Chorus Grows for Independence for Muslims in Central African Republic’s North

A few months ago in this blog, I reported on a nascent ambition among the Central African Republic’s beleaguered Muslims to split away as a separate independent country.

Governance of the C.A.R., since independence, has swung between different peoples,
in a country where no ethnicity has a majority.

The C.A.R. was not always on the list of countries straddling Africa’s Christian–Muslim divide plagued by militant separatism, a list that has included Nigeria, Kenya, Côte d’Ivoire (Ivory Coast), and the recently-partitioned Sudan.  But in 2012 a civil war broke out along the lines separating the 15% Muslim minority from the 80% Christian majority in France’s former landlocked colony.  (Since 35% are sometimes reported as “animist,” and since followers of tribal religions often belong to an organized religion as well, these figures are fairly approximate.)  Within months, Séléka, the Muslim umbrella coalition, deposed the Christian-dominated government in a coup d’état, but in just under a year, in January of this year, a Christian counter-coup turfed them out.  Reprisals have been particularly bloody, including massacres on a scale that has made some toy with the word genocide and even some fairly well documented instances of revenge cannibalism, including by a young “Muslim eater” nicknamed “Mad Dog.”

The notorious Islamophage “Mad Dog”

As in other civil wars, reprisals have forced the ethnic and religious boundaries on the ground to sharpen, as local minorities flee to areas where their own groups predominate.  For months now, Séléka has effectively sealed off the northern portion of the C.A.R. and is running it as a sort of de facto state, outside government control.  As one Muslim put it back in April, “The partition itself has already been done.  Now there only remains the declaration of independence.”

That may be coming.  General Mohamed Moussa Dhaffane, a Séléka delegate, said on July 22nd at a multi-party conference on the C.A.R. crisis in Brazzaville, Congo, that the only solution to the nation’s strife that can protect Muslims from pogroms is full independence.

Abakar Sabone wanted to bring a partition plan back
from Brazzaville, not another cease-fire

That view was echoed by Abakar Sabone, who heads the Movement of Central African Liberators for Justice (M.L.C.J.).  Sabone, a former Muslim cleric, said that Séléka “represent[s] the Muslim community in the north.  The partition is already effective because all Muslims are now in the north and the current government has no access to the north.  Séléka are voicing what that community in the north wants.”

The Brazzaville summit had a more modest result, however.  All the participants went home with was a half-hearted cease-fire agreement between Séléka and the Christian–“animist” coalition called the “Anti-Balaka movement.”  Left unspecified was how such a cease-fire could be enforced in a country where no one is really in charge.  And shortly after the deal was announced, the Séléka leader Major-General Joseph Zoundeiko (pictured above), who had not attended the conference, told the B.B.C. that he rejected its terms and that his followers would not abide by it.  He demanded instead the immediate partition of the country.

Some C.A.R. Muslims are saying that a full half of the country should become their new state, reflecting not their share of the population so much as the vast areas Séléka held at the height of the civil war (see map above).  Still unresolved, too, is what the new country would be called.  The rather uninspiring Republic of Northern Central Africa has been proposed; I suppose Sélékastan is a possibility as well.  In April, supporters of the idea were circulating a proposed flag, but I have not yet been able to track down such an image.

When Séléka fighters do display a flag, it tends to be the C.A.R.’s national flag.

It is hard to imagine the international community ever sanctioning such a plan.  The Republic of South Sudan next door serving as an illustration of how dividing a country (in that case, the Republic of Sudan, partitioned with the United Nations’ blessing in 2011) between a Muslim north and Christian south can lead to previously unimaginable levels of misery and chaos.  Meanwhile, the United States and other Western countries fear that radical Islamist insurgencies in an arc stretching from northern Mali to northern Nigeria to Kenya and Somalia and Yemen are gradually making common cause with one another under what may eventually be an al-Qaeda banner.  And there is reason to fear that an “independent” state governed by an ill-disciplined rebel army in northern C.A.R. could allow that region to once again become a haven for Joseph Kony and his dreaded Lord’s Resistance Army (L.R.A.).

No one wants to give Joseph Kony a new lawless zone to move around in.

No, the international community, including even and especially the African Union (A.U.), remain steadfastly committed to making Africa’s European-drawn, colonial-era borders sacrosanct—no matter how much suffering ensues as a result.

[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.]

Virginia Dad Crowns 7-Year-Old Daughter “Princess” of African No-Man’s-Land He Dubs “Kingdom of North Sudan”

This Bastille Day, the world awoke to news that a new independent nation had been declared.  No, not Kurdistan or Catalonia or Scotland, but something called, in what is one of the more bizarre “micronations” to be founded in recent years, the Kingdom of North Sudan.  Nor was it founded by any of the numerous rebel groups—Nubians, Darfuris, etc.—who are battling the genocidal regime that runs the Republic of Sudan.

Bir Tawil is now the “Kingdom of North Sudan.”

The declaration was made by one Jeremiah Heaton, a former Democratic Party Congressional hopeful from Abingdon (pop. ca. 8,000), in the Appalachian western reaches of Virginia, who last month made a 14-hour overland trek via desert caravan to a remote, disputed shard of territory between Sudan and Egypt, planted a flag, and declared it, provisionally, “the Heaton Kingdom” and later, officially, on a suggestion from his children, the Kingdom of North Sudan.

His children?  Yes, well, this is sort of all about his children.  The reason Heaton has made himself king of North Sudan is to fulfill a promise to his seven-year-old daughter, Emily Heaton. As the self-styled monarch told the press, “Over the winter, Emily and I were playing, and she has a fixation on princesses.  She asked me, in all seriousness, if she’d be a real princess someday.  And I said she would.”

“Someday, princess, all this will be yours.”

The piece of land in question is Bir Tawil, an 800-square-mile lozenge of desert.  Its special status is due to it having fallen between the cracks of two border agreements: first, the Anglo-Egyptian Condominium Agreement of 1899—which made the 22nd parallel the frontier between the United Kingdom’s newly conquered “Anglo-Egyptian Sudan” (with an emphasis on the Anglo) and what was then an Ottoman Empire puppet state called the Khedivate of Egypt—and, second, a British modification of the boundary in 1902, taking tribal territories into slight account.  For a time, Egypt ruled Bir Tawil while the British in Sudan ruled the larger, coastal wedge of land falling between the two borders, the so-called Hala’ib Triangle.  Today, the independent states of Egypt and Sudan both claim the far larger and more strategic and valuable Hala’ib Triangle.  But the Egyptians, as part of their insistence on using the 22nd parallel as the boundary (thus granting themselves the Hala’ib Triangle), have relinquished their claims on Bir Tawil, and the Sudanese have done the same as part of their position that only the 1902 line is valid.  Thus, today, Egypt de facto administers the Hala’ib Triangle, and no one administers Bir Tawil.

Bir Tawil has attracted the attention of micronation hobbyists before,
as in this image from a 2010 cybernation blog—but only King Jeremiah
has actually planted a flag there.

This is what made Heaton figure that no one would mind if he, you know, just took the territory.  As Heaton himself put it this week, “It’s beautiful there.  It’s an arid desert in northeastern Africa.  Bedouins roam the area; the population is actually zero.”  Whoa, wait, wait—what did he say again?  “Bedouins roam the area; the population is actually zero.”  Yes, that’s what he said.  So, let me get this straight: Bedouins don’t exist? or they aren’t people? or is it just that Bedouins, being nomadic, are presumed to have no rights in any territory whatsoever?  The same callous, dehumanizing logic that has been used to legitimize European colonialism not just in Africa but in the Americas, Australia, and elsewhere is on full display here: “You’re not doing anything with the land that I recognize as ‘ownership’ or ‘permanent residence.’  Thus, white people can take it.”  Oh, but, wait, no—it’s all about Daddy’s Little Princess!  Sorry, sorry, I forgot; didn’t mean to make it sound colonialist or anything.

Africans, sadly, are used to white monarchs—most often, admittedly, legitimate ones—using their land to hand out as party favors to ease family relationships.  One example is the Heligoland Treaty of 1890, in which Germany’s emperor, Kaiser Wilhelm II, swapped Zanzibar to Queen Victoria in exchange for the North Sea island of Heligoland and the Caprivi Strip territory (which, as discussed in an article on this blog, Germans could could use as a supply route between German South-West Africa, today’s Namibia, and German East Africa, today’s mainland Tanzania).  That treaty included a special clause which threw a dogleg into German East Africa’s otherwise ruler-straight border with British Kenya, leaving Mt. Kilimanjaro on the Tanganyika side.  This was done because Wilhelm, who was also Victoria’s grandson (yes, that eventually made things kind of awkward, oh, ’round about 1914), had been pouting about the fact that he didn’t own as many African mountains as his English cousins.  Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.

But Jeremiah Heaton is hardly Kaiser Wilhelm II.  In fact, even though the Kaiser’s facial hair is considered much more hip in 2014 than Heaton’s evenly trimmed full beard, Heaton nonetheless very commendably refrained from using mustard gas as a campaign tactic when he sought the Democratic nomination to represent Virginia’s 9th District in 2012.

Kaiser Wilhelm’s facial hair:

hip in 1914, and in 2014

King Jeremiah’s facial hair:
so 1990s

As for Princess Emily, she seems determined to become a benevolent dictator (though with two brothers, she may never accede to the throne, at least under Salic Law).  True, she is as pampered as any well-off little American girl and sleeps in a princess-themed canopy bed.  But she has expressed concern that the people in and around her new realm have enough to eat.  “That’s definitely a concern in that part of the world,” King Jeremiah told an interviewer.  “We discussed what we could do as a nation to help.  If we can turn North Sudan into an agricultural hub for the area—a lot of technology has gone into agriculture and water.  These are the things [Emily and her brothers Prince Justin and Prince Caleb] are concerned with.”

“And next, I want an Oompa Loompa, Daddy—and I want one right now!”

Such magnanimity, unfortunately, may not mollify the brutal Islamist regime in the Republic of Sudan.  The country’s military dictator, Omar al-Bashir, rules through shari’a (Islamic law), something made easier after Western powers sheared off the predominantly-Christian, oil-rich southern half of his country away as an independent state, the Republic of South Sudan, in 2011.  Since then, Bashir has also faced Arab Spring uprisings challenging his rule, insurgencies in the southern regions of Nubia and Darfur, and a 2009 International Criminal Court (I.C.C.) arrest warrant on charges of crimes against humanity, including genocide, for his pitiless proxy war—using the dreaded Janjaweed militia—against the civilian population of Darfur.  Because of these international criminal charges, he is barely able to leave his country, and Sudan is excluded from participating as a full member of the international community.  Sudan was (as discussed at the time in this blog) also one of only 11 states—alongside pariah nations like Syria, Iran, and North Korea—to vote with Russia against a United Nations resolution recognizing Ukraine’s territorial integrity following the Russian invasion and annexation of Crimea.  To sum things up, Omar al-Bashir is a very, very grumpy man indeed.

The supposed “Kingdom of North Sudan” is highlighted in blue.

Nor does the official absence of a territorial interest in Bir Tawil mean that this piece of land is not an ideological and political flashpoint.  Sudan’s narrow Red Sea coastline is now its most important economic asset, that being the only route by which Bashir’s former captive nation and current arch-enemy, South Sudan, can bring its oil to market, via pipelines through Sudan proper to Port Sudan.  That interdependence between the two Sudans is probably the only thing keeping Sudan and South Sudan from destroying each other in all-out war (that and the fact that South Sudan is busily destroying itself in a civil war).  But South Sudan’s military, the Sudanese People’s Liberation Army (S.P.L.A.), a former rebel army, is, by most accounts, at least indirectly in league with rebel groups within the predominantly-Arab rump Sudan—not just the Justice and Equality Movement (J.E.M.) rebels in Darfur (a formerly quasi-independent region on border with Libya) but also something called the Eastern Front.

Flag of coastal Sudan’s
“Eastern Front” rebels

The Eastern Front, which draws support from the coastal area’s Cushitic-speaking Beja ethnic group and the Saudi-derived Rashaida Bedouin Arabs—and perhaps from the dictatorship in neighboring Eritrea—routinely demands more autonomy and is well aware of the strategic importance of the coastline.  In 2005, the Sudanese military killed 17 Beja rioters in Port Sudan, stoking anti-government feeling.  And one of their key demands is wresting the Hala’ib Triangle from Egyptian control—a demand which has become shriller as the new Egyptian dictatorship has cracked down harder on Islamists.  In short, the Eastern Front, with its preoccupation with the unsettled Egyptian border, is a potential mortal threat to the Bashir regime.  The question of who runs Bir Tawil and Hala’ib could conceivably be reopened at any time.

Omar al-Bashir, Princess Emily’s new enemy

King Jeremiah’s naïveté in the face of such realities is stunning.  As he told reporters this week regarding the question of diplomatic recognition, “I feel confident in the claim we’ve made. That’s the exact same process that has been done for thousands of years.  The exception is this nation was claimed for love.”  That’s right: he loves his little princess so much that he’s giving her the gift of a coveted spot on the target list of a terrorist Islamist régime.

Sudan’s pro-government Janjaweed militia
doesn’t like it when people get in their way.
Welcome to Africa, Emily!

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

As one might imagine, sometimes my friends and colleagues let me know about a news development before Google Alerts has a chance to.  In this case, thanks are due to Susan Abe, Tea Krulos (author of Heroes in the Night), and Emperor George II (Empire of Atlantium; like it on Facebook) for calling this story to my attention.

Muslim Rebels in Central African Republic Demand Separate State but Turn Down Chance to Switch to Catchier Name

The Central African Republic (C.A.R.) may be about to become a bit more decentralized.  Since 2012, members of the Christian and tribal majority in the center and south and the northern Muslim minority have engaged in a bloody civil war.  The mostly-Muslim rebel coalition Séléka took power in the capital, Bangui, in a March 2013 coup d’état but was forced out of office in January of this year.  Now, Séléka leaders are saying that they think a separate state is the only way to avoid escalating ethnic cleansing or even genocide.  Some, indeed, are already using the term genocide to refer to reprisals by Christians against Muslim civilians—including highly-publicized but not fully verified accounts of Christian-on-Muslim cannibalism.  As one Muslim leader put it recently, “The partition itself has already been done. Now there only remains the declaration of independence.”

Naturally, the African Union, the United Nations, and other international organizations scrambling to contain the C.A.R. violence are against the idea: only one fully new border has been drawn since African decolonization beginning in the 1960s decided to leave unmodified the patchwork of European-drawn lines that paid no attention to where cultural, linguistic, and religious groups actually lived.  The one exception is the Republic of South Sudan, which the United States and U.N. ushered through a referendum process and secession in 2011, separating the mostly-Christian and spiritually traditional nation from its Muslim former rulers in the rump Republic of Sudan.  But South Sudan has since then descended into a fratricidal civil war that has also tipped close to something worthy of the term genocide.  The former Sudan and C.A.R. are only two out of a string of African states straddling the volatile boundary between Africa’s Muslim (often Arab) north and a sub-Saharan area that is less Arabized and more often Christian, including Mali, Nigeria, Côte d’Ivoire (Ivory Coast), Chad, and Cameroon, all of which to different extents have seen horrific sectarian violence along that divide.  Mali came closest to disintegrating with the creation of the brief-lived radical-Islamist northern Republic of Azawad, finally shut down last year by France’s military.

The viral-video sensation “Mad Dog” (standing), the reputed “Muslim-eater”
of the recent sectarian conflict in the Central African Republic

Séléka rebels and sympathizers in and around Bambari, near the sectarian fault-line, are reportedly circulating a flag design via cellphone (I am so far unable to find an image or description; can anyone help?) and have proposed a name, which is (wait for it ...) the Republic of Northern Central Africa (in French, possibly, République du nord de l’Afrique centrale).

The C.A.R.'s Muslims are concentrated primarily in the far north.

All other issues aside, the C.A.R.’s northern Muslims seem to be following the same unimaginative path as the South Sudanese, who rejected more colorful proposed names such as Azania, Equatoria, Jubaland, Juwama, Kush, and Nilotic Republic and settled for just inserting the word South into the middle of the parent country’s name.  They also barely even chose a new flag, but just shuffled the stripes a bit, made the green (for Islam) triangle blue, and added a star.

Spot the difference!  The flags of Sudan (top) and South Sudan (bottom)

The C.A.R. (in French, R.C.A., i.e. République centrafricaine, or, informally, Centrafrique) has long been the butt of geography students’ jokes, along the lines of: they really couldn’t come up with a better name than that?—just the name of the continent and then a vague coordinate?  (Of course, when you think about it, United States of America is not much better.)  There is a history to this, however.  Before autonomy in 1958 and independence in 1960, France called this landlocked colony Ubangi-Shari (or, in French, Oubangui-Chari), after its two main rivers; Bangui is still the capital’s name.  Ubangi-Shari was part of French Equatorial Africa (F.E.A.), a swathe of connected colonies also including what are now Chad, Gabon, and the Republic of the Congo.  But the first president after independence, Barthélemy Boganda, had dreams of expanding the F.E.A. states to create an independent superstate taking in the former Belgian colonies of Rwanda, Burundi, and the (now) Democratic Republic of Congo; the former Portuguese colony of Angola; the former Spanish colony of Equatorial Guinea; and the former French colony of Cameroon.  At times, Boganda wanted to call such a regional superpower United States of Latin Africa, as a counterweight to the large bloc of Anglophone former United Kingdom colonies covering most of southern Africa (South Africa and the various Rhodesias).  The idea never caught on, but Boganda held onto the name République centrafriquaine, cooked up by French bureaucrats in 1958, with the idea of eventual expansion.

Emperor Bokassa I on his way to have the Belgian ambassador for dinner

For a few years in the late 1970s, the country was ruled by a French-backed psychopathic dictator who called himself Emperor Bokassa I.  Though he was rather colorful and imaginative (reader, he ate people), he still settled for calling his country simply the Central African Empire—though it did not expand or even terribly much bother its neighbors.

A reporter this week quoted one Muslim Séléka-supporter, Oumar Tidiane, as saying, of the C.A.R.’s Christian southerners, “They don’t want any Muslims.  Rather than calling their country the Central African Republic, they can call it”—ahem, get this—“the Central African Catholic Republic.”  Good God, when they send the next aid shipment, can they please airdrop a team of marketing experts?  It’s time for a lesson on branding.

As for the chances of the success of the Republic of Northern Central Africa, they are slim.  In addition to the problem of international opposition is the question of demographics.  One consultant in the region, David Smith, suggested to the Guardian newspaper that the impetus for partition was coming mostly from foreign fighters from predominantly-Muslim states like Chad and (north) Sudan, rather than from Centrafriquain people themselvess.  Besides, he pointed out, the already small Muslim share of the C.A.R. before the current conflict, between 10% and 15%, has shrunk dramatically, due to ethnic cleansing, emigration of refugees, and outright massacres: tens of thousands have been killed and a million displaced, this in a country with fewer than 5 million people total to begin with.  As in places like Bosnia, Tibet, and Palestine, the dominant, more aggressive group has changed the demographic facts on the ground, making earlier goals less and less feasible by the day.  If for that reason alone, a separate R.N.C.A.—or whatever—is a pipe dream.  But if this movement goes down in flames, they should least pick a punchier name.  And when I finally see that flag, I don’t want another tricolor, okay?

In French colonial days, Oubangui-Chari (now the C.A.R.)
was Kentucky-shaped.

[You can read more about 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.]

Abyei Votes Overwhelmingly to Leave Sudan, Join South Sudan, but Khartoum Says Forget It

A referendum rally in Abyei, highlighting the Dinka people’s elaborate bovine clan emblems

This has been a season for referenda.  Readers maybe disappointed to learn that the tiny resort community of Lamb Island, near Brisbane, Queensland, recently voted down a proposal (reported on last month in this blog) to secede from Australia as the Republic of Nguduroodistan.  The final tally was 49 to 34, with most of the islet’s 426 residents not bothering to vote.  Meanwhile, disgruntled rural Republicans in the northeastern corner of the increasingly urban and Democratic state of Colorado are gearing up for ballot measures on November 5th on whether to create a State of North Colorado (or New Colorado).  (Read earlier reports from this blog on the North Colorado movement here, here, and here.) We will be bringing you analysis of that situation after the votes are in.

Disputed areas are in brown, including Abyei

Most dramatically, however, residents in the disputed Abyei District voted overwhelmingly on October 31st to leave the Republic of Sudan and join the fledgling Republic of South Sudan.  With 65,000 registered voters, the results were, according to Deng Alor, chairman of the Abyei Referendum High Committee, “99.9%” in favor of switching sides.  Never mind that it was a non-binding referendum; neither the (north) Sudanese nor the South Sudanese government approved it.  And never mind that red flag of a number, 99.9%.  (Why is it always 99.9%?  Just once, I’d like to see an election in some half-democratized corner of the world where the winning votes are a modest 99.85%—you know, just for verisimilitude’s sake.)  Most crucially, the question is 99.9% (or whatever it was) of whom?

Deng Alor

Abyei became one of the flashpoints of conflict when South Sudan prepared to secede from Sudan, under international auspices, in 2011.  The south had been waging war to secede from the north since the 1950s, when the Republic of Sudan was granted independence by the United Kingdom.  Northerners are mostly Arab and Muslim, and with an increasingly harsh, Islamist regime; southerners meanwhile, are mostly not Arabs, tend to follow local religions or Christianity, and are in sub-Saharan African, or “black,” in their ethnic appearance.  South Sudan was ushered along toward a binding referendum under the auspices of the United Nations and under the guidance of the George W. Bush and later Barack Obama administrations in the United States.  Geopolitically, this was a way for the West to contain the Sudanese regime in Khartoum (the northern capital) by chopping back its territory, in particular emasculating it of its oil-rich south.  The idea was that landlocked South Sudan would have the oil wealth but would be dependent on Sudanese pipelines and harbors to bring it to market, forcing at least a kind of uneasy cooperation.

South Sudanese flying their new flag on independence day, 2011

But the small, rectangular-shaped, oil-rich region district of Abyei was the scene of ethnic cleansing by northern forces in the months leading up to the planned independence referendum.  The state in which Abyei sits, South Kordofan, and another state, Blue Nile, were two regions which were mostly Southern in their cultural affinities and political sympathies but which were on the northern side of the proposed line.  These include the much-oppressed (non-Arab) Nubian ethnic group, in the mountains of Blue Nile.  A proviso in the negotiation of the referendum was that those two states would eventually vote separately on which of the two Sudans they preferred to be part of; naturally, those referenda never came.

There has been fighting all along the disputed border, before and after independence—not so much in the past few months—but Abyei has always been a focus of the conflict, partly because Khartoum early on attempted to remove “Southerners” from the district as a kind of pilot project, to see how much ethnic cleansing they could get away with in their attempt to keep South Kordofan and Blue Nile in the north.  Some even suggested making the little scrap of land an independent United Republic of Abyei, belonging to neither Sudan.  (This would have been one of many examples in history of a border people becoming elevated to the level of a state or a nationality by virtue of being in territorial dispute.  Kosovo, Transylvania’s Magyars, Transnistria, Nagorno-Karabakh, the Madheshi Hindus of Nepal, and the Pattani Muslims of southern Thailand are only some among many examples.)


The two ethnic groupings that are a presence in Abyei are (1) communities belonging to the Ngok, one of many subdivisions of the Dinka nationality—a traditionally pastoralist society, transhumant but increasingly settled, of the kind that make up a large part of the population of South Sudan—and the Misseriya Arabs, cattle herders who are more nomadic and actually only reside in Abyei for part of their annual seasonal round.  The million or so Misseriya make up a large part of the population of South Kordofan, southern Darfur, and central Chad.  In fact, last week’s referendum was scheduled to occur just before large numbers of Misseriya return to their Abyei grazing lands and thus swell the local population to much greater than the number on the referendum’s voting rolls.  Ironically, South Africa’s often controversial former president, Thabo Mbeki, who was a member of an African Union panel weighing in on the larger conflict, suggested last year that there be a referendum on Abyei in which only Dinka could vote—ironically, given the color-blind spirit of inclusiveness that ushered his own homeland to democracy two decades ago with minimal bloodshed and disunity.  Mbeki’s suggestion was shouted down, but what he proposed was essentially what the Dinka have just carried out.

It is true that Khartoum is cruelly stonewalling the opportunity for the people of South Kordofan and Blue Nile to vote to join the South, as they would most probably do, but it is also true that the local Dinka have engineered a shamefully rigged electoral process.  One can only conceive that the Dinka were seeking a provocation that would reignite the war.

But cooler heads are prevailing in Khartoum and Juba, the northern and southern capitals.  The South Sudanese government has distanced itself from the vote and has banned advertisements connected with it from the media.  Sudan, for its part, is taking a firm stand.  Nafie Ali Nafie, a high-ranking presidential advisor, said that the results were illegitimate and that if the vote were held after the seasonal return of the Misseriya, the results would have been the opposite.

South Sudan’s president, Salva Kiir, with Hillary Rodham Clinton

As in many similar cases around the world, however (think: Bosnia, Palestine, Nagorno-Karabakh, Tibet), violence and ethnic cleansing and aggressive settlement have changed the facts on the ground, so that it becomes contentious and difficult to decide who should vote on the status of a territory—the people living there now (often as the result of importation for this purpose), or something more closely approximating the pre-conflict population dynamics.

The two Sudans are far from deciding the fate of Abyei and of the rest of the disputed areas.  For the time being, though, both national leaderships seem determined not to let Abyei drag them both into war once again.

[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 some time in 2014.  I will be keeping readers posted of further publication news.]

Scottish Referendum, M.I.A. & Assange, Rohrabacher on South Azerbaijan, Play-Doh and the Māori: The Week in Separatist News, 19-25 August 2012

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