Ten Separatist Movements to Watch in 2016

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.]

10 Separatist Movements to Watch in 2014

2014 promises to be an earth-shaking year for separatist movements.  In addition to already scheduled referenda in Catalonia and Scotland (more on them below), February will bring us the Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia, which is already proving to be a magnet for extremists with (sometimes very legitimate) ethnonationalist grievances (more on them below as well).  There will also be at least one referendum in northern California on whether particular counties want to split away to become the State of Jefferson.  In fact, with Colorado and Maryland facing partition challenges as well, state-secession movements proliferated more in 2013 than at any time since the Civil War (well, maybe not, but it sure seems that way) (more on that below too).

Officials in Weld County announcing results of a North Colorado statehood referendum in 2013
while baffled spectators look on from above.

Last year in this space, my top-10 list included some movements that in fact disappointed and fizzled out: Texas, Barotseland (in Zambia), and Azawad (though of these Azawad, Mali’s northern two-thirds, could still reignite).  A few, on the other hand, continued indeed to be ones to watch, even if 2013 brought no game-changing developments: Jubaland (in Somalia), the Alawite State (in Syria), Tibet, and Palestine.  Catalonia, Scotland, and Kurdistan were my bullseyes, since those proved to be enduring movements which made huge, dramatic strides in 2013, though the Kurdish role in Syria is being edged aside by a newer, more dangerous player (more on that below).  Meanwhile, my geopolitical crystal ball in December 2012 failed to foresee the invasion of eastern Malaysia by the Philippines’ revanchist “Sultanate of Sulu” insurgency or the Moro rebels’ “Battle of Zamboanga” that followed (see also follow-up article here); the de facto independent Puntland State of Somalia openly mulling formal secession; the rapid moves to establish a Telangana State in India; the dramatic but failed attempt to establish a white-supremacist enclave in North Dakota; or the emergence of internal-partition movements in British Columbia (Vancouver Island), Maryland (Western Maryland), upstate New York, and especially Colorado (North Colorado/New Colorado) (see also follow-up articles here and here) and the “State of Jefferson” region in the northern California and southern Oregon borderlands (see also follow-up articles here and here and here and here).  No matter how closely one follows these things, there are always surprises.  (See also my 2012 list.)

The Sultan of Sulu, who commanded an invasion of Malaysia in 2013

So here, without further ado, is my list of 10 separatist movements to watch in 2014 (in reverse order of importance, building up to no. 1):

10. Cyrenaica (Libya)—it’s about the oil

The vast eastern region of Libya called Cyrenaica or, in Arabic, Barqa, was a colony of Italy until the Second World War and then was set up in 1949 by the new landlords, the United Kingdom, as an independent Emirate of Cyrenaica.  In 1951, the United Nations sponsored the new, Western-leaning emirate’s merger with the British colony of Tripolitania, to the west, and the landlocked colony of Fezzan, part of French West Africa, to form a new United Kingdom of Libya, with considerable autonomy for the three regions.  But when the kingdom’s monarch, King Idris I (freshly promoted from Cyrenaican emir), abolished autonomy and created a unitary state in 1963, Tripolitanians smelled a Cyrenaican power-grab, stoking regional tensions that erupted in 1969 with a military coup d’état by a bedouin army colonel from Tripolitania named Moammar al-Qaddafi.  Cyrenaican royals staged a failed monarchist counter-coup in 1970, which ushered in years of persecution of monarchists and a neglect of the Cyrenaican infrastructure—except for those parts of it that processed and exported Libya’s oil, 80% of which is in Cyrenaican territory, even though the region has only 20% of the national population.  No surprise, then, that when revolutions toppled dictators in the 2011 “Arab Spring,” it was in Cyrenaica that the anti-Qaddafi insurgency began.  Now, with Qaddafi dead and a fragile interim government trying to craft a new constitution, both Cyrenaica and Fezzan are demanding that the new Libya be a decentralized one, with autonomy for the regions, just as King Idris had at first implemented.  Idris’s nephew, Zubair al-Senussi, founded the Congress of the People of Cyrenaica, since renamed the Cyrenaica National Council (also called the Council of Cyrenaica in Libya), but, though Senussi soft-pedals any kind of monarchist revanchism, he yielded the spotlight in 2013 to a more radical group, the Political Bureau of Cyrenaica.  With no members of the Senussi dynasty in it, the P.B.C. has done Senussi’s earlier declaration of autonomy (reported on at the time in this blog) one better by unilaterally forming an interim government for the eastern region, with ministers and everything.  Fezzan followed suit and did the same.  (See my recent report on those developments.)  Most dramatically, the P.B.C. piggy-backed its cause onto ongoing labor unrest in Cyrenaica’s oil refineries, adding autonomy to the demands of those strikers who have been holding Libya’s economy hostage and causing power blackouts in Tripoli and other western cities.  Libyan Berbers have begun to do the same, with refineries in their far-northwestern corner of the country as well.  Western media have concentrated more on Islamist insurgencies in Cyrenaica, since the killing of the United States ambassador in an attack in Benghazi, the Cyrenaican capital, in 2012 became a partisan football in Washington (the sanctimonious lecturing of Obama’s diplomats by Republican senators who had earlier backed the disastrous Iraq War was breath-takingly hypocritical), but in reality the biggest threat to Libyan unity, for better or for worse, are minority groups like the Cyrenaicans, Fezzanis, and Berbers, who have their hands on the oil spigots and are making it clear that Libya will be structured the way they want it to be structured, or will come apart at the seams.  Tripolitanians will have to choose.

You take the middle stripe out of the post-Qaddafi flag of Libya
and it’s the black flag of the formerly independent Emirate of Cyrenaica

9. East Turkestan—tarred with Beijing’s “terrorist” brush

The People’s Republic of China’s vast northwestern desert regions, now called the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (though there is nothing remotely autonomous about it), have for centuries been the homeland of the Uyghur people, Muslims who speak a Turkic language related to those spoken in neighboring former Soviet nations like Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan.  There is a large Kazakh minority in Xinjiang as well.  In 1933, Uyghurs and Kazakhs in this part of China founded an Islamic Republic of East Turkestan in defiance of the new Kuomintang (Nationalist) government that had toppled the imperial family in the 1911 revolution.  Using shock troops from the Hui ethnic group (Han Muslims), the fledgling republic was snuffed out and its emirs executed.  Hui warlords ruled Xinjiang as their own fief, but when Japan began plotting its takeover of the Chinese mainland, Josef Stalin pulled the region into the Soviet Union’s orbit, which the K.M.T. allowed, knowing that they could not defend all of the mainland on their own.  But the Soviet–Japanese non-aggression pact of 1941 led to a Soviet withdrawal and the Uyghur leadership switching sides to the K.M.T.  This betrayal, as it was seen, inspired a more grass-roots East Turkestan Republic in 1944, in the northern reaches of Xinjiang near Mongolia, but the Russians were too busy fighting Germans to back it, and in 1945, after the war, Stalin bargained it away to the K.M.T. in the Yalta conference, on condition it stay autonomous.  When Mao Zedong’s Communists took Beijing in 1949, Mao let the region be for a while but absorbed it the following year.  Kazakh rebels backed by the K.M.T. kept fighting until 1954.  Since then, Communist rule in the Uyghur homeland has been brutal.  The Uyghur language has been suppressed, Muslim religious practices are hemmed in or even outlawed, and, as in Tibet, an aggressive program of settlement by migrants from China’s dominant Han ethnic group has made Uyghurs a minority in their own “autonomous” region, at 40% (though, if Kazakhs and others are added, Turkic-speaking Muslims still outnumber Han).  In the past five years, violence between Uyghurs and the central government has flared up like never before.  Uyghur activists blame Beijing’s heavy-handedness, while Beijing blames the East Turkestan Islamic Movement (ETIM), which supposedly (though there is no evidence for this) launches operations out of Pakistan’s lawless Waziristan region.  In fact, most Uyghurs, especially abroad, are more amenable to groups like the more moderate World Uyghur Congress (W.U.C.), based in Germany.  These conflicting views were crystallized in the aftermath of what seems to have been a Uyghur suicide attack in October 2013 in Tiananmen Square, the Beijing landmark that represents Chinese unity for Han Chinese but for the rest of the world is synonymous with anti-Communist dissent.  A video from the Turkestan Islamic Party (TIP) praised the attack, which killed two tourists and injured dozens, which the Chinese government interpreted (after initially blaming ETIM) as a claim of responsibility.  But the W.U.C. smells a rat: it is odd for there to be no claim of responsibility for such a dramatic attack at the symbolic heart of Chinese power, and the attack also has proved to be a suspiciously handy excuse for an accelerated crackdown on Uyghur activists in China, even moderate ones.  We may never know the truth, but the suggestion that this was a “false flag” operation engineered by Beijing itself is not at all implausible.  Look for more friction, and more bloodshed, between Uyghurs and the Chinese government in the year to come.

A young Uyghur at a protest in Europe.
If he waved this flag back home he’d disappear into a reeducation camp within minutes.

8. West and East Ukraine—torn between Moscow & Brussels

Russian nationalists—and that includes the Russian Federation’s president, Vladimir Putin—have never really in their hearts accepted the fact that Ukraine is independent.  Its capital, Kiev, was the center of Kievan Rus’, the medieval empire that both Russians and Ukrainians regard as their ancestral polity.  Russians still smart from their defeat by the Ottomans in the Crimean War in the 1850s, even though one of the results of that series of Russo-Turkish wars was the ethnic Russification of the Crimean peninsula, which had been dominated by Tatars and other Muslims for centuries.  Crimea is only part of Ukraine today because Nikita Khrushchev transferred it from the Russian S.F.S.R. to the Ukrainian S.S.R. in an ill-considered whim, and in a special deal struck with Moscow at independence in 1992, Russia’s Black Sea fleet will make its home in Sevastopol harbor at least well into the 2040s.  More to the point, losing Kazakhstan or Estonia or Armenia was one thing, but the line between Russians and Ukrainians has always been blurry: they understand each other’s languages (which by one technical definition makes Ukrainian only a dialect), and Ukraine really just means “borderlands” in Russian (and in Ukrainian)—that is, borderlands of the Russian Empire.  So Putin has long treated as a line in the sand the very idea of Ukrainian membership in the European Union (E.U.) (which Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania have already joined), or the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), which has already swallowed up eight former Communist satellite states as well as the three Baltic states.  When the Republic of Georgia was seen in the 2000s to be tipping too far to the West, tensions with the Kremlin led to the South Ossetia War of 2008, in which Abkhazia and South Ossetia, two chunks of the old Georgian S.S.R., were made into technically independent puppet states of the Russian Federation.  That same year, Moscow was widely suspected of being behind an out-of-the-blue declaration of independence for the Republic of Carpathian Ruthenia, now the Ukrainian oblast of Transcarpathia but in the interwar period the eastern tail of Czechoslovakia and still home not only to some ethnic Russians but to the Rusyn (Ruthenian) minority.  Ethnic Russians have indeed been on the political offensive in Ukraine’s dirty, shaky 21st-century “democracy”: in 2012, a proposed law (since passed) to make Russian an equal language alongside Ukrainian in Russian-speaking areas led to one of the most spectacular brawls to ever break out in a parliamentary session anywhere (as reported on at the time in this blog) (the video of it is a must-see).  Already ethnic Ukrainians were seeing President Viktor Yanukovych’s Party of the Regions as a mouthpiece for the 30% of Ukrainian citizens who speak Russian.  These are mainly concentrated in the Crimea, around Odessa, in Kiev, and especially in the industrial Dnieper valley in the east, including the Donetsk region, where Yanukovych was born to a Russian mother and a Polish–Belarussian father.  But in November 2013, Yanukovych’s decision, after a meeting with Putin, to renege on a promise to sign a (mostly symbolic) “association agreement” with the E.U. led to an unprecedented wave of street protests by ordinary ethnic Ukrainians—and not a few Russians—who want to accept Brussels’ extended hand instead of Putin’s offer to join Russia’s rag-tag excuse for a customs union with Belarus and Kazakhstan.  (Though, really, who needs luxury cars and high tech when you can get exclusive access to radioactive Belarussian turnips and Kazakh goat meat?)  There have been pro-Moscow counter-demonstrations but so far no open demands for a partitioning of the country along linguistic lines or for re-annexation of the east to Russia.  But Lvov and other ethnic-Ukrainian-dominated western oblasts are declaring themselves no longer subject to the Ukrainian central government’s authority, moves which Yanukovych angrily decries as “separatism,” so perhaps the seeds have already been planted.  A drive to split Ukraine would also run right through Crimea, where Russians outnumber Ukrainians but where the Mejlis of the Crimean Tatar nation openly sides with the E.U. proponents.  A split would also complicate things for Transnistria, a sliver of eastern Moldova which is an ethnic-Russian-dominated puppet state sponsored by Moscow and which you will notice in the very theoretical and (for now) fanciful map above as part of a new pro-Russian (eastern) Ukrainian State.  It’s getting cold in Kiev, and the anti-Yanukovych demonstrators are not giving up.  Ukraine is already divided ideologically.  A more concrete division may soon be on the table.

7. The State of Jefferson—a Teapartistan among the timbers

Originally, the State of Jefferson was to be the 49th state, when John Childs, a Crescent City, California, judge in 1935 declared himself governor of a new entity that would free itself from Sacramento’s legislative yoke.  Then, in 1941, the mayor of Port Orford, Oregon, lobbied to transfer his county, Curry, to California, and that tapped a vein of discontent over infrastructure, water rights, and other issues that galvanized voters in the borderlands.  Oregon’s four border counties and three, later five, northern California ones formed the kernel of the new state, mock roadblocks were set up at its “borders” to pass out protest flyers, and a Jefferson flag was designed, with two “X”es to represent the “double cross” by city-slicker legislators in Salem and Sacramento.  Childs was elected governor of Jefferson on December 5th, but, in a spectacular piece of unlucky timing, Japan bombed Pearl Harbor two days later, which made state-partition movements suddenly seem frivolous, even unpatriotic.  Alaska and Hawaii were admitted to the United States in 1959, and the idea of a 51st state with a capital at Yreka receded, until the Barack Obama years, when a rising tide of anti-government sentiment spawned the Tea Party movement.  That wave of activism has resuscitated the corpse of the State of Jefferson.  Jefferson joined all 50 actual states in lodging online petitions on the White House website to secede from the U.S. in the wake of Obama’s reelection in 2012.  Referring to Thomas Jefferson, who first opened the Oregon Country to U.S. settlement with the Lewis and Clark expedition, the proposed state’s name now also evokes the Jeffersonian idea of popular revolt which makes the third president an icon of the “don’t tread on me” crowd that was behind most of those petitions, as well as most other statehood movements, in places like New York, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Illinois, “South California,” and Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.  But whereas Childs and the original Jeffersonians wanted more government services, today’s statehood proponents in the California–Oregon borderlands want the government to tax less, build less, spend less, and all in all just do less—especially when it comes to guns, environmental regulations, and helping the needy.  The boards of supervisors of Siskiyou and Modoc, two original Jefferson counties in northern California, voted in 2013 to secede and form a State of Jefferson, and the board in Tehama County, just to the south, has said it will put the proposal on a ballot in 2014.  A similar wave of county referenda in northeastern Colorado in 2013 saw five out of 11 counties voting “yes” to a new State of North Colorado.  Perhaps by November the turnout in Jefferson will dwarf that.  And it might not even end there.  Already, Silicon Valley technocrats talk of seceding, and one has devised a plan to break up the state into “Six Californias.”

6. French Polynesia—itching to ditch Paris in paradise

Of all European colonial powers, France has struggled the hardest to hang on to its overseas territories well into the 21st century.  The one most eager to break free is French Polynesia, the vast swathe of the Pacific that includes Tahiti as well as the Mururoa Atoll where the French have tested many nuclear devices.  Between two-thirds and three-quarters of the territory’s population is indigenous Polynesians (France has not asked about ethnicity in a census here since 1988), with almost 10% being of mixed French and Polynesian ancestry (the so-called Démis), but the territorial parliament is just about evenly split by anti- and pro-independence parties—the question of independence being what all partisan politics in French Polynesia pivots on.  In 2013, the long-serving pro-independence territorial president, Oscar Temaru, a traditionalist with mixed Tahitian, Chinese, and Māori ancestry, was voted out of office last year and replaced by Gaston Flosse, who is part French and part Polynesian and once made France’s president, Jacques Chirac, godfather to one of his sons.  As a parting shot before leaving office, Temaru finally cajoled the United Nations into putting French Polynesia back on its list of “Non-Self-Governing Territories” (a highly politicized list, as discussed before in this blog, which includes many completely self-governing territories, such as Bermuda and the Falkland Islands).  Lately, Flosse has been pushing for a referendum on independence as soon as possible.  In an exact parallel with the anti-independence strategy in another French Pacific possession, New Caledonia (reported on earlier in this blog), he is banking on the “no” votes carrying the day and putting the matter to rest for a long time, rather than waiting too long and holding a referendum after the swelling indigenous population and white emigration have tipped the demographic balance.  Other events kept Polynesian self-determination in the news in 2013, including the death of Tauatomo Mairau, a Tahitian prince who had lobbied hard for a restoration of the monarchy, and a proposal from the culturally similar colony of Easter Island (Rapanui), to the east, to secede from Chile and join French Polynesia, even if the latter stayed French (see my report on that development in this blog).  A pro-independence activist named Athenase Terii, who calls himself King Pakumoto, tried to stage a takeover of the territorial legislature in Papeete in 2013 and later ran into legal troubles for “Pakumoto Republic” “citizenship cards” that he was selling at rather steep prices (never mind the contradiction in having a “republic” with a king).  If President Flosse gets his hoped-for referendum in 2014, or even if he doesn’t, battle lines are being drawn.

Tahitians proudly bearing their flag into a FIFA soccer match.
They have their own team, and now they want the rest of the independence package.

5. The Caucasus Emirate—Islamists paint a target on Sochi

Sochi—what a terrible idea for a place to hold the Winter Olympics!  Patriots in Russia are all excited at hosting their first Olympics since 1980, but they managed to locate it in the most restive, separatist region of the country.  The Caucasus region and the northern Black Sea coast were the northern fringe of the Ottoman Empire which Russian czars conquered in a series of bloody wars in the 19th century.  One crucial battle between Russians and indigenous Circassians was right near Sochi, just west along the coast from Abkhazia (see map above), and it assured the complete obliteration of the Ubykh branch of the larger Circassian ethnic group.  For Muslim and other minority activists in Russia and elsewhere, the 2014 Olympics will amount to a crass, triumphalist sesquicentennial of a genocide.  Today, Circassians are scattered among three different ethnically-designated republics within the Russian Federation (the Adyghe Republic, Kabardino-Balkaria, and Karachayevo-Cherkessia), so Circassian nationalism and separatism, while strong, are not centrally organized.  That cannot be said of a radical Islamist group based farther east in the Caucasus region, the Caucasus Emirate, which aims to split away from Russia the entire Muslim belt between the Caspian and Black Seas—including Dagestan, Chechnya, Ingushetia, North Ossetia (a Christian enclave, but they want it anyway), the Circassian republics, and all the ethnically Russian bits in between.  They plan to make their new state into a militant theocracy on the model of Saudi Arabia (from which they get their ideology) or Afghanistan under the Taliban (which is where many C.E. fighters were hardened).  Boris Yeltsin and Vladimir Putin’s flattening of Chechnya in two post-Soviet wars which saw the most devastating bombing campaigns in Europe since the Second World War are a more immediate memory than the Ubykh genocide, but in the Caucasus memories are very very long.  Already, the Emirate’s tentacles have been reaching out to Tatarstan and even to ethnic-Russian turf like Volgograd, where two train bombings on December 29th and 30th are being blamed on the Caucasus Emirate.  It’s safe to assume that they will try to make a splash at the Olympics, which will put Chechen and Circassian independence to the forefront and Russia’s unity in the crosshairs.

The Caucasus Emirate: it’s kind of like Duck Dynasty, but with a lot more guns, a lot less beer,
... and approximately the same amount of facial hair and homophobia.

(Come February, readers of this blog will be able to get continual updates on incidents, protests, controversies, and, best of all, flag kerfuffles, just as I did for the London games in 2012 (see articles here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.  See also a recent preview of some Sochi controversies.)

4. Kurdistan—a dramatic détente with Turkey

Kurdistan is a prominent topic in this blog, as regular readers well know, and this year’s round-up is no exception.  Spread out among four different nations—Turkey, Iraq, Syria, and Iran—the 30 million or so Kurds are reckoned to be the most numerous stateless nation in the world.  2013 has brought huge changes to all parts of Kurdistan.  A landmark peace deal between the Republic of Turkey and the banned army known as the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (P.K.K.) resulted in a virtual disarmament of the group and a phased withdrawal of their forces—this after an acceleration of violence between the two sides in recent years which, combined with spillover fighting from Syria, nearly created a ground war in the far southeastern corner of Turkey.  Huge reforms are expected to emerge from the deal, and so far the withdrawal has been with surprisingly little incident.  Many of the P.K.K. fighters are decamping to the Kurdistan Autonomous Region of northern Iraq, an increasingly quasi-independent statelet which began assembling itself under the protection of the United States and NATO’s “northern no-fly zone” between the two Gulf Wars and was enshrined in the new Iraqi constitution after the U.S.’s 2003 invasion.  Iraqi Kurdistan made great strides in 2013 as well, including a more aggressive policy of forging oil deals with foreign states and firms unilaterally—without either seeking the approval of the Arab-Shiite-dominated central government in Baghdad or, more to the point, giving them a cut of revenues.  This has pushed Baghdad and Iraqi Kurds farther apart than they have ever been politically, with more and more observers openly predicting full independence, and it has also improved ties with Turkey, which had initially been hostile to the idea of an autonomous Iraqi Kurdistan.  With Turkey as an ally, Iraqi Kurdistan will be able to deliver oil to Europe through a planned network of pipelines and not through the Arab-Shiite-controlled Iraqi port city of Basra.  Over to the west in Syrian Kurdistan, things are more complicated, and here Ankara is not at all happy about the de facto independent West Kurdistan Autonomous Region—also called Rojava—which Kurds aligned with the P.K.K. have declared along the northern fringe of the country, along the border with Turkey (as reported recently in this blog).  The Rojava administration, which is not run by the faction favored by the Kurdish government in northern Iraq, is trying to portray itself as a confederation of autonomous enclaves for Kurdish, Arab, Turkmen, and Assyrian (Christian) ethnic groups, but for the most part it seems to be a Kurdish project.

The embattled Shiite-run central government of Syria had long ago surrendered the border areas to the Kurds—it creates a buffer zone which makes running guns to rebels via Turkey a bit harder—but Syrian Kurdistan is still fighting for its life against the Western-backed Free Syrian Army as well as the new bully on the block, which brings us to number 3 ...

3. “Al-Sham” (Syria and Iraq)—jihadists gain a Syrian foothold

The original for this image can be found at the wonderful and highly recommended blog Political Geography Now.

The new bully on the block in Syria’s civil war, far more organized than the Western-backed Free Syrian Army (F.S.A.), is the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS)—al-Sham being an archaic Arabic term roughly corresponding to “the Levant,” or Syria plus Lebanon.  An outgrowth of the Afghan-al-Qaeda-derived Islamic State in Iraq (I.S.I.) group and the smaller jihadist fighting units in Syria known as the al-Nusra Front, ISIS is a Sunni-Arab-dominated militia which is ideologically aligned with the rigid interpretation of Sunni Islam associated with Saudi Arabia or the Taliban.  In September 2013, ISIS took a Syrian town along the border with Turkey called Azaz, which Kurdish autonomist militias (see above) regard as their turf, and set it up as a sovereign mini-emirate, like the ones al-Qaeda groups had earlier set up in the towns of Jaar and Zinjibar, in Yemen.  Theoretically, as the name suggests, ISIS would like to include the central and western, predominantly Sunni Arab parts of Shiite-dominated Iraq, in their new theocratic state, but so far have formally announced only an intention to annex Anbar, Iraq’s vast western province, Sunni-dominated and home to much of non-Kurdish Iraq’s oil reserves.  For the time being, though, ISIS is concentrating on taking as many towns in Syria as they can, and on that score they have hit the ground running, turning Jarabulus into another mini-emirate and even seizing, as the above map shows, al-Raqqah, capital of a large province that includes Kurdish lands in its north.  ISIS has no particular quarrel with Kurds, who are after all fellow Sunnis—not like the “heretical” Druze and ruling Alawite Shiites—but that could change, since when it comes to the areas they are finding it easier to assemble into a coherent territory, Kurds are—I can’t believe I’m typing this—Kurds are in their whey.  The anti-regime forces outside Syria—the U.S., the United Kingdom, France, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Qatar—have been trying hard to wishfully think that ISIS isn’t gaining ground, but they are, and they have the more moderate F.S.A. on the ropes.  Unless outsiders intervene eventually, more forcefully than they have, they may even win—or at least secure enough territory to rule their own fief for a long time.

Syria’s children deserve a better future than the one al-Qaeda is planning for them.

2. Catalonia—challenging Spain with an “illegal” referendum

“Catalunya is not Spain” is the common refrain, and it was spelled out in banners waved by a human chain of hundreds of thousands of Catalans holding hands across 400 kilometers of Catalonia, from the border with France to that with the Autonomous Community of Valencia to the south—that was the scene on September 11th, the 299th anniversary of Catalonia’s reabsorption into the Kingdom of Spain after Spain’s defeat by the United Kingdom, a Catalan ally, at the end of the Spanish Wars of Succession.  The 300th continuous year of Catalonia’s inclusion in the kingdom will, if nationalists have their way, be its last.  The Euro Zone crisis of 2011 and Catalonia’s position as a prosperous nation-within-a-nation that subsidizes poorer Spanish regions led to failed talks between Madrid and Barcelona in 2012 and a determination by nationalists to hold a referendum, soon, on independence from Spain.  The central government in Madrid now says the vote will not be held, that it would be in defiance of the Spanish constitution, and that Catalonia may not secede.   Catalonia’s pro-independence president, Artur Mas i Govarró, tried to wiggle out of it recently, backpedalling and saying that his ruling coalition, Convergence and Union (Convergència i Unió, or CiU), would instead wait and treat the next regional elections in 2016 as a symbolic plebiscite on Catalonia’s status.  But Mas governs with only a 30% mandate for CiU itself and depends for his job on the more left-wing and radically separatist junior coalition partner, the Democratic Left of Catalonia (Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya, or E.R.C.), which is more deeply socialist and also calls for unification with Catalan lands over the border in France and for (and this one is a deeply unpopular opinion in Spain at large) continued British rule over Gibraltar (discussed earlier in this blog).  (See my recent article about an even farther-left Catalan party.)  Well, E.R.C. would have none of Mas’s talk of canceling the referendum, so CiU has kept its initial promise and has now scheduled a vote on independence for November 9, 2014.  The advantage of that is that it gives several weeks to absorb lessons from Scotland’s referendum on independence on September 18th, including the crucial question of whether secession would mean ejection from the European Union (E.U.), as the Spanish government has sternly promised it would.  Pro-independence sentiment is running, according to recent polls, just a hair over 50%.  But eleven months is a long time; anything can happen.

This is the only kind of colony Catalans want any part of.

And speaking of Scotland ...

1. Scotland—divorce? or just the usual 307-year itch? 

Scotland has been a part of the United Kingdom for longer than Catalonia has been continually Spanish.  In fact, it is the reason that it is the United Kingdom, rather than just the Kingdom of England with Wales tacked on.  It was in 1707 that the two kingdoms of England (including Wales) and Scotland merged to become the United Kingdom of Great Britain (Great Britain being technically just the island that England, Scotland, and Wales sit on).  In 1800 it became the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland when the Emerald Isle was added in, and then the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland when most of Ireland, except the Protestant bits, became independent in 1922.  Now Scotland is challenging the United part of the equation and seeks to take the St. Andrew’s Cross out of the Union Jack.  Enthusiasm for Scottish independence picked up steam during the Margaret Thatcher years in the 1980s, and when the Labour Party took power in London again in 1997 one of the first things Tony Blair did was devolve powers to Scottish and Welsh parliaments.  Scottish parliamentary elections in 2007 and 2011 solidified the pro-independence Scottish National Party (S.N.P.) as the ruling party north of Hadrian’s Wall, and Scotland’s S.N.P. First Minister, Alex Salmond, spent 2012 hammering out an agreement with the U.K.’s Conservative Party prime minister, David Cameron, on an independence referendum.  The big vote is now scheduled for September 18, 2014, just three months after the 700th anniversary of the Scottish defeat of the English at the Battle of Bannockburn.  2013 brought not only that announcement but, recently, a white paper from the S.N.P. outlining what an independent Scotland would look like.  Junior partners in the independence movement, the Scottish Greens and the Scottish Socialist Party (S.S.P.) had favored a Scottish Republic, but with support for independence declining during 2013 from 39% to a new low this month of 27%, it is crucial to keep mainstream voters on board, and mainstream voters love the Queen and that nice handsome young man, Prince Harry.  So an independent Scotland would become a Dominion realm, like Canada, Australia, or Jamaica.  The Dominion of Scotland would stay in NATO but would kick the U.K.’s nuclear submarines out of Scottish waters (a long-standing grievance).  In fact, much of Salmond’s increasingly desperate sales pitch is now not so much about all that North Sea oil but rather about how little would change after a “yes” vote: Scots would still use the pound, at least for the time being (they may eventually mint their own currency, or adopt the euro, like Ireland), would still be able to watch EastEnders on the B.B.C., and would remain in the European Union (E.U.).  Wait—or will they?  Cameron says no way, and legal scholars are divided.  This sort of thing hasn’t actually come up before, so success probably hinges on whether Scottish voters can be reassured on this point.  But things are happening in England too which might affect the outcome.  In particular, the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP), a libertarian movement which advocates taking the U.K. out of the E.U., is rapidly becoming the fourth-largest party in the U.K., though much more in England and Wales than in Scotland.  It is threatening even to eclipse the Liberal Democratic Party, Cameron’s junior coaliton partner.  Sensing which way the wind is blowing, Cameron has said that if he wins reelection in 2016 he will hold a referendum on the U.K.’s continuing membership in the E.U.  This makes Cameron and the U.K. look weak, and it makes some Scots—who have always been more global and, frankly, Scandinavian in their social and international views than the English—wonder if maybe, rather than being grounds for automatic ejection from the E.U., Scottish independence might be the only way to ensure staying in it.

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