TOCOSA – Corsica, Sardinia and Pisa (Tuscany)

Map Tocosa-2
Millisphere of TOCOSA – Tuscany, Corsican & Sardinia

Millisphere (noun) at discrete region inhabited by roughly one thousandth of the total world population. About seven million but anywhere between 3.5 and 14 million will do.

In February 2018 French president Emmanuel Macron visited the fractious French Mediterranean island of Corsica where nationalist, anti-French sentiments go back centuries. If Spain has Catalonia, France has independence movements in Brittany, Alsace, Provence and Corsica.

“France is playing with fire by rejecting Corsican demands for autonomy,” said newly elected Corsican Nationalist leader Gilles Simeoni, voicing local sentiment.

With a population of 330,000 Corsica doesn’t qualify as a millisphere. Combined with it’s Italian near neighbour, Sardinia (population 1.7 million), they make two million but don’t meet the 3.5 to 4 million cut-off.

Divided by the narrow Straits of Bonifacio they share an ancient history including being conquered by Rome. The fierce and rebellious inhabitants were not considered good slaves and the mountainous centre of the islands were avoided by the Romans.

Complex shifting alliances orbited around northern Italy and Pisa until Genoa sold Corsica to France to pay off debts in the eighteenth century. To this day the Corsican and Sardinian bourgeoisie send their children to be educated in Pisa and if more people are needed to form a millisphere it should be with Tuscany in Italy, not Provence in France.

Steamboats, Napoleon, jobs in the army, language, empire and prestige drew Corsica into France’s orbit in the nineteenth century. Taking advantage of the chaos of the French revolution Corsican soldier Napoleon Bonaparte (of Italian descent) quickly rose through the ranks of the French army, becoming first emperor of France and then king of Italy before being exiled to island of Elba (between Bastia in Corsica and the Italian mainland).

Bastia Hill, in Whanganui, is named after the town in northern Corsica where the Georgetti family came from and a friend of mine, and a Georgetti descendant, went there to check it out. “There would be men outside drinking coffee and there would always be one watching you,” he said sensing its reputation for banditry. Corsican number plates ensured avoiding road rage while driving in the continent he told me. “No one in their right mind would nut off at a Corsican.”

From the days of Carthage (near Tunis), before Christ, Sardinia in the south has had links with North Africa. Barbary pirates from Tunisia raided Sardinia for slaves until the late eighteenth century and today there is a weekly ferry from Cagliari in Sardinia to Tunis. In good weather a fast boat carrying illegal immigrants can cross from Algeria in one night.

During the Algerian war for independence thousands of “Pied-noir” (European Algerians) were resettled in Sardinia where they found the locals less than welcoming. Around 100,000 boat people arrive from North Africa in Italy every year, 10.000 of them in Sardinia. Once again finding the locals less than welcoming these refugee then try to carry on to the Italian mainland and the larger capitalist cities of Western Europe.

The people of the rural villages of Sardinia, along with some Japanese in Okinawa, have the longest life expectancy in the world but because of emigration and a low birthrate some years the island’s population is actually shrinking and lacking the people to care for an aging population. Some North African immigrants would be useful for elder care.

Recently there was an incident with North African tourists on a Corsican beach. Some Corsican youths were photographing Muslim women swimming in “burkinis” when one their menfolk protested and stabbed a Corsican youth. Returning with the entire village the youths attacked the bathing tourists and torched their cars.

Corsica, which is included in the Provence, Alpes, Côte d’Azur European Union region, receives too many subsidies from Paris to want full independence but it now wants more autonomy, language recognition and the release of nationalist prisoners held on the French mainland.

Just as the steamboat changed geography in the nineteenth century cheap airfares have changed the twentieth century. Corsican grievances now include absentee holiday home owners form Europe pricing the locals out of the housing market.

DH Lawrence, when he visited Corsica, described it as “belonging to nowhere, never having belonged to anywhere.”

Rwanda

Rwanda and surrounding millispheres

Last month Rwanda’s president, Paul Kagame, was sworn in as chairman of the African Union so this week I talked with two women from Whanganui about their time in Rwanda.

The 1994 genocide, when 800,000 people were murdered by their machete wielding neighbours, still keeps tourists and travelers away but by all accounts Rwanda is one of the safer places to visit in Africa. Pam and Anne went to volunteer in an orphanage.

Landlocked, high on the watershed between the Congo and the Nile, and with fertile soils Rwanda is beautiful and the people humble, they told me. It is also one of the most densely populated countries in Africa.

Apart from a handful of Muslim countries in the Middle East the world’s fastest growing populations are in sub-Saharan Africa. Rwanda’s population is growing at 2.4 percent per annum but twenty African countries are growing faster, including Rwanda’s neighbours: Burundi, The Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Tanzania and Uganda.

Rwanda (2015 population 11.2 million) is mostly Christian with a small Muslim community. Rwanda is also divided into Hutu (86%) and Tutsi (14%).

The conflict started with a Hutu revolution in 1959 when the Tutsi monarchy was deposed and 300,000 Tutsis were forced out of the country. In 1994 a plane carrying both the presidents of Rwanda and Burundi was hit by a rocket shortly after leaving Kigali airport, followed by the assassination of the moderate Hutu woman Prime Minister. The army and bands of Hutu “Interahamwe” (those who attack together) then attacked Rwanda’s Tutsis with whatever weapons they could lay their hands on.

Hutu extremists were thought to be responsible for the rocket attack but the Tutsi Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) and even Paul Kagame have not been ruled out.  Kagame’s RPF then took the capital, Kigali, and two million Hutus fled into the DRC. Anne’s orphanage was near Lake Kivu on the border with the DRC. In 1996 the Hutu/Tutsi conflict spilled over the border into the Congo (then known as the Zaire) and another five million died in the DRC

Because of the huge number of genocide cases the accused are tried in “Gacaca” courts – traditionally used for disputes between families. Pam saw chain gangs, dressed in different coloured overalls depending on the crimes they has commited, maintaining Rwanda’s roads, “I think the murderers wore pink overalls and lots of people had horrible machete scars,” Pam said. Pam also visited the Diane Fossey Research Centre in Karisoke where the mountain gorillas live. “There are armed guards with the gorillas all the time to stop poachers,” she said. American comedienne Ellen DeGeneres has recently established a wildlife fund there.

Since the RDF takeover Rwanda has enjoyed economic stability and the Rwandan army punches well above its weight in the region. Kagame is “genuinely popular” although his enemies “tend to die.”

Kagame’s ambition is to make Rwanda “the Singapore of Africa”. The capital Kigali is sprouting high rise office buildings and the county has the densest road network in the region, twenty percent of which are paved. Landlines are insufficient but they are currently rolling out fibre optic cable and mobile phone ownership is growing rapidly. Along with its neighbours Rwanda has agreed to phase out the import of second-hand clothing and shoes from the first world. Rwanda’s HIV rate has halved since 2000 but there is still malaria and TB.

When tourists arrive any plastic bags are confiscated Pam and Anne told me. Rwanda is a plastic bag free country, there is no graffiti and the last Sunday of the month is a “rubbish pickup day”. In 2008 English was made the language for educational  instruction.

Rwanda today is an oasis surrounded by ongoing conflicts. As head of the African Union Kagame faces many challenges. “The temptation to link the entire conflict in Rwanda with overpopulation and competition for resources is irresistible,” said NZ economist Gareth Morgan when he passed through on a motorbike. This goes for much of Africa today.

 

New York (part two)

Millisphere, noun: A discrete region inhabited by roughly 1000th of the total world population.

This summer I ran into “Squirrel”, an “art-mover” who had once gone to New York to install tuku-tuku panels as part of the $US two billion plus upgrade of the United Nations building.

Originally built in the 1940s, with a $65 million interest-free loan from the United States government, the United Nations HQ has been a steady earner for the City of New York ever since. “The further you go away from the UN the cheaper the hotel rooms are,” Squirrel observed.

Depending on point of view the United Nations is either a global humanitarian organisation or a bloated New York based bureaucracy controlled by the world’s arms manufacturers. Ever since the American Civil War, New York arms dealers have prospered from just about any conflict going. New York physicist, Robert Oppenheimer, led the “Manhattan Project” which built the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

In the nearby “Trump World Tower” is the “World Bar” where UN diplomats socialise and the Saudis own an entire floor there for their UN delegation. Newsman Walter Cronkite, at the time, led a protest against the building of the Trump Tower; claiming it would dwarf the UN building, block views and was aesthetically unappealing. Following advice from his mentor, Mafia lawyer Roy Cohn, Trump counter-sued and built his “slab of banality.”

After the US decided to move its embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem the UN Security Council took the unprecedented step of censuring the US. “We will be taking names,” the US threatened, cut UN funding and closed the Palestinian’s office in Washington.

New York is 60% Christian, one in three New Yorkers are Catholic and one in five are Jewish, over half of whom live in Brooklyn. One third of all US Jews live in New York. During the 1970s Brezhnev/Nixon negotiated detente another wave of Russian Jewish immigrants arrived in Brooklyn, including mobsters released from Soviet prisons.

Since the days of Al Capone doing business with the Mob has been almost inescapable in New York. Lately the Cosa Nostra have been displaced by the Russian Mafia who have moved up from drugs and extortion into high level finance. New York’s Russian Mafia now import most of the Afghan heroin consumed in the United States.

New York is the world’s preeminent banking and finance city. Two of the previous three chairmen of the Federal Reserve have been from New York. The 2008 global financial crisis was caused by trillions of dollars of toxic derivatives going down a plughole somewhere in New York – where they were originally invented. The largest ponzi scam off all time netted New York investment adviser Bernard Madoff $US 65 billion.

New York is the most important source of funding for US presidential campaigns. The last US Democrat primary was between New York native Bernie Sanders and former New York senator Hillary Clinton, who was ultimately defeated by New York reality television star and property developer Donald Trump.

The art of “public relations” was invented in New York (to bring the US into WWI) and its broadcast networks, ABC, NBC, CBS & Fox, shape public opinion worldwide through both traditional and “new” media, promoting an ideology of vulgar conspicuous consumption and ultra-superficial patriotism. Facebook boss, Mark Zuckerberg, is from New York and Madison Ave taught the world how to drive the that consumption.

New York markets itself as “the most energy efficient efficient city in the US,” but generates 14 million tonnes of trash per year (more than any city in the world). Once dumped at sea now the Mob moves the trash to landfill in the surrounding states.

The millisphere of New York dominates the politics of the United States which in turn casts its shadow over rest of the world. New York intellectual property lawyers initiated the raid on Kim Dotcom’s mansion in Auckland. Billy the Kid, Timothy McVeigh and Harvey Weinstein were all from The Big Apple.

New York’s legendary “creativity and entrepreneurship” has its dark side. Rather than calling other countries “shit-holes” Donald Trump should look at his own backyard.