This is the story of Shum D’var. Had it ever actually existed, it would have filled today’s news and split opinions wildly. The tiny nation of Shum would have sat on the western half of a small imaginary island, called D’var in one of the indigenous dialects. The island would have been located in the center of the Atlantic Ocean, about 800 miles east of North Carolina and about 200 miles northeast of Bermuda, clearly distinguishing this from any other conflicts we know.
Now, almost all of the indigenous people were very family oriented. They valued their local traditions and respected those of others. Indeed, multiple ethnicities and religions had been mashed together over many centuries of consensual and non-consensual migration in and out of this land. And for just as long, the various groups were quite tolerant of their differences, united more by multiple waves of occupation by outsiders.
Yet today the island is home to an ongoing crisis of ethnic and religious conflict preoccupying the international daily news. Everyone seemingly has an opinion, though not everyone has the same set of facts. So let’s understand how this situation came to be and then ask what we can do.
Despite (or maybe because of) its various indigenous names, the U.S. military calls the island “Loci”, which is Latin for ‘place.’ It became quite useful as a…
