Çerid Autonomous State
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This article or section is a work in progress. The information below may be incomplete, outdated, or subject to change. |
| Çerid Autonomous State Donetaghçeridkashan | |||
State of  Alduria
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| Motto | Donetagh Kinramin ("We Stand Unrestrained") | ||
| Anthem | |||
| Subdivision | Autonomous region | ||
| Capital | Aladurkidal | ||
| Largest cities | Aladurkidal | ||
| Area | |||
| - Ranked | |||
| Population | 9,462 (1752 AN) | ||
| - Ranked | |||
| Governor | Firuzeh Neveaux | ||
| Kalashegtin (Great Speaker) |
Sidli par Kadurim | ||
| Legislature | Takileshidgul (Assembly of Representatives) | ||
| Established | 1699 AN | ||
| Languages | Çervelik, Alexandrian, Constancian, Babkhi | ||
| Local religion | Predominantly Taghlishen, some syncretism with Melusinianism, Alexandrian Nazarene | ||
| Abreviation | ÇAS | ||
| Time Zone | CMT+4 | ||
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Name
Despite the terminology of the name, the Çerid Autonomous State is legally an autonomous region of Alduria. Its designation as "Çerid" is, simply enough, for the species inhabiting it. Its Çervelik name, Donetaghçeridkashan, is merely an approximate translation of the Micrasian name, though its literal meaning is more accurately rendered as the Unrestrained Çerid Household.
History
Throughout the 1600s AN, scattered Çerid populations had diffused from their homelands in and around the Gulf of Aqabâ into the surrounding deserts of western Eura, at the time lying withing The Green. Most of these populations were found to the west and north of the Gulf, in the Razamin Desert. The emergence of the human nation of Antakia north of the Gulf in 1674 AN marked the beginning of a severe change in the fortunes of these Çerid, many of whom were displaced. Their contacts with their homeland were then largely cut off several years later when Antakia subjected Çeridgul to annexation, albeit as an autonomous state.
The nomadic Çerid subsisted mostly on herding, cross-desert trade, gathering and dealing in scrap, and low-level raiding, the latter particularly of the Antakians, against whom they now held a significant grudge. This may have contributed to the decision of the Thraci Confederation, of which Antakia was by then a member, to claim and seize the entirety of the Razamin Desert between 1692 AN and 1693 AN.
Fleeing the vengeful Antakians, the Çerid poured westward into Nouvelle Alexandrie, overwhelming border stations in the Aldurian states of Napoléon and (to a lesser extent) Biscarosse, where a few of their kindred had already been living quietly in rural outposts. The Nouvelle Alexandrians - at least partly out of humanitarian concerns, though geopolitical resentment of Antakia's expansionism may have contributed as well - accepted these strange beings into their country, but it quickly became clear that integrating a society that was still largely neolithic, not to mention nonhuman, presented a number of difficulties. It was decided that they required their own territory to inhabit, and - fortunately for the Alexandrian government and the Çerid both - the conclusion of Operation Paramount provided a wealth of land whose occupation and recivilization was considered a national security interest. Therefore it was in 1699 AN that a now mostly-uninhabited valley was carved out from lands previously assigned to the Aldurian state of Villalba south of Wahda, to become the Çerid Autonomous State.
In 1706 AN, Antakia collapsed when the Thraci Confederation, deciding to consolidate its position in Corum, withdrew its support. Nouvelle Alexandrie and Constancia moved in quickly to occupy the lawless territory, with the former gaining control not only of the majority of the previously Çer-inhabited wastes, but also Çeridgul itself. Many members of those few Çer communities remaining in the newly-occupied lands chose to use the opportunity to remove either to Çeridgul or to the ÇAS.
Geography
The territory of the CAS lies to the east of, and borders on, Lake Nerub in north-central Eura. It lies between the Aldurian state of Villalba to the north, and the Constancian territories of Molivadia to the east and Nouradin City to the south.
The CAS occupies a wide, shallow valley that it shares with the neighboring surrounds of Wahda in Villalba. The northeastern end of the CAS extends into shallow hills from which most of Lake Nerub's eastern tributaries flow through the valley, forming draws and gullies in a largely rolling landscape. The terrain becomes flatter and lower toward the south and particularly the west, adjoining the lake.
Climate
Though south of the rainforests of far northern Eura and rather drier, the CAS does not extend into the desert zones of central Eura; it consists mostly of tropical savanna in the west and tropical dry forests in the east.
Politics
Levels of government
In Çeridgul and other Çer-inhabited lands, government had traditionally been heavily decentralized to nonexistent. As part of the consultation process involved in planning the formation of the CAS, it was quietly made clear to the Çerid that some form of government empowered to create and enforce law and maintain order, encoded in the Statute of Autonomy, was going to have to be created - and acknowledged by those living in the territory. The result, while not as absent of centralized authority as previous structures, is an attempt to achieve what the Çerid consider a viable balance between a central and local authority.
Kashangulid
The populated parts of the CAS are divided into kashangulid (sing. kashangul), sometimes referred to by humans as hundreds, parishes or communes. Kashangulid are local administrations responsible for maintaining infrastructure and local cleanliness, and also serve as legislative constituencies. Each kashangul is administered by a small, usually three-person, steering committee whose members are chosen by direct election every year. This committee is responsible for receiving, managing, and responsibly spending funds allocated by the state government, particularly in using it to hire workers or companies to perform maintenance work.
Kashangulid almost never having more than 200 Çerid living within their bounds, only some of whom are qualified to vote, the committees are not merely responsible to, but very intimately affected by, public opinion. "Town hall" meetings and informal referenda both guide and hinder a committee's work on a frequent basis.
There are three special kashangulid, each devoted to migratory males within a given region. While they are managed in much the same way as any other kashangul, their responsibilities are different; rather than maintaining infrastructure, they instead pay the upkeep for various hostels, wilderness huts, and campsites scattered around their respective regions for the use of Çer menfolk on the move, and serves also as a kind of park ranger service to monitor the use of wilderness areas and prevent their overexploitation.
Central bodies
The state legislature, the Takileshidgul (usually translated "Assembly of Representatives") consists of 53 seats. The seats are allocated to kashangulid on the basis of population; each kashangul is a multi-member district with a number of seats roughly proportional to its population. Elections are held concurrently with regional and federal elections.
The Takileshidgul is the sole legislative body of the ÇAS. The legislature's competence is subordinate to the regional and federal governments, but generally is not rigidly circumscribed provided that the state government remains democratic and transparently accountable - though laws can be, and often are, forced into reexamination by popular initiative.
The ÇAS' head of government, the Kalashegtin ("Great Speaker"), is chosen by and from the takileshid holding the legislative seats. Since the founding of the state, there have been few political groupings in any organized sense, and factional activity in the Takileshidgul consists mainly of temporary alliances and cliques; therefore the Kalashegtin is generally expected to be an impartial and well-liked negotiator rather than strongly representing a particular area or faction. That said, even the best Kalashegtin is tested by the contentiousness of her colleagues; the famously physical altercations occasioned by legislative debates have become a valued form of entertainment for those Çerid with access to radio, television, or the Internet, and increasingly also in Alduria at large.
Regional and federal representation
Çer deputies are almost always in favor of local autonomy, decentralization, and individual and community rights, though there has been a wider range of opinions on economic models. Like the Çerid at large, they are implacably opposed - in both ideology and general political stance - to the Federal Humanist Party, and have a history of using their status as the rare non-human deputies in their chambers to draw attention to their thunderous, and sometimes eloquently insulting, denunciations of Humanist platforms and legislation.
Regional
The ÇAS elects one deputy to the Parliament of Alduria. Generally, the Çerid prefer to elect independents; partly this is a function of the ongoing struggle of major parties, dominated by humans, to fully internalize Çer concerns, but also the Çer distaste of formal party structure. While party-supported Çer candidates have previously stood for election and won, they tend to receive the stigma of being subservient, and it has been more common for independent Çer deputies to be counted with a party by officially caucusing with them.
Federal
The ÇAS falls within a federal constituency that also includes Wahda and other adjacent parts of Villalba, and up until recently was represented in the Federal Assembly of Nouvelle Alexandrie by humans from that region.
In a rather spectacular upset, the 1754 elections saw the incumbent, Abbas Darzi of the DSP, unseated by independent Eshinin ra Uri, a male Çer who might be loosely described as a green anarcho-communist. Though he has shown some willingness to work with the FCP on a case-by-case basis, he is quite obviously more at home with the positions of the AJNE in general and the Wakara People's Party in particular.
Demographics
Between increasing access to health care and immigration of Çerid from other parts of Eura, the population of the ÇAS has more than quadrupled in the nearly fifty years since its founding.
The overwhelming majority of the population are indeed members of the Çer species. That said, although - as part of its autonomous status as a Çer state - the ÇAS has a wide degree of latitude in restricting residency, non-Çerid are not disallowed nor even particularly discouraged. Though there are certain difficulties for humans living in a built environment intended primarily for another species, there are several hundred permanent human residents, mostly educators, technical experts, and consultants.
Military participation
Due to the low population of the ÇAS and the psychological difficulties experienced by Çerid in hierarchical chains of command, most inhabitants participating in the Federal Forces are members of the Reserve Forces. Of the hundred or so ÇAS Çerid in other Forces, the overwhelming majority are in the Federal Guards Service, mostly in the local regiment of the Border Guards and the 2nd MEU of the Federal Support Corps.
A very small number of individuals are known to be serving with the 45th RRU of the 513th Army. The first member of this group, Kolan ra Isti, achieved a certain amount of local fame while serving in a minor role in the invasion of Oportia during the Fourth Euran War; this appears to have attracted the subsequent recruits.
Economy
Needs rewriting
The economy of the Çerid Autonomous State, a fairly new entity in political terms, is still very much in development. Although the Çerid who moved to the CAS are no strangers to the entrepreneurial spirit and many economic ideas such as private property, contracts, employment, and rent, they have no experience with the outside monitoring of economic data. Much of the local economic movement remains small-scale and informal, neither being tracked nor taxed. The official budget of the CAS currently derives from higher government funding.
Most Çerid come from a background where the largest enterprises are essentially cottage industries, a fact which is only now beginning to change; formal employment is relatively rare. Since there is little physical infrastructure and, indeed, a fairly rudimentary built environment of any kind, construction remains a particularly busy sphere of activity, and such money as government and takileshid can provide is often prioritized toward it.
Education
The idea of formal education has been slow in coming to the Çerid, who previously had no such concept except for adults entering particular vocations. Nonetheless, in modern times each kashangul maintains at least a part-time teacher for primary education, though it is becoming more common for there to be an established school combined with daycare. The secondary schooling system is more established; not all settlements have secondary school buildings, but there will usually be at least one in the general area. In these, subject matter becomes more specialized. Although the teachers in these schools include increasing numbers of Çerid, many of them are human due to lack of Çer teachers with the required subject matter knowledge. It is expected to be a number of years yet before the ÇAS reaches the same level of development in K-12 education as the rest of the country.
While debate continues on establishing a university in or around Aladurkidal, either as a separate institution or (more likely) as a satellite campus of one of the existing universities, or possibly petitioning for the founding of a Grand Institute, at the moment post-secondary education in the ÇAS consists entirely of a very small number of vocational schools.
Infrastructure
The ÇAS has benefited greatly from the same infrastructural investments as were extended to the rest of the territories added to eastern Alduria in the wake of Operation Paramount, but development has proceeded with a meticulous care and organization otherwise quite unusual in official planning in the region. This has much to do with the traditional Çer belief in zerenid, spirits of the land, who are acutely sensitive to changes in and around their domains; pleasing the spirits involves respecting and enhancing the aesthetics of place, an attitude which has only been strengthened by an increasing understanding of modern concepts of ecology. Improvements that are necessary but unsightly are minimized in visual impact as much as is feasible, while those that impact wildlife are built in such a way as to minimize disruption.
Major highways connect Aladurkidal to Wahda and Villalba to the north within Alduria itself, as well as Nouradin City (to the south) and Al-Mahabid (to the east) in neighboring Constancia. There is also an increasingly extensive network of paved local roads, though expansion is held back by Çer insistence on property rights and hostility toward eminent domain. In recent years the ÇAS government has tried to arrange a sort of standardized template deal between kashangulid and landowners, allowing the former access rights for construction, maintenance, and public transit in exchange for the latter receiving a proportionate measure of transportation funds as a perpetual rent.
Aladurkidal is also now something of a rail hub, being well-connected to Nouvelle Alexandrie Railways as a terminus of the East Coast Line, the Eastern Relief Line, and the Southern Relief Line.
The power grid has been relatively slow to expand, since the ÇAS insists on burying transmission lines underground, and indeed there is not so much one grid as there are many small ones, centered on settlements and slowly creeping outward toward each other. The ÇAS has been investing heavily in solar power and battery storage for power generation, since sunshine is clean and locally plentiful, though it remains to be seen whether this will continue to be a viable strategy for future energy needs.
In terms of communications infrastructure, the adoption of cellular phone and data networks has been far faster - even explosively so - than their landline equivalents. Partly this is due to the high mobility of large segments of the Çer population, partly to the cost of laying the lines, and also in large part due to disputes with NAXConnect over the latter's pricing strategies and attempts to obtain guarantees from the ÇAS of ownership of any fiber it lays. What are seen as attempts by NAXConnect to interfere with attempts to build locally-controlled fiber networks have resulted in litigation.
Culture
Religion
At the founding of the ÇAS, Taghlishen was virtually the only religion practiced among its inhabitants, and it remains the majority faith by an overwhelming margin; while hard figures are difficult to come by, given Çer laxity in responding to census forms and other surveys tending to be confounded by nebulous religious boundaries, a relatively pure strain of Taghlishen is thought to be followed by at least 95% of the population. Almost all of these are Çerid, though there are thought to be some human converts in the single digits.
Çer Nazarenism
The Alexandrian Nazarene Church has a number of adherents among the human population of the ÇAS and maintains a small church in Aladurkidal for their use, but its hopes to attract converts from the Çerid have not borne fruit in the fashion that it might have preferred. Although aspects of the Nazarene faith are as appealing to Çerid as to humans, the Church has many points of theology and governance that present as alien to Çer culture, psychology, or even biology, and so the form of Nazarenism that has begun to take shape among interested Çerid is so heavily influenced by Taghlishen as to be considered syncretic rather than Nazarenism per se.
Generally, Çer Nazarenism merges the figures of Miryam and God, elevating the former to the position and powers of the latter - effectively God the Mother (rather than the Father). Her son Yeshua, begotten only of Herself, was sent into the world to spread the message of Her motherly love for all beings and Her advice to them for living a good and righteous life. There remains some concept of the Trinity, with light and warmth, particularly those of the heavens (collectively the "Holy Light"), taking the role of the Holy Ghost, but it is generally supposed that Miryam is the "primary" form of God, of which the other two are emanations.
Counterparts of Heaven and Hell are thought to exist, but somewhat in keeping with traditional Çer concepts of paradise and damnation, the Fields of Plenty - the heavenly equivalent - are visualized as an endless, warm, fertile savanna populated by the souls of the virtuous, while its opposite is the Abyss - a realm of terrible pressure, cold, dark, and wet - where corrupted souls are chased down and eaten by the Devourer. This latter figure is the closest equivalent to the Devil or Satan, though it acts almost entirely as a tormentor rather than a tempter.
This, perhaps, ties in well with the faith's emphasis on free will and personal responsibility. Just as no other being can be blamed for one's own misdeeds or indiscretions, Miryam did not issue commandments to the world to be blindly obeyed. She is responsible for the definitions of right and wrong and, through Yeshua, gave advice for how to do the former and avoid the latter, but the advice is a "safe" path, not a prescriptive one; entrance into the Fields of Plenty is determined by finding a way to do right, not by following a particular way of doing so.
Çer Nazarene congregations are each guided by a pastor. While pastors keep in touch with each other and coordinate their activities and doctrine to some degree, congregations are each fully autonomous.
Baptist Taghlishen
The teachings of the Melusinian Faith present an exercise in contrasts to the Çer mind, and their adoption - or lack thereof - has resulted in a more drastic transformation than Nazarene beliefs have undergone, to the point that the result is in many ways closer to mainstream Taghlishen than to Melusinianism.
Melusine is held, in this belief system, to be an originally-mortal aspect or incarnation of Taghli, linking the light of the heavens to the waters of the earth. The Çerid having spent many portions of their history as a desert-dwelling people, the idea of water being an object of importance and reverence was easily understood, and the association of bodies of water with kathid lent itself to the acceptance of water as an agent of change. There is some ambiguity regarding appreciation of seawater; Çer nervousness about the ocean and its depths leads them to avoid using it for immersion or other rituals, and there is an emerging feeling that it should be considered "reserved" for Melusine's use.
The Bovic associations of the original faith have been almost entirely removed. Although their time on Micras, and their adoption of goatherding, have accustomed the Çerid to the idea of lactation, they do not produce milk themselves and no species on their original homeworld did so, at least not in the fashion of Micrasian mammals. Most Çerid find handling milk to be, at best, an unpleasant reality of agriculture in much the same way that animal dung is, and the idea of consuming it - or products made from it - to be rather disgusting. As a result, Bovinism proper - and its obsession with butter and milk - tends to have an unsavory reputation. Tahgli/Melusine therefore stands alone in the divinity of the faith, and there is no mention of Bous. Likewise, the transformation of Melusine into a sea-dwelling form is held to have been occasioned by having holy water, rather than butter, poured over her.
