The Western IslesBoard

1920s
(Includes the post war years of the 1910s)
In the immediate aftermath of the War of Independence the country was gripped by political instability and turmoil at both the local and national level as the central government in Barbarosa struggled to maintain control over the various factions that had fought for independence. The young nation also had to deal with the militant Ipachi population in the interior who had been promise an independent state of their own after the war. From this chaos Saint Anna Chae’La Tsunter emerged as the leading figure in the new government by undermining the support networks of the other factions before ruthlessly sending one of the more brutal groups in the Interior to arrest the Ipachi leaders, displace much the Ipachi civilian population and repress the supress the rest in act known as the Ravaging of the Interior. Afterwards she established the Triumvirate, a popular dictatorship, as the new government. Instituting a centrally planned economy she rapidly industrialised the nation focusing heavily on the shipbuilding industry and its allied mining industry, funding this industrialisation through foreign loans. While the 1920s saw genuine improvements to the quality of life for the average Tsunter, especially when compared to conditions under Estral rule, the vast majority of the population were poor, lived in the cramped apartment complexes and work around 15 hours a day in a shipyard or a mine, while these industries that became controlled by a few wealthy individuals drawn from the leadership of major clans. The government redirected resentment away from the establishment and towards foreign nations constantly preaching to the citizenry that their sacrifices were essential for the Tsunterlands to fulfil its destiny as a great and powerful nation. This was supported by the rise in a large number of nationalist artists and poets who often depicted the Tsunterlands as a nation destined to master the seas.

1930s
By the 1930s the officials in the dictatorship became aware that its ore deposits, of which the shipbuilding industry (which at this point constituted most of the economy) depended on, were drying up and would likely be near depletion by the end of the 1940s. This information was largely covered up to prevent causing a panic. For the most part the early 1930s continued as the 1920s had with little change. One major development was the emergence of the so-called New Young subculture among individuals who had been too young to fight in the war of independence but desired to experience a similar conflict in which they could serve their country. The New Young, supported by the government, created organisations like the Brotherhood of Romance and the Legion of Blood which preached the virtues of obedience and sacrifice to the Republic and eventually began to call of the Tsunterlands to seize its role on the world stage through force of arms. Ironically this in turn lead to the birth of a counter-culture subculture among certain members of the Tsunter youth which would take on a distinctive socialist character and start to drive a nascent labour movement within the nation. The death of Saint Anna in early 1936 would lead to a crisis in government as various actors scrambled and fought amongst themselves to seize the void left by her absence. In this brief period of political chaos the truth about the Tsunter economy came to light and nation’s foreign creditors called in their loans. In an effort to pay of their debts the government reduced its subsidisation of food and energy imports leading to blackouts across the nation along with a impending food crisis. The government also closed down a number of major shipyards and sold off the associated capital to pay of their debts raising unemployment throughout the nation and leading to a explosion in labour union activity. A year into the crisis Wolffeld Chae’La Crawl, leader of the Legion of Blood, would gain enough support among the movers and shakers of the government to manoeuvre himself into position of premier of the nation. He blamed the nation’s woes on a conspiracy by foreign states who’d sought to prevent the Tsunterland’s rise to world power by undermining its economy from within and promised to protect the nation from its foreign enemies and their domestic patsies. To this end he ordered mass arrests and seizure of property within the government, consolidating his position while claiming the targets of his purges were foreign agents, before directing the forces of the state against the labour union movement, which had become to primary nexus of opposition activity. Thousands of socialists ending up fleeing to neighbouring Jeriga. Instituting a system of price controls while turning to the printing of money he resuscitated the Tsunter economy while leaving it even more fragile to another crisis, but this was largely ignored due to his popular reinstatement of the “Food and Fuel” subsidy. However, the most consequential policy of Wolffeld’s government was the decision to embark on a massive program of rearmament, as the Wolffeld ordered the construction of the massive fleet with which to bring about the Tsunterland’s supposed inevitable destiny as a world power.
1940s
For the Tsunterlands the Imperial War began on the 16 of March 1941 when the nation, along with the Empire of Magarat, invaded and partitioned neighbouring San Montagna between them. Utilising a newform of warfare called “Hurricane Warfare” which pioneered the use of aircraft carriers, bombers and parachute regiments in battle the Tsunterlands would then spend the next 8 years locked in a bloody war in Aizcona. Following Jeriga’s joining of the opposing Free Power alliance in 1943 and with its navy overstretched in the North Mesder to assist its Magarati ally, the tide of war turned against the Tsunterlands.

A Free Power offensive in 1945 plunged deep in Tsunter territory while the majority of its forces were trapped in Estral cities without any hope of relief. In order the halt the Free Power advance the allied Magarati and Partitioner armies would become heavily involved in the fighting in the Tsunterlands. The true end of Tsunter war effort came the following year when the Partitioner army, led by the insane Jacob Zastere who dreamed of rebuilding the Chah-Chajd Empire, betrayed its ally and massacred what remained of the Tsunter army. It blitzed across the nation in a few weeks and captured Wolfeld’s government in Barbarossa before engaging the Free Powers over the corpse of the Tsunter nation. Wolfeld and his government would find themselves at the mercy of Zastere, who had them ritualistically sacrificed in the manner of the Chah-Chajd empire – by cutting out their hearts. Much of the Tsunter population rose up against their occupiers – including a large and successful Free-Power sponsored ipachi insurrection in the Interior – and while some were aided by the Jerigan military they found little mercy in the Estrals who often rounded up and shot both civilians and resistance fighters as retribution against the previous invasion. The Partitioner occupation would only end following a coup de’tat against Zastere’s government and the Free Power army’s took full control of the Tsunterlands. They would divide the nation up: most of the south, where a significant minority of Estrals were present, would be annexed by Aizcona while the north would be split into an Ipachi dominant state in the interior and an Jerigan puppet state on the Hook Peninsulas. Many of the socialists and union leaders who’d fled to Jeriga in the early days of Wolffeld’s reign and would work with the occupying authorities to build a republican form of the same government they had encountered there. In the Ipachi Free State, as the Interior became called, an agricultural ecologically minded society emerged amidst the ruins of Tsunter industry as political power became divided among the five tribes while the national government focused its attentions on the politics and turmoil of the northern Ipachi state that had broken away from Khas-Kirati republic, the successor of the Empire of Magarat. In the South the ethnic Tsunters found themselves subjected to the harsh retributionist rule of the Estrals, forced into the role of second-class citizens. Divided into the three nations the identity of the Tsunter’s remained as shattered as the nation with the dream of Tsunter greatness having died in the Imperial War.

1950s
Includes the late 1940s
A foreign journalist once described the Tsunterlands in years following the Imperial War as “a nation gripped in a state of self-loathing”. The Jerigan occupiers found themselves having to contend with a country that was constantly on the edge of famine, a economy whose infrastructure had been destroyed by war and people that seemed to be utterly broken. The nation had been utterly defeated in the final years of the war, humiliated by both the Free Powers and its own former allies, the Tsunter people forced to bear atrocities at the hands of their invaders. Adding to the nation’s troubles was an emerging refugee crisis as thousands of Tsunters fled persecution from the lands annexed by the Estral republic. In the aftermath of the war the old social order of clan loyalties seemed to be breaking down as the nation entered a period of self-destructive nihilism. The occupying forces had to contend with roaming bands of deserters and looters, while hundreds of illicit bars and brothels were established as the Tsunter people sought to drown their sorrow in hedonism. One commentor dryly remarked that “Wolffeld and the nationalists sought to return the Tsunterlands to a mythical past wherein the sea’s were controlled by Tsunters. They succeeded in returning us to our actual past – a nation of cities filled with sin and disrepute, where law and order were seen as antithetical to freedom and pleasure”. The Jerigan occupying force diagnosed the troubles of the post-war country as a failure in ideology – the country had been built on a myth of Tsunter superiority and with the destruction of that myth the remedy required was the establishment of a new ideology.

Socialism in the Tsunterlands was never intended to be authoritarian in nature. The new governing body – the Free Power Control Commission in the Western Tsunterlands (often abbreviated to FPCC-WT) – was composed largely of members of the Jerigan military was mandated with creating a parliamentary republic in the Jerigan zone. The Cooperative Party, the political organisation formed by the returning exiles, intended to establish a nation that combined the democratic practice of socialism they had seen in Jeriga and the collectivist traditions found in Tsunter culture. While the Tsunterlands had never had democratic national governance, it did have a deep tradition of local democracy baked into the clan system – leading to the post-war rebuilders having to rely on the clans to send representatives to the new parliament the FPCC were constructing in Barbarossa, thus giving birth to the Clan Parley. The clans largely sent conservative figures who recognised that some reforms were necessary, particularly to the economy, but were uninterested in any largescale reordering of the pre-war social order and who saw collaboration with the FPCC as distasteful at best and treasonous at worst. However more troublesome were the minority of nationalists and militant sabre rattlers, who demanded an immediate withdrawal of all Jerigan forces and for the nation to rebuild its forces and immediately embark on a war of reunification for its lost territories. Among the urban public these were figures on national ridicule – no one wanted another war after the Tsunterlands had been so thoroughly defeated during the previous war. Yet the fact that the post-war Tsunter Republic still maintained these types of jingoistic demagogues in its parliament was something of an international embarrassment for both the nation and the Jerigan occupation. The Conservative faction – fearful that any action against the nationalists would set a precedent for further action preached against the ejection of the nationalists from the burgeoning parliament.

The FPCC instead sought to undermine the parliament’s power through the creation of second parliamentary chamber – the People’s Parley - which was to be elected. The FPCC called snap elections in 1949 in which it believed that its collaborators, the Cooperative Party, would easily sweep, as they were the only party capable of organising an election campaign. However, the Parliament threated to break of all negotiations with the FPCC unless they agreed to delay the elections long enough for alternative parties to organise. When the elections were held the Democratic Alliance, a party largely funded by the Conservative faction of the Clan Parley, narrowly won taking home 50.9% of the vote and winning 27 of the 50 available seats. The Cooperative Party took around 22% of the vote winning 12 seats while the Action Party, a more moderate nationalist party, won 18% of the vote and 8 seats while the remainder were won by independents. However, as this new parliament and the government it formed would be responsible for the drafting and ratifying of a new constitution, the FPCC mandated that no government would be formed without at least 75% of the available seats thus forcing the Democratic and Cooperative Parties to enter into a coalition, along with several indepedents, creating the first post-war civilian government, known as the Popular Front, under Prime Minister Sprints Chae’La Calloway of the Democratic Alliance. However, the position of Interior Minister went to a member of the Cooperative party, Titan Chae’La Rackham, giving the party power over the Gendarmerie. Rackham used the Gendarmerie to begin a crackdown on the opposition Action Party, painting them as dangerous nationalists. Simultaneously the Cooperative Party covertly supported the creation of two new parties. The first was the Tsunter National Front, a more radical nationalist party which, despite its more jingoist rhetoric, was free from police persecution causing many supporters to defect from the Action Party to the National Front. Meanwhile the Cooperative Party itself adopted certain policies from the Action Party and began using similar rhetoric (although with a slight socialist bent) – this effectively allowed the Cooperative’s and National Front to cannibalise the Action Party’s support. The same process was repeated against the Democratic Alliance with the Cooperative Party creating the Parliamentarian Democratic Party, which directly competed with the Democratic Alliance over the same supporters.

Scheduled elections were held in June of 1952 wherein the Cooperative Party would win a plurality of 34% of the vote taking 17 seats. The Party entered into a coalition with their puppets, the Tsunter National Front, giving them a narrow majority in parliament with 26 seats crucially blocking the Democratic Alliance from government. Sarky Chae’La Waterman, now leader of the Cooperative Party, was appointed as Prime Minister. The government at the same time moved to disempower the Clan Parley which was still a bastion of Democratic support. Nation-wide protests against these actions, organised by the Democratic Alliance, were repressed by the Gendarmerie in the Riots of June 5th. Afterwards the government arresting the leaders of over twenty clans and replaced them with individuals loyal to Waterman and the Cooperative Party, creating allies from previously hostile clans. The final coup de ’grace came in August when the government announced the creation of twenty new voter districts all to be formed from Cooperative strongholds. A second round of elections was held for these new districts and by the end of 1952 the government held 46 out of 70 seats giving them the majority needed to reform the constitution and reorganise on the country according to Cooperatist principles, with the country being renamed on the 25th December the Cooperative Tsunter Republic.
The Co-operatisation of both economy and society would take around seven years to complete and would see heavy opposition from both the remaining opposition in parliament and the clans which still retained their original leaders. The early cooperatives quickly became rife with corruption and abuses of power as bribery, blackmail and intimidation led to the most ruthless and Machiavellian individuals being elected as managers. This corruption left the cooperatives ineffective as producers while the residential areas reorganised as housing cooperatives often fell in the disrepair and eventually became uninhabitable.

In 1956 Titan Chae’La Rackham, Minister for the Interior, would begin pushing for a series of major reforms to the cooperative System. These reforms centred around having the clans be responsible for creating and managing worker, housing and consumer cooperatives, with the democratic traditions of the clans replacing the cooperative elections which were so rife with corruption, and allowing the public image of Cooperatism to be less of a new and foreign ideology and more as modern evolution on Tsunter traditions. Rackham’s reforms would proved to be a huge success not only reducing the rampant corruption among the cooperatives, turning them into an economically viable units, but actually helping to revive the shipbuilding and mining industry to be once again internationally competitive.

In 1958 Rackham would replace Waterman as Prime Minister following a series of political shakeups within the Cooperative Party. Shortly afterwards he would oversee the withdrawal of the last of the Jerigan occupying forces from the Tsunterlands along with negotiating with the Estral republic to allow ethnic Tsunter refugees to return to their former homes in the annexed South.

1960s
The 1960s are often remembered fondly in the Tsunterlands and for good reason. After the bloodshed and terror of the 1940s and political and economic instability of the 1950s, the 1960s saw the Tsunterlands prosper. The pre-war industries were beginning to recover under the cooperative economic system and the Tsunterlands began to lever its maritime position to become a major trading hub. The discovery of Germanium on the Little Hook peninsula in the 1950s had laid the scenes for a new mining and allied semiconductor-based electronics industry now began to bore fruit. The rise in international tourism in the 1960s also benefitted the nation as thousands flocked the south-facing coasts and beaches of the Big Hook peninsular, creating the so-called Argean Riviera along the Bay of Thieves. The standard quality of life for the Tsunter people also grew in this period. Over the course of the decade car ownership would expand by around 3000%, average life expectancy went from being 60 years old in 1955 to 75 in 1965 while from 1960 to 1963 electricity coverage expanded from around 20% of the nation to over 90%.

The Cooperative Party’s power over the government remained absolute due to their guaranteed majority in the People’s Parley and their overwhelming support in the Clan Parley. Political competition only occurred within the structures of the Party itself and line between party and government became increasingly blurred. Criticism of the government was suppressed harshly by the newly created secret police force, the National Security Directorate or NSD, which was quick to send those suspected of opposing the government to it’s the notorious prison camp, Grathenporre. In 1964 the Cooperative party would create another institution meant to ensure its control, the Special Political Oversight Committee, which had the power regulated the activities of political party’s and effectively transformed the nation into a one-party state. Despite its authoritarian nature, the government did enjoy a fairly large degree of support from the population, as many enjoyed the nation’s rising prosperity and ignored its less savoury elements.

Increasingly the attentions of the Tsunter people began to turn to the territory they had lost in the aftermath of the Imperial War. In the decade following the war the Ipachi Free State (later renamed as the Free Ipachi Confederacy) which presented itself as a homeland for the Ipachi people, had descended into corrupt and kleptocratic state, loosely held together as a confederation of the five major Ipachi tribes in the area. Much of the international community saw the Confederacy as a rogue nation especially after it supported the breakaway Ipachi state against Khas-Kirati republic during the 50th Parallel War and the Chatheese War. Consequently, when proponents of foreign interventionism began to re-enter the Tsunter political establishment they presented the notion of a conflict with the Free Ipachi Confederacy not as a revanchist war to retake old territory but as act that would help stabilise Argus.

The other key foreign issue of the 1960s was the fate of the ethnic Tsunter population living in the South, the land annexed by the Estral Republic following the Imperial War. During the war most of the Ethnic Tsunter population had fled north to avoid the advancing Free Power army. Negotiations in the late 1950s had allowed much of the refugee population to return but many now found them homes and lands occupied by Estrals and forced to live in ghettoised communities on the outskirts of cities. Discrimination and persecution were common occurrences for impoverished ethnic Tsunters who were often beaten or even killed if they strayed too far from their ghettos. Increasingly Tsunters on both sides of the border called on the Cooperative party government to either pressure the Estral regime into combating the discrimination (this was attempted and was largely ineffective) or else use force to liberate the Tsunter population in the South.

On the 5th of July 1965, the Tsunter embassy in the Khas-Kirati Republic was bombed with an Ipachi extremist group claiming responsibility. Ten days later the Tsunter government declared war on the Ipachi Confederacy, sending its airborne and mountain regiments to seize control of the nation. Tsunter airpower would prove decisive and in less than five days the Tsunter Republic declared victory in the so-called Interior War. The Confederacy was reorganised as the “Tsunter Interior Autonomous Republic” with the government announcing its intention to hold a referendum on the region’s fate the following year. During that time-span they committed what many call “the second ravaging”, using violence to force almost three quarters of the 1.5 million Ipachi population to leave and encourage ethnic Tsunters to resettle there with the promise of accessing the rich mineral wealth the area supposedly had. When the referendum was held a year later, the so-called Autonomous Republic voted to be incorporated into the Cooperative Tsunter Republic.

For the international community, the actions of the Tsunterlands came as shock with many nations being surprised that the Tsunter military was capable of launching an offensive war. In particular the Interior War had deep shocks in the South with the Estral government and population, who now once again saw their northern neighbour as a serious threat, while the ethnic Tsunters experienced a wave of nationalism that eventually sparked into a secessionist insurgency against their oppressors. This insurgency would continue for four years as the Estral security forces became increasingly desperate to supress their dissident population. They began rounding up the ethnic Tsunter population into so-called strategic hamlets where they could better control them. Tensions between the Tsunterlands and Aizcona only worsened as it became increasingly evident that the Tsunterlands were arming the insurgency and both nations prepared themselves for war breaking about between them. That eventuality came in 1969 when it was revealed that Estral-armed paramilitary groups had taking over many of the strategic hamlets and had begun executing the inhabitants. The Tsunter government felt it had no choice but to declare war. Despite making some headway the Tsunter advance quickly stalled and both nations were quickly locked in a stalemate with the international community pressuring them both to make peace. After twelve days of fighting a ceasefire was agreed and shortly afterwards the Estral government would agree to sell the Tsunters back their old territory in exchange for a guarantee that the Estral’s living in the territory would not lose their own land. Thus, peace was agreed to with both nations be able to appear as though they had protected their people.

1970s
Many of the trends of the 1960s continued in to the early 1970s: the economy continued to grow at a rapid rate, standards of living were ever rising, and government approval rates remained high. However, as the decade wore it became clear the cracks were beginning to form in both the economy and society.

An issue that began emerging during this period, which would grow into a crisis the following the decade, was the stagnant political leadership of the nation. The composition of both the Cabinet and the executive committee of the Cooperative Party Executive Committee remained largely the same as it had when the Cooperatists took power in 1954, however now those young revolutionaries had become grey-haired men without the energy or willingness to embrace economic innovation or political reform. Adding to this issue was the National Security Directorate, which remained an ever presence force in Tsunter political and society and was deeply suspicious of any notion of change. This stagnancy extended to the local level as only those approved by the government were able to ascend to clan leadership positions, thus ensuring that only party loyalists were placed in charge of both providing local leadership and managing the cooperatives.

This would have dire consequences in 1973 when the Tsunter economy was shaken up by the spread of silicon-based semiconductors onto global markets which outcompeted the more expensive Tsunter Germanium-based alternatives. Analysts have argued that a major cause for why Tsunter foundries largely failed to switch to producing silicon semiconductors was due to a failure of the cooperative management to embrace the measures needed to implement such a switch, which in- turn led to the industry basically collapsing over the course of 1973 and 1974.

This in-turn would destroy the allied germanium mining industry on the Little Hook peninsular causing a massive spike in unemployment rates. The death of both industries would have major impacts on the Clan Culture on the Little Hook Peninsular. As clans and cooperatives were heavily integrated the newly unemployed blamed their clan leadership for their position and as a result many Tsunters on the peninsular increasingly no longer saw their clan as dominant part of their identity. This would mark the emergence of cultural differences between the populations of the Little Hook and Big Hook where Clan Culture, integrated with the still strong shipbuilding and shipping industries, remained fairly strong.

Another consequence of the death of the Germanium mining industry was the migration of miners from the Little Hook to the Interior causing an increase in labour competition between the new miners and the old, especially the remaining Ipachi population there. Due to an anti-Ipachi hiring culture, many Ipachi miners were replaced by the new Little Hook miners widening the rift between the two communities.

Tensions would lead to violence when, in 1975 an Tsunter Band-Captain, Soaps Chae’La Fowl, would kill into an Ipachi child in the city of Dominzoa while driving under the influence of alchohol. However, in the resulting court case Fowl received a fairly light sentence, which included no prison time, leading to outrage among the Ipachi community. Shortly afterwards Fowl was kidnapped by a group of Ipachi calling themselves the Ipachi Nation Army or INA. They videotaped their own mock trial of Fowl, before executing him by hanging, and released the video to national newspapers. The incident would lead to twelve year period of lynching’s, bombings and assassinations between the ethnic Tsunter and Ipachi communities known as the Trials. The National Security Directorate, with its special powers to detain and torture, found itself largely responsible for policing the Interior and increasingly became militarised.

The 70s also saw the Tsunterlands began increasingly flex their power as a major regional player on the world stage. The Tsunter government would intervene in the Loxodon Civil War in 1976 helping aid the socialist LRS to victory two years later. The 1970s are also generally considered a brief period of the easing of relations between the Tsunterlands and Aizcona, marked by Aizcona’s recognition of the 1915 Tsunter Genocide in 1975.

1980s
1990s