The Founding of Khazaron (250-107 B.D.)

What is known today as the nation of Khazaron actually began in 250 B.D. as a conglomeration of “fiefdoms” run by cruel landlords who had settled in the region to try and make a profit by initially setting up mining operations and lumber mills. However, much to the chagrin of those landlords, Khazaronian lumber was found to be of sub-par quality and the minerals found in the region where not very impressive either. Still, having bought all this land, the landlords wanted to make some kind of a profit out of it and decided to set up port cities across the area. The idea was to have these multiple port cities serve as halfway points for ships on their way to trade with other nations.

In having these ships stop in their lands the landlords hoped to give a huge boost to their coffers and begin building a power base for themselves. The major problem was that each individual landlord wanted his fief, and his fief only, to be the sole recipient of these trading ships. Greed began to consume the leaders of the various fiefdoms and they went to war with each other, fighting for the right to control all commerce in the region. These trade wars where devastating and cost hundreds of thousands of Khazaronian lives over the decades. Often the landlords would conscript the peasants working their land to fight in their armies, whenever their standing army would run low due to attrition and desertion. This period of Khazaronian history is known as the Century of Blood, the Thousand Fief Reign, and the Trade Wars.

As famine, disease and bloodshed pock-marked the countryside, many of the peasants began to become fed up with the landlords and their constant squabbling over trade rights and the increasingly limited resources of the land. Eventually partisan bands began to spring up all over the countryside, in an effort to tear down the governments of the corrupt landlords. Initially the partisan groups met with little success as they operated independently of each other and focused mostly on just harassing the landlords. However, in 112 B.D., about 3 years after the partisan bands began their guerilla tactics, a charismatic leader by the name of Marcus Carain managed to begin uniting the partisan bands together in an effort to mount a serious offensive.

The Republic (106-1 B.D.)

The Birth of the Republic

Marcus began leading the partisan fighters on raids against the supply lines of the landlords and using their own equipment against them. He also began a regimented training of their troops, making them much more disciplined and willing to stand up against the personal armies of the landlords. The first big victory came three years after Marcus revamped the partisan bands, when they managed to capture the city of Sairion, which had been one of the most sought after cities in the Trade Wars, due to its central location and easily defendable position on a plateau.

The fall of Sairion gave a boost to the morale of the partisan army under Marcus and lead to the liberation of several more cities over the following five years. In each of these liberated cities a provisional council of leading citizens was established to help run the city until the war was over.

Finally, 106 years ago, the last strongholds of the landlords fell. With the landlords gone, the former partisan army began to re-work themselves back into civilian life and rebuilding their beautiful cities. It was during this time that the idea of forming a single national identity came up, so as to prevent any infighting or civil wars from happening again. To that end, the 12 major cities of the country sent representatives to the city of Sairion to meet with each other to discuss plans for unifying their previously divided lands.

The main problem for the delegates to the meeting was how to ensure freedom, while still having enough strength in a national government to prevent in-fighting from breaking out. The assembled delegates decided on a representative form of democracy would work out the best for their needs. Over the following year the delegates worked on the Declaration of Laws and Rights, the set or rules that their new nation would go by. Upon finishing them they each signed the document and made official their announcement the next day, declaring the founding of the Republic of Khazaron. The name of Khazaron had been taken from the amalgam language of their colonial forefathers, meaning Peace and Power.

The nation would be split up into 12 separate districts, 13 counting the capital district. Each district was overseen by a Democratic Council which was elected by the citizens of the district. Each Democratic Council would then send a representative to the National Council in Sairion. This National Council would act as an advisor to the office of the President, as well as be where the next President would be chosen from should the current one fall ill or be killed or otherwise unable to perform his duties. To deal with matters of national legislation, a Senate was established, with each district getting to send a number of Senators equal to their population to the Senate.

Marcus Carain was elected by a landslide to be the first President of the Republic of Khazaron. In his inaugural address he pledged to bring about a new age of progress and prosperity. For seven and a half decades, peace and commerce did become the norm for the Khazaronian people. Ships from foreign lands docked and brought much needed revenue, and the Democratic Councils of the provinces would oversee these transactions and ensure that laws where obeyed.

The Fall of The Republic (45-6 B.D.)

Over time the Democratic Councils became increasingly more powerful from the revenue of the trade going on in their respective cities. Using the wealth gained from trading revenue, many of these Council members began influence elections by buying votes for themselves and their supporters. However with all this money the Councils where making from their deals with the trading companies in their Districts, they where also tying their hands; as the trading companies demanded much in return for the money they funneled into the Councils.

Starting at around 45 B.D. the trading companies, which where now becoming Khazaron’s first corporations, began to openly flaunt their power over the political landscape of the country. Where once they had been careful in revealing their ties to key political figures of the land, fearing reprisal from a very vocal and powerful voting public, they know publicly announced their endorsement and involvement with political figures and key Senators. The corporations had bought enough power and had begun to effectively persecute the voters of the land through a series of laws they got passed in the Senate. These laws, called the “Corporate Domain Laws”, pushed for a democracy that was more intimately tied with the corporations and their employees. They, the corporations who lobbied for these laws, conjectured that since the original goal of the Republic of Khazaron was to provide for unity and freedom, that full on support of capitalism, and its’ representatives in the form of corporations, would be the best way to organize society. The laws stated that corporations would be given preferential treatment in government spending, that they would be allowed to send their own people as special voting observers to the Senate, and that executives of the corporations would be given the same rights as foreign ambassadors.

Many voters became outraged and there was small scale rioting throughout the countryside when the Corporate Domain Laws passed in the Senate. Many where still convinced that they could still work within the system to regain the Senate from the corporations and interest groups they represented. For 10 years a harsh political debate raged in the Senate and throughout many of the small villages that where the centers of the riots going on. Three groups formed during the fierce debates of the time: the Corporate Centralists, who wanted to give all decision making power to the corporations; the Democratic Alliance, who favored a return to a simpler democracy by abolishing the Democratic Councils and letting the individual city councils decide policy for their people; and finally the Freedom Alliance, which was openly antagonistic to the Corporate Centralists and would go to great lengths to impede their progress.

Of the three groups, the Democratic Alliance would be the only one to fall during this period, due to an inability to coordinate effectively and a harsh split on what role capitalism should play in government. With only the two extremely antagonistic groups left, the stage was set for a rather nasty showdown, which is exactly what happened exactly three months after the Democratic Alliance closed its doors. A night raid was conducted on a corporate headquarters in the city of Metropole, resulting in the death of 3 guards and injuring of 15 employees as a bomb was set off by the Freedom Alliance in an attempt to distract corporate goons while they escaped. The catastrophe set the stage for the Corporate people to call an emergency session of the Senate the next day, in which they passed an addendum to the Corporate Domain Act, stating that only those officially recognized by the corporations would be allowed to vote and participate in politics. In one fell swoop millions of voters had been disenfranchised.

While the corporations did manage to keep a hold on the reigns of government, the Freedom Alliance gained a great deal more of support from people with the passage of the addendum to the Corporate Domain Act. Where once they had hundreds of thousands, where now rumored to be in excess of a couple of million followers. Unfortunately for the Freedom Alliance, a crackdown by the corporate controlled government caused them to disband into small cells and go underground for a couple of decades in fear of being wiped out. Hit and run tactics became the standard tactic of the Freedom Alliance, until one day 15 years ago.

During an attempt to seize control of the Senate building and force the corporations to abdicate all control of the government, the Freedom Alliance was caught in an ambush by foreign mercenaries under orders of the corporations. Key members of the Freedom Alliance where caught and executed the next day. The following week information gained through through the torture of captured members of the Freedom Alliance lead to several raids on Freedom strongholds. It toke 7 months, but eventually the government tracked down and eliminated the majority of the Freedom cells, for all intents and purposes end the opposition to their reign and allowing them to rule carte blanche.

This would prove to be their downfall, as with no groups to worry about in trying to stop them, the corporations turned on each other and started to war, like the landlords of old, for control of the country. These wars, thankfully, where not nearly as vicious as the ones during the Thousand Fief Reign, but still did much to tear the country apart. The military was all but abandoned as the corporations sought to fill their security forces with cheap mercenaries, rather than the more expensive and harder to maintain local units. Mutiny ran high, to the point where the military was becoming so angry with the government and the corporations that ran them, that they defected in group of tens of thousands at a time.

The Rise of The Dominion (5 B.D.-D.Y. 1)

In 5 B.D. the government first started hearing reports of a new figure surfacing in the partisan resistance groups. This man was completely unknown to the government, but was said to be charismatic and a veteran of the last few campaigns conducted by the now defunct Freedom Alliance. At first thought of as an urban legend, the government found out otherwise when the figure made himself known in an attack and bombing of the Senate building, succeeding where the Freedom Alliance failed. The man, James Khara, announced a declaration of war against the government and declared the founding of the Sons of Khazaron. For Khara however, the war would be short-lived, with the abundance of mercenaries at their command, the government quickly began a search for Khara, hunting him down and chasing him across the countryside, beginning a 4 year long game of cat and mouse across Khazaron.

During his period of running from the government, Khara realized that he would have to garner powerful, professional allies to take on the corporations. To that end, Khara began to have meetings with high-ranking members of the military, promising to put back together their beloved nation and depose the corrupt politicians and the corporations they had become synonymous with. The majority of the military agreed with him and signed on with the Sons of Khazaron movement. The time for Khara to strike came a little over a year ago when, under the cover of dark while the mercenaries where still chasing him elsewhere, he snuck into the capital city and seized the President. In a pirate broadcast live from the Presidential Mansion, Khara found the President guilty of crimes against the people of Khazaron and forced him to abdicate power, executing him shortly thereafter.

The following conflict between those Loyalists of the old government and those who supported the Sons of Khazaron, was called the Six Month War, and remains to this day the bloodiest and most destructive war the nation has endured. Entire cities where leveled and the infrastructure of the nation, one that had been built up over a century of commerce, ceased to exist. The Sons of Khazaron managed to take control of the capital and maintain control of it throughout the war, effectively severing supply lines for the Loyalists. In the end, with the fall of the last Loyalists stronghold of Metropole, Khazaron was firmly in the hands of Khara and his Sons of Khazaron.

James Khara’s first act after victory was to declare private enterprise illegal in Khazaron and to announce the formation of the Dominion of Khazaron, abolishing the Republic and establishing a homeland for all Khazaronians to enjoy a secure life. The ad hoc government set up appointed Khara as First Archon and set up a group of Regional Archons to administer the districts of the country. Currently the government is trying to re-establish the economy that was destroyed during the War and rebuild the cities that where destroyed.