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Lebanon

A decades ago, when I first ran the millisphere focus over the globe, Lebanon (2007 population 4 million) just qualified as a millisphere.

At the time I called this millisphere “Phoenicia” because I had included the “European” island states of Cyprus and Malta — whose populations are genetically similar to the Lebanese because of their shared Phoenician seafaring history and the maritime highway the crusaders took to the Levant.

With a 2017 population over six million, and the recent shock resignation of their Prime Minister, Saad al-Hariri, it is timely to focus on the millisphere of Lebanon.

The phenomenal 50 per cent population increase in a decade is a result of 1.7 million Syrian refugees arriving in the past five years. Lebanon’s 2014 population of 5.8 million was divided — 4.1m Lebanese; 1.1m Syrian refugees and nearly half a million Palestinian refugees.

It is estimated that there are about 14 million Lebanese worldwide. During the 1975-1999 Lebanese civil war, which included ethnic cleansing by both sides, one million Lebanese emigrated, but they had been leaving for decades.

Fortune magazine’s “world’s wealthiest man” is Carlos Slim, the son of Lebanese immigrants to Mexico. Eighty per cent of the Lebanese diaspora are Christian and there are six million Lebanese living in Brazil alone.

As at 2012, Lebanon was 54 per cent Muslim, 40.5 per cent Christian and 5.5 per cent Druze (who don’t consider themselves Muslim). The powerful Maronite Christians, centred around Mt Lebanon and Beirut, comprise 21 per cent of the population, while Lebanese Muslims are evenly split with 27 per cent Shi’a and 27 per cent Sunni who are centred around West Beirut and Tripoli.

Under the 1943 power-sharing arrangement (based on a 1932 census), the Lebanese parliament’s speaker is always a Shi’a, the prime minister is always a Sunni and the president is always a Maronite Christian.

Recognising the changing religious demographics, representation in parliament was recently changed from 6:5 Christian/Muslim to 1:1, with the Shi’a gaining more representation but the Maronite Christians continuing to dominate the economy.

Before the Lebanese civil war, Beirut was the richest city in the Middle East with a thriving tourism and banking sector. The World Bank estimated the cost of the civil war at US$18 billion in destroyed infrastructure.

Many of Lebanon’s conflicts originate in neighbouring Israel and Syria. After the 1948 Arab-Israeli war 100,000 refugees fled to Lebanon, joined later by more from Jordan, creating a Palestinian mini-state in southern Lebanon.

In 1968, responding to Palestinian hijacking of Israeli aircraft, IDF commandos raided Beirut airport and shot up Arab carriers. This raid polarised Lebanese Christians and Muslims, and was followed by Israeli invasions in 1978, 1982 and 1996.

In 1976 Syria sent troops to fight the Palestine Liberation Organisation on behalf of the Lebanese Christians, but then changed sides, siding with the Shi’a Muslim Hezbollah.
Before being killed by a car bomb in February 2005, Prime Minister Rafic al-Hariri — father of the recently-resigned Saad, spoke of the “inevitability of Palestinians getting Lebanese citizenship”. Hezbollah and Syria were blamed for the bombing.

United Nations Security Council resolution 1559 calls for the disarming of Hezbollah but this has yet to happen. In 2006 Hezbollah and Israel clashed in southern Lebanon and, for the first time, Israel was not the clear victor and withdrew.

Former Prime Minister Saad al-Hariri gave fear of being assassinated, like his father, as his reason for resigning last month, citing rivalries between Saudi Arabia and Iran.

The strategy of the United States is to create conflict between Sunni and Shi’a Muslims in the Middle East; to divide and rule while picking up some lucrative arms sales on the side, and Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner and Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have their fingerprints all over it.

Just as Beirut has rebuilt after the tragic civil war and is, once again, the party capital of the Middle East, ancient religious feuds and geo-political machinations are conspiring to bring war to Lebanon once again.

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Mapuche

millisphere (noun): A discrete region of approximately 1000th of the total world population – a bit over 7 million people but anywhere between 3.5 million and 14 million will do. A lens through which to examine human geography.

We have been Wwoof hosts (willing workers on organic farms) since 1976, and over the years we’ve hosted young travellers from all over the world.

Last year we had our first South Americans – from Chile.

Danielle was a young vintner from Santiago working the season in New Zealand vineyards and Jose was a recent English language graduate from southern Chile, and I took the opportunity to quiz them about Jose’s millisphere of Mapuche.

Relative to the rest of the world, South America is characterised by large rural millispheres, indicating low population density; and a number of very large cities where South Americans tend to congregate.

Eighty per cent of the indigenous people of southern South America are Mapuche who remained independent for the first 350 years of European settlement until the Arauco war in Chile and the “Conquest of the Desert” in Argentina around 1870 brought them under state control.

There have been Mapuche settlements in Chile and Argentina since 500 BC and there is evidence that the Fuegians reached the Falkland and South Shetland Islands by canoe.

At the southern tip of South America, the island of Tierra del Fuego is divided east/west by the boundary between Chile and Argentina. This boundary continues up the continent following the watershed of the Andes. Chile drains west into the Pacific and Argentina east into the Atlantic.

It takes most of the land south of the major cities of Santiago (7.3 million) in Chile and Buenos Aires (13.5 million) in Argentina to make up enough people for a millisphere.

Most of the people cling to the coast; the rest of southern South America is too cold and too dry to support much life.

Both Danielle and Jose were “Mestizos” (of mixed European and Amerindian blood).

University of Chile figures reveal that the Chilean population is around 30 per cent Caucasian, 65 per cent Mestizos and 5 per cent indigenous. The “average” Chilean gene is 60 per cent European and 40 per cent Amerindian.

Argentina was originally majority Mestizo until mass European immigration in the 19th century.

Of the two million Mapuche, most live in the Araucania region of southern Chile where Jose was from. Although Jose was a Mestizo, he certainly didn’t consider himself Mapuche. In 2002 only 4.3 per cent of Chileans identified as Mapuche; by 2016 this had risen to 11.4 per cent, and there are about 200,000 remaining Mapuche language speakers.

Ever since the Chilean army invaded Mapuche territory in the late 1800s, Mapuche relations with the state have remained fractious.

The conflict has accelerated in recent years with armed groups burning houses, churches, trucks and forest plantations. Forestry is Chile’s second highest export earner after mining.

Only 36 per cent of Chileans believe that Mapuche feel they are “Chilean”.

Under the military administration of General Augusto Pinochet (1970-73), remaining Mapuche land-holdings were reduced from 10 million to 400,000 acres when the state acquired land for forestry (mostly Pinus radiata for export to the United States).

Pinochet introduced anti-terrorism laws which are still applied to Mapuche resistance – and 60 per cent of Chileans believe terrorism exists in the Araucaria region.

Chile is in the grip of a 10-year drought, experiencing historically high temperatures and about a million acres of forest, valued at US$333 million ($464m), were destroyed by fire last summer, most being attributed to accidental causes.

This year’s Indigenous Peoples’ Day (Dia de la Raza), held on the day that Christopher Columbus made landfall in the Americas, was marked by marches in Santiago calling for Mapuche judicial autonomy, return of their ancestral lands and the re-establishment of Mapuche cultural identity.

Both Danielle and Jose acknowledged that “indigenous things have less value” in Chile and that Chileans were prejudiced against Mapuche – prejudice highest among the old, the poor and the right-wing, they told me.

The violence between Mestizo landowners and Chile’s indigenous people was getting worse, they thought, and that “both sides are victims of the ongoing processes of globalisation”.

■When Fred Frederikse is not building, he is a self-directed student of geography and traveller, and in his spare time he is the co-chair of the Whanganui Musicians’ Club.

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Catalonia

millisphere (noun): A discrete region of roughly one 1000th of the total world population – a bit over seven million people. A lens through which to examine human geography.

The state-aborted referendum on independence in Catalonia (population 7.5 million) puts the spotlight on yet another millisphere seeking to extract itself from the state it is part of.

It was in Catalonia that I forgave the Spanish gypsies …

In Andalusia, my travel companion had lost her plane-ticket and the contents of her purse to lightning-fast gypsy fingers. After that we went on alert whenever we ran into gypsies, but a few live performances by gypsy street musicians softened my heart.

In front of Antonio Gaudi’s Sagrada Familia cathedral in Barcelona, a gypsy woman with a baby on her hip was working a queue of tourists. We were leaving Spain, so I emptied my accumulated small change into her proffered McDonald’s carton. She returned the gesture with a high five – it felt like a blessing.

Catalonia – in the northeast corner of Spain and on the border with France – was incorporated into the Spanish empire in 1516 in the “dynastic union” of Castile and Aragon/Catalonia under emperor Charles V.

In the 17th century, Catalonia briefly revolted against Spain, siding with France in the Franco-Spanish war, and retained a degree of autonomy until 1716, when the Nuevo Plata decree abolished Catalan institutions.

By the 19th century, when Spain started losing its New World colonies and had to look for new income streams, it was Catalonia that led Spanish industrialisation. In the early 20th century, Catalan anarchist activists achieved the first eight-hour working day in Europe.

Franco’s fascist government put down the anarchists, banned any activities associated with Catalan nationalism and banned the use of the Catalan language, which is a Romance language somewhere between Spanish, French and Italian.

After Franco’s death in 1975, the Generalitat (regional government) was restored. In 1978 the Catalan Generalitat was granted control over culture, environment, communication, transport, public safety and local government. The Generalitat shares health, justice and education with Madrid.

In 2006 the Catalan Generalitat passed the “Statute of Autonomy” but it was declared “non-valid” by Spain’s constitutional court. When the Generalitat banned bullfighting, the constitutional court overturned it, ruling that bullfighting was a Spanish cultural tradition.
Madrid retains control over ports, airports, coasts, international borders, passports and ID, immigration, arms control and terrorism prevention.

Catalonia has its own police, the Mossos d’Esquadra, and the national police, the feared Guardia Civil who maintained political control in Franco’s time but were rarely seen in Catalonia … thousands of them were sent in to stop the Catalan independence referendum.

Catalonia is pretty evenly split between those seeking independence and those wanting to stay with Spain but they all agreed with having a referendum.

“If Scotland can have an independence referendum, why can’t we?” they all said.

“Occupation forces out,” they shouted when the Guardia Civil occupied the polling stations; and “No tine por” (“We are not afraid”), which is what the crowds in Barcelona chanted after the Islamist van attack on Las Ramblas last month.

My friend Johnny Keating was in Barcelona in the lead-up to the referendum last week.
Coming into the city from the north with his travel companion Sue behind him on a motorbike, he said the landscape was flat, hot and dry and the “ladies of the night”, sitting under red sun umbrellas and pointing their long legs out at the passing traffic, were a bit distracting.

Johnny said the locals were “pissed off” with the presence of the Guardia Civil in the free-spirited city that had given the world Joan Miro, Pablo Picasso and Salvador Dali. Johnny thought the European Union should be mediating.

The composer of the hymn of the United Nations, the Catalan cellist Pablo Casals, who is considered the pre-eminent cellist of the 20th century, said: “The love of one’s country is a splendid thing. But why should should love stop at the border? There is a brotherhood among all men.”

Traditionally Catalans follow their own “Seny” philosophy (called “the wisdom of sensibleness”) – that, their language and banning bullfighting make Barcelona different from Madrid.

■When Fred Frederikse is not building, he is a self-directed student of geography and traveller, and in his spare time he is the co-chair of the Whanganui Musicians’ Club.

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Iraqi Kurdistan

Kurdistan

Aspirant millispheres (discrete regions of approximately one thousandth of the total world population) have been coming thick and fast lately. Kurdistan, the semi-autonomous Kurdish region (8.4 million) in  northern Iraq and Catalonia (7.5 million) in Spain have both had referenda in the last month about forming independent states.

On the 25th of September 2017 Iraq’s Kurdistan regional government asked voters: “Do you want the Kurdistan region to become an independent state?” – 93% percent of those who voted said: “Yes.”

At the end of the World War I, the Ottoman Empire was divided up by the victors at the Treaty of Lausanne, roughly into the countries we see today in the Middle East. The Kurds were initially promised their own country but today’s 40 million Kurds are distributed along the mountainous borders between Syria, Turkey, Iraq and Iran.

“We have no friends but the mountains,” say the Kurds and (with the exception of Israel) this remains mostly true today. Iraq’s reaction to the referendum was to impose a land and air blockade and to threaten military action. In the 1980s 180,000 Kurdish “infidels” were killed by Saddam Hussein’s Baathist Arab government – this included the infamous 1988 Halabja poison gas attack on civilians.

Turkey warned of military measures, cancelled flights and called the referendum “treachery.”

One in five Turkish citizens are Kurdish. Ankara refers to their country’s Kurds as “Mountain Turks” and has actively suppressed the Kurdish language and culture. 40,000 Kurds have been killed by the Turkish forces maintaining control in southeast Turkey.

Ten percent of Syrians are Kurdish and Syria also has a semi-autonomous Kurdish region (Rojava in northeast Syria). Syria rejects the “unilateral” call for independence by Iraq’s Kurds and says it cannot accept the division of Iraq – fearing a similar division in Syria.

The Kurds are largely Sunni Muslim but there are also Yazidi, Zoroastrian, Christian and Jewish Kurds and schools in Iraq’s Kurdish autonomous region are “religiously neutral.”

It was the Kurdish Peshmerga who helped the Iraqi Army defeat ISIS in Mosul recently.

The fundamentalist Wahhabi branch of Sunni Islam has failed to attract adherents among Sunni Kurds like it did with their Sunni Arab neighbours to the south. Kurds have also been active in defeating ISIS in Kobane in Syria.

Iraqi Kurds have only been able to secure a passport since 2005. Admittedly it is an Iraqi passport and about as difficult to travel with as a Somali or Afghan passport – but it is easier than traveling with no passport at all.

When the Iraqi army fled in the face of ISIS advances the Kurdish Peshmerga occupied the Kirkuk oil fields in 2014, resisting an ISIS takeover. Oil now flows by pipeline from Kurdistan to the Turkish port of Ceyhan in the Mediterranean.

Trade between Erbil and Ankara is estimated to be $US7.5 billion per year, with a similar volume of trade between Erbil and Tehran. The Kurds have set up free trade zones on both their Turkish and Iranian  borders. The per capita income in the Kurdish regional government area is 25% higher than in the rest of Iraq.

Kurdistan has four billion barrels of proven oil reserves and an estimated forty-five billion barrels of unproven reserves. Exxon has recently defied Baghdad and signed exploration agreements with Kurdistan, walking away from its southern Iraq oil fields.

Based on the region’s history one would need a heart of stone to oppose Kurdistan independence but at present Russia, China, the European Union, the United States and the

United Nations are all against it. The United States government says that independence for Kurdistan risks destabilising Iraq.

Iran has called Kurdistan’s president Massoud Barzani a “middleman for the Zionists.” Chuck Schumer the Jewish Democrat senator for New York said: “neighbouring states, led by despots, who oppose the Kurdish state out of self-interest need to have respect for the Kurds to determine their own future,” echoing the position taken by Israel; the one country to support independence for Kurdistan. There are 200,000 Jewish Kurds now living in Israel.

While Spain called the referendum illegal Artus Mas, the former president of Catalonia, said he supported Kurdistan’s bid for independence and applauded Kurdistan’s leadership for “defending democracy.”

 

 

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New Zealand

Millisphere (noun): A discrete region of approximately one-thousandth of the total world population. Around seven million people but anywhere between 3.5 and 14 million will do.

I have previously sketched out the millisphere of Te Moananui (population 8 million) which includes Aotearoa and all the other islands of the Pacific but, following the above rules, New Zealand (population 4.7 million) qualifies as a millisphere by itself – a millisphere simply being a lens for examining human geography and it is allowable to change the focus.

The Dutch navigator Abel Tasman called these islands “Nieuw-Zeeland” when his party of explorers laid eyes on them in 1642 – and we have been spelling it wrongly ever since. A century-and-a-half later, Captain Cook redrew the map.

In November this year, Te Awahou Nieuwe Stroom will open in a repurposed Mitre-10 in Foxton. Located next to the replica Dutch windmill, Te Awahou will tell the story of the contribution to this country of 160,000 Dutch New Zealanders (and our ancestors).

Lockwood homes, Rembrandt suits, Vogels bread and the Royal Gala apple are some Dutch contributions and we are reputed to have introduced cafe culture to New Zealand.

The English have traditionally found the baldly direct Dutch way of communicating a little unsettling. “You won’t die wondering,” is what they say about the Dutch; as well as being notoriously tight.

Last weekend’s general election provides another lens through which to examine the human geography of “Nieuw-Zeeland”.

Candidates from all parties portrayed a country with a housing crisis, polluted rivers and child poverty – and naturally they were the ones to fix it. Not exactly the happy, green and clean image that we market to the world.

Though New Zealand winters are mild compared with the Netherlands, post-war Dutch immigrants complained that they had never been so cold as their first winter in a traditional NZ timber bungalow. One was expected to put on woolly socks and jumpers and soldier on.

We are only now learning that poor-quality housing leads to poor health. There are ways to build inexpensive warm dry houses (passive solar mass, small rooms and simple things like curtains) but the NZ building regulations often stand in the way.

Ironically, because of the leaky (and rotting) building crisis, caused by the mainstream building industry, it has become virtually impossible for the homeowner to legally do any building work on their own property.

Education and empowerment are ways out of the housing crisis – not the government and the building industry.

We could build our way out of the housing crisis but, at the moment, on the outskirts of Auckland we are building speculator suburban slums when we should be rebuilding well-designed higher density homes in the inner city.

Cleaning up our rivers is also possible. In recent times the regional councils have marginally improved land-use practices while at the same time doubling dairy herd numbers.

Many Dutch immigrants went into intensive agriculture like dairy and poultry. In the Netherlands, cows are kept inside barns but there are animal rights regulations requiring farmers to let their cows outside for some fresh air and severe regulations about what to do with the manure.

New Zealand dairy farmers were caught by the recent dairy price downturn but in the Netherlands it was worse because farmers there had just borrowed millions of euros to install robots to milk their cows to stay ahead of their competitors.

Last weekend’s election saw the tide go out for the minor parties. All that is left of United Future is the faint smell of stale fart and the Maori Party sank below the waves.

“There will be consequences,” said Winston Peters after the Greens called him a racist, and the Greens are dreaming if they think they can be part of a Labour/NZ First/Green coalition. The Greens lost support because both National and Labour appropriated their policies.

“If other parties take Green policy, that’s winning,” said former Green co-leader Russel Norman.

The Greens only option now is to work with National, and their bottom line should be the legalisation of “personal” cannabis. When I was in the Netherlands last, the government was gathering tax from the “coffee shops”, and most Dutch people had never heard of methamphetamine.

*When Fred Frederikse is not building, he is a self-directed student of geography and traveller, and in his spare time he is the co-chair of the Whanganui Musicians Club.

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Houston

Millisphere: a region containing one thousandth of the total world population, around seven million people.

Natural disasters have a way of revealing aspects of the geography of the region affected.

The Greater Houston metropolitan area (pop 6.5 million and the fourth largest in the USA) was last week flooded by Hurricane Harvey, which broke all previous records for rainfall.

This “natural” disaster was actually a perfect storm of economics, population and land use.

In 1900 the deadliest hurricane in US history devastated Galveston, when a 4.6-metre storm surge swept over the 2.4-metre high island on which it was built. Not surprisingly many of the survivors moved inland to nearby Houston.

Built on a swamp, Houston has 4000 kilometres of managed waterways – the first of them dug by hand by black slaves and Mexicans. Today it is estimated that one in ten of Houston’s residents is an illegal “alien” from south of the Mexican border.

Parts of Houston have been sinking because of the extraction of groundwater. Some areas have subsided by 3m since 1920, others by 300mm in a decade, creating cracked foundations, uneven footpaths and areas where floodwaters collect.

Houston has very few planning restrictions. Developer-friendly bylaws and no formal zoning code mean that housing was cheap and Houston largely escaped the 2008 economic crisis when American house prices plummeted.

Described by some as “America’s worst designed city,” Houston has doubled in population since 1980, with the resulting urbanization exacerbating the flooding. To cope with the extra run-off many of the waterways needed widening but that would require the city coming up with billions to buy out the properties lining the “bayous.”

A graph of the rainiest days in Houston (1890 – 2016) reveals a trend to intensified rainfall with extreme weather events more frequent. Climate modeling depends on a complex confluence of factors but the world’s temperature is about 0.7℃higher than 1980 and for each degree celsius increase air holds 7% more water.

Houston is the “oil and gas capital of the world” and has the headquarters of over 500 global energy firms. The Shell Oil Company (the US branch of Royal Dutch Shell) has a head office there with 22,000 employees.

The Shell Oil Company’s “futurists” came up with “three hard truths” that the company faced. They were: 1. that global energy demand is rising; 2. that the supply of conventional energy will not be able to keep up, and; 3. that climate change is both real and dangerous.

Red Adair the famous oil well firefighter was from Houston. As well as providing jobs in the downstream oil and gas industry Houston is known for its terrible traffic and bad public transport. The climate is very hot and humid and there are fire ants, snakes, alligators, “mosquitoes the size of sparrows” and residents are forced to spray once a month for the cockroaches. It also has the distinction of being America’s “fattest city.”

Both the Bush presidents, Ted Cruz, Indianapolis 500 race car driver A J Foyt, Howard Hughes, Kenny Rogers, Rodney Crowell and some of ZZ Top are all from Houston and it has the highest number of Fortune 500 companies after New York.

The Port of Houston is the second largest US port in total tonnage (2015) and the first US port in foreign tonnage (2016), exporting oil field equipment, plastic, resins, synthetic rubber, insecticide and chemical fertilizers.

As well as “natural” disasters art has a way of revealing aspects of the geography of a region. Houston’s phenomenally wealthy oil industry has a collective a reputation for patronising “high” art such a Mark Rothko’s multi denominational chapel built to display his blue/black modernist abstract paintings dedicated to “truth and freedom.”

The paintings are so much part of the architecture that visitors have been known to ask: “where are the paintings?”

The Latino barrios are decorated with folk art such as “bathtub Madonnas” – an old decorated bath, sometimes with lights, standing upright with a madonna inside.

President Trump declared the Sunday after the deluge a national day of prayer for the victims of Hurricane Harvey. Planning might be more useful than prayer to avoid future “natural” disasters.

 

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Yorkshire/Humberside

Millisphere: a discrete region of roughly one-thousandth of the total world population – around seven million people but anywhere between 3.5 and 14 million will do. A lens through which to examine human geography.

Choosing the millisphere of Yorkshire highlighted for me the arrogance of attempting to describe a region the writer has never been to. It would be easy to trot out the oft quoted trope: “A Yorkshireman is a Scot with all charity wrung out of him” or to list some famous people from “God’s Own Country” but I was looking for something deeper.

Yorkshire Captain James Cook constructed an early link to the millisphere of Te Moananui (covering the Pacific) by putting up the Union Jack for the United Kingdom but also from Yorkshire are: Jeremy Clarkson, Joe Cocker, Mark Dawson, Judi Dench, Guy Fawkes, Andy Goldsworthy, Barbara Hepworth, David Hockney, Frankie Howard, Henry Moore, Michael Palin, Diana Rigg, Jimmy Savile, Harold Wilson and Ernie Wise, to name a few.

The Yorkshire anarchist philosopher, poet and art critic, Sir Herbert Read, once said: “poetry is concerned with the truth of what is, not with what is truth.” The millisphere is concerned the geographical “truths” – a region’s distinctive character and its relationship with other millispheres.

The EU administrative region of Yorkshire/Humber (pop 5.3m) covers most of the historic county of Yorkshire. York comes from the Viking word for town and it was the last English kingdom to be incorporated into the United Kingdom. The Wars of the Roses are symbolically contested to this day with the football match between Leeds United (white/York) and Manchester United (red/Lancaster).

In the 1980s thousands of miners and police faced off for bare-knuckle battles before Margaret Thatcher closed down the Yorkshire coal mines. At the time geographer Doreen Massey (Manchester Open University) in Geography Matters pointed out that poor regions tend to be blamed for their own poverty. “Northern regions are told to stand on their own feet while in the south, around London, the government subsidises development,” she said citing London’s Canary Wharf development and the channel tunnel.

During the 2008 “Global Financial Crisis” (GFC) British bankers unloaded (pound symbol) 1.3 trillion worth of derivatives that, at the time, they referred to as “crap” and “vomit. In the process every British man, woman and child handed over (pound symbol) 19,721 to the bankers. Like South Canterbury Finance in New Zealand, the robbers got bailed out and paid out by the government, the rest got austerity. It was the working class and middle class who paid, leaving seven million Britons in “precarious” employment; setting baby-boomers against millennials and the metropolitan elite against everyone else.

In the recent Brexit referendum Yorkshire/Humber voted to leave – London voted to stay. Since the GFC a regionalist party has emerged in Yorkshire. The Yorkshire Party (originally titled “Yorkshire First”) got only 1% of the votes in 2014 and 5% in the 2017 parliamentary elections, which is insignificant in a first-past-the-post system; their platform is “If Scotland can have their own parliament, why not Yorkshire?”

Sir Herbert Read believed that “the poet is necessarily an anarchist and that he must oppose all organised conceptions of the State, not only those which we inherit from the past, but equally those which are imposed on people in the name of the future.” Read was also an advocate for the importance of art in education.

Like Read, film director Francis Lee is the son of a Yorkshire farmer. Currently screening in cinemas around the county, Francis Lee’s film God’s Own Country has won first prize at Sundance and at the Berlin and Edinburgh Film Festivals.

Described as Yorkshire’s Brokeback Mountain because it depicts a love affair between two men, it also depicts the Yorkshire Landscape. “I want to see the landscape’s effect on the characters, rather than the landscape,” Lee said.

To illustrate the difference between rural Britain and metropolitan London Lee recalled being youngest family member (with the smallest hands) on a pig farm. “My mother talks about me with one hand up a pig’s vagina pulling out piglets and the other hand holding a bacon butty.” You don’t do that in the city.

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Central Visaya

Millisphere (abstract noun). A discrete region of approximately one-thousandth of the total world population – around seven million people. A lens through which to examine human geography.

This month I ran into a former Whanganui man who had just emerged from the millisphere of Central Visaya (pop six million) in the Philippines (pop 101 million).

My Maori acquaintance had worked in Australia before traveling in Asia and settling down in Lapu Lapu, Mactau Island – connected by a causeway to the island of Cebu in the Visaya island group. The Mactau-Cebu airport is the busiest in the Philippines after Manila.

Nicknamed “Ceboom”, Cebu is one of the more developed parts of Philippines and is estimated to have over half a million call-centre operators. My contact had run into a spot of “competition” there trying to start a call-centre and had to beat a hasty retreat. It’s the sort of place where, “if you don’t have a gun, you’d better go out and get one,” he told me.

Lapu Lapu is named after the 16th century ruler of Mactau who is remembered as the “first native to resist colonisation.” Lapu Lapu’s warriors, in 1521, had killed Magellan in the surf there. Magellan, after crossing the Pacific was the first European to land in the Philippines and had presented an image of the Holy Child to the ruler of Cebu. The “Santo Nino de Cebu” is still the centre of an annual Catholic festival in Cebu.

The Philippines is a Christian country with only about 5% Muslim (Moro), mostly in Mindanao in the south. Many of the Moro have been displaced from their original lands and have moved to the slums of Manila, Cebu and Davao (the home city of the president of the Philippines, Rodrigo Duterte).

Duterte’s father was a Chinese/Filipino from Cebu and his mother is of Moro descent.

In 2013 Duterte was elected mayor of the Mindanao capital, Davao, which in 2016 had the highest murder rate and second highest rape rate and is one of the top five areas for child prostitution and sex tourism in the Philippines. Ironically, in 2009, Duterte had promoted the empowerment of Filipina women with his “Magna Carta for women.”

While Duterte was mayor of Davao, 1400 drug users, petty criminals and street children were summarily executed by police and vigilantes. “The man is barking mad and has a history of violence,” my contact said. Duterte put a ban on fireworks, smoking in public places and the sale of alcohol between 1am and 8am. He reduced the speed limit in Davao and made all malls install high definition CCTVs at all entrances and exits.

In 2016 Duterte campaigned for the presidency on “putting drug dealers in funeral parlors not prisons” and getting rid of crime and corruption in government and the police. “In Cebu the police carry two guns, one to leave with the body to look like they were shot at,” my contact told me. “The wider population is fantastic though” he thought. Many of the people were very poor with barely enough money for food and some were ill-nourished and the infrastructure was poor. There were power “brown-outs” and sewage spills in  the street, he told me.

Since Duterte became the president, Philippines police have killed 3500 “drug personalities” and thousands more have been killed in unexplained circumstances. Last week after one of the bloodiest nights in the Philippines war on drugs Duterte said “I will kill another thirty-two every day, then maybe we can reduce what ails this country.”

Indonesia is following the Philippines example with 60 killings of drug dealers so far this year compared with 18 in 2016 and Donald Trump praised Duterte for “doing an unbelievable job in his anti-narcotics campaign.”

Duterte admitted that police were “corrupt to the core” but has vowed to issue “a thousand pardons a day” to protect police who commit human rights abuses and to issue a presidential pardon to himself for mass murder at the end of his six year term.

A more accurate translation from Hebrew of “thou shalt not kill,” apparently is “you shall not murder”. In the Philippines Rodrigo “the punisher” Duterte ultimately decides what is killing and what is murder.

 

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Papua

Millisphere (noun). A discrete region of roughly one-thousandth of the total world population. Around seven million people but anywhere between 3.5 and 14 million will do.

This weekend the protracted elections in Papua New Guinea (PNG) finally came up with a winner. Peter O’Neill’s People’s National Congress (tainted with accusations of corruption) won – but with a reduced majority.

The ABC commented that the average Australian knew more about “what Donald Trump had for breakfast” than they did about their neighbour PNG – partly due to the number of ABC journalists covering PNG being slashed from six to one.

Pre-European contact the Sultan of Tidore in the Mollacas included the western “bird’s head” end of New Guinea in his sultanate – collecting a tribute of tortoiseshell and bird of paradise feathers – which were then traded all the way to China and Europe.

.The first recorded European contact was in 1528 when a Spanish ship kidnapped three men from Manus Island and took them to the Philippines. One year later the ship passed Manus Island again and the three islanders jumped overboard and swam for shore.

In 1494 the world’s maritime trade had been divided between the Portuguese and the Spanish by the “Tordesilla Line” along the 321st meridian, dividing South America. In 1529 the circle was closed at the anti-meridian on the 141st meridian – the north/south line that divides PNG from Papua in Indonesia to this day.

Before World War One PNG was divided into German New Guinea to the north and British Papua in the south. Administered as one by Australia from 1914 until independence in 1975 and with a population of 7.1 million PNG qualifies as a millisphere. Another option is to combine the various tribes and languages into the one millisphere of “Papua” covering the entire island (total population 11.5 million).

The previously Dutch territory, once known as Irian Jaya, now the Indonesian provinces of Papua (3.5m) and West Papua (0.9m), could equally qualify as a millisphere. Before annexation by Indonesia in 1969 Papua/W Papua was almost entirely Melanesian, now, because of migration, the population is almost half Indonesian/Malay, colonising the lowlands for palm-oil, while the Papuans are still the majority in the highlands.

Indonesia claims to have eleven million Melanesians, counting the Melanesian/Malay inhabitants in the Moluccas and East Nusa Tenggara, and there are another million Melanesian/Polynesians in the millisphere of Te Moananui (covering the Pacific) giving a total nearing 20 million.

The “Melanesian Spearhead,” was formed in 1986 by Fiji, PNG, The Solomon Islands, Vanuatu and the Kanaks of New Caledonia to create a united Melanesian voice. The Melanesian Spearhead has a HQ funded by China in Port Vila (Vanuatu) and it calls for a “free West Papua,” a position endorsed by New Zealand Maori and Australian Aboriginals.

Because half of all “Melanesians” are Indonesian, Indonesia has applied to join the Melanesian Spearhead and have appointed Tantowi Yahya as their ambassador to  NZ and the Pacific.The son of a plastic recycler from Sumatra, Tantawi rose to become a TV presenter and country music singer before turning to politics. His job, he says, is to correct the “misperception” about the Indonesian presence in Papua.

Meanwhile in New Zealand this month a small group of MPs from National, Labour, the Maori Party and the Greens signed a  declaration calling for “ an internationally supervised self-determination vote in Papua.”

The Free Papua Movement  was formed in 1963. “We do not want modern life! We refuse any kinds of development: religious groups, aid agencies and government organisations, just leave us alone!” they said at the time.

On YouTube you can find “Everything can be burnt,” a video by RNZ’s Johnny Blades and Koroi Hawkins about their recent trip across the border from PNG into Indonesia’s Papua province, to report on the campaign for Papuan independence there.

“You should go to the highlands,” Johnny told me, “the gardens there are amazing.” Agriculture is said to have started simultaneously in Asia, Europe and the Papuan highlands – where gardening is still practiced in the old way. Melanesians are to this day differentiated by altitude and their true homeland is in the New Guinea highlands – on both sides of the 141st meridian.

 

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Changchun

Millisphere (noun): A discrete region of around 7 million people. A sphere of interest of roughly one-thousandth of the total world population.  

Liu Xiaobo (1955-2017) the poet, literary critic and Nobel Peace Prize winner, who died recently in prison, was born in Changchun, in China’s north-east, near the border with North Korea. Changchun has a metropolitan/urban population of 7.5 million and is known as the “Detroit of China”.

Changchun’s mayor, Liu Changlong, shares the Liu family name but the real power lies with the party-secretary, Wang Junzheng. Wang is a typical communist party operative; with doctorates in social science and management.

Changchun started as a minor siding on the Russian railway-line before being captured by the Japanese who made it into the capital of their Manchurian domain. Unlike most Chinese cities, whose layout evolved from antiquity, Changchun was laid out by the Japanese in the 20th century on western lines; built to be a symbol of Japanese rule: progressive, beneficent and modern.

Liberated by the Russians in 1946 it was briefly held by the nationalist Kuomintang before falling to Mao Tse Dung’s army in the “siege of Changchun” when 80% of the town’s residents were deliberately starved to death.

Liu Xiaobo completed a PhD on Aesthetics and Human Freedom and rose to the top of Chinese academia, lecturing at Beijing University and abroad. He set up and was the president (2003-2007) of China’s PEN (an international writers organisation) and flew back from overseas to negotiate on behalf of the protesters in Tiananmen square.

Liu Xiaobo had a moment of epiphany in the Museum of Modern Art in New York. He reasoned that he could use western civilisation as a tool to critique China and to use his own creativity to critique the west. “Islamism” he called  extremely intolerant and bloodthirsty and he called Chinese intellectuals search for rationalism and harmony in Marxist materialism and Kantian idealism: “slave mentality.” All it would take for China to come right was “300 years of colonisation and to make the Dalai Lama the next leader” he said, using intellectual shock tactics.

Liu Xiaobo got himself locked up the fourth time for drawing up “Charter 08”, a list of nineteen changes Liu thought necessary for the future of China. These included an independent legal system, freedom of association and  the elimination of a one-party state. Liu advocated a federated republic, like the United States, with elected public officials instead of centrally appointed functionaries, like party-secretary Wang. Liu Xiaobo was arrested in 2009 for “inciting the subversion of state power”.

Liu Xiaobo was awarded the Nobel Prize in 2010, while in prison, “for his long and nonviolent struggle for fundamental human rights in China.” Faced with international criticism the Chinese government’s bottom line was that Liu was imprisoned “to make sure a society of 1.4 billion runs smoothly.” The dissident artist Ai Wei Wei (exiled in Germany) said: “Liu was imprisoned for his words.”

Liu Xiaobo said the internet was “God’s gift to the  Chinese people” calling it the first medium the Chinese Communist Party can’t control. The internet makes traditional  media more truthful by giving Chinese citizens a place to “meet while not meeting,” he reasoned.

From the centre of accademia Liu Xiaobo told the Party and the Chinese people that all was not rosy-red. The “Red and the Black”, the government and the underworld, had become one, he said. China had no ideology other than vulgar conspicuous consumption and ultra-superficial patriotism, full of blind self-confidence, empty boasts and pent-up hatred. The Chinese Communist Party was a 19th century authoritarian violent government where corruption was pervasive, Liu concluded. “China has no freedom, therefore Tibet has no autonomy,” he once said.

In his condolences to Liu’s widow, Liu Xia, the 14th Dalai Lama said that the people of China should honour Liu Xiaobo by carrying forward the principles he long embodied, which would lead to a more harmonious, stable and prosperous China.

Liu Xiaobo’s ashes were spread at sea so as not to create a shrine where people might pay homage to this poet, but in his leafy hometown of Changchun, Liu Xiaobo’s ideas would have been discussed, if not in public then on the internet.