Baseriote Insurrection

The Baseriote Insurrection (Savamese Insurrection basériote; Baseriote Dëgjohet, from ne do të dëgjohet, “we will be heard”) was a period of civil unrest in southern and central Transvechia, the primary homelands of the Baseriote people. Lasting from 2004 to 2018, it brought in troops from Transvechia’s ally Savam and some other Savamese-allied forces in an attempt to maintain order and eliminate the threat represented by the main armed Baseriote group, the Mënyrë për të Lavdisë (Baseriote “the way to glory”, hereafter MptL).

Background

The position of the Baseriote community in Transvechia has, over the last 100 to 150 years, become steadily more difficult. Historically occupying lands of marginal agricultural quality (having been displaced from their earlier homeland by Sabamic colonisation), they have usually been impoverished; Baseriotes who have abandoned the land and moved to the cities have struggled to find work. Standards of education in many Baseriote communities lag well behind the average in Transvechia; and the Baseriotes’ nominal adherence to Orthodoxist Cairony is, in the opinions of many, severely distorted by the influence of their pre-Cairan shamanistic beliefs (associated to Cairan Magic), to the extent that many mainstream Cairans find participation in Baseriote ceremonies distinctly uncomfortable. For most of the country’s history since the end of the Long War, Baseriotes have been informally barred from much government employment, including jobs with the Transvechian police force, the Écussonnerie Civile, and are frequently subject to more overt forms of discrimination in daily life.

Activism by Baseriotes angry and wearied by such treatment is by no means anything new in Transvechia; the first pro-Baseriote pressure groups emerged as early as 1840, with the Belle-Étape-based Zëri (literally “the voice”) being one of the largest and, appropriately, the most vociferous. However, the period between approximately 1900 and 1930 was one of reasonable prosperity in most of Transvechia, with even parts of the fringe elements of society becoming at least prosperous enough to blunt the sharper edges of discontent.

The position would deteriorate dramatically during the Long War period. Transvechia became a front line of conflict as Kiy reasserted itself as a significant power in the region, fighting a series of wars against Transvechia, during which the Far Transvechia region, including the important trade terminus of Saint-Auguste-du-Grand-Nord (today Ditdangallal) was annexed by Kiy. With the fighting reaching as far west as Belle-Étape on occasions, the Baseriotes saw their own share of disruption during the conflicts.

The end of the wars with the establishment of a ceasefire and the signing of the Kethpor Accords – including the formal cession of Far Transvechia – came as a relief to the Baseriotes and to the wider country. However, with the restoration of peace – and the brutal climatic conditions which struck most of the country during the first years without summers – the Transvechian economy nosedived during the 1960s and spent most of the period to 1980 in a state of depression. The prolonged fiscal belt-tightening prompted by this state of affairs saw the Baseriotes now pushed back towards the margins of society.

Beginnings

The MptL was established in 1982 by a group primarily made up of community college students and trade apprentices, and based in the Baseriote town of Polichie (Poliçan). At the outset it was merely a pressure group in the vein of most of its predecessors, but it grew in importance quickly and gained a firm foothold in the political life of the region. In this it was aided substantially by the oratorical skills of its first leader, Këllëç Mexnë; although he had partially assimilated to Transvechian ways as he grew up in the capital, Santa Constantina (as an endacak or “wanderer” in Baseriote parlance), he had returned to the majority-Baseriote county of Baseria in his mid-thirties. As Transvechia’s central government extended a measure of autonomy to the Baseriotes, establishing a regional parliament, the Këshill i Parë or “first council”, in 1990, Mexnë and his leadership cadre assumed prominent roles within it, with Mexnë himself becoming the chamber’s chief minister in 1992.

However, over time the MptL’s gradually ageing leadership had become perceived by its younger and more radical members as out of touch with the demands of their constituency, and were increasingly referred to as babagjyshi – a word which literally means “grandfathers”, but which carries overtones of contempt and dismissal in the Baseriote language. Mexnë fought a valiant rearguard action, but was forced out of office in 1999 by the challenger Shpëtim Rragani. The firebrand Rragani was then 28 years of age and had quit formal education at 15, working in various manual labouring jobs before advancing to a position as a motorcycle courier at the time of his victory, and had built a substantial following within the group under the umbrella title Kemi Marrë (abbreviated from kemi marrë atë që duam, “we take what we want”).

Radicalism and revolt

Now holding a platform for their extremist views – including outright independence from Transvechia – Rragani and his supporters drove an increasingly tougher line with Santa Constantina; among their more high-profile endeavours was the organisation of a week-long general strike in the province of Rochinia in Empery 2002. Although support was patchy across the province as a whole, it was strong in the main urban areas in Orosci (Rrëshen) and Santa Anastasia (Bulqizë), and demonstrated that, impoverished as many Baseriotes might be, they still possessed significant economic weight. On the other side of the coin, though, the strike proved to be the breaking point for the remaining moderates within the organisation, with Mexnë forming a splinter group calling itself I Vërtetë, “true” or “authentic” in protest at what they saw as Rragani’s “false path”.

The MptL’s militancy was met by adamantine resistance by the Transvechian authorities, with Chancellor Lorenzo di Lurcio pressuring the Këshill i Parë to denounce the group and its activities, even though it was increasingly becoming semi-detached from the chamber by this point, with Rragani and many of his supporters viewing the Këshill as a sideshow at best, and as a nest of Transvechian sympathisers at worst. However, public opinion among the Baseriotes was moving strongly against the government, even among sections of the population such as the over-60 age group who had previously offered the MptL and its supporters little backing. The single incident which is usually held to have begun the Intervention took place on 5 Sation 2004, when a home-made incendiary device was detonated inside the central bus terminal on Via Ponte Albano in Santa Constantina, an attack which killed twelve people and wounded eighty others. Although the MptL did not claim responsibility for the attack – the perpetrators remain anonymous to this day – the group stepped up its activities substantially in the following months.

Although the Transvechian military had, for the most part, acquitted itself well during the Borean War some fifteen years previously, like most conventional forces it was poorly equipped to deal with the kind of asymmetrical warfare with which it was now confronted. Over the next year large parts of the traditional Baseriote homelands became substantially disconnected from Transvechia proper, with anything representative of Transvechian officialdom becoming an immediate target and being dealt with in the most hostile fashion.

An increasingly frustrated government strove desperately to come up with solutions. The MptL was officially proscribed on 15 Sation in an emergency session of the Transvechian parliament; and an increasingly circumscribed Këshill i Parë, despite having expelled all of its remaining MptL members following the proscription, was finally shut down by Lurcio’s administration in Petrial 2005. However, these steps were seen – with some justification – as largely symbolic actions against a background of military failure bordering upon impotence. With public opinion in the remainder of Transvechia rising in fury against him, Lurcio was forced to swallow his pride and request the assistance of the country’s long-time ally Savam; the first Savamese troops were dispatched to the Baseriote region in Empery 2005.

The decision to send troops was not popular in Savam; its army had already been heavily involved in fighting in the neighbouring Rastovid Confederacy during the then-recent Operation Northern Spear, and had apparently achieved little against Lutoborsk forces with their own agenda in the Rastovid north. Savamese forces continued to work alongside their Transvechian counterparts, but their relative unfamiliarity with montane combat techniques – and continuing public disquiet at home – prompted army chiefs to call on assistance from other allies. Soldiers from Helminthasse and Brex-Sarre were deployed in Rochinia and southern Transvechia from the early autumn of 2005.

The increased militarisation of the region did not deter the MptL, whose activities in disruption of civic society continued, not only in its own areas but also further afield. Santa Constantina, with a significant resident Baseriote population, received particular attention, as did other major Transvechian cities such as Barielle and Fort-Saint-Pierre. The explosion of a bomb attached to a truck making deliveries of fruit and vegetables to an army barracks in Fort-Saint-Pierre in Petrial 2006 made particular headlines in Savam, as a Savamese army detachment had been rotated out of the facility only two days previously and were thought to have been intended as the real targets of the attack.

The war of attrition

The presence of boots on the ground in large numbers cannot realistically be said to have intimidated the MptL, given some of their attacks in the early Intervention period; however, by late 2007 their penchant for large-scale and flamboyant operations had been replaced with a more covert approach aimed more as a persistent war of nerves with the Savamese and their allies.

The scaling-down of activity by the MptL and their allies prompted differences of opinion between the Transvechian government and their guest forces. Continued Savamese involvement was, albeit with some concerns, accepted as a given by Quesailles; the MptL had persistently targeted the critical logistic link formed by the Northern Transcontinental Railway, with consequent disruption to services, even when they were less heavily involved elsewhere, and this link was deemed too strategically valuable to go without protection. The Savamese army command also had concerns – tentatively and diplomatically expressed in Santa Constantina – that the Transvechian military was not sufficiently competent to deal with the situation, despite extensive cross-training with Savamese and Helmin forces.

The Helmin involvement was also threatened by an adverse political environment at home. Although Eir Dæld, who had been strongly opposed to the deployment, had been succeeded as alráðherra by the more sympathetic Grár Dillotur, public opinion in Helminthasse ran firmly against involvement in the remote north, far from any potential strategic interest. Dillotur pressed hard for the establishment of a withdrawal timetable, although the issue assumed lesser importance within government after Dillotur was replaced by Heiðra Steinn in 2011.

The Santa Rosalia plant targeted by the MptL, prior to the attack.

The MptL continued to stage intermittent attacks, some of which were well away from their own heartlands, including an attack on an industrial chemical plant at Santa Rosalia in Fabricad 2013 in which eleven plant workers were killed and facilities severely damaged, involving some 500,000 aurels in repair costs. During this period Rragani and several of his chief lieutenants largely dropped out of public view, and were widely thought to have established a redoubt somewhere in the more inaccessible areas of the Severnistine mountains on the far side of the border with the Rastovid Confederacy. Despite diplomatic pressure from Transvechia and Savam, the government in Bogograd exhibited no great sense of urgency to assist in their capture and repatriation, citing a need for clear evidence before resources could be committed to what they saw as an open-ended endeavour.

End of the line

For all their loud proclamations, however, the MptL were proving to be steadily more ineffective by the end of 2016; a young generation which had grown up in the shadow of intermittent armed conflict was finding the courage to shake off the older fears of their forebears. Although the Këshill i Parë remained suspended, local council elections in the autumn of 2016 had been notable for the emergence of a clear movement towards peace. The Transvechian authorities also enjoyed a signal coup in turning a key figure at the heart of the group’s councils. Xhevahir Laço, thought at one time to have been the MptL’s chief quartermaster, was revealed in a statement released by Rragani to Transvechian media in Animare 2017 to have been responsible for information which led to the capture of more than a dozen high-ranking officials within the organisation at various locations across southern Transvechia, and to have been working on behalf of Transvechian police and intelligence services since the beginning of 2014.

Although Laço was himself killed in Ediface of that year, apparently in retribution, the coup which he helped to bring about proved to be a body-blow to an organisation which, according to informed opinion, was showing signs of splintering in any event. No large-scale attacks took place since the mass arrests, and available evidence suggests that the MptL had been left so faction-ridden and crippled by internal mistrust as to be on the edge of complete collapse. The last official statement made by Rragani himself was a rambling and semi-coherent recording sent to a Fort-Saint-Pierre newspaper in late Conservene 2017.

The shift was more than welcome at government levels. The Transvechian government, although a staunch ally of Savam, had never reconciled itself to the presence of foreign troops on its soil – and the unspoken inference that it could not deal with the Insurrection itself; and with an impending viceregal election in Savam, the coalition government led by Camille de Lautrec was anxious to bring its soldiers home from an intervention which had never enjoyed domestic support. With similar qualms being expressed in Brex-Sarre and Helminthasse, the time was increasingly ripe for change. All that seemed necessary was a suitable catalyst; and this came to hand in late Fabricad 2018, when officers of the Écussonnerie Civile were called to an apparent domestic disturbance in Polichie, where they found the bodies of Rragane and two other known members of the MptL’s command structure. The circumstances of the deaths were unclear, but, while investigations continue, informed sources have indicated that the incident is being treated as internal score-settling.

The slump in activity and the death of Rragane were enough to convince the authorities in Santa Constantina that the MptL had been broken; and the announcement on 3 Empery 2018 by Chancellor Paolino Maccelese that the first troops were to be withdrawn from Baseria within two weeks was taken by most observers as an official end to the Insurrection. While there have since been some isolated incidents in which involvement by the MptL has been claimed, these have been at the level of petty criminal activity and have been taken up by the Écussonnerie and local civil police.

Although suggestions which originally aired in Dominy 2018 were denied by likely participants, the Transvechian magistracy for the interior looked favourably on the notion of restoring the Baseriotes’ autonomous parliament. The revived Këshill i Parë came into being on 30 Ediface 2018, initially on an appointive basis pending formal elections in Floridy 2019; Heria Mexnë, daughter of the late Këllëç and currently regarded as the leading figure among Baseriote political moderates, accepted an interim role as chief minister. She was confirmed in that position after being elected as representative for Orosci, where she currently lives.