Ambazonian Separatists Focus on Bakassi Peninsula in New Push to Split Cameroon

[Note: This article was written based on preliminary reports on the Bakassi situation.  A more complete analysis, with more background, is in my blog article “Southern Nigeria Splitting Apart Too as Muslim North Burns” (Aug. 23, 2012).]

The flag of Ambazonia

The relatively newly minted Ambazonia People’s Congress (A.P.C.), representing Cameroon’s Anglophone minority, has asked the national legislature to revisit the 2006 international agreement under which the Bakassi Peninsula was transferred from Nigeria to Cameroon.  The group’s head, Fon Gorji-Dinka—an attorney working since the 1980s on behalf of the formerly British-ruled Southern Cameroon region, which now includes Bakassi—claims that the Bakassi region is technically a part of neither Nigeria nor Cameroon but in fact an independent state.

A scene during the tense period, in 2006, when the United Nations
was deciding whether Bakassi was to be part of Nigeria or Cameroon.
Many Efik here still feel Nigerian, though they have been made into Cameroonians.

Gorji-Dinka’s rather flimsy and tangential legal argument cites a 1984 United Nations (U.N.) committee finding referring to a distinct region called Ambazonia and the 1984 Cameroonian law erasing the Cameroon’s status as a titular union of Anglophone and Francophone territories—i.e. the name change from the United Republic of Cameroon to the Republic of Cameroon.

A map of Cameroon’s imaginatively-named provinces,
highlighting those that were formerly British-ruled and consider themselves a separate country.

The larger region of which Bakassi is now a part—so-called Ambazonia or Ambazania—was the part of Germany’s colony Kamerun that was subdivided in 1918 between the British and the French as First World War spoils.  The francophone part eventually became independent of France as Cameroon (Cameroun, in French) in 1961, while a plebiscite was held to determine the fate of the British portion—two territories called Southern Cameroons and Northern Cameroons.  Southern Cameroons, though English-speaking, was attached to the French-dominated, newly independent Cameroon, while Northern Cameroons became part of Nigeria, the eastern edge of today’s Middle Belt region.  In 1972, a new Cameroonian constitution extended Francophone central-government control, exacerbating separatism in the former Southern Cameroons.  In 1999, the Southern Cameroons National Council (S.C.N.C.) declared, mostly symbolically, an independent Republic of Ambazonia, citing a 1995 non-binding referendum on independence in which separatists won out with 99%, and in 2006, after the Bakassi cession, the Southern Cameroons Peoples Organization (SCAPO) declared a rival Republic of Ambazania (note slight difference in spelling), which included Bakassi as well.

Neither movement ever controlled any territory or won much support abroad, but activists such as Gorgi-Dinka continue to press their case.  The restriction of the Ambazonian claim to the tiny Bakassi Peninsula, however, seems to be a new wrinkle.

There might be a logic to this.  It may be that mainland Ambazonians, who are more cosmopolitan, are more keen on integrating peacefully into Cameroon.  Bakassians, though—members of the Efike or Efik ethnic group, some of whom have been agitating quietly for several years now for a separate Republic of Bakassi—have linguistic, cultural, and historical affinities with the Ogoni, Ijaw, and other peoples of the Niger Delta region over the border in Nigeria.  Both areas were part of the Calabar (a.k.a. Kalabar) Kingdom, which became part of the British Empire in 1884 (see map above).  Many Bakassians, less so than mainlanders in southwestern Cameroon, consider themselves tied to Calabar, which still operates as a largely ceremonial kingdom on the Nigerian side of the border.  The Ogoni, in their battle with international oil companies, have been among the most strident separatists in Nigeria in recent history, and their cause was brought to prominence by the state-sponsored murder, in 1995, of their most prominent activist, the novelist Ken Saro-Wiwa.  With an Islamist insurgency in the north led by Boko Haram, and worries about a resurgence of Yoruba and Igbo (Biafran) nationalism as well, Nigeria is at a centrifugal point in its history.  Perhaps Gorji-Dinka and other Ambazonian nationalists are hoping that that is a regional trend they can work with and build on.

A Calabarian coronation

[Related articles: “Remembering Odumegwu Ojukwu: On Biafra and on an African Continent Riven by European Borders” (Nov. 2011), “Mali Becomes the Latest African Country to Split along North–South Lines” (Feb. 2012), “Jihadists Imperil Nigerian Unity” (June 2012).]

[For those who are wondering, yes, this blog is tied in with my forthcoming book, a sort of encyclopedic atlas to be published by Auslander and Fox under the title Let’s Split! A Complete Guide to Separatist Movements, Independence Struggles, Breakaway Republics, Rebel Provinces, Pseudostates, Puppet States, Tribal Fiefdoms, Micronations, and Do-It-Yourself Countries, from Chiapas to Chechnya and Tibet to Texas.  The book, which contains dozens of maps and over 500 flags, is now in the layout phase and should be on shelves, and available on Amazon, by early fall 2014.  I will be keeping readers posted of further publication news.  Meanwhile, please “like” the book (even though you haven’t read it yet) on Facebook.]

Dream of a Tuareg State Fizzles: Is This the End of Azawad? (Mali Update)

The flag of the Independent State of Azawad.  Is it time to fold it up?

[Other blog articles on this topic: “Mali Becomes the Latest African Country to Split along North–South Lines” (Feb. 5, 2012), “A New Country in Africa: Islamic Republic of Azawad” (April 5, 2012), and “Why It Matters What You Call Your Country: Cyprus vs. Northern Cyprus, Azawad vs. THE Azawad” (April 17, 2012).]

Secular Tuaregs Drop Separatist Agenda, Just Want Islamists Ejected.  The secular Tuareg separatist army called the National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad (M.N.L.A.) announced July 15th that it was dropping its goal of secession from the Republic of Mali.  The group declared independence in early April for the Tuareg-dominated northern two-thirds of Mali, which then became the unrecognized Independent State of Azawad.  But gradually Ansar al-Dine, the al-Qaeda-affiliated Islamist militia that aided in the Tuareg conquest of Mali’s northern cities—while the central government was paralyzed by a military coup d’état—took over the governing of Azawad and has been imposing a harsh form of Islamic law (shari’a) on the population.  Ibrahim Ag Assaleh, a senior M.N.L.A. official, told media on the 15th, “We are seeking cultural, political, and economic independence, but not secession.  It would be something like Quebec.”  Another official, Hama Ag Mahmoud, added, “Independence has been our line since the start of the conflict, but we are taking on board the view of the international community to resolve the crisis.”  However, another M.N.L.A. spokesman, Moussa Ag Assarid, says that the group has not abandoned the quest for independence and says any such reports are deliberate misinformation.  Clearly, then, there is not M.N.L.A. unanimity on the issue.  For its part, Ansar al-Dine claims that its goal is to impose shari’a on all of Mali—which is so unlikely that in reality they will only be able to achieve a brief de facto independent Azawad made up of the Islamist-controlled areas—until the international community starts trying to wipe them off the face of the Sahel.

Ansar al-Dine’s flag welcomes arrivals in Azawadi cities

Various international organizations—the United Nations (U.N.), the African Union (A.U.), and the Economic Community of West African States (Ecowas)—have favored a return to civilian rule in the capital and a reunification of the country.  But the International Crisis Group (I.C.G.), a global non-governmental organization (N.G.O.), said in a report on July 18th that Mali’s crisis of leadership in the capital needs to be resolved before Azawad can be recaptured by military intervention, and the foreign ministers of France and Algeria issued a joint statement July 15th favoring political over military solutions.

Pro-Government “Gandakoy” Militia in Mali’s Mopti State Defects to Islamists.  About 400 fighters from a militia known as the “Gandakoy,” formerly loyal to the Malian government, have switched sides and are now allied with Ansar al-Dine.  The defection seems to have occurred in Douentza, in Mopti province—the southernmost and by far most populous and least nomadic and least ethnically Tuareg portion of Azawad, though only part of Mopti is under Azawadi control.  Douentza, in fact, lies right on the border area between Azawad-controlled and Malian-controlled areas.

To understand what this defection means, we should review a little about Mali’s ethnic geography.  The Tuareg are a nomadic people related to the Berber who inhabit a vast interior desert area that includes, in addition to Azawad, parts of Mauritania, Niger, Burkina Faso, Algeria, and Libya.  Tuaregs were the personal strike force of Moammar al-Qaddafi, and it was Tuaregs fleeing the anti-Tuareg reprisals of the post-Qaddafi regime in Libya who stoked separatism in northern Mali earlier this year.  The three northern Malian provinces of Gao, Kidal, and Timbuktu—which, with Mopti, make up Azawad’s claimed territory—are overwhelmingly Tuareg (other than an Arab, or “Moorish,” minority along Timbuktu province’s border with Mauritania).  But Mopti is a far more densely populated, less arid area which is home to Dogon, Songhai, Bambara, Bozo, Fulani (a.k.a. Peul, speakers of Fula, a.k.a. Fulfulde), and other ethnic groups.  (Bambaras dominate in southern Mali and in the capital, Bamako.)

A map showing The three main provinces of Azawad to the north—Timbuktu, Kidal, and Gao—plus the semi-Azawadi-controlled Mopti province, with the areas of its Songhai, Dogon, and Fulani (Fulfulde-speaking) inhabitants.

It is hard to learn much about the Gandakoy, which appears to be dominated by the Songhai, but a Facebook account active mainly in February and March of this year, named Mouvement Patriotique Malien Gandakoy (Patriotic Malian Movement of Gandakoy), emphasizes multi-ethnic Mopti’s edge in population over the territorial vastness of the thinly populated, nomadic, Tuareg parts of Azawad—writing, in a March 1st status update, “The French media have de facto adopted M.N.L.A.’s definition of Azawad and stubbornly want to instill in the minds of the public that Azawad consists of four major regions, namely Timbuktu, Gao, Kidal, and Mopti”—a territory which, because of Mopti, has “a majority (90%) of sedentary Songhai, Peul, Bozo, Arabs, Bambara, making up a population of 6 to 7 million inhabitants.”  The Tuareg separatist M.N.L.A., which launched the secession, “represents,” the status update goes on, “only a tiny fraction of this population.”  The page’s profile picture includes a map coloring an area that includes all of Mali, Senegal, and Guinea-Bissau, most of Sierra Leone, plus western Niger, southern Mauritania and bits of Burkina Faso and Algeria.  This area corresponds to no single ethnic or religious group, leading to the impression that these are ultranationalists nostalgic for the old days of the Malian Empire.  So their switch to join the anti-nationalist, internationalist-jihadist Ansar al-Dine is a case of strange bedfellows—especially since part of, perhaps most of, Ansar al-Dine’s leadership and membership is Tuareg.  More curiously, an apparently pro-M.N.L.A. website, in a December 2011 article, identified the Gandakoy as “nothing but an emanation of the Malian government” (this was before the coup d’état) which practices terrorism against Tamasheq (i.e. Tuareg) and Arab civilians.  I would welcome any further enlightenment from readers on who the Gandakoy are and how they fit into Mali’s rapidly shifting political ethnoscape.

The Gandakoy Facebook page profile picture.

Ansar al-Dine Literally Whips Secularists into Line after Uprising near Timbuktu.  In Goundam, west of Timbuktu, in Azawad, secularists rose up July 13th against their Ansar al-Dine overlords after a young Islamist patrolman whipped a woman carrying a baby because she (the mother) was wearing an inadequately modest veil.  The baby fell as a result of the attack and was critically injured, according to witnesses.  This was too much for the citizenry, about 100 of whom then marched on the Ansar al-Dine local headquarters, vandalized it, and looted food supplies.  The Islamists responded with a crackdown—surrounding the town with checkpoints and going door to door to round up suspected dissidents and, reportedly, whipping 90 of them.  By the next day, most residents were staying inside while heavily armed jihadists patrolled the city.  Goundam originally had a population of 13,000, but since the civil war began in March, about two-thirds of the population has fled.

Ansar al-Dine

Islamist Threats Lead to Cancellation of Moorish Conference in Azawad.  A pro-secession group dominated by Azawad’s Arab (Moorish) minority has had to cancel a conference after threats of violence from radical Islamists.  The Moorish group, the National Liberation Front of Azawad (called N.L.F.A. or, more commonly, F.N.L.A., its French acronym), originally scheduled the July 7th conference, in Boujbeiha, north of Timbuktu, for dignitaries and community leaders from Azawad’s Moorish communities, some of them residents of refugee camps for Malians in neighboring Mauritania.  A Timbuktu journalist said that Ansar al-Dine denied issuing the threats, suggesting that the threats came from the al-Qaeda Organization in the Islamic Maghreb (A.Q.I.M.), the regional terrorist network of which Ansar al-Dine is in some ways a local affiliate.  The conference, however, will be rescheduled, and an F.N.L.A. activist, Sidi Ould Abdallah, said, “We will challenge these threats to express Azawad Arabs’ refusal to give in to a theocracy.”

MUJAO Releases 6 Algerian, European Hostages.  The Movement for Unity and Jihad in West Africa (MUJAO), another offshoot of A.Q.I.M. which has also been running wild in Azawad, has released three of the seven diplomats from Algeria that it had abducted in Gao, in Azawad, around the time of the territory’s declaration of independence, on April 5th.  The release was announced on July 12th.  A few days later, on July 18th, MUJAO freed two aid workers from Spain and one from Italy who had been kidnapped in October 2011 from a refugee camp in Algeria for refugees from Western Sahara.  The three were flown to safety in Burkina Faso before returning home to Europe.

One last group photo before we have to go home!

[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.]

Introducing the Republic of Wadiya

Last month in this space I introduced readers to the world and Africa’s newest (de facto) independent country, the Independent State of Azawad, carved for the time being out of the northern, Tuareg-dominated two-thirds-or-so of what the rest of the world still regards as the Republic of Mali.  While that drama is ongoing (and reported on in this blog’s “This Week in Separatist News” installments), yet another, not-too-dissimilarly named African country has made its debut: the Republic of Wadiya.  But it isn’t showing up on any real maps.  It is the fictional country ruled by the dictator Admiral General Aladeen, played by Sacha Baron Cohen in his new film The Dictator, due to be released in American theaters on May 16th.

The last time Baron Cohen parodied the third world (while at the same time parodying the West and everything and everybody else) was with his 2006 mockumentary Borat! Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan.  The title character, Borat Sagdiyev, was an amalgam of numerous stereotypes of Slavic, Muslim, Middle Eastern, and third-world men in general (he is the dark side of Steve Martin and Dan Aykroyd’s Czechoslovakian “wild and crazy guys” from Saturday Night Live), though the script is careful to mention he is non-Muslim, following an (invented) indigenous Kazakh religious system.  (Likewise, his new character Aladeen is “not an Arab” and is also, fairly apparently, not a “black” sub-Saharan African.)

Borat Sagdiyev in his native Kazakh village (actually, Romania)

The Republic of Kazakhstan, needless to say, was not amused at Baron Cohen’s deadpan portrayal of a Kazakh filmmaker who masturbates in public, tongue-kisses his sister, marries a prostitute, is gleefully misogynistic and anti-Semitic, cheerfully refers to African-Americans as “chocolate-faces,” and tries to stuff Pamela Anderson into a traditional Kazakh “marriage sack”—or the film’s portrayal of Kazakhstan as a nuclear-contaminated, backward, dirt-poor wasteland (the Kazakhstan scenes were shot on location in Romania) full of bigots, fanatics, perverts, and holders of an undying, unspecified grudge against Uzbekistan.

A timeline of Kazakh history, from the coffee-table book published to accompany the film Borat

The Kazakh government threatened law suits against Baron Cohen and his producers, and Kazakhstan’s president, Nursultan Nazarbayev, even very somberly took the matter up with the United States’ president, George W. Bush, during a state visit.  However, a Kazakh journalist who got around his country’s ban on the movie by screening it at a film festival in Vienna, declared, “Cultural Learnings is certainly not anti-Kazakh, anti-Romanian, or anti-Semitic.  It is a cruelly anti-American movie.  It is amazingly funny and sad at the same time.  I think this is the best film of the year.”  (Baron Cohen, incidentally, is permitted over-the-top anti-Semitic jokes; he is himself an Englishman of Jewish extraction, who wrote his Cambridge thesis on the role of Jewish Americans in the 1960s civil-rights movement.)

A scene from Borat showing Kazakhstan’s supposed annual “running of the Jews” ceremony

More than five years later, Kazakhstan’s ruffled feathers are not yet smoothed down.  As I reported in this blog in March of this year, the Kazakh government flew into a diplomatic rage after a Kazakh receiving her gold medal at a sharpshooting competition in Kuwait stood on the podium and had to hear the mock Kazakh national anthem from Borat played over the public-address system.  The lyrics say, in part, “Kazakhstan, greatest country in the world / All other countries are run by little girls ... / Kazakhstan, Kazakhstan, you very nice place / From plains of Tarashenk to northern fence of Jewtown / Kazakhstan, friend of all / Except Uzbekistan, they very nosey people with bone in their brain ... / Kazakhstan, prostitutes cleanest in the region / Except of course for Turkmenistan’s.”  The athlete, Maria Dmitrienko, smiled uncontrollably while it played (watch her reaction here), but her government refused to believe it was not deliberate and demanded an apology.  The incident in actuality showed nothing more than the dangers of hastily searching YouTube to find obscure countries’ national anthems.  (It is also worth mentioning that the tournament Dmitrienko won was called the Arab Shooting Championships—which, with or without a hyphen, itself sounds like something out of Borat.)

Kazakh markswoman Maria Dmitrienko hears the Borat version of her country’s national anthem

The Dictator—not to be confused with the identically titled 1935 silent classic featuring Charlie Chaplin as Adolf Hitler—not only stars but is written by Baron Cohen as well.  It is a fully fictional, scripted film, unlike the guerilla Candid Camera approach taken in Borat, where Baron Cohen is mostly improvising opposite unwitting American dupes who think he is a genuine Kazakh journalist.  The Dictator tells of Aladeen’s unlikely assimilation into American life.  One feature of the new film’s promotional campaign has been a website for the Republic of Wadiya featuring film trailers but also information on Wadiya itself.  (Its level of professionalism is eerily reminiscent of the actual website for the Independent State of Azawad, which may indeed have helped inspire the fake Wadiya site.)  A map, under “Invest in Wadiya” on the Wadiya site, shows its position, on the Horn of Africa—or, rather, on what used to be the Horn of Africa until it was digitally shaven down to resemble Aladeen’s profile.  (See this announcement of the ribbon-cutting ceremony for the newly sculpted Aladeen Beach, which more or less erodes the Puntland State of Somalia out of existence.)

Now, it is one thing to piss off the Republic of Kazakhstan, as Baron Cohen did with Borat.  A few Kazakhs even managed to figure out that Baron Cohen has no grudge against Kazakhstan per se; he chose it because Kazakhstan is so little known in the West, because it sounds remote and obscure and has a funny name.  It would be quite another thing to piss off an actual living dictator.  Aladeen, in his unhinged flamboyance, resembles no one more than Libya’s Moammar al-Qaddafi.  The Dictator was conceived and began shooting well before Qaddafi’s downfall and execution in October 2011, but presumably by that point Libya’s dictator was already clearly on his way out (a fate he might have avoided if he had done what Baron Cohen’s Aladeen does: in order to avert a possible future Arab Spring uprising, he has all of the spring months removed from the national calendar).  (See my blog article on conflict in post-Qaddafi Libya.)

The original Aladeen?

But, still, one doesn’t want any actual dictator deciding that he is the model for Aladeen and taking appropriate Lockerbie-esque or Salman-Rushdie-fatwa-esque action in retaliation.  So Baron Cohen has shifted his fictional country into a zone where hardly any government functions at all, Somalia.  Perhaps coincidentally, Azawad, which resembles Wadiya somewhat in name (see my recent blog article discussing the name Azawad), was founded during The Dictator’s post-production, though the name Wadiya also somewhat resembles Awdal, a self-governing pseudo-state in extreme northwestern Somalia (i.e. Somaliland).  (See my recent blog article on the fragmentation of Somalia.)

The actual mess that is “Somalia” today (at least as of a few months ago; it skips a few recently created statelets).

Neither Sacha Baron Cohen nor Evelyn Waugh could have made this up.

Situating Wadiya in the Horn of Africa also fits with the film’s portrayal of Aladeen and the Wadiyans as neither Arab nor really black African either—though there are hardly examples of Somali demagogues quite as colorful as, say, Qaddafi, Egypt’s King Farouk, or the Central African Republic’s Bokassa.  (Ethiopia’s Emperor Haile Selassie is a possible inspiration, however.)  In choosing the Horn region, Baron Cohen is also following in the tradition of Evelyn Waugh, whose darkly comic novels Black Mischief (1932) and Scoop (1935), which set the high-water mark for satirizing third-world inefficiency and venality, were set in fictional East African or Horn of Africa nations called, respectively, Azania and Ishmaelia.  (Azania has since then been suggested as a name for post-apartheid South Africa, for the aspirant state which was eventually named the Republic of South Sudan, and for the self-governing Somali state in the far south more often called Jubaland or, sometimes, Greenland (itself a confusingly unoriginal name, but let’s not digress too much).)  Waugh knew the Horn, having worked as a journalist in Ethiopia, covering the Second Italo-Abyssinian War.  The chances that Baron Cohen is not a Waugh fan are approximately nil.

The frontispiece and title page for the first edition of Black Mischief, including “Azania”

John Updike’s brilliant comic novel The Coup (1978), however, shifts the geographically unspecified action a bit to the southwest, Congo-ward, in the countries of Kush and Zanj, though a neighboring country referred to as Sahel perhaps suggests more proximity to the Horn—and the original, ancient Kingdom of Kush is approximately where the Republic of Sudan is now.  And readers of Marvel Comics may be aware that the superhero known as the Black Panther is actually a prince from the Kingdom of Wakanda, situated more or less in the part of Ethiopia wishing to split off as Oromia, in the Horn of Africa region.  (See my blog article on separatism in Ethiopia.)

Map showing location of Wakanda, home of the superhero the Black Panther.

Just out of shot, not far from Waugh’s Azania, is the island nation of Genosha, where mutants are kept as slaves.

(Boy, they were asking for it when they tried to enslave Wolverine, though.  I know, right?)

But perhaps Baron Cohen has not entirely escaped something like the barrage of lawsuits and diplomatic kerfuffles that followed upon Borat.  It seems possible that some African dictator—or, just as likely, some “non-state actor,” as the jargon has it—may decide that Wadiya bears a little too close a resemblance to a real country, or aspirant country, or deranged demagogue.  Qaddafi is safely in his grave, but I wouldn’t want to make any enemies among Ansar al-Dine or the Polisario Front or Boko Haram.  Their tentacles are everywhere.

Borat’s family tree.  Just because.

In the meantime, the Republic of Wadiya website’s Tourism page invites us to visit Wadiya and see for ourselves.  Attractions include the Wadiyan State Zoo (“including pandas, white tigers, and Amnesty International officials”) and the Wadiyan Museum of Tolerance (“Open daily from 9 to 5; Women, Jews, and disabled not allowed”).

The flag of the Republic of Wadiya

[You can read about many 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.]

Why It Matters What You Call Your Country: Cyprus vs. Northern Cyprus, Azawad vs. THE Azawad

Last month in this space I reported on the Alice in Wonderland world of Balkan politics in an article titled “Balkan Semantics: How Kosovo Dropped Two Words and Serbia Gained Europe”—describing how an agreement to let the Republic of Serbia’s diplomats refer to the Republic of Kosovo as simply Kosovo, without the words Republic and of, was sufficient to clear a decade-old political logjam over the status of the secessionist province sufficiently to smooth the way for Serbia’s eventual admission to the European Union (E.U.).  But, although southeastern Europe provides some of the more colorful examples of onomastic pettiness in international diplomacy (cf. Macedonia, Former Yugoslav Republic of), there are many parts of the world where it genuinely matters what a country is called, even, or especially, down to the little words.

In July of last year (2011), Sudan was partitioned and, after a protracted search for a name for the newly born southern state, colorful names like Jubaland and Azania were rejected in favor of the more dour and familiar Republic of South Sudan—a name which, if one thinks about it, sort of makes it sound as though the new country formed by the south’s secession is indeed simply a subsection of the very country (the Republic of Sudan) the separatists spent decades of war and spilt millions of gallons blood to separate from.  Shortly afterwards, the government in what was left of the Republic of Sudan, no longer saddled with a large non-Muslim population, let its hair down and further tarnished its own brand in Western eyes by renaming its ruling party Hezbollah, using the same name as the Iranian-sponsored jihadist terrorist organization based in southern Lebanon.  If all of that doesn’t sound a bit Balkan, I don’t know what does.

The flag of the Republic of South Sudan, being waved on their independence day last year

More recently, media are reporting this week that the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, a Turkish Republic puppet state which administers the northern third of the island of Cyprus, will drop the word Northern from its name unless the decades-old conflict over the partition of Cyprus is not resolved by July 1st.  That is the date when the Republic of Cyprus, the ethnically-Greek-dominated southern two-thirds of the island, takes over the rotating presidency of the E.U.  The whole island of Cyprus was a colony of the United Kingdom from the First World War till the 1950s, when, just as other British possessions in the region were easing toward independence, an organization called the National Organisation of Cypriot Fighters, or EOKA, representing the ethnically Greek majority on the island, began pushing for enosis, or union, with Greece.  Instead, in 1960, an independent Republic of Cyprus was established, with constitutional protections for the 18% Turkish minority in the north of the island.  But this was not enough for the Turkish government (see a recent blog article of mine outlining the number that Turkish nationalists pulled on the State of Hatay in the 1930s): in 1974, the Turkish military, taking advantage of a coup d’état in Cyprus’s capital, Nicosia, invaded the island and established the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, a puppet state which not even Turkey itself will take the formal step of recognizing.  (Northern Cyprus, as it tends to be called for short, is recognized, among sovereign states, only by the largely unrecognized Russian puppet states of Abkhazia and South Ossetia.)  For decades the U.K., and now the United Nations, have had to maintain a continuous peacekeeping presence just to keep Greece and Turkey from all-out war.  This stalemate is a surprisingly enduring one. It survives Turkey and Greece’s shared membership in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, and the European Union even managed to ignore—when it admitted Cyprus as a member state in 2004 and even let it join the Euro Zone—that it did not even administer all of its territory.  (It’s also, like nearly all of Turkey, in Asia, not Europe, but never mind that.)

A Turkish map of the island of Cyprus

Northern Cyprus’s threatened name change would partially correct an onomastic imbalance, whereby the name Republic of Cyprus implies a claim over the entire island—and indeed the E.U. and most of the rest of the world asserts that the Republic of Cyprus is the legitimate government of the entire island.  Presumably, the new name would constitute a more aggressive stance by implying a claim over the entire island.  However, it’s not clear that the E.U. will either mind or notice.  Turkey is threatening to take its ball and go stwaight home, but no one seems interested in playing its game anyway.

Other possibilities for a new name are being floated by Northern Cyprus’s president, Dr. Derviş Eroğlu, including Northern Cyprus Turkish State and Northern Turkish State (which would make it sound like it’s on the Black Sea, but never mind).  Not mentioned was Turkish Cypriot State, a name first floated in 2004 by Kofi Annan, at the time the U.N.’s Secretary-General, as part of his never-adopted Cyprus Plan.  It envisioned a United Cyprus Republic consisting of a Turkish Cypriot State and a Greek Cypriot State, very much along the lines of the 1995 Dayton Accords which nominally united a Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina consisting of two mostly sovereign entities called the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina (governed by Croats and Bosniaks) and Republika Srpska (governed by Serbs).  Turkish Cypriot State is also the name under which Northern Cyprus sits as a member state in the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (O.I.C.)—it having been upgraded from observer status after Cyprus’s accession to the E.U., in 2004.  That wording seemed to suit the O.I.C. as sufficiently vague on the question of its level of independence.  Once again, as with Kosovo, the words Republic of seem to scare people.  (Other entities with O.I.C. observer status include Bosnia and Herzegovina, the Russian Federation, the Central African Republic, the Kingdom of Thailand, and the Moro National Liberation Front (whose inclusion prevents the Philippines from becoming a member state, or even observer).)

Flag of the Organization for Islamic Cooperation

Northern Cyprus’s geopolitical position and its level of diplomatic recognition is also a unique situation in the shadow world of pseudo-states.  Aside from Turkey itself (and, please, skip this paragraph if you’re not interested in a digression on the relationship between Caucasian and Cypriot geopolitics), only one entity (that I know of) recognizes Northern Cyprus as sovereign: the Autonomous Republic of Nakhchivan (a.k.a. Nakhichevan), which is today part of the Republic of Azerbaijan but had a brief flirtation with independence just after the fall of Communism.  In fact, it has the distinction of being the first territory to secede from the Soviet Union, beating Lithuania’s declaration of independence in 1990 by a matter of some days.  Oddly enough, Azerbaijan itself—which is Turkey’s geographically closest fellow Turkic-speaking nation—has never recognized Northern Cyprus.  This is mostly, of course, because of Nagorno-Karabakh, the unrecognized but self-governing Armenian puppet state which was carved out of Azerbaijan’s western flank by a bloody war in the early 1990s.  Nagorno-Karabakh is the one issue on which all Azerbaijani foreign policy pivots.  Pan-Turkic solidarity does not trump it, and Turkey’s aggression in Cyprus too much resembles Armenia’s in Nagorno-Karabakh for Azeris to be able to stomach recognizing Northern Cyprus; it would also open them up to charges of hypocrisy by Armenia and by the United States’ Armenia lobby.  Nakhchivan is another matter, however: an exclave of Azerbaijan, cut off from the rest of the country by Armenia’s southern arm, Nakhchivan was economically choked by Armenia during the Nagorno-Karabakh fighting that began even before the Soviet Union dissolved.  The Turkish government threatened to declare war on Armenia if it tried to occupy Nakhchivan the way it had Nagorno-Karabakh.  This, more than anything else, kept Nakhchivan out of the war.  Currently it remains under Azeri control, and no longer claims independence (Turkey is tacitly ensuring its safety), though a portion at the far north has remained under Armenia’s control.  So Nakhchivan needs Turkey, though Azerbaijan has reasons to feel betrayed by Turkey’s unwillingness to engage in all-out war to keep Nagorno-Karabakh out of Armenian hands.)

The official seal of the City of Nakhchivan, in the Autonomous Republic of Nakhchivan.

Yes, that’s Noah’s Ark.

But the flap over Northern Cyprus’s name is not the only naming muddle in recent news.  The other happened with much less fanfare.  The world’s newest country—and one unlikely ever to be internationally recognized in its current form—the Independent State of Azawad, declared its independence from the Republic of Mali on April 6th, but at the time it did so as the Islamic Republic of Azawad.  That turned out to be a mistake, since the state had been declared by Tuareg militias left over from Libya’s civil war, but largely with the help of the firepower of an al-Qaeda-affiliated Islamist militia called Ansar Dine.  This was not supposed to be noticed, but it became the one fact that nearly every major foreign ministry mentioned prominently in explaining why it would not dream of recognizing Azawad as sovereign.  The words Islamic Republic of were giving Azawadis a branding problem.  So they quietly became the Independent State of Azawad.  Dropping the word Islamic would keep the West from getting nervous, and dropping Republic of—as Northern Cyprus and Kosovo have learned—helps take the edge off of a declaration of independence when it comes to international diplomacy.  But it was too late.  I will be surprised if the international community allows Azawad to survive for even a year.

In early reports in this blog on the Azawad rebellion, I referred to the country as the Islamic Republic of Azawad, even after the name change, since it had happened so quietly. Also, in early blog postings, I called it the Islamic Republic of the Azawad.  Most English-language media now seem to be saying just Azawad, not the Azawad.  The question is in one sense moot, since in French, the former colonial language of Mali, still used as a language of administration, the country is called l’État Indépendant de l’Azawad.  In French (as in many other continental European languages), all countries are given a definite article—some masculine, some feminine.  So why were some sources translating—and why are some still translating—this into English as the Azawad?  No one says the Germany or the France, after all.  Well, there is a practice, in African countries, of sometimes using the definite article, in English, before the main name of the country.  The Republic of Sudan used to be called the Republic of the Sudan, and the Republic of the Gambia, still uses its the, to say nothing of the misnamed Democratic Republic of the Congo, not to be confused with the Republic of the Congo.  In the case of Gambia and Congo, these are rivers, and that follows the common practice of calling rivers in English the (So-and-So) River.  (Think also of the Confederation of the Rhine etc.)  Gambia, then, describes not the land territory but, more properly, the river around which the republic is oriented.  (This approach is helpful in post-colonial Africa, where several ethnic groups often share one “nation”; geographical features are more neutral than ethnonyms.)  You can also see this pattern in places like the Yukon Territory and the Klondike region—districts overtly associated with their primary rivers and oriented around them in a way that places like Mississippi, Missouri, and Ohio (note, the State of Mississippi, not the State of the Mississippi, etc.)—whose eponymous rivers they merely border, sometimes only glancingly, rather than being formed more recently all around them—are not.  The Sudan, on the other hand, like the Sahel and the Azawad, was a geographical descriptor long before it was a country name.  The Sudan was the area of the southern Sahara called, by Arabs, “the land of the blacks”—straight across the continent, west to east, not at all restricted to what is now Sudan and South Sudan.  In fact, South Sudan is not really part of the Sudan at all—yet another reason it is, if I may be so blunt, a stupid name for their country.  The phrase the Azawagh—which inspired the name of the new Independent State of (the) Azawad—refers to a dry basin in the western Saharan and Sahelian regions, defined originally geographically and not just in its current usage as the places where Tuaregs live, in Mali, Algeria, Burkina Faso, and Niger.

Of other countries that use the before their chief name (I’m not counting places which feature a the merely by virtue of being prefixed with the Kingdom of or the Republic of), at least one, the Kingdom of the Netherlands, retains it because the name means literally the lowlands (hence, the Low Countries, which also technically include Belgium and Luxembourg); it is a transparent geographical descripter like the Sahel.  (The Dutch have also given the English language definite-article-laden geographically-descriptive toponyms like the Hague—den Haag or ’s-Gravenhage, literally “the count’s wood”—and the Bronx, named for the Bronx River which was in turn named for the 17th-century Dutch-American settler Jonas Bronck. Why we don’t say the Brooklyn (from the Dutch for “the broken-up land”) or the Flatbush (from de vlacke bos) is a question I leave to the philologists.)

But most “the” countries are island chains, such as the Republic of the Philippines and the Republic of the Marshall Islands (one could also add St. Vincent and the Grenadines).  The Seychelles and the Maldives, however, have dropped their definite articles and are now the Republic of Seychelles and the Republic of Maldives.  In the case of the Seychelles, I can conjecture that this is because the republic’s main language is a French-based creole language called Seychellois, which lacks a definite article.  Actually, Seychellois has vestiges of the French definite article but not as a morpheme, only as some variation on the l sound absorbed into the beginning of the word.  So lezyel is the Seychellois word for “sky,” based on French le ciel, but it is a single word meaning simply “sky.”  “The islands” is lezil, from French les îles.  (This process can be found in other French creoles, which is why the Louisiana folk music called zydeco derives from saying les haricots—the beans—in a Southern U.S. accent.  The “L” section in French creole dictionaries tend to be half the book.)  So the name for the Republic of the Seychelles in Seychellois is Ripiblik Sesel, not the Ripiblik Sesel or le Ripiblik Sesel.  I’m not sure why it isn’t Liripiblik Sesel, though.  Hence, the Republic of Seychelles.

The coat of arms of the Republic of Seychelles

Similarly, Slavic languages tend to lack articles (as can be noticed in the mistakes made by English-speakers whose first language is Russian), so one would think it would be no difference whether the country which calls itself Ukrayina is referred to in English as the Ukraine or as Ukraine.  But to Ukrainians it matters a lot, which is why the people that consented through the years of Soviet rule to being called, in English, the Ukraine, asked the world to call them simply Ukraine.  (Also, it is simply Ukraine, not the Republic of Ukraine—though it is a republic—which makes the lack of a definite article harder to notice at first on official insignia.)  But why?  Well, partly it is because Ukraine derives from an old word meaning “borderlands,” which implies, if not outright states, that the country is in fact just the fringe or edge of the more important and central land of Russia.  (Some Ukrainian nationalists have tried to concoct alternative etymologies, but I leave negotiating such controversies to the Slavicists.)  In English, putting in the the emphasizes the noun-ness and thing-ness of the name and not its arbitrary designation as a proper name.  The the reminds goads people into asking “the borderlands of what?”, so it was dropped.

The flag of the Ukraine—oops, I mean, Ukraine.

Interestingly, a cognate word in Serbian provides the name for the Serbian Republic of Krajina (Republika Srpska Krajina), which existed as a de facto self-governing puppet state of the Republic of Serbia, consisting of those parts of Croatia, mostly in eastern Slavonia and along the rim of Bosnia, under the control of Serb militias during the Bosnian and Croatian wars in the early 1990s.  It was just as often referred to in English as the Krajina.  But then again, the Krajina, unlike Ukraine, never minded being the borderland; its ultimate goal was always reunification with Serbia.

The Azawadis will have time to think about these precedents and decide whether the way the Tuaregs’ Tamashek language is translated into Arabic and French and how that comes across in English either recommends or does not recommend retaining the in its name.  As of this writing, Mauritania, Burkina Faso, Côte d’Ivoire, and other neighbors are contemplating a joint invasion to return to the region to Malian rule.  So they’d better figure it out fast.

[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.]