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.]

Tax Hike in Mexican Border Region Sparks Baja California Independence Movement

Up until a week or so ago, Mexico was the largest country in the world, other than Argentina, with no significant active separatist movement.  But that changed on October 30th when the Mexican legislature enacted sweeping tax reforms which have sparked an uprising in the nation’s northwesternmost point, the state of Baja California.

Until the new law, Mexico’s border regions enjoyed a sales tax five percentage points below the national sales-tax rate of 16%.  The special tax rate is designed to attract visitors from the United States (who are used to far lower sales taxes) and to dampen border residents’ incentive to pop across the border to shop in U.S. border towns like El Paso, Nogales, and San Diego.  The 11% rate applies in areas within 20 kilometers of the United States border, as well as to three resort areas in Sonora state (Puerto Peñasco, Caborca, and Cananea) and to the entire states of Baja California, Baja California Sur, and Quintana Roo.  (Quintana Roo is not a border state but feels like one during spring break, when Cancún is filled with drunken U.S. college students.)

This is part of a package which also includes an increase in corporate income tax and capital-gains taxes, which could seriously affect the lucrative maquiladoras, or light-assembly factories, that thrive in the border regions.  Tax-hike proponents say the new rate will increase revenue and close loopholes that benefit retailers and manufacturers that are doing just fine anyway.  But for many residents of Baja California, it is the last straw.  Independence rallies were held over the November 2-3 weekend in Mexicali, the Baja capital, and a new Facebook group called República de Baja California now has over 134,000 likes.

Along with Chihuahua and Nueva León, two other states in the border region, Baja is one of the three most prosperous states in Mexico.  But in a country where half the population lives in poverty, that still still means a lot of Bajans for whom any increase in the sales tax is a hardship.  However, proponents of Baja independence feel it is about more than taxes, even if maquiladora owners and chambers of commerce are the loudest complainers about the tax hike.  As one journalist in the region put it, “There’s this longstanding feeling on the Northern border—‘Look, we’re a different region.  We’re right next to California ... we have to compete day after day with the United States.  We offer hope to a lot of Mexico and we’re also an escape valve for people in poorer regions of Mexico who come here to find work and hope for the future.”

But Baja has been here before, in very different circumstances.  In the 1850s, a Tennessee-born soldier of fortune named William Walker declared what are now the states of Baja California and Baja California Sur (which make up the current proposed republic too) an independent República de Baja California and declared himself president.  This kind of off-the-cuff state formation by non-state actors was part of a messy geopolitical process going on in the U.S.–Mexico border regions called “filibustering” (no relation to the modern meaning of filibustering; no diapers or catheters or recitations of The Song of Hiawatha are involved).  19th-century filibustering meant the takeover of border areas by mercenaries, who settled Anglos (English-speaking whites) in the area, erected state structures, and then ushered the territories toward U.S. statehood.  Similar projects included the brief-lived Republic of the Rio Grande, with a capital in Laredo, and the Republic of Yucatan.  One could certainly classify the processes by which California and Texas became independent, and then parts of the U.S., as successful filibusters.

But Walker’s Republic of Baja California, with its capital in Ensenada, was not authorized, nor even approved of, by Washington, and this is partly because of its relationship to internal U.S. politics.  In the 1850s, slavery was the divisive issue that was sending the U.S. hurtling in the direction of civil war.  The loss of Kansas to the “free state” side meant that Southern slave states were desperate to preserve the balance of power between slave and free states and were eyeing tropical regions as a place to found new slave states.  An organization called the Knights of the Golden Circle—of which John Wilkes Booth and Sam Houston were reputed members—sought to establish Southern-Anglo-ruled slave territories all around the Gulf of Mexico and Caribbean, extending to Yucatan, Cuba, and even as far as the Guyanas (the Caribbean rim being the “Golden Circle”).  Walker’s agenda was similar, and after declaring Baja independent he briefly tried to convince Louisiana, a slave state where he had wealthy sponsors, to annex the Baja peninsula.

William Walker’s travels

After the Baja republic failed, Walker tried again with a Republic of Sonora that included the Baja peninsula as well as today’s Sonora state; its capital was in La Paz, B.C.  When this failed too, he was arrested and put on trial in California (Alta California, that is, in the U.S.) on charges of inciting foreign wars, but despite the profusion of evidence a jury sympathetic to his pro-slavery views acquitted him after eight minutes’ deliberation.  Walker later tried something similar in Nicaragua a few years later, in the late 1850s, declaring himself president and reinstating slavery there.  But a joint liberation force from El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala deposed him and sent him fleeing into the arms of the U.S. Navy, which spirited him back to the U.S. without helping him in at all in his ambitions.

Flag of the 19th century’s brief-lived Republic of Sonora

It is hard to know who or what was ultimately responsible for Walker’s untimely death.  In New Orleans, on the eve of Civil War, he was convinced by one of his well-heeled patrons that a colony of British settlers in the Bay Islands off the coast of Honduras needed help in establishing an independent Republic of Roatán and that he was the man for the job.  In exchange, he was promised help in using Honduras as a springboard for reconquering Nicaragua.  But on the way from New Orleans to the Bay Islands a British Navy vessel intercepted him and arrested him.  He escaped and joined an anti-government rebel army in the Honduran bush, but the British snitched on him to the Honduran military, which executed him.  The whole Roatán business may have been a set-up conceived in London, part of the United Kingdom’s rivalry with the U.S.—and, soon, with the Confederacy—for lucrative plantation territories in the region.  (The British already ruled Jamaica, British Honduras, etc. and had an interest in Nicaragua in particular.)

Walker is remembered fondly in Tennessee, if nowhere else

Today, the Walker filibusters are mostly a footnote.  But relations with the economic giant to the north still dominate the struggle for identity in Mexico’s northern reaches.  Perhaps this time a Republic of Baja California will be planned from the ground up, rather than the top down, and perhaps it will make some headway.  Watch this space.

If so, I have some suggestions.  Understandably, modern Bajans do not want to use the smart-looking flag used by William Walker ...

... but instead of using the relatively drab, bureaucratic-looking flag the movement has been using so far (which unapologetically borrows Walker’s color scheme), ...

... or the far worse current Baja California state flag, which is merely its seal ...

... which brings to mind nothing so much as the Wonder Twins from the old Saturday-morning cartoon series Super Friends ...

... they should really consider adopting the flag of Baja California Sur as their national flag:

[Also, for those who are wondering, yes, this blog is tied in with a forthcoming book, a sort of encyclopedic atlas to be published by Auslander and Fox under the title Let’s Split! A Complete Guide to Separatist Movements, Independence Struggles, Breakaway Republics, Rebel Provinces, Pseudostates, Puppet States, Tribal Fiefdoms, Micronations, and Do-It-Yourself Countries, from Chiapas to Chechnya and Tibet to Texas.  Look for it some time in 2014.  I will be keeping readers posted of further publication news.]

Arkansas Republicans Scramble to Disown Elected Pro-Confederate Colleagues Who Praise Slavery, Genocide

The good ol’ days in Arkansas, according to some members of its current legislature

Members of the Republican Party in Arkansas began speaking out this week to attempt to distance themselves from three Republican elected officials who have been outed—in some cases have long ago outed themselves—as proponents of, variously, slavery, genocide, religious pogroms, and the summary execution of naughty children.

Rep. Jon Hubbard

Rep. Jon Hubbard, a state legislator, wrote in a 2009 book, Letters to the Editor: Confessions of a Frustrated Conservative, that Southern slavery “may actually have been a blessing in disguise” because “the blacks who could endure those conditions” (you know, the ones that people like Hubbard’s ancestors didn’t whip to death) “would someday be rewarded with citizenship in the greatest nation ever established upon the face of the Earth.”  He also blamed African-Americans for bringing down educational standards with their “lack of discipline and ambition” and said that “planned wars or extermination” as a policy response to immigration “now ... seems to be barbaric and uncivilized” but “will at some point become as necessary as eating and breathing.”

Rep. Loy Mauch

Another Arkansas state representative, Rep. Loy Mauch, wrote in 2009, “If slavery were so God-awful, why didn’t Jesus or Paul condemn it, why was it in the Constitution, and why wasn’t there a war before 1861?”  Mauch, a member of the League of the South, a Southern separatist group classified by the Southern Poverty Law Center (S.P.L.C.) as a racist hate-group, has also called the Confederate flag “a symbol of Christian liberty vs. the new world order,” and he once delivered a keynote address titled, “Homage to John Wilkes Booth,” referring to Abraham Lincoln’s assassin.

A League of the South rally in South Carolina

Lastly, a former legislator running for Arkansas office again, Charlie Fuqua, published a book this year, titled God’s Law, in which he argues that there is “no solution to the Muslim problem short of expelling all followers of the religion from the United States.”  Fuqua, a recipient of the Arkansas Christian Coalition’s “Friend of the Family” award, also quotes scripture to the effect that parents have the right to kill their children in order to set a disciplinary example for other children.

Most Arkansas Republican politicians, in replies to nosy Yankee journalists over the past week, have been pretending that they didn’t know that their colleagues, whom they had supported numerous times in the past, including financially, had such views—although Hubbard’s book came out in 2009, for crying out loud, and the other men’s views were also well known long before being brought to light this week.

Fuqua told reporters on October 6th, “I think my views are fairly well-accepted by most people.”  Given that it’s Arkansas, he’s probably right.

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