MOSKITIA
Caribbean coastal region seeking a return to self-rule.
The announcement took outsiders by surprise. After electing a new leader on 18 April 2009, the Council of Elders made a declaration: from this day forward, Moskitia would be independent from the rest of Nicaragua. They added that their coastal homeland would be defended, if necessary, by a new indigenous army of approximately 200 men. All companies operating in the region were instructed to desist from paying central government taxes and to pay the Moskitia authorities instead.
Relations between the indigenous Miskito people and Nicaragua’s government have seldom been easy. Since their land was annexed by Nicaragua in the late nineteenth century, the previously autonomous Miskitos have received little assistance while facing a litany of woes. These include plagues of rats, periodically devastating hurricanes, and a curious form of contagious hysteria known as GRISI SIKNIS (crazy sickness). Meanwhile, the government happily allowed generations of outsiders to exploit the Miskitos’ jungle territory with impunity. Few of the resultant benefits have been returned to Moskitia, still the poorest and least developed region of Central America.
Although the general discontent of the Miskito and other indigenous peoples is widely acknowledged, this didn’t stop the conspiracy theorists. Some suspected Colombian drug cartels of encouraging separatist sentiments, looking to improve conditions for cocaine trafficking through the region. Others saw the dark hand of US neo-imperialism, seeking to undermine the central government as they did during the Cold War era. But there was no need to invoke sinister subversive forces to explain the breakaway movement. Local feeling was well expressed by Moskitia’s new leader, a religious man named Hector Williams, just elected Great Judge of the Nation of Moskitia. Stroking his thin moustache thoughtfully, Mr Williams made reference to 1894, the year his homeland lost its autonomy. ‘People have been waiting and waiting for this for 115 years,’ he explained. ‘Everything has its moment.’
MAPUCHE
Indigenous American people seeking a return to self-determination.
It is all about territory. In their own language, Mapuche means ‘people of the land’. Trouble is, the Mapuche have spent a long time being dispossessed of their traditional heartland.
The decline has been steady over the last century or so, in harsh contrast to the previous 10,000 years of self-rule. Tucked away in the southernmost tip of the continent, the Mapuche were never conquered by the Incas. Or indeed the Spanish. In fact, they were the first and only indigenous people in South America to have their sovereignty recognized by the Spanish empire. In 1641, the two sides signed a treaty setting the Bio Bio River as the boundary between them.
The river frontier held for another two centuries and more, until in 1881 the Chilean army defeated the Mapuche, seventy years after achieving independence from Spain. At about the same time, on the eastern side of the Andes, Argentina conducted a similar campaign of pacification. All over Mapuche territory the results were the same: their land was handed over to immigrant settlers. For a century they were killed or evicted, sidelined and suppressed. Forced into overcrowded reservations, many left to find work in cities. Today more Mapuche live in urban areas than in traditional rural communities. But now, perhaps, the tide is turning. In both Chile and Argentina, governments have recognized indigenous peoples’ rights, including the right to land. Returning territory is slow, cumbersome and without guarantees. Most Mapuche hold no legal title to areas inhabited by their ancestors, some of which are now in the hands of rich corporations. Whether or not reclaiming their land is the first step back towards self-determination, as many hope, the land itself is vital. This is how Mapuche people define themselves. As one activist put it, ‘Without our land, we are not a people.’
RAPA NUI
A special territory of Chile, annexed in 1888 under dubious circumstances.
The island at the end of the world is a long way from anywhere, 3,800 kilometres from the coast of South America, and over 2,500 kilometres from Polynesia. Its first settlers arrived in wooden canoes probably some 800 years ago, navigating by the stars and the ocean swells. They did not find a new Polynesian paradise. Rapa Nui’s soil is poor and there is little fresh water.
What happened next is a matter for conjecture. What we do know is that several hundred years passed before the first European, a Dutchman, set foot on the windswept Pacific isle. It being Easter Sunday, 1722, he duly named the new Dutch territory Easter Island.
The name has become synonymous with mystery and intrigue. By the time the Dutch arrived, most of the island’s giant primeval palm trees had vanished, replaced by enigmatic statues, enormous basalt monoliths embodying the spirits of powerful ancestors. But riddles remain and archaeologists disagree over exactly what went wrong on Easter Island.
The Chilean government took possession of the island in 1888. A naval officer negotiated EL ACUERDO DE VOLUNTADES (‘The Voluntary Agreement’) with the King of the Rapa Nui and his chiefs, a document in two versions: Spanish, and Rapanui mixed with Tahitian, a spoken language. These versions are not the same. In the Spanish text the chiefs cede sovereignty over the island to Chile; in the Rapanui version Chile offers to be a ‘friend of the island’.
The king and his chiefs could not write, so they signed with an X. During the treaty ceremony, King Tekena grabbed a handful of turf, passed the grass to Chile’s naval officer and held on to the soil. To him and his people, this action was worth more than the treaty itself, but to the Chilean government it was the other way around.
AHWAZ
Also known as Arabistan, Khuzestan
Arabic-speaking corner of Iran seeking a return to self-rule.
They called it the Day of Rage. While the world watched multiple protests escalate into the Arab Spring, local activists using Facebook organized their own anti-government demonstrations. On 15 April 2011, they took to the streets of towns and cities across the region, to mark the anniversary of large-scale unrest six years earlier. Many sources say live ammunition was used against the protesters but few details seeped through the news blackout.
Ahwaz is an Arab region in a non-Arab country. The violence of 2005 had been triggered by reports of an Iranian government policy to forcibly relocate members of the Arab community to other provinces. The government insisted the document was forged, but in Ahwaz they saw just another facet of the foreign occupation of their homeland. Forced displacement, forced assimilation, confiscation of land: they all add up to the same cultural repression.
It is the paradox of plenty. Beneath the sandy soils of this province lie some of the richest oil reserves the world has ever known. Above ground, the Ahwazi Arabs endure extreme levels of poverty, unemployment and illiteracy. It was the discovery of oil in the early twentieth century that sealed the region’s fate. The Ahwazis enjoyed self-rule as an emirate called Arabistan until 1925, when Iran’s Shah Reza Pahlavi overthrew their ruler and seized total control of the province. Teaching in the Arabic language was banned, traditional Arab clothing outlawed and the name of the region changed to Khuzestan. And so began a long-running, low-level conflict between the government and Arab separatists that every so often escalates into protests with a violent end. Iranian authorities question the spontaneity of such gatherings, seeing foreign influences at work. Some Ahwazi Arabs in exile want a separate state, others seek regional autonomy in a federal Iran. All yearn for an end to the discrimination and deprivation.
AKHZIVLAND
Proclaimed independence from Israel in 1971.
The azure Mediterranean laps quietly at a sandy cove. Palm trees sway in a gentle breeze. Eli Avivi narrows his eyes at the sun-glint on the water. Balding and barefoot, he is ready for another day in court.
The history of this one-man state and its founder is punctuated by such legal encounters. As a boy in the 1930s and 40s he appeared before a judge many times, charged with sabotage against the British Mandate in Palestine, then the occupying force in the Holy Land.
He and his friends were a junior part of the struggle to force Britain out, to make way for the establishment of a Jewish state.
Among the ruins of an old fishing village that is mentioned in the Bible, Avivi illegally constructed a number of huts. In the 1950s they became a peaceful haven for nonconformists from around the world. Dressed in a flowing robe festooned with flowers, Avivi pronounced a teenage couple man and wife a month after they met in Akhzivland. The wedding reception was held on the beach and after the sun slipped below the horizon, guests danced naked around a bonfire. Without permission to conduct marriages from the spiritual authorities in Israel he was liable to legal action, but he got away with a small fine.
Some of Avivi’s huts were subsequently torn down by the National Parks authority in 1971, Eli Avivi confronting bulldozers alone with his licensed submachine gun. He was charged with ‘establishing a country without permission’ but the case was thrown out. Avivi declared that he loved Israel, but he was fundamentally against the government. In Akhzivland he was both inside Israel, but also in his own country, just a short drive up Coastal Route 4 from Nahariya; a country whose national anthem is the gentle sound of ocean waves.
BALOCHISTAN
Independence declared a day after India and Pakistan, nullified a year later, and declared again after Balochistan’s status as a province in Pakistan was abolished.
The helicopter gunships came from the east, out of the sun, flying low and in formation. Bristling with rockets and machine guns, they were to prove more than a match for the Marri Baloch people in their goat-hair tents.
Some 15,000 Baloch families had gathered in the fertile Chamalang Valley to graze their flocks of fat-tailed sheep. It is one of the few areas with rich grazing in all of Balochistan, an austere land of rugged desert that respires its own dust. This was the summer of 1974 and most of the menfolk had stayed in the mountains to fight with the guerrillas. Women, children and the elderly had slipped down from the highlands to escape the unremitting bombs and strafing attacks.
Pakistan’s military, frustrated by their failure to annihilate the Baloch insurgents, sent in the Huey Cobra gunships to lure the fighters from their mountain hideouts to defend their families. Every Baloch knows the story of Chamalang, a vicious six-day battle with the inevitable, bloody finale.
The pastoral communities of Balochistan were divided in three when Britain drew her imperial boundaries in the nineteenth century. Roughly a third went to Persia, a few were destined for a narrow strip of Afghanistan, and the rest to British India, later Pakistan. The Baloch never asked to be in Pakistan. Forced into nullifying their own independence in 1948, an insurgency arose and is periodically suppressed. In that summer of 1974, the Shah of Iran, fearing that insurrection might spread across the border to the Baloch living in eastern Iran, sent the Huey Cobra gunships with Iranian pilots to help.
The massacre at Chamalang helps to motivate successive insurgencies, each protesting against the continued economic marginalization and political discrimination faced by the Baloch. Each suppression leaves a legacy of hatred to fuel another generation.
COCOS ISLANDS
Also known as the Keeling Islands
Indian Ocean archipelago ruled by the Clunies-Ross family until 1984.
Without the coconuts none of this would have happened. The swaying palms flourished on the atoll and successive descendants of Captain John Clunies-Ross, a Scottish seaman, built a business empire on copra: the dried flesh of coconuts, squeezed for its oil. Labourers from Asia were brought to these isolated ocean specks, nearly 1,000 kilometres from the nearest land, to work the plantations and make Cocos their home.
In 1886, fifty years after Charles Darwin visited on the beagle, Queen Victoria granted all the islands to John’s grandson, George, and his heirs in perpetuity. Building of the family home commenced, using bricks and tiles shipped all the way from Scotland. The grand colonial mansion still stands to this day.
What followed is almost another century of personal plantation rule. Workers were given housing, education and medical attention for free, and paid with coloured plastic tokens: Cocos rupees. The currency was minted by the Clunies-Ross family and could be redeemed at the company store, the country’s one and only shop. At weekends, families went fishing in the shallow lagoon, launching their boats from the talcum powder-white beach sands.
The last Clunies-Ross to rule the Cocos Islands was known as ‘Tuan’ (Master). He walked the islands barefoot, with a dagger in his belt. He had complete control and divided opinion. Was he colonial autocrat or benevolent father figure? He ran a working plantation, not a tropical island paradise. Cocos Malays could only earn a living serving the Clunies-Ross family; workers were free to leave the islands, but they could never return.
Under pressure from the modern world, and short of money, Clunies-Ross sold the family sovereignty to the Australian government in 1978. His reign ended six years later when the islanders voted in a UN-backed referendum to integrate fully with Australia. He left the Cocos to live in exile in Perth.
NAGALIM
Independence declared a day before India.
Rani Gaidinliu was no ordinary teenager. A guerrilla leader fighting British rule, she was sixteen years old and had a price on her head. Hiding out in the Naga Hills with her band of freedom fighters, she taunted the colonials from sepia villages in the clouds. Gaidinliu, it was said, was blessed with magical powers. She could turn bullets into water, come and go at will, like a ghost in the morning mist. When finally arrested by troops of the Assam Rifles, she was convicted of murder and sentenced to life imprisonment. Gaidinliu was freed only after India had become independent. She was thirty-two and had spent nearly half her life in jail.
Before the British arrived in Naga in the early nineteenth century, each hilltop settlement was an independent sovereign state. When villages clashed with their neighbours headhunting was a central feature of each conflict. But the British discouraged headhunting, introduced Christianity, and inadvertently paved the way for Naga nationalism.
The quest for self-determination, now that Naga villages were united, still drove Rani Gaidinliu on her release from prison. But the newly autonomous Indian state, which had ignored her people’s own declaration of independence, saw her potential as a beacon for Naga autonomy. Hence it was another decade before they allowed her to return home.
By then Christian Nagas had taken over the separatist struggle, now against the Indians, and the magical girl from the hills was seen as a menace. Threats were made and in 1960 Rani Gaidinliu disappeared again, taking up residence in a cave high above the precipitous green valleys. In later life, Gaidinliu chose negotiation as the means to achieve liberation for her people. With limited success, she died a neglected figure in 1993. But her people continue their struggle, for the dream of a free sovereign Naga nation.
SIKKIM
Independent Buddhist kingdom annexed by India in 1975.
It was early in the morning when the last King of Sikkim heard the roar of military vehicles accelerating up the hill towards his palace. Indian troops were soon everywhere, a 5,000-strong force that quickly overwhelmed his 243 palace guards. It was all over before lunchtime, by which time an independent Himalayan monarchy had ceased to exist.
Under house arrest, King Palden Thondup Namgyal was stunned. He had been a staunch supporter of Jawaharlal Nehru who, as India’s first prime minister, had accepted Sikkim’s continuing monarchy when India became independent in 1947. It was Nehru himself who later said that ‘Taking a small country like Sikkim by force would be like shooting a fly with a rifle.’ But this was 1975 and Nehru was dead and cremated. His daughter, Indira Gandhi, was in office. Her government had secretly decided to annex Sikkim some years earlier, and commanded their so-called Research and Analysis Wing (RAW) – the secret service – to prepare the ground. RAW quietly stoked pro-Indian sentiments and supported moves against the king. For two years there had been rioting on the streets of Gangtok.
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nbsp; Sikkim has a geopolitical importance that belies its tiny size. Sitting astride two critical passes through the Himalayan mountains, it has great strategic significance for the political manoeuvring between India and China. Indira Gandhi cited such national interest when she made Sikkim the twenty-second state in the Indian union.
Following the Indian army’s move into Sikkim, a referendum was organized in which 97.5 per cent voted to join India. Some Sikkimese suggested the result reflected a degree of manipulation by their neighbour. China protested but in 2003 acknowledged Sikkim as part of India. In exchange, India recognized that Tibet was part of China. The agreement was hailed as a breakthrough in India and China’s relationship. Ultimately for Sikkim, its geography was its destiny.
TAIWAN
Also known as Republic of China
Chinese province controlled by a republican government since 1949.
Taiwan and China agree: they are both part of the same country and the country is China. But how exactly does that work, with two separate governments, one in Beijing and another in Taipei? They call it the ‘Two China Problem’. No one seems to have the definitive answer to this one – except that the two sides have agreed to disagree since 1949, when the Chinese Nationalists lost the civil war and fled the mainland. They took up residence on the island that is Taiwan, as the Republic of China (ROC). The ROC was a founding member of the United Nations and most countries maintained relations with this sole representative of China. Until 1971, when everything changed.
An Atlas of Countries That Don't Exist Page 5
