Limbo World
They start by acting like real countries, then hope to become them.
Foreign Policy – JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2010
BY GRAEME WOOD

On my most recent visit to the Republic of Abkhazia, a country that
does not exist, I interviewed the deputy foreign minister, Maxim
Gundjia, about the foreign trade his country doesn’t have with the
real countries that surround it on the Black Sea. Near the end of our
chat, he paused, looked down at my leg, and asked why I was bleeding
on his floor. I told him I had slipped a few hours before and ripped a
hole in my shin, down to the bone, about the size of a one-ruble
coin. Blood had soaked through the gauze, and I needed stitches. "You
can go to our hospital, but you will be shocked by the conditions,"
Gundjia said. So he pointed me to the building next door, where in
about 20 minutes I had my leg propped up on a dark wooden desk and was
wincing at the sting of a vigorous alcohol-swabbing by the health
minister himself. I was not accustomed to such personalized government
service. Fake countries have to try harder, I thought, and wondered
whether it would be pressing my luck to ask for the finance minister
to personally refund my vat and for the transportation minister to
confirm my bus ticket back to Georgia, which is to say, back to
reality.
Abkhazia, along with a dozen or so other quasi-countries teetering on
the brink of statehood, is in the international community’s prenatal
ward. If present and past suggest the future, most such embryonic
countries will end stillborn, but not for lack of trying. The totems
of statehood are everywhere in these wannabe states: offices filled
with functionaries in neckties, miniature desk flags, stationery with
national logos, and, of course, piles of real bureaucratic paperwork
— all designed to convince foreign visitors like me that
international recognition is deserved and
inevitable. Nagorno-Karabakh, the Armenian separatist enclave within
Azerbaijan, issues visas with fancy holograms and difficult-to-forge
printing. Somaliland, the comparatively serene republic split from
war-wasted Somalia, prints its own official-looking currency, the
Somaliland shilling, whose smallest denomination is so worthless that
to bring cash to restock their safes, money-changers need to use draft
animals.
These quasi-states — which range from decades-old international
flashpoints like Palestine, Northern Cyprus, and Taiwan to more
obscure enclaves like Transnistria, Western Sahara, Puntland, Iraqi
Kurdistan, and South Ossetia — control their own territory and
operate at least semifunctional governments, yet lack meaningful
recognition. Call them Limbo World. They start by acting like real
countries, and then hope to become them.
In years past, such breakaway quasi-states tended to achieve
independence fast or be reassimilated within a few years (usually
after a gory civil war, as with Biafra in Nigeria). But today’s Limbo
World countries stay in political purgatory for longer — the ones in
this article have wandered in legal wilderness for an average of 15
years — representing a dangerous new international phenomenon: the
permanent second-class state.
This trend is a mess waiting to happen. The first worry is that these
quasi-states’ continued existence, and occasional luck, emboldens
other secessionists. Imagine a world where every independence movement
with a crate of Kalashnikovs thinks it can become the new Kurdistan,
if only it hires the right lobbyists in Washington and opens a
realistic-looking Ministry of Foreign Affairs in its makeshift
capital. The second concern is that these aspirant nations have none
of the rights and obligations of full countries, just ambiguous status
and guns without laws. The United Nations is, in the end, binary: You
are in or you are out, and if you are out, your mass-produced
miniature desk flag has no place in Turtle Bay.
My tours of Limbo World over the last few years have taken me around
the full spectrum of these enclaves, from the hopeless chatter of
virtual Khalistan, a Sikh separatist state that talks a big game and
has a president in exile, but not a postage stamp of actual land, to
the earnest dysfunction of Somaliland to the slick-running,
optimistically almost oil-state of Kurdistan. Each of these would-be
countries is, in its own way, an object lesson in the limits of
statehood.
They are also ghosts of war-zones future — most have enemies keen to
take back the breakaway territory — and past. They represent the wars
that time forgot, frozen in unresolved crisis because it is either too
convenient to keep them that way or too problematic for the Real World
countries on their borders to come to a more lasting solution. Limbo,
it turns out, is useful because it lets actual countries punish each
other by proxy and allows them to exact loyalty and tribute from the
quasi-countries dependent on their patronage. If Limbo status didn’t
exist, someone would invent it.
Unfortunately for these states, winning the full Rand-McNally, General
Assembly treatment is more difficult than merely hiring a
professional-quality printer to start cranking out the
passports. Carving land from other countries is nearly always bloody
and in most cases leaves borders that bleed for decades. Somaliland
and Abkhazia have existed for almost 20 years, with little indication
that widespread recognition is imminent. Indeed, the rare successful
cases these days of countries making the leap from troubled enclave to
independent nation have pretty much bypassed Limbo entirely. Think
East Timor and Kosovo, which jumped from brutal occupation to
U.N. administration to independence to become two of the first new
countries of the 2000s. The Limbo countries tend to start with
violence and then get stuck in the next stage: a path that leads on
and on and on, apparently to nowhere.
The Abkhazian case is typical. Abkhazia (pop. 190,000) occupies a
stretch of Georgia’s Black Sea coast, an area whose beaches, pine
forests, mountains, and lakes once attracted Soviet leaders Stalin,
Khrushchev, and Brezhnev for holidays. A war in the early 1990s
separated Abkhazia from Georgia, killing thousands on each side in the
first 13 months and sending 100,000 ethnic Georgians and Mingrelians
fleeing from their homes in Abkhazia.
Midwifing Abkhazia’s rebellion was Russia, the Abkhazians’ ally and
guarantor. Georgia was one of the ex-Soviet states most eager to
explore alliances with the West, and Abkhazia was Russia’s way to make
Georgia suffer for its infidelity. Russia sent support to Abkhazia,
opened the Abkhazian border for trade, and gradually took steps just
short of annexation. In 2006, it granted Russian passports to all
Abkhazians, and finally — once Abkhazia had become entirely reliant
on Russia — it became the first country to recognize Abkhazian
independence. According to Abkhazians, Georgia planned to invade in
the summer of 2008, and only an influx of Russian troops into Abkhazia
at the last minute led Georgia to make a play — ultimately doomed,
due to Russia’s surprisingly strong response — for South Ossetia,
another Russian client state inside Georgia, instead. The uneasy
standoff meant Russia never formally annexed Abkhazia from Georgia,
and in return the Abkhazians made sure the Russians never needed to
annex them, because they do Russia’s bidding anyway. This guarantee
has emboldened the Abkhazians, who taunt the Georgian army just across
the line of control. "The first Georgian soldier who crosses the
Inguri River will be shot," Gundjia vowed when I visited in the fall.
As the health minister, a lapsed dermatologist named Zurab Marshaniya,
rinsed the clotted blood from my leg, he sighed in frustration at his
government’s predicament. I told him how impressed I was at the pace
of Abkhazia’s return to its old Soviet status as a tourist
resort. When I last came to the Abkhazian capital of Sukhumi in 2006,
the one-time jewel of the boardwalk, the Hotel Abkhazia, was bombed
out and abandoned to weeds. Now it was half-repaired, and its rival,
the Ritsa Hotel, had opened its suites to the richest of Abkhazia’s 1
million annual visitors, nearly all of them Russian. (Ritsa’s Room
208, from whose balcony a vacationing Leon Trotsky addressed a crowd
on the occasion of Lenin’s death, goes for about $150 a night.)
Abkhazia’s hospitals may have been "shocking," but the city as a whole
looked no worse from the outside than a down-market cottage town on
Lake Superior. Marshaniya was all shrugs and said as long as Georgia
still intended to march back into Sukhumi, the gains were fragile.
In the meantime, Abkhazia’s foreign policy is based on courting anyone
who might recognize its sovereignty. Daniel Ortega’s government in
Nicaragua obliged in 2008, likely influenced by old Soviet ties, and
Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez formally acknowledged Abkhazia in
2009. Except for Russia, though, Abkhazia has no real formal
relations, and its diplomats are strictly limited in where they can
go. The United States, a close ally of Mikheil Saakashvili’s
government in Georgia, denies visa requests from Abkhazian government
officials, and other states such as India have been persuaded to do
the same.
That leaves Abkhazia represented instead by quirky volunteers like
George Hewitt, a professor at the University of London’s School of
Oriental and African Studies who has made a specialty of Abkhazia’s
culture and its language, Abkhaz, a linguistic freak show with 67
consonants and only one vowel. Hewitt knows Abkhaz as well as any
non-Abkhazian, and he writes impassioned and informed essays on the
Abkhazian question. But he is very much a scholar, not a political
strategist. I visited Hewitt before my first visit to Abkhazia in 2006
and asked whether he needed anything from Georgia, where he is
decidedly non grata. I thought he might like a book, or a postcard. He
said there had been calumnies against him in the Mingrelian-language
newspapers; could I investigate? Alas, I could not.
Encouraging states like Abkhazia to flourish and proliferate has
created precisely the kind of second-class statehood, with uncertain
rights and responsibilities in the international system, that
diplomacy was designed over the last several centuries to avoid. The
Peace of Westphalia established an international order of fixed
boundaries in 1648 and made no provisions for the existence of
functionally independent enclaves in Brandenburg-Prussia, say, that
France could use for leverage. The whole point was to come to
conclusions about what was sovereign territory and agree to knock off
the warfare and ambiguity. That was in part for the welfare of those
enclaves, so they were not trapped in uncertainty and used as proxies
— or worse, neocolonies — by first-class states. But Limbo World
suffers that exact fate today.
Ethiopia, smarting from the loss of its actual colony Eritrea two
decades ago, effectively adopted an unofficial second one on the
northern edge of Somalia, called Somaliland. Somaliland was among the
most noisome and rebellious areas in Somalia under the dictatorship of
Muhammad Siad Barre. In the late 1980s, Siad Barre killed hundreds of
thousands in bombings of its main city, Hargeisa, and the
countryside. When Siad Barre fell, Somaliland rapidly asserted itself
as an independent state, and it is now approaching 20 years of
relative peace. The coastline that Ethiopia lost in Eritrea it has
effectively gained back in Somaliland, with the port of Berbera now a
key trade valve into the Gulf of Aden. Ethiopia’s support for
Somaliland also represents a perpetual outrage to the Somalis of
Mogadishu. While continuing to fight among themselves for nearly two
decades, most factions agree that Ethiopia is a mortal external
threat, especially because it invaded Somalia proper in 2006.
Like the Abkhazians, the Somalilanders are as helpful as they are
hapless, as I found from the moment I stepped into their small
representation office in the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa. At most
African embassies, the diplomats regard visa applicants as captive
sources of revenue. But rather than a droopy-lidded kleptocrat, the
Somaliland office produced a slim, energetic young man with an
endearing eagerness to show off his country. He came out to stamp my
passport and sat down next to me to sketch a map of the complex land
journey between Addis and Hargeisa. "They grow the best khat here," he
said, referring to the mildly narcotic chew popular in the region. His
index finger traced a proud little circle on an area just on the
Ethiopian side of the border. For $20, he pressed into my passport a
full-page visa, as official-looking as any in Africa.
On the journey he described, there was an emphatic lack of
officialdom, a studied denial by Ethiopia that any border existed at
all. At Jijiga, 10 hours from Addis and the last big town before I
would cross into the nonexistent country of Somaliland, I had to hunt
down a police officer to get him to inscribe my passport with a note
confirming I had exited Ethiopia legally. This was a border that
existed only by request.
Once on the Somaliland side it took about two hours of off-road
driving — through hills of desert scrub, past herders crouching in
huts made of discarded U.N. and usaid flour sacks — before I met
anything resembling a sign of government. At the edge of Hargeisa, a
hilly town whose lights were the one glowing dot on the horizon as I
drove, two men with machine guns intercepted the car to demand my
papers. This, I thought, would be my cue to do what one does at so
many other African borders, which is to wink and offer smokes and a
small bribe in exchange for safe passage. But before I could phrase my
tentative offer, they found the inky blue stamp in my passport and
waved me through, asking only that I register with the Ministry of
Foreign Affairs the next day.
Unlike Abkhazia, Somaliland did not exactly enchant me as a place
beautiful enough to die for. Perhaps it was the heat — well over 100
degrees Fahrenheit, with nothing to drink, due to strict enforcement
of the Ramadan fast — or perhaps the buggy eyes and green-flecked
teeth of the khat-chewers outside my hotel room each night. The
standard meal, spaghetti and ground camel meat, eaten with the hands,
made clear why I had never been to a Somali restaurant outside
Somalia.
The Somalilanders, of course, had already done quite a bit of dying
for their land and for their spaghetti, and they missed no chance to
tell me how cynical and cruel the international community had been by
not recognizing their state. At the foreign ministry satellite office
set up to stamp in the rare tourist, two excitable Somalilanders
pointed out that Somaliland had multiparty elections, a free press,
and an anti-terrorism policy that the government enforced with
zeal. It had done all this without recognition and without help from
the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, or any other agency
that requires an international rubber stamp to operate. If this was
illegitimacy, other African governments should try it.
And in any case, what was the alternative? A reconstituted Somalia
would require reconnecting Somaliland with what may be the world’s
most spectacularly failed state. Where Somaliland has a fledgling
coast guard, Somalia has flourishing pirates, and where Hargeisa has a
form of democracy, Mogadishu has howling anarchy punctuated by fits of
sharia law.
Yet this is the alternative urged by nearly everyone in the
region. Arab states are reluctant to see Somalia, a fellow Arab League
member, sliced up and leased to predominantly Christian Ethiopia. The
African Union worries that the Somaliland example will persuade
separatist movements that if they just fight hard enough, they’ll
eventually get their own U.N. seats. Somaliland, of course, retorts by
pointing out that Somalia is being used by foreign states just as
surely as Ethiopia is using Somaliland. Moreover, Somaliland asks
whether peaceful and responsible democracy isn’t something worth
incentivizing, regardless of whether the peaceful and responsible
democracy is being practiced by separatists. For now, even Ethiopia,
Somaliland’s closest regional ally, hasn’t bestowed recognition, and
there is no sign it intends to.
Critics charge Limbo Worlders with having things backward, even
practicing a form of cargo cultism. Just as New Guinean tribes built
crude airstrips to lure planes bearing valuable cargo, quasi-countries
build crude foreign ministries in the vain hopes of luring ambassadors
bearing credentials from London, Paris, and Washington. These critics
say Limbo World countries are fatally misled about how independence is
supposed to work: Recognition precedes, rather than follows, the
creation of an actual state. The list of Limbo World alumni —
countries that gained independence by acting like independent states
first, and then getting recognition — is small, and the few examples
of partial success (Kosovo is stuck on 63 recognizing countries,
Taiwan on 23) suggest Limbo is a permanent condition when it is not a
fatal one.
Indeed, once Limbo World countries have reached a certain level of
development, many of them start considering the possibility that
independence isn’t the brass ring it once appeared. Abkhazia might
have entered that phase. After Georgia suffered an embarrassing defeat
trying to reclaim South Ossetia (the other quasi-state within its
borders) in 2008, Abkhazia became emboldened and developed its trade
and infrastructure significantly with Russian backing. It expanded its
sea trade, despite a blockade vigorously enforced by the Georgian
navy. (Occasional Turkish merchant vessels break the blockade by
sailing to the Russian port of Sochi and then skirting the coast until
they reach Sukhumi.)
No quasi-state has reached a happier Limbo status than Iraqi
Kurdistan. Throughout the 1990s, Iraqi Kurdistan was riven by internal
divisions, and at times its senior leaders viewed each other as
greater bogeymen than Saddam Hussein. In 1996, the Kurdistan
Democratic Party even allied with Hussein against the Patriotic Union
of Kurdistan (puk) and invited his forces into Irbil to flush out the
puk. The factions reached an icy truce in 2002, with the understanding
that they would cooperate to dislodge Hussein and achieve eventual
independence.
Nominally, independence remains the goal. Indeed, suspicions that
Iraqi Kurdish politicians have discarded that goal have done much to
alienate them from their people. But since my first visit there in
2003, the rationale for full independence has become less clear, just
as the apparatus of the Kurdish state has become slicker and more
sophisticated. On that first visit, the Kurdistan government asserted
itself mostly through the indelicate searches by its peshmerga
militia, which daily tore apart my luggage and rifled through it with
ruthless attention.
Within a few years the peshmerga had become smoother, and the
government more comfortable with its fate. Barham Salih, the puk’s
representative in Washington, led the Kurds’ successful push to get
the United States to dislodge Hussein. He eventually became a deputy
prime minister of post-Hussein Iraq, and puk chief Jalal Talabani, the
Iraqi president. In Washington, they retained Barbour Griffith &
Rogers, the Republican-affiliated lobbying firm, and their
presentation to the outside world became even cannier, with less
mention of phrases like "autonomy" that might spook the Turks next
door.
I crossed into Kurdistan from Turkey at midnight, on foot, and got a
big stamp indicating "Republic of Iraq-Kurdistan Region." On either
side of the border, trucks were lined up hundreds deep, loaded with
goods and ready to pay a hefty sum in duties — money destined not for
Baghdad but for the Kurdish capital of Irbil. Turkey was a happy
partner in this looting of the transport paths, eager to watch Iraq’s
Kurdish leadership enrich itself as long as it stopped short of asking
the world to treat its borders as reality.
When I crossed the southern edge of Kurdistan, where Arab Iraq and its
then-horrific carnage began, the only indication of the change in
administration was the different color uniform, light blue for the
Arab Iraqi police in lieu of the desert camouflage of the
peshmerga. In the early days after Hussein’s toppling, the border had
been a vigorously policed checkpoint that separated Kurdistan
unmistakably from its neighbor. Now the Kurds were less zealous in
marking the line, as if to say: Feel the fear as you leave the safety
of our territory and enter the land of Arabia and of car bombs. We
don’t need to mark our border on the map because the chill in your
spine is marking it for us.
By 2006, the word "independence" was everywhere whispered but nowhere
spoken. Instead, Kurdish officials brought me to eat at the buffet of
the new hotel they called the Sheraton (not really a Sheraton, but
this was not really a country either), to inhale the fresh paint fumes
at the clean and orderly international airport, to ogle the tracts of
luxury apartments under development by a Turkish construction
firm. Pushing the independence issue would have seemed gauche, with
Limbo so profitable.
Throughout my travels in Limbo World, the conversation would often
swing back to Uruguay, where a 1933 agreement was sealed that is today
an article of faith to Limbo Worlders. The Montevideo Convention
established a theory of statehood that treated countries like
starfish, capable of surviving after having their limbs hacked off and
able to sprout new and independent states from those hacked-off limbs.
It has come to be known as the declarative theory of statehood: the
idea that a state is any entity with a fixed territory and population,
and a government that can enter into relations with other
states. Needless to say, if the letter of this convention, to which
the United States is a signatory, were followed, nearly every country
in Limbo World would immediately convert into full nationhood and
every rebel group on the planet would be scrambling to print business
cards for its hastily convened diplomatic corps. Like many sweeping
declarations of foreign policy, the Montevideo Convention has been the
victim of wise neglect nearly ever since its signing. Still, the
opposite extreme in international relations — giving existing
countries a veto over every self-determination movement — hardly
recommends itself, and whatever happy medium exists between the two
has not yet been reached.
Some in Limbo World are at least temporarily content with this
ambiguity. In his Sukhumi office, Maxim Gundjia pointed out that being
Russia’s pawn is no less embarrassing than being America’s pawn, like
Saakashvili. And in any case, recognition is overrated, as long as the
quasi-state’s economy is poor. "What’s the use of being recognized
like Afghanistan?" he asked. "They have the first flag at the
U.N. square, but who wants to live there?"
That evening, as I limped along the Black Sea boardwalk (gingerly, to
keep my leg from tearing back open), it was easy to see his
point. Indeed, it wasn’t obvious why Abkhazia was pursuing recognition
so fervently, when even if it achieved legitimacy it would probably
have to rely on Russia for most everything, including security. For
now, a glance at the shore showed that Abkhazia had more than most
real countries: the beauty of a moonlit sea, and the beginnings of
prosperity from a flow of tourists glad to disgorge their rubles to
buy fancy hotel rooms, cheap wine, and rich Caucasian pastries. The
Russian holiday-makers who walked past me were a constant reminder
that the desire for true independence, from Georgia and from Russia,
was not a realistic one, no matter how hard Abkhazians worked to
achieve it. But as I looked out on the scene, the moonbeams caught a
ship in the distance, and the uncertainty over whether that ship flew
a Georgian flag made me understand, for a second, what keeps them
trying.

Graeme Wood is a staff editor for The Atlantic.