How Are the World's De Facto States Faring?

Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer

In 2004 I co-edited De Facto States: The Quest for Sovereignty, a book that examined ten unrecognized polities around the world, though a few others, such as the Kurdish Region of Iraq, Timor Leste, and South Sudan, didn’t make the cut. (The last two, though very troubled, are in fact independent today.)

How are these ten entities faring today? It’s a mixed bag.

Four of them are the result of the “frozen conflicts” in the zones of contention between newly-formed states that emerged in the wake of the disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1991.

Transnistria, largely Russian and Ukrainian in ethnicity, broke away from Romanian-majority Moldova in 1992. In the Caucasus, Armenian-majority Nagorno-Karabakh declared its independence from Azerbaijan, a Muslim Azeri state, after a war that ended in 1994.

Chechnya tried to free itself from Russia, and the Abkhazians demanded their freedom after Georgia become a separate country.

Nagorno-Karabakh survives due to its support from neighbouring Armenia. The conflict heats up occasionally, most recently last April, when dozens of Azeri and Armenian soldiers died in a flare-up of hostilities.   

Abkhazia, which emerged as a country after a war with Georgia in 1993-1994, has become stronger following the abortive attempt by the Georgians to recapture it, and also Russian-majority South Ossetia, another secessionist area, in 2008.

Moscow quickly came to their aid and defeated Georgia’s aspirations to reunify its former territory as a Soviet republic.

As for Chechnya, after two bloody wars against Russia in 1994-1996 and 1999-2000, it has slid backwards and is now a satrapy ruled by a warlord, Ramzan Kadyrov, who governs the ethnic republic with the blessing of Russian president Vladimir Putin.

In the Balkans, the Republika Srpska, Kosovo and Montenegro all emerged from the detritus of the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s.

The Republika Srpska is the Serbian region of Bosnia-Herzegovina, the loose federation that is also home to Croats and Muslim Bosniaks. Since the end of the war in Bosnia in 1995, it is a virtually autonomous region in a failed state paralyzed by ethnic conflict.

Albanian-majority Kosovo, wrested from Serbia with help from NATO in the 1999 war of secession, declared formal independence in 2008. However, Serbia continues to claim it and a Russian veto keeps it out of the United Nations. Montenegro, on the other hand, parted ways with Serbia peacefully in 2006. It is in the United Nations and has applied for membership in the European Union.

The Mediterranean island of Cyprus has been partitioned since 1974 between the officially recognized Republic of Cyprus, in effect a Greek jurisdiction, and the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus.

Tensions between the two have eased since the island was admitted to the European Union in 2004, although the EU legislation is suspended in Northern Cyprus.

The Palestinians remain enmeshed in the seemingly intractable conflict with Israel and now administer two semi-sovereign statelets which are often at odds with each other.

One of them, the West Bank, ruled by the Palestine Liberation Organization, is mired in corruption; the other, Gaza, under the control of Hamas, is a hotbed of ideological Islamism.

Somaliland in the horn of Africa remains a beacon of stability within the anarchic vacuum that is Somalia since 1991. Nonetheless, though it is a democratically governed country which has run free elections since 2003, and also a rare development success story, no one has recognized it.

In the Pacific, the island of Bougainville, part of the Solomon Islands archipelago, tried to free itself from Papua New Guinea in a civil war that ended in 1999. But, though now an autonomous part of that country, it may yet re-emerge as a state after a scheduled 2019 referendum.