Category: Independence Days

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Belarus – Independence Day

July 3

“After 60 years of peaceful life, Chernobyl, dismantling of the USSR, 14 years of sovereignty, still WWII remains a major emotional rift in the Belarusian soul.”
http://www.belarusguide.com/history1/WWII_partisan_resistance_in_Belarus.htm
“We want the peaceful sky not to know the fire of war” — My Dear Motherland, station designator of Belarusian Radio
Belarus as we know it today declared its independence from the Soviet Union on July 27, 1990, and became the Republic of Belarus the following year.
But the country celebrates Independence Day on July 3, in memory of the liberation of its capital city Minsk from Nazi forces in 1944.
We know all about D-Day on June 6th and the liberation of Paris on August 25th that year, but at that same time, the Soviet Union was conducting an equally pivotal advance against German forces.
The Belorussian Strategic Offensive Operation (Operation Bagration, named for a 19th century Georgian general) was “the most calamitous defeat of all the German armed forces in World War II” according to Bagration 1944 author Steven Zaloga. (http://books.google.com/books?id=1DAYmRrJTDAC&dq=operation+bagration&as_brr=3&client=safari&source=gbs_navlinks_s)
Operation Bagration began on June 22, 1944, exactly three years after the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union. The Soviets successfully used a bevy of ploys to confuse the Germans about their plan of attack, and borrowed a page from the Nazi military playbook…
“A Soviet force of one and quarter million men punched a two-hundred-mile hole in the German front between Ostrov and Kovel…ironically having mastered enveloping tactics once used by the Germans themselves.”
In just over a week, the Red Army crossed the Berezina River. Three days later, on July 3, 1944, they liberated the Belorussian capitol of Minsk.
“…as the Russians crossed Belorussia, they encountered a ‘desert zone’ with a million houses burned, crops deliberately ploughed under, and no evidence of livestock.”
According to Pravda…
Every fourth citizen of Belarus was killed in the war.
http://english.pravda.ru/world/ussr/03-07-2009/107933-belarus-0

Our Bloody History –

belarusguide.com

http://www.belarusguide.com/as/history/history.htmJuly 3

 

 

 

“After 60 years of peaceful life, Chernobyl, dismantling of the USSR, 14 years of sovereignty, still WWII remains a major emotional rift in the Belarusian soul.”

— Partisan Resistance in Belarus During World War II

Belarus declared its independence from Russia on March 25, 1918 (an independence which lasted about 10 months) and again from the Soviet Union on July 27, 1990. But Belarus celebrates neither of those dates as its official independence day. Instead, the festivities of July 3rd commemorate the liberation of Belarus’s capital city of Minsk from Nazi forces in 1944.

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We know all about D-Day on June 6th, 1944 and the liberation of Paris that summer, but simultaneously the Soviet Union’s Red Army conducted an equally pivotal advance against German forces.

The Belorussian Strategic Offensive Operation (Operation Bagration, named for a 19th century Georgian general) was “the most calamitous defeat of all the German armed forces in World War II” according to Bagration 1944 author Steven Zaloga.

Operation Bagration began on June 22, 1944, exactly three years after the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union. The Soviets successfully used a bevy of ploys to confuse the Germans about their plan of attack, and borrowed a page from the Nazi military playbook…

“A Soviet force of one and quarter million men punched a two-hundred-mile hole in the German front between Ostrov and Kovel…ironically having mastered enveloping tactics once used by the Germans themselves.” — Michael Burleigh, The Third Reich

In just over a week, the Red Army crossed the Berezina River. Three days later, on July 3, 1944, they liberated the Belorussian capitol of Minsk.

“…as the Russians crossed Belorussia, they encountered a ‘desert zone’ with a million houses burned, crops deliberately ploughed under, and no evidence of livestock.” (Burleigh)

According to Pravda, “Every fourth citizen of Belarus was killed in the war.”

The division among Belorussians referred to in the opening quote stems from the notion that World War II was merely one occupation replaced by another. Prior to the Nazi invasion in 1941, the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin conducted mass executions in Belarus—the mass graves from which were uncovered in the 1980s. In 1986 the Chernobyl Disaster and the Soviet Union’s initial denial of the nuclear accident fueled the flame of nationalism and independence once more.

Our Bloody History – belarusguide.com

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Statehood Day – Croatia & Slovenia

June 25


Like a family of members forced to live under one roof through most of the 20th century, the states that made up Yugoslavia had little in common but rivalries. Forged in the wake of World War I, the country was initially known as the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes. The Kingdom of Yugoslavia, as it was later called, was dismantled after the Nazi invasion of 1941.

The country rose from the ashes of World War II as Democratic Federal Yugoslavia. Then as Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. (The Democratic thing didn’t work out too well.) Yugoslavia—the union of Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia, Macedonia, Montenegro, and Bosnia & Herzegovina—held together during the post-War period largely due to the iron will of one man, Josep Tito, the country’s president from 1953 to 1980.

Tito didn’t get along with Stalin. Because Yugoslavia’s Socialist revolution wasn’t thrust upon it by the Soviet Union, but was home-grown, Yugoslavia’s Communist Party wasn’t dependent upon the Soviets. They didn’t look at Stalin as a national hero. Relations with the Soviets soured after Yugoslavia refused to compromise its independence and merge with Bulgaria, as the Soviet Union requested. And throughout the Cold War, Yugoslavia remained neutral.

In 1980 President Tito’s death left a power vacuum that would never be filled. In the late 80’s, ethnic tensions broke out in Kosovo and across the separate states.

Tensions came to a head in June 1991 when, following a Croatian referendum, Croatia and Slovenia announced their intentions to break away from the union. Both states declared their independence on June 25th of that year. Though Slovenia’s declaration met with some violence, Croatia’s erupted into a full scale war. The former Yugoslavia became the site of one of the bloodiest European conflicts since the end of the World War II.

Today—June 25—Croatia and Slovenia, the Yugoslav fraternal twins, celebrate their birthdays.

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Russia Day

June 12

In the grand saga of the Russian Empire, Russia Day is a relatively new holiday, eagerly burrowing into the Russian consciousness to create roots and establish traditions.

In the early 1990’s it was known as “Russian Independence Day”. June 12th marks the day in 1990 that the Congress of People’s Deputies of the Soviet Russian Republic declared independence from the Soviet Union.

The irony that Russia declared independence from an entity to which it was virtually synonymous in the eyes of the world was not lost on the Russians. So in 1994, the holiday name was changed to “Day of the Declaration of the Sovereignty of the Russian Federation” for clarification, which was ultimately more confusing than the first name.

Finally, in an uncharacteristic Russian push for brevity, Vladimir Putin shortened it to Russia Day in 2002, and the name has stuck.

One Russia Day tradition is the handing out of the “Russia Medals” for achievements in science and culture. But the rituals that seem to have made the biggest headway are sports and racing.

Marathons, drag races and motorcycle stunt competitions will bring Moscow traffic to a stop today. Several running and motoring races take place today, including the final leg of the 1,151 kilometer “Golden Ring” race which finishes up just outside the Kremlin, and the “drifting” contests where drivers basically treat their cars like big roller skates. The weekend also hosts the “Call of Russia” Tournament, the Independence Cup, and the Moscow Sailing Cup.

In general though, the populace has yet to rally around June 12th as a symbol of what it means to be Russian.

“…for some people, June 12 signifies a tragedy because it marks the end of a glorious Soviet era. And for others, the date means nothing at all. What a fitting date for a state holiday!” — Boris Kagarlitsk, Moscow Times

But I love Russia Day if, for nothing else, it gives me an excuse to post one of my favorite pictures.

Russian_joy

A Sporting Russia Day – The Moscow News

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Tonga – Emancipation Day

June 4

It would be hard to describe Tonga in a word, but you could do worse than  ‘exceptional’. Over the past two hundred years, the remote archipelago has stubbornly been the exception in the Pacific rather than the norm.

Though it was a British protectorate until 1970, Tonga is the only Pacific island nation never to have been formerly colonized. It’s the only nation in the region continuously governed by its indigenous population. And it’s the last Polynesian monarchy, making it one of only five members of the Commonwealth of Nations to have its own monarch.

Located about 3,000 kilometers east of Australia, Tonga consists of 171 islands.

Tonga is one of the smallest countries in the world, both in terms of area and population. At 747 sq. km, its landmass is roughly one-tenth the size of Los Angeles County and it has 1/100th the population.

Its life expectancy is 73–quite long for the region. And for our Moscow readers, the lowest temperature ever recorded in Tonga was 48 F/8.7 C.

That’s not to say Tonga is without problems. In addition to widespread poverty, public demands for reducing royal power have met stiff resistance. And its not hard to see why. Over the past two hundred years, Tonga’s monarchs have been the core force in maintaining its highly autonomous status and development.

Tonga has been inhabited since about 2500 BC. Oral history recalls the sovereign line dating back a thousand years. But there are no written records of Tongan history before Captain Cook’s landings in the 1770s. Cook called the place the “Friendly Islands” based on the population’s hospitality and his positive exchanges with the locals.

King George Tupou I

The first king of Tonga as we recognize it today was King George Tupou I. Tupou is believed to have been born in 1793. As a chieftain, he consolidated power over the disparate island groups.

“From a small, disputed inheritance in the Ha’apai group in 1820, his ambition to reunite Tonga after its civil wars which had begun in the 1780s led him first to the conquest of Ha’apai in 1826; he secured the inheritance of Vava’u in 1833, and the inheritance of the Tu’i Kanokupolu title which nominally gave him Tongatapu in 1845, and thus made him king of all Tonga.”

— The Alleged Imperialism of George Tupou I. Campbell, I.C. Journal of Pacific History

He had abolished serfdom in Vava’u—part of Tonga—back in the 1830s. In 1862 he took two more extraordinary steps. Not only did he create a parliamentary system of government, he also…

“…abolished the system of semi-serfdom that had previously existed and established an entirely alien system of land tenure whereby every Tongan male, upon reaching the age of 16, was entitled to rent for life at a nominal fee a plot of bush land (api) of 8.25 acres, plus a village allotment of about three-eighths of an acre for his home.”

— Landfalls of Paradise

For these and more sweeping changes, the first modern king is Tonga’s national hero. The anniversary of the Tupou’s coronation in 1875 is celebrated in December, but June 4 is Tonga’s National Day. It remembers both the anniversary of the the abolishment of serfdom in 1862 and the end of Tonga’s status as a British protectorate over a century later.

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Azerbaijan – and other names I have gone by

May 28

Azerbaijanis have been celebrating May 28 as Independence Day for the past 90 years–with a brief intermission during that whole 70-year Soviet occupation thing.

After the collapse of the Russian Empire in 1917 Azerbaijan joined ranks with Armenia and Georgia to form the Transcaucasian Democratic Federative Republic. Faced with the reality that no one could remember their quindeci-syllabic name, the trio split the following year, and Azerbaijan became the independent nation we know today.

For two years.

Then in 1920 the Bolshevik Red Army overthrew the Islamic world’s first democratic republic. Vaporizing the autonomy of the newborn Azerbaijani Parliament, the Bolsheviks also sadistically cursed Azerbaijan (together with Georgia and Armenia) with the name “the Transcaucasian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic”. Even the Soviets had to admit the cruelty of this name, and shortened it (slightly) to the Azerbaijan SSR (Soviet Socialist Republic) in the 1930s.

During the 23 months Azerbaijan had been an independent democratic republic, it granted women’s suffrage–preceding the U.S. and U.K.–and gave women equal political rights as men.

In January 1990 Soviet troops killed 132 demonstrators in the Azerbaijani capital of Baku. The following year during the turmoil of the Soviet Union’s collapse, Azerbaijan formerly declared its re-independence. One of its first acts as was to chose to celebrate the May 28–the date of its 1918 proclamation of independence–as its Republic Day.

The first years of the country’s independence were marred by the ongoing Nogorno-Karabakh War, a territorial war with neighboring Armenia. Atrocities ran deep on both sides; in 1992 the Armenian army allegedly killed over 600 Azerbaijanis in the town of Khojaly. All told, approximately 10,000 Azerbaijanis were killed in the war between 1988 and 1994, and nearly 30,000 were wounded.

93% of Azerbaijan’s 8 million people are Muslim. Freedom of religion is written into the Constitution.

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Timor of the Rising Sun

O mundo é dos audazes. Timor triunfará!

— Jorge Heiter

East Timor (now Timor-Leste) is the eastern half of a small island–conveniently named ‘Timor’–southeast of Indonesia. ‘Timor’ actually means East, or Rising Sun, so technically it’s ‘East East’.

Timor-Leste is one of two Catholic countries in Asia, the other being the Philippines; and the only Asian country where Portuguese is a second language.

For over 400 years the Portuguese ruled East Timor as a colony, until a 1975 coup d’etat in Portugal ushered in an era of de-colonialization. With a destabilized government, fighting broke out between two Timorese political parties, one of which allied themselves with Indonesia. (Indonesia occupied the western half of Timor.) The other party, FRETILIN, unilaterally declared East Timor an independent nation on November 28, 1975.

That independence was short lived.

The following week the Indonesian military, under President Suharto, began one of the most brutal, and one of the most ignored, invasions and occupations of the second half of the 20th century.

The United Nations condemned the invasion, but took no further action. Indonesia justified the invasion by claiming that the artificial border that split the island was the result of European imperialism and political oppression. (The Dutch had once occupied West Timor.)

Constancio was a young boy at the time of the invasion. Like many others, he and his family fled to the jungle, where he witnessed friends and family die from illness and starvation. All the while the Indonesian air force continued bombing from above. After several months he was captured and interred in a make-shift concentration camp that was worse than the mountainous jungle.

“There were thousands of people in a small area that was infested by mosquitoes and with no running water, no food. At least 15 people died every day.”

The island was effectively cut off from the rest of the world; it is estimated that of a population of 700,000, up to 100,000 Timorese died in the first 5 years of occupation.

After being released, Constancio became a servant to an Indonesian police officer in Dili. He gained entrance to a private school and became active in a students’ movement for an independent East Timor.

In 1991 Constancio helped organize a demonstration protesting the murder of Sebastiao Gomes, a 22 year-old killed in a church the month before. As over 3,000 unarmed demonstrators converged on the cemetery where Gomes was buried, Indonesian troops opened fire using American-made M16s. He recalled…

“We didn’t think they would open fire with United Nations observers and journalists being there.“

Over 250 Timorese were killed; 200 more ‘disappeared’ in the following military crackdown. What separated the massacre of Santa Cruz from previous atrocities was that it was documented by Australian media, one of the few events on the otherwise isolated island to be so. The massacre at Santa Cruz became a rallying point for supporters of Timorese independence.

With a little less luck, Constancio might have been one of the disappeared, but he was tipped off by an inside friend who warned him not to go home that night when the secret police were waiting for him.

Constancio escaped to the western half of the island with the aid of friends, false papers, and money to bribe an Indonesian official to issue him a passport to Singapore.

He never took a moment of his freedom for granted. Traveling to Portugal and the U.S., he spread awareness of the situation in East Timor. In 1993 he matriculated to Brown University and he continued speaking across the U.S. about his life, the East Timor people, and the horrors he had seen.

In 1996, two of his countrymen Jose Ramos-Horta and Bishop Ximenes Belo, won the Nobel Peace Prize for their efforts at ending the violence in East Timor, bringing international attention to the fate of the small island.

In the late 1990s the determination of Timorese like Pinto, Ramos-Horta, and Ximenes Belo, as well Australian journalists like Allan Naird, met with help from an unlikely source. The crash of the Asian markets in 1997 destabilized Indonesia, and the ensuing recession forced President Suharto to call an end to his 30-year reign in May 1998. Dependent on foreign support during the financial crisis, the new President gave in to the international community’s demands for an election in East Timor.

On August 30, 1999, East Timor voted overwhelmingly for independence from Indonesia. But even after the election, paramilitary groups continued attacks on unarmed civilians in an attempt to provoke widespread violence and justify the need for Indonesian peacekeepers. Despite provocation, the Timorese kept their side of the peace.

Under international pressure, the last Indonesian troops left East Timor on October 31, 1999.

On this day in 2002 Timor-Leste became the first newly-independent nation of the 21st century.

Timor Com Dor e Com Amor

Flight from East Timor: Student works from Brown base toward freedom for his homeland – Richard Morin

East Timor and the International Community – Heike Krieger

The Future of East Timor

The Path out of Poverty

Instability Sours Timor Celebration

I have come a long way, but East Timor has come further

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Independence Day – Paraguay

May 15

Today, May 15, is Paraguay’s Independence Day.

The Rio Paraguay winds across 1500 miles of Brazil, Paraguay and Argentina. Its both the source and outlet for the Pantanal wetlands, the largest tropical wetlands in the world, and, due to its Amazonian neighbor, one of the most overlooked.

The river divides Paraguay in half, giving the country it’s name and its lifeblood. Paraguay is a landlocked country, one of only two in South America. Like the Pantanal wetlands, Paraguay has been overlooked by the world in favor of its larger and more accessible neighbors like Brazil, Peru, and Argentina.

The first European to reach the Paraguay River (and live to tell the tale) was Alejo Garcia. After being shipwrecked on the coast of Brazil he lived for 8 years with a tribe who told him of a great “White King” out West on a mountain of silver. Garcia traveled inland to what is now Paraguay, where he recruited 2000 Guarani to fight who would turn out to be the Incas. They stole vast amounts of gold and silver from the Empire, but Garcia was killed on the way back to Brazil.

Word of the city of silver and gold intrigued the Spanish, who initially took interest in Paraguay as a centerpoint of their South American empire. But interest in the area around Asuncion soon waned in favor of Lima and Buenos Aires.

“Madrid preferred to avoid the intricacies and the expense of governing and defending a remote colony that had shown early promise but ultimately proved to have dubious value.”

Map of Paraguay

The settlers elected the Basque Domingo Martinez de Irala governor of the colony. Irala was considered a humane leader and a tough governor, who gained the respect of both the natives and the colonists. But he conceded to settlers’ demands for the parceling of land and conscripted Indian labor to the settlers, a system which eventually degenerated into near-slavery conditions.

Elsewhere in South America this system yielded profits for the Spanish government. But Paraguay was not a farming society like Peru. The Guarani were hunter/gatherers, not farmers.

Friction increased between the descendants of the settlers and the Spanish government. Spain’s economic policies and consistent downgrading of Paraguay’s importance deepened the colony’s impoverishment. In 1617 when the colony was split into two–Asuncion and Buenos Aires–Paraguay lost control of the throughway to the Atlantic via the Rio de la Plata.

There was also friction between the landowning Mestizos and the Jesuit missionaries. For 150 years the Jesuits organized the Indians to block the attempts at forced labor. In the 1720s the Paraguayans rebelled against pro-Jesuit Spanish leaders, and the Jesuits were eventually expelled.

To the Paraguayans, the final blow came in 1776 when Spain officially put Paraguay under control of Buenos Aires and Argentina.

The Napoleonic Wars hit Spain hard in 1808. Spain lost the ability to control its colonies, and in 1810 Argentina overthrew the Spanish government in Buenos Aires. The Paraguayans followed suit on May 14, 1811 with a coup that overthrew the Spanish governor and affirmed the separation between Paraguay and Argentina.

The following day the new government elected its first president, 45 year-old Gaspar Rodriguez de Francia.

Cultures of the World: Paraguay

Paraguay: Independence and Dictatorship

Paraguay Chooses Between Firsts

South American Travels, by Henry Stephens, 1915

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Zimbabwe Independence Day

April 18


Happy Independence Day, Zimbabwe!

Okay, well, maybe not so happy.

A quick scan of the blogosphere headlines reveals:

and my favorite:

According to the first article,

“Independence followed a seven-year war between nationalist blacks and the white-minority regime that left 27,000 people dead. Robert Mugabe was sworn in as president in 1980 and has maintained his grip on power ever since.”

— Louise Dunne, Radio Netherlands Worldwide

“The first decade, 1980 to 1990 was superb for everyone, there was an independence euphoria, things were moving. Then 1990 to 2000, people started looking at what they had actually achieved from independence, scrutinising things like corruption. And then after the land reform in 2000, things just went down”.

— Charles Rukuni, Zimbabwe journalist

Zimbabwe is a land-locked African nation sandwiched between Zambia, Botswana, Mozambique, and South Africa.

Zimbabwe was once called Rhodesia, named after the British dude ‘Cecil’.  According to “Disability, Liberation, and Development” by Peter Coleridge…

“The Rhodesian colonial system was geared primarily for the benefit of a white minority for whom ‘the whole economic system on the farms as well as in the mines, rested on a cheap and plentiful supply of native labour.'”

Sadly, as the above quote suggests, they didn’t even know how to spell labor. Education was a big problem back then, and the disparity was rampant. Rhodesia spent ten times as many education dollars on whites than on blacks.

Fortunately, after gaining independence, the government poured vast resourced into the education system, allocating “22 per cent of its budget to education, which it declared to be the birthright of every Zimbabwean. (This compares with an education budget of around 2 per cent in Britain in the same period.)”

The school population more than tripled between 1979 and 1989. Sounds like a great idea, except, as Coleridge points out, “the downside of educating so many people so suddenly is that there are very few jobs.”

In other words, you pretty much need a Ph.D. to work at Coco’s now.

Zimbabwe also suffers from hyperinflation. It made news in early 2009 when the government printed what may be the world’s first $100 trillion bills. A 1 with 14 zeroes in case you were wondering.

Don't spend it all at once

But if you find one on the street, don’t go on a spending spree. It was worth about $30. Shortly thereafter, the government changed the currency system by removing 12 zeroes from the dollar, so that $1 trillion now equalled $1 Zimbabwean. Though it saved a lot of zeroes, it was a moot point, as Zimbabweans stopped accepting/using the ZD and now use foreign currencies for transactions.

Some blame President Robert Mugabe for the country’s problems, but to be fair, he has only been in charge of the country for the past three decades.

President Mugabe’s life is the stuff of legend. Born in 1924, he was a leader of the independence movement. He spent 11 years in prison for speaking out against the colonial government, during which time he earned three degrees, including a law degree. After independence, in which he played an instrumental part, he was elected the country’s first Prime Minister, and later President.

Since then however, his critics insist his reign has exhibited symptoms of Saturday Night Live skit syndrome. A good idea gone on about 20 years too long.

“On this day I am hoping for change, especially for the president…He is not going to go on and on. The talks must end now so we can vote.”

— Fanuel Chikwakwaire, Zimbabwe citizen (Mugabe rejects violence as Zimbabwe celebrates Independence)