Dragons, Doubts, and Devils Dog Welsh Identity as Scottish Referendum Looms

Opinion polls predict that the September 18th referendum on Scotland’s secession from the United Kingdom will fail, with polls giving somewhere between 46% and 47% intending to vote for continued union with England (and Wales and Northern Ireland) and only about 35% to 40% intending to opt for independence.  With just about four months to go before polling day, a lot could change.  But if the outcome is not 100% assured, one thing is: the truism that in the event of a “yes” result for Scottish independence, or even, as looks likely, a relatively close (non-landslide) “no,” the other constituent parts of the U.K.—England, Northern Ireland, and Wales are going to experience something of an identity crisis.

Wales, in particular, in the event of a Scottish split, would probably be carried along to independence itself like a rudderless ship in Scotland’s wake—much in the way that in the 1990s Serbia, the Czech Republic, and Belarus became independent states not from any desire to separate themselves but because of the dissolutions of their larger federations driven by centrifugal forces generated elsewhere.  After all, the U.K. is the United Kingdom because of the early-18th-century merger of the kingdoms of England and Scotland; without that constitutional basis, a rethinking of the rest of the union is in order.

Some of this anxiety is expressed as kerfuffles over flags.  Wales, were it to be independent, would suddenly become the European country with the most striking, remarkable, and dramatic national flag, featuring a rampant red dragon on a horizontal white-and-green bicolor (see above).  That prospect has attracted the superstitious nervousness of a fringe group called the Welsh Christian Party.  (Unlike more primitive backwaters like the United States, in Britain fundamentalist Christianity is a phenomenon of the fringes, not the political mainstream.)  As the Rev. George Hargreaves, speaking for the party, put it, “We will not allow this evil symbol of the devil to reign over Wales for another moment.  Wales is the only country in history to have a red dragon on its national flag.  This is the very symbol of the devil described in the Book of Revelation 12:3.  This is nothing less than the sign of Satan, the Devil, Lucifer, that ancient serpent who deceived Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden” (he explains helpfully in case we haven’t heard of him).  Just for the record, Revelation 12:3 tells us, “And there appeared another wonder in heaven; and behold a great red dragon, having seven heads and ten horns, and seven crowns upon his heads.”  Far be it from me to contradict a man of the cloth, but I’ve been studying that Welsh flag and I’m afraid I see only one head and no crowns at all.

Now that’s the dragon of Revelation.  See?  Lots more heads.

But never mind that.  Hargreaves recommends that the Welsh dragon—which is of murky origins but has been in use on the flag only since 1959—be replaced by a black-and-yellow cruciform design called the Cross of St. David, which is the emblem of the patron saint of Wales (see the flag at right in the photo at the top of this article).  This flag is often flown on March 1st, which is the feast of St. David and the Welsh national holiday.  Adopting this flag would put Wales’s flag on the same footing as those of England, Northern Ireland, Scotland, and Cornwall, which feature the traditional crosses of those countries’ patron saints—St. George (yes, of dragon fame), St. Patrick (patron saint of all Ireland, actually), St. Andrew, and St. Piran, respectively.

This vessel in Queen Elizabeth II’s Diamond Jubilee flotilla in 2012 featured, atop the cabin,
the flags of England, Scotland, London (England’s flag but with sword in upper left), Northern Ireland
(not official, but the St. Patrick’s Cross), Cornwall, and Wales,with flags for the sponsoring Motability, Inc.,
mixed in, plus, aft, the U.K. civilian ensign.

(Hargreaves, given his feelings about the Welsh dragon, will be equally vexed to learn that archaeologists have recently discovered, in the ruins of Leiston Abbey in East Anglia, the remains of a seven-foot-tall canine who some feel might have been the origin of the 16th-century legend of the “Hell Hound of Suffolk.”)

It is not just conservative Christians who are unhappy with Wales’s flag.  The radical, militant Free Wales Army (F.W.A., or Byddin Rhyddid Cymru), uses a vaguely swastika-ish black-and-white emblem as its flag.  The F.W.A. are republicans and presumably would like to eschew anything heraldic as too posh.  Among other parties, the left-wing socialist Cymru Goch (“Red Wales”) independence party, though republican, wants to keep the dragon flag—it’s red, after all!—as does the equally republican Cymru Annibynnol, the Independent Wales Party, along with the former majority party in the Welsh Assembly, Plaid Cymru (“the Party of Wales”), which has republican and pro-Commonwealth (monarchist) tensions within it.  Nor are these minor distinctions: Plaid Cymru came under fire (as reported at the time in this blog) when a party leader appeared alongside F.W.A. radicals and their flags at a rally marking the 729th anniversary of the killing by English soldiers of Llywelyn ap Gruffudd (Llywelyn the Last), the last true Prince of Wales (before it became a title affixing to any English crown prince), thus ending Welsh independence.  By contrast, the Scottish National Party has prevailed over republican Greens and socialists in its coalition and plans on keeping Scotland in the Commonwealth, with Elizabeth II as its head of state.

No one respectable wants to be seen alongside the F.W.A. banner.
(A more benign St. David’s Cross flag is at right.)

The Scottish referendum campaign has raised vexillological vexations in other parts of the kingdom as well.  Northern Ireland’s identity crisis in a post-Scottish dis-United Kingdom would be even more severe than Wales’s, since the Scottish ancestry of the Protestant Scots-Irish majority in the region is the only rationale behind it being part of the U.K., rather than the Republic of Ireland, in the first place.  Northern Ireland currently has no flag, and uses only the Union Jack, but the traditional flag of Ulster is used by the small minority (soon to be taken more seriously, perhaps) who wish Northern Ireland to be independent.  (Ulster, rather awkwardly, includes not just the Northern Ireland counties but the majority-Catholic county of Donegal within the Republic, so there might be some words over that ...)

Unionist rallies in Belfast sometimes feature the “red hand” flag of Ulster.

And what of a rump U.K. minus only Scotland?  The current Union Jack is a blending of the crosses of SS. George, Andrew, and Patrick—

—and without the Scottish St. Andrew’s Cross it would look like this:

Clearly, a lot less colorful.  Thus, some favor incorporating Wales’s green into it somehow ...

... or in some other way taking the opportunity to give Wales a piece of the flag to call its own, if only to persuade them not to secede themselves:

Okay, well, maybe not that prominently.  It isn’t all just about Wales, you know.  Others favor solving the color problem in a more grandiose way:

If Scotland’s secession is followed by those of Wales and Northern Ireland, then England would find itself independent in spite of itself.  Indeed, the St. George’s Cross flag is the one preferred by the pro-independence party English Democrats (as reported on earlier in this blog):

... though some of independence-for-England activists prefer the “three lions” flag which is a modification of the personal royal standard Richard the Lion-Hearted (and which for complicated reasons—1066 and all that—is also a flag used by regional activists in the Normandy region of France):

Presumably, some of these suggestions are ones that the Welsh Christian Party can live with.  And if it’s Satanic symbols they’re worried about, just be glad they don’t have deal with Morocco’s national flag:

Oh, no, wait, sorry, I put it upside-down.  Here, let me fix that ...

Phew!  That was a close one.

Thanks to Jen Mayfield Shafer for alerting me to the report on the Leiston Abbey discovery.

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

Amidst Ukraine Crisis, Turkey Courts Tatars, Abkhaz, and Gagauz in Soft-Power Campaign for Black Sea Dominance

In the first Crimean War, in the 1860s, the Russian Empire, though it held onto that strategic peninsula, was stymied in its effort to seize all the areas around the Black Sea where the faltering Ottoman Empire’s grip was loosening.  But the same geopolitical tension between Constantinople and Moscow was in play over the next fifty years in the Russo-Turkish Wars, the Balkan Wars, and the First World War.  Through all of these later conflicts, Russia either extended or solidified its control of more Black Sea coastline.  With the transformation of Romania and Bulgaria into client states of the Soviet Union after the Second World War, Turkey was reduced to controlling only the very southern, though long, Anatolian coast of the Black Sea.

Then the break-up of the Soviet Union in 1991 freed Romania, Bulgaria, Moldova, Georgia, and Ukraine from Moscow’s control.  The first two in 2004 joined the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), of which Turkey was and is a member.  The last three were leaning toward the West and aspired to NATO membership but had chunks of territory invaded and established as puppet states (e.g. Transnistria, Abkhazia, South Ossetia; more on these below) by the newly expansionist Russian Federation—the most recent instance being this spring’s secession of Crimea from Ukraine, and its subsequent annexation by Russia.  But now Turkey is regrouping, in a quiet way, by trying to woo bits of the Russian-claimed and Russian-leaning territories away from Moscow.

Here is a run-down of the pincers—soft pincers, mind you—in Ankara’s new charm offensive in the northern Black Sea region.

The Crimean Mejlis in session

Crimean Tatars
Like many Muslim peoples of the former Soviet Union, Crimea’s Tatar minority speak a Turkic language, i.e. one related to Turkish.  As discussed earlier in this blog, Tatars were among the most ardent proponents of Ukraine’s ties to the European Union (E.U.) and opponents of the deposed Ukrainian president, Viktor Yanukovych, and of President Vladimir Putin’s annexation of the peninsula in March 2014.  Long ago, Tatars were the majority in Crimea and in what is now the south-central mainland of Ukraine until Czarist forces began pushing south in the 18th century.  They were were decimated by deportation to Siberia and Central Asia by Josef Stalin as punishment for supposed colllaboration with Nazi Germany in the Second World War, and when Nikita Khrushchev, Stalin’s reformist successor, allowed many deported peoples to return home in the 1950s, Crimean Tatars (along with the Meskhetian Turks of Georgia) were not on the list.  Tatars had only built their numbers up to a meagre 12% in the post-Soviet period.

Deportation by Stalin is still a stinging memory for Crimean Tatars.

The Russian annexation caused something of an exodus of Tatars to the Ukrainian mainland—reliable numbers are still hard to come by—and the news out of Crimea on treatment of Tatars has been grim.  Although Putin was shamed into “rehabilitating” the ethnic group—essentially, doing what Khrushchev had refused to do in the 1950s, making them an official nationality with minority rights—Tatars are under fire.  Crimea’s chief public prosector, Natalia Poklonskaya, has said the autonomous but mostly toothless Mejlis (Council) of the Crimean Tatar Nation was full of “extremists.”  Poklonskaya was responding to council members’ vociferous protests after Mustafa Dzhemilev (a.k.a., in Tatar, Mustafa Abdülcemil Kırımoğlu), a former Mejlis chairman and an iconic leader in the struggle for Tatar rights, was barred from reentering Crimea on his return from a visit to Kyiv, the capital of the rump Ukraine whose new government the Kremlin demonizes.

Dzhemilev is banned from Crimea.

Poklonskaya (who, in one of the weird twists of this Second Crimean War, has become an unexpected international celebrity, especially in Japan, due to her anime-style, doe-eyed, angelic looks) is threatening to “liquidate” (her word) the Mejlis outright, along with other allied organizations.  Moscow propaganda to the contrary, the corrupt and dysfunctional pre-crisis Ukraine had been doing its best to be inclusive, though many Tatar former deportees were forced into substandard squat housing.  Nonetheless, Tatars who now find themselves suddenly residents of Russia are subject to the same prejudices, whims, and pogroms as other beleaguered Muslim groups within the Russian Federation such as Chechens and Volga Tatars.  Today, May 18th, is the 70th anniversary of Stalin’s deportations of Tatars.  Most expect some kind of flare-up of ethnic tension, especially with Putin having just placed a ban on mass demonstrations in Crimea for fear of a Tatar rally against Russian rule, and as Russian secret police raided the still-exiled Dzhemilev’s home (he is banned from Russia for five years) with a full battalion on May 16th, causing his wife to be hospitalized.

Natalia Poklonskaya threatens Crimean Tatars with “liquidation,”
even as her doe-eyed innocence captures the hearts of anime fans worldwide.

But Turkey has stepped into the fray, initiating a series of high-level contacts between its foreign ministry and Dzhemilev and other representatives of the Mejlis.  In April, Dzhemilev was brought to Ankara to receive Turkey’s Order of State award—its highest honor, whose previous recipients include anti-Soviet icons like Lech Wałęsa and Václav Havel.  Turkey’s prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, has pledged support to protect Tatar language and culture and Tatar communities from Russian repression and to support individual Tatar families in either fleeing Crimea or settling there from eastern exile, as they choose.  Within Crimea, on March 29th, the Mejlis reacted to the annexation by voting to pursue “national and territorial autonomy” within Russia.  The March 29th resolution, titled “On the Crimean Tatar People’s Right to Self-Determination on Their Historical Territory in Crimea,” reads, in part, “By adopting this document, we inform all parties of the beginning of political and legal procedures for setting up a national autonomous territory of the Crimean Tatar people on their historical territory in Crimea.”  Turkey has given tacit support, but it may not be able to do much to help in concrete ways.  After all, Turkey’s membership in NATO, with its mutual-defense pact, means that an out and out military conflict with Russia would pretty much trigger World War III, which no one wants.  The declaration is vague, in any case.  Establishing an autonomous ethnic region for Tatars on the peninsula would be resisted by the Kremlin, and in any case the bulk of the Tatar population is in the east of the peninsula, clustered around the city of Kerch at the Strait of Kerch, which is the entry point of supplies from the Russian mainland now that the Ukrainian government has shown its willingness to seal the isthmus to the Ukrainian mainland in order to stymie the Russians.

Dzhemilev accepting turkey’s Order of State Award, in front of a Turkish flag
and with a Crimean-Tatar-flag tie and a Ukrainian-flag pin.

Abkhazia
One piece of Putin’s empire which has particular cultural and historic ties with Turkey is Abkhazia, one of the two chunks of the Republic of Georgia (South Ossetia is the other) which declared themselves independent of Georgia after the fall of Communism and which have become client states, with Russia granting them diplomatic recognition after its victory over Georgia in the brief South Ossetia War in 2008.  Only a handful of countries have followed suit, namely Nicaragua, Venezuela, and the minuscule South Pacific island of Nauru.  Tuvalu (as reported at the time in this blog) withdrew its diplomatic recognition in the wake of the Crimean annexation.  The Crimean annexation made Abkhazians and South Ossetians wonder what was next for them.  Some hoped that they were next in line for formal absorption into Russia, being fed up with their current diplomatic limbo and fearful that, as Tuvalu’s defection indicated, Putin’s new aggressiveness can only further isolate the two republics.  But Russia’s foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, dashed those hopes last month when he announced that there were no plans and no reason for Russia to annex the two republics.  (But Abkhazia and South Ossetia are tentatively slated to join Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Armenia in the new “Eurasian Union” trade bloc that Putin is establishing as a counterweight to the E.U.—the same bloc whose wooing of Ukraine caused the political crisis there to flare up late last year.)

In any case, Abkhazia has responded to this snub by attempting, on its own, to increase its relations with nations beyond Russia, and Turkey has become a natural choice.  Turkey is already one of Abkhazia’s most significant trading partners (much of it under the table), and Turkey is home to about a half-million Abkhaz who are descended from refugees from Russia’s invasions of the Caucasus in the 19th century.  Turkey is also home to perhaps as many as 2 million Circassians—the ethnic group whose traditional territory stretches along the Black Sea between Abkhazia and Crimea, including Sochi, site of this year’s Winter Olympics.  Circassian nationalism has increased recently (as discussed in this blog), and Abkhaz are sometimes considered a branch of the Circassian nation.  (Circassian is a language unrelated to either Russian or Turkish.)  During the Russo-Turkish wars in the 19th century, Abkhaz were split between Muslims who sided with the Ottomans and Eastern Orthodox Christians who sided with the Czar.  Russian victory chased most Muslim Abkhaz to Turkey.  In the Soviet period, Abkhaz were mostly Muslim but became outnumbered by ethnic Georgians in their “autonomous” republic within the Georgian Soviet Socialist Republic.  Secession from Georgia in 1992 was accompanied by ethnic cleansing of Georgians from Abkhazia.  That, and the restoration of religious freedom, helped make Muslims by now a large-ish (16%) minority in Abkhazia.  (South Ossetia, by contrast, is overwhelmingly Christian.)

The flag of Abkhazia

This in fact may be one reason behind Kremlin wariness of absorbing Abkhazia next: in addition to further antagonizing the West, Abkhazian annexation would mean bringing into the Russian empire 40,000 Muslims, with the possibility that they—and maybe even some Christian Abkhaz—may hitch their wagon to the rising nationalism among the predominantly-Muslim Circassians, who are focused on uniting their nation as a single entity within the Russian Federation.  (Currently, they are dispersed among three separate republics in the north Caucasus.)

Abkhazia’s president, Aleksandr Ankvab, hobnobs with Putin—
but isn’t getting what he wants out of the relationship.

Georgia is not happy about any Abkhaz–Turkish friendliness, and when eighty Turkish journalists formed an official delegation to Abkhazia earlier this month, the Georgian government cried foul.  Georgian law forbids entry to Abkhazia other than via Georgian territory (though it knows it can do nothing about Abkhazian–Russian border traffic), and Georgia denies entry to anyone with an Abkhazian or South Ossetian stamp in his or her passport.  That diplomatic kerfuffle between Ankara and Tbilisi took some work to smooth over.  But the reality is that Georgia is not in a position to risk what relations it does have with any NATO country, especially as a mostly symbolic protest over territories that it in its heart realizes it has lost for good.  Though Georgians will not admit this, they would rather have an Abkhazia aligned with Turkey than with Moscow.

By some reckonings, the Circassian nation, which abuts Crimea
and has a large diaspora in Turkey, includes Abkhazia.

Gagauzia
At the other end of the Black Sea is another cluster of Turkic ethnicity in a sea of Slavic and Romanian peoples, the 160,000 or so Gagauz, who speak a Turkic language but are mostly Eastern Orthodox Christian.  Gagauz Yeri, or the Autonomous Territorial Unit of Gagauzia, as their homeland is called, is an autonomous region within the Republic of Moldova, the former Moldavian S.S.R., which is mostly ethnically Moldavian (i.e. Romanian).  The Moldovan government has gone into crisis mode this year over the Russian annexation of Crimea.  Its own eastern region of Transnistria (a.k.a. Transdniestria, a.k.a. Pridnestrovia) is a de facto independent puppet state of Russia, and many fear that Russia will try to annex Transnistria next.  (Ethnically, it is about a third Moldovan (i.e. Romanian), a third Russian, and a third Ukrainian.)  The tiny unrecognized republic’s government has already formally requested admission to the Russian Federation, though Putin may be wondering if he should wait first until more or all of Ukraine’s Black Sea coast comes under Russian or pro-Russian control—in the way that Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts in the east now have—so that Transnistria can be connected to Russia proper by a land-bridge.  Transnistria abuts Ukraine’s mostly-Russian-speaking Odessa oblast, whose capital was built by Catherine the Great and which many Russians feel should not be part of Ukraine.

Though the Gagauz people have a generous autonomous region in southern Moldova, they do lean toward Moscow.  In February of this year (as reported at the time in this blog), Gagauzia held a local referendum in its 700 square miles of territory.  In that vote, 98.9% said that Gagauzia should declare independence in case Romania and Moldova attempt reunification.  (Moldavia is one of the traditional three constituent lands of Romania, along with Wallachia and Transylvania.)  Also, 98.4% of voters preferred membership in Putin’s new “Eurasian Union” trade bloc to membership in the E.U., of which Romania is part.  Perhaps Gagauz fear that Romanian nationalists would erase their autonomous region in case of reunification, just as the Szekler (i.e. Hungarian) minority lost their autonomous region farther west in Romania, in the Transylvania region.  Romania and Bulgaria are also both seeing rising discontent with Muslim refugees from the civil war in Syria and intolerance of Muslims in general.  Though Gagauz are not Muslim, they are Turkic and are eastern in their culture and might face persecution.  Or so they fear: in reality, indigenous minorities are well protected in the E.U., but Gagauz are wary of ethnic Romanians after a history of persecution.

Welcome to Gagauzia

Here is where Turkey may step into the breach.  The Turkish Cooperation and Development Agency (analogous to the United States Agency for International Development, or USAID) has been offering economic and educational support to Gagauzia, and last week the speaker of Turkey’s parliament, Cemil Çiçek, made a formal visit to Gagauzia to offer whatever support it could. Ankara may be hoping that they can peel away some Gagauz support for Moscow in the wake of the new Russian expansionism, especially after Gagauz have had the chance to see the fate (see above) of their fellow Turcomans, the Tatars, in annexed Crimea.  Gagauzia abuts the portion of Ukraine’s Odessa oblast which is nearly separated from the rest by the narrow point where Transnistria almost meets the Black Sea.  All this area is served by the navigable estuary of the Dniester River and counts, strategically and economically speaking, as Black Sea coast.  If Russia were to annex Transnistria, it would put Moldova in the position, like the current rump Ukraine, of having to retreat into neutrality in order to save what is left of its territory.  That strategic and territorial loss to the West could be counteracted by a Gagauzia that, whatever its status, is oriented to warm relations with a NATO country.  And if, as seems likely, there is a ground war for control of Odessa oblast as there already is for Donetsk and Luhansk farther east, having Gagauzia as a friendly territory will be an asset to either side.

Cemil Çiçek in Gagauzia

Sometimes NATO wonders whether it is worth having Turkey in its ranks.  Since the end of the Cold War and the beginning of the “War on Terror” in the Middle East, Turkey has been a more awkward fit with the predominantly-European and predominantly-Christian alliance.  And Turkey’s chances for joining the E.U. look as poor as ever.  But if Turkey can help contain Russia by preventing Putin’s tentacles from swarming around all sides of the Black Sea, NATO will be grateful.

Related articles from this blog:

“Donetsk Rebels’ ‘Novorossiya’ Fits Russian Vision of Reshaped Europe in 2035” (April 2014)

“Russian Ultranationalists in Odessa Go for Whole Enchilada, Declare ‘Republic of Novorossiya’” (April 2014)

“West Watches Helplessly as Declaration of “Odessa People’s Republic” Hastens Dismemberment of Ukraine” (April 2014)

“Tuvalu Unfriends Abkhazia & South Ossetia in Wake of Crimean Annexation” (April 2014)

“After Crimea, Transnistria, Then Donetsk ... and Alaska? and Sardinia?? Annexation Fever Sweeps Globe” (March 2014)

“Islam and the Second Crimean War: Russian Invasion a Calamity for Tatars but a Recruitment Windfall for Jihadists” (March 2014)

“Yet Another Genocide Olympics: 10 Political Causes Sure to Disrupt the Sochi Games” (Feb. 2014)

“Minuscule Gagauzia Votes 99% to Declare Independence If Moldova Attempts Romanian Reunification” (Feb. 2014)

“Is Ossetian Reunification Just Russian Irredentism by Another Name?” (Jan. 2014)

“Abkhazia & South Ossetia Won’t Compete in Sochi Olympics, I.O.C. Declares” (Oct. 2013)
“She Recognizes Me, She Recognizes Me Not: Fickle Vanuatu Dumps Abkhazia for Georgia” (March 2013)
“Gagauzia Threatens to Secede from Moldova If Nationalists Push Reunification with Romania” (Sept. 2012)
“Transnistria’s Limbo to Continue Indefinitely” (Nov. 2011)

[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 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.]

Cliven Bundy Standoff May Be Harbinger of the Next Far-Right “Silly Season” (or Civil War?)

Bundy-ranch hangers-on pause to salute Old Glory

Far-right extremist political views and movements have lately come in the form of a series of what in United States politics are called “silly seasons.”  After President Barack Obama’s reelection in 2012 came, on the White House’s “We the People” petition web page, a wave of declarations of intent to secede from the Union—from all fifty states (plus the State of Jefferson) but mostly in the states of the Old Confederacy, Texas most notably.  Then, last year saw a series of movements in rural, conservative portions of “blue” (Democratic-dominated) or “swing” states, to create new states that would be mostly Republican.  The most notable were Colorado’s “North Colorado” or “New Colorado” movement, the Appalachian panhandle region of “Western Maryland,” and a “State of Jefferson” movement in northern California which is even now being prepared for voters in next month’s ballot in several rural counties.  Those have been, and are, mostly harmless and quixotic publicity stunts; they vent real grievances but have no hope of success given the U.S. Congress’s role as gatekeeper for admission to the union and the lack of any mechanism or successful precedent for full secession.

An impromptu lecture from Cliven Bundy

This year’s silly season may turn out to be a bit less silly.  And a lot of it has to do with Cliven Bundy, the rancher in southern Nevada who in March and April attracted an armed posse to help him “defend” “his” cattle from confiscation in the end game of a long-standing legal and financial dispute between his ranch and the federal Bureau of Land Management (B.L.M.).

Ground zero of the latest Tea Party uprising, the Bundy standoff

More than three-quarters of Nevada is public land administered by either the B.L.M. or the U.S. Forest Service, both of which lease out their land for private use for fees.  Bundy was of the opinion that he didn’t have to pay his. As he put it, “My forefathers have been up and down the Virgin Valley here ever since 1877.  All these rights that I claim have been created through pre-emptive rights and beneficial use of the forage and the water and the access and range improvements.”  Quite apart from the fact that this played fast and loose with the facts and that the Bundys have only been ranching there since 1954, the Bundy standoff—which the ranchers won, with the B.L.M. deciding not to come under fire by moving in and trying to confiscate Bundy’s cattle—represents a new wrinkle in the anti-government ideology that has been ramping up since the Clinton-era “state militias” of the 1990s and exploded after the election of the first Black president in 2008.

... plus lots and lots and lots of guns (and no “Negroes,” apparently)

Bundy’s opposition to the existence of public land and to the federal government in general is rather standard far-right-wing thinking.  But instead of merely wishing that public lands could all be sold off somehow, as is standard in Libertarian Party circles, Bundy takes the step of asserting that use equals ownership.  Though such an idea is rooted in the Enlightenment utilitarian philosophers whose thinking laid the groundwork for the American Revolution in the first place, it has other odd resonances as well. It uses some of the same arguments as radical socialist land-reform movements in Latin America, which argue that land should be distributed from its wealthy owners to the peasants that work it.  The Bundy standoff also seems dissonant with the standard far-right disdain for “welfare bums,” since that is a pretty good description of ranchers like Bundy throughout the West who are preferentially allowed to use public lands for scandalously low fees.

The Bureau of Land Management administers most of Nevada, and much of the West

Bundy also uses some of the precisely identical arguments as many American Indian activists and attorneys, to say nothing of indigenous peoples elsewhere in the world.  As Jacqueline Keeler (who is Dineh (Navajo) and Yankton Dakota Sioux) wrote recently in Indian Country Today and the Nation, “Bundy’s hullabaloo is particularly ironic considering that the Western Shoshone Nation’s claim to the land predates his own.  He has declared he will only recognize the original sovereignty of the state of Nevada, despite the fact that Nevada did not achieve statehood until 1864 and as such has no pre-existing claims to sovereign status.  Only the thirteen original colonies possessed sovereignty prior to the creation of the United States” (though one could argue for the formerly independent Texas, Hawaii, Vermont, and possibly California belonging to the club as well).  Quite notably, as Keeler points out, the Western Shoshone have never signed away their land, which they call Newe Sogobia, in a treaty and have refused all cash compensation for it.  Their territory includes most of Nevada, pieces of Idaho and Utah, and a generous swath of Southern California’s high deserts.  If any court anywhere were to rule dispassionately on the status of Western Shoshone lands, they would cease to be (or would cease to pretend being) part of the United States at all.  More precisely, the land Bundy ranches, which is in a rural eastern part of Clark County (county seat: Las Vegas), is the traditional territory of the Southern Paiute—who also, incidentally, were “pacified” without a proper treaty ceding territory.

Most of the U.S.’s nuclear weapons testing has been on the
unceded territory of the Western Shoshone nation.

This seems to signal a new phase in the emerging “sovereign citizen” and allied movements which declare the very illegitimacy of the federal government.  Further, the impulse is to halt the supposed distribution of wealth from white citizens, via the federal government, to nonwhites—hence the demonization of the word “entitlement.”  And, as though to prove the dictum that if you scratch a Tea Partier you find a racist, Bundy torpedoed his own popularity among the Fox News–watching public by a rambling statement before reporters in which he said, “I want to tell you one more thing I know about the Negro,” and described a housing project in Las Vegas, saying, “and in front of that government house the door was usually open and the older people and the kids—and there is always at least a half a dozen people sitting on the porch—they didn’t have nothing to do.  They didn’t have nothing for their kids to do.  They didn’t have nothing for their young girls to do.  And because they were basically on government subsidy, so now what do they do?  They abort their young children, they put their young men in jail, because they never learned how to pick cotton.  And I’ve often wondered, are they better off as slaves, picking cotton and having a family life and doing things, or are they better off under government subsidy?  They didn’t get no more freedom.  They got less freedom.”  Suddenly Ron Paul and other Republicans were backpedalling like crazy to distance themselves from this new folk hero who apparently hadn’t gotten the memo that you don’t say stuff like that out loud.

Michigan’s separatist Hutaree Militia is one of hundreds such
right-wing armed extremist groups in the U.S.

There is no formal Nevada independence movement, but there is a rising movement of radical individualists who peddle a cocktail of capitalist, anarchist, and back-to-the-land ideas and feel that they have the right to take up arms against the federal government for any and all real or imagined abuses.  Many openly hope for “another Ruby Ridge,” referring to a 1992 federal standoff in Montana which galvanized the “militia” movement.  The far right may have thrown Bundy under the bus for public-relations reasons, but they have not given up their fight.  Some groups, such as local militias and a nonprofit called Oath Keepers who favor defying the federal government to protect the Constitution, have set up a near permanent encampment at the Bundy ranch—a sort of “Occupy” tent city for the Duck Dynasty crowd.  And they are always, always armed.

One possible emerging folk hero is one Ernie Wayne terTelgte, as he is legally known, who also goes by the monniker “Natural Man” or “Living Natural Man.”  Dressed in breeches and a three-cornered hat and armed with a musket, this self-described Montana mountain man has been making a personal crusade out of fishing without a license and doing other things to provoke arrest so that he can deliver impassioned Ayn Rand–style soliloquies in court, channeling Thomas Hobbes, and John Locke, and Robert Nozick.  As he told one judge in a fishing case, “I was searching for something to put in my stomach as I am recognized to be allowed to do by universal law.  I am the living man and I have the right to forage for food when I am hungry.”  (Again, never mind the prior ownership by Native American tribes.)

Grizzly Adams meets John Quincy Adams:
“Living Natural Man” prepares for his perp walk.

Not only does Natural Man do things like getting jailed for contempt for not recognizing the authority of state courts, but he has also been involved in organizing “citizen grand juries” (spiffed-up vigilante mobs, really) which report only to county sheriffs, bypassing the entire judicial branch (so much for that part of the Constitution).  This takes a page from the Posse Comitatus, a white-supremacist-oriented militia movement of the 1970s and ’80s which refused to recognize any governmental authority above the county level.  Many “patriot militia” groups are hoping that terTelgte will provide the spark for the coming “civil war” in which “the people” will restore freedom and the Constitution.

... but at least his legal arguments are rock solid.
(Is there a tinfoil lining under that three-cornered hat?)

But this trend has gone beyond unhinged white mountain men quoting dead white philosophers.  In this blog I recently reported on the death last month of Verdiacee Washington-Turner Goston El-Bey, “Empress” of something called the “Washitaw Nation,” which melded the occultic Moorish Temple philosophy of the 1930s Black-nationalist movement with the tax-revolt tactics of the “sovereign citizens” movement.  Ostensibly African-American, Empress Verdiacee (her claimed “empire” was the entire Louisiana Purchase) subscribed to a strain of Afro-nationalist crackpot anthropology called the “Paleo-Negroid” hypothesis, which claims that an ancient migration of sub-Saharan Africans to the Americas makes African-Americans indigenous people as well—not subject to the Constitution or taxation.  Ever generous, she lifted the flaps of her big tent to admit any tax-hating Tea-Partier who could claim a drop or two of Cherokee blood.

An Afro-Amerind spin on the “sovereign citizen” movement:
the late Empress Verdiacee of the Washitaw Nation

Actual enrolled American Indians are catching the bug as well.  In a remote central Alaska Indian village, two law-enforcement officers who had appeared on the National Geographic reality-television show Alaska State Troopers were shot and killed in an apparent ambush May 1st as they were investigating a inter-family dispute over a couch.  The two men arrested in the killing, Nathaniel “Satch” Kangas and William Walsh, both of the Indian community of Tanana (pop.: 275), turn out to be members of a militia-style group called Athabascan Nation which does not recognize the authority of the State of Alaska and believes in taking up arms to make that point.  (The Dene, or Athabaskan, peoples are actually a broad linguistic grouping that includes most indigenous peoples of the Alaskan and western Canadian interior as well as far-flung groups such as the Navajo and Apache.)  They are on pretty good legal ground in questioning whether the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act (ANCSA) of 1971 really did have the authority to nullify millennia-old land-tenure systems, in many cases still operational ones. “We haven’t ever been conquered,” said Gary Albert, another Tanana member of the group, “and we ain’t going to feel like we’re conquered” But the arguments Athabascan Nation uses seem straight out of the playbook of the radical fringe of the Tea Party movement: Oath Keepers (see above), “nullification” advocates and “Tenthers” (those who read the 10th amendment to the Constitution as forbidding most of the federal government’s current functions), “organic constitutionalists” (who believe that everything since the Bill of Rights is an illegitimate modification of the federal structure), etc.  Calling them “brainwashed” “troublemakers,” the Tanana Tribal Council a week later formally banished Walsh, Kangas, and Kangas’s father, a ringleader of the group, from the community.

Taking away the dead troopers from Tanana:
this is not the way to win sympathy for the cause of indigenous sovereignty.

Dead-end petitions for independence or statehood are one thing.  But this new right-wing extremist “silly season” seems like it’s just waiting for the excuse to get serious.

[You can read more about 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.]

Thanks to Tanya Ignacio and Jason Rosenbaum for alerting me to some of the information used for this article.

Imperialism, Not Democracy: Donetsk and Luhansk Vote Today at Russian Gunpoint

Voters in Luhansk, Ukraine, make their choice today at gunpoint (New York Times photo)

We at Springtime of Nations are in favor of regional, ethnic, and linguistic self-determination and the right of peoples to choose who governs them.  But that does not mean that every movement that invokes those principles is worth supporting.  The referenda being held in two oblasts (provinces) in Ukraine that have already declared themselves independent “people’s republics”—Donetsk and Lugansk (Luhansk, in Ukrainian)—are a case in point.

A few things have to be in place before a referendum on self-determination can be legitimate.  First, there must be freedom of the press and freedom to speak and organize and there must be independent bodies keeping watch on the voting process to ensure it is carried out properly.  Not only are those conditions not being met in Donetsk and Luhansk, but they cannot be met.  Those two oblasts—especially Donetsk, which, unlike Luhansk, is more or less completely out of the central Ukrainian government’s control—are effectively under military rule by a shadowy group of separatist activists.  These include local ethnic-Russian militants (many of them current or former members of far-right or far-left street gangs or terror groups), police and military who have defected to them, certainly mercenaries and special forces trained in Russia, and quite likely even regular Russian troops operating in disguise.  Most of the armed activists wear masks, and some exhibit such sophisticated equipment and training that the idea that they are not Russian-trained troops (which the Kremlin swears up and down is the case) is difficult to maintain.  In such a climate, it is impossible for citizens to feel that they can campaign or vote in any way that they please.

A Donetsk Republic flag

The Crimea referendum on March 16th failed to meet those criteria as well.  In some voting districts, the number of those voting “yes” to annexation by Russia exceeded the number of residents.  But the Russian military controlled the entire peninsula; although previous referenda clearly show that the majority of Crimean residents did and do prefer to be part of Russia, this vote was illegitimate.  In the Donetsk Oblast city of Slavyansk, which is under complete separatist control, the newly installed mayor, Vyachislav Ponomaryov, predicted—“with a gold-toothed smile,” as the New York Times put it—a “yes” vote of 100%.  Given the fact that everyone knows that many elements in the community are known to be against separation, this amounts to a bald-faced promise that the vote will be rigged.

Another important component of a legitimate vote on self-determination is that the separatism not be a mere cloak for the expansionist aims of a neighbor.  This was the problem with independence referenda in Azerbaijan’s Nagorno-Karabakh region (now a de facto puppet state of Armenia) and in the pro-Russian pseudo-states of South Ossetia and Abkhazia (on Georgia’s territory) and Transnistria (on Moldova’s).  And just to show that we are not completely partisan, it has also been an inherently troubling factor in autonomy and independence movements in places as varied as Kosovo (a part of Serbia coveted by nationalists in Albania), the Miskito Indian autonomous region in Nicaragua (used as puppets of the United States during the 1980s), Sri Lanka (where the government of India has at times had a stake in establishing a separate Tamil state), Northern Cyprus (a puppet state of Turkey), and the ethnically Magyar (Hungarian) parts of Romania, where dreams of autonomy dovetail unsettlingly with neo-fascist dreams of a reestablished “greater Hungary.”  The very presence of such a dynamic does not mean any such vote is invalid, but it means that the relevant foreign power’s hands need to be seen to be withheld from the entire process.  In Donetsk and Luhansk the opposite is the case.  President Vladimir Putin’s grubby little fingerprints are all over every aspect of today’s referenda.

Kosovars love to wave Albanian flags.  Russia claims their independence
movement is a cover for Albanian expansionism.

Sometimes, a minority is so threatened with violence that it is necessary to push through a good-enough referendum and make some kind of forced separation from the parent country just to save lives.  This is the rationale that was used when the U.S. and the United Nations ushered South Sudan to independence in 2011 and, most notably, in the late 1990s when the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) established the Republic of Kosovo, which declared full independence in 2008. Putin and his state-controlled media cite the Kosovo example constantly, to point up the West’s supposed hypocrisy in opposing his annexation of Crimea.  Putin claims that ethnic Russians and Russian-speakers are an endangered and oppressed minority in post-Soviet Ukraine and that Serbs were not really persecuting ethnic Albanians in Kosovo all that badly.  He is wrong on both counts.  There is no violence or oppression to speak of by Ukrainians against Russians in Ukraine to justify any kind of rebellion.

Vyacheslav Ponomaryov, Slovyansk’s coup-installed “mayor,” speaks to
the press beneath the Donetsk oblast flag (left) and the Slovyansk municipal flag (right).

Roman Lyagin, the pro-Russian election commissioner for the Donetsk People’s Republic, told reporters this week that the question on today’s ballot, “Do you support the act of self-rule for the People’s Republic of Donetsk?”, is open-ended and intentionally ambivalent. “ We win the right for self-determination,” he said. “The next step will be another referendum when we ask, ‘Do we want to join Russia? or do we want to join Ukraine? or do we want to become an independent state?’ There are many possibilities.”

But residents of Donetsk and Luhansk—only a third or so of whom, polls indicate, want to split from Ukraine—can be forgiven for not feeling that there are “many possibilities.”  Their oblasts have been overrun by armed men in masks.  No one in the world doubts the outcome of the vote.  This is not democracy.  This is an attempt by Russia to at least destabilize and weaken—at worst, to dismember and consume—a sovereign nation, Ukraine.  And there doesn’t seem much reason to think it won’t work.

Pavel Gubarev, “people’s governor” of Donetsk

[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 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.]