Vermont Snub on Karabakh May Signal Crimea Crisis Has Derailed Armenian-American Pressure-Politics Gravy Train

For decades, the Armenian-American political lobby in the United States has pushed aggressively to chalk up symbolic victories by pressuring state and other legislative bodies into granting utterly-nonbinding “recognition” to the independence of the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic (N.K.R.), the Armenian puppet state which the newly independent Republic of Armenia, with the help of Russia, carved out of Azerbaijan’s western flank in a bloody campaign of ethnic cleansing in the late 1980s and ’90s.  The N.K.R. has essentially no recognition in the real world of international diplomacy, except from three puppet states of the Russian Federation: Abkhazia and South Ossetia (within Georgia) and Transnistria (within Moldova).  Not even Armenia or its close ally, Russia, recognizes the N.K.R.  But the Armenian National Committee of America (A.N.C.A.) and other groups have successfully cajoled the state legislatures of Louisiana, Maine, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island, as well as the Los Angeles city council, to “recognize” the N.K.R.  (Abroad, Australia’s state of New South Wales recognizes it too.)

Armenian-American demonstrators in Los Angeles display Nagorno-Karabakh flags.

Some reckon that the Armenian lobby is the third most powerful immigrant-minority lobbying group in U.S. politics, exceeded in influence only by the Jewish and Cuban-American lobbies.  They have also been pushing for recognition of the Armenian genocide at the hands of Anatolian Turks a century ago as a genocide, something the U.S. has over the decades resolutely refused to do, mostly to avoid offending Turkey, a North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) ally.  There are perhaps as many as a million and a half Armenian-Americans in the U.S., mostly in southern California and New England.  There are, for example, only three cities in Armenia itself that have more Armenian residents than there are in Glendale, a suburb of Los Angeles.  For legislators confronted with an N.K.R.-recognition bill, the choice is between capitulating, passing the bill, and moving on, on the one hand, or, on the other, needlessly alienating and infuriating a powerful ethnic lobby.  There is, by contrast, almost no Azeri-American community of any size to exert pressure of the same kind.

Mammad Talibov tells the Vermont Senate the Azeri side of the story.

But the Armenian lobby’s winning streak, in New England at least, ended last week when Vermont’s state senate declined to wade into South Caucasus politics and recognize the N.K.R.  Vermont senators debating on the resolution were paid a visit by Yusif Babanly of the U.S. Azeris Network and a legal attaché from the Azerbaijani embassy in Washington, D.C., Mamma Talibov.  Babanly and Talibov gave the (in America, rarely heard) Azeri perspective on the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict and emphasized the strategic relationship between the U.S. and oil-rich Azerbaijan.  Azeris are closely related to the Anatolian Turks of Turkey proper, both culturally and linguistically, and Azerbaijan is a front-line state in the U.S.’s cold war with Iran.  (The Azeri lobby, which is closely linked to Turkey, is no stranger to manipulation and propaganda either.  See an article from this blog which touches on Azeri and Turkish efforts to build up the very minor 1992 “Khojaly Massacre” into a full-fledged “genocide” by Armenians.)  Mostly, the senate threw up its hands and decided the situation on the ground was too complex for the body to take a position on it.  As Norm McAllister, a Republican senator said, “We’re never going to know in this little committee who’s actually telling us the whole story.”

Earlier, in 2004, Vermont’s governor, James H. Douglas, officially recognized the Turkish genocide of Armenians during the First World War.  There are not a lot of Armenians in Vermont, but they include the novelist Chris Bohjalian, possibly the most prominent Armenian-American writer, who has written novels about the genocide and lives in Lincoln, Vermont.  It was Bohjalian who brought the N.K.R. recognition issue to Montpelier.

Chris Bohjalian poses before a statue in Yerevan, Armenia,
of William Saroyan, another Armenian-American writer.

Not only that, but Armenian-Americans are on the defensive elsewhere.  They only just barely managed to scotch Azeri-initiated bills this spring in Mississippi and Tennessee on recognizing Azerbaijan’s territorial integrity—i.e., declaring the N.K.R. illegitimate.  Hawaii, South Dakota, and Wyoming also rejected pro-Azerbaijani bills in February.  Similar Azeri lobbyists to those that swayed Vermont were involved in those states’ efforts as well.

Armenians with their national flag

Why did Azeris manage to keep Vermont in their column—or at least out of Armenia’s—after trying and failing to do so in those other five states?  The answer may have something to do with Crimea.  Armenia was one of only eleven countries which (as discussed recently in this blog) sided with Russia and against Ukraine in a recent United Nations General Assembly vote condemning Russia’s invasion and annexation of Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula.  Others in that small club included some of the most brutal dictatorships in the world, like North Korea, Syria, and Sudan.  It is possible, in fact, as an Armenian politician recently suggested (discussed recently in this blog), that Kremlin arm-twisting brought Armenia into Russia’s new “Eurasian Union” trade bloc with Belarus and Kazakhstan, using the threat of seeing to it that Armenia would lose its grip on the N.K.R. (which many Armenian nationalists hope, and most of the rest of the world fears, could be among the next territories President Vladimir Putin is eyeing for annexation).  We may never know whether the Armenian government was bullied by Putin into backing him at the U.N. or whether it found immoral and hypocritical reasons of its own for doing so.  But Armenia’s international standing has taken a hit.  Pre-Crimea, it was a mere detail of Caucasus geopolitics that Armenia was more aligned with Russia while Georgia and Azerbaijan were more aligned with NATO and the West.  But after Crimea, it matters quite a bit.  Supporting Armenia’s foreign-policy agenda is now, in a not so indirect way, support for Putin’s new cold-war project of aggressively expanding the territories in which Russians—and allied nationalities, like Armenians—are in charge.  “Recognizing” N.K.R. is, for state legislatures today, not just taking an irrelevant position on an obscure struggle.  It’s actually siding against U.S. interests.

The Armenian lobby in the U.S. should have just stuck with the genocide question.  Their moral stance on that issue is unassailable.  Instead, they opted for mimicking the fundraising model of Jewish-American groups raising money for Israel in the early days of Israeli settlement.  In fact, the N.K.R. was largely built with money from Armenian-American donors.  But Armenia has now squandered the moral authority it enjoyed as a nation victimized by genocide.  Armenian-Americans had better climb down from their support for the N.K.R. now.  Because if Nagorno-Karabakh does become the next Crimea-type battleground in Putin’s Russo-fascist expansionist schemes, it could get very uncomfortable for them in the U.S.

You won’t see this picture on the Armenian National Committee of America
website: Syria’s dictator Bashar al-Assad with Armenia’s president, Serzh Sargsyan

Oh, and one other thing.  The chair of the Vermont senate’s Government Operations Committee, Sen. Jeanette White, told a reporter while discussing the setting aside of the N.K.R. question, “I believe that countries should be able to determine their own destiny.  However it isn’t Vermont seceding from the U.S., which we have threatened to do.  It’s complicated.”  She is reminding us that Vermont has its own independence movement, a left-wing, environmentally-oriented movement called the Second Vermont Republic (S.V.R.).  (Vermont was an independent nation before joining the U.S. in 1791.)  So if Vermont ever does become an independent state, it can just forget about getting any diplomatic recognition from Armenia.  In the South Caucasus, people have long memories.  They never forget a slight.

Flag of the Second Vermont Republic

[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.]

The Power of Pressure Groups: 3 California Lawmakers Advocate Nagorno-Karabakh Independence

In California, two United States legislators, addressing an Armenian-American pressure group, advocated diplomatic recognition of the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic (N.K.R.), also known as the Artsakh Republic, an Armenian puppet state which Armenian and Russian troops brutally carved out of the Republic of Azerbaijan’s territory in the 1990s.

Rep. Brad Sherman said, “I think Nagorno-Karabakh is an independent state, period.  It’s time to put an embassy in Stepanakert.”

Rep. Howard Berman was more equivocal, saying, “The people of Los Angeles don’t get to decide for Nagorno-Karabakh, the people of Nagorno-Karabakh get to decide.  ...  I have no doubt that they want independence and that’s where I’d like to see the process headed, but we are in a negotiation process that the government of Armenia and the government of Azerbaijan have agreed to.”

Reps. Howard Berman and Brad Sherman

They spoke at an event this week sponsored by the Armenian National Committee of America (A.N.C.A.).  Sherman and Berman, both Democrats, represent different parts of Los Angeles County’s San Fernando Valley.  California is home to a large number of Armenian-Americans, and in fact has more Armenian residents than anywhere outside the Republic of Armenia itself.

Later, Armenian-American media quoted a third San Fernando Valley Democrat, U.S. Rep. Adam Schiff, chiming in, “The people of Artsakh—overwhelmingly Armenian and overwhelmingly Christian—cannot be allowed to fall into the hands of Aliyev”—referring to Ilham Aliyev, Azerbaijan’s president.

Rep. Adam Schiff

Meanwhile, the Armenian National Committee of America (A.N.C.A.) has announced that it is supporting neither Barack Obama nor Mitt Romney for the U.S. presidency since neither candidate has accepted A.N.C.A. invitations to speak out on the Nagorno-Karabakh, Armenian-genocide, and Javakhk issues.  Boy, that’s a real game-changer in the election, eh?  Hear that, folks?  Forget soccer moms, forget NASCAR dads—Armenian-American single-issue-Nagorno-Karabakh-voters are up for grabs!

[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.]

“South California” Statehood Movement Reignites in Election Year

The movement to make part of southern California the 51st state of the United States has reemerged this election season.  California’s famously left-wing governor (and a nemesis to conservatives), Jerry Brown, on September 19th vetoed a law that would have returned $14 million in vehicle-license fees to four cities in Riverside County, a vast rectangular swathe of inland southern Californian desert.  Those towns’ loss of funds in a move by Brown and the Democratic-majority legislature last year would, according to Jeff Stone, the county supervisor, have caused the towns to go bankrupt, and it was that diversion that first lit the fuse of separatism last year.

Stone now heads a South California statehood movement called Rebellion 2012, which has about 600 members, 1,400 or more supporters (to judge by its Facebook page), and a budget of, ahem, $1,200, but Stone’s chief of staff said this week that he still believes in the cause “absolutely” and “passionately ... because the state is so dysfunctional.”  Its rallying cries are smaller government, decentralization, and deregulation, key themes in the Obama-era “Tea Party” movement that has turned the national Republican Party upside-down.  A major Rebellion 2012 rally scheduled for September 29th in Vail Lake, however, has just been rescheduled for the spring (by which time, one assumes, it will be renamed Rebellion 2013).

The counties in Stone’s envisioned South California are Riverside, San Bernardino, Imperial, San Diego, Orange, Kings, Kern, Fresno, Tulare, Inyo, Madera, Mariposa, and Mono (see map below).

“South California,” a new state proposed by Jeff Stone’s Rebellion 2012 movement

This draws a quite different map than the usual, unofficial division between “Northern California” and “Southern California,” which tends to use the straight line that has San Bernardino, Kern, and San Luis Obispo to its south and Monterey, Kings, Tulare, and Inyo to the north (see map below).

“Southern California,” as envisioned in common parlance

That division makes some sense culturally and geographically, but modern state-partition movements in the U.S. tend to be about partisan politics, often ultimately national partisan politics.  And in California, a “blue” (Democratic Party) state, the divide between “red” (Republican Party) and “blue” counties tends to be, as elsewhere in the country, an urban–rural split, and to some extent (as in Oregon and Washington as well), a coastal-vs.-inland one.  Here, for example, is how California’s counties voted in the 2000 presidential race, the race that has come to define the modern deep partisan divide in American politics:

... and here are equivalent maps for the 2004 election ...

... and the 2008 election (blue is Barack Obama, red is John McCain) ...

... and for the breakdown, by party, of California’s federal Congressional districts, after the last two elections:

Though there have been some distorting effects over the years—such as the enormous popularity of Ronald Reagan, a charismatic Californian Republican who carried many traditionally Democratic jurisdictions in 1980 and 1984—these maps give a general picture of the urban–rule, coast–inland divide.  And the above map shows how the trend is toward an ever-shrinking reliably-Republican zone in California.  This is due to a number of factors, including the increasing numbers of Hispanics—who tend, especially in the Obama era, to be Democrats—in parts of California.  You can see here that, in the American electoral system—under which the presidential candidate who gets the most votes in a state gets all the electoral votes for that state—many Republican Californians feel that they may as well not vote at all.  Dividing California would create a blue North California and a red South California and would re-empower some of California’s Republicans in national races.  In this, Stone is far more astutely attentive to real-world politics than, for example, a 1992 proposal for a three-way partition of California which would have created three states that would each have the same internal partisan divides as California as a whole:

Given that, Stone’s choice of his 13 counties is a bit counterintuitive in places.  Obama’s sweep of southern counties outside Los Angeles and Orange may be ephemeral—due to his appeal to non-whites that might otherwise vote Republican, perhaps.  So, clearly, Stone is relying on San Bernardino and Riverside being, at base, Republican counties—as non-presidential races in those counties tend to confirm.  Less supportable is the idea that San Diego and Imperial counties are, at heart, Republican counties.  Although it is true that San Diego is a more politically conservative city than many cities its size, especially in local politics, both those counties are trending blue (and trending more Hispanic) and, though they were evenly split in 2000 and 2004, went strongly for Obama in 2008.

Stone openly excludes Los Angeles County as “too liberal,” and, indeed, the county does seem to be Democratic across the board.  Orange County, likewise, is red across the board.  Orange is, in fact, by some measures, the most consistently Republican-voting county out of all the U.S.’s 3,033 counties (Louisiana’s parishes and Alaska’s boroughs being considered “counties” here).  Orange County is also the birthplace of Richard M. Nixon, it was ground zero of “Reagan Country” in Reagan’s gubernatorial and presidential races, and the county’s main airport was renamed the John Wayne International Airport ... do I need to go on?  The South California movement’s reasoning seems to be that Orange County cannot be excluded from any envisioned new, southern state, while Los Angeles cannot be included.  Thus, San Diego and Imperial need to be brought into South California so as not to leave North California split into two noncontiguous chunks.  San Diego also brings South California a respectable coastline, rather than consisting only of Orange County’s smaller coastline, which contains mostly public beaches anyway, not usable harbors.  And San Diego would make a much more respectable capital for the new state than a backwater like Fontana, Barstow, Bakersfield, or Irvine.  But the idea of San Diego County residents consenting to leave California and becoming the most, almost the only, Democratic part of a solidly-Republican state is quite far-fetched.

A statue of the Duke himself greets arrivals
at John Wayne International Airport in Orange County.

Also, why not include some of California’s far-northern Republican counties in “South California”?  Surely, there would be—and probably already is—more enthusiasm for getting out from under Sacramento’s thumb in any of the inland counties north of Lake Tahoe—Lassen, Siskiyou, etc. etc.—than anywhere in San Diego County, for example.  Here, the secessionists’ motivations might be psychological or symbolic.  A reorientation of the partition to the political realities of the coastal–inland split would make the separatists look more rural and remote than they are, and thus less likely to be taken seriously as a movement and as a state.

Secondly, South California separatists might desire to not appear to be asking for more than half the state.  Stone’s smaller “South California” sends the message: “Look, we’re just a small group of people that disagree with the way things are run.  Let us leave, and you might not even notice.”  (Though South California would still be gigantic by any standards other than western North American ones.  One of its constituent counties alone, San Bernardino County, is the largest county in the U.S., larger than, say, Connecticut, and larger than countries such as, say, Costa Rica, the Netherlands, or Albania.)

Here, Stone and his supporters are perhaps savvier than Bill Maze, a former state legislator who represented Inyo, Kern, Tulare, and San Bernardino counties, and heads a movement called Citizens for Saving California Farm Industries.  He advocates a partition involving hiving off a relatively small part of the coastline as “Coastal California” (see map below), leaving the rest of the state as a larger, more Republican jurisdiction.  But his rallying issues are mainly agricultural, and in the Central Valley, and he has not tapped anywhere near the strong feelings across the state that Stone’s movement has.  Plus, Coastal Californians would not consent to losing so much valuable real estate; they rightly perceive Maze’s movement as a version of “let’s just kick the hippies ’n’ queers out of California.”  (The same problem vexes a conservative-Republican-led movement to eject Cook County, which includes Chicago, from Illinois, which I discussed in a blog post several months ago.)

Bill Maze’s vision for a State of Coastal California

Leaving northern inland California under Sacramento’s control also has a political logic to it.  Those counties are far less populous and so would be less important to the success of the statehood movement.  They also include areas of natural beauty and, more crucially in the coming decades, water resources that Sacramento might fight much harder to keep control of.

So “South California,” as it is delineated, is an odd gerrymander but one that makes some sense.  The question is whether it could ever be implemented.

Partition of California is an old idea.  It was floated in the run-up to the Civil War, when many states and territories were torn between joining the slave or free parts of the U.S.  In the late 19th century, and then again in 1965, dividing the state using a straight line across the approximate Southern California–Northern California divide was proposed.  In 1965, it passed in the Senate but died in the Assembly.  And, of course, in 1941 there was a proposal to take the far-northern counties of California and the far-southern ones of Oregon to create the State of Jefferson.  That idea is still raised wistfully by modern Tea Party types in that region who feel that the liberals in Sacramento and Salem don’t listen to them.  Some barns in northern California and southwestern Oregon display large State of Jefferson flags to make their point.  (The two “X”es refer to the area’s residents feeling that they have been “double-crossed” by urban elites.)

Speaking of flags, one way that you can tell the South California movement is not serious is that they don’t have a flag yet.  And to judge by the flag of Stone’s own Riverside County ...

... there is no reason to expect anything impressive in the flag department.  In fact, let’s just admit it, Riverside County’s flag looks like shit—in composition, colors, image quality, typeface, everything.  (See one of my favorite blogs, Bad Flags, for much more nuanced rants in this vein.)  Most U.S. counties don’t even have flags at all, but merely use the county seal to place upon a plain background to serve as a flag.  Orange County, however, has done a nice variation on this that is reminiscent of the New Mexico flag (the most striking and aesthetically pleasing of all state flags, incidentally):

Or, as another possibility, South California could play on California’s excellent (almost as good as New Mexico’s) bear flag ...

... and have a flag showing half a bear.  If so, I can suggest which half would be appropriate.

But to be implemented, any new states admitted to the Union must be approved by the U.S. Congress.  Just as in the Civil War era, it was only politically possible to admit new states in pairs—one slave, one free—to maintain the tense political balance, so in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries with partisan politics.  Alaska and Hawaii were admitted in tandem in 1959 because Hawaii is a Democratic state and Alaska Republican one.  If South California is made a state, then the rest of California would remain reliably blue, so it would amount to creating a new red state, and that would have to be balanced by the admission of a new blue state.  Perhaps, if the right alliances are made across the aisle and across the continent, this could be the moment the District of Columbia has been waiting for.

(Then there’s Puerto Rico, but that I will leave to a later blog post.  Watch this space.)

[You can read more about South California, the State of Jefferson, 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.]

Study Lists U.S. Hot Spots for Ethnonationalist Terrorism—New York, L.A., and ... Cairo, Illinois??

A recent study on “terrorist hot spots” in the United States lists seven counties where “ethno-nationalist/separatist” terrorism has been concentrated.  Hot Spots of Terrorism and Other Crimes in the United States, 1970 to 2008, a report released Jan. 31st by the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START) at the University of Maryland, and provided to the Department of Homeland Security, counts 267 such incidents in the 1970s, focused on the nation’s three largest cities, with 170 in Manhattan, Queens, and Bronx counties (i.e. New York City); 44 in Los Angeles County; and 36 in Cook County, Illinois (which includes Chicago).  But there were also nine in Alexander County, Illinois (county seat: Cairo—that’s pronounced kay-ro), a rural patch of land in the state’s “Little Egypt” region near the Missouri and Kentucky borders, and eight in Alameda County, in the San Francisco Bay area (see table below).

Though the study does not list the exact incidents, the Alameda incidents probably relate to, or at least include, the 1974 kidnapping in Berkeley of the newspaper heiress Patty Hearst by the fringe black-revolutionary Symbionese Liberation Army.

Patty Hearst in 1974, in front of the

Symbionese Liberation Army banner

In the 1980s, there were 38 incidents in Manhattan and sixteen in L.A. County.  In the ’90s there were two in Manhattan—that’s all—and none at all in the U.S. in the 2000s.

I am as yet unable to figure out what the heck was going on in and around Cairo, Illinois, in the ’70s that got counted as ethnonationalist or separatist terrorism.  There is not much to distinguish the area.  It is in an area of southern Illinois that is culturally rather Southern and is referred to locally as Little Egypt, partly because of a profusion of Egyptian place names in that part of the Mississippi River (extending as far south as, most famously, Memphis, Tennessee)—a toponymic pattern that is the product of nineteenth-century pioneers’ notion of classical erudition.

In Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), Huck and Jim originally set out for Cairo on their raft, since Illinois was a free state, but they overshoot and end up in Arkansas, a slave state, by mistake—grimly ironic considering the town’s later reputation as a lynching capital, hardly a “safe haven” for African-Americans.  (It is not anything lynching-related that seems to be referred to in the terrorism study.  Right-wing (and left-wing) and religiously motivated and single-issue incidents are tabulated separately, and if racially motivated killings were counted as ethnonationalist terrorism in the study then the statistics would look a lot different.)

The screenwriter and humorist H. Allen Smith (author of Rhubarb), in 1947 published Lo, the Former Egyptian!, a memoir of his childhood in  McLeansburg, Illinois, in Little Egypt, and his main point seemed to be that hilariously little ever happened there.

Perhaps there was a Little Egyptian separatist movement.  If so, someone please tell me more about it.