Ten Separatist Movements to Watch in 2016

A year ago in this space, I offered my predictions for which separatist movements would capture the world’s headlines in 2015.   Some of those, such as East Turkestan (in western China) (no. 8) and the Russian puppet states of Abkhazia and South Ossetia within Georgia (no. 4), are conflicts which continued to simmer during the past twelve months but did not boil over (and I am happy to have been wrong about that).

Abkhazia—still quasi-independent, but in a holding pattern

Scotland, which was no. 10 in this list a year ago, continued to build momentum for independence, but without too many significant developments other than the United Kingdom’s Labour Party betraying its utter ideological disarray in the face of defections to the Scottish Nationalist Party (S.N.P.) by selecting a cantankerous, bearded paleo-Marxist, Jeremy Corbin—who disrespects Queen Elizabeth II and sympathizes with Vladimir Putin—as the official opposition leader in Parliament.  This means that, to all intents and purposes, the S.N.P. is the opposition.  The U.K. is still headed for break-up, but probably not for a few more years yet.

Scots have not put their flags away, but independence is on hold.

Other aspirant states, such as South Yemen, Novorossiya (eastern Ukraine), and Islamic State (a.k.a. the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham, or ISIS)—nos. 6, 5, and 2, respectively, last year—continued to be the focus of high-profile conflicts in 2015 and will probably continue to be in 2016, though they didn’t make this year’s list.  Catalonia (no. 9 last year), Republika Srpska (no. 7 last year), Transnistria (no. 3 last year), and Kurdistan (no. 1 last year) remain on this year’s list.  For better or for worse, they may get their moment in history in 2016.  Here is the full list:

10. Biafra: A 1960s Cause Revitalized in the Face of Islamist Terror

Southeast Nigeria’s Igbo people were the first stateless nation to make a credible bid for independence after the mass European decolonization of Africa in the 1960s.  British colonists had left the supposedly more pliable northern Hausa–Fulani Muslims in charge of the new nation, but after a series of coups and counter-coups among Nigeria’s main ethnic groups, Igbos declared a Republic of Biafra in 1967.  The ensuing war killed millions, many through deliberate blockade and starvation by the British-backed Nigerian government.  Since then, modifying Africa’s irrational, arbitrary colonial-era borders has become a taboo, and nowhere more so than in Nigeria, still traumatized by the Biafra catastrophe.  But the emergence of the terrorist Islamist group Boko Haram in northern Nigeria has changed things.  In a country about evenly divided between northern Muslims and southern Christians, national unity is less of a priority today to the south’s Yorubas, Igbos, and others as Islamist radicals rampage through the north with massacres, rapes, and pillage.  The spectacle of Muslim terrorists targeting the predominantly-Christian Igbo population in the demographically mixed “Middle Belt” region has reopened the wounds of the north–south conflict that led to the Biafra War in the first place.  Few noticed when the tiny Biafra Zionist Movement (B.Z.M.) declared independence in 2012, but the Movement for the Actualization of the Sovereign State of Biafra (MASSOB) has been issuing Biafran currency and passports and hoisting the banned Biafran flag, and this year a new group, Indigenous People of Biafra (IPoB), launched a pirate station called Radio Biafra.  This was the last straw for the newly elected president, Muhammadu Buhari, a northern Muslim who this year replaced Goodluck Jonathan, a southerner more popular with Igbos.  Buhari had the IPoB leader, Nnamdi Kanu, arrested, and riots ensued, with several killed.  Igbos claim that the government cannot protect them against Islamic terror or against trigger-happy federal police, and that a new Muslim-dominated government will marginalize the southeast politically and economically, as other administrations have done.  If Buhari cannot convince them otherwise, the conflict will worsen.  So far, he seems to be stoking conflict by meeting protests with disproportionate force.  Add to these complications the fact that some smaller ethnic groups within the former Biafra are saying that Biafran nationalists do not speak for them and that they are willing to secede from any independent Biafra in order to stay in Nigeria, and there is a recipe for horrible conflict in 2016.

9. Cyrenaica: A Sufi Kingdom That Suddenly Looks Like a Good Idea Again

Aside from Syria (see nos. 2 and 1 below), Libya is the most dynamically fractious country in the world today.  When the Arab Spring revolutions reached Libya in 2011, the eastern third of the country, Cyrenaica, which was an independent moderate Sufi kingdom from 1949 to 1951, rose up first, and for a while its main city, Benghazi, was the “capital” of “Free Libya.”  After NATO unseated and then offed the dictator Moammar al-Qaddafi, the scores of local Cyrenaican, Tripolitanian, Toubou, Tuareg, Berber, and Islamist warlords throughout the country did not want to give up the little fiefdoms they had established during the civil war, and they still haven’t.  Zubair al-Senussi, a nephew of the deposed King Idris, declared Cyrenaica autonomous in 2013, but the influx of Islamist militants to Libya soon after that has made the situation more complex: last year, the newly elected Libyan national parliament had to decamp to Tobruk, in Cyrenaica’s far northeast, while Libya Dawn, the bloc that lost the election, has set up a rival parliament in the official capital Tripoli, in the western region of Tripolitania (see map below), and is dominated by the Muslim Brotherhood.  Meanwhile, affiliates of Islamic State have utter control of an area around Sirte, Qaddafi’s birthplace, in eastern Tripolitania on the central coast.  On December 17, 2015, the two rival parliaments officially formed a “national unity government” at a summit in Morocco, but no one knows if that will mean anything in practical terms.  Real power in Libya lies in the ability to rally local militias, and those pushing for greater autonomy in Cyrenaica have a few things on their side: there is more unity among militias in the east, Tripolitania has more remnant Qaddafi loyalists and Berber unrest and is less friendly to foreign investment (despite the fact that the internationally-recognized Muslim Brotherhood government is temporarily located in the east), and Cyrenaica has nearly all the oil.  Ah, yes, it may all come down to oil in the end.  Unity government or not, 2016 may be the year Cyrenaica asks the world to give up on Libyan unity and back their secession.

8. Assam: Is China Contemplating Putin-Style Puppet States in Its Own Near Abroad?

Assam, the largest state in India’s eastern panhandle, is at first glance an obscure part of the world.  Its decades-long conflict among warring separatist militias, spilling over into neighboring states that form with it the “Seven Sisters” region, tend to have little effect on wider politics.  But that may be changing—and it’s all about China’s frustrated geopolitical ambitions.  First, understand that the government in Beijing does not recognize the MacMahon Line which the British (who then ruled India) agreed upon with the then-autonomous government of Tibet in 1914; China regards the area just below it, governed today as India’s Arunachal Pradesh state, part of its Tibet “Autonomous” Region.  Second, China has begun to flex its muscles beyond its borders in a way that it has not done for decades.  The West is alarmed over Chinese construction and military-patrolling activities—both in violation of international law—on and around tiny disputed islands and pseudo-islands in the South China Sea.  Surely, Beijing’s new boldness is partly due to China having seen Russia getting away with bald-faced expansionism in Ukraine, Moldova, Georgia, and elsewhere (see nos. 3 and 2 below).  China has mostly only tacitly backed Vladimir Putin’s irredentist empire-rebuilding, wary of being seen as a hypocrite on the subject of separatism.  But now that Russia is happily clamping down on separatists at home while arming them abroad, with none of its fist-pumping pro-Putin masses seeming to notice the contradiction, China may feel a little freer to do the same.  Despite brutal repression of any moves toward autonomy in Tibet, the Xinjiang Uyghur “Autonomous” Region, and even Hong Kong, China is very tentatively making ideological forays into neighboring regions.  Separatists in Japan’s far-southern archipelago, Okinawa, which used to be a separate kingdom with feudal-style allegiance to China, have been getting support from Beijing in the form of statements to the effect that Japan’s historical claims on the islands are concocted.  Okinawa, like the South China Sea islands, is part of a vast chain of Western-friendly territories—South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, the Philippines, Guam, etc.—which form an impermeable barrier preventing China from projecting power toward the Pacific.  Keep in mind, also, that the recent elections in Burma (Myanmar) are the latest chapter in a Burmese liberalization and pivot toward the West, which threatens to rob China of some of its trade access to the Indian Ocean.

The Indo-Chinese border is a mess of competing claims.
If Beijing decides to aid Assamese rebels, it will get even messier.

So where does Assam come in?  Well, just last month, Paresh Baruah, the leader of the armed United Liberation Front of Asom (ULFA) came out openly courting Beijing’s support.  Using Communist doublespeak in referring to Arunachal Pradesh (which was part of Assam state until 1987) as “South Tibet,” he scolded New Delhi for hosting Tibet’s government-in-exile despite having in 2003 pledged recognition of Chinese sovereignty over Tibet (but not Arunachal Pradesh) in exchange for China backing off its claims on the formerly independent Himalayan kingdom of Sikkim.  It would be a cinch for Beijing to back eastern Indian rebels of various kinds—as well as those in neighboring Burma—as a way to destabilize the enemy and creep inch by inch toward the Indian Ocean.  Beijing seems poised to, ever slowly, “go Putin” on its neighbors.  This is a stealth phenomenon, but Springtime of Nations will keep readers informed of it during 2016.

7. Catalonia: The Stars May Be Aligning for a Final Break with Spain

Catalonia, a secessionist region of Spain, was no. 2 on last year’s list, being at that time fresh off of a non-binding referendum in which 81% of Catalans favoring independence but turnout was well below 50%—giving both sides, the unionist central government in Madrid and Catalonia’s ruling separatist Convergence and Unity (Convergència i Unió, or CiU) coalition, reasons to dig in their heels.  But in June, CiU split evenly into rival camps over the question of whether or not Catalonia should pursue independence unilaterally, even in the face of Madrid’s insistence that such moves are unconstitutional.  In Catalan parliamentary elections in September of this year, the new pro-independence Together for Yes (Junts pel Sí, or JxSí) coalition gained four seats and the more gradualist Popular Unity Candidacy (Candidatura d’Unitat Popular, or CUP) seven, but the surprise surge was from the anti-independence Ciutadans (“Citizens”) party, which gained sixteen seats, leaving pro-independence parties as a whole with only 48% of the vote—weak, but enough to keep the separatist Catalan president, Artur Mas, clinging to power for the time being.  Then came another blow—this month’s Spanish court ruling that any secession bid would indeed be unconstitutional, which prompted the usual defiance from President Mas.  But just this week the game has changed: in elections to the Spanish parliament on December 20th, Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy’s People’s Party (Partido Popular, or P.P.) lost 64 seats, plunging from 45% to 29%.  No one did any better, though: the Socialists lost 20 seats, bringing them down to 22%, and the newly minted far-left Podemos (“We Can”) party came out of nowhere to take 69 seats.  Podemos could well be the king-maker, and its young, hip, pony-tail-sporting leader, Pablo Iglesias, supports the idea of a Catalan independence referendum.  Not surprisingly, Podemos did well in Catalonia in particular, and if a Catalan vote for Podemos counts as a vote for independence, it looks like these elections show separatism to be surging again.  The coalition-building process may drag into the new year.  Catalonia’s hopes for independence depend on the result.  Either way, their fight is far from over.

6. Confederate States of America: Trump’s Rise and the “Browning” of America Lure Extremists out of the Shadows

All realistic dreams of independence for the “Confederated States of America” in the southern United States died in 1865 with the Unionist victory in the American Civil War.  But Confederate nationalism never went away, and, since the war was mostly (among other things) about slavery, Confederate nostalgia has always had a central racial component.  Federal enforcement of desegregation in the South in the 1960s reawakened the Southern white rhetoric of “states’ rights” that had dominated secessionist rhetoric in the 19th century, and the Republican Party repositioned itself atop a “base” of Southern white racists after Democrats like Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson adopted Civil Rights as their cause.  That explains why the 2000 electoral map that led to the months-long standoff between the candidates Al Gore and George W. Bush was essentially a map of old North-versus-South divisions—with of course a large extension of “red state” America into the Plains, where rural whites share many Southern “values.”  That also explains why the election of Barack Obama in 2008 sparked an explosion of racially-tinged far-right militancy in the guise of the “Tea Party” and the re-booted “Patriot” militia movement and a recruitment bonanza for Ku Klux Klan and neo-Nazi groups.  This year’s white-supremacist massacre at an African-American church in South Carolina sparked a broad public backlash against the Confederate flags, symbols, and toxic rhetoric that had warped the deranged young shooter via the Internet.  So today right-wing Southern whites feel their “heritage” is under attack.  And the ongoing tilting of American demographics toward a larger and more electorally mobilized dark-skinned (especially Hispanic) population has white conservatives in a panic as well—hence all the talk of “taking our country back” and hence the bizarre spectacle of the 2008 election, in which a protracted Republican primary season with unhinged xenophobes like Rick Santorum, Rick Perry, and Michele Bachmann ranting about the black and Latino menace demolished any hopes of denying Obama a second term (even though their eventual candidate was by comparison very moderate).

And now comes Donald Trump, a billionaire Republican front-runner seemingly uninterested in preparing the ground for his party’s victory next year and dropping all pretense and all code in openly stoking ultra-bigotry.  Gone are the days of Republican nods and winks about “welfare mothers,” “voter fraud,” or—ahem, you know who I mean—“the inner city”: Trump calls illegal immigrants “murderers and rapists,” vows to erect a giant wall along the border with Mexico, contorts his arms on stage to mock the disabled, applauds when thugs beat and hurl the N-word at an African-American heckler at one of his hate rallies, and proposes that Muslim Americans be registered and monitored just as German Jews were in the 1930s and ’40s—an historical parallel he pointedly refuses to be offended by.  Trump for months now has dominated American political news with what is very easily the most openly racist major presidential campaign since Reconstruction—a new low for America’s image around the world.

What does this mean for neo-Confederates?  We had always been told that they were a minuscule political fringe, and perhaps they are, in one sense, but the following scenario still seems likely: Trump loses the nomination, but the aftersmell of his long, ugly campaign costs the Republicans any hope of the Hispanic and centrist (“undecided”) votes needed to win, meaning Hillary Rodham Clinton is headed unstoppably to the White House.  That leaves the 38% of Republicans who today back Trump and the 15% who today back Texas’s equally deranged and intolerant Ted Cruz (who is equally incapable of securing a nomination), angry and feeling betrayed by their party, their tiny brains aboil with conspiracy theories and thoughts of revolution and race war.  Mind you, we are talking here about somewhere between 10% and 20% of the population of the U.S.—tens of millions of people—and a solid majority of whites in much of the Deep South.  If you think that’s an exaggeration, look again at Trump’s poll numbers and listen to the unprecedented levels of furious racism in his rhetoric.

White supremacists tried to take over Leith, North Dakota, last year.  Where will they try next?

These nuts won’t start a real revolution or a secession, but many may split away as a militant-rightist, mostly-Southern-based third party that could be a more durable feature in American politics than third-party runs by the likes of John Anderson (1980), Ross Perot (1992), or Ralph Nader (2000 and 2004) could ever have hoped to be—and perhaps Trump will even start his own party before the election; he can certainly afford to, and he hasn’t ruled it out.  This would split the right just enough to keep the Republican base more or less permanently out of power nationally—and thus more and more paranoid and angry.  What I predict for 2016 and 2017 is a boost in visibility for groups like the League of the South and the Texas Nationalist Movement, both of them far-right in their orientation and both with violent elements.  (In 2014, the League launched its own paramilitary wing, called the Indomitables.)  More and more mainstream Republicans will also begin to adopt the doctrines of “nullification” and “state sovereignty” that are the underpinnings of secessionist Constitutional arguments.  And we can expect a spike in violent incidents, such as race massacres like the one in South Carolina; hostage situations and sieges involving armed neo-Confederates; and attempts to establish all-white enclaves, like the “Pioneer Little Europe” attempted in South Dakota in 2014 by the white-supremacist Craig Cobb (see reports from this blog here and here) or his more recent follow-up attempts in Nebraska.  America won’t split into two countries, but its people will be even more divided, and the ignorant conservative white masses who feel disenfranchised will rally more and more under their own disgraced Confederate flag.

Welcome to Dixie.

5. Russians in the Baltic States: Could the Kremlin Pull Another Crimea Right under the NATO Umbrella?

When Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, invaded and annexed Ukraine’s majority-ethnic-Russian Republic of Crimea in 2014, his triumphant speeches made clear what Russian expansionist ambitions were about.  He addressed the “plight” of those Russians who went to sleep one night in 1991 as the dominant ethnic group in the Soviet Union and woke up as minorities in foreign lands such as Ukraine, Moldova, Kazakhstan, and, most of all, in the Baltic States.  In Lithuania, 5% of the population consider themselves ethnic Russians (15% in the capital), in Latvia it is 28% (with nearly half of Riga and most of its second-largest city, Dagauvpils, speaking Russian), and in Estonia 24% (with 47% of the population of Estonia’s capital, Tallinn, being Russian-speakers).  These high numbers are the result of an explicitly colonial policy of settling Russians in the Baltics which began soon after their illegal annexation by the Soviet Union during the Second World War.  (The United Nations and most of the world refused to recognize the annexations, but no one did anything about it.)  By the time the Baltics became independent again in 1989, the demographic damage could not be undone; large parts of the three countries had become Russified.  Post-Soviet Latvia instituted harsh laws excluding newcomers and non-Latvian-speakers from public life, and so here Russophones’ resentment is sharpest.  In 2012, a referendum on making Russian an official language alongside Latvian was doomed by numbers to fail (as reported at the time in this blog), but the emotionally-fought campaign put Russians in alliance with some Latgalians, a sort-of-separate ethnic group in the area around Dagauvpils which feels marginalized.  After the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Balts became understandably jittery.  All three are in NATO, so a full-on attack by Russia is unthinkable—it would put Putin on an instant war footing with three nuclear powers—but Putin favors “stealth annexations” anyway.  In places like the Russian puppet states within Georgia, Moldova (see no. 3 below), and Ukraine, the Kremlin has distributed Russian passports to local Russian-speakers and used or threatened economic blockades.  If Putin ever decides to pull a Crimea in the Baltics, he will start with strategies like this.  Keep in mind, Putin violated NATO airspace one time too many this month, in Turkey, but he probably still feels that was worth it: he lost only one plane, but whipped up jingoism at home and destabilized an enemy state.   Speculative maps leaked from the Kremlin in 2012 (as reported on in this blog) (see map below) showed eastern Estonia and eastern Latvia absorbed into Russia as, respectively, Narvski District (Narva is a 94% Russian-speaking town in Estonia) and Dvinskaya Oblast (Dvinsk being the Russian name for Dagauvpils).  Sure, that sounds silly, but so did the phrases “Donetsk Republic” and “Luhansk Republic” a couple years ago.  Already, Russian submarines troll Baltic harbors, and it is within the Kremlin’s means to stoke grievances in Russian-speaking parts of the Baltics (where they all watch Russian propaganda television anyway) and even run guns to rebels for a “liberation.”  Annexation and old-style direct invasions are off the table, but severe destabilization would be the next best thing.  2016 may be the year Putin tries it.

Modifications to the map of Europe in progress at the Kremlin

4. Republika Srpska: Bosnia’s Serbs Haven’t Had a Good War in 20 Years or So ...

After the devastation of the Bosnian War, the 1995 Dayton Accords created a Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina divided into two quasi-independent and insanely gerrymandered halves, with only a veneer of national unity between them: the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, governed by Croats and Bosniaks (Muslims), and the Republika Srpska, the “Serb Republic,” which is called by its Serbian name in English to avoid confusion with the fully independent Republika Srbija (Republic of Serbia) just to the east.  It was a pyrrhic victory for the peacemakers: the fighting had stopped, but the new map rewarded “ethnic cleansing” (a term coined for this war) by carving into stone the territorial gains made through wholesale massacre.  Both sides seemed content to simply pretend, for the sake of greater peace, to pretend that they were a single country.  But then, in 2014, Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, changed all of the ideological dynamics in the Slavic world by invading and annexing Ukraine’s Republic of Crimea.  Russia had always been the diplomatically isolated Serbia’s one ally in the wider world, since Russian nationalists see in Serbia parallels to their own grievances: a feeling that NATO and the West are punitively whittling their empires away, a sense of historic humiliation, and a panic over Muslim insurgency (where Bosniaks and Kosovars are analogous to Chechens or Crimean Tatars—never mind that all of these are among the most politically and doctrinally moderate Muslims in the world).  Russia’s new muscle-flexing and its eagerness to settle old scores have now rekindled the embers of the Republika Srpska’s dormant jingoism.  Serbia itself, which hankers for European Union (E.U.) membership and is eager to shed its global image as a pack of bloody-fanged ultranationalists, wants nothing to do with Republika Srpska, even though in the bad old days reunification was the mutual goal.  But Bosnian Serbs are now once again thinking about independence, or at least some way to cut their ties with Croats and Bosniaks.  The republic’s president, Milorad Dodik, stated this year that a referendum on independence for Republika Srpska was the only way forward and that 99% of Bosnian Serbs would support it—surely an exaggeration, though such a referendum, if held, might well pass.  Dodik’s own party, plus two far-right radical nationalist parties, hold nearly two-thirds of the seats in Republika Srpska’s parliament.  Just in the past few months, Serb nationalists have upped the ante: they are planning a referendum on whether the republic is beholden to decisions by Bosnia and Herzegovina’s Constitutional Court, and earlier this month the republic announced it was severing all ties to Bosnian state institutions.  The provocations that led to these moves were mostly symbolic ones: the Court voted to abolish Republika Srpska’s own “national” holiday, Republic Day, and federal Bosnian authorities arrested several Srpska citizens on decades-old war-crimes charges (still a sore spot for Serbs).  But the course Dodik is taking amounts to a virtual declaration of independence.  He might climb down, but it’s also possible that with tensions running high a minor event could lead to the renewal of fighting.  Putin has shown he would have no compunctions about sending in troops, regular or irregular, to help Serbs in any renewed civil war (if only to repay the Serb irregulars who flooded to Ukraine to fight for Putin last year).  And Bosnia is not in NATO, so, if previous events in Georgia and Ukraine are any indication, the West would in such a case sit on their hands and watch in horror as the Balkans descend once again into open war.

Milorad Dodik wants to re-open the Bosnian can of worms—and dump it all over NATO’s head.

3. Transnistria: A Pseudo-State in the Balkans Seems Ripe for Russia’s Plucking

Transnistria—more properly the Pridnestrovian Moldavian Republic—is not much, actually.  It’s a wafer-thin sliver of the formerly-Soviet Republic of Moldova, and Moldova itself is a sliver, being the slice of Romania’s Moldavia region which ended up being divvied out to the Soviet Union after the Second World War.  Today, Transnistria governs itself and calls itself independent, but doesn’t even have the official diplomatic recognition from Russia that puppet states like Abkhazia and South Ossetia, in Georgia, have.  Transnistria’s half-million or so people are about about evenly divided three ways among ethnic Russians, ethnic Ukrainians, and ethnic Moldavians (i.e., Romanians).  In 2006, 97% of them voted in a referendum that they wanted to break from Moldova completely and be recognized as a separate state in “free association” with the Russian Federation.  There is no reason to think that sentiment has cooled in the decade since, except in defection to the even more appealing idea, since 2014, of following Crimea’s lead in become part of Russia outright—which is the openly stated goal of Transnistria’s government.  The only problem is that a large chunk of independent Ukraine stands between Transnistria and the nearest point of de facto Russian territory, Crimea.  For a while it looked as if President Vladimir Putin and his proxy forces meant to take not only the Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts in the southeast of Ukraine but also the entire Black Sea coast, where ethnic Russians are also numerous.  Those ambitions have been scaled back a bit, but it’s not out of the question that Russian residents of the ethnically tense Odessa Oblast which borders Transnistria on its east could secede from Ukraine just as Donetsk and Luhansk have done and unify with Transnistria.  (Anti-Western Odessans did declare an “Odessa Republic of Novorossiya” in April 2014, as reported at the time in this blog, but it never translated into actually holding any territory.)  Putin’s Syrian adventure (see below) has overextended his forces somewhat, but if the right opportunity came along—such as a local uprising by ethnic Russians that “need protecting,” he might just snatch up Transnistria as an after-dinner snack, or at least grant it diplomatic recognition on its own.

2. Alawite State: Shouldn’t Assad Be Gone by Now? If Putin Has a Say, We’re Stuck with Him

Since Syria descended into civil war four years ago, Russia’s President Vladimir Putin has used his influence with the embattled Syrian dictator, Bashar al-Assad, to enhance his own diplomatic credibility.  In 2015, the United States and western European nations, which had only half-heartedly been helping the Free Syrian Army (F.S.A.) and other moderate rebels, began stepping up their fight against the self-declared terrorist Islamic State (a.k.a. ISIS), which controls large swathes of Syria and Iraq, and in October Russia stepped into the Syrian fray itself, with public announcements that Russia and the West, despite their differences, were partners in the fight against the Islamic State terrorists.  But a look at where exactly Russia has been dropping its bombs since early October tell a different story.  Putin is expending very little of his firepower against Islamic State and instead is pinpointing his attacks on the F.S.A. and other moderates who control the territory surrounding Assad’s redoubt in the west.  This includes the area around Damascus, the capital, but also the coastal provinces of Tartus and Latakia, where Russia has its military bases.  This is the part of Syria which was known as the Alawite State when it was a colony of France, and it is home to the doctrinally liberal Shiite Muslims of Assad’s minority Alawite sect, whom Islamic State regards as heretics.  Assad’s Syria is a crucial part of Putin’s loose alliance of tinpot dictatorships (also including Cuba, Iran, Zimbabwe, and Sudan), since it offers him a guaranteed Mediterranean presence, and Syria is also part of an arc of Shiite-ruled states, along with Iraq and Iran, that Islamic State is keen to punch holes in.  Already Putin is starting to treat western Syria more and more as his own territory, including threatening to turn the whole country into a “no fly” zone for Turkey, which is aiding some Syrian rebels but attacking others (like the Kurds; see no. 1 below) and which shot down a Russian warplane earlier this month.  Many observers expect that Assad’s long-contemplated plan to reestablish an Alawite State as a way of avoiding being removed from power entirely could become reality if Putin uses the same approach he has used with some success in places like Georgia, Moldova (see no. 3 above) and Ukraine: establishing quasi-independent puppet states, with or without diplomatic recognition.  Russians and Turks have been battling for centuries for dominance in the Black Sea and eastern Mediterranean.  The establishment of an independent Alawite State is Russia’s logical next step.

1. Kurdistan: No One Has Waited Longer, or Fought Harder, for Freedom

The Middle East’s 30 million or so Kurds are the world’s largest stateless nation, spread across northern Iraq, northern Syria, northwestern Iran, and—the largest chunk of their homeland—southeastern Turkey.  They were promised their own independent state when Woodrow Wilson and the League of Nations dismantled the Ottoman Empire after the First World War, but the brutal nationalists who founded the Republic of Turkey had other ideas and absorbed the Kurds and another aspirant people, the Armenians, into their rump empire.  The Armenians finally secured independence in 1991—though without their heartland in northeast Turkey that was depopulated by genocide.  But the Kurds are still waiting.  Iraq’s Kurds tasted autonomy of a sort after the First Gulf War of 1990, when the United States enforced a “no fly” zone that kept them safe from Saddam Hussein’s worst abuses, and then after Hussein’s fall they were able to convert that into a genuine Kurdistan Autonomous Region.  Their cousins in Turkey fared far worse: millions of Kurds were massacred by Turkey during the 1920s and ’30s, and their culture and language were criminalized to the extent that they were officially “Mountain Turks”: it was illegal to even say the words Kurd or Kurdistan.  Starting in the 1970s, an (initially Soviet-backed) Communist insurgent army called the Kurdistan Worker’s Party, or P.K.K., waged a fierce war against the Turkish state, with tens of thousands dead over the decades.  A ceasefire in 2013 promised to bring an end to the fighting, but that has mostly unraveled under pressure from the situation to the south, where Syria’s embattled dictator, Bashar al-Assad, retreated from the far north of his civil-war-torn country and allowed Kurds to found there a quasi-state called Rojava, which is—unlike the Kurdish government in northern Iraq, which Turkey gets along with—aligned with the P.K.K.  And then, soon after, the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS), a.k.a. Islamic State, established itself in the large Sunni Arab homeland that stretches across much of Syria and Iraq.  Islamic State’s success in exploiting the local oil wealth, recruiting followers from around the world, and exporting terrorism to the West meant that the Syrian civil war became internationalized, with Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Russia, and various NATO countries, including the U.S., fighting there either directly or indirectly, all with different agendas.  Of these players, the Kurds closest allies are the U.S. and other Western powers and, to a lesser extent, Russia.

It has become clear that the West is promising independence to the Kurds of Iraq when and if Islamic State is defeated, and indeed it is Kurds in Iraq and Syria who are in the very front lines of that fight.  What is not clear is whether or not Rojava will be allowed to become part of that independent Kurdistan.  That will depend on how the Syrian civil war resolves itself eventually: Turkey is dead against the idea and Russia would only allow it if Assad is able to retain some territory outright (see Alawite State, no. 2, above), but the U.S. seems open to the idea.

Rojava, it should be said, is a kind of miracle: a progressive, democratic enterprise, with respect for women’s rights (Kurds have the world’s most feared female soldiers), a very moderate form of Islam, and, though its population is mostly Kurdish, a robustly multi-ethnic government with power-sharing between Kurds and the Sunni Arab, Assyrian, Chechen, and other minorities—all of this in the eye of the hurricane, surrounded on all sides by what is today the world’s most devastating war.  A merger with Iraqi Kurdistan would mean that this new member of the international community could be something the Middle East desperately needs: a place where Christians, Muslims, Yezidis, and others of all ethnic backgrounds can live in peace and security.  Plus, they’ve got all that oil.  Maybe 2016 will be the year that ISIS is defeated, or contained enough that the international community can allow the Kurds to start building independence.  It cannot happen soon enough.  They’ve waited long enough.

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

Why Does Abkhazia Get to Host the 2016 “World Cup” for Aspirant Nations?

[Special note to readers: This article elicited a strong reaction from ConIFA, which contributed a statement to the effect that it considers itself a “non-political” organization.  For that statement, please see the comments section at the end of this article.  This blog welcomes and encourages a full discussion of the political and ethical implications, if one feels there are any, to ConIFA’s relationship with Abkhazia, Transnistria, Magyar irredentists, and other entities which many see as playing a negative role, to say the least, in European politics.]

We are used to international geopolitics inserting itself into the world of association football (that’s “soccer” to Americans).  World powers sometimes use the game as a proxy war for their own tussles over what is and is not a state and where national borders lie.  Examples include the ban on holding FIFA games in Russian-occupied Crimea, Spain trying to block Gibraltar, which it still claims, from member-state status, and ongoing politically motivated fan violence in Balkan hotspots like Bosnia and Kosovo.  But now a smaller football league that was supposed to be aloof from the rougher political edges of FIFA (the French acronym for the International Federation of Association Football) is courting similar controversy.

This league, the Confederation of Independent Football Associations (ConIFA), a new organization devoted to aspirant or unrecognized states ineligible for FIFA membership, decided this summer that its 2016 football (soccer) world cup would be held in the Republic of Abkhazia, a de facto–independent Russian puppet state in what most of the world outside Russia regards as part of the Republic of Georgia.  Despite damage and economic instability resulting from a recent history of separatist war and ongoing diplomatic limbo, Abkhazia and its capital city, Sukhumi, can, ConIFA promises, offer “top-class infrastructure” for a sporting event.  But Abkhazia is bound to be a divisive choice, considering that Russian support for violent separatism in Ukraine since early last year—a political situation which closely parallels Abkhazia, which split away as the Cold War ended—has led to calls to boycott the Russian-hosted FIFA World Cup planned for 2018.

ConIFA is not the first league of its type.  A predecessor was Viva, which doesn’t stand for anything but is a play on the name FIFA, also set up for national teams of unrecognized states.  Viva’s first world cup, in 2006, was originally to be held in the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, a puppet state that every country in the world other than Turkey recognizes as part of the Republic of Cyprus.  Northern Cyprus ended up ceding hosting duties to Occitania (southern France) after a brouhaha over Northern Cypriot demands to vet participating teams—probably the result of Turkish skittishness at that time about any kind of recognition of any kind of Kurdish entity, since northern Iraq’s autonomous Kurdistan Region was also a participant.  Viva has successfully kept politics out of the team-selection process in the four subsequent Viva cup finals hosted by, in turn, Sápmi (the northern Scandinavian homeland of the Sami, or Lappish, people), Padania (separatist northern Italy), Gozo (the Republic of Malta’s smaller island), and Erbil, the Iraqi Kurdish capital.

Sami (Lapp) footballers competing in Östersund

Other participating Viva teams over the years have included Monaco (not a pseudo-state, but too small for FIFA nonetheless), Provence, Zanzibar, Arameans Soryoye (the team of the Christian Syriac people), Darfur (southwestern Sudan), Raetia (the linguistically distinct Ladin, Friulian, and Romansh speakers of southeast Switzerland and northern Italy), Tamil Eelam (the Hindus of northern Sri Lanka), and Western Sahara (the Moroccan-occupied Sahrawi homeland).  Customs red tape and other logistical problems have mostly prevented Southern Cameroons, West Papua, and Tibet from participating.  But no one was deliberately excluding anyone, or being remotely provocative.  Even the Northern Cypriot team graciously conceded defeat to the Kurdish team in the 2012 Erbil games.

(Yet another organization, FIFI (Federation of International Football Independents), in 2006 held a one-off exhibition “Wild Cup” tournament in Hamburg, Germany, where Northern Cyprus triumphed over Zanzibar, Gibraltar, Greenland, Tibet, and the Republic of St. Pauli—this last being a fictive micronation (fictive even by micronational standards) consisting of Hamburg’s red-light district.)

The ConIFA European cup this June, for its part, was hosted in Hungary by Székely Land, a proposed state in western Romania’s ethnic-Magyar (Hungarian) region.  Padania (northern Italy) won that 11-match series, with the County of Nice (in southeastern France), the Isle of Man, and Felvidék (Slovakia’s “Upper Hungary” region) ranking second through fourth, in that order.  The first ConIFA world cup, in 2014 in Östersund, Sweden, hosted by Sápmi (Lappland), was won by the highly impressive Niçois team.

Magyar nationalists displaying the Székely Land flag in Transylvania

And here, with this ConIFA line-up, the observant reader who is familiar with the minor nationalisms to which this blog is devoted will have caught perhaps a clue as to why Abkhazia, of all places, was selected to host the 2016 ConIFA cup.  Start with Székely Land, an autonomist cause with nowhere near the popular momentum enjoyed by, say, Scotland, Catalonia (both of which keep a plenty high profile in FIFA football), Padania, Kurdistan, or Tibet.  In fact, the idea of giving autonomy to the Magyar-dominated parts of western Romania is mostly a pet cause of the extremist far right in Hungary and Romania (as discussed once in this blog).  Autonomy for Romania’s Szeklers (Magyars) is in particular an abiding emotional rallying point for Jobbik, the neo-fascist ultranationalist party in Hungary, which in an election last year became Hungary’s third-largest party.

Jobbik armbands on parade

Felvidék, or “Upper Hungary,” the formerly Hungarian-ruled parts of Slovakia, is an even obscurer cause.  Slovakia is a stable, increasingly western-style state, and Hungarian is an official language in areas where speakers are more than 20% of the population.  (They are 8.5% of it nationwide.)   Slovakia’s Magyars are hardly separatist, but Jobbik has not forgotten them.   The party specifically calls for the revocation of the 1920 Treaty of Trianon.  That agreement, part of the dismantling of the defeated Austro-Hungarian Empire after the First World War, whittled the newly independent Hungary down to its current size, stripping away territories that had been under the Hungarian crown within the empire: all of Slovakia, a third or so of modern Romania, the Vojvodina province of northern Serbia, Ukraine’s Transcarpathia oblast, and significant territories which are now along the edges of Austria, Slovenia, and Croatia.  Jobbik wants all these lands back.  Only small bits of them have ethnic-Hungarian majorities today, but under Habsburg rule the German-speaking Austrian and Magyar élites ruled over smaller ethnonational groups in a political structure that was almost feudal.  Hungary, when it was an Axis country during the Second World War, tried and failed to use that conflict to regain lost territories.

Light green is modern Hungary;
darker green are those areas stripped from
the Kingdom of Hungary after the First World War

The County of Nice, too, is mostly a right-wing, even neo-fascist, irredentist cause.  In the years of conflict leading up to Italian unification in the mid 19th century, this Mediterranean city and its environs were ceded by the Kingdom of Sardinia’s House of Savoy (soon to become the ruling house of unified Italy) to France in exchange for help fighting the Austrians.  This stuck in the craw of the unification hero Giuseppe Garibaldi, a Niçois native who once famously said, “If Nice is French, then I am a Tatar.”  Thus Nice shifted from a mostly Italian-speaking city to a francophone one.  A claim on Nice was revived by Benito Mussolini during the Fascist era, and it is also included by the far-right, xenophobic, anti-Brussels Lega Nord (Northern League) in northern Italy as part of its dreamed-of “Greater Padania.”  Oh, and of course Padania is prominent in ConIFA too (as it was in Viva).  A ConIFA delegation to Nice in May of this year is prominently featured on the ConIFA website.

Football fans waving the Niçois separatist flag

Abkhazia, next year’s ConIFA host, is one of two ethnically distinct parts of Georgia which split away from Georgia after the fall of Communism in the early 1990s—the other being South Ossetia, which, like Abkhazia, is also a ConIFA member “state.”  After the brief South Ossetia War in 2008, Russia’s President Vladimir Putin shored up their de facto independence and granted them diplomatic recognition, something only a handful of other tiny states have followed the Russian example in extending.  Abkhazia and South Ossetia are in fact just the longest-standing parts of an archipelago of Russian-backed puppet states in non-Russian parts of the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.  Others (discussed at length elsewhere in this blog, e.g. here) are Transnistria, in Moldova; the Armenian-dominated Nagorno-Karabakh Republic in Azerbaijan (the N.K.R. is also in ConIFA); the Donetsk and Luhansk “People’s Republics” established last year in eastern Ukraine; and, less concretely, possible future separatist entities in places like Transcarpathia (see discussions in this blog here and here), Ukraine’s Odessa oblast (see reports from this blog here and here), and ethnic-Russian parts of Kazakhstan, the Baltic States, and elsewhere.  Another emotional issue for Armenian nationalists and their Turkophobic puppetmasters in the Kremlin is another ConIFA “member,” Western Armenia, a proposed N.K.R.-type entity many Armenians would like to carve out of what is now eastern Turkey.  (Turkey is a member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and has been a bugbear of Russian nationalists since Ottoman days.  Turkey and Azerbaijan are both allies of the U.S.)

Transnistria, it will be no surprise, is also a target of ConIFA diplomacy, in the form of an official ConIFA visit just before June’s European cup to Tiraspol, capital of this tiny, Russian-backed sliver of a pseudostate consisting of Moldova’s eastern edge abutting Ukraine.  ConIFA would like Transnistria to host a future tournament.  It also features prominently in contingent Russian plans for a takeover of more of the southern, ethnic-Russian-dominated areas of Ukraine, which mostly extend in a belt across the northern shores of the Black Sea, extending to Odessa oblast, which borders Transnistria.

Transnistrians in Bessarabian folk costume in a flag ceremony in Tiraspol

Putin’s proxy expansionism, while it exploits Soviet iconography and terms like “people’s republic,” is in fact a right-wing type of enterprise, and to this end it is not surprising that it has gained the support of far-right parties in the west that might otherwise talk a lot about “freedom”—such as (see discussion in this blog) Jobbik, Lega Nord, Flemish separatists in Belgium, libertarian-leaning separatists in Venice, the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP), and high-profile right-wing conspiracy-mongering nuts in the United States such as Lyndon LaRouche and Ron Paul.  Putinism shares with these far-right movements a suspicion of the European Union (E.U.), NATO, and multilateralism in general; xenophobia focusing on a nakedly bigoted Islamophobia; and an infatuation with muscular militant nationalist leadership that in fact has more in common with 1930s Fascism than with Soviet-style Communism.

Putin is a darling of xenophobic Padanist separatists like these Lega Nord activists in Milan

To be sure, leftist aspirant states are in ConIFA too, including the Aymará indigenous nation of Bolivia; the disinherited Chagos Islanders of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean, who live in exile in England; and Cascadia in the American and Canadian Pacific Northwest.  But even some of these are causes which appeal to Putin’s anti-Western imperialism.   The Aymará nation includes Bolivia’s left-wing president, Evo Morales, who sided with Putin’s invasion and annexation of Crimea.  Bolivia was one of only ten countries which sided with Russia in voting against a March 2014 United Nations resolution that upheld Ukraine’s right to territorial integrity following the Crimea annexation; the others—all of them (as discussed at the time in this blog) mostly profoundly undemocratic societies—were Armenia, North Korea, Zimbabwe, Cuba, Nicaragua, Venezuela, Syria, Sudan, and Belarus.  Even Iran, China, and Myanmar had the decency to at least abstain.  The Chagos Islanders’ cause, too (see discussion here and here), is one which Putin is keen to highlight because it is an example of a serious human-rights abuse which can be laid at the feet of NATO.  Along with the prominence of the above-discussed obscure neo-fascist irrendentist entities like Upper Hungary, Székely Land, and Nice, most of the teams prominent in ConIFA are ones that conform to the anti-Western, anti-NATO, anti-E.U. agenda of Putin’s new imperialism in its “near abroad.”

Aymará Indian demonstrators with their national flag

One possible result of a tournament in Abkhazia next year, and a possible later one in Transnistria, would be to spread the popularity and prestige of the Russian puppet-state model among separatist groups across the political spectrum and around the world—fitting the new pattern of parties like Lega Nord, France’s National Front, and Jobbik—even the otherwise-leftist Basque nationalists in Spain—lining up behind Putin’s imperialist agenda in Georgia, Moldova, and Ukraine.  Playing in Abkhazia is sure to be willfully misinterpreted as a de facto recognition by these aspirant nations.  It is worth asking who is running ConIFA—or, perhaps, who has taken it over or whom it serves.  While Putin plays hardball in Ukraine, the lurch to the right in separatist soccer may be playing into the hands of his stealth “soft power” offensive against the West.

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

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

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

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

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

The Crimean Mejlis in session

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

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

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

Dzhemilev is banned from Crimea.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The flag of Abkhazia

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

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

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

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

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

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

Welcome to Gagauzia

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

Cemil Çiçek in Gagauzia

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

Related articles from this blog:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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