Damn Yalta! Damn Tito! As soon as I started learning Russian, it dawned on me whilst looking at an atlas that all Yugoslavia means is Land of the Southern Slavs. Land of the Southern Slavs? Only a Brit could deem lumping so many traditionally warring ‘foreigners’ together in one nation and expect it to work. Almost as bad as all the straight lines we see from the Colonial Borders in Africa. And we expect peace? I mean, boundaries in Africa aren’t even ethnic in many cases, nor do they follow any topography or natural frontiers. I can just imagine a half-drunken British General, his moustache soaring into the heavens like two arcs of flame, muttering to himself as he scrawls a straight border over distinct tribal boundaries, using a ruler so as not to accidentally cross the line into the Belgian Congo, French Cameroon, German Tanganyika or whatever.
In Europe, borders are simply so complex- try looking at a historical map of Silesia from the 1920s, for instance. Plebiscites abound, every nation claims part of every other and you can’t publish any kind of impartial map because the boundaries are so specific any interpretation of them will offend someone.
Kosovo, though? Not that I’m a great fan of Mr. Putin and his recently deemed successor, but Russia has always traditionally backed Serbia. Think WWI- the Russian Lion will roar sometimes, that’s what it’s doing now. Supporting its fellow Slavs. Fair enough, one could say, but that would be ignoring the Serbian atrocities in Bosnia and Kosovo in 1991 against Bosniaks and Albanian Muslims.
In 1900, a nation could only be independent if it could muster enough gold and armed forces- hence why there were so few nations in Europe those days. Small nations that did exist, such as Liberia, only did so as puppet states of others. Today, however, thanks to the UN, any nation of any size can exist and expect to for its forseeable future. This is why the Balkans have been able to fragment so easily.
A letter in this week’s New Statesman (in which Julian Clary wrote a superbly funny article, might I add) pointed out the fact that we’re more than happy to let Albanians in Kosovo who’ve murdered innocent Serbs have independence, but we won’t let the Serbs in Bosnia unite with Serbia proper. This of course leads me to point out that the writer’s surname did happen to end in an ‘-ic’. You can take it as read he was probably a Serb, but the guy did have a point. There probably is a bit of racism against the Serbs from the international community- not as much as this (http://www.ww1-propaganda-cards.com/s002slide.html) from the First World War, but still a fair amount.
Due to the way we run nations today, being interdependent, Kosovo won’t need huge amounts of natural materials, money, or military forces to survive. But it is true that Kosovo contains a huge amount of Serbain historical sites- if we go on the premise that every majority ethnic group in an area should have independence, then so many nations would loose the cream of their culture. For example, if the Home Counties over the next five hundred years or so had so much immigration that they were around 80% non-English, would we give independence to them on this premise? No, we wouldn’t. So why is it any different with Kosovo?
http://www.foreignaffairs.org/20051101facomment84603/charles-a-kupchan/independence-for-kosovo.html
^ This describes quite nicely how the Serbs in Kosovo live- undoubtedly, an independent Kosovo would not be fair to the Serbian minority. How many more nations are going to succeed in Europe? The more that do, the more nationalism they will experience. Kosovo will be a satellite of Albania, rising nationalism there. And nationalism plus Balkans is never a happy mix, as they learnt in Srebenica, Gorazde, and all over Croatia in World War Two and 1991. Funny, demographically, isn’t it? We have peoples like the Uyghurs (8 million), Kurds (16 million), Assyrians (4 million), and Copts (8 million) without their own nations, yet Europe has managed to give everyone self-rule. Very nice. If only they could do the same in Asia and other continents.
From what I can see, there’s Vojvodina, Dalmatia, Illyria, Herzegovina, and Srpska (Bosnian Serbia) left without independence. This kind of links in to what I put about nations like Spain in my last post, and what division can cause. Anyway, I wish them the best in Kosovo. But also, the Serbs too. In Serbia and there.
I can recommend the book Åsne Seierstad wrote about the Serbs and Serbia in 2003. Better than Michael Palin’s depiction of the country, though. A bit deeper and more incisive than a Serbian rock-star. Not that I know a great deal about Serbia- all I can remember about going there is seeing the Cathedral in Belgrade (pretty amazing, actually) and a bad coffee outside the city of Niš. Southern Serbia is nice, though. Quite Meditterean in many respects. Perhaps in twenty years’ time or maybe sooner, we’ll see the polo-neck sweater wearing, tinted sunglasses, cigarillo smoking intelligensia buying holiday homes there. And at the same time complaining about housing shortages. Lovely little paradoxes we live in, eh? 
Strike Seven- Kosovo
The Knights Who Say… Yi!
I recently had the pleasure of reading an excellent book, The Great March- the real truth behind the story which made Mao’s China, by Ed Jocelyn and Andrew McEwan, and one of the main things which so struck me was the ethnic diversity of China- not just in Yunnan Province but even further North, through into Gansu, Qinghai, and Shanxi Provinces.
China, like Russia and to an extent Spain are all deeply divided nations traditionally- many Spaniards have often held the belief that the lack of a strong government in Madrid will cause devolution, and ultimately secession for minorities such as the Aragonese, Catalans, and Basques. Indeed, this point was proven during the Spanish Civil War when Euskadi, the Basque Country, was practically independent.
Perhaps China’s uniqueness in its division is the fact that even among the Han Chinese, there are many dialects so mutually unintelligible that one could technically count them as seperate languages (Shanghainese? Mandarin? Cantonese?)- but also the sheer number of ethnic groups, which far surpasses the mere fifty-five officially recognised by the government in Beijing.
As in the Spanish Civil War, China devolved into numerous areas of de-facto control or fully blown independence in some cases. As Peter Fleming’s famous book about his journeys through Turkestan stated, by 1936, the Nationalist Chinese governor of Xinjang was practically a ruler in his own right. Earlier, the region had been declared an independent ‘nation of East Turkestan’.
Just a look at one of my favourite sites, www.worldstatesmen.org, shows the amount of different warlords ruling the different Chinese provinces. This source (http://orpheus.ucsd.edu/chinesehistory/pgp/sheridan.htm) states that many of the apparently pro-Nationalist Chinese generals lacked nationalism. Probably explains why so many of them ruled with their own little cliques- and also why so many of the non-Han Chinese were able to achieve some kind of limited self rule.
When I first heard about Chinese Warlords, I immediately assumed they were some of the vast and impenetrable stories in that pantheon of classical Chinese literature a Westerner can never understand, unless they can decipher the cacophonic squeaks of the Peking Opera, that is.
They were also mentioned briefly in Bertolluci’s excellent film The Last Emperor (such a sad film!)- anyway, coming back to the matter in hand, I read in this book of mine that the Long Marchers encountered a lot of problems in Sichuan Province around 1936, because the local Yi people hated any Han intruders, be they Communist or Nationalist. What interests me is that the book goes on to mention that the Yi were so fierce that not only were they able to seize thousands of rifles from the Red Army, but they even stole so much that one scout regiment returned back without even their clothes!
The Yi were so fierce, indeed, that Mao had to sign a pact known as the Yihai alliance with the Yi warlord Xiao Yedan, in the form of one of his generals becoming blood brothers with him. Now, how an ethnic minority about whom most people probably now very little managed to force the Red Army into submission through an alliance astounds me. This one tribe did what all Chiang Kai-Shek’s horses and all Chiang Kai-Shek’s men couldn’t do- near defeat the Red Army. The Mongols and Tibetans have had some pretty fierce fighters, but the Yi people, numbering 2.5 million only today?
It is surprising how little info I can find online or anywhere else about this event and these Yi fighters- I would have thought that for an event as large as the Long March for China, the pact would have been celebrated with ridiculous propaganda slogans, stylised portraits and the like. Here’s all I’ve been able to find in terms of propaganda-
http://www.liuhuan.com/blog/uploads/200508/12_211430_74.jpg (statue of the two blood brothers). Can’t find any photos of Yedan, though. Shame, really. Would have been interesting to see, as well as the statue in the link above suggesting his having a rather snazzy hat.
Talk about historical trivia…
Oh, and for anyone else interested in Chinese History-
You thought Chinese Warlords were dead? Think again! Here’s one blogging straight from 1941, apparrently ;D
http://yanxishan.wordpress.com/about/
^ The Yan Xishan Blog, Notes from 1941 China’s most noteworthy warlord
Dyw un iaith byth yn ddigon! (One language is never enough)
Went to jolly old Cardiff today- hadn’t been to Wales in ages. After reading some books by Nicolaus Ostler and Kenneth Katzner, I seemed to spend most of the time trying to read the Welsh signposts out loud. I’d forgotten how different Welsh is from English- such as pronoucing an ‘f’ as a ‘v’, a ‘dd’ as a ‘th’ and so on.
The language really fascinates me- it’s one of the few whose prefixes change rather than suffixes (so whilst Wales is Cymru, the name whilst used in welcoming someone to Wales becomes Gymru). I was pretty impressed with the attempts they’d made in Cardiff to put Welsh everywhere on the streets and in the adverts. And the fact that the language is growing is surely a clear sign that it’s working. Hooray for the Welsh language, I say. The fact that it’s managed to persevere in an area so close to England, whilst English has destroyed much larger languages in the Americas, can be seen- I think- as a sign that smaller languages still can survive.
Unlike a certain few Tories about the Polish signs in Cheshire the other day, who kicked up a bit of a fuss about the government wanting to save lives rather than be linguistically snobbish (http://www.cheshire.gov.uk/PR/2007/february07/74-07.htm). I mean, honestly. The Poles in the UK pay taxes, work damned hard and bring great Krakus Jam and Wiejska Sausage here with them. ‘Na Zdrowie!’/ Cheers!, I say to them. But that’s a different story altogether.
It’s also been said that once the language of an ethnic group goes, the culture begins to go as well. That’s why, teaching all the children in Wales the Welsh language is not a waste- it’s a reaffirming of Wales as a seperate cultural entity from England. Though perhaps there is less of an argument for the complusory study of Cornish and Manx some local seccessionists in those areas wish to implement.
Although it is often stated that travel guides overemphasise the cultural diversity of places, it’s very refreshing to find out that a place is just as diverse as they report it to be. I remember one time when I was walking down from an old ruined monastery at Vazelon in North Eastern Turkey, near Trabzon. This old woman in traditional dress with a flock of goats talked to me in some language which certainly wasn’t Turkish. Probably, it was Hemsin, Laz or Georgian. Turkey’s a bit of an oddball in the cultural diversity spectrum- Istanbul was around 60% Christian up until the population exchanges and anti-Greek riots of the 1920s and 1960s, but Turks are still prohibited from defining any organisation under an ethnic banner and are restricted from insulting ‘anti-Turkishness’ by the notorious Article 301 of their constitution. That’s why the new book, Ebru, which has caused quite a stir in Turkey, is such a godsend if Turkey wants to clear up its human rights.(http://www.metiskitap.com/Scripts/Catalog/MetisBooks/1997.asp).
I also had the interesting experience of attending a festival near Ventspils, in NW Latvia a few years back, where some of the only living Livonian speakers were. It’s sad to know that by the time anyone outside of Latvia has heard of the Livonians, their last native speakers will be dead. Languages do need to be preserved- think of how many idioms in English tell us about our heritage as a nation. If an entire language dies, so does its history. So go forth! Learn Komi, Yao, Papiamento, Wolof- or whatever. As they say in Wales, ‘Dyw un iaith byth yn ddigon’!
That’s all from me anyway. I’m off to see the Gemini meteor shower about which Patrick Moore waxed lyrical in his wonderfully strangulated accent this morning on BBC Radio 4.
Hi there
Welcome to Various Musings, O dear reader.
I have to make the point clear that this is, as one may expect, musings, not rantings.
Rantings, one would usually associate with an extremist political or religious group- musings, are unsure of themselves and therefore a good deal more modest as a result. Many of my musings therefore, will probably end up contradicting their initial arguments in the first place, leaving me the wiser and probably the reader with a few laughs as they watch someone’s political self-education.
That said, given that some of my musings will in future devolve into senseless rantings if some breaking news event on BBC sends me to the keyboard to let off some steam, it’ll probably be helpful for me to listen to my readers’ (should I have any) opinions and talk such events over. If only I’d started up this blog during the Israeli-Lebanese War, oh if only. Anyway, many people say that you are what you eat. I see little truth in this- indeed, if it were true, I could be anything from finely-cooked Chicken in Cider to a ketchup-smeared lamb kebab of questionable origin served fresh from the polystyrene box. I personally believe in our society today, people are what they read (magazines or books) or watch on TV. Magazine and newspaper-wise, my personal favourites would have to be the Geographical, The Chap, Coin News, New Statesman, Private Eye, The Guardian and if I can find the funding for its extortionate price, The Monocle.
Figure that out for yourself. I suppose it could mean anything- if anything has something interesting to read, I’ll buy it. Unless it’s The Telegraph or The Daily Mail.
Watch this space- this blog, as far as I can see, will probably be updated most Wednesdays and weekends. That is, unless I decide to jet off to Burkina Faso or Laos or God knows where. In which case I shall be sure to mention it. And write about it after the return journey 
As they would say on Facebook, my wall virginity is now taken.
Happy hunting!
Mehmet12, twelfth of the name.
