In the midst of the Middle Eastern refugee crisis roiling Europe, an unrecognized “micronation” on a chunk of no-man’s-land between Serbia and Croatia is trying to market itself as a haven for tens of thousands fleeing civil war in places such as Libya, Iraq, Yemen, and, especially and most tragically, Syria.  The so-called Free Republic of Liberland was declared April 13th (as reported at the time in this blog; see also article here) on three nearly empty square miles of grassy fields, thickets, and riverbank along the Danube River, one of several shards of intersecting claims by Serbia and Croatia as a result of the shifting course of the winding Danube over the decades.  Neither side presses its claim, but both are clear that Liberland has no right to set up shop there.  The republic is intended as a libertarian utopia, founded by Vít Jedlička, a 31-year-old officer in the Czech Republic’s small libertarian Free Citizens’ Party (Strana svobodných občanů).  Croatian and Serbian police and border agencies have quietly foiled attempts by Jedlička to do more than raise a flag there.  Meanwhile, despite Jedlička’s big talk to the contrary, the chances of any kind of international recognition are close to nil.

Vit Jedlička

Indeed, even among the hundreds-strong community of micronations around the world, Liberland is an outcast.  As far as I can tell, only the risible Kingdom of North Sudan—founded last year along the border between Egypt and Sudan by an American from Virginia so that he could make his seven-year-old daughter a “princess” (as reported at the time in this blog)—has extended diplomatic recognition.  They have also gotten an endorsement from Switzerland’s libertarian Unabhängige Partei (“Independence Party”) (which uses the exclamatory acronym UP!); much of Liberland’s support and organizational energy seems to come from Switzerland.  (Unlike many libertarian parties which pander to the xenophobic right, UP! supports abolishing all restrictions and controls on movement across any borders.)  The reaction from other micronational leaders, who tend, at least in Europe and Australia, to be more left-leaning than Jedlička, has been cold.  Now Jedlička is raising more hackles by wading into the debate over the flood of migrants to the Balkans by offering citizenship to anyone willing to pay his $10,000 passport fee.  A couple weeks ago Jedlička told media that among the 380,000 or so citizenship applications received since April are now 20,000 from Syria and nearly 2,000 from Libya.

“Bring us your tired, your poor, your hungry ... and we will take every last penny they have and then turn them out into the cold.”

This is not surprising.  Other micronations, such as the Grand Duchy of Flandrensis, a Belgium-based micronation project which administers no territory (though it claims some islands off Antarctica), report a sharp increase in applications from the Middle East.  Doubtless this is because of desperate and ill-informed war refugees grasping at straws and not realizing from their web-surfing that some online citizenship-application forms are not from physically existing countries.  On September 22nd, Niels Vermeersch, the Flandrensisian grand duke and head of state, posted on his Facebook page, “On a weekly basis we receive requests for the Flandrensisian citizenship from the Middle East with often sad stories.  Those people are so desperate that they are willing to try everything and they don’t seem to know that Flandrensis is only a micronation.  We believe that every human being has the right to a home and a decent life.  That is the world we want for our future generations to come!”

Big plans for Liberland

Thus the news out of Liberland particularly infuriates Vermeersch. “Where do they plan to put them?” the post continued.  “How will they feed them?  Where will these people work & live?  ...  Liberland used this crisis to get press and it is cruel to give those people false hope, using misery of refugees to make money.”  Georg von Strofzia, foreign minister of the Kingdom of Ruritania (the fictional nation from The Prisoner of Zenda, asserted to be within the Czech Republic), added, “Three square miles!  That’s 7 square kilometers!  This isn’t Dubai.  There is no treasury to pay to import food for these people.  The sanitation problems would be a nightmare.”  This, of course, despite long-term plans to erect a futuristic city on the spot.  (See the artist’s rendering at the top of this article for one such plan.)

Alleged scenes of Liberlandic nation-building can be found on YouTube. But it’s not clear if anything is actually being built there.

Prince Jean-Pierre IV, of the Principality of Aigues-Mortes, a high-profile micronation in a walled Medieval city on the Mediterranean coast of France, agreed, writing September 30th on the “Micronations and Alternative Polities” Facebook group, “We all agree that Liberland is a scam and that it gives a very bad image of micronationalism.”  And Olivier Touzeau, Emperor of Angyalistan (a French-based micronation whose territory is “the horizon”), added in what became an official communiqué on behalf of the Organization of Microfrancophony (Organisation de la MicroFrancophonie) and co-signers from Aigues-Mortes, “The micronations who publish passports are faced with the serious problem of the refugee crisis and the actions needed to give hope to humanity without fooling anyone.  Liberland just did exactly the opposite of what can be hoped from a serious micronational project.  We strongly condemn the despicable initiative of the leader of the free Republic of Liberland, offering Syrian refugees to come to his claimed territory for $ 10,000.  The free Republic of Liberland is a media smokescreen that throws ridiculous and vain shadows at the expense of human distress on the ideals of most serious micronations and shows thus the full extent of the intellectual swindle it stands for.”  (See my recent blog article for more on these micronations.)

Flag of the Grand Duchy of Flandrensis

So far, several other micronations have signed on to Emperor Olivier’s declaration, including, in addition to Aigues-Mortes and Flandrensis, the Cyanocitta Cristata Principal Republic (an environmental project; Cyanocitta cristata is the scientific term for the bluejay), the Principality of Hélianthis, Ladonia (on the coast of Sweden), the Empire of Lemuria (not to be confused with either the Indian Ocean protocontinent or the mythical “sister city” to Atlantis), Lykosha (an online community which gathers under a lupine banner), the Republic of Navalon (an ecological “floating island” project), the Republic of Padrhom, the Holy Empire of Réunion (declared by citizens of Brazil on the eponymous French territory of the African coast), Ruritania (see above), the Kingdom of Ruthenia (not to be confused with Transcarpathian Ruthenia, a.k.a. Ukraine’s Transcarpathia (Zakarpattia) oblast, discussed frequently in this blog—e.g., articles here and here), the State of Sandus, the Republic of Saint-Castin (located within Quebec), and the Consulat of Surland (five islands in the Moselle River, in France).


Jedlička even went so far as to host, at a hotel in Istanbul, a Liberland recruitment drive on September 16th.  Turkey is the point of transit for most European-bound refugees from Syria and elsewhere.

H.I.M. George II, Emperor of Atlantium

George II, Emperor of Atlantium (which is surrounded by New South Wales, Australia), thundered, “Liberland is a financial scam dressed up in the language of ‘freedom’ that is used by libertarians and other conservatives to deliver the exact opposite: the entrenchment of power and privilege and the denial of opportunity.”  (His comments remind me that I lament still that he was unable to attend this summer’s 3rd PoliNation conference and micronational summit in the Italy-based Republic of Alcatraz (attended by this blogger and reported on in this blog), where his presentation was to have been titled “Reclaiming Micronationalism: How Libertarians Ruined a Good Thing.”)

Liberland’s one building.  It doesn’t look like it can sleep 10,000.

Jedlička may or may not have his heart in the right place, and he may or may not believe that he will really build a shining city of freedom on his little plot of land.  But at the very least he needs to scale back his big talk, and not raise false hopes among desperate people.

Swiss volunteers scouting Liberland for a good spot for a refugee camp

[Thanks to Emperor Olivier, Michael Cessna, and Queen Anastasia for information for, and corrections to, this article.]

[You can read more about many micronations and 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.]

Since late August, members of an indigenous First Nations community from the Tsimshian (also spelled Ts’msyen) Nation have been occupying—“re-occupying,” as they prefer to put it—an island off the coast of northern British Columbia where an energy multinational from Malaysia wants to build a liquid natural gas (L.N.G.) exporting terminal.  The community, Lax Kw’alaams, often referred to by its colonial name, Port Simpson, is the most populous Tsimshian village in Canada (there is also one over the border in Alaska) and is home to nine of the Tsimshian Nation’s fourteen constituent tribes.  Lax Kw’alaams members overwhelmingly voted down the developments plans in a referendum in May of this year, and the community’s mayor, Garry Reece, said late last month that the Lax Kw’alaams First Nation would file suit for aboriginal title to the island, Lelu Island, and to nearby Flora Bank.


Tsimshian territory makes up about the northern third of B.C.’s coast.  Since, with very few exceptions, almost no land in this vast province has been ceded by Indian treaty, technically all of Tsimshian territory, and nearly all of B.C., is in one sense not part of B.C. or Canada but is unceded aboriginal territory.  An “aboriginal title” claim by Lax Kw’alaams would take these territories out of their current legal limbo (which the federal and provincial governments treat as de facto Crown sovereignty) and put them squarely before the courts, where a number of recent decisions (the Gitxsan in 1997, the Tsihlq’otin in 2014) have greatly strengthened the aboriginal hand.

Artist’s rendering of the L.N.G.-terminal project proposed for Lelu Island

The struggle over L.N.G. pipelines through the territories of B.C. nations has become a flashpoint in the indigenous North American land struggle, including the recent aboriginal push against environmentally destructive energy projects which operates under the banner “Idle No More.”  (See articles from this blog about the Gitxsan land struggle here, here, and here and about that of B.C.’s Wet’suwet’enhere.)


The Lelu project planners, Petronas (a Malaysian corporation known worldwide for its record-breaking Petronas Towers skyscraper complex), and its Canadian arm, Pacific NorthWest L.N.G., have said that construction of the terminal would cost nearly $1.5 billion.  This includes constructing a bridge and a harbor in addition to the processing plant.  But Lax Kw’alaams, with studies in hand, points out this will harm salmon habitat in the nearby Skeena River estuary, a serious issue for a community very dependent on the traditional seasonal round of resource-gathering, primarily salmon.  Among the other six Tsimshian communities in Canada, Metlakatla (Maxłakxaała) and Kitselas (Gits’ilaasü) bands signed off on the project (Metlakatla is home to members of several of Lax Kw’alaams’s nine tribes, but the tribes’ paramount chiefs are of Lax Kw’alaams), but Kitsumkalum (Gitsmgeelm), Kitkatla (Gitkxaała), Klemtu (the Gidestsu people at Kłmduu), and Hartley Bay (Gitga’ata), as of late September, had yet to do so.  B.C.’s premier, Christie Clark, is a supporter of the Petronas plan.


Sm’oogit Yahan, a.k.a. Donald Wesley, Jr., who has been speaking for the protestors, said in September that his group will be co-founding a brand-new organization called the Northern First Nation Alliance, along with some of the more uncompromisingly sovereigntist nations in the province, including the Gitxsan, the Wet’suwet’en, and the Council of Haida Nations.  (The Nisga’a, just to the north, are not part of the club: their chiefs surrendered their territory to the Crown in the 1990s for a cash settlement and for self-government rights that they already possessed.)  As Yahan explained, “Our Traditional ways of life and the resources which have sustained our people are not to be pawns in the Christie Clark government’s L.N.G. dreams.  Development within our Traditional territories must have our free, prior and informed consent.  The people of Lax Kw’alaams spoke very clearly in their rejection of the 1.25-billion-dollar offer from Petronas, and this camp builds upon that rejection.  This issue is not just a First Nations issue but one that will affect all British Columbians, especially those who rely upon healthy and abundant fish stocks.”


Meanwhile, Mayor Reece—whose village government office is separate from the Lelu protest group but for a while was quoted in the media as implicitly supporting it—said last month, “We want to protect crucial salmon habitat, protect our food security, and ensure that governments and industry are obligated to seek our consent.  If we obtain title, we will own Lelu Island and Flora Bank.”  He added, “Our traditional law, backed by our scientific reports, has made it clear that Flora Bank cannot be touched by [Pacific NorthWest] or any other company that proposes development.”

Gitxsan chiefs visited Lelu Island to show solidarity.

But things got complicated in late September, when Petronas workers conducting unauthorized surveying on Lelu were escorted away by members of the Lax U’u’la Warriors—an intertribal, interethnic support group linked to the Lelu protest camp.  (Lax U’u’la, also spelled Lax Üüla, or “place of the harbor seals”) is the Sm’algyax (Tsimshian language) name for the island.)

The flag of Lax Kw’alaams, flying on Lelu Island

In response, in early October, a statement issued on behalf of “the Hereditary Chiefs of the Nine Tribes of Lax Kw’alaams” granted Petronas surveyers “conditional access to Lelu Island and the Flora Banks to complete their studies, the results of which will allow us to determine our final stance.”  The statement said that Yahan and the island’s occupiers did not have “authority to speak or act, no authority to unilaterally decide to use and occupy any lands and no authority to use the identity of the Nine Tribes.  All of this contravenes Ts’msyen Law.  ...  We are actively addressing the shame certain individuals, bound by our laws, have brought by these actions.”  Regarding the expulsion of the Petronas workers, the hereditary chiefs’ statement added, “To commit violence, demean and disgrace the station of Ts’msyen Chieftainship through words and action is abhorrent to the true Chiefs of the Ts’msyen Nation and such disrespect threatens the Nine Tribes of Lax Kw’alaams,” whose “duties and responsibilities” and “names handed down since time immemorial, are thus activated, and we remind all our people that they have the right to live and work in safety under the protection of the Laws of the Ts’msyen.”

Lax Kw’alaams

In the traditional social and political structure of the Tsimshian, Gitxsan, Nisga’a, Wet’suwet’en, Haisla, Haida, Tlingit, and other nations in the area, it is the hundreds of matrilineal extended families (houses) which hold sovereignty over their separate territories.  In Lax Kw’alaams, however, houses pool some of their authority in the paramount hereditary chieftainships of the community’s nine tribes.  (For more detail on Tsimshian social structure, see my book Becoming Tsimshian: The Social Life of Names.)

Mayor Garry Reece (left), with timber executive Wayne Drury

Yahan, identified as chief of the Gitwilgyoots (one of the Nine Tribes), reacted swiftly to the joint statement from the hereditary chiefs by stating that only he had the authority to grant access to the island.  “I stand on that island because it is on our traditional territory.  I am the sole chief in standing in this tribe that has a say in what goes on.  ...  We are all individual tribes and we don’t go over other tribes’ territory.”  Mayor Reece, who uses the chiefs’ name Txagaaxs and is identified as chief of the Ginaxangiik, appeared to agree with Yahan that no one had “authority to represent or sign anything on the tribe’s behalf.”  He added that no person or group currently speaks on behalf of all nine tribes.


The Tsimshian, at least, certainly are idle no more.  Which approach to land stewardship will prevail in the Lax Kw’alaams community, and whether protectors of the land will win this battle in the war over energy projects and the environment, remains to be seen.


[You can read more about the Tsimshian, Gitxsan, Nisga’a, etc., as well as sovereignty and independence 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.]

Vladimir Putin, as this blog tirelessly points out, is a hypocrite when it comes to separatism.  Though the authoritarian Russian president arms and funds separatists in places like Ukraine, Georgia, Moldova, and—perhaps soon—Syria, within Russia it is (as I have reported in this blog) a crime, as of last year, even to publicly advocate secession from the Russian Federation.  I have detailed how the Russian government has cracked down mercilessly on activists arguing even for enhanced autonomy in Russian regions like Circassia (in the north Caucasus and nearby steppes) and Siberia (see articles here and here), to say nothing of demands for self-determination by the Tatar minority in Crimea, which Russia reconquered from Ukraine last year.  A Crimean Tatar activist, Rafis Kashapov, was the first person tried under the new advocacy-of-separatism ban.  But the latest flare-up of resistance to Moscow rule is not along one of these familiar fault-lines but to the Sub-Arctic extreme northwest of the country, in the Republic of Karelia.

A year ago in this space, I offered my predictions for which separatist movements would capture the world’s headlines in 2015.   Some of those, such as East Turkestan (in western China) (no. 8) and the Russian puppet states of Abkhazia and South Ossetia within Georgia (no. 4), are conflicts which continued to simmer during the past twelve months but did not boil over (and I am happy to have been wrong about that).

Abkhazia—still quasi-independent, but in a holding pattern

Scotland, which was no. 10 in this list a year ago, continued to build momentum for independence, but without too many significant developments other than the United Kingdom’s Labour Party betraying its utter ideological disarray in the face of defections to the Scottish Nationalist Party (S.N.P.) by selecting a cantankerous, bearded paleo-Marxist, Jeremy Corbin—who disrespects Queen Elizabeth II and sympathizes with Vladimir Putin—as the official opposition leader in Parliament.  This means that, to all intents and purposes, the S.N.P. is the opposition.  The U.K. is still headed for break-up, but probably not for a few more years yet.

Scots have not put their flags away, but independence is on hold.

Other aspirant states, such as South Yemen, Novorossiya (eastern Ukraine), and Islamic State (a.k.a. the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham, or ISIS)—nos. 6, 5, and 2, respectively, last year—continued to be the focus of high-profile conflicts in 2015 and will probably continue to be in 2016, though they didn’t make this year’s list.  Catalonia (no. 9 last year), Republika Srpska (no. 7 last year), Transnistria (no. 3 last year), and Kurdistan (no. 1 last year) remain on this year’s list.  For better or for worse, they may get their moment in history in 2016.  Here is the full list:



10. Biafra: A 1960s Cause Revitalized in the Face of Islamist Terror


Southeast Nigeria’s Igbo people were the first stateless nation to make a credible bid for independence after the mass European decolonization of Africa in the 1960s.  British colonists had left the supposedly more pliable northern Hausa–Fulani Muslims in charge of the new nation, but after a series of coups and counter-coups among Nigeria’s main ethnic groups, Igbos declared a Republic of Biafra in 1967.  The ensuing war killed millions, many through deliberate blockade and starvation by the British-backed Nigerian government.  Since then, modifying Africa’s irrational, arbitrary colonial-era borders has become a taboo, and nowhere more so than in Nigeria, still traumatized by the Biafra catastrophe.  But the emergence of the terrorist Islamist group Boko Haram in northern Nigeria has changed things.  In a country about evenly divided between northern Muslims and southern Christians, national unity is less of a priority today to the south’s Yorubas, Igbos, and others as Islamist radicals rampage through the north with massacres, rapes, and pillage.  The spectacle of Muslim terrorists targeting the predominantly-Christian Igbo population in the demographically mixed “Middle Belt” region has reopened the wounds of the north–south conflict that led to the Biafra War in the first place.  Few noticed when the tiny Biafra Zionist Movement (B.Z.M.) declared independence in 2012, but the Movement for the Actualization of the Sovereign State of Biafra (MASSOB) has been issuing Biafran currency and passports and hoisting the banned Biafran flag, and this year a new group, Indigenous People of Biafra (IPoB), launched a pirate station called Radio Biafra.  This was the last straw for the newly elected president, Muhammadu Buhari, a northern Muslim who this year replaced Goodluck Jonathan, a southerner more popular with Igbos.  Buhari had the IPoB leader, Nnamdi Kanu, arrested, and riots ensued, with several killed.  Igbos claim that the government cannot protect them against Islamic terror or against trigger-happy federal police, and that a new Muslim-dominated government will marginalize the southeast politically and economically, as other administrations have done.  If Buhari cannot convince them otherwise, the conflict will worsen.  So far, he seems to be stoking conflict by meeting protests with disproportionate force.  Add to these complications the fact that some smaller ethnic groups within the former Biafra are saying that Biafran nationalists do not speak for them and that they are willing to secede from any independent Biafra in order to stay in Nigeria, and there is a recipe for horrible conflict in 2016.



9. Cyrenaica: A Sufi Kingdom That Suddenly Looks Like a Good Idea Again


Aside from Syria (see nos. 2 and 1 below), Libya is the most dynamically fractious country in the world today.  When the Arab Spring revolutions reached Libya in 2011, the eastern third of the country, Cyrenaica, which was an independent moderate Sufi kingdom from 1949 to 1951, rose up first, and for a while its main city, Benghazi, was the “capital” of “Free Libya.”  After NATO unseated and then offed the dictator Moammar al-Qaddafi, the scores of local Cyrenaican, Tripolitanian, Toubou, Tuareg, Berber, and Islamist warlords throughout the country did not want to give up the little fiefdoms they had established during the civil war, and they still haven’t.  Zubair al-Senussi, a nephew of the deposed King Idris, declared Cyrenaica autonomous in 2013, but the influx of Islamist militants to Libya soon after that has made the situation more complex: last year, the newly elected Libyan national parliament had to decamp to Tobruk, in Cyrenaica’s far northeast, while Libya Dawn, the bloc that lost the election, has set up a rival parliament in the official capital Tripoli, in the western region of Tripolitania (see map below), and is dominated by the Muslim Brotherhood.  Meanwhile, affiliates of Islamic State have utter control of an area around Sirte, Qaddafi’s birthplace, in eastern Tripolitania on the central coast.  On December 17, 2015, the two rival parliaments officially formed a “national unity government” at a summit in Morocco, but no one knows if that will mean anything in practical terms.  Real power in Libya lies in the ability to rally local militias, and those pushing for greater autonomy in Cyrenaica have a few things on their side: there is more unity among militias in the east, Tripolitania has more remnant Qaddafi loyalists and Berber unrest and is less friendly to foreign investment (despite the fact that the internationally-recognized Muslim Brotherhood government is temporarily located in the east), and Cyrenaica has nearly all the oil.  Ah, yes, it may all come down to oil in the end.  Unity government or not, 2016 may be the year Cyrenaica asks the world to give up on Libyan unity and back their secession.



8. Assam: Is China Contemplating Putin-Style Puppet States in Its Own Near Abroad?


Assam, the largest state in India’s eastern panhandle, is at first glance an obscure part of the world.  Its decades-long conflict among warring separatist militias, spilling over into neighboring states that form with it the “Seven Sisters” region, tend to have little effect on wider politics.  But that may be changing—and it’s all about China’s frustrated geopolitical ambitions.  First, understand that the government in Beijing does not recognize the MacMahon Line which the British (who then ruled India) agreed upon with the then-autonomous government of Tibet in 1914; China regards the area just below it, governed today as India’s Arunachal Pradesh state, part of its Tibet “Autonomous” Region.  Second, China has begun to flex its muscles beyond its borders in a way that it has not done for decades.  The West is alarmed over Chinese construction and military-patrolling activities—both in violation of international law—on and around tiny disputed islands and pseudo-islands in the South China Sea.  Surely, Beijing’s new boldness is partly due to China having seen Russia getting away with bald-faced expansionism in Ukraine, Moldova, Georgia, and elsewhere (see nos. 3 and 2 below).  China has mostly only tacitly backed Vladimir Putin’s irredentist empire-rebuilding, wary of being seen as a hypocrite on the subject of separatism.  But now that Russia is happily clamping down on separatists at home while arming them abroad, with none of its fist-pumping pro-Putin masses seeming to notice the contradiction, China may feel a little freer to do the same.  Despite brutal repression of any moves toward autonomy in Tibet, the Xinjiang Uyghur “Autonomous” Region, and even Hong Kong, China is very tentatively making ideological forays into neighboring regions.  Separatists in Japan’s far-southern archipelago, Okinawa, which used to be a separate kingdom with feudal-style allegiance to China, have been getting support from Beijing in the form of statements to the effect that Japan’s historical claims on the islands are concocted.  Okinawa, like the South China Sea islands, is part of a vast chain of Western-friendly territories—South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, the Philippines, Guam, etc.—which form an impermeable barrier preventing China from projecting power toward the Pacific.  Keep in mind, also, that the recent elections in Burma (Myanmar) are the latest chapter in a Burmese liberalization and pivot toward the West, which threatens to rob China of some of its trade access to the Indian Ocean.

The Indo-Chinese border is a mess of competing claims. If Beijing decides to aid Assamese rebels, it will get even messier.

So where does Assam come in?  Well, just last month, Paresh Baruah, the leader of the armed United Liberation Front of Asom (ULFA) came out openly courting Beijing’s support.  Using Communist doublespeak in referring to Arunachal Pradesh (which was part of Assam state until 1987) as “South Tibet,” he scolded New Delhi for hosting Tibet’s government-in-exile despite having in 2003 pledged recognition of Chinese sovereignty over Tibet (but not Arunachal Pradesh) in exchange for China backing off its claims on the formerly independent Himalayan kingdom of Sikkim.  It would be a cinch for Beijing to back eastern Indian rebels of various kinds—as well as those in neighboring Burma—as a way to destabilize the enemy and creep inch by inch toward the Indian Ocean.  Beijing seems poised to, ever slowly, “go Putin” on its neighbors.  This is a stealth phenomenon, but Springtime of Nations will keep readers informed of it during 2016.



7. Catalonia: The Stars May Be Aligning for a Final Break with Spain


Catalonia, a secessionist region of Spain, was no. 2 on last year’s list, being at that time fresh off of a non-binding referendum in which 81% of Catalans favoring independence but turnout was well below 50%—giving both sides, the unionist central government in Madrid and Catalonia’s ruling separatist Convergence and Unity (Convergència i Unió, or CiU) coalition, reasons to dig in their heels.  But in June, CiU split evenly into rival camps over the question of whether or not Catalonia should pursue independence unilaterally, even in the face of Madrid’s insistence that such moves are unconstitutional.  In Catalan parliamentary elections in September of this year, the new pro-independence Together for Yes (Junts pel Sí, or JxSí) coalition gained four seats and the more gradualist Popular Unity Candidacy (Candidatura d’Unitat Popular, or CUP) seven, but the surprise surge was from the anti-independence Ciutadans (“Citizens”) party, which gained sixteen seats, leaving pro-independence parties as a whole with only 48% of the vote—weak, but enough to keep the separatist Catalan president, Artur Mas, clinging to power for the time being.  Then came another blow—this month’s Spanish court ruling that any secession bid would indeed be unconstitutional, which prompted the usual defiance from President Mas.  But just this week the game has changed: in elections to the Spanish parliament on December 20th, Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy’s People’s Party (Partido Popular, or P.P.) lost 64 seats, plunging from 45% to 29%.  No one did any better, though: the Socialists lost 20 seats, bringing them down to 22%, and the newly minted far-left Podemos (“We Can”) party came out of nowhere to take 69 seats.  Podemos could well be the king-maker, and its young, hip, pony-tail-sporting leader, Pablo Iglesias, supports the idea of a Catalan independence referendum.  Not surprisingly, Podemos did well in Catalonia in particular, and if a Catalan vote for Podemos counts as a vote for independence, it looks like these elections show separatism to be surging again.  The coalition-building process may drag into the new year.  Catalonia’s hopes for independence depend on the result.  Either way, their fight is far from over.



6. Confederate States of America: Trump’s Rise and the “Browning” of America Lure Extremists out of the Shadows


All realistic dreams of independence for the “Confederated States of America” in the southern United States died in 1865 with the Unionist victory in the American Civil War.  But Confederate nationalism never went away, and, since the war was mostly (among other things) about slavery, Confederate nostalgia has always had a central racial component.  Federal enforcement of desegregation in the South in the 1960s reawakened the Southern white rhetoric of “states’ rights” that had dominated secessionist rhetoric in the 19th century, and the Republican Party repositioned itself atop a “base” of Southern white racists after Democrats like Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson adopted Civil Rights as their cause.  That explains why the 2000 electoral map that led to the months-long standoff between the candidates Al Gore and George W. Bush was essentially a map of old North-versus-South divisions—with of course a large extension of “red state” America into the Plains, where rural whites share many Southern “values.”  That also explains why the election of Barack Obama in 2008 sparked an explosion of racially-tinged far-right militancy in the guise of the “Tea Party” and the re-booted “Patriot” militia movement and a recruitment bonanza for Ku Klux Klan and neo-Nazi groups.  This year’s white-supremacist massacre at an African-American church in South Carolina sparked a broad public backlash against the Confederate flags, symbols, and toxic rhetoric that had warped the deranged young shooter via the Internet.  So today right-wing Southern whites feel their “heritage” is under attack.  And the ongoing tilting of American demographics toward a larger and more electorally mobilized dark-skinned (especially Hispanic) population has white conservatives in a panic as well—hence all the talk of “taking our country back” and hence the bizarre spectacle of the 2008 election, in which a protracted Republican primary season with unhinged xenophobes like Rick Santorum, Rick Perry, and Michele Bachmann ranting about the black and Latino menace demolished any hopes of denying Obama a second term (even though their eventual candidate was by comparison very moderate).


And now comes Donald Trump, a billionaire Republican front-runner seemingly uninterested in preparing the ground for his party’s victory next year and dropping all pretense and all code in openly stoking ultra-bigotry.  Gone are the days of Republican nods and winks about “welfare mothers,” “voter fraud,” or—ahem, you know who I mean—“the inner city”: Trump calls illegal immigrants “murderers and rapists,” vows to erect a giant wall along the border with Mexico, contorts his arms on stage to mock the disabled, applauds when thugs beat and hurl the N-word at an African-American heckler at one of his hate rallies, and proposes that Muslim Americans be registered and monitored just as German Jews were in the 1930s and ’40s—an historical parallel he pointedly refuses to be offended by.  Trump for months now has dominated American political news with what is very easily the most openly racist major presidential campaign since Reconstruction—a new low for America’s image around the world.



What does this mean for neo-Confederates?  We had always been told that they were a minuscule political fringe, and perhaps they are, in one sense, but the following scenario still seems likely: Trump loses the nomination, but the aftersmell of his long, ugly campaign costs the Republicans any hope of the Hispanic and centrist (“undecided”) votes needed to win, meaning Hillary Rodham Clinton is headed unstoppably to the White House.  That leaves the 38% of Republicans who today back Trump and the 15% who today back Texas’s equally deranged and intolerant Ted Cruz (who is equally incapable of securing a nomination), angry and feeling betrayed by their party, their tiny brains aboil with conspiracy theories and thoughts of revolution and race war.  Mind you, we are talking here about somewhere between 10% and 20% of the population of the U.S.—tens of millions of people—and a solid majority of whites in much of the Deep South.  If you think that’s an exaggeration, look again at Trump’s poll numbers and listen to the unprecedented levels of furious racism in his rhetoric.

White supremacists tried to take over Leith, North Dakota, last year.  Where will they try next?

These nuts won’t start a real revolution or a secession, but many may split away as a militant-rightist, mostly-Southern-based third party that could be a more durable feature in American politics than third-party runs by the likes of John Anderson (1980), Ross Perot (1992), or Ralph Nader (2000 and 2004) could ever have hoped to be—and perhaps Trump will even start his own party before the election; he can certainly afford to, and he hasn’t ruled it out.  This would split the right just enough to keep the Republican base more or less permanently out of power nationally—and thus more and more paranoid and angry.  What I predict for 2016 and 2017 is a boost in visibility for groups like the League of the South and the Texas Nationalist Movement, both of them far-right in their orientation and both with violent elements.  (In 2014, the League launched its own paramilitary wing, called the Indomitables.)  More and more mainstream Republicans will also begin to adopt the doctrines of “nullification” and “state sovereignty” that are the underpinnings of secessionist Constitutional arguments.  And we can expect a spike in violent incidents, such as race massacres like the one in South Carolina; hostage situations and sieges involving armed neo-Confederates; and attempts to establish all-white enclaves, like the “Pioneer Little Europe” attempted in South Dakota in 2014 by the white-supremacist Craig Cobb (see reports from this blog here and here) or his more recent follow-up attempts in Nebraska.  America won’t split into two countries, but its people will be even more divided, and the ignorant conservative white masses who feel disenfranchised will rally more and more under their own disgraced Confederate flag.

Welcome to Dixie.

5. Russians in the Baltic States: Could the Kremlin Pull Another Crimea Right under the NATO Umbrella?


When Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, invaded and annexed Ukraine’s majority-ethnic-Russian Republic of Crimea in 2014, his triumphant speeches made clear what Russian expansionist ambitions were about.  He addressed the “plight” of those Russians who went to sleep one night in 1991 as the dominant ethnic group in the Soviet Union and woke up as minorities in foreign lands such as Ukraine, Moldova, Kazakhstan, and, most of all, in the Baltic States.  In Lithuania, 5% of the population consider themselves ethnic Russians (15% in the capital), in Latvia it is 28% (with nearly half of Riga and most of its second-largest city, Dagauvpils, speaking Russian), and in Estonia 24% (with 47% of the population of Estonia’s capital, Tallinn, being Russian-speakers).  These high numbers are the result of an explicitly colonial policy of settling Russians in the Baltics which began soon after their illegal annexation by the Soviet Union during the Second World War.  (The United Nations and most of the world refused to recognize the annexations, but no one did anything about it.)  By the time the Baltics became independent again in 1989, the demographic damage could not be undone; large parts of the three countries had become Russified.  Post-Soviet Latvia instituted harsh laws excluding newcomers and non-Latvian-speakers from public life, and so here Russophones’ resentment is sharpest.  In 2012, a referendum on making Russian an official language alongside Latvian was doomed by numbers to fail (as reported at the time in this blog), but the emotionally-fought campaign put Russians in alliance with some Latgalians, a sort-of-separate ethnic group in the area around Dagauvpils which feels marginalized.  After the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Balts became understandably jittery.  All three are in NATO, so a full-on attack by Russia is unthinkable—it would put Putin on an instant war footing with three nuclear powers—but Putin favors “stealth annexations” anyway.  In places like the Russian puppet states within Georgia, Moldova (see no. 3 below), and Ukraine, the Kremlin has distributed Russian passports to local Russian-speakers and used or threatened economic blockades.  If Putin ever decides to pull a Crimea in the Baltics, he will start with strategies like this.  Keep in mind, Putin violated NATO airspace one time too many this month, in Turkey, but he probably still feels that was worth it: he lost only one plane, but whipped up jingoism at home and destabilized an enemy state.   Speculative maps leaked from the Kremlin in 2012 (as reported on in this blog) (see map below) showed eastern Estonia and eastern Latvia absorbed into Russia as, respectively, Narvski District (Narva is a 94% Russian-speaking town in Estonia) and Dvinskaya Oblast (Dvinsk being the Russian name for Dagauvpils).  Sure, that sounds silly, but so did the phrases “Donetsk Republic” and “Luhansk Republic” a couple years ago.  Already, Russian submarines troll Baltic harbors, and it is within the Kremlin’s means to stoke grievances in Russian-speaking parts of the Baltics (where they all watch Russian propaganda television anyway) and even run guns to rebels for a “liberation.”  Annexation and old-style direct invasions are off the table, but severe destabilization would be the next best thing.  2016 may be the year Putin tries it.

Modifications to the map of Europe in progress at the Kremlin

4. Republika Srpska: Bosnia’s Serbs Haven’t Had a Good War in 20 Years or So ...


After the devastation of the Bosnian War, the 1995 Dayton Accords created a Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina divided into two quasi-independent and insanely gerrymandered halves, with only a veneer of national unity between them: the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, governed by Croats and Bosniaks (Muslims), and the Republika Srpska, the “Serb Republic,” which is called by its Serbian name in English to avoid confusion with the fully independent Republika Srbija (Republic of Serbia) just to the east.  It was a pyrrhic victory for the peacemakers: the fighting had stopped, but the new map rewarded “ethnic cleansing” (a term coined for this war) by carving into stone the territorial gains made through wholesale massacre.  Both sides seemed content to simply pretend, for the sake of greater peace, to pretend that they were a single country.  But then, in 2014, Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, changed all of the ideological dynamics in the Slavic world by invading and annexing Ukraine’s Republic of Crimea.  Russia had always been the diplomatically isolated Serbia’s one ally in the wider world, since Russian nationalists see in Serbia parallels to their own grievances: a feeling that NATO and the West are punitively whittling their empires away, a sense of historic humiliation, and a panic over Muslim insurgency (where Bosniaks and Kosovars are analogous to Chechens or Crimean Tatars—never mind that all of these are among the most politically and doctrinally moderate Muslims in the world).  Russia’s new muscle-flexing and its eagerness to settle old scores have now rekindled the embers of the Republika Srpska’s dormant jingoism.  Serbia itself, which hankers for European Union (E.U.) membership and is eager to shed its global image as a pack of bloody-fanged ultranationalists, wants nothing to do with Republika Srpska, even though in the bad old days reunification was the mutual goal.  But Bosnian Serbs are now once again thinking about independence, or at least some way to cut their ties with Croats and Bosniaks.  The republic’s president, Milorad Dodik, stated this year that a referendum on independence for Republika Srpska was the only way forward and that 99% of Bosnian Serbs would support it—surely an exaggeration, though such a referendum, if held, might well pass.  Dodik’s own party, plus two far-right radical nationalist parties, hold nearly two-thirds of the seats in Republika Srpska’s parliament.  Just in the past few months, Serb nationalists have upped the ante: they are planning a referendum on whether the republic is beholden to decisions by Bosnia and Herzegovina’s Constitutional Court, and earlier this month the republic announced it was severing all ties to Bosnian state institutions.  The provocations that led to these moves were mostly symbolic ones: the Court voted to abolish Republika Srpska’s own “national” holiday, Republic Day, and federal Bosnian authorities arrested several Srpska citizens on decades-old war-crimes charges (still a sore spot for Serbs).  But the course Dodik is taking amounts to a virtual declaration of independence.  He might climb down, but it’s also possible that with tensions running high a minor event could lead to the renewal of fighting.  Putin has shown he would have no compunctions about sending in troops, regular or irregular, to help Serbs in any renewed civil war (if only to repay the Serb irregulars who flooded to Ukraine to fight for Putin last year).  And Bosnia is not in NATO, so, if previous events in Georgia and Ukraine are any indication, the West would in such a case sit on their hands and watch in horror as the Balkans descend once again into open war.

Milorad Dodik wants to re-open the Bosnian can of worms—and dump it all over NATO’s head.

3. Transnistria: A Pseudo-State in the Balkans Seems Ripe for Russia’s Plucking



Transnistria—more properly the Pridnestrovian Moldavian Republic—is not much, actually.  It’s a wafer-thin sliver of the formerly-Soviet Republic of Moldova, and Moldova itself is a sliver, being the slice of Romania’s Moldavia region which ended up being divvied out to the Soviet Union after the Second World War.  Today, Transnistria governs itself and calls itself independent, but doesn’t even have the official diplomatic recognition from Russia that puppet states like Abkhazia and South Ossetia, in Georgia, have.  Transnistria’s half-million or so people are about about evenly divided three ways among ethnic Russians, ethnic Ukrainians, and ethnic Moldavians (i.e., Romanians).  In 2006, 97% of them voted in a referendum that they wanted to break from Moldova completely and be recognized as a separate state in “free association” with the Russian Federation.  There is no reason to think that sentiment has cooled in the decade since, except in defection to the even more appealing idea, since 2014, of following Crimea’s lead in become part of Russia outright—which is the openly stated goal of Transnistria’s government.  The only problem is that a large chunk of independent Ukraine stands between Transnistria and the nearest point of de facto Russian territory, Crimea.  For a while it looked as if President Vladimir Putin and his proxy forces meant to take not only the Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts in the southeast of Ukraine but also the entire Black Sea coast, where ethnic Russians are also numerous.  Those ambitions have been scaled back a bit, but it’s not out of the question that Russian residents of the ethnically tense Odessa Oblast which borders Transnistria on its east could secede from Ukraine just as Donetsk and Luhansk have done and unify with Transnistria.  (Anti-Western Odessans did declare an “Odessa Republic of Novorossiya” in April 2014, as reported at the time in this blog, but it never translated into actually holding any territory.)  Putin’s Syrian adventure (see below) has overextended his forces somewhat, but if the right opportunity came along—such as a local uprising by ethnic Russians that “need protecting,” he might just snatch up Transnistria as an after-dinner snack, or at least grant it diplomatic recognition on its own.



2. Alawite State: Shouldn’t Assad Be Gone by Now? If Putin Has a Say, We’re Stuck with Him



Since Syria descended into civil war four years ago, Russia’s President Vladimir Putin has used his influence with the embattled Syrian dictator, Bashar al-Assad, to enhance his own diplomatic credibility.  In 2015, the United States and western European nations, which had only half-heartedly been helping the Free Syrian Army (F.S.A.) and other moderate rebels, began stepping up their fight against the self-declared terrorist Islamic State (a.k.a. ISIS), which controls large swathes of Syria and Iraq, and in October Russia stepped into the Syrian fray itself, with public announcements that Russia and the West, despite their differences, were partners in the fight against the Islamic State terrorists.  But a look at where exactly Russia has been dropping its bombs since early October tell a different story.  Putin is expending very little of his firepower against Islamic State and instead is pinpointing his attacks on the F.S.A. and other moderates who control the territory surrounding Assad’s redoubt in the west.  This includes the area around Damascus, the capital, but also the coastal provinces of Tartus and Latakia, where Russia has its military bases.  This is the part of Syria which was known as the Alawite State when it was a colony of France, and it is home to the doctrinally liberal Shiite Muslims of Assad’s minority Alawite sect, whom Islamic State regards as heretics.  Assad’s Syria is a crucial part of Putin’s loose alliance of tinpot dictatorships (also including Cuba, Iran, Zimbabwe, and Sudan), since it offers him a guaranteed Mediterranean presence, and Syria is also part of an arc of Shiite-ruled states, along with Iraq and Iran, that Islamic State is keen to punch holes in.  Already Putin is starting to treat western Syria more and more as his own territory, including threatening to turn the whole country into a “no fly” zone for Turkey, which is aiding some Syrian rebels but attacking others (like the Kurds; see no. 1 below) and which shot down a Russian warplane earlier this month.  Many observers expect that Assad’s long-contemplated plan to reestablish an Alawite State as a way of avoiding being removed from power entirely could become reality if Putin uses the same approach he has used with some success in places like Georgia, Moldova (see no. 3 above) and Ukraine: establishing quasi-independent puppet states, with or without diplomatic recognition.  Russians and Turks have been battling for centuries for dominance in the Black Sea and eastern Mediterranean.  The establishment of an independent Alawite State is Russia’s logical next step.



1. Kurdistan: No One Has Waited Longer, or Fought Harder, for Freedom


The Middle East’s 30 million or so Kurds are the world’s largest stateless nation, spread across northern Iraq, northern Syria, northwestern Iran, and—the largest chunk of their homeland—southeastern Turkey.  They were promised their own independent state when Woodrow Wilson and the League of Nations dismantled the Ottoman Empire after the First World War, but the brutal nationalists who founded the Republic of Turkey had other ideas and absorbed the Kurds and another aspirant people, the Armenians, into their rump empire.  The Armenians finally secured independence in 1991—though without their heartland in northeast Turkey that was depopulated by genocide.  But the Kurds are still waiting.  Iraq’s Kurds tasted autonomy of a sort after the First Gulf War of 1990, when the United States enforced a “no fly” zone that kept them safe from Saddam Hussein’s worst abuses, and then after Hussein’s fall they were able to convert that into a genuine Kurdistan Autonomous Region.  Their cousins in Turkey fared far worse: millions of Kurds were massacred by Turkey during the 1920s and ’30s, and their culture and language were criminalized to the extent that they were officially “Mountain Turks”: it was illegal to even say the words Kurd or Kurdistan. Starting in the 1970s, an (initially Soviet-backed) Communist insurgent army called the Kurdistan Worker’s Party, or P.K.K., waged a fierce war against the Turkish state, with tens of thousands dead over the decades.  A ceasefire in 2013 promised to bring an end to the fighting, but that has mostly unraveled under pressure from the situation to the south, where Syria’s embattled dictator, Bashar al-Assad, retreated from the far north of his civil-war-torn country and allowed Kurds to found there a quasi-state called Rojava, which is—unlike the Kurdish government in northern Iraq, which Turkey gets along with—aligned with the P.K.K.  And then, soon after, the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS), a.k.a. Islamic State, established itself in the large Sunni Arab homeland that stretches across much of Syria and Iraq.  Islamic State’s success in exploiting the local oil wealth, recruiting followers from around the world, and exporting terrorism to the West meant that the Syrian civil war became internationalized, with Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Russia, and various NATO countries, including the U.S., fighting there either directly or indirectly, all with different agendas.  Of these players, the Kurds closest allies are the U.S. and other Western powers and, to a lesser extent, Russia.


It has become clear that the West is promising independence to the Kurds of Iraq when and if Islamic State is defeated, and indeed it is Kurds in Iraq and Syria who are in the very front lines of that fight.  What is not clear is whether or not Rojava will be allowed to become part of that independent Kurdistan.  That will depend on how the Syrian civil war resolves itself eventually: Turkey is dead against the idea and Russia would only allow it if Assad is able to retain some territory outright (see Alawite State, no. 2, above), but the U.S. seems open to the idea.


Rojava, it should be said, is a kind of miracle: a progressive, democratic enterprise, with respect for women’s rights (Kurds have the world’s most feared female soldiers), a very moderate form of Islam, and, though its population is mostly Kurdish, a robustly multi-ethnic government with power-sharing between Kurds and the Sunni Arab, Assyrian, Chechen, and other minorities—all of this in the eye of the hurricane, surrounded on all sides by what is today the world’s most devastating war.  A merger with Iraqi Kurdistan would mean that this new member of the international community could be something the Middle East desperately needs: a place where Christians, Muslims, Yezidis, and others of all ethnic backgrounds can live in peace and security.  Plus, they’ve got all that oil.  Maybe 2016 will be the year that ISIS is defeated, or contained enough that the international community can allow the Kurds to start building independence.  It cannot happen soon enough.  They’ve waited long enough.



[You can read more about all these and other sovereignty and independence 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.]

Back in spring of 2014, I wrote in this space about the armed confrontation in southern Nevada led by the extremist Mormon rancher Cliven Bundy.  He was in serious arrears for grazing fees on federal land and hit upon the idea that he didn’t have to pay them at all because his family had become owners of the land through “pre-emptive rights and beneficial use” (similar, ironically, to arguments used by radical leftists against absentee landlords in Latin American land-reform movements).  Federal agents arrived to confiscate his cattle in accordance with the law, but he and hundreds of armed supporters, including snipers and wielders of automatic weapons, stood their ground until finally the feds backed off.  Bundy never did have to pay those grazing fees.  I warned at the time that this would embolden future libertarian and anti-government militants.  And just last week I opined in my annual round-up article “Ten Separatist Movements to Watch in 2016” that the rise of the Republican Party’s far-right extremist frontrunner for the presidential nomination, Donald Trump, would further inspire anti-government demonstrations and siege situations.  I was not pessimistic enough to think that I would be proven correct so soon, but events in Oregon this week have brought not just anti-government militancy, but the Bundy family in particular, back into the news.

Cliven Bundy in Nevada in 2014

Some Three-Percenters with their flag (not a scene from this week’s standoff)

Ammon and Ryan Bundy

A special Oregon version of the Gadsden (“Don’t Tread on Me”) flag on display in Harney County this week

Philadelphia, 1985: what happens to armed protest encampments if you’re black

The Branch Davidian compound near Waco, Texas, in 1994

Is that a Nazi salute, or is he just showing people where the port-a-potties are?

TOP STORY



After Coalition Deal, New Catalan President Vows Independence within 18 Months.  President Artur Mas of Catalonia lost his chance to form a fragile coalition government for his autonomous region on January 3rd when the small, left-wing Popular Unity Candidacy (Candidatura d’Unitat Popular, or C.U.P.) party refused to back him.  On January 9th, Mas announced he was stepping aside as party leader and as president.  Late the following night, just before a midnight deadline, Mas’s party and the C.U.P. reached a deal and elected, in a 70-63 vote, Carles Puigdemont i Casamajó as the new president of Catalonia.  Puigdemont, age 53, was mayor of the town of Girona and a former journalist.  In his acceptance speech, he echoed a famous quote from a Catalan martyr of the Spanish Civil War, saying, “The invaders will be expelled from Catalonia.”  He promised independence from Spain within 18 months.  (Catalonia is listed in my article last month on “Ten Separatist Movements to Watch in 2016.”)



EUROPE


Serbian Premier, Bosnian Serb President Defy Bosnian Court on “Republic Day.” The unspoken agreement by which leaders in the Republic of Serbia keep at political arm’s length their more virulently nationalist ethnic kindred in the separatist Republika Srpska in neighboring Bosnia & Herzegovinadeteriorated significantly on January 9th as Serbia’s prime minister, Aleksandar Vučić, attended celebrations in the Srpska capital, Banja Luka, for “Republic Day,” marking the republic’s declaration of independence in 1992 from Bosnia amidst the chaos of the Wars of Yugoslav Succession.  Moderates in Serbia railed against this symbolic return to revanchist nationalism.  In addition, Republika Srpska’s president, Milorad Dodik, attended in defiance of a Bosnian federal court ruling that the celebration day was discriminatory against Muslim Bosniak and Catholic Croat fellow citizens because it falls on a holy day in the calendar of the Eastern Orthodox faith, which most Serbs follow.  Dodik has frequently spoken in favor of his republic’s secession from Bosnia and reunification with Serbia and has even suggested a referendum be held by April.  (Republika Srpska is listed in my article last month on “Ten Separatist Movements to Watch in 2016.”)

Serbian Patriarch Irinej joined Bosnian Serb and Serbian leaders Aleksandar Vučić and Milorad Dudik in Banja Luka on Republic Day.

Bosnians Divided over Arrests of Bosniaks Accused of Anti-Serb War Crimes. In Bosnia and Herzegovina, federal police on January 4th arrested three Bosniaks (Muslim Slavs) accused of war crimes against Serbs during the Bosnian War.  The alleged attack occurred in 1992 in Zalazje, not far from Srebrenica, site of the infamous massacre of Bosniaks by Serbs that same year.  The Serb mayor of Srebrenica, Miloš Milovanović, praised the arrests but pointed out that far too few Bosniaks have been arrested for war crimes and none have been punished.  But pro-Bosniak organizations like the Mothers of Srebrenica and Žepa Enclaves criticized the arrests, saying that “these arrests will be used by politicians to minimise and justify the genocide committed in Srebrenica.”




Kosovars Riot over Government Concessions to Serbia, Montenegro. Rioting broke out in Pristina, the capital of the partially-recognized Republic of Kosovo, on January 9th.  A fire was started in a government building, and police used tear gas and water cannons against protestors hurling rocks and Molotov cocktails.  Among 8,000 or so protestors, dozens (police said two), as well as two journalists and 10 police, were injured.  The demonstrators were demanding that the Kosovar government step down on the argument that its recent deals with Serbia and Montenegro were unconstitutional.  (Serbia still regards Kosovo as a rebel province.)  One ethnic-Serb legislator in Kosovo said, after the rioting, that police had done nothing while protestors urinated in an Orthodox church.  Among the parties organizing the demonstration was Vetevendosjë, a nationalist party which wants to merge Kosovo into a “Greater Albania.”  That party particularly objected to agreements which grant more local autonomy to majority-Serb municipalities in North Kosovo.

The rioting in Pristina this month

Alsatians Sidelined, Normans Reunified as Redrawn French Regions Take Effect.  As of January 1st, France’s 22 régions (administrative regions) have been reduced to 13 in a wholesale streamlining that reveals some of the country’s anxieties over regional identities.  Though the French government is more centralized than those of other European Union (E.U.) states, and though the smaller départements (all 101 of them, including overseas ones) are a much more powerful level of local government, the régions still have symbolic significance, not least because some of the local nationalism that challenge French nationalism, such as those in Brittany, Corsica, Alsace, Occitania, Savoy, Normandy, and French Catalonia, have a strong stake in how régions are demarcated.  Some of the new changes please regionalists, such as the merger of Upper Normandy and Lower Normandy into Normandy.  Their very bifurcation was a vestige of the time when France worried that the Nordic-derived Norman French were susceptible to Nazi Germany’s “Aryan” ideology.  (The fears were mostly unfounded.)  Alsace and its German-speaking population, which are also a source of strong regional feeling, are now merged with Champagne–Ardennes.  Meanwhile, the far less regional-minded residents of Picardy and Franch-Comté found their entities absorbed into mergers with Nord–Pas-de-Calais and Burgundy, respectively.  Two régions with long histories of resistance to French rule were able to keep their borders: Brittany, with its often nationalistic Celtic population, and the large Mediterranean island of Corsica.  Here, the central government seems to gamble that dividing or subsuming those entities would stoke, rather than tamp down, regionalist sentiment.  In Corsica, at least, it seems to have made no difference: separatists took power there in a recent election in which most of the rest of the south of France tilted heavily toward the neo-fascist National Front party.




ISIS Takes Credit for Dagestan Fortress Attack on Russian Agents. The Islamic State terrorist group (also known as ISIS, for Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham) claimed responsibility early this month for a December 29th, 2015, attack in Derbent, in southwestern Russia’s Republic of Dagestan.  The attack, on the ancient Naryn-Kala fortress that is a busy tourist attraction and a UNESCO World Heritage Site, killed an officer in Russia’s Federal Security Service (F.S.B.) (successor to the feared K.G.B.) and wounded eleven other people.  Sources in Russia identify the three attackers as headed by one Abutdin Khanmagomedov of the Yuzhnaya gang, which has sworn allegiance to the Islamic State.  In recent months, the Islamic State has been recruiting heavily in the predominantly-Muslim North Caucasus region, which includes Chechnya and the mostly lawless Dagestan republic, edging out another jihadist “caliphate” group, the Caucasus Emirate.  ISIS has even claimed that it has “annexed” Dagestan.



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



Turkey’s War with Kurds Kills Hundreds; Erdoğan Praises Hitler, Vows Devastation.  The situation in Turkey’s vast Kurdish region tipped more and more into open wide-scale civil war this month, with hundreds killed in fighting between government and Kurdish forces.  On January 1st, the army reported that two police, one soldier, and 12 militants from the armed Kurdistan Worker’s Party (P.K.K.) had died in fighting in Cizre district over the previous 48 hours.  That incident began when police dismantling a P.K.K. roadblock were attacked by rockets.  On January 2nd, Turkey’s military announced that 179 P.K.K. militants in Cizre, 27 in the Silopi district, and 55 Diyarbakir province’s Sur district—nearly 300 in all—had been killed in recent fighting, and that a school supposedly being used as a rebel training center was destroyed.  At least one civilian was killed and another wounded in a Turkish mortar attack on a home in Diyarkbakir on January 3rd, while on the same day a civilian was shot outside his home, and a soldier was killed by a P.K.K. bomb.  On January 10th, according to Turkish sources, 12 P.K.K. rebels were killed in a raid in Van province, but the Firat News Agency (A.N.F.), which is pro-Kurdish, said it was a raid on a civilian home and that the 12 dead were massacred civilians.  One police officer was killed in the operation.  Authorities said a total of 32 P.K.K. fighters were killed over that weekend.  A January 13th P.K.K. attack on a police station near Diyarbakir with bombs and long-range missiles killed six.  On January 5th, the military reported that 14 militants had been killed the day before in and around Sur, Cizre, and Silopi.  The statement added that 296 rebels had been killed since December 14th, when major operations began.  Over 100,000 people have been displaced.  Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who praised Nazi Germany in a speech this month, describes the ongoing operation in scorched-earth terms: “You will be annihilated in those houses, those buildings, those ditches which you have dug,” he said.  “Our security forces will continue this fight until it has been completely cleansed and a peaceful atmosphere established.”  Russia has criticized Turkish military actions in Kurdistan, prompting this reply from the Turkish foreign ministry: “For a country whose record on democracy, the rule of law, and human rights is very well known by everyone, which has caused indignation with its acts in neighboring countries such as Ukraine and Georgia and by violating international law, which has provided political and military support to crimes against humanity by the bloody-handed dictator in Syria, and which actively launched campaigns leading to the death of hundreds of civilians, giving a human rights lecture to others is only an example of dark humour.”  (Kurdistan is listed in my article last month on “Ten Separatist Movements to Watch in 2016.”)



Turkey Releases Iraqi Vice Reporter Held on Terrorism Charges. On January 5th, Vice magazine reported that a journalist in its employ, 25-year-old Mohammed Rasool, had been released from prison in Turkey after 131 days.  Rasool, who has also worked for the Associated Press and Al Jazeera, had been arrested in Diyarbakir, the notional capital of Turkish Kurdistan, and charged with “aiding a terrorist organization,” which Rasool, a citizen of Iraq, denies.  He is awaiting trial and may not leave the country.


Abkhazia Joins Russian Sanctions against Turkey. The Republic of Abkhaziaannounced this month that it would be joining Russia in its program of economic and political sanctions against Turkey.  Abkhazia, which seceded from Georgia after the end of Communism, is recognized as independent only by Russia, its sponsor, and a handful of other countries.  Most of the world regards it as part of Georgia’s territory.


Ethnic Armenians, Angry over Turkish Base, Threaten Javakhk Secession from Georgia. An association of diaspora Armenians from Georgiaissued a formal statement this month, with strong pro-Kremlin overtones, calling on the Georgian government to block a plans by Turkey to establish a military base in Georgian territory.  The statement, from the Javakhk Diaspora of Russia, added that if the base goes ahead, ethnic Armenians in Georgia should gather signatures for a petition to allow Javakhk—an ethnic-Armenian district in Georgia abutting Turkey and Armenia—to secede from Georgia.  Armenia in recent years has become a close ally of Russia, while Georgia and Turkey remain aligned with the West.

Some Armenians’ vision of a “Greater Armenia”

South Ossetia Prosecutor-General Killed by Drunk Driver. The prosecutor-general of the Republic of South Ossetiawas killed in the street in Tskhinvali, the capital, police said on January 9th.  Merab Chigoyev died instantly when he was struck down by a drunk driver.  It is being ruled an accident.



MIDDLE EAST



Saudi Execution of Shiite Cleric Raises Sectarian Tensions throughout Middle East.  Tensions between Shi’a and Sunni Muslims across the Middle East flared after the government in Saudi Arabiaexecuted a revered Shiite cleric, Sheikh Nimr al-Nimr, on January 2nd.  Nimr was a focus for Saudi Arabia’s restive Shiite minority, who are a majority in his native Eastern Province, the country’s largest.  He was arrested in 2012 after being shot in a Shiite uprising against the House of Saud’s brutally repressive regime, which adheres to, and imposes on all, an archaic, extremist form of Sunni Islam.  After years of torture, hunger strike, and a death sentence, Nimr was executed along with 46 others for crimes such as “disobedience” and inciting foreign meddling (presumably by Iran).  International response was swift, with Iran cutting off diplomatic relations and officially inciting a mob to storm the Saudi embassy in Teheran (a crude tool of Iranian foreign policy familiar to those who remember the hostage crisis of 1979-81).  Already, Iran and Saudi Arabia are in fierce competition as local superpowers in a Middle East being remade in the wake of the Arab Spring revolutions, with Yemen, Syria, and Iraq being torn by Shi’a-vs.-Sunni sectarian fighting and other areas, such as Bahrain, Lebanon, eastern and southwestern Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan’s Hazarajat region, and Iran’s Balochistan region being perpetually in danger of boiling over.  There is occasional talk of secession of Saudi Arabia’s majority-Shi’a Eastern Province, but since it accounts for the country’s entire Persian Gulf coast, the Sauds will do anything to prevent that.

Yemenis at the Saudi embassy in Sanaa protest the execution of Nimr al-Nimr.

Iraq Accuses Peshmerga of Using Trenches to Demarcate a Larger Kurdistan. As a multi-sided war continues to rage in Iraq and Syria among Kurds, government forces, the Islamic State (a.k.a. ISIS), and foreign powers, the chairman of the defense committee in Iraq’s parliament claimed that trenches that the Kurdish Peshmerga are digging in northern Iraq are not just defenses against the Islamic State but are also being used as a flag-planting exercise to consolidate Kurdish sovereignty over coveted areas outside the relatively small Kurdistan Autonomous Region.  “The Kurdistan region uses its defense against I.S. as a justification to dig the trenches,” said the chairman, Saad Yosif al-Muttalibi.  “We don’t think this is to defend against I.S.  We think this is to separate Kurdistan from Iraq and it’s an attempt by Massoud Barzani [the president of the Kurdistan Regional Government] to declare Kurdish independence.”  Disputes over the trenches have at times flared up between Peshmerga and government-aligned Arab Shiite fighters near the town of Tuz Khurmatu.  (Kurdistan is listed in my article last month on “Ten Separatist Movements to Watch in 2016.”)



AFRICA





Ethiopia Scraps Capital Expansion Plans That Sparked December Oromo Uprising.  Activists from the marginalized Oromo ethnic group, Ethiopia’s largest, won a victory on January 13th when the central government announced it was scrapping plans for an expansion of the capital, Addis Ababa, into Oromo farming areas.  In December, the expansion plans led to an eruption of protests and a government crackdown.  The government claims between 75 and 80 Oromos were killed in the unrest, while human-rights advocates say it was closer to 122, with “more than 4,500” put into “concentration camps” and 800 missing and unaccounted for.  The United States and other Western governments are pressing for Ethiopia to release Oromos arrested in the aftermath, including journalists.

If the oppressed Oromo people seceded from Ethiopia, there wouldn’t be much left.

Islamic State Suicide Attack in Western Libya Kills 60. At least 60 police were killed and as many as 200 others injured on January 7th when a suicide bomber driving a truck filled with explosives hit a police facility in Zliten, in western Libya.  An affiliate of the Islamic State calling itself I.S. Vilayat Barqa, claimed responsibility.  Barqa is the Arabic name for Cyrenaica, Libya’s eastern region, where I.S. forces are concentrated.


Tuareg–Toubou Violence Erupts in Southern Libya.  Violence erupted in Obari, in southern Libya, on January 10th between members of the Tuareg and Toubou ethnic groups.  Four were killed and five wounded in the fighting, said to have begun with a Toubou raid on the city, which is majority Tuareg.  300 people have been killed in violence between the two ethnic groups since September 2014.




Thousands of Berbers Protest New Algerian Constitution’s Language Policy. In Algeria, thousands of members of the Berber (a.k.a. Amazigh) minority marched in the streets of Tizi Ouzou, the notional capital of their Kabylia region, on January 12th (the Berber new year) to protest changes to the constitution that they feel do not go far enough in making the Berber language, Tamazight, official.  It has been upgraded from a “national language” to an “official language,” but a spokesman for the Kabylia Self-Determination Movement (M.A.K.) explained, “With this new constitution, they are planning to say that Tamazight, the language of North Africans, is an official language but Arabic is even more official.”  More concretely, Berbers object to the constitution’s stipulation that only Arabic-speaking Muslims are eligible for public office.




Somaliland Forces Attack Khatumo State Military Base.  Media in the self-declared but unrecognized Republic of Somalilandreported on January 14th that Somaliland troops had attacked a military base in the nebulous, on-again-off-again Khatumo State, a rebel entity whose territory straddles the disputed border between Somaliland and the de facto self-governing Puntland State of Somalia.  Somaliland’s military is trying to subdue the area so that voting can be held there for upcoming national (Somaliland) elections.  The skirmish occurred near the town of Sahdheer, according to Khatumo’s deputy interior minister, Abshir Abdulaziz.




MASSOB Leader Announces, Then Scraps, Plans for Biafra Elections.  In Nigeria, Chief Ralph Uwazuruike, a leader in the Movement for the Actualisation of the Sovereign State of Biafra (MASSOB), announced in early January that an election will be held February 22nd—after a three-day period of fasting and prayer—to elect a government for the proposed Republic of Biafra.  The polls were to be administered by the newly appointed chairman of the Biafra Independence National Election Commission (B-INEC), the Rev. Father Samuel Aniebonam, a Catholic priest.  Uwazuruike said that all of the electoral officers would be “men and women of God” like Father Aniebonam.  “Our election,” he said, “will not be like Nigeria’s election, it will be a transparent one.  In Biafra, there won’t be electoral fraud.  The tenure of the elected Regional Governor or Minister would be four years and nine months.  There shall be no second tenure.”  But only members of MASSOB or of its new parent organization, the Biafra Independence Movement (B.I.M.), will be allowed to vote in the elections.  Then, on January 11th, Uwazuruike announced that the election would be postponed indefinitely, to allow for more consultation.  (Biafra is listed in my article last month on “Ten Separatist Movements to Watch in 2016.”)

Nnamdi and Uchechi Kanu, in happier times

Ailing and a New Father, Political Prisoner Kanu’s Fate Is Focus of Political Pressure. The underground Biafra Radio news outlet reported on January 13th that an as-yet-anonymous pro-Biafra activist was bringing suit against Nigeria’s central government in New York the following day to press for the release of Nnamdi Kanu, the imprisoned leader of the Indigenous People of Biafra (IPoB) organization.  Meanwhile, Kanu’s wife, Uchechi Kanu, gave birth on January 5th to a healthy baby boy, named Mazi Nnamdi Kanu.  Mrs. Kanu calls her husband “a prisoner of conscience.”  On January 6th, a group called Campaign for Democracy South East Zonegave the Nigerian government seven days to release Kanu, along with two other political prisoners: the former president Goodluck Jonathan’s national-security advisor, Col. Sambo Dasuki, and Chief Olisah Metuh.  Meanwhile, Kanu’s brother, Prince Kanu, said that the new father was sick and was being denied medical care.

Mazi Nnamdi Kanu, the world’s newest Igbo freedom-fighter

Igbo Leader Claims Niger Delta Minorities Back Biafra Independence.  Amid growing friction in Nigeria between the large Igbo ethnic group, many of whom want an independent Republic of Biafra, and smaller peoples such as the Ogoni of the Niger Delta region, one Igbo leader says Niger Delta people are not Biafra’s enemies.  Chief Solomon Chukwu, of the Movement for the Actualization of the Sovereign State of Biafra (MASSOB), told the Vanguard newspaper in an interview published January 4th, “During the war [he means the Biafra War of 1967-70], people said the Niger Delta denied Biafra.  It is not true.  ... People like Ojukwu’s second in command, Gen. Philip Effiong, fought for Biafra till the end.  My father and many strong men of Niger Delta also fought for Biafra.  ...  Today, they still support Biafra.  ...  Everybody was saying Biafra is for Ndigbo and South East, but today the story has changed, the entire people of Niger Delta have realised the need to actualize Biafra. ...  Today, people from all over the former Eastern region and Niger Delta now attend MASSOB meetings.  Recently, we were in Warri, Delta State, where the people received us with a rousing welcome.  They were jubilating that this time, there will be no dichotomy again.  ...  The former Eastern region and Niger Delta are working in unison to actualize an independent Biafra.”




Ogoni Give Nigeria 30-Day Deadline on Environmental Cleanup. A pro-autonomy group in southern Nigeria, the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People (MOSOP), on January 4th gave the Nigerian federal government a 30-day deadline to clean up oil-industry-related pollution in their territory as mandated by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP).  MOSOP’s president, Legborsi Pyagbara, said if the deadline passed without action, then “we will take up series of non-violent measures to press down our message.”  Meanwhile, a federal court in Lagos on January 14th summoned a former rebel leader from the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND).  The leader, named Government [sic] Ekpemupolo, a.k.a. Tompolo, was active in the 2000s.  He is now a wealthy oil tycoon and is wanted on corruption charges.  Meanwhile, a lawyer for the MEND activist Charles Okah, brother of MEND’s leader, Henry Okah, says that his client is being held in solitary confinement in Abuja’s Kuje prison because he blew the whistle on abuses within the prison.  He is serving a sentence for a deadly 2010 bombing.


Kabila Frees Jailed “Kongo Kingdom” Militants in Reconciliation Move. President Joseph Kabila of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (D.R.C.) marked the new year by commuting the life sentences of nine militants from the group Bundu Dia Kongo (B.D.K.).  The nine were arrested in 2009 after a battle with police whose death toll was officially 27 but, according to some, as high as 100.  B.D.K., whose name means Kingdom of Kongo, wants to restore the monarchy that predated European colonists in an area that now includes parts of Gabon, Angola, and coastal areas of both the D.R.C. and the neighboring Republic of the Congo.  Kabila said the announcement was part of a new project of “national unity” for the chronically war-torn country.





Kenyan Police Recover Weapons Caches from Al-Shabaab, Mombasa Separatists. Police in Kenyaannounced on January 5th that a series of arrests and raids on militant safe houses in the coastal region included the recovery of a rifle that was last seen being stripped from the body of a killed navy officer in February 2014 after an attack by the banned Mombasa Republican Council (M.R.C.), which seeks a separate state for the predominantly-Muslim areas of Kenya’s southern coast.  The rifle was recovered in the town of Majengo, a suburb of Mombasa.  Authorities are always keen to link the M.R.C. with Al-Shabaab, a Somalia-based Islamist terrorist network which also operates in Kenya, though the M.R.C. is far more moderate in its Islam.  The same day, an M.R.C. suspect arrested for illegal fundraising along with 41 others told a court in nearby Kwale that the M.R.C. is nearly broke.  Even the operational expenses of the group’s chairman, Omar Mwamnuadzi, he said, must be gotten through fundraising.

Kenyan police display seized weaponry

Uganda’s Ankole Royal House Dismisses New Claimant to Throne. A claimant to the throne of Uganda’s disestablished Ankole Kingdomis in a war of words with the institution representing the deposed royal house.  William Katatumba, the kingdom’s prime minister, referred to the claimant, Umar Asiimwe, as a “mere spoiler” who is hurting, not helping, the cause of Ankole restoration.  “He is joking,” “Prince” Asiimwe responded hotly, “and he will not threaten me in my effort to reclaim my grandfather’s throne that was grabbed by selfish people who have never been in the kingdom lineage.  If he thinks Prince Rwebishenge is the king, let him call the Ankole elders, we will perform cultural rituals in order to see the rightful king.”  Charles Aryaija Rwebishegye Notomi ya Rugazinda was unofficially coronated as Mugabe (king) of the Ankole in 2011, after the death of his father, Prince John Patrick Barigye (1940-2011), who was King Ntare VI.  Asiimwe claims to be the fourth grandson of Ntare VI.

The royal pretender: Prince Umar Asiimwe

Busongora Monarchy Denounces Foreign Minister’s Son Claiming to be New King. In another of Uganda’s kingdoms, Busongora, ministers and members of the royal family denounced the royal pretense of Dan Kashagama Bazira, son of a former Busongora foreign minister, who declared himself king in November.  Apollo Bwebale, son of the late king Apollo Bwebale Kabumba V, was crowned king early in 2015, but his long stretches of time out of the kingdom have inspired a movement to remove him.  Kashagama also calls himself chairman of the kingdom’s governing council.

Another royal pretender: Dan Kashagama Bazira

ASIA





India Beefs Up Dalai Lama’s Security, Claiming Chinese Assassination Plot.  The People’s Republic of Chinaclaimed on January 4th that the government of India was trying to “frame” China by deploying extra security around the exiled Dalai Lama to defend against supposed “well-trained female agents” dispatched by Beijing to kill him.  Indian media cited government sources in saying that “there have been several instances in the recent past when alleged Chinese spies with maps and documents containing secret information have been arrested around his residence” in Dharamsala, India.  A Chinese government statement on the Tibet Autonomous Region’s official website noted, “Claims that China is sending spies to assassinate Dalai Lama are groundless as he has been snubbed by many countries and has lost his international influence.”

Target of an assassination plot?

Beijing Shutters Tibetan Hotel That Caved to Employee Ire over Language Policy. A hotel in a Tibetan autonomous prefecture in China’s Qinghai province was shut down this month by the authorities after ethnic-Tibetan employees protested hotel rules banning the Tibetan language.  On January 7th, the Shangyon Hotel, in Rebkong County, eventually rescinded the policy and apologized to employees—prompting the shutdown, ordered from above.  These developments leaked to the outside world via social media.  Apparently as a result of the controversy over the hotel, Tibetan was given official-language status alongside Chinese in Rebkong, which is part of Qinghai’s Malho (Huangnan) Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture.

Leaked photo of tortured political prisoner Kalsang Tsering

Situation Dire for Tortured Tibetan Political Prisoner Airlifted to Chengdu. A former political prisoner in Chinahas been airlifted from Lhasa, the Tibet Autonomous Region’s capital, to Chengdu for medical treatment on January 12th, according to Radio Free Asia, to treat him for injuries resulting from torture while in prison.  But R.F.A. adds that “there is little hope for his recovery” since his main injury, a large open wound in his back, “had failed to respond to treatment following his release, and his condition today remains critical.”  The former prisoner, Kalsang Tsering, was arrested in 2008 during protests held to coincide with the Olympics in Beijing.  140 Tibetans were murdered by the “People’s Liberation Army” and other authorities in the crackdown that followed.

Ursula Gauthier (right)

Beijing Expels French Journalist Critical of Treatment of Uyghur Minority. A journalist from Francehad to leave China this month after criticizing the government’s treatment of Uyghurs, a Muslim minority who are a majority in the far-western Xinjiang Uyghur “Autonomous Region.” The journalist, Ursula Gauthier, had been a correspondent in Beijing for the French magazine L’Obs (formerly Le Nouvel Observateur) since 2009.  In November, after the Islamist terrorist attacks in Paris, she wrote that the Chinese Communist Party’s rhetoric of solidarity with France in the fight against terrorism was hypocritical, given what she called “the merciless crushing of the Muslim Uyghur minority.”  Gauthier, a Chinese foreign ministry spokesman lied, “overtly advocates for acts of terrorism and killings of innocent civilians,” and so, he said, “it is no longer appropriate for her to continue working in China.”

Police manhandle a Hong Kong protestor as she prepares to trample a P.R.C. flag.

Hong Kongers Protest “Disappearances” of 5 Booksellers Critical of Beijing. Thousands of people rallied in the streets of Hong Kong on January 10th to protest the plight of five booksellers from a single bookshop who have been missing since late last year and are presumed to have been “disappeared” by China’s central government for selling books critical of China and its leadership.  The practice of abducting people in the dead of night and whisking them away to reeducation camps or torture chambers for merely whispering any criticism of Beijing is the norm in mainland China but has largely been absent from Hong Kong, because of the “one country, two systems” principle underlying the deal by which the United Kingdom surrendered Hong Kong to China in 1984 (it was handed over in 1997); human rights are to be preserved in the Hong Kong “Special Administrative Region.” After the “Umbrella Revolution” of 2014, directed at Beijing’s refusal to allow direct democracy in the territory, an increase in “disappearances” could be what pushes Hong Kongers over the edge toward full-blown separatism.

This protestor spells out “Kidnapped!”

Kashmiri Separatists Distance Themselves from Islamists after Air Base Siege.  In India, Asiya Andrabi of Dukhtaran-e-Milat (“Daughters of the Nation”), which struggles for independence for Kashmir, found herself pressed to deny that her group has any links to the Islamic State (a.k.a. ISIS) terror group after three cousins from Hyderabad were arrested in December trying to fly to Srinagar in order, they claimed, to meet with Andrabi, who they said was promising to help recruit them for ISIS.  The three were nephews of Syed Salahuddin, the former head of the Students Islamic Movement of India (SIMI) who now heads the radical Islamist separatist militia the United Jihad Council (U.J.C.).  Meanwhile, the revered Syed Ali Shah Geelani, who heads the secessionist but religiously moderate Hurriyat Conference, said that ISIS was “anti-Islamic” and said young Kashmiris should not be waving its flags.  “Those fighting for Daesh,” he said, using a derogatory term for ISIS, “are actually murderers who are spilling innocent blood and are not in any way representing Islam.”  Kashmiri separatists are also believed to be behind a three-day-long siege that followed a January 2nd rebel attack on an Indian air force base at Pathankot, just over the border from Kashmir in Punjab state, that left 14 people dead.  The U.J.C., which wants an independent Kashmir, claimed responsibility for the attack, saying it was carried out by a brigade called the National Highway Squad, a previously unknown group.  But the Indian government has been focusing its arrests and investigation on an allied separatist Islamist group, Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM, or “Army of Muhammad”).

A minority of Kashmiri separatists have gone over to the dark side.

Kashmir Rebel Warns Pakistan Not to Provoke India by Annexing Baltistan.  The head of India’s separatist Jammu Kashmir Liberation Front (J.K.L.F.), Muhammad Yasin Malik, warned Pakistan’s prime minister, Nawaz Sharif, on January 12th that any plans to integrate the autonomous region of Gilgit-Baltistan more closely into Pakistan would have repercussions in Kashmir.  Gilgit-Baltistan, along with “Free Jammu and Kashmir,” is part of the Pakistani-controlled portion of the disputed state of Jammu and Kashmir.  India’s portion is the Indian state called simply Jammu and Kashmir.  “If Pakistan imposes its sovereign writ over Gilgit Baltistan,” Malik wrote in a letter, “India will then have a political and moral right to integrate Kashmir with it.  With one stroke, Pakistan will be helping India to consolidate its writ on Kashmir.”  Gilgit-Baltistan is largely self-governing, but its residents have been lobbying for a referendum giving them the right to choose whether to be part of India, China, or Pakistan or be an independent Republic of Balawaristan.




Baloch Militants Claim Responsibility for Lethal Landmine in Pakistan. Two members of Pakistan’s coast guard died, and three were injured, when their vehicle hit a landmine on January 9th in the separatist province of Balochistan, near the border with Iran.  The incident occurred in the town of Koldan.  The Baloch Liberation Army (B.L.A.) claimed responsibility for the bomb, adding, “We will continue targeting Pakistani forces.”


Maoist Ex-Premier of Nepal Blames India for Madheshi Autonomy Movement. A Communist former prime minister in Nepal on January 5th accused political parties pushing for autonomy for the southern Madheshi region as stooges of India’s government.  Pushpa Kamal Dahal, a.k.a. Prachanda, who served as premier briefly in 2008 and 2009 after ten years as a Maoist rebel leader, is today chairman of the Unified Communist Party of Nepal–Maoist (U.C.P.N.–M).  He says that leaders of the Terai Madhes Loktantrik Party are “working at the behest of India.”  He said that C. K. Raut, a computer scientist and separatist currently under house arrest, and Jai Krishna Goit, founder of the separatist Janatantrik Terai Mukti Morcha, are the movement’s “military wing.”  This comes after months of unrest following a Nepali constitution adopted in September which southerners feel denies them regional autonomy.

If the Madheshi people seceded from Nepal, they would have a very very skinny country.

Malaysia Arrests Acehnese Sorceress Calling Herself “Queen of Malay Archipelago.” A woman from Indonesiawas arrested with her husband in Malaysia’s Malacca state on January 8th on charges of “impersonation,” after holding an “investiture ceremony” that she claimed legitimized her as royalty.  Calling herself “Queen of the Malay Archipelago” (she also uses the title “Queen Mother”), the 37-year-old, who goes by the name Her Majesty Bonda Ratu Kuasa Alam Kesumo Dinigratd Tun Saripah Muraini, also claims to be the daughter of the “Queen of the South Sea” (Ratu Laut Selatan) (a folkloric ocean deity), and she bears a ceremonial dragon’s-head dagger which she said was bequeathed to her “from the skies.”  She also claims supernatural powers, including the ability to control the weather.  Police confiscated her passport, removed several weapons from her home, and began an investigation into her identity.  She claims ancestry in both Turkey and in Indonesia’s westernmost and most conservatively Muslim region, Aceh, not far from Malaysia.  Her 45-year-old husband, whom she says she married at age 14, is Malaysian.  Two years ago, she formally applied to the Malaysian government for the restoration of what she claims is her sultanate—though none of the titles or domains she refers to actually exist.  The Sultanate of Malacca, whose territory included the arrestees’ current home, Sungai Rambai, was dissolved in the 16th century.  But she told an interviewer at that time that she was not interested in that crown, since with her current royal status 184 sultans in the Malay Archipelago are under her patronage.

Her Royal Majesty displays her mystic dagger from Heaven

OCEANIA





Indonesian Police Kill Papua Rebel Involved in Deadly December Attack.  The national police force in Indonesia announced January 11th that they had launched an operation against separatist forces in the far-eastern Papua region, resulting in the death of one member of the Free Papua Movement (Organisasi Papua Medeka, or O.P.M.).  Police claimed the dead man had played a role in an attack on a police station on December 27th in which three police were killed.  A second O.P.M. was said to be injured in the recent operation.

Don’t mess with the O.P.M.

Monarchist Separatists in Hawai‘i Seek Official Party Status. In Hawai‘i, a pro-independence organization called the Aloha Aina Partyhas begun the process of establishing itself as a registered political party.  It will need 707 voter signatures by February 25th.  The party was founded by three members of the Royal Order of Kamehameha, including Pua Ishibashi, land manager at the Office of Hawai‘ian Affairs.  Their goals include secession from the United States and restoring the Kingdom of Hawai‘i.

NORTH AMERICA





Right-Wing Militants Seize Oregon Federal Buildings to Protest Federal Land Policy.  Federal buildings at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in southeastern Oregon are still under occupation by extremist right-wing militants after a January 2nd take-over.  The occupiers, who are heavily armed—and some of whom have ties to white supremacists and other hate groups—seem to be led by three sons of Cliven Bundy, an openly racist anti-government rancher from southern Nevada who led an armed uprising in 2014 against federal agents trying to enforce his payment of grazing fees—and made the feds back down.  That dynamic is in play now in Oregon, since police and state authorities are staying far away from the occupied buildings and claim they will not intervene, though they are letting food and supplies in.  The events began as a protest against the imprisonment of two Oregon ranchers charged with arson on federal lands run by the Bureau of Land Management (B.L.M.).  The Bundys believe that there should not be such thing as federal land.  Land, they and their followers claim, belongs to the people who work the land—ironically, for these ultra-conservatives, echoing the ideology of radical socialist land-reformers in places like Latin America.  The Bundys’ conservative Mormonism may play a role in the ideological stew of white supremacism, anarcho-libertarianism, firearms fetishism, and good-ol’-boy frontier mentality that informs this mini-movement.  One activist in the occupied building who spoke to the media identified himself only as “Captain Moroni, from Utah.”  Some observers think that this is designed to appeal to Mormons who will recognize the reference to the figure of the same name in the dog’s breakfast of 19th-century pseudo-scientific gobbledygook called the Book of Mormon who rallied the Nephites (a fictional ancient tribe) against a corrupt king under a “flag of liberty.”  The Malheur occupiers found some support from the novelist and neo-Nazi Harold Covington, founder of the Northwest Front organization, which aims to create an all-white Northwest American Republic that would include Oregon.  “Looks like someone may have decided to start the revolution without us,” Covington wrote on January 4th, adding, in reference to the massacre at a South Carolina church last summer by a fan of the Northwest Front, “What Dylann Roof did was a hissy fit.  This is not.  There is in fact a worthy cause here, a legitimate casus belli.”  In the most recent development, the militants are threatening to set up vigilante “citizen’s grand juries” to try in absentia public officials accused of violating (the militants’ reading of) the U.S. Constitution.  Meanwhile, the chairwoman of the Burns Paiute tribe, whose homeland includes Harney County and the occupation site, objected strongly to the Bundys and their followers’ claim to be “defenders” of the land against the federal government.  “Don’t tell me any of these ranchers came across the Bering Strait,” she said.  “We were here first.  We’d like the public to acknowledge that.”  Paiutes “don’t need some clown coming in here to stand up for us,” added Jarvis Kennedy, of the tribal council: “We survived without them before.”  (See my recent blog article on the Oregon standoff.)

The Bundy brothers—or at least two of them

California Counties File Secession Papers at “State of Jefferson” Rally at Capitol.  Proponents of creating a separate “State of Jefferson” in California’s far north rallied on January 6th in front of the state Capitol building in Sacramento.  Mark Baird, a retired pilot from Siskiyou County, at the Oregon border, who is the most prominent Jeffersonian separatist, stood on the Capitol steps to tell about 200 supporters standing in the rain that it was Jefferson’s “Declaration Day.”  Organizers said they had submitted to the legislature declarations from 15 of California’s 58 counties, requesting the right to secede and join Jefferson.  This brings, they said, the total number of such county declarations formally submitted to 21.  But the Keep It California political action committee (PAC) has poured cold water on those claims, pointing out that although voters in Tehama County and the boards of supervisors in Siskiyou, Modoc, Glenn, Sutter, and Yuba counties have approved the Jefferson proposal, voters in Del Norte County and boards in Trinity, Shasta, Sierra, Lake, Alpine, and—as of January 12th—Plumas counties have rejected the plans.  Lassen County has plans to put the measure before voters.  (On the eve of the rally, the county board in Sierra County, voted 3-2 to opt out of the State of Jefferson movement.)  This all suggests that many county applications were filed by individual activists without any political mandate.  At the rally, Baird waxed libertarian in railing against the environmental and other policies of the state government under Governor Jerry Brown, whom he compared to the Soviet dictator Josef Stalin.  “The government,” Baird said, “was not instituted to keep you safe from bad baby carriages and raw milk.  It was instituted to protect liberty.”  The closest thing to an ally Jeffersonians have within the state legislature, however, is Assemblyman James Gallagher, a Republican from Yuba City, in Sutter County, but on the day of the rally he told a reporter, “I sympathize with their frustrations, but this is not part of my legislative package.”






Charges Dropped against North Dakota Mayor for Burning White-Supremacist Buildings. The mayor of Leith, North Dakota, the hamlet targeted in 2013 and 2014 by the white supremacist Craig Cobb, who wanted to turn-it into an all-white “Pioneer Little Europe” called Cobbsville, was set to go on trial January 12th in Carson, North Dakota, for failing to control or report a house fire, but on January 6th the charges against him were dropped for want of evidence.  The charges against the mayor, Ryan Schock, stemmed from an incident in 2014, after Cobb had been arrested on terrorism charges for menacing the community: the town government was burning down condemned homes formerly owned by Cobb which reverted to municipal ownership, but the blaze spread dangerously.  Cobb, who is serving a four-year probation, lives in nearby Sherwood.  Meanwhile, in Antler, North Dakota, where Cobb tried and failed to buy up property last year for a similar “Aryan enclave” project, a disused bank building which was among the properties the municipal government bought up to thwart the takeover will be ceremonially burned after Schock’s trial, but Schock does not plan to attend that event.

“Cobbsville” during the height of the crisis

Gullah–Geechees Sue Georgia for Destruction of Language, Culture on Resort Island. On Sapelo Island, a resort area off the coast of Georgia, local African-Americans who identify as Gullah–Geecheefiled a federal lawsuit against the State of Georgia this month, claiming that touristic development on the island is forcing them out and threatening their language and culture.  “You’re looking at the deprivation of our human and civil rights through public corruption,” said one of the plaintiffs, Reginald Hall, adding, “The state is violating land ownership rights outside of what the Constitution of the United States of America has written.”  There are an estimated 36 remaining Gullah–Geechees on the island, in a community called Hog Hummock.  The suit singles out R. J. Reynolds, Jr., the tobacco tycoon, for buying up most of the island and crowding the Gullah–Geechees into a small area.

Queen Quet of the Gullah/Geechee Nation (though she is not a party to the current lawsuit)

War Criminal Šešelj Asks Serb-Americans to Vote for Trump; Neo-Nazis Agree. Along with racists, xenophobes, gun nuts, homophobes, and people who believe the Earth is flat, Donald Trumpmay be poised to win over yet another constituency in his quest for the presidential nomination for the Republican Party: Serbian-Americans.  Vojislav Šešelj, a legislator and founder of the Serbian Radical Party, is awaiting sentencing by an international court for crimes against humanity in the Bosnian War, and on January 3rd he announced on Twitter, “I call on brother Serbs who live in the USA to strongly support Republican Party candidate Donald Trump in the upcoming presidential elections.”  Šešelj, who believes that Serbia should invade and decimate the Muslim populations in Bosnia and Kosovo, is especially enamored of Trump’s plan to force Muslims to register with the government and for the borders to be closed to any Muslims wanting to come to the U.S.  Also this month, the Southern Poverty Law Center (S.P.L.C.), which tracks hate groups, reported that two prominent white supremacists, Jared Taylor of the New Century Foundation and William Johnson of the American Freedom Party (A.F.P.) lent their angry voices to robocalls directed at caucus voters in Iowa, asking people to vote for Trump.  The A.F.P. also has its own presidential candidate, Bob Whitaker, whose campaign slogan is “Diversity Is a Code Word for White Genocide.”  Trump also has the support of the Ku Klux Klan grand wizard David Duke and the Council of Conservative Citizens hate group.

“Would you like some Kosovar casserole with some sauer-Croat on the side?” War criminal Vojislav Šešelj posted this defiant photo on Twitter recently after someone called him a “butcher.”

Airborne South Carolina Neo-Confederates Buzz G.O.P. Debate Site with Treason Slogan. In South Carolina, scene of last year’s white-supremacist massacre at an African-American church, a newly minted hate group called Save Southern Heritageprotested Governor Nikki Haley’s order to remove the Confederate flag from the statehouse last year by flying over Charleston on January 14th with a plane trailing a banner that reads, “No Votes for Turncoats.”  The occasion was the Republican Party presidential debate being held just below, where most candidates have distanced themselves from the suddenly widely stigmatized Confederate flag but in other respects were falling over themselves trying to see who could sound the most racist and xenophobic.  A press release from Save Southern Heritage explained, “This is a message to Mrs. Haley and the other G.O.P. traitors who turned their back on the average S.C. voter by bringing down the Confederate Memorial flag at the Statehouse Confederate Memorial.  We will not forget this treason!”  (American neo-Confederates are listed in my article last month on “Ten Separatist Movements to Watch in 2016.”)



LATIN AMERICA





Tijuana Mayoral Candidate Backed by “Republic of Baja California” Movement.  One of the four candidates who declared this month their intention to run for mayor of Tijuana, a border city in northwestern Mexico, draws his support from the movement for the surrounding state, Baja California, to secede from Mexico.  The candidate, Gastón Luken Garza, formerly served as a legislator affiliated with the opposition National Action Party (Partido Acción Nacional, or PAN) before recent constitutional changes allowing independent candidates.  Luken’s platform includes mass-transit reform and anti-corruption efforts, but he is funded by the group Republica de Baja California (R.B.C.), which formed a few years ago to protest tax reforms that threatened the system of border-state maquiladoras on which much of Baja’s economy depends.  One R.B.C. co-founder, César Faz, says, “We formed a team in which people like Gastón, ... myself, and others can work with themes of convergence, without the prior agendas controlled by the heads of political parties.”



SPORTS





New “Western Armenia” Football Club Loses to Marseille in First Friendly.  The Football Federation of Western Armenialost in a 3-2 friendly against Olympique de Marseille on January 6th in what was its first match.  The newly formed team became a member last June of the Confederation of Independent Football Associations (ConIFA), which aims to give athletic representation to stateless nations.  “Western Armenia” is the name for the Armenian territories lost when the Republic of Turkey swallowed up planned Kurdish and Armenian homelands after the First World War, but the F.F.W.A. is said to, in one journalist’s words, aim “to unite all football players who make up the Armenia Diaspora with the sport of soccer.”  The club includes footballers from Yerevan (Armenia’s capital), Istanbul, and elsewhere in the world.  (See my recent blog article on some of ConIFA’s unsavory bedfellows.)



[You can read more about all these and other sovereignty and independence 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.]

TOP STORY



TSAI ING-WEN ELECTED TAIWAN PRESIDENT FOR PRO-INDEPENDENCE PARTY—FIRST FEMALE LEADER OF A CHINESE-SPEAKING COUNTRY

In Taiwan, Tsai Ing-wen, a 59-year-old legal scholar, was elected on January 16th to be president of the Republic of China (R.O.C.) and the first female chief executive in the Chinese-speaking world (which also includes mainland China, Hong Kong, Macau, and Singapore).  With 56% of the popular vote, her Democratic Progressive Party (D.P.P.), which favors looser ties with—and even formal independence from—the People’s Republic of China, unseated Ma Ying-jeo of the long-ruling Kuomintang (KMT), the party that persists in the conceit that the R.O.C. is the merely temporarily sidelined true government of all of China.  But President-Elect Tsai made clear that she does not intend to provoke Beijing with any kind of independence declaration, which would almost certainly precipitate war.


Teen Pop Star Publicly Shamed for Waving Taiwanese Flag on Korean TV.  In a bizarre sideline to the Taiwanese elections and the emotions it aroused, a 16-year-old K-pop singer from Taiwan named Tzuyu felt the need to apologize publicly on YouTube after a furor over her waving a Republic of China flag in November in an online-only segment of a television variety show in South Korea called My Little Television.  It was little noticed outside Korea at the time, but another Taiwan-born pop singer, Huang An, an apologist for China’s Communist Party, complained about it on mainland China’s heavily government-controlled social-network site Weibo in January, wondering aloud whether Tzuyu (whose full name is Chou Tzuyu) was in favor of Taiwanese independence.  Tzuyu—noted for the song “Like Ooh-Ahh”—was also criticized for referring to herself as Taiwanese instead of Chinese.  Tzuyu is a member of an all-girl band called Twice, which also includes three members from Japan and five South Koreans.  Huang An’s exposé led to the cancellation of both an appearance by Twice on Chinese television and a cellphone endorsement deal for Tzuyu that had been in the works.  “Tzuyu, only 16, has limited political experience and can hardly take a political stance,” read a formal statement from JYP Entertainment, which represents Twice.  “But the rumor has damaged our image in China and jeopardized our relations with Chinese partners.”  In Tzuyu’s apology video, she bows, apologizes for hurting Chinese national feeling, and asserts that there is and always will be only one China.  (And she loves Big Brother.)  Even President-Elect Tsai (see above) chimed in on the controversy, saying, “I believe everyone feels hurt and angry to see that Chou was forced to do what she was made to do. ...  Everyone should unite to voice their belief to the world that no national of the Republic of China should be [attacked] for identifying with her country.”

The Taiwanese pop singer Tzuyu (top left) in the offending K-pop video that caused the international furor. Clearly, these girls are hardened criminals who deserve to be forcefully broughtinto ideological line by guardians of socialist propriety like Huang An.

EUROPE



New Catalan President Seems to Rule Out Unilateral Independence Declaration.  The newly elected separatist president of Cataloniaclarified this month that, despite his vow to achieve independence from Spain within 18 months, there would not be a unilateral declaration of independence.  The president, Carles Puigdemont, asked a television interviewer rhetorically, “Do we have sufficient strength to declare independence for Catalonia with this parliament?”, then answered, “Still no.”  Puigdemont took office on January 10th (as reported recently in this blog), with a promise to achieve independence within 18 months.


Spain Reduces Sentences for 35 Basque Separatists in Plea Deal. Thirty-five Basque separatists from north-central Spainwere given relatively short prison terms on January 21st after a plea deal in which they confessed to being members of the armed pro-independence group Basque Homeland and Freedom (Euskadi Ta Askatasuna, or ETA) and promised to renounce violence.  This reduced their to 18 to 24 months, from a possible 10 years.  Officially at least, ETA laid down its arms in 2011.


Blair Warns an E.U. “Brexit” Would Set Scottish Secession in Motion.  The United Kingdom’s former prime minister Tony Blair warned the British public on January 26th that if the U.K. voted to leave the European Union (E.U.), it would almost certainly lead to Scotland voting to leave the U.K.  Speaking about the upcoming vote this (probably) June on a British exit—a “Brexit,” as the idea is known—Blair said that, “If Scotland is taken out of the E.U. against its will, then obviously there will have been a fundamental breakdown in what should be a partnership of nations and it is highly likely that this would trigger an overwhelming demand for a second Scottish independence referendum.”  Anti-E.U. sentiment is far higher in England and Northern Ireland than in Scotland and Wales—in fact, with Scotland’s 5 million people to England’s 53 million, Scotland has realistically no voice at all in the referendum—and Scotland only narrowly defeated an independence resolution in a 2014 referendum, with differing attitudes toward Brussels being very much in play.  Even the Scottish National Party’s leader Nicola Sturgeon, First Minister of Scotland, says a second independence referendum in the event of a Brexit would be “unstoppable.”  And a former S.N.P. leader, Gordon Wilson, said he was even considering, like many fellow Scots, voting to ditch Brussels for the sole reason of making Scottish independence more likely.  “I helped steer the S.N.P. towards [a pro-]European policy” in the 1970s, he pointed out, “but certain things have happened and ... I want to look at it from the Scottish viewpoint.”

Tony Blair, campaigning against Scottish independence two years ago

Mebyon Kernow Urges London to Make 2016 “Year of Cornish Recognition.”  The deputy leader of the United Kingdom’s Party for Cornwall (Mebyon Kernow, or M.K.) said at this year’s first party executive session that the British Parliament needs to make 2016 the year of “Cornish recognition.”  “It is almost two years,” said the deputy, Loveday Jenkin, “since the British government bowed to years of pressure and recognised that the framework covered the Cornish.  But they have since failed to act on this important convention in terms of the political recognition of Cornwall, and the protection of its distinct territoriality.  They have also failed to properly invest in Cornwall’s distinct culture and identity.  Mebyon Kernow believes that 2016 must be the year that Cornish recognition—in terms of politics and governance, territoriality and culture—becomes a mainstream issue across the U.K.”  The M.K. economics spokesman, Andrew Long added that London owes Cornwall recognition “as one of the historic nations of the United Kingdom,” as deserving of devolution as Scotland or Wales.


Le Pen Breathes Xenophobic Fire in Milan as Padanian, Flemish Separatists Cheer. Right-wing separatist, ultra-nationalist, and other delegates cheered on January 24th as Marine Le Pen, leader of France’s ascendant neo-fascist National Front (Front national, or F.N.), addressed a thousand or so delegates at a rally in Milan for the European Parliament’s far-right, xenophobic Europe of Nations and Freedom (E.N.F.) caucus.  In her remarks, she said that the current influx of Middle Eastern migrants to Europe would “impoverish European nations and kill their civility forever.”  Among the other parties in attendance were the United Kingdom Independence Party, Italy’s Northern League (Lega Nord), and Belgium’s Flemish Interest (Vlaams Belang) party.

Marine Le Pen, preaching hate with a smile in Milan, with a Flemish flag in the background

Corsican Leader Irks Paris, Calling France Allied Country, Not Parent Country.  The president of the Corsican Assembly, the regional legislature of the French-ruled island of Corsica, ruffled French feathers this month when he told a radio interviewer that he regarded France as a “pays ami,” i.e. a friendly country, or, translated more idiomatically, an allied state.  It sounds friendly on the face of it, but the implication is that Corsica is not part of France.  The Corsican leader, Jean-Guy Talamoni, who was in Paris for talks with Prime Minister Manuel Valls in preparation for new demands for Corsican autonomy to be written into the French constitution.  Corsican separatists took control of the regional assembly in elections late last year.


Aigues-Mortes to Host 2016 Summit of Francophone Micronations. The Principality of Aigues-Mortes, a micronation surrounded by southern France’s Camargue region, announced this month that it would be hosting the first annual summit of the Organization of MicroFrancophonie (Organisation de la MicroFrancophonie, or O.M.F.), an organization of French-speaking micronations, on September 23rd and 24th of this year.  In addition to Aigues-Mortes, a Medieval walled city which mints its own quasi-currency, other O.M.F. members include the Empire of Angyalistan (whose territory is “the horizon”), the Grand Duchy of Flandrensis (headquartered in Belgium), the Principality of Green Island (Principauté de l’Île Verte, off the coast of Newfoundland, Canada), the Principality of Hélianthis, the Republic of Padrhom (an acronym for Pays des Droits de l’Homme, i.e. “Country of Human Rights”), the State of Sandus (co-extensive with the State of Maryland in the United States), and the Republic of Valinois–Saint-Castin (which seceded in 2014 from the Federal Republic of St. Charlie, within Quebec), as well as the Republic of Jura, an actual, concrete secessionist movement in northwestern Switzerland.  The O.M.F.’s secretary general is Her Serene HighnessOlivia-Eugènie of Aigues-Mortes.  (See a recent article in this blog for more on Aigues-Mortes, Angyalistan, and Flandrensis.)

Princess Olivia-Eugènie and Prince Jean-Pierre IV, center, flanked by the Emperor of Angyalistan, the Queen of Ladonia, and other dignitaries

Swedish Saami Say Planned Norwegian Soapstone Mine Threatens Reindeer Herds.  An indigenous Saami (Lappish) community in northern Sweden is bristling in opposition to plans to construct a soapstone mining operation in highly valued reindeer grazing lands.  The community, Sirga, consists of about 300 Saami people and over 15,000 reindeer.  Sirga’s chief, Jakob Nygård, said, “We have had reindeer in this area for a long time.  Noise from machines and equipment will disrupt our practices.  All the mountains will be mined.  We need to start examining what will happen.  ...  We will see what we can do.”  Sirga is in the vicinity of Hamarøy, just over the border in Norway.  A Norwegian firm, Leonhard Nilsen & Sønner, has bought the rights to the soapstone deposits, previously thought too costly to extract.

The Saami community leader Jakob Nygård, pictured here with some of the threatened land in dispute

Bosniaks in Serbia Rally for Autonomy for Sandžak Region. In Novi Pazar, in southwestern Serbia, local Muslim Bosniaksrallied on January 17th demanding autonomy for the Sandžak region.  Sulejman Ugljanin, president of the Bosniak National Council (B.N.V.) and the Party of Democratic Action (S.D.A.), said that self-rule for the Bosniak-dominated region along the border with Montenegro was the only way to protect local residents from the government in Belgrade, whose members “behave as if they were the owners of the lives of Sandžak’s citizens.”  Referring to corruption and to violence against Bosniaks, Ugljanin added, “This savagery has reached its peak.  We need to stop this evil.”

Serbian Bosniaks rallying for autonomy in Novi Pazar

Kosovo Serb Gets 9 Years for War Crimes; K.L.A. Commando Starves Self in Prison. A former commando in the Kosovo Liberation Army (K.L.A.) entered the fifth day of a hunger strike on January 19th, in protest over the refusal of medical treatment.  The prisoner, Sami Lushtaku, is being held in a prison in Podujevë, near Pristina.  He began his 12-year prison sentence in May 2015 after being sentenced on war-crimes charges, including the murder of an Albanian civilian in 1998.  Meanwhile, on January 21st, a Kosovar Serbwas sentenced to nine years in prison by a European Union (E.U.) court for war crimes against ethnic Albanian Kosovars.  The convict, Oliver Ivanović, committed the crimes in 1999 during the Kosovo War.  Serbia’s president, Aleksandar Vucić, said that the conviction “looks more like political force than law or justice.”  In a separate trial, 11 Serbs being retried in an old case pleaded innocent to war-crimes charges on January 25th for offenses committed during the Kosovo War, including looting, killing, and torturing ethnic Albanians in four villages in 1999, with the larger goal of ethnic cleansing.  Meanwhile, three opposition leaders in Kosovo called on January 22nd for mass protests against the current government, and even called for toppling the government by force, in anger over government accommodations with Serbia and Montenegro over the status of the ethnic-Serb minority in the country.  The statement said that unless the current administration cancelled the agreements by February 17th—the eighth anniversary of Kosovo’s declaration of independence—then citizens would overthrow the government.  The three parties are the Kosovo Self-Determination Party, the Alliance for the Future of Kosovo, and Initiative for Kosovo.

Sultan Murad I

Kosovars Torn over Proposal to Name Community Center for Ottoman Conqueror.  In the town of Obiliq, in Kosovo (spelled Obilić in Serbian), a dispute has been raging over what to name a new community center.  The government of Turkey, through its local embassy, had offered to build the center in exchanged for naming it after Sultan Murad I, who was killed by a Serbian knight at the Battle of Kosovo in 1389, in the midst of the Ottoman Empire’s expansion into the Balkans.  Fortunately or unfortunately, that Serbian knight, Miloš Obilić, is the man for whom the town was named, back when it used to be more Serb than Albanian.  The mayor of Obilić, Xhaferr Gashi, felt constrained to refuse the Turkish proposal.  Why, though, if an enemy of the Serbs is to be celebrated?  After all, the Republic of Kosovo is struggling for legitimacy after seceding bloodily from the Republic of Serbia in 1999; Serbia still claims it.  As it turns out, ethnic Albanians, who make up the majority in Obilić and in Kosovo, are not necessarily pro-Ottoman.  They tend to be proud of the fact that a mixed army of Serbs and Albanians resisted Ottoman conquest over the centuries.  One city councillor, Teuta Berisha, from the Alliance for the Future of Kosovo party, put it this way: “We do not want a sultan in our municipality because our people have had too many invaders already.”
Moldova Tightens Cordon around Transnistria as Public Decries New Premier.  The foreign ministry of Transnistria said on January 27th that Moldova’s border authorities have been tightening the border between the self-declared republic and Moldova proper, with a new policy of deporting any Transnistrians Ukrainian and Russian passports that try to cross into Moldova.  Transnistria says the new strictures “exceed the boundaries set by [bilateral] agreements,” which include guarantees of free movement within reason.  The tensions came only a week after ongoing anti-government protests in Moldova’s capital, Chisinau, became violent with hundreds (some sources, less plausibly, said “tens of thousands”) of people storming the parliament in anger on January 20th after the body chose Pavel Filip as prime minister.  The protestors, some chanting in Russian, focused their anger on financial misdeeds that have bankrupted the country, though others emphasized Filip’s unexpectedly pro–European Union stance.  Some shouted that Moldova must choose between being in the E.U.’s orbit or in Russia’s.

Unrest in Chisinau (pictured here) is reverberating in Transnistria as well.

At Least 5 Killed in Intermittent Fighting in Rebel-Held Eastern Ukraine. Despite a supposed cease-fire, ongoing intermittent shelling in the civil war in southeastern Ukraine’s Donbas region claimed a victim on January 23rd, with one Ukrainian soldier killed and another injured after an attack by pro-Russian rebels near Bulavynske, in the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic (D.P.R.).  Some rebel attacks have used missile launchers and other weapons banned under the Minsk accords.  Two days later, the D.P.R. announced that shelling by Ukrainian troops had killed two people—one a civilian—and wounded four others (two of them civilians).  Ten homes were also destroyed, the D.P.R. said.  And on January 31st the Ukrainian government announced that within the Donetsk oblast two Ukrainian soldiers had been killed—one in combat and one in a booby-trap, with three injured.

Igor Girkin, a.k.a. Igor Strelkov, a fan of Stalin-style vigilante courts and executions

Russian Rebel Commander Admits to Stalin-Style Executions in Southeast Ukraine. A colonel in Russia’s F.S.B. who was also commander of pro-Kremlin separatists in southeastern Ukraineappeared on Russian radio this month admitting to executing civilians.  The fighter, Igor Girkin, a.k.a. Igor Strelkov, was asked on Radio Komsomolskaya Pravda how he dealt with looters in Slovyansk, in the so-called Donetsk People’s Republic, and he said, “With executions”—executions carried out via a vigilante court modeled on 1941 military laws implemented under Josef Stalin.  He referred to four executions in Slovyansk, one of a supporter of the Right Sector.  Girkin also spoke of his dream of absorbing all of Ukraine and Belarus into an enlarged Russian Federation.


Kremlin May Be Planning to Replace Donetsk Rebel Leader with Yanukovych Crony.  The Kremlin puppet-masters in Moscow who control the self-styled Donetsk People’s Republic (D.P.R.) and Luhansk People’s Republic (L.P.R.) in eastern Ukraine are preparing to oust the D.P.R.’s current leader, Oleksandr Zakharchenko, according to a pro-Ukrainian group, the Information Resistance Group (I.R.G.).  Among the replacements being considered, according to the I.R.G., are two former cabinet members of the pro-Kremlin former president of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych, whose impeachment in 2013 accelerated the current conflict.  The two are Yanukovych’s former prime minister, Mykola Azarov, and his former first deputy prime minister, Serhiy Arbuzov.  Meanwhile, on January 25th, Zakharchenko blithely told a Youth Socio-Political Forum this month about how he oversaw the obliteration of the village of Kozhevnya in July 2014.  “It was our first offensive,” he said.  “Unfortunately, in the course of fighting we practically destroyed this village.  By burning down houses, we saved our lives and the lives of our people.”


Czech Communist Parliamentarians under Fire for Visit to Donetsk Republic. Two communist members of the Czech Republic’s parliament visited the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic for three days this month, causing a furor because they did it behind the backs of the Czech parliament and foreign ministry.  The two M.P.s, Zdeněk Ondráček and Stanislav Mackovik, are members of the Communist Party of the Czech Republic (K.S.C.M.), and Ondráček is on a list of people banned from entering Ukraine, and in December was hustled onto a plane by Ukrainian authorities and sent home to the Prague.  The government in Kyiv called the two Czechs’ entry into Ukraine illegal.

Donetsk Rebels Say “California Flu” Leaked by Secret American Lab Killed 20 Troops. The Donetsk People’s Republic’s propagandists betrayed their amateurism this month as press releases quoted Eduard Basurin, Vice-Commander of the republic’s army, in saying that the virus which recently killed 20 soldiers and hospitalized another 200 is something called the “California flu” and was intentionally released from a U.S. military facility near Kharkiv, in non-rebel-controlled eastern Ukraine.  Of course, there is no such thing as a “California flu,” and the D.P.R. paranoiacs fail to explain how releasing biological agents into the general population could be expected benefit one side over the other a close-fought, street-by-street civil war like the one in the Donbas.  Of course this doesn’t mean that most of D.P.R.’s Russian-speakers, their brains addled by Putinist propaganda, won’t fall for it hook, line, and sinker.

Eduard Basurin accuses Washington of covert bio-terrorism in Ukraine.

Tatar Leader Vows Blockade Will Continue Until Ukraine Reclaims Crimea.  A Crimean Tatar activist and former deputy prime minister of the Autonomous Republic of Crimea before Russia’s annexation vowed on January 19th that Tatar civilians’ blockade of the Crimean peninsula will continue until Russia, which invaded and annexed Crimea two years ago, withdraws and allows reunification with Ukraine.  The activist, Lenur Islyamov, said, “We showed the Tatars in Crimea, Ukrainians, and all pro-Ukrainian people that there is a genuine movement under way to free Crimea.”  He added, “Crimea is the land of the Crimean Tatars. It is our land.  “Therefore, when we organize an economic blockade, or an energy blockade, we are completely within our rights.  We are Crimean Tatars.  Crimea is our land.”  Meanwhile, Mikhail Kasyanov, a former prime minister of Russia under Vladimir Putin (2000-04) who now heads the anti-Putin People’s Freedom Party, met withMustafa Dzhemilev, the exiled Crimean Tatar leader, in Strasbourg, France, during a Council of Europe event and told him, “Accept my reassurances that Crimea will eventually be freed and returned to Ukraine.”



Puppet Tatar Forum in Crimea Condemns Pro-Ukrainian Muslims. A pro-Kremlin conclave of Crimean Tatars on January 16th condemned the main organization of Crimean Tatars, now based in Kyiv, Ukraine’s capital, as a “clone” organization tarred with the brush of radical Islam.  The conference, held in Simferopol, capital of the Republic of Crimea, which Russia illegally annexed two years ago, was called “New Challenges to the Unity of the Crimean Islamic Ummah” and included 450 delegates.  It praised the Department of Crimean Muslims, a pro-Moscow puppet organization, and and said that any Tatars opposition to that body “are condemned by Allah as a grave sin.”  It referred to Crimean Tatars allied with the Ukrainian government, which is recognized by most of the world as having sovereignty over Crimea, as being engaged in a “pseudo-jihad” which endangers the safety of those Tatars left in the peninsula.  Meanwhile, a Russian court in Simferopol, Crimea’s capital, ordered the arrest of Mustafa Dzhemiliev, the most prominent Crimean Tatar leader, who was exiled from his peninsula homeland two years ago as Russia invaded.

Ramzan Kadyrov and his dog Tarzan

Chechen President Parades Attack Dog, Vows Vengeance on Putin Critics. The Kremlin-appointed president of Russia’s Chechen Republic, Ramzan Kadyrov, amped up his rhetoric against any and all who oppose President Vladimir Putin on January 19th when he published an article in Izvestia channeling Soviet-era rhetoric in blaming “Western lackeys ... this pack of jackals” in the media and in the Russian diaspora who hate Russia and sling mud at her.  “The politics of these warriors for injustice,” he writes in the article, titled “The Jackals Will Be Punished under Russian Law,” “is an anti-people one that represents their own personal interests.  When they criticize all and sundry without grounds, using vile words and spraying spittle, they think that we will remain silent.  And when they get a tough response with mass support, they run to their defenders howling and tucking in their jackal’s tails.  If these dogs have their protectors in our country, then the main protector of the Russian people is the president of our country, Vladimir Putin, and I am prepared to carry out his orders, no matter how difficult.”  The article appeared two days after an ally of Kadyrov’s, Magomed Daudov, who is speaker of Chechnya’s parliament, posted on Instagram a photo (shown above) of Kadyrov with his pet dog Tarzan, a Caucasian shepherd, along with threatening comments.  “This is our old friend, Tarzan,” Daudov wrote.  “Tarzan just hates dogs of foreign stripes—especially American ones.”  He said that Tarzan’s “fangs were itching” to sink into the flesh of “traitors” against Putin.  A few days later, on January 22nd, a (possibly government-orchestrated) rally in support of Kadyrov was held in Grozny, the Chechen capital, drawing reportedly 700,000 people—half of Chechnya’s population.  Analysts are divided as to whether Putin approves of Kadyrov’s rhetoric and is using him as a lightning rod or if Kadyrov is overstepping his bounds, perhaps dangerously so, trying to outflank Putin on the right.

Alexander Zadolstanov of the pro-Kremlin “Night Wolves” motorcycle gang speaking at the pro-Kadyrov rally in Grozny

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





Cypriot Leader Offers to Make Turkish Official E.U. Language upon Reunification.  The president of the Republic of Cyprussaid on January 19th amid ongoing trilateral unification talks with the unrecognized Turkish puppet state the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus that Turkish could be made the European Union’s 25th official language as part of a final agreement.  President Nicos Anastasiades and his Turkish Cypriot counterpart, President Mustafa Akıncı, hope to produce a plan by the end of the year that will merge their two states into a federal union of two autonomous entities, similar to Bosnia and Herzegovina.


Nagorno-Karabakh Friendship Group in French Parliament Grows to 48. In France, eight members of parliament have joined the Franco–Nagorno-Karabakh Friendship Group, bringing to 48 the number of French legislators who have thrown their support behind the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic (N.K.R.), an ethnic-Armenian-populated Russian puppet state carved bloodily out of the western flank of the Republic of Azerbaijan in an Armenian ethnic-cleansing campaign after the fall of Communism.  No United Nations member state recognizes the N.K.R., not even its sponsors, Armenia and Russia.  The new members are Bruno Le Roux, the Socialist leader in the parliament; six other Socialists, and Emmanuel Mando, head of the Rhône–Alpes region’s “Union of Democrats and Independents” coalition.  Estimates of the number of Armenians in France range as high as 750,000 (the French government is constrained by law from compiling ethnic census data)—easily the highest in western Europe.


Slovene Lawmakers: Killing 613 Azeris Is “Genocide,” Killing 1.5 Million Armenians Isn’t. The National Council in Slovenia, one of the houses of its bicameral parliament, passed a resolution on January 20th recognizing the Armenian massacre of 613 people in Khojaly, Azerbaijan, in 1992 as “genocide.”  That event was part of the Nagorno-Karabakh War between the newly independent Azerbaijan and Armenia after the fall of Communism.  However, Slovenia, unlike most major western European countries, has so far refused to recognize the massacre of possibly one and a half million Armenians by the Republic of Turkey as a genocide.  The Khojaly massacre is also considered a “genocide” by the governments of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Colombia, the Czech Republic, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Pakistan, Panama, Peru, Romania, and Sudan.  (See my blog article on the politics of genocide recognition in the South Caucasus.)



Israeli Justice Minister Wants Independent Kurdistan as Buffer between Iran, Turkey. The Israeli minister of justice joined her boss, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, in supporting the idea of an independent Kurdistan, according to news released on January 20th.  Israel’s justice minister, Ayelet Shaked, told the annual meeting of the Institute for National Security Studies (I.N.S.S.) in Tel Aviv that the Israeli government “must openly call for the establishment of a Kurdish state that separates Iran from Turkey, one which will be friendly towards Israel.  The Kurdish people are a partner for the Israeli people,” she said, adding that “the Kurds are an ancient, democratic, peace-loving people that have never attacked any country.”  Meanwhile, the president of the Kurdistan Regional Government in northern Iraq, Massoud Barzani, told the Guardian newspaper in England that the Middle East’s borders will need to be redrawn because the old Sykes–Picot agreement had dramatically failed.  He added that world leaders realized this, but, “as you know, diplomats are conservatives and they give their assessment in the late stages of things.  And sometimes they can’t even keep up with developments.”  On January 26th, Barzani added that, ideally, a referendum on independence should be held “before the U.S. presidential election” in November.

Turkey Arrests 27 Signatories of “Peace Declaration” Critical of War on Kurds.  In Turkey, security forces on January 15th arrested, then released, 27 academicians who were among more than a thousand signatories to a “peace declaration” condemning Turkey’s war on its Kurdish minority and demanding an end to curfews.  President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who earlier in the month had compared his government favorably with Nazi Germany’s, referred to the signatories—an international array including the American linguist and peace activist Noam Chomsky—as “dark, nefarious, and brutal” and equated them with the Kurdistan Worker’s Party (P.K.K.).  The arrests took place in and around Kocaeli province, near Istanbul.  “The right to life, liberty, and security,” the peace declaration read, in part, “and in particular the prohibition of torture and ill-treatment protected by the constitution and international conventions have been violated.  We demand that the state abandon its deliberate massacre.”

Scores Die in Ongoing Civil War between Turks and Kurds.  Meanwhile, scores—if not hundreds—died in two weeks of ongoing fighting between Turkey’s military and security forces and the Kurdistan Worker’s Party (P.K.K.), which is fighting for an autonomous or independent homeland in southeastern Turkey.  A skirmish between the military and the P.K.K. in Diyarbakir province on January 15th killed 16 P.K.K. fighters and injured eight soldiers, one of whom died of his wounds the next day.  On January 16th, Turkish tanks attacked the town of Cizre, causing dozens to flee the destruction.  The military reported on January 19th that a skirmish in Sur, in Diyarbakir province, killed one Turkish soldier when a group of P.K.K. fighters opened fire on some troops.  On January 21st, the Turkish army announced that it had killed 33 P.K.K. fighters the day before (two civilians were also killed, Kurdish sources said), bringing the P.K.K. death toll to 641 for the previous five weeks, according to the military.  Kurdish sources said two civilians were also killed in the January 20th operations, including a city councillor in Cizre who was trying to clear wounded people out of the streets when he was shot.  The violence there continued into the following day.  On January 23rd, the P.K.K. claimed responsibility for a truck bomb attack on a police station and nearby housing in Cinar the previous week, in which six people were killed, including three children.  Two soldiers were injured on January 22nd when they came under attack by P.K.K. fighters in Sur.  On January 22nd, a bomb was tossed into a schoolyard in Diyarbakir province, injuring five children.  The Turkish government blamed the P.K.K. for that attack.  On January 27th, three soldiers were killed in fighting in Sur district, in Diyarbakir province, while thousands fled the area.  On January 31st, in Sirnak and Diyarbakir provinces, security forces reportedly killed 17 P.K.K. fighters.  In incidents not directly related to the fighting, at least 28 Kurdish refugees fleeing Turkey died when their ship capsized in the Aegean Sea; a total of 65 were killed.  Other reports said 70 Kurds drowned in the accident.  Twenty Kurdish bodies later washed up on the Greek island Kalymnos, some from Iraqi Kurdistan.  The following week, a boat with 65 refugees, mostly Iraqi Kurds but with an Afghan skipper, capsized near Samos, and at least 24 Kurds were believed dead.  Amnesty International issued a report on January 21st condemning Turkey’s crackdown, calling it “collective punishment.”  Meanwhile, any softening of the United States’ position on the conflict seemed farther than ever as Vice-President Joseph Biden met with the Turkish prime minister, Ahmet Davutoğlu, on January 23rd and declared the P.K.K. a “terror group, plain and simple.”


Russia Says ISIS Runs Training Camp in Chechen Enclave of Georgia. The foreign minister of Russia, Sergey Lavrov, told reporters at his annual press conference on January 26th that the Islamic State (a.k.a. ISIS) was operating a training camp in the Republic of Georgia, in the Pankisi Gorge region.  The government in Tbilisi immediately denied the claim.  Lavrov also spoke of a willingness to restore diplomatic ties with Georgia, which were cut in 2008 after the South Ossetia War.  Lavrov said ISIS uses the supposed Pankisi Gorge base “to train, rest, and replenish their supplies.”  The Pankisi Gorge is home to a Muslim minority called the Kist, who are part of the Chechen ethnic group.  Islamist radicals have in the past called for the creation there of an Islamic emirate called Pankisi Jamaat.



MIDDLE EAST





Amnesty Report on Ethnic Cleansing by Kurds Disputed by Arab “Victims.”  A report by Amnesty International on January 20th said satellite data and field interviews with more than 100 eyewitnesses back up accusations that Kurdish Peshmerga fighters in northern Iraq are not just fighting the Islamic State (a.k.a. ISIS) but also deliberately destroying Arab villages.  Sometimes, the report said, they worked in concert with Yezidi militias or with Kurdish fighters from Turkey and Syria, and bulldozing, detonations, and arson were all used to destroy communities.  Donatella Rovera, Amnesty’s senior crisis response advisor, who conducted the investigation, says the actions “may amount to war crimes.”  The Kurdistan Regional Government (K.R.G.) reacted swiftly, denying the accusations and saying that the incidents it was aware of were examples of Peshmerga using self-defense.  Later, on January 26th, Arab community leaders in Makhmour disputed the Amnesty report, saying that some villages were relocated, but for their safety, and that it was the Peshmerga that was protecting Arab civilians and communities from ISIS.

Budget Crisis Leads to Road Blockades in Iraqi Kurdistan; Crucial Pipeline Bombed.  Inability to pay public servants became a more concrete crisis for the Kurdistan Regional Government (K.R.G.) in northern Iraq on January 17th as residents of the town of Darbandikhan and surrounding areas, in Sulaimaniyah province, blocked major transport roads, preventing tanker trucks from passing through.  The protestors demanded better jobs and more prompt disbursements of pay.  Some government employees have not been paid since September 2015—largely the result of budget cuts from the central government in Baghdad.  Then, on January 29th, an explosion the interior ministry blamed on “terrorists” destroyed a gas pipeline responsible for about half of the Kurdistan Region’s electricity supply.


Kurds Find Yezidi Mass Grave in Iraqi Town Liberated by ISIS.  In Iraq, Kurdish Peshmerga forces found a mass grave near the town of Shingal on January 17th.  The fifteen to 20 bodies within are believe to be those of Yezidi men killed by the Islamic State (a.k.a. ISIS) before November, before Shingal was liberated from ISIS control by the Peshmerga.  The United Nations, in a report released on January 19th, estimated that about 3,500 people, mostly Yezidis—and most of them being women and children—are being held in slavery by Islamic State.


France Vows to Recognize Palestine If Talks on “Two State” Solution Founder. The French government raised the stakes considerably as it prepared to host a several-weeks-long summit to push for a two-state solution in Israel and Palestine: it threatened to diplomatically recognize Palestine if no progress is made.  “France will engage in the coming weeks in the preparation of an international conference,” said Laurent Fabius, the foreign minister, “bringing together the parties and their main partners, American, European, Arab, notably to preserve and make happen the two-state solution.”  But, he said, if attempts to solve the decades-old conflict hit a wall, then “we need to face our responsibilities by recognizing the Palestinian state.”  So far, the only western European countries to recognize Palestine are Iceland, Malta, Sweden, and Vatican City.  Meanwhile, the president of China, Xi Jinping, said during a visit to Egypt on January 21st that he supports the establishment of a Palestinian state in pre-1967 borders, with East Jerusalem as its capital.  He made the comments while addressing a session of the Arab League in Cairo.  Xi also mentioned $15 billion in aid China plans to offer in special loans to develop Middle Eastern industry.

The French foreign minister, Laurent Fabius, with Mahmoud Abbas, president of the Palestinian Authority

String of Palestinian Knife Attacks Leave 6 Dead, 4 Injured amid Ongoing Violence. Sporadic violence between Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs in the West Bank and elsewhere continued in the second half of January, with the public being especially alarmed by a string of apparently unconnected stabbing attacks, mostly involving minors.  In those attacks, six died, four were injured, and three arrested.  It began January 17th as Israeli troops shot and killed a Palestinian in the West Bank after he attempted to stab a soldier.  That same day, in Hebron, a Palestinian broke into an Israeli settler home and stabbed a woman to death in front of her family.  The following evening, a 16-year-old male suspected in that killing was arrested.  On January 18th, a Palestinian teenager stabbed a pregnant Jewish woman, though not fatally, in a thrift store in the illegal West Bank settlement of Tekoa.  On January 23rd, a 13-year-old Palestinian girl ran with a knife at an Israeli security guard near the entrance to a Jewish settlement on the West Bank, and he responded by shooting and killing her.  According to police, she had set out that morning, after a family argument, to become a martyr.  On January 25th, two Palestinian males, aged 22 and 16, were shot and killed after stabbing two Jewish women in a grocery store in the illegal West Bank settlement Beit Horon.  Of the two women, a 23-year-old and a 58-year-old, the younger later died of her wounds.  Three explosive devices were also found nearby.  On January 27th, a 17-year-old Palestinian male stabbed and injured a 50-year-old Israeli man near a gas station in Givat Zeev, in the West Bank.  Two Arab children stabbed a 17-year-old Jewish boy in the back in Jerusalem, near the Damascus Gate, on January 30th.  He was rushed to the hospital, where it was determined his wounds were not life-threatening.  Later, the stabber was arrested along with his companion, who was also carrying a knife.  In other violence over the same period, an Israeli soldier was wounded on January 20th by what was believed to be a Palestinian gunman near Tulkarem in the West Bank.  On January 22nd, Israeli soldiers stormed into Bethlehem, shot and wounded a young Palestinian, and beat and abducted him and two others.  A fourth Palestinian suffered tear-gas inhalation as a result of the incident.  On January 26th, heavy rains caused the collapse of a tunnel used by Hamas for attacks on Israel from the northern Gaza Strip.  Seven Palestinians were inside the tunnel at the time.  Their deaths bring to 10 the total number of people killed in Gaza tunnel collapses in January.  Also, on January 28th, an unidentified attacker shot and killed the security chief of a Palestinian refugee camp on the outskirts of Beirut, Lebanon.  And a 34-year-old Palestinian policeman was shot dead by Israeli soldiers at a West Bank checkpoint near the illegal Jewish settlement of Beit El after he jumped out of his car and opened fire, wounding three people.

A victim of the January 25th stabbing in a Beit Horon grocery is brought to the hospital.

AFRICA





North African al-Qaeda Chapter Calls for Reconquest of Two Spanish Enclaves.  A video from al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (A.Q.I.M.) posted on YouTube on January 15th calls on Islamist militants to take back Ceuta and Melilla, two communities on the Mediterranean coast of north Africa, surrounded by Morocco, which are part of the Kingdom of Spain.  The video, narrated by Abu Obeida Yusuf al-Annabi, A.Q.I.M.’s leader, refers to Spain with its old Arabic name “al-Andalus.”




Sweden Decides against Recognizing Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic. The government of Swedenannounced on January 15th that it had decided against granting diplomatic recognition to the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic (S.A.D.R.)—a decision greeted with delight by the Kingdom of Morocco, which illegally occupies Western Sahara, and with disappointment by human-rights activists.  The Swedish foreign minister, Margot Wallström, gave a curt explanation, saying the current administration’s position was “consistent with the assessment of previous governments in this regard,” i.e. that “the criteria required under international law to recognize Western Sahara are not fulfilled.”  M’hammed Grine, of Morocco’s Party of Progress and Socialism (P.P.S.), said that Sweden’s entertainment of the idea of recognition had been “a source of a great crisis” between the two countries, praising Sweden for “not embrac[ing] a separatist utopia, supported by Algerian hegemonic temptation completely outdated in a precarious regional geostrategic context carrying enormous risks.”  Meanwhile, in the Canary Islands, an autonomous region of the Kingdom of Spain off the coast of Africa, President Fernando Clavijo met with a representative of the Polisario Front and renewed his territory’s commitment to freedom and self-determination for the Sahrawi people.




2 Berbers Dead after Clashes with Sahrawis in Moroccan Campus Unrest. University students from the separate Berber and Sahrawi ethnic groups came into violent conflict on campuses in Marrakesh and Agadir in Morocco on January 23rd, leaving two Berbers dead.  Rival protests over the question of Morocco’s illegal control of most of the territory of Western Sahara was at issue, with Berbers of the Amazigh Cultural Movement (A.C.M.) opposing recognition of the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic (S.A.D.R.) because of what it called the Polisario rebel group’s mistreatment of Berbers in S.A.D.R. territory it controls.  One Berber student, Omar El Khaleq, was beaten to death by pro-Polisario rioters during the protests, and another succumbed to his wounds four days later.  The A.C.M. blames Polisario directly for the deaths.

Omar El Khaleq, the Berber student recently killed in campus unrest

Oil Facilities Bombed in Niger Delta after Rebel Leader’s Arrest Ordered.  Several oil facilities in Nigeria’s Delta State, in the ethnically volatile Niger Delta region, were damaged on the night of January 15th-16th by bombs set by militants, according to Nigerian media.  The affected facilities included important pipelines.  The blasts occurred shortly after a federal court in Lagos ordered the arrest of a former rebel leader named Government Ekpemupolo, a.k.a. Tompolo, former leader of the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND).  Corporations targeted in the bombings included the Nigerian Gas Company, Chevron, and NECONDE, and government sources said the damage was costing those companies nearly two and a half million dollars per day.  Tompolo is now a wealthy oil tycoon charged with corruption.  Most of the explosions occurred in the territory of Tompolo’s native Gbaramatu Kingdom.  Tompolo claims no link to the attacks—a position echoed a few days later by other former members of the MEND leadership, though one MEND veteran, Africanus Ukparasia , a.k.a. General Africa, claims Tompolo planned the attacks with another MEND militant named General Shoot at Sight.  Military forces entered Okpelama, Tompolo’s home community, on the 16th looking for militants.  At least two local monarchs have condemned the bombings: Ogiame Ikenwoli, the Olu of the Warri Kingdom, and Orhue I, the Orodje of the Okpe Kingdom.  Meanwhile, another former MEND member, Excel Toriomo, a.k.a. General Monday, said on January 21st that the governor of Bayelsa State, Seriake Dickson, has tried to have him assassinated, apparently in anger over Toriomo’s switching party membership from the People’s Democratic Party (P.D.P.) to the All-Progressives Congress (A.P.C.).  Another group, the Arogbo Ijaw National Front, complained this month about rampant ethnic violence and crime in Ondo State.  The Ijaw group blamed the current situation on the military having shut down “a local anti-vices outfit” called Gallery Security Services, which is run by Chief Bibopre Ajube, a former frontline commander for MEND.

Government Ekpemupolo (“Tompolo”), in the garb of the sect to which he now belongs, the Brotherhood of the Cross and Sword

Biafran Political Prisoner, Denied Bail, Writes Open Letter to European Parliament.  In Abuja, Nigeria, a federal court denied bail to the Nnamdi Kanu, the jailed leader of the organization Indigenous People of Biafra (IPoB), on January 29th.  His case has been adjourned until February 9th.  He was arrested in October 2015 on charges of sedition and “ethnic incitement” for operating the pirate media network Radio Biafra, among other activities.  The same day, a judge in Port Harcourt, in Rivers State, granted bail to 20 Biafra activists also held since October.  (Earlier, also in Port Harcourt, a judge remanded two Igbo men to prison on conspiracy charges on January 21st for a demonstration six days previously at which, the judge said, they conspired to declare war on Nigeria.)  On January 27th, Kanu released an open letter to the European Parliament in Strasbourg, France, in advance of a scheduled appearance before that body by Nigeria’s president, Muhammadu Buhari.  In the letter, Kanu writes, “I am that Biafran locked up in Buhari’s DSS [Department of Security Services, Nigeria’s secret police] dungeon for 98 days without trial, given inhuman treatments, tortured and abused. ...  “I am that Biafran his 7 years old child was shot to death in Aba, that Biafran his brothers and sisters were massacred in Onitsha.  I am that Biafran his people were again massacred in Aba, that Biafran his people are being kidnapped, extra-judiciary killed and illegally imprisoned by Buhari.  I am that Biafran who Buhari illegally ordered soldiers of Gowon to invade my land and slaughter my children, sisters, brothers, fathers and mothers in their millions in 1967.  ...  The treatment of Kanu represents how Biafrans are treated in Nigeria, we are Biafrans, condemned by Nigerian government and deprived of right to live, speech, belong, freedom and thrive.”  (Read the full text here.)  Meanwhile, at least eight people were reported killed by police during a rally for Biafran independence in Aba on January 18th.  Police claim there were no deaths or injuries.  The same day saw protests were held in six different southern states, all protesting Kanu’s continued detention.  As this article is being written, reports are emerging that a ship hijacked off the coast of the disputed Bakassi Peninsula, in far-southeastern Nigeria, on January 29th is now being held captive by militants, who say that they will blow up the ship with its foreign crew unless Kanu is released immediately.



Pro-Independence Igbo King Found Murdered; Separatists Suspect Foul Play.  A traditional Igbo monarch known for his activism in pursuit of a Republic of Biafra was founded murdered by a roadside on January 20th.  The 52-year-old Agbogidi Akaeze Edward Ofulue III, the Obi (King, or Prince) of Ubulu-Uku, in Nigeria’s Delta State, was abducted from his vehicle on a bandit-infested road on January 5th and then found dead in the bushes 15 days later alongside the badly decomposed body of an unidentified Hausa man.  A Fulani herdsmen was arrested on January 19th in connection with the murder.  But an anonymous former Biafran intelligence agent from the late 1960s told The Biafra Times that the Ubulu-Uku king had in fact been assassinated by Nigeria’s government for his pro-independence activities.  Giving only his nom de guerre, “Holy-Eyes,” the agent said the king had been involved with the Biafra Restoration Committee and had pressed the Biafran cause with the European Union (E.U.) and United Kingdom, among a life of pro-independence activism.  “Nigerian government was very late in the day in killing him,” “Holy-Eyes” said.  “If they had killed him a year ago, it would have somehow affected the struggle negatively.  But they were as clumsy as ever, and the man was able to evade and outsmart them at every turn on the assignment, until it was completed.  ...  You see our worldwide demonstrations?  That was part of the work his committee did.  You see how smooth and effective the protests have been, then you will know that our brother was a genius.”  The monarch, also an evangelical minister, had ruled the community of Ubulu-Uku since 2006.  Meanwhile, within the formally organized Biafran movement, one faction of the Movement for the Actualisation of the Sovereign State of Biafra (MASSOB) accused the head of another faction, Ralph Uwazuruike, of plotting against the secretariat of the first group, in Imo State.  The claim was made by the faction led by Uchenna Madu, which refers to Uwazuruike as MASSOB’s former leader.

The assassinated Obi of Ubulu-Uku, shown here in red during a ceremony

Northern Nigerian Ex-Senator Says Let Biafra Go If It Wants. Also this month, a former Nigerian legislator said that in his opinion if Biafra want to secede, it should be allowed to.  The senator, Salisu Ibrahim Musa Matori, who served as senator from 1999 to 2003, “If the people of Biafra want to go, let them go.  Let this administration not make the mistake of forcing people to live where they don’t want to live.”  As an example, he cited the successful secession of the Republic of South Sudan.  Matori’s constituency was in Bauchi State, in northeastern Nigeria, which is now a war zone due to a sometimes-separatist insurgency by Boko Haram.  Meanwhile, a former head of the Niger Delta Vigilante (N.D.V.) militia, Chief Ateke Tom, found it necessary this month to deny publicly reports that he had given Nigeria’s president, Muhammadu Buhari, a two-week deadline to establish a Republic of Biafra, on threat of the resumption of armed rebellion.  He also denied links with Indigenous People of Biafra (IPoB) and other Biafran separatist groups.  A spokesperson quoted Tom, saying, “Nigerians should be patient with the Buhari-led government and support him.  Buhari is a good man; he is a peace-loving man.”


Shooting of Ogadeni, Fears of Oromo “Cannibal” Raise Tensions in Somaliland. The Ogaden National Liberation Front (O.N.L.F.), a rebel group aiming for a separate state in the border region straddling eastern Ethiopia’s Somali Region and Somalia itself, blamed the government of the unrecognized Republic of Somaliland for the death of an Ogadeni man who was shot to death January 18th in Hargeisa, the Somaliland capital.  Local police called the death a targeted killing and said they have begun to round up suspects.  The next day, police in Hargeisa rounded up several members of the ethnic-Oromo community—who are also from Ethiopia—after an Oromo man supposedly killed and ate an ethnic Somali toddler.




The president of Khatumo State—a warlord fief with shifting territory in the disputed borderlands between the unrecognized Republic of Somaliland and the self-governing Puntland State of Somalia—rattled sabers at Somaliland on January 31st, claiming that the republic is illegally occupying Khatumo territory in what the outside world regards, technically, as the Federal Republic of Somalia’s Sool province.  “This time ’round we saying enough is enough,” said the president, Ali Khalif Galeyr, “and we shall be waging war against them soon so that we recapture our land, and as well show them who we are.”


Azawadi Separatists among Suspects Rounded Up after Burkina Faso Attack. Approximately 15 members of the National Movement for the Liberation for Azawad (M.N.L.A.), a northern Malian rebel group, were rounded up for interrogation by police in Burkina Faso in the wake of the January 15th terrorist attack on the Hotel Splendid in Ouagadougou, the capital, which killed 30 people.  Police also arrested refugees from Mali in a refugee camp in Burkina Faso.  Also detained were four citizens of Niger, including Adal Rhoubed, an ethnic-Tuareg physician who is running for president of Niger.  Meanwhile, in Mali itself, the killing of three police officers in Mopti province on January 20th focused suspicions on Tuareg rebels.  The three were killed in an ambush by “terrorists,” according to police.  This follows the January 15th killings, also in Mopti, of two soldiers guarding a relief aid convoy and a security guard who died when a market in the village of Dioura came under attack by militants.  Then, on January 28th, one Malian soldier was killed in an ambush just outside Timbuktu, deep in the Azawad region, and near Gao, elsewhere in Azawad, three other Malian soldiers were killed when their vehicle hit a landmine.

No longer so splendid after jihadists got through with it

Kenyan Police Arrest Chairman of Mombasa Republican Council. The chairman of the Mombasa Republican Council (M.R.C.) was arrested at his home in coastal Kenya on January 24th and was arraigned the next day on charges that include membership in, and fundraising for, a banned organization.  The chairman, Omar Mwamnuadzi, was also charged with possession of an “article bearing the words ‘Pwani si Kenya’”—Swahili for “Coast [province] Is Not [part of] Kenya”—a slogan which the prosecutor claims is in itself an incitement to violence.  Mwamnuadzi denies all charges.  A day before Mwamnuadzi’s arrest, police arrested three alleged M.R.C. members in a raid on a mosque in Diani, near Kwale, where they received a tip a secret meeting was being held.  About 30 people eluded arrest in the raid.

Omar Mwamnuadzi of the Mombasa Republican Council

Matabeleland Separatists Join Furor over Non-Ndebele-Speaking Teachers in Zimbabwe. The Mthwakazi Republic Party (M.R.P.), which wants to secede from Zimbabwe, joined protests this month sparked by the central government’s appointment of teacher who don’t speak the Ndebele (Matabele) language to schools in Matabeleland North province.  The M.R.P. is echoing complaints from local communities that the dictator Robert Mugabe’s secret police force, the Central Intelligence Organisation (C.I.O.), has been targeting Ndebeles who are vocal on the issue.  Mbonisi Gumbo, an M.R.P. spokesman, said, “C.I.O.s are going around Lupane in the Gumede and Masenyane areas intimidating people over their resolution to sign a petition against” one of the teachers.  Mugabe is a member of the more northerly Shona ethnic group.


ASIA





Switzerland Denies Political Asylum to Baloch Rebel Leader from Pakistan.  The government of Switzerland on January 15th turned down a request for political asylum by Brahamdagh Khan Bugti, the exiled leader of the Baloch Republican Party (B.R.P.), an organization which is banned in Pakistan and seeks independence for the Balochistan region.  A few days later, the former Pakistani military dictator Pervez Musharraf was officially acquitted in the elder Bugti’s killing.  Bugti fled Pakistan in 2006 after his grandfather Nawar Akbar Bugti was killed by the Pakistani military, fearing his own assassination would be next, and lived in Afghanistan until moving himself and his family to Switzerland in 2010.  The Pakistani government quickly praised the Swiss decision.  Two days later, separatist sources told media that, although Bugti intended to file an appeal of the decision, he is now considering moving to a country with no extradition agreement with Pakistan.  Candidates included Bahrain, France, Germany, Kenya, Norway, Oman, Qatar, South Africa, Tunisia, and the United Kingdom.  Musharraf’s acquittal, on January 18th, came after his indictment last year for various crimes committed during his tenure, including the 2007 assassination of Benazir Bhutto.  There is yet to be a ruling on the Bhutto murder.  Musharraf currently lives under house arrest in Karachi while his cases move through the courts.


Baloch Liberation Army Claims Credit for Killing 6 Soldiers, Assassinating Poet’s Son.  On the outskirts of the city of Quetta, in Pakistan’s Balochistan province, an army vehicle hit a roadside bomb on January 18th, resulting in an explosion in which six paramilitary soldiers were killed.  The Baloch Liberation Army (B.L.A.) claimed responsibility for the incident.  The previous day, according to the Baloch National Movement (B.N.M.), Pakistani troops abducted young Baloch people out of several communities, and three bodies riddled with bullets found in the area around Turbat were identified as those of three “freedom fighters” abducted by the military on January 13th.  Then, on January 20th, members of Pakistan’s Frontier Corps killed five B.L.A. fighters, including a commander, in Barkhan district.  Three B.L.A. fighters were captured.  Baloch insurgents are also suspected in an attack on soldiers in a gas station in Quetta’s snooty Satellite Town suburb.  Four police were killed in the attack.  The B.L.A. took responsibility for the assassination of the 27-year-old son of Bashir Bedar, a prominent Baloch author and poet.  The son, Fazul Bashir, was shot by unknown assailants in the town of Tump on January 28th as he returned from mosque.  The B.L.A. statement said the younger Bashir was a spy for the government.

The Balochistani home minister, announcing Abdul Manan’s death

Baloch Liberation Front Leader Killed by Security Forces in Pakistan. The home minister of Pakistan’s Balochistan province, Sarfraz Bugti, told a press conference on January 30th that government security forces had killed the head of the Baloch Liberation Front (B.L.F.) (not to be confused with the Baloch Liberation Army; see above) the previous day in Mastung.  The leader, Abdul Manan, was killed as part of an operation in which eight Baloch militants were killed.


3 Separatist Guerrillas Killed in Military Operations in Indian Kashmir. Two Kashmiri militants were killed in a battle with Indian troops in Naina, in Jammu and Kashmir, in northern India, on January 20th, after the troops converged on the village on a tip that Kashmiri separatists were hiding out there.  One home was destroyed, with the body of a third militant suspected to be beneath the rubble, and an explosion, possibly the accidental detonation of a grenade wounded two villagers, one of whom died later.  The events led to spontaneous anti-government protests in Naina and in a neighboring village, Batpora, in which an armored vehicle was set aflame and riot police responded by shooting one man to death and injuring two others.  Indian security forces “launched an operation against militants,” sources said, in Kashmir’s Kupwara district on January 29th, and the fighting lasted into the next day, with at least one separatist guerrilla killed.




Hindu Nationalists Call Muslim Riots in West Bengal Ploy to Create Indian “Kosovo.”  Indians are steeling reeling from an outburst of sectarian violence on January 3rd in West Bengal state, when a Muslim rally boiled over in anger over remarks by a Hindu politician in Uttar Pradesh who supposedly who called the prophet Muhammud the “world’s first homosexual.”  This has prompted some Hindu observers to raise the spectre of Muslim separatism.  A police station and other government buildings and vehicles were set on fire in Kaliachak, in West Bengal’s Malda district, where Muslims are almost as numerous as Hindus, and 30 police were injured.  India’s ruling party, the radically Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (B.J.P.), is using the riot to whip up Islamophobia in the country, though some analysts say the events had less to do with religion than with criminal conflict related to counterfeit currency rings and poppy-growing syndicates that are in conflict with the police.  One Islamophobic political analyst, Jay Bhattacharjee, wrote in Swarajya magazine that West Bengal had parallels with Kosovo and blamed the state’s ruling Trinamool Congress (TMC) party for allowing Malda and other West Bengali districts near Bangladesh to tip toward a Muslim majority.  The violence has given a boost to the B.J.P., which hopes to secure control of West Bengal in upcoming elections.

Muslims and Hindus in West Bengal’s Malda district don’t always get along.

Graffiti in Thailand Province May Herald Muslim Rebels’ Spread to New Areas. Authorities in Thailandhave become concerned in mid-January over the appearance on roads in Surat Thani province of graffiti touting the Runda Kumpulan Kecil (R.K.K.) rebel group, since that province is considerably farther north than the R.K.K.’s usual area of activity.  One of the graffiti, which are in Arabic and Burmese scripts, reads, “Welcome, R.K.K. Fighters.”  Another says, “Death Route—Watch Out.”  And on January 28th, authorities discovered rockets and other weaponry in Pattani province bearing the legend “Nampra Army”—referring to a faction of the Patani United Liberation Organisation (PULO), an older organization, dating to the 1960s, which shares the R.K.K.’s goals.  The R.K.K. has been fighting an insurgency for 14 years to try to get all or parts of the far-southern provinces near Malaysia—Pattani, Narathiwat, and Yala—to secede as a separate Muslim-dominated state.




Karen Rebels Say Burmese Soldiers Burned Down 10 Homes after Firefight. Rebels from the Karen ethnic group battled Burma’s military from January 23rd to 26th, with a Karen splinter group, the Democratic Karen Benevolent Army (D.K.B.A.), claiming the Burmese burned down 10 homes, in retaliation for the wounding of two men from the government-aligned Karen Border Guard Force.  The government denies the accusations.  The D.K.B.A. is a reincarnation of sorts of the former Democratic Karen Buddhist Army in a more secular guise.  The fighting occurred near Kawkareik, in Karen State.




Missing Hong Kong Publisher Confesses on Mainland TV, Raising New Questions. One of the five booksellers missing from Hong Kong and feared “disappeared” by the mainland Chinese government for their dissident publishing and other activities (discussed recently in this blog) appeared suddenly on Chinese television on January 17th, confessing through tears that he had turned himself in to Chinese authorities over a fatal drunk-driving accident 11 years ago.  The publisher, Gui Minhai, who is also a naturalized citizen of Sweden, says he killed a young woman while driving drunk in Ningbo, in Zhejiang province, in 2003 and was given a suspended sentence but skipped the country in violation of his probation the following year.  Now, he says, he is returning to China.  He had last been seen at his condominium in Thailand in October 2015.  Gui and the other four missing men are employees of Mighty Current Media, which publishes and sells books about the sex scandals and corruption of mainland Chinese officials—the kind of activity that would would be a one-way ticket to a reeducation camp on the mainland but is tolerated in Hong Kong because of the “one country, two systems” guarantees under which the United Kingdom surrendered Hong Kong to the People’s Republic of China in 1997.  Most Hong Kongers believe there is more to the story than Gui’s televised version of events and that he is being held against his will.  Amnesty International says Gui’s “confession” “has no validity from a legal standpoint.”  Another of the five, Lee Bo, a dual citizen of China and the U.K. last seen in Hong Kong on December 30th, is apparently being held on the mainland.  His wife says she visited him there in late January at a “guesthouse” in an unspecified location, where she says he was a “witness” in an ongoing investigation.  The European Union (E.U.) has called the illegal Chinese detention of E.U. citizens “unacceptable.”

Gui Minhai’s tearful televised “confession”

Police Round Up Inner Mongolian Herders after Protests Hit Social Media. Hundreds of ethnic Mongolian herders in the People’s Republic of China’s “autonomous” region of Inner Mongoliaheld public protests in front of government buildings on January 20th over the withholding of herders’ subsidies in compensation for grazing bans.  Some herders then distributed on social media video clips of the protests in the community of Darhan-Muumingan Banner, and some were interviewed by human-rights activists and foreign journalists.  Beijing responded quickly: local police abducted at least a dozen herders on January 25th and interrogated them aggressively about “engaging in national separatism” before releasing them.  Others received threatening phone calls.  In 2008, the central government banned livestock grazing in the area but offered monetary compensation.  Those payments stopped abruptly six months ago without explanation, causing extreme economic hardship for the Mongolians, who are a minority in their own “autonomous” region—which Mongolian nationalist call “South Mongolia.”  “Now our very survival is threatened,” one herder told the Southern Mongolia Human Rights Information Center.

Inner Mongolia is one of China’s largest subdivisions

Courageously defying strict bans on such expression, over one thousand people in China’s Tibet “Autonomous” Regiongathered at a Buddhist monastery in Kardze, a “Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture” in Sichuan province to pray publicly for the health of the 14th Dalai Lama.  “This is an annual prayer gathering which usually begins on January 13 and ends on January 25,” an exiled Tibetan official told Radio Free Asia, “but following a notice sent out on January 20 by the Central Tibetan Administration [the Tibetan government-in-exile, in India] requesting prayers for His Holiness the Dalai Lama while he undergoes a health check at the Mayo Clinic in the U.S., the Tibetans extended their praying for two extra days.”  A gigantic portrait of the Dalai Lama was incorporated into the open-air prayer sessions.  Chinese authorities, miraculously, stayed away.



OCEANIA





Polynesian Separatist Opposition Leader to Run for President ... of France.  The opposition leader in French Polynesia, Oscar Temaru, who supports independence for the territory, announced this month that he intended to run for president of the French Republic, of which French Polynesia is a constituent “overseas collectivity.”  But he told an interviewer that his real intention was to win the French election “here in Maohi Nui, not in France” (using a native Polynesian term for the territory, which includes the archipelago of Tahiti).  Temaru is of mixed Tahitian, French, and Māori (indigenous New Zealander) ancestry.

Oscar Temaru

Australian Monarchists Propose Making Queen Elizabeth Their “President.” Monarchists in Australia—those who want the country to retain its status as a member of the Commonwealth of Nations, with Queen Elizabeth II as its head of state—responded to a rise in activity by the Australian Republic Movement (A.R.M.) this week by proposing a compromise that involved Her Majesty being given the lesser title of President of Australia, but with the position still being hereditary.  The suggestion was made by David Flint, who heads the organization Australians for Constitutional Monarchy.  In reply, Peter FitzSimmons, who chairs the A.R.M., said, “We’re so chuffed that monarchists are really starting to warm to the idea of a true Australian republic,” adding, “If pleasing everybody means having Her Majesty the Queen as President of Australia, so be it.  Australians are reasonable people.”  Among other voices in support of the proposal was Tony Abbott, the recently ousted ultra-conservative prime minister, who said, “This is the kind of thing Australia needs.”  It is unclear in what sense a state with a hereditary head of state, even one called “president,” would be a republic.

Following a well-established tradition of monarchist Australian prime ministers displaying an utter ignorance of royal protocol, Tony Abbott put his hand on H.R.H. Prince William, Duke of Cambridge, during a royal visit to Canberra

NORTH AMERICA





Parti Québécois Leader to Stay On Despite Tax Inquiry, Marital Problems.  In Canada, the leader of Quebec’s pro-independence Parti Québécois (P.Q.), Pierre Karl Péladeau, attempted on January 28th to lay to rest talk that he might step down.  “Don’t worry—I’ll be there,” he said, in response to speculation that he might not lead the P.Q. into the next provincial election, in October 2018.  Péladeau’s separation from his wife was recently made public, support for the party is slipping in the polls, and the media have been inquiring into whether the francophone media conglomerate he runs, Quebecor, is paying all its taxes.

Pierre Karl Péladeau

Tsimshians, Lawmakers Vow to Save British Columbian Island from Gas Project.  An agreement was struck, in Prince Rupert, British Columbia, Canada, on January 24th to end a long-standing occupation (as detailed recently in this blog) by members of the Tsimshian nation of an island whose salmon-based ecology is threatened by a multinational corporations billion-dollar plans for a liquid natural gas plant.  The “Lelu Island Declaration” was signed by Tsimshian hereditary chiefs from the Nine Allied Tribes of the Lax Kw’alaams First Nation, Grand Chief Stewart Phillip of the Union of B.C. Indian Chiefs, and four provincial and federal parliamentarians from the New Democratic Party (N.D.P.).  Nathan Cullen, who represents the Bulkley Valley constituency in Ottawa, said, “This project isn’t going to happen.  This project can’t happen.”  Leaders from the Gitxsan, Wet’suwet’en, Lake Babine, and Haisla nations also signed the accord.  But cold water was poured on the agreement the following day by the “chiefs”—not actual hereditary chiefs, but government-salaried, locally-elected administrators—of five Tsimshian communities.  Their declaration states that the Lelu Island protection agreement was without their “consultation or support.”  None of the five communities—Kitkatla, Metlakatla, Kitsumkalum and Kitselas (near Terrace, B.C.), and Gitga’at (Hartley Bay, B.C.)—has ownership rights on Lelu Island.

Celebratory signatories to the Lelu Island Declaration

Sidelining of Pipeline Deals under Trudeau Reawakens Alberta Separatism. The Calgary Herald in Alberta, Canada, reported this week that Justin Trudeau’s ascent to the prime-ministership in Ottawa last year is stoking a resurgence of separatist feeling in the province, which seems to wax and wane according to how far left or right politics in the federal capital are leaning.  Following Trudeau’s promises this month that his Liberal Party would not just be a “cheerleader” for pipeline projects, in the way that his Conservative Party predecessor, Stephen Harper was, ordinary Albertans, fearful of the effects on their economy, are voicing more skepticism about the whole idea of Canada.  Over 13,000 people have “liked” the Republic of Western Canada” Facebook page founded a few short months ago.  The Herald quoted one poster to that forum opining, “It would be nice if the Quebec sponges would return the money we have donated to their pathetic welfare state.”

Militant nutcases at the Malheur Wildlife Refuge in Oregon

Oregon Refuge Standoff Drags On Despite Killing of 1 Militant, Arrests of Many Others. The armed standoff by extremist anti-government militants at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon entered a violent phase on January 26th, with one militant dead and several under arrest.  Ammon Bundy, the de facto leader, and at least five others were en route to a community meeting in the town of John Day, about 70 miles away, when they were arrested by Oregon State Police on a state highway.  During the arrest, LaVoy Finicum, a spokesman for the militants, was shot and killed.  In addition to Bundy, son of the racist Mormon patriarch and anti-government militant Cliven Bundy, of Nevada, those arrested included another of the 14 Bundy siblings, Ryan Bundy; Shawna Cox, of Utah; Ryan W. Payne, of Montana; and Brian Cavalier, a former bodyguard of Cliven Bundy’s from Nevada who used the nom de guerre“Fluffy Unicorn” (don’t ask).  Two others, Peter Santilli, of Ohio, and Joseph D. O’Shaughnessy, of Arizona, were arrested shortly afterward in Burns, Oregon, and Jon Eric Ritzheimer, the 32-year-old member of the group with the strongest ties to white-supremacist hate groups, turned himself in to police in Arizona.  Earlier, Kenneth Medenbach, age 62, had been arrested while driving off-site to the grocery store on January 15th in a (stolen) Fish and Wildlife Service truck, and two days later a former Cliven Bundy bodyguard, Schuyler Pyatte Barbeau, had been arrested near Springdale, Washington, for illegal possession of semi-automatic weaponry that he was hoarding in preparation for “shoot-outs with law enforcement.”  Barbeau had already been on the F.B.I.’s radar for loudly talking about plans to “lynch” a California judge who had sentenced him on an earlier weapons charge.  One of the militants remaining at the wildlife refuge, Jason Patrick, of Georgia, said that the mood there was “prepared but calm.”  He added, “They said ‘peaceful resolution,’ but now there is a dead cowboy.”  On January 27th, however, Patrick was one of three arrested as he voluntarily left the compound, out of a total of eight who left that day; another was Dylan Anderson, of Utah, who used the nom de guerre“Captain Moroni.” Although the Federal Bureau of Investigation (F.B.I.) in very short order took the unusual step of releasing a video clearly showing Finicum reaching for his gun before being shot in the arrest, the occupiers and their supporters continue to call it a “cold-blooded” murder.  The day after his arrest, Ammon Bundy released a statement through his attorney in which he begged the remaining militants to end the occupation.  “Let us take this fight from here,” the statement said, addressing those still within the compound.  “Please stand down.  Go home and hug your families.  This fight is ours for now in the courts.  Please go home.”  But Cliven Bundy himself, interviewed in Nevada on January 28th, disagreed and urged the remaining militants to “battle on,” saying, “I’ll tell you one thing, we’re dang sure going to have to fight his battle over and over if we just give up right today.”  The events began on January 2nd, when the Bundys and a group of other militant extremists took over the refuge in protest over the sentencing of local ranchers for arson on public lands, though their demands focused on the larger issue of libertarian objections to the vast scale of federal ownership of land in the rural West—the same issue that animated the elder Cliven Bundy’s standoff in 2014.  As of this writing, the standoff continues, with possibly only four or five militants left inside the compound.  (For more on the Oregon standoff, see a recent article from this blog.)

Jon Ritzheimer, a true-blue patriotic American, shown here in happier times

San Diegan Running for California Assembly on Platform of Independence from U.S. Among the candidates for elections to California’s legislature this year is Louis J. Marinelli, of San Diego, who told media this week that his ultimate aim is the state’s secession from the United States.  Though he has little chance against the Democratic incumbent, he hopes in the long term to get Californian independence on a referendum ballot.  “There are two kinds of people in California,” he said to a Los Angeles Times reporter: “people who identify themselves as Californians and Americans who are occupying California.”  Marinelli, a 29-year-old E.S.L. teacher with a Russian wife, was born in Buffalo, New York.  Formerly, he was a vocal activist against same-sex marriage and organized a campaign called “Summer for Marriage 2010” but in 2011 had a dramatic change of heart to become an opponent of the anti-same-sex-marriage movement, though he still said he supports “traditional marriage.”*




2 More California Counties Drop out of State of Jefferson Movement. In northern California, the executive officer of Nevada Countyclarified for the public on January 15th that his county was not part of the movement to secede and form a 51st state called the State of Jefferson.  Rick Haffey, the executive officer, said his office had been flooded with inquiries after media quoted Jefferson activists at a rally a few days earlier as saying they were submitting secession declarations on behalf of 21 northern counties, including Nevada County.  Haffey said, “The County of Nevada has not taken any action on this issue and has no plans to take action.  It is not something the Board of Supervisors is considering.”  This follows a unanimous vote by Plumas County’s board of supervisors three days earlier to rescind its previous decision to put secession from California on the ballot in November 2016.  Perhaps this is why Mark Baird, head of the Jefferson Declaration Committee, may be turning his freedom-loving attention to other noble causes.  At a public meeting on wolf-management policy in Yreka, in Siskiyou County, on January 21st, he said that he believes that it is no accident that the canine predators, for whom environmentalists express so much concern, are killing ranchers’ livestock and that in fact wolves are being “trucked into” northern California.  He has no evidence, but he is looking for it.  Neither Nancy Pelosi nor the Knights Templar were mentioned as suspects, but it’s too early to rule anything out.




Georgia Legislator Likens “Confederate Cleansing” to ISIS, Moves to Protect Symbols.  A member of Georgia’s legislature introduced legislation on January 28th to reverse the trend of what he called “Confederate cleansing”—the erasure of the state and region’s Confederate history, as evidenced by a broad movement to remove Confederate flags and other symbols from public spaces.   His proposals include making Confederate Memorial Day and Robert E. Lee’s Birthday into state holidays, creating special protections for the pro-Confederate memorial at Stone Mountain, and designating April “Confederate Heritage Month” (appropriate, I suppose, since it includes April Fool’s Day).  The lawmaker, Rep. Tommy Benton, of the Republican Party, who is a retired history teacher, explained the proposals by saying, “I’m tired of the anti-Confederate rhetoric toward Stone Mountain and any other Confederate monument that’s out there.   We’re entitled to our heritage just like other people are entitled to theirs, and there seems to be an attempt to do Confederate cleansing.  I refer to that as more cultural terrorism than anything.  They’re attacking us for no reason at all.  We’ve not done anything to provoke them or anything else.”  (Yes, he really said that—a history teacher.)  “They’re very similar to what’s going on in the Middle East with ISIS that’s destroying all those mosques and temples and everything because they don’t agree with that history over there, so they’re just destroying it and doing away with it.”  He also made statements minimizing the racism and dangerousness of the Ku Klux Klan, which he says was a positive vigilante group which “made a lot of people straighten up.”

Rep. Tommy Benton’s idea of “being straightened up”

LATIN AMERICA



Second Party Joins PIP in Calling for Puerto Rican Independence. A second party has joined the Puerto Rico Independence Party (PIP) in demanding that the United States government hold a referendum on Puerto Rico’s political status.  The smaller party, the Hostosiano National Independence Movement (M.I.N.H.), made the announcement on January 18th. “The PIP proposal should be backed by all independence movements,” the statement read, in part, “and, even more, by all the Puerto Rican people.”


PRACTICALLY BLOODY ANTARCTICA





British Labour Party Leader under Fire for Seeking “Dialogue” on Falklands.  The divisive new leader of the United Kingdom’s incredible shrinking Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn, revived controversy by calling for dialogue with Argentina, which was defeated by the U.K. in a short war in 1982 after it invaded and attempted to annex the Falkland Islands, a British territory.  “It seems to me ridiculous that in the 21st century we would be getting into some enormous conflict with Argentina about some islands just off it.  Yes, of course the islanders have an enormous say in it but let’s bring about some sensible dialogue.”  The U.K.’s prime minister, David Cameron, lambasted Corbyn and told Argentina’s new president, Mauricio Macri, in his first meeting with any Argentine president, that the Falklands would remain British so long as that was what Falklanders preferred.  Shortly afterwards, the outgoing Argentine ambassador to the U.K., Alicia Castro, revealed to media that Corbyn had told her that he would like to see a “power-sharing” agreement in the Falklands, along the lines of that in Northern Ireland.  The Falklands have no indigenous people, and Argentina has never had a permanent settlement there; its claim stems from an 1820 flag-planting by a naval mercenary from Connecticut in the name of the Spanish crown.   In a 2013 referendum, Falklanders voted 1,513 to 3 in favor of remaining a fully British territory, without any sharing of sovereignty with Argentina.  It is not clear, then, what Corbyn thinks there is to talk about, or why he is interested in becoming prime minister of a democracy (the U.K.) if he doesn’t think people have the right to choose who governs them.

H.R.H. Anne, the Princess Royal, during a visit to the Falklands amidst the Jeremy Corbyn kerfuffle

SPORT


Saami Athletes to Defy Warnings against Visiting Abkhazia for Alternative World Cup. The governments of Norway and Georgia are warning footballers against attending an unofficial tournament for aspirant nations this year in the Russian puppet state of Abkhazia.  Norway’s department of state has long warned citizens against visiting Abkhazia, which most of the world other than Russia and a handful of countries regards as part of Georgia.  And the Georgian government has given notice that entering Abkhazia—a Russian client state which has been de facto self-governing since 1994—from anywhere but Georgian territory is a violation of its law.  “At the moment they [athletes] cross the border into Abkhazia in the north [the Russian side], we will raise criminal cases,” the Georgian embassy in Norway announced.  Members of the Saami (or Lappish) nation—an indigenous people whose homeland stretches across parts of Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Russia—have a team, called F.A. Sápmi, which is one of 12 slated to play in the tournament, which is being organized by the Confederation of Independent Football Associations (ConIFA).  The vice-president of ConIFA (in wording implying that he himself is Abkhazian), tried to reassure the Saami footballers, saying, “We have nothing to do with the Georgian Embassy, ​​because Abkhazia is independent.  There has been war between Abkhazia and Georgia in 1992-1993.  Therefore we still have a political problem with our neighboring country.”  ConIFA’s president, Per-Anders Blind, is an ethnic Saami.  The F.A. Sápmi coach, Håkon Kuorak, said that his team would be traveling to Abkhazia no matter what.


* Thanks to Louis Marinelli himself for writing to me and clarifying his position on this point—and apologies to him for an earlier version of this article which misrepresented him.

[You can read more about these and other sovereignty and independence 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.]

TOP STORY

LAST HOLDOUT AT OREGON WILDLIFE REFUGE SURRENDERS;
PATRIARCH CLIVEN BUNDY ARRESTED OVER 2014 NEVADA SIEGE;
FOLLOWERS VOW TO CARRY ON FIGHT OVER FEDERAL LAND POLICY




The last of the armed extremist opponents of federal land ownership occupying a wildlife refuge in Oregon threw in the towel peacefully on February 11th, ending an ordeal lasting nearly six weeks.  With shouts of, “All I needed was marijuana! You guys wouldn’t even let me have marijuana!”, 27-year-old David Lee Fry of Ohio agreed to “one more cookie, one more cigarette,” and then came out with his hands up, even though less than an hour earlier he had had a gun to his head and was ready to pull the trigger.  The occupation, which began with the takeover by a not entirely determinable number of right-wing militants, possibly dozens, on January 2nd (see my blog post on the subject), had by early February dwindled to a cast of only four, the rest having either surrendered or been arrested during forays out of the compound.  By February 4th, 16 of the occupiers, including the previously arrested brothers Ammon and Ryan Bundy as well as—in absentia—the four still inside the refuge, were indicted by a federal grand jury in Oregon for preventing “federal officials from performing their official duties by force, threats and intimidation.”  The Bundys’ father, the virulently racist Mormon rancher Cliven Bundy, age 74, who scared off armed Bureau of Land Management (B.L.M.) agents after he refused to pay years of derelict grazing fees, had recently been bragging that he was de facto immune from prosecution because federal authorities were permanently intimidated, but he too was arrested, on February 10th, as he arrived at Portland International Airport, on his way to the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge to show support to the, at that point, last four holdouts.  He is now housed in the same jail as his two sons, on weapons-related charges as well as charges of conspiracy to impede federal officers back during his 2014 standoff.

Cliven Bundy in 2014 during the Nevada standoff

By the end, the long occupation had become a kind of three-ring circus of right-wing nuttery.  In the closing hours, Michele Fiore, a Republican state legislator from Nevada who had been a public supporter of the occupation, talked him down over patched-in radio conversations from Portland while thousands listened for more than an hour on live streaming.  Fiore is a certified gun-toting nutcase herself, unembarrased about her self-produced, ahem, indie film Siren, starring herself ...


... or her family’s most recent Christmas card, which became viral on the Internet a few months ago:


She is noted for calling African-Americans “colored” and believing that cancer is a fungus which can be removed with baking soda.  Her ledge-psychology patter in the end spoke of supporters of the occupiers’ cause—opposition to federal ownership of land in the West—as “we,” while Fry ranted about flying saucers, Trayvon Martin, drone strikes, and abortion, saying, at various points, “Look how stupid the American people are—U.F.O.s are real, those little spaceships flying around,” and saying that “the government needs to stop chemically mutating people.”  The Rev. Franklin Graham (son of Billy Graham)—another head case who believes President Barack Obama is a foreign-born Muslim and that the Muslim Brotherhood has has infiltrated the United States government—also arrived at the scene to help end the standoff, telling the militants he was “proud of you and love you.”  Another of the occupiers was Pete Santilli, a real-estate-swindler who claims falsely to be a Yale University law graduate and Marine veteran and is a renowned conspiracy-theorist on right-wing talk radio—notorious for once saying on the air that Hillary Rodham Clinton should be “tried, convicted, and shot in the vagina” for supposedly faking Osama bin Laden’s death.  Santilli is now under arrest as well.

LaVoy Finicum’s final moments, captured by an F.B.I. helicopter camera

Bundy, Sr., is likely to remain a rallying figure for disaffected rural whites who use tortured legal arguments—mixed with half-baked Mormon prophecies and militia-stoked conspiracy theories—to question the role or legitimacy of the federal government.  And 54-year-old Robert “LaVoy” Finicum, the one fatality in the occupation, who was shot by Oregon state troopers when he reached for his weapon upon his arrest on January 26th, is likely to become the cause’s martyr.  At Finicum’s funeral in Kanab, Utah, on February 5th, Bundy rallied the troops, calling on fellow ranchers to tear up their grazing permits and take possession of the land they use (using, ironically, the same use-equals-possession arguments against absentee landlords employed by socialist land-reform movements in Latin America).


EUROPE


Spain Acts to Shut Down Catalonia’s “Foreign Ministry.”  The government of Spain announced on February 5th that it was prepared to act to prevent the autonomous region of Catalonia from creating its own ministry of foreign affairs.  The government plans to ask the Constitutional Court to order the entity shut down.  A spokeswoman for the Catalan government, Neus Monte, dismissed Madrid’s threat, saying, “This shows us the death throes of a government in a freefall and at its lowest point.”


Madrid Judge Orders Arrest of Puppeteers for Promoting Basque Terrorism. The British tabloid Express called it “Punch and Jihadi,” but a court in Madrid was in no joking mood when it ordered the arrest and detention of two puppeteers for advocating terrorism in a children’s puppet show that was part of the city’s Carnival (Mardi Gras) celebration.  The judge, Ismael Moreno, showing a paranoia about sedition more often associated with Vladimir Putin’s Russia, said that the puppet show, The Witch and Don Cristóbal, staged by Alfonso Lazaro de la Fuente and Raúl Garcia Pérez, of the puppet troupe Títeres desde Abajo (“Puppets from Below”), depicted “the hanging in effigy of a judge, the stabbing of a nun with a crucifix, and several police beatings,” as well as a puppet holding a sign reading, “Up with ETA”.”  This stands for Euskadi Ta Askatasuna, or Basque Homeland and Freedom, an armed group which has used violence in its pursuit of independence for the Basque Country.  Praising terrorism is a crime in Spain.  But, as explained by one journalist, the sign held by the puppet said “GORA ALKA-ETA,” using a form of the Basque verb “to live” (gora; “Gora ETA” means “Long Live ETA”) and a pun on the similarity of the acronym ETA to the last two syllables in al-Qaeda and depicted a character who was set up by the police by having the sign planted on her—an irony which I am sure was not lost on the puppeteers.  A public group that supports terrorism victims filed a complaint against Madrid’s mayor, Manuela Carmena, and Spain’s ruling People’s Party (P.P.) even called on the Madrid region’s culture minister, a member of the left-wing Podemos party, to resign—part of what some observers see as a P.P. strategy of linking Podemos to terrorists whenever possible.  After a public outcry, the puppeteers were released.  On February 10th, after a public outcry, including complaints from Amnesty International, the puppeteers were released.  Meanwhile, Spanish authorities forbade a planned visit by a delegation of rights activists from the United States to Logroño prison in north-central Spain to visit Arnaldo Otegi of the Basque separatist party Batasuna.  The delegation included the African-American former Black Panther and writer Angela Davis, the Spanish rocker Fermín Muguruza, and Amaio Izko, a Basque politician.
[Thanks to a reader, Raphael Tsavkko Garcia, for helping sort out the details in this news story.]

The seditious puppet show in question

Mebyon Kernow Urges Redistricting Panel Not to Blur Devon–Cornwall Boundary. The head of the Cornish nationalist political party Mebyon Kernow (“Party for Cornwall”) responded to a Conservative Party announcement of a looming revision of parliamentary constituency boundaries by challenging the six members of Parliament on the committee to ignore the boundary between Cornwall and its neighboring English county Devon (Devonshire).  “The Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Act, if enacted, would inevitably lead to the creation of a cross-Tamar ‘Devonwall’ seat,” said the party leader, Dick Cole, referring to the Tamar River which separates the two counties, “but Cornwall’s M.P.s are in a position to challenge the leadership of their own party on this matter.  ...  [T]he territorial integrity of Cornwall—a historic Celtic nation—must be protected and that our future M.P.s must serve constituencies that lie entirely within the boundaries of Cornwall (and the Isles of Scilly).  The Cornish people have been recognised as a ‘national minority’ and it would be inconsistent to treat the historic border of Cornwall differently from those of Scotland and Wales, which the Government intends to respect when it comes to the delineation of new constituencies.”  (The Isles of Scilly, which are part of the Duchy of Cornwall (under Prince Charles, Duke of Cornwall), but not Cornwall the county, are also claimed by Cornish nationalists.)




Plaid Cymru Parliamentarian Advocates Separate Welsh Banknotes.  A Welsh lawmaker argued on the floor of the British parliament on February 1st that Wales should have its own separate designs of pound notes, just as Scotland does.  Jonathan Edwards, M.P., who is from the nationalist Plaid Cymru party, said the move would affirm Wales’s status “as an equal nation” within the United Kingdom.  No Welsh currency has been printed since 1908, when the North and South Wales Bank closed.  Edwards also suggested renaming the Bank of England the “Sterling Central Bank.”  The proposal has started a national conversation about which prominent Welsh people would merit appearing on a banknote.  One cultural historian, Peter Stead of Swansea, suggested the boxer Jimmy Wilde; Owain Glyndwr (a.k.a. Owen Glendower), the last Prince of Wales who was actually Welsh (the current one is a German); the biologist Alfred Russel Wallace; Prime Minister David Lloyd George; the poet Dylan Thomas; the novelist Richard Llewellyn; and Betsi Cadwaladr, a Crimean War nurse known as “the Welsh Florence Nightingale.”  Others have proposed the crooners Tom Jones and Shirley Bassey and the comedian Terry Jones of Monty Python.  (Of course, the House of Tudor was Welsh, but that’s a bit of a sore point.)

Just the right mood for a ten-pound note

Witan of Mercia Backs Staffordshire M.P.’s Plan for England-Only Parliament. In response to a legislative proposal for a separate parliament just for England—along the lines of Scotland’s and Wales’s subnational parliaments within the United Kingdom—the “Acting Witan of Mercia,” Jeff Kent, said that that plan would be “just tinkering with the system,” but he added that Mercia supports “any move towards devolving power.”  Kent, who is 62, lives in Cotes Heath, in Staffordshire.  The idea was brought to the floor of the House of Commons by Tristram Hunt, M.P., of Stoke-on-Trent, Staffordshire.


Reincarnated King Arthur Battles Facebook, Rival Druids over Use of Name. The social network Facebook’s rules against using false names in personal accounts is being used as a weapon in a factional fight in a druidic organization, according to the Rev. Arthur Uther Pendragon, a 61-year-old ex-biker who lives in Salisbury, England, near Stonehenge.  Born as Johnny Rothwell, Pendragon believes that he is the reincarnation of King Arthur—yes, the King Arthur—and in 1986 had his name legally changed, as reflected on all his U.K. legal documents.  But Facebook declares the facsimiles of his passport and driving license fakes and keeps shutting down his account.  Pendragon thinks that’s really because his rivals within his druidical organization, the Loyal Arthurian Warband, keep filing complaints.  Apparently, Pendragon’s objection to English Heritage’s alcohol bans at the Stonehenge summer-solstice celebration are among the controversies in which he is embroiled.  For now he is “back up and running” on Facebook as “Arthur Rex” “for as long as it takes the ‘idiot druids’ and the idiot Facebook to pull me down again.”

“Arthur Rex”

Lega Nord Lawmakers Want Bilingual Schools, Signage in Italian and “Lombard.” Members of northern Italy’s separatist Northern League (Lega Nord), in collaboration with the Lombard League, put forth legislation in Lombardy’s regional parliament on February 10th to divert funds toward schools that teach the Lombard dialect of Italian as a separate language and to institute “bilingual” street signs and place names, in Italian and Lombard.  The legislation as written refers to the “continuum Gallo-Romanzo-Cisalpino,” under which northern Italian dialects like Lombard are classed not only with the Arpitan dialects of the cross-border Savoy/Val d’Aosta/Geneva region where Italy, France, and Switzerland meet but also with mainstream French, and not with standard Italian.

No, this town name doesn’t mean “Big Bust”—neither in Italian nor in Lombard.

Latvians Unnerved by BBC Program Warning of Russian Expansionism into Baltics. Latvians, who are understandably sensitive and jittery on the question of Russia and colonialism, did not appreciate a speculative mockumentary broadcast this month by the British Broadcasting Corporation (B.B.C.) titled World War Three: Inside the War Room, which posited Latvia’s northeastern Latgalia region as the pretext—à laCrimea or South Ossetia—for an invasion by Russia and an escalating confrontation between President Vladimir Putin and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).  Latgalia, of Latvia’s four constituent historic regions, is the most distinctive culturally and linguistically, and it is today home to most of Latvia’s ethnic Russians.  Russians, who are 27% of the country’s population, are the majority in the Latgalian capital, Dagauvpils.  In 2012, when ethnic Russians in Latvia tried and failed to push through a referendum making Russian an official national language alongside Latvian, they allied themselves with Latgalian autonomists (as discussed at the time in this blog).  The B.B.C. program also envisioned unrest among Estonia’s ethnic Russians (who make up a quarter of that country’s population) leading to Russian military intervention in the Baltics.  Some Latvians object to the overheated depiction, which showed pro-Kremlin goons wearing arm insignia with the Latgalian griffin on it:


“I feel Latgalian,” explained one native of Rēzekne, “and Latgalians, in turn, as a rule feel Latvian, not in the least bit Russian.  The only kind of people who believe that ethnic Latgalians would favour being part of the Russian Federation are those who either never bothered to speak with any ethnic Latgalians, or who are unable to distinguish Latgalians from Baltic Russians.”  And maps leaked from the Kremlin in 2012 (as reported on at the time in this blog) showed a changed Europe in 2035 where eastern Estonia and eastern Latvia have been absorbed into the Russian Federation as, respectively, Narvski District (Narva is a 94% Russian-speaking town in Estonia) and Dvinskaya Oblast (Dvinsk being the Russian name for Dagauvpils).  I still maintain that Russians in the Baltics are one of “Ten Separatist Movements to Watch in 2016,” as I insisted in a section in my blog article of that title, under the heading “ Russians in the Baltic States: Could the Kremlin Pull Another Crimea Right under the NATO Umbrella?”

Neo-Czarist heraldry is put into place in the Baltics in another scene from World War Three: Inside the War Room

Republika Srpska President Indefinitely Postpones Controversial Referendum. The president of the Republika Srpska within Bosnia and Herzegovina announced February 8th that he was postponing a divisive and controversial referendum on the question of whether federal Bosnian courts were to have jurisdiction over his republic.  At a press conference in Banja Luka, the republic’s capital, President Milorad Dodik said he would set aside referendum plans until such time as there was more agreement among different stakeholders within Republika Srpska on whether it should be held.  “We will not go into the referendum without a consensus,” he said.  Meanwhile, on February 11th, federal Bosnian authorities arrestedSlobodan Pavlović, a bank owner, and three other financial officials in connection with “crimes of abuse of office or authority and money laundering” related to loans made to Dodik.

Milorad Dodik kissing the Serbian flag

Karadžić Advisor Nabbed on War Crimes Charges; Srebrenica Participant Dies in Prison. An advisor to the Bosnian Serb war criminal Radovan Karadžićwas arrested trying to cross from Serbia into Bosnia and Herzegovina on February 8th and is being held under the terms of an arrested warrant issued in 1999.  He is being charged with war crimes and crimes against humanity committed in and around Vogošća, a suburb of Sarajevo, during the Bosnian War in the 1990s.  The defendant, Jovan Tintor, was a senior official in the Serb Democratic Party (S.D.S.) during the war.  The following day, another Bosnian Serb separatist described as “the right-hand man” of the notorious Republika Srpska war criminal Ratko Mladićdied in a United Nations prison in the Hague.  The prisoner, 67-year-old Zdravko Tolimir, was serving a life sentence for his role in the Srebrenica massacre.  Just in the past week, a court in Pejë (Peć), in Kosovo, issued war-crimes indictments against 14 Serbs for their roles in atrocities in Kosovo in 1999.  Meanwhile, the government of the Republic of Serbia is bristling at the insistence of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (I.C.T.Y.), in the Hague, that Serbia round up and turn over three members of the Serbian Radical Party who are accused of threatening witnesses during the trial of the party’s leader, the war criminal Vojislav Šešelj.


European Parliament Urges E.U.’s 5 Holdouts to Recognize Kosovo.  The European Parliament in Strasbourg, France, on February 4th passed a resolution praising the progress made in normalization of relations between Kosovo and Serbia.  The resolution, which passed 403-130, also stressed that it would be helpful to the process if all European Union (E.U.) member states extended diplomatic recognition to Kosovo.  Out of the 28 members, Spain (fearful of its own separatist movement in Catalonia) along with Cyprus and three Balkan neighbors of Kosovo’s—Greece, Romania, and Slovakia—have still not recognized Kosovo.



Kosovo Police Arrest 4 “Armed Islamists” Near Serb Cemetery.  Four armed Kosovars were arrested near a Serb cemetery in the town of Deçan, in western Kosovo.  The police had been following them and, after the arrest, weapons that included an assault rifle were confiscated from their vehicle.  Orthodox church officials and Serb media, however, called the four suspects “armed Islamists” and criticized the authorites for not treating the incident as terrorism-related.  A few days later, on February 4th, a car belonging to a public prosecutor for Gračanica was set on fire.  About 85% of the population of Gračanica, in central Kosovo, belong to Kosovo’s Serb ethnic minority.


Ruritania Announces Death of Foreign Minister; Grand Duchess Sworn In as Interim. The Kingdom of Ruritania, a manifestation of the fictional Central European nation in Anthony Hope’s 1894 novel The Prisoner of Zenda,announced this month the death of its minister for foreign affairs, Count Georg von Strofzia.  He was reportedly found dead on the morning of February 14th “at his home in Strelsau” (the Ruritanian capital in Hope’s novels).  “H.S.H. Grand Duchess Lydia von Elphberg (known to most as Cathy) has been nominated to act as Interim Minister of Foreign Affairs,” an official statement read, “until a new one is selected by Our Queen, H.R.M. Anastasia.” Ruritania, which calls itself “not a game, model, or secessionist state” but “an actual nation ... with the right of self-determination,” theoretically claims territories straddling the border between Germany and the Czech Republic but, more concretely, operates out of an “embassy” in Stone Mountain, Georgia, in the United States.


Ukrainian Soldier Killed by Rebels in Donetsk Republic; Landmine Kills 4. A military spokesman in Ukraine said on February 5th that a Ukrainian soldier had been killed within the previous 24 hours in combat with Russian-backed rebels in the unrecognized Donetsk People’s Republic (D.P.R.).  The fatality occurred in a rebel assault on the village of Zaitseve, 35 miles from Donetsk.  The following day, Ukrainian sources said 11 soldiers had been injured in recent fighting. Also in the D.P.R., four civilians were killed on February 10th when a minibus ran over a landmine near a Ukrainian checkpoint when it veered offroad, ignoring warning signs.  One passenger survived.  Meanwhile, in Moldova, a public prosecutor announced in a press conference on February 11th that his office had indicted 10 Moldovans for fighting as mercenaries on the side of separatists loyal to Russia in southeastern Ukraine.  Two so far have been given three-year prison sentences.  Most of the remaining eight facing trial are Russian-speakers from the south of Moldova.


Pro-Russian Forces Blamed for Bombing of Crimean Tatar Council in Ukraine. The embattled and persecuted Mejlis (national council) of the Crimean Tatar people in Kherson, on the Ukrainian mainland, was damaged on February 7th when a bomb exploded in its main building.  No one was injured.  The Mejlis blamed “pro-Russian forces.”  Many Crimean Tatars, who are indigenous to the Crimean Peninsula, were displaced by Russia’s invasion and annexation of Ukraine’s Autonomous Republic of Crimea in 2014, and their institutions, including the Mejlis, have come under legal and political assault.


Despite Shared Anti-Islamist Cause, Chechnya, Ingushetia Won’t Merge, Kadyrov Says. The president of Russia’s Chechen Republic, Ramzan Kadyrov, clarified on his Instagram page early this month that he was opposed to any suggestions that his republic merge with the neighboring Republic of Ingushetia.  This responded to speculation that followed a meeting between Kadyrov and his Ingush counterpart, Yunus-Bek Yevkurov, which highlighted their shared antipathy toward Wahhabism and jihadism in their territories.  Chechnya and Ingushetia, now separate majority-Muslim republics within the Russian Federation, were in the Soviet era united as the Chechen-Ingush Soviet Socialist Republic.  Chechens and Ingush at times regarded themselves as one nationality, the Vainakh, but went their separate ways due to doctrinal differences.

Ramzan Kadyrov (center)

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





Abkhazia Bans Abortion, Citing Concerns for Low Population.  Tearing a page from the playbook of Romania’s Nicolae Ceaușescu, the president of the Russian puppet state the Republic of Abkhazia, recognized as independent by only a handful of countries, signed into law on February 8th a ban on abortions passed by its parliament last month.  Though “pro-life” language pervaded the debate, one of the authors of the bill, Said Kharazia, cited concerns that “abortion artificially reduces the number of the already small population of Abkhazia.”  Abkhazia’s official population is just under a quarter-million, and a reported 11,900 abortions have been performed since 1993.  Abortion remains legal in the country most of the world regards Abkhazia as part of, the Republic of Georgia.  In Abkhazia, the ban, which is effective immediately, begins at conception.  One Russian news source pointed out that only two other European states ban abortion—Malta and Vatican City—forgetting that Abkhazia, being on the south side of the Caucasus ridge, is in Asia.






Russian Prosecutor Sees Bias in International Court’s South Ossetia War Probe.  The director of Russia’s federal Investigative Committee—the equivalent of attorney general—complained on February 3rd about the ongoing probe by the International Criminal Court (I.C.C.) into the South Ossetia War of 2008.  The director, Alexander Bastrykin, said that the probe so far has ignored what he characterized as torture and mass killings of Ossetians by the government of Georgia, as well as the forced relocation of 16,000.


Nagorno-Karabakh Soldier, Armenian Shepherd Killed at Azerbaijani Border. A soldier in the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic’s army was shot and killed early on the morning of February 5th at the border with the government-controlled part of Azerbaijan.  The incident happened amid what for years have been regular exchanges of gunfire across the cease-fire line in what is for the most part a frozen conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan.  Later, on February 12th, the N.K.R. ministry of defense reported that an Armenian shepherd had been killed by ammunition fired from the Azerbaijani side of the border.  Azerbaijan denied the report.  Meanwhile, in Russia, an ethnic Armenian businessmen named Samvel Karapetyan, has announced that he will give $5,000 to every fourth baby born to a family in the N.K.R.  A spokesman for the N.K.R.’s President Bako Sahakyan pointed out that this provides an incentive for Armenian couples that already have three children to relocate to the N.K.R.




Cypriot Reunification Talks on Track, Say Presidents; Land, Troops at Issue.  Negotiations are proceeding between the presidents of the Republic of Cyprus and the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (K.K.T.C.) on reunification of the island, Cypriot media reported on February 2nd.  Front and center are territorial questions, with the (southern) Cypriot president, Nicos Anastasiades, asking the K.K.T.C. president, Mustafa Akıncı, for the return of the towns of Güzelyurt and the withdrawal of 20,000 troops from the Republic of Turkey from the self-declared K.K.T.C.


Ankara Announces End to Anti-Kurdish Military Operation in Şırnak. A military operation against the Kurdistan Worker’s Party (P.K.K.) in Cizre, in southeastern Turkey’s Şırnak province, has come to an end, according to a statement from authorities on February 11th.  But curfews are to remain in place.  Fighting is ongoing in Sur, in Diyarbakır province.  Earlier, it had been reported that two government officers were killed and another wounded when a state-owned vehicle was destroyed in a bomb blast in Şırnak on February 2nd.  Two of the casualties in the vehicle were employees of a state-run hospital.  The Turkish military claims more than 600 P.K.K. fighters have been killed in Cizre since the operations began in mid-December.  Meanwhile, on February 10th, five people in masks threw Molotov cocktails at the offices of a pro-government newspaper in Istanbul, then opened fire with rifles.  Another newspaper office was attacked an hour later.  The government blamed the P.K.K.


MIDDLE EAST





Barzani Calls for “Immediate” Referendum on Kurdish Independence from Iraq.  The president of Iraq’s Kurdistan Region, Massoud Barzani, called on February 2nd for an immediate referendum on Kurdish independence from Iraq.  “It is clear to all that this region and Kurdistan in particular was divided without regard to the will of its indigenous people which in turn led to hundred years of troubles, war, denial, and instability,” Barzani said, adding, “Kurdistan has every geographic, historic, and human factor just as Scotland, Catalonia, Quebec, and others do.  The same way people in those places have the right to decide their future, the Kurds too have that right and this is not open to argument.”  The central government in Baghdad condemned the statement, emphasizing the inviability of a referendum, while also saying that it could not offer any financial assistance to the economically troubled region.  A spokesman for Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development Partyresponded to Barzani’s comments on February 4th, saying that an independence push in Iraqi Kurdistan would only “complicate the picture.”  Within Kurdistan Region politics, the referendum idea is backed by the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (P.U.K.), the Kurdistan Islamic Union (K.I.U.), and Kurdistan Democratic Party (K.D.P.).  Meanwhile, three police were injured in Erbil on February 7th when violence erupted among hundreds of Iraqi Kurds protesting against Turkey’s government outside a United Nations compound.

President Massoud Barzani

Syrian Kurdish Parties Announce Founding of Umbrella Group. In Syria, Kurdish groups announced on February 13th the founding of a new umbrella group called the Kurdish National Alliance in Syria.  A coalition of five different parties, the K.N.A.S. plans to use a federal approach to build on what it called “Auto-Administration,” the de facto autonomy achieved by several different Kurdish “cantons” in the northern Syrian region Kurds call “Rojava.”  As a spokesman, Mustafa Mashayikh, told the media, “Rojava has given a good example for the maintenance of civil peace, and we believe by establishing a federal state in Syria we could avoid any future clashes between the different social components as every group would be fairly represented in a federal system.”  Meanwhile (see below), Rojava seems to be drifting more and more into Russia’s diplomatic orbit, as evidenced by the recent announcement of the opening of Syrian Kurdish “embassies” in not only Moscow but in Russia’s Donetsk People’s Republic puppet state in eastern Ukraine.



Kurds Retake Land—from ISIS in Iraq with U.S. Help, and from Moderates in Syria with Russian Help.  The stateless nation of Kurdistan straddles the border between Iraq and Syria, but Kurds are playing a dangerous game of playing opposing parties in both those multi-sided civil wars against one another.  In Iraq, Kurdish Peshmerga forces and Arab tribal militias retook the village of Karmrdi, near Makhmour on February 1st by ejecting forces from the Islamic State (a.k.a. ISIS), with United States warplanes providing backup.  Within days, Peshmerga sources announced the recapture of Kudila, another nearby village from ISIS, Kudila.  Meanwhile, in Syria, however, where Kurds allied with Turkey’s Kurdistan Worker’s Party are allied with Russia, an air force base near the Turkish border has been abandoned by anti-government rebels under fire from Kurdish forces backed by Russian bombers, according to a February 11th report by the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.  The Kurdish “People’s Protection Units” (Yekîneyên Parastina Gel‎, or Y.P.G.) took the Menagh air base from moderate Sunni Arab rebels from the Levant Front, after 30 bombing sorties by Russian warplanes.  Starting on February 13th, the Turkish air force began a bombing campaign against Kurdish-held areas in northern Syria, including the Menagh air base as well as areas around Azaz, while the Turkish foreign minister talked openly of a ground invasion of Syria.  In other news, an aid-worker reported on February 11th that ISIS was using chemical munitions on Peshmerga forces near Sinjar, Iraq, and 19 people, including 14 Filipino citizens, were killed in a hotel fire on February 5th in Erbil, Iraqi Kurdistan’s capital.  The cause is believed to have been “an electrical problem in a sauna.”

An excellent, up-to-date map of Syria from the blog Pietervanostaeyen.

British Foreign Minister Accuses Russia of Planning Alawite Statelet in Syria.  The United Kingdom’s foreign minister accused the Russian government on February 2nd of concentrating its military in Syria against moderate opponents of the dictator Bashar al-Assad rather than against Islamic State (a.k.a. ISIS), with the aim of eventually carving out a mini-state for Assad’s fellow Alawite Shiite Arabs.  “Is Russia really committed to a peace process,” the minister, Philip Hammond, asked during a meeting with journalists in Rome, “or is it using the peace process as a fig leaf to try to deliver some kind of military victory for Assad that creates an Alawite mini-state in the northwest of Syria?”


Netanyahu Ally Says Palestinian Nationhood Fake Because Arabic Lacks “P.”  Even her colleagues in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing Likud party thought it was going too far on February 10th when she told the Knesset (parliament) that the nation of Palestine did not really exist because the Arabic alphabet lacks the letter P.  “I want to go back to history,” said Anat Berko during a parliamentary debate on the “two-state solution”; “what is our place here, about Jerusalem, about Palestine, when like we said, Arabic doesn’t even have P, so this loan-word also merits scrutiny.”  While it is true that the name Palestine is borrowed from the Latin name Palestina, dating to the days of the Roman Empire, Arabic-speakers have been referring to Palestine as Falastin for centuries, if not millennia.  Tamar Zandberg of the Meretz party spoke for most of Berko’s Knesset colleagues by responding, “What?  Did everyone hear this?  Are you an idiot?”  At least one Arab member of the Knesset walked out of the chamber in protest.

12 Palestinians, 1 Israeli Dead as Spate of Knife Attacks Continues in West Bank. Two weeks of unrest in Israeli-occupied parts of Palestine left 11 Palestinians dead, many of them killed in the course of knife attacks on Israeli Jews, in what is an increasing pattern in West Bank violence.  A kitchen-knife-wielding 15-year-old Palestinian boy was arrested in an attempt to stab a Jewish man near the Damascus Gate on February 2nd.  There was no injury.  On February 7th he was remanded on charges including attempted murder.  An Israeli security officer was killed on February 3rd by a group of three heavily armed Palestinians who were then all shot and killed by nearby police.  The Palestinians were also wired with explosive devices, which were defused before they could go off.  The following day, Israeli authorities sealed off the entire home village of the three attackers, Qabatiya, near Jenin.  That incident inspired two 14-year-old Palestinian girls from the town of Ramle, to stab a Jewish security guard at a shopping mall on February 4th.  The guard was only lightly injured; the two girls were apprehended and later charged with attempted murder and conspiracy.  A court in Israel on February 4th sentenced two young Jewish men to long prison terms for the brutal random murder of a Palestinian 16-year-old in 2014.  One of the men received a life term and the other 21 years.  On February 5th, a Palestinian teenager was shot and killed by Israeli soldiers when he was about to throw a Molotov cocktail at a busy highway in the West Bank, the military reported.  A 24-year-old Palestinian man died on February 8th because he was performing maintenance on a supply tunnel between Egypt and the Gaza Strip when the tunnel collapsed.  On the same day, police arrested a 42-year-old Palestinian woman near the Damascus Gate who was armed with a large knife.  On February 9th, two teenaged Palestinian girls, one only 13, were arrested in the West Bank in connection with the stabbing of a 28-year-old Israeli man while he was jogging.  A Jewish Israeli man attacked a Palestinian’s truck with an axe near an illegal West Bank settlement on February 10th.  The man was arrested and implicated himself in the incident.  Also on February 10th, a 16-year-old Palestinian was shot in the chest and killed when soldiers spotted him and other boys throwing stones at vehicles near a refugee camp in the West Bank.  The same day, a court in Jerusalemindicted two Palestinian teenagers, ages 14 and 16, for stabbing an Israeli teenager in the city in January.  Police on February 11th arrested a right-wing Jewish extremist for death threats against a Palestinian member of the Israeli Knesset, Ayman Odeh.  This was in response to the suspension three days earlier of three Palestinian parliamentarians from Odeh’s party, the Joint List, for visiting the families of Palestinian civilians who were killed while attacking Israelis.  On February 13th, a 17-year-old Palestinian girl was shot to death after attempting to stab an Israeli soldier near a mosque in Hebron.  On February 14th, in four separate incidents in Jerusalem and the West Bank, five Palestinians were killed and another injured during attempts to attack Israelis.  The incidents included: a machine-gun attack on Israeli forces near the Damascus Gate, resulting in the deaths of the two Arab gunmen; two 15-year-old Palestinians killed by security forces after throwing rocks at vehicles and then opening fire; a 17-year-old Palestinian from near Bethlehem shot dead by a paramilitary border guard whom he attacked with a knife; and a 21-year-old Palestinian woman critically wounded after attacking a police officer at a checkpoint in Hebron.  No Jewish Israelis were harmed in those incidents, but in the last incident, in Hebron, video footage of an Israeli policeman, well after the would-be stabber was apprehended, dumping a Palestinian man out of his wheelchair and into the street went viral on social media (see below).



AFRICA





Pro-Biafra Militants Sail Hijacked Tanker to Benin, Escape with 5 Captive Crewmen.  The pro-Biafra militants who hijacked a 9,000-ton chemical tanker on January 29th (as reported earlier this month in this blog) released the ship on February 2nd into the hands of the Beninois navy.  But the hijackers themselves absconded with five crew members—one allegedly injured—who include citizens of Russia, Georgia, and the Philippines.  Their whereabouts are unknown.  The vessel, the M.T. Leon Dias, which is registered in Liberia but owned by an outfit based in Greece, was hijacked on January 29th in the Gulf of Guinea 100 miles off the coast of the disputed Bakassi Peninsula, in Cameroon, near the border with Nigeria.  The hijackers demanded the release within 31 days of Nnamdi Kanu, the imprisoned leader of the Nigerian separatist group Indigenous People of Biafra (IPoB), which seeks independence for Biafra, a region in southeastern Nigeria which by some reckonings includes the Bakassi Peninsula.  Within a few days, the Leon Dias had arrived in the territorial waters of the Republic of Benin.  The hijackers’ spokesman identified himself as “General Ben.” IPoB denied any involvement in the hijacking, citing its commitment to nonviolence, and a leader from the other major Biafran separatist group, the Movement for the Actualisation of the Sovereign State of Biafra (MASSOB), said that “Captain Ben” was not an actual Biafran separatist but just “some Niger Delta militant who has shown interest in working with us.”  Dirk Steffen, a maritime security expert in Denmark, gave the opinion that the Biafran separatist cause was adopted by the hijackers to veil their actual motive, which was likely to hold the crew for ransom.  IPoB’s spokesman, Emma Powerful, accused the federal government of falsely linking them to the hijacking in order to justify keeping Kanu in prison.

The Leon Dias, the hijacked tanker

10 IPoB Protestors Killed by Police, Dozens Injured; Buhari Besieged in London Riot. While Nnamdi Kanu awaits trial, security forces mowed down peaceful protestors in Abia State on February 9th, killing 10 and injuring at least 20 and possibly over 30.  The demonstration was organized by the group Kanu founded, Indigenous People of Biafra (IPoB).  Some reports said that after the killings an IPoB mob attacked a nearby school, accusing those inside of causing the killings by acting as informers to the authorities.  While the official IPoB statement the following day, referring to over 1,000 IPoB protestors killed by security forces since Kanu’s arrest, was a wild exaggeration, nonetheless protests pressing for the release of Kanu have become a global phenomenon.  While the Leon Dias crisis dragged on, bodyguards had to sneakNigeria’s president, Muhammadu Buhari, out of his London hotel via the basement because of Biafran demonstrators that had surrounded much of the building.  Police refused to disperse the protestors, as Buhari’s aides had requested, explaining that in the United Kingdom there is such a thing as the right to free expression (unlike in Nigeria; see below).  Buhari was in London to address members of the U.K.’s Nigerian community.  Kanu is a dual citizen of Nigeria and the U.K.

President Buhari being led into a London police van for his protection from pro-Biafra demonstrators

MASSOB to Make Nigeria “Ungovernable” If Igbo Denied Independence Vote. Meanwhile, MASSOBissued a statement during the hijacking crisis to the effect that if the Nigerian government did not permit Igbo people to vote on whether or not to be part of Nigeria then “MASSOB and other pro-Biafra agitators will make Nigeria ungovernable.  We shall use everything at our disposal to fight the Nigerian government, especially through civil disobedience.  We are going to call for ‘sit at home’ in all Biafran land and Lagos.”  The statement is, perhaps deliberately, vague as to whether violent tactics would be used.  Nor is it clear if the MASSOB “National Director of Information,” Samuel Edeson, meant, by “other pro-Biafra agitators,” IPoB as well.  In January, another MASSOB “National Director of Information,” Sunny Okereafor, met in Rivers State with Goodluck Freeman, a leader from the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People (MoSOP), and agreed to work together toward the goal of an independent Biafra.  In his statement, Edeson also revealed plans to bring the former Nigerian president Olusegun Obasanjo before the International Criminal Court (I.C.C.) for war crimes committed during the Biafra War in the late 1960s.  Nigeria’s Director of Defense Information, Brig. Gen. Rabe Abubakar, responded on February 4th, warning in an official statement that the military and security services would not tolerate unrest.  He also, apparently without irony, warned against pro-Biafra activists who “hide under” the constitution’s free-speech provisions “to stir up trouble and insecurity.”  (Translation: you have free speech, as long as you don’t use it to challenge the status quo.)


Nigeria Arrests Alleged Mastermind of Niger Delta Oil Pipeline Bombings. The government of Nigeria revealed on February 11th that it had arrested an alleged mastermind of the oil-facility bombings in the Niger Delta region last month shortly after the incidents occurred.  The suspect, Prince Alvin Cockman Oygun, a.k.a. Commander Abula, is allegedly specifically behind bombings of a pipeline belonging to the Italian oil multinational Eni’s subsidiary Agip, which operates in Bayelsa State.  Abula was captured by Nigerian Joint Forces in Idema, Bayelsa, after a manhunt, and he is presumably linked to the formerly active ethnic insurgency in the region under the banner of the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND).


Bodyguard Shot, Dowager Queen Dies at 104 as Yoruba Feud with Benin Rages.  A member of the personal security detail of Oba Adeyeye Enitan Ogunwusi, Ojaja II, the Ọọ̀ni of Ilé-Ifẹ̀, and one of Nigeria’s highest ranking Yoruba monarchs, was shot and killed by alleged armed robbers on February 8th.  Three suspects have been arrested.  The following day, further tragedy struck the royal house when Ojaja II’s paternal grandmother, the dowager Queen Mariani Adeyemi Ogunwusi, died at the age of 104.  On that same day, Ojaja II continued his war of words with the Oba of Benin (a kingdom in Nigeria’s Edo State, not to be confused with the Republic of Benin) by insisting that Edo is in Yoruba territory.  This follows complaints from the Beninese royal palace disputing Ojaja II’s earlier statement ranking the Oba of Benin as only third among southwestern Nigerian kings, behind himself and the Alaafin of Oyo.  The Oodua People’s Congress (O.P.C.), which wants a separate Yoruba republic, also chimed in, criticizing what it called the Beninese distortion of history.

The monarch Ojaja II of Ilé-Ifẹ̀ (right) and the late Queen Mariani Adeyemi Ogunwusi.

Kookis Fume over Arrest of Monarch Who Rammed Ugandan V.P.’s Convoy.  Tensions between the disestablished Kooki monarchy and the central government in Uganda erupted into the open this month when Apollo Sansa Kabumbuli II was arrested on February 2nd for nearly crashing into the convoy of the Ugandan vice-president, Edward Kiwanuka Ssekandi, after he refused to yield to it.  Kabumbuli II is the Kooki nation’s Kamuswaga, a monarchal title variously translated as “chief,” “prince,” “cultural leader,” or even “king.”  Kabumbuli was driving his own vehicle when the near crash occurred, and Ssekandi’s security detail descended on him with weapons drawn.  The monarch drew his own gun and the situation devolved into scuffling.  The guards overpowered him, ripped his clothing, took off his shoes, and removed him from the scene in a police truck.  Such indignities, when heaped upon royalty, are not taken lightly in Kooki culture.  Though the monarch was released without charge in short order, he publicly demanded two days later—in a statement given at Entebbe airport as he prepared to depart for Germany for medical treatment—that the federal police prosecute the guards who “unlawfully and unjustifiably tortured” him.  “Your officers’ acts,” a lawyer’s statement read, “were not only intended to torture our client but to humiliate him.”  The palace declared a 10-day period of mourning throughout the Kooki nation to mourn the disrespect shown the Kamuswaga.  The chief of police apologized officially, but as late as February 9th Kookis were still angry.  Over 300 demonstrated in front of the royal palace in Rakai district, many dressed in mourning.  In July 2015 (as reported on in this blog), the Kooki chieftainship declared a secession from the Buganda Kingdom, the monarchy that is sometimes considered coextensive with the Ugandan state itself.

No way to treat a Kamuswaga

Campaigning Ugandan President Promises East African “Superstate.”  Nine days before Uganda’s general election, the country’s president, Yoweri Museveni, who plans to run for another term, told a radio interview on February 9th said that his primary goal for the remainder of his tenure is the creation of a union of central African states that would include Burundi, Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania, and Uganda.  These five are already members of the East African Community (E.A.C.), which has a sort of common market and even plans to introduce a single currency by 2024.  Museveni says the Rwandan and Kenyan governments are on board with the idea, though “we have been having some issues with Tanzanians.”  With 157 million people, any “East African Federation” would still be less populous than Nigeria, which has 177 million.





Ethiopia Accused of “Ethnic Cleansing” of Anuaks in Gambela Region.  A coalition of minority and opposition parties in Ethiopiasounded the alarm on February 3rd over what it called ethnic cleansing of tribal people in the Gambela region, on the border with South Sudan.  According to the Peoples’ Alliance for Freedom and Democracy (P.A.F.D.), special police attached to the Gambela People’s Region in southwestern Ethiopia, and presumably under the direction of the federal government, cracked down on the Anuak ethnic minority beginning January 27th, killing at least four.  In a statement released on February 3rd, the P.A.F.D. said the massacres were ongoing.  The Anuak are a tribal people from the Nilotic ethnolinguistic grouping, related to the ethnic groups that make up a majority in South Sudan.  Many Anuak are affiliated with the Gambella People’s Liberation Front (G.P.L.F.), which is a constituent member of the P.A.F.D., along with the Oromo Liberation Front (O.L.F.), the Ogaden National Liberation Front (O.N.L.F.), the Sidama National Liberation Front (S.N.L.F.), and the Benishangul People’s Liberation Movement (B.P.L.M.).  The ethnic tensions are being attributed to interethnic warfare spilling over from South Sudan.







Kenya Releases Mombasa Republican Council Chairman on Bail.  The chairman of the separatist Mombasa Republican Council (M.R.C.), Omar Mwamnuadzi, was released on bond on February 1st, amounting to 200,000 Kenyan shillings (just under $2,000 US).  The bond was granted partly so that he could seek medical attention.  The M.R.C. has been fighting for years for the secession of the predominantly-Muslim Coast (or Pwani) Province, including Mombasa, from Kenya, which is mostly Christian.  (There is also a large Muslim population, mostly Somalis, along the border with Somalia.)  Before the British colonial period, Mombasa and its environs were part of the Sultanate of Zanzibar.




Two Rioters Killed in Puntland; Prominent Businessman Assassinated.  Two people died in rioting in the Puntland State of Somalia on February 1st.  The demonstrators, in Bossaso, were protesting the continued imprisonment of Farah Haji Saed, who had been arrested the day before for inciting demonstrations against the Puntland government.  Five people were also injured in the violence.  The following day, also in Bossaso, unidentified men shot dead a prominent local businessman, Hersi Aden (a.k.a. Hersi Adunyo).


Puntland, Somaliland Ask for International Relief from Drought, Famine. From both the Republic of Somaliland and the Puntland State of Somalia came pleas this month to the international community to help ameliorate famine in their territories caused by drought.  The president of Puntland, Abdiweli Mohamed Ali, announced on February 5th that his statelet was officially in a state of famine and he pleaded with international aid organizations to help the estimated hundreds of thousands of Puntlanders in acute need of food.  He said the hardest hit provinces were Bari, Sanag, Karkaar, Gardafu, and Sool.  Sanag and Sool are in disputed territory, also claimed, and partially governed, by Somaliland.  Shortly afterward, the governor of Gabiley province, in western Somaliland, Mustafa Abdi Essa (“Mustafe Chine”), called specifically on the United Nations and on the (internationally unrecognized) Somaliland national government.

Dr. Ali Khalif Galaydh, the Khaatumo State warlord

Ex–Khaatumo Warlord in Somaliland Cabinet Condemns His Successor’s Killing Spree. In the disputed borderlands between the unrecognized Republic of Somaliland and Somalia’s autonomous republic of Puntland, a third entity, the territorially shifting Khaatumo State, fulfilled its threats to kill pro-Somaliland nomads by killing one and wounding two on February 12th.  The killings happened in the Buhoodle region, near the border with Ethiopia.  Somaliland’s minister of health and labor, Dr. Suleiman Ahmed Issa Kara, a.k.a “Hagaltosie,” condemned the murders, saying authorities needed to “act now on these terrorists rather than later.  Dr. Ali Khalif Galaydh,” he added, referring to Khaatumo’s warlord, “has openly vowed to wage Jihad against Somaliland, threaten to send suicide bombers, attack bridges and transportation system, but worse of all to massacre innocent civilians at will.”  “Hagaltosie” is in a good position to judge in this matter: he himself was Khaatumo’s warlord until 2012, when a peace-deal between Khaatumo and Somaliland (now shattered) included his being given a cabinet position in Somaliland.


ASIA





8 Dead in Suspected Baloch Bicycle-Bombing; Pakistani Forces Kill 10 Separatists.  Separatists in Pakistan fighting for an independent Balochistanare suspected in a bicycle-borne suicide-bombing in Quetta, the provincial capital, which killed nine people on February 6th and injured more than 35.  The cyclist blew up himself as he neared a vehicle of the paramilitary Frontier Corps.  The eight dead included seven civilians in addition to two F.C. members.  On February 9th, police in Lasi Goth, Pakistan, arrested a suspected member of the Baloch Liberation Army (B.L.A.) for a role in an attack on a shrine last year.  The suspect, Chuthal Magsi, reportedly admitted under interrogation that he was among other B.L.A. members who attacked the Zinda Pir Astana in Mehran on September 18th.  He named other co-conspirators.  Later, February 10th, a truck carrying marble to Karachi was attacked by gunmen and damaged and the driver briefly “arrested.”  The B.L.A. claimed responsibility for that incident, saying that it was retaliation for natural resources being taken out of Baloch territory.  And authorities reported on February 13th that a paramilitary operation in Kohlu district, in northeaster Balochistan, had resulted in the deaths of 10 B.L.A. separatists, the arrest of 12, and the destruction of three training camps.

Aftermath of the bicycle suicide-bombing on February 6th in Balochistan

Indian Security Forces Kill 2 Kashmiri Civilians During Protest over Militant’s Death. In India’s disputed state of Jammu and Kashmir, one militant was killed as separatists clashed with security forces near Kakapora, leading to protests in the nearby village of Lelhara.  During those demonstrations, security forces opened fire on civilians, killing two students, ages 19 and 22.  The 22-year-old, a graduate student named Shaista Hameed, was not even demonstrating; she was standing on the verandah of her home when she was shot in the neck and head.  Another civilian has life-threatening injuries.  Meanwhile, a spokesperson for the Hurriyat Conference, the leading Muslim separatist outfit in Kashmir, announced on February 13th that it had received a death threat the previous day from the prominent organized-crime figure Ravi Pujari against the Hurriyat leader, Syed Ali Shah Geelani.  The spokesperson said Pujari had “used unparliamentary language” in demanding Geelani “desist from what he called ... provocative speeches.”  The Hurriyat Conference’s position is that if anything happens to Geelani it will be the fault of India’s government, currently led by the Hindu-nationalist and often Islamophobic Bharatiya Janata Party (B.J.P.).




Madhesi Separatists Say Protests over Nepalese Constitution to Continue.  A Madhesi separatist leader in Nepalsaid on February 2nd that protests will continue until the next national election.  C. K. Raut, who heads the Alliance for Independent Madhesh (A.I.M.), said “the steam has gone out of” the mainstream Madhesi parties, making room for “radicalised” Madhesis to press for full independence.  “They are no more going to be satisfied just by the demarcation or proportional representation,” he said.  The Madhesi region, a thin strip of lowlands along the entirety of the Indian-Nepali border, is populated by speakers of the Maithili language, who have closer cultural ties to India than to Nepali highlanders.


Beijing Blames “Radical Separatists” for “Fishball Revolt” in Hong Kong. The People’s Republic of China’s foreign ministry has taken the unprecedented step of declaring rioting that broke out in Hong Kong during Chinese New Year festivities the work of “radical separatists.”  The unrest on February 9th, which was focused in Hong Kong’s working class Mong Kok district and has been dubbed on social media the “Fishball Revolution” or “Fishball Revolt,” was officially declared a “riot” by Hong Kong’s Beijing-leaning chief executive, Leung Chun-ying.  This is the first time this powerful legal designation has been used since the United Kingdom handed Hong Kong back to the P.R.C. in 1997.


The police commissioner, Lu Wei-cong, claimed protestors planned to torch police cars and throw bricks, but this could not be verified—nor could claims that some protestors should slogans promoting full independence for Hong Kong.  As far as anyone can tell, the violence began with demonstrations against a city crackdown on street-food vendors.  It is probably the fact that these protests were led by Liu Xiao-li, a leader in the failed anti-government “Umbrella Revolution” of 2014, that alarmed the authorities.


By February 9th, another group prominent in the Umbrella Revolution, Hong Kong Indigenous, was taking part as well.  Authorities claim that 89 police were injured but made no mention of civilian casualties, even though witnesses report police firing into unarmed crowds.  At least 64 people were arrested, including five members of Hong Kong Indigenous.





Sichuan Shopkeepers Ordered to Take Down Dalai Lama Portraits; Tibetan Tortured to Death in Chinese Prison. Authorities in China’s Sichuan province mandated that shopkeepers take down any portraits of the 14th Dalai Lama and hand them in to the authorities, according to reports on February 3rd from state-run media.  Meanwhile, Radio Free Asia reported this month that a man arrested in 2014 for refusing to fly the Chinese flag has died in prison from the effects of torture.  The man, whose full name was Trigyal, was sentenced to 13 years in prison along with two other men (who got 10 years each) in Driru county, in the Tibet Autonomous Region, when they refused to participate in a government campaign to get Tibetans to fly the Chinese flag.  Over 1,000 people in the village of Mukhyim also participated in the protest, and some threw Chinese flags into a river.  This invited a crackdown by security forces, including firing into crowds of unarmed protestors.  Also, on February 11th, the Tibetan Centre for Human Rights and Democracy reported that two prominent monks from Drango County in Sichuan’s Tibetan autonomous area were arrested after holding a prayer service for the health of the Dalai Lama, who is currently undergoing prostate surgery in the United States.

The late Akong Tulku Rinpoche (right)

Beijing Sentences Murderers of Tibeto-British Monk to Death.  The People’s Republic of Chinahas handed down death sentences to two men for the murder of a British monk who founded the first Tibetan Buddhist monastery in Europe.  Akong Tulku Rinpoche, who in 1967 founded the Samye Ling monastery in Scotland, was stabbed to death at his home in Chengdu in 2013 in a dispute over money.  The United Kingdom’s government responded by reiterating to Beijing its opposition to capital punishment.  The monk, born in eastern Tibet in 1939 fled to India in 1959 and was later naturalized as a U.K. citizen.


China Cuts Prison Terms for Uyghur “Terrorists”; Activist Kept out of Taiwan. Prison terms were reduced for 11 members of the Uyghur minority convicted of terrorism and related crimes, sources said on February 1st, including Huseyin Celil, a citizen of Canada who fled China as a refugee in 2000 but was later extradited there from Uzbekistan and given a life sentence.  He had been accused of involvement with the East Turkestan Islamic Movement (ETIM).  The World Uyghur Congress (W.U.C.), an exile group based in Germany, calls the commutations a “political propaganda tool” intended to draw attention away from what is going on in China’s Xinjiang Uyghur “Autonomous” Region.  Meanwhile, W.U.C.’s executive director, Dolkun Isa, has been denied permission by Taiwan’s government to attend a human-rights conference in that country, the W.U.C. announced on February 12th.  “It is a true shame,” the W.U.C. statement said, “that a democratic country such as Taiwan should be so influenced by the will of the [mainland] Chinese government.”




Taiwan Parliament Speaker Sworn In; Madonna Stirs Uproar with KMT Flag.  In Taiwan, the pro-independence Democratic Progressive Party (D.P.P.), which swept into power in elections in January, appointedSu Jia-chyuan as the first “president” (equivalent to speaker) of parliament who is not from the now ousted Kuomintang (KMT) party.  The D.P.P. now controls 89 out of 113 seats in the chamber.  Su, who is 59 years old, was minister of the interior and later of agriculture the last time the D.P.P. held power.  Meanwhile, the American singer Madonnacaused an online stir among Beijing loyalists just before her first concert appearance in Taiwan on February 4th by posting a photo of herself on Facebook and Instagram framed by a blue-star design that is a symbol of the KMT).




Rights Group Accuses Thai Security Forces of Torturing Muslim Separatist Suspects. The national anti-terrorist agency in Thailandis accused of torturing confessions out of Muslim separatist suspects in the far south in 2015, in a report released on February 2nd by the Muslim Attorney Center Foundation.  The report is based on the testimony of 33 different victims, covering all three insurgence-plagued provinces, Pattani, Yala, and Narathiwat.  A spokesman for the Internal Security Operation Command (ISOC) rejected the accusations, saying that they were “an attempt to discredit Thailand.”  Later, authorities reported that security forces had raided a secret separatist insurgent camp in the mangrove forests of Pattani province on February 10th, where weapons and bomb-making equipment were seized.  A clash with the camp’s occupants led to no injuries and only one arrest.

A terrorist nest in the Thai jungle

Philippine Congress Refuses to Green-Light Bangsomoro Autonomous Region.  The Philippine legislature declined on February 3rd to consider a law that would formally grant autonomy to the Bangsomoro region based on the southern, majority-Muslim island of Mindanao, despite a 2014 deal between government and rebels to make the autonomous region possible.  The Congress’s session ended on the 3rd, with the matter of Bangsomoro deliberately set aside.  President Benigno S. Aquino had pushed hard for the autonomous region, but after a massacre of 44 police by the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) in January 2015, Congressional support for the deal began to waver.  Now, with Aquino’s term to end in June, it is not clear if the autonomous region will be created or if civil war on Mindanao will resume.

OCEANIA





10 Papuan Rebels Seek Amnesty from Indonesia.  Intelligence officials in Papua New Guineaconfirmed this month that ten former rebels from the Free Papua Movement (O.P.M.) have asked the government for amnesty.  The ten include Teranus Enumbi, a former platoon commander.  They are also asking for living assistance in exchange for putting down their arms.  The western half of the island of New Guinea was promised independence by its colonial rulers, the Netherlands, after the Second World War, but the United States and the United Nations helped Indonesia annex it instead, after a rigged plebiscite on the territory’s status.  Indigenous people there have been fighting a separatist insurgency ever since.


Australia’s Norfolk Island Bristles at Broadcast Rules, Revocation of Autonomy. Residents of Norfolk Island, an Australian possession in the South Pacific, are upset after new restrictionsAustralia imposed this month, as the government ordered Norfolk’s radio station to avoid political broadcasts.  Later, the executive director of the Norfolk Island Administration, which represents Canberra on the island, clarified that it was not censorship because Radio Norfolk is a government radio station and thus requires a balance of views.  Last year, Norfolk Island was unilaterally demoted from a separate territory within the Commonwealth of Australia to a regional council within the state of New South Wales—which is about 1,500 miles away.  Norfolk has a population of about 2,300 people living on 14 square miles.  It was settled in 1856 by a splinter group from the Pitcairn Island colony.  A group called Norfolk Island People for Democracy plans to take the matter of the island’s status to the United Nations and have Norfolk added to its list of “non-self-governing territories.”


NORTH AMERICA





Petition for Separate North Ontario Province Unnerves Former Secessionist Party.  The Northern Ontario Heritage Party (N.O.H.P.), known for its past advocacy of provincial status for Ontario’s vast, sparsely populated north, is trying to distance itself from a new petition pushing for a separate “Province of Northern Ontario” within Canada.  After only a month, the provincehood petition, brought by a 33-year-old North Bay bus driver named Trevor Holliday, had, by February 6th, 3,500 signatures.  Holliday is a member of the N.O.H.P. but began parting ways with the more moderate mainstream of the party, which has largely abandoned the secession idea.  “There are still some in the party who don’t think it can happen at all,” said Paul Sloan, who finished last in his 2014 N.O.H.P. bid for the Thunder Bay–Superior North riding in the provincial legislature, “and there are some who see it as a gradual process.  It’s not going to happen immediately.  ...  When Nunavut decided to become a territory, it took about nine years to get it into operation.”  But Holliday, who came to secessionism through a friendship with the N.O.H.P.’s erstwhile leader, Ed Deibel, pointed out, “In comparison to size, both New Brunswick and Newfoundland fit into ours.  They do a fine job of it.  I’m not saying everything’s going to be riches and everybody’s going to have streets of gold but yes, money can be made in raw materials.”


“Free State Project” Meets Goal: 20,000 Libertarians Pledge to Move to New Hampshire. The Free State Project (F.S.P.) announced on February 3rd that it had reached its goal of 20,000 signers of a pledge to move to New Hampshire and help to electorally shape it into an experimental Libertarian state.  Signing constitutes a pledge to move to the state within five years and to “exert the fullest practical effort toward the creation of a society in which the maximum role of government is the protection of individuals’ rights to life, liberty and property.”  F.S.P. spokespeople say about 10% of signers have already moved there, and a whopping 40 have at various times been elected to statewide public office.  Their policy initiatives have focused on easing licensing restrictions, marijuana decriminalization, and the ever-present tyranny of parking meters in downtown Keene.  The F.S.P. chose New Hampshire in 2003 as its target state because of its low population.  Vermont and Wyoming were also considered, but Vermont is far too leftist, and nobody wanted to move to friggin’ Wyoming.

Among the New Hampshire Free State Project’s “early movers” is Robert Mathias (far right), a blogger, radio host, and proponent of polyamory, who moved to Manchester from Chicago in 2014.  His fiancée, the “pot and poly activist” Anne Leverette, a.k.a. the Rebel Mistress, is the third woman from the left.

Western Pennsylvania Secessionist Gets 6 New Hampshire Votes in White House Bid. Among the also-rans in this month’s primaries in New Hampshire was Matt Drozd, a 71-year-old former county councilman from Ross, in the Pittsburgh suburbs of Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, who received only six votes (or maybe even five, according to one source) in his bid  to be the Republican Party’s nominee for president of the United States.  Followers of 51st-state movements will remember Drozd for his 2013 proposal for western Pennsylvania to split off as the State of Western Pennsylvania—free of the political influence of Philadelphia’s supposed tax-and-spend liberals to the east.  At least one Pittsburgh newspaper columnist recommended at the time the more catchy name Westania (though Pittsylvania should definitely be considered, in my opinion).  Drozd found a secessionist ally in Bill Robinson, a Democrat, but the bill was voted down 13 to 2 (and would anyway have needed the backing of the U.S. Congress in order to create a new state).  Pennsylvanian partition is not a plank in Drozd’s platform this year, though.  Like most of his colleagues, he’s more focused on overhauling Obamacare and keeping immigrants out.  He told one journalist before the New Hampshire voting, “I know I’m going to get blown away.  But I still think I’m more qualified than most of the candidates to be president.”  After his poor showing, he told a reporter that he would keep his website up but does not have the resources to continue campaigning.



White-Supremacist-Linked Plan to Raise Battle Flag Near Alabama Campus Stalls. A pro-Confederate group began raising money to install a 50-foot Confederate battle flag on private property facing Alabama State University (A.S.U.), whose student body is predominantly African-American.  The group, First Capitol Flaggers (F.C.F.), based in Tallassee, Alabama, and its partner, the local chapter of Sons of Confederate Veterans (S.C.V.), were halfway toward their funding goal of $3,000 when city inspectors deemed the plot of donated land unsuitable for a flagpole “due to power line proximity.”  A co-founder of F.C.F., Dana Jones, has admitted to media that she is also a member of the League of the South, a Southern pro-independence group which the Southern Poverty Law Center (S.P.L.C.), a nonprofit which tracks hate groups, classifies as a white-supremacist organization and which its own paramilitary wing, known as the Indomitables.  The League’s president, Mike Hill, said on February 4th that his group was not directly involved in the flag-raising plans but sought to become involved.

A recent League of the South demonstration

NAACP Asks Mississippi Counties to Take Down State Flag. In other Confederate-flag-related news, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (N.A.A.C.P.) asked officials in two coastal counties of Mississippi on February 1st to take the state flag of Mississippi down from public facilities because it includes the battle flag of the Confederate States of America.  “The history of this state is that it is a racist state,” explained Curley Clark, who heads Jackson County’s N.A.A.C.P. chapter, “and it has been symbolized by the leadership wanting to hold on to the Civil War and what the Confederacy represented.  That flag perpetuates slavery and white supremacy and it is very insulting, demeaning, and something we want to try to put in our past.  We want to feel equal.  However, it is very hard to do that with symbols in our face that infer we are inferior and that we do not belong.”  Pascagoula is the seat of Jackson County.  The other county is Harrison, which includes Gulfport and Biloxi.  Also, the rules committee in Florida’s senate approved a new design for the state seal from which the Confederate flag has been removed.  Pro-Confederate Mississippians responded on February 9th with a “keep the flag” rally in Jackson.  Said one participant, Chuck McMichael, former head of Sons of Confederate Veterans, “This is not about what happened in the 1860s.  This is not about what happened in the 1960s.  What this is really about is what the leftist, progressive agenda wants this country to look like in 2060.”  Meanwhile, an African-American state senator from Charleston, South Carolina—Marlon Kimpson, of the Democratic Party—put forth a bill on February 9th ordering the removal of the Confederate flag from a chapel at the Citadel, a military college in the state.


“Washitah” Moorish Black Nationalists Take Over House in New Orleans. In Louisiana, a group of what appear to be Black-nationalist squatters have taken over a house in New Orleans’ central Bywater neighborhood, near the French Quarter, changed the locks, and claimed it for what they call the “Washitah Mu’ur Nation.”  The house is up for sale, and its owner, Fredrick Hines, called the police this month after the squatters had been there about a week.  Their name indicates that they may be affiliated with the late Verdiacee Hampton-Goston, a.k.a. Verdiacee Washington-Turner Goston El-Bey, “Empress” of the “Official Empire Washitaw de Dugdahmoundyah,” who died in 2014 at the age of 87 (see my obituary of her from this blog), or, much less likely, her self-proclaimed successor, a middle-aged Trenton, New Jersey, neighborhood eccentric who calls himself Crown Prince Emperor El Bey Bigbay Bagby, but apparently born as William McRae and has at times called himself a Native American tribal leader (see my report on him from this blog).  These groups are offshoots of the vaguely Islamic and Masonic “Moorish Science Temple” movement founded in the early 20th century by Noble Drew Ali and subscribe to the “Paleo-Negroid” hypothesis, which holds that African-Americans are the true indigenous people of the Americas because Black Africans were there before the so-called American Indians.  (See a report from this blog on a similar “Moorish” squatter action in Philadelphia last year.)  But they have also in recent years entangled themselves with the anarcho-libertarian ideology of the “sovereign citizens” movement.  “Empress” Verdiacee, who lived in a small town in Oklahoma, claimed the entire territory of the Louisiana Purchase, both through her Afro-“Washitaw” pedigree and through her alleged descent from the uncrowned King Louis XVII, the “Lost Dauphin” of the French monarchy, who historians believe died in prison in 1895 at age ten during the French revolutionary “Reign of Terror.”  As for the Bywater squatters, they apparently showed paperwork that convinced police to refuse to get involved.  “It’s frustrating,” said Hines, the landlord; “the police told me this is, like, the third house they’ve broken into.”

The “Washitah” squatters in New Orleans’ Bywater neighborhood

Hate Groups from California to Croatia Band Together as “United Aryan Front.” The Southern Poverty Law Center (S.P.L.C.), an Alabama-based nonprofit which monitors hate groups, warned this month about the recent formation of “pan-Aryan” and nascently international coalition of white-nationalist groups under the name United Aryan Front (U.A.F.).  This umbrella group, formed just a few months ago in late 2015, seems to exist only online so far, but it may well represent a new phase in broad coordination between racist militias.  Its members include the Klan Militant Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, based in Ohio; Die Auserwahlten, a.k.a. Crew 41, based in Louisiana; the Noble Breed Kindred, based in California; Endangerd [sic] Souls, a.k.a. Crew 519, a motorcycle gang; the Aryan Renaissance Society (the largest of the member groups) and its Texas-based offshot White Lives Matter; Werwolf 88, a neo-Nazi outfit; Divine Truth Ministries, a “Christian Identity” group; the Croatian National Front (Hrvatski Nacionalni Front, or H.N.F.); and, at least initially, Right Wing Resistance and the International Keystone Knights of the Ku Klux Klan.



CARIBBEAN





Rebel Army Cries “Colonialism” as Puerto Rican Assembly Debates Statehood.  The financial crisis in Puerto Ricois revitalizing calls on the island protectorate for a referendum on full statehood within the United States.  The president of the state bank said on February 5th that statehood would grant Puerto Rico powers to restructure its debt which it currently lacks, and the idea was taken up in the island’s legislature.  But at least one Puerto Rican pro-independence group, the shadowy Boricua Popular Army, a.k.a. E.P.B.–Macheteros, issued a statement February 7th condemning the mainstream Puerto Rican Statehood Movement as colonialist, adding, “In this moment, which could be decisive for our history, we don’t see the protests, nor the struggle that an organized independence movement should be building and coordinating.”


Arkansan Posing as Conch Republic “Ambassador” Unveils New Stun-Gun Invention. A man in Arkansas claiming to be an ambassador for southern Florida’s tongue-in-cheek Conch Republic now says that he has invented a new type of stun gun that will revolutionize policing.  The Arkansan, Nimrod Sterling, calls it “the Red” and says it is “two times stronger than police tazers [and] 10 times stronger than most stun guns.”  He finalized the design while serving a 57-month federal prison sentence in Texas for impersonating a diplomat to evade parking tickets.  He is also awaiting trial for pointing a weapon at some teenagers in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, in 2014.  Sterling, who legally changed his last name from Sanders, claims that he is awaiting a presidential pardon from Barack Obama.  The actual Conch Republic says that he has no connection with their statelet.

His soi-disant Excellency Nimrod Sterling

SOUTH AMERICA



“Fort Galt” Libertarian Commune Plans 2016 Launch in Chile, with Bitcoin as Currency.  A Canadian tech entrepreneur is among a mixed group of partners from Canada and the United States planning a libertarian community which they hope will become operational this year in Chile.  Gabriel Scheare, described as an “anarcho-capitalist,” originally wanted to locate his intentional community at Galt’s Gulch Chile, a libertarian experiment that ended up mired in recrimination and accusations of real-estate fraud.  Now he is setting up what he calls “Fort Galt” near Valdivia, in southern Chile.  Scheare, a long-time resident of Vancouver, British Columbia, was involved with an earlier experiment called Exosphere and in 2014 staked a claim at Galt’s Gulch.  He plans to get Fort Galt rolling this year.  Like Galt’s Gulch, it takes its name from John Galt, the enigmatic hero of the libertarian philosopher Ayn Rand’s 1957 novel Atlas Shrugged, which envisions the world’s top industrials “going on strike” because of the spread of socialism and founding a free-market commune hidden in the Colorado mountains.  Scheare says Fort Galt’s currency will be Bitcoin.

I don’t think I was alone in assuming that the Chechen Republic’s bigger-than-life, flamboyant, authoritarian president, Ramzan Kadyrov, would stay in office as long as he possibly could, whether by hook or by crook.  He is just the type we would expect to bend every rule to try to keep himself in power past his constitutional expiration date, just like (to take two examples in the news this week) Uganda’s Yoweri Museveni or Bolivia’s Evo Morales—or, indeed, like Kadyrov’s sponsor, protector, and ally, Russia’s President Vladimir Putin.



But I was wrong, and the rest of the world was surprised too when Kadyrov told the media on February 27th that when his term of office ends in April he will step aside and retire from politics.  “My time is past,” he said.  “Every human has a limit.  I believe Kadyrov has passed his peak.”  (Like his pet attack-dog Tarzan’s namesake, Kadyrov likes to refer to himself in the third person.)  “Family, personal life, Islamic studies,” is how he summed up his plans for retirement.  The following day he pleaded with the public to cancel planned rallies to get him to change his mind.

Kadyrov and Tarzan

But why is he stepping aside, instead of, say, grooming a close advisor as a successor and continuing things from a nominally secondary position—the way Putin did when he got around term limits by switching places with his prime minister Dmitri Medvedev for a term?  In the Russian and Chechen political world, no one would have so much as blinked an eye.


Perhaps it had something to do with the report released four days earlier by a leader in Russia’s political opposition (such as it is), Ilya Yashin, who runs a protest group called Solidardost (its name, meaning “solidarity,” inspired by Poland’s anti-Soviet mass movement from the 1980s, Solidarność).  That document described Kadyrov—utterly accurately—as a virtual dictator of a regime that is in most concrete ways a de facto autonomous state (de jure, it is a republic within the Russian Federation, one which does significant damage to Russia’s international reputation (such as it is), and threatens to do worse.  Yashin referred to Kadyrov’s Islamist autocracy and his much-flaunted lavish lifestyle enabled by corruption and embezzlement.  He wondered aloud how smart Putin was to allow Kadyrov to run his own separate military, answerable only to himself, which fights as a separate state military in conflicts such as the civil war in Syria, where Putin and Kadyrov back the embattled Shi’a Arab dictator, Bashar al-Assad.  Could this private army one day turn on Russia itself, as it did in the Chechen Wars?

Kadyrov’s Instagram account is one of the strangest places on the Internet.

Yashin also asserted what most aware people not blinded by Putinist propaganda already believe: that there is “no doubt” that armed thugs under Kadyrov’s personal direction assassinated the dissident leader Boris Nemtsov in Moscow last year.  Kadyrov responded to Yashin’s report on his favored channel of communication, Instagram, dismissing the accusations as “blather.”  But maybe he noticed that the Kremlin did not exactly leap to his defense when the report hit the public.  (Compare this to the case of the anti-Putin dissident Andrei Piontkovsky, who fled the country this month after his criticism of the Putin–Kadyrov political friendship prompted Putinists in parliament to brand his inquiries “an incitement to separatism and extremism.”)


There are good reasons why Putin might not be all that happy with Kadyrov lately.  First and foremost perhaps is Kadyrov’s quiet takeover this month of the oil firm Chechenneftekhimprom, detaching it from its Russian parent company Rosneft and putting it under direct Chechen Republic control.  This effectively meant Kadyrov would own it after the transfer is completed in March.  Chechenneftekhimprom oversees nearly all of Chechnya’s energy industry.  Chechen operations constitute only 0.23% of Rosneft’s total oil extraction, and lower prices of Siberian oil have made them less profitable, but for tiny Chechnya, local control of the resource makes de facto independence more viable.  Control of oil resources was a major struggle in the Chechen wars for independence in the 1990s.  It does seem odd that Kadyrov would execute such an economic coup just weeks before he leaves the picture entirely.  It’s not too far-fetched to think that when the takeover was planned he hadn’t yet decided to step aside.  Did the oil grab finally push Putin to the point where he decided that Kadyrov had to go?

In a viral video he created, Kadyrov, on prayer mat, faces down—and later grapples with—a serpent representing radical Islam.

Or perhaps the Moscow–Grozny axis had simply become weighed down by too many historical, political, and ideological contradictions.  In fact, it is still baffling that the alliance ever existed.  To understand why, a quick history lesson.



Chechnya and the Kadyrovs: a short history lesson
The Chechen people, like other peoples of the North Caucasus region, are mostly Muslim, and they came under Moscow’s control only in the 1870s, when they were wrested from the Ottoman Empire’s sphere of influence as part of the general Czarist push to dominate the Black Sea at Turkey’s expense.  (Warm-water ports have always been a constant overriding preoccupation in Russian foreign policy.  It’s hard being an empire or a superpower when the only harbors you can set sail from, other than the Black Sea—whose exit is controlled by Turkey—are St. Petersburg (which is at the mercy of the Swedish and Danish waters that have to be passed through on the way to the open sea) and ice-bound Vladivostok in Siberia.)  The Czars held onto the North Caucasus brutally and with difficulty.  Most of the dirty work was delegated to Cossacks.  It is very arguable that the tactics Russia used in this era against the Chechens and their neighbors amounted to genocide.


During the civil war that followed the Russian Revolution of 1917, the North Caucasus peoples rebelled and tried to establish a rival Mountainous Republic of the Northern Caucasus in alliance with the Ottomans.  It was even diplomatically recognized by Germany, the Ottoman Empire, and two other newly declared states, Georgia and Azerbaijan.  The ruling Bolsheviks in Moscow promised the Mountain Republic that they could keep their autonomy if they helped defeat the Mensheviks.  Chechens dutifully helped defeat the Mensheviks, but then the Bolsheviks reneged on their promise.  Chechnya became a mere “autonomous” okrug (district) within the Mountain “Autonomous” Soviet Socialist Republic within the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic within the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.  What this meant is that, like the rest of the U.S.S.R. it was ruled directly by the party dictatorship in Moscow.


After the Second World War, Chechens were accused of having sided with the Nazis.  (Indeed, some did; mostly, they were just trying to survive.)  Along with other groups like the Crimean Tatars and Meskhetian Turks, they were forcibly removed by Josef Stalin to points east, in Siberia and the Central Asian republics.  During this ordeal, somewhere between a third and a half of the Chechen and Ingush nations died from executions, starvation, and cruelty in the work camps.  (It was during the Chechen diaspora in the Kyrgyz S.S.R. that the Tsarnaev family nursed a resentment toward Russians and Christians; generations later, in 2013, two of their grandchildren in the United States would carry out a bombing attack on the Boston Marathon.)

Hundreds of thousands of Chechens were deported by Stalin in 1944; almost half did not survive the ordeal.

Nikita Khrushchev, in the 1950s, reversed many of Stalin’s more repressive policies toward minorities and allowed Chechens to move home.  Chechnya was part of the Chechen-Ingush Autonomous Republic, within Russia, until 1991.  As the fully separate republics of the U.S.S.R., like Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan won independence, the new Russian president, Boris Yeltsin, told republics to “take as much autonomy as you can stand,” and even seemed to be contemplating letting the two most independent-minded republics, Chechnya (which had separated itself from its Ingush half) and Tatarstan, to secede as well.

Dzhokar Dudayev, independent Chechnya’s first leader

A young soon-to-be-ex K.G.B. agent in Yeltsin’s cabinet named Vladimir Putin had other ideas, though.  First as chief of staff and then as a minister responsible for minorities (the same job Stalin had held before becoming party secretary), Putin urged harsh dealing with the independent Chechen Republic of Ichkeria that declared itself in 1991.  The proud and eager Chechen rebels fought the underpaid, half-hearted post-Soviet army to a standstill, and by 1994 Chechnya had agreed to join the newly minted Russian Federation but in reality ran itself as a de facto independent state under the rebel leader Dzhokar Dudayev, who dissolved the local parliament and anointed himself dictator.  Dudayev was fiercely Russophobic and steeped in paranoid superstitions; he believed that earthquakes in the Caucasus were caused by diabolical “earthquake machines” in the Kremlin.  Most of his time was spent fighting the rival Chechens who kept trying to overthrow him.  In 1994, Yeltsin had had enough and let Putin try to retake Chechnya, which he did by leveling the capital, Grozny, in a pitiless carpet-bombing campaign that killed tens of thousands.  Dudayev was killed in 1996.

Grozny, the Chechen capital, in 1995, courtesy of Vladimir Putin

There was peace for a while, until 1999, when some of the many foreign Islamic fighters that had flooded into Chechnya in 1994 to fight the Russian infidels needed a new crusade and crossed over the mountain passes into the Russian republic of Dagestan to declare an Islamic State of Dagestan.  It was one thing for Chechnya to be a tiny Islamic-run republic that minded its own business, but Putin, who succeeded Yeltsin as president the following year, would not stand for Islamic radicalism spreading within Russia.  He soundly defeated the Chechens in what came to be known as the Second Chechen War.  His “Gulf of Tonkin”–type pretext was the terrorist demolition of four Moscow apartment buildings in late 1999.  He blamed Chechens, but there is strong evidence that the K.G.B., under Putin’s orders, blew up the buildings to provide a rationale for war.  The new president who took over in 2003, Akhmed Kadyrov (father of Ramzan), was, like Dudayev, under whom he had been chief imam, and like most Chechens, very moderate, even mystical in his Islam.  Most Chechens are traditionally Sufis, with not much use for the doctrinally rigid salafism or Wahhabism emanating from places like Saudi Arabia and Taliban-run Afghanistan.  But by now the Second Chechen War, unlike the first, became a jihad, fought to a great extent by battle-hardened salafists flooding in from all over the Islamic world.


A turning point in the war came early on, when Kadyrov switched sides and brought his vast extended family of militiamen into the pro-Russian camp.  It may never be clear in what order things happened here.  Perhaps it was Putin who initially convinced Kadyrov that if he betrayed the more Islamist fighters (like the radical separatist Chechens who carried out the Beslan school siege in late 2004), then he would allow Chechnya to be his personal fief as long as it had a Russian flag flying over it too.  Or perhaps the deal was made with his son Ramzan after the elder Kadyrov’s assassination (by whom?) in early 2004.


Anyway, in the end that is what happened: from 2007 until now, Ramzan Kadyrov has been allowed to run Chechnya any way he pleases.  He imposes a form of shari’a law which tolerates polygamy and honor killings, he loots the treasury so that he can live like a medieval king, and in return Putin has rebuilt Grozny with massive projects like Europe’s largest mosque and Kadyrov makes sure to fix local elections in Putin’s favor, such as the national vote in 2012 when an absurd 99.89% of Chechens supposedly voted for Putin—the man who practically bombed their country off the map only a few years earlier.  But most of all, Kadyrov’s personal army has served as a crack battalion much like the old-style Cossacks (who still exist also), doing battle wherever the Czar—I mean, Putin—feels Russian interests are at stake.

Kadyrov’s father’s assassination, at a military parade in 2004, was captured on Russian television.

This means that Kadyrov’s fighters have, over the years, aligned themselves with the Armenians against the Azeris in Nagorno-Karabakh; with the Serbs against the Bosniaks and Croats in Bosnia and against the Albanians in Kosovo; with the Russians against the Ukrainians and Tatars in Crimea; and, most recently, with the Alawites (and, increasingly, Kurds) against the Sunni Arabs in Syria.  Yes, that means that Kadyrov has been sending the youth of the Chechen nation to kill Muslims in the service of Russian Orthodox Christian colonialism and Islamophobia.  Did that begin to weigh on his conscience?  Or was there an Islamist insurgency preparing itself in Chechnya? or perhaps only the fear of one?

Chechen mercenaries go wherever Russian—not Chechen—interests are threatened.

A clue may lie in a bizarre episode that occurred only eight days before Kadyrov’s announcement, when he was obliged to publicly deny reports the previous day that he had instituted a plan for all young men to obtain “spiritual-moral passports” documenting their Islamic commitments.  The news had appeared on the website of the Chechen parliament and in official government news agencies and had described the initiative as Kadyrov’s own.  The new passports, to be issued to all men aged 14 through 35, would have listed each man’s name, nationality, patrilineal ancestry, clan, denomination (of Islam, of course), and, for Sufis, the individual order (vird) to which he belongs, as well as the names of senior male relatives “responsible” for the holder’s moral behavior.


In his denial, Kadyrov called all talk of such passports “fantasies,” adding, “There is only one passport in our country—citizen of Russia!”  I would guess that Kadyrov was quickly forced to backtrack after a warning from the Kremlin that such a passport requirement would be baldly unconstitutional.  But why this, and why now, when Chechnya is already run under virtual shari’a?  Were the spiritual passports an attempt to mollify anti-Kadyrov sentiment among the more radical sectors of Chechnya?  Or was Kadyrov communicating to Putin that, despite their relationship, he is still a Muslim first?  We may never know.


In any case it is ironic that not long before Kadyrov’s announcement, Akhmed Zakayev, the moderate prime-minister-in-exile of the old self-declared Chechen Republic of Iskerria—the anti-Russian separatist entity with which the Kadyrovs used to be aligned—told Radio Free Europe in February that Kadyrov is “here to stay.”  According to Zakayev, who lives in London, this was because of Chechnya’s fiercely loyal private armed forces: “Any attempt to remove Kadyrov by decree or to appoint another leader of the republic would spark uproar in Kadyrov’s ranks.  In order to remove him, security forces would need to conduct operational measures within his close circle.  If they don’t, the reaction will be very negative and Putin won’t be able to get rid of him with a simple decree or a stroke of the pen.”

Eventually, Kadyrov will have to get friends wherever he can find them.

Another reason Zakayev thought Kadyrov would cling to power is that, if he ever fell out of political favor—and he has lots of enemies, many of them radical Islamists—where would he go?  “Three, four, five months ago,” Zakayev said, “there were still places he could leave for: Turkey, Sunni states, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates.  He has now lost these possibilities because he supported the conflict in Syria together with Putin and backed and sided with the Shi’a to defend Bashar al-Assad.  By doing this, he has blocked the escape routes that he had spent several years preparing.”


That, of course, was all said before Kadyrov said he would leave politics.  Now, though, the questions are many.  Who will replace Kadyrov?  Will his successor be a more conventional republican president, or will Chechnya still be an autonomous Islamic statelet?  Will Putin appoint a president of the republic, as he does in the case of the more volatile nationalities?  To whom will Kadyrov’s army be loyal?  Will they in reality be the ones who choose Kadyrov’s replacement?  Or is Kadyrov’s talk of leaving politics a ruse?  Will he really run things from behind the scenes?  Or will there be a manufactured crisis between now and April to justify extending his term or instituting emergency powers?

Yes, they’re throwing money at him.  Like he needs it.

Perhaps Kadyrov tipped his hand a bit when he made his announcement the other day, saying, “Family, personal life, Islamic studies—that’s where I see myself.  If there is a need for me to take in hands a shovel, an assault rifle or a backpack—I can do that.”  Wait, did he say “assault rifle”??  Something tells me it may be a while before we’ve seen the last of Ramzan Kadyrov.

TOP STORY:
HONG KONG INDEPENDENCE BACKER POLLS STRONGLY IN LOCAL VOTE;
“FISHBALL REVOLUTION” ORGANIZER ARRESTED; COPS SAY BOMBS FOUND

“‘Radical’?” asked Edward Leung Tin-kei when asked about the Chinese Communist Party’s criticism of the protest movement to which he belongs.  “Yes.  ‘Separatist’?  I have no objection to either [term].”  Those words, if uttered by a Tibetan or Uyghur or Inner Mongolian activist in the People’s Republic of China, would mean a one-way ticket a “reeducation” camp, or worse.  But Leung (pictured above) belongs to Hong Kong Indigenous, which carefully uses the term “localist” to describe its cause of home rule for the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, which the United Kingdom transferred to the P.R.C. in 1997 with a Chinese commitment to maintaining “one country, two systems.”  That phrase means Hong Kong gets to keep the freedom of expression and religion and conscience, and its approximation of democracy, that it enjoyed as part of the U.K., while mainland China—the most murderous regime in world history, responsible for the massacre of 70 million people since it took power in 1949—keeps its “system” that consists of a pitiless totalitarianism.

The February 9th Fishball Revolution

Leung is part of a new trend in Hong Kong, which is openly calling itself separatist and testing how much dissent Beijing will tolerate in the autonomous quasi-colony.  What’s worrying to the Chinese government is that he is not a marginal figure.  In a February 27-28 election to Hong Kong’s Legislative Council, Leung came in third, with 15% of votes cast—despite the fact that he is one of scores of peaceful citizens facing charges of incitement to riot for a February 9th New Year celebration in Hong Kong’s working-class Mong Kong district which turned violent.  That riot was dubbed the “Fishball Revolution” (reported on recently in this blog) because the grievance that sparked it had been municipal restrictions on street-food vendors.  (Alvin Yeung, by the way, a more mainstream pro-democracy candidate, won the contested seat, with 37% of the vote.  Holden Chow, who is pro-Beijing, came in second.)

Ray Wong (on truck, with megaphone) is defying the most brutal and repressive government in the world. And no one’s sure where it will lead.

Meanwhile, the head of Hong Kong Indigenous, Ray Wong Toi-yeung, was arrested by Hong Kong police on February 21st.  He had been in hiding since the unrest, with his last public statement having been this proverb posted online on February 18th: “Rather be a shattered vessel of jade than an unbroken piece of pottery.”  Police claimed that upon his arrest they found bomb-making chemicals, batons, Guy Fawkes masks, and Viagra—showing that even police who plant evidence have a sense of humor.  Wong, who is 22 years old, was charged with rioting by a magistrate a few days later and ordered held on $100,000 bail.  He could get a 10-year sentence if convicted.  Police say they are searching for 100 other suspects who played an “active role” in the riots.

OTHER HONG KONG UPDATES



“Father” of Hong Kong Autonomy Movement Set to Lose Academic Job.  A professor at Hong Kong’s Lingnan University who is considered the father of the idea of the city-state’s independence from the People’s Republic of China has been told by the university’s Chinese Department that there would be no recommendation to renew his contract, which ends in August.  The professor, Horace Chin Wan-kan (a.k.a. Chin Wan), on February 23rd blamed political pressure from Beijing for the development.  Chin’s 2007 book, On the Hong Kong City-State, is said to have inspired the modern pro-autonomy movement known euphemistically as “localism” so as not to run afoul of Chinese laws forbidding discussion of separatism.  Chin has a Ph.D. in ethnology from Germany’s University of Göttingen.

China Bans Broadcast of Hong Kong Film Awards over Anti-Communist Dystopia.  The Chinese Communist Party imposed broadcast bans on one, maybe two, major film-awards ceremonies, one in Hong Kong and one in Taiwan.  The Hong Kong Film Awards, slated for April 3rd, was a source of tension with Beijing because of one of the leading entries, Ten Years, which depicts Hong Kong in the year 2025, with direct totalitarian rule having replaced the current (threatened) “one country, two systems” regime.  For Beijing, it dovetails a bit too neatly with this year’s Fishball Revolt (see above).  The awards association said it would accept the ban rather than pull Ten Years from the program.  There are also indications that Taipei’s Golden Horse Film Awards, which are typically held in November, may get the same treatment.

Taiwanese Denied Entry to Hong Kong for “Republic of Taiwan” Stickers on Passports.  Two citizens of Taiwan were denied permission to enter mainland China’s Hong Kong Special Administrative Region on February 27th because they had stickers on their passports which covered the words “Republic of China”—Taiwan’s official name—and replaced them with the words “Republic of Taiwan”—the name that many separatists on the island would like their country to adopt.

EUROPE





Sturgeon Vows 2nd Independence Push in Case of Brexit; E.U. Vote Set for June.  The United Kingdom’s prime minister, David Cameron, announced on February 20th that the promised U.K.-wide poll on whether or not to stay in the European Union (E.U.) will take place on June 23rd.  Despite saying, “I do not love Brussels, I love Britain,” Cameron reiterated that he thinks Britain is “safer and stronger” in the E.U. and hopes voters reject the idea of a “Brexit,” as the idea of a U.K. withdrawal is called.  Scotland’s first minister, and head of the separatist Scottish National Party (S.N.P.), Nicola Sturgeon, responded by sharpening her stance on the subject.  She reminded the public that the great majority of Scots want to stay in the E.U.—a larger and firmer majority than in England—and as good as promised that in the event of a Brexit, Scotland would seek a second referendum on independence.  England, whose population is 84% of the U.K., could pass a Brexit vote no matter what Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland say.  “If we get into the situation,” Sturgeon said, “where Scotland votes to stay in, the rest of the U.K. votes to come out, then people in Scotland will have big questions they will want to look at again about whether Scotland should be independent.”  Unlike the situation before the narrowly defeated independence plebiscite in 2014, polls show a second vote could easily pass.  Meanwhile, London’s flamboyant, mercurial, tousle-haired mayor, Boris Johnson, who has in the past argued for London’s secession from the U.K., came out on February 21st in favor of a Brexit.

Scotland and Wales stand out like sore thumbs in this map of the most and least Euroskeptic parts of Great Britain

Welsh Voters, Wooed by UKIP, Tilt against Brussels; Ulster Remains Pro-E.U. In Wales, unlike Scotland (see above), opinion has shifted sharply in the direction of favoring the United Kingdom’s withdrawal from the European Union (E.U.).  A mid-February opinion poll indicated 45% of Welsh favoring leaving a “Brexit,” and only 37% sure that they want to stay in the E.U.  Analysts attribute the shift to the rise in popularity of the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP).  In Northern Ireland, by contrast, 55% say they favor staying in the E.U.—the position of Sinn Fein—while only 13% want to quit it.  The 13% minority, however, includes the new First Minister in Belfast, Arlene Foster, of the Democratic Unionist Party.


Pan-Celticists Want to Fly Tricolor Near Glasgow on Centenary of 1916 Irish Revolt. A flag kerfuffle is brewing in a council area (county) just east of Glasgow.  A Celtic nationalist group called Cairde Na hÉireann (“Friends of Ireland” in Scots Gaelic), which calls itself “the national structure for republicans in Scotland,” has applied for permission to fly the Irish tricolor from North Lanarkshire Council facilities in Coatbridge, Cumbernauld, and the council-area seat, Motherwell.  It would be flown on April 24th, which is the hundredth anniversary of Ireland’s 1916 Rising.  The council voted narrowly to allow the flag to be flown, but a final decision will not be made until late March.


Founder of Isle of Skye’s Pictish Free State Revealed as Leo DiCaprio’s Godfather. A bearded eccentric living on Scotland’s Isle of Skye and self-appointed leader of the Picts (though they are no longer a distinct people) was revealed in February to be the godfather to the American film actor Leonardo DiCaprio, according to the newspaper the Scotsman.  The revalation came mere days before DiCaprio received an Academy Award for his portrayal of the crazed Scotch-Irish-American frontiersman Hugh Glass in The Revenant.  “Robbie the Pict,” as DiCaprio’s godfather is legally known (he changed his name from Brian Robertson when he renounced his United Kingdom citizenship in 1984), heads a micronation called the Pictish Free State, over one thousand acres on Skye which began as a single-acre plot in 1977.  Robbie—who supports Scottish independence, at least for the parts of Scotland outside his island fief—has had run-ins with the law stemming from using his own Pictish license plates, among other causes.  He spent part of the 1990s seeking political asylum in Estonia, and in 1999 he won 0.57% of the vote in a bid for a seat in the Scottish parliament.  He met DiCaprio’s father, the Italian-American underground comic-book writer George DiCaprio, in California in the 1970s. “ Much as George was proud of his Italian connections,” the Pictish leader says, “he thought it would be an interesting break from that tradition to have a Scottish godfather.”  The elder DiCaprio confirms Robbie the Pict’s account, saying, “Robbie used to come down here to Los Angeles and spend time with me, Leo and the family.  He is a very colourful character.”

Sometimes, it seems, you can Pict your relatives: Leo (left) and godfather Robbie.

Flemish, Scottish M.E.P.s Scold Madrid for Mistreatment of Catalonia. Several members of the European Parliament who know something about independence movements warned the government of Spain in late February that Spanish plans to forcefully disband Catalonia’s new “Ministry for Foreign Affairs” would be “counterproductive” and would only stiffen the resolve of Catalans to take their autonomous region out of Spain.  Some M.E.P.s advised Madrid that renaming a Catalan regional ministry as a foreign-affairs ministry was merely semantic, and Algirdas Saudargas, an M.E.P. who was once foreign minister for Lithuania—a state which owes its very existence to an “illegal” unilateral declaration of independence in 1991—said that if Catalans feel themselves to be “a nation and want to do more things and decide more things for themselves, they will do that sooner or later.”  Ian Hudghton, M.E.P., who is president of the Scottish National Party (S.N.P.), said his country was “fortunate” not to have “been treated in the way that Madrid seeks to treat Catalonia.”  And Mark Demesmaeker, M.E.P., of Belgium’s separatist New Flemish Alliance, chided Madrid for using “their courts to do their dirty work for them, to take a political decision,” in delegating its assault on Catalonia’s foreign ministry to the judiciary.


Vaudois Politician Parleys with Sardinians Pushing for Swiss Annexation. The mayor of Avenches, in French-speaking western Switzerland, was in Cagliari, the capital of Sardinia, on February 25th for a meeting with the Sardinian Association for the Maritime Canton (Associazione Sardegna Canton Marittimo), a movement which aims to make Sardinia, an autonomous region within Italy, the 27th Swiss canton (described before in this blog).  The mayor, Daniel Trolliet, who is also a legislator for Avenches’ canton, Vaud, gave a presentation on Switzerland’s economic and political systems and the possibilities for cooperation.  Trolliet agrees with A.S.C.M.’s founders, Andrea Caruso and Enrico Napoleone, that trade and scientific ties are a necessary first step in the annexation process.  Perhaps the reason an Aventine politician was chosen for the event has something to do with historical connections: not only are Sardinian and Vaud both territories formerly ruled by the House of Savoy, but Avenches’s coat-of-arms (on the left, below) and Sardinia’s flag (on the right) both feature the heraldic “Moor’s head” device.




Bosnian Serb President Said to “Incite Racial Hatred” for Calling Bosniaks “Turks.” The ultranationalist and separatist-minded president of the half of Bosnia and Herzegovina called the Republika Srpskais the target of a criminal complaint filed February 16th for inciting racial hatred.  The complaint, filed by the organization Truth, Justice, and Reconciliation, singles out President Milorad Dodik’s reference to Bosniaks—Slavic-speaking European Muslims who are one of the three constituent peoples of Bosnia—as “Turks.”  “This is primitivism,” said the organization’s president, Sinan Alić, angry that criminal charges weren’t brought automatically, “and I find it unbelievable that the prosecutions didn’t act on their own accord, but if they don’t want to work, we have filed a complaint.”  (The case is interesting because, although on the face of it the law is intended to promote tolerance, these charges imply that there is something wrong with being a Turk.)  Meanwhile, the president of a Serb-victims awareness group, Milan Mandić, was also charged with inciting racial hatred for what is defined as genocide denial in Bosnia: he described the Serb-run Srebrenica massacre of 1995 as “God’s justice.”  Mandić heads the Serb Association of the Missing of the Sarajevo Region.


Thousands Rally against Government on Kosovo National Day; Thaçi New President. On Kosovo’s national day on February 17th, marking the 8th anniversary of its declaration of independence from Serbia, thousands of opposition demonstrators thronged the streets of the capital, Pristina, demanding the resignation of the government, accusing it of capitulation to power-sharing demands by Serbia and border concessions to Montenegro.  Nearly all the flags waved in the crowd were flags of Albania, rather than Kosovo.  Visar Ymeri, who heads the Self-Determination Movement (Vetevendosjë), the main opposition party, which favors unification with Albania, gave the administration until February 27th to step down and promised protests would not cease till it did.  Police estimated the crowd at 15,000, but organizers said over 100,000 participated.  Two days later, in the Kosovar parliament, opposition legislators resorted to a common tactic in the chamber: lobbing tear-gas canisters as a way of expressing disagreement with matters under discussion.  After three tear-gas attacks, the parliamentary speaker, Kadri Veseli, wearing a gas mask, tried in vain to prevent lawmakers from fleeing the chamber.  As of February 23rd, there were still hundreds of Kosovars encamped in Pristina’s main square demanding new elections.  “We will stay here until the government goes home,” Ymeri said at the protest camp.  Over the night of February 23-24, a car belonging to the wife of Memli Krasniqi, Kosovo’s minister of agriculture, was burned, and authorities blamed the crime on “paramilitary terrorists” linked to the protest movement.  On February 26th, opposition lawmakers opened tear gas again in parliament during a debate on whether to make the foreign minister and former prime minister Hashim Thaçi the new president.  Despite the disruptions, Thaçi won easily and will be the new president.

Anti-government protestors in Pristina

Albanians in Preševo Protest Impoundment of Textbooks by Serbian Customs.   In Preševo, an ethnic-Albanian-dominated town in Serbia, residents rallied on February 18th to complain about Albanian-language textbooks being impounded, for no legitimate reason, in a customs terminal in the town for six months.  Finally, the Serbian foreign minister, Ivica Dačić, gave a reason: that the textbooks were unacceptable, since they refer to Kosovo as independent and laud Kosovo Liberation Army (K.L.A.) fighters as national heroes.  This open confession sparked the latest protests.  The impoundment of the books violates a September 2015 agreement by which the Kosovar government supplied textbooks to Albanian-speaking schools in Serbia and the Serbian government would be allowed to do the same for Serbian-speaking schools in Kosovo.  (For more on Preševo, see my blog article.)

Location of the Preševo Valley

Transnistria Agrees to Talks Only If 2006 Independence Vote Respected. In rebel-controlled eastern Moldova, the government of the unrecognized Pridnestrovian Moldavian Republic (a.k.a. Transnistria) agreed on February 19th to participate in international talks on the territory’s status, but only on the condition that the negotiations take into account a 2006 referendum in which (if you believe the figures) 98% of Transnistrians supported independence and eventual annexation by the Russian Federation.  The chairman of the republic’s supreme soviet, Vadim Krasnoselsky, announced the conditions after a meeting with Russian senators.  The proposed talks are called “5 + 2” talks and would include Moldova and Transnistria, in addition to three outside mediators—Russia, Ukraine, and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (O.S.C.E.)—and two observers, the European Union (E.U.) and the United States.  Meanwhile, the European Court of Human Rights (E.C.H.R.) in Strasbourg, France, on February 23rd levied a €29,000 ($32,000) fine against the Russian government for violating the rights a Moldovan man who was arrested in Transnistria in 2008 and has been maltreated in prison since then.


Poroshenko Unveils Strategy to Retake Crimea, with Crimean Tatars’ Help. The president of Ukraine, Petro Poroshenko, defied the conventional wisdom in the international community that his country has, though it is loath to admit it, written off Crimea as a lost cause.  On the contrary, Poroshenko says, the Ukrainian military is making a pivot toward the Black Sea, with the ultimate goal of retaking the Crimean Peninsula.  Marking the second anniversary on February 26th of the Russian Federation’s invasion and annexation of Crimea, Poroshenko said, “Crimea was, is, and will be an integral part of the Ukraine state,” adding, “I am confident that we will certainly return these two administrative territories under Ukrainian sovereignty.  This extremely complex and promising process has already begun.”  The two territories referred to are the Autonomous Republic of Crimea and the province-level City of Sevastopol, which together make up the peninsula.  The new initiative will be centered on building up naval and infantry capabilities on the mainland coast of Ukraine facing Crimea, especially in Kherson Oblast (province).  Ukraine’s minister of the interior, Arsen Avakov, also said in late February that the recapture of Crimea will involve Crimean Tatar political leaders as well as separate Tatar military divisions.

Ukraine’s Eurovision Song about Crimean Tatar Deportations Tests Contest Rules.  In Stockholm, Sweden, a spokesman for Eurovision said on February 23rd that Ukraine’s entry to this year’s Eurovision Song Contest, an angry ballad about Josef Stalin’s deportation of Crimean Tatars in the 1940s, will have to be evaluated to make sure it complies with contest rules barring “lyrics, speeches, gestures of a political or similar nature.”  Paul Jordan, the spokesman, said that the European Broadcoast Union (E.B.U.) will as a matter of course also be vetting all of the songs by the same criteria.  The song in question, “1944,” is by Susana Jamaladinova, a 32-year-old jazz singer of Tatar ancestry who uses the stage name Jamala.  The lyrics, in English and Tatar, include lines like, “When strangers are coming, they come to your house, they kill you all / And say, we’re not guilty, not guilty.”  (Gee, I can’t wait; my toe’s tapping already.)  Jamala’s great-grandmother and her five children were among the 240,000 Crimean Tatars, nearly the entire nation’s population, moved from the Crimean Peninsula to points farther east, including Siberia and the Central Asian republics, in May 1944, 72 years before this year’s contest, in Stockholm.  Russian politicians have complained loudly about the Ukrainian entry, calling it retaliation (though if so, one must admit rather meek retaliation) for Russia’s invasion and annexation of Ukraine’s Autonomous Republic of Crimea in 2014.  All songs will be evaluated after March 14th, the deadline for entries.

Luhansk Rebels Launch Kids’ Magazine Featuring Fascist Uncle Sam, “Papa” Putin. In the self-declared, pro-Kremlin Luhansk People’s Republic, in southeastern Ukraine, a new magazine for children was unveiled on February 17th, full of anti-Western propaganda.  The magazine is called Polite Little People, the term used in Russia, apparently with a straight face, to describe the shock troops that invaded and annexed Ukraine’s Autonomous Republic of Crimea to Russia in 2014.  The colorful magazine features a villainess named Gnuland (a thinly veiled Victoria Nuland, a United States assistant secretary of state), a bogeyman called Fashiston who resembles the American “Uncle Sam,” a benevolent father figure named “Papa” who is a dead ringer for President Vladimir Putin, and Ukraine’s president, Petro Poroshenko, wearing the head of a pig.  The magazine’s editor, Sergei Kolesnikov, says the publication is intended to foster children’s “spiritual-patriotic education.”

A Russian children’s story even creepier than Baba Yaga

15 Reported Dead as Ukraine, Rebels Clash Near Donetsk; Village Mayor Murdered.  At least 14 people were reported killed in late February in skirmishes in rebel-controlled areas of eastern Ukraine.  The Ukrainian military reported on February 16th that three of their soldiers had been killed and seven others injured during the previous 24 hours.  That made it the most deadly day in the civil war since mid-November.  Most of the new fighting took place in Zaitseve, in the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic (D.P.R.) in what the world officially regards as southeastern Ukraine.  Later, two Ukrainian soldiers were wounded amidst shelling near Avdiyivka.  Then, on the 26th, the Ukrainian government announced the death of another of its soldiers, near Granitne, in Donetsk Oblast.  The same day, the D.P.R. announced that in the previous week 11 people—two civilians and nine D.P.R. fighters—had been killed in shelling by Ukraine’s military.  Police in Starobilsk, a Ukrainian-controlled city in the area claimed as the Luhansk People’s Republic, reported on February 23rd that the city’s mayor had been killed.  The mayor, 44-year-old Volodymyr Zhyvaga, was found unconscious outside the town council building with severe head and neck wounds.  He died before he could be brought to a hospital.  Police so far do not have suspects or a motive.  The murder may or may not be connected with a recent claim by Ukraine’s ministry of defense that Russia had dispatched a large team of secret police hitmen to the Donetsk and Luhansk regions “in order to kill some commanders of illegal armed formations uncontrolled by the command of the Russian occupation troops.”  According to Kyiv, these include F.S.B. agents that have already arrived in Donetsk city.


Chechen Strongman’s Retirement Baffles Experts Even After Kremlin Ties Fray.  The flamboyantly macho authoritarian president of Russia’s quasi-autonomous Chechen Republic, Ramzan Kadyrov, stunned political observers by announcing his intention to retire from politics next month.  This came after a week of tension during which an opposition leader in Moscow denounced him as a threat to Russia’s national security and Kadyrov quickly scuttled a plan to impose a system of Islamic “spiritual passports” after a Kremlin warning.  But is the retirement Kadyrov’s own idea, or Vladimir Putin’s, or are local Islamist radicals edging him out? or is he even really retiring?  And who inherits his powerful, ruthless private army?  See my full blog article for a detailed discussion of these developments.

Ramzan Kadyrov

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





Georgia’s Chechens, Ingush, Kists Mark Solemn Anniversary of Soviet Deportations.  Just over the border from Chechnya, members of the Republic of Georgia’s Vainakh minority came together in Tbilisi, the capital, on February 23rd to commemorate Josef Stalin’s deportation of their people to Siberia and Central Asia in 1944.  The term Vainakh—for the Chechen, Ingush, and Kist ethnic groups—is used far less on the northern, Russian side of the Caucasus ridge, where doctrinal and political differences have accentuated the differences between the Cechen and Ingush and made them into effectively separate national identities.  During the Soviet-era deportations, about a third of all Vainakh died as a result of the deportations and their aftermath, including executions and being intentionally worked to death in concentration camps.  “The Chechen population of Georgia was spared this tragedy,” said Meka Khangoshvili, a Chechen diaspora leader, “because Georgian authorities insisted that Kists were peaceful citizens of Georgia.  These 10,000 people today faithfully guard the territory of Georgia from Pankisi Gorge.”

Nona and Meka Khangoshvili marked the anniversary of the Chechen deportations, with flags of the Ingush and Chechen republics behind them.

South Ossetian President Calls for Referendum on Joining Russia.  The president of the Republic of South Ossetia, a de facto independent puppet state of Russia which nearly the whole rest of the world regards as part of the Republic of Georgia, says he is planning a referendum on unification with the Russian Federation.  President Leonid Tibilov, in addressing the South Ossetian parliament February 19th, referred to South Ossetians’ “ancient dream” to unite with their ethnic kindred in the adjacent Republic of North Ossetia–Alania, which is part of Russia.  Tibilov said he wants the details for a roadmap to a referendum to be worked out within the coming year.  He also asked parliament to “request to prepare and initiate hearings in the State Duma of Russia to recognize the genocide of the South Ossetian people committed by Georgia in 1920, 1989-1991 and 2008.”  In Vladimir Putin’s Russia, the term genocide refers to any real or rumored act of violence, no matter how obscure or minuscule, that is against Kremlin interests.  Tibilov also called for renaming the republic Alania.  Meanwhile, North Ossetia’s president, Tamerlan Aguzarov, died of pneumonia on February 19th at the age of 53 in a Moscow hospital.  The government chairman, Vyacheslav Bitarov, has assumed the role of acting president.




Abkhazia Planning Visa-Free Regimes for Russian Puppet States, Sponsors. The government of the Republic of Abkhazia told Russia’s state-controlled news media on February 23rd that it planned to put in place a visa-free regime embracing, to start with, three unrecognized or barely-recognized states: Abkhazia, Transnistria, and the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic (N.K.R.).  This follows an earlier announcement of plans for a visa-free regime for countries that recognize Abkhazia as independent—a small club which currently consists of Russia, Nicaragua, Venezuela, and the world’s third-smallest state, the Pacific island of Nauru—plus five diplomatically isolated Russian puppet states: the Donetsk People’s Republic and Luhansk People’s Republic in southeastern Ukraine, the N.K.R., the Republic of South Ossetia, and Transnistria.


Adjara’s Civic Leaders Get Their Panties in a Bunch over “Gay” Beachfront Sculpture. In the predominantly-Muslim, formerly secessionist Republic of Adjara, in southwestern Georgia, political leaders are getting all hot and bothered over an abstract sculpture that they suspect depicts homosexuality.  Niaz Bolkvadze, who chairs the pro-Russian Ancestral Patriotic Union of Adjara, invited several art “experts” to assess whether a well known sculpture along the Black Sea beachfront in Batumi, the Adjar capital, shows two men in love.  The figures in the sculpture (see photo below) are shown only in outline, one is down on one knee, and a heart is poised between them as they hold hands.  No gender is visible anywhere, though it is true that neither figure is clearly wearing a dress or skirt.  “When the City Council wrote to me saying that it is a depiction of Romeo and Juliet,” Bolkvadze said, “I decided to invite a group of experts—artists, sculptors, architects.  All 11 of them confirmed my suspicion that both figures are men.  Another member of Bolkvadze’s group, Malkhaz Tsenteradze, said, “This is a sculpture of a couple of gays,” adding, “We’ll take care of this.  We’re giving them a week.  If they do nothing, then I’ll break this so-called monument myself and they’ll have to arrest me if they can.”  One proposal is to modify the design so that one of the figures looks more female.




Armenians with Artsakh Flags Disrupt Azeri Rally in Stockholm. Members of the South Caucasus diaspora in Sweden waged a peaceful battle with flags in front of Armenia’s embassy in Stockholm on February 22nd.  The Swedish Azerbaijani Congressrallied there in honor of the 24th anniversary of an Armenian-led massacre of Azeris during the Nagorno-Karabakh War in Agdam, a city which is recognized by the world as Azerbaijan’s territory but which is administered by the unrecognized Nagorno-Karabakh Republic (a.k.a. Artsakh Republic).  Their protest was disrupted by members of the Armenian-Swedish community carrying Artsakh flags.  Meanwhile, in the on-again-off-again Nagorno-Karabakh War, two ethnic-Armenian soldiers in the N.K.R. armed forces were killed in unspecified circumstances on February 18th, according to military reports.

Dueling flags in Stockholm

Talysh Activist Calls for Independence and for Dissolution of Azerbaijan. Not only should independence be the ultimate goal for Azerbaijan’s Talysh ethnic minority, said a Talysh political scientist at a conference in Armenia’s capital on February 27th, but perhaps Azerbaijan should not even exist.  “The best option for the Talysh people will be gaining independence,” said Fahraddin Aboszoda at a round-table discussion in Yerevan titled “Ethnic People of Azerbaijan Republic: Reality and Prospects,” adding, “Of course, there are many Talyshes that do not embrace this goal, and I feel regret about it.  The majority of our intellectuals accept this idea.  Our ideas go in line with the opinion of our Armenian friends.  We are interested in seeing a regional map without Azerbaijan Republic.  I am convinced that this will happen in the future.”  The panel was organized by the Institute of Native Peoples of Caucasus-Caspian Region.  (For more on the Talysh people, see my article from this blog.)


Lezgins March to Nagorno-Karabakh, Complaining of Abuses under Azeri Rule. About 25 members of the Lezgin (a.k.a. Lezgian) ethnic minority in Azerbaijanmarched across an active civil-war frontline into the self-proclaimed Nagorno-Karabakh Republic (N.K.R.), it was reported on February 29th, carrying white flags.  Lezgin territory straddles Azerbaijan’s border with southwest Russia’s Republic of Dagestan, but the N.K.R., a puppet state backed by Armenia, is considerably to the south.  The Lezgins, from the tiny village of Ketuklu in the Qəbələ district, marched toward Ağdam, an Azeri city now a ghost town because of the Nagorno-Karabakh War.  They were immediately arrested by N.K.R. police, and one Lezgin, Ramin Ismayilov, said they were protesting the harsh rule of the Nabiyev extended family back in Ketuklu.  “The Nabiyevs slandered and illegally arrested our children,” Ismayilov said, adding that these Azeris “have taken our region under their control.  They do not let us live.  They throw drugs into the villagers’ houses and cars, and then order to arrest innocent people.  We are sick and tired of that, that is why we attempted to pass to the Armenian side.”  They demanded an audience with a representative of the Azerbaijani presidency.  Reportedly, this is only the latest in a series of individual Lezgin incursions into the N.K.R.  Since the fall of Communism, Lezgins have complained of harsher treatment in Azerbaijan than in Russia (an ally of Armenia).  In 1990, there was a movement to establish an independent Lezginistan, cobbled together from pieces of Azerbaijan and Dagestan, and in 1993 a massive protest by some 70,000 Azerbaijani Lezgins ended up with six demonstrators shot dead by riot police.  Lezgin organizations are banned in Azerbaijan, though not in Russia.




Zhirinovsky Wants Armenians, Kurds, Others to Dismantle Turkish State. The Republic of Turkey, along with nearly the whole rest of the world, refuses to recognize Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea, so this month the Russian parliament’s most unhinged ultranationalist firebrand, Vladimir Zhirinovsky, proposed a response to Ankara.  Zhirinovsky, who heads Russia’s grossly misnamed Liberal Democratic Party, is offering to submit to the Turkish government a territorial claim on behalf of the Republic of Armenia, a Russian satellite state, for “Western Armenia,” the historically Armenian-dominated region seized by the fledgling Turkish republic in the 1920s.  But that’s not all.  “I think that we, in response, must recognize Turkish Kurdistan,” Zhirinovsky said, “and Bulgarians and Greeks can submit their claims, and at that point nothing will remain of Turkey.”

Bombing Near Turkish Parliament Kills 28; Kurds in Iraq Bombed in Response. A massive explosion near Turkey’s parliament complex in Ankara on February 17th killed 28 people, including at least 60 military members, and injured another 61.  The prime minister, Ahmet Davutoğlu, with unusual specificity, quickly blamed the attack on the insurgent Kurdistan Worker’s Party (P.K.K.) and specifically on one Saleh Najar, a Kurd from northern Syria with links to the People’s Protection Units (Yekîneyên Parastina Gel‎, or Y.P.G.), which is allied with the P.K.K.  Kurdish authorities in Syria later claimed they could find no evidence of the existence of such a person.  The interior ministry said 14 suspects had been rounded up across Turkey in connection with the incident.  In retaliation for the bombing, the Turkish military launched a series of airstrikes across the border into northern Iraq’s Kurdistan Region the following day.  Soon, a small group called the Kurdistan Freedom Falcons (Teyrênbazê Azadiya Kurdistan, or T.A.K.), often called a P.K.K. offshoot, claimed responsibility for the Ankara bombing.  The T.A.K. statement called the attack a “revenge suicide mission” for the “massacre of wounded civilians in basements in Cizre,” in Turkey’s Şırnak province, and said its aim was to devastate Turkey’s tourism industry.  Also on February 18th, six soldiers were killed and a seventh wounded in southeastern Turkey’s Diyarbakır province when their armored vehicle hit a roadside bomb.  An oil pipeline running through Turkey along the Syrian border from Adana, Turkey, to Kirkuk, in Iraq, was sabotaged on February 16th, with an explosion near Cizre.  The P.K.K.-allied Group of Communities in Kurdistan (K.C.K.) denied claims that it was behind the attack, but reiterated its opposition to pipelines that carry energy resources out of Iraqi Kurdistan into Turkey.  On February 23rd, a police station near Izmir, in western Turkey, came under rocket attack, but with no injuries.  The same day, a Turkish army sergeant was killed in a fight with the P.K.K. in Sur, in Diyarbakır province.  Turkish army helicopters killed 12 P.K.K. fighters on February 24th in Şırnak province, the military reported.  The following day, in Diyarbakır province, a Turkish sergeant was killed and another two servicemen wounded in a battle with the P.K.K.

The February 17th bombing in Ankara

Brussels Says Keep P.K.K. on Terrorism List, Despite M.E.P.s’ Petition. Over 100 member of the European Parliament have signed a petition asking for Turkey’s Kurdistan Worker’s Party (P.K.K.) to be removed from the European Union’s official list of terrorist organizations.  The petition has 102 signatures so far, according to Barbara Spinelli, a Green-leaning M.E.P. from Italy, who passed the information to media in Iraq’s Kurdistan Region.  But on February 23rd, the E.U.’s High Representative for Foreign Affairs, Federica Mogherini, also an Italian, clarified the bloc’s position before the parliament in Brussels, stating,  “The European Union condemns in any possible way any terrorist act and considers the P.K.K. as a terrorist organization.”  The E.U. also, she added, “does not support any separatist agenda for the Kurds—being it in Turkey, being it in Iraq, being it in Syria.”

Turkish Security Forces Detain Scottish M.P. for Recording Sound of Bombs. Security forces in Turkeyseized, then interrogated and released, a member of Scotland’s Parliament on February 25th because she was making sound recordings of falling bombs with her cellphone.  The detention occurred near Diyarbakır, which is currently at the center of Turkey’s war against its Kurdish minority.  Once officers ascertained that the lawmaker, Natalie McGarry, who represents Glasgow East for the Scottish National Party (S.N.P.), was on a fact-finding mission organized by the National Union of General and Municipal Workers (G.M.B.) she was released.  She alerted the public via Twitter that she was “safe and absolutely fine.”

MIDDLE EAST



Peshmerga Rescues Swedish Teen from ISIS Captors Near Mosul. On February 17th, forces from Iraqi Kurdistan’s military, the Peshmerga, rescued a 16-year-old Swedish girl from ISIS captors near Mosul.  The girl, Marlin Stivani Nivarlain, was returned to her family in Sweden.  Swedish media report that the girl was pregnant when she ran away from home in Borås, in southern Sweden, to join ISIS (also called the Islamic State) in Syria with her boyfriend last year.  She was captured in Aleppo, and her boyfriend was killed in a Russian airstrike near Ramadi.  Meanwhile, the leader of the Islamic State terrorist group (a.k.a. ISIS) ordered 36 prisoners executed in Mosul just before more than 100 ISIS fighters fled the city on February 21st in expectation of a joint Iraqi–Kurdish offensive intended to liberate the city.  Meanwhile, the Peshmerga, Iraqi Kurdistan’s military, reported in late February that seven ISIS fighters had been captured by their forces on the Kirkuk front over the preceding two weeks.

First Marlin Stivani Nivarlain got knocked up— then she really got into some trouble.

Ultra-Orthodox Soldier Gets 9 Months for Electric Torture of Palestinian Suspects.  A military court in Israel on February 16th handed down a nine-month prison term to an ultra-Orthodox Jewish member of the Israeli Defence Forces (I.D.F.) for administering electric-shock torture to Palestinian arrestees last year.  In both cases under consideration, Palestinian suspects were tied to chairs, handcuffed, and given electric shocks to the neck.  Two other soldiers were also charged, one of whom apparently filmed the torture with his cellphone.

Israel Frees Palestinian Reporter, Ending his 90-Day Hunger Strike. A 33-year-old Palestinian journalist ended a hunger strike in its 91st day on February 26th after the Israeli government agreed to free him by May.  The reporter, Mohammad al-Qeeq, who is 33, was arrested in November for unstated reasons, though he had been an outspoken sympathizer with violent Palestinian response to occupation.  He was held under Israeli rules which allow six months’ detention without charge.  Israel’s domestic intelligence agency, Shin Bet, links him to Hamas and says that he is an “extremist.”  Qeeq was not force-fed, mainly because the Israeli Medical Association defines that practice as torture.

Mohammad al-Qeeq

Mossad Suspected of Assassinating Palestinian Refugee in Embassy in Bulgaria. A Palestinian refugee died just outside the Palestinian embassy in Bulgaria on February 25th, and authorities are still trying to figure out who, if anyone, killed him and why.  The dead man, Omar Nayef Zayed, age 52, had been convicted of killing a yeshiva student in Jerusalem in 1986, but escaped from prison in 1990 when he was being transferred to a prison hospital as the result of a hunger strike, and had been on the run ever since.  In late December 2015, an extradition deal between Israel and Bulgaria gave Zayed 72 hours to turn himself in or face arrest.  He had been living at the embassy, according to Bulgaria’s chief prosecutor, Sotir Tsatsarov.  The initial call to the police said that Zayed, who was found lying in the embassy’s backyard, had “died as a result of violence,” while other reports said he was alive when found but died on his way to the hospital in an ambulance.  Examination of the body failed to find any bullet wounds or any other signs of violence.  One possibility is that he fell—or was pushed—from an upper storey.  Mahmoud Abbas, president of the Palestinian National Authority (P.A.) in Ramallah, called the death an assassination.  The dead man’s brother, Hamzeh, apparently told the P.A. that the Palestinian mission in Sofia had told the family that an “unknown group” had killed Zayed during a raid on the embassy building.  “The Palestinian ambassador is complicit in the killing of my brother,” said Hamzeh Zayed.  “From the first day that he sought asylum inside the embassy, the ambassador and the staff had been trying to expel him.  The security personnel at the embassy did not provide him with protection.”  The truth may never be told, but Israel’s international secret police, Mossad, is well known for carrying out impromptu executions rather than wait for pesky nuisances like due process or the rule of law.  That is certainly the opinion of Yaffa Pinhasi, sister of the student Zayed killed in 1986.  “Whoever did this,” she said, “deserves praise.”

Killed by Mossad in Bulgaria?—Omar Zayed

5 Palestinians, 2 Israelis Dead as West Bank Knife Attacks, Other Violence Continue.  At least seven people died in Israeli-Palestinian violence during the second half of February, mostly as part of an ongoing string of individual knife attacks in the West Bank and Jerusalem.  A 16-year-old Palestinian girl was indicted on February 17th for attempted murder in a knife attack on a border policeman eight days earlier.  An off-duty Israeli soldier was killed in a supermarket in the settlement of Sha’ar Binyamin in the West Bank on February 18th when he was attacked by two knife-wielding Palestinian teenagers.  Police shot but did not kill the two assailants, both aged 14, and took them into custody.  On February 19th, a Palestinian man attacked two policemen with a knife in Jerusalem, and in response the police shot him to death.  Another Palestinian was shot to death a few hours later in the West Bank as he tried to ram his car into a group of Israeli soldiers.  The same day, Palestinian men opened fire on Israeli soldiers in the West Bank, according to the military, prompting the soldiers to return fire.  One of the Palestinians, age 21, later died of his wounds.  Along the border with the Gaza Strip on the same day, Israeli forces clashed with Palestinians, seven of whom were injured by smoke inhalation and rubber bullets.  A Palestinian who tried to stab an Israeli soldier at a checkpoint near Nablus in the West Bank was shot dead by other troops on February 21st, while a 14-year-old Palestinian boy was arrested in another stabbing attack, on a group of patrolling soldiers near Banai Naim.  A 17-year-old girl was arrested with a knife near the West Bank town of Ariel in the midst of a planned attack, police say.  The Israeli military announced on February 23rd that it had demolished the homes of two Palestinians who carried out knife and gun attacks in November 2015.  An Israeli soldier accidentally shot dead an air-force officer near an illegal Jewish settlement on the West Bank on February 24th as he was trying to halt a knife attack.  The Palestinian attacker was also hurt.  On February 26th, a Palestinian man wielding an axe and a knife inflicted serious injury on an Israeli man at an illegal Jewish settlement, and a few hours later, near Ramallah, an Israeli soldier shot dead a 17-year-old Palestinian (who was also a United States citizen) who was attempting to stab other soldiers.  And on February 28th the Israeli army seriously wounded two Palestinians by shooting them in the chest during a clash in a village near Bethlehem.  Locals said that the incident when the Israeli soldiers raided the village and opened fire on civilians.  One of the victims was a middle-aged dentist who was sitting in his car when he was shot.


Al-Qaeda May Be Rebuilding “Emirate of Waqar” Statelet in Southern Yemen. A security analyst who is an expert on al-Qaeda claims that al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (A.Q.A.P.), which operates in Yemen in the midst of its devastating civil war, may be taking and holding enough territory to rebuild an Islamic “emirate” it established in 2011 and 2012 in the south of the country.  The expert, Katherine Zimmerman, of the American Enterprise Institute, wrote in an article published on February 17th that A.Q.A.P. has retaken Jaar and Zinjibar, which are near the major port city of Aden and which formed the original self-proclaimed “Emirate of Waqar” five years ago.  They have also captured Hawta in the south, al-Mukalla and al-Shihr in the far east, and, more recently, the towns of Ahwar, Azzan, Habban, al-Mahfad, and Shaqra—ultimately covering a large area.  These major towns cut straight across what used to be the separate country of South Yemen.

AFRICA





Libyan Leader Orders Army to Dislodge ISIS from Sirte; U.S. Hangs Back.  The acting prime minister of Libya’s General National Congress gave orders on February 18th for the entire armed forces to converge on Sirte and dislodge the Islamic State (I.S.) terrorist group (a.k.a. ISIS) from their rule there.  The prime minister, Khalifa al-Ghawi, whose administration is based in Tripoli and who heads the Libya Dawn coalition that lost the 2014 national elections, made the statements at events marking the 5th anniversary of the overthrow of the late dictator Moammar al-Qaddafi during the Arab Spring revolutions.  The following day, 50 people were killed in a United States air strike on an I.S. training camp near Sabratha, another I.S. stronghold in the far northwest of Libya.  At least six Libya Dawn guerrillas were killed fighting the Islamic State on February 22nd in Derna, another I.S.-controlled city, in Cyrenaica near the legitimate Libyan government’s capital at Tobruk.  And on February 25th three Libyan troops died fighting I.S. in Sabratha, and the Sabratha’s I.S. “emir,” Mohamed Saad al-Tajuri (nom de guerre: Abu Sleiman), was captured in that battle.  Most dramatically, an entire I.S. convoy was destroyed by an airstrike near Sirte on February 28th, but the Tripoli government denied that their air force was responsible for it.  Meanwhile, in the United States, President Barack Obamagave a thumbs-down to his military and foreign-policy advisors’ recommendations for a full-on bombing campaign against ISIS in Libya.  One White House official told the media, “There’s nothing close to happening in terms of a major military operation. It will continue to be strikes like the kind we saw in November against Abu Nabil.”


Morocco Suspends E.U. Ties after Court Kills Trade Pact over Western Sahara Question. The Kingdom of Moroccotook the unusual step of suspending contacts with the European Union (E.U.) on February 25th in anger over a European Court of Justice ruling on a Moroccan–E.U. pact on fisheries and agriculture.  The court, based in Kirchberg, Luxembourg, had rejected the deal because it includes as Moroccan territory the former Spanish Sahara (a.k.a. Western Sahara), which is illegally occupied by Morocco but claimed as the partially recognized Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic (S.A.D.R.).  Morocco called the court decision “highly political.”  The E.U. is now scrambling to reestablish diplomatic normalcy.


Exiled Berber Leader Courts Moroccan King, Distances Kabylia from Sahrawi Cause. During a visit to Paris, the Algerian Berber folk singer and independence leader Ferhat Mehniemphasized the strengthening of ties between his organization, the Provisional Government of Kabylia (G.P.K.), and the Kingdom of Morocco.  He praised King Mohammed VI’s enhancement of the cultural and linguistic rights of the Berber (also called Amazigh) people in Morocco and said the G.P.K. is committed to “weaving strong relations with Morocco in the event of independence.”  Mehni, who lives in exile in France, made his remarks during a meeting with Dr. Khalid Cherkaoui Samouni, who is secretary general of the International Organization for the Promotion and Defense of Human Rights.  Mehni also reiterated that  the G.P.K. does not recognize the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic (S.A.D.R.), the government which claims the former Spanish Sahara, now illegally occupied by the Moroccan military.  Most Arab countries recognize the S.A.D.R., and Algeria is the most prominent sponsor of the Sahrawi independence struggle.

Ferhat Mehni

Jihadists Kill Malian Soldier as French Premier Visits Troops in Azawad. A soldier was killed in an attack on a remote army post in the Azawad region of northern Mali on February 19th, mere hours before a visit by France’s prime minister, Manuel Valls, to the northern city of Gao to meet with French troops.  The attack took place in Menaka and also left another soldier injured.  The French defense minister, Jean-Yves Le Drian, accompanied the prime minister and referred to the battle against jihadists as “a battle against barbarity.”  On February 23rd, officials told Agence France Presse that the previous week had seen 10 deaths from violence in Tuareg communities in Azawad in the aftermath of the killing of a tribal elder a week earlier.


Ethiopia Blames Eritrea for Oromo “Rampage” That Killed 7 Soldiers. In Ethiopia’s largest ethnic state, Oromia, populated by the marginalized Oromo people, seven federal security police were killed on February 15th in a still unexplained incident, according to Ethiopia’s communications minister.  “The information we have,” said Getachew Reda, the minister, “is they were ambushed by people carrying guns, apparently on a rampage.”  Government buildings were also reported damaged in the unrest, which occurred in Arsi, a district just southwest of Addis Ababa, the capital.  Ethiopia’s prime minister, Hailemariam Desalegn, weighed in on the unrest on February 24th, saying that “destructive forces” in Oromia with separatist aims would not be tolerated, and, as per the usual government line, neighboring Eritrea was blamed for backing Oromo violence.  The killing of the police followed an incident three days earlier in which Ethiopian soldiers fired on a bus which was carrying wedding guests, according to activists.  Human Rights Watch (H.R.W.) announced on February 21st that “killings and arbitrary arrests” have been reported to them on an almost daily basis since the beginning of 2016.  Some of the 60 Oromo protestors interviewed by H.R.W. “said that security forces have shot randomly into crowds, summarily killed people during arrests, carried out mass roundups, and tortured detainees.”




Ijaw Rebel Tompolo Appears in Court, Denies Threatening Pipeline Bombings.   The Ijaw ex-rebel leader Government Ekpemupolo, who uses the nom de guerreTompolo, appeared in a federal court on February 22nd, more than a month after an order for his arrest prompted (as reported in this blog) a wave of bombings of oil facilities by his supporters in the Niger Delta region.  His attorney opened with a blanket denial of one charge against Tompolo—that he had issued an ultimatum to President Muhammadu Buhari, threatening to blow up oil pipelines if the military were not withdrawn from his native Gbaramatu Kingdom, in Bayelsa State.  The statement said that that published ultimatum “is not from Tompolo, rather it is the work of those that have sworn to kill him by all means.”  So far, Tompolo’s lawyer has not addressed charges of theft and money-laundering against him and nine co-defendants.  Earlier, on February 19th, a federal judge in Lagos had ordered the seizure of all of Tompolo’s assets.  Tompolo is a former commander in the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND).


Nigerian Military Massacres Ogonis Searching for Former Rebel “Osama Bin Laden.”   As many as 18 people may have died on February 23rd in a raid by Nigeria’s military on Gokana, in the Yeghe district of Rivers State, during an unsuccessful hunt for the Ogoni former rebel fighter Solomon “Solo” Ndigbara, known by his nickname “General Osama Bin Laden.” The military denied the following day that anyone had been killed, sharply conflicting with numerous eyewitness reports.  Reports said that Ndigbara’s home was destroyed by a bulldozer.  During the extensive gun battle and other unrest precipitated by the raid, Ndigbara supporters torched a senator’s campaign office in nearby Bori.  Gunfights the following day had also reportedly spread to Port Harcourt, the Rivers State capital.  The violence prompted an unusual angry rebuke to the federal government from the Rivers State governor, Nyesom Ezenwo Wike, who vowed to bring the military killers to justice, adding, “The Rivers State government will take up this unfortunate incident with the appropriate authorities.  The military must subject itself to civil authority.  I am the chief security officer of this state.  Before any deployment of soldiers, I should be informed, but in this case I was not aware.  I will always support the security agencies in the fight against criminals and criminality, but I will never support the killing of innocent persons.  ...  I have seen for myself the destruction in Yeghe and the killings that took place.  I went to the mortuaries to see the corpses and the relatives of the deceased confirmed they were killed in the operation.”  Ndigbara is a former rebel fighter from the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND).  As this article goes to press, the hereditary Ogoni monarch of the Bua-Yeghe district, Chief Barinada Theophilus, was warning that another Nigerian military invasion of Ogoniland was imminent, even within a few hours.  Thousands of residents were fleeing their homes.

Ogonis fleeing the incursion by Nigeria’s military in their territory

Kanu Trial Adjourned Till March 7; Rights Group Outraged over Igbo Mass Grave.  A federal judge in Abuja, Nigeria’s capital, on February 19th denied a request to conduct the trial of the Igbo independence leader Nnamdi Kanu in secret.  Justice James Tsoho justified the decision on grounds that the charges against Kanu are not terrorism-related.  The trial, whose other two defendants are Benjamin Madubugwu and David Nwawusi, has been adjourned until March 7th.  A mainstream Igbo civic organization, Ohanaeze Ndigbo, said that the creation of a “South-East Development Commission” to address Igbo grievances would halt the ongoing Biafra uprising, in an apparent attempt to open negotiations for Kanu’s release, but spokespeople in the United Kingdom for Kanu’s organization, Indigenous People of Biafra (IPoB), evinced the endemic squabbling among Igbo factions by warning Ohanaeze Ndigbo not to attempt to speak for the Biafra movement.  They quoted Kanu himself as saying, “I will rather die in jail than for Ohanaeze Ndigbo to claim the glory of my release.”  Meanwhile, human-rights organizations are renewing their condemnation of a massacre of pro-Biafra demonstrators in Abia on February 9th after the recent discovery of a pit containing the corpses of 13 of the murdered.  Acid was poured over some of the bodies to obscure their facial features.  Twenty-two members of IPoB were killed in the Abia incident and 30 wounded.  The northern Nigerian umbrella group the Arewa Consultative Forum (A.C.F.) and Ohanaeze Ndigbo, an Igbo group, joined the chorus of organizations calling for Kanu’s release.

Advocates of independence for Biafra took their cause to St. Peter’s Square in Vatican City on February 28th and even met with Pope Francis.

Pro-Biafra Hijackers Release 5 Tanker Crewmen Held since January.  The Russian foreign ministry confirmed that self-identified pro-Biafra rebels on February 21st freed the five hostages (from Russia, Georgia, and the Philippines) that had been held since (as reported at the time in this blog here and here) they seized a Greek chemical tanker off the Nigerian–Cameroonian coast in January.  “The kidnappers,” said a Danish maritime security expert, Dirk Steffen, “were from the southern Niger Delta.  They were not Biafran separatists as had been initially reported.  The Nigerian military and intelligence services have absolved the Biafran agitators from any involvement shortly after the incident.”

People’s Progressive Party Demands Nigeria-Wide Referendum on Biafra Independence.  The chairman of Nigeria’s marginal People’s Progressive Party (P.P.P.) said on February 22nd that the country’s legislature and executive should immediately begin to organize a referendum on the question of independence for Biafra.  The chairman, Dr. Damian Uzoma Ogbonna, cited the United Nations charter and added that a referendum “has become necessary in order to stem the tide of ongoing killings and bleedings in our country.”


Biafra Youth Leader Admits Contacts with Ambazonian Separatists in Cameroon. The head of the separatist Biafra Nations Youth League (B.N.Y.L.) confirmed in February that members of his group had met officially with representatives of a group seeking independence for southwestern Cameroon, which borders Nigeria’s Biafra region.  The chairman, Prince Chimezie Obuka, said he could not disclose the identies of the B.N.Y.L.’s Southern Cameroonian contacts, out of concern for possible retaliation against them by their government.  But he said they were from an organization called the Liberation Governing Council of Former British Southern Cameroon, “and not Rufasca, though with the influence of Rufasca.”  (Rufasca stands for Respect Unity for All Southern Cameroons Ambazonians).  “It’s only an independent Biafran State,” Obuka added, “that will force the artificial government out from Ambazonia including Bakassi Peninsula.”  Later, Ebenezer Akwanga, president of the Southern Cameroons Youth League, who spent six months as a political prisoner in the late 1970s and early 1980s, confirmed that an Ambazonian–Biafran coalition is a possibility.


Mombasa Republican Councils, in U-Turn, Urges Coast Residents to Vote. The head of Kenya’s largest Muslim separatist group has reversed policy and is urging residents of Coast Province to register to vote, instead of shunning elections.  Hamza Randu, secretary general of the Mombasa Republican Council (M.R.C.), made the comments in Mombasa on February 23rd.  “Elections are all about democracy,” he said, “and we cannot tell people not to go for voters’ cards.”  The area claimed by the M.R.C., centered on Kenya’s second largest city, Mombasa, was formerly part of the Sultanate of Zanzibar and includes virtually the entire coast of Kenya.


New “Barotseland Liberation Army” Tells Northern Zambian Politicians to Keep Out. Police in Zambiaare issuing warnings to whoever is distributing flyers in the Barotseland region threatening to prevent any Zambian politicians from outside the region from holding campaign rallies in the Bartose-dominated Western Province.  The flyers claim to be produced by the Barotseland Liberation Army, a previously unknown group.  On February 27th, police announced that they had arrested one member of the new group, but revealed few details.  Elections will be held across Zambia on August 11th of this year for the presidency and National Assembly.

Map showing greater Barotseland

Boer Terrorists in South African Prison Enjoy Special Privileges, Critics Say. Advocates for the incarcerated in South Africaare complaining about preferential treatment for two dangerous white-supremacist terrorists serving decades-long sentences for treason at the Baviaanspoort Prison in Pretoria.  The newspaper the Sowetan is reporting on leaked secret footage from January showing the two men, Dirk Hanekom and Herman van Rooyen, enjoying privileges like using cellphones, which are banned in all South African prisons.  The anonymous group responsible for filming the men says the images “show how privileged they are and how management tolerates them more than everybody else.  They use their phones without hiding them.  They get more privileges than inmates of other races.”  Hanekom and Van Rooyen were sentenced in 2013 for plotting with members of the Boeremag, an Afrikaner (Dutch South African) militia, to assassinate President (as he then was) Nelson Mandela, take over the reins of state, and reinstitute apartheid in a Boer republic.

ASIA





Russian Official Warns Yakutian Online Organizers Big Brother Is Watching.  An interior-ministry official in Russia’s Sakha Republic, in Siberia, told a conference on interethnic relations that his bosses’ technological reach makes it impossible for “extremist” or separatist dissidents there to organize using WhatsApp, a cellphone application that is a primary medium of communication in the republic.  The comments were made by Sergei Ponomarev, who heads the Anti-Extremism Center’s branch in Sakha, which is also called Yakutia.  “It would be pointless to ban the use of the messenger,” he said: “people will immediately start using substitutes.  On the other hand, we can control the situation and find anonymous senders when needed.  In fact, we found one quite recently and sent the case to the investigative committee, which decided to give him a chance based on his positive history and not initiate criminal proceedings.”

Russia’s Sakha Republic is larger than all but a handful of world’s countries, and is the largest political unit in the world that is not an independent state.

8 Dead in Indian Military Siege of Police Academy Held by Kashmiri Rebels.  In India, a two-day-long siege of a police training facility in Jammu and Kashmir’s capital captured by separatist militants ended on February 22nd with eight people dead.  It began when a group of pro-independence Kashmiri gunmen attacked a bus full of policemen in Srinagar and then stormed into the Entrepreneurship Development Institute, as the facility is called.  About 100 people were safely evacuated, but two of the police reservists, one civilian, three members of the military, and one militant were killed in the first hours of the battle with security forces that followed.  The other two of the three militants were dead by the end of the siege.


Tibetan Rights Group Slams Chinese Communist Regime in Annual Report.  The Tibetan Centre for Human Rights and Democracy (T.C.H.R.D.) released its annual report on February 19th, with scathing criticisms of the one-party dictatorship in Beijing.  “In 2015,” according to a summary by the organization’s director, Tsering Tsomo, “China passed laws on national security and counter-terrorism that appear to do little but provide China with a convenient pretext to continue violating human rights.  Moreover, China failed to implement any measures that contribute positively to the degrading ecosystem which many experts say is ‘irreversible’ by pursuing a policy of prioritising rhetoric over substance.”  The summary added, “Religious figures were targeted for disappearance, detention, and, sometimes, death.  Local Chinese police also detained monks and laypeople, and in many cases, they used pretence to detain community leaders, who are frequently religious leaders.”  (Read the report here.)

Tibetan Dissident Writer Shokjang Sentenced to 3 Years in Prison.  A court in the People’s Republic of China (P.R.C.) on February 17th gave a three-year prison term to the dissident Tibetan author and blogger Druklo, who uses the nom de plumeShokjang, for writings critical of the P.R.C. government, contact with separatist groups, and allegedly inciting a separatist riot in 2008.  The sentencing, coming almost six years after his arrest, occurred in the Huangnan (a.k.a. Malho) Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture in Qinghai province.  Shokjang’s book The Courage of Path is banned in the P.R.C.  The same day, and also in Malho, a 47-year-old monk was sentenced to two years in prison because an image of the 14th Dalai Lama had been found on his cell phone.  It was also revealed in late February that a 41-year-old Tibetan named Jamyang Dorjewas arrested in the Sichuan province’s Garzê Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture on February 14th for standing at a crossroads and shouting for the return of the Dalai Lama.  He has not been heard from since.  The Tibet “Autonomous” Regionwas closed to outsiders on February 25th and will remain so until March 10th, the anniversary of the Tibetan uprising which prompted its brutal invasion and annexation by the P.R.C.

Shokjang: in the hands of the Thought Police now

2 Uyghurs Plead Not Guilty in Hindu-Shrine Bombing, Cite Coerced Confession. Two Uyghur men from northwestern Chinapleaded not guilty in a military court in Thailand on February 16th for an August 2015 terrorist bombing of a Hindu shrine in the capital, Bangkok.  A lawyer for one of the two, Adem Karadag, a.k.a. Bilal Mohammed, age 31, says his client had been tortured—with attack dogs and waterboarding—into confessing to a role in the attack, which killed 20 people and injured over 100.  A second Uyghur, Yusufu Mieraili, age 28, is also charged in the attack.  No group has claimed responsibility, and Karadag’s lawyer says Karadag was not even in the country on the date of the bombing.  Both men are from Urumqi, capital of China’s Xinjiang Uyghur “Autonomous” Region.  The head of the bomb squad which responded to the incident suggested in court on February 26th that the defendants had been targeting Chinese tourists in the attack, in retaliation for Thailand’s deportation of more than 100 Uyghurs to China in July 2015.


Dozens Feared Dead as Islamists, Security Forces Clash in Mindanao.  In the Philippines, renewed violence between security forces and southern Muslim rebels left six people dead and 20,000 displaced, the government claimed on February 25th.  The battles began on February 20th when rebels attacked a military post near Butig, on the island of Mindanao.  The rebels involved were apparently from the al-Qaeda-linked group Jemaah Islamiyah, the same jihadist terrorist group responsible for a bombing in Bali, Indonesia, which killed hundreds in 2002.  Jemaah Islamiyah’s aim is to create an Islamic caliphate embracing most of southeast Asia.  Reports indicated that the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF), the most prominent rebel group in the region, was not involved.  Some sources said 61 rebels had been killed, but the government would only confirm the deaths of three rebels and three members of the security forces.

OCEANIA





Indonesia Investigates Opening of Papuan Rebel Chapter in Wamena.  Police in the Indonesian-administered western half of the island of New Guinea were on February 18th investigating reports that a branch of the United Liberation Movement of West Papua (U.M.L.W.P.), which seeks independence from Indonesia, is opening in Wamena.  A nameplate on the building where the U.M.L.W.P. allegedly has its offices was confiscated by police.  Initially, rumors had it that it was the Free Papua Movement (O.P.M.) which was opening an office in Wamena.  Also in Wamena, Indonesian authorities are reportedly considering slapping a treason charge on a Catholic priest who led a prayer service at which a U.L.M.W.P. banner was displayed.  The priest, Father John Djonga, has refused to cooperate with the investigation.


Australia Begins Legislative Process of Absorbing Norfolk Island.  In Australia’s parliament on February 24th, the minister for territories, Paul Fletcher, introduced a bill that would redefine the Commonwealth of Australia to include tiny Norfolk Island., situated in the open seas about halfway to New Zealand.  This is the inauguration of a long, complicated bureaucratic process to revoke Norfolk’s decades-old autonomous status and make it just another council area within New South Wales—a violation of political rights that has Norfolkers up in arms.  The process is to be complete by July 1st.  Some Australian federal laws, such as the minimum wage, which is more $6.59 higher than Norfolk’s, will be introduced gradually.


Queensland’s “Prince of Wy” Stays Aloof from Council-Boundary Fray. One resident of Balmoral—a suburb of Brisbane, the capital of Queensland, Australia—claims to be utterly unaffected by the contentious redrawing of council-area boundaries that is consuming local politics.  That is because Paul Delprat, who calls himself Paul, Prince of Wy, says his 700 square miles of Balmoral seceded from the Mosman Council in 2004 in the midst of a dispute over road access through the principality.  Asked what would happen to the Principality of Wy if Mosman is amalgamated with a nearby council area, His Royal Highness said, “We were consulted and our view is that there should be more councils,” not fewer; “there should be a council in every street and a mayor on every street corner.  Then councils would be truly local.”  The potentate’s day job is as principal of the Julian Ashton Art School in Sydney, New South Wales.

H.R.H. Prince Paul of Wy

Emperor of Atlantium Freezes Citizenship Rolls, Blaming Freeloaders. The emperor of Atlantium, George II, announced on the micronation’s Facebook page on February 26th that he had stopped accepting new applications for citizenship.  “The reason for this policy shift is simple,” said the statement: “almost all of the several thousands citizens that we’ve enrolled over the past twenty-something years have done absolutely nothing to support Atlantium—and it is a considerable drain on our resources to manage a burgeoning citizen database for no discernible benefit,” adding, “Citizenship is a privilege—not a right.”  The emperor left it unclear when, or even if, the moratorium would end.  The Empire of Atlantium, which consists of just over three-quarters of a square kilometer in New South Wales, Australia, has over 2,000 citizens, none of whom live in the territory.

H.I.M. Emperor George II of Atlantium

Native Hawai‘ian Constitutional Conclave Flouts Supreme Court, Passes Charter. A conclave of Native Hawai‘ansput the finishing touches on February 26th on a constitution for a government for Hawai‘i.  The project, years in the making, became more of an abstract exercise after a United States Supreme Court decision in 2000 which held that no election in the U.S. could restrict eligibility to vote on the basis of race or ethnicity.  The original plan, under the auspices of the Office of Hawai‘an Affairs, an indigenous subdivision of the state government of Hawaii, had been for a parallel legislature with its own constitution to come into force alongside the state government.  The process that concluded this February was spearheaded by Na‘i Aupuni, an organization committed to Native Hawai‘an self-government.  At the ’aha, or gathering, held in Maunawili, on O‘ahu, to approve the constitution, the final document passed with a vote of 88-30, with one abstention.  A group of Native Hawai‘ans called Protest Na‘i Aupuni, which is opposed to the ’aha staged protests outside the closed meeting.  One former constitutional delegate among the protestors, Walter Ritte, said, “The process is full of bad decisions and it's not a process that all of us understand.  They didn’t take the time to explain, to educate, to unite in order to get this important thing into the place it should be.”  He added that the new constitution was being “forced down Hawaiians’ throats”—even though there is little realistic expectation now that the constitution will be implemented in any way.

Protestors were unhappy with how the new Hawai‘ian constitution was approved.

NORTH AMERICA





Head of New Quebec-Sovereignty Think Tank Distances Himself from Péladeau, P.Q.  The appointed chairman of a new think tank supporting Quebec’s movement for independence from Canadasaid on February 24th that his organization will not just be an extension of the opposition Parti Québécois (P.Q.).  Daniel Turp, a former politician with both the P.Q. and the Bloc Québécois, will be both chairman and research director of the Institut de recherche sur l’autodétermination des peuples et des indépendences nationales (IRAI) (Institute for Research on Self-Determination and National Independence), which was established by the embattled P.Q. leader, Pierre Karl Péladeau.  But, says Turp, “W will not be taking orders from anybody when it comes to the research.  You have my word on that.”  Meanwhile, Péladeau himself is trying to reach out to other pro-independence parties, concerned that fragmentation is keeping them out of power.  But at least one small-party leader, André Fontecilla of Québec Solidaire, is wary.  “We welcome the effort,” he said on February 27th, “but will need to know more.”




“Lawless and Violent” Cliven Bundy Denied Bail, Sent Home to Nevada for Trial.  A federal court in Portland, Oregon, ruled on February 16th that Cliven Bundy, the militant racist Mormon patriarch arrested February 10th on his way to cheer on his sons’ followers’ occupation of a wildlife refuge, will stay behind bars while he awaits trial for his central role in an armed confrontation with federal officers at his Nevada ranch in 2014.  In arguing for the refusal of bail, a prosecutor, Steven W. Myhre, called Bundy a “lawless and violent man.”  Referring to the Bureau of Land Management (B.L.M.) officers who faced off in April 2014 against over 400 armed thugs Bundy had recruited from 10 states, Myhre said, “Almost to a person, every federal law enforcement officer there thought they were going to die that day.”  Two days later, a judge ordered Bundy to be returned to Nevada to await trial there behind bars.  Upon his arrival, a federal grand jury in Nevada on the 17th indicted Bundy and four participants in the occupation, including his sons Ammon and Ryan, on a wide range of charges including weapons charges, conspiracy, assault, and extortion.  Ammon Bundy and 9 other defendants pleaded not guilty in a federal court in Portland on February 24th.

Charlotte Rodrique chairs the Burns Paiute tribal council in Oregon.

Refuge Occupiers Desecrated Sacred Indian Sites; Lawsuit Cites “Devil’s Works.”  Meanwhile, on February 16th, a United States attorney released a report on the condition of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge after the end of the occupation.  The report says two large latrine trenches, at least one containing human feces, were dug through an area containing artifacts sacred to the Burns Paiute tribe.  Jarvis Kennedy, of the Burns Paiutes’ tribal council said, “This is their mindset—not really caring about anything.  For them to do that in that area is so disgusting.”  Kennedy added that he knows that the occupiers were informed it was a sacred site.  One of the former wildlife-refuge occupiers, Shawn Cox, filed a federal complaint on February 15th, larded with legalistic gibberish characteristic of the “sovereign citizens” movement and claiming that she and her comrades in the action were being “maliciously prosecuted” because of what they know about U.S. government misdeeds.  In the eight-page filing, Cox also asked for $666,666,666,666.66 in compensation for “damages from the works of the devil.”


Cruz Woos Nevada Bundy-ites with Land Reform Vow; Trump Wins Caucus Anyway. In Nevada, meanwhile, in the run-up to the caucuses for the Republican Party nomination for president on February 23rd, Ted Cruzreleased a new television spot in the state in which he pledged to give the State of Nevada“full control” of the lands currently managed by the federal government—a transfer that his rival Donald Trump had gone on record as opposing.  Trump still won Nevada by a healthy margin, taking 45.9% of the vote, compared to Marco Rubio’s 23.9% and Cruz’s 21.4%.  But meanwhile the United States House of Representatives is considering bills—vanishingly unlikely ever to pass a Senate vote—that would ease the transfer of federal lands to the states.

Members of Donald Trump’s “base” turned out to support him in Las Vegas.

New Orleans Police Flush “Moorish” Squatters from Vacation Home. In Louisiana, police on February 16th entered a house in New Orleans’ Bywater neighborhood and arrested four squatters from a “Moorish” nationalist group who had been occupying the house illegally for a week.  Three were arrested in the house, and one was arrested in the street nearby.  Among the two were 24-year-old Devin Garner and 18-year-old Danamaria Thornton.  The house was owned by Fredrick Hines, a resident of Inglewood, California, who uses the property, which he has owned since before Hurricane Katrina, as a vacation home.

The Washitaw Moorish squatters, now evicted

Meanwhile, in New Jersey, the ex-wife of another “Moorish” nationalist, Don Finney, who uses the name Fevor Ador El and has links to the “sovereign citizens” movement, testified in detail on February 16th that her ex-husband had beaten, choked, and raped her, threatened her life, and held her hostage in their Trenton home for three days.  Because of the nature of the case, the woman’s name was not revealed to the press.  Finny is fighting 14 criminal charges, including kidnapping and aggravated sexual assault.

Members of the Moorish community in Philadelphia

Philadelphian Tries to Dodge Fines by Claiming “Moorish American” Citizenship. In a suburb of Philadelphia, a 47-year-old man found his giant pile of unpaid traffic fines and other violations were made into a bigger problem for him when he told a policeman in Limerick, Pennsylvania, that he didn’t have to pay anything because he was not a United States citizen.  He claimed that instead he was a member of the “Moorish American National Government.” So now a Montgomery County court has added giving false information to a police officer and presenting false documents to his charges.  The man, Rodney Logan, is a resident of Philadelphia, one of the centers of the “Moorish Science Temple” movement and its offshoots (see above).


Cruz Makes Rebel Flag Wedge Issue as Trump Sews Up South Carolina Bigot Vote. According to a poll conducted in South Carolina before the February 20th Republican Party primary there, 70% of those planning on voting for Donald Trumpbelieved that the Confederate battle flag should still be flying over the state capitol building in Columbia.  Only 20% were happy it was down.  62% of Ted Cruz supporters agreed it should be raised again, as did, surprisingly, 33% of backers of Ben Carson, who is African-American.  But Trump himself had earlier approved of the removal of the flag from the South Carolina statehouse—a fact which Cruz exploited in robocall ads which grumbled, “Trump talks about our flag like it’s a social disease” (emphasis added).  Thirty-eight percent of Trump voters said they wish the Southern states had won the Civil War, with only 24% saying the Northern victory was a good thing, while another 38% were “not sure.”  Almost one in five pro-Trump South Carolinians think the slaves should not have been freed.  For Cruzadistas, pro-Confederates were 35%, while only 28% of Jeb Bush backers and 12% of Carson fans pined for an independent Dixie.  A full 30% of South Carolina Republicans wish they lived in a Confederate States of America.  Meanwhile, Trump won the endorsement of the Conservative Action Report, a neo-Confederate racist newsletter which claims Barack Obama is a Muslim.  In the primary itself, Trump won 33% of the vote, Marco Rubio 23%, Cruz 22%, and Carson 7%.  Meanwhile, the neo-Nazi David Duke, former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, endorsed Trump, telling his radio listeners, “Voting against Donald Trump at this point is really treason to your heritage.”

2 White Kentucky Teens Use Confederate Flag, Pole in Assault on Biracial Girl.  In Kentucky, controversy continued to rage over a racial assault near a high school in the town of Mt. Washington.  In the February 12th incident, two white teenagers, Hayleigh Blevins and Nicholas Chapman, shoved a 17-year-old biracial girl, used the “N”-word on her, and then attacked her car with a Confederate flag on a pole, causing $1,000 in damage.  Eric Farris, of the Bullitt County school board, later told media, “Based upon information we have gathered, and information provided by the Mt. Washington Police Department, there is no evidence of a ‘hate crime.’”  Meanwhile, three white students at San Jose State University in Californiawere found guilty of battery for calling an African-American student the “N” word, taunting him with a Confederate flag, and putting a bicycle lock around his neck, but those acts also apparently did not qualify the incident as a “hate crime.”  One wonders what does count as a hate crime nowadays.


Ku Klux Klansmen Stab 3 Counter-Protestors for Disrupting California Rally. Anaheim, the city near Los Angeles in Southern California which is home to Disneyland, was hardly the happiest place on Earth when a Ku Klux Klan (K.K.K.) rally in a city park turned violent on February 27th.  As far as it’s possible to tell from eyewitness reports, when a sport utility vehicle disgorged black-suited thugs with Confederate-flag patches, counter-protestors attacked them, some with two-by-fours, and some were stabbed in retaliation.  In total, three people were stabbed, at least one badly, and 13 people were arrested.  The Klan had a city permit to hold a rally, but there was, according to some observers, insufficient police presence.  At one point a flagpole was used as a weapon by Klansmen.  Among those arrested was William Quigg, of Anaheim, who had organized the rally.  Brian Levin, who directs the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University, San Bernardino, was in the midst of the scuffle and later told reporters on the scene, “There were no police officers here when this started happening.  It was the longest few minutes between when the S.U.V. was attacked and when the police responded in droves.  I think the police response saved their [the Klansmen’s] lives.  They would have been torn limb from limb.”  Police are still searching for one of the K.K.K. perpetrators.

Klansmen and counterdemonstrators scuffling in Anaheim

Mississippi House Speaker Says Only a Referendum Should Alter State Flag. The speaker of Mississippi’s House of Representatives, Philip Gunn, said on February 22nd that any redesigns of the state flag should be put to a statewide referendum first.  Gunn was among the first Republicans last year to call for his state to remove the Confederate“stars and bars” from the canton (upper left corner) of its flag.  In a referendum on the subject in 2001, Mississippians voted to keep the flag.  In other rebel-flag news, a volunteer fire department in Spotsylvania County, Virginia, voted again on February 15th, reversing an earlier decision to keep the Confederate flag in their official patch.  The vote was overwhelming among the 60 or so members who voted, with only three or four wanting to keep the Stars and Bars.  The vote a month earlier was 21-14 in favor of keeping it.


Separatist Assembly Candidate Says 41% of Californians Want to Secede from U.S. The San Diego politician pushing for an independent California estimated on February 22nd that 41% of Californians would like the state to become a separate country.  Louis Marinelli, who heads the National California Party (N.C.P.) and (as reported recently in this blog) is running for a seat in California’s legislature, told a Vancouver, British Columbia, radio interviewer that he wants to see a California that keeps the tax revenue it raises and can offer its citizens free health care and a good education and free them from the political and financial entanglements of the United States’ military adventurism.  “We disagree with what’s going on in the world,” Marinelli said, “with the United States as a leader in the world; we don’t want to be a part of America’s imperialism.”  As for the 41% figure, what he said was, “There hasn’t been any official polling on the issue yet, but we did commission a poll, about nine thousand Californians, we got 41% saying yes to independence, that was about two weeks ago.”  Marinelli’s “Yes California” campaign, with its goal of an independence referendum by 2020, uses a logo explicitly based on that of the “Yes Scotland” campaign from 2014.

Tim Draper and his map of Six Californias—or “supercounties”

Father of “6 Californias” Partition Movement Unveils Plan for “6 Supercounties.” The venture capitalist and television comedy actor Timothy Draper, whose “Six Californias” partition proposal ran aground in 2014 (discussed in this blog here and here), now wants to divide California into six “supercounties,” he said on February 25th at a conference on alternative politics.  The conference, held at Chapman University, a private evangelical institution in ultra-conservative Orange County, was titled “Reimagining Local Government.”  Participants ranged from the ultra-liberal former mayor of Portland, Oregon, Sam Adams, to familiar Orange County politicians.  Draper’s “supercounties” plan is not yet fully formulated but would presumably mean that, instead of adding five new stars to the United States flag, he would like to see greater powers invested in a smaller number of counties.  Currently, California has 58 counties.  The “Six Californias” plan, which did not gather enough signatures to make this year’s ballot, would have divided the Golden State into (see map in photo above): South California, West California, Central California, Silicon Valley, North California, and a far-northern State of Jefferson.  Draper also lauded Estonia, whose president, Toomas Hendrik Ilves, is a friend of his who used to live in Silicon Valley.  Estonia, Draper says, “has a virtual government.  ...  Communication is so good now, borders almost don’t matter.  This is the beginning of a new way of governing.”

CARIBBEAN



Puerto Rican Activists Rally in Times Square for Release of Political Prisoner.  About two dozen Puerto Rican activists demonstrated in New York City’s Times Square on February 28th to urge President Barack Obama to pardon and release an independence agitator who has been in prison for 34 years.  The prisoner, Oscar López Rivera, who is now 73, was given a 55-year sentence in 1981 for “seditious conspiracy.”  He was a member of the violent Fuerzas Armadas de Liberación Nacional (F.A.L.N., or Armed Forces of National Liberation), responsible for a string of bombings in opposition to United States colonialism in Puerto Rico, but López himself had never been convicted of a violent act.  One protestor, 62-year-old Rosario Vera, said, “What they’ve done to him is wrong.  ...  It’s basically putting a muzzle on the independence movement in Puerto Rico.  His life was basically cut short.”




Survey Shows Satisfaction with Status Quo on Dutch Caribbean Islands. Preliminary data from the latest opinion polls in Curaçao and Aruba, two self-governing Caribbean island nations, show only weak support for full independence.  Only 14% of Arubans and 30% of Curaçaoans want to sever all ties with the Kingdom of the Netherlands, of which they are currently “constituent countries.”  Moreover, in Curaçao, less than 40% wanted to keep the status quo—still the most popular choice—while 32% wanted the island merged back into the Netherlands Antilles.  In Aruba, those figures were 70% and 7%.  A further option, of becoming ordinary Dutch municipalities alongside other subdivisions of the Dutch homeland—in the manner of France’s “overseas départements” and of the Dutch Caribbean possessions of Saba, Statia, and Bonaire—got hardly any support at all.  The survey was conducted from September to November 2015 by the Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies.  Survey data from St. Maarten were discarded because of forged questionnaires by the seven freelance field interviewers.

SOUTH AMERICA





Wikileaks Documents Expose U.S. Backing for Rightist Separatism in Eastern Bolivia.  A Norwegian political researcher revealed to Bolivian media on February 18th that documents from the late 2000s declassified by the anti-secrecy group Wikileaks show the United States government supported separatism in eastern Bolivia and sat on information about planned attacks in the country by militant rightists.  Eirik Vold reported that the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) funnelled $4 million to a right-wing secessionist movement in the eastern Bolivian departments of Beni, Pando, Santa Cruz, and Tarija.


Chilean Mapuches Rally to Make Mapudungun Official Language in Araucanía. Thousands of members of the Mapuche indigenous nation in Chilemarched through the town of Temuco on February 19th in support of giving their language, Mapudungun, official status in the Araucanía administrative region.  The protest was organized by the Movement for Mapudungun Official Status.  A new legal decision as of November 2015 permits regions to take that step so long as it did not infringe on the right to use Spanish.  The crowd was estimated at between 1,500 and 2,000 people.



PRACTICALLY BLOODY ANTARCTICA





Argentine Cops Jail, Torture British “Barbie Bandit” after Falklands Comments.  The abusive behavior of Argentina’s police—and its relatedness to aggressive Argentine colonialism—were brought once again to global attention with the recent case of a woman tabloids have dubbed “the Barbie Bandit.” A 26-year-old nursery-school teacher from Wiltshire, England, named Georgia Wawman was in her home in Buenos Aires on January 14th with her two-year-old son Milo, when police “in black suits with guns” kicked down her door at 5:30 in the morning and ransacked the house.  They were looking for her former boyfriend José Mino, the boy’s father, whom they believed to be the head of a noted armed gang.  “They didn’t even know who I was,” Wawman said later.  “They were making sarcastic comments about the Falkland Islands and asked me who they belong to.”  Wawman responded—correctly—that the islands are a territory of the United Kingdom, “but I realised it was a mistake straight away.”  The police took her to the station, called her a “whore,” handcuffed her in a cell for 12 hours without water, forced her to stand for hours with her nose against the wall, and ignored her pleas referring to her heart condition.  Only the intervention of the U.K. embassy enabled her to get a cup of water.  “When I told people about it in England,” she said, “they said it was so terrible.  But people in Argentina said, ‘Don’t worry about it, at least you’re alive.’”  Wawman and Mino have so far not been linked to any of the robberies, which the Argentine police have been slow to admit.  Wawman’s father is the ethnographic documentary filmmaker Richard Wawman, whose most recent film, about a tribal group in New Guinea, is Only Rich Men Get Girls with Great Breasts.  She has returned to England with her son and is in the process of suing the Argentine police department involved.