Donetsk Rebels’ “Novorossiya” Fits Russian Vision of Reshaped Europe in 2035

Ultranationalist demands by ethnic Russians and their supporters in eastern Ukraine have now shifted from talk of Crimea or the Donetsk People’s Republic and are now focussing on creating a larger entity to be carved out of southern and eastern Ukraine to be called Novorossiya, or “New Russia,” using Czarist Russia’s name for the region.  The most high-profile proponent of the idea is Pavel Gubarev, the imprisoned “people’s governor” of Donetsk, whose covertly-Kremlin-backed government-building takeover in that southeastern oblast (provincial) capital last month sparked the uprising and military confrontation in the region.  From prison in Kyiv, Ukraine’s capital, last week, Gubarev said that “we”—i.e. the Donetsk People’s Republic, which he considers already independent—“want to join the new federative State of Novorossiya, which will build its own relations with the Customs Union of Russia, Belarus and Kazakhstan in the future.”  The leadership of the neighboring “Lugansk People’s Republic” plans to join the Donetsk republic in holding the May 11th vote.  He added that plans were underway—as other Russian-backed rebels have said also—to hold an independence referendum on May 11th in Ukraine’s rebel-held regions.  (Gubarev’s wife, Yekaterina Gubareva, the self-proclaimed Donetsk republic’s “foreign minister,” has since then announced that her husband is on hunger strike to protest the Ukrainian military’s offensive on the northern Donetsk Oblast city Slovyansk.)

Yekaterina Gubareva, foreign minister and first lady of the “Donetsk People’s Republic”

But there is nothing “new” about Russian nationalist dreams of a “New Russia” carved out of Ukraine. Nationalism- and separatism-watchers in Europe were abuzz in late 2012 and early 2013 over a high-level report by Russian security and policy experts on what Europe’s borders would probably look like in 2035.  The accompanying maps offer an unsettling insight into Russian ultranationalists’ hopes and fears—but also, as is now becoming clear, their plans.  The Russians apparently based the projection on Central Intelligence Agency (C.I.A.) and other United States and Russian intelligence sources as well as the writings of American geopolitical experts like Zbigniew Brzezinski (President Jimmy Carter’s Polish-born national-security advisor) and Samuel Huntington (the xenophobic neo-conservative political scientist who wrote Clash of Civilizations).

A pro-independence demonstrator in Catalonia.
Madrid says “don’t hold your breath,” but Moscow thinks she’s got it in the bag.

In 2035 in western Europe, the report envisions, quite feasibly (see map below), independent republics in Scotland, Catalonia, the Basque Country, northern Italy, and even Corsica, Sardinia, and Sicily.  Less feasibly, a reunified Ireland will become closer to Scotland than the rump United Kingdom is.  Southeastern France’s Provence region is to have become an Arab republic—something that presumably Marine Le Pen will not take lying down.  But in the Russian view this is how the French government will solve the inevitable “multicultural collapse”—by picking a region and sticking all the unassimilable Muslims there.

It takes no expert to suggest that Belgium might divide—it is practically two states already—though it is a stretch to think, as Russia’s expert prophets do, that Flanders will join the Netherlands in a “Holland Union” while Wallonia becomes a tiny land-locked state and Alsace–Lorraine confederates with Germany as something called simply “Lorraine.”  The experts here underestimate not only Alsatian pride but Germany’s appetite for expansion—after all, they already control Europe financially, so why change the map?  Equally comical is the suggestion that Germany will retake Silesia, Pomerania, and East Prussia from Poland—and, incidentally, from Russia’s Kaliningrad Oblast exclave.  Don’t these Russian “experts” realize that no Germans live there anymore?

The Russian map of 2035 in the Balkans (see map above) likewise reeks of Russia’s preoccupation with U.S. and North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) hidden agendas in the Wars of Yugoslav Succession—especially the Kosovo War, in which Russia resolutely sided—and still does—with Serb nationalists who saw it as a Trojan horse for some sort of Islamization of Europe.  The 2035 map’s whittled-down Serbia feeds the shared Serb and Russian ultranationalist feeling that the West has been cruelling paring down these once-mighty Slavic nations: Albania has swallowed up western Macedonia, Kosovo, and a juicy slice of southern Serbia proper (in reality, Kosovar and Albanian nationalists do indeed openly plan for a united “Greater Albania” within the European Union); Hungary now extends into western Romania’s Transylvania region as well as Serbia’s Vojvodina province; and the disappearance of Bosnia and Herzegovina as an independent state has, quite unrealistically, only meant its near-complete absorption into Croatia, including presumably subject Serbs in the former Bosnian subdivision of Republika Srpska.  (Poor maligned Serbia doesn’t even manage to pull Montenegro back into its orbit.)  Turkey and its bloodthirsty Saracens have also, apparently, by 2035 retaken the Rumelian and Pomak areas in the southeast of proud Slavic Bulgaria.

It is once we get to the former Soviet Union itself (see map below) that things really get wonky.  First of all, the Russian experts see an independent Carpathian Ruthenia emerging from Ukraine’s Zakarpattia (Transcarpathia) oblast.  This is the region—formerly the eastern tail of Czechoslovakia, where Slavic-speaking Ruthenians (Rusyns) are far outnumbered by ethnic Ukrainians—where alleged Kremlin provocateurs staged a declaration of independence in 2008 which came to nothing.  Today, pro-Russian nationalists in Ukraine are envisioning a “Transcarpathian People’s Republic,” though the oblast is so far, in 2014, quiet.  Romania, in 2035, will supposedly have swallowed up nearly all of Moldova, except for the tiny sliver of Bessarabia—i.e., the current Russian puppet state of Pridnestrovia (a.k.a. Transnistria, a.k.a. Transdniestria)—which the Russian geopolitical visionaries see absorbed into the Russian Federation along with Crimea (that part, in 2014, is a done deal) and the south and eastern region of Novorossiya and Donbas (those are, today (April 26, 2014), works in progress).

But not even all that’s left of Ukraine gets to be Ukraine, according to the Russian experts.  They see, by 2035, in what is today far-western Ukraine, an independent Galicia (Halychyna, in Ukrainian—no relation to the Galicia in northwestern Spain), with its capital at Lviv.  This Galician state even takes in part of southeastern Poland, while Romania has also taken Bukovina, also in Ukraine’s west (i.e., Chernivtsi oblast, where the population today is about 20% Moldavian (Romanian).  It seems odd for Russian nationalists to claim on the one hand that Ukrainian national identity is only some post–Cold War figment invented by the West but then assume that a “Galician” national identity (which in the real world barely exists at all) is strong enough to snatch away NATO (Polish) territory with such ease.

Galicia (Halychyna) was its own kingdom briefly during the First World War,
but today’s Galicians mostly want to be in a united Ukraine.

Belarus as an independent state has vanished in the 2035 map, becoming just a big Russian oblast, which actually does seem fairly likely.  Belarus is barely even independent today.  Belarussians never had as strong a national identity as Ukrainians and would never have asked for independence on their own if they hadn’t been handed it on a platter in 1991.  Much less plausibly, eastern Latvia, including its ethnic-Russian-dominated second city, Dagauvpils, has become a Russian oblast called Dvinskaya (Dvinsk is the city’s name in Russian), while Estonia’s northeast, including the Russian-speaking city of Narva, is not even an oblast; it is a raion (district) within Russia called Narvskiya.  Apparently, Russians doubt how seriously NATO takes its mutual-defense pact with the Baltic states.  In reality, a Russian invasion would put President Vladimir Putin on an immediate war footing with three nuclear powers (the U.S., France, and the U.K.), so he will probably leave the Baltics alone, at least territorially (economic blockades and punishments are another matter).

These Belarussians, shown at an independence-day rally last month in Minsk,
stand with Ukraine in its conflict with Russia.  But, in Belarus, they are a minority.

In the Caucasus, there is a mixture of hope and fear as well.  Dagestan, Chechnya, and Ingushetia have become split away as the Caucasus Emirate, which is the name that an ongoing Islamist insurgency does indeed want to plaster over the whole north Caucasus.  The Russian puppet state of Abkhazia has been absorbed into Russia, but its sister republic within internationally recognized Georgian borders, South Ossetia, is returned to Georgia as a consolation prize.  The reverse, to my mind, has more logic to it: in reality, Ossetes seem to feel far more Russian than Abkhaz do, and the dispossession and expulsion of ethnic Georgians in Abkhazia has been more extreme.  Plus, just think: annexing South Ossetia puts Josef Stalin’s home town of Gori, in Georgia proper, close enough to recapture as well!  How could they pass that up?

The Caucasus Emirate terrorist group’s map is slightly different.

It is no surprise that Azerbaijan’s Nagorno-Karabakh and Lachin regions are shown (again, see map no. 3 above) as part of Armenia in the Russians’ map of 2035; those areas are already the unrecognized Armenian puppet state of Artsakh (a.k.a. Nagorno-Karabakh Republic).  Russia has indeed been increasingly building ties with Armenia and making Armenia’s expansionist agenda an ancillary cause to its own Slavic blood-and-soil nationalism.  But a big conundrum for Russian nationalists today is how to fully incorporate Armenia into the Russian geopolitical backyard.  Today, Armenia is slated to join Putin’s envisioned Belarussian–Kazakh–Russian “Eurasian Union” trade bloc—the same one that Ukraine was almost bullied into joining last year, which is how the whole Ukraine crisis erupted in the first place.  But Armenia–Artsakh is currently nearly entirely surrounded by Turkey, Azerbaijan, and Georgia, all of them Western-aligned states (Turkey is even in NATO).  The only Russian-allied state bordering Armenia is Iran, but that is a circuitous supply route for a geostrategic partner; plus, Iranians and Armenians regard each other far, far more warily than their shared alliance with Russia would otherwise suggest.  So the solution, in this 2035 map, is a “transport corridor” that bisects Georgia, running from the Russian–Georgian border ’round about Ossetia to northern Armenia.  The coloration on the map implies that Georgia will remain united but become territorially discontinuous, divided into “Western Georgia” and “Kakhetia.”

Russia would like to draw the Artsakh Republic into its sphere of influence.
But why stop there?  Next: Legoland!

One modification missed in the 2035 map is the question of the Armenian minority in the southern Georgian region of Javakhk.  Already, since earlier this year, the Russian consulate has been distributing Russian passports to ethnic Armenians there, which is the kind of thing that was a precursor to the Russian takeovers in Abkhazia, South Ossetia, and Crimea.  An Armenian-annexed Javakhk would shorten the necessary “transport corridor.”  On the downside for the Kremlin would be the complication that Javakhk is only the eastern part of Georgia’s Samtkhe–Javakheti province; the western part is Meskhetia, a.k.a. Moschia, whose indigenous Meskhetian Turks were deported eastward by Stalin during the same campaign of ethnic cleansing in the 1930s that shipped Chechens, Crimean Tatars, and others to Siberia and Central Asia as well.  Like the Crimean Tatars, Meskhetian Turks were not allowed to return during the repatriations of Nikita Khrushchev’s de-Stalinization policies, though, like Crimean Tatars, they trickled back in the post-Soviet era.  Any realization of Javakhki irredentist aspirations could reawaken Meskhetian grievances.  Then again, Putin seems to have made an art of “rehabilitating” the Crimean Tatars as an official national minority while still cracking down on their political leadership, so perhaps the Armenian government could learn to perform that dance with its own Turkic minority.  Armenians are quick learners, and their government seems eager to make them solid citizens, as a junior nationality, in Putin’s neo-Czarist Russian empire.  When it comes to shitting all over Muslims, Armenian nationalists have shown an eagerness to learn from the best.

“Greater Armenia” in the Armenian—and maybe also Russian—imagination

Now, it is important to take predictions a quarter-century out with a grain of salt, even when they come from intelligence sources.  After all, the C.I.A. had agents and bureaus in every Arab capital in 2011, and nobody saw the Arab Spring coming.  The way to read these Russian maps is not as a true vision of the future but as a map to the Russian ultranationalist mentality with its hopes, fears, and—as I mentioned above—perhaps its plans.  Be warned: this is not the future, but it is a peek into the madness swirling inside the brains of the Kremlin’s strategists.

The Donetsk People’s Republic’s Yekaterina Gubareva whips out her foreign-policy agenda.

[You can read more about these 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.]

Members of the Ukrainian feminist political collective Femen demonstrating against Russia outside the Ukrainian peace talks in Geneva, Switzerland, on April 17th.

Right-Wing English Separatists Declare “Precious” Cornish Nationalism “Dead”

The idea of a national identity for the people of Cornwall, England’s southwesternmost point and the most obscure of the Celtic nations, is “dead,” according to the chairman of the English Democrats political party.

Robin Tilbrook

The party’s chairman, Robin Tilbrook, was exulting over recently-released census data which show depressed figures for those identifying themselves as ethnically or nationally “Cornish.”  He added, “The census figures show that not many people are precious about declaring themselves as Cornish.  There’s at least five times more people for English nationalism than Cornish.”  Only 14% of Cornwall residents in the 2011 census indicated Cornish as their national identity—though that is a more impressive figure when one considers that Cornish was not one of the printed choices and that those 73,200 people Cornish nationals were all write-ins.  Moreover, Cornwall has one of the highest rates of immigration from other parts of the United Kingdom among England’s counties, and nearly 5% of the population is from immigrant ethnic groups.  Given that, the true figures for those thinking of themselves as Cornish first may give greater cause for English Democrat worries.

The English Democrats were founded in the late 1990s (as the English National Party) in response to devolution of powers to Scotland and Wales.  On the face of it, they are a devolutionist and Eurosceptical movement favoring removal of England from the European Union and of course from the U.K.  But its true motives are less savory: English Democrats regularly march in white-supremacist rallies alongside National Front neo-fascists, and the movement is part of a broader movement of Continental European right-wing extremist groups such as Serbia’s neo-Nazi Obraz movement, the affiliated Russky Obraz in Russia (which the English Democrats publicly support), the New Right (Noua Dreaptă) hate group in Romania, and even Golden Dawn, the violent, high-profile fascist party in Greece whose leaders and M.P.s have recently been rounded up by the Greek government.*

Coming to a Skinhead rally near you

The English Democrats have no seated legislators and have recently lost ground to the more centrist (but still plenty right of center) United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP), which aims to remove the entire U.K. from the E.U. and currently seats three parliamentarians in the House of Lords and nine in the European Parliament’s U.K. delegation in Strasbourg.  So the English Democrats are floundering for an edge in the polls.  Picking on the Cornish seems especially pathetic and bullying, but that sort of image problem has never bothered them before.

Cornwall has a peculiar status within England.  The only English county known formally as the Duchy of ..., rather than County of ..., this does not actually translate to any kind of autonomy.  It is semantic merely, like Pennsylvania’s designation as a “Commonwealth” or Quebec’s parliament being called a “National,” rather than provincial, assembly.  But it is also the constituent part of England with the most recent experience with sovereignty.  King Edward III unilaterally annexed to England the previously independent Duchy of Cornwall in 1337 and designated his son Edward, the “Black Prince,” as Duke of Cornwall.  Since then, that title has been reserved for the first in line to the throne, alongside the title Prince of Wales.  Today’s Prince of Wales, Charles, is thus Duke of Cornwall as well.  His specific royal prerogatives include silly medieval stuff like the right to all shipwrecks that wash ashore on Cornwall’s beaches or any porpoises “or other royalle Fishes” caught in Cornish waters, but also more serious assets such as over 540 square kilometers of productive land in and around Cornwall, including enough lucrative farmland to support his lavish lifestyle without dipping into other royal coffers.  Cornwall is really Charles’s personal royal fief—and is one day to be Prince William’s.

The current Duke of Cornwall is ready to claw the county back if necessary.

That is, unless the nationalist Party for Cornwall (Mebyon Kernow, or M.K.) has anything to say about it.  They argue that the original ducal line, and the Cornish sovereignty it embodied, were never formally extinguished.  In 2003, a non-binding referendum showed 55% favored a devolved legislature for the duchy.  Others favor being made a full constituent “country” of the U.K., like England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland, or a quasi-independent “Crown Dependency” like Jersey, Guernsey, and the Isle of Man.  Still others, like the sometimes violent Cornish Nationalist Party, back full independence.

Cornwall is, along with Brittany across the water in France, one of the only two of the seven (as they are sometimes defined) Celtic nations to lack any home rule.  (Ireland is independent—most of it, anyway—while Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland, the Isle of Man, and Spain’s region of Galicia all have powerful regional parliaments, and Scotland is voting on independence next year.)  The Cornish language went more or less extinct in the 19th century, by some reckonings, but recently it has been brought somewhat back to life by schooling elders who had dimly remembered passive knowledge of it up to proficiency, with the help of younger speakers of the more-healthy, mutually-intelligible Breton language in northwest France.

Cornish nationalists reacted strongly to Tilbrook’s death certificate, with one local leader, Wendron Loveday Jenkin, saying, “Most Cornish people define themselves as Cornish and British but not English, and many non-Cornish people living in Cornwall would recognise Cornwall as a land apart, a duchy and a distinct region, if not a nation.  A significant number of people have voted for Mebyon Kernow and more than 50,000 have called for Cornwall to have its own assembly to run its own affairs.”  And even this does not include the even greater popularity in the county of the Liberal Democratic Party, now the U.K.’s ruling junior coalition partner, which champions Cornish autonomy.

Indeed, the English Democrats and M.K. are a study in contrasts.  Like the separatist movements in Scotland, Wales, Brittany, and Galicia and Ireland’s Sinn Féin, Cornish nationalists are considerably left of center.  Galician separatism even includes a Communist component (though there are, to be far, smaller far-right Scottish and Welsh nationalist movements).  The English Democrats, however, have more affinity with far-right separatist groups on the Continent, nearly all of them from the more prosperous parts of their countries, like northern Italy’s Lega Nord (Northern League), Belgium’s Flemish nationalists, and the fascist-tinged Norman Movement in northeastern France.

But Lega Nord, for all its racist anti-immigrant bluster, does champion the rights of linguistic minorities such as Provençal and Swiss-German speakers in Italy’s northwestern Alpine fringes, and the Friulian, Ladin, and South Tyrolean peoples in the northeast along the border with Austria.  The English Democrats, by contrast, are as intolerant of indigenous diversity as they are of immigrants.  They hate anything that spoils the picture of an English unitary state and are even cold to movements to establish devolved parliaments for the Wessex and Yorkshire regions.

With high hopes for referenda on Scotland and Catalonia next year and rising nationalism in Wales, Cornish national identity may in fact be on the upswing.  It is the English Democrats who may be headed for the dustbin of history.  Good thing, too.

*Note: This article includes a revision of the original version, which featured a statement to the effect that the English Democrats were formally allied with the extremist groups listed in the third paragraph.  See comments below for the discussion.  Thank you to all readers who provide feedback, clarifications, and corrections.



[For those who are wondering, yes, this blog is tied in with my new book, a sort of encyclopedic atlas just published by Litwin Books under the title Let’s Split! A Complete Guide to Separatist Movements and Aspirant Nations, from Abkhazia to Zanzibar.  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.]

Basques Elect Separatists, Catalans Appeal to E.U. Fearing Civil War, Juan Carlos’s Paternity Suits: Spanish Separatism Update, 21-27 October 2012

Rajoy’s Party Keeps Power in Galicia, but Separatists Surge in Basque Country.  Elections to two regional autonomous parliaments within the Kingdom of Spain on October 21st provided good news and bad news for Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy Brey, whose austerity measures in the face of the European financial crisis has already pushed one autonomous region, Catalonia, to the brink of secession.  In Galicia, Rajoy’s home region, in the northwest, his ruling People’s Party (P.P.) retained power, with 41 out 75 seats in the Galician parliament, but in the Basque Country, in north-central Spain, a new separatist coalition called Euskal Herria Bildu (E.H.B.) (translated as “Basque Country Gather” (is that an imperative, or a bad translation?)) has come in second behind the gradualist but still pro-independence Basque Nationalist Party (E.A.J.).  E.H.B., with a quarter of the votes, now controls 21 of the Basque parliament’s 75 seats, while E.A.J. holds 27, putting separatists in the majority.  [Related article: “The World’s 21 Sexiest Separatists,” featuring a profile of the Basque warrior Idoia López Riaño, a.k.a. la Tigresa.]

... Meanwhile, Is the Real Heir to the Spanish Throne a Catalan Bastard?  Two courts in Spain this week rejected cases brought before them requesting permission to pursue paternity claims on the country’s monarch, King Juan Carlos I.  The two claimants are Alberto Solà Jiménez, a waiter from northeastern Spain, and Ingrid Sartiau, a housewife from Ghent, in Belgium.  (Ironically, both live in separatist regions—Catalonia and Flanders.)  Solà is adopted but claims evidence that his birth mother had an affair with Juan Carlos, while Sartiau says she was conceived in Luxembourg in 1966 in a rendezvous between her mother and the future king, during Francisco Franco’s dictatorship—and also—ahem!—during Juan Carlos’s marriage to the current Queen Sofía (also true of Solà’s conception).  Sartiau told reporters, “My mother told me who my father was while we were watching television.  An image of Juan Carlos flashed up and she said, ‘That man’s your father.’”  Genetic tests comparing the DNA of Solà and Sartiau concluded that there is a 91% chance they share one parent.  The royal family has not commented on the matter, but the court this week cited a Spanish constitutional provision that “The person of the King is inviolable, and not subject to responsibility.”  Solà is 56 years old and thus 12 years older than Juan Carlos’s only son, Felipe, Prince of Asturias, who is 44 years old and next in line to the throne.  But a paternity test could not knock Felipe down a rung in the line of succession: illegitimate children are barred from the throne.  Oh, well ... but there might be some money in it, no?

Sartiau and Solà: spawn of royal Spanish seed?

Catalan M.E.P.s Ask E.U. to Intervene If Spain Uses Force to Keep Catalonia Spanish.  Four members of the European Parliament (M.E.P.s) representing Catalonia wrote to Vivian Reding, European Commissioner for Justice, Fundamental Rights, and Citizenship, on October 22nd requesting European Union (E.U.) intervention should the Kingdom of Spain carry out threats to use military force if necessary to prevent a unilateral declaration of independence by Catalonia taking effect.  (Read the letter here.)  Rosa Díez González, a former centrist M.E.P. from the Basque Country called the letter an insult to Spanish democracy.

Spanish Police Nab Basque Police-Attack Suspect on French Extradition Order.  Police in Irún, in north-central Spain near the French border, on October 19th arrested a suspected member of the disarmed and mostly disbanded Basque separatist army ETA (Euskadi Ta Askatusana, “Basque Homeland and Freedom”), in accordance with a 1995 extradition order from France.  The suspect, José Ignacio Pérez Aramburu, was given a three-year prison sentence by a French court in absentia, for injuring several in a Molotov-cocktail attack on a police van.

ETA, in more militant times.  Love the berets, no?
One thing you have to say about Basque terrorists, they can accessorize.

[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.]

Catalans Must Decide: EU or Not EU? Unilateral or Negotiated? Include Valencia and Balearics?

As Catalan leaders plan a referendum in 2014 on independence from Spain, they are debating questions such as whether they ought to make a unilateral declaration of independence “à la Kosovo” and whether this would prevent Catalonia from seamlessly remaining in the European Union (E.U.) after a split.  The E.U.’s 2007 Lisbon Treaty clearly says it would, but it’s not clear that the Catalan president Arturo Mas’s plan for a referendum question asking, “Do you wish for Catalonia to become a new state of the European Union?” will get around that if Madrid refuses to play ball.  (See my blog article analyzing this question in detail with respect to Scotland.)

Moreover, media are reporting that some (perhaps most?) Catalonian separatists also envision the Autonomous Community of Valencia, the region to Catalonia’s south, as well as the Balearic Islands off the coast, as part of a “Greater Catalonia.”

The flag of Valencia

Valencia, the Balearics, and Aragon are three regions headed by Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy Brey’s People’s Party (P.P.) which have begun rebelling against austerity measures in the P.P.’s 2013 budget.  Valencia and Catalonia are Spain’s two most indebted regions, and prosperous, productive regions feeling that poorer, less productive Spanish regions are pushing them into indebtedness is the main economic factor fueling the secessionist crises in Spain.

Valencia, the Balearics, and Catalonia—along with Aragon, Andalusia, the Basque Country, the Canary Islands, and Galicia—are all constitutionally recognized as distinct “nationalities” within Spain, and Valencia and the Balearics are among those with their own devolved parliaments, like Catalonia’s.

There are differences of opinion as to whether Valencia and the Balearics are culturally and linguistically part of Catalonia: the Balearics use Catalan as an official language alongside Spanish, but the Valencians call their local official language Valencian, not Catalan, though the two are mutually intelligible.

The flag of the Balearic Islands

Separatist sentiment in Valencia, which was its own kingdom until 1707, has never been as strong as in Catalonia, the Basque Country, or Galicia, but Communists in the Balearics briefly agitated for independence in 1978 in the political disorganization following the dictator Francisco Franco’s death.

The flag of Galicia

Expect the exact boundaries of an independent Catalonia to be the source of conflict in the months ahead.  (At least Scotland has Hadrian’s Wall to keep things simple, eh?)

Basque graffiti.  (Boy, they sure make Catalonia look small in this map, don’t they?)

[For those who are wondering, yes, this blog is tied in with my forthcoming book, a sort of encyclopedic atlas to be published by Litwin Books under the title Let’s Split! A Complete Guide to Separatist Movements and Aspirant Nations, from Abkhazia to Zanzibar.  (That is shorter than the previous working title.)  The book, which contains 46 maps and 554 flags (or, more accurately, 554 flag images), will be on shelves and available on Amazon on March 1, 2015.  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 and see this special announcement for more information on the book.]

Catalonia to Hold Referendum; Basques and Bavarians Next? Also, Quasi-State in Kivu, TWO California Separatist Movements, Welsh Terrorists, Partitioning Kosovo, Palestine at the U.N.: The Week in Separatist News, 23-29 September 2012

Photo of the week: The symbolism of Scots nationalism, Occupy Wall Street leftism, and, not incidentally, hostility toward the parliament in London combined in this memorable image from this week’s massive independence rally in Edinburgh.

TOP STORY:
EURO ZONE CRISIS RIPPING EUROPE APART, STARTING WITH SPAIN:
CATALONIA SCHEDULES REFERENDUM ON INDEPENDENCE;
RUMBLINGS OF SEPARATISM IN GALICIA, BASQUE COUNTRY, BAVARIA;
SPANISH DISUNITY SPARKS RENEWED CONFLICT OVER GIBRALTAR

The Euro Zone crisis has, from its beginnings last year, had the potential to sunder western Europe’s already fractious nation-states.

In Belgium and Italy, the effects have been the opposite.  The crisis created the impetus for a disintegrating Flanders and Wallonia to agree last year on forging a fragile government after more than a year of power vacuum filled with squabbling (as reported on in detail in this blog).  For the time being, Belgium might survive as a single country.  The prosperous north of Italy, meanwhile, which hankers to secede as Padania, has not been able to press its argument that it is being unfairly asked to subsidize the poor, crime-ridden, inefficient south of the country, since one of the early effects of the financial crisis was to bring down Silvio Berlusconi’s government and along with it its always-unlikely junior coalition partner, the Lega Nord Padania (“Northern League”).  Then, a corruption scandal ended the career of the League’s founder, Umberto Bossi, this spring (as reported on at the time in this blog), during a time when it should have been making political hay.

However, in Spain—like Italy, a crisis-wracked debtor nation—and Germany—the country that feels it is being asked to bail out southern Europe’s economic failures—divides between the regions are growing.

The New York Times used the occasion of the annual obligatory tapping-the-first-keg-of-Oktoberfest feature story to sound an alarm over the stirrings of separatism in Bavaria, which has always been the part of post-war Germany with the strongest feelings of national distinctness.  Officially today called Freistaat Bayern, “Bavarian Free State,” the largest and most culturally and regionally coherent of Germany’s 16 Bundesländer (federal states), was convulsed by separatism in the Weimar era, during the financial crisis in 1923, and probably would have been also during the Great Depression if a specifically Bavarian-based fanatical nationalism had not filled that void.  Eager to dissociate itself after the war from the Germanic jingoism it had helped spawn, Bavaria was the one region which in 1949 voted against joining the emerging Federal Republic of Germany, but, since, unanimity was not required, it went along with only a few grumbles in the interests of stability.  Still, the separatist Bavaria Party pulled in more than a fifth of the vote in the early 1950s and was briefly part of a coalition government.  Bavarians were among the coolest welcomers of the absorption of five new third-world economic-basket-case states amid the dissolution of the German Democratic Republic (East Germany) in 1990.

Now, of the four Bundesländer that are, essentially, paying in to subsidize the other 12, Bavaria is by far the most prosperous: last year, Bavaria (home to B.M.W., Audi, Siemens, and other Wirtschafstwunder behemoths) saw a net transfer of nearly $4 billion to the central government, more than the contributions of the other three net-contributors—Baden–Württemberg (also in the prosperous south), Hessen, and the state-level Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg—combined.  Now, with Germany itself being prevailed upon to save all of Europe, Bavaria feels it is, internally, the put-upon savior of Germany, the victim of what one journalist, Wilfried Scharnagel, calls “a double-transfer union.”  Scharnagel’s new book, Bayern kann es auch allein: Plädoyer fur den einigen Staat (Bavaria Can Also Go It Alone: A Plea for a Separate State) is now a bestseller, and if the idea catches on, as it seems to promise to do, it may yet pose the greatest threat to German unity since the war, especially with Bavaria’s ruling party now on the ropes.

But it is Spain, and not at all quite yet Germany, which is completely coming apart at the seams this week.  September 11th saw one of the largest independence rallies in recent European history (reported on in this blog), as hundreds of thousands of Catalans thronged Barcelona and Madrid to push for their own independent state.  Earlier this week, on September 21st, a spokesman for the Autonomous Community of Catalonia, said that his government was considering seeking full independence in the wake of the breakdown of negotiations the previous week with Spain over fiscal relations between federal and regional levels.  The spokesman, Francesc Homs, said that the possibilities included the status quo, a referendum on independence within the next four years, or, alternately, “it could also be done by parliamentary decision after elections.”  By this he meant not the Spanish parliament, of course, but that of Catalonia, which a few days later announced an early election for November 25th.

Then, on September 27th, came the bombshell as the Catalan parliament voted overwhelmingly to hold a referendum on independence, despite vows from the central government in Madrid to oppose any moves toward secession, with the deputy prime minister saying that Catalonia is forbidden from holding a referendum without approval from the central government.  The vote was 84 for, 21 against, and 25 abstaining.

Catalonia’s separatist ambitions have been stoked by the European financial crisis, which has necessitated bailouts of the Spanish government that are a humiliation for what is, after all, far and away Spain’s most prosperous region and the jewel in the crown of its tourist industry (especially after the Barcelona Olympics of 1992).  Catalans remember that during the Spanish civil war they enjoyed de facto independence for years as they held out against the Fascists that most of the rest of Spain more or less allowed to roll right over them.  Emboldened by Scotland’s momentum toward an independence referendum and mindful that they would have little to lose from independence, so long of course as they could remain in the European Union (E.U.) (an issue discussed in detail in an article in this blog with respect to Scotland), Catalonia’s separatist feeling has never been stronger.

Upcoming regional elections in (from left to right) Galicia, the Basque Country, and Catalonia
are a threat to Spanish unity.

Nor is it just Catalonia.  The recently disarmed and mostly disbanded Basque separatist organization ETA (Euskadi Ta Askatusana, “Basque Homeland and Freedom”) issued a formal statement September 26th saying that, as the October 21st elections in the Autonomous Community of the Basque Country approach, left-wing Basque parties need to push harder for an independent state.  Polls are showing that the pro-autonomy Basque Nationalist Party (E.A.J.) (mainstream, considering that the Basque Country already has autonomy) is likely to stay in first place, but a new coalition of ETA-sympathizing Basque leftists, Euskal Herria Bildu, is likely to unseat the current coalition partner, a branch of the center-left Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party (P.S.O.E.).

Another autonomous region in Spain, Galicia, west of the Basque Country and north of Portugal, will also be holding elections on October 21st, and observers are predicting that Spain’s ruling People’s Party (P.P.) may lose ground there to the two opposition parties, the nationalist (i.e., Galician nationalist) local branch (P.S. de G.–P.S.O.E.) of the Spanish Socialist Worker’s Party and the outright pro-independence Galician Nationalist Bloc (B.N.G.).  This would embarrass the P.P., since Spain’s P.P. prime minister, Mariano Rajoy Brey, is himself Galician.  Galicia is another area that enjoyed some autonomy during the civil war.  The part of the Iberian peninsula with the strongest Celtic cultural survivals, Galicians have never felt very Spanish.  Earlier this month (as reported in this blog at the time), the terrorist Galician Resistance even reared its ugly head, with the arrest of a quartet of would-be bombers.

The flag of Galicia incorporates, as does Scotland’s, the Cross of St. Andrew,
who is the patron saint of both countries.

As a side effect of this disunity, the Spanish central government is, quite pathetically, trying to get some traction out of its spurious claims to Gibraltar.  Speaking before the United Nations General Assembly, the United Kingdom’s prime minister, David Cameron, was prevailed upon to respond to the a Spanish request for bilateral talks under E.U. auspices on the status of Gibraltar by reiterating this week his refusal to negotiate.  He added, however, that the U.K. was open to “new ways of taking forward dialogue and cooperation on issues of mutual importance by any means that fully reflect the interests, rights, and responsibilities of the people of Gibraltar”—whose population has repeatedly made clear its desire to remain in the U.K.  Earlier in the week, the territory’s chief minister, Fabian Picardo, had lashed out at a new Spanish conservation plan that would restrict what it calls environmentally hazardous activities in a 27,000-hectare area of the Mediterranean around Gibraltar.  The proscribed activities are to include ship-refuelling, a major part of Gibraltar’s economy.  Spain claims to be simply applying E.U. law, but Picardo saw it as a confrontation linked to Spain’s spurious claims.  Picardo used unusually strong language, threatening “a serious international confrontation” and adding, “However much they say they will tighten the screws on Gibraltar, we have to say that this has been tried already.  That is the policy of the past, the failed and sterile attempts by Franco’s fascist government.”  Cameron’s backing for Picardo’s position constitutes the U.K. government’s strongest statement on Gibraltar in decades.

Spain, of course, realistically, will never regain Gibraltar.  Its people oppose it, and that’s not the way Europe works.  Just as surely, the Catalan people want independence, and they want it badly enough that sooner or later they will get it.  That may prove to be the end of modern Spain as we know it.

AFRICA

U.N. Says M23 Rebels Have Set Up “de Facto” State in East Congo’s Kivu Province.  The United Nations’ under-secretary-general for peacekeeping operations, Hervé Ladsous, said September 18th that the “M23” rebel army in the east of the Democratic Republic of Congo (D.R.C.) has set up a “de facto administration” in North Kivu province.  After addressing the U.N. Security Council on September 18th, Ladsous told reporters, “M23 elements are concentrated in a corner of the eastern Kivu, which is next to the borders of Rwanda and Uganda.  They are already establishing a sort of de facto administration, controlling population, taking ‘taxes’ from people who pass through and that ... is hardly acceptable.”  M23 is a successor organization to the Tutsi-dominated National Congress for the Defense of the People (C.N.D.P.), which was folded, uneasily, into the Congolese military in 2006, until the “M23” mutiny this April.  The international community regards M23 as a puppet of the government of Rwanda, also dominated by the Tutsi ethnic group—a claim Rwanda denies.  M23’s military leader, Col. Sultani Makenga, denied on September 20th that a “parallel administration” was in place, adding, “When you wage war, when you occupy a territory, you have to administrate it,” but “We sing the [D.R.C.] national anthem, we raise the national flag, therefore there is no parallel administration.”

Ecowas Force Gearing to Liberate Azawad, but Tuaregs May Side with Islamists.  As plans slowly start to take shape for an international force to seize the self-proclaimed Independent State of Azawad from the Islamist militias that govern it and return it to the Republic of Mali, the Economic Community of West African States (Ecowas) said on September 24th that it would support the Malian military “on the ground” but would have to rely on countries like Nigeria and France to provide air support.  (Nigeria is a member of Ecowas but theoretically could intervene as a state actor as well as by contributing to the Ecowas force.)  For now, though, neither Nigeria nor France has committed itself, though the French, arguing for Ecowas intervention at the United Nations on September 26th, promise “logistical support.”  At the U.N. summit on the conflict, the United States’ secretary of state, Hillary Rodham Clinton, was even less committal: she praised the idea of a regional force, but said that even Ecowas should wait until Mali has a stable government in its capital, Bamako.  In addition, things could get complicated on the ground in ways that were not foreseen until recently: the National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad (M.N.L.A.)—the ethnically Tuareg militia that separated Azawad from Mali in March and April before the secession was hijacked a few months later by the al-Qaeda Organization in the Islamic Maghreb (A.Q.I.M.) and the al-Qaeda-affiliated Movement for Unity and Jihad in West Africa (MUJAO)—said that any international intervention without M.N.L.A. approval might prompt them to side with the Islamists.  Ibrahim Ag Mohamed Asseleh, a member of the M.N.L.A.’s transitional council, said this week at headquarters in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, that if Ecowas intervened “without prior agreement between the M.N.L.A. and the authorities in Bamako” (Mali’s capital), the M.N.L.A. might “seek alliances of convenience with Islamist and terrorist groups.”  Meanwhile, one faction of the M.N.L.A., under Col. Hassan Ag Medhi, announced on September 24th that it was forming a rival Front for the Liberation of Azawad (F.P.A.), which is anti-jiahdist and anti-independence.  Also in Ouagadougou, the colonel said, “What is foremost in our minds is saving these people whose hands are being cut off”—a reference to A.Q.I.M. and MUJAO’s pitiless implementation of Islamic law (shari’a) in Azawad.

Mob Violence near Mombasa Claims 11 Lives; Separatists Implicated.  Eleven people were killed on September 27th in Kaloleni, near Mombasa, Kenya, after locals notified police of a supposed oath-taking ceremony in progress by the Muslim separatism Mombasa Republican Council (M.R.C.).  The separatists were supposedly armed with firearms and machetes and were set upon by a mob before police intervened.  Reports of the mêlée are sketchy, and there are indications that the group in question may in fact not have been, as originally thought, the M.R.C., which wants Kenya’s Coast Province to form a separate nation.  One security officer said, “This was not the M.R.C.  It is an entirely new group and it looks like we have a bigger security problem.”

Puntland President’s Plan to Extend Term of Office Spurs Uprisings.  Violence broke out in different parts of the de facto independent Puntland State of Somalia, on September 21st over President Abdirahman Mohamed Farole’s plans to extend his term of office by a year.  In the town of Qardho, hundreds of protesters met a visiting electoral-commission delegation by rallying in protest over the term extension.  Rioters burned rubber tires in the streets and chanted, “No five years.”  Meanwhile, on the same day, in Puntland’s main harbor town and economic hub, Bosaso, military police raided the offices of clan leaders who had days earlier issued a statement condemning Farole’s moves.  The offices were shut down, and soldiers stripped them of everything, including computers and furniture.  Farole spoke out against his detractors on September 24th, saying that he “will not tolerate those failed politicians and so-called websites and media who are supporting Puntland’s enemies including terrorists and pirates” etc. etc.  Um, paranoid much?

Rioting in Puntland

Somaliland Offers Blanket Amnesty to al-Shabaab Defectors.  The minister of the interior in the de facto independent Republic of Somaliland this week offered a general amnesty to members of the al-Qaeda-affiliated Islamist militia al-Shabaab, which has murdered thousands throughout the lawless zone the world regards as the Federal Republic of Somalia.  The amnesty will be restricted to al-Shabaab members who are from Somaliland.  The minister, Mohamed Nur Arale Duur, told media, in explaining the amnesty, said, “All humans make mistakes.”

Afar Vigilantes Carrying Out Ethnic Cleansing of Ogaden in Ethiopia, Swede Reports.  In the vast part of Ethiopia’s east known as the Somali Regional State—where the population is related to the peoples of the nearby Federal Republic of Somali and its breakaway regions, presumably have self-rule—there has been widespread ethnic cleansing of Ogaden people amid the ethnic-political jostling after the death last month of the long-ruling ethnic-Tigray dictator of Ethiopia, Meles Zenawi.  The Swedish journalist Johan Ripås, gathering information on the local situation in eastern Ethiopia in the wake of the release recently of two journalists from Sweden—who had been imprisoned in Ethiopia for alleged ties to Ogaden rebels (as reported last week in this blog)—is reporting that entire Ogaden villages are being emptied of their inhabitants, part of a process of ethnic cleansing that has been going on for some time, according to local people.  Using information smuggled out of the country by a former Ethiopian civil servant, Abdullahi Hussein, Ripås reports that most of the executions, ethnic cleansing, and other atrocities are at the hands of the so-called “Liyuu Police,” a nominally government-run militia operating out of the nearby Afar Regional State in Ethiopia (as reported on briefly recently in this blog).  Originally, the Liyuu Police were founded to counteract the influence of the rebellious Ogaden National Liberation Front (O.N.L.F.), but it now operates as a vigilante army answerable to no one.  Afar people are also related to Somalis and are one of the two dominant ethnic groups in the nearby Republic of Djibouti, formerly known, when it was a colony of France, as Afars and Issas.

Sudan, South Sudan Agree on Demilitarized Zone along Border, but Abyei Still Disputed.  In peace talks in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, delegations from the Republic of Sudan and from the country that seceded from it a little over a year ago, the Republic of South Sudan, reached agreement on September 26th on some border disputes but not on the toughest nut to crack in their months-long conflict, the Abyei District.  The Sudanese and South Sudanese presidents, Omar al-Bashir and Salva Kiir Mayardit, respectively, agreed to withdraw all troops from a new six-mile-wide demilitarized zone along the length of their shared, but contested 1,100-mile-long boundary.  Bashir rejected outright, however, an African Union (A.U.) plan to hold a referendum in the small rectangular border territory to determine which country it would join.  Ethnic cleansing by pro-(north)-Sudanese militias early last year—in an attempt to swing the ethnic and political orientation of the populace ahead of a then-planned plebiscite—sparked the conflict, which has by now spread to most areas along the shared border, including the states of South Darfur, South Kordofan, and Blue Nile.

The Abyei district

Efik Chief, Senators, Protesters Condemn Nigerian Cession of Bakassi to Cameroon.  The central government in Nigeria is facing several protests over its announcement this week that it will not take advantage of the quickly closing window (October 10th is the deadline) to contest a 2002 International Court of Justice (I.C.J.) decision transferring sovereignty of the Bakassi Republic from Nigeria, which had been administering it, to the neighboring Republic of Cameroon.  A paramount traditional ruler of the displaced Bakassi people in southeastern Nigeria, Dr. Etinyin Etim Okon Edet, petitioned Nigeria’s president, Goodluck Jonathan, this week, to release Bakassi from all ties to the Nigerian state since Nigeria has, in his view, violated its obligations to the Bakassi people.  Edet, chairman of the Cross River State Council of Chiefs and a traditional ruler from the Efik ethnic group, told reporters, “The people of Bakassi are being held in bondage by Nigeria, which has divested its interest to listen to the wishes of the Bakassi people and to force them into a situation of perpetual refugee status in their own country or to remain in Cameroon as migrants who could be tortured, killed, or deported by the Cameroonian authorities that have been pursuing a policy of ethnic cleansing since 2008.”  The coordinator of the Save Bakassi Group, in Nigeria, told reporters the new evidence “is concrete enough to ensure us victory at the I.C.J. and the federal government can take us for our words.”  A group of Nigerian senators is also pressing Jonathan to reconsider.  The Nigerian government, however, has said that an appeal would expose Nigeria “to international ridicule” and would amount to reneging on a solemn international agreement.  Then, hundreds of Efik people from Bakassi marched in Nigeria’s capital, Abuja, to protest being placed under Cameroonian rule.  Meanwhile, in July, Efik people in the Bakassi Peninsula itself declared an independent Republic of Bakassi, apparently without attracting much notice from the Cameroonian government.

9 Killed, Hundreds Arrested in Boko Haram Violence across Northern Nigeria.  Suspected members of the northern Nigerian Islamist militia Boko Haram stormed a clinic in Maiduguri, capital of Borno State, in northeastern Nigeria, on September 20th, killing the eldest son of the resident physician.  The gunmen seemed to be targeting the doctor himself.  Last month, Boko Haram had planted a bomb at the clinic.  Also in Maidiguri, members of the federal government’s anti-terrorist Joint Task Force (J.T.F.) killed four suspected Boko Haram members, arrested three others, and recovered numerous arms in a coordinated operation in different parts of the city on September 22nd.  The same day in Damaturu, capital of Yobe State, J.T.F. and local police arrested 32 Boko Haram suspects, including women and children, in a house-to-house sweep.  In Bauchi State, a suicide bomber killed himself and two bystanders—a woman and a child—outside a Catholic church on September 23rd, also injuring 46.  Police say he detonated himself after he tried to enter the church but was barred.  The J.T.F. announced on September 24th that a raid on a terrorist hideout in Mubi, in Adamawa State, killed an important Boko Haram commander, believed to be Abubakar Yola (nom de guerre: Abu Jihad), and resulted in the arrest of 156 suspected Boko Haram members.  Also this week, gunmen stormed the residence of a former federal-government official in Azare, in Bauchi State, killing two police guards.  The official, Aminu Saleh, is involved in ongoing attempts to negotiate with Boko Haram.  Meanwhile, the Nigerian playwright, poet, Nobel laureate, and former political prisoner Wole Soyinka took the occasion of a visit to the United Nations in New York on the International Day of Peace on September 21st to call for taking up arms against Boko Haram.  “This is a violent organization,” Soyinka said.  “What do you do with them?  I am sorry, but you must fight them.”

Self-Styled Prime Minister to Demand Uganda Restore Ankole Kingdom.  The prime minister of the unrecognized Ankole Kingdom said in an interview September 22nd that he was planning to go to Uganda’s parliament “in a few days” to demand reinstatement.  The movement for restoration began in 1993 when Ankole was excluded from the list of originally constitutionally embedded Ugandan kingdoms restored by President Milton Obote.  In late 1993, Prince Barigye was installed as heir to the Ankole throne, but he died last year without seeing the fulfillment of his dream of constitutional recognition and the return of confiscated lands.  His son, Charles Rwebishengye, was installed the new crown prince in October 2011 and vowed to carry on the struggle.  He is now 21 years old and is a university student in the United Kingdom.  One barrier to restoration is a 1901 agreement, during the time of British colonialism, which consolidated the smaller kingdoms of Buhweju, Igara and Buzimba, Bunyaruguru, and parts of Mpororo under the Nkole ethnic group, thus forming the Ankole Kingdom as it is delineated today; these absorptions are still the source of resentment.  But, as the Ankole prime minister, William Katatumba, said this week, “There is no giving up.  We have drawn plans.”

Uganda’s kingdoms

Barotse Separatists in Namibia Turn to U.N. in Anger over Drawn-Out Treason Trial.  In the Republic of Namibia, a Barotse (Lozi) organization, the Caprivi Concerned Group, this week called on the United Nations General Assembly to press the Namibian government to end a 13-year-old treason trial of participants in a 1999 separatist uprising in the Lozi-dominated Caprivi Strip region.  The group also wishes to raise the general issue of Caprivian independence and favors the diplomatic isolation of Namibia to make it mend its ways.  The Namibian government refuses to negotiate with the banned pro-Caprivian party, the United Democratic Party (U.D.P.), unless it renounces calls for independence for the Caprivi Strip.

EUROPE

Scots Separatists Reject Ulster Protestant Request to Vote in Independence Referendum.  A senior figure in the Ulster Scots community in Northern Ireland this week requested of the Scottish National Party (S.N.P.), which is pushing for Scotland to secede from the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, that Ulster Scots people be allowed to vote in the planned 2014 referendum on independence.  The leader, Dr. David Hume, who is director of services in the Grand Orange Lodge of Ireland—a Protestant fraternal order representing those of Scottish ancestry who make up the bulk of Northern Ireland’s Protestant population—said that the Scots of Ulster (as Northern Ireland is traditionally known) were “stakeholders” in the question of Scottish independence.  “After all,” Hume told an audience in Glasgow on September 4th, “we provided the first unifying force in Scotland in the 6th century A.D., and we later extended Scottish influence to Ireland in the 17th century,” adding, “It would be our hope that the Scottish people remain with us and remain within the Union.”  An S.N.P. spokesman, however, rejected the idea out of hand, saying, “The future of Scotland is a matter for the people of Scotland, and the future of Northern Ireland is a matter for the people of Northern Ireland.”

J. K. Rowling, Edinburgh Resident, Opposes Scottish Independence from U.K.  The woman who is arguably the most famous resident of Scotland (as well as one of the wealthiest women in the world), J. K. Rowling, author of the Harry Potter series of books, told media on September 22nd that she would be voting against independence for Scotland in the referendum slated for 2014.  Rowling, who was born in Gloucestershire, England, to an English father and a mother who was half-French and half-Scots, has lived in Edinburgh since 1993 and is a vocal and generous supporter of the Labour Party.  Perhaps or perhaps not relatedly, a new poll indicates that only 26% of Scottish teenagers support independence from the United Kingdom—casting doubt on the wisdom of the Scottish National Party’s push to lower the voting age to 16 in time for the referendum.

Plaid Cymru under Fire for Party President Sharing Stage with Banned Welsh Militia.  The leader of Wales’s separatist political party, Plaid Cymru, after facing criticism last week for chanting a strange radical republican loyalty oath last year while playing hooky from Queen Elizabeth II’s opening of the Welsh Assembly (reported on at the time in this blog), is on the hook again.  The leader, Leanne Woods, now faces demands from the Labour Party that she speak out against her party’s president, Jillian Evans (also a Welsh representative in the European Parliament), who can be seen in a newly publicized video speaking at a rally where flags from the Free Wales Army (F.W.A.), a banned separatist militia, were displayed.  Woods has refused.  The rally last year marked the 729th anniversary of the killing of Llywelyn ap Gruffudd (Llywelyn the Last), the last true Prince of Wales, by English soldiers, thus ending Welsh independence.  Nine F.W.A. members were arrested in 1969 for planning attacks on the ceremony crowning Elizabeth II’s son, Charles, as Prince of Wales.  One Plaid Cymru colleague said, in Evans’s defense, “Jill can be accused of many things, most particularly being a pacifist.  But to suggest she would have any sympathy with a paramilitary group is quite ridiculous.”  The tradition of naming the heir to the throne of England “Prince of Wales” dates to 1301, when King Edward I (a.k.a. Edward Longshanks), according to legend, broke his promise to appoint a Welshman as Llywelyn the Last’s successor, only to place the title instead on his son, later Edward II, King of England.

The Free Wales Army displays its creepy, swastika-like flag while Jillian Evans speaks.

New Serbian Prime Minister Says Partition of Kosovo Is Only Solution.  The prime minister of the Republic of Serbia, Ivica Dačić, said September 21st that the partition of Kosovo—which is a de facto independent but only partially recognized republic which Serbia still claims—“is the only possible, realistic solution.”  Dačić, who took office in July of this year, had made this point before, when he was deputy prime minister, but making such a statement now reflects a subtle but unmistakeable shift in policy as Serbia tries to resolve the Kosovo dilemma as a condition for joining the European Union (E.U.).  A chunk of land abutting Serbia called North Kosovo, dominated by Serbs, is already outside of the Republic of Kosovo’s control and largely administered via local governments over the border in Serbia proper.  “In this phase,” Dačić added, “everything is acceptable other than accepting the unilaterally declared independence of Kosovo.  Brussels cannot force us to accept that.”  However, the speaker of Serbia’s parliament, who is from the right-wing opposition Serbian Progressive Party, said on September 25th that partition would be unconstitutional and that Serbia, including Kosovo, is indivisible.

Vojvodina Autonomy Leader Resigns after Bar Fight over Niece.  The leader of the main political party pushing for more autonomy for the Republic of Serbia’s Autonomous Province of Vojvodina resigned his parliamentary seat on September 25th after criticism that followed a fistfight he’d been involved in two days earlier.  The politician, Nenad Čanak, admits (though at first he denied it) punching a man outside a nightclub in Vojvodina’s capital, Novi Sad, after the man made sexual advances on his (Čanak’s) niece.  The victim went to the police to report it, which is how the story broke.  “The parliament will not protect me,” Čanak said, “but it is a safe house for war criminals.” His party, the League of Social Democrats of Vojvodina (L.S.V.), holds 10 out of 120 seats in the provincial assembly, but only 5 out of 250 seats in Serbia’s national parliament.  Among its aims is more autonomy for the historically-Magyar-dominated province of Vojvodina.

Lega Nord Leader Maroni Plans to Resign after 2015 Regional Elections.  The secretary (leader) of Lega Nord Padania, Italy’s separatist Northern League, Roberto Maroni, said this week that he would resign after the next regional elections, in 2015.  Speaking during a two-day party summit in Turin, said that the party has not yet decided whether to even contest the next national elections and that the 2015 regional elections is where attention is being concentrated.

[For the latest news from the North Caucasus (including Dagestan, Chechnya, and Ingushetia), see this week’s Caucasus Update.]

BITS OF ASIA THAT LIKE TO PRETEND THEY’RE PART OF EUROPE

[For the latest news from the South Caucasus, including Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia, see this week’s Caucasus Update.]

Turkey’s Erdoğan Raises Possibility of Talks with Kurds, Freedom for Öcalan.  The prime minister of the Republic of Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, signaled to media on September 26th that talks were possible with the banned separatist Kurdistan Workers’ Party (P.K.K.), which has brought southeastern Turkey near to a state of civil war this spring, even indicating that it is possible that the P.K.K.’s founder, Abdullah Öcalan, may be freed from prison.  “There is a military dimension to this,” Erdoğan said, “a security dimension, which is separate and will continue.  But beside this there is a diplomatic, socio-economic, and psychological dimension.”  But two opposition parties, the Republican People’s Party (C.H.P.) and the Nationalist Movement Party (M.H.P.), on September 26th condemned remarks from the government suggesting that negotiations with Öcalan could be part of a solution to the Kurdish problem.

30 Killed in Battles in Turkish Kurdistan, Including 15 in Fresh Battle in Hakkari.  Thirty people were killed in clashes and ambushes between Kurdish rebels and the Turkish military this week.  In Tunceli province in east-central Turkey, in the Kurdistan region, two simultaneous attacks on military outposts by rebels from the banned separatist Kurdistan Workers’ Party (P.K.K.) on the night of September 22nd left a Turkish soldier and three Kurdish militants dead.  In Van province, in southeastern Turkey, two P.K.K. members were killed by Turkish special forces who were retaliating for an attack the day before on a medical facility which had killed one policeman.  Seven Turkish soldiers died, again in Tunceli, on September 24th when a convoy of armored trucks was hit by a roadside bomb presumed to have been planted by Kurdish rebels.  Two Turkish soldiers and 13 P.K.K. rebels were killed in a battle in Hakkari province on September 26th.  Authorities reported on September 27th that two Turkish soldiers had been killed by a landmine in Şırnak province and that, in Ağrı province, in east-central Turkey, seven P.K.K. operatives, including two females, were arrested.  Meanwhile, in the early morning on September 25th, police across five provinces in Turkey rounded up nearly 40 members of the Human Rights Association, the Peace and Democracy Party (B.D.P.), and other groups, as part of an ongoing crackdown on the Kurdistan Communities Union (K.C.K.), a lawful civic group which advocates for Kurdish rights.

Kurdish Rebel Admits to P.K.K. Role in Killings of Witnesses in İzmir.  Meanwhile, a P.K.K. rebel confessed this week to a killing of which Kurdish rebels had been suspected: the murder of three villagers just before a fatal bombing far outside Kurdish areas near Foça in western Turkey’s İzmir province on August 9th (as reported at the time in this blog).  The villagers were apparently killed because they inadvertently became witnesses to the planning of the attack.

ASIA—MIDDLE EAST

Abbas Presents Scaled-Back Palestinian U.N.-Membership Hopes amid Fiery Rhetoric.  The president of the Palestinian National Authority (P.A.), Mahmoud Abbas, said in an address to the United Nations General Assembly in New York that he would soon pursue a scaled-down version of Palestine’s 2011 application for full membership in the G.A.—which at the time was, as predicted, scotched by the Security Council veto wielded by Israel’s only real ally, the United States.  Instead, Palestine will seek status as a “non-member state”—an odd choice since it is already, you know, not a member.  For now, the Palestine Liberation Organization (P.L.O.) has “observer status” in the G.A., which it has held since 1998.  Other “observers” include the Vatican, multinational blocs such as the European Union (E.U.), and global organizations such as the International Society of the Red Cross (I.C.R.C.).  One interpretation is that Abbas means that he intends to replace the P.L.O. delegation with a full P.A. one.  Meanwhile, the rest of Abbas’s speech involved fiery, and mostly completely accurate, rhetoric, accusing the Israeli government of rejecting the two-state solution, of “ethnic cleansing,” and of “promising the Palestinian people a new catastrophe, a new Nakba.”  He referred to “relentless waves of attacks against our people, our mosques, churches, and monasteries, and our homes and schools; they are unleashing their venom against our trees, fields, crops, and properties, and our people have become fixed targets for acts of killing and abuse with the complete collusion of the occupying forces and the Israeli government.”  He condemned the terrorist tactics of Hamas, the Islamist terror group that rules the Gaza Strip portion of the Palestinian Territories, outside the control of Abbas’s Fatah-led government, but also singled out Israeli “state terrorism” for condemnation.  Give ’em hell, Mahmoud!

Barak Defies Netanyahu, Favors Unilateral Withdrawal from West Bank.  The former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak, who is now minister of defense, defied the more hard-line current prime minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, on September 24th by stating publicly that if peace talks with Palestine remained stalled then Israel should unilaterally withdraw from the occupied West Bank.  Barak’s envisioned withdrawal would nonetheless leave in place the illegal Israeli settlement “blocs,” near the border with Israel proper, where 80-90% of the illegal Israeli settlers in the Palestinian Territories live.  Netanyahu opposes any and all concessions to the Palestinian side, and the settlements remain the foremost obstacle to peace.  Barak stated that a proactive separation of Israeli and Palestinian lands, moving toward a two-state situation, “will help us not only in dealing with the Palestinians, but also with other countries in the region, with the Europeans, and with the American administration—and, of course, will help us.”

ASIA—SOUTH ASIA

Kashmir Separatists Stage Violent Protests over American Anti-Muslim Video.  The only majority-Muslim state in India, the rebellious Jammu and Kashmir region, was hit hard by the protests rocking the Muslim world over the low-budget American video Innocence of Muslims.  The Indian government imposed curfews and other restrictions on Srinagar, the Kashmiri capital, last week, and also jammed cellphone communications.  Two separatist leaders, Grand Mufti Bashiriddin and the hardline Hurriyat Conference leader Syed Ali Shah Geelani, had called for protests after Friday prayers on September 21st.  That morning, riot police in Srinagar had used tear-gas to disperse a protest by Dukhtaran-e-Millat, a separatist women’s group, the Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front (J.K.L.F.) leader Mohammad Yasin Malik was removed from the capital by police, and, after prayers, police and protesters in Baramulla, in northern Kashmir, fought in the streets.  Also in Baramulla, but possible unrelated to the protests, separatist rebels gunned down and killed a village headman on September 23rd, and on September 25th two rebels and an Indian soldier were killed in a skirmish in Kashmir’s Kupwara district.

Indian President Faces Mass Protests in 3-Day Visit to Kashmir.  The president of the Republic of India, Pranab Mukherjee, faced protests during his three-day visit—his first as president—to the predominantly-Muslim separatist Jammu and Kashmir state on September 27th, including a mass silent protest in Srinagar, the capital, where demonstrators demanded reprieve for Mohammad Afzal Guru, a member of the Kashmir-based jihadist terrorist organization Jaish-e-Mohammad who is on death row for his role in the deadly terrorist attack on India’s parliament in 2001.  Activists also demanded that India release hundreds of what they call political prisoners.  Most of Srinagar remained shuttered during his visit due to a general strike called by Syed Ali Shah Geelani, head of the separatist Hurriyat Conference.  There were showdowns between demonstrators and police, who used pepper guns to disperse crowds, but no injuries.  Mukherjee, for his part, addressed Kashmiri youth in an address, saying, “Let the dark days of violence and conflict be left behind.  Let a new dawn emerge.  It is time to move ahead with faith in our collective future.”

114 Manipur Rebels Hand over Arms, Surrender in Northeastern India.  In a ceremonial surrender, 114 militants from some of the over 20 separatist and other ethnic militias in India’s far-northeastern Manipur state unconditionally handed over their weapons to officials in the Manipuri capital, Imphal, on September 26th.  The pro-federal Assam Rifles paramilitary group was credited with helping bring the rebels to heel.  Among the organizations whose members participated in the surrender were the United National Liberation Front, the People’s Revolutionary Party of Kangleipak, Kanglei Yaol Kanna Lup, the People’s Liberation Army, the Kangleipak Communist Party, the United People’s Party of Kangleipak, the People’s United Liberation Front, and the Kuki National Liberation Front.

NORTH AMERICA

Jerry Brown Funding-Bill Veto Reignites “South California” Separatism.  “South California” (not “Southern California”) secessionism reared its head again on September 19th when California’s governor, Jerry Brown, vetoed a law that would have returned $14 million in vehicle-license fees to four Riverside County cities.  See my full blog article on this development.

Organic Constitutionalists in “California Free State” Found Rival County Assembly.  A rival version of a local county assembly in California, the Butte County Assembly, has organized itself under the rubric of the Republic of the united States of America (R.u.S.A.) (sic—including the lowercase u), a new movement which regards the current United States government as an illegitimate, unconstitutional entity and grants citizens the right to form parallel government structures.  The Butte County Assembly goes farther than some R.u.S.A. activists in calling themselves “organic constitutionalists,” a point of view which treats any modifications to the federal constitution after the Bill of Rights as illegitimate—including, oh, say, you know, the part that says that black people cannot be owned as though they were donkeys and wheelbarrows, and that other part about women voting.   The rival Assembly held its first meeting on September 22nd at the Round Table Pizza in the town of Paradise, a location the official announcement described as being in “California Free State, a part of the Republic for the united States of America.”

150 Counter-Demonstrators Face Down 14 Aryan Nations Morons in Washington.  Fourteen members of the American white-supremacist militia Aryan Nations demonstrated in Washington, D.C., the United States capital, on September 22nd, in the face of anti-racist counter-demonstrators who outnumbered them about ten to one, and all watched over by a large presence of police in full riot gear.  Many counter-demonstrators tried to jump police lines, and one told a reporter that if not for the police he would “beat the shit out of the Nazis.”  The Aryan Nations protest focused on what they rather fictitiously referred to as “genocide” against white farmers in South Africa.  In the early afternoon, the police escorted the white-supremacists into a waiting charter bus, whose African-American driver whisked them out of the city.

Aryan Nations march in Washington, D.C.

Idaho Police Brace for Festival of Neo-Nazi Music Linked to Wisconsin Sikh Killings.  In Idaho, heartland of militant white-supremacism in the United States, police in Boise, the capital, are bracing themselves for a music festival to be held near there October 6th which focuses on the rock music favored by the racist and neo-Nazi movement called Hammerskins.  The event, Hammerfest 2012 (given white supremacists’ infatuation with Scandinavia, the homonymy with the city in Norway is probably intentional), is organized by a loosely-organized, Texas-based network of racist skinheads called Hammerskins Nation, which frequently uses “hatecore” music festivals to recruit new members.  Hammerskins came to public awareness when Wade Michael “Jack Boot” Page, a drifter who killed six members of the Sikh religion in Oak Creek, Wisconsin, on August 5th before killing himself (as reported at the time in this blog), turned out to be a Hammerskin as well as a “white power” or “hatecore” rock musician with a résumé that included membership in the bands End Apathy and Definite Hate.  Boise police are already fielding numerous complaints and are preparing for the possibility of violence, including conflicts with counter-demonstrators.

An album cover from Definite Hate, the “hatecore” band
of which the Sikh-temple spree killer Wade Michael “Jack Boot” Page was a member.
No one ever accused skinheads of subtlety.

Florida Republican Contender Favors Puerto Rico Statehood.  A Republican Party candidate for United States Congress in Florida, Todd Long, has come out in favor of statehood for Puerto Rico.  The statements are being seen as an attempt to court the Hispanic vote in the district, which covers mostly some suburbs of Tampa and is expected to turn Democratic in the 2012 election.

Italo-Québécois Soccer Great Suspended for Praising Election-Rally Assassin.  An already controversial retired professional soccer player in Quebec, Canada, was suspended and forced to apologize this week after posting Twitter comments praising Richard Henry Bain, the unhinged fishing-lodge entrepreneur charged with murder for a shooting rampage at a Parti Québécois (P.Q.) election-victory rally on September 4th (reported on at the time in this blog).  The player, Sandro Grande, an anti-separatist Quebec-born Anglophone midfielder, born to immigrants from Italy, who competed on Italian, Norwegian, and Lithuanian teams as well as the Major League Soccer team Impact de Montréal, wrote on Twitter the day after the shooting, “The only mistake the shooter made last night was not getting the target!!!  Marois!!!  Next time buddy!!  Hopefully!”—referring to the newly elected premier of Quebec, Pauline Marois, still considered by police a possible target in the shooting.  On Facebook, meanwhile, Grande referred to P.Q. voters as “stupid ... fucken hillbillies in the north” who were “on wellfare!” (sic).  Grande claimed his Twitter account had been hacked but also, in a seeming contradiction, apologized for what he called “immature and irresponsible” words but has still been suspended from his position as a youth coach.  In 2009, Grande was kicked off Impact for choking an assistant coach during a match (known in Quebec as a “Shawinigan handshake,” named for the hometown of Jean Chrétien, the Canadian prime minister who throttled a nonviolent protester by the neck in Hull, Quebec, on Canadian Flag Day 1996).

Sandro Grande during an earlier indiscretion.

SPORT

Catalan and Kurdish Footballers Await FIFA’s Kosovo Decision with Optimism.  As the International Federation of Association Football (FIFA) prepares to announce its terms for allowing the football (soccer) team of the partially recognized Republic of Kosovo to compete with other national teams, the Kurdistan Football Association and Catalonia Football Federation are planning on building on Kosovo’s expected at-least-partial success by pushing their own applications for admission to FIFA.  Catalonia’s bid is supported by the Spanish Football Federation, but, unlike Kosovo, Catalonia and Kurdistan are not recognized as independent by any sovereign states.  In June (as reported in this blog at the time), northern Iraq’s autonomous Kurdistan Regional Government (K.R.G.) hosted this year’s Viva World Cup, a tournament for unrecognized states.  In addition to the Kurdish team, Viva competitors have included Assyria, the Cyprus Turkish Republic, Darfur, Gozo, the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, Occitania, Padania, Provence, Raetia, the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic, Sápmi (Lapland), Southern Cameroons, Tamil Eelam, Tibet, and Zanzibar.  (Catalonia and Kosovo, who feel themselves more on the brink of actual international recognition, do not condescend to compete in Viva tournaments.)

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