End of an Era: Ramzan Kadyrov’s Decision to Step Aside Leaves a Power Vacuum, and Raises Questions

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

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

Kadyrov and Tarzan

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dzhokar Dudayev, independent Chechnya’s first leader

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fiji Junta Rounds Up Islamophobes Bent on Separate Christian State on Viti Levu

The military strongman who runs the Republic of Fiji is continuing to crack down this month on what his government and military call a separatist insurrection on Viti Levu, the Pacific nation’s largest and most populous island.

The self-declared Christian republics are in Ra and Nadroga-Navosa provinces.

The crisis came to international attention last month, when over 50 people were arrested in Viti Levu’s Ra province, on the northeast coast, on suspicion of connection with a training camp allegedly run by a former British military officer.  Authorities said the camp was training forces to help establish two separate “Christian states” declared late last year.   The Nadroga-Navosa Sovereign Christian State, on the southwestern end of the island, in Nadroga-Navosa province, and the Ra Sovereign Christian State, in Ra, were declared in October and November 2014, reportedly with the approval and participation of some (supporters say all) local traditional chiefs.  Five people were arrested and charged with sedition at the time in connection with those declarations.  The presidents ceremonially installed for the two would-be states—Nadroga-Navosa’s Ratu Osea Turaga Gavidi and Ra’s Ratu Meli Bolobolo—have since died.

The Nadroga-Navosa Sovereign Christian State flag flying over Cuvu village last month

It is not entirely clear who runs the provisional governments now, but supporters in Sydney, Australia, some calling themselves the Fiji Democracy Movement, speak for the entities and have commissioned flags.  Their views are disseminated to the public by a Fijian, now banned from re-entering the country, named Oni Kirwin, who calls herself “attorney general” of the Ra and Nadroga Christian State (which makes it sound like one entity, instead of two) and talks brashly of bringing her case to the International Criminal Court in the Hague and to Queen Elizabeth II.  (Fiji was a United Kingdom colony until 1970, then a Commonwealth realm until a coup d’état in 1987.)

Oni Kirwin

Most of those arrested last month, plus others later, have been charged with sedition.  In a statement, Prime Minister Josaia Voreque “Frank” Bainimarama, the former naval commander who heads the country’s ruling junta, said, “There will be no so-called independent states established in Fiji.  Anyone who swears an illegal oath will face the full force of the law.  Anyone who encourages political violence will face the full force of the law.  We will not and should not tolerate the kind of instability certain people are currently trying to provoke.  Put simply, any insurrection will be crushed.”

Frank Bainimarama

Bainimarama, who was elected prime minister last year in a shady and dirty election process, had served as president (and later as acting prime minister) in an unelected capacity since he took the reins of the 2000 coup d’état that unseated the elected prime minister, Mahendra Chaudhry.  Chaudhry is from the large Indo-Fijian (i.e., South Asian) community—descendants of indentured laborers imported from India by British colonists who have become so numerous that indigenous Fijians like Bainimarama are only about 53-57% of the population.  Indo-Fijians are 38%, but used to have a larger share before the coup and a wave of emigration.  Reliable numbers are hard to come by, since demographics has become such an explosive source of political tension in this tiny nation of around 900,000 that census-taking has been nearly abandoned.  Bainimarama builds his support on Indo-Fijians as much as on indigenous Fijians.

The collective flag for the Ra and Nadroga-Navosa Sovereign Christian States

Christians (mostly Methodists) make up 58% of the Fijian population, including 6% of Indo-Fijians but over 90% of the remaining population, which includes indigenous Fijians and those with origins in China, Europe, or elsewhere in Oceania.  Indigenous Fijians have only recently regained their slim majority, and the phrase “Christian state” as it is used in the latest unrest is used by indigenous Fijians resentful of the Indo-Fijian role in politics, which is still considerable.  One member of parliament, Mosese Bulitavoare, of the Social Democratic Liberal Party (Sodelpa), was charged with sedition recently for whipping up anti-Indian bigotry.  Sodelpa has found itself in the position of denying publicly any role in the current separatist movements.

Some neighborhoods in Fiji’s capital, Suva, feel like India.

Fijian Christian activists’ concerns are less focused on Hinduism, practiced by 77% of Indo-Fijians (a third of the national population), than on Islam, even though it is practiced by only 16% of Indo-Fijians and a mere 7% of Fiji’s total population.  As the soi-disant “attorney general” Kirwin, in Australia, puts it, “I’m not frightened or scared at all.  There is a takeover in Fiji and it is not a good one.  We’re concerned by Muslims.  Their influence is very, very high.” She explicitly opposes constitutional guarantees of equal rights for all Fijians, regardless of ethnic background or faith.  Fiji’s attorney general, Aiyaz Sayed-Khaiyum, has in particular been subjected to considerable vilification for his faith by some indigenous Christians.

Attorney General Khaiyum has been the focus of much indigenist Christian vilification

Details on last month’s arrests are hard to come by, and are usually filtered through the government’s interpretation of events.  Late last month, Bainimarama blamed “high-profile figures” in Australia for abetting the uprising, which he blamed on “enemies of modern Fiji.”  This may be a reference to one of the Fijian Christian states’ loudest supporters, the Rev. Fred Nile, a New South Wales state legislator who heads the Christian Democratic Party (C.D.P.) and is a perpetual target of ridicule in Australian politics.  Each year Nile publicly prays for Sydney’s annual gay-pride parade to be rained on, and he has pushed for laws banning Muslim immigration, the wearing of Muslim religious dress, and not just same-sex weddings but also pagan and Wiccan ones.

A defaced Fred Nile billboard in Australia

Fiji is no stranger to ethnic and sectarian unrest.  In addition to several coups d’état and the tensions between indigenous and South Asian Fijians, there is recurring separatist activity on an outer Fijian island called Rotuma (1.2% of Fiji’s population), which shares more with the Polynesian culture of Samoa and Tonga than with Fiji’s Melanesian one.  And on Fiji’s Rabi Island an elders’ council of expatriates from the Republic of Kiribati’s Banaba Island, which is more Fijian than Kiribatian culturally, acts as a sort of provisional government for Banaba, where there is ongoing advocacy of either seceding as an independent state or transferring Banaba to Fiji.

Sometimes politics in Fiji gets racial, in an ugly way.

Seventy alleged “Christian state” activists await trial for sedition.  Sixteen have pleaded not guilty and are due back in court on September 22nd.  Due to the repressive political atmosphere in Fiji and constraints on the press, it is not clear how true any of the allegations are.  One defense lawyer for the defendants, Aman Ravindra-Singh, has said, “We have been kept in the dark as counsel for these persons and we have yet to see any shred of evidence with regards the allegations of guns and firearms being involved in military-style training.”  Nor can we rely on any kind of pressure for due process from neighbors like Australia and New Zealand, who regard Bainimarama’s Fiji as a crucial link in the geopolitical containment of China’s naval ambitions.

Fiji’s flag

The proposed Christian states on Viti Levu are dangerously intolerant and undemocratic.  The attitudes and prejudices underlying them have no place in a modern democratic nation.  But neither do the military-style policing and disregard for civil rights with which Bainimarama is trying to keep the uprising down.  Fiji’s junta may find that it is feeding the nation’s cycle of coups and counter-coups rather than stabilizing the country.

One of many proposed redesigns of the Fijian national flag

[Thanks to Olivier Touzeau for a correction on identification of flags in this article.]

[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.]

Philadelphia Apartment Building Claimed as Sovereign “Moorish” Territory on 30th Anniversary of MOVE Bombing

A new Black nationalist micronation in Philadelphia?

The city of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, has never healed from the horrific events of May 1985, when police helicopters bombed an urban compound rented by the radical Black nationalist organization MOVE and the mayor ordered firefighters to stand aside while 65 homes burned to the ground, after a siege followed police attempts to evict the group.  MOVE, a (heavily armed) communitarian, back-to-nature movement, had been branded a terrorist organization linked to the killing of a police officer seven years earlier, though in the 1985 eviction case had done little more than torment neighbors with political diatribes delivered through bullhorns.  Last month, media and activists revisited the MOVE siege on its thirtieth anniversary, which came amid a new civil-rights movement across the United States focusing on police brutality against African-Americans.

How Philadelphia police handled an eviction complaint in 1985.

It was in this climate that four African-American activists facing eviction from another Philadelphia apartment building invoked Black nationalism last week and tried to turn a minor court hearing into an international incident.  They say the entire building is a sovereign territory, not part of the United States.

A tenant in the latest dispute being arrested last month

At the June 2nd hearing addressing defiance of an eviction order by the landlord, Francine Beyer, the four tenants of the apartment at 13th and Hamilton identified themselves as “Aboriginal Indigenous Moorish Americans,” refusing to recognize the court’s right to call them or its authority over the building, which they regard as “theirs by birthright,” according to the Philadelphia Daily News, and not subject to U.S., state, or municipal law.

Location of the apartment building on 13th and Hamilton in Philadelphia being claimed as a separate nation.

“Are you aware that the people who you have falsely called defendants,” one defendant, Nanye Amil El (a.k.a. 45-year-old Dante Morris), wearing a maroon fez cap, asked Judge David C. Shuter, “are actually heirs to this land?”  Another defendant, 65-year-old Delilah Passe, waved what the press described as a Moorish flag but was asked to put it away lest it be used as a weapon.  (If a reader can tell me which flag was used, I would be grateful.)

This (in center) may or may not be an example of the type of Moorish flag
displayed by defendants in court last week in Philadelphia.

At this point, students of the history of Black nationalism and readers of this blog will recognize the names and terminology of the tenants as indications that they are part of the Moorish Science Temple movement.  This precursor to modern Black nationalism emerged in the ferment of religious and political ideas in 1920s and ’30s Detroit, Michigan, where Islam, Freemasonry, offbeat anthropological theorizing, and an infatuation with all things Egyptian and occultic gave rise to Marcus Garvey as well as the Nation of Islam’s founder, Elijah Muhammad, among others.  Many Moorish activists claim that African-Americans are actually African-featured “Israelites.”  This is known as the “Paleo-Negroid” hypothesis, which holds, against all evidence, that the Americas were peopled by ancient Africans who are responsible for the monumental architecture of the Midwestern mound-building cultures and others.

Historic photo of Moorish Science Temple of America members

Other offshoots of the group that have been reported on in this blog include the Washitaw Nation in Oklahoma and elsewhere (see an article from this blog) (whose crown is currently claimed by a Trenton, New Jersey, eccentric calling himself “Crown Prince Emperor El Bey Bigbay Bagby-Badger” (see article), the Nuwaubian Nation of Moors (whose 500-acre compound Tama-Re, in Georgia, was demolished by authorities in 2005), and a new splinter group called the United Nuwaupian Nation (see article). Yet another group, the Moorish Divine and National Movement of the World, includes among its followers Pilar Sanders, the estranged wife of the retired football star Deion Sanders, who in court last month tried to void a prenuptial agreement which would cost her millions by saying that she now calls herself Pilar Biggers Sanders Love El-Dey and answers only to the laws of the “Moroccan Empire.”

Moorish Science follower Pilar Sanders as depicted in a graphic by the celebrity gossip website TMZ

One reporter contacted Brother A. Kinard-Bey, of the largest and oldest Moorish group, the Moorish Science Temple of America, Inc., in Washington, D.C., who called the four Philadelphia tenants “impostors” and said his group is the only real Moorish Temple in the U.S.  He added, “We’re seeing a number of people claiming to be of our temple who want to know how to naturalize or how to gain to their sovereignty.  Those are not lessons that the Moorish Science Temple of America teaches.”

Noble Drew Ali, founder of the Moorish Science Temple movement

Indeed, while Moorish Science traditionally is communal and leftish in its orientation, new offshoots like the Washitaw Nation are borrowing concepts and legal strategies from the “individual sovereignty” movement more popular among alienated right-wing white American males.  One of the tenant activists in Philadelphia this month, 38-year-old Rebecca Lyn Harmon, who asked to be referred to as R. Lynn Hatshepsut Ma’atKare El, is also an attorney (under yet a third name, Rhashea Lynn Harmon), who has talked of running for mayor of Philadelphia on the Republican Party ticket.

R. Lynn Hatshepsut Ma’atKare El (a.k.a. Rebecca Harmon),
a defendant in the current eviction case

A formal arraignment will be held for the four tenants on June 23rd.

American and Moroccan flags on display at a charity event hosted by a separate Moorish group in Philadelphia recently.  Note the 48-star flag.

[You can read more about many of these 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.]

Boko Haram’s Nascent State in Nigeria Takes Shape, with Vast Parts of Borno, Adamawa under Islamist Control

As reported in August in this blog, Boko Haram, the extremist Islamist terrorist group in Nigeria which has been waging a lethal war against Christian (and other) civilians for years, took a page from the Islamic State (I.S.) and al-Qaeda playbook and declared a separate Islamic “caliphate” in northern Nigeria.  But now the contours of that nascent state are coming into sharper focus.  Last week, Boko Haram renamed Mubi, a city of over 100,000 people in Adamawa State, near the border with Cameroon, which the group had recently taken control of.  It is now, they say, “Madinatul Islam,” which means “City of Islam,” and presumably it is the capital of this kernel of a new Islamic nation.

The city of Mubi after Boko Haram paid it a visit about a year ago.  Now it controls it completely.

Boko Haram, according to news reports, controls four of Adamawa’s twelve local government areas (L.G.A.s)—as subdivisions of Nigerian states are called.  These L.G.A.s are all adjacent and bunched in the northern tip of Adamawa.  They are Madagali, Michika, Mubi North, and Mubi South—including, of course, the city of Mubi.  Boko Haram roadblocks and checkpoints have been set up along the borders of the quasi-statelet, and the Nigerian government and military have no presence there.  The group has announced its aim to take over all of Adamawa, a state of nearly 4 million people roughly the size of Maryland or Taiwan.

In this map, Borno State local government areas
controlled by Boko Haram are circled in red.

Already, Boko Haram was reported to control an astounding one-third of the twenty-four L.G.A.s in Borno State.  Borno is the much larger and more populous state to the north of Adamawa where Nigeria, Chad, Niger, and Cameroon meet at Lake Chad.  It is here, in late August, that Boko Haram declared the city of Gwoza, which it had captured, to be the kernel of the new caliphate.  It also at that time already controlled Gulak, in the current northern-Adamawa statelet, and a string of towns spilling across southern Borno into Yobe State as well.  Borno, with over 5 million people, is about the size of Ireland.  In addition to Gwoza, then, Boko Haram now also controls the Borno L.G.A.s of Gamboru-Ngala, Kala-Balge, Marte, Dikwa, Bama, and Askira-Uba, as well as part of Konduga (see map above).  Observers expect the group to make a grab soon for Maiduguri, the Borno capital, which has over 1 million people and which is already nearly surrounded by Boko Haram territories.

One map showing Boko Haram–controlled areas in northern Nigeria, from John Campbell’s excellent blog.
Other clear and informative maps of de facto Boko Haram territories
can be found at the useful Political Geography Now blog.

One wonders if that is the point at which Nigeria will bring the full force of its military to combat the Boko Haram threat, or the point at which the international community will regard what is happening in northern Nigeria as a crisis as serious as that in Iraq and Syria with Islamic State.

Every northern Nigerian’s nightmare is to wake up in the morning and see something like this roll into town.

[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 though you haven’t read it yet) on Facebook and see this special announcement for more information on the book.]