The Second Book of General Ignorance (15 page)

Yes, there are two such places.

The first is Marie Byrd Land in western Antarctica, which is so remote that no government seems to want it.

It’s a vast swathe of the Earth’s surface, spreading out from the South Pole to the Antarctic coast and covering 1,610,000 square kilometres (622,000 square miles). This is larger than Iran or Mongolia, but it’s so inhospitable that it supports only one permanent base, which belongs to the USA. Marie Byrd Land is named after the wife of US Rear-Admiral Richard E. Byrd (1888–1957), who first explored it in 1929. The remote research station was the inspiration for John Carpenter’s classic horror film,
The Thing
(1982).

The rest of Antarctica is administered by twelve nations under the Antarctic Treaty system established in 1961, which
made the continent a scientific preserve and banned all military activity there. The biggest territories belong to the nations that first explored the continent (Britain, Norway and France) and those that are closest (New Zealand, Australia, Chile and Argentina). The ocean beyond Marie Byrd Land stretches up into the empty reaches of the South Pacific, where no one nation is close enough to claim it as their own.

The legal term for a territory outside the sovereign control of any state is
Terra nullius,
literally ‘no-man’s-land’. Although Marie Byrd Land is the biggest remaining example, there is one small tract of Africa that can claim the same status.

The Bir Tawil Triangle lies between Egypt and Sudan and is owned by neither. In 1899, when the British controlled the area, they defined the border between the two countries by drawing a straight line through a map of the desert. This put Bir Tawil in Sudan and the piece of land next door, called the Halai’b Triangle, in Egypt. The boundary was redrawn (using wigglier lines) in 1902. Bir Tawil (‘water well’ in Arabic) went to Egypt, and Halai’b to the Sudan.

Bir Tawil is the size of Buckinghamshire – 2,000 square kilometres (770 square miles) – and you’d think both countries would be fighting over it, but they’re not. What they both want is Halai’b. Whereas Bir Tawil is mostly sand and rock, Halai’b is fertile, populated, on the Red Sea coast and ten times larger. Egypt currently occupies it, citing the 1899 boundary. Sudan disputes the claim, citing the 1902 amendment. Both disown Bir Tawil for the same reason.

The world’s most disputed territory is the Spratly Islands, an archipelago of 750 uninhabited islets in the South Pacific: 4 square kilometres (1½ square miles) of land spread over 425,000 square kilometres (164,000 square miles) of sea. Rich fishing grounds and potential oil and gas fields mean that six nations claim them: the Philippines, China, Taiwan, Vietnam, Malaysia and Brunei. Apart from Brunei, all maintain
a military presence in the area. To strengthen their claim, the Philippines pay a rotating team of public sector employees to live on one of the Spratlys. It isn’t a popular posting: the charm of a tiny tropical rock that can be walked round in thirty minutes soon fades.

Despite its timeless association with Egypt, most of the Nile is in Sudan.

The Nile rises in Rwanda, in the Great Lakes area of Central Africa, and flows through Ethiopia, Uganda, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Egypt, but the largest section traverses Sudan. The river’s two great tributaries – the Blue and White Niles – meet in Khartoum, the country’s capital.

Sudan is the largest country in Africa, covering 2,505,813 square kilometres (967,500 square miles), making it bigger than Western Europe and a quarter of the size of the USA. It is also the largest country in the Arab world. Because of its political and military precariousness, no one is quite sure what its current population is, but most estimates suggest 40 million, with four times as many living in the Arabic-speaking Muslim north as in the largely Christian south.

The northern Muslim population is descended from Arab invaders and the indigenous Nubian people, one of black Africa’s earliest civilisations. The name ‘Nubia’ comes from the Egyptian
nbu
, ‘gold’, as the region was famous for its gold mines. From the seventh century
AD
, waves of Arab invaders spread out from Damascus and Baghdad, establishing Islam throughout north-west Africa. The first Nubian Muslim ruler
ascended to the throne in
AD
1093 and northern Sudan has been a part of the Islamic world ever since.

‘Sudan’ means ‘black’ in Arabic. It comes from the Arabic
bilad as-sudan
meaning ‘land of the black people’ and southern and western Sudan contains a complex mix of almost 600 black African tribal groups, speaking over 400 different languages and dialects. Many of them are Christian, or practise traditional African religions. The Dinka – whose name means ‘the people’ and who are, at over a million strong, Sudan’s largest tribal group – practise both.

For over thirty years, the northern government and the southern tribes like the Dinka were locked in civil war. Ending in 1989, the war cost the lives of more than 2 million people and displaced another 4 million. It is estimated that 200,000 southern Sudanese have been forced into slavery in the north. Most of them are Dinka. In 2005 Southern Sudan was finally granted autonomy and this is being implemented by the United Nations.

In the meantime, the Northern Islamic government has been accused of genocide by using terrorist militias to destroy three tribal groups in the western region of Darfur. In 2008 the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued an arrest warrant for President Omar al-Bashir, charging him with war crimes and crimes against humanity. This is the first time the court has brought charges against a serving head of state.

Sudan is 150th out of 182 nations on the UN’s human development index. One in five Sudanese lives on less than £1 a day. In the 2009 Happy Planet Index, which measures well-being and environmental impact, Sudan is ranked 121 out of 143, though this beats both Luxembourg and Estonia.