Corruption Scandal Set to Put Separatists in Charge of Greenland; Inuit Debate Independence and E.U. Relations as Energy-Rich Arctic Ocean Warms

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

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

Aleqa Hammond

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

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

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

Sara Olsvig—Greenland’s next prime minister?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Eventually, Greenlanders will sort it all out.

[You can read more about Greenland 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 special announcement for more information on the book.]

Angelina Jolie in Erbil and Baghdad, Rioting in Bingöl, Kurds Rounded Up in Denmark: Kurdistan Update, 16-22 September 2012

NORTH KURDISTAN (TURKISH KURDISTAN)

Killing of 18 Turkish Police, Military Prompts Anti-Kurdish Riot in Bingöl.  In southeastern Turkey’s Bingöl province, in the Kurdish region, eight police officers were killed by a landmine on September 16th, and nine were injured.  Also in Bingöl, on September 18th, a Turkish army convoy of over 200 soldiers was attacked by Kurdish rebels armed with rockets, killing 10 and injuring more than 70.  On September 21st, a non-Kurdish mob in Bingöl, angry over the violence, attacked the local offices of the pro-Kurdish but mainstream Peace and Democracy Party (B.D.P.).  The mob hurled stones, sticks, and furniture and had to be dispersed by riot police with water cannons.

The anti-Kurdish mob in Bingöl this week.

5 Killed in Other Kurdish Violence across Turkey.  Four Turkish soldiers were killed by remote-controlled bombs in Turkey’s southeastern Hakkari province, it was announced September 15th, in an area near the borders with Iran and Iraq where fighting with the separatist Kurdistan Workers’ Party (P.K.K.) has approximated civil war in recent weeks.  Five were wounded in the incident.  A regional public prosecutor in Tunceli province, Murat Uzun, was shot in the head as he entered his apartment building on September 19th and died the following day in the hospital.  The P.K.K. claimed responsibility for the killing.  Then, on September 20th, security forces near Diyarbakir, the notional Kurdish capital, in southeastern Turkey, defused a bomb found on a bridge near an airport, causing the cancellation of flights as the situation was investigated.  Police suspect the P.K.K.  The group is also suspected in the torching of a school in Hakkari province on September 21st.  There were no injuries in that incident.

SOUTH KURDISTAN (IRAQI KURDISTAN)

Angelina Jolie Visits Syrian Refugees, Urges Iraqi Kurds to Keep Borders Open.  The United States actress Angelina Jolie visited northern Iraq’s autonomous Kurdistan region this week, and on September 16th she visited refugee camps and urged the Kurdistan Regional Government’s prime minister, Nechirvan Barzani, as well as other officials, to keep borders open so that refugees from Syria’s civil war can seek refuge in the K.R.G. area.  Jolie is a Special Envoy for the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (U.N.H.C.R.).  Over a quarter-million Syrians have fled to neighboring countries since the civil war began.

Angelina Jolie visiting with Kurds in Baghdad

EAST KURDISTAN (IRANIAN KURDISTAN)

Iranian Kurdish Dissident Survives Assassination Attempt in Sweden.  The deputy head of Iran’s dissident Kurdistan Freedom Party, Hossein Yazdanpanah, told Kurdish media this week survived an assassination attempt in Sweden last month, which he blames on Iranian agents.  But it wasn’t the first time.  “Since 1991,” he says, “the Iranian government has tried to kill me more than 10 times.”  During his stay in Sweden, visiting friends, three masked men tried to break into the house where he was staying, he said.  Despite the masks, Yazdanpanah conjectured from hair and skin tone that the men were from Lebanon and Somalia and had received paramilitary training in Iranian camps in Syria.  (That’s a lot of information to glean from merely, say, part of a wrist or an earlobe!)  Swedish police are apparently investigating the incident.

Hossein Yazanpanah, assassination survivor

KURDISH DIASPORA

Danes Bust 8 Kurds on Terrorism Fundraising Charges during Probe of T.V. Station.  In Denmark this week, authorities arrested eight people who are accused of raising and distributing money for a terrorist organization, in this case the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (P.K.K.).  Danish authorities made the discoveries during an investigation into Roj TV, a Kurdish television network based in Copenhagen.

Flag of the P.K.K.

[Also, for those who are wondering, yes, this blog is tied in with a forthcoming book, a sort of encyclopedic atlas to be published by Auslander and Fox under the title Let’s Split! A Complete Guide to Separatist Movements, Independence Struggles, Breakaway Republics, Rebel Provinces, Pseudostates, Puppet States, Tribal Fiefdoms, Micronations, and Do-It-Yourself Countries, from Chiapas to Chechnya and Tibet to Texas.  Look for it in spring 2013.  I will be keeping readers posted of further publication news.]

Orkney—the Next Dubai? Further Reflections on Scottish Independence

Recently in this blog I discussed the political machinations surrounding the fate of a group of godforsaken, windswept, rocky islands in the South Atlantic, the Falkland Islands.  Today I’ll turn my attention to a group of godforsaken, windswept, rocky islands in the North Atlantic, the northern, sub-Arctic fringe of the ex-kingdom of Scotland, which has of late been trying to find its way free of the United Kingdom.

The U.K. has agreed in principle that, as with the Falklands or Gibraltar, if the majority of Scots vote for independence, then the process of secession will be set in motion.  Recently the U.K.’s prime minister, David Cameron, visited Edinburgh to meet with Alex Salmond, Scotland’s First Minister and the head of the nation’s separatist Scottish National Party, to plead for unity.  The vote is pencilled in for some time in 2014, but Cameron would like it held sooner, so as to give less time for Salmond to try to rally Scottish support for independence above the current one third or so.  Ironically, there is more support in England for Scottish independence than there is in Scotland, but the English won’t be voting on it.  (There is also a very marginal English independence movement.)  Salmond would also like the voting age for the poll to be lowered to sixteen, since separatism is more popular among the young.

Alex Salmond

Details to be worked out before the vote include who would get which part of the British military, whether an independent Scotland would stay in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization or the European Union or both or neither (a complicated legal issue which I discussed in detail last month), and who would get all that oil in the North Sea.  Much of the U.K.’s natural-gas reserves lie off of England’s coast, but if conventions on marine boundaries are applied to a partitioned Great Britain, Scotland would get most of the oil, which is farther north in the North Sea.  This would make it, economically speaking, a very viable state indeed.

The U.K.’s marine boundaries, with an independent Scotland’s boundaries shown in dark blue

Understandably, this aspect of the independence issue has the Conservative Party and others who represent British business interests in a tizzy.  And it has prompted the right-wing Spectator magazine to muse, in a recent article, how far the principles of right to self-government enunciated by the Scottish National Party would apply if parts of Scotland itself were to vote for independence.  The article’s author, Laurance Reed, a Scottish former Conservative member of (British) Parliament (who once proposed deporting all Irish citizens out of the U.K.), asks, rhetorically, why the Orkney Islands or Shetland Islands to the north of the Scottish mainland should not seek independence from Scotland itself and take with them vast oil reserves—or even Reed’s native Hebrides islands, which are closer, off Scotland’s western coast.  Reed asks, apocalyptically, “If oil and its riches can transform the fortunes of the Scottish National Party and destabilise the United Kingdom just a few decades after its discovery, what makes us think that the people of the Hebrides will not be changed by the black stuff?  Wait until the oil price goes through the roof as the result of demand in Asia, making the exploitation of the Hatton/Rockall Basin profitable.  The Icelanders and the Faroese may soon scramble for the riches.”

The marine boundaries of a hypothetical independent Scotland,

with the marine boundaries of a far more hypothetical

independent Shetland, Orkney, and Hebrides shown in darkest blue

In fact, there is more nascent separatism in Scotland than Reed may realize.  Some of these questions have been asked in recent years from an unlikely place, the so-called Crown Dependency of Forvik, one of many more or less frivolous micronation projects which the British Crown quietly tolerates within its boundaries.  (See my recent blog post on another British micronation, Sealand.)  Unlike others, Forvik’s cause has intersected with serious regionalist politics.  The nation was founded by Stuart “Captain Calamity” Hill, an English eccentric whose attempt to circumnavigate the British Isles in a private craft ended in 2001 when he was shipwrecked on Forewick Holm, a 2.5-acre islet in the Shetland Islands.  In 2008, after purchasing the island, he renamed it with the Norn name Forvik (Norn is the Scandinavian language spoken in the Orkneys and Shetlands until about a hundred years ago) and unilaterally declared it a Crown Dependency—like the Isle of Man and the Channel Islands—and thus not fully a part of the U.K. and not at all a part of the E.U.

Although Hill swears allegiance to Queen Elizabeth II, his arguments include his claim that the Shetlands’ and Orkneys’ transference in 1469, when King Christian I of Denmark essentially “pawned” the archipelago to King James III of Scotland to raise money for his daughter’s dowry, is illegitimate (a legal tangle that Reed also raises).  Christian never paid up, which is why the islands remain Scottish, but what if the Danish Crown suddenly paid its bill?  Hill told one journalist, “It’s all jolly good fun.  Every pensioner should do something like this.”  Still, it is not all a lark: some of Hill’s invocations of ancient Norse law were lauded by some in the Shetland Islands Council—the archipelago’s semi-autonomous government—during a recent legal challenge to the Crown for seabed resource rights, invoking ancient Norse law.  Orcadians (as people of the Orkney Islands are known) and Shetlanders have always been fiercely independent, and have always had a streak of Viking in their culture that is not found in Edinburgh or Glasgow or even the Isle of Skye.

“Captain Calamity” Hill, a one-man secessionist movement that has raised deep legal issues

Jurists and statesman have already begun studying the legalities of the Acts of Union of 1706-07 which created the United Kingdom out of the kingdoms of England and Scotland.  Organizations representing culturally distinct groups within Scotland such as the Shetland and Orkney councils may see independence as the chance to claim their own, probably more limited autonomy (which tends to be the pattern, as we continue to see in the Soviet Successor States).  So far, a political party called the Orkney and Shetland Movement is demanding devolution and its own parliament, but not outright separation, and so far the S.N.P. is tolerating the O.S.M. as uneasy allies.  But, depending on how far these questions are pushed, the very basis of Scotland’s original claims over its own territory may be called into question.  Indeed, if Orcadians and Shetlandes tried to push for their own separate states—which right now they have no plan to do—then it would probably make the S.N.P. pull back.  A Scotland without much of its North Sea oil would be far less viable economically.  But if those archipelagoes became independent, then their tiny population would have a mathematical relationship to their nations’ natural-resource wealth that would make them as rich as the emirs of Dubai and Kuwait.

King Christian I of Denmark, who pawned the Orkneys and Shetlands

to Scotland to pay for his daughter’s marriage.

See, doesn’t it look like he regrets it already?

Scotland, it should be noted, also administers, within the United Kingdom, the tiny rocky islet called Rockall (also mentioned sarcastically in Reed’s article), about equidistant between Ireland and Iceland.  Both Dublin and Reykjavík claim Rockall—and, by extension, the vast resource-rich seas around it—while the Danish government insists it is part of their self-governing Faroe Islands territory (which itself has its own separatist movement, the inspiration for the Icelandic singer Björk’s 2008 hit “Declare Independence”).

In 1972, the British parliament, which claims Rockall by right of possession, asserted the rock was not just part of Scotland but was specifically part of the Scottish county of Inverness-shire (which also, by the way, includes the Inner Hebrides).  (Rockall, though uninhabited, did have its own brush with independence, in 1997, when Greenpeace occupied the island as a publicity stunt and declared it an independent “global state” called Waveland.  It lasted only a matter of days, though the Crown made a point not to interfere.)

Waveland

What all of this reminds us is that the legal basis of marine and land boundaries in the North Sea and western Scandinavian region are far from settled.  Scottish independence has the capacity to reopen cans of worms like that of Rockall.  Suddenly, an independent Scotland would find itself responsible for a dormant territorial dispute with Ireland and Denmark, one which further resource exploration could reawaken.  This is to say nothing of what will happen as the Arctic Ocean continues to melt.  Already countries around the Arctic rim are positioning themselves for a race for the polar seas’ wealth of natural gas and who knows what else.  An independent Scotland would be well positioned to take part in that mad scramble as well. 

Map showing different nations’ maritimes claims in the Arctic Ocean

(see a larger map showing this complex issue here)

Could Scotland go the way of Ukraine with its Crimean and Trans-Carpathian Ruthenian separatists? or Georgia with its Abkhazian and Ossetian ones?—breaking free of an empire only to find itself fracturing within (a phenomenon of nested identities I like to call matrioshka nationalism)?  Not likely, since an independent, oil-rich Scotland would be a mighty comfortable, prosperous, progressive place to live.  But we can expect the Shetlands and Orkneys and maybe the Outer Hebrides to demand status as special autonomous regions, and, now that the legal experts have questioned our assumptions about marine territories and about the legal basis of sovereignty in the British Isles, the legal field may be wide open and the economic stakes for that might be fairly high.