It’s being reported this week that a 59-year-old businessman from Bulgaria has declared what he hopes will be the world’s newest independent country: the Principality of New Atlantis (Нова Атлантида).  The businessman, Vladimir Yordanov Balanov, has chosen as New Atlantis’s location a giant mass of floating volcanic pumice in the South Pacific measuring about 26,800 square kilometers—a bit smaller than Haiti or Belgium.  (See the nation’s website here.)


This rocky mass, generated by an underwater volcanic eruption, was first reported in 2012 by New Zealand’s navy, but it is not in that country’s territorial waters.  It is at approximately 168ºW and 38ºS, due east of the country’s large North Island and due south of the self-governing overseas New Zealand territory of Niue.  It even lies significantly outside New Zealand’s exclusive economic zone.

The approximate location of “New Atlantis” in relation to New Zealand’s marine boundaries.

Balanov originally tried to convince his native Republic of Bulgaria to annex it—there are even indications he travelled there to plant a flag—but he got no expressions of interest either from Sofia or from the European Union (E.U.), of which Bulgaria is a member.  (Bulgaria has never had any overseas territories.  The E.U. does not have overseas territories itself other than overseas territories of specific member states.  Some overseas territories of E.U. member states, such as French Guiana and the Canary Islands, are part of the E.U., while others, like Greenland, the Falkland Islands, Curaçao, and French Polynesia, lie outside the union while still being tethered to their mother countries.  Nor has any Eastern European country had overseas colonies, except for one: the Duchy of Courland and Semigallia, a part of modern Latvia which enjoyed quasi-independence from the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth in the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries and briefly established colonies on Tobago in the Caribbean—now half of independent Trinidad and Tobago—and on St. Andrews Island off the coast of what is now the Republic of the Gambia.  (St. Andrews has been renamed Kunta Kinteh Island, named for a fictional ancestor of African-Americans in Alex Haley’s 1976 novel Roots, later played on television by LeVar Burton.))

The flag of Liberland

Other citizens of New Atlantis include, in addition to Balanov himself (whom, the published constitution implies, will be New Atlantis’s founding hereditary prince), Balanov’s wife Galina, as well as Hristo Radkov, vice-president of the Bulgarian chapter of Mensa, the international organization for high-I.Q. individuals.  Balanov said that he was partly inspired by the establishment in April (reported at the time in this blog) of the tiny libertarian micronation of Liberland, on the border between Serbia and Croatia—a project headed by a Czech but largely, it seems, funded and staffed via Switzerland.

In this map of disputed and unclaimed areas along the Serbian-Croatian border, the green area (“Siga”) is “Liberland,” while “Pocket 1” is the proclaimed territory of the Kingdom of Enclava (see below).

Liberland is situated in a 3-square-mile area consituting one of several no-man’s-lands along the disputed border.  The Liberland project had already inspired one other micronation: a group of tourists from Poland later that month declared a Kingdom of Enclava along the border between Croatia and Slovenia.  But the Slovenian foreign ministry quickly pointed out that “Enclava” was not terra nullius but was actually undisputed Slovenian territory, even though admittedly the two states have not finalized the demarcation of their border.  Enclava’s founder, Kamil Wrona, calling himself King Enclav I, then relocated his 134-citizen project to one of the true no-man’s-lands on the Danube River near Liberland (see map above).  But Croatian and Serbian police have consistently done everything they can to shut down Liberland’s publicity stunts and flag-raisings.

The U.K.’s Sun tabloid has covered the Enclava story, since Britain, which has a large Polish population, is home to some who are connected the project.

The Bulgarian founders of “New Atlantis” may yet prove to be making the same mistake that Liberlanders, Enclavans, and many other micronationalists have made—assuming that because a scrap of land is technically unclaimed, no state will interfere with the founding of an independent entity there.  A libertarian Lithuanian-American real estate mogul named Michael Oliver made this mistake in the early 1970s, when he barged tons of sand from Australia to the Minerva Reefs, a set of low seamounts between Fiji and Tonga which did not poke above water for enough of the tidal cycle to be classified under international law as “territory.”  But as soon as the reef was built up enough to pass legal muster, Taufa’ahau Tupou IV, Tonga’s king, claimed it, and sent a naval vessel to eject Oliver and his nascent Republic of Minerva.  (Today, the reefs have eroded away once again to nothingness, but rival claims are still being made by Tonga, Fiji, and one “Prince Calvin,” an American who says he is the “island’s” monarch.)  Oliver’s similar “seasteading” project in Palmyra Atoll, a United States territory near Hawai‘i, got even less far.

Spidermonkey Island, a floating island off the coast of Brazil invented by Hugh Lofting for the Doctor Dolittle novels, would not qualify as “territory” under international law because, like the New Atlantis pumice patch, it is not anchored to the ocean floor.  Here, some whales under Dolittle’s command help move Spidermonkey Island to a more convenient spot.

The “New Atlantis” mass of pumice stays above water throughout the tidal cycle, but it is not legally “land” either, since it is floating, not anchored.  Whether New Zealand, its nearest neighbor, will tolerate any state-building there remains to be seen.  Certainly, with no source of freshwater and no supply ports anywhere near by, it would be difficult to colonize.  Perhaps Balanov was also inspired by the recent Image Comics series titled Great Pacific, which envisions a do-it-yourself nation called New Texas founded atop an (actual existing, sadly) floating mass of plastic in the northern Pacific Ocean.  The comics series, however, remains silent on many of the insuperable logistical barriers to such a project.


Balanov and compatriots may also want to consider a new name for their principality.  The term New Atlantis may well derive from the use of the name Atlantis in Ayn Rand’s 1957 novel-format libertarian manifesto Atlas Shrugged, in which it, along with Galt’s Gulch, was a label for the hidden mountain refuge in Colorado where the world’s leading industrialists relocated themselves after dropping out of society so that they could live in peace and prosperity while the greedy, lazy “second-handers” bent on the redistribution of wealth suffered the utter implosion of the rest of the world’s now rudderless economy.  (Just to clarify: in Rand’s novel, these industrialists were supposed to be the good guys.)

Vladimir Balanov posing with the Bulgarian and New Atlantean flags

Also, this isn’t even the first use of the name New Atlantis. In 1964, Ernest Hemingway’s brother Leicester Hemingway founded his Republic of New Atlantis on a bamboo raft lashed to an old Ford engine block floating off the coast of Jamaica.  And in 1624, Sir Francis Bacon published a description of a fictional utopian “New Atlantis” on an island called Bensalem off the coast of Peru.

The flag of Leicester Hemingway’s Republic of New Atlantis (1964)

But the oddest thing about the name is that New Atlantis is not in the Atlantic but in the Pacific. Why don’t they call it New Lemuria?

The original, original New Atlantis, as envisioned by Sir Francis Bacon

Thanks to Peppino Galiardi of the Kingdom of Cavaleria for alerting me to some sources and information for this article.

(photo by the author)

Though “Springtime of Nations” is in many ways a news blog, rarely do I present first-person reportage on these pages.  Earlier this month, however, I was an invited speaker at the 3rd PoliNation conference, at the Free Republic of Alcatraz, in the Umbrian mountains of Italy, and was able to witness the signing of a first-of-its-kind environmental treaty by heads of state and other representatives of some of the world’s most high-profile micronations.

Daily life in the Free Republic of Alcatraz, with some of its 111 inhabitants (photo by the author)

Titled the Alcatraz Environmental Treaty of 2015, the document, signed on July 5th, charges that “the large states of the world have been ineffective and their efforts have been lacking in intention and execution concerning efforts to improve the environment, preserve existing natural resources, and reduce carbon emissions to slow the change of the climate.”  Signatories agree to set a global example through responsible ecological stewardship in their own (usually tiny) territories, especially bee populations; to urge the preservation of Antarctica as a nature preserve set aside for scientific research only, even after the expiration of the Antarctic Treaty in 2020; to create “highly localized sub-currencies that will promote the local production and consumption of goods and produce”; to support efforts “to clean the human-generated debris from the oceans and reduce the ‘garbage patches’”; and to financial restructuring to reduce poverty and inequality.

Queen Carolyn and other dignitaries work on a draft of the final environmental treaty (photo by the author)

In addition, the treaty demands, “for every square foot of land or glacier lost to melting ice sheets and rising ocean levels, compensation from the large landed nations of one square meter of dry/non-threatened land so that we may relocate the climate refugees that will be created as a result of the rising waters.”  (See my recent article which addresses the issue of the survival of low-elevation nations in a warmer planet with higher sea levels.)  You can read the full text of the treaty here.

For the Principality of Aigues-Mortes, one of the world’s lowest-elevation nations, rising sea levels are no small matter.

Signatories of the treaty are Queen Carolyn of Ladonia; Grand Duke Niels of Flandrensis; President Iacopo Fo of Alcatraz; the Republic of Benny André Lund; Prince Jean-Pierre IV of Aigues-Mortes; Emperor Olivier of Angyalistan; Sogoln Yg Ysca, president of the Institut Fomoire; and a delegation from the otherwise acephalous (leaderless) Bunte Republik Neustadt.  Other nations have since expressed an interest in adding their names to the treaty.

At Alcatraz (photo by the author)

The Royal Republic of Ladonia is a 1-square-kilometer art installation of sorts on the coast of Sweden, founded by Lars Vilks, a Latvian–Swedish avant-garde artist now living an underground, Salman Rushdie–style existence due to being targeted by jihadists for his cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad.  (The apparent oxymoron in Ladonia’s full name is reconciled through their unique form of government, remony (republic + monarchy).

Ladonia is an unusual place

The Grand Duchy of Flandrensis, founded by Niels Vermeersch of Belgium, claims five islands off the coast of Antarctica, arguing that the Antarctic Treaty bars territorial claims by states but not individuals such as soi-disant heads of state.


The Republicof (sic; one word) Benny André Lund is a native of Norway, born in 1977, who has styled himself as a sovereign nation of one.  He has changed his name legally to this phrase, including the first name Republicof.

The Republic of Benny André Lund and his flag (photo by the author)

The Principality of Aigues-Mortes is a small town on the coast of France’s Provence region, centered on a Medieval castle, which promotes tourism as well as causes such as sustainability, including through the use of its local currency, the tune, serving a function much like that outlined in the Alcatraz treaty.  One invited speaker, the Belgian journalist Julien Oeuillet, called Aigues-Mortes the world’s most successful micronation.

Vive la microfrancophonie! (photo by the author)

The Empire of Angyalistan, founded in 1999 and active in environmental causes, is a nation whose territory is the horizon: it is always around us and can never be reached.

Emperor Olivier explains Angyalistan (photo by the author)

The Formori Institute (Institut Fomoire), mostly found in the French-speaking world, is a landless international nation (structured much like a fraternal order) which claims for itself the heritage of the Formori (a.k.a. Fomorians or Fomoire), a legendary race of chthonic demi-gods who were defeated, according to Irish mythology, by the Tuatha Dé Danann, the pantheon of pre-Christian Celtic deities.  (The present writer had the honor of being inducted into the Formori’s House of the Yew.  Contact me privately if you are curious about my name in the (re)constructed Formoric tongue; I am still a novice in Formori protocols and confidentiality.)

A Formori induction ceremony, at the PoliNation conference (photo by the author)

The Colorful Republic of Newtown (Bunte Republik Neustadt), in the former East Germany, is a leaderless micronation, much in the style of Copenhagen’s Christiania community, which is the focus of an annual music and cultural festival drawing more than 100,000 people to Dresden’s Neustadt neighborhood, which is where all the funky artist types were living when the Berlin Wall came down in 1989.  It sets itself against the forces of conformity, homogenization, gentrification, and the fragmentation of community in the new Germany.  (I was also made a citizen of the B.R.N., I am proud to say.)

The foreign minister of the Bunte Republik Neustadt with, to his left, the B.R.N. flag, featuring a gleefully-pirated trademarked image in place of the old D.D.R.’s Masonic device (photo by the author)

As for the host community of the conference, the Free Republic of Alcatraz (Libera Repubblica di Alcatraz) is an area of private land near Perugia in the stunningly beautiful hills of Italy’s central, landlocked region of Umbria.  It was founded by Jacopo Fo, son of Dario Fo, the Italian winner of the 1997 Nobel Prize for Literature, and a writer and sex guru in his own right.  The Free University of Alcatraz (Libera Università di Alcatraz) has a full calendar of dance workshops, art exhibitions, conferences, music festivals, and other events and also advocates sustainability and strong local community by example.

A map showing the territories of the Free Republic of Alcatraz, in the central Italian highlands. (Darn!  I missed the gnome village.)

Other dignitaries at the conference include King Bruno of Noseland, a patch of land surrounded by northern Switzerland’s Canton of Argovia (Aargau), which has its own currency.  Its king is also producer of a documentary about micronations.  One of the conference’s organizers, Emperor George II of Atlantium (a territory surrounded by New South Wales, Australia), was unable to attend, due to illness—to my disappointment, since he has been a supporter of my book Let’s Split! and is helpful to my work in other ways.

Bruno, king of Noseland (photo by the author)

Other highlights of the conference included a talk by the Austrian anthropologist Irina Ulrika Andel on the micronation phenomenon; a presentation on the Principality of Outer Baldonia by the Canadian historian Lachlan MacKinnon; presentations by nearly all of the micronations listed above (the playing of the Noselandic national anthem, “sung” through the nose, was a highlight); and an official statement by Queen Carolyn to announce that, contrary to what some sources on the World Wide Web still state, Ladonia is no longer in a state of war with Sweden or any other nation.  (In further state business, Her Majesty sealed a mutual-recognition accord with the Empire of Austenasia at a hastily arranged meeting at Heathrow airport en route back to her home in the United States.)

Jacopo Fo, circulating at the conference (photo by the author)

As Oeuillet, the Belgian journalist (and author of a new book on impostor noblemen), put it at the conference, today’s micronations are conducting private activity using the language and symbols of public institutions, and the best of them are doing things that the recognized public institutions should be doing but aren’t.  When it comes to climate change, maybe these “silly” and “self-styled” monarchs and heads of state can nonetheless help prod the real powers that be to move in the right direction.

A group photo of the participants in the PoliNation conference, swiped from the ArciPerugia website. I am at the lower right.

In fact, during my stay in Alcatraz, the news came in over the radio that voters in Greece had thumbed their nose at the European Union (E.U.) in general and at Germany’s chancellor, Angela Merkel, in particular by rejecting the austerity measures proposed to help keep Greece in the euro zone.  In jubilant celebration, Alcatraz’s queen, Eleonora Albanese, passed out grappa for everyone.  Not, of course, because a “Grexit” would necessarily be the best thing or because anyone knows which course might be best for the people of Greece and the rest of southern Europe—but most of all, I gather, because, in geopolitics, Going Big isn’t working, and something has to give.

Eleonora Albanese, Queen of Alcatraz (photo by the author)

[You can read more about Atlantium, Ladonia, and many other separatist and new-nation 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 interview for more information on the book.]

Right Sector ultranationalists in Lviv this week

Back in early 2014, during the Winter Olympics in Sochi, I predicted on this blog that Crimea would be the next part of the post-Soviet “near abroad” to explode in violence between pro-Russian and anti-Russian forces.  And indeed it was that republic within independent Ukraine that the Russian Federation invaded and annexed mere weeks later.  This blog has followed the ensuing Russian war on Ukraine closely, and almost exactly a year ago (in an article in this blog titled “Will Transcarpathia Be the Next Donetsk—or Crimea?”), I opined that Ukraine’s Transcarpathia was a likely place for President Vladimir Putin’s next infringement of Ukrainian sovereignty.  Well, this week the Transcarpathian domino has started to fall, but not quite in the direction I had predicted.


First, some history.  The oblast (province) of Transcarpathia is a former part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire which between the world wars was attached by the League of Nations as the eastern “tail” of the new composite republic of Czecho-Slovakia.  Its inhabitants included, and continue to include, Ukrainians, Magyars (Hungarians), Russians, and a long-standing local minority called the Ruthenian, or Rusyn, people—Slavs whose communities are also found in nearby Poland and Slovakia today, where they tend to be known as Lemkos.  When Adolf Hitler moved into Czechoslovakia in 1938 and 1939, Ruthenia and Slovakia, separately, declared independence, but Transcarpathia was annexed by the Axis government in Hungary.  After the Second World War, Transcarpathia, also called Carpathian Ruthenia or Carpatho-Ukraine, was grafted onto the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic under Josef Stalin.  In the centrally-governed Soviet empire, boundaries between constituent S.S.R.s had little meaning, but after the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991, Ukraine became one of the places where, as Putin was later to put it, people went to bed as Soviet citizens and woke up as a Russian minority in a foreign country.  (Imperialist karma’s a bitch, ain’t it?)  Autonomy-minded residents, including some ethnic Hungarians (12% of the oblast), Russians (3%), and Ruthenians (by then less than 1%) declared an independent Republic of Subcarpathian Rus’ in 1993, but it fizzled.

The flag of Transcarpathia

In 2008, as Putin was flexing his muscles in the neighboring Republic of Georgia—formalizing, through war, two of its constituent regions, South Ossetia and Abkhazia, as Russian puppet states—trouble was brewing in Ukraine as well.  Again, Transcarpathians rose up, this time declaring an independent Republic of Carpathian Ruthenia.  This the government in Kyiv would not indulge, claiming that it was all being staged by Moscow—which, given the events in Georgia, remains a reasonable interpretation.


In 2012, the new ethnically Russian–Polish–Belarussian pro-Kremlin president of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych, helped enshrine Russian, Ruthenian, Hungarian, and other minority languages as official.  But after Yanukovych fled and was impeached in the popular “Euro-Maidan” uprising in 2014, the largely progressive, democratically-minded new government included strong elements of the Ukrainian-nationalist far right, including the fringe neo-fascist group Right Sector (Pravyi Sektor), who, because of their importance in the Euro-Maidan movement, were given a small political role, including some ministries.  (I discussed Right Sector and kindred groups in an article last year; see also this article.)  These right-wing elements pushed through an erasure of minority language rights—a policy which was quickly reversed, under international pressure, but remains for many non-Ukrainian-speakers a symbol of the new regime’s disdain for them and a pretext for ethnic-Russian separatism in places like Crimea and the Donbas.  The cause of Transcarpathian autonomy has an ally (as discussed earlier in this blog) in Jobbik, the pro-Kremlin right-wing extremist nationalist group which is now Hungary’s third-largest political party.  As in Kharkiv (see article from this blog) and Odessa (see article from this blog) oblasts, a pro-Kremlin “people’s republic” has been declared in Transcarpathia, but without any actual rebel control of territory as there is in the self-declared pro-Kremlin Donetsk People’s Republic and Luhansk People’s Republic in southeastern Ukraine.

Right Sector yobbos with “Wolfsangel” armbands

Observers have long wondered now which “near abroad” territories Putin would, either directly or, as he prefers, through “false flag” battalions and agents provocateurs, try to invade next: Odessa? Transnistria? Transcaspia? Transcarpathia?  But in Transcarpathia the spark that lit the fuse this week has come from the aforementioned ultranationalist Ukrainian group Right Sector, which has thousands of active, armed members throughout Ukraine and as many as 10,000 fighting Russian troops in the Donbas.  On July 11th, according to Ukrainian prosecutors, two dozen armed militants wearing Right Sector insignia exchanged gunfire with police at a café in the Transcarpathian city of Mukachevo, destroying police and civilian cars with grenade launchers and killing two officers.  Five Right Sector fighters were wounded, but most fled to a nearby rural area where police engaged them in a siege—still ongoing three days later as this is being written, with ten Right Sector militants holding out against state police (though reliable up-to-date reports are difficult to find).

Will Transcarpathia join the archipelago of Russian puppet regimes?

Russian news reports the same day described Right Sector attacks on a gymnasium and a police station, also in Mukachevo.  Two were killed at the gym, owned by a local legislator, Mikhail Lanyo, allied with the Yanukovych regime.

Ukrainian fascists with red-and-black flags were a minority but a high-profile presence during the Euro-Maidan movement of 2013-14.

Some descriptions of events say the incident in the café was a meeting between rival gangs—one run by Lanyo, who controls border crossings with the European Union (E.U.) states of Romania, Hungary, and Slovakia, and rivals in league with Right Sector and a local politician named Viktor Baloha, who is reported to run Transcarpathia as his own mafia-style fief.  The summit meeting, planned to divide territories in gangland-politics fashion, got out of hand, drawing in the police.

Viktor Baloha

As this article goes to press, two Right Sector participants in the events have been taken to Kyiv for questioning, a six-year-old boy taken hostage by Right Sector has been released, and Right Sector volunteer troops, who seem extremely well organized, have established roadblocks on the main Kyiv–Zhytomyr road.  Right Sector spokespeople also say they are working with the Ukrainian secret police, the S.B.U. (Sluzhba Bezpeky Ukrayiny, or Security Service of Ukraine), to restore order—which, if true, anyone should find a bit worrying.

A Right Sector roadblock in Transcarpathia this week

The same state-owned and state-controlled Russian media outlets that the Kremlin uses as a tightly scripted propaganda machine disseminating lies about the conflict in the southeast are describing what sounds like a near-takeover of Ukraine by Right Sector forces.  Ukraine’s president, the former chocolate tycoon Petro Poroshenko, on the other hand, says the events are only about smuggling and not about geopolitics.  Meanwhile, however, hundreds of Right Sector protestors in Kyiv are demanding the resignation of the minister of the interior, Arsen Avakov.  In Ukraine’s second city, Lviv (the Ruthenian capital in the days of the Habsburgs), according to Russian media, Right Sector demonstrators lowered E.U. flags at the main administrative building and replaced them with their own ultranationalist red-and-black flags.  And Right Sector demonstrations are being reported in cities as far apart as Kharkiv in the east and Ternopil in the west.

Right Sector on parade

In a reshuffle reminiscent of the decision earlier this year to install the former Georgian president, Mikheil Saakashvili, as governor of the ethnopolitically tense Odessa oblast, Poroshenko’s administration today namedHennady Moskal, the chairman of Luhansk oblast’s State Military and Civil Administration, to be Transcarpathia’s new governor.  In both cases, Poroshenko seems interested in shoring up Ukraine’s geopolitically vulnerable regions by putting them in the charge of politicians that have direct experience with surrendering to Russia.  Moskal supports Poroshenko’s position on the conflict, saying that Transcarpathia is a “green channel” through which billions of dollars’ worth of commodities, including timber but mostly Belarussian cigarettes, are smuggled into the E.U. via light planes, drones, and tunnel systems, as well as co-opted border controls.

The Euro-Maidan movement was—sometimes unfortunately so—a big tent.

One possible cause of the rise of Right Sector at this particular juncture is popular Ukrainian dissatisfaction with Poroshenko’s handling of the ongoing undeclared war with Russia.  The government has all but written off Crimea as lost and seems willing to accept Putin’s demand that Ukraine turn the 24 out of 27 oblasts it still controls from a unitary state (as the constitution designates it) into a loose confederation—which is rightly seen as a euphemism for allowing ethnic-Russian-dominated areas to be hived off as Russian puppet states.  Even the E.U. is urging Poroshenko to throw in the towel and allow “federalism.”  (Interestingly, Putin has no appetite for autonomy or federalism within the Russian Federation itself, which he rules from the center with an iron fist.)

Putin preparing to ride westward across the Steppes

As in Crimea, Donetsk, and Luhansk—and as in Odessa, where a deadly arson fire last year that killed pro-Russian demonstrators stoked anti-Kyiv feeling—one must be especially on guard when local events seem to provide a perfect pretext for Russian intervention.  As one Ukrainian political analyst, Petro Kralyuk, puts it, Russia’s Federal Security Service (F.S.B., successor to the K.G.B.) “has successfully picked up the baton.  For Russia, Transcarpathia and its surroundings remain an important region.  Taking into account the blurred identity and ethnic diversity of the local population, the field of activities for these agents is quite fertile.”  Kralyuk calls this week’s apparent rise of Right Sector violence “a wonderful gift” for Moscow.  If events follow the earlier scripts, Putin will now say that neo-Nazis (Right Sector) are taking over Ukraine and that it is time to help the poor ethnic Russians, Hungarians, and Ruthenians in Transcarpathia “liberate” themselves from Kyiv’s tyrrany, just like Crimea, Donetsk, and Luhansk.  With Russian help, of course.  Out of the goodness of Putin’s heart.  You read it here first.


[You can read more about Transcarpathia, Donetsk, Luhansk, Crimea, Transnistria, and many other separatist and new-nation 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 interview for more information on the book.]

A small, previously relatively unknown polity in south-central Uganda, the Kooki chieftainship, quietly declared independence a couple weeks ago, the culmination of long-simmering conflict with its larger neighbor—or, depending on whom you ask, overarching entity—the Buganda Kingdom.  The Kooki prime minister, Hajji Idi Ahmed Kiwanuka, announced his small nation’s independence from Buganda in a July 27th letter to the Baganda prime minister, Charles Peter Mayiga.

Uganda’s kingdoms, of which Buganda is the largest and most powerful. (The Rwenzururu live between Toro and the Congolese border.)

The Republic of Uganda is not a monarchy, but, in a situation similar to that in Malaysia, Nigeria, or South Africa, monarchies within the state are tolerated and semi-officially established, though without constitutionally recognized powers.  The Ganda, occupying a large area in south-central Uganda, are the ethnic group for which the country as a whole is named (Ganda are the people, Baganda the adjective, Buganda the kingdom, and Luganda the language).  They are the largest group—both in population (almost 17%) and in territory (almost 25%)—and were favored under the United Kingdom’s colonial rule, which pitted smaller kingdoms against one another in a “divide and rule” tactic.  Uganda’s second president, Milton Obote, who was from the far north, came to power with Baganda support and made the large Buganda Kingdom nearly coextensive with the Ugandan state itself.  This lopsided situation provoked a rebellion by the neighboring Ankole Kingdom, Uganda’s second-largest, and Obote eventually disestablished the kingdoms in 1967.  Yoweri Museveni, an Ankole, rose to power in 1986 and restored the kingdoms but only to semi-official status—and he refused to restore some monarchies, including, surprisingly, his own Ankole one, as part of his own agenda to disrupt and divide the normal monarchic order.  Territorial disputes and rivalries have raged for decades and threatened to destabilize what would otherwise be one of central Africa’s most stable and prosperous countries.

Rakai District, homeland of the Kooki, is in the south of the Buganda Kingdom.

The Kooki, a few tens of thousands of people (though figures are hard to come by) living in the Rakai District along the border with Tanzania, have for more than a century been considered a chieftainship and a county within the Buganda Kingdom, the result of an 1896 merger that was part of the British plan for Baganda hegemony.  Opinion is fiercely divided today as to whether the Kooki were traditionally a sovereign monarchy and whether Kooki is its own language or is instead a dialect of Luganda.  (The homeland is tiny: Kooki County is only one of six in Rakai, a district considerably smaller than Rhode Island.)  Only within the past few years have the Kooki introduced their own flag and anthem.

(from The Trentonian)

A man claiming to be the newly crowned emperor of a Black-nationalist group called the Washitaw Nationargued before a judge in Trenton, New Jersey, on September 9th that a defendant in a gun-possession case was immune from prosecution because he was a “sovereign citizen.”

Photo from the S.P.L.C.

The Southern Poverty Law Center (S.P.L.C.), an Alabama-based non-profit organization which monitors hate groups, announced this week that it has learned that the League of the South is forming a paramilitary unit to be called “the Indomitables.”


The League of the South, whose name is inspired by Italy’s similarly right-wing, anti-immigrant, separatist Northern League (Lega Nord), is the most prominent organization in the United States working toward the secession of the Southern states as what it in particular would call Confederation of Southern States (C.S.S.).  (The original secessionist South, during the Civil War, was officially the Confederate States of America (C.S.A.).  The League wants the C.S.S. to be the eleven core C.S.A. states, without Texas and with Kentucky and Oklahoma added.  Texas, of course, has its own separatist movement.)  Though it claims to be mainly interested in “preserving Southern culture,” its rhetoric is shot through with intolerant, often white-supremacist, ideas, and its membership overlaps heavily with groups like the Ku Klux Klan and various neo-Nazi parties.  For a while, the League sponsored registered state political parties, primarily in Georgia and the Carolinas, called the Southern Party (S.P.).


Michael Hill, president of the League, has described the group’s aims this way: “We are for the survival, well-being, and independence of the Southern people.  And when we say ‘the Southern people,’ we mean white Southerners.  We are an ethno-nationalist movement and we want a free and independent South for our people, as our homeland.  That’s pretty much what we are fighting for.”

Michael Hill, president of the League of the South

Information on a novel paramilitary turn for what had until now been mainly a group that makes lots of noise comes from leaked internal documents and anonymous sources within the group, according to the S.P.L.C. article on the subject.  One of the internal documents outlining the plans is by President Hill himself, who writes, “We desire that our women and children be warm and snug while the world outside rages.  And as our due for that we must face the world.”


“The Indomitables were conceptualized at the LOS national meeting earlier this year,” according to the S.P.L.C. article by Ryan Lenz, “and appear to be coming online quickly, with Floyd Eric Meadows, 43, of Rome, Ga., who also goes by Eric Thorvaldsson online, in charge of ‘training,’ according to sources within the group and internal documents.”  The article also releases confidentially acquired images from Thorvaldsson’s Facebook presence, which is full of pagan iconography and white-supremacist “dogwhistle” references like “‘earning’ his red bootlaces––awarded in skinhead culture for drawing blood for ‘the movement.’”

The Indomitables’ head trainer, Floyd Meadows, posted this on Facebook recently using his pseudonym.

Nazi-style insignia used in confidential League of the South documents leaked to S.P.L.C.

Due to the “Anglo-Celtic” connection, St. Andrew’s crosses and similar insignia recur in League of the South heraldry. See an article from this blog for more detail on Confederate–Russian–Ukrainian-Scottish separatist vexillological affinities.

Readers of the Springtime of Nations blog know that the next few weeks are a crucial time for our topic, that of ethnonationalism and new-state movements.  A referendum in Scotland the day after tomorrow challenges the seventy-year-old political order in Europe and may sunder the United Kingdom—the progenitor, by some measures, of the modern nation-state (or nations-state, if you will).  Meanwhile, an anti-nationalist caliphate with global ambitions called Islamic State has established itself in the heart of the Middle East, threatening to draw world powers into a gigantic, unending conflict.  And Western hegemony is being challenged from another direction as well, as the fate of a cease-fire in Ukraine between pro-Western and pro-Eastern forces will determine whether Russia’s ambition to rebuild the territory of the Soviet Union and restore itself as a superpower to rival the United States will be curbed or energized.


Meanwhile, the articles in this blog have slowed to a trickle of late.  Partly this is because (or at least I tell myself this) the kind of news readers used to have to read this blog to find are now the world headlines, day after day.  (And long-time readers will recall that Springtime of Nations knew that ISIS / Islamic State, Scottish devolution, and the patchy demographics of the Soviet successor states were crises-in-the-making long before the mainstream media acknowledged it.)


But the main reason is my forthcoming book—Let’s Split! A Complete Guide to Separatist Movements, Independence Struggles, Breakaway Republics, Rebel Provinces, Pseudostates, Puppet States, Tribal Fiefdoms, Micronations, and Do-It-Yourself Countries, from Chiapas to Chechnya and Tibet to Texas—which is right now in the final stages of production.  Galleys have been corrected, and the final composition of the pages is nearly done.  The book, which will be published by Auslander and Fox, is over 500 pages long and contains over 35 maps and over 500 flags—flag images, rather—and if there is a more complete guide to separatist movements in print anywhere, to see nothing of one packaged so accessibly and usefully, then I don’t know about it, and I’ve looked.


Once Let’s Split! is out of my hands, which I trust will be in the next month or so, I will return to blogging more regularly, and I will also take time out to offer some general observations on the Scottish referendum before long as well.


Meanwhile, please “like” and “follow” the Let’s Split! page on Facebook, where I regularly post news, observations, and other entertaining and informative links on separatist and ethnonationalist movements—some of which will eventually be developed into articles for this blog.


Both this blog and the Let’s Split! Facebook page are places where readers will find updates on the publication of the book, now scheduled to hit the shelves—knock on wood—in time to stuff the stockings of the regional activist, tinfoil-hat-wearing “sovereign citizen,” separatist rebel, Zapatist subcomandante, president-in-exile, sois-disant micronational “emperor,” or just plain old vexillophile, map-freak, news junk, or foreign-policy wonk on your holiday list.

In his last-ditch efforts to prevent Scotland from voting “yes” on independence tomorrow (September 18th), the United Kingdom’s prime minister, David Cameron, has shifted away from the tones of condescension which have in the past proved to make Scots bristle and become even more determinedly separatist.  Instead, he has veered from maudlin nostalgia—saying he would be “heartbroken” if the U.K. were sundered, as though the hurt feewings of the leader of the Conservative Party ever entered into the considerations of nationalistic Scots—to, mostly, dire warnings.  But those warnings at best misleading, and at worst disingenuous.


“If you don’t like me,” Cameron said yesterday, addressing himself to Scottish nationalists who are overwhelmingly way to the left of him, and of England, “I won’t be here forever.  If you don’t like this government, it won’t last forever.  But if you leave the U.K., that will be forever.”  He added, “It is my duty to be clear about the likely consequences of a yes vote.  Independence would not be a trial separation.  It would be a painful divorce.”

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.]

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-blue 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 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.]

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.

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.]

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 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.]

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 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.]

We are used to international geopolitics inserting itself into the world of association football (that’s “soccer” to Americans).  World powers sometimes use the game as a proxy war for their own tussles over what is and is not a state and where national borders lie.  Examples include the ban on holding FIFA games in Russian-occupied Crimea, Spain trying to block Gibraltar, which it still claims, from member-state status, and ongoing politically motivated fan violence in Balkan hotspots like Bosnia and Kosovo.  But now a smaller football league that was supposed to be aloof from the rougher political edges of FIFA (the French acronym for the International Federation of Association Football) is courting similar controversy.


This league, the Confederation of Independent Football Associations (ConIFA), a new organization devoted to aspirant or unrecognized states ineligible for FIFA membership, decided this summer that its 2016 football (soccer) world cup would be held in the Republic of Abkhazia, a de facto–independent Russian puppet state in what most of the world outside Russia regards as part of the Republic of Georgia.  Despite damage and economic instability resulting from a recent history of separatist war and ongoing diplomatic limbo, Abkhazia and its capital city, Sukhumi, can, ConIFA promises, offer “top-class infrastructure” for a sporting event.  But Abkhazia is bound to be a divisive choice, considering that Russian support for violent separatism in Ukraine since early last year—a political situation which closely parallels Abkhazia, which split away as the Cold War ended—has led to calls to boycott the Russian-hosted FIFA World Cup planned for 2018.


ConIFA is not the first league of its type.  A predecessor was Viva, which doesn’t stand for anything but is a play on the name FIFA, also set up for national teams of unrecognized states.  Viva’s first world cup, in 2006, was originally to be held in the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, a puppet state that every country in the world other than Turkey recognizes as part of the Republic of Cyprus.  Northern Cyprus ended up ceding hosting duties to Occitania (southern France) after a brouhaha over Northern Cypriot demands to vet participating teams—probably the result of Turkish skittishness at that time about any kind of recognition of any kind of Kurdish entity, since northern Iraq’s autonomous Kurdistan Region was also a participant.  Viva has successfully kept politics out of the team-selection process in the four subsequent Viva cup finals hosted by, in turn, Sápmi (the northern Scandinavian homeland of the Sami, or Lappish, people), Padania (separatist northern Italy), Gozo (the Republic of Malta’s smaller island), and Erbil, the Iraqi Kurdish capital.

Sami (Lapp) footballers competing in Östersund

Other participating Viva teams over the years have included Monaco (not a pseudo-state, but too small for FIFA nonetheless), Provence, Zanzibar, Arameans Soryoye (the team of the Christian Syriac people), Darfur (southwestern Sudan), Raetia (the linguistically distinct Ladin, Friulian, and Romansh speakers of southeast Switzerland and northern Italy), Tamil Eelam (the Hindus of northern Sri Lanka), and Western Sahara (the Moroccan-occupied Sahrawi homeland).  Customs red tape and other logistical problems have mostly prevented Southern Cameroons, West Papua, and Tibet from participating.  But no one was deliberately excluding anyone, or being remotely provocative.  Even the Northern Cypriot team graciously conceded defeat to the Kurdish team in the 2012 Erbil games.


(Yet another organization, FIFI (Federation of International Football Independents), in 2006 held a one-off exhibition “Wild Cup” tournament in Hamburg, Germany, where Northern Cyprus triumphed over Zanzibar, Gibraltar, Greenland, Tibet, and the Republic of St. Pauli—this last being a fictive micronation (fictive even by micronational standards) consisting of Hamburg’s red-light district.)


The ConIFA European cup this June, for its part, was hosted in Hungary by Székely Land, a proposed state in western Romania’s ethnic-Magyar (Hungarian) region.  Padania (northern Italy) won that 11-match series, with the County of Nice (in southeastern France), the Isle of Man, and Felvidék (Slovakia’s “Upper Hungary” region) ranking second through fourth, in that order.  The first ConIFA world cup, in 2014 in Östersund, Sweden, hosted by Sápmi (Lappland), was won by the highly impressive Niçois team.

Magyar nationalists displaying the Székely Land flag in Transylvania

And here, with this ConIFA line-up, the observant reader who is familiar with the minor nationalisms to which this blog is devoted will have caught perhaps a clue as to why Abkhazia, of all places, was selected to host the 2016 ConIFA cup.  Start with Székely Land, an autonomist cause with nowhere near the popular momentum enjoyed by, say, Scotland, Catalonia (both of which keep a plenty high profile in FIFA football), Padania, Kurdistan, or Tibet.  In fact, the idea of giving autonomy to the Magyar-dominated parts of western Romania is mostly a pet cause of the extremist far right in Hungary and Romania (as discussed once in this blog).  Autonomy for Romania’s Szeklers (Magyars) is in particular an abiding emotional rallying point for Jobbik, the neo-fascist ultranationalist party in Hungary, which in an election last year became Hungary’s third-largest party.

Jobbik armbands on parade

Felvidék, or “Upper Hungary,” the formerly Hungarian-ruled parts of Slovakia, is an even obscurer cause.  Slovakia is a stable, increasingly western-style state, and Hungarian is an official language in areas where speakers are more than 20% of the population.  (They are 8.5% of it nationwide.)   Slovakia’s Magyars are hardly separatist, but Jobbik has not forgotten them.   The party specifically calls for the revocation of the 1920 Treaty of Trianon.  That agreement, part of the dismantling of the defeated Austro-Hungarian Empire after the First World War, whittled the newly independent Hungary down to its current size, stripping away territories that had been under the Hungarian crown within the empire: all of Slovakia, a third or so of modern Romania, the Vojvodina province of northern Serbia, Ukraine’s Transcarpathia oblast, and significant territories which are now along the edges of Austria, Slovenia, and Croatia.  Jobbik wants all these lands back.  Only small bits of them have ethnic-Hungarian majorities today, but under Habsburg rule the German-speaking Austrian and Magyar élites ruled over smaller ethnonational groups in a political structure that was almost feudal.  Hungary, when it was an Axis country during the Second World War, tried and failed to use that conflict to regain lost territories.

Light green is modern Hungary; darker green are those areas stripped from the Kingdom of Hungary after the First World War

The County of Nice, too, is mostly a right-wing, even neo-fascist, irredentist cause.  In the years of conflict leading up to Italian unification in the mid 19th century, this Mediterranean city and its environs were ceded by the Kingdom of Sardinia’s House of Savoy (soon to become the ruling house of unified Italy) to France in exchange for help fighting the Austrians.  This stuck in the craw of the unification hero Giuseppe Garibaldi, a Niçois native who once famously said, “If Nice is French, then I am a Tatar.”  Thus Nice shifted from a mostly Italian-speaking city to a francophone one.  A claim on Nice was revived by Benito Mussolini during the Fascist era, and it is also included by the far-right, xenophobic, anti-Brussels Lega Nord (Northern League) in northern Italy as part of its dreamed-of “Greater Padania.”  Oh, and of course Padania is prominent in ConIFA too (as it was in Viva).  A ConIFA delegation to Nice in May of this year is prominently featured on the ConIFA website.

Football fans waving the Niçois separatist flag

Abkhazia, next year’s ConIFA host, is one of two ethnically distinct parts of Georgia which split away from Georgia after the fall of Communism in the early 1990s—the other being South Ossetia, which, like Abkhazia, is also a ConIFA member “state.”  After the brief South Ossetia War in 2008, Russia’s President Vladimir Putin shored up their de facto independence and granted them diplomatic recognition, something only a handful of other tiny states have followed the Russian example in extending.  Abkhazia and South Ossetia are in fact just the longest-standing parts of an archipelago of Russian-backed puppet states in non-Russian parts of the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.  Others (discussed at length elsewhere in this blog, e.g. here) are Transnistria, in Moldova; the Armenian-dominated Nagorno-Karabakh Republic in Azerbaijan (the N.K.R. is also in ConIFA); the Donetsk and Luhansk “People’s Republics” established last year in eastern Ukraine; and, less concretely, possible future separatist entities in places like Transcarpathia (see discussions in this blog here and here), Ukraine’s Odessa oblast (see reports from this blog here and here), and ethnic-Russian parts of Kazakhstan, the Baltic States, and elsewhere.  Another emotional issue for Armenian nationalists and their Turkophobic puppetmasters in the Kremlin is is another ConIFA “member,” Western Armenia, a proposed N.K.R.-type entity many Armenians would like to carve out of what is now eastern Turkey.  (Turkey is a member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and has been a bugbear of Russian nationalists since Ottoman days.  Turkey and Azerbaijan are both allies of the U.S.)


Transnistria, it will be no surprise, is also a target of ConIFA diplomacy, in the form of an official ConIFA visit just before June’s European cup to Tiraspol, capital of this tiny, Russian-backed sliver of a pseudostate consisting of Moldova’s eastern edge abutting Ukraine.  ConIFA would like Transnistria to host a future tournament.  It also features prominently in contingent Russian plans for a takeover of more of the southern, ethnic-Russian-dominated areas of Ukraine, which mostly extend in a belt across the northern shores of the Black Sea, extending to Odessa oblast, which borders Transnistria.

Transnistrians in Bessarabian folk costume in a flag ceremony in Tiraspol

Putin’s proxy expansionism, while it exploits Soviet iconography and terms like “people’s republic,” is in fact a right-wing type of enterprise, and to this end it is not surprising that it has gained the support of far-right parties in the west that might otherwise talk a lot about “freedom”—such as (see discussion in this blog) Jobbik, Lega Nord, Flemish separatists in Belgium, libertarian-leaning separatists in Venice, the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP), and high-profile right-wing conspiracy-mongering nuts in the United States such as Lyndon LaRouche and Ron Paul.  Putinism shares with these far-right movements a suspicion of the European Union (E.U.), NATO, and multilateralism in general; xenophobia focusing on a nakedly bigoted Islamophobia; and an infatuation with muscular militant nationalist leadership that in fact has more in common with 1930s Fascism than with Soviet-style Communism.

Putin is a darling of xenophobic Padanist separatists like these Lega Nord activists in Milan

To be sure, leftist aspirant states are in ConIFA too, including the Aymará indigenous nation of Bolivia; the disinherited Chagos Islanders of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean, who live in exile in England; and Cascadia in the American and Canadian Pacific Northwest.  But even some of these are causes which appeal to Putin’s anti-Western imperialism.   The Aymará nation includes Bolivia’s left-wing president, Evo Morales, who sided with Putin’s invasion and annexation of Crimea.  Bolivia was one of only ten countries which sided with Russia in voting against a March 2014 United Nations resolution that upheld Ukraine’s right to territorial integrity following the Crimea annexation; the others—all of them (as discussed at the time in this blog) mostly profoundly undemocratic societies—were Armenia, North Korea, Zimbabwe, Cuba, Nicaragua, Venezuela, Syria, Sudan, and Belarus.  Even Iran, China, and Myanmar had the decency to at least abstain.  The Chagos Islanders’ cause, too (see discussion here and here), is one which Putin is keen to highlight because it is an example of a serious human-rights abuse which can be laid at the feet of NATO.  Along with the prominence of the above-discussed obscure neo-fascist irrendentist entities like Upper Hungary, Székely Land, and Nice, most of the teams prominent in ConIFA are ones that conform to the anti-Western, anti-NATO, anti-E.U. agenda of Putin’s new imperialism in its “near abroad.”

Aymará Indian demonstrators with their national flag

One possible result of a tournament in Abkhazia next year, and a possible later one in Transnistria, would be to spread the popularity and prestige of the Russian puppet-state model among separatist groups across the political spectrum and around the world—fitting the new pattern of parties like Lega Nord, France’s National Front, and Jobbik—even the otherwise-leftist Basque nationalists in Spain—lining up behind Putin’s imperialist agenda in Crimea, Georgia, Moldova, and Ukraine.  Playing in Abkhazia is sure to be willfully misinterpreted as a de facto recognition by these aspirant nations.  It is worth asking who is running ConIFA—or, perhaps, who has taken it over or whom it serves.  While Putin plays hardball in Ukraine, the lurch to the right in separatist soccer may be one of his stealth “soft power” offensives.


[You can read more about Abkhazia, Transnistria, and many other separatist and new-nation 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 interview for more information on the book.]

The military strongman who runs the Republic of Fiji is continuing to crack down this month on what his government and military call a separatist insurrection on Viti Levu, the Pacific nation’s largest and most populous island.

The self-declared Christian republics are in Ra and Nadroga-Navosa provinces.

The crisis came to international attention last month, when over 50 people were arrested in Viti Levu’s Ra province, on the northeast coast, on suspicion of connection with a training camp allegedly run by a former British military officer.  Authorities said the camp was training forces to help establish two separate “Christian states” declared late last year.   The Nadroga-Navosa Sovereign Christian State, on the southwestern end of the island, in Nadroga-Navosa province, and the Ra Sovereign Christian State, in Ra, were declared in October and November 2014, reportedly with the approval and participation of some (supporters say all) local traditional chiefs.  Five people were arrested and charged with sedition at the time in connection with those declarations.  The presidents ceremonially installed for the two would-be states—Nadroga-Navosa’s Ratu Osea Turaga Gavidi and Ra’s Ratu Meli Bolobolo—have since died.

The Nadroga-Navosa Sovereign Christian State flag flying over Cuvu village last month

It is not entirely clear who runs the provisional governments now, but supporters in Sydney, Australia, some calling themselves the Fiji Democracy Movement, speak for the entities and have commissioned flags.  Their views are disseminated to the public by a Fijian, now banned from re-entering the country, named Oni Kirwin, who calls herself “attorney general” of the Ra and Nadroga Christian State (which makes it sound like one entity, instead of two) and talks brashly of bringing her case to the International Criminal Court in the Hague and to Queen Elizabeth II.  (Fiji was a United Kingdom colony until 1970, then a Commonwealth realm until a coup d’état in 1987.)

Oni Kirwin

Most of those arrested last month, plus others later, have been charged with sedition.  In a statement, Prime Minister Josaia Voreque “Frank” Bainimarama, the former naval commander who heads the country’s ruling junta, said, “There will be no so-called independent states established in Fiji.  Anyone who swears an illegal oath will face the full force of the law.  Anyone who encourages political violence will face the full force of the law.  We will not and should not tolerate the kind of instability certain people are currently trying to provoke.  Put simply, any insurrection will be crushed.”

Frank Bainimarama

Bainimarama, who was elected prime minister last year in a shady and dirty election process, had served as president (and later as acting prime minister) in an unelected capacity since he took the reins of the 2000 coup d’état that unseated the elected prime minister, Mahendra Chaudhry.  Chaudhry is from the large Indo-Fijian (i.e., South Asian) community—descendants of indentured laborers imported from India by British colonists who have become so numerous that indigenous Fijians like Bainimarama are only about 53-57% of the population.  Indo-Fijians are 38%, but used to have a larger share before the coup and a wave of emigration.  Reliable numbers are hard to come by, since demographics has become such an explosive source of political tension in this tiny nation of around 900,000 that census-taking has been nearly abandoned.  Bainimarama builds his support on Indo-Fijians as much as on indigenous Fijians.

The collective flag for the Ra and Nadroga-Navosa Sovereign Christian States

Christians (mostly Methodists) make up 58% of the Fijian population, including 6% of Indo-Fijians but over 90% of the remaining population, which includes indigenous Fijians and those with origins in China, Europe, or elsewhere in Oceania.  Indigenous Fijians have only recently regained their slim majority, and the phrase “Christian state” as it is used in the latest unrest is used by indigenous Fijians resentful of the Indo-Fijian role in politics, which is still considerable.  One member of parliament, Mosese Bulitavoare, of the Social Democratic Liberal Party (Sodelpa), was charged with sedition recently for whipping up anti-Indian bigotry.  Sodelpa has found itself in the position of denying publicly any role in the current separatist movements.

Some neighborhoods in Fiji’s capital, Suva, feel like India.

Fijian Christian activists’ concerns are less focused on Hinduism, practiced by 77% of Indo-Fijians (a third of the national population), than on Islam, even though it is practiced by only 16% of Indo-Fijians and a mere 7% of Fiji’s total population.  As the soi-disant“attorney general” Kirwin, in Australia, puts it, “I’m not frightened or scared at all.  There is a takeover in Fiji and it is not a good one.  We’re concerned by Muslims.  Their influence is very, very high.” She explicitly opposes constitutional guarantees of equal rights for all Fijians, regardless of ethnic background or faith.  Fiji’s attorney general, Aiyaz Sayed-Khaiyum, has in particular been subjected to considerable vilification for his faith by some indigenous Christians.

Attorney General Khaiyum has been the focus of much indigenist Christian vilification

Details on last month’s arrests are hard to come by, and are usually filtered through the government’s interpretation of events.  Late last month, Bainimarama blamed “high-profile figures” in Australia for abetting the uprising, which he blamed on “enemies of modern Fiji.”  This may be a reference to one of the Fijian Christian states’ loudest supporters, the Rev. Fred Nile, a New South Wales state legislator who heads the Christian Democratic Party (C.D.P.) and is a perpetual target of ridicule in Australian politics.  Each year Nile publicly prays for Sydney’s annual gay-pride parade to be rained on, and he has pushed for laws banning Muslim immigration, the wearing of Muslim religious dress, and not just same-sex weddings but also pagan and Wiccan ones.

A defaced Fred Nile billboard in Australia

Fiji is no stranger to ethnic and sectarian unrest.  In addition to several coups d’état and the tensions between indigenous and South Asian Fijians, there is recurring separatist activity on an outer Fijian island called Rotuma (1.2% of Fiji’s population), which shares more with the Polynesian culture of Samoa and Tonga than with Fiji’s Melanesian one.  And on Fiji’s Rabi Island an elders’ council of expatriates from the Republic of Kiribati’s Banaba Island, which is more Fijian than Kiribatian culturally, acts as a sort of provisional government for Banaba, where there is ongoing advocacy of either seceding as an independent state or transferring Banaba to Fiji.

Sometimes politics in Fiji gets racial, in an ugly way.

Seventy alleged “Christian state” activists await trial for sedition.  Sixteen have pleaded not guilty and are due back in court on September 22nd.  Due to the repressive political atmosphere in Fiji and constraints on the press, it is not clear how true any of the allegations are.  One defense lawyer for the defendants, Aman Ravindra-Singh, has said, “We have been kept in the dark as counsel for these persons and we have yet to see any shred of evidence with regards the allegations of guns and firearms being involved in military-style training.”  Nor can we rely on any kind of pressure for due process from neighbors like Australia and New Zealand, who regard Bainimarama’s Fiji as a crucial link in the geopolitical containment of China’s naval ambitions.

Fiji’s flag

The proposed Christian states on Viti Levu are dangerously intolerant and undemocratic.  The attitudes and prejudices underlying them have no place in a modern democratic nation.  But neither do the military-style policing and disregard for civil rights with which Bainimarama is trying to keep the uprising down.  Fiji’s junta may find that it is feeding the nation’s cycle of coups and counter-coups rather than stabilizing the country.

One of many proposed redesigns of the Fijian national flag

[Thanks to Olivier Touzeau for a correction on identification of flags in this article.]

[You can read more about and many other separatist and new-nation 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 interview for more information on the book.]

The barely functioning Federal Somali Government (F.S.G.) is pushing forward this fall to replace its original system of small administrative regions with large autonomous “regional states,” officially enshrining a fragmentation that has been going on over a quarter-century of civil war.  But the plan is running into problems, notably with outbreaks of factionalism and fighting in the central Galmudug and Hiiraan regions.  Some say it is long past time to abandon the whole idea of Somali unity.

It’s only gotten more complicated since.

The most well known of these states, Puntland State of Somalia, has been de facto self-governing since 1991, when Somalia fragmented in civil war following the end of its sponsor state, the Soviet Union.  Today, Puntland is in most ways independent, though the government is nominally “unionist.”  Another region, the former British Somaliland, is the de facto independent Republic of Somaliland, which, unlike Puntland, does not pretend to be part of the Federal Republic of Somalia, though Somalia insists it is.  Somaliland is diplomatically unrecognized, but treated by the United Nations and many states as independent in every respect other than the exchange of ambassadors—mostly because of its oil wealth, exploited by firms from the United Kingdom, Canada, the United Arab Emirates, and elsewhere.

Puntlanders with their flag

The federal government gave its blessing last July to an officially autonomous “Central Regions State,” just south of Puntland.  (That’s the occasion for the flag display at the top of this article.)  That entity has now reverted to calling itself Galmudug Regional State (Galmudug being a portmanteau of the names of the smaller Mudug and Galduduud administrative regions), the name used when it first declared itself self-governing in 2004 amidst the chaos of the Somali civil war.  Galmudug’s formal establishment last year created tensions not only with Puntland—the two states’ shared border is in dispute—but with neighboring entities on its western and southern side which have long aspired, with less success, to formal autonomous status, notably Ximan and Xeeb (also spelled Himan and Heeb) State and Hiiraan State.  Puntland, jealous of threats to its preeminence as a stable, economically viable, and (not incidentally) territorially expansive pseudo-state, has (as discussed before in this blog) repeatedly threatened to withdraw from the Somali federation whenever another autonomous state begins establishing itself.

Mudug + Galgaduud = Galmudug

Internally, Galmudug is riven by factionalism within Ahlu Sunna, a moderate Islamist militia whose conservative faction controls some areas of Galmudug, including the town of Dhusamareb.  Twenty people were killed in a two-day battle for Abudwaak this month between the Interim Galmudug Administration (I.G.A.) and the traditionalist Ahlu Sunna Wajameeca faction, with the I.G.A. securing control of the town.

Warring Ahlu Sunna factions make a stable Galmudug difficult to achieve.

Just last week the newly elected president of Galmudug, Abdikarim Guled, said that Galmudug was in talks with Puntland to end their hostilities.  The Puntland–Galmudug conflict swirls mostly around rival claims on the Northern Mudug administrative district (in the terms of the old, vestigial map of Somalian regions and sub-regional districts), where Galmudug’s newly relocated capital, Adado, sits.  Local clans do most of the fighting in these disputes.  Formerly, Galmudug used the southern part of the city of Galkayo as its capital; Galkayo straddles, Berlin-like, the de facto border between Galmudug and Puntland.  Adado is farther south but is still claimed by Galmudug.  Awkwardly, it is also the capital of the aforementioned Ximan and Xeeb State, an intermittently self-governing landlocked pocket of desert which theoretically aspires to be a Mogadishu-recognized autonomous regional state.

To add to the mess, al-Shabaab (literally “the Youth”), a radical Islamist terror group which affiliates itself with al-Qaeda, is in a constant tug-of-war with these entities, the central government, and with the African Union (A.U.) Mission in Somalia (Amisom), a peacekeeping group dominated by Ethiopia and Kenya, for control of remote towns.  Just last week, federal troops, joined by some of the 2,000 Amisom troops there from Djibouti (a country which sponsors insurgent separatists in western Somaliland, incidentally), drove al-Shabaab out of two Hiiraan villages.  Hiiraan and Middle Shabelle (also called Hiiraan and Jawhar) Regional State was supposed to begin its implementation process on September 1st and complete it in December.  So there is a big push to stabilize that region so it can keep to its timetable.  There is also tension within Amisom, since Djibouti—which sponsors insurgent separatists in western Somaliland, incidentally—suspects Ethiopia of having an anti-Djiboutian agenda in the peacekeeping operations.  Djibouti is ruled by its Issa (Somali) minority, which is in perpetual conflict with its Afar majority, which is also a powerful minority in neighboring Ethiopia and Eritrea.

Somalian subdivisions—old style ...

The current parliamentary system is an arcane one involving unelected traditional clan elders as a sort of estate or upper chamber within the representative system.  But one of the plans being considered divides Somalia into seven large legislative districts: Puntland, the Interim Jubba Administration in the far south (also called, at various times, Jubaland, Jubbaland, Azania, or even Greenland), the Interim South West Administration (also called sometimes Asal, just to the north of Jubaland) (see article from this blog), Galmudug, Benadir, Somaliland, and the Hiiraan–Shabeelle entity (see above).  Jubaland, in particular, is supported by the A.U. and by the Kenyan military command which operates through the A.U. in southern Somalia; Kenya sees it as a useful buffer state between the Kenyan homeland and the al-Shabaab-ruled areas bent on exporting terrorism across the border into Kenya.  (See an article from this blog on Jubaland.)

... and old old style.

Somaliland, in the far northwest, will never accede to being part of the failed state of Somalia; it has done well on its own, and federal forces would never try to subdue Somaliland’s capable military.  But the Puntland, Galmudug, Hiiraan–Shabelle, South-West, Benadir, and Jubaland regional states are gradually trying to normalize themselves, in almost impossible circumstances.  Whether they can ever succeed is an open question.  In my opinion (as I have written as long ago as 2012), the problem is that the international community unanimously backs the failed idea of a central government based in Mogadishu.  The world’s leading nations should grant diplomatic recognition to Somaliland and showcase the country, imperfect though it is, as the island of stability it is in its horrifically dangerous neighborhood (near, among other places, South Sudan and Yemen).  This might encourage Puntland to declare independence as well (it is a quite viable state), or might convince Mogadishu to craft with local leaders a very loose confederation of four or five large regions.  The alternative is today’s dysfunction, with vast areas under no clear governance and becoming a breeding ground for al-Shabaab.  It would be good to get this in place before al-Shabaab, like Boko Haram in Nigeria, switches its allegiance to Islamic State.

The flag of Hiiraan State

[You can read more about Puntland, Galmudug, and many other separatist and new-nation 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 interview for more information on the book.]