Unruly Places: Lost Spaces, Secret Cities, and Other Inscrutable Geographies

by Alastair Bonnett

  Thankfully not. Of course, enclaves are a serious problem in some parts of the world, as we shall see next in Chitmahals and observed earlier in Ağdam (see [>]). In fact, in a curious return to medievalism, they started emerging again in the 1990s as the USSR fell apart and some twenty new enclaves were created. More could follow. The likelihood of a world without borders is not high, and when we think of that world—a utopia of sameness where there is no possibility of escape—we might begin to wonder if it is an attractive destination. Baarle illustrates how creating places and creating borders are interwoven. It also provides an example of the pleasure of borders, hints at their playful and absurd side, and shows us how, in a topophobic world, the fascination of the border can be rediscovered and humanized.

  Chitmahals

  26° 16′ N, 89° 06′ E

  Chitmahals are the “paper palaces” of the India–Bangladesh border. A composite name, it combines the English word for a monetary slip—a chit—with the Hindi word for palace, “mahal.” Nearly two hundred of these enclaves are chaotically nestled in and around the border zone. They range in size from Balapara Khagrabari in Bangladesh, at 25.95 square kilometers, to Upan Chowki Bhaini, a counter-enclave (an enclave inside an enclave) and, at 53 square meters, one of the smallest enclaves in the world.

  Local folklore has it that the chitmahals are the result of aristocratic play. It is said that the chitmahals, which are often referred to by their Indian regional name of Cooch Behar, are spots of land won or lost in a chess game between the Maharajah of Cooch Behar and the Nawab of Rangpur in the early eighteenth century. A rival story pushes the date of their creation into the mid-twentieth century. In 1947, a drunk British cartographer is said to have knocked over his inkpot while finishing this tricky section of India’s provincial borders. All the specks and blotches had dried by morning and ended up as the world’s most pockmarked geopolitical landscape. While there’s no truth to the second legend, the first captures the key points. The chitmahals are indeed remnants of princely deal-making and favors dating from the early eighteenth century. But for most of their history they were far less sealed off than they became in the second half of the twentieth century. The creation of India, then Pakistan, and then Bangladesh turned the chitmahals from local anomalies into an international problem.

  Unlike Baarle-Nassau and Baarle-Hertog (see [>]), the 51,300 people who live in this geopolitical jungle don’t revel in their uniqueness. The chitmahals show what happens when borders subvert rather than foster people’s sense of place. The residents aren’t proud of their baroque borders, their numerous counter-enclaves (there are twenty-eight of them), or even having the world’s only counter-counter-enclave, which is called Dahala Khagrabari and consists of seven thousand square meters of India inside a Bangladeshi village, which sits inside an Indian enclave in Bangladesh. No one is interested in the curiosity value of all this because life inside the enclaves is grim. For the chitmahals are not places of tourism or creativity but of abandonment and imprisonment.

  Most of the enclaves have been left to fend for themselves, which means that the residents have had to build their own schools and bridges. Each enclave has had to come up with its own system of justice and enforcement and its own way of settling disputes about land ownership and just about everything else. It is anarchy, a self-governing society without government, and it means that children don’t get educated, roads and bridges are ramshackle, justice is meted out by the strong against the weak, and disputes between residents turn into vendettas. As a result, the villages look with envy at their neighbors, who live in places protected and ordered by states. As one thirty-eight-year-old who sits on one of the local councils that run many of the enclaves explains, “If there is a flood in Bangladesh, or any other country, relief will come. If we are surrounded by water we will have to die here. When it floods people are like prisoners surrounded by water.”

  The problems of the chitmahals are caused by too many borders preventing the state from functioning adequately. It turns out that when you cut off people, especially poor and vulnerable people, from the state, you inhibit rather than enable autonomy. The proof can be found within these blotchy borderlands. Their plight shook loose the last remnants of my anarchism, or at least the vague antistatism I quietly nurtured well into middle age. My cozy faith in community autonomy, shaken by the bleakness of Hobyo (see [>]), has been snuffed out by the chitmahals. Now when I read the nineteenth-century anarchist Mikhail Bakunin, I wince. “If there is a State, then there is domination, and in turn, there is slavery,” he claimed in 1873. And if there isn’t a state? It usually turns out to be worse.

  But it’s also true that the residents of the chitmahals have not been treated well by the states of India or Bangladesh. Their life has been made hard, cruelly so. Indeed, it could be said that their key problem is one manufactured by state bureaucracy. In order to leave these tiny enclaves, the inhabitants have to obtain a visa to travel through the foreign territory that surrounds them. But in order to obtain a visa they have to leave their enclave, since visas can only be obtained in cities many miles away. The consequences of this system have frequently been tragic. In 2010 a young woman called Jaimona Biwi, a resident of Mashaldanga village, a Bangladeshi enclave inside India, started to go into labor. She traveled to the hospital nearest to her chitmahal, but because she was not an Indian citizen the doctors refused to see her. “I was in unbearable pain but lay on the hospital floor for two days,” she explained to Indian journalists. “I bled profusely and delivered a stillborn child.” When she became pregnant again she relied on a local trick, hiring an Indian husband. But she is bitter: “He has taken 2,000 rupees from our family and has given his name in the hospital register as my husband.” Biwi’s words hint at the stigma that comes with living as political untouchables. One of the few Indians who has moved into Mashaldanga says, “In our area, no resident of an Indian village will marry a man or a woman who is from a chitmahal. Only if a family is very poor will they marry their daughter to someone from an enclave in exchange for a bride price.”

  It is hoped that recent moves by both countries to cede territory will soon allow the chitmahal problem to be resolved. A land exchange deal signed in 2011 should see most of the enclaves merging with the nation that surrounds them. When this finally comes to pass the number of enclaves in the world will plummet by 70 percent. They won’t be missed by many of the people who live in them, many of whom want to change nationality. This is partly a consequence of the fact that the chitmahals are largely populated by families who fled their own country. A seventy-year-old Indian Muslim in the Kajaldighi enclave, inside Bangladesh, interviewed by political geographer Reece Jones, recalled that he and his family came there in 1969 because “there was violent oppression of Muslims at that time in India. There was lots of fighting, killing, and extortion. We were threatened by local landlords. In order to preserve our respect, honor, and lives we fled. Everyone came.” He went on to say, “At that time everyone in the enclaves was Hindu. When we came here, they left.” This old man would be delighted if his enclave was absorbed into Bangladesh. But others are less happy about this prospect. The Indian Enclave Refugees’ Association has been formed to lobby for the right to “return” to India. This group asserts that “refugees” from the Indian enclaves in Bangladesh trying to return to India are treated as foreigners in their home country. They are spurned by India and denied the right to settle. One of the group’s spokesmen, Deb Singha, complains, “Dwellers of Bangladeshi enclaves in India will now be called ‘Indians’ and we, despite being Indians, don’t have that right.”

  The endgame for the chitmahals may be a messy business. And at each turn the states involved, rather than being helpful, have either turned a cold eye on the plight of these people or gone out of their way to make their lives a misery. The residents of the chitmahals experience a common predicament but in a uniquely stark form. These places are abandoned by the state but it’s the state that hounds them.
Their paper palaces are islands of freedom from the state but also prisons within it. The paradox remains that government is essential to our liberty but it also pushes us around and demands our subjugation. All of us live with this dilemma in some form; it is an expected facet of modern life that people both need the state yet resent it. Some manage to escape this uneasy relationship with the government by striking out on their own. But setting up a breakaway nation poses its own challenges.

  Sealand

  51° 53′ 40″ N, 1° 28′ 57″ E

  Wouldn’t it be fun to have your own island nation with your own laws? No matter how small, on an island your independence is tangible. Your borders are real and beyond doubt. With a bit of luck your kingdom will be unclaimed and there waiting for you, requiring you only to hop onshore, unfurl your flag, and claim sovereignty. Just like Sealand.

  The Principality of Sealand is an “independent state” that was established in 1967 by a retired British army major, “Paddy” Roy Bates, on an abandoned World War II gun platform. It is located on Rough Sands, off the Essex coast, and has an inhabitable area of 550 square meters. The platform was built in international waters and abandoned after the war, so when, on September 2, 1967, Bates and his family hauled themselves up the side of the old sea fort, they felt entitled to claim sovereignty. Bates bestowed upon himself and his wife the titles of Prince and Princess, and “the royal family” set about turning Sealand into both a home and a kingdom.

  Sealand is the best example of a sub-breed of the world’s numerous self-started nations, or micro-nations, called platform states. These maritime nations are often short-lived. Ernest Hemingway’s brother, Leicester Hemingway, was briefly president of the bamboo-platform republic of New Atlantis, off the west coast of Jamaica, anchored down by a railway axle and a Ford engine block. When this structure was destroyed in a hurricane in 1964, Hemingway created another such fiefdom, Tierra del Mar, an 840-square-meter platform built on a sandbar near the Bahamas. However, the US State Department persuaded him not to declare sovereignty; it was worried that Tierra del Mar could serve as a springboard for the annexation of nearby islands by unfriendly powers.

  Compared to such fragile endeavors, Sealand has a long and rich history. In 1968 the Royal Navy sent two gunboats to evict the Bates family. Roy Bates fired warning shots at them and was arrested. However, he managed to argue in court that British law did not apply to Sealand. In its judgment of November 25, 1968, the court declared that Sealand was outside of British national territory and hence jurisdiction. Flush with success, the Sealanders began to issue gold and silver coins, the Sealand dollar, and postage stamps. The sale of these collectors’ curiosities helped to finance the new kingdom. Passports were also issued, but whether these too were offered for sale is disputed. The next dramatic event in Sealand history came in 1978 when a group of Dutch and German businessmen visited with a commercial proposition. While they were there, they took the fortress at gunpoint, holding Roy Bates’s son and heir, Prince Michael, prisoner for three days. He was freed only after his father organized a counterattack. The Sealand News, the island’s online newspaper, reported Bates as saying, “We phoned a friend who owned a helicopter.” The story went on: “He’d performed stunts in James Bond films, but this was the first time he’d done it for real. ‘I descended from the helicopter to the platform with a gun, fired a shot and said: “Everyone put their hands up!” and that was that.’”

  There was plenty of gunfire but no injuries, and in true Bond style, the invaders were swiftly overpowered and taken as “prisoners of war.” When the German government asked Britain to intervene, it was told the fortress was beyond British jurisdiction. The prisoners were later released, after the arrival of a German diplomat. The first to be freed, though, were the Dutch citizens. The one German invader was held a little longer because, it was reasoned, he had accepted a Sealand passport and therefore was guilty of treason.

  Those were Sealand’s glory days. But most games, however serious, lose their excitement in the end, and the players drift off. Despite its military triumph, in the 1980s Sealand began to sink into disrepair and disuse. Its independence was also called into question when, in 1987, the UK extended its territorial waters from three to twelve miles. Sealand retaliated with its own twelve-mile claim, declaring the annexation of Harwich and Felixstowe on the English coast.

  Britain has made no attempt to take Sealand, and the British government still treats it as a de facto independent state. Prince Roy paid no British National Insurance during his time as a resident of Sealand. Moreover, the obvious infringements of UK law on Sealand continued to go unpunished. For example, when Roy Bates fired “warning shots” at a ship that he felt was straying too near his kingdom in 1990, the ship’s crew’s complaints were not pursued. In its official history of the new state, the Bates clan claims that this was “a clear indication that Britain’s Home Office still considers Sealand to be outside their zone of control.”

  Unfortunately, the buccaneering image of Sealand drifted into murkier waters in the 1990s. In 1997, after the killer of fashion designer Gianni Versace committed suicide on a Miami houseboat, the police discovered that the man who owned the houseboat had a Sealand passport. In the spring of 2000, Spanish police arrested a Madrid-based gang tied to international drug trafficking, money laundering, and selling forged documents. Found among its cache were thousands of Sealand passports. Questioned by Interpol, Roy Bates was adamant that the passports were not for sale. “Sealand has all been a game, an adventure, and it is very unfortunate to see it take this turn,” he told one reporter. The source of these forgeries was later traced to the same German man who had tried to take Sealand by force nearly twenty years earlier. Dubbing himself Sealand’s Minister of Finance, he had created a fake Sealand Business Foundation and boasted that he had sold more than 150,000 fake Sealand passports. The Sealand national website claimed that “many of the forged passports were sold to people leaving Hong Kong at the time of Chinese reoccupation, for USD 1,000 each.”

  The lease of Sealand to an Internet company, HavenCo, in 1999, compounded its tarnished image. Silicon Valley investors pumped in hundreds of thousands of dollars in seed money to turn Sealand into an off-limits Internet server and “fat-pipe data haven.” Child pornography, spamming, and malicious hacking were prohibited, but with no restrictions on copyright or intellectual property for data hosted on its servers, Sealand looked set to become a center for file sharing and other infringement activities. The injection of cash was used by the Bates family to secure the kingdom. A desalinization plant and new generators were installed, satellite connections were established, microwave links to Britain were rigged up, and miles of cables were laid. With the help of the extra cash Prince Michael also established a Sealand army and navy, with machine guns and high-speed dinghies. Despite all this, HavenCo’s customers soon began to thin out. What seems to have scared away most of them was the fact that all of Sealand’s Internet traffic went through Britain, which claimed that the platform was within its territorial waters. In 2008 HavenCo went bust, and the media was fed a story by Michael Bates that Sealand was up for sale, valued at 750 million euros. This appears to have been a ploy to drum up interest in a new leasing arrangement. With no new funds, Sealand became, in the late 2000s, once again uninhabited, and Prince Michael lives out his days in Leigh-on-Sea. This is also where his father spent his last days. Roy Bates died on October 9, 2012, at the age of ninety-one.

  Talking to the Sealand News, Joan Bates offered a romantic view of life on Sealand: “It’s been a fairytale. What greater compliment can a man pay to a woman than to make her Princess of her own Principality? I love being able to call myself Princess. When we travel abroad on our Sealand passports we are always greeted with a lot of fuss and treated like royalty.”

  It’s a fantasy that is immediately comprehensible. For those of us who are bored and frustrated by the endless rules and impersonal bureaucracies of conventional nations, the idea of c
reating one’s own island kingdom has tremendous appeal. Indeed, the most telling recent stories about Sealand concern the way it has been taken up as an icon by a new generation of eco-libertarian planners. The Seasteading Institute, founded in 2008 in California, looks to Sealand as a pioneer. The aim of the institute is plainly stated as “creating sustainable sea platforms where people can choose to live if they’re unsatisfied with life on solid ground.” Man-made sea kingdoms have a growing appeal, and something of that appeal is being captured in new islands built in the Maldives and Dubai, as well as in a new generation of cruise ships that are morphing into permanent sea-roving settlements. But the root of Sealand’s appeal takes us into terrain that these ventures still only hint at. It is the territory of independence, of sovereignty, of really having one’s own place. It may be a foolish fantasy, but it’s an important and very human one.

  United Kingdom of Lunda Tchokwe

  12° 39′ S, 20° 27′ E

  Although it is accompanied by a lot of polemic about fragmentation and crisis, the birth of new nations is an unstoppable and unending process. One of the reasons it has become a difficult and sensitive topic is that ethnicity is still central to most acts of nation-building. The widespread tendency to treat such ethnic claims as throwbacks consigns many embryonic nations to the geopolitical shadows. This is where the United Kingdom of Lunda Tchokwe languishes, ignored by the outside world yet ceaseless in its struggle.