The lighter side of secessionism

There has been plenty of serious discussion from all quarters - not to mention overblown posturing from some - about Kosovo's declaration of independence. Heck, even here at Scraps of Moscow I have been unable to resist posting on the subject from time to time (though not because it should necessarily have any relevance or precedential value for the resolution of the other unresolved conflicts). But there is also a lighter side to the struggle of unrecognized states, de facto states, microstates and other secessionist entities for legitimacy.

For example, shortly after Kosovo's "UDI," snarky DC gossip site Wonkette - in a tongue-in-cheek style which was intended to ape American provincialism but really just confirms a sort of knowing indifference which may be worse than ignorance - posted a rundown of the other spots on the globe vying to be next:

The Foreigns Present: Your Guide To The Hellholes

Those crazy Kosovars! Their little declaration of independence has caused quite the shitstorm — not just among the great powers who are wrangling over whether to recognize them or not, but among the world’s other pissant quasi-countries, who are mad that they didn’t get to do it first....This week, The Foreigns will take you on a tour of the world’s saddest unrecognized not-countries.

The territories profiled were "TRANSNISTRIA: Come for the heroin, stay for the whores"; "NORTHERN CYPRUS: Maybe this 'independence' thing wasn’t such a hot idea"; "SOMALILAND: Proving that 'hellhole' is a relative term"; "ABKHAZIA AND SOUTH OSSETIA: Sometimes pawns are just happy to be in the game"; and "WESTERN SAHARA FREE ZONE: Sand, sand sand!"

The highlights of the comments section:

Bill Clinton: "Transnistria? I think I caught that from a New Orleans hooker once."

And:

"because nothing could possibly go wrong for you when your enormous neighbor is playing games with your sovereignty for its own larger geopolitical purposes!"

Huh. I have that EXACT phrase on my license plate holder.

But the real impetus for this rundown was not a month-and-a-half-old Wonkette post. No, it was my good fortune in happening upon a hilarious episode of Family Guy entitled E Peterbus Unum. Here is Wikipedia's plot synopsis:

Peter declares his house to be the new microstate of "Petoria." He spends a night in Quahog insulting Horace (at The Druken Clan) and bringing beer out into the streets, stepping on grass that can't be touched, and violating numerous laws such as littering, sexual harassment, and vandalism. He flaunts his diplomatic immunity by singing a parody of MC Hammer's song "U Can't Touch This" and mentions that he can’t be sued by Hammer.

Snubbed at the United Nations, Peter follows the advice of a diplomat from Iraq and annexes Joe's pool, calling it "Joe-hio." Days later, when Chris tries to go to school, he is turned away because the US Army surrounds and blockades the nation of Petoria with tanks and missiles as part of "Operation: Desert Clam." Further, all electricity and water has been cut and Lois home schools the kids.

Sadly, this is not one of the few Family Guy episodes that have been made available on the TV companies' new video site Hulu. But you can watch MC Hammer parody, "U Can't Touch Me," on YouTube, at least for now:

The idea of being "untouchable" - more commonly known as immunity - as well as a general bad-ass complex, seems like it could be common among the leaders of would-be states. The Family Guy parody calls to mind a story I heard from someone who'd had occasion to meet with Igor Smirnov, the de facto leader of Transnistria. Apparently Smirnov keeps a safe full of gold coins in his office, and when he wants to convince his interlocutor of the fact that he is both independent of Russia and not susceptible to Western inducements, he shows off his hoard.

The last bit of comic relief I wanted to share is about Kosovo, from a Wall Street Journal article last week:

Freedom's Ring: Kosovo Covets A Dialing Code

By CHRISTOPHER RHOADS
March 27, 2008; Page A1

Kosovo, which a month ago declared independence from Serbia, is working on a constitution. One problem: On the front page of the latest draft, the government phone number is Serbian.

....Kosovo has a problem, because it isn't a member of the U.N., and only countries that are can get their own dialing codes. So, land-line calls into Kosovo still must use the exchange, +381, of a group that many Kosovars detest: the Serbs.

"Every country's independence rests on certain pillars," says Anton Berisha, chief telecom regulator of Kosovo, a land of two million a little larger than Delaware. "One of them is a country dialing code."

Matters so mundane aren't usually considered the stuff of patriotic fervor. But in Kosovo during the past tumultuous decade, the battle for telephone autonomy has led to the ouster of the head of a telecom company, the dismantling of cell towers built by a Serbian company and two assassination attempts, one using a rocket launcher.

"I was not prepared for this kind of debate," says Mr. Berisha, the target of both attacks, which occurred last year. He now travels only with police escort.

In fact, dialing codes have figured in nationalist movements before, from the Palestinian territories and Taiwan to Catalonia and Sudan. "Even if it doesn't make sense, people are attaching more weight to having a dialing code," says Richard Hill, whose duties include distributing dialing codes as an official at a U.N. body in Geneva, the International Telecommunication Union, or ITU.

For those of a nationalistic bent, Mr. Hill says, a dialing code can be as meaningful as a flag, a national anthem or a team in the Olympics. He declines to comment on the Kosovo situation.

Without permission from the ITU, the Palestinian phone company has struck agreements with phone companies in sympathetic Arab countries to connect calls through the Palestinian company's unofficial code, +970. Previously, calls to the Palestinian territories connected only through the Israeli dialing code, +972, which is still used by callers from many Western countries.

As for Taiwan, as it emerged as an economic power in the 1980s, it began using an unassigned calling code, +886. Taiwan, too, persuaded some foreign phone companies to send along calls with the number it preferred. The move defied China, which has long claimed Taiwan and had assigned it a regional phone prefix as a Chinese province. After years of negotiations, the ITU in 2006 officially assigned the +886 exchange to Taiwan, while still listing the island as part of China.

Foreign Exchange

Dialing codes carried little of this political baggage in the late 1950s and early 1960s, when they first grew in use and became standardized, according to Mark Cuccia, a retired library worker in Lafayette, La., who tracks phone numbers as a hobby. Creating a single list of dialing codes made it easier for international operators to connect calls, since countries often had unique phone systems.

In the 1990s, political events turned dialing codes "into a big phenomenon," Mr. Cuccia says.

The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and disintegration of Yugoslavia in the early '90s led to a scramble for dialing codes by new states eager to underscore their independence. Tiny European states like Andorra and Liechtenstein, which had long shared the dialing codes of their bigger neighbors, felt compelled to get their own codes, too. Just last year, Montenegro, a former Yugoslav republic that's now independent, was granted +382.

The struggle for a Kosovo dialing code dates to as early as 1999. Bombing led by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization had just expelled Serb forces from Kosovo -- then a Serbian province -- and placed Kosovo under U.N. supervision.

The U.N. mission ousted the head of the Kosovo telecom operator after he bitterly opposed awarding a mobile-phone license to Monaco Telecom. His problem: Although the Monaco company had essential international roaming agreements, using the company would mean using Monaco's dialing code.

The disgruntled chief of the local telecom operator, which is called PTK, had wanted a bidder with no dialing code, so he could agitate for Kosovo's own code. But, a U.N. official told reporters at the time, PTK needed a solution that "would actually allow people to make phone calls."

Monaco Telecom began to charge PTK tens of millions of dollars in annual fees to handle Kosovar wireless calls. The deal meant that people abroad who called a cellphone user in Kosovo had to use Monaco's +377 exchange.

But that was still better than using a Serbian carrier, in the eyes of many ethnic Albanians, who are about 90% of Kosovo's population. Ethnic Serbs in Kosovo, most of whom live near the border with Serbia, can pick up signals from a Serbian carrier.

In 2005, a Kosovar delegation visited the ITU in Geneva to argue that Kosovo should get its own code, says Etrur Rrustemaj, a PTK official in the delegation who later served as chief executive officer of PTK.

Unsuccessful, Mr. Rrustemaj turned his attention instead to dismantling antennas installed by a Serbian wireless carrier in the Kosovo capital of Pristina, including one atop a PTK building.

He was careful not to destroy the antennas, just unplug them. "If I took them down, I'd be in jail for attacking minorities," he says.

In February of last year, after a muddled bidding process for Kosovo's second mobile-phone license, Kosovo declared the winner to be Slovenia Telekom. Mr. Berisha, the telecom regulator who oversaw the auction, had to consider foreign bidders, since Kosovo doesn't have its own dialing code.

Bullets Fly

One morning later that month, Mr. Berisha was riding in a car to work with his aunt and her daughter when gunmen emerged from the side of the road and opened fire on their car. No one was injured.

Just six weeks later, Mr. Berisha, by then commuting in a police vehicle with two armed officers, was attacked again. This time, one of the gunmen launched a rocket at the car. It didn't explode properly, and injured only the driver, he says.

One of the alleged attackers, later arrested, turned out to be an official of PTK, the local telecom operator. Mr. Berisha believes his attackers were upset that he had awarded a mobile-phone license to a Slovenian operator and at the prospect of new competition.

The solution, for nationalists who yearn for a Kosovo dialing code, would be U.N. recognition of Kosovo as an independent nation. But while the U.S. and more than 30 other countries recognize Kosovo's newly declared independence, U.N. membership is far from assured. Russia, which has a veto as a permanent Security Council member, has vowed to block it.

"We are forced to work with these mixed country codes, which has made our lives more difficult," says Mr. Berisha.