Sovereign Association of the Great Bitter Lake
The Motor Ship
Melampus is an aging former cargo ship that first entered use in the 1960s- although her current function is no doubt far from what her one-time owners envisioned. Decades of sand blowing from the Egyptian desert have rendered her a uniformly yellow color, except for where the bright outlines of artwork and murals stand out from her sides and structure. It is evident that a restoration project is ongoing, there are catwalks along the
Melampus’ sides and those of her thirteen sisters and there are divers busy at work in the water. I step off the long pier that was constructed in the late 70s to facilitate movement to and from the ship and I am onboard.
It is crowded, little has ever been done to regulate the habitation of the ship beyond communal efforts to clean up garbage and maintain facilities, the former cargo hold is a riot of people crowded together with a density similar to that of Kowloon. There are roughly six hundred people living on the MS
Melampus, in apartments made by marking off the interior of shipping containers or in tents set up on unclaimed bits of floor. In one out of the way corner a tie-dye clad young woman is selling candles and marijuana, and also brightly colored handkerchiefs. I trade a pair of sunglasses for half a dozen handkerchiefs and a chance to talk.
“So you’re from another universe? That’s groovy.” I can follow the young woman’s dialect of English fairly well and I guess that she’s American, but she shakes her head.
“I’m a person.” She tells me. “Not an American. National identities were invented by The Man to split people up and make them easy to finger. But I bugged out of there- got enlightened before Ed’s Boys got too hacked at me.”
Why come to the Bitter Lake?
“Why the fuck not?” She laughs. “It’s the blueprint, the outline for the world!” She says something in Esperanto that I’m unable to follow. “Dig it?”
Not so much.
“There’s people in the YF from a hundred so-called “countries”, praying to their own little tin gods, and everyone’s just hanging easy. We can lay it on each other without fighting, without money, without any of that junk. Righteous, isn’t it?”
I’m not really sure how to respond to that one.
“The point is.” The Bitter Laker explains, “that if we can do it why can’t everyone? Why can’t the world just hang loose?”
The Sovereign Association of the Great Bitter Lake has its origins in fifteen civilian cargo ships that had the misfortune to be passing through the Suez Canal (connecting the Red Sea and the Mediterranean Sea) between June 5th and June 10th in 1967 when war erupted between the State of Israel and the United Arab Republic, Syria, and Jordan. The canal was closed- temporarily it was intended for the duration of the conflict. However as the Israeli army advanced through the Sinai desert the UAR realized that they might not be able to hold what was one of the most strategically important waterways in the world. In order to prevent Israel from getting any use out of it, ships were sunk at both ends of the canal, along with bridges, dredges, and other floating craft. Large numbers of mines were laid and all possible measures were taken to deny the Suez Canal to the enemy. When the Six-Day War ended it did so with Israel on one side of the canal, the United Arab Republic on the other, and the canal itself as no-man’s land separating them. A war of attrition subsequently commenced between the two countries, with sporadic clashes between their respective armies.
It was clear that the channel would not be opened again any time soon and the fifteen ships who had been passing through it were trapped. Other than one vessel that was caught in Lake Timsah by obstructions, the ships anchored in the Great Bitter Lake which was the widest part of the canal to wait. And wait. After four months had passed the captains and crew of the ships of eight nations belonging to opposing geopolitical alliances, met onboard the MS
Melampus and founded the precursor to the SAGBL, the Great Bitter Lake Association to assist each other. The GBLA organized communal events, including picnics, yacht races, football games, and church services. Movies were screened and in 1968 the Great Bitter Lake Olympic Games were held parallel to the World Olympics. Handmade stamps issued by the Association were recognized by UAR authorities and thus subsequently by postal authorities worldwide. Gradually however, as it became clear that the issue would not be resolved soon, the ships’ crews were increasingly withdrawn by the companies who owned them. The truncated Association survived, but in much smaller numbers. The ships became known as the “Yellow Fleet” after the blowing desert sand that gradually colored them yellow.
In 1971 the UAR underwent a change of leadership that saw it replaced by the Republic of Egypt. The new President, Anwar el-Sadat clamped down on the leftist supporters of the former government, realigning Egypt geopolitically. He supported the country’s Islamist movement and later in the same year a group of about a hundred pro-socialist officers and enlisted men in the Suez contingent of the Egyptian Army fled in fear that they were about to be purged by Sadat. Initially they had planned to defect to the Soviet Embassy, but their plans were discovered and they ended up fleeing to the Yellow Fleet. The remaining civilian crewmen of the ships were in no position to refuse the Egyptians who claimed asylum onboard the Bulgarian, Polish, and Czechoslovakian ships.
The communist governments under which those ships were registered announced their willingness to allow the defectors to remain, as they (and their hegemon the Soviet Union) were unhappy with Egypt’s switch from left-wing to right-wing. When Sadat made moves to potentially occupy the Fleet he faced widespread protest by the Communist Block and by the western governments (including the United States) whose ships made up the majority of the Yellow Fleet. Notably Israel indicated that it would resist any moves by Cairo to expand its military presence in the canal by force. As a result the status quo remained, with Israel and Egypt continuing to spar and the socialists safe. The defectors participated in the GBLA, revitalizing it by virtue of their numbers, and developing permanent habitations as unlike the original ships’ crews they could not leave. They also operated an anti-Sadat radio station that broadcast from the MS
Lednice and moved between both Eastern and Western flagged components of the fleet. Egypt withdrew its recognition of Association stamps and refused to allow relief for the crews to pass through its territory, as a consequence Israel extended recognition to GBLA stamps and permitted Yellow Fleet personnel to pass through the Israeli-occupied Sinai. The left-wing governments of Iraq and Syria similarly made gestures of support towards the Great Bitter Lake Association as they now fell on the other side of the communist/capitalist divide.
Both countries would set aside that division two years later in 1973 when a coalition of six Arab countries with support from the USSR attacked the State of Israel on the Jewish holiday of Yom Kippur. Egyptian forces smashed through Israeli lines at the canal and advanced virtually unopposed into the Sinai desert. Once there they discovered large numbers of Israeli civilians who had moved in to settle the region after 1967 and founded a number of communities. Some of these communities fled east with their country’s army, others were occupied and poorly treated by the Egyptian government. The town of Yosef Ramon existed only a few kilometers inland from the canal, where it had provided services for the Israeli troops stationed nearby and established a small farm. Cut off by approaching Egyptian forces the better part of Yosef Ramon’s population (mostly women and children as the men had been drafted) fled south and west to the Bitter Lake. Despite initial resistance by the previous Egyptian defectors who now made up the majority of the Yellow Fleet’s inhabitants, the mostly civilian refugees were allowed onto the American and British ships where they took up residence. Although Sadat considered occupying the Fleet again, he refrained due to threats by the United States to supply Israel with military supplies if the neutrality of the Great Bitter Lake Association were violated.
It is unlikely that America would have actually carried out this threat as the European countries had stated their unwillingness to permit American supply planes to use their airfields in such an operation, but it was sufficient to convince Sadat to back down. Although Israel was able to establish a temporary stalemate, shortages of ammunition saw their forces forced on the defensive and on October 18, facing utter disaster in the field and its possible destruction, the Israeli government authorized the use of a 20 kiloton tactical nuclear device on the advancing Egyptian troops. In the aftermath both the United States and the Soviet Union (who feared that this might lead to a greater nuclear war between the major powers) forced a ceasefire and an armistice that left Syria controlling the Golan heights, Jordan with a strip of territory on the West Bank of the Jordan River, and Egypt holding once again the Sinai peninsula.
For the Association and the Yellow Fleet this meant trying times. The Siege of the Great Bitter Lake, undertaken by the Egyptian government, involved an attempt to totally isolate the fourteen ships and their inhabitants. Members of the neutral crews were permitted to leave but not to return and the companies that owned the ships ordered their personnel to return home. A surprising number stayed with the refugees and defectors who were trapped their, including a significant portion of the remaining communist block ships. Food and medical supplies were not permitted to pass to the Fleet, nor was any communication allowed in or out. Efforts to reopen the canal were halted by fears of sparking a new confrontation and it remained closed, despite Sadat’s admitted desire to clear it.
To the Zionist Israelis and the Nasserite Egyptians their acquaintance was an unusual one. Initially the hostility had been overwhelming and there had even been incidents of physical violence. With prolonged contact however the two groups came to tolerate each other, and with the beginning of the Siege they found that they were literally in the same boat. They co-operated to produce fresh water and to ration food and to cultivate a number of gardens throughout the Fleet. Relying on Israeli seeds and agricultural expertise and Egyptian labor they worked to supplement their limited supplies and increasingly became the focus of the community’s existence. Toleration turned into respect which turned into genuine friendship, particularly where the children were concerned and the two groups came together. They caught fish that passed through the canal where ships could no longer go, and survived for the next year until sufficient pressure on the Egyptian government forced it to permit the Red Cross to bring emergency supplies to the Yellow Fleet. But in that time the Great Bitter Lake Association had become something much more serious than it had been previously.
To call it a government would be a bit of a stretch, there was no official leader and communal decisions were made communally. But it was more than just a group of people trying to wile away the months. In 1978 the Fourth Israeli Arab War saw the Sinai back in Israeli hands and some of the Association’s Israelis left, others however, stayed as they disagreed with the right-wing government that had taken power in Jerusalem since the last war and preferred to remain outside its influence. World attention was riveted to the Yellow Fleet again, at a time when Jewish-Muslim conflict was at its bitterest it was an example of a place where members of both faiths lived in harmony. Immigrants began arriving, primarily young people who belonged to the counter-culture movements in Europe and America. They were welcomed by the Bitter Lakers and the population of the Yellow Fleet grew as peaceniks and hippies made their homes in the aging ships. The original owners of the Western ships finally gave them up as lost and transferred ownership officially over to the Great Bitter Lake Association- now a loose organization of 700-odd people from dozens of different countries speaking dozens of different languages. Most of the immigrants left after a while or simply came to visit, but others remained. A tourism based barter-economy slowly developed, catering to visiting radicals who supported what they hoped would become an ideal commune. A community of Esperantists developed and promoted the language.
The step from quasi-statehood to full sovereignty came in 1984 in response to the Papuan Revolution. None of the world powers were willing to recognize the rebels in West Papua, but the revolutionaries were the darling of the counterculture movement whose members now made up a majority of the members of the Great Bitter Lake Association. In a communal vote a majority of the Bitter Lakers voted to declare themselves sovereign for the purpose of extending recognition to the Republic of West Papua and the Sovereign Association of the Great Bitter Lake was born. It issued passports, certificates of citizenship, and continued to issue stamps, but attempts to issue money were defeated in several votes and the Yellow Fleet remained a currency-less society. The United Nations refused to recognize the SAGBL, and both Israel and Egypt rejected its existence, but several countries, beginning with the Republic of West Papau (later the Republic of Papau), Biafra, Ambazonia, Cuba, and the Tibetan Government-In-Exile extended recognition.
The biggest triumph of the SAGBL came with the world’s greatest tragedy. In 1985 a glitch in the Soviet computer system caused radar reports of nonexistent American ICBMs to be forwarded to the Kremlin, triggering the Third World War. A week and 20 million lives later the badly battered superpowers were unable to agree on a suitably neutral location to negotiate an armistice, until the Yellow Fleet was proposed as a place for the diplomats to meet that was neither capitalist nor communist. The nuclear war (but not the Cold War) ended onboard the MS
Melampus, the Association’s unofficial capital.
Today the Sovereign Association of the Great Bitter Lake counts over 10,000 citizens hailing from all over the globe and some even born within the fleet. Donations poured in from left-wing organizations around the globe to pay for a restoration of the decaying ships and now that the Suez Canal is finally open again (bypassing the Great Bitter Lake) there is talk of brining in new ships to replace them. New immigrants replace those who leave and continue to inject fresh resources into the Association, that coupled with heavy tourism and UN aid keeps it viable. The only real government institutions of the SAGBL are its Postal Service and Foreign Affairs Co-Operative, the former continues to issue stamps and deliver letters and the latter issues passports and keeps in touch with its handful of ambassadors. Over two dozen internationally recognized countries recognize the Association, another ten unrecognized countries do and six official embassies are operated by the SAGBL with financial assistance from their host countries.
Any governing that has to be done is done in regular monthly community meetings on the
Melampus in which any issues are resolved by majority vote. For serious concerns a referendum of the entire population is held, these usually occur once a year. There is still no official currency, although various different currencies may be used. Esperanto serves as an unofficial
lingua franca and is spoken throughout the fleet.
“I won’t pretend that we don’t have our challenges.” Nikolas Booram is an old man, one of the few original crew members of the fourteen ships to remain and former captain of the MS
Lednice. He is one of several unofficial leaders in the Association and commands a great deal of respect. “How do you organize a society with no government? But I like to think of it as trailblazing, this is what True Socialism will look like when the state whither away. We‘re just ahead of the curve.”
I ask if he’ll elaborate about some of those challenges.
“Drugs is the big one.” He tells me. “Not so much the marijuana that the young folks like to smoke, but hard drugs like cocaine and methamphetamine. Criminals take advantage of our lax rules to make deals here and bring the stuff in and out and we don’t really have a way to stop them. I’m organizing voluntary opposition, but it’s slow going.”
What about the condition of the fleet? Didn’t one of the ships actually sink a year ago?
“That we’re dealing with.” The Czech mariner folds liver-spotted hands. “The restoration ought to help and I’m a proponent of bringing in new vessels to ease the overcrowding. We’d have to get the canal co-dominium authority to go along with it though, and getting the Israeli and Egyptian governments to agree to anything is almost impossible.”
Does he really believe that the Great Bitter Lake’s system can be applied to the world?
“Of course I do!” Nikolas’ eyes blaze with idealistic fervor. “I believe that it’s the only alternative humanity has to another war- and this one might be final.”
(please forgive the roughness of this update, I will edit it later)