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August 12, 2015

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Somalia Lived While Its Government Died: "Serious" foreign policy minds care about everything but citizens' lives.

Don't you know that borders are decreed by G#d?
Just ask certain influential RW evangelical preachers in the US (in particular concerning the US Southern Border and (Great) Israel).

it's all part of Big Atlas' plan for world domination. by controlling the borders, they control the flow of people. by controlling the flow of people, they can make it impossible to escape, once they start "purging the surplus" (as their internal documents call it).

resist this!

These are tricky questions. Whereas I'm all for self determination for any significant population that wants it, there are tactical and political reasons for Iraqi (and possibly Syrian in due course) Kurdistan not to rush into declaring statehood. To do so would inevitably attract the hostility of Turkey, and probably also of Iran, and while I defer to nobody in my admiration of the military qualities of the Peshmurga, this would not end well. Even if neither of the regional superpowers actually invaded, the economic damage they could inflict on a landlocked country sandwiched between them doesn't bear thinking about.

Also, as Juan Cole notes this morning, Kurdistan has a lot less oil than the rest of Iraq, so retaining some formal link which enables it to benefit from the revenues might be a smart move.

The case of Somaliland is different. It already existed for several decades (with slightly different borders) as the British Somaliland Protectorate and regards itself as the successor state thereunto. The union with the Italian Somalia Trust Territory on independence was in good faith, and as far as I know unforced, but as you say, most of Somalia is essentially ungoverned at the moment, you would think it would be sensible to recognise the powers that be in one of the few parts that is. It may be that one of the great powers is for some reason so heavily invested in the "government of Somalia" - essentially the city state of Maputo - as to preclude it, but I'm not aware that this is the case. I suspect it's just foreign ministries being bloody minded.

Why did I type Maputo when I meant Mogadishu? I must be getting senile, they're 2000 miles apart.

cleek, it seerms like Big Atlas would benefit from shifting borders. Think of how much planned obsolescence did for the auto industry. This would be just another way to sell more atlases (and globes) every year.

It's my understanding that the division of India had more to do with Britain wanting to split up the colony so it could maintain influence, and that the Partition is one of the worst things that happened there, with basically unending awful consequences. I could be mistaken, but I don't think you should paint that as a good thing.

The British left a trail of failed divisions - Ireland, India, arguably the Palestinian mandate - behind them in the decolonisation process. They were equally keen on inappropriate mergers - the Central African Federation, comprising what are now Malawi, Zambia and Zimbabwe, and the Federation of the West Indies (no, thank you, Jamaica and Trinidad did not fancy subsidising all the small islands indefinitely). Not to mention Somalia. Whatever looked most likely to let them retain a degree of control.

However, It is a fact that by 1947 Jinnah had come to believe that an independent Pakistan was necessary, and if the Muslim League had been overridden on that there would probably have been as much or more bloodshed on the subcontinent than there actually was. This is not to excuse the details of the way partition was carried out.

Probably, the continuing non-recongnition of Somaliland stems from the fact that they are unimportant. For many practical purposes, Somaliland cooperates with the West even if it is only recognised de facto: for instance, it accepts deportations of its citizens back to the Somaliland soil from the EU. On the other hand, if West did commit to the independence of Somaliland, it would need to have the Somalian "government" recognising it also. This would undermine the credibility of the Somalian government which is even otherwise pretty low.

Furthermore, the de jure independence of Somaliland would be an encouraging signal for other African sub-national regions to make a bid for independence. Western diplomats are afraid of opening a Pandora's box, and because there are very few other issues in play, we can afford not to recognise Somaliland in the meantime.

if West did commit to the independence of Somaliland, it would need to have the Somalian "government" recognising it also.

Why?

There are a number of governments which are not recognized by everybody. The most obvious example being Taiwan. For a variety of reasons, mostly how powerful China is economically, nobody recognizes both China and Taiwan. But Somalia isn't really in a position to object effectively if someone recognizes Somaliland. (And it wouldn't be heartbreaking if Somalia decided to break relations anyway.)

Obviously, as cleek insinuates, this is just a conspiracy of cartographers [h/t Tom Stoppard]:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=geXY7TgamYA

I got the impression that the partition of British India was deliberately done the way it was* to make Pakistan an non-viable state that would soon beg to return to the union and would have to accept the conditions previously rejected. I have also heard that in hindsight the engineers of the pre-planned disaster cursed themselves because they had not taken Jinnah's bad health into account. Had they just procrastinated a little more, Jinnah would have died leaving no one strong enough to fight successfully for an independent Pakistan. The result would probably have been a civil war inside India as bloody as the separation and consequent wars. Had Jinnah lived, maybe, just maybe, Pakistan would have taken a better course.

*I do not know whether it is true that the Hindu ruler of (predominantly Muslim) Cashmere got heavily bribed to vote to join Hindu India. Jinnah considered it as a massive breach of trust and good faith.

I do not know whether it is true that the Hindu ruler of (predominantly Muslim) Cashmere got heavily bribed to vote to join Hindu India either, but I've never heard anything to the contrary. What he actually wanted was an independent state, but that was not acceptable to either India or Pakistan, and probably not to the Muslim majority of Kashmiris either.

It's less well known that a similar, but mirror image, situation prevailed in Hyderabad in south central India. The Nizam was Muslim, the population overwhelmingly Hindu. The Nizam tried to establish an independent state, but in 1948 the Indians invaded while the UN sat on their hands, and that was that. I've seen a map of the subcontinent printed in Pakistan in the 1960s which still marked Hyderabad as an independent state.

Geographically rather than demographically, it's not easy to see how partition could have been organised much differently. Logically East Bengal should have been a separate state from the outset, but I doubt that the Muslim League would have worn that. Hyderabad was, to be honest, unviable given its situation. The handling of Kashmir was certainly criminal by both the British and the Indians, but the wickedest thing about the rest of it was the haste with which it was imposed.

If either Nehru or Mountbatten thought the Pakistani government would plead for reintegration after the bloodshed they had done nothing to mitigate, they must have been high. No, seriously it couldn't have happened.

"Some, notably India, were allowed to break into more sensible parts."

This is a remarkable way to describe an event accompanied by the slaughter of between 200,000 and a million people and the displacement of 14 million - the largest migration, forced or unforced, in history.

Not to mention that the two-part Pakistan was not remotely sensible and its inevitable dissolution resulted in the further slaughter of between 300,000 and 3 million people.

Or that the borders between the "more sensible parts" are even today not agreed and have been the cause of three wars and never-ending conflict.

It's not a remarkable way to describe the fact tht other countries accepted the partition. Regardless of how it happened.

So it looks like it's unwise to recognize de facto independence when the area is important, and unwise to do so when it's unimportant. Sucks to be de facto independent and wishing benefits, I guess.

Or that the borders between the "more sensible parts" are even today not agreed and have been the cause of three wars and never-ending conflict.

The most notorious manifestation of this was settled at the beginning of May this year, when the Indian parliament finally ratified an agreement made in 1974 on the exchange of enclaves, 68 years after partition. 162 enclaves were exchanged on 1st August. This included the rationalisation of Dahala Khagrabari, hitherto 7000 sq. metres of India entirely surrounded by a piece of Bangladesh, which was entirely surrounded by a piece of India which was entirely surrounded by the mainland of Bangladesh - the only one of its kind in the world.

The pre-existing map can be seen here.

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