Chorus Grows for Independence for Muslims in Central African Republic’s North

A few months ago in this blog, I reported on a nascent ambition among the Central African Republic’s beleaguered Muslims to split away as a separate independent country.

Governance of the C.A.R., since independence, has swung between different peoples,
in a country where no ethnicity has a majority.

The C.A.R. was not always on the list of countries straddling Africa’s Christian–Muslim divide plagued by militant separatism, a list that has included Nigeria, Kenya, Côte d’Ivoire (Ivory Coast), and the recently-partitioned Sudan.  But in 2012 a civil war broke out along the lines separating the 15% Muslim minority from the 80% Christian majority in France’s former landlocked colony.  (Since 35% are sometimes reported as “animist,” and since followers of tribal religions often belong to an organized religion as well, these figures are fairly approximate.)  Within months, Séléka, the Muslim umbrella coalition, deposed the Christian-dominated government in a coup d’état, but in just under a year, in January of this year, a Christian counter-coup turfed them out.  Reprisals have been particularly bloody, including massacres on a scale that has made some toy with the word genocide and even some fairly well documented instances of revenge cannibalism, including by a young “Muslim eater” nicknamed “Mad Dog.”

The notorious Islamophage “Mad Dog”

As in other civil wars, reprisals have forced the ethnic and religious boundaries on the ground to sharpen, as local minorities flee to areas where their own groups predominate.  For months now, Séléka has effectively sealed off the northern portion of the C.A.R. and is running it as a sort of de facto state, outside government control.  As one Muslim put it back in April, “The partition itself has already been done.  Now there only remains the declaration of independence.”

That may be coming.  General Mohamed Moussa Dhaffane, a Séléka delegate, said on July 22nd at a multi-party conference on the C.A.R. crisis in Brazzaville, Congo, that the only solution to the nation’s strife that can protect Muslims from pogroms is full independence.

Abakar Sabone wanted to bring a partition plan back
from Brazzaville, not another cease-fire

That view was echoed by Abakar Sabone, who heads the Movement of Central African Liberators for Justice (M.L.C.J.).  Sabone, a former Muslim cleric, said that Séléka “represent[s] the Muslim community in the north.  The partition is already effective because all Muslims are now in the north and the current government has no access to the north.  Séléka are voicing what that community in the north wants.”

The Brazzaville summit had a more modest result, however.  All the participants went home with was a half-hearted cease-fire agreement between Séléka and the Christian–“animist” coalition called the “Anti-Balaka movement.”  Left unspecified was how such a cease-fire could be enforced in a country where no one is really in charge.  And shortly after the deal was announced, the Séléka leader Major-General Joseph Zoundeiko (pictured above), who had not attended the conference, told the B.B.C. that he rejected its terms and that his followers would not abide by it.  He demanded instead the immediate partition of the country.

Some C.A.R. Muslims are saying that a full half of the country should become their new state, reflecting not their share of the population so much as the vast areas Séléka held at the height of the civil war (see map above).  Still unresolved, too, is what the new country would be called.  The rather uninspiring Republic of Northern Central Africa has been proposed; I suppose Sélékastan is a possibility as well.  In April, supporters of the idea were circulating a proposed flag, but I have not yet been able to track down such an image.

When Séléka fighters do display a flag, it tends to be the C.A.R.’s national flag.

It is hard to imagine the international community ever sanctioning such a plan.  The Republic of South Sudan next door serving as an illustration of how dividing a country (in that case, the Republic of Sudan, partitioned with the United Nations’ blessing in 2011) between a Muslim north and Christian south can lead to previously unimaginable levels of misery and chaos.  Meanwhile, the United States and other Western countries fear that radical Islamist insurgencies in an arc stretching from northern Mali to northern Nigeria to Kenya and Somalia and Yemen are gradually making common cause with one another under what may eventually be an al-Qaeda banner.  And there is reason to fear that an “independent” state governed by an ill-disciplined rebel army in northern C.A.R. could allow that region to once again become a haven for Joseph Kony and his dreaded Lord’s Resistance Army (L.R.A.).

No one wants to give Joseph Kony a new lawless zone to move around in.

No, the international community, including even and especially the African Union (A.U.), remain steadfastly committed to making Africa’s European-drawn, colonial-era borders sacrosanct—no matter how much suffering ensues as a result.

[For those who are wondering, yes, this blog is tied in with my 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.  The book, which contains dozens of maps and over 500 flags, is now in the layout phase and should be on shelves, and available on Amazon, by early fall 2014.  I will be keeping readers posted of further publication news.  Meanwhile, please “like” the book (even though you haven’t read it yet) on Facebook.]

Muslim Rebels in Central African Republic Demand Separate State but Turn Down Chance to Switch to Catchier Name

The Central African Republic (C.A.R.) may be about to become a bit more decentralized.  Since 2012, members of the Christian and tribal majority in the center and south and the northern Muslim minority have engaged in a bloody civil war.  The mostly-Muslim rebel coalition Séléka took power in the capital, Bangui, in a March 2013 coup d’état but was forced out of office in January of this year.  Now, Séléka leaders are saying that they think a separate state is the only way to avoid escalating ethnic cleansing or even genocide.  Some, indeed, are already using the term genocide to refer to reprisals by Christians against Muslim civilians—including highly-publicized but not fully verified accounts of Christian-on-Muslim cannibalism.  As one Muslim leader put it recently, “The partition itself has already been done. Now there only remains the declaration of independence.”

Naturally, the African Union, the United Nations, and other international organizations scrambling to contain the C.A.R. violence are against the idea: only one fully new border has been drawn since African decolonization beginning in the 1960s decided to leave unmodified the patchwork of European-drawn lines that paid no attention to where cultural, linguistic, and religious groups actually lived.  The one exception is the Republic of South Sudan, which the United States and U.N. ushered through a referendum process and secession in 2011, separating the mostly-Christian and spiritually traditional nation from its Muslim former rulers in the rump Republic of Sudan.  But South Sudan has since then descended into a fratricidal civil war that has also tipped close to something worthy of the term genocide.  The former Sudan and C.A.R. are only two out of a string of African states straddling the volatile boundary between Africa’s Muslim (often Arab) north and a sub-Saharan area that is less Arabized and more often Christian, including Mali, Nigeria, Côte d’Ivoire (Ivory Coast), Chad, and Cameroon, all of which to different extents have seen horrific sectarian violence along that divide.  Mali came closest to disintegrating with the creation of the brief-lived radical-Islamist northern Republic of Azawad, finally shut down last year by France’s military.

The viral-video sensation “Mad Dog” (standing), the reputed “Muslim-eater”
of the recent sectarian conflict in the Central African Republic

Séléka rebels and sympathizers in and around Bambari, near the sectarian fault-line, are reportedly circulating a flag design via cellphone (I am so far unable to find an image or description; can anyone help?) and have proposed a name, which is (wait for it ...) the Republic of Northern Central Africa (in French, possibly, République du nord de l’Afrique centrale).

The C.A.R.'s Muslims are concentrated primarily in the far north.

All other issues aside, the C.A.R.’s northern Muslims seem to be following the same unimaginative path as the South Sudanese, who rejected more colorful proposed names such as Azania, Equatoria, Jubaland, Juwama, Kush, and Nilotic Republic and settled for just inserting the word South into the middle of the parent country’s name.  They also barely even chose a new flag, but just shuffled the stripes a bit, made the green (for Islam) triangle blue, and added a star.

Spot the difference!  The flags of Sudan (top) and South Sudan (bottom)

The C.A.R. (in French, R.C.A., i.e. République centrafricaine, or, informally, Centrafrique) has long been the butt of geography students’ jokes, along the lines of: they really couldn’t come up with a better name than that?—just the name of the continent and then a vague coordinate?  (Of course, when you think about it, United States of America is not much better.)  There is a history to this, however.  Before autonomy in 1958 and independence in 1960, France called this landlocked colony Ubangi-Shari (or, in French, Oubangui-Chari), after its two main rivers; Bangui is still the capital’s name.  Ubangi-Shari was part of French Equatorial Africa (F.E.A.), a swathe of connected colonies also including what are now Chad, Gabon, and the Republic of the Congo.  But the first president after independence, Barthélemy Boganda, had dreams of expanding the F.E.A. states to create an independent superstate taking in the former Belgian colonies of Rwanda, Burundi, and the (now) Democratic Republic of Congo; the former Portuguese colony of Angola; the former Spanish colony of Equatorial Guinea; and the former French colony of Cameroon.  At times, Boganda wanted to call such a regional superpower United States of Latin Africa, as a counterweight to the large bloc of Anglophone former United Kingdom colonies covering most of southern Africa (South Africa and the various Rhodesias).  The idea never caught on, but Boganda held onto the name République centrafriquaine, cooked up by French bureaucrats in 1958, with the idea of eventual expansion.

Emperor Bokassa I on his way to have the Belgian ambassador for dinner

For a few years in the late 1970s, the country was ruled by a French-backed psychopathic dictator who called himself Emperor Bokassa I.  Though he was rather colorful and imaginative (reader, he ate people), he still settled for calling his country simply the Central African Empire—though it did not expand or even terribly much bother its neighbors.

A reporter this week quoted one Muslim Séléka-supporter, Oumar Tidiane, as saying, of the C.A.R.’s Christian southerners, “They don’t want any Muslims.  Rather than calling their country the Central African Republic, they can call it”—ahem, get this—“the Central African Catholic Republic.”  Good God, when they send the next aid shipment, can they please airdrop a team of marketing experts?  It’s time for a lesson on branding.

As for the chances of the success of the Republic of Northern Central Africa, they are slim.  In addition to the problem of international opposition is the question of demographics.  One consultant in the region, David Smith, suggested to the Guardian newspaper that the impetus for partition was coming mostly from foreign fighters from predominantly-Muslim states like Chad and (north) Sudan, rather than from Centrafriquain people themselvess.  Besides, he pointed out, the already small Muslim share of the C.A.R. before the current conflict, between 10% and 15%, has shrunk dramatically, due to ethnic cleansing, emigration of refugees, and outright massacres: tens of thousands have been killed and a million displaced, this in a country with fewer than 5 million people total to begin with.  As in places like Bosnia, Tibet, and Palestine, the dominant, more aggressive group has changed the demographic facts on the ground, making earlier goals less and less feasible by the day.  If for that reason alone, a separate R.N.C.A.—or whatever—is a pipe dream.  But if this movement goes down in flames, they should least pick a punchier name.  And when I finally see that flag, I don’t want another tricolor, okay?

In French colonial days, Oubangui-Chari (now the C.A.R.)
was Kentucky-shaped.

[You can read more about 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.]

Shots Fired as French Authorities Arrest Tahitian “King” Issuing His Own Currency

French authorities in the colony of French Polynesia on January 30th arrested a Tahitian man claiming to be a Polynesian king, for issuing a phony currency.  Shots were fired from within the king’s compound as police moved in, according to news accounts calling it an “alleged rebellion.”  In the end, five people were arrested and three firearms were confiscated, but there were no injuries.  (French Polynesia was included a month ago in this blog’s list of “10 Separatist Movements to Watch in 2014.”)

Location of French Polynesia in the Pacific

The target of the raid was Athanese Teiri, who calls himself King Tanginui I of the Pakumotu Republic (Hau Repupirita Pakumoto) despite the fact that republics, by definition, do not have kings.  He was tried in absentia on January 22nd in Papeete, French Polynesia’s capital on the main island of Tahiti, on charges of issuing a fake currency, and sentenced to six months.  Earlier, in 2012, he had received a suspended sentence for issuing illegal identity cards, and last month a follower of his Republic had gotten two months in jail for trying to buy gasoline with a 100-patu note issued by the self-styled government.

Confiscated Polynesian funny money

After the shots fired and firearms seized, the King and the four followers arrested with him are now in even bigger trouble.  They are being charged with attempted murder of a police officer, armed rebellion, and forming a militia, in addition to weapons possession charges.  Life imprisonment is now a possibility.

Pakumotu perp walk

At the time of his in absentia trial last week, the defendant’s daughter, Mahina Teiri, was also given a six-month suspended sentence, on charges of defrauding the printing press producing the Pakumotu currency.

At the time of that sentence, a Pakumotu Republic spokesman reiterated his government’s June 2, 2010, declaration of independence from the French Republic.  “France no longer has authority,” said the spokesman, who was present in court along with several ministers of the republic.  “A state cannot judge another state.”

The king declares independence in front of the Pakumotu flag

The prosecutorial moves against the Republic this month seem to have been motivated by King Tanginui’s announcement late last year that the new currency, the patu, would become legal tender on January 1, 2014, at a specified fixed exchange rate.  He even sent a formal letter to France’s Institut d’Émission d’Outre-Mer, the central bank which issues the French Pacific franc (Change Franc Pacifique, or C.F.P.), notifying it that the Pacific franc would no longer be legal tender in French Polynesia.  The C.F.P. is also used in two other French colonies, New Caledonia and Wallis et Futuna.

King Tanginui I and his daughters display what appears to be the Pakumotu royal standard—
a modification of the national flag (see above), with a coat-of-arms included.

The Pakumotu group has been operating since 2008, when it campaigned as a political party aiming for the secession of the Tuamotu chain of atolls in French Polynesia.  Tuamotu includes the notorious Moruroa Atoll, where France has carried out nuclear tests that have poisoned the indigenous population.  In 2009, it proclaimed an independent Pakumotu Republic on the Moorea in the colony’s Society Islands archipelago and a shadow government was formed.  Mr. Teiri, initially the republic’s president, eventually called himself King (though without dropping the word republic to reflect that) and expanded his claimed realm to include all of French Polynesia.  In 2010, and again last year, the Pakumotu group tried and failed to occupy the territorial legislature in Papeete.  (Watch the Pakumotu declaration of independence here.)

Mahina Teiri with a banned 100-patu note

In addition to Teiri’s movement, another group claims the legitimacy of the Maohi Republic (République Maohi, or Hau Repupirita Ma’ohi), declared in 1982 by a Polynesian named Tetua Mai who later was arrested when one of his bodyguards injured a police officer.  This self-proclaimed state has also attempted to issue identity cards.

French Polynesia’s official flag

A more generally acknowledged heir to the Polynesian throne, Tauatomo Mairau, died last year.  He was a member of France’s secret service and an ardent monarchist activist.

Self-proclaimed president of the rival Maohi Republic

Pro- and anti-independence parties are about evenly divided in the territorial parliament, though polls show support for independence running a bit below 50%.  Indigenous people make up about three-quarters of French Polynesia’s quarter-million people.

What is not yet known is whether the king’s arrest marks the end of the Pakumotu Republic.  French authorities are wondering if more armed restorationists are out there, biding their time.


Related articles from this blog:
“Easter Island Wants to Split from Chile, Join French Polynesia”
“What Is a Colony? The United Nations’ Definition Needs an Overhaul”
“10 Separatist Movements to Watch in 2014”
“France’s Far Right Wants Early Vote on New Caledonia Independence—but Only Because They’re against It”

[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 some time in 2014.  I will be keeping readers posted of further publication news.]

Redrawing of French “Régions” to Buoy Right-Wing Normans but Stoke Breton, Basque, and Savoyard Anger

There is a world of difference between France’s new Socialist president, François Hollande, and his rightward-tilting, law-and-order predecessor, Nicolas Sarkozy.  But there is one thing at least that both seem to agree on: Hollande decided this month to revisit plans developed under Sarkozy to reduce the number of France’s constituent régions.  Hollande would like to see 15 régions, down from the current 22 (not counting overseas régions in the Indian Ocean and Caribbean, which make for a total of 27).

Hollande takes aim at anyone expressing regional pride

To redraw the map, Sarkozy, in 2008, had commissioned Édouard Balladur, a fellow conservative who had been François Mitterand’s prime minister in the 1990s, to proposes reforms to France’s governmental structures.  Though Hollande has not yet said how he wants the 15 régions to be organized, his party’s backing of the number 15 suggests a close hewing to the Balladur proposal.

Édouard Balladur and Nicolas Sarkozy cooking up reforms (careful—Bretons can read lips!).

It should be said here that France’s régions are not a big deal in the way that Italy’s or Spain’s regions are.  Many Spanish and Italian regions have devolved legislatures, even fully autonomous status.  France, on the other hand, is one of the most centralized states in the Western democratic world.  The départements—tiny collectivities much like counties in the United States—are the most significant level of local government, but the régions have no legislative authority but merely spend some education and infrastructure funds in accordance with decisions made at higher levels of government.  These régions were created only in 1982.  The original 40 or so provinces of pre-revolutionary France corresponded in many cases to strong regional and ethnic identities, but when, in the 1790s, the French nobility was abolished, so were the various duchies and other petty monarchies they governed.  The départements were designed specifically to be small enough to prevent regional identities from asserting themselves.  The Napoleonic interregna were similarly hostile to anything that challenged a centralized French national identity.

The French Republic, let us recall, has one of the worst records on the treatment of minorities of any Western democracy.  The French Revolution practically invented modern nationalist chauvinism as we know it, and the government doesn’t let their minorities forget it.  Official recognition of any minority language is constitutionally forbidden.  Breton and Basque citizens of the republic still recall being savagely beaten in state-run schools for uttering a mere word of their native languages.  France has some of the free world’s most restrictive laws against wearing religious clothing—laws blatantly crafted to punish and marginalize the country’s Muslims and Jews.  Gypsies are routinely rousted from their encampments by police thugs before being deported, with a brutality that alarms human-rights organizations.  And the openly racist National Front (Front nationale, or F.N.) political party is stronger in France than equivalent anti-immigrant hate parties in any other western European country.  France, as we all know, is a nice place to live—but really only if you’re French.  (See recent articles from this blog on sectarian frictions in Sarkozy’s France and on equivalent abuses in Québécois nationalism in Canada (plus a follow-up).)

Sarkozy goose-stepped his way into the hearts of French xenophobe voters.

When the régions were created in 1982, some pre-revolutionary provinces, such as Franche-Comté, Alsace, Lorraine, Brittany, and Burgundy, were reincarnated as régions, while others were not: Normandy was now split between Upper Normandy and Lower Normandy, while Poitou was absorbed into a larger region, Languedoc and Roussillon were merged, and others, like Anjou, Lyonnais, and Marche were left buried.  In 2010, activists in Picardy had to raise a stink to avoid the abolition of their region altogether.

The French régions as they are today

No scheme pleases everybody, but top-down schemes, which characterize the way nearly everything of this sort is done in France, please fewest of all, and the Balladur map, if implemented, will be not much of an exception.  Here is what the Balladur plan would look like:

First, the winners.  Normans were the most vocally disenfranchised—or, let’s say, explicitly not re-enfranchised—by the 1982 reforms.  Surely this has something to do with the Second World War.  Normans, after all—snug against Flanders and across the English Channel from Britain—speak a dialect full of Scandinavian and other Germanic idioms and feel a particular kinship with England.  Every English schoolboy knows that his kingdom’s history only truly picks up the pace with the Norman Conquest of 1066.  Queen Elizabeth II, as monarch, holds also the ceremonial title Duchess of Normandy, signifying her suzerainty over the crown dominions of Jersey and Guernsey—the only remaining places where the old Norman language is spoken—while the right-wing English Democrats party, which seeks England’s exit from the United Kingdom (discussed recently in this blog), waves the triple-lion flag of Normandy at its rallies.  Then, in the 1960s, France’s greater economic integration with Germany as founding members of the European Common Market (precursor to today’s European Union) disgruntled Norman nationalists in France, who felt their ties with the U.K. (which did not join until 1973) weakened in favor of ties with the much less well liked Germans to their southeast.  Most Normans, like most Scandinavians, had reacted coolly to Nazi Germany’s attempt to woo them during the war as “fellow Aryans.”  But Normans were more specifically anti-German than anti-fascist: the radical Norman Movement (Mouvement normand) of the 1960s, had a distinctly right-wing tilt which emphasized their Teutonicness, if not specifically Germanness (much like the way in which northern Italy’s right-wing Northern League (Lega Nord) clings to the attenuated historical “Nordicness” of the Lombard people).  The movement’s leader, Didier Patte, was convicted in the 1970s of running guns to Breton terrorists (more on the Bretons below).  Surely, in 1982, Normandy was left partitioned as a way of ensuring that a distinctly un-French regional identity did not rise again.

Likewise with Alsace–Lorraine, an even more culturally Germanic part of France which has spent about as much time under German dominion as under French in the modern period.  They were left as two regions, Alsace and Lorraine, perhaps for fear that uniting them as Alsace–Lorraine would reawaken proud memories of the short-lived Republic of Alsace–Lorraine, a Soviet-sympathizing workers’s state which existed for 12 defiant days in 1918 in the chaos of the end of the First World War.  The Balladur plan would reunify both Normandy and Alsace–Lorraine.  After all, the war was far in the past now, and, after all, it was important for Sarkozy to court the votes of supporters of Jean-Marie Le Pen, the Nazi-sympathizing founder of the National Front.  Indeed, Alsace First! (Alsace d’abord! / Elsaß zuerst!), the main Alsatian nationalist party (Lotharingians have always felt more French than Alsatians), has itself come under criticism for being far too right-wing and anti-immigrant.

Completely ignored in the Balladur plan are the interests of the Basque people of Pyrenées-Atlantique département in the région of Aquitania and of the small number of Catalans in Provence–Alpes–Côte d’Azur région on the Mediterranean.  Clearly, the French government regards these ethnic groups’ ties with larger and more autonomous communities of radical separatist kindred just over the border in Spain to be a security threat.  The terrorist group Basque Homeland and Freedom (Euskadi Ta Askatasuna, or ETA) has been a major force mostly in Spain but has killed innocent people in France as well, while the Republican Left of Catalonia (Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya, or E.R.C.) political party is the king-making junior partner in the fragile ruling separatist coalition in Spain’s autonomous region of Catalonia, seeking not only full independence for Catalonia but reunification with the “Northern Catalonia” region just over the Pyrenees in France.  So no surprises there in the Balladur map, though it might not be wise to take up this issue in 2014 as both Catalan and Basque nationalism in Spain are cresting as never before, threatening to unravel the kingdom itself.

Members of the Basque nationalist group ETA.  Something tells me they’re not moderates.

Savoy is another problem area.  It used to be a powerful independent duchy, with a capital at Turin and territory that included a large swath including what are now southeastern France, northwestern Italy, and much of francophone Switzerland, Savoy was always at least as Italian as it was French.  It became part of the Kingdom of Sicily in 1714, then was taken over by France after the Revolution, then given to the Kingdom of Sardinia after Napoleon’s fall in 1815, then retaken by Napoleon III in 1860, which modern Savoyard nationalists still call an illegal, secret deal.  In fact, when the Kingdom of Italy was established soon after, the House of Savoy became the royal family of all Italy.  Even today, residents of the two French départements of Savoie and Haute-Savoie, abutting Italy and Switzerland, speak a group of Frenchish–Italianish dialects which are sometimes called a separate language, Arpitan.  This is also spoken in Geneva and in Italy’s fully autonomous francophone region, Val d’Aosta, just over the border in the Alps, where there is a popular movement to reunify with their kindred in an independent Savoy Republic.  Savoyard nationalism is very active in French Savoy itself.  Not only is there a Savoy Region Movement (Mouvement Région Savoie, or M.R.S.), which seeks a separate région of Savoy, but there is also a political party called I Believe in the Savoy Region! (La Région Savoie, j’y crois!), which wants a fully autonomous Savoy with a devolved autonomous parliament—in addition to the Savoyard League (Ligue savoisienne), which has set up a provisional government-in-exile in Geneva.  A poll in 2000 found a quarter of respondents in the two Savoy départements wanting to be an independent state, while a full half wanted an autonomous region.  In 2010, 48% of Savoyards liked the idea of Savoie and Haute-Savoie becoming Swiss cantons, and a whopping 43.7% of all Swiss and 55.9% of French-speaking Swiss agreed.  In that Swiss survey, the question also included the annexation of Franch–Comté, a région to the north, along the Swiss–French–German border which would also, incidentally, be obliterated in the Balladur plan and merged with Burgundy.  Why Hollande wants to kick awake the sleeping giant of Savoyard nationalism by producing yet another map that denies their existence and keep them barricaded from the Italian and Swiss citizens they regard as kindred is beyond me.

Savoyard nationalists protest at a Swiss border crossing

The most anger, however, over the Balladur plan has been generated in Brittany, where the Balladur suggestion of attaching Pays-de-la-Loire région’s Loire-Atlantique département to Brittany has been popular, but not at all the suggestion of merging Brittany with all of Pays-de-la-Loire into a single region.  This is regarded, quite rightly, as designed to dilute Breton regional identity and make the establishment of a Breton autonomous region even less likely than it already is.  (And it is unlikely; France doesn’t “do” autonomous regions.)  The nationalist Breton Democratic Union (Union Démocratique Bretonne, or U.D.B.), a left-wing, sometimes radically left-wing party, has been especially forceful on this point.

This is a bad time to alienate Breton nationalists.  At a time when Scotland is planning a referendum on independence for later this year, Welsh and Cornish nationalism (see my recent article) are becoming more strident, and even the Celtic nation of Galicia is only agreeing to stay within the Kingdom of Spain because the current Spanish prime minister, Mariano Rajoy Brey, is himself Galician—at such a time, this is not when you want to needlessly piss off a bunch of radical Celts when you could just as well leave things be.  But the insular mindset of French nationalism chauvinism sort of doesn’t even “get” what regional and ethnic pride are; why, after all, would anyone want to not be French?  As the United Kingdom, Spain, and Italy unravel all around them, François Hollande may be the next European leader to get a rough lesson in what the new European ethnoscape is shaping up to be.  Good luck with that map-redrawing business, Monsieur Président.  Tell us how it works out for you.

[You can read more about Bretons, Basques, 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.]

Chagossian Diaspora in Sussex Buoyed by London Vow to Examine Resettlement

Among the many stateless nations to which the British Isles are home—Scots, Welsh, Manx, Orcadians, Cornish, even modern separatists who regard themselves as members of the ancient Kingdom of Mercia—is one unexpected group: the Chagossians.  About half the global populations of this ethnic group, also called Îlois, live in the town of Crawley, in England’s County Sussex.  The rest live in Mauritius and elsewhere.  This is because their homeland, the Chagos Archipelago, smack dab in the middle of the Indian Ocean, was ethnically cleansed by the United Kingdom government in the late 1960s and early 1970s to make way for a massive joint British–U.S. military presence, especially on the largest island, Diego Garcia.  But the Chagossian exiles, having long despaired that the British government would ever notice them, let alone resettle them on the islands as they have long wanted, were encouraged this week by an announcement from the government’s Foreign Office to the effect that there would be a ministry study on the feasibility of resettlement—the necessary first step.

The announcement was made by Mark Simmonds, a Conservative Party M.P. for Lincolnshire, who is also an Under-Secretary-of-State whose portfolio includes the British Overseas Territories.  The B.O.T. includes Gibraltar, the Falklands, some bases on Cyprus, a bunch of Caribbean islands, a pie-slice of Antarctica, and the British Indian Ocean Territory.  The B.I.O.T., which is simply the Chagos Islands, was created in 1965 when it was hived off of the colony of Mauritius off the African coast, so that the strategic archipelago would not become part of an independent Commonwealth of Mauritius, which came into being three years later.

Airstrip visible at upper left

The Chagos Islands don’t have an indigenous population in the commonly understood sense of the term.  The archipelago was uninhabited when Vasco de Gama spotted it in the 16th century and in the 18th century France included it as part of the colony of Mauritius, which was in those days French. Both French and British colonists on the islands imported African slaves and freedmen to work the plantations there.  They quickly became the majority and are the ancestors of today’s Chagossians.  The British seized Mauritius from the French during the Napoleonic wars, and their ownership of it, and thus of the Chagos Islands too, was made legal in the Treaty of Paris.  (The Republic of Mauritius, as it is now known, still claims the islands, awkwardly enough.)

Chagossian activists in exile

Not long after, in 1833, slavery was abolished throughout the British Empire, and probably by this time the French-based trade pidgin the islanders spoke had evolved into a full-fledged mother-tongue creole language called Îlois.  So, although in a sense the Chagossians are settlers as much as the French and British are, in another sense they are a nation whose only home is the Chagos Islands.

The annual village fair in Crawley, Sussex, is unlike that of any other in England.

Since the 1960s, Diego Garcia and the smaller islands have become heavily militarized.  The United States, the U.K., and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) regard Diego Garcia as indispensible—a spot from which they can respond militarily to events in the Middle East (and elsewhere, such as Somalia) on short notice, without relying on the fickle hospitality of countries like Saudi Arabia and Turkey.  The airstrips at Diego Garcia played a huge role in early stages of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.  Its total population of around 4,000 includes no Chagossians, except those that might happen to join the British military.

What could be more British?  Two quasi-nations face each other on the field.

The Chagossians have been lobbying for years for the right of return, and it is likely that, if and when they are resettled, some will favor eventual independence—though that is unlikely to happen unless it includes iron-clad assurances that the British can continue to use it as a military base.  If they do become independent, they may will probably ditch the existing Union Jack–laden and becrowned B.I.O.T. flag ...

... in favor of the Chagossian nation’s own jaunty, ultra-hip tricolor ...

... or even a blend of the two ...

... but would be encouraged to keep at least some components of the current charmingly-Lewis-Carroll-esque territorial coat-of-arms ...

... and will probably have to discuss whether to retain the current territorial motto, “In tutela nostra Limuria,” which is Latin for “Lemuria is in our charge.”  The name Lemuria, originally referring to the lemurs of Madagascar, was first coined by the 19th-century German biologist Ernst Haeckel to label a proposed proto-continent.  The term was embraced not only by geologists but by Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, founder of the partly-Hinduism-based religion Theosophy, who said that it was a lost continent with a lost civilization—the Indian Ocean’s answer to Atlantis—and more recently by the Bengali anthropologist Sarat Chandra Roy, who bent the idea to nationalist ends.  Roy suggested that, since Lemuria possibly bridged what are now southern India and East Africa (hundreds of millions of years ago, but never mind that), this was a way to directly link the Dravidian-speaking peoples of southern India such as the Tamils and Telugus with the very origins of humanity.  So Lemuria is pined for not only by Western occultists but by Tamil nationalists in northern Sri Lanka and India’s Tamil Nadu state as an antediluvian paradise, supposedly called in Proto-Dravidian Kumarināṭu.  For them Lemuria is not just their own Atlantis, but humanity’s Rift Valley and Mt. Ararat, rolled into one.

Lemuria in the Tamil nationalist imagination—
reflected, too, in the British Indian Ocean Territory’s official colonial motto

Sunken continents, alas, are an appropriate theme in the Indian Ocean.  The Chagossians’ saga of national cohesion and international political activism while in exile is an inspiring tale, and is in particular being examined by much lower-lying island nations such as the nearby Maldives and Seychelles and the more distant Kiribati, Nauru, Tuvalu, and others in the South Pacific.  Even conservative estimates of the rise in sea levels expected from the ongoing climate changes will mean these entire countries will disappear beneath the waves.  The highest point in the Maldives, a nation composed of atolls, is 7 feet above sea level—as opposed to the more substantial Diego Garcia, which towers as high as 15 meters.  For many terrifying minutes during the Boxing Day tsunami of 2004, the entire Republic of the Maldives was underwater.  If, as many scientists believe, this is a harbinger, then Maldiveans, Seychellois, and other Indian Ocean peoples will have to look for a new place to locate their nations.  Well, I hear there are a bunch of properties, and a community hall, in Crawley, Sussex, that are expected to be vacated before long ...  (Crawleyites can take cheer too: Chagossians are nice enough chaps, but I hear Seychellois curry is to die for.)

[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.]