For any active or former UNICEF staff, these errors and omissions should jump out. Can you point out the wrongly drawn or missing borders?
Some tiny city-states (such as San Marino) may be too small to be shown on the map, but you may want to point them out nevertheless.
A bonus for those who can identify occupied
territories; these are not marked on the map. Active and unresolved (so called
frozen) conflicts are waiting to explode and rob children of much of their potential and future. The UN should help to negotiate durable solutions where those living in the areas should determine their own fate; the areas also should be in the focus of UNICEF advocacy and asssistance.
Name as many corrections and disputed or conflict areas as you can find.
When you are done puzzling, you may read past Insights from Outside the Bubble dealing with the darker side of UN reform and UNICEF.
Detlef can be contacted via detlefpalm55@gmail.com
SPOILER ALERT!!
ReplyDeleteMany thanks, Detlef, for this Insight with a difference. The errors - deliberate or otherwise - are not that obvious! I think even many seasoned UNICEFers would have difficulties. Apart from the howlers and (minor) omissions, it's actually not bad map at all, considering the medium. How big was it? Given your connections to the Balkans I can see why it attracted your attention/ire!
I’ve always been fascinated by maps ever since I got a school atlas of the world around the age of 7 – one with all those countries in red! (no, not the USSSR et al, but the British Empire in its dying days!).
Here’s what I could see without googling anything up:
• Serbia looks much larger than it is: because it has absorbed Bosnia & Herzegovina and Montenegro!! It thus appears to have bit of coastline which is actually part of Croatia and Montenegro. A map like this could spark a war, a flurry of outrage and protests at the UN! Are you sure it wasn’t cut by Milosevic while awaiting trial? And hasn’t anyone protested yet to the authorities of wherever you found the map? (I presume is was part of a public picnic table or something).
• Kosovo is not there of course and is absorbed into Serbia as well.
• Luxembourg (the little semi-circle on the edge of Belgium) is slightly mis-placed – it has southern border with France.
• Malta is missing and as proud member of the EU deserved a little dot at least!
• The borders by the Bosphorus between Greece, Bulgaria and Turkey are not clear – but that’s a messy bit on any map!
• Something seriously wrong in the Caucasus – Georgia has absorbed Azerbaijan, or vice versa? And let’s not get into all those tragic conflicts in that region! We know who is behind those! Otherwise we’ll get into the issues of Catalonia, the Basques, not to mention the potential break-up of the United Kingdom! (Would the UN/UNICEF intervene on behalf of the children of Scotland in the forthcoming confrontation between Edinburgh and London over the second referendum? No, because the UK will use its veto of course!)
• Liechtenstein, Andorra, Monaco, San Marino, The Faroes, Gibraltar and various islands off the mainland of the UK are all a bit small to be shown, as are the various “off-shore” bits of Spain and Portugal (Azores, Madeira, the Canaries etc.).
• Intrigued to see the tiny and very northerly border between Norway and Russia clearly marked - the one that some very daring/adventurous/desperate refugees tried to use to get into Europe a couple of years ago, if I remember correctly, including a guy on bike!
I may have missed a few more.
Geography is fun but can also also dangerous! Pity it is no longer taught as a separate subject in most schools.
Tad
Vienna