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  • They start by acting like real countries, then hope to become them

    Foreign Policy
    Jan 4 2010


    Limbo World
    They start by acting like real countries, then hope to become them.

    BY GRAEME WOOD | JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2010

    On my most recent visit to the Republic of Abkhazia, a country that
    does not exist, I interviewed the deputy foreign minister, Maxim
    Gundjia, about the foreign trade his country doesn't have with the
    real countries that surround it on the Black Sea. Near the end of our
    chat, he paused, looked down at my leg, and asked why I was bleeding
    on his floor. I told him I had slipped a few hours before and ripped a
    hole in my shin, down to the bone, about the size of a one-ruble coin.
    Blood had soaked through the gauze, and I needed stitches. "You can go
    to our hospital, but you will be shocked by the conditions," Gundjia
    said. So he pointed me to the building next door, where in about 20
    minutes I had my leg propped up on a dark wooden desk and was wincing
    at the sting of a vigorous alcohol-swabbing by the health minister
    himself. I was not accustomed to such personalized government service.
    Fake countries have to try harder, I thought, and wondered whether it
    would be pressing my luck to ask for the finance minister to
    personally refund my vat and for the transportation minister to
    confirm my bus ticket back to Georgia, which is to say, back to
    reality.

    Abkhazia, along with a dozen or so other quasi-countries teetering on
    the brink of statehood, is in the international community's prenatal
    ward. If present and past suggest the future, most such embryonic
    countries will end stillborn, but not for lack of trying. The totems
    of statehood are everywhere in these wannabe states: offices filled
    with functionaries in neckties, miniature desk flags, stationery with
    national logos, and, of course, piles of real bureaucratic paperwork
    -- all designed to convince foreign visitors like me that
    international recognition is deserved and inevitable.
    Nagorno-Karabakh, the Armenian separatist enclave within Azerbaijan,
    issues visas with fancy holograms and difficult-to-forge printing.
    Somaliland, the comparatively serene republic split from war-wasted
    Somalia, prints its own official-looking currency, the Somaliland
    shilling, whose smallest denomination is so worthless that to bring
    cash to restock their safes, money-changers need to use draft animals.

    These quasi-states -- which range from decades-old international
    flashpoints like Palestine, Northern Cyprus, and Taiwan to more
    obscure enclaves like Transnistria, Western Sahara, Puntland, Iraqi
    Kurdistan, and South Ossetia -- control their own territory and
    operate at least semifunctional governments, yet lack meaningful
    recognition. Call them Limbo World. They start by acting like real
    countries, and then hope to become them.

    In years past, such breakaway quasi-states tended to achieve
    independence fast or be reassimilated within a few years (usually
    after a gory civil war, as with Biafra in Nigeria). But today's Limbo
    World countries stay in political purgatory for longer -- the ones in
    this article have wandered in legal wilderness for an average of 15
    years -- representing a dangerous new international phenomenon: the
    permanent second-class state.

    This trend is a mess waiting to happen. The first worry is that these
    quasi-states' continued existence, and occasional luck, emboldens
    other secessionists. Imagine a world where every independence movement
    with a crate of Kalashnikovs thinks it can become the new Kurdistan,
    if only it hires the right lobbyists in Washington and opens a
    realistic-looking Ministry of Foreign Affairs in its makeshift
    capital. The second concern is that these aspirant nations have none
    of the rights and obligations of full countries, just ambiguous status
    and guns without laws. The United Nations is, in the end, binary: You
    are in or you are out, and if you are out, your mass-produced
    miniature desk flag has no place in Turtle Bay.

    My tours of Limbo World over the last few years have taken me around
    the full spectrum of these enclaves, from the hopeless chatter of
    virtual Khalistan, a Sikh separatist state that talks a big game and
    has a president in exile, but not a postage stamp of actual land, to
    the earnest dysfunction of Somaliland to the slick-running,
    optimistically almost oil-state of Kurdistan. Each of these would-be
    countries is, in its own way, an object lesson in the limits of
    statehood.

    They are also ghosts of war-zones future -- most have enemies keen to
    take back the breakaway territory -- and past. They represent the wars
    that time forgot, frozen in unresolved crisis because it is either too
    convenient to keep them that way or too problematic for the Real World
    countries on their borders to come to a more lasting solution. Limbo,
    it turns out, is useful because it lets actual countries punish each
    other by proxy and allows them to exact loyalty and tribute from the
    quasi-countries dependent on their patronage. If Limbo status didn't
    exist, someone would invent it.

    Unfortunately for these states, winning the full Rand-McNally, General
    Assembly treatment is more difficult than merely hiring a
    professional-quality printer to start cranking out the passports.
    Carving land from other countries is nearly always bloody and in most
    cases leaves borders that bleed for decades. Somaliland and Abkhazia
    have existed for almost 20 years, with little indication that
    widespread recognition is imminent. Indeed, the rare successful cases
    these days of countries making the leap from troubled enclave to
    independent nation have pretty much bypassed Limbo entirely. Think
    East Timor and Kosovo, which jumped from brutal occupation to U.N.
    administration to independence to become two of the first new
    countries of the 2000s. The Limbo countries tend to start with
    violence and then get stuck in the next stage: a path that leads on
    and on and on, apparently to nowhere.

    The Abkhazian case is typical. Abkhazia (pop. 190,000) occupies a
    stretch of Georgia's Black Sea coast, an area whose beaches, pine
    forests, mountains, and lakes once attracted Soviet leaders Stalin,
    Khrushchev, and Brezhnev for holidays. A war in the early 1990s
    separated Abkhazia from Georgia, killing thousands on each side in the
    first 13 months and sending 100,000 ethnic Georgians and Mingrelians
    fleeing from their homes in Abkhazia.

    Midwifing Abkhazia's rebellion was Russia, the Abkhazians' ally and
    guarantor. Georgia was one of the ex-Soviet states most eager to
    explore alliances with the West, and Abkhazia was Russia's way to make
    Georgia suffer for its infidelity. Russia sent support to Abkhazia,
    opened the Abkhazian border for trade, and gradually took steps just
    short of annexation. In 2006, it granted Russian passports to all
    Abkhazians, and finally -- once Abkhazia had become entirely reliant
    on Russia -- it became the first country to recognize Abkhazian
    independence. According to Abkhazians, Georgia planned to invade in
    the summer of 2008, and only an influx of Russian troops into Abkhazia
    at the last minute led Georgia to make a play -- ultimately doomed,
    due to Russia's surprisingly strong response -- for South Ossetia,
    another Russian client state inside Georgia, instead. The uneasy
    standoff meant Russia never formally annexed Abkhazia from Georgia,
    and in return the Abkhazians made sure the Russians never needed to
    annex them, because they do Russia's bidding anyway. This guarantee
    has emboldened the Abkhazians, who taunt the Georgian army just across
    the line of control. "The first Georgian soldier who crosses the
    Inguri River will be shot," Gundjia vowed when I visited in the fall.

    As the health minister, a lapsed dermatologist named Zurab Marshaniya,
    rinsed the clotted blood from my leg, he sighed in frustration at his
    government's predicament. I told him how impressed I was at the pace
    of Abkhazia's return to its old Soviet status as a tourist resort.
    When I last came to the Abkhazian capital of Sukhumi in 2006, the
    one-time jewel of the boardwalk, the Hotel Abkhazia, was bombed out
    and abandoned to weeds. Now it was half-repaired, and its rival, the
    Ritsa Hotel, had opened its suites to the richest of Abkhazia's 1
    million annual visitors, nearly all of them Russian. (Ritsa's Room
    208, from whose balcony a vacationing Leon Trotsky addressed a crowd
    on the occasion of Lenin's death, goes for about $150 a night.)
    Abkhazia's hospitals may have been "shocking," but the city as a whole
    looked no worse from the outside than a down-market cottage town on
    Lake Superior. Marshaniya was all shrugs and said as long as Georgia
    still intended to march back into Sukhumi, the gains were fragile.

    In the meantime, Abkhazia's foreign policy is based on courting anyone
    who might recognize its sovereignty. Daniel Ortega's government in
    Nicaragua obliged in 2008, likely influenced by old Soviet ties, and
    Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez formally acknowledged Abkhazia in
    2009. Except for Russia, though, Abkhazia has no real formal
    relations, and its diplomats are strictly limited in where they can
    go. The United States, a close ally of Mikheil Saakashvili's
    government in Georgia, denies visa requests from Abkhazian government
    officials, and other states such as India have been persuaded to do
    the same.

    That leaves Abkhazia represented instead by quirky volunteers like
    George Hewitt, a professor at the University of London's School of
    Oriental and African Studies who has made a specialty of Abkhazia's
    culture and its language, Abkhaz, a linguistic freak show with 67
    consonants and only one vowel. Hewitt knows Abkhaz as well as any
    non-Abkhazian, and he writes impassioned and informed essays on the
    Abkhazian question. But he is very much a scholar, not a political
    strategist. I visited Hewitt before my first visit to Abkhazia in 2006
    and asked whether he needed anything from Georgia, where he is
    decidedly non grata. I thought he might like a book, or a postcard. He
    said there had been calumnies against him in the Mingrelian-language
    newspapers; could I investigate? Alas, I could not.

    Encouraging states like Abkhazia to flourish and proliferate has
    created precisely the kind of second-class statehood, with uncertain
    rights and responsibilities in the international system, that
    diplomacy was designed over the last several centuries to avoid. The
    Peace of Westphalia established an international order of fixed
    boundaries in 1648 and made no provisions for the existence of
    functionally independent enclaves in Brandenburg-Prussia, say, that
    France could use for leverage. The whole point was to come to
    conclusions about what was sovereign territory and agree to knock off
    the warfare and ambiguity. That was in part for the welfare of those
    enclaves, so they were not trapped in uncertainty and used as proxies
    -- or worse, neocolonies -- by first-class states. But Limbo World
    suffers that exact fate today.

    Ethiopia, smarting from the loss of its actual colony Eritrea two
    decades ago, effectively adopted an unofficial second one on the
    northern edge of Somalia, called Somaliland. Somaliland was among the
    most noisome and rebellious areas in Somalia under the dictatorship of
    Muhammad Siad Barre. In the late 1980s, Siad Barre killed hundreds of
    thousands in bombings of its main city, Hargeisa, and the countryside.
    When Siad Barre fell, Somaliland rapidly asserted itself as an
    independent state, and it is now approaching 20 years of relative
    peace. The coastline that Ethiopia lost in Eritrea it has effectively
    gained back in Somaliland, with the port of Berbera now a key trade
    valve into the Gulf of Aden. Ethiopia's support for Somaliland also
    represents a perpetual outrage to the Somalis of Mogadishu. While
    continuing to fight among themselves for nearly two decades, most
    factions agree that Ethiopia is a mortal external threat, especially
    because it invaded Somalia proper in 2006.

    Like the Abkhazians, the Somalilanders are as helpful as they are
    hapless, as I found from the moment I stepped into their small
    representation office in the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa. At most
    African embassies, the diplomats regard visa applicants as captive
    sources of revenue. But rather than a droopy-lidded kleptocrat, the
    Somaliland office produced a slim, energetic young man with an
    endearing eagerness to show off his country. He came out to stamp my
    passport and sat down next to me to sketch a map of the complex land
    journey between Addis and Hargeisa. "They grow the best khat here," he
    said, referring to the mildly narcotic chew popular in the region. His
    index finger traced a proud little circle on an area just on the
    Ethiopian side of the border. For $20, he pressed into my passport a
    full-page visa, as official-looking as any in Africa.

    On the journey he described, there was an emphatic lack of
    officialdom, a studied denial by Ethiopia that any border existed at
    all. At Jijiga, 10 hours from Addis and the last big town before I
    would cross into the nonexistent country of Somaliland, I had to hunt
    down a police officer to get him to inscribe my passport with a note
    confirming I had exited Ethiopia legally. This was a border that
    existed only by request.

    Once on the Somaliland side it took about two hours of off-road
    driving -- through hills of desert scrub, past herders crouching in
    huts made of discarded U.N. and usaid flour sacks -- before I met
    anything resembling a sign of government. At the edge of Hargeisa, a
    hilly town whose lights were the one glowing dot on the horizon as I
    drove, two men with machine guns intercepted the car to demand my
    papers. This, I thought, would be my cue to do what one does at so
    many other African borders, which is to wink and offer smokes and a
    small bribe in exchange for safe passage. But before I could phrase my
    tentative offer, they found the inky blue stamp in my passport and
    waved me through, asking only that I register with the Ministry of
    Foreign Affairs the next day.

    Unlike Abkhazia, Somaliland did not exactly enchant me as a place
    beautiful enough to die for. Perhaps it was the heat -- well over 100
    degrees Fahrenheit, with nothing to drink, due to strict enforcement
    of the Ramadan fast -- or perhaps the buggy eyes and green-flecked
    teeth of the khat-chewers outside my hotel room each night. The
    standard meal, spaghetti and ground camel meat, eaten with the hands,
    made clear why I had never been to a Somali restaurant outside
    Somalia.

    The Somalilanders, of course, had already done quite a bit of dying
    for their land and for their spaghetti, and they missed no chance to
    tell me how cynical and cruel the international community had been by
    not recognizing their state. At the foreign ministry satellite office
    set up to stamp in the rare tourist, two excitable Somalilanders
    pointed out that Somaliland had multiparty elections, a free press,
    and an anti-terrorism policy that the government enforced with zeal.
    It had done all this without recognition and without help from the
    World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, or any other agency that
    requires an international rubber stamp to operate. If this was
    illegitimacy, other African governments should try it.

    And in any case, what was the alternative? A reconstituted Somalia
    would require reconnecting Somaliland with what may be the world's
    most spectacularly failed state. Where Somaliland has a fledgling
    coast guard, Somalia has flourishing pirates, and where Hargeisa has a
    form of democracy, Mogadishu has howling anarchy punctuated by fits of
    sharia law.

    Yet this is the alternative urged by nearly everyone in the region.
    Arab states are reluctant to see Somalia, a fellow Arab League member,
    sliced up and leased to predominantly Christian Ethiopia. The African
    Union worries that the Somaliland example will persuade separatist
    movements that if they just fight hard enough, they'll eventually get
    their own U.N. seats. Somaliland, of course, retorts by pointing out
    that Somalia is being used by foreign states just as surely as
    Ethiopia is using Somaliland. Moreover, Somaliland asks whether
    peaceful and responsible democracy isn't something worth
    incentivizing, regardless of whether the peaceful and responsible
    democracy is being practiced by separatists. For now, even Ethiopia,
    Somaliland's closest regional ally, hasn't bestowed recognition, and
    there is no sign it intends to.

    Critics charge Limbo Worlders with having things backward, even
    practicing a form of cargo cultism. Just as New Guinean tribes built
    crude airstrips to lure planes bearing valuable cargo, quasi-countries
    build crude foreign ministries in the vain hopes of luring ambassadors
    bearing credentials from London, Paris, and Washington. These critics
    say Limbo World countries are fatally misled about how independence is
    supposed to work: Recognition precedes, rather than follows, the
    creation of an actual state. The list of Limbo World alumni --
    countries that gained independence by acting like independent states
    first, and then getting recognition -- is small, and the few examples
    of partial success (Kosovo is stuck on 63 recognizing countries,
    Taiwan on 23) suggest Limbo is a permanent condition when it is not a
    fatal one.

    Indeed, once Limbo World countries have reached a certain level of
    development, many of them start considering the possibility that
    independence isn't the brass ring it once appeared. Abkhazia might
    have entered that phase. After Georgia suffered an embarrassing defeat
    trying to reclaim South Ossetia (the other quasi-state within its
    borders) in 2008, Abkhazia became emboldened and developed its trade
    and infrastructure significantly with Russian backing. It expanded its
    sea trade, despite a blockade vigorously enforced by the Georgian
    navy. (Occasional Turkish merchant vessels break the blockade by
    sailing to the Russian port of Sochi and then skirting the coast until
    they reach Sukhumi.)

    No quasi-state has reached a happier Limbo status than Iraqi
    Kurdistan. Throughout the 1990s, Iraqi Kurdistan was riven by internal
    divisions, and at times its senior leaders viewed each other as
    greater bogeymen than Saddam Hussein. In 1996, the Kurdistan
    Democratic Party even allied with Hussein against the Patriotic Union
    of Kurdistan (puk) and invited his forces into Irbil to flush out the
    puk. The factions reached an icy truce in 2002, with the understanding
    that they would cooperate to dislodge Hussein and achieve eventual
    independence.

    Nominally, independence remains the goal. Indeed, suspicions that
    Iraqi Kurdish politicians have discarded that goal have done much to
    alienate them from their people. But since my first visit there in
    2003, the rationale for full independence has become less clear, just
    as the apparatus of the Kurdish state has become slicker and more
    sophisticated. On that first visit, the Kurdistan government asserted
    itself mostly through the indelicate searches by its peshmerga
    militia, which daily tore apart my luggage and rifled through it with
    ruthless attention.

    Within a few years the peshmerga had become smoother, and the
    government more comfortable with its fate. Barham Salih, the puk's
    representative in Washington, led the Kurds' successful push to get
    the United States to dislodge Hussein. He eventually became a deputy
    prime minister of post-Hussein Iraq, and puk chief Jalal Talabani, the
    Iraqi president. In Washington, they retained Barbour Griffith &
    Rogers, the Republican-affiliated lobbying firm, and their
    presentation to the outside world became even cannier, with less
    mention of phrases like "autonomy" that might spook the Turks next
    door.

    I crossed into Kurdistan from Turkey at midnight, on foot, and got a
    big stamp indicating "Republic of Iraq-Kurdistan Region." On either
    side of the border, trucks were lined up hundreds deep, loaded with
    goods and ready to pay a hefty sum in duties -- money destined not for
    Baghdad but for the Kurdish capital of Irbil. Turkey was a happy
    partner in this looting of the transport paths, eager to watch Iraq's
    Kurdish leadership enrich itself as long as it stopped short of asking
    the world to treat its borders as reality.

    When I crossed the southern edge of Kurdistan, where Arab Iraq and its
    then-horrific carnage began, the only indication of the change in
    administration was the different color uniform, light blue for the
    Arab Iraqi police in lieu of the desert camouflage of the peshmerga.
    In the early days after Hussein's toppling, the border had been a
    vigorously policed checkpoint that separated Kurdistan unmistakably
    from its neighbor. Now the Kurds were less zealous in marking the
    line, as if to say: Feel the fear as you leave the safety of our
    territory and enter the land of Arabia and of car bombs. We don't need
    to mark our border on the map because the chill in your spine is
    marking it for us.

    By 2006, the word "independence" was everywhere whispered but nowhere
    spoken. Instead, Kurdish officials brought me to eat at the buffet of
    the new hotel they called the Sheraton (not really a Sheraton, but
    this was not really a country either), to inhale the fresh paint fumes
    at the clean and orderly international airport, to ogle the tracts of
    luxury apartments under development by a Turkish construction firm.
    Pushing the independence issue would have seemed gauche, with Limbo so
    profitable.

    Throughout my travels in Limbo World, the conversation would often
    swing back to Uruguay, where a 1933 agreement was sealed that is today
    an article of faith to Limbo Worlders. The Montevideo Convention
    established a theory of statehood that treated countries like
    starfish, capable of surviving after having their limbs hacked off and
    able to sprout new and independent states from those hacked-off limbs.

    It has come to be known as the declarative theory of statehood: the
    idea that a state is any entity with a fixed territory and population,
    and a government that can enter into relations with other states.
    Needless to say, if the letter of this convention, to which the United
    States is a signatory, were followed, nearly every country in Limbo
    World would immediately convert into full nationhood and every rebel
    group on the planet would be scrambling to print business cards for
    its hastily convened diplomatic corps. Like many sweeping declarations
    of foreign policy, the Montevideo Convention has been the victim of
    wise neglect nearly ever since its signing. Still, the opposite
    extreme in international relations -- giving existing countries a veto
    over every self-determination movement -- hardly recommends itself,
    and whatever happy medium exists between the two has not yet been
    reached.

    Some in Limbo World are at least temporarily content with this
    ambiguity. In his Sukhumi office, Maxim Gundjia pointed out that being
    Russia's pawn is no less embarrassing than being America's pawn, like
    Saakashvili. And in any case, recognition is overrated, as long as the
    quasi-state's economy is poor. "What's the use of being recognized
    like Afghanistan?" he asked. "They have the first flag at the U.N.
    square, but who wants to live there?"

    That evening, as I limped along the Black Sea boardwalk (gingerly, to
    keep my leg from tearing back open), it was easy to see his point.
    Indeed, it wasn't obvious why Abkhazia was pursuing recognition so
    fervently, when even if it achieved legitimacy it would probably have
    to rely on Russia for most everything, including security. For now, a
    glance at the shore showed that Abkhazia had more than most real
    countries: the beauty of a moonlit sea, and the beginnings of
    prosperity from a flow of tourists glad to disgorge their rubles to
    buy fancy hotel rooms, cheap wine, and rich Caucasian pastries. The
    Russian holiday-makers who walked past me were a constant reminder
    that the desire for true independence, from Georgia and from Russia,
    was not a realistic one, no matter how hard Abkhazians worked to
    achieve it. But as I looked out on the scene, the moonbeams caught a
    ship in the distance, and the uncertainty over whether that ship flew
    a Georgian flag made me understand, for a second, what keeps them
    trying.




    http://www.foreignpolicy.com/arti cles/2010/01/04/limbo_world

    From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress
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