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Rojava

Rojava

Millisphere: a discrete region inhabited by roughly one thousandth of the world population.

I first noticed Rojava (northeast Syria) a decade ago – while running my millisphere model through a philosophy of the science of geography paper. At the time Syria was in the grip of the 2006-2010 drought (probably caused by climate change). Large areas of Syria’s crop lands were turning into desert and by 2009 their cattle herds had been reduced in number by 80%. Desperate farmers were migrating to the cities.

The Arab spring of 2011 was the spark that started Syria’s civil war but there were pre existing factors. Drought, ethnic factions, economic divides, religious differences and rapid population growth all contributed. Before 2011 Syria’s population had been doubling every twenty years – since 2011 the population has dropped from 21 million to 17 million today.

Roughly 40 million Kurds live in the mountainous region where the states of Syria, Turkey, Iraq and Iran meet. In 2005 Abdullah Ocalan, the founder of the PKK (Kurdish Workers Party), proposed a “border-free confederation” of North Kurdistan (S.E. Turkey), West Kurdistan (N.E. Syria aka Rojava), South Kurdistan (N. Iraq) and East Kurdistan (N.W. Iran) – neatly equating to four millispheres.

Originally from Turkey, Abdullah Ocalan lived in Syria from 1979-98 before he was captured by the Turks – with the help of the CIA. Ocalan has been banned from holding public office for life and has been held on the Turkish prison island of Imrali since 1999.

While in prison Ocalan discovered the writings of the American anarchist philosopher Murray Bookchin (The Ecology of Freedom, 1982). Abandoning his Marxist/Leninist beliefs, Ocalan embraced Boochin’s Libertarian Socialism which amongst other things doesn’t believe in capitalism, the nation state or the United Nations.

The Syrian branch of the PKK embraced Ocalan’s ideas and in 2011 the Kurds formed the YPG (People’s Defence Units) and the YPJ (Women’s Protection Units) and entered the Syrian civil war. In 2012 Bashar Assad’s forces withdrew from Rojava leaving the Kurds in control of half of Syria’s oil fields – and the United States put the PKK on its list of foreign terrorist organisations.

The Kurds have administered N.E. Syria since 2014 “working voluntarily at all levels to make Ocalan’s experiment successful.” Based on a bottom-up direct democracy with no hierarchy or party line they set up self-governing sub-regions. Ocalan was critical of nationalism and the Kurds instead proposed a democratic confederation within Syria obeying all Syrian civil laws. So as not to inflame Assad’s government they called their autonomous region NES (North East Syria) instead of Rojava.

In jail Ocalan wrote a book on feminism – his sister had been in a forced marriage – and he was for gender equality. The Kurds in Rojava have banned child marriages and polygamy and a 40% gender quota is required on all councils for a vote to take place. All men entering the Kurdish army take a compulsory class on feminism – highly unusual in the Middle East.

Rojava’s PEP (People’s Economic Plan) proposes “moving beyond capitalism”. Private property and entrepreneurship are protected “by the ownership of use” – but there was to be no absentee ownership. In Rojave there are no direct or indirect taxes and government services are funded through the sale of oil.

From 2014 to 2017 ISIL (the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant) controlled large areas of Iraq and Syria. The Kurds (both in Syria and Iraq) played a major role in the defeat of ISIL. Women YPJ snipers with antique Kalashnikovs were deployed to the front line where they proved to be very accurate. In October 2019 the Kurds led the American Special Forces to a tunnel NW of Idlib where Abu Bakr al-Baghadadi detonated his own suicide vest and that was the end of the first caliph of ISIL.

Turkey meanwhile vehemently opposes Kurdish autonomy in Syria and has moved its forces across the border into Rojava. Trump’s sudden pullout of US forces shortly before the Turkish invasion was seen as a “serious betrayal” of the Kurds who have “no friends but the mountains.”

Nanaia Mahuta should ask president Erdogan of Turkey to free Abdullah Ocalan. Twenty years is a long time for starting a political party.

 

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Brandenberg

Brandenburg

Millisphere: a discrete region inhabited by approximately one thousandth of the world population – around eight million people.

The millisphere of Brandenburg (the Berlin/Brandenburg metropolitan region: six million people) came to my attention when Holly (born and raised in Whanganui) bailed from Berlin and repatriated to Whanganui.

“Why did you leave Berlin?” I had asked her. “After the baby was born everything changed”. Instead of the party scene that drew young people from all over the world lockdown with a newborn wasn’t as much fun; besides, “poor but sexy” Berlin was rapidly gentrifying and even before Covid the young international set were heading for cheaper cities like Leipzig, Warsaw and Lubyanka in Europe and Mexico City and Sao Paulo in the Americas.

In the middle ages Berlin was on the east/west trade route roughly where Europe divided from Frankish to Slavic. In the sixteenth century Berlin went Lutheran and half of the population was killed during the Thirty Years War (1618-48) which started as a conflict between German protestants and catholics.

Berlin became the Prussian capital, German states unified and Berlin became the capital of the “German Empire” and in the twentieth century Prussia was subsumed into Adolf Hitler’s “Third Reich”.

Under the Nazis “the mother of all airports” was built at Tempelhof, outside Berlin. Hitler’s architect Albert Speer’s megalomaniac vision for the “world city of Germania” was made manifest at Tempelhof. Pre WWII Tempelhof was the world’s busiest airport. With huge arc shaped hangers it has been described as the “one of the really great buildings of the modern age”. Tempelhof ceased operating in 2008 and today is used as a recreation zone and recently a refugee camp for Syrians.

During the Cold War West Berlin found itself an island in Soviet Russian controlled territory and when the communists closed all land access West Germany was faced with the choice of abandoning Berlin or supplying it by air. Tempelhof became the destination for the Berlin Airlift and by 1954 was the 3rd busiest in Europe. The fall of the Berlin wall in 1989 spelled the end of Tempelhof which was replaced with a modern airport with longer runways at Brandenburg.

During the cold war West Berlin suffered economically from regional isolation and from 1979-81 self organised squatter communities occupied abandoned apartment blocks. Starting with DIY reconnections of water and electricity, then knocking out walls and reconfiguring architecture, by 1981 there were 168 houses occupied creating a large and vibrant counterculture scene – and conflict with authority. Evictions were met with protests but some 77 squats secured contracts to occupy.

In 1988, a year before the fall of the wall, squatters occupied a piece of bare land which was technically in East Berlin but the wall had been built in the wrong place and in 1989-90 “black living” moved into East Berlin proper. Because people were excluded the east/west border had become a nature corridor.

Since German reunification the capital moved from Bonn back to Berlin. Property speculators piled in to take advantage of the boom and worked with police to evict the squatters “keeping Berlin weird” and gentrified the old apartment blocks. Berlin, like many western cities, now suffers from the lack of affordable housing and in 2017 prices increased faster than any “world city’.

Brandenburg is low lying and flat with chains of lakes and forests that make it very beautiful. The villages and towns in the old East Germany have retained a lot of their heritage values. Berlin itself is a very livable “Green” city of parks and bike paths. Berlin is a “low emission zone” and a green sticker is required to drive a car into the city. Berlin is also the most multicultural German city and is the largest Turkish city outside Turkey.

Post Covid people like Holly are making do with places like Whanganui to congregate. I heard one describe Whanganui as a “a sublimbly pretty town which hasn’t had the heritage knocked out of it, is two-and-a-half hours from Wellington, has an airline to Auckland that gives you Tim Tams, has an art scene and an independent bookshop; it’s a place where you can manage a work life balance with ease.”

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Denmark

Denmark

Millisphere: a discrete region inhabited by roughly one thousandth of the world population.

Technically Denmark (2020 population 5.4 million) includes Greenland and the Faroe Islands but in a previous millisphere I had lumped them in with Iceland, Finland, Alaska and the indigenous people living within the Arctic Circle to make up the millisphere I called “North Pole”.

Previous to WWII Iceland had belonged to Denmark but had turned itself over to the then neutral USA in 1941 and is now independent. Today the Faroes and Greenland enjoy a degree of autonomy from Denmark.

Home to IKEA, Lego, Carlsberg beer and Maersk shipping containers Denmark is a Nordic Lutheran welfare state well known for its socially liberal views and in recent times has been embroiled in a global debate on free speech.

Pornography was legalised in 1969 and the Danes allowed “gender neutral” marriage before same sex marriage was adopted elsewhere. In 2009 the Danish royal family moved to “absolute primogeniture” – if the firstborn is a girl she becomes the new monarch, not her younger brother and in 2020 Denmark pushed Switzerland out of the top position on the world environmental performance index.

Recently I have come to know Frank, a Dane, who as a seventeen-year-old musician was involved with the anarchist commune of Christiania which started in 1971 as a hippie squat on 19 acres of abandoned army barracks. In defiance to the state laws they proposed a self governing society where “everyone held themselves responsible for the well being of the entire community” – which included drug addicts – and they made their own rules. Pusher Street, their “green light district”, became one of Copenhagen’s main tourist attractions. When international bands like Pink Floyd played Copenhagen the after concert party was at Christiania. “The music scene was magic,” Frank remembers.

Since the 2000s Christiania has come under increased state pressure. Police invaded in 2007 demolishing unpermitted houses and introduced a policy of zero tolerance. A police request for drug sales to be “less visible” was responded to by draping camouflage nets over the stalls. In 2016 a Bosnian, carrying the day’s takings, shot two police and a civilian during a police raid. The residents then voted to remove the drug stalls – but they sprang up again.

The process of “normalisation” in Christiania is ongoing. The Danish state refused to recognise the collective – only individuals they said – and they are still trying to force the 1000 odd residents, who are opposed to individual ownership, to buy the property they have occupied for over 40 years.

Denmark’s “worst international relations incident since WWII”, according to their Prime Minister, started when in 2005 the ring-wing Jylland-posten newspaper pushed the boundaries of free speech. Free speech was self evident in liberal Denmark, the paper opined, this piece of journalism was to be about self censorship. Danish cartoonists were approached to submit cartoons depicting the prophet Mohamed. Some declined citing contractual obligations but twelve responded.

After publication all hell broke loose. Representations of the prophet Mohamed are considered blasphemous by most Moslems, let alone cartoons depicting him as a bomb wearing a turban. Imams and entire Moslem countries condemned Denmark for allowing the cartoons to be published and Danish exports to the Middle East dropped by 50%.

The incident sparked a global debate on free speech. The Danish government had lived without censorship since the Nazi occupation and held that free speech was one of their intrinsic values. There is a Danish tradition of satire they reiterated.

In the spirit of “journalist solidarity” the French satirical magazine, Charlie Hebdo, republished the cartoons in 2011. In 2015 two French Muslim brothers forced their way into the offices of Charlie Hebdo killing twelve and wounding eleven and in 2016 another Muslim gunman attacked a meeting in Copenhagen organised to discuss free speech.

The Danish government has recently required that sermons given in a foreign language be translated and supplied to local authorities. Five percent of Danes are Muslim and fifty percent of them believe criticism of religion should be censored.

Jyllands-posten has just published a cartoon depicting the Chinese flag but with yellow coronaviruses instead of stars. This time it is the Chinese who are outraged.

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Alexandria

Alexandria

Millisphere: a discrete region inhabited by roughly one thousandth of the world population.

Alexandria (5.2 million) was founded over two millennia ago by Alexander the Great when he had a causeway built to Pharos Island, creating two harbours where the Nile Delta meets the Mediterranean. Famous for its lighthouse and library it became a centre for learning and the exchange of ideas – where classical Greece met animist Africa.

Alexandrian geographers mapped the then known world, observed that it was round and  correctly estimated its diameter. Alexandria was where the bible was translated from Hebrew into Greek and where Euclid wrote his treatise on geometry. Indian sadhus mixed with Jews and Greeks in the bazaar and trade goods from Africa, Asia and Europe changed hands.

The destruction of the greatest library of antiquity coincided with the arrival of Christianity from Palestine and fanatical monks lynched the neoplatonic woman philosopher Hypathia. Woman fared little better with the arrival of Islam. Ninety-seven percent of Egyptian women have been subjected to genital mutilation, which has been banned since 1996 (New Internationalist 2007).

.The medieval traveler, Ibn Battuta, passed through in the fourteen century, en route from Morocco to Sumatra, and back, well before the Portuguese got to India. The strategic Suez crossing from the Mediterranean to the Red Sea drew the French and English in the nineteenth century and by the twentieth century Alexandria, “the Paris of the Mediterranean”, lingered on as Egypt’s intellectual capital long after the political capital had moved to Cairo.

I revisited Laurence Durrell’s Alexandrian Quartet, which I’d read in the 1970s. In volume four the narrator arrives in Alexandria in the middle of the night, appropriately by boat from Greece, and he observes German bombers, spotlights, bomb flashes and gunfire before coming ashore. As well as refugees fleeing the Nazi advance across the Mediterranean, Alexandria’s exotic mix included the New Zealand army heading up the coast to El Alamain.

During WWII Alexandria had a Jewish population of around 50,000 and Egypt’s population was under twenty million. Now Egypt’s population is over one hundred million and there are only about 60 Jews still living in Alexandria. Greeks had dominated Alexandria until the 1950s, and then, overnight, Abdul Nassar expropriated the Greek banks and business and expelled the Jews, British and French at the same time – leaving Alexandria to be impoverished by nationalism and decades of corrupt state socialism. Families who had lived in Alexandria for centuries, some for millennia, were forced to emigrate.

In Clea, Durrell devotes a chapter to the art of writing, including the writer’s self-doubt. After losing my Tuesday slot in the Whanganui Chronicle to Kevin Page I did pause to ask myself if I had anything to say. “The vanity and laziness of the artist is matched by the self indulgent blindness of the people,” counselled Durell, but, he continued, “there is always the chance that the writer stumbles on The Great Inkling – the blinding second of illumination”.

The “millisphere” explores the fact that there have never been so many humans inhabiting the world – coming up for eight billion in total. Forget everything else – this is the biggest issue facing the earth in the twenty-first century.

Each millisphere has a unique environment. As the Nile approaches the Mediterranean it fans out into multiple branches, lakes and wetlands. Near Alexandria is Lake Mariout. During antiquity the lake covered 700 square kilometres. In the beginning of the 20th century it was 200 square kilometres and in the beginning of the 21st century it had shrunk to 50 square kilometers. Originally it had no mouth to the Mediterranean and oscillated between freshwater and dry before the Nile floods. In 1801, during the siege of Alexandria, the British cut the freshwater canal to Alexandria and Lake Mariout turned from freshwater to brackish. Today the lake is also polluted by sewage and factory waste.

In Egypt’s 2011-12 parliamentary elections the Muslim Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party won nearly half the seats. Attacks on Coptic Christians and tourists, corruption and general ineptitude led to the overthrow of Morsi’s “brotherhood” government in 2013.

Alexandria’s future lies in its past when, unlike today, it was a multicultural intellectual beacon in the Mediterranean.

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Kazakhstan

 

Kazakhstan – divided into Millispheres

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Millisphere: a discrete region inhabited by roughly one thousandth of the world population; around eight million but anywhere between four and sixteen million will do.

Back before Covid, when one could still contemplate traveling, my dream list of potential journeys included the Northern Silk Route through Central Asia.

In the 1980s Olive Newland had gone to Urumqi in the far west of China, traveling as an elderly Whanganui woman by herself. From Urumqi Olive took the southern route across the Tarim depression and over the Karakoram Pass and down the Indus to Pakistan. Olive survived only to die in a car crash in Westmere.

The Northern Silk Route follows where the life-giving waters of glacier fed rivers meet the desert lowlands, passing through the region that gave us the apple, peach, apricot, walnut and almond as well as cannabis and scented roses.

From Urumqi the northern route goes to Almaty in Kazakhstan and a decade ago my friend Blackie the cowboy carpenter arrived in Almaty on a flight from Amsterdam. Slightly drunk, wearing jandals and without a visa, Blackie had planned for his brother Mike, who was teaching in Kazakhstan, to help him get in – but Mike wasn’t there. Kazak customs were suspicious of all the different stamps in Blackie’s passport. “International traveler eh!,” sneered the uniformed customs officer in an oversized, braided Russian cap and Blackie caught a glimpse of his brother arriving as he was frogmarched onto the next flight to Schiphol.

Blackie never made it to Almaty but my friend Chris, the international English literature teacher, had spent a year working there as well as doing another stint in Uralsk, in Kazakhstan’s far west, where the temperature goes from minus fifty celsius in the winter to plus fifty in the summer.

Kazakhstan (2020 population 18 million) by my rules is too large to qualify as a millisphere and we ended up dividing Kazakhstan by watersheds into the millispheres of Aral, Balkhash and Kazak (see map).

Before examining Kazakhstan through my human geography model of the millisphere we should pause to look at Halford MacKinder’s influential 1905  “Heartland” geopolitical model. Mackinder saw the world through the lens of the British Empire. British control of its empire was only possible through being the world’s preeminent navy, he reasoned, and its ultimate threat was from the centre of Eurasia – far from Britain’s navy. Britain’s bogeyman at the time was Russia whom they feared would invade India – overland.

MacKinder’s mythical “Heartland” coincides with present day Kazakhstan. MacKinder’s homily that “whoever controls Eastern Europe controls the Heartland and whoever controls Heartland controls the ”World Island” – being all of Europe and Asia – resonated with the postwar United States, inspiring a Cold War with the Soviet Union. If anyone controls the “Heartland” today it is China but MacKinder didn’t see China coming.

In 1991 the USSR shattered into the independent states we see today. The Baltic “republics” lead the way as the peripheral states broke away and when Russia finally declared independence Kazakhstan was left as the last member of the USSR.

Geopolitics credits geography with determining the rise and fall of empires – twentieth century thinking. The millisphere model credits human geography with revealing the relationship that we humans have with our environment – twenty first century thinking.

Central Asian physical geography starts with plate tectonics. Mountain ranges like the Himalayas, Pamir, Tien Shan and Hindu Kush thrust up as land masses collide and, like an old fashioned hub cap crumpling, depressions like the Tamin and the Caspian plunge to below sea level.

Of the three millispheres of Kazakhstan two (Aral and Balkhash) drain into inland seas and lakes – the Aral Sea and Lake Balkhash respectively. One millisphere (Kazak) drains north into the Ob river in Russia which discharges into the Arctic. A common theme is the environmental degradation of these landlocked seas as rivers were harnessed for irrigation.

 

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Aral

Aral

kaz1
Millispheres of Kazakhstan – Aral, Balkhash and Kazak

Millisphere: a discrete region inhabited by roughly one thousandth of the world population.

The millisphere of Aral (a bit over four million) covers Kazakhstan’s Syr river watershed draining into the Aral Sea and stretches from the Caspian sea in the west nearly to Tashkent in the south-east. If truly defined on a watershed basis Aral would have to include the dry portion of the Aral Sea, in Uzbekistan, and the lower reaches of the River Amur.

By the end of the 20th Century the Aral Sea achieved worldwide notoriety by drying up completely. A diverse and abundant ecosystem was reduced to a desert in about a century.

It all started with the American Civil War disrupting global cotton production. Seeing an opportunity, Russia went into cotton – building a railway line from Moscow to Tashkent. Water hungry cotton required irrigating and the Syr and Amur rivers were harnessed. Shoddy industrialisation under the Soviets produced leaky canals and reservoirs and by the time the USSR collapsed in 1991 the Aral Sea was dry.

Since 2000 Kazakhstan has built dams to catch what water the Syr still discharges and now the “North” Aral Sea covers about 10% of the Aral’s previous area. Aquatic wildlife was quick to colonise the new lake.  It has been estimated that the volume of water coming from a river the size of the Volga would have to run for several years to fill the Aral Sea again. UN funded German water engineers are working with the upstream countries (Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and ultimately Afghanistan) but the Amur remains dry before it reaches the Aral.

Uzbekistan’s response has been to plough up the lake bed in its territory and plant salt tolerant shrubs in an attempt to mitigate the salt storms. Despotic Uzbekistan is also imfamous for its modern day cotton slavery.

My friend Chris, who spent a year teaching in Uralsk, in the north-west, had seen the rusting ships standing in the dry Aral seabed. “It’s tragic what has happened to the Aral, but it is just as sad for the Caspian”.

In the not too distant past the Aral Sea (31m above sea level) would periodically discharge into the Caspian Sea (26m below sea level). Isolated from the oceans for over two million years the Caspian had evolved unique species like the Beluga sturgeon, fished to near extinction for its valuable caviar. The only legal caviar on the world market today is produced in aqua-farms in Florida, USA, and, ironically, fertile eggs from Florida have been released in the Caspian and the Volga river in an attempt to reestablish populations.

“Oil wells flooded and leaking, pesticides, chemicals, heavy metals and untreated sewage spewing out of the Volga from Russia, you wouldn’t want to swim in the Caspian,” Chris said. The Caspian depression contains most of Kazakhstan’s oil and gas.

“And what about Baikonur?” Chris added when we discussed the environmental problems of Aral. Once on a three day taxi ride from Uralsk to Almaty Chris had passed near the Baikonur space launch site – the most costly project ever undertaken by the USSR. Yuri Gagarin, the first human in space, was launched from Baikonur.

After the Soviet Union collapsed Russia leased Baikonur from Kazakhstan and, allied with the United States, got paid to send American astronauts to the international space station – to which China is excluded. Baikonur has a rough and dirty history, dangerously discharging launch debris and causing health problems for nearby residents. Today scrap metal recovery is a local economic activity and there have been no launches since 2019 because of lack of funds.

Uralsk, where Chris taught, is right on the border with Russia and most people spoke Russian there (20% of the Kazakhstan population is Russian). Chris had planned to do one more stint in Kazakhstan but covid intervened. As of August 2021 Kazakhstan (population 19 million) is reporting 10,000 new Covid cases per day and has had over 11,000 covid deaths. Just across the border in China (population 1,440 million) they are reporting 50 odd covid cases per day and their total covid deaths stands at 4,600. What a difference a border can make.

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Balkhash

Balkhash

kaz3

Dividing Kazakhstan by watershed produced the millispheres of Kazakh, Aral and Balkhash – named after Lake Balkhash. There are 3.3 million people living in the Balkhash basin – in Kazakhstan – not enough for a millisphere. We need to add the watershed in China to qualify. There are another 2 million Kazakhs and Chinese living in the Illi valley on the Chinese side of the border.

Eighty percent of Lake Balkhash’s inflow comes from the Illi River which rises in the Tien Shan mountains in Xinjiang in China. As one would expect there is a growing demand for water in China which has increased its irrigated crop area in the Illi valley by 30% in the last two decades. The Illi river also suffers from industrial pollution in China.

The Lake Balkhash water level has dropped by two metres since the 1970s and it looks like a repeat of the Aral disaster. Like the Caspian and Aral seas Balkhash is an endorheic basin (no exit to the ocean) and Balkhash was once an interconnected system of sixteen lakes (some fresh water and some saline). Now there are five lakes and there has been a major loss of surrounding ecosystems. The Illi river flow into Balkhash has been reduced by about a third.

China refuses to ratify the UN law of trans-border water use claiming an absolute right to the water regardless of the consequences; and that “the water is needed to provide power and food to the burgeoning populations of the region”.

Almaty, the largest city in Kazakhstan, was also the political capital before the government moved to Nursultan in the millisphere of Kazakh to the north. An important staging post on the historic Northern Silk Route under the Soviets Almaty became a place where exiles were sent. Trotsky was sent to Almaty when he fell out of favour with Stalin and New Zealanders sometimes go there to teach the children of the kleptocracy.

Sitting on China’s “One belt, One road,” Almaty is a multicultural city. Uyghurs run restaurants selling fatty mutton dishes and there is still a sizable Russian population. Mike, a teacher from Northland, liked the Russians. “Because they are no longer the top dogs they are not as arrogant as the Kazakhs; and they were always trying to get me drunk”. Mike’s wife liked skiing in the mountains nearby.

My friend Chris also enjoyed his time teaching in the “Big Apple” – Almaty is thought to be where the apple originated. Like me Chris has a geography degree. “Chinese money is building new railway lines and roads all over Kazakhstan, I don’t know how they are ever going to pay for it,” Chris said.  China is thought to control 40% of Kazakhstan’s oil production.

In 2020, 4000 Chinese freight trains passed through Kazakhstan on their way to Europe. At Khorgos, on the Chinese border, in the Illi valley, they change all the bogies under the trains because Kazakhstan railways run on the Russian gauge which is different to that in China.

When Kazakhstan became a republic under the rule of the kleptocrat Nursultan Nazarbayev there was a feeding frenzy for the previously state owned property and businesses characterised by nepotism, political cronyism, corruption, violence and intimidation.

Almaty had large squatter communities and when developers attempted to demolish some in Shanyrak in 2006 large scale riots broke out. A year later 600 police came and arrested the ring leaders. Poet Aron Atabek was sentenced to 18 years in prison and in 2012 he smuggled out of prison and published “Heart of Eurasia”, which called for the squatters to be given their “miserable 0.06 hectare plots.” For this he was put in solitary confinement and the squatters of the Shanyrak Asar (cooperative) are still negotiating for titles to their homes.

Also from Almaty is cyber pirate Alexandra Elbakyan. What New Zealand’s Kim Dotcom did to Hollywood’s intellectual property with his Mega Upload website; thirty-two year old Elbakyan is doing to the intellectual property of accademia with her Sci-Hub website. Reed Elsevier, the London based publisher of (government funded) university research, is not happy.

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Jakarta

Millisphere: a discrete region inhabited by 1000th of the world population

Jabodetabek

The island of Java is only slightly larger than New Zealand’s North Island and has a population of 145 million (2015). Java can be divided into twenty millispheres, the smallest in area is the city of Jakarta, ten million (2014).

Jakarta lies at the centre of a metropolitan sprawl of over 30 million. Viewed from the air a patchwork of orange tile and rusting corrugated roofs are punctuated with high-rise concrete towers and the odd remaining rice paddy and coconut palm.

I’ve flown into and out of the Soekarno-Hatta International Airport in Tangerang. Both times Jakarta was a shock. The first time we’d leisurely worked our way along Java before making a run for the airport from Bogor, on the periphery. On a motorway a truck had lost a load of concrete pipes and we experienced a legendary Jabodetabek traffic jam. Food and drink venders appeared through holes in fences and worked the captive market. We made our flight – just.

Flying in from New Zealand and dropping into an area about the size of Auckland, but with twenty times as many people, was shock again, but it is surprising how quickly you adapt to a new environment. Centrally holed up near Jalang Jalang, next to a slum built under a motorway flyover, pretty soon we were eating street food again.

The first thing Indonesians ask you is: “dari mana?” and we’d reply “dari Zeelandia Baru” (from NZ). After that it was “how many children do you have?” and then “what is your religion?” Indonesians have no concept of not having a religion.

I once told an Indonesian dowager that I was a “non-monotheist”. “What is that?” she asked. I explained that everyone has some sort of concept of a God, some people, like Hindus, have multiple Gods, therefore if you accepted everyone’s Gods, then there can’t be just one.

She thought about this for a while, drew herself up to her full height and said, “No! There is only one God and it is Allah!” Occasionally we ran into a fundamentalist Sunni preacher, rallying the gullible with a sound system, usually with lots of menacing reverb. You could pick up the vibe, and the odd word like “Satan” and “Amerika,” and it was usually time to cut a track.

On the 25th of January this year the former governor of Jakarta, “Ahok” Basuki was released from prison after serving two years for “blasphemy” for suggesting that the Koran didn’t say that Muslims couldn’t vote for non-Muslims. Ahok is a Christian and Chinese and the small, but influential, Chinese community is resented by many Indonesians. Ahok’s work stamping out corruption in the city bureaucracy had earned him enemies but his legacy is Jakarta’s “Smart City” initiative. Reports on smart-phones about crime, flooding, rubbish or potholes are now responded to in just over a day instead of the usual two weeks.

Last year a Buddhist woman who complained about the volume of the mosque loudspeaker was sentenced to eighteen months, also for blasphemy. Despite Indonesia’s secular, pluralist heritage, the coming Indonesian elections, in April this year, are being contested in the shadow of hard line Islam.

Social media smear campaigns have targeted the presidential incumbent, Joko Widodo (Jokowi), claiming he too is Chinese and a Christian. He’s not. He’s Javanese and a moderate Muslim but his campaign to stamp out corruption and modernise infrastructure also made him powerful enemies. In the hope of warding off Islamist political attacks Jokowi has chosen a Muslim Cleric, Ma’ruf Amin, as a running mate. Jokowi has been pressured to release from prison the radical muslim cleric Abu Bakar Bashir, who is the spiritual head of Jemaah Islamiyah (responsible for the Bali bombing) and supports Isis.

Running against Jokowi is his 2014 opponent, former army general Prabowo Subianto, the son-in-law of the late dictator, Suharto. Prabowo is accused of committing human rights abuses during his military career. Prabowo’s Gerindra Party is behind the Islamist social media attacks on Ahok and Jokowi. Prabowo is the Trump/Bolsonaro candidate.

Jakarta stands at a crossroads between becoming a smart city or a medieval caliphate. The path it takes will be determined in the April election, Gods willing.

 

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Sinaloa

map SinaloaThe Mexican state of Sinaloa (2.9 million) is too small to qualify as a millisphere but combined with the state of Sonora (also 2.9 million) we have a millisphere stretching from the US border in the north to Guadalajara in the south. I call this millisphere “Sinaloa” because both states are “controlled” by the Sinaloa drug cartel.

Sinaloa’s colonisation by Spain in the 16th century transformed the landscape. Concerned about Cortez and his conquistadors turning Mexico into their own domain King Charles sent his personal bodyguard, Nuno de Guzman, to establish control for the Spanish crown.

On horseback, de Guzman’s forces headed northwest into unclaimed territory, following Indian walking trails from village to village, slaughtering and enslaving and capturing corn supplies. Slaves were used to open the walking trails though the thorny scrub to accommodate a man on a horse and we have the route the highway follows today.

Proving to be truly psychotic in his attempt to outdo Cortez de Guzman was eventually sent back to Spain in chains, leaving behind an almost deserted millisphere. When gold and silver were discovered in the Sierras, Amerindian and African slaves and poor Spaniards were brought in, and their descendants populate the Sinaloa millisphere today.

Last week the former “head” of the Sinaloa Cartel, Joaquin Guzman, aka El Chapo, was convicted in a New York Federal Court on firearms, drug trafficking and money laundering charges. Key witnesses to testify against El Chapo were Jesus Zambada and Vicente Zambada the brother and the son of “El Mayo” Zambada, who now heads the Sinaloa cartel – along with El Chapo’s sons.

El Chapo was born in Mexico’s “Triangulo Dorado” (Golden Triangle), in the mountains between Culiacan, Durango and Chihuahua, some time in the 1950s. Poverty in Mexico and the demand for cannabis in America meant El Chapo was growing marijuana from an early age.

By the 1960s the Sinaloa marijuana farmers had formed a growers’ collective and were developing stronger varieties of cannabis. The potent “sinsemilia” strain (Spanish for “without seed”) was developed in Sinaloa and much of the weed the hippies were smoking north of the border in the 1970s was being supplied by what became the Sinaloa Cartel.

El Chapo’s strength was “freight logistics”, and he had a network of tunnels dug across the US/Mexico border. The Columbians nicknamed him El Rapido for the speed he moved their cocaine into the American market and by the 1990s the Sinaloa cartel was fabulously wealthy – and El Chapo was in jail.

In 2001 he escaped from prison for the first time and he was on the loose somewhere in Sinaloa when my travel companion and I passed through. Mazatlan, where El Chapo was recaptured in 2014, was a laid back, heritage tourist town with a nice beach. Motorhome parks were filled with “snow birds” from as far north as Canada.

Los Mochis, where El Chapo was recaptured, again, in 2018, is where you catch the Chihuahua-Pacific that takes you through the scenic Copper Canyon (deeper and longer that the Grand Canyon).

At Los Mochis we slept in and missed the early “tourist” train. Trundeling northeast towards the Sierras, a bi-plane, trailing a plume of mist, came in low and sprayed our train, and a team of Mexicans picking tomatoes, probably for Los Angeles; vulchers settled on Saroya cacti in the sunset, and it was dark when we entered the canyon.

Since El Chapo’s recapture and extradition to New York, the volume of heroin crossing Mexico’s northern border into the USA has gone up by 40 percent and Fentanyl is up 100 percent. Since de-facto cannabis decriminalisation in many US states, Mexican marijuana exports have dropped by 40 percent.

Sitting in the Manhattan Metropolitan Correctional Centre, in New York, El Chapo now faces being transferred to the dreaded ADX, in Colorado, where 500 men are kept in permanent solitary confinement.

Fifteen tonnes of Columbian cocaine is worth 39 million in LA, 48 million in Chicago, and 78 million in New York, still the most lucrative market (Guzman trial evidence).

“The day I don’t exist [drugs] are not going to decrease in anyway at all,” Joaquin Archivaldo Guzman Loera, Rolling Stone interview, 2017.

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Khuzestan

khuzestan

The millisphere of Khuzestan appeared briefly in the news when, in September 2018, five Arab gunmen, disguised in Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard uniforms, opened fire on a Revolutionary Guard parade commemorating the day the Iran/Iraq war started.

The Shi’a Revolutionary Guard blamed Arab Sunni militants from Syria for the shooting in Ahvaz (pop 1.3 million) one of Iran’s most oil-rich cities. In 2015 the WHO (World Health Organisation) named Ahvaz “the most polluted city in the world”.

The Iran/Iraq war started in 1980 when, with US help, Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi forces invaded Iran’s southwest province of Khuzestan (population 4.7 million) and occupied Iran’s oil fields. During the war, despite an American arms embargo, Israel covertly supplied Iran with arms in exchange for oil.

Iran (population 82 million) has the world’s fourth largest oil reserves. In quality terms, Iranian crude is second only to Saudi Arabian, and Khuzestan produces 85 percent of all Iran’s oil.

Khuzestan has the Iranian portion of the once extensive Mesopotamian Marshes, the original ecosystem of the Euphrates and Tigris river deltas, and it is the home to Iran’s Arab minority. Khuzestan, sometimes referred to as Arabistan, was virtually autonomous from 1880 to 1920 and after the 1979 Iranian Revolution the Marsh Arabs unsuccessfully sought autonomy for their province again. The occupation of Iran’s London embassy in 1980 was by Arab separatists from Khuzestan.

American relations with Iran deteriorated after November 1979, when fundamentalist Iranian students occupied the United States embassy in Tehran, detaining the diplomatic staff there for 444 days.

The American CIA had failed to recognise the discontent that would sweep away the Shah in 1979, nor the deep distrust in Iran of the US and the UK. Iranians remembered when the 1953 “Operation Ajax” coup, organised by the CIA and MI5, deposed the Mossadeq government, which had offended Western oil companies in 1951 by nationalising their oil industry.

The geopolitics of oil and its attendant wars have embroiled Khuzestan regularly during the twentieth century. In 1941 the UK occupied Ahvaz to cut oil supplies to Nazi Germany and in 1988 the US shelled two Iranian oil platforms in the Persian Gulf. When Saddam Hussein’s forces pulled out in 1988 they left Iran’s largest refinery in flames, palm groves annihilated, cities destroyed and historic sites demolished. When Saddam Hussein’s amy torched the oil fields in Kuwait, the soot fell on Khuzestan.

In the marshes a combination of water, soil and heat once sustained a rich, diverse ecosystem. Wild wheat and pulses were easily domesticated and agricultural civilization blossomed here. In the Mesopotamian imagination this was The Garden of Eden. Iran refers to the city of Ahvaz as the “birthplace of the nation”, dated at about 3000 BC.

Ahvaz sits on the Karun River, which is navigable to the Persian Gulf.The Karun River flow has been reduced to less than a half of what it was in 1970 and dams divert water to neighbouring provinces. The marshes have also been drained for agribusiness – mainly sugar cane – which is water hungry. The palms that once produced the best dates in the Middle east are dying from ‘saline penetration’ and polluted rivers. Khuzestan has turned from a “wetland into a wasteland”, and now has drought, dust storms, unemployment and air pollution. “Khuzestan has dried up,” said one farmer.

In 2006-7 the US, the EU and finally the UN applied sanctions, demanding that Iran halt its development of nuclear arms, but the Chinese, during the Ahmadinejad years (2005-14), continued doing business with Iran, providing inferior, rough and dirty, oil refining technology.

Iran refers to the US and Israel (who both have nuclear weapons) as “big Satan and little Satan”, and in May 2018 Donald Trump, at the behest of Benjamin Netanyahu, imposed sanctions on Iran once again – before leaving office Barack Obama had lifted sanctions on Iran, seamingly assured that Iran had given up its nuclear ambitions.

Since Donald Trump’s Iran sanctions petrol prices have risen steeply at New Zealand service stations, Saudi Arabia’s economy is prospering again and Mohammed bin Salman can afford to pay for his American weaponry.