What is a country? Is it a collection of people with the same culture, heritage or goals? What about the factions of people within a country: the Basques, Northern Ireland, Bavaria, Somalia, the Sudan, the former Yugoslavia, Bosnia, Croatia, Israel, Palestine, etc.
On the most basic level national borders are simply imaginary lines visible only on a map and only truly meaningful there. The only tangible borders are the island nations of this world including the UK, New Zealand and Australia. Where you have land-locked nations, such as in Europe, Asia and Africa, the borders are fictitious, created over the years by conquering or retreating or simply an arbitrary carving up of territories and drawing of maps, such as happened in the last century with the creation of Pakistan and the break-up of the Soviet Union.
Former Soviet countries seem to have suffered the most in the 1990s after the break-up but it does not seem to have dissipated 20 years later. Where once they were part of a massive nation-state within which ethnic conflicts were quickly quashed by the Kremlin, they are now forced to govern themselves side-by-side. The most recent example of this is the crisis in Kyrgyzstan with the ethnic Uzbeks.
Accounts of the horrific violence are still coming out: rape, mutilation, burning alive, beatings. Furthermore, there is speculation that Kyrgyzstan authorities may have been at the very least aware, if not complicit, in the violence. These two groups have a history of violence. Since Josef Stalin divided up the area encompassing Osh and Jalal-Abad between Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan these two groups have lived in bitter rivalry. A border arbitrarily drawn in the 20th century has led to this violence. This quote from an eyewitness sums up all ethnic conflicts with profound simplicity:
“But our ancestors were born here. Where should we go?”
This brings me back to my original question. What is a country? Can it be defined? There will never be a utopian society where there are no borders, where we all live in peace and harmony. That is a myth and even I am not so naive as to think it can work.
At issue, for me, is that these ethnic conflicts continue to happen and, more and more, they are pushed to the back pages of the newspaper or down to the bottom of the news website. At the moment the BP oil spill is dominating the headlines. While I think it is important news and, especially being from the region, am devastated by its effects, human beings are being murdered for nothing more than being of a particular ethnic group. Unfortunately, future ethnic conflicts may be just as difficult to prevent or contain as the oil spill. Both are just as damaging but both deserve as much attention.
Sources:
Wikipedia: Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan
Guardian 1 and Guardian 2