Crimea has joined the ranks of the world’s ‘gray areas.’ Here are the others on that list like Somaliland

Somaliland: "In 1991 the Somali National Movement declared Somaliland an independent republic (in gray) with Hargeysa as the capital. It is not internationally recognized."

A man removes a Ukrainian flag after seizure of the base in Novofedorivka, about 30 miles west of Simferopol, Crimea, on Saturday. (AP Photo/Max Vetrov)

Last week National Geographic found itself in a controversial spot when a report in U.S. News and World Report suggested that the National Geographic Maps would show Crimea as part of Russia. “We map de facto, in other words we map the world as it is, not as people would like it to be,” Juan José Valdés, the magazine’s geographer and director of editorial and research, explained.

National Geographic has since clarified its position: In a statement, it announced that Crimea would be treated "shaded gray" to show that it was now an "Area of Special Status."

To put it simply, Crimea is now a gray area.

What other gray areas are there in the world? Well, according to National Geographic's Atlas of the World (ninth edition), quite a few. Here are the ones we could find (with National Geographic's notes):

Abkhazia: "Separatists defeated Georgian troops to gain control of this region 1993 -- negotiations continue on resolving the conflict."

Abu Musa: "Claimed by Iran and U.A.E. and jointly administered by them."

Cyprus: "DIVIDED CYPRUS," according to National Geographic. "Cyprus was partitioned in 1974 following a coup backed by Greece and an invasion by Turkey. The island is composed of a Greek Cypriot south with an internationally recognized government and a Turkish Cypriot north (gray) with a government recognized only by Turkey. The UN patrols the dividing line and works towards reunification of the island."

Dokdo: "Administered by South Korea. Claimed by Japan."

Ilemi Triangle: "Administered by Kenya. Conflicting claims by Sudan and Ethiopia."

Kashmir: "India and Pakistan both claim Kashmir -- a disputed region with some 10 million people. India administers only the area south of the line of control. Pakistan controls northwestern Kashmir. China took eastern Kashmir from India in a 1962 war."

Kosovo: "On February 17, 2008, Kosovo declared its independence, but Serbia still claims it as a province. Some places show the Albanian name with the Serbian name in parentheses."

Nagorno-Karabakh: "Since a 1994 cease-fire between Azerbaijani and Armenian forces, ethnic Armenians have controlled Nagorno Karabakh and surrounding areas (gray). Azerbaijan continues to claim this disputed region."

New Moor Island: "Claimed by India and Bangladesh."

Paracel Islands: "Occupied by China in 1974, which calls them Xisha Qundao; claimed by Vietnam, which calls them Hoang Sa."

Senkaku Shoto: "Administered by Japan. Claimed by China and Taiwan."

Somaliland: "In 1991 the Somali National Movement declared Somaliland an independent republic (in gray) with Hargeysa as the capital. It is not internationally recognized."

South Ossetia: "A 1992 cease-fire ended fighting between Ossetians and Georgians, but with no political settlement."

Spratly Islands: "The scattered islands and reefs called the Spratly Islands are claimed by Brunei, China, Malaysia, the Phillipines, Taiwan, and Vietnam. The Spratleys possess rich fishing grounds and potential oil."

Taiwan: "The People's Republic of China claims Taiwan as its 23rd province. Taiwan's government (Republic of China) maintains that there are two political entities."

The Falklands Islands: "Administered by United Kingdom (claimed by Argentina)."

The Kiril Islands: "The Southern Kiril Islands of Irurup (Etorofu), Kunashir (Kunashiri), Shikotan and the Habomai group were lost by Japan to the Soviet Union in 1945. Japan continues to claim these Russian-administered islands."

Transdniestria: "Since the break-up of the Soviet Union, Ukrainian and Russian minorities have been struggling for independence from Moldova."

Tunb Islands: "Administered by Iran (claimed by U.A.E.)"

West Bank and Gaza Strip: "Captured by Israel in the 1967 Six Day War, a 1993 peace agreement gave areas of the West Bank and Gaza limited Palestinian autonomy. The future for these autonomous areas and 3 million Palestinians is subject to Israeli-Palestinian negotiations."

Western Sahara: "Western Sahara (in gray) is in dispute and has been administered by Morocco since 1979. Fighting between Morocco and a Western Sahara independence movement called Polisario ended with a UN-brokered cease-fire in 1991, but no agreement on the area’s status has been reached. Morocco built a 1,500-mile-long sand wall to confine Polisario to the sparsely populated southeast."

National Geographic's list is far from exhaustive. For example, it could be argued that Tibet should be included over  questions about China's sovereignty over the land. And the independence referendums due to be held this year in Scotland and Catalonia could lend themselves to the "gray area" tag, too. Really, we're only scratching the surface here: Wikipedia lists hundreds of territorial disputes. The world is a very gray place.

Looking over these gray areas, how does Crimea fit in? First, these disputed areas span almost all parts of the world, from the Falkland Islands at the very tip of the South American continent, to the Kiril Islands between eastern Russia and Japan. Many date back decades, if not centuries. Like Crimea's own complicated situation, the fall of the Soviet Union seems to have played a big role in a number of them, most notably in the cases of Transdniestria, Abkhazia, and South Ossetia.

These are also, almost without exception, places of conflict. The gray status of the West Bank and Gaza strip, Kosovo and Taiwan, is indicative of those areas' places at the center of the biggest and bloodiest international issues of the last century. What's more, these gray areas are remarkably resilient. For example, the dispute between Argentina and the United Kingdom over the Falklands Islands goes back hundreds of years, and despite a bloody war over the islands in 1982 hasn't settled the situation. Argentina only recently announced it would not respect the results of the Falklands' own referendum on the islands' status.

Source: washingtonpost.com

Why Somalia isn’t the real piracy threat

Despite dangers portrayed in Captain Phillips, pirate attacks in Somali waters have declined drastically. It’s a different story in Strait of Malacca.

BANGKOK—Maybe God has a soft spot for pirates. That would explain the Strait of Malacca, a natural paradise for seafaring bandits.

Imagine an aquatic highway flowing between two marshy coasts. One shoreline belongs to Malaysia, the other to Indonesia. Each offers a maze of jungly hideaways: inlets and coves that favour pirates’ stealth vessels over slow, hulking ships.

It’s a narrow route running 885 kilometres, roughly the distance between Miami and Jamaica. This bottleneck is plied by one-third of the world’s shipping trade. That’s 50,000 ships per year — ferrying everything from iPads to Reeboks to half the planet’s oil exports.

The world’s fascination with neo-piracy now centres on Somalia. Thanks to the 2013 thriller Captain Phillips, in which Tom Hanks plays a cargo ship captain abducted by Somalis, even teenagers know the anarchy-prone African state is a breeding ground for pirates.

At least it was. In truth, Hollywood stumbled onto Somalia’s piracy phenomenon rather late. In the last three years, pirate strikes in Somali waters have plummeted 95 per cent to a meagre seven incidents in 2013; none were successful.

Piracy in Southeast Asia, meanwhile, is accelerating. Attacks and attempted attacks in the waters of Indonesia — which controls much of the Malacca Strait and its environs — totalled 107 last year. That’s a 700 per cent increase in just five years.

The German insurance firm Allianz, which released these figures in a new report, is now sounding a warning: Southeast Asian piracy must be reined in before it’s too late.

The attacks mostly amount to “opportunistic thefts carried out by small bands,” according to Allianz, but these syndicates could potentially “escalate into a more organized piracy model.”

Modern-day captains plying risky waters look to a guide called the BMP. Based on intel from Western navies and shipping firms, it offers tactics on avoiding pirates and — if that doesn’t work — fending them off and surviving abduction.

The guide’s best advice? Go really fast. No pirates have ever boarded a ship pushing 18 knots, or nearly 34 kilometres per hour, the guide says.

But that’s practically impossible in the Strait of Malacca.

The channel is simply too crowded and too shallow. Gigantic vessels are instead forced to churn through at slow speeds that invite pirates in fast-moving skiffs. (To save fuel, today’s cargo ships often travel at about 22 kilometres per hour.)

Indonesian pirates typically have different tactics from their Somali counterparts, who’ve made headlines by invading vessels and demanding multimillion-dollar ransoms.

In the Malacca Strait, pirates like to get in and get out. Their “modus operandi isn’t to kidnap,” according to Tim Donney, an Allianz marine risk consultant. “These pirates just want the cash aboard the vessel or to rob the crew of any valuables.”

Indonesia isn’t nearly as lawless as Somalia. But both are coastal nations where poverty is rife and police are ill-equipped. Both also happen to be situated on routes trafficked by wealthy nations’ trade vessels.

“Most piracy takes place in areas where people are poor. Their livelihood has been taken from them by globalization, civil unrest or war,” writes Nigel Cawthorne, author of the book Pirates of the 21st Century.

Somalia’s turnaround is owed to several factors: NATO- and EU-backed naval patrols, ships hiring on-board riflemen and, perhaps most importantly, a new Somali government working to stabilize its lawless coast.

Somali pirates also forced the shipping industry to get creative. They’ve come up with effective pirate-proofing techniques that could be applied to more ships entering the Malacca Strait.

The BMP recommends blasting approaching pirates with hot water, ringing ships with razor wire and even installing electric fencing. Discharging foam, according to the manual, is “effective as it is disorientating and very slippery.”

Piracy along the Malacca Strait route should be easier to fight than in Somalia. All of the nations patrolling the strait have functioning governments, committed to fighting the problem, and are financially incentivized to maintain a bandit-free trade route.

Piracy poses no existential threat to the shipping industry. Considering the volume of international trade, losses from piracy “amount to little more than a rounding error,” according to piracy analyst Martin N. Murphy. But the “sense of disorder” created by piracy, he writes, “may be hard to calculate in dollars.”

By: Patrick Winn Globalpost, Published on Thu Mar 27 2014

Somalia May See Shell Return in 2015 as Soma Tests Waters

By Eduard Gismatullin

Somalia is conducting offshore surveys in hopes of attracting explorers including Royal Dutch Shell Plc two decades after the outbreak of a bloody civil war drove foreign investors away.

The East African country plans to hold a licensing tender next year after Soma Oil and Gas, funded by Russian billionaire Alexander Djaparidze, completes the seismic study, according to Abdullahi Haider, a federal government adviser. Somalia, with no proven reserves, has been in talks with Shell about resuming work suspended at the start of the war in 1991, said Abdirizak Omar Mohamed, an adviser to President Hassan Sheikh Mohamoud.

“Once we settle all the issues between the federal-central government and regional authorities, the petroleum law, the establishment of the regulatory framework, then optimistically there will be full-scale exploration,” Haider said in an interview from Mogadishu. “This time next year we could have the possibility of seeing major oil companies coming in.”

International oil companies are weighing a return to the Horn of Africa nation as the political situation stabilizes and pirate attacks subside. Somalia wants to catch up with Kenya, Tanzania and Mozambique to the south, where recent discoveries promise East Africa’s first oil exports as soon as 2016.

Armed Insurgents

“We have expressed interest in appraising opportunities for future projects in Somalia,” said Julia Dudley, a London-based spokeswoman at Shell. The Anglo-Dutch company holds rights to blocks M3 to M7 where it still has force majeure in place, exempting it from exploration obligations.

Foreign investors continue to face obstacles, from problems transferring funds to the country to security threats from al-Shabaab militants, who have waged an insurgency since 2007 to try to topple the Western-backed government and impose Shariah, or Islamic law.

Djaparidze-led investment company Winter Sky, which holds 30 percent of Soma Oil, provided the explorer with $50 million to start the survey in an area the size of the North Sea, Soma Oil Chief Executive Officer Robert Sheppard said. Soma Oil will have the right to make an application for as many as 12 blocks covering 60,000 square kilometers (23,000 square miles) in “consideration for doing” the seismic study, he said.

‘Risk Exposure’

The company “will be given some blocks, but it’s not going to be their own preferences,” said Mohamed, the government adviser. “We will have an open and transparent bidding process,” said Mohamed, a former national resources minister who signed the survey contract with Soma Oil.

“Somalia seems promising,” Djaparidze’s son Georgy, a non-executive director at London-based Soma Oil and an investor in the company, wrote in an e-mail. It’s his first project in East Africa, and he chose it because he was seeking an opportunity to increase risk exposure, he said by e-mail.

Djaparidze senior is a founder of Eurasia Drilling Co., Russia’s largest oilfield services provider, and has extensive experience in petroleum exploration.

Soma Oil is betting on oil discoveries in Madagascar, where more than a dozen companies including Exxon Mobil Corp. and Total SA are operating. The island split from East Africa about 165 million years ago, and it’s gearing up “to find something very big” in south Somalia’s deep waters, where the only well ever drilled was by Exxon in 1982, Sheppard said in an interview in London.

Somalia “will be able to negotiate and work with them, the big companies, on a more equal basis” equipped with seismic data, he said. “We’ll open the door for the big guys.”
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To contact the reporter on this story: Eduard Gismatullin in London at egismatullin@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Will Kennedy at wkennedy3@bloomberg.net Alex Devine, Tony Barrett 

Source: bloomberg.net

Morocco and the Saharawi Republic participate side by side in an Africa-EU meeting?

Morocco appears to a adopt a schizophrenic behavior towards the Saharawi Republic by officially sitting down in international forums side by side with the Saharawi delegation. Yet behind closed doors it continues to wage a campaign to discredit the rights of the Saharawi for full independence

By Malainin Mohamed Lakhal

For the third consecutive time in less than four months, the Moroccan government participated in an event where the Saharawi Republic was fully taking part as an independent State, during the works of the 2nd High Level Meeting of the Africa-EU Energy Partnership. The meeting was held between 11- 14 February 2014 in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. A Saharawi delegation chaired by the Saharawi ambassador to the AU and Ethiopia, participated side by side with a Moroccan delegation composed of the Moroccan Ministry of Energy, Mines Water and Environment. This information may seem normal to anyone who doesn’t know how Morocco is normally very sensitive to any regional, continental or international forum where the Saharawi Government’s representatives participate.

SITTING SIDE BY SIDE 

Morocco, which still occupies parts of the Saharawi territory and refuses to recognize the Saharawi Republic. It is a founding member of the African Union (AU) and has surprisingly participated in two other events in which the Saharawi Republic’s participation was noticeable. The first was last December 10, 2013 during the Nelson Mandela’s official memorial service that took place in Johannesburg, and the second on 11 December in Kenya during the celebrations marking the 50th anniversary of the independence of this African country.
On both occasions Morocco was represented by High Level Officials. In the first it was even by Prince Rachid, the third in the Moroccan Monarchic order, and El Fassi El Fehri, the close friend and advisor of the actual King of Morocco, Mohamed VI.

This Moroccan presence can only be explained as a recognition of the political fact of the Saharawi republic that Rabat can no more ignore especially in its shy and sometimes inappropriate attempts to reintegrate the African Union. Rabat unilaterally abandoned the OAU in 1984 in a crucial period of the African unity’s process and in a blatant disregard to the OAU’s decisions and support to the independence of Western Sahara.

It should be recalled that some Moroccan officials had repeatedly mentioned the Moroccan eagerness to return to the Pan African organization, but of course with the usual Moroccan acrobatics and conditions, which asked for the freezing of the membership of the SADR in the AU. Such a demand is impossible since nothing in the AU constitution would allow such action, in addition to the fact that it is politically incorrect and would strongly harm the image and future of the African Union if it was even openly discussed.

But, it seems that Morocco is more and more uncomfortable with its African isolation especially that the French block that is a traditional vehicle to reflect the Moroccan-French’s hostile position vis-à-vis the SADR, is no more as strong in the AU as it used to be in the OAU between the fifties and the nineties.

POINT SCORING FOR MOROCCO? 

Yet, while Morocco keeps calling and even harassing its allies to convince them not to allow the participation of the SADR in meetings organized outside Africa, especially the famous African partnerships with other continents and entities, Rabat seems to be willing to give a concession for the moment, and may start participating in meetings even when the Saharawi Republic is present and fully represented as a State. Morocco hopes maybe to score some points and create a sort of confusion and uneasiness for other participants, who may ask the Saharawi Republic, as they did in some previous occasions to voluntarily abstain from taking part in African meetings with Arabs or Europeans or others. The SADR of course, has always adopted the decision to unilaterally abstain from attending those meetings just to facilitate their holding, and so as not to be accused of hindering AU’s partnerships. Though SADR can maintain its sovereign right to take part in any AU event no matter who is the co-organiser, and would enjoy the support of its allies and strongest countries in the AU.

AU DISQUIET OVER MOROCCO’S NEW FOUND PARTICIPATION IN THE AU 

Many countries and officials in the AU have started to complain off the record about this controversial Moroccan attitude and sneaky methods. Opinions tend to voice that Morocco, which abandoned Africans when they needed it most in the eighties, cannot put conditions to the AU now that it is getting stronger, and cannot continue to put obstacles to the African integration due to the kingdom’s failure to respect the international legality and African decisions regarding the decolonization of Western Sahara. It should be recalled that the Constitutive Act of the African Union is clear in its objectives that include for example the AU: “respect of borders existing on achievement of independence;” and willingness to “defend the sovereignty, territorial integrity and independence of its Member States” and to “promote and protect human and peoples' rights in accordance with the African Charter on Human and Peoples' Rights and other relevant human rights instruments,” in addition to its will to “accelerate the political and socio-economic integration of the continent.”

HINDERING AFRICAN INDEPENDENCE 

Other African voices estimate in internal and intellectual discussions that Morocco and some of the French-speaking African countries, cannot continue to hinder the African political hegemony and independence by being the executers of French policies in Africa. In fact, everyone in the AU knows that if Africans have to succeed they must stop all those French and Occidental policies and agendas that few African countries keep defending within the AU, causing repeated abortions of the Pan African organisation’s progress towards real political, economic and security autonomy and integration.

Finally, it seems that Morocco is more and more aware of the importance of the role that the African Union can play in the resolution of the last decolonization issue in Africa. Rabat and its European allies are trying to influence all African countries in which they have influence to adopt hostile positions against the Saharawi Republic, and for this we keep seeing the diplomatic battle Morocco and SADR are waging against each other especially in the last decade. The last of which were for example the freezing of recognition of SADR by Mauritius, and on the other side, the opening of an Embassy by SADR in Kenya in January and February 2014. But the most strange is that Rabat attacks any country that invites or declares support to the Saharawi Republic and ask African countries to “freeze” their recognition of SADR, while at the same time high Moroccan officials accept to participate in activities in which SADR is fully represented!

*Malainin Mohamed Lakhal is a member of the Saharawi Natural Resource Watch (SNRW), Saharawi refugee camps

Somaliland:’What Did You Do in the War, Mother?

Forensic experts working in a newly found  mass grave in Hargeisa

By Nadifa Mohamed

What is it like to know that you must leave your home this instant? What would you take with you? Where would you go? These were the questions that I asked my cousin, my aunts and former neighbors, but to be precise, I asked, “What was it like? What did you take with you? Where did you go?”, because all of these women had been forced to flee the Somali civil war in the late eighties. My cousin was separated from her parents on the first day of fighting, my aunt carried three very young boys to the Ethiopian border, while it took the war for a family friend to realize that her husband of many years had lied about his own background. The stories that emerged were of heroism and cowardice, despair and hope, a violent normality disturbed by abnormal violence.

I left Hargeisa in northern Somalia as a child but was born in a hospital that symbolized the brutality of the regime; my mother was nearly turned away from the labor ward as I had the temerity to want to arrive after the curfew, doctors who tried to improve the hospital were arrested on trumped-up charges and given life sentences, and during the war it became the site of unimaginable abuses. To return to this world of sadness was no easy act but one story kept leading me forward, demanding to be told and that was of my grandmother, my namesake, Nadifa. An apparently stern and no-nonsense kind of woman, she had been born a nomad in 1908 and had eloped at the age of seventeen with my grandfather, for the rest of her life she traveled where she wanted as free as any man, from the borderlands of Eritrea to Mecca, she pushed aside whatever barriers stood in her way. On her return to Somalia, she wanted to live a quiet life tending to her orchard, reading fortunes in coffee cups, and singing the songs a lifetime of adventure had taught her. It was not to be. A traffic accident left her bed-bound and when the bombardment of the city began she was left abandoned, as were many of Hargeisa’s elderly and disabled residents. I reflected on her fate with guilt, sorrow and most of all anger. The seed of The Orchard of Lost Souls was sown from that reflection, what does war mean when you strip it of machismo and romanticism? What does it mean for elderly women? The disabled? Street girls? What would it have meant for me if we hadn’t left?

That I made the story of the Somali civil war one of women doesn’t mean that it is solely one of men against women; the dictatorship of Siad Barre had a much vaunted policy of sexual equality and many Somali women supported the regime and took part in its abuses. From the local espionage networks to the Women’s Auxiliary Unit in the army they wielded power over perceived enemies of the state. These individuals have been completely overlooked, as are most female perpetrators of violence, but when we are forced to confront them, as we were by Lynddie England’s smirking face in the images from Abu Ghraib, we feel a particular hatred and maybe even betrayal. Although male combatants often return home from war with trophy photos and engage in sexual humiliation of both men and women, the sight of her doing the same enraged people, and it was hard to tell if the condemnation was based on the idea that women are above these cruel acts or if we were unsettled by seeing a female exert that raw power over men. I wanted to investigate that discomfort and ask if women are in essence different to men when it comes to violence, if that desire is present in us however submerged or if, in fact, it’s just another power that we are denied?

The lasting impression I will have from those conversations with my female relatives is that there are no medals for women who show courage, ingenuity, or who sacrifice themselves for others. In the end, my grandmother was rescued by a niece, who braved the bombs, bullets, and mortars falling on their small, provincial city, and brought my grandmother to a place of safety and kept her alive until she was reunited with my uncle in Ethiopia.

Nadifa Mohamed is the author of the new novel The Orchard of Lost Souls