10 Separatist Movements to Watch in 2015

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

ISIS comes to town ...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

10. Scotland

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

Don’t look behind you, Cameron.

9. Catalonia

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

8. East Turkestan

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

7. Republika Srpska

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

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

6. South Yemen

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

5. Novorossiya

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

4. Abkhazia and South Ossetia

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

3. Transnistria

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

Nina Shtanski, foreign minister of Transnistria

2. Islamic State

The short game ...

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

... and the long game

1. Kurdistan

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

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

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.]