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I was just glancing at my map of the world and noticed something I've never seen before. The country Azerbaijan is split into two parrts by Armenia: http://www.rferl.org/images/maps/azerbaijan-map.jpg
This sort of boundary must make it difficult to govern the country. Does anyone know how these boundaries were first defined?
Posts: 2756 | Registered: Jul 2002
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I'm pretty sure that both Lesotho and Swaziland were originally parts of South Africa. During apartheid, the white minority government, in trying to deal with the racial problems they had, made parts of their country sovereign nations under black rule. It's something like our Native American reservations. And then they forcibly moved people there, something like we did with the reservations, to get them out of the mainstream political landscape of the country, or something. The land they chose to set aside for them was not what you might call choice territory, again similar to our reservations. I'm sure I'm totally butchering this account and anyone who knows more please correct me. Anyway, they remain, I think, as independent nations.
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Anne Kate is essentially right...Lesotho and Swaziland are two out of several "Bantustans" that were created by the South African government during apartheid as places to shove black people into--the only two that were actually recognized by other countries. There were several more (which may no longer exist in any sense), some of which were even more ridiculously bordered--one was broken up into several small pieces.
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