British Antarctic Territory

When Apple announces a new iPhone, or Coach a new handbag, or BMW a new sedan, or J. K. Rowling a new Harry Potter novel, well, it's obvious, everybody has to have one, even if it does turn out to be no different really from the last one, and that was, well, let's not say junk, but you could have lived your life perfectly satisfactorily with what you already had. Thus it is with commercial trinkets and the mediocrities of entertainment, and thus it is, for nations, with regions of the world. The Spanish have just discovered some islands off the coast of America; then we must have some too. The Russians are planning a moon-landing. The Belgians are bringing slaves from Africa. The Pharaoh has an amazing new design for a burial-chamber. Must have one. Must have one.

So, apparently, it is with Antarctica; and therefore, alongside the Australians and New Zealanders and South Africans and Chileans and Argentinians, all of whom actually inhabit the northern regions of Antarctica and therefore have a reasonable claim on it, bits of the region are now in the hands of those other local neighbours, Belgium, France, Japan, Norway, the United Kingdom, the United States and Russia; not China, surprisingly; or not China yet.

Australian Antarctic Territory covers nearly 3.7 million square miles, about 42% of Antarctica and nearly 80% of the total area of Australia itself. That seems to me entirely reasonable, given Australia’s geography. The British portion, by contrast, is rather smaller, but surely much larger, by about 100%, than can possibly be justified – after all, if Britain can own a portion, why shouldn't Chad, say, or Latvia, or Myanmar? The British portion nonetheless "comprises the sector of the Antarctic south of latitude 60 degrees South, between longitude 20 degrees West and 80 degrees West...The UK's claim to this part of Antarctica is the oldest of any made on the continent," according to the British government's own dedicated website. As though longevity mitigated. I hereby claim the entire western portion of Mars and Jupiter. It's mine because I claimed it first.

Such has been the competition for the glaciers, the penguin roosts, the seal birthing-grounds, and of course the billions of barrels of untapped oil underneath the ice somewhere, that the countries with claims, or wannabe claims, got together in Washington as long ago as December 1959, and signed The Antarctic Treaty, whose terms are well worth reading, if only because they provide a perfect template for a wider and larger treaty of all nations, which I shall call "The Template For World Peace", and hope that no one starts a fight with me over any part of the wording.

The Treaty asserts that the Antarctic "should be used exclusively for peaceful purposes. Military activities, such as the establishment of military bases or weapons testing, are specifically prohibited," which makes a wonderful starting-point; the next clause "guarantees continued freedom to conduct scientific research", which is outstanding; but it gets even better, with lines such as "promotes international scientific cooperation, including the exchange of research plans and personnel, and requires that results of research be made freely available; sets aside the potential for sovereignty disputes between Treaty parties by providing that no activities will enhance or diminish previously asserted positions with respect to territorial claims; provides that no new or enlarged claims can be made, and makes rules relating to jurisdiction; prohibits nuclear explosions and the disposal of radioactive waste; provides for inspection by observers, designated by any party, of ships, stations and equipment in Antarctica to ensure the observance of, and compliance with, the Treaty; requires parties to give advance notice of their expeditions; provides for the parties to meet periodically to discuss measures to further the objectives of the Treaty; puts in place a dispute settlement procedure and a mechanism by which the Treaty can be modified"; and it even has a clause which states that "any member of the United Nations can accede to it".

Wow! Today the Antarctic, tomorrow the world!


Marks For: 6.5 billion (one for everybody living on the planet)

Marks Against: 12 (for the number of countries who own a portion of Antarctica but sadly, based on the evidence of history, and the current state of world politics, cannot be trusted to fulfill all their treaty obligations)


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Melanesia

Not so much an afterthought as a parenthesis, an add-on anyway, by whatever name. I hadn't intended to include it, but early readers of the blog have complained that I have included Micronesia (which I had to do; it's a member of the United Nations), and Polynesia, as well as the Caribbean, and all of the world's major oceans, and so it would be discriminatory at worst, remiss at best, to leave out Melanesia. The argument in my defense is that Melanesia is merely a sub-region of Oceania, the part that extends from the western end of the Pacific Ocean to the Arafura Sea, and then eastward to Fiji, all of it due north, and for a part north-east, of Australia; but I have included other sub-regions, and I have not actually included Oceania, and so the argument falls. 

At a second attempt, I have put the case that the region consists of Vanuatu, the Solomon Islands, Fiji and Papua New Guinea, all of which have their own entries; but this is true of the Caribbean countries, and the major oceans, so this argument too falls flat. As a third case, I could have pointed to Oceania, of which Melanesia forms a part, but so do most of Polynesia (Fiji is not part) and Micronesia; but then I would find myself needing to create a page for Oceania as well, and then point out that New Zealand is not part of Oceania because it is part of Australasia, while the Malay Archipelago is treated differently again, being included in the Indomalaya ecozone, which of course would require yet another page; all of which would simply make the atlas of the world incoherently confusing, which of course it is, once you get beyond countries and into zones and alliances and confederations...enough said.

Melanesia, incidentally, means "black islands", and this too is odd, given that the indigenous people do not fit into any of our normal racial stereotypes, being neither black-skinned nor white-skinned nor red-skinned nor brown-skinned, though generally tending to the dark, in everything except their hair, which is quite remarkably, quite Swedishly blond, and the number of albinos among them goes far beyond the median anywhere else on planet Earth.

The term "black islands" was first coined by the French explorer Jules Dumont d'Urville in 1832, and he was quite specifically distinguishing this ethnic group from the Poly- and the Micro-nesians, though he was also failing to distinguish within the category the Austronesians from the Papuans, who for some reason are not called the Papuanesians. The Austronesians came from Taiwan tens of thousands of years ago; the Papuans from New Guinea, but only fives of thousands of years ago, which makes them newcomers, and so they cannot be counted as natives yet and one absolutely cannot let one's daughters marry their sons, or one's sons their daughters.

Melanesia consists of around two thousand islands in total, covering a combined land and sea area of about 386,000 square miles, and is inhabited by around twelve million people. The two thousand, however, also fall into national clusters, so that we are speaking of Bismarck Archipelago (200 islands off the northeastern coast of New Guinea which belong to Papua New Guinea), Fiji (322 islands, of which 110 are inhabited, and 522 smaller islets), Maluku Islands (which we tend to call the Moluccas; only one island, and it isn't even an island really, but an archipelago inside Indonesia), New Caledonia (Grande Terre with several smaller islands, the Belep archipelago to the north, the Loyalty Islands to the east, Île des Pins to the south, the Chesterfield Islands and Bellona Reefs further west), New Guinea (the world's second largest island, but still only one island, even if it is two countries: Papua and West Irian Jaya which belong to Indonesia and Papua New Guinea which stands alone), Solomon Islands (more than a thousand), Torres Strait Islands (two hundred and seventy-four of these), Vanuatu (eighty-three, of which two, surprise, surprise, are claimed by France: Matthew Island and Hunter Island).

Politically Melanesia counts in the world because there is the "Melanesian Spearhead Group Preferential Trade Agreement", an economic arrangement that parallels the European Union and ASEAN (the Association of South-East Asian Nations) and ECOWAS (the Economic Community of West African States), among others.

Marks For: In Melanesia all marks are tatoo marks, which every male is expected to acquire as proof of manhood, usually in combination with the ceremony of head-hunting; however "scarification", which involves raising keloids - extremely large scars - as marks of age and social status, is a custom found only among the Papuans, but not other Melanesians. I am not going to post any photographs of keloids here; they are simply too revolting; however I am going to recommend that you click here, to learn how keloids are being used around the world as a form of torture.

Marks Against: 2 (the number of tribes - the Korowai and the Kombai of southeastern Western New Guinea to be precise - who were still practicing cannibalism the last time any anthropologists went to check.



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Zambia

Many of you will have surfed randomly through these pages, choosing countries because you live there, or are planning to visit, or for some other reason, probably highly personal, that made a connection for you. Others of you may have started at the beginning, and worked your way systematically through the pages, reading this miniature encyclopaedia as if it were a novel. If you are from the latter group, and you have made it this far, congratulations; but let me also acknowledge that there is a question on your lips, that has been on your lips for some while now, and which I have failed to answer. Let me phrase it in this way: there are so many corners of the world which turn out to be "owned" or "managed" by Britain, France, the USA and Russia, but surely that list is incomplete, for should it not also include China? That is to say, China beyond the obvious local issues of Hong Kong and Taiwan and Macau?

The truth is, that it is very hard to say how much of the world is now owned by China, but the evidence appears to allow an adjective that ebbs and flows somewhere between "significant" and "imperial", and with every likelihood that it will expand and not contract in the decades ahead. GlobalInsolvency.com, a website worth perusing just because of the dark beauty of its name, notes that China is now the biggest holder of US debt (about $1.28 trillion), and is in negotiations to take on the somewhat smaller but still massive debt of Italy, which the EU would lack the resources to undertake itself, even were it not already propping up Greece, Portugal, Spain and Ireland, to name just four. In the first decade of this millennium, China placed a good deal of focus on Australia as well as the USA, but it was really Africa that was its primary target: thirty-four countries in Africa, with Nigeria taking pride-of-place ($21bn of Chinese investment), Ethiopia and Algeria attracting more than $15bn between them, Angola and South Africa collecting almost $10bn, and Zambia, for a long while, threatening to overtake all of them as China did for the country what Britains feared the Arabs were doing to their homeland back in the 1990s, conquest by economics.

It started with the Chinese building an eleven hundred mile railway across Zambia in the 1970s, when sanctions against Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) prevented the Zambians from transporting their minerals to the coast; Zambia is landlocked and the Europeans refused to help. The Chinese then set up and ran Zambia China Mulungushi Textiles, the largest textile mill in the country, producing almost twenty million yards of international awards quality cloth every year, employing more than 1,000 people, effectively providing northern Zambia with an economy that it would not otherwise have, and sustaining the nation's cotton growers. All good, you would have said. Until you realise what China really wants in exchange, and why the number of Chinese in Zambia has escalated into the tens of thousands. Zambia is mineral-rich, and China wants those minerals. At knock-down prices preferably. Which it now feels entitled to, and can therefore demand, because look what we have done for you.

What China has actually done is to take home the quality textile goods, and ship into Zambia vast quantities of cheap, poor quality goods from its own factories, flooding the market in Zambia. Most construction workers are now Chinese, while Zambians who could do the same work look on from the unemployment benefits queues; the Chinese companies simply undercut the Zambian ones, and bring their labourers on the very cheap from home. Zambian markets are full of Chinese selling bamboo and beansprouts and cabbages - not famously indigenous Zambian foods, but cheaper than most local produce. And when the Zambians say no to the Chinese, government to government, the response is a threat to withdraw investment. The classical techniques of colonialist bullying. Europe taught it to the world, so we shouldn't be the ones who are protesting. Nor do we need to. The Zambians themselves are beginning to protest. Sadly, for them, and for the rest of Africa, and probably for Europe and America and Australia as well, it may already be too late.



Marks For: 590 (the distance in feet that you would have to dive, or fall, to get from the top of Mosi-oa-Tunya, the "Smoke that Thunders”, which we know colonially as the Victoria Falls, to the bottom of Batoka Gorge and the waters of the Zambezi River)

Marks Against: potentially ∞ (the symbol known as the "lemniscate"; it stands for "infinity")

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The Argaman Press

Yemen

photo courtesy thetimes.co.uk

Arabia Felix to the Romans - a rather ironic name; it means "Happy Arabia", a term that most definitely does not apply today. 

The land of the Queen of Sheba, at least according to some theologians and historians, though they are probably wrong. 

Unlike most of the Arabian lands, which tend towards barren desert and therefore encourage nomadic lifestyles, Yemen sits at the point where the Arabian Sea narrows into the Gulf of Aden, and then turns north and narrows again into the Red Sea, making it a key point for trading ships out of Asia Minor, but also extremely fertile. After the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, the country was for decades divided, an inversion of Korea and Vietnam, into a Communist south and a tribally governed north; the two merged into one in 1990, then fought a war in 1994 when the south tried to secede, then warred again in 2009 when a radical Shia Islamic group calling itself the Houthis, or the Ansar Allah (the Partisans of Allah) took on the government, leaving about a quarter of a million refugees in the north. All that, before al-Qaida chose Yemen as one of its targets, and then the Arab Spring drove President Ali Abdullah Saleh from office in 2011. The new government agreed a truce with the Houthis, a convenience for both sides, as both sides are equally threatened by al-Qaida, and Yemen is now the primary base of operations for al-Qaida in the Middle East, with the US deploying drones to attack them.

Then, early in 2014, the Houthis broke the truce, and seized control of Sanaa, the capital, where they are still sitting with their guns loaded and not much sign that the new partnership government, arranged by the UN, will ever take office. The war gets more brutal by the day.

Marks for: 0

Marks against: 3

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The Argaman Press

Western Sahara

On the west coast of Africa, immediately south of Morocco, which claims it, and actually controls most of it. 

Algeria also claims it, or at least the Algerian Polisario Front does, though it isn't obvious from the map why an Algerian claim would be valid; the answer is that the Algerian Polisario Front is really the Southern Saharan Front, but based in Algeria, where hundreds of thousands of Saharan people, known as Saharawis, fled in the early 1970s. 

Mauritania, which borders it to the south and east, also once claimed it, though this was rejected in 1975 by the International Court of Justice. 

What it did not reject – indeed the opposite – was the right of the Saharawis to self-determination, a decision which the King of Morocco decided not simply to ignore; he gathered three hundred thousand Moroccans together, and staged a "Green March" into their territory (Green as the colour of Islam, not of Ecology), effectively annexing it. This led to the Madrid Agreement, through which Morocco took control of the entire north and northern centre of the Spanish Sahara, amounting to two-thirds of the whole, while Mauritania seized the remainder, and the exiled Saharawis remained, where they still remain today, in refugee camps in Algeria, or else they joined the Polisario Front to fight to get their land back.

The so-called civil war (properly it is only a civil war when fighting within a country’s borders is between people who belong inside those borders; this was a war by the natives against the foreign occupiers) ended in 1991 with a theoretical peace deal, but the King of Morocco was no more interested in keeping to this than he had been interested in keeping to the ICJ’s verdict sixteen years earlier. Instead, he erected a seventeen hundred mile sand wall the length of the country, behind which his troops remain amassed, and the UN-recommended referendum on the future status of the country has simply never happened – and why would it, when it would require Morocco to administer it, and Morocco does not want the result that will inevitably consequence.

Just for the detail, Morocco’s interest, like Mauritania’s, is not the land, which is mostly uninhabitable desert as the country’s name suggests, or at best desert inhabited by the nomadic Saharawis. The interest is in the rich deposits of phosphates, and the rumours of offshore oil. Plus ça change. Or كلما يتغير as they say in Arabic (type "plus ça change" into Google Translate and you can hear how this is said in Arabic; kulameyatareyira is about as near as I can get in English letters).

Marks for: 2

Marks against: 3

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The Argaman Press

West Bank

Yet one more dip into the CIA World Factbook:

"From the early 16th century through 1917, the area now known as the West Bank fell under Ottoman rule. Following World War I, the Allied powers (France, UK, Russia) allocated the area to the British Mandate of Palestine. After World War II, the UN passed a resolution to establish two states within the Mandate, and designated a territory including what is now known as the West Bank as part of the proposed Arab state. Following the 1948 Arab-Israeli War the area was captured by Transjordan (later renamed Jordan). Jordan annexed the West Bank in 1950. In June 1967, Israel captured the West Bank and East Jerusalem during the 1967 Six-Day War. With the exception of East Jerusalem and the former Israeli-Jordanian border zone, the West Bank has remained under Israeli military control. 

"Under a series of agreements signed between 1994 and 1999, Israel transferred to the Palestinian Authority (PA) security and civilian responsibility for many Palestinian-populated areas of the West Bank as well as the Gaza Strip. Negotiations to determine the permanent status of the West Bank and Gaza Strip stalled after the outbreak of an Intifada in mid-2000. In early 2003, the "Quartet" of the US, EU, UN, and Russia, presented a roadmap to a final peace settlement by 2005, calling for two states - Israel and a democratic Palestine. Following Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat's death in late 2004 and the subsequent election of Mahmud Abbas (head of the Fatah political party) as the PLO Executive Committee Chairman and PA president, Israel and the PA agreed to move the peace process forward. Israel in late 2005 unilaterally withdrew all of its settlers and soldiers and dismantled its military facilities in the Gaza Strip and redeployed its military from several West Bank settlements but continues to control maritime, airspace, and other access. In early 2006, the Islamic Resistance Movement, HAMAS, won the Palestinian Legislative Council election and took control of the PA government. Attempts to form a unity government failed, and violent clashes between Fatah and HAMAS supporters ensued, culminating in HAMAS's violent seizure of all military and governmental institutions in the Gaza Strip. Fatah and HAMAS in early 2011 agreed to reunify the Gaza Strip and West Bank, but the factions have struggled to implement details on governance and security. The status quo remains with HAMAS in control of the Gaza Strip and the PA governing the West Bank. In late 2010, direct peace talks between the Israelis and Palestinians collapsed. In November 2012, the UN General Assembly upgraded the Palestinian status at the UN to that of an observer "state." The Israeli government and Abbas returned to formal peace negotiations in July 2013.”

Rather long-winded, much like the negotiations to resolve this absurd conflict over a piece of land so small and economically non-viable it might as well be a coral atoll in the Pacific (but, no - if it were, the French would claim it). The fact that no one wants to accept is stated right at the beginning of the CIA piece. The West Bank is part of Jordan, and Jordan belongs to the Palestinians, not to the exiled sheiks of Mecca who now rule it. Give Jordan back to the Palestinians, with or without the West Bank, and the entire farago is resolved once and for all. Is anybody listening to me?

Marks against in one direction: 121 (the number of illegal Israeli settlements spread out across the West Bank)

Marks against in the other direction: 3 (the number of Palestinian terrorist groups who have made it to the top of the list of the world's worst terrorist organisations; click here for the full list)

Marks against in several other directions: see Hamas, Gaza, Jordan.

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Copyright © 2015 David Prashker

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The Argaman Press