Denmark.  This was just over 300 votes more than the main opposition party, the far more stridently separatist Inuit Ataqatigiit (I.A.), received, with 33.2% of votes.  Each now gets 11 seats in the 31-seat Greenlandic parliament.  At first it seemed that Siumut, as the narrow winner, was courting I.A. with hopes of forming a government, but negotiations seemed to snag on mining issues, which are related to question of Greenland’s viability as an independent state.  Now, within the past few days, Siumut has formed a coalition with two smaller anti-independence parties, the Democrat Party and the Atassut Party, with only seven parliamentary seats between them—enough for Siumut to shut I.A. and make sure their coalition partners are unambiguously junior. This puts the independence cause significantly farther from the center of Greenland politics—the opposite of what had been predicted mere weeks ago (including by this blog).  72.9% of the vast but sparsely populated territory’s 40,424 eligible voters cast ballots.

Against expectations, Aleqa Hammond and her Siumut party prevailed.

Quebec Gunman Seeks Bail, Claims No Memory of Lethal Attack on Premier’s Rally.  The rabidly anti-Francophone and court-certified mentally ill Canadian who may have been attempting to assassinate Quebec’s new premier-elect, Pauline Marois, when he was arrested in 2012, told a judge at a bail hearing on November 28th that he cannot prepare for his own defense while jailed.  A bathrobe-wearing Richard Henry Bain had shot and killed one person at the separatist Parti Québécois’s post-election victory rally in September 2012 when police tackled him.  Bain, a disgruntled guide–outfitter, was suspected of attempting to assassinate Marois, but he claims now he has no memory of the event, due to what he now calls an overdose of medication.  Bain claimed oppression of Anglophones by Canada’s government and was an advocate for secession from the province of the city of Montreal, which has a higher proportion of Anglophones than other Québécois cities.

“And another thing ...!”: Bain being arrested in 2012

Californian Seeks “Sub-National Sovereignty” for State; Jeffersonians Court Lake County.  A plan to split California into six separate states of the United States (discussed in this blog) died with not enough signatures earlier this year, but disgruntled Californians are not out of the game.  Libertarian and conservative Californians are arguably the most disenfranchised ideological bloc in the U.S., since under the winner-take-all system in elections for the presidency and the U.S. Senate, the perennial political minority in the most populous state may as well not bother voting.  So, while Tim “Six Californias” Draper has gone back to the drawing board, Louis Marinelli, a 28-year-old English teacher in San Diego has founded an organization called Sovereign California.  The group’s aim is not to secede from the U.S.—at least not yet—but to carve out a more sovereign constitutional status for California within the union.  “We’re not pursuing actual separation from the rest of America,” Marinelli says.  “It’s more like sub-national sovereignty, something like Scotland has within the United Kingdom, with a lot of autonomy, but still within the national system.”  (A politically and geographically closer example might be Quebec’s new status as a “nation within a nation” in Canada.)  This “sub-national sovereignty” would include the right to form foreign diplomatic relations unilaterally—an idea also once favored by the former centrist Republican governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger.  A commonwealth status akin to Puerto Rico’s is another possibility, Marinelli says.  He is also very focused on petitioning to allow the Bear Republic Flag—the state flag, which still bears the phrase “California Republic” dating to its brief independence in 1846—to fly at the same height as the Stars and Stripes at government facilities.  Meanwhile, the board of supervisors of Lake County, in northern California, debated for two hours on December 2nd the idea of joining a proposed 51st state called the State of Jefferson.  Glenn, Modoc, Siskiyou, Sutter, Tehama, and Yuba counties have passed resolutions in favor of the secession, and Colusa has considered it.  In June of this year, Tehama County voted to secede in a non-binding ballot measure, while Del Norte and Siskiyou counties defeated similar proposals only narrowly and Siskiyou and Modoc counties delivered a “declaration of withdrawal” to Sacramento in August (as reported at the time in this blog).

One day ... side by side (or so hopes Sovereign California)

Feds Slap Aging Surfer Dude’s Wrists for Minting Unofficial “Liberty Dollars.”  A United States federal judge in Statesville, North Carolina, on December 2nd sentenced Bernard von NotHaus, a 70-year-old “ex–surfer guy” and founder of the Free Marijuana Church of Honolulu (it’s the church that’s free, not the marijuana, unfortunately), to six months of house arrest for issuing his own minted Liberty Dollars in defiance of the U.S. government.  This follows a 2011 conviction for “counterfeiting”—a dubious charge, since creating coins and notes from scratch is forgery, not counterfeiting, and since Von NotHaus was not trying to pass the dollars off as U.S. currency.  He had since become a hero to libertarians for his championing of the cause of resisting the supposedly “phony” (i.e., not gold-backed) U.S. dollar.  As Von NotHaus put it in 2011 when feds tried to link his enterprise to domestic terrorism, “This is the United States government.  It’s got all the guns, all the surveillance, all the tanks, it has nuclear weapons, and it’s worried about some ex-surfer guy making his own money?  Give me a break.”  The judge had indeed given him a break: at his age, a maximum sentence could have meant life in prison.

Von NotHaus with one of the offending pieces of paper

SOUTH AMERICA

“Galt’s Gulch” Libertarian Commune in Chile Switching to Bitcoin. An 11,000-acre utopian community called Galt’s Gulch Chile (G.G.C.), modeled on the secret mountain redoubt portrayed in Ayn Rand’s 1957 libertarian novel Atlas Shrugged,has announced that it is adopting the alternative currency Bitcoin as the coin of its realm.  Jeff Berwin, a United States citizen who is G.G.C.’s spokesman and a player in the early history of Bitcoin, stated recently, “I can think of no better way to invest bitcoins than on real estate, especially legally protected land with clean water and organic farmland in quickly developing markets, like Chile.  ...  Just like bitcoins, I think land in emerging markets will only increase in value over the coming years.  The U.S. dollar and other fiat currencies will continue to collapse and we recommend those holding dollars to divest themselves of those dollars as soon as possible.  We also want to show our commitment to bitcoin and accept it very happily as payment for land at Galt’s Gulch.”  This comes despite strong indications from those claiming to have been hoodwinked by G.G.C. financiers that the whole enterprise is a money-making scam which grossly overstates the functionality and sustainability of the community and dissembles about what happens to the money prospective communards pay in.  (Bitcoin is also a proposed currency for the Principality of the Portinha, a 2,000-square-foot rock off the coast of Madeira, an Atlantic possession of Portugal’s off the coast of Morocco, which is recognized by no one.)

Second-handers use rear entrance

[For those who are wondering, yes, this blog is tied in with my forthcoming book, a sort of encyclopedic atlas to be published by Litwin Books under the title Let’s Split! A Complete Guide to Separatist Movements and Aspirant Nations, from Abkhazia to Zanzibar.  (That is shorter than the previous working title.)  The book, which contains 46 maps and 554 flags(or, more accurately, 554 flag images), will be on shelves and available on Amazon on March 1, 2015.  I will be keeping readers posted of further publication news.  Meanwhile, please “like” the book (even though you haven’t read it yet) on Facebook and see this special announcement for more information on the book.]

Hong Kong’s streets have been cleared, but no one is conceding defeat (see below under “Asia”)

EUROPE

Kosovo Names New Government; Mustafa of L.D.K. to be Premier.  After a six-month stalement, the parliament of the partially recognized Republic of Kosovo has formed a new government.  The new prime minister, after a 73-to-38 vote by legislators, will be 63-year-old Isa Mustafa, of the Democratic League of Kosovo (L.D.K.).  Mustafa is expected to continue three-way negotiations with Kosovo’s former parent country, the Republic of Serbia, and the European Union (E.U.), on formalizing Kosovo’s independence in preparation for admission of both countries to the E.U., and to move more aggressively than his predecessors in seeking prosecution for war crimes committed by Kosovars in their struggle for independence in the 1990s.

Isa Mustafa, Kosovo’s new prime minister, with Kosovar and Albanian flags

2014 Was Slow Year for Kosovo Recognition; “Institutional Gridlock” Blamed.  Though 2014 was touted in advanced by the Republic of Kosovo’s foreign ministry as a watershed year in the breakaway province’s international recognition, in fact only four new states established diplomatic relations with Kosovo this year.  One Kosovar political scientist, Afrim Hoti, blames “institutional gridlock” within the foreign ministry for the slowdown.  The new diplomatic partners Kosovo snagged in 2014 were all small third-world nations: the Solomon Islands (as reported at the time in this blog), Togo, and two miniature monarchies: Tonga and Lesotho.  (Rumors that Burma (Myanmar) and Fiji were granting recognition turned out, embarrassingly, to be just that, as reported at the time in this blog.)  Kosovo had racked up twice as many new diplomatic partners in 2013, by contrast, including major nations like Thailand, Egypt, and Libya, as well as, for example (as reported at the time in this blog), El Salvador.  In December 2012, the Commonwealth of Dominica, a former British colony in the Caribbean, became (as reported at the time in this blog) the 97th country to recognize Kosovo, putting Kosovo past the point where 50% of the world’s countries recognize it.  But membership in the United Nations General Assembly has been blocked by the Security Council vetoes wielded by the Russian Federation, an ally of Serbia, which still claims Kosovo, and by the People’s Republic of China, which takes a principled stand against separatism in general.  In addition, major nations such as Spain (fearful of encouraging its own Catalans), India, and Indonesia, as well as most of Latin America, refuse to recognize Kosovo.

The 110 countries that recognize Kosovo’s independence are in green.

Ukraine Fortifies Border with Transnistria as Kremlin Reacts to Moldova Vote.  After last week’s elections in Moldova (reported at the time in this blog) allowed a new Western-leaning, Kremlin-wary government to squeak narrowly into power and the decades-old, and with the Russian-backed separatist regime in Moldova’s de facto independent Transnistria region (a.k.a. Trans-Dniester Republic, a.k.a. Pridnestrovian Moldavian Republic, etc.) openly asking to be annexed by Russia, tensions were already high.  Add to this a mysterious Russian “humanitarian” convoy headed to Transnistria that eerily recalls similar convoys that heralded the separatist rebellions in Crimea and the Donbas earlier this year.  (This blog has been predicting an eventual Russian grab for Transnistria, as long ago as March and April of this year.)  The Ukrainian government is not taking any chances, and its military is now digging a 33-kilometer-long trench as it fortifies the border between Transnistria—a self-declared republic on a slender crescent of land which separates Moldova from Ukraine along the entirety of their shared border—and Ukraine’s Odessa Oblast, which has been the center of mostly aborted unrest by ethnic Russians.  As Germany’s chancellor, Angela Merkel, told media this week, “Moldova, Georgia, and Ukraine are three countries in our eastern neighbourhood that have taken sovereign decisions to sign an association agreement with the E.U. Russia is creating problems for all three of these countries.”



Russo-Austrian Opera Diva Criticized for Posing with Novorossiya Rebel Flag. In St. Petersburg, the renowned opera singer Anna Netrebkohas placed herself on the side of the pro-Kremlin separatists in eastern Ukraine, by posing with a flag of the self-styled Federal State of Novorossiya (or “New Russia,” consisting of the Donetsk People’s Republic and Luhansk People’s Republic) during an event at which she donated 1 million rubles to the cause of building an opera house in the war-torn city of Donetsk.  She posed for the flag with Oleg Tsaryov, a former member of Ukraine’s parliament who sides with pro-Russian rebels.  She later claimed that she did not recognize the flag and that the photo was not her idea.  A spokesman for the foreign ministry in Austria, where Netrebko lives and has dual citizenship, said, “Her meeting with a separatist leader and having a photo taken in front of a separatist flag is highly problematic.  Given the really difficult situation we are facing in Ukraine, this is anything but helpful.”  Austrian Airlinesalso severed its celebrity-endorsement contract with her, adding, “We distance ourselves from extreme political positions and the use of armed violence.”  This is not the only time that Austria and Russia have found themselves on opposite sides of a politically-tinged scandal in the world of vocal performance.  When the bearded drag-queen Conchita Wurst won the Eurovision Song Contest in Copenhagen in May, Russian nationalist leaders in Russia and Ukraine condemned the win as an example of Western decadence.

Tsaryov and Netrebko in the now infamous photo with the flag of Novorossiya (whose resemblance to the flag of the Confederate States of America is, as described in detail in an article in this blog, more or less coincidental).

American Conspiracy Theorist Says Jews Planning “Second Israel” in Ukraine. An American conspiracy theorist, Wayne Madsen, who believes that Cable News Network (C.N.N.) is controlled by Jews, and who was a key figure disseminating the widely-believed folklore that President Barack Obama was concealing his true birthplace in Kenya (the so-called “birther” view), now has a theory about Ukraine, and, once again, Jews are in the middle of it.  According to Madsen, the government of Israel is aware of, and worried by the implications of, the supposed fact that the contemporary communities identifying themselves as Jewish Ashkenazim are in fact descendants not of the Israelites of the Old Testament but of Khazars who converted to Judaism centuries later.  The Khazars were a Turkic-speaking people of medieval Central Asia about whom little is known, including who their actual descendants are.  The “Khazar” theory of Jewish origins is a common anti-Semitic libel in the Muslim world, especially where that overlaps with the Russian sphere of influence.  Madsen claims that when Western nations side with the government of Ukraine against Russia, they do so at the bidding of their puppet-masters in Israel, who are making secret plans to establish a “second Israel” in Ukraine—since the old Khazar empire included part of what is now Ukraine.  The Turkic-speaking Karachay and Balkar nationalities in Russia’s North Caucasus region likewise claim descent from Khazars and some in those communities wish to join together in an autonomous or independent republic called New Khazaria.  Madsen makes no mention of the existing—but eerily Jewless—Jewish homeland that already exists in Russia, the far-eastern Siberian wasteland called the Jewish Autonomous Region (J.A.O.) dating to the Josef Stalin era.

“Next year, in Sebastopol!” (according to an American wingnut)

Russia Threatens BuzzFeed over “Extremist” Coverage of Chechen Bombing.  The bureau in Russia responsible Internet censorship threatened this week to ban the United States website BuzzFeed after its coverage of the December 4th and 5th Islamist terrorist attacks (reported at the time in this blog) in Grozny, capital of the Chechen Republic, was deemed to “contain appeals to mass riots, extremist activities or participation in mass (public) actions held with infringement of the established order.”  The offending article (read it here) contains a link to a YouTube video embedded in an article hosted by Kavkaz Center, a pro-Islamist news website covering the Caucasus which is banned in Russia for its cheerleading coverage of the region’s uncontrollable Islamist separatist insurgency at the hands of the Caucasus Emirate movement.  (For example, the site refers to the Grozny attack as a “successful raid of Mujahideen on the Russian-occupied city of Jokhar [i.e. Grozny], the capital of the Islamic Emirate of Caucasus.”)  YouTube shortly after removed the video for its incitement to violence, after which BuzzFeed removed the now-broken link.  The Russian agency then thanked BuzzFeed for its “cooperation.”  This was the first time the Russian watchdog agency had come to loggerheads with a U.S. news source in its campaign to eradicate dissenting views from the airwaves and Internet.

The jihadist attack this month in Grozny

Russian Security Forces Kill 4 Militants in Kabardino-Balkaria. Security forces killed four alleged militants on December 11th in a shoot-out in a Nalchik, capital of the Russian Federation’s Kabardino-Balkar Republic, in the southwestern North Caucasus region.  The republic, which is shared by Kabardin (Circassian) and (Turkic-speaking) Balkar ethnic minorities, is in an area claimed by the jihadist separatist Caucasus Emirate movement.



Former Scots Separatist Premier Salmond to Run for Parliament—the One in London. The former First Minister of Scotland and head of the Scottish National Party (S.N.P.), who resigned in September after bringing Scotland to the brink of independence in a referendum, now says he will run for Parliament—the British parliament, that is.  Alex Salmond, who is currently the S.N.P. M.S.P. (member of Scottish Parliament) for East Aberdeenshire, made the announcement at a party meeting December 7th in the town of Ellon.  The riding he plans to seek is that of Gordon, in Aberdeenshire, currently represented at Westminster by Sir Malcolm Bruce, of the Liberal Democratic Party.  Though this puts him out of Scottish politics in a way, Salmon reiterated that he fully expects a repeat referendum on independence in his lifetime.

Alex Salmond

Scottish Terrorism Suspected to Be Extradited from Ireland to U.K. after Final Appeal. In a United Kingdom court, a pro-independence Scottish terrorism suspect lost his appeal against an extradition order to bring him home from the Republic of Ireland, where he has been living for decades.  The defendant, Adam Busby, who is 65, had to be brought to court in an ambulance because of his severe debilitation from multiple sclerosis.  In 2009, under the rubric of the supposed “Scottish National Liberation Army”—which may have consisted only of himself—Busby phoned a newspaper in Glasgow, Scotland, and threatened to poison the water supply in major U.K. cities.  He also apparently claimed he had mailed poisoned packages to leaders such as the U.K. prime minister at the time, Gordon Brown.  He is also charged with phoning in various bomb threats in 2010.

It’s back to Blighty for Busby the bomber

Basque Terror Group Endorses Far-Left Party in Spain—or Not? In Spain, according to a report in Newsweek, jailed spokespeople for the recently disarmed Basque terrorist group ETA (Euskadi Ta Askatasuna, or Basque Homeland and Freedom) announced December 8th that the organization was supporting Pablo Iglesias and his far-left political party Podemos in Spain’s upcoming national elections.  Podemos holds no seats in national Spanish legislatures but has five of Spain’s 54 seats in the European Parliament.  Newsweek’s information, to my knowledge, is not confirmed by other sources and seems sketchy in light of the fact that there are Basque pro-independence parties.  In fact, Iglesias recently said that he would sue Spain’s ruling People’s Party (P.P.) for slurs that Podemos was on the side of “Castrists, Chavists, and ETA” (referring also to Cuba’s dictator Fidel Castro and Venezuela’s late left-wing populist president Hugo Chávez).  It seems at this point that ETA, rather than changing its political stripes, is merely being used as a pawn in a war of words between larger parties.  (Thanks to a reader—see comments section, below—for calling my attention to the discrepancy.)

ETA—still fighting the Man after all these years.  (Nice berets, by the way.)

German Judge Jails “King Peter” for Driving with Royal “New Germany” License.  A self-styled “King of Germany,” who claims to rule over a 9-hectare area in Germany’s Saxony–Anhalt state called “New Germany” (Neu-Deutschland), was jailed on December 4th for using a driver’s license issued under the name of his imaginary realm.  (Earlier, he seemed to have been calling his state simply Königreich Deutschland.)  The 48-year-old King Peter—a.k.a. Peter Fitzek, a former cook and video-store manager—appeared in court in Neustadt in full royal regalia, but was sentenced to three months behind bars for using a fake driver’s license.  This was his ninth conviction for the same charge and his 24th in total.  When Fitzek tried to invoke his immunity as a head of state, the judge told him, “You have built a fantasy world with a fanciful political worldview.”  King Peter claims over 3,000 “citizens” and a currency called Engel-Geld, or “angel money.”  A Kingdom of Germany does not even exist historically.  Until 1918, Germany was a confederated empire, whose constituent kingdoms included Bavaria, Saxony, and Prussia, with the King of Prussia holding the imperial crown.

King Peter fights city hall

Saxony State Premier Sounds Alarm over Hate-Crimes against Sorbs. Meanwhile, in the real Germany, and also in Saxony, Stanislaw Tillich, premier of Saxony Free State, in the former East Germany, warned on December 19th that thuggish xenophobic violence in his state is not directed only at Muslims or at immigrants—as with recent hate rallies in the Saxon capital, Dresden—but also at the indigenous people of the region of Lusatia (Lausitz), the Slavic-speaking Sorbs (also sometimes called Wendish people).  Tillich is one of about 60,000 total Sorbs in Germany, and he says the group has been victimized by hate crimes, in a continuation of prejudicial treatment he received growing up in East Germany—and of policies before that, during the Nazi era, when Sorbs were officially denigrated as Untermenschen (“subhumans”).  He accused extremists of using the pretext of general anxiety about refugees and immigration to “misuse this situation and rail against everything different.  That prompts some to become abusive toward Sorbs.  I regard that as alarming.”

Saxony’s premier Stanislaw Tillich with fellow Sorbs

Karelia’s Ingermanland Finns Recall Stalin’s Deportations on Anniversary. In the frozen far-northwest of Russia early this month, an organization called the Ingermanland Union of Finns of Kareliamarked its 25th anniversary.  In addition to cultural preservation, the Union is devoted to preserving the memory of the deportations during Josef Stalin’s rule, in 1942, when 28,000 or so Finno-Ugrian-speaking indigenous people (variously known as Karelians, Russian Finns, Ingermans, Ingrians, Veps, etc.; the boundaries among the groups are not always clear) were deported eastward, along with many ethnic Germans, to keep them away from the vicinity of Leningrad (St. Petersburg).  Thousands of them died in deportations to places such as Yakutia (now called the Sakha Republic) in Siberia.  Karelians and related peoples make up only a minority of the Russian Federation’s Republic of Karelia, outnumbered by ethnic Russians.  Karelia’s Ingermanland Finns number only 441.

The once-vast nation of Ingria (shown in green) now numbers only a few thousands

BITS OF ASIA THAT LIKE TO PRETEND THEY’RE PART OF EUROPE

Uruguay Veep Hints at Plan to Be First to Recognize Nagorno-Karabakh.  The vice-president of Uruguay, Danilo Astori, surprised many on December 8th when, on a state visit to Armenia, he declared that his country was interested in becoming the first country to grant diplomatic recognition to the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic (N.K.R.), an Armenian puppet state carved out of Azerbaijan’s western flank by Armenian and Russian forces after the fall of Communism.  (But Uruguayan recognition of the N.K.R. has been rumored as long ago as 2012, as reported at the time in this blog.)  Armenia and the Armenian-American (i.e., Armenian-U.S.) diaspora prop up the N.K.R., but neither Armenia nor Armenia’s ally, Russia, nor any other country has taken the step of recognizing it.  But, as Astori said in a joint press conference with the speaker of Armenia’s parliament, Galust Sahakyan, in response to a question about N.K.R. recognition, “My country is working toward that direction.”  Astori also laid a wreath at the Dzidzernagapert Armenian Genocide Memorial and spoke of plans to build an Armenian Genocide museum in Montevideo, the Uruguayan capital.  Uruguay is one of several left-leaning states in Latin America which have allied themselves against United States foreign influence—the others are Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Bolivia—and, in a Cold War–style polarization, make a point to take positions contrary to U.S. foreign-policy positions on matters such as Crimea, Cuba, Iraq, Palestine, and Puerto Rico.

Vice-President Astori honors Armenian genocide victims; will he turn around and lend legitimacy to ethnic cleansing by Armenians next?

Azerbaijan, Nagorno-Karabakh Dispute Facts of Armenian Soldier’s Death.  An Armenian soldier was killed in a clash with Azerbaijan’s military on December 8th, at an unspecified location, possibly or possibly not along Azerbaijan’s de facto border with the unrecognized Nagorno-Karabakh Republic (N.K.R.), which is maintained by Armenia’s military on what the world regards as Azerbaijani territory.  Each side has a different version of the soldier’s death: an N.K.R. spokesman said that Azerbaijani forces attacked Armenian positions, while the defense ministry in Baku says Azerbaijani soldiers were defending themselves against an Armenian assault.  Cease-fire violations are an almost routine occurrence in the decades-old “frozen conflict.”


South Ossetia President Won’t Rule Out Annexation to Russia in Coming Treaty. The president of the Republic of South Ossetia, a Russian puppet state on what most of the world regards as part of the Republic of Georgia, said on December 10th that his country would soon sign a treaty with Russia like the one signed a few weeks ago (discussed last week in this blog) between Russia and South Ossetia’s sister republic in Georgia’s west, Abkhazia.  The details are yet to be worked out, said the president, Leonid Tibilov, but he explained, “The range of [possible levels of] integration can be pretty wide: from becoming a subject of the Russian Federation to an associated partnership.”



MIDDLE EAST


With Caucasus Emirate Divided, Some Suspect ISIS Role in Chechnya Attack.  Some experts on the Caucasus region are speculating strongly that Islamic State (a.k.a. Islamic State in Iraq and al-Sham, or ISIS) had a role in the December 4-5 terrorist attack (reported at the time in this blog) in Grozny, the capital of Russia’s Chechen Republic, which left 20 dead.  As reported last week in this blog, the Caucasus Emirate movement was quick to claim responsibility, but the editor of the Caucasian Knot news-website Gregory Shvedov pointed out, “The underground intends to demonstrate that the existing security system is not effective.  We reported a split in the ‘Caucasus Emirate’ with some insurgents joining ISIS. There is still a question who really was behind the current attacks.”  Though they have coeval aims and use the same Ottoman Empire jargon of “emirates” and “caliphates,” the Caucasus Emirate and ISIS are not firmly linked; the Emirate has not aligned itself very strongly with ISIS’s global-caliphate agenda, as some in groups like Nigeria’s Boko Haram (as reported in this blog) and Somalia’s al-Shabaab have.  But one faction may be making common cause.  Such an alliance would cause an odd triangulation in the region: ISIS is fighting both the “Great Satan” the United States and the Syrian government which the U.S. wants to step down, while Russia, a deadly enemy of the Caucasus Emirate, is an ally of Syria.  A wider conflagration on these terms would find a Syria–Iran–Iraq–Russia axis allied against Kurdistan, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, moderate Syrian rebels, and the U.S., while ISIS and the Caucasus Emirate would be at war with all of the above.

Are some factions of the Caucasus Emirate now in bed with ISIS?

Kurds Eager to Fill Void in European Natural-Gas Supply Left by Russian Conflict. The dramatic Russian entente with western and central Europe over the past year has presented stark geopolitical choices to countries dependent on natural gas piped through Ukraine from Russia.  But the timing may have one advantage.  With Iraq and Syria fragmenting rapidly, resource-rich Kurdistan seems headed for eventual independence, and that could help Europe.  As Dilshad Sha’ban, deputy head of the (Iraqi) Kurdish parliament’s Natural Resources Committee, pointed out this week, Kurdistan is capable of meeting as much as 30% of Europe’s natural-gas needs.  “The Kurdistan Regional Government will produce a surplus of natural gas that will be exported abroad in the next three years, and sold to Europe,” Sha’ban said, adding, “Annually, the K.R.G. spends three billion U.S. dollars generating electricity.  There is a plan to use Kurdish local natural gas to produce electricity in the first stage and then in the next stage, the gas will be exported abroad.  Recently, we met with the French Consul in the Kurdistan Region who emphasized that France and Europe in general are hoping the Kurdistan Region’s natural gas will fulfill a portion of their requirements.  The Ministry of Natural Resources has signed an agreement with ExxonMobil, Butash Oil, Genel Energy, and some other companies in order to produce natural gas and soon production will start.”

Waving Kurdish flags

Kurdish Cabinet Member Backs Autonomous Region for Iraq’s Sunni Arabs. The deputy prime minister of the Kurdistan Regional Government (K.R.G.), in northern Iraq, said on December 9th that the central government in Baghdad needs to devolve more power to regions and communities, including allowing the creation of an autonomous region for Sunni Arabs.  The official, Qubad Talabani, added that this was perhaps the only way to stop discontented Sunnis from joining Islamic State (a.k.a. Islamic State in Iraq and al-Sham, or ISIS).  But Talabani said he opposed outright separatism, adding, “It seems counterintuitive, but the only way you’re going to keep Iraq together is to give up power from Baghdad.”

The idea of a Sunni Arab autonomous region now has Kurdish support.

Houthis and al-Hirak Agree to Work Together toward Federation of Two Yemens. Media in Yemen are citing anonymous insider sources attesting to a firm alliance that has emerged between the predominantly-ShiiteHouthi militias that have taken over the national capital, Sana’a, on the one hand, and, on the other, the al-Hirak movement fighting to reestablish an independent South Yemen.  Their aim is not a full partition of the country but the creation of a loose federation more on the model, say, of the post-Communist Czecho-Slovakia.  The South Yemeni delegate to the alliance is reportedly Ali Salim al-Beidh, former president of the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen, a.k.a. South Yemen, which was dissolved when the two Yemens reunified in 1990.  Rumors have it that the predominantly-Sunni al-Hirak movement is allied not with radical Sunni Arab groups like al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (A.Q.A.P.) which operate in the area but with Shiite power-brokers in Lebanon and Iran.


Irish, Danish Parliaments Take Up Recognition of Palestine. The Irish political party associated with the Republican struggle for independence and for unification of the island, Sinn Fein, moved in the parliament in Dublin on December 9th to call on the government of Ireland to grant diplomatic recognition to the State of Palestine.  A similar motion passed the upper house of parliament in October, and this follows similar non-binding resolutions (discussed last week in this blog) in the legislatures of Belgium, France, Spain, Sweden, and the United Kingdom.  The resolution calls on Ireland to “officially recognize the State of Palestine, on the basis of the 1967 borders, with East Jerusalem as the capital, as established in U.N. resolutions, as a further positive contribution to securing a negotiated two-state solution to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict.” It also states that “continued Israeli settlement construction and extension activities in the West Bank is illegal and severely threatening the establishment of a viable Palestinian state.”  Pro-Palestinian sentiment is uncontroversial in Ireland.  The government has said it will not oppose the bill.  Meanwhile, Denmark’s parliament took up the question of Palestinian statehood on December 11th.  One of the parties sponsoring the Danish bill was the separatist Inuit Ataqatigiit (I.A.) party in Greenland, a Danish possession.  But the measure was defeated handily.  Nonetheless, the country’s foreign minister, Martin Lidegaard, said that eventual Danish recognition of Palestine was likely.

Many Irish nationalists see themselves as natural allies of Palestine.

ISIS Publishes Slave-Owners’ Manual for Jihadists, with Rape Tips. The Islamic State, also known as Islamic State in Iraq and al-Sham, or ISIS, published on December 3rd a pamphlet outlining the “rules” that govern the treatment of slaves captured by jihadist fighters, according to their deviant interpretation of Islam.  The Arabic pamphlet, titled Questions and Answers on Taking Captives and Slaves (Su’al wa-Jawab fi al-Sabi wa-Riqab), bears the imprint of ISIS’s Research and Fatwa Department and explains, for example, that a female captive, even a young girl, may be raped.  “If she is a virgin,” the pamphlet says, her new owner “can have intercourse with her immediately after taking possession of her.  However, if she isn’t, her uterus must be purified.”  It also explains, “It is permissible to beat the female slave as a form of disciplinary beating, but it is forbidden to beat for the purpose of achieving gratification or for torture.”  That, I suppose, would be an example of decadent Western fetishism.

Worse than al-Qaeda ever was: Islamic State’s “peculiar institution”

AFRICA

Last Remaining French Prisoner of Malian Islamists Freed in Shady Prisoner Swap.  The French government revealed on December 9th that the last French hostage held by al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (A.Q.I.M.) in Mali had been released.  But rights groups and other observers expressed outrage that the release was apparently negotiated in a deal that involved the prior release of four Islamist terrorists held in Bamako, the Malian capital.  The four were a Western Saharan (Sahrawi), a Tunisian, and two Tuaregs from northern Mali closely associated with the Tuareg terrorist group Ansar al-Dine and its feared fanatical leader, Iyad Ag Ghaly.  That group, along with A.Q.I.M. and others, ran a separate state in northern Mali called Azawad for much of 2013 before being ousted by French troops.  Ironically, the two Tuaregs had been arrested in 2011 for the kidnapping of Serge Lazarevic, the French citizen released this week.  The other Frenchman kidnapped with Lazarevic on that occasion, Philippe Verdon, was found shot to death in 2013.   Drissa Traore, of the Malian Association for Human Rights (Association Malienne des Droits de l’Homme, or A.M.D.H.), said of the prisoner release, “The liberation is a violation of the rights of the victims but also of the principles that say the government should not interfere with the work of the judiciary.”  The French government has for decades come under harsh criticism from nearly every other modern democracy for its unapologetic practice of negotiating with terrorist kidnappers, including paying ransoms which are then used to finance later kidnappings.

Lazarevic and Verdon in capitivity with Ansar al-Dine gunmen.  (The “Al-Andalus” logo refers to Ansar al-Dine’s long-term aim of “recapturing” Andalusia, in Spain.  That’s a whole other story.)

Emir of Mubi Returns to Palace as Nigeria Regains Adamawa Areas from Boko Haram. With order beginning to be restored to much of Adamawa State and neighboring areas in northern Nigeria as the central government wrests back control from the self-proclaimed caliphate of the Boko Haram terrorist group (as discussed last week in this blog), a local traditional monarch returned to his palace in the town of Mubi on December 12th in a symbolic moment of a return to normalcy. As he led prayers soon after his return, the Emir of Mubi, Abubakar Ahmadu, said, “We appreciate the gallant efforts of the Nigerian military, the hunters, and the vigilantes that saw the liberation of our towns.  We are optimistic that the remaining towns will soon be liberated.”

The emir is on his throne, and all’s right with the world

Mombasa Separatists Suspected in Lethal Machete Attack on Police Camp. Unknown persons armed with machetes attacked a police camp at Mwanamwinga, near Mombasa, Kenya, on December 11th, killing a police corporal and injuring two others.  They then stole weapons and left.  The commissioner for Kilifi County, where Mwanamwinga is located, said he suspected the Mombasa Republican Council (M.R.C.), an often violent group which wants independence for Kenya’s coastal region, which has a Muslim majority in this mostly Christian country.

The Mombasa Republic flag

Three Jubaland Militiamen Turn Up Dead outside Kismayo.  The bodies of three dead soldiers with the military of the autonomous Jubaland State of Somaliawere found by a military base, not far from the presidential palace just outside Kismayo, the Jubaland capital, on December 7th.  Mogadishu and Kismayo are mum, but Garowe Online quoted independent sources as saying that the three—two men and a woman—had fought alongside a militia which three months ago had surrendered to the African Union (A.U.) mission in Somalia, known as AMISOM, which is battling the al-Qaeda-affiliated al-Shabaab militia alongside troops from Kenya.



ASIA

Police Dismantle Last Hong Kong Protest Camp; Democracy Activists Not Giving Up.  Police in the People’s Republic of China’s semi-autonomous Hong Kong Special Administrative Regionarrested over 200 people as they dismantled on December 11th pro-democracy protest camps blocking highways since September, putting a symbolic end to the so-called “Umbrella Revolution” that challenged the Communist Party dictatorship’s chokehold on power more seriously than anything since the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989.  These protests were in response to a decision from Beijing to allow only candidates hand-picked by the central Communist Party to run in Hong Kong elections.  For democracy advocates, this clearly violates the spirit, and probably also the letter, of the 1984 treaty which transferred sovereignty over the territory from the United Kingdom to Beijing in 1997.  The Chinese government conceded nothing, and on paper the movement achieved nothing.  But the spectacle of hundreds of thousands of Chinese citizens taking over the major public spaces and demanding drastic revolutionary political change, without being gunned down, proves for many that the dictatorship knows its days are numbered.  And activists are very far from conceding defeat.  One protester, Cat Tang, said, “We have learned we have power when we are together and have enough people.  Today, we don’t have enough people.  But tomorrow, sometime, we can.”  “This is the start, the very beginning,” said another, Charlotte Chang, aged 19, “and the pressure will accumulate.  The next protests will be more aggressive,” she said, adding, “Those who claim political neutrality cannot go on.  You can’t pretend not to care.”  And, as Lee Cheuk-yang, a Hong Kong legislator, put it, “The young people have awakened.  This is really the gain of the movement.”

Caution—men at work burying democratic hopes

7 Xinjiang Students Jailed for “Separatism”; 8 Other Uyghurs Face Execution.  A court in Urumqi, capital of the People’s Republic of China’s Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, handed down three-to-eight-year prison terms on December 8th to seven students—all but one from the predominantly-Muslim Uyghur nationality—on charges of “separatism.”  The seven were allegedly allies of Ilham Tohti, the Uyghur scholar and human-rights activist whose life sentence on “separatism” charges, given him in September, prompted an international outcry.  On the same day, another court in Urumqi sentenced eight Uyghurs and gave prison terms to another four for their supposed role in knife and bomb attacks in the ongoing ethnonationalist strife in the area.  The World Uyghur Congress (W.U.C.), based in Germany, called the sentences “unacceptable.”  In other Uyghur news, a Uyghur linguist named Abduweli Ayup has been freed served after serving part of a sentence for “illegal fund-raising” for selling t-shirts to raise money for Uyghur-language education, and the city of Urumqi has banned the wearing of face-covering veils in public—which, mind you, puts Communist China in the company of many major cities in western Europe’s supposedly pluralistic democracies when it comes to religious freedom.  Meanwhile, in a captive nation at the other end of China, an activist named Hada was released from prison in Hohhot, capital of the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, after serving 15 years for “separatism.”

Ilham Tohti

Rights Group Says Pakistan “Disappears,” Executes Sindhi Nationalists. The Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (H.R.C.P.) is reporting that the grisly repressive techniques that Pakistan’s military has long used in its rebellious province of Balochistan, including abductions, extrajudicial killings, and “disappearances,” are also being used against separatists in its other coastal province, Sindh.  Such “custodial killings,” according to the H.R.C.P., included one instance in which, according to a news source, “a young wounded man was taken away from Karachi’s Civil Hospital by over a dozen men, including some in police uniform; the man’s body was later found dumped near Hyderabad.”  But there have been many other such cases over the past several weeks, even though the movement to create an independent Sindhudesh is far less popular or organized than the pro-independence insurgency in Balochistan.

Enemies of the state, needing liquidation? Sindhi nationalists on parade

9 Killed in Bus Bomb on Mindanao; Moro Rebels Suspected. On Mindanao island in the southern Philippines, nine people were killed on December 9th in a bus bombing in which separatists are suspected.  The explosion occurred in Maramag, in an area outside the Moro ethnic group’s Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (ARMM) but within the area claimed as the Bangsamoro Republic (variously spelled) by the more radical Moro rebel group, the Moro National Liberation Front (M.N.L.F.).  The ARMM is set to become an even more autonomous region called Bangsamoro, under the terms of a deal negotiated by Manila with another group, the rival Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF).  An al-Qaeda-affiliated separatist terrorist army, the Abu Sayyaf Group (A.S.G.), also operates in the region.


OCEANIA

800 Papuans Rally against Military Beating of 12-Year-Old; Troops Open Fire, Kill 5.  On December 8th, in Enalotari, on the Indonesian-ruled portion of New Guinea, police and military opened fire on about 800 Papuans demonstrating peacefully.  Five people were killed, mostly teenagers, while 17 others, including five schoolchildren, were injured.  The demonstration was in response to an incident during a Christmas-tree-decorating ceremony in the town, when a group of Indonesian soldiers savagely beat a 12-year-old boy with rifle butts.  The boy’s condition is unknown.  Most residents of the states of Papua and West Papua are Christian or follow tribal religions, while the majority in Indonesia is Muslim.  Indonesia’s minister for security affairs, Edhy Purdijatno, said the soldiers at the demonstration did nothing more than “defend themselves” from “a bunch of people fighting the authorities.”  Phelim Kine, deputy Asia director at Human Rights Watch (H.R.W.), said of the incident, “The Indonesian government needs to investigate why security forces found it necessary to fire into a crowd of peaceful protesters.  Ordinary Papuans are too often victims of security force abuse for which no one is ever punished.”

The scene in Papua this week after the army moved in

Queen of Cook Islands Denounces Local Anti-Gay Laws. The hereditary monarch of the Cook Islands, in the South Pacific, has come out with a strongly worded statement about legislation discriminating against gays and lesbians.  Marie Pa Ariki, known as takitumu, or paramount chieftainess, or queen, of the Cook Islands, told an interviewer that gays and lesbians “are knowledgeable and contribute to society and to home life. They are human like everyone else … we are all wahanau”—using a Polynesian word for family.  She denounced laws that criminalize homosexual intimacy in the islands, “but,” she added, “Pacific Island conservatism is changing now. People are learning.”  The Cook Islands is a constitutional monarchy, but that monarchy has nothing to do with Queen Marie, whose authority is not recognized by the state; the Cook Islands are, via their “free association” arrangement with New Zealand, in the Commonwealth of Nations, and so their head of state is Queen Elizabeth II.

Marie Pa Ariki, traditional Queen of the Cook Islands

NORTH AMERICA

Uruguay Uses Gitmo Prisoner Deal to Seek Release of Puerto Rican Independence Activist. The Republic of Uruguay, is agreeing to accept six prisoners (or “detainees,” as the misleading euphemism would have it) from the United States’ illegal prison camp in occupied Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and hopes that it can use leverage from this favor to secure the release of U.S. political prisoners, including an independence fighter from Puerto Rico, a U.S. colony in the Caribbean.  In an open letter to President Barack Obama, Uruguay’s president, José “Pepe” Mujica, affirmed his commitment to accepting the Guantánamo prisoners, writing, in pointed language about U.S. policy, “We have offered hospitality to human beings suffering an atrocious abduction in Guantánamo.  Since the time of our independence, and even before, individuals and sometimes large groups of people have come to this country seeking refuge from international wars, civil wars, tyranny, religious and racial persecution, poverty and also destitution.”  In exchange, Mujica hoped that the U.S. would consider releasing three Cuban spies who have been held since 1998 and the 70-year-old Puerto Rican separatist, Oscar López Rivera, who is more than thirty years into a life sentence that has included twelve years of solitary confinement.  There is almost no chance that the U.S. will agree.  For Mujica, though, the these matters are personal.  A former leftist guerilla with the Tupamaros National Liberation Movement (Movimiento de Liberación Nacional-Tupamaros, or M.N.L.–T), Mujica spent thirteen years in prison, including spending two years in brutal solitary confinement boxed up at the bottom of a dilapidated horse trough.

Still behind bars, but Pepe gave it the old college try

Gitxsan Activists Block British Columbia Highway to Protest Natural Gas Plans. Members of the indigenous Gitxsan nation in northern British Columbia, Canada, blocked a highway in their territory on December 6th.  According to the protestors’ press release, “Gitxsan hereditary chiefs Spookw and Luutkudziiwus closed Hwy. 16 at New Hazelton on Dec. 6, 2014, in protest over the recent B.C.E.A.O. [British Columbia Environmental Assessment Office] approvals of two natural gas pipelines proposed for Gitxsan territory, and one L.N.G. [liquid natural gas] terminal proposed for the Skeena Estuary.  The chiefs say these projects threaten to collapse the Skeena salmon run that all upstream nations rely on.  About 65 people collected at Hwy. 16 on Saturday to support the closure.  Attendees cited a number of issues that render the proposed L.N.G. projects unacceptable including: low provincial L.N.G. tax revenue, job loss to temporary foreign workers, potential of toxic air emissions on the north coast, potential of conversion of the pipelines to carry oil, and high risk to juvenile salmon at the Petronas L.N.G. site on Lelu island.”  The site of the protest, called Madii Lii in the Gitxsanimix language, is owned by Chief Luutkudziiwus (a.k.a. Charlie Wright) on behalf of his matrilineal extended family (“house”), and the area has for several weeks been sealed off by Gitxsan activists to prevent unauthorized economic activity on the territory.

Gitxsan activists at a roadblock

Utah Flushes Hundreds of Polygamists out of Fundamentalist Mormon Compound. In the Utahan half of the state-line-straddling twin community of Hildale, Utah, and Colorado City, Arizona, state authorities moved in this week to enforce some of the most extensive evictions yet of polygamous families from the elaborate compound of the imprisoned child-rapist Mormon“prophet” Warren Jeffs and his Fundamentalist Latter Day Saints (F.L.D.S.) community.  The small, marginal F.L.D.S. conservative Mormon community follows the spirit and laws and social structure of the sect’s founder, Joseph Smith, far more closely than the assimilationist offshoot Church of Latter-Day Saints in Salt Lake City with its tens of millions of members around the world.  The evictions, focusing on fourteen households—which, mind you, means a lot more folks than fourteen average American households—occurred mostly without incident.  The compound has been taken into the possession of the State of Utah, but most occupants are refusing to pay the state’s $100 monthly “rent”—presumably under the orders of Jeffs, who many believe still controls the community from prison.

Hilldale, Arizona—an average American community, except for the heavily-armed citadels, the razorwire, the harem chambers, and the rows and rows of magical Masonic underwear on the clotheslines.

SPORTS

Olympic Committee Green-Lights Kosovo for 2016 Games; Serbs Furious.  The International Oluympic Committee (I.O.C.) on December 9th granted full recognition to the disputed Republic of Kosovo, removing the last hurdle for the mini-state to send athletes to the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.  This week’s decision is a ratification of a decision made in October.  The government of Serbia, which still claims Kosovo, reacted angrily, with its foreign minister stating, “We see this decision as unacceptable and unprincipled, therefore maintaining that it contravenes the Olympic Charter.  The act represents a biased politicisation of sport, while the International Olympic Committee, a universal organisation dedicated to the development of sport and the promotion of understanding and friendship, has assumed the role of a political arbiter.”  The minister, Ivica Dačić, did not explain how it was that not granting Kosovo recognition would not have been a political arbitration as well.  Some questions the I.O.C. cannot simply dodge.

Besim Hasani, president of Kosovo’s Olympic Committee

European Football Body Bans Matches in Disputed Crimea. The Union of European Football Associations (UEFA) has courted controversy before by promoting separate national teams for the partially-recognized Republic of Kosovo and for Gibraltar, a self-governing overseas territory of the United Kingdom which Spain would like to reclaim.  This time, UEFA is dodging the question of whether Crimea is part of Russia, which invaded and annexed it in March, or—as nearly the entire rest of the world regards it—part of Ukraine.  Crimea is, for football purposes, now a “special zone” where no matches will be held until the peninsula’s status can be resolved.  “The UEFA executive committee has prohibited clubs from Crimea playing in the Russian Football Union, and the Russian Football Union may not organise any competition in the Crimea,” explained UEFA’s secretary general, Gianni Infantino, at a press conference, adding, “We trust the associations will respect these decisions.  If one of the associations does not respect this decision then a disciplinary case would have to be opened.  It is not up to UEFA to determine any political situation.  Having discussed this with the Ukraine and Russia and Ukrainian and Russian football authorities, the executive committee came to the conclusion that for the time being the decision has to be to consider Crimea as a special zone.”



[For those who are wondering, yes, this blog is tied in with my forthcoming book, a sort of encyclopedic atlas to be published by Litwin Books under the title Let’s Split! A Complete Guide to Separatist Movements and Aspirant Nations, from Abkhazia to Zanzibar.  (That is shorter than the previous working title.)  The book, which contains 46 maps and 554 flags (or, more accurately, 554 flag images), will be on shelves and available on Amazon on March 1, 2015.  I will be keeping readers posted of further publication news.  Meanwhile, please “like” the book (even though you haven’t read it yet) on Facebook and see this special announcement for more information on the book.]

Last year, in my annual look forward at what the coming twelvemonth promises in the way of ethnonationalist struggles and new-state movements, my predictions were sadly accurate when it came to a few movements in particular that came to dominate the headlines in 2014.

ISIS comes to town ...

No. 3 a year ago was what I referred to then as “Al-Sham”—the territory of “Greater Syria” referred to in Islamic State’s erstwhile, and still colloquially widely used, name ISIS, standing for the Islamic State in Iraq and al-Sham.  (Al-Sham can also be translated as “the Levant,” hence its other English acronym, ISIL.)  At that time, December 2013, ISIS was confined to Syria, but I alluded to announced plans (not widely reported at the time) to annex Iraq’s vast, adjacent Anbar province, which they then proceeded to do.  I also wrote, at the time, “ISIS has no particular quarrel with Kurds, who are after all fellow Sunnis—not like the ‘heretical’ Druze and ruling Alawite Shiites—but that could change, since when it comes to the areas they are finding it easier to assemble into a coherent territory, Kurds are—I can’t believe I’m typing this—Kurds are in their whey.”  And how.  I did not predict such a colossal battle as the siege of Kobanê—nor the barbaric slaughter and enslavement of the Yezidi minority.  Syria’s embattled ruling Alawites were no. 8 on my list two years ago, but the advent of ISIS has pushed them far down the list and out of sight.  As might be expected, ISIS is on the 2015 list too, at no. 2 (see below), and the Kurds—who have had a roller-coaster of a year and were no. 4 on last year’s list, no. 1 the year before, and no. 3 for 2012—are this year’s no. 1 (see below).

In Ukraine in 2014, the patients took over the mental hospital.

In Ukraine, too (“West and East Ukraine” were no. 8 last year), I wish I had not been as prescient as I was.  “There have been pro-Moscow counter-demonstrations,” I wrote, referring to the Euro-Maidan movement then, a year ago, in its first weeks, “but so far no open demands for a partitioning of the country along linguistic lines or for re-annexation of the east to Russia.   But Lvov and other ethnic-Ukrainian-dominated western oblasts are declaring themselves no longer subject to the Ukrainian central government’s authority, moves which [Ukraine’s president at the time, Viktor] Yanukovych angrily decries as ‘separatism,’ so perhaps the seeds have already been planted.”  Indeed, in the months since Yanukovych’s replacement by a pro-Western government, Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts in eastern Ukraine—or shifting territories therein—have become de facto rebel states amidst a war that has already killed almost 5,000.  It all started, of course, with Crimea, which I was presciently flagging as a trouble spot shortly thereafter during the Winter Olympics in Sochi, when no one thought Vladimir Putin would dare an outright invasion and annexation.  But in December 2013, I was more naïve, writing, “A drive to split Ukraine would also run right through Crimea, where Russians outnumber Ukrainians but where the Mejlis of the Crimean Tatar Nation openly sides with the E.U. proponents.”  Alas, I underestimated the Islamophobia of the Putin regime and his readiness to roll right over and marginalize the indigenous Tatar minority.  Novorossiya—or “New Russia,” as the “people’s republics” in Donetsk and Luhansk call themselves collectively—is no. 5 on this year’s list (see below).

Slavering Serb “Chetniks” in Crimea, returning the favor after Cossacks lent their cutlasses to the Serb side in the Bosnian and Kosovo wars.

Of the three movements it took no great insight to add to the list, Scotland (no. 1 last year), Catalonia (no. 2 last year), and northern California’s State of Jefferson (or at least three counties of it) (no. 7 last year) (or counties of it) already had votes scheduled.  The Jefferson results in June disappointed statehood proponents, and that cause has fizzled quite a bit.  But Scotland and Catalonia, though unionists mock their referenda as failures, are showing quite a bit of life in them yet, and they remain on the list, at nos. 10 and 9, respectively (see below).

2014 saw the rise and fall of a movement to create a separate state for people who never take their prole caps off, even at city-council meetings.

A few movements from last year’s list petered out rather unexpectedly.  In French Polynesia (no. 6 last year), things looked evenly divided politically a year ago, but in July the colonial government in France pressed a prosecution for charges of corruption against Gaston Flosse, the pro-French president of the territory.  By September, his party, Tahoera’a Huiraatira, had replaced him with his son-in-law, Édouard Fritch.  Flosse’s party is unpopular and Fritch thus at a political disadvantage, but the party has gone behind his back in pressing a compensation claim against Paris for the effects of nuclear testing in the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s.  Initially, Flosse had planned on calling an early referendum on independence, which, the hope was, would result in a “no,” thus inoculating the territory against separatism for another generation.  (Unionists in another French Pacific territory, New Caledonia, are taking a similar approach.)  But after Flosse’s judicial take-down, that plan, if implemented, could, unionists feared, backfire and end French rule, so the nuclear-compensation bid is a new effort to woo anti-colonialists and peel nationalists away from the independence cause.  It seems to be working.  Separatists are a minority still, and they have unable to make any political hay out of Tahoera’a Huiraatira’s troubles.

French Polynesia’s roller-coaster politics in 2014: President Gaston Flosse was garlanded with leis— and then with subpoenas and court orders.

A year ago, Libya (no. 10 on the list back then) seemed to be coming apart at the seams: the Berber minority, as well as traditional leaders and trade-unionists in the formerly independent eastern region, Cyrenaica, were holding Libyan oil facilities hostage demanding more autonomy, and Cyrenaica and the southern, formerly French region of Fezzan both unilaterally declared autonomy and formed governments.  But a year later the tables have turned—in an almost absurdly unexpected way.  Cyrenaican nationalism has declined as a factor in the still fissiparous politics of Libya, and armed militias left over from the 2011-12 civil war, whose grievances are rarely openly regionalist, have become the real threat, along with Ansar al-Shari’a and other jihadist groups, which operate, again, mostly in the east.  Most grievously in 2014, the mishandling of a militia skirmish originally related to the Cyrenaican separatist cause was mishandled so badly that a coup d’état turfed the sitting government out of the capital, Tripoli, forcing it to relocate—wait for it—to Cyrenaica, where the president now runs a parallel government.  The oil is flowing, though, so the international community is willing to treat this odd state of affairs as business as usual.  The upshot is that Cyrenaica is now home base for the original unionists, and the rebel government in the capital is pursuing an agenda that has little do with partition or autonomy.  (However, a new faultline might be the radical Islamists, including some Tuaregs, who are decamping to Fezzan in ever larger numbers as Nigeria and Mali claw back Islamist-rebel-claimed regions.)  I do not predict Libya will move toward subdivision in 2015, but once the current crisis has resolved itself—maybe with another civil war—expect the Cyrenaican regionalist agenda to reemerge.  After all, that’s where all the oil is.


And in the heady run-up to the Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia, I listed the Caucasus Emirate movement as no. 5, fearing that they—more so than the more moderate Circassian activists, with their far more legitimate grievances—would disrupt the Games, perhaps in a spectacular way reminiscent of Munich in 1972.  But the F.S.B. (néK.G.B.) and hordes of Cossacks (yes, it is 2014, not 1814) worked mightily, and successfully, to tamp down both jihadists and ethnic autonomists in the Black Sea and North Caucasus region.  Perhaps only temporarily, though: the latest news (reported on recently in this blog) is that one faction of the now divided Caucasus Emirate group is aligning itself with Islamic State (a.k.a. ISIS).

Circassian and Caucasus Emirate unrest were mostly no-shows at Sochi in 2014. But now that the Emirate has fallen in love with ISIS, they at least will be back.

Without further ado, then, here is this year’s list: the ten separatist movements to watch in 2015.

10. Scotland


But, wait, wasn’t that all settled in September?  Why is Scotland (which was no. 1 last year and no. 4 the year before) on the list again?  Well, in a way it was settled, with the stay-in-the-United-Kingdom vote beating the independence vote by 55%-45%, and this in a vote that on election eve was polling too close to call.  Unionists interpret this as Scots deciding, once push came to shove, that the status quo was not too bad.  But, in another sense, as the U.K.’s prime minister, David Cameron, pointed out in his “Better Together” campaign for the no side, there was no vote for the status quo.  This is because Westminister threw wavering voters so many promises of perks of autonomy and quasi-independence in the weeks leading up to the vote that once these are implemented, the Union will be a different one, with less power in the center.  One thing that everyone agrees on now—and, say what you will, we have Scotland’s pro-independence former premier Alex Salmond to thank for that—is that the structure of the Union will be completely rethought.  For Scots, even though their geographically proportionate share of North Sea oil revenues is not going to be on offer, that can still mean goodies like better environmental protection, more public funding, and in general the chance to build a more Scandinavian-style social democracy north of the border, as befits the Nordic-inflected culture of Scotland.  For Wales and Northern Ireland, it will mean longer leashes too—and, what luck!, they didn’t even have to advocate for it themselves (in fact, Northern Ireland Protestants have fought the idea of Scottish independence tooth and nail, since it calls their own identity as Britons into question).  And for England, coming changes should mean fixing a situation where there is almost no level of governance to speak of between Westminster and the municipalities—county boundaries nowadays are as quaint and meaningless as hedgerows—and where Scottish parliamentarians can vote on, for example, both Scottish and English education policy, while English M.P.s can vote only on their own.  In short, we might see England getting a parliament as well, which means that it would take over many of the functions now served by the House of Commons and the House of Lords.  (Watch also for regional-autonomy movements in Cornwall, Yorkshire, Wessex, and elsewhere to pick up steam.)  Then we might find a situation in which all the U.K. government is involved in is monetary and foreign policy.  As I argued in an editorial in this blog on election eve, Cameron’s fear-mongering about ejection from the European Union (E.U.) and inability to use the pound were largely invented, as he more or less admitted as soon as the voting was over—and “independence” could have meant all sorts of things for Scotland, including the very comfortable, very self-governing status enjoyed by the Isle of Man, Jersey, and Guernsey, “Crown Dominions” which are really independent Commonwealth realms (in the way Canada, Australia, and Jamaica are), but in “free association” with the U.K.  Thus, I argued, the referendum was not about whether massive changes were coming, but about whether Scots would have an equal, rather than a subservient and petitioning, voice in the way those changes were chosen and implemented.  Sadly, not enough of them really understood the question.  But, even if there isn’t another referendum soon—not this year, certainly, but within five years is possible—Scotland is set to receive a lot more self-government in the months and years to come, and Wales, Northern Ireland, and, yes, England, will get a lot too.  Oh, and there might still be another referendum anyway: membership in the Scottish National Party (S.N.P.) more than tripled in the weeks after the vote, and polls show that if the same ballot were presented today, Scots would secede by a hefty margin.  So the idea of Scottish independence is not going away at all.

Don’t look behind you, Cameron.

9. Catalonia


This one was supposedly settled too but, of course, wasn’t really.  About 91% of the votes cast in Spain’s wealthiest subdivision, the Autonomous Community (i.e., republic) of Catalonia, on November 9th said yes to the question, “Do you want Catalonia to become a State?” and about 81% voted yes to the second question, “Do you want this State to be independent?”  (No explanation was given what the difference was—for example, in what sense Catalonia is not already a “State” if being a state does not entail independence.)  But, despite all the hype and the months of building public interest and passion, turn-out was only somewhere between 37% and 41%, inviting the Spanish prime minister, Mariano Rajoy, to deride the whole hullaballoo as a “deep failure.”  But indeed the reason for the low turnout was surely that the central government in Madrid had declared the looming vote illegal and unconstitutional and promised to stop it.  As soon as Catalonia’s president, Artur Mas, tried to climb down and cancel it, though, the crucial junior partner in his ruling coalition, the radically separatist Republican Left of Catalonia (Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya, or E.R.C.), threatened to quit in protest and knock Mas’s separatist coalition out of power.  So Mas had to do a careful diplomatic dance in order to both stay in power locally and keep Madrid from sending in the tanks.  The compromise was spinning it a non-binding “participation process,” or opinion poll, on “self-determination” rather than independence.  Luckily, the weasel usage of the undefined term State (see above) had left some wiggle room.  But compromise has its risks: Catalan voters were disgusted by Mas’s waffling.  If anything, this may strengthen the hand of the E.R.C. against the currently more numerous moderate, gradualist independentists.  The “street” in Spain does seem to be shifting leftward these days: for example, not only is public opinion in the Basque Country, the second most independent-minded of Spain’s autonomous regions, becoming more separatist, but radical leftist Basque separatists are forming informal political ties with some of Vladimir Putin’s nominally-socialist puppet states, the Armenian-populated Nagorno-Karabakh Republic in Azerbaijan, and Ukraine’s pro-RussianDonetsk People’s Republic and Luhansk People’s Republic (which are not people’s republics at all in the way that Basque radicals are used to thinking of) (see below under “Novorossiya”)—all just to stick a thumb in the eye of Madrid, and of NATO and the E.U.  That’s more anti-establishment than Mas would like things to be drifting, but then again he’s had his chance to exercise real leadership and blew it.  Don’t let last month’s anticlimactic referendum fool you: Spain is fragmenting, and disappointment over what happened—and especially what didn’t—in November will only deepen the cracks.  Catalans (who were no. 2 on last year’s list and no. 6 the year before) are just looking for the next vehicle for their frustration and impatience.



8. East Turkestan


For decades, Tibet (no. 7 on this list two years ago) and Taiwan had dominated the large area of the Chinese Communist Party’s collective brain labeled “paranoid fantasies.”  But now the most serious threat to the unity of the Chinese state is the tiny Uyghur national minority, who form only a slight majority in the vast far-western Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, the People’s Republic of China’s largest province-level jurisdiction, known by nationalists as East Turkestan (which was no. 9 on last year’s list).  Uyghurs are different: their land is an arid swath of Central Asia, they are Muslim, and they speak a Turkic language related to those of formerly Soviet republics like Azerbaijan and nearby Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan.  In the early 20th century, Xinjiang (called Sinkiang, in English) was a far-flung, thinly governed part of the old Chinese Empire, then a Soviet satellite of sorts for a while, till Josef Stalin, at Yalta, negotiated it away to the Nationalists who were running China as the Second World War ended.  The Nationalist Kuomintang (KMT) promised, and to some extent granted, Xinjiang some autonomy, but once Mao Zedong seized the territory in 1950, ruthless central control was imposed and it became a Glorious Worker’s Paradise where all were treated equally—actually, I’m just kidding about that last part.  During the Cultural Revolution in Xinjiang, Maoists, in a frenzy similar to what was happening in the rest of the country, embarked on an orgy of destruction, much of it focused on obliterating the Muslim religion.  Alas, little has changed.  Muslim holidays, prayers, and dress are criminalized as part of the official ideology of denouncing all religion as superstition.  In the old Maoist China, worship of Mao was the only worship permitted; today, Chinese—and their smaller captive nations as well—are really only allowed to worship money.  (Buddhism of the type practiced half-heartedly by the ethnic Han majority gets a pass.)  For several years now, a sporadic Uyghur uprising has been claiming lives on a regular—recently almost weekly—basis.  Most unrest takes the form of crude knife or hatchet attacks by Uyghurs on civilian targets like marketplaces.  According to Beijing, that is: as with much else in this closed, totalitarian society, no one knows what is really happening in these incidents—whether Uyghurs are being provoked, whether agents provocateurs are staging the attacks in “false flag” operations to discredit Muslims, or whether, indeed, some of these events are even happening at all.  And some of the alleged Uyghur terrorist attacks have happened far afield—in Kunming, even Beijing.  This is a far cry from the peaceful approach taken by proponents of Tibet’s autonomy or independence, and Beijing is making much of supposed links to Islamic radicals in places like Pakistan, Central Asia, even—implausibly—Turkey.  But Beijing had better be careful what it wishes for: after seeing what has been going on in Hong Kong this fall, Uyghurs may be awakening to the fact that—even though Han Chinese are threatening to soon outnumber them in their own region, as part of Beijing’s internal-migration program to dilute the local culture—there is still some strength in numbers.  Uyghurs do, if they play it right, have the capacity to make Xinjiang ungovernable.  It’s possible a truly general uprising would result in a bloodbath that would make the Tiananmen Square massacre look like nothing.  But if it happens in the context of a general unraveling of Chinese unity—with separatist sentiment on the rise in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Tibet as well—then anything can happen.  I predict that, if nothing else, there will be more and greater interethnic carnage in China’s wild west in 2015, and a further official crackdown on Uyghur religion and culture—which, of course, will only create more radicals.



7. Republika Srpska


One of the many odd side-effects around the world of Russia’s invasion and annexation of Ukraine’s Republic ofCrimea this spring has been the stirring of similar irredentist feelings among the Serb ethnic group in Bosnia and Herzegovina.  Back in the 1990s, when the West was demonizing Serbia and the Serbs in adjacent republics as the villains of the Wars of Yugoslav Succession, Russia responded with a warming of relations with Serbia, especially as Belgrade with its bitter, foam-flecked nationalism became diplomatically isolated in the years that followed.  The secession of Serbia’s Kosovo province, under North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) cover, exacerbated the matter, with Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, starkly opposed to Kosovo’s independence and asking President Bill Clinton, at one point, why in God’s name he wanted to help along “the Islamization of Europe.”  And Putin has made much of the Kosovo precedent in justifying the Crimean land-grab and in pointing fingers at Western hypocrisy on the subject.  Nationalist Serbs that now find themselves outside Serbia, in places like Croatia, Bosnia, Macedonia, and Kosovo, have remained more fiercely nationalistic and more enamored of the idea of a “Greater Serbia” than the more cosmopolitan and pragmatic Serbs in Serbia itself, who are groping for a face-saving way to make peace with the reality of Kosovo so that everyone can be in the European Union (E.U.) together.  And no Serbs are more passionate than the Serbs of Bosnia, whose designated half of the two-part federation, Republika Srpska (translatable as “(Ethnic) Serb Republic,” as opposed to the “Republic of Serbia” called Republika Srbija) is more or less completely self-governing and separate from the other half, shared by Croats and (Muslim) Bosniaks.  So when the Russian–Ukrainian conflict erupted a year ago, it pushed Bosnian Serbs’ nationalist emotional buttons: reclaiming lost lands (Bosnia, analogous to Ukraine) and reattaching them to the motherland (Serbia, analogous to Russia), and of course ruthlessly rolling right over any Muslims that stand in their way (Bosniaks or Kosovars, analogous to the disenfranchised Crimean Tatars).  Just as Russian irregulars, including Cossacks, fought on the Serb side in the Bosnian and Kosovo wars, so have Serb mercenaries been joining battle in Ukraine on the side of ethnic Russians.  Bosnian Serbs don’t seem to care much whether they ever join the E.U. or not; they’d rather be part of an expanded Serbia that—in this emerging Second Cold War—joins the new anti-NATO axis of Russia, Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Syria, and Iran in thumbing its nose at the West.  Mind you, Serbia itself would never ignite another war by offering to annex half of Bosnia, and the international community would never accept the logic of two Serb republics, so it is a non-starter.  But life is economically rough in Bosnia, and Serbian political culture, like its Russian counterpart, is dominated by a persecution complex.  The Srpska president, Milorad Dodik, says, with probably only a little bit of exaggeration, that 99% of his subjects crave independence.  The eastern half of Bosnia (“half” not being the best word for the meandering gerrymander that is Srpska) could be the site of a hasty, ill-thought-through declaration of independence, and a messy, murky guerrilla war (à la eastern Ukraine, but in miniature) during 2015.  Stranger things have happened.

President Milorad Dodik kisses a Serbian flag at his inauguration in 2010.

6. South Yemen


As much as Iraq and Syria, Yemen is arguably the emerging front in the Sunnivs.Shiite war within Islam that has always been a subtext of the 2011 Arab Spring uprisings and their ongoing aftermath.  (South Yemen was no. 4 on this blog’s first of these lists, for 2012.)  North Yemen (on a map it looks more like West Yemen, but its capital is almost due north of the Southern one) was the mountainous, Shiite-dominated portion that became an independent kingdom during the Arab Revolt in the 1910s.  South Yemen was the United Kingdom’s former Aden Protectorate, which became independent in 1967.  Through the latter part of the Cold War, this divide was less a sectarian one than a geopolitical one, with the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen, in the south, being a Communist client state of the Soviet Union and the north a pro-Western bulwark.  But when the Cold War ended, the two reunified, almost simultaneous with Germany’s unification and for similar reasons.  Since then, the northern, Shiite Arab tribes, including a powerful one called the Houthis, and the southern, Sunni Arab tribes have chafed at sharing a country.  The southern separatist insurgency, called the al-Hirak movement, was reawakened when the Arab Spring toppled Yemen’s post-unification Shiite dictator Ali Abdullah Saleh in 2012, but it bumbled along with no real way to get traction for a while—hindered mostly by the necessity of acquiescing to the central government in order to let them fight the Sunni extremists of al-Qaeda in the Arab Peninsula (A.Q.A.P.), who were also searching for a South Yemeni foothold.  But the sudden shift of al-Qaeda resources and attention to Iraq and Syria in 2014 (see below under no. 2, “Islamic State”), combined with a Shiite-led invasion of the capital, Sana’a, by Houthi militias over the past few months, have changed the whole political landscape.  The Houthis may or may not be backed by Iran or by Lebanon’s Shiite-dominated Hezbollah militia or both, as detractors claim, and al-Hirak may or may not be in league with al-Qaeda or Saudi Arabia or both, as its enemies say, but both groups have been able to make enough headway that the central government has capitulated to the Houthis and more and more southerners are feeling that there is no unified, pluralist alternative to secession.  Yemen is breaking up in spite of itself.  In 2015 this may become permanent.



5. Novorossiya


When the Russian Empire and the Austro-Hungarian Empire conspired, two centuries ago, to dismember and divvy up Poland and Ukraine, Catherine the Great ended up with the southeastern portion, the Donbas (Donetsk basin) and Crimea, an area plastered on Czarist maps with names like “Little Russia” (Malorossiya) and “New Russia” (Novorossiya), while regions like Transcarpathia, Galicia, Bukovina, Silesia, and Bessarabia became Habsburg lands centered on vigorously multi-cultural cosmopolitan cities like Lvov and Odessa.  In reality, this cultural and geopolitical divide in Ukraine is long-standing.  When Russian Bolsheviks in the Russian Civil War consolidated their control over the entire area, pushing out the more multi-ethnic and progressive Mensheviks of western Ukraine, these differences rapidly declined in significance: everyone was ruled directly from Moscow anyway, under a Russophilic hegemony thinly disguised as a petty-nationalism-transcending Red internationalism.  Thus, there were no real administrative implications when Nikita Khrushchev (during a vodka bender, according to popular belief) swapped Crimea from the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (R.S.F.S.R.) over to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic.  But when the Soviet Union unravelled in 1990 and internal administrative boundaries became international frontiers, it suddenly mattered quite a bit.  Crimea, dominated by ethnic Russians, including many rootless military families, resisted inclusion in independent Ukraine, but Boris Yeltsin, Russia’s first post-Communist leader, did not press the matter.  Russian-speakers who dominated the southeastern oblasts were willing to reclassify themselves as Ukrainian nationals.  But when, in late 2013 (Ukraine’s divisions premiered on last year’s list at no. 8), Ukrainian nationalists began to push back against diplomatic bullying from Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, over the question of ties to the European Union (E.U.), and when the Ukrainian parliament removed the pro-Russian president under popular pressure, Novorossiya boiled over.  After Putin’s sotto voce Blitzkrieg and Anschluß of Crimea, to which the stunned West to all practical purposes acquiesced, Novorossiyans wanted a similar deal.  With heavy covert (but only half-heartedly denied) backing from Russia, two of the several oblast rebellions gelled over the summer as the Donetsk People ’s Republic and Luhansk People’s Republic (loosely federated as the Federal State of Novorossiya).  Slow to react, the central government in Ukraine eventually moved in, and the resulting grinding war has so far cost nearly 5,000 lives, with pro-Kremlin rebels still in control of big parts of those two oblasts.  For whatever reason, Putin has declined to recognize the republics, let alone annex them, but he has also not called off his dogs.  His strategy now seems to be to permanently destabilize the rump Ukraine, so as to make it an unappealing morsel for NATO or the E.U. to ever want to swallow up.  It has worked.  Putin has won.  No one thinks Ukraine’s central government can ever fully reassimilate the rebel areas.  In 2015, we will learn if the situation will drift into a “frozen conflict”—like Transnistria (no. 3 below), Armenia’s client state the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic (N.K.R.), or Georgia’s Abkhazia and South Ossetia (no. 4 below)—or if more oblasts will declare their own “people’s republics”—Transcarpathia, Odessa, and Kharkiv seem ripe for it—or if Putin will pull his support and allow the Kyiv government to move back in, perhaps as a way of easing sanctions against Russia.



4. Abkhazia and South Ossetia


As with Novorossiya, so with the Republic of Abkhazia and the Republic of South Ossetia, two Russian puppet states in what nearly the whole rest of the world regards as the Republic of Georgia’s territory.  These territories were only very quietly backed by Russia when they rebelled, mostly of their own accord, after the fall of Communism, fearful of Georgian hegemony—and expressing that fear by ruthlessly ethnically cleansing ethnic Georgians from these lands.  But in 2008 when Georgia finally decided to bust a move and reclaim these rebellious, unrecognized de facto states for good, Russia stepped up its game, gave Georgia a bloody nose in a five-day war, and formally recognized the two republics as independent.  (Venezuela and Nicaragua have followed suit, mainly just to piss off the United States, along with Nauru, the world’s third-smallest country.)  Abkhazia and South Ossetia—Abkhazia more stridently—have openly asked to be annexed by Russia, and a brand-new Russo-Abkhaz treaty seems like a preliminary step toward just that.  But there is tension too: Belarus and Kazakhstan, two countries traditionally reliable as Russian vassal states, are balking at the idea of Abkhazia and South Ossetia joining Putin’s new eastern Eurasian Union trade bloc; they fear that an extension of Putin’s irredentist agenda might mean their countries, or the large ethnic-Russian dominated parts of them, getting swallowed up too.  How far will Putin push things?  In 2015 we may find out.  The same can be said for Transnistria (see below).



3. Transnistria


Like Abkhazia and South Ossetia (see above), the area east of the Dniester River in the newly minted Republic of Moldova consisted, in the early 1990s, of ethnic minorities—mostly Russians and Ukrainians—who feared being finding themselves marginalized in a country dominated by possibly nationalistic and chauvinistic ethnic Romanians (Moldova, or Moldavia, being merely a subdivision of traditional Romania).  The newly sovereign Russian Federation exploited those tensions by carving this slender splinter of a nation out of Moldova using Russian tanks and Russian cash, but it never went as far as recognizing its self-declared independence.  However, Transnistria (or the Pridnestrovian Moldavian Republic, as it is formally known) has—again, like Abkhazia and South Ossetia—has become impatient watching Crimea rapidly go, in the spring of 2014, from being solidly part of Ukraine to being solidly part of Russia in a matter of weeks.  Transnistria wants an end to its ambiguous status and isolation and not just be a place-holding chess piece that prevents Moldova from joining NATO.  Last month, Moldovan elections narrowly returned anti-Kremlin parties to power, which has irked Transnistrians.  Ukraine has fortified its border, and Russia is sending “humanitarian convoys” to the pseudo-republic—eerily similar to how it ships arms into southeastern Ukraine (see above).  Moreover, if Russia does ever attempt to ignite more oblast-level uprisings in ethnic-Russian-dominated areas of Ukraine, Odessa Oblast is a likely candidate—and that could help create a geographically continuous arm of Russia stretching from Donetsk to Crimea all the way to Odessa and Transnistria.  This would bring Russia closer to Catherine the Great’s dream of turning the Black Sea into more or less a Russian lake.  If Vladimir Putin truly isn’t done expanding his geographical reach—and why should we assume he is?—this seems like his next project.  I modestly predict that Odessa Oblast and Transnistria will erupt in Ukraine-like violence in 2015.

Nina Shtanski, foreign minister of Transnistria

2. Islamic State

The short game ...

Not to say, “I told you so,” but this blog was covering the Islamic State in Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) with alarm way back in September 2013 when they had captured one little town in Syria.  It was clear they were looney-tunes.  But even when, over the course of 2013, they expanded their hold in the chaos of the civil war in northern and northeastern Syria, I did not fully predict (though al-Sham was no. 3 on last year’s list) that during 2014 this radical reincarnation of al-Qaeda in Iraq (A.Q.I.) would capture most of Iraq’s far west, push boldly toward Iraqi Kurdistan, and create a massive quasi-state in the Syrian–Iraqi borderlands that would impose a reign of terror, committing ethnic cleansing, slavery, and outright genocide against Shiites, Kurds, resistant Sunnis, and, most grievously, Iraq’s ancient—older than Islam—Assyrian (Christian) and Yezidi religious minorities.  In 2014, President Barack Obama, who had just rather belatedly finished extricating the United States from George W. Bush’s disastrous and illegal Iraq War, went back into Iraq with a bombing campaign designed to at least contain and maybe defeat ISIS (now renamed simply Islamic State).  (Let’s never forget that Bush’s lies and crimes created the very power vacuum that ISIS is now filling in the first place.)  But the reality is that it will take far more than bombing to do the job.  And on the Syrian side U.S. and NATO policy is further complicated by the fact that anything done against ISIS benefits the brutal anti-Western Alawite Shiite regime in Damascus—and vice versa.  No wonder millions of average Iraqis and Syrians are so confused that they seem convinced that ISIS is actually, in some convoluted way, working for the U.S.  It would be kind of like Obama to decide to merely kick this can down the road until it becomes his successor’s problem, but along the way, during 2015, something might just have to give.  And that brings us to ...

... and the long game

1. Kurdistan


... because (see above), just about the only way that Islamic State can be contained on the ground is with the central help of Kurds (whose aspirations to statehood were no. 4 on last year’s list and no. 1 the year before).  When ISIS first started expanding northward, in 2014, from Fallujah to Mosul and Nineveh, the Kurds dug in their heels and slowed them, even stopped them, while the official (Shiite-dominated) army of Iraq dropped its guns and ran screaming.  The West took due note of this, and strengthening the Kurds is becoming another question—along with opposition to ISIS in general—on which the West and Iran agree.  Kurdistan is a perennial entry on my annual “separatist movements to watch” lists, but that is not because I am wrong again and again about their imminent independence.  In fact, the necessary conditions for Kurdish independence have been steadily falling into place for years—first the no-fly zone over northern Iraq in the 1990s that allowed them to build real autonomy outside the killing range of Saddam Hussein; then the 2003 war which overthrew Hussein and granted Kurds a constitutionally enshrined autonomous region; then growing economic cooperation between Iraqi Kurdistan and Turkey; then the civil war in Syria, which prompted the regime there to withdraw from the far north and allow the creation of a de facto Kurdish buffer state called Rojava along the border with Turkey; then the peace deal between Turkey and the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (P.K.K.) which ended decades of strife and opened the space for some sort of autonomy there; and now the rise of Islamic State, which is gradually revealing to the world that the only way to keep Sunni radicalism at bay is by creating an independent pro-Western state straddling the deeply strategic Asia Minor–Arabian Peninsula divide, defended by the region’s most committed and fierce military (the Peshmerga), and with a constitution crafted by the most liberal, progressive, and egalitarian society in the Muslim world.  That country would be the Republic of Kurdistan, and it would include Iraq’s Kurdistan Region and some already-Kurd-governed areas to the south provisionally, possibly adding Syria’s Rojava, and maybe eventually (probably not soon) parts of Turkey or (perhaps never?) Iran as well.  Kurds are the world’s largest stateless people.  They’ve had shit thrown at them from every possible direction, going back centuries.  They’re ready, and the world needs them.  No one deserves it more.


[For those who are wondering, yes, this blog is tied in with my forthcoming book, a sort of encyclopedic atlas to be published by Litwin Books under the title Let’s Split! A Complete Guide to Separatist Movements and Aspirant Nations, from Abkhazia to Zanzibar.  (That is shorter than the previous working title.)  The book, which contains 46 maps and 554 flags (or, more accurately, 554 flag images), will be on shelves and available on Amazon on March 1, 2015.  I will be keeping readers posted of further publication news.  Meanwhile, please “like” the book (even though you haven’t read it yet) on Facebook and see this special announcement for more information on the book.]

The day has come.  Your copy of Let’s Split! A Complete Guide to Separatist Movements and Aspirant Nations, from Abkhazia to Zanzibar, published by Litwin Books, is available now for purchase on Amazon.com.  Click here to order your copy now.

The number of African countries which do not have an active separatist movement has shrunk by one more, as the Republic of Malawi, a remarkably slender sliver of land wedged between Mozambique and Zimbabwe in southern Africa, is having its unity challenged by a separatist movement in its Northern Region.


In May of this year, the Progressive Democratic Party (P.D.P.) was voted in to replace the People’s Party (P.P.), whose charismatic president, Joyce Banda, a champion of women’s rights, was more popular internationally than at home.  (Only Africa’s second female president ever, she was also a champion of gay rights.)  The new president, Peter Mutharika, a Yale-educated lawyer and diplomat and brother of a former president, has angered P.P. supporters by stuffing 80% of his cabinet with fellow residents of Malawi’s Southern Region.  Banda had been vice-president under Mutharika’s brother, Bingu wa Mutharika, until she succeeded him upon his death in 2012.  Though also a southerner, Banda’s constituency was a big tent and she worked hard not to show preference for one region over another.  Her succession to the post was assailed since she had become a critic of the first President Mutharika’s policies.

Joyce Banda

The governer of Malawi’s Northern Province, the Rev. Christopher Nzomera Ngwira, has now proposed breaking the northern region off as a separate “Nyika Republic.”  Ngwira (shown on the left in the photo at the top of this article) is from the P.P., which Banda had founded.  The Malawi Congress Party, which is now the main opposition party, is calling instead for a federal system in which each of the three administrative regions will have considerably enhanced powers—a position to which the current President Mutharika’s party has in recent weeks had to pay serious attention.

Map showing hotbeds of separatist sentiment in Malawi’s north

The president of the Peoples Transportation Party (PETRA) and Lucius Banda (no relation to Joyce), a traditional African musician and former political prisoner who now leads the United Democratic Front’s parliamentary delegation, have both called for a referendum to decide the matter.


Federalism is a controversial topic in Malawi.  Under British rule, Malawi, then known as Nyasaland, was part of the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland, a vast macro-colony sprawling across southern Africa’s interior whose touted “federalism” was a cruel joke that belied the injustices of apartheid.  Thus, Malawi’s first president and hero of the independence movement, Hastings Kamuzu Banda (once again, no relation), a U.S.-educated physician, in 1964 organized the fledgling Republic of Malawi as a strong unitary state.  Thus the country’s three administrative regions are blandly named the Northern, Southern, and Central regions.  Banda was a member of the Chewa ethnic group which forms 90% of the population of Central Region; Chewas are the largest ethnic group in Malawi, about a third of its total population.  (Fun fact: when Banda was at the University of Chicago in the 1920s and ’30s, he studied history but also got to know prominent anthropologists like Edward Sapir and collaborated with the legendary folklorist Stith Thompson on recording Chewa traditions.  When I studied anthropology at the University of Chicago in the 1990s, a huge number of ethnological works on Africa in the university library bore book-plates announcing their donation by “President for Life” Hastings Banda.  Therefore I owe him something of an intellectual debt, though the wealth that paid for those books was pillaged from the Malawian people under his party dictatorship.  Dr. Banda’s regime was cosy with apartheid-era South Africa and murdered perhaps as many as 18,000 political opponents.)

Hastings Kamuzu Banda and the Prince of Wales during a state visit in 1972

Malawian politics have been tumultuous since Hastings Banda’s removal in 1994 ushered in a belated crash course in multi-party democracy on the part of the Malawian people.  There seems to be an emerging, and also long-overdue, consensus that politics should be less centralized.  Whether this can be done before Northern Region secessionists became frustrated enough to push for separation more aggressively remains to be seen.  We will keep readers posted.

The Malawian flag introduced by the first President Mutharika in 2010. It replaced an earlier version showing only the top half of the sun; some had pointed out that that one could be interpreted as a setting sun just as well as a rising one.

[For those who are wondering, yes, this blog is tied in with my new book, a sort of encyclopedic atlas just published by Litwin Books under the title Let’s Split! A Complete Guide to Separatist Movements and Aspirant Nations, from Abkhazia to Zanzibar.  (That is shorter than the previous working title.)  The book, which contains 46 maps and 554 flags (or, more accurately, 554 flag images), is available for order now on Amazon.  Meanwhile, please “like” the book (even if you haven’t read it yet) on Facebook and see this special announcement for more information on the book.]

The contested United States presidential election in 2000 between Al Gore and George W. Bush made Florida famous not only for ballot-box dysfunction but also for its division on a razor’s edge between Republican and Democratic halves, mirroring the country as a whole.  A point of debate between the candidates had been climate change, which Gore, along with most educated and intelligent people, saw as a real threat and which Bush’s supporters scorned—as most Republicans still do—as a scare story in service to a liberal plot to overregulate industry.  That same divide was seized upon this month by Democratic leaders in South Miami, including its mayor, as a primary reason that the southern half of the state should split away as the “State of South Florida.”

Also check out U.S. Constitution, Article IV, Section 3.

Another high-ranking supporter of partition, Vice-Mayor Walter Harrisput it, “We have to be able to deal directly with this environmental concern and we can’t really get it done in Tallahassee.  I don’t care what people think; it’s not a matter of electing the right people.”  And Robert Welsh, a city commissioner, said, “The only time you get real cooperation from a government is when you threaten them with action.”  Mayor Philip Stoddard, a former professor of biology, added, “Our representatives aren’t paying attention to the scientists.  It seems a bit quixotic, but I have been advocating separation for 15 years.”  Mayor Stoddard on October 7th signed the (very non-binding) resolution on statehood, after the municipal commissio it with a 3-to-2 vote.

Miami?  Hm, maybe we’ll vacation in Denver this winter.

The proposed 51st state would include 24 counties and have a capital, according to Harris, somewhere in Orange County, near Kissimmee.  The area would include the Everglades, the Florida Keys (home to the self-declared independent Conch Republic, but that’s another story), and the larger Miami metropolitan area and reach just far enough north to take in Orlando and Tampa as well.  The 24 counties make up about 39% of Florida’s land and, with 13.5 million people, constitute two-thirds of the state population.

Key West’s self-declared Conch Republic would be part of the State of South Florida under the new plan.

Typically, 51st-state movements—not counting those of overseas territories like Puerto Rico, Guam, and American Samoa—have a partisan dimension and in particular tend to be spearheaded by voting blocs whose minority status in an existing state effectively shut them out of not only gubernatorial elections but also indeed national politics under the non-proportional, first-past-the-post system that sends representatives to the Senate as well as to the Electoral College that elects the president.  Thus, California Republicans in that state’s rural far north (“State of Jefferson”—sometimes taking in part of Oregon as well) and far south (“South California”) would like to split away to escape domination by California’s Democratic majority.  Likewise for statehood movements in the “red” fringes of other “blue” states—examples including “Western Maryland,” “West New York,” and movements by downstate Republicans to expel Chicago from Illinois and upstate conservatives in Nevada to draw a state boundary between themselves and Las Vegas.  (Since Republicans would retain the state capital, these are more properly expulsion, rather than secession, movements.)


Less numerous are blue statehood movements in red states, the most prominent of which is a push for a “State of Baja Arizona” centered on liberal Tucson.  But none of any of these proposals has any chance of success.  After all, U.S. Congress has to approve any new admissions to the union, even those (like Maine and West Virginia, historically) which join through secession.  The U.S. political system encourages closely divided legislatures, and therefore the necessary consensus to admit a new state usually occurs only when two states, one for each moiety of the political spectrum of the day, can be admitted in tandem.  That pattern was inaugurated with the Missouri Compromise of 1820, in which the slave state of Missouri and the free state of Maine were created nearly simultaneously, and continued right up to the admission of Democratic-dominated Hawaii and Republican-dominated Alaska in 1959.  Creating a State of Jefferson would guarantee two new Republican senators on Capitol Hill, while leaving the Democratic hold on what remained of California unchanged, and Democrats would never go for that; likewise with Republican attitudes toward any talk of Baja Arizona.

Elements in this proposed Baja Arizona flag seem designed to irk Republicans: a French tricolore, and a saguarro cactus that looks a lot like a raised middle finger.

So it is only in swing states that there is any chance of adding a 51st star to the flag.  A premier example was last year’s “State of North Colorado” movement, in which rural conservative counties in Colorado’s Front Range region pushed for secession.  It was a reaction not only to the formerly solidly Republican state’s becoming more and more Democratic as cities grow and Latino immigration increases but also to its tipping far into the social-issues vanguard by decriminalizing marijuana.  But Colorado’s demographics and political future are still ambiguous enough that no one in Washington is willing to risk dividing it; the status quo is a better bet.  (For one thing, no one’s sure how many Hispanic voters will remain Democratic after Obamamania subsides.)  Another example of a statehood movement in a swing state is a long-standing movement in Michigan’s remote, conservative Upper Peninsula to become the “State of Superior.”  (Some Superior proposals include the northern fringes of the Lower Peninsula and the northern edges of Wisconsin—another swing state—and mostly-liberal Minnesota as well.)  A recent proposal from the Pittsburgh suburbs to hive off western Pennsylvania as the “State of Westania” is less partisan in motivation: each resulting half would contain one of Pennsylvania’s large liberal cities (Philadelphia would dominate the rump eastern Pennsylvania) and thus both would likely still be swing states.

The blue counties voted to stay in Colorado in the 2013 non-binding referenda; the orange ones opted to become the State of North Colorado.

But a South Florida proposal may just give Republican and Democratic leaders pause.  After all, every four years each party spends enormous amounts of time and money courting votes in Florida to tip that most populous of swing states, and the most closely divided one, into one column or the other.  Presidential candidates would be delighted to be able to skip the “safe” states of North Florida and South Florida and concentrate campaigns on a smaller number of mostly contiguous key swing states like Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Iowa, and Wisconsin.

Some Tea Partiers want to found a red state in the North Woods of Michigan and Wisconsin.

Demographically, Florida is an odd mix: part of the Deep South historically, the southern part of the state has received large numbers of retirees from the liberal north, and especially northeast (remember those thousands of Palm Beach Jews in 2000 who apparently accidentally voted for the rabidly xenophobic third-party nut-job Pat Buchanan?), while the presence of world-class beaches and Orlando’s Disney World has made South Florida seem at times like a colonial outpost of California.  Some South Floridians don’t even talk funny.  Cuban-Americans, arriving in a flood after the Communist revolution of 1959, are most of the state’s 18% Hispanic share and an influential force in state politics; traditionally, they have been the only reliably Republican-voting Latino population in the U.S., since Republicans have always done a better job of portraying themselves as aggressive opponents of Communism (especially after John F. Kennedy bungled the Bay of Pigs invasion).  But with the Cold War over, state socialism looking set to slide gently into Chinese-style economic liberalization as Fidel Castro fades away, and a younger generation feeling more American than Cuban, Cuban-Americans, who are concentrated in and around Miami, are becoming more Democratic.

Ah, I’m getting all nostalgic for fin-de-siècle America!

Even among whites, the Democratic–Republican divide does not pattern neatly into one horizontal line across the neck of Florida.  Partisan differences, as elsewhere, largely follow an urban–rural split (the conservative city of Jacksonville being an exception), and, though South Florida has Miami, Tampa, Orlando, and other large cities, there are liberal pockets in the north and conservative pockets in the south as well (see map below).  It’s possible that even Republicans in the south could eventually be brought around to consider the scientific consensus on climate change plausible.  A couple inches of water would probably do it.  After all, even Republicans in Alaska are aware—the polar regions being a kind of canary in the mines where climate change is having the most dramatic effect—that global warming is real.


And South Florida is a very low-lying peninsula.  Huge parts of it, including nearly all the southern counties that include the Everglades and greater Miami, would be underwater if sea levels rose by, say, 5 to 10 meters (see map below).  No one’s predicting a 10-meter rise any time soon, but even a rise of a couple feet would destroy the Everglades and maybe prompt the abandonment of Miami—a city less easy to fortify with levees than, say, New Orleans or the coastal cities of the Netherlands.  It puts one in mind of the post-deluvian near-future southern Louisiana depicted in the fanciful 2012 film Beasts of the Southern Wild. It made a good movie, but life there wasn’t pretty.


The South Florida movement, then, may just be the first secessionist movement motivated mostly by fears of climate change.  But a five-meter rise would change the political stakes beyond just the Sunshine State.  All of coastal Louisiana would vanish, prompting a more wholesale version of what happened after Hurricane Katrina in 2005, when somewhat purplish but still mostly “red” (Republican) Louisiana ended up a more solid bright red after thousands of Democratic-leaning coastal populations like African-Americans, Cajuns, and urban middle-class whites fled the state for good.


As the map below shows, rising sea levels could also have effects that include disrupting democratic and economic reforms in Cuba—possibly prompting a new exodus to (what’s left of) Florida—and chaos in the Yucatan Peninsula, a region of Mexico dominated by Mayan Indians, a group which spearheaded the Zapatista anti-globalization uprising in Chiapas and elsewhere in 1994.  Oh, and one more thing: could Orlando or Atlanta or someplace please find room for the entire population of the Bahamas?


Rising sea levels in the southern Caribbean would bring disruptions to Venezuela’s oil industry and turn politics upside-down there, including anti-socialist (and to an extent C.I.A.-stoked) rebellions in the westernmost and most oil-rich state, Zulia.  French Guiana’s coastline would be swallowed up, raising the question of whether France will want to give up that lucrative colony, currently the largest remaining overseas territory of a European country other than Greenland (which, incidentally, by this time would be independent and richer than Kuwait due to suddenly accessible energy resources in the ice-free Arctic Ocean).


Turning to northern Europe (see below), among the cultures which might vanish if sea levels rose is the nation of Frisia, concentrated mostly in the Netherlands but also including parts of Denmark and Germany.  The Dutch could protect part of their territory from the sea, but not all of it.  (This could bring normally dormant interethnic tensions into relief—and we don’t even need to mention Belgium, where most of the land swallowed up would be low-lying Flanders.)  And London, if it survives, will have to be a below-sea-level city like New Orleans, constantly worried about floods and the strength of its levees.  Avoiding that stress by decamping to Brighton for the weekend will seem a less attractive option after the Gulf Stream diverts away, so maybe it’s time for a holiday in Florida—oh, no, wait, never mind.


Southern Europe would be in better shape.  If the European Union, Israel, Turkey, and the Arab League pooled their resources, they could easily install locks at the Strait of Gibraltar and keep the Mediterranean Sea at any level they want, thus saving cities like Istanbul, Venice, Barcelona, and Alexandria from inundation.  Suddenly, southern Europe would be the rich part of the E.U., with flood-ravaged countries like Germany and Denmark going cap-in-hand to the high-and-dry booming economies of Greece and Italy.)

The Pillars of Hercules: nec plus ultra except lots and lots of water.

Indonesia, always kept on a boil by ethnic strife, would be tested to its limit.  Though it has oil, it will have to perform a bit of triage to decide which regions to help the most.  Riau and other wealthy ethnic-Malayan/Indonesian areas on Sumatra along the Strait of Malacca, near Singapore, will likely get lots of economic aid and structural assistance, but expect the tribal peoples of Papua, West Papua, and Kalimantan (Borneo) to get the shitty end of the stick as usual and maybe rise up in protest.  Oh, and that South Moluccas government-in-exile in the Netherlands? It won’t be a government-in-exile anymore, but only because nearly all the residents of those now submerged islands will have to relocate to Amsterdam permanently.)


Perhaps worst off will be Bangladesh.  With more than half the U.S.’s population packed into a region of fragile deltas and sandbars the size of Wisconsin, and millions living on the brink of survival anyway, this poorest of the poor among major nations could become a demographic Cheronobyl in the middle of Asia.  Already, the bloody war of independence from Pakistan in 1971 and hopeless miring in poverty and coastal erosion since then have created an exodus of Bengali Muslims into neighboring countries.  In nearby parts of India, Hindu and Christian ethnic militias have long been itching to expel Bengalis from their territories, and in Burma (Myanmar) Buddhist-led pogroms against the Rohingya people—800,000 stateless Muslims marginalized by the state as “Bangladeshi squatters”—has derailed the ruling junta’s attempt to liberalize and present itself to the world as a responsible global citizen.  Imagine what it would do to Burma and India if, instead of tens or hundreds of thousands of displaced Bangladeshis, they would be asked to absorb, oh, say, 70 million of them.  Especially since Burma would be losing much of its coastline too.


Though their population is dwarfed by the countries listed above, it is possibly the minuscule nations consisting mainly of low-lying islands that have the most to fear from rising sea levels.  The Bahamas in the Caribbean (see above); Kiribati, Nauru, and Tuvalu in the South Pacific; and the Seychelles and Maldives in the Indian Ocean are among those nations which could disappear altogether if the seas rose more than a little bit.  The highest Maldivean point of land is seven feet above sea level, and for several terrifying minutes during the Boxing Day tsunami of 2004 the entire Republic of the Maldives was underwater.  If a situation like that became permanent, not only would there have to be material provisions made for the survival of such populations, but a whole rethinking of the idea of nation might have to take place.  Hundreds of local cultures could become like the sovereign but landless Military Order of the Knights of Malta, or like the Roma (Gypsy) people, or, in a closer analogy, like the Chagossians—the native people of Diego Garcia in the British Indian Ocean Territory who were deported by the British and Americans in the late 1960s and early ’70s to make way for NATO bases and who now live mostly in the village of Crawley, in County Sussex, England, dreaming of home and trying to keep their culture and dignity together.  (See a recent article from this blog on the Chagossians.)

The Chagossian nation has a flag but no place to plant it. Could Kiribatians and Seychellois one day be—pardon the expression—in the same boat?

The people of Miami don’t want to end up like that.  But the state’s Republican governor and industry-bought-out power-brokers (of both parties, incidentally) will not help them prepare for coming changes.  As Mayor Stoddard told a reporter, “It’s very apparent that the attitude of the northern part of the state is that they would just love to saw the state in half and just let us float off into the Caribbean.”  I guess North Florida should be careful what it wishes for: if South Florida secedes, it will take most of Florida’s economy with it.

“It’s a small world after all” ... you know, especially the land part of it

[For those who are wondering, yes, this blog is tied in with my new book, a sort of encyclopedic atlas just published by Litwin Books under the title Let’s Split! A Complete Guide to Separatist Movements and Aspirant Nations, from Abkhazia to Zanzibar.  (That is shorter than the previous working title.)  The book, which contains 46 maps and 554 flags (or, more accurately, 554 flag images), is available for order now on Amazon.  Meanwhile, please “like” the book (even if you haven’t read it yet) on Facebook and see this special announcement for more information on the book.]

Sometimes there’s a theme in a week’s minor news stories, and this week it seems to be: the mislaid spermatazoa of flamboyantly (even specifically upward-turning!) mustachioed Mediterranean fascist-sympathizing bohemian egomaniacs.  First, there was the news that one Pilar Abel, a 58-year-old Spaniard, was filing a paternity suit against the estate of Salvador Dalí, claiming the bombastic Catalan surrealist painter had had an affair with her mother while he was married to Gala Diakonova Éluard Dalí, his Tatarstan-born Russo-Spanish muse.  Of course, the case will get tossed right out; after all, she looks nothing like him:



And now there is the news that police in Italy have used a semen-stained handkerchief to map the genome of Gabriele d’Annunzio, an Italian poet, playwright, and ennobled prince who founded his own authoritarian micronation of sorts, the Regency of Carnaro, in 1919, and styled himself “il Duce” (“the Leader”) in anticipation of the eventual rise of Benito Mussolini.  The aristocratic snail tracks were sent, in 1916, to Countess Olga Levi Brunner, d’Annunzio’s mistress, and were preserved for most of a century in a private collection in Cagliari, Sardinia.  The hanky is now housed with other Annunziana at the Vittoriale degli Italiani (“Shrine of Italian Victories”) museum at his the prince’s former home on Lake Garda in Lombardy.

Gabriele d’Annunzio, Prince of Montenevoso

In the aftermath of the First World War, the Kingdom of Italy and the fledgling Kingdom of Yugoslavia were still squabbling over where their final border would be.  D’Annunzio, a wildly popular poet and war hero, in 1919 marched a makeshift army into Fiume—a then-Italian-populated town which today is on the Croatia side of the border and named Rijeka—and claimed it for Italy.  Italy’s King Victor Immanuel III, however, wanted no part of the plot and declined to formally reabsorb the enclave.  So d’Annunzio—an androgynous and wildly prolific bisexual erotic conqueror who followed the Italian art movement called Decadentism and whose megalomaniacal nicknames for himself included “il Magnifico” (“the Magnificent”) and “il Profeto” (“the Prophet”)—declared the town the Regency of Carnaro (Reggenza Italiana del Carnaro) and ran it as his de facto–independent personal fief for a year before the Italian navy retook the town.  Carnaro’s bizarre constitution, which was a piece of performance art in itself, declared “music” to be the founding political principle of the state, but d’Annunzio’s bombastic balcony speeches and black-shirted militias anticipated—some would say laid the groundwork for—the capital-F Fascism which later, in the 1920s, ’30s, and ’40s, swallowed up Italy and half of Europe.  (Carnaro was later known as the Free State of Fiume (Stato Libero di Fiume) and in 1924 was formally attached to Italy.  After the Second World War, despite an attempt to revive the Carnaro entity, it reverted to Yugoslavian control.)

Olga Brunner, the prince’s mistress. She’d better wait till the maid leaves the room before opening the mail.

Two years after Mussolini came to power in Italy in 1922 and began gently bending the monarchy to his will, Victor Immanuel III ennobled d’Annunzio as “Prince of Montenevoso”—the geographical principality in question being an Alpine town and district then within Italy but now known as Snežnik, in the Republic of Slovenia.

Poor Prince Gabriele: before the age of smartphones and “sexting,” little ... um ... presents had to be sent through the royal mails.

D’Annunzio’s semen and its DNA are being used for comparison with his great-grandson Federico d’Annunzio, the current Prince of Montenevoso (Italy, a republic, nonetheless retains a semi-official aristocracy), and all press reports indicate that it is a test run for forensic genomics that does not rely on exhumation.  Though one wonders if something else is going on.  A succession dispute or paternity case?

In the waning days of the Second World War, a second try at an independent Carnaro also claimed some now-Croatian islands in the Adriatic.

Indeed, the chief of the museum which owns the crusty rag, Giordano Bruno Guerri, raised, in an interview, the specter of a kind of small-scale version of The Boys from Brazil, musing that theoretically the poet, whom Italians regard as ambivalent sort of national hero and who died in 1938, could now be cloned.  “Nobody wants to clone d’Annunzio,” Guerri hastily clarified, “but nobody knows what changes will take place in science and society.  It’s good the DNA has been collected.”  Hmm, hard to know where he’s going with that.  If Guerri is planning to clone and breed a Decadentist pro-Fascist aristocracy to wrest control of Italy from corrupt republican politicos and imperialist Teutonic creditors, then where will it end?  We may have to swipe Monica Lewinsky’s dress from the Department of Justice’s evidence vault and clone an army of Bill Clintons to stop him.  Who’s in?




[You can read more about the Free State of Fiume, the Regency of Carnaro, and other bizarre and obscure separatist movements in my new book, a sort of encyclopedic atlas just published by Litwin Books under the title Let’s Split! A Complete Guide to Separatist Movements and Aspirant Nations, from Abkhazia to Zanzibar.  The book, which contains 46 maps and 554 flags (or, more accurately, 554 flag images), is available for order now on Amazon.  Meanwhile, please “like” the book (even if you haven’t read it yet) on Facebook and see this special announcement for more information on the book.]

The contested United States presidential election in 2000 between Al Gore and George W. Bush made Florida famous not only for ballot-box dysfunction but also for its division on a razor’s edge between Republican and Democratic halves, mirroring the country as a whole.  A point of debate between the candidates had been climate change, which Gore, along with most educated and intelligent people, saw as a real threat and which Bush’s supporters scorned—as most Republicans still do—as a scare story in service to a liberal plot to overregulate industry.  That same divide was seized upon this month by Democratic leaders in South Miami, including its mayor, as a primary reason that the southern half of the state should split away as the “State of South Florida.”

Also check out U.S. Constitution, Article IV, Section 3.

Another high-ranking supporter of partition, Vice-Mayor Walter Harrisput it, “We have to be able to deal directly with this environmental concern and we can’t really get it done in Tallahassee.  I don’t care what people think; it’s not a matter of electing the right people.”  And Robert Welsh, a city commissioner, said, “The only time you get real cooperation from a government is when you threaten them with action.”  Mayor Philip Stoddard, a former professor of biology, added, “Our representatives aren’t paying attention to the scientists.  It seems a bit quixotic, but I have been advocating separation for 15 years.”  Mayor Stoddard on October 7th signed the (very non-binding) resolution on statehood, after the municipal commissio it with a 3-to-2 vote.

Miami?  Hm, maybe we’ll vacation in Denver this winter.

The proposed 51st state would include 24 counties and have a capital, according to Harris, somewhere in Orange County, near Kissimmee.  The area would include the Everglades, the Florida Keys (home to the self-declared independent Conch Republic, but that’s another story), and the larger Miami metropolitan area and reach just far enough north to take in Orlando and Tampa as well.  The 24 counties make up about 39% of Florida’s land and, with 13.5 million people, constitute two-thirds of the state population.

Key West’s self-declared Conch Republic would be part of the State of South Florida under the new plan.

Typically, 51st-state movements—not counting those of overseas territories like Puerto Rico, Guam, and American Samoa—have a partisan dimension and in particular tend to be spearheaded by voting blocs whose minority status in an existing state effectively shut them out of not only gubernatorial elections but also indeed national politics under the non-proportional, first-past-the-post system that sends representatives to the Senate as well as to the Electoral College that elects the president.  Thus, California Republicans in that state’s rural far north (“State of Jefferson”—sometimes taking in part of Oregon as well) and far south (“South California”) would like to split away to escape domination by California’s Democratic majority.  Likewise for statehood movements in the “red” fringes of other “blue” states—examples including “Western Maryland,” “West New York,” and movements by downstate Republicans to expel Chicago from Illinois and upstate conservatives in Nevada to draw a state boundary between themselves and Las Vegas.  (Since Republicans would retain the state capital, these are more properly expulsion, rather than secession, movements.)


Less numerous are blue statehood movements in red states, the most prominent of which is a push for a “State of Baja Arizona” centered on liberal Tucson.  But none of any of these proposals has any chance of success.  After all, U.S. Congress has to approve any new admissions to the union, even those (like Maine and West Virginia, historically) which join through secession.  The U.S. political system encourages closely divided legislatures, and therefore the necessary consensus to admit a new state usually occurs only when two states, one for each moiety of the political spectrum of the day, can be admitted in tandem.  That pattern was inaugurated with the Missouri Compromise of 1820, in which the slave state of Missouri and the free state of Maine were created nearly simultaneously, and continued right up to the admission of Democratic-dominated Hawaii and Republican-dominated Alaska in 1959.  Creating a State of Jefferson would guarantee two new Republican senators on Capitol Hill, while leaving the Democratic hold on what remained of California unchanged, and Democrats would never go for that; likewise with Republican attitudes toward any talk of Baja Arizona.

Elements in this proposed Baja Arizona flag seem designed to irk Republicans: a French tricolore, and a saguarro cactus that looks a lot like a raised middle finger.

So it is only in swing states that there is any chance of adding a 51st star to the flag.  A premier example was last year’s “State of North Colorado” movement, in which rural conservative counties in Colorado’s Front Range region pushed for secession.  It was a reaction not only to the formerly solidly Republican state’s becoming more and more Democratic as cities grow and Latino immigration increases but also to its tipping far into the social-issues vanguard by decriminalizing marijuana.  But Colorado’s demographics and political future are still ambiguous enough that no one in Washington is willing to risk dividing it; the status quo is a better bet.  (For one thing, no one’s sure how many Hispanic voters will remain Democratic after Obamamania subsides.)  Another example of a statehood movement in a swing state is a long-standing movement in Michigan’s remote, conservative Upper Peninsula to become the “State of Superior.”  (Some Superior proposals include the northern fringes of the Lower Peninsula and the northern edges of Wisconsin—another swing state—and mostly-liberal Minnesota as well.)  A recent proposal from the Pittsburgh suburbs to hive off western Pennsylvania as the “State of Westania” is less partisan in motivation: each resulting half would contain one of Pennsylvania’s large liberal cities (Philadelphia would dominate the rump eastern Pennsylvania) and thus both would likely still be swing states.

The blue counties voted to stay in Colorado in the 2013 non-binding referenda; the orange ones opted to become the State of North Colorado.

But a South Florida proposal may just give Republican and Democratic leaders pause.  After all, every four years each party spends enormous amounts of time and money courting votes in Florida to tip that most populous of swing states, and the most closely divided one, into one column or the other.  Presidential candidates would be delighted to be able to skip the “safe” states of North Florida and South Florida and concentrate campaigns on a smaller number of mostly contiguous key swing states like Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Iowa, and Wisconsin.

Some Tea Partiers want to found a red state in the North Woods of Michigan and Wisconsin.

Demographically, Florida is an odd mix: part of the Deep South historically, the southern part of the state has received large numbers of retirees from the liberal north, and especially northeast (remember those thousands of Palm Beach Jews in 2000 who apparently accidentally voted for the rabidly xenophobic third-party nut-job Pat Buchanan?), while the presence of world-class beaches and Orlando’s Disney World has made South Florida seem at times like a colonial outpost of California.  Some South Floridians don’t even talk funny.  Cuban-Americans, arriving in a flood after the Communist revolution of 1959, are most of the state’s 18% Hispanic share and an influential force in state politics; traditionally, they have been the only reliably Republican-voting Latino population in the U.S., since Republicans have always done a better job of portraying themselves as aggressive opponents of Communism (especially after John F. Kennedy bungled the Bay of Pigs invasion).  But with the Cold War over, state socialism looking set to slide gently into Chinese-style economic liberalization as Fidel Castro fades away, and a younger generation feeling more American than Cuban, Cuban-Americans, who are concentrated in and around Miami, are becoming more Democratic.

Ah, I’m getting all nostalgic for fin-de-siècle America!

Even among whites, the Democratic–Republican divide does not pattern neatly into one horizontal line across the neck of Florida.  Partisan differences, as elsewhere, largely follow an urban–rural split (the conservative city of Jacksonville being an exception), and, though South Florida has Miami, Tampa, Orlando, and other large cities, there are liberal pockets in the north and conservative pockets in the south as well (see map below).  It’s possible that even Republicans in the south could eventually be brought around to consider the scientific consensus on climate change plausible.  A couple inches of water would probably do it.  After all, even Republicans in Alaska are aware—the polar regions being a kind of canary in the mines where climate change is having the most dramatic effect—that global warming is real.


And South Florida is a very low-lying peninsula.  Huge parts of it, including nearly all the southern counties that include the Everglades and greater Miami, would be underwater if sea levels rose by, say, 5 to 10 meters (see map below).  No one’s predicting a 10-meter rise any time soon, but even a rise of a couple feet would destroy the Everglades and maybe prompt the abandonment of Miami—a city less easy to fortify with levees than, say, New Orleans or the coastal cities of the Netherlands.  It puts one in mind of the post-deluvian near-future southern Louisiana depicted in the fanciful 2012 film Beasts of the Southern Wild. It made a good movie, but life there wasn’t pretty.


The South Florida movement, then, may just be the first secessionist movement motivated mostly by fears of climate change.  But a five-meter rise would change the political stakes beyond just the Sunshine State.  All of coastal Louisiana would vanish, prompting a more wholesale version of what happened after Hurricane Katrina in 2005, when somewhat purplish but still mostly “red” (Republican) Louisiana ended up a more solid bright red after thousands of Democratic-leaning coastal populations like African-Americans, Cajuns, and urban middle-class whites fled the state for good.


As the map below shows, rising sea levels could also have effects that include disrupting democratic and economic reforms in Cuba—possibly prompting a new exodus to (what’s left of) Florida—and chaos in the Yucatan Peninsula, a region of Mexico dominated by Mayan Indians, a group which spearheaded the Zapatista anti-globalization uprising in Chiapas and elsewhere in 1994.  Oh, and one more thing: could Orlando or Atlanta or someplace please find room for the entire population of the Bahamas?


Rising sea levels in the southern Caribbean would bring disruptions to Venezuela’s oil industry and turn politics upside-down there, including anti-socialist (and to an extent C.I.A.-stoked) rebellions in the westernmost and most oil-rich state, Zulia.  French Guiana’s coastline would be swallowed up, raising the question of whether France will want to give up that lucrative colony, currently the largest remaining overseas territory of a European country other than Greenland (which, incidentally, by this time would be independent and richer than Kuwait due to suddenly accessible energy resources in the ice-free Arctic Ocean).


Turning to northern Europe (see below), among the cultures which might vanish if sea levels rose is the nation of Frisia, concentrated mostly in the Netherlands but also including parts of Denmark and Germany.  The Dutch could protect part of their territory from the sea, but not all of it.  (This could bring normally dormant interethnic tensions into relief—and we don’t even need to mention Belgium, where most of the land swallowed up would be low-lying Flanders.)  And London, if it survives, will have to be a below-sea-level city like New Orleans, constantly worried about floods and the strength of its levees.  Avoiding that stress by decamping to Brighton for the weekend will seem a less attractive option after the Gulf Stream diverts away, so maybe it’s time for a holiday in Florida—oh, no, wait, never mind.


Southern Europe would be in better shape.  If the European Union, Israel, Turkey, and the Arab League pooled their resources, they could easily install locks at the Strait of Gibraltar and keep the Mediterranean Sea at any level they want, thus saving cities like Istanbul, Venice, Barcelona, and Alexandria from inundation.  Suddenly, southern Europe would be the rich part of the E.U., with flood-ravaged countries like Germany and Denmark going cap-in-hand to the high-and-dry booming economies of Greece and Italy.)

The Pillars of Hercules: nec plus ultra except lots and lots of water.

Indonesia, always kept on a boil by ethnic strife, would be tested to its limit.  Though it has oil, it will have to perform a bit of triage to decide which regions to help the most.  Riau and other wealthy ethnic-Malayan/Indonesian areas on Sumatra along the Strait of Malacca, near Singapore, will likely get lots of economic aid and structural assistance, but expect the tribal peoples of Papua, West Papua, and Kalimantan (Borneo) to get the shitty end of the stick as usual and maybe rise up in protest.  Oh, and that South Moluccas government-in-exile in the Netherlands? It won’t be a government-in-exile anymore, but only because nearly all the residents of those now submerged islands will have to relocate to Amsterdam permanently.)


Perhaps worst off will be Bangladesh.  With more than half the U.S.’s population packed into a region of fragile deltas and sandbars the size of Wisconsin, and millions living on the brink of survival anyway, this poorest of the poor among major nations could become a demographic Cheronobyl in the middle of Asia.  Already, the bloody war of independence from Pakistan in 1971 and hopeless miring in poverty and coastal erosion since then have created an exodus of Bengali Muslims into neighboring countries.  In nearby parts of India, Hindu and Christian ethnic militias have long been itching to expel Bengalis from their territories, and in Burma (Myanmar) Buddhist-led pogroms against the Rohingya people—800,000 stateless Muslims marginalized by the state as “Bangladeshi squatters”—has derailed the ruling junta’s attempt to liberalize and present itself to the world as a responsible global citizen.  Imagine what it would do to Burma and India if, instead of tens or hundreds of thousands of displaced Bangladeshis, they would be asked to absorb, oh, say, 70 million of them.  Especially since Burma would be losing much of its coastline too.


Though their population is dwarfed by the countries listed above, it is possibly the minuscule nations consisting mainly of low-lying islands that have the most to fear from rising sea levels.  The Bahamas in the Caribbean (see above); Kiribati, Nauru, and Tuvalu in the South Pacific; and the Seychelles and Maldives in the Indian Ocean are among those nations which could disappear altogether if the seas rose more than a little bit.  The highest Maldivean point of land is seven feet above sea level, and for several terrifying minutes during the Boxing Day tsunami of 2004 the entire Republic of the Maldives was underwater.  If a situation like that became permanent, not only would there have to be material provisions made for the survival of such populations, but a whole rethinking of the idea of nation might have to take place.  Hundreds of local cultures could become like the sovereign but landless Military Order of the Knights of Malta, or like the Roma (Gypsy) people, or, in a closer analogy, like the Chagossians—the native people of Diego Garcia in the British Indian Ocean Territory who were deported by the British and Americans in the late 1960s and early ’70s to make way for NATO bases and who now live mostly in the village of Crawley, in County Sussex, England, dreaming of home and trying to keep their culture and dignity together.  (See a recent article from this blog on the Chagossians.)

The Chagossian nation has a flag but no place to plant it. Could Kiribatians and Seychellois one day be—pardon the expression—in the same boat?

The people of Miami don’t want to end up like that.  But the state’s Republican governor and industry-bought-out power-brokers (of both parties, incidentally) will not help them prepare for coming changes.  As Mayor Stoddard told a reporter, “It’s very apparent that the attitude of the northern part of the state is that they would just love to saw the state in half and just let us float off into the Caribbean.”  I guess North Florida should be careful what it wishes for: if South Florida secedes, it will take most of Florida’s economy with it.

“It’s a small world after all” ... you know, especially the land part of it

[For those who are wondering, yes, this blog is tied in with my new book, a sort of encyclopedic atlas just published by Litwin Books under the title Let’s Split! A Complete Guide to Separatist Movements and Aspirant Nations, from Abkhazia to Zanzibar.  (That is shorter than the previous working title.)  The book, which contains 46 maps and 554 flags (or, more accurately, 554 flag images), is available for order now on Amazon.  Meanwhile, please “like” the book (even if you haven’t read it yet) on Facebook and see this special announcement for more information on the book.]

The speaker of parliament of southwestern Russia’s Chechen Republic responded on March 24th to recent measures in the United States Congress to arm Ukraine against Russian aggression by threatening to arm Mexico for a reconquista of vast territories the U.S. swiped in the 19th century.

Chechnya’s president, Ramzan Kadyrov, ready for some sort of reconquista, in a photo from his twisted Instagram account

The parliament speaker, Dukvakha Abdurakhmanov, said in a statement on the legislature’s website that that day’s 348-48 non-binding House of Representatives vote on supplying “lethal aid” to Ukraine was an overstepping of America’s bounds and that it was time to “resume debate on the legal status of the territories annexed by the U.S.,” including “California, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, Utah, Colorado, and a part of Wyoming.”  The statement added, “ We reserve the right to conduct conferences in Russia, Mexico and the U.S. to raise the question of breaking away the above mentioned states from the U.S., and [about] supplying weapons to resistance fighters there.”

The Chechen parliament speaker, Dukvakha Abdurakhmanov

Dmitry Peskov, a spokesman for Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, reminded Chechen leaders three days later that Russian law forbids arms sales abroad by individual constituent republics of the Russian Federation.  But the Kremlin pointedly did not distance itself from the underlying sentiment.


Chechnya fought and lost two brutal wars to secede from Russia after the fall of Communism, the second of which was spearheaded by Putin, punishing the tiny predominantly-Muslim nation with the most lethal and destructive bombing campaign in Europe since the Second World War (the Yugoslav Wars of Succession didn’t even come close).  Since then, Chechnya has been sealed off and under the iron fist of Ramzan Kadyrov, the unelected, Putin-appointed dictator (and, ironically, former separatist rebel) who keeps the peace by toadying to the Kremlin and rewarding his citizens for their compliance with a form of Islamic law that, technically, flouts Russia’s secular constitution, including the reintroduction of polygamy, conservative clerics taking a leading role in public life, and the draining of public coffers to build football-stadium-sized mosques.

The flag of the Chechen government-in-exile (i.e., not the loonies that run the place now)

Chechnya—along with other predominantly-Muslim Russian republics like Ingushetia and Tatarstan—came out fully in favor of Russia’s illegal invasion and annexation last year of Ukraine’s Crimea peninsula (as discussed at the time in this blog; read articles here and here), even though these nations also have a history of suffering horribly under Russian imperialism and even though Crimean Tatars, who are fellow Muslims, have gotten the worst of the Crimean annexation.  Pro-Kremlin Chechen mercenaries are also active in the pro-Russian insurgencies in the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic and Lugansk People’s Republic in southeastern Ukraine, and it is widely understood that last month’s assassination of the Russian opposition leader Boris Nemtsov was almost certainly carried out by Chechen special forces.  Chechens, sadly, are the new Cossacks.

Chechen irregulars, from the imaginatively named “Death” battalion, photographed recently in the Donetsk People’s Republic

So does that mean that Kadyrov’s paramilitary reach is extending to, as Abdurakhmanov put it, “supplying weapons to resistance fighters” in formerly-Mexican parts of the U.S.?  Well, probably not, since such a resistance movement doesn’t really exist.  Sure, there have been publicity stunts.  In 1966 Chicano activists inspired by the recent American Indian Movement (A.I.M.) standoff on Alcatraz island, in San Francisco Bay, occupied part of the Kit Carson National Forest in northern New Mexico and declared it a Republic of San Joaquín del Río de Chama.  Around the same time, radical “Brown Berets” modeled on the Black Panthers took over Santa Catalina Island off the coast of Southern California, claiming that it fell outside the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo, the 1848 agreement which cemented the American annexation of the northern half of Mexico after the Mexican-American War.  And groups like the Congreso de Aztlán and the student collective Movimiento Estudiantil Chican@ de Aztlán (MEChA, or, in English, the Chicano/Chicana Student Movement of Aztlán) has advocated the idea of the southwestern United States becoming a Hispanic-ruled territory called Aztlán (either as its own country or as part of Mexico).  The former University of New Mexico ethnic-studies professor Charles Truxillo was in the 2000s calling for a new Republica del Norte (“Republic of the North”) including territories on both sides of the current U.S.–Mexican border.  But never have any of these risen above the level of symbolic protest to become an actual movement.

A bit of right-wing propaganda about the (in fact, almost non-existent) Aztlán movement

Nor is the Mexican government interested in taking up the issue, any more than it was when Kaiser Wilhelm II made a similar offer in 1917, during the First World War, in a Berlin–Mexico City telegram intercepted by U.K. intelligence.  And let’s face it, Germany’s military was already stretched a little thin at the time.


But pointing out the shaky ground America stands on when it comes to respect for territorial integrity is part of the Kremlin’s propaganda assault since the invasion of Ukraine last year.  Just as Russia’s English-language R.T. media network teems with the (often right-wing, pro-Putin) separatist movements that plague western Europe—as an example of supposed European vulnerability on the topic—so, also, did the possibility of a Russian re-annexation of Alaska become a “silly season” story of the week (discussed at the time in this blog here and here), and Russia’s lock-step foreign-policy allies in the Western Hemisphere, Cuba and Venezuela, have more than once called for U.S. decolonization of Puerto Rico (as reported on in this blog), even as they (as this blog has also discussed) vote with Russia and against Ukraine in the United Nations.  The message seems to be: if the West thinks it can tell Russia what should be part of Russia and what shouldn’t, then we can play that game too.

Ramzan Kadyrov—wrapping Christmas presents for the Brown Berets?

So far, it’s only talk, but Springtime of Nations will be keeping you posted of any further developments.

Russian nationalists second that sentiment—or at least they pretend to in order to make a point

[You can read more about Chechnya, Aztlán, the Donetsk People’s Republic, and other separatist movements, both famous and obscure, in my new book, a sort of encyclopedic atlas just published by Litwin Books under the title Let’s Split! A Complete Guide to Separatist Movements and Aspirant Nations, from Abkhazia to Zanzibar.  The book, which contains 46 maps and 554 flags (or, more accurately, 554 flag images), is available for order now on Amazon.  Meanwhile, please “like” the book (even if you haven’t read it yet) on Facebook and see this special announcement for more information on the book.]

The recent rise of the far-right United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP), which wants the U.K. to leave the European Union (E.U.), has shaken up British politics.  Next month’s general election is not at all shaping up to be the usual American-style horse race between the left-of-center Labour Party and right-of-center Conservative Party, with the more lefty Liberal Democratic Party (currently in a coalition government with the Conservatives) as a side show.  In last year’s elections to the European Parliament, UKIP became the largest party in the U.K.’s delegation, but the UKIP phenomenon is far from being a flash in the pan, even though the largely toothless European Parliament attracts far more protest votes than the more consequential general elections do: UKIP is actually the third-largest party in the U.K. now.  And a further complication is the surge in support for the separatist Scottish National Party (S.N.P.) (at Labour’s expense) after last year’s narrowly defeated independence referendum in Scotland.  Next month’s election will have serious geopolitical consequences as no British election in recent memory has.


This means that Conservatives and Labour have to some extent resigned themselves to the groundswell of populist centrifugal forces likely to define the U.K.’s future.  Prime Minister David Cameron has already capitulated to UKIP by promising, if he is reelected, to hold a referendum on continued E.U. membership, and during the run-up to the Scottish referendum his government instituted a raft of new powers of self-government, for not only Scotland but Wales and Northern Ireland as well.  These developments are convergent: UKIP would also like a more decentralized Britain.  But Nigel Farage, UKIP’s bombastic leader, a self-described libertarian, has scoffed at the S.N.P.’s and the Scottish public’s overwhelming desire to stay in the E.U. but leave the U.K.  He has called Scottish nationalism a “fraud” which aspires merely to “swap your masters from Westminster to Brussels.”  (See article from this blog here and here on the question of whether Scotland could leave Britain but stay in the Union.)

Nigel Farage—now destroyer of empires, as well?

One unexpected reverberation of this political earthquake is policy toward the U.K.’s overseas territories.  In the past, Farage has called for a special Member of Parliament to represent colonies like Gibraltar and the Falkland Islands.  Presumably this would overlay the current self-government in those territories which fill the role an M.P. in London would for most areas of governance.  As Farage points out, citizens in the overseas territories have no say in those functions still reserved to Westminster: currency, defense, and foreign relations.  (This is similar to Puerto Rico’s relationship to the United States (as discussed earlier in this blog).)


The rethinking has already begun in Gibraltar: the territory’s Chief Minister, Fabian Picardo, said this week that in the event of a “Brexit”—as the media have dubbed UKIP’s hoped-for secession from the E.U.—Gibraltar would want to stay in the Union.  “The only existential threat to our economy,” Picardo told the conservative Daily Telegraph,“is one where we are pulled out of the European Union against our will and denied access to the single market.  I think everybody who is serious about the subject, even those whose views I don’t share, talk about retaining access to Europe as a member of the European economic area.  I know that there are many in the U.K. who advocate the U.K. moving out of the E.U. who consider themselves to be very good friends of Gibraltar, but they need to understand the economics of this.”  Gibraltar is the only overseas U.K. territory that is not in the E.U. (though some far-flung possessions of E.U. member states are in it, notably French Guiana and other French territories like Réunion and Mayotte in the Indian Ocean and Guadeloupe and Martinique in the Caribbean, as well as Spain’s special municipalities of Ceuta and Melilla and its Canary Islands, which are all geographically African).


Picardo’s words echo the position not only the S.N.P. in Scotland but of Plaid Cymru, the nationalist party in Wales: both demand that their countries be allowed binding local referenda on E.U. membership in the event of a U.K.-wide vote on the question.  The E.U. is only really unpopular in England, not in other parts of the U.K.  But in Gibraltar the statement represents a serious reversal of thinking on the status of “the Rock,” as locals call the two-and-a-half-square-mile peninsula jutting off Spain’s mainland.  Gibraltarians, after all, have never favored independence.  In a 2002 referendum on Gibraltar’s status, confirming a similar result in 1967, more than 98.97% of the 30,000 or so residents opposed any change in status.  This ranks among history’s most thunderously near-unanimous votes against changing the status of a territory, alongside similar polls in the Falkland Islands (where residents in 2013 backed the status quo 1,513 to 3) and the Cocos Islands (where, in 1983, only 9 out of 261 wanted independence from Australia).

These Gibraltar residents don’t care which flag flies over them.

But is Picardo thinking of what would amount to independence—continued membership in the E.U. on its own? (it would make it the Union’s tiniest member state, smaller by far even than Luxembourg or Malta)—or is he thinking of joining Spain?  Surely not the latter, since Spain’s ongoing claims on the territory are the chief source of Gibraltarian indignation that has energized opposition to change.


A quick history review: the Spanish claim go goes back to 1700, when the death of Spain’s childless King Carlos II, left him with no clear successor.  Carlos was a member of Austria’s Habsburg dynasty, so the Britain, Prussia, and Portugal wanted the crown to pass to the Austrian kaiser’s son, Archduke Karl—um, I mean, Carlos—while France and Bavaria backed a candidate from France’s royal family, the House of Bourbon.  Thus began the War of the Spanish Succession.  The Bourbons and their supporters prevailed: the prospective Carlos III stayed Karl and later became Holy Roman Emperor, and a Bourbon sits on the throne in Madrid even today.  But the end of the war in 1714 sorted out lots of outstanding territorial squabbles around the world among the European powers: France gave big chunks of Canada to Britain, for example, and Spain lost numerous colonies, including Sicily and what are now the Netherlands and Belgium.  Since the British and Spanish were in the midst of a long struggle for naval supremacy, Queen Anne of Great Britain negotiated hard, and successfully, for her consolation prize, Gibraltar, ownership of which meant theoretical control of trade through the narrow passage between the Mediterranean Sea and the open Atlantic.

No Mediterranean climes for Archduke Karl; he had to settle for this measly job.

The Spanish have never gotten over this, even now that shared membership in the E.U. means the border between Gibraltar and the Spanish mainland amounts to very little (though Spain routinely tests British patience by imposing punitive border controls from time to time).  Spanish political candidates thunder on about taking back the Rock whenever patriotism needs to be whipped up before an election.  The Spanish royal family even boycotted Queen Elizabeth II’s diamond jubilee in 2012 over the issue (as reported on at the time in this blog)—which in terms of historical memory and emotional maturity is sort of equivalent to what it would be like if David Cameron refused to shake hands with Barack Obama because he was still pouting over mean things said about King George III during the Boston Tea Party.

This past week a new nation was declared, on a spot of land in the murkily demarcated border zone in the region of Slavonia where the Republic of Serbia and the Republic of Croatia meet.  But it is not a Serb or Croat behind the project, but a Czech one, and it is more ideological than ethnonationalist. The founder, Vít Jedlička, on April 13th, announced the independence of the Free Republic of Liberland (Svobodná republika Liberland) on a parcel of land on the west bank of the Danube (the mostly Croatian side) around Gornja Siga, an area which is a de facto no-man’s-land since neither side asserts a claim on it.

An unexpected chain of events over the past several weeks has put independence for the Danish possession of Greenland back on the table and may determine the future of energy politics in the Arctic, and in the European Union (E.U.)


Aleqa Hammond, the accommodationist prime minister of Greenland, who is cold (pardon the expression) to the idea of independence, saw her political career implode in the last days of September after a financial scandal uncovered over 100,000 Danish krone spent on her and her family’s travel expenses and hotel mini-bar tabs.  Hammond’s socialist pro-independence party Siumut (Inuktitut for “Forward”) had up to that point been sitting at the top of the heap.  It garnered 43% of votes in the 2013 parliamentary elections and formed a coalition with the far-left separatist Inuit Party and with the premier unionist party, Attasut (“Solidarity,” also translatable as “Union”), each of those having pulled in just over 6%.

Aleqa Hammond

All eyes are now on the elections scheduled for November 28th.  But in the wake of the Hammond scandal, Siumut’s popularity has dropped.  The lastest polls of Greenland’s tiny electorate (about 40,000 people, mostly Inuit (Eskiimo), scattered over an area the size of half the E.U.) show a healthy but still lower 36.5% support, with the far more boldly pro-independence Inuit Ataqatigiit party surging at 44.4%.  That close to a majority, it would need to make deals with anti-independence parties to form a government.  Meanwhile, Attasut, which is a Liberal party in the big-L, European sense, is registering only 6.8% in the polls, down from more than 8% in 2013.  So Hammond has now pushed Siumut, a socialist party which has sat precariously on the fence on the independence question, out of the running, and a firmly pro-independence coalition is set to take office.

Together for the time being: the flags of Greenland and Denmark

Hammond is Greenland’s first female prime minister, and her likely successor, Sara Olsvig, would be the second.  (As a point of interest to anthropologists, she would become the second world leader to take office this year who has a background in anthropology, with degrees from the Universities of Greenland and Copenhagen.  The other is Ashraf Ghani, a Columbia University alumnus who is now president of Afghanistan.  What with Barack Obama’s mother having been an anthropologist as well, is this now a trend?)

Sara Olsvig—Greenland’s next prime minister?

Not only is Greenlandic independence now likely to be back on the table, but the corruption scandal also represents a close call for separatists alarmed by Hammond’s plans to bring Greenland into the E.U.  Greenland is not in the trade bloc, though its parent country, the Kingdom of Denmark, is.

A remaining questions is whether the current crisis will seem like a deep enough financial or corruption scandal that foreign investment will be affected.  This is what many in the E.U. would like Greenlandic voters to think.  This matters because the promise of foreign investment is one of the key planks in Inuit Ataqatigiit’s pro-independence platform.  So how financial markets on the European continent react and how E.U. leaders react may determine how confident Greenlanders feel when they go to the polls on the 28th, and what kind of a mandate the new government will feel it has to push for separation.


There is quite a bit at stake.  As northern latitudes warm and the Arctic Ocean becomes more and more of an open sea, the oil and, especially, natural-gas resources under the water will increasingly be the focus of a mad geopolitical scramble over the next century.  Without energy, Greenland—currently dependent on fishing (hardly reliable), Danish aid (slightly humiliating), and tourism (really?)—would be a much less viable state.  Russia controls by far the greatest part of the Arctic (see map above), owning nearly half of its circular coastline.  Canada, the world’s second-largest country, has the next biggest piece, while the United States (by virtue of Alaska), Norway, and Denmark (by virtue of Greenland) have smaller pie slices of roughly equal size.

E.U. member-states are shown in blue.  Blue and blue-circled territories overseas are in the E.U.  Overseas territories of E.U. member-states which lie outside the E.U. are in green.

The E.U. would like to be a major player in the development of the Arctic, naturally, but, inconveniently, Norway is not in the Union (Norwegians have always had too much North Sea oil to feel that they needed to be) and Greenlanders, as they eye independence, go back and forth as to whether they want to join.  Greenland is one of a small number of dependent territories of E.U. member states which are not in the E.U.  Others (see map above) include the Isle of Man and Jersey and Guernsey, which are technically independent but in free association with the United Kingdom; Denmark’s Faroe Islands (which also have an independence movement); France’s Pacific possessions New Caledonia, French Polynesia, and Wallis and Futuna; the Netherlands’ Caribbean possessions such as Aruba and Curaçao; and most of the U.K.’s island territories abroad.  Other overseas possessions are in the E.U., however, such as the U.K.’s Gibraltar and Falkland Islands, Spain’s Canary Islands and its African-mainland enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla, and French possessions like Réunion and the large and valuable French Guiana, where the European space program is based.  Greenland has always debated whether it should stay in the former group or join the latter one—and, indeed, whether an independent Greenland would benefit from E.U. membership on its own.

Russia has planted a flag under the sea at the North Pole ...

Would it be granted it?  Surely.  That it is in fact in North America will be no problem, since Brussels already kindly overlooks the fact that one of its member states, Cyprus, is (sshhh) in Asia.  And the huge expenses involved in running Greenland’s infrastructure would be more than made up for by the energy potential, which would strengthen western Europe’s hand mightily in what everyone agrees is a looming and burgeoning geopolitical struggle with Russia for energy resources.  With Greenland and a warming Arctic, the E.U. hopes it would not be dependent on an increasingly anti-Western Russia to keep its houses and businesses warm through the winter.

... but under international law, the reality is slightly more complicated.

But there is an irony here.  As many European colonial powers shed their overseas territories in the 1960s and ’70s, many of them were careful not to pull up stakes until they had put governments and agreements in place to guarantee parent-countries’ corporations’ access to the former colonies’ resources.  The pro-British governments installed in Iraq and Libya as the British withdrew are examples of this, and their inequities and abuses led directly to the rise of the dictatorships of Saddam Hussein and Moammar al-Qaddafi, respectively.  Likewise, the Dutch tolerated a pro–Shell Oil dictatorship in newly independent Indonesia, while Spain’s attempt to leave the former Spanish Sahara’s oil open to Spanish corporate exploitation, which set the stage for the ongoing dispute over that territory between the semi-recognized Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic (S.A.D.R.) and the new colonial master there, Morocco.  (Portugal, by contrast, tended to take its ball and go straight home, leaving colonies like Angola, Mozambique, and East Timor ravaged by decades of civil war.)  So E.U. shakers and movers in Paris, London, Madrid, and Amsterdam would very much like to see Denmark extract some concessions of this sort from Greenland as part of negotiations for independence, so that Greenland’s future energy supply can be moved into, and moved around in, the E.U. free-trade area without tariff or political disruption.  And here’s the irony: Denmark, a far more progressive, egalitarian-minded state which has never depended on colonies for its considerable prosperity, is much more likely to be a benevolent version of Portugal and let a newly independent Greenland do whatever it likes with its resources, including handing them over to non-E.U. contractors—like, say, the Chinese, who are all over Greenland right now like mud on a pig, waiting for the gold rush to start.

Greenlanders say: we may want your investment, but don’t plant your flag just yet.

Greenland must decide whether it is ready to bank on an energy still in its infancy as a guarantor of viability as an independent state.  If it does go it alone, Greenland will not need either Denmark or the E.U.  Russians, Chinese, and Americans will also be lining up to set up business there.  Economists and analysts on the Continent are already warning Greenland not to be too rash and hoping that the recent political troubles will make voters fret about investment.  No fretting is necessary.  Greenland’s voters should plug their ears, look at the facts, and make up their own minds.

Eventually, Greenlanders will sort it all out.

The city of Mubi after Boko Haram paid it a visit about a year ago.  Now it controls it completely.

Boko Haram, according to news reports, controls four of Adamawa’s twelve local government areas (L.G.A.s)—as subdivisions of Nigerian states are called.  These L.G.A.s are all adjacent and bunched in the northern tip of Adamawa.  They are Madagali, Michika, Mubi North, and Mubi South—including, of course, the city of Mubi.  Boko Haram roadblocks and checkpoints have been set up along the borders of the quasi-statelet, and the Nigerian government and military have no presence there.  The group has announced its aim to take over all of Adamawa, a state of nearly 4 million people roughly the size of Maryland or Taiwan.

In this map, Borno State local government areas controlled by Boko Haram are circled in red.

Already, Boko Haram was reported to control an astounding one-third of the twenty-four L.G.A.s in Borno State.  Borno is the much larger and more populous state to the north of Adamawa where Nigeria, Chad, Niger, and Cameroon meet at Lake Chad.  It is here, in late August, that Boko Haram declared the city of Gwoza, which it had captured, to be the kernel of the new caliphate.  It also at that time already controlled Gulak, in the current northern-Adamawa statelet, and a string of towns spilling across southern Borno into Yobe State as well.  Borno, with over 5 million people, is about the size of Ireland.  In addition to Gwoza, then, Boko Haram now also controls the Borno L.G.A.s of Gamboru-Ngala, Kala-Balge, Marte, Dikwa, Bama, and Askira-Uba, as well as part of Konduga (see map above).  Observers expect the group to make a grab soon for Maiduguri, the Borno capital, which has over 1 million people and which is already nearly surrounded by Boko Haram territories.

One map showing Boko Haram–controlled areas in northern Nigeria, from John Campbell’s excellent blog. Other clear and informative maps of de facto Boko Haram territories can be found at the useful Political Geography Now blog.

One wonders if that is the point at which Nigeria will bring the full force of its military to combat the Boko Haram threat, or the point at which the international community will regard what is happening in northern Nigeria as a crisis as serious as that in Iraq and Syria with Islamic State.

Every northern Nigerian’s nightmare is to wake up in the morning and see something like this roll into town.

[For those who are wondering, yes, this blog is tied in with my new book, a sort of encyclopedic atlas just published by Litwin Books under the title Let’s Split! A Complete Guide to Separatist Movements and Aspirant Nations, from Abkhazia to Zanzibar.  (That is shorter than the previous working title.)  The book, which contains 46 maps and 554 flags (or, more accurately, 554 flag images), is available for order now on Amazon.  Meanwhile, please “like” the book (even though you haven’t read it yet) on Facebook and see this special announcement for more information on the book.]

A new Black nationalist micronation in Philadelphia?

The city of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, has never healed from the horrific events of May 1985, when police helicopters bombed an urban compound rented by the radical Black nationalist organization MOVE and the mayor ordered firefighters to stand aside while 65 homes burned to the ground, after a siege followed police attempts to evict the group.  MOVE, a (heavily armed) communitarian, back-to-nature movement, had been branded a terrorist organization linked to the killing of a police officer seven years earlier, though in the 1985 eviction case had done little more than torment neighbors with political diatribes delivered through bullhorns.  Last month, media and activists revisited the MOVE siege on its thirtieth anniversary, which came amid a new civil-rights movement across the United States focusing on police brutality against African-Americans.

How Philadelphia police handled an eviction complaint in 1985.

It was in this climate that four African-American activists facing eviction from another Philadelphia apartment building invoked Black nationalism last week and tried to turn a minor court hearing into an international incident.  They say the entire building is a sovereign territory, not part of the United States.

A tenant in the latest dispute being arrested last month

At the June 2nd hearing addressing defiance of an eviction order by the landlord, Francine Beyer, the four tenants of the apartment at 13th and Hamilton identified themselves as “Aboriginal Indigenous Moorish Americans,” refusing to recognize the court’s right to call them or its authority over the building, which they regard as “theirs by birthright,” according to the Philadelphia Daily News, and not subject to U.S., state, or municipal law.

Location of the apartment building on 13th and Hamilton in Philadelphia being claimed as a separate nation.

“Are you aware that the people who you have falsely called defendants,” one defendant, Nanye Amil El (a.k.a. 45-year-old Dante Morris), wearing a maroon fez cap, asked Judge David C. Shuter, “are actually heirs to this land?”  Another defendant, 65-year-old Delilah Passe, waved what the press described as a Moorish flag but was asked to put it away lest it be used as a weapon.  (If a reader can tell me which flag was used, I would be grateful.)

This (in center) may or may not be an example of the type of Moorish flag displayed by defendants in court last week in Philadelphia.

At this point, students of the history of Black nationalism and readers of this blog will recognize the names and terminology of the tenants as indications that they are part of the Moorish Science Temple movement.  This precursor to modern Black nationalism emerged in the ferment of religious and political ideas in 1920s and ’30s Detroit, Michigan, where Islam, Freemasonry, offbeat anthropological theorizing, and an infatuation with all things Egyptian and occultic gave rise to Marcus Garvey as well as the Nation of Islam’s founder, Elijah Muhammad, among others.  Many Moorish activists claim that African-Americans are actually African-featured “Israelites.”  This is known as the “Paleo-Negroid” hypothesis, which holds, against all evidence, that the Americas were peopled by ancient Africans who are responsible for the monumental architecture of the Midwestern mound-building cultures and others.

Historic photo of Moorish Science Temple of America members

Other offshoots of the group that have been reported on in this blog include the Washitaw Nation in Oklahoma and elsewhere (see an article from this blog) (whose crown is currently claimed by a Trenton, New Jersey, eccentric calling himself “Crown Prince Emperor El Bey Bigbay Bagby-Badger” (see article), the Nuwaubian Nation of Moors (whose 500-acre compound Tama-Re, in Georgia, was demolished by authorities in 2005), and a new splinter group called the United Nuwaupian Nation (see article). Yet another group, the Moorish Divine and National Movement of the World, includes among its followers Pilar Sanders, the estranged wife of the retired football star Deion Sanders, who in court last month tried to void a prenuptial agreement which would cost her millions by saying that she now calls herself Pilar Biggers Sanders Love El-Dey and answers only to the laws of the “Moroccan Empire.”

Read an interview with Chris Roth, author of Let’s Split!, on the “Library Juice” blog ...

Click here for the interview.



Let’s Split! A Complete Guide to Separatist Movements and Aspirant Nations, from Abkhazia to Zanzibar is a sort of encyclopedic atlas published by Litwin Books.  Containing 46 maps and 554 flags (or, more accurately, 554 flag images), Let’s Split! is available for order now on Amazon.  Meanwhile, please “like” the book (even if you haven’t read it yet) on Facebook and see this special announcement for more information on the book.]