History of Kalgachia/The 220s
The 220s began with a phased drawdown of Kalgachi military forces in the Upland Confederation following the Slavegate Convention, only for part of them to be redeployed for border security duties in Northbloom and Northern Schlepogora as the King of Batavia and Amokolia began displaying an indulgent attitude toward civilisational pathogens in the latter realm. The delicacy of the situation with regard to Kalgachia's trade routes through Batavia was not helped by a simultaneous purge of Norestrian emigré specialists in the Directorate of Labour and Economic Planning, displaced as they were by the heir of Kalgachia's most powerful family seeking to follow the example of his relatives and cultivate a critical organ of the national bureaucracy as a power base.
The Northern Pivot (220-221 AL)
For some years suspicions had existed that the King of Batavia and Amokolia, Arkadius IV, was being drawn into the orbit of the Storish élite; a group long shunned by most Micran powers on the consensus that they were little more than a manipulative sex cult operating under the pretence of a royal court. The means by which King Arkadius might have fallen under the spell of Harald Thorstein were unknown, although the relative youth and inattention of the former during the events leading up to the Auspicious Occasion had made him, from a Storish perspective, an exploitable weak point among the other eminent figures of Benacia whose shared disenfranchisement in the shadow of an uncaring Froyalanish hegemony had provoked them to systematically eject persons of Storish descent from the civil life of most of the continent.
In 220 AL elements within the Elwynnese intelligence community leaked the Pact of Reykjavík, a draft covenant between the royal houses of Amokolia and Stormark whereby the Storish colonial territory of Gascony, in Benacia's boreal northwest, would be merged with the Kingdom of Amokolia to form a revivicated Froyalanish state. Reaction among the other states of Benacia was instant and unanimously negative; the Guttuli Protectorate, Ransenar, Sanama, Sathrati, the rump regency of Shireroth, the Sovereign Confederation, the Unified Governorates and indeed Kalgachia took immediate measures to seal off Amokolia's eastern borders and suspend diplomatic relations. A number of parliamentarians in King Arkadius' other realm of Batavia voiced opposition to their sovereign's actions. Further afield, Natopia redoubled its post-Vanic reform efforts in Uppland whilst Talenore and Constancia sent armed volunteers to help the Konkordskaya Bratva and other formations of the Raspur Pact in securing Mishalan against Amokolian frontier provocations.
In the face of opposition from a dozen nations, the Chancellor of Amokolia assumed an attitude so unyielding that in the former's perspective, it all but confirmed his government and sovereign as compromised and fully controlled agents of the Storish ruling house with whom negotiation and reasoning would be futile. In a speech to the Amokolian legislature, the Chancellor committed Amokolia to a policy of unconditional rehabilitation for the Froyalanish people and explicitly identified Amokolia as their homeland. The declaration was followed by an appeal to Kalgachia in particular to repatriate to Amokolia those bonded Froyalanish labourers it had imported from Shireroth between 155 and 164 AL.
By this time Kalgachia's Froyalanish population, having been sterilised as a condition of entry, were all of elderly age and few remained in the workforce. The Lord Lieutenants' Council, the state organ responsible for settling questions of nationality in Kalgachia, recommended a programme of voluntary repatriation which was duly authorised by the Council of Perfecti in 221 AL. Uptake for the programme was, however, minimal - especially for those who arrived in Kalgachia after the abolition of Froyalanish bondage 161 AL, for whom the move across the frontier from Shireroth had improved their status from enyoked community servant to wage-earning citizen.
The Council of Perfecti had accompanied its ruling on repatriations with a rare direct appeal to King Arkadius to avoid ignoring the underlying causes behind the suppression of the Froyalanish, lest his own Amokolian subjects succumb to the same. This was dismissed by the king in a following speech where he implied the behaviour of the Froyalanish before Auspicious Occasion to be to be "natural right" against which the only available countermeasures of the time were eternally illegitimate, "regardless of the history or background". His assertion in the same speech that "different population groups, different customs and traditions illustrate the cultural diversity" was heavily quoted in the Kalgachi media and intercut with the archived works of Froyalanish bards advocating the expansion of their "ancient ways" to all corners of the globe along with footage of refugees fleeing King Noah's purges and forced land clearances in Mishalan.
The effect of King Arkadius' defiance upon Kalgachia's relations with other powers was profound. The perennial state of military tension with the Unified Governorates, already reduced by the Slavegate Convention, now seemed to evaporate almost entirely; efforts were made by the authorities of each side to reduce ideological invective against the other while Kalgachi troops on the Ҳazedinov Line met in no man's land with Black Legionaries from the opposing Abatis Line to play soccer. In Shirekeep, the Regent Li Naomiai - a figure reviled in Kalgachia for her emotive outbursts against the Garden - announced her resignation for the express purpose of improving Sxiro-Kalgachi relations and establishing a unified Benacian front against the new civilisational threat in the north.
Within Kalgachia, a scattered handful of maverick Deep Singer and Nezeni microbiologists who had been the subjects of varying levels of scrutiny and/or detention by the Prefects for expressing Doronist sentiments, suddenly found themselves with restored security clearances and new job oppurtunities within deniable unitary enterprises of the Directorate of Health and Public Welfare. The object of their new work was a large sample set of I-M253 genotypes, collected from the wilds of northeast Apollonia by Unit 666 and obtained in exchange for three pairs of newborn Tee-als at a military airbase in Wuqi.
