Tag: Russia

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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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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

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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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Donbass

Donbass

Millisphere (abstract noun): a discrete region inhabited by roughly 1000th of the world population. A lens to examine human geography.

In 2014 Malaysia Air flight MH17 was shot down by a Russian BUK-telar missile, near the village of Hrabove, in the Ukraine (population 44 million), killing all 298 crew and passengers (including 27 Australians and one New Zealander) – beating the precious record of 290 when the USS Vincennes shot down Dubai bound Iran Air IR655 in 1988, mistaking it for a missile.

Hrabove is in Ukraine’s Donetsk Oblast (population 4.6 million) near the border with the Luhansk Oblast (population 2.3 million). Both oblasts (regions) are claimed by Ukrainian-Russian separatists who refer to this entire region as “the Confederation of Novorossiya” (population 6.9 million and shrinking).

I call this millishere “Donbass”, a local term for the Donets River basin. The Donets flows southeast and across the border into Russia where it joins the River Don. The Donbass is a centre for coal mining and heavy industry.

Once the breadbasket of the USSR, Ukraine has a population that is shrinking at the rate of -0.6 percent per year; the fastest decline of all countries with negative population growth rates – Eastern Europe, Russia and Japan – as measured by the sum of all births and deaths and not including emigration and immigration.

During the  Second World War, seven million of Ukraine’s eight million Jews were captured and murdered by the Nazi German occupation forces. After the war half the survivors left, mostly for Israel, where three of Israel’s Prime Ministers have been Ukrainian Jews. Roseanne Barr, Noam Chomsky, Carl Sagan, Leon Trotsky, and Simon Wiesenthal were all Ukrainian Jews or their descendants.

Since the collapse of the USSR in 1991 the Ukraine has engaged in a difficult, and sometimes brutal, political and economic separation from Russia. Two decades of cronyism, corruption and censorship, including the murder of journalists, followed independence as gangs fought for control of state businesses, which included arms manufacturers.

Under the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, the US, UK and Russia agreed to guarantee Ukraine’s territorial integrity in return for Ukraine giving up its Soviet-era nuclear weapons (the then third largest stockpile) and transferring them to Russia.

The Ukraine is roughly three-quarters ethnic Ukrainian and around 30 percent (mostly in the east) speak Russian as their first language. Pro-Russia Viktor Yanukovych, who was from Donetsk and backed by Putin, was followed as President by pro-EU Viktor Yushchenko, who suffered dioxin poisoning during the Orange Revolution. Then it was Yanukovych again which led to the pro-EU Maidan Square protests, during which 100 protesters were shot by government snipers, before Yanukovych fled his ostentatious, bad taste villa in Kiev for exile in Russia.

In 2010 Ukraine was the world’s ninth largest arms exporter – one above Israel. America and Russia were first and second. Since losing Donetsk in 2014 Ukraine has slipped to eleventh, being replaced by the Netherlands in the top ten and Israel has moved up to eighth place.

Donetsk city (metropolitan area over two million) is roughly 50/50 Russian/Ukrainian. Roughly one third of the residents of Donbass identify as Russian, one third Ukrainian and one third neither, calling themselves Slav, who can be either Ukrainian or Russian. Pre-2014 seventy percent of Ukraine’s arms exports were to Russia, a market Donbass arms manufacturers still supply.

The Dutch team investigating MH17 have traced the missile launcher that fired the BUK-telar to Kursk in Russia and they want to talk to Igor Girkin who claimed on social media to have shot down a Ukrainian military aircraft above Hrabove, before taking down the post the same day, and also Oleg Vladimirovich Ivannikov, who commanded the launcher.

With Russian paratroopers and American Paratroopers in the country and “alcoholics, dodgers, drug addicts and morons” on both sides manning dangerously heavy arms and the Ukrainian Mafia involved with the arms industry the people of the Ukraine find themselves between a rock and a hard place.

One is reminded of the words of Bob Dylan, whose paternal grandparents were Ukrainian, “You’ve thrown the worst fear that can ever be hurled. Fear to bring children into the world,” (Masters of War, 1963).

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Korea (ten millispheres)

Readers of this blog will know that I occasionally use the lens of the “millisphere” to examine the context of an international news story, a millisphere being a region with roughly 1000th of the world population.

An invaluable resource when writing a millisphere column is Wikipedia. The internet encyclopedia is the result of millions of contributions, subject to continuing editing by its online readers.

Up until now, spin and deliberate disinformation has been quickly edited out and corrected. As Wikipedia says: “With enough eyes all swamps are shallow”.

In recognition of the democratising power of reliable sources of information, I make an annual contribution to Wikipedia and I am watching with interest their recently signalled move into journalism with their venture, Wikitribune.

A small percentage of what passes for news these days actually includes primary research, whether it be an eyewitness account, an interview or digging up facts and figures that illustrate a news story.

The majority of news stories appear to be passed from one agency to another unaltered. This was highlighted for me when I did an internet search about the MOAB (mother of all bombs) that the United States dropped in Afghanistan on April 13, 2017.

Almost every international news agency carried the story word for word, based on an initial press release from the US Defense Department.

It was refreshing then to come across some left-field primary research by Murray Horton from Anti-Bases Campaign (ABC) on the “militarisation” of Christchurch Airport.

Murray had asked the New Zealand Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade about the movements of US military aircraft passing through Christchurch NZ in the 2015-16 year.

Of the 26 flights – nearly all C-130s – five didn’t fly to and from Antartica. Their destinations included American Samoa, Hawaii and  the Richmond RAAF base near Sydney – en route to the American spy base in Pine Gap, Alice Springs.

Horton’s point was that because a MOAB was too heavy for a conventional bomber, and is transported by C-130s, there is no way the New Zealand government would know whether or not the MOAB passed through Christchurch on some circuitous route to attack Afghanistan. Personally I think the MOAD is most likely to have gone through Guam.

This week the American war machine is steaming towards the Korean peninsula.

The underlying philosophy of the millisphere is the notion that wars are primarily caused by competing empires.

The history of the conflict between North and South Korea goes back to World War II; at the end of the war, Japan, which had occupied the entire Korean peninsula since 1910, surrendered the north to the Soviet Union and the south to the Americans.

When North Korea attempted to occupy South Korea by force in 1950, the Soviets and the People’s republic of China supported the North and America and her allies supported the South, and we had the world’s first Cold War conflict.

After three years and over one million casualties, the two sides fought themselves to a standstill and a truce was called – although technically the two sides are still at war.

In recent times, the South Koreans have taken more responsibility for their own defense from their ally, America, and have initiated a peaceful dialogue with North Korea, but the North continues its warlike posturing towards South Korea and America, initiating the occasional skirmish.

One such “skirmish” was the reputed hacking of Sony’s Hollywood computers in retaliation for the movie The Interview – something the North Koreans have consistently denied.

Some say that the North Koreans didn’t have the technical ability and that it could have equally been the Russians or even a disgruntled former Sony employee.

Either way Sony got lots of publicity for what was a pretty ho-hum movie, which subsequently did better at the box office when it was finally released.

In this age of “false news”, the declining number of investigative journalists employed by the traditional print media, social-media echo-chambers and the endless propaganda from warring empires, it is hard to know what is real news and what is manufactured.

What the world doesn’t need though, is a unified Korean empire. Instead what the Korean peninsula needs is ten separate millispheres.

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Syria (part two)

Asi, Halab, Furat, Rojava – and the three-step peace plan for Syria.

Imaginary speech to the United Nations Security Council.

Mr Chairman, members of the United Nation Security Council, in our speech last week we said that the conflict in Syria was a proxy war between Russia and America. In this our second speech, we declare once again that empires cause war and we put forward a peace plan based on this supposition.

The first step of our peace plan we call “Russki and Yankee go home.” Russia must give up its Mediterranean naval and air bases in Latakia and withdraw from Syria. The United States has military personnel stationed in 133 countries around the world and it is high time for them to all go home, starting with those in the Middle East. All other member states of the United Nations must then halt arms sales to the various parties to the Syrian conflict.

The second step we call the “Millistate solution,” based on a proposal by the Marquis of Bath: that to avoid warring empires the world should consist of one thousand roughly equal population states. This means the creation of states with an average population of around seven million people.

The third step we call the “Bio-region solution.” When drawing the boundaries of these new “millistates” we should attempt to follow geophysical boundaries not geopolitical ones – ideally water catchments and river systems. We propose redrawing the map of Syria into the separate regions where the various factions have dug in and ground to a halt. Some of these millistates will straddle the borders of neighbouring countries.

The Asi River catchment and Damascus together form the millistate of Asi. It includes the Russian base at Latakia and a small piece of Turkey that the Asi flows through on its last few kilometres to the Mediterranean. Safely wrapped around their ally “sister Lebanon” Bashar al-Assad and his Alawite, Shia aligned clan can remain in charge and the military bases in Latakia can be converted into holiday parks for sun starved Russian tourists.

Halab (Aleppo) was the Mediterranean terminus of the Silk route from China. When the Ottoman Empire was split up, after the First World War, the region around Aleppo was divided between Turkey and Syria. Restored Halab would have a connection to the sea at Iskenderun (in Turkey) and Aleppo would again be a terminus for highways leading north, south, east and west. The bombing of Aleppo must cease immediately and interim power should devolve to the people who have been driving the ambulances, staffing the hospitals, reconnecting the power, water and sewage and keeping the roads open (whether they be Sunni, Shia, Christian, Jew or Kurd).

Terrorism is a consequence of the Syrian war; it did not cause it. Maps of ISIS held territory show lines through the Syrian Desert that are either roads or the Euphrates River (al Furat). Sunni tribes all the way from Jarabulus on the Turkish border to Ramadi and Fallujah near Baghdad largely control the millistate of Furat. The withdrawal of Assad’s forces from their last base in Dayr az Zawr would give the Sunni tribes control of this stretch of the Euphrates straddling the Sykes-Picot on the Iraq/Syria border.

North of Furat, on the border with Turkey, is the semi-autonomous region the Kurds call Rojava. There are about 40 million Kurds in the Middle East, enough for six or seven millistates on their own. History has drawn the red lines of national borders through the middle of their homelands, which straddle the borders of Turkey, Iran and Iraq. The Syrian army has all but withdrawn from Rojava and the Kurds there should be left to manage their own affairs – as they do in the Kurdish autonomous region of Northern Iraq.

Mr Chairman, members of the Security Council, our previous Prime Minister, Helen Clark, has said that a solution to the war in Syria would take the “wisdom of Solomon” and would involve external actors from both within the region and beyond, referring to both the USA and Russia as well as Iran, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Israel. How right she is.

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Syria (part one)

Fred’s speech to the United Nations about the war in Syria

Mr Chairman

This speech marks the end of the two-year period in which New Zealand has been one of the ten elected members of the United Nations Security Council.

Last year New Zealand pointed out that the Security Council is an institution with failings. This year we go further and call the United Nations Security Council a failed institution. The problem is a structural one. The power of veto given to the five permanent members of the Security Council (USA, Russia, China, UK and France), merely because they were victors of the Second World War, means that the P5 negotiate positions before engaging us, the ten elected members, and that no action is taken if any one of the permanent five does not agree. This extraordinary imbalance of power is what is preventing action on Syria.

New Zealand challenges the authority of the permanent members of the United Nations Security Council for reasons other than structural ones. The Russian Federation was not one of the winners of the Second World War, it was the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) who helped defeat Hitler’s Third Reich, therefore we challenge the right of Russia to be a permanent member of the security council.

Equally we question the right of the United States of America to still be a permanent member. The Security Council was originally set up to resolve conflicts and prevent wars such as we are seeing today in the Syria. Since the Second World War the USA has developed a massive global arms industry that has an economic interest in fuelling conflict, therefore we believe that America has lost any moral right to a permeant seat.

In summary New Zealand believes that the superpowers are part of the problem; that what we are seeing in Syria today is actually a proxy-war between Russia and America – the shared rationale being, to quote Henry Kissenger, “he who controls oil controls the world.”

Our previous Prime Minister, Helen Clark, has said that a solution to the war in Syria would take the “wisdom of Solomon” and would involve external actors from both within the region and beyond, referring to both the USA and Russia as well as Iran, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Israel.

Some of the causes for the war in Syria go can be traced back to the First World War and the division of the Ottoman Empire, but there are others. Resource depletion from overpopulation is one – although the Syrian birth rate has fallen from seven children per woman in the1960s to three at the present day. From 2006 to 2009 Syria experienced its worst drought in living memory resulting in a million pastoralists moving to the towns and cities, joining the 1.5 million refugees from the war in Iraq that Syria was already hosting. This contributed to overcrowding, worsening unemployment and rising tensions.

The first thing that is required on the ground is a nationwide ceasefire. The main suppliers of arms to the conflict are in order of magnitude, starting with the largest: America, Russia, China and then Israel (recently moving from position six to position four). If the flow of arms from the superpowers, either directly or indirectly, to the various factions in Syria were to stop then the conflict would simply run out of bullets and the process of reconstruction could begin – it is estimated that there are over a thousand different armed militias with constantly shifting alliances operating in Syria today.

The sheer complexity of the situation on the ground is compounded by various religious disputes. As the numerous sects of Judaism, Christianity and Islam embrace fundamentalism and then turn inhumanly on one another it is useful to remember that Moses, Jesus and Mohamed were all Middle Eastern Semites.

Mr Chairman, members of the United Nations Security Council, thank you for giving us the time to present what we think are the causes of the awful conflict in Syria. Next week we will outline our plan to bring peace.