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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Armenians with their national flag

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

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

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

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

Flag of the Second Vermont Republic

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

EPA Extends Jurisdiction of Wind River Indian Reservation, Swallowing 3 Wyoming Towns

The response from whites in Wyoming has been one of alarm.  Despite the headlines, an Indian reservation has not in fact taken over three nearby towns (just as Indians did not take over a town in Oklahoma a couple years ago, as reported in this blog), but the decision is still momentous.  This week, the United States Environmental Protection Agency (E.P.A.), in its proper recognition of state-like powers for the Wind River Indian Reservation to conduct its own air-quality monitoring, clarified the boundaries of the reservation, thus overruling 1905 land grants that had allowed the creation of three non-reservation towns within the reservation in violation of the original treaty.  So far there has been no talk of extending other aspects of Wind River jurisdiction to the towns, but that is what residents now fear.

The Northern Arapaho and Eastern Shoshone tribes, which govern the reservation, greeted the changes with approval.  The towns of Riverton, Kinnear, and Pavillion were built on reservation land ceded under an act of Congress in 1905, and subsequent court rulings have upheld that these lands—which totally 1.5 million acres—are no longer reservation lands.  But unashamed disregard for treaty rights is routine in American judicial history.  The E.P.A., in its ruling, has taken the (in American jurisprudence) unusual step of taking Indian treaties at face value and not treating violations of them as faits accompli.

The town of Riverton, the largest of the three communities in question, had, in the 2010 census, 10,615 people, of whom 83.5% were white and 10.4% were Native American.  Kinnear (population 599) is only 57.5% white and 36.6% Native American.  Pavillion has 231 people, 93.1% white and 0.3% Native American.  All are in Fremont County.  The Wind River Indian Reservation is the seventh-largest reservation in the U.S. and is larger than the State of Delaware.  It has a population of just over 23,000 people, plus Wyoming’s only four casinos.  It also contains the burial place of Sacagawea, one of the most famous Native Americans in U.S. history, the Shoshone guide who accompanied Meriwether Lewis and William Clark on the Corps of Discovery expedition in 1804-06.

The final resting place of Sacagawea, on the Wind River reservation

One of Wyoming’s two Republican senators, John Barrasso, said, in reaction to the E.P.A. ruling, “Once again the Obama administration thinks it can ignore the law of the land when it suits their agenda.  Changes to the reservation boundaries were legally made in the early 1900s.  These boundaries should be followed by all parties including the E.P.A. and other agencies within the administration.”  Matt Mead, the state’s Republican governor, had earlier warned the E.P.A. mulled the extension of boundaries last year, that such a move would have “implications for criminal law, civil law, water law, and taxation, and would also take away the voices of the citizens in Kinnear, Riverton, and Pavillion.”  Mead has now formally requested that the U.S. Attorney General challenge the ruling.

Wyoming’s Gov. Matt Mead (left)

All critics of the move seem oblivious to the irony that the land was stolen from Indians in the first place.

Flag of the Eastern Shoshone Tribe, one of two nations that call Wind River home

Individual Indians from Wind River and other communities have heralded the ruling, with many references to all of the other lands across the U.S. stolen in violation of treaties.  But the response from the Wind River administration has been anything but triumphalist.  The chairman of the Northern Arapaho Business Council (N.A.B.C.), which is the Northern Arapaho government in Fort Washakie, on the reservation, wrote to Riverton’s mayor last month, after the statelike status had been granted the tribes but the boundaries had not yet been adjusted, extending an offer to discuss the situation openly and candidly and its implications for whites and Indians alike.

One of the saddest aspects of the whole business is how quickly the media resort to clichés and jokes about American Indians in discussing the matter, as though there were something inherently anachronistic and hilarious about the fact that Indians still exist.  For example, widely read conservative Washington, D.C., newspaper the Washington Times, which was founded by the Rev. Sun Myung Moon’s right-wing Unification Church religious cult (the “Moonies”), ran an editorial critical of the E.P.A. decision, full of references to “palefaces,” bows and arrows, and John Wayne, adding, “Riverton residents didn’t even get any beads.”  I don’t think one would ever, for example, see an editorial on some random issue involving African-Americans full of references to watermelons and minstrel shows.  Actually, I take that back.  I haven’t read any of the Washington Times’ editorials on Barack Obama, and I’m not sure I want to.

The Northern Arapaho flag

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

5 of 11 Counties Vote to Secede: Whither "New Colorado" Now?

On November 5th, Colorado went to the polls.  Among other issues at stake there—all of which featured the dynamic of rural Tea Party pushback against an urbanizing, increasingly Democratic-dominated state—11 counties in the northeast and north were asked whether they wanted to secede to form a new, and solidly Republican, State of North Colorado.

Orange counties voted yes to secession; blue ones voted no.

Of the 11, five contiguous counties said yes, while the other six voted to stay in Colorado.

The five splittist counties are Cheyenne (where 62.2% voted yes), Kit Carson (54.2%), Phillips (62.2%), Washington (58.1%), and Yuma (59.6%).  They form a contiguous territory snug against the Kansas border but do not reach into the far northeastern corner of the state, where Sedgwick County voted by 57% to stay under Denver’s thumb.  Weld County, where the rebellion began earlier this year—home to the region’s largest city, Greeley, the presumed future capital—rejected secession by a margin of 56.3% to 43.6%.  The other counties that elected to stay are Elbert, Lincoln, Logan, and—the outlier, in the state’s northwest corner—Moffat County.

From this summer, this news graphic showed green states planning to vote on secession
and blue states expressing interest.

But does this mean that silkscreeners are now poised to churn out 51-star flags?  Not at all.  Any new admission to the Union must be approved by both houses of Congress.  The last state to secede from another was West Virginia, in 1863, and it was really seceding from the Confederacy back into the United States.  And the last time new stars were added, in 1959, Hawaii and Alaska were admitted more or less in tandem, so as to preserve the balance of power between the two national political parties.  A new state, after all, means two new senators, and the redrawing of congressional districts as well.  This two-at-a-time pattern is an old tradition, dating back to events such as the Missouri Compromise (Maine and Missouri, in 1820), and even to the simultaneous admission of Kentucky and Vermont in 1791—in those days the idea being to preserve the balance between slave and free states.  A new Democratic state would need to be added to balance a North Colorado in today’s divided, fiercely partisan political climate.  And no one in Congress seems remotely interested.

A proposed flag (not proposed by proponents, it need hardly be added)

The North Colorado movement began in early summer of this year (as reported at the time in this blog), with initially eight counties—Kit Carson, Logan, Morgan, Phillips, Sedgwick, Washington, and Yuma—though, by early July, Cheyenne and Lincoln had joined as well, soon followed by Elbert County.  The whole phenomenon has been a response to this politically mixed state—famous for category-defying maverick politicians like Governor Richard “Dickie” Lamm and Senator Ben Nighthorse Campbell—turning “blue” in recent years, led by the growth of the capital, Denver, and to a lesser extent the counterculture mecca Boulder.  Barack Obama was the first Democratic presidential candidate to draw a majority of Colorado voters since 1964.  It was a swing state for several election cycles, until Obama won it handily in 2008, and it is now considered a blue state.  New legislation decriminalizing marijuana and restricting gun rights and animal cruelty further incensed socially conservative voters in the rural plains east and northeast of Denver, a region sometimes known as the Northern Front Range.  This week’s election also featured a heated recall campaign growing out of resistance to gun control and other issues.  The growing Hispanicization of Colorado has also been a factor, and the North Colorado rebellion, like the broader Tea Party movement of which it is a part, can reasonably be seen as connected to demographic shifts that promise to make white Americans become this century a racial minority, in a country with no racial majority at all.  North Colorado would be by far the whitest state in the Union.  There aren’t even that many American Indians there.

These two fellers represent the demographics of the North Colorado secession movement.

But interest came too from more than a dozen other Colorado counties, covering more than half the state’s land area, and even a couple counties in neighboring Kansas to the east and Nebraska to the northeast.  Interest was expressed in southeastern Wyoming as well (all reported at the time in this blog).  In fact, the North Colorado movement is only the most serious of numerous suggestions made over the years to create some kind of new state in the eastern Colorado area where the state meets up with rural parts of Wyoming, Nebraska, Kansas, and Oklahoma.  West Kansas, Kansorado, Kansahoma, and even CoKaNe (i.e., parts of Colorado, Kansas, and Nebraska)—yes, pronounced like cocaine—are all names that have been tossed around.

A more seriously proposed North Colorado flag

The name New Colorado has also been proposed for this year’s 51-state movement, and perhaps that name is destined to replace North Colorado, since the configuration of secessionist-voting counties now appears less northeasterly oriented and more easterly oriented than originally conceived.  Nor is the movement likely to go away.  Despite the six counties that voted no, those defeats were surprisingly narrow, and this has definitely been the most well-organized and high-profile state secession movement since 1975, when Michigan’s legislature came one vote shy of approving a proposal to hive off the state’s rural, conservative Upper Peninsula as the State of Superior (or Superiorland, or Ontonagan) (which some want to include northern Wisconsin as well).  North Colorado separatism inspired conservative regions in blue or blue-trending states like California and Oregon (the State of Jefferson), Maryland (Western Maryland), and New York (West New York) to contemplate secession too.  And Tuesday’s electoral showing is likely to get heartlanders thinking harder about partition in places where it has already been suggested in the past, such as “South California,” Florida, Virginia, Illinois, Washington, Nevada, and elsewhere.

As a movement, it is not going away.  In Colorado, rural conservative forces had already, even before this week’s vote, been thinking of other ways to increase their political participation, such as turning the Colorado legislature’s upper chamber into one where counties had equal representation irrespective of population.  This would in effect make Colorado into a federation of counties—something that to my knowledge has never been implemented at the state level, where upper and lower chambers differ in their structure mainly in the size of representative districts (but if any readers know of other historical examples of such proposals I would be grateful).

Birthplace of the North Colorado rebellion

And last month in northern California, where the decades-old but suddenly jump-started State of Jefferson movement has been re-energized (as reported on regularly in this blog), there is a new proposal to sidestep the requirement for federal congressional approval of new states by creating a sort of Jefferson “autonomous region” free of state laws and taxes and with its own courts, police, and social services (or, rather, lack of social services, since that seems to be what Jeffersonians prefer).  You know, that sounds like nothing so much as an Indian reservation.  Maybe, in the increasingly brown United States, white people’s reservations are the future.  North Colorado, be careful what you wish for.

Would North Colorado be better off as an autonomous Caucasian Reservation?

[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.]

“North Colorado” Wants to Add 51st Star to the American Flag

It started as a pipe dream among many others, where residents of one area of a U.S. state contemplate seceding, so that they can be free of a political majority they find distasteful.  Examples that have been reported on in this blog are the Republican-led South California movement in southern California’s high deserts, the similarly politically conservative State of Superior movement in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, and a proposal by Republican downstaters in Illinois to eject Chicago and thus make the rest of Land of Lincoln a red state.  But the recent plan by disgruntled rural conservatives in northeastern Colorado to split off and form the State of North Colorado turns out to be a more durable idea than had at first been thought.  On July 8th, 10 Colorado counties, forming the state’s northeastern corner, met in Akron, Colorado, to lay out a plan of action.

[Note: For North Colorado and 51st-state updates since this article was published, see this recent article.)

The movement, which began in the minds of the county commissioners in Weld County, builds on rural anger of legislative moves in the capital, Denver, that make many northeasterners feel “our way of life is under attack.”  Such developments include new laws on cruelty to livestock (Republicans appear to be for it), renewable energy (they’re against that), gun control (“cold, dead fingers” and all that), and, most nationally prominent, Colorado last year becoming one of now two states (Washington is the other) where marijuana is no longer illegal.

Colorado used to be pretty much a red state.  Yes, it is known for producing individualistic and eccentric political views that don’t always map well onto what the East Coast regards as the left–right political spectrum.  The best example of this is Richard “Dick” Lamm, governor from 1975 to 1987, an ardent environmentalist Democrat who killed a plan to hold the 1976 Winter Olympics in Denver but who also regarded his own Democratic Party as “too close to the trial lawyers and the National Education Association” and supported physician-assisted suicide, long before any other public figure did, not on the grounds of compassion but because invalids had “a duty to die and get out of the way.”  (Later, he joined Ross Perot’s fiscal-conservative Reform Party.)  But rural Coloradans’ individualism, suspicion of government, and romanticism of the Wild West always overrode their other impulses and made Colorado a Republican Party stronghold.  At least until demographics began to shift over the past couple decades: Denver and the emerging hippie counterculture mecca of Boulder have grown, and so has the state’s Hispanic population.  It is now a swing state, and that explains why those in the state’s rural northeast feel (correctly, actually) that they are losing their voice.

Richard Lamm

Initially, North Colorado was to consist of eight counties: Kit Carson, Logan, Morgan, Phillips, Sedgwick, Washington, and Yuma.  By the time of the July 8th meeting, Lincoln and Cheyenne had come on board, creating a set of boundaries that would embrace about a fifth of the state’s land area (and essentially none of its famous mountains) but only just over 6% of its population.  Signatures are now being gathered in all 10 counties, plus Elbert County, which, unlike any of the others, is treated by the U.S. Census as part of the greater Denver area.  There have also now been expressions of interest from a much less geographically homogeneous array of rural counties around the state, 19 of them: Delta, Garfield, Mesa, Moffat, Montrose, Rio Blanco, and Routt in the northwestern corner; Larimer in the north; and Baca, Bent, Crowley, Douglas, El Paso, Fremont, Kiowa, Otero, Park, Pueblo, and Teller in the southeast.  This makes nearly half of the state’s 64 counties and over half its land area.

In addition to the original 8 “North Colorado” counties (see map at top of article), all the counties in green on this map are now on board with secession, and 19 other Colorado counties (in blue) and two Kansas ones (in white) have expressed support.  In dark green is Cheyenne County, where the issue will go on the ballot.

There is also support from two counties in western Kansas who would like to join (Cheyenne and Wallace) as well as parts of western Nebraska.  These ideas are not new.  Shortly after marijuana was decriminalized, a conservative Coloradoan newspaper columnist suggested a conglomerate of rural counties at the intersection of eastern Colorado, western Kansas, and southwestern Nebraska’s “panhandle” become a new state to be called CoKaNe (yes, pronounced like that—and that does line up pretty well with the drugs of choice of the two parties’ candidates in the 2000 presidential election).  And in 1982, 85% of residents in Nebraska’s 11 “panhandle” counties told a newspaper they wanted to get out from under Lincoln’s thumb and join Wyoming (an idea, actually, which dates to the 1890s).  A columnist in Alliance, Nebraska, said, to this suggestion, “Then we’d have mountains and they’d have a football team.”  States of West Kansas, Kansahoma, and Kansorado have also been mulled in the past.  But none of this had ever been as serious as the North Colorado movement.  Officials in Cheyenne County, Colorado, are already planning to put the issue before voters in a referendum, and Phillips County is considering it.

After the initial hubbub, some moderates began saying that perhaps a less, um, democratic federalism might be in order, such as guaranteeing individual counties a certain share of legislative seats, as a way of slowing the demographic juggernaut of Denver and Boulder city-slickers in Coloradan elections.  But presuming that the North Colorado idea goes forward, some things will have to be sorted out first.

Welcome to downtown Boulder

One is the United States Congress, which has to approve any new states.  Generally, Congress is only willing to admit states in pairs, for political reasons.  This dates back to the Missouri Compromise of 1820, when the admission of Maine and Missouri retained the delicate balance of slave and free states and was most recently in play in 1959, when conservative Alaska and liberal Hawaii were added to the union in tandem.  If the North Colorado push does not go away, it may be time for the District of Columbia or Puerto Rico to seize the moment.

Second is a postal abbreviation.  North Carolina is already NC, and ND and CO are likewise taken.  This is as good a reason as any for North Coloradoans to actually come up with a new name for the state and not take the lazy West Virginia route.

Third, of course, is a flag.  Both opponents and proponents of North Colorado statehood have offered designs, though the movement itself does not have one yet.  The Southern Nationalist Network, a (rather embarrassingly for North Coloradoans) racist neo-Confederate organization, has suggested this one (the uncommented-upon use of a red star showing just how far in the past the Cold War is for many young conservatives) ...

... while a more Democratically inclined blogger suggests either this ...

... or an expression of rural Colorado values that looks like this:

[Also, for those who are wondering, yes, this blog is tied in with a forthcoming book, a sort of encyclopedic atlas to be published by Auslander and Fox under the title Let’s Split! A Complete Guide to Separatist Movements, Independence Struggles, Breakaway Republics, Rebel Provinces, Pseudostates, Puppet States, Tribal Fiefdoms, Micronations, and Do-It-Yourself Countries, from Chiapas to Chechnya and Tibet to Texas.  Look for it in spring 2013.  I will be keeping readers posted of further publication news.]

Basques Pelt Sarkozy with Eggs, Landlocked Wyoming to Form Its Own Navy, Phony Chechen Assassination Plot against Putin: The Week in Separatist News, Feb. 26 - March 3

AFRICA


Al-Shabaab Extends Tentacles into Puntland.  An Islamist militia operating in the de facto independent Republic of Puntland has announced that it has joined the Islamist al-Shabaab network which controls much of southern Somalia and, thereby, has become part of al-Qaeda.  The leader of the the Golis Ranges Islamists militia—also known as the Galgala Martyrs—operating in the hills around Bosasso, Puntland, Yasin Khalid Osman, said that it was the intention of his group and of al-Shabaab to disrupt Puntland’s increasingly profitable economic development. Puntland has numerous oil contracts with Western and Middle Eastern firms.  Puntland considers itself part of the Republic of Somalia but has had to function as an independent state, with its own parliament and ministries, since the internationally recognized Transitional Federal Government of Somalia only controls the capital, Mogadishu, and other small areas.  No countries recognize the sovereignty of either Puntland or its neighboring independence-seeking state, the Republic of Somaliland.  (See my blog post from last week with an overview of Somalia’s different autonomous regions.)

Djibouti Sponsors Tribal Statelet in Western Somaliland.  The president of the Republic of Djibouti, Ismail Omar Gelle, is escalating a water dispute with the Republic of Somaliland by setting up a rival pseudo-state run by his clan coalition, to be called the Saylac and Lughaye State of Somalia, in a region just over the border from Djibouti in a part of Somaliland claimed also by the Awdal State (a.k.a. Awdalland).  Somaliland declared independence from the Republic of Somalia in 1991 but remains unrecognized by any nation.  In other parts of Somalia, autonomous regions have been establishing de facto independent republics, many of them clan-based, under a system put in place by the Transitional Federal Government in Mogadishu in 2004—most notably the successful Puntland State of Somalia.  Only recently have some of these unionist states been encroaching on Somaliland’s territory, including Awdal and the Sool, Sanaag, and Cyn State (S.S.C.).  This puts further pressure on Somaliland to press its case for international recognition.  President Gelle is a member of the Issa ethnic group; Djibouti was known under French rule as Afars and Issas, until independence in 1977.  (See my blog post from last week with an overview of Somalia’s different autonomous regions.)

Flag of the newly declared Saylac and Lughaye State of Somalia

Somaliland Foreign Minister Has Brain Hemmorhage.  The Somaliland Press reported this week that Somaliland’s State Minister for Foreign Affairs, Dr. Mohamed Rasheed Sheikh Hassan, fell ill Feb. 25th during the London Somalia conference and was evacuated to a hospital.  He is reported to be in intensive care and seems to have suffered from a brain hemorrhage.

Emirati Spies, Danish Warship Halt Somaliland Seajacking.  Denmark’s navy reports that one of its warships intercepted a cargo ship hijacked in the Gulf of Aden and that two of the pirates’ hostages were killed.  The intelligence service of the United Arab Emirates (U.A.E.) had been tailing the ship, originally bound for Berbera in the Republic of Somaliland.  The ship, which originated in the Sultanate of Oman, was suspected of being bound for Hobyo, a port city in the pirate-infested Galmudug State, an autonomous state of the Republic of Somalia which operates as a de facto independent clan fiefdom and has no relationship with Somalia’s ineffective Transitional Federal Government in Mogadishu.  But the Danish warship Absalon opened fire and forced a surrender, capturing seventeen pirates and freeing eighteen hostages, of unspecified nationality, two of whom did not end up surviving their wounds from the incident.  The Emirati agency believes that some or most Somali piracy is coordinated by confederates operating out of the U.A.E. and has said that they believe the government of Puntland is complicit in the network as well.  Meanwhile, Puntland has announced that its maritime police are forming a new, U.A.E.-funded anti-piracy unit which will cooperate with the Transitional Federal Government in Mogadishu and seek to arrest pirates in their hideouts on land.  (See my blog post from last week with an overview of Somalia’s different autonomous regions.)

Galmudug Legislator Gunned Down in Market.  A former member of the de facto independent Galmudug State of Somalia’s parliament, Abdullahi Mohamed Saeed, was gunned down and killed in the public market in Galkayo, the capital of Galmudug, on Feb. 28th.   The northern part of Galkayo is governed by the de facto independent Puntland State of Somalia.  The killer escaped and was not identified.

France Offers to Mediate Mali’s Civil War.  The Foreign Minister of France, Alain Juppé, has said that his government is willing to mediate to end the separatist Tuareg rebellion in northern Mali, which has displaced thousands (discussed in my recent blog article), and he has registered in mild terms with the Malian government French displeasure with how the military has been handling it.  French forces became involved on the ground last year in the succession struggle that erupted into civil war in Côte d’Ivoire (Ivory Coast).  Both Côte d’Ivoire and Mali are former French colonies.

New Fighting in South Kordofan.  Battles have erupted again in South Kordofan, one of the provinces claimed both by the Republic of Sudan and by the Republic of South Sudan, which seceded from Sudan in July 2011.  The Sudanese foreign ministry described what it called South Sudanese forces’ unprovoked attacks as “a direct and blatant attack on Sudan’s sovereignty and security.”  Hundreds died in the fighting, which is in violation of a cease-fire brokered last month by the African Union.  South Kordofan—where Nuba militants from the otherwise decommissioned pre-independence Sudan Peoples Liberation Army are battling forces from the Republic of Sudan government that controls the area—is one of two provinces, along with Blue Nile, that were promised referenda to decide whether to stay with the north or join the south, but those referenda never occurred. (See my blog article listing the ongoing South Sudan secession struggle as one of “Ten Separatist Movements to Watch in 2012.”)

Kenya’s Mombasa Rebels Plan Petition to Queen.  Members of Kenya’s banned Mombasa Republican Council (M.R.C.), which would like the country’s Coast province to secede, plan to bring their historical grievances over colonial and post-independence land seizures to Queen Elizabeth II in June for her Diamond Jubilee celebration.  The M.R.C. say they will try to secure visas from the United Kingdom’s High Commissioner in Kenya.

The flag of Mombasa

Election Convoy Attacked by Casamance Separatists.  During the Republic of Senegal’s otherwise surprisingly peaceful elections this week, a military convoy bringing ballots to the separatist Casamance region in the country’s south was attacked, according to Agence France Presse, and the incident was blamed on separatist fighters.

Anti-Christian Killings in Nigeria Continue.  Violence in northern Nigeria attributed to the radical Islamist sect Boko Haram escalated this week, including the disturbing case of the 79-year-old mother of a Christian pastor found with her throat slit and a note, for her son, left on her body saying, “We will get you soon.”  The incident occurred in Maiduguri, Boko Haram’s center of operations in the northern Hausa region.  (See my blog post listing Boko Haram as one of “Ten Separatist Movements to Watch in 2012.”)

EUROPE


Spain Drops Objections to Scottish E.U. Membership.  The Kingdom of Spain has pulled the rug out from under one of the dire predictions that the United Kingdom’s government has been using to warn Scots away from voting for independence in a referendum set for 2014.  The Spanish foreign
minister, José Manuel García-Margallo y Marfil, now says that his government will not block the desire of a potentially independent Scotland to join (or remain in, depending on your legal interpretation) the European Union.  He stated, “If, in the U.K., both parties agree that this is consistent with their constitutional order, Spain would have nothing to say.  This does not affect us.  The constitutional arrangements in Britain is one and in Spain another.  It is up to them.” Earlier, the Spanish government—which, for example, refuses to recognize Kosovo—had fretted over Scottish separatism for fear that a successful secession would embolden Spanish separatists in Galicia, Catalonia, and the Basque Country.  Scotland’s ruling Scottish National Party asserts that continuing membership of an independent Scotland in the E.U. would be automatic (a topic I discussed at length in a recent blog post).  Legal experts in London and Brussels, however, are still studying the issue.  Meanwhile, a recent poll shows that only 7% of the population of Wales favors independence for that country.

Kosovars Protest E.U. Compromise; Serbian Candidacy on Track.  Thousands demonstrated in Pristina, the capital of Kosovo, this week to protest the European Union–sponsored Feb. 24th compromise between the Republic of Serbia and Kosovo’s de facto sovereign government over how Kosovo will be referred to in international forums.  The words “Republic of” will be dropped from the country’s name, and “footnotes” will refer to competing United Nations and International Court of Justice rulings that leave the legality of Kosovo’s 2008 declaration of independence from Serbia unsettled.  The demonstration was called by Vetëvendosje! (Albanian for “self-determination”), Kosovo’s third-largest and most anti-Serb political party.  On Feb. 28th, the E.U.’s member states’ foreign ministers agreed to recommend Serbia’s official candidacy, which had been contingent on a resolution of the Kosovo question.

Pro-Kosovo demonstrators

Egg-Throwing Basques Attack Sarkozy in Bayonne.  The president of France, Nicolas Sarkozy, was forced to hide with his entourage in a bar while on a campaign stop in Bayonne, in the country’s southwestern Basque region, on March 1st after a mob of protestors, including Basque separatists pelted him with eggs.  Riot police eventually were called in.  Sarkozy said afterwards, “ We are in France and the French president will go wherever he wants in the French Republic.  And if that doesn’t please a minority of louts, then they will just have to put up with it.”  Sarkozy is deeply unpopular and is widely expected to lose to the Socialist François Hollande in next month’s election.

Nicolas Sarkozy under Attack

Basque Separatist Arrested in France.  A member of the separatist militia Euskadi Ta Askatasuna (E.T.A.) (“Basque Homeland and Freedom”), the Basque separatist organization, was arrested in Bayonne, France, on Feb. 24th.  The “most wanted” terrorist, Oa Puyol, age 27, was carrying false documents and bags of cash when he was arrested.  He was on the run after failing to appear in court in 2009.  E.T.A. officially laid down its arms in October 2011 after decades of violent struggle to establish an independent Basque state in northern Spain and southwestern France.

Only Bosniaks Celebrate Bosnian Independence Day.  March 1st, the anniversary of Bosnia and Herzegovina’s independence from what was then the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia was not celebrated throughout the now-twenty-year-old independent state.  One of the two constituent entities of this only nominally unified country, Republika Srpska, dominated by Serbs, did not mark it as a national holiday, while in the other half of the country, the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, known colloquially as the Muslim–Croat Federation, it was only a day off work in those cantons (provinces) dominated by Muslim Bosniaks, not those dominated by ethnic Croats.

Nottinghamshire Village Declares Independence for a Day.  In the land of Robin Hood, near Sherwood Forest, the villagers of Morton, Nottinghamshire, England, declared Feb. 29, 2012, a Leap Year day, as the day on which they briefly revived the status as a de facto independent city-state that they enjoyed in the tenth century under a dispensation from King Edwy.  The idea for the day-long declaration of independence was hatched in a local pub and included a separate currency, called the groat, pegged to the pound sterling at a rate of one to one.  A local journalist reported on the day-long village celebrations, including “the national anthem followed by the national dance, which was performed by much of the Cabinet and looked somewhat like Morris dance mixed with comedy pub brawl.”  A Mortonian spokesperson reassured the press that no ill will or disrespect was intended toward Queen Elizabeth II in her diamond jubilee year.  Morton reverted to United Kingdom territory on March 1st.

Independence Day celebration in Morton, Nottinghamshire

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

Putin “Assassination Plot” Linked to Chechen Separatists.  Russian media announced that Ukrainian and Russian agents foiled a plot to assassinate Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, after next week’s presidential elections, in which he is considered likely to win a third term.  Two men were arrested in the plot, both of them connected with a separatist group seeking to establish an Islamist republic in Russia’s North Caucasus region.  One, Ilya Pyanzin, was nabbed in Odessa, Ukraine, on the Black Sea, who was wounded in a January 4th bombing in an apartment in Odessa, an explosion which killed a co-conspirator.  Pyanzin had been hired, the Russian reports said, by Doku Umarov, the Chechen separatist leader.  The other, Adam Osmayev, was arrested without a shot being fired in an apartment on February 4th.  Both were planning to plant bombs along Moscow’s Kutuzovsky Avenue, a route used by Putin daily.  All this information comes from the pro-government Channel One television news, leading some Russians to suspect that the story—old news whose release was, if anything, clearly timed—was concocted to attract sympathy for Putin ahead of the elections, and to remind the public of his rise to power in association with his brutal and pitiless—but in Russia popular—war against separatists in Chechnya.  It is only Russian sources and not Ukraine’s secret police, the SBU, that are making the connection with an assassination plot.

One of Putin’s alleged would-be assassins, shown on Russian TV

Search On for Abkhaz Leader’s Would-Be Assassins.  Authorities in the Republic of Abkhazia report that the search is on for the gang that ambushed their president, Aleksandr Ankvab, and killed one of his bodyguards on Feb. 23rd (as reported in last week’s update).  The search for the killers is concentrated in the Gali region and has been given the imaginative nickname Operation Capture.  Meanwhile, a second bodyguard hurt in the attack died from his injuries March 2nd.

Khojaly Massacre Memorialized in Baku and Istanbul.  Over 50,000 Azeris marched in Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan, on Feb. 26th to commemorate victims of the Khojaly massacre, which occurred twenty years earlier on that day, in the midst of the war for the independence of the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic.  Over 600 civilians died in the incident at the hands of Armenia’s fledgling military, Nagorno-Karabakh militants, and rogue Russian troops.  It was part of an ultimately successful drive to establish a de facto state in the ethnic-Armenian-dominated province of the then-newly-independent Soviet successor state of the Republic of Azerbaijan.  Khojaly commemoration has become a global movement and is in some ways a response to the Armenian push to raise awareness of Turkey’s anti-Armenian genocide a century ago.  Organizations in various parts of the Turkish diaspora in the United States and Europe, especially Germany, have been orchestrating the publicity blitz.  In Turkey, predictably enough, Khojaly memorial rallies were essentially anti-Armenian rallies, with signs reading, “Don’t Believe Armenian Lies,” and, “You Are All Armenian, You Are All Bastards.”

Anti-Armenian hate rally in Istanbul

Ambassador to Russia to Run for South Ossetia President.  The electoral commission in the Republic of South Ossetia has registered Dmitri N. Medoyev, the partially recognized state’s ambassador to its patron state, the Russian Federation, as a candidate for the presidency.  The elections will be held March 25th.  There were elections in November 2011, won by Allia Dzhioyeva, an anti-Moscow candidate, but South Ossetia’s supreme court invalidated the results (discussed at the time on this blog).  Dzhiyoeva took office nonetheless but remains hospitalized after a police beating earlier this month and has announced she will not run in March.  Twenty-two different candidates would like to run, but the commission has rejected thirteen of them.  One, Stanislav Kochiyev, representing the republic’s Communist Party, will need to pass a language exam to qualify.  In other developments, the Georgian government has swept away visa requirements for Russians visiting the Republic of Georgia, but Georgia still rejects Moscow’s offer of the renewal of diplomatic ties so long as Russia still recognizes South Ossetia and Abkhazia.

WikiLeaks Reveals Israeli Role in 2008 South Ossetia War.  An email released by the rogue hacker website WikiLeaks refers to a secret deal between Russia and Israel that helped set the stage for the South Ossetia War in 2008.  According to the source, the Israeli government gave the Russian Federation secret codes for the Republic of Georgia’s unmanned aerial vehicles (U.A.V.s)—commonly called drones—in exchange for information from the Kremlin on Iran’s missile systems.  The email, from an analyst for the Texas-based global-intelligence consulting firm Strategic Forecasting, Inc. (Stratfor), says, “ Israel and Russia made a swap—Israel gave Russia the ‘data link’ code for those specific UAVs; in return, Russia gave Israel the codes for Iran’s Tor-M1s.”  Those codes were used by the Russian military to take down a Georgian drone, one of the provocations that led to the 2008 war, in which South Ossetia and Abkhazia formally seceded from Georgia under Russian protection.

Turkey’s Circassians Demand Rights.  Over the weekend of Feb. 25-26 in Turkey, members of the 2-million-strong Circassian community held a workshop on questions such as language rights and visibility.  The event, run by the Circassian Rights Initiative, is a direct response to the government’s slightly more conciliatory stance of late toward cultural rights for Turkey’s violently repressed Kurdish people, which has opened questions of other minorities in Turkey.  Turkey’s Circassians, whose homeland is in the North Caucasus region of the Russian Federation, are descended from refugees from what they call Czarist “genocide” in the nineteenth century during the Russo-Turkish war.  Circassians—known in Russia today as Kabardians and Cherkess—form 3% of Turkey’s population.

Map showing the Circassian exodus from Russia’s fringes to Turkey

Greek Cypriots Fret over Scottish Referendum.  In an editorial published in the Cyprus Mail, a Cypriot academic wonders what an independent Scotland might mean for his island.  Phedon Nicolaides, who teaches at the European Institute of Public Administration, in Maastricht in the Netherlands, asks if a successful referendum on Scotland’s independence, currently planned for 2014, would result in Scotland automatically, or even easily, retaining membership in the European Union.  If so, Nicolaides writes, would this embolden Northern Cyprus to apply for E.U. membership?  Currently, Cyprus is an E.U. member state, but in practical terms this just applies to the Republic of Cyprus, the two-thirds of the island run by the internationally recognized ethnic-Greek-dominated government.  The northern third of the island is the de facto sovereign Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, a puppet state of the Republic of Turkey, established after a Turkish invasion in 1974.  Nicolaides, who displays a particularly paranoid form of nationalism characteristic of the Balkans and Asia Minor, probably does not need to worry, since currently only one United Nations member state recognizes Northern Cyprus, and that is Turkey.  Sadly, the divisive status quo in Cyprus is likely to persist indefinitely.

ASIA

Phony Election Does Not End Yemeni Violence.  Secessionist violence if anything escalated in the aftermath of Yemen’s go-through-the-motions single-candidate “elections,” with a massive car bomb detonating just hours after the new president, Abdrabbuh Mansour Hadi, accepted the results.  The explosion, in the formerly South Yemen port city of al-Mukalla, targeted Yemen’s Republican Guard and killed at least 26.  Later, in Aden, South Yemen’s erstwhile capital, government forces raided a hide-out of the Higher Council of the Peaceful Movement for the Liberation of the South.  The raid resulted in a firefight that injured at least two soldiers and killed at least two civilians.  (See my blog article listing South Yemen as one of “Ten Separatist Movements to Watch in 2012.”)

Hamas Switches Support to Syrian Rebels.  Hamas, the radical Islamist party which governs the Gaza Strip portion of the Palestinian Territories and has traditionally been allied with Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria, has switched sides.  Hamas’s leader, Ismail Haniyeh, announced at Friday prayers in Cairo, Egypt, on Feb. 24th that Hamas now supports the democratic opposition in Syria’s escalating civil war. “I salute all the nations of the Arab Spring and I salute the heroic people of Syria who are striving for freedom, democracy and reform,” he said.  This is a shift in some of the Middle East’s most consequential alliances.  Hamas had been a lone Sunni link in a chain of largely Shi’a Muslim states and entities stretching from Iran through Iraq and Syria to the Hezbollah-controlled areas of Lebanon.  Assad’s ruling dynasty, closely allied with Iran’s theocratic regime, are Alawites, which is a Shiite sect, but the majority of the Syrian population is Sunni, like most Palestinians.  Iran has traditionally been a sponsor and funding source for both Hezbollah and Hamas, including their campaigns of violence.  At the Cairo prayer service, some of the crowds chanted, “No Hezbollah and no Iran.  The Syrian revolution is an Arab revolution.”  (See my blog article on sectarian and ethnic dynamics in Syria’s civil war.)

Hamas flags at a rally

Violence at Palestinian Funeral.  Palestinians burned tires and threw firebombs on Feb. 25th during a funeral for a 25-year-old man killed by Israel’s military the previous day, after rioting near the Temple Mount.  The funeral occurred in a-Ram, a town in the Palestinian Authority–governed West Bank just outside Jerusalem.  (See my blog article listing the Palestinian struggle as one of “Ten Separatist Movements to Watch in 2012.”)

Israel Raids West Bank TV Stations.  On the morning of Feb. 29th, soldiers dispatched by Israel’s Ministry of Communications raided two television stations in the West Bank, seizing equipment.  One station, al-Watan TV, Israel calls a pirate station, which regularly broadcasts news reports sympathetic to the Palestinian cause.  The second, Jerusalem Educational TV, in Ramallah, is not a pirate station but is run by Al-Quds University, a Palestinian institution with a campus in Jerusalem.  The prime minister of the Palestinian Authority, Salam Fayyad, visited the al-Watan station later in the day and called the raids an attempt to undermine Palestinian sovereignty.

Sindhi Separatists Target Pakistan Railroads.  Sixteen separate explosions occurred Feb. 25th along railways between Sukkur in the north of Pakistan’s Sindh province and Karachi, Pakistan’s largest city.  One person was killed.  The Sindhu Desh Libration Army claimed responsibility for the attacks.  The movement was founded in the early 1970s in an attempt to follow Bangladesh’s secession by establishing a separate state called Sindhudesh out of Pakistan’s largest and most populous province. But the movement is extremely marginal today, especially compared to the ongoing secessionist violence in Pakistan’s southwestern Balochistan province—where, on Feb. 26th, three explosions on gas lines were blamed on separatists.

Flag of Pakistan’s Sindhi independence movement; they don’t appear to be gradualists

New Ethnic Militant Group Claims Nepal Bombing.  A bomb detonated on Feb. 27th near a government office in Katmandu, the capital of the Federal Democratic Republic of Nepal, killed three people and injured seven.  A previously unknown group calling itself the United Ethnic Liberation Front claimed responsibility.  Nepal experiences intermittent tumult not only from Maoist insurgents but from activists seeking autonomy or independence for the southern Terai region, a predominantly Hindu lowland area in an otherwise mountainous Buddhist kingdom.

Sri Lankans Protest U.N. Position on War Crimes.  Thousands of Sri Lankans thronged the streets of their capital city, Colombo, Feb. 27th to protest a proposed resolution in the United Nations Human Rights Council condemning the Sri Lankan government’s use of violence in the 1983-2009 civil war, instead of restricting criticism to the Tamil rebels who sought to establish a separate state called Tamil Eelam. Many carried placards with the image of Sri Lanka’s president, Mahinda Rajapaksa, who was already in power when the war ended in 2009.

Thai Soldiers Kill Separatist in South.   Soldiers from a special task force killed a wanted separatist militant in Thailand’s Yala province Feb. 28th.  Acting on a tip, soldiers approached a house but were fired upon and fired back, according to the police report.  They found 29-year-old Masahudee Samae’s body at the  scene afterward, and arrested one other.  Samae was believed to be a key figure in the militant Runda Kumpulan Kecil (R.K.K.) group.  Thailand’s southern provinces, by the border with Malaysia, which are ethnically Malay and predominantly Muslim, have been waging a separatist war against the central government for decades.

Uighurs with Axes Kill 12 in Xinjiang.  An attack on a public market on “Happiness Road” in Yecheng (known in Uighur as Kargilik), in the People’s Republic of China’s western Xinjiang province, killed at least ten on Feb. 28th.  The attackers, members of the predominantly-Muslim, Turkic-speaking Uighur national minority, were wielding axes (other reports said knives), and most of the victims were Han, i.e. members of China’s dominant ethnic group.  Police shot and killed five (other reports say seven) of the assailants.  A different account was provided by the United States–government-run Radio Free Asia, which claims that in the incident the Uighurs killed three Han and that police responded by killing twelve young Uighurs.  The government in Beijing usually blames interethnic violence in Xinjiang on groups, such as the East Turkestan Islamic Movement, which aim to set up a separate Uighur republic in China’s far western desert.

A rather biased map of China; then again,

the official Chinese maps are pretty biased too

Chinese Party Chief Brings Warning to Tibetan Monastery.  The chief of the Communist Party for the People’s Republic of China’s Sichuan province visited the Tibetan Buddhist monastery in Kirti, Sichuan, which is at the center of a recent wave of protests and self-immolations, bringing an anti-separatist message. “We should resolutely crack down on separatist activities and crimes of all kinds, uphold state unification, ethnic unity and the normal legal order,” said the party leader, Liu Qibao, adding, “This upholds the basic interests of the people and upholds their religious freedom.” The part about religious freedom was apparently uttered with a straight face.  This part of Sichuan is in a region that is traditionally culturally Tibetan.

OCEANIA


Tahitian Separatist Backs French Anti-Separatist.  The president of French Polynesia, Oscar Temaru, says that he supports the Socialist candidate François Hollande for the presidency of France, even though Hollande opposes independence for the colony.  Temaru stated that he understood that French politicians have little leeway on the issue of decolonization because of natural resources and other strategic interests in places like French Guiana, New Caledonia, and French Polynesia (which includes Tahiti).

The flag of French Polynesia

Papua Violence Disrupts Copper Mining.  Freeport–McMoRan Copper & Gold, a United States mining corporation based in Phoenix, Arizona, says its production is being hampered by ongoing violence at its Grasberg mine, in Indonesia’s easternmost province, West Papua.  The violence is related not only to labor troubles, but to the ongoing separatist violence in the province.  The Grasberg mine has the world’s largest recoverable copper deposit.  The Indonesian military is sending troops to ensure that production is not disrupted further.  (See my blog article listing West Papua as one of “Ten Separatist Movements to Watch in 2012.”)

Fiji Denies Russian Blackmail over Caucasus Recognition.  The prime minister of the Republic of Fiji, Commodore Voreqe Bainimarama, rejected suggestions that the government of Russia was pressuring small Pacific nations to grant diplomatic recognition to South Ossetia and Abkhazia in return for development deals.  He spoke glowingly of the recent visit to Fiji by Russia’s foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, in contrast with what he calls Australia’s neglect of the region.  Both Russia and the People’s Republic of China are extending their “soft power” in the South Pacific.  The island mini-nations Kiribati, Tuvalu, Nauru, and Vanuatu are among the small handful of nations that recognize South Ossetia and Abkhazia, two Russian puppet states which were established as international entities after a 2008 war with the Republic of Georgia.

Sergei Lavrov visiting Fiji

NORTH AMERICA


Wyoming Mulls Separate Military in Case of U.S. Collapse.  The House of Representatives in Wyoming has proposed a bill that would form a “continuity task force” to enable a sovereign Wyoming to survive a possible future disintegration of the United States of America.  The bill suggests contingency plans for currency devaluation, famine, constitutional crisis, or “a situation in which the federal government has no effective power or authority over the people of the United States.”  Rep. Kermit Brown proposed an amendment, which was accepted, asking the task force to examine “conditions under which the state of Wyoming should implement a draft, raise a standing army, marine corps, navy, and air force, and acquire strike aircraft and an aircraft carrier.”  As a columnist for Forbes notes, Wyoming, the U.S.’s least populous and one of its most Republican states (and home of the former vice-president, Dick Cheney), is landlocked.  An aircraft carrier could fit in its largest lake (Yellowstone Lake, in Yellowstone National Park), but it might not have room to move around much in it.  The bill’s sponsor, Rep. Lorraine Quarberg, who represents Thermopolis, Wyoming (population 3,172), told her colleagues, “I don’t think there’s anyone in this room today what [sic] would come up here and say that this country is in good shape, that the world is stable and in good shape—because that is clearly not the case.  To put your head in the sand and think that nothing bad’s going to happen, and that we have no obligation to the citizens of the state of Wyoming to at least have the discussion, is not healthy.”

... and if an independent Wyoming needs a warlord, there’s always Dick.

California Indian Casino Feud Turns Violent.   A feud over membership rules in the tribal government of a California Indian tribe flush with new casino wealth erupted into violence Feb. 28th.  Over a hundred police responded to a scene of “absolute pandemonium” in the parking lot outside the tribal offices of the Chukchansi (formerly known as Yokuts) tribal government in Coarsegold, a town in the almost exact geographical center of California.  About twenty Chukchansi were involved in the mêlée, from two different factions that have each been claiming legitimacy since a disputed election in December, and the injuries included a stab wound.  The Chukchansi own the Chukchansi Gold Resort and Casino, near Yosemite National Park.  The events Tuesday began when the leader of one faction broke into the tribal offices and tried to assume the reins of government, but members of the other faction cut power to the building and laid seige to it, including throwing a smoldering log through the window and attacking with bear spray.  The United States Bureau of Indian Affairs has declined to mediate, but the bureau is in touch with both sides in the dispute, and the factions are barred from confrontation during a “cooling off period” negotiated by the Madera County sheriff’s department.

 After the battle in Coarsegold, California

Ron Paul’s Donors Include White Supremacists.  The Huffington Post reports federal campaign filings showing that contributors to the presidential campaign of Ron Paul, U.S. representative for Texas, received more than $6,000 in campaign contributions from the chairman and director of American Third Position, a White-supremacist, anti-Semitic, anti-immigrant political organization which the Southern Poverty Law Center classifies as a hate group and which favors the separation of the races.  Third-positionism is a polite term for National Socialism in American far-right populist rhetoric.  Paul, who is known for publishing virulently racist newsletters, has said that he would like to revoke the Civil Rights Act of 1964.  Paul has repeatedly refused to return donations from far-right racist groups, saying he rejects their positions but accepts their support.

One proposed flag for the Third Position movement that supports Ron Paul; lovely, isn’t it?

You see, the crosshairs and the iron cross symbolize Ron’s love of liberty.  He’s all about liberty.

PRACTICALLY BLOODY ANTARCTICA


U.K. Draws Up Plans to Defend Falklands.  The United Kingdom’s Ministry of Defense has drawn up contingency plans in case Argentina decides to act militarily on its ongoing claims to the Falkland Islands, a British overseas territory.  The plans involve a highly mobile mini-task-force that could respond immediately.  Naval forces would be diverted from patrols in the Caribbean and along the African coast, while C-17 transport vehicles would fly troops from the Royal Air Force base at Brize Norton, Oxfordshire, to Ascension Island.  Ascension, an islet near the Equator about equidistant between Brazil and Africa, is part of the U.K. overseas territory of St. Helena, Ascension, and Tristan da Cunha.  April will bring the thirtieth anniversary of Argentina’s unsuccessful 1982 war to conquer the Falklands and associated territories from the U.K.  (See my recent blog article on the current Falklands dispute.)

Two Bermuda-Flagged Ships Barred from Argentine Port.  In Tierra del Fuego province, Argentina made good on its promise to bar all ships bearing the flags of the United Kingdom or its dependent territories from Argentine ports.  Two cruise liners, sailing under the flag of Bermuda, a British colony in the north Atlantic, were prevented from docking in the harbor in Ushuaia.  One of the liners, the Adonia, had mostly British passengers.  The moves are in retaliation for what the Argentine government views as provocative moves to assert its claim over the Falkland Islands.  Meanwhile, Uruguay has said it will ban Falklands-flagged vessels from its ports, and Argentina’s president, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, has said that her country will not boycott this year’s Summer Olympics in London over the Falklands dispute.  (See my recent blog article on the current Falklands dispute.)

Roger Waters, Morrissey Back “Malvinas” Claims.  The former bass player for Pink Floyd, Roger Waters, has joined the American actor Sean Penn in backing Argentina’s claims on the Falkland Islands.  He made the statement after arriving in Chile for a concert tour.  The Falklands dispute was referred to in Pink Floyd’s 1983 album The Final Cut, where the lyrics, “Oh, Maggie, Maggie, what have we done?” apparently refer to Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s orders to sink the Argentine battleship Belgrano in the 1982 war.  At press time, the British singer Morrissey has also told crowds in Argentina that he supports Argentina’s claims over the islands.  In other celebrity Falklands news, Sean Penn is still a moron and has still not been fed to crocodiles, but we will keep you posted in case there are any developments in that area.

Roger Waters

Two Die in Blast on Disputed Antarctic Island.  Two Brazilian sailors were killed in an explosion at a generator facility at a research station on King George Island, near Antarctica.  King George Island is part of the South Shetland Islands, which, being close to the Antarctic mainland, come under the Antarctic Treaty of 1959 and are thus not recognized as any nation’s territory.  However, like the rest of the continent, it is subject to dormant claims that are in most cases not asserted.  The United Kingdom calls the islands, which it claimed in 1908, part of the British Antarctic Territory.  Chile since 1940 has considered the South Shetlands part of Antártica Chilena province, and Argentina, the only country which asserts its Antarctic claims aggressively, says they belong to its Tierra del Fuego province.  The South Shetlands lie near, but are not part of, the U.K.’s South Georgia and South Sandwich Territories, which do not come under the Antarctic Treaty and are, like the still farther north Falkland Islands, subject to a live dispute between the U.K. and Argentina.  When Argentina launched an unprovoked invasion of the Falklands in 1982, it claimed both the Falklands and the South Georgia–South Sandwich groups as its territory.  King George Island, in the South Shetlands, hosts research stations flying flags of Argentina, Brazil, Chile, the People’s Republic of China, Ecuador, the Republic of Korea (South Korea), Peru, Poland, the Russian Federation, and Uruguay.  Foul play is not suspected in the blast, which occurred at the Admiralty Bay settlement.