Corporate Wars
Haraway's World is one of oldest human colonies and one of the first longshot missions to leave earth. Its colonists were members of the Fifth Wave feminist movement, the last hurrah of the great feminist social movement on earth before true gender equality was finally achieved. Haraway’s founders were fundamentally utopian in their beliefs, seeking to build the perfect society on a distant planet without the conflict and uncertainty that plagued mid twenty-first century earth.
Landing on Haraway they found a beautiful, lush, hot and thoroughly poisonous world and set gamely to the task of making it theirs and them its. The Initial colonisation was entirely transhumant and they quickly adapted genetic engineering techniques to allow themselves and their children to survive in Haraway’s heavy metal rich environment and high temperature (around 55 degrees at the equator,) giving rise to a massive and constant belt of high pressure storms that restrict colonisation to near the iceless poles. The first colony was set up on the large island named "Landing" around a major Posthuman sight which turned out to be a nano-factory the colonists could take control of for their own use.
Efforts were made to reduce the colonies affect on the alien ecosystem, both for ethical and scientific reasons, and this gave birth to the system of augmented reality that still marks Haraway today, Harawayans were able to carry their civilisation with them in their implanted computers rather than plough over the wondrous alien environment that the colonists had found. Cities were built however, first around the posthuman assembly plant on landing, then further afield, and the population rapidly expanded. Great works of art and culture were created, as was Haraway’s colour system of communitarian transhumanism and direct democratic government. The caste systems origins came from both a technical and social problem. It was observed that in Haraway's relatively mild conditions and with manufacturing systems like fabers, it would become possible for a truly transhuman beings to live essentially alone, without needing contact with anyone else. Further, while it was possible to create a transhuman who would be good at a large range of areas, a specialist transhuman would be far superior in her speciality than a generalist. These two observations combined to lead to the creation of the Colours, both allowing better transhumans and making better community.
Many Harawayans still remember their time of isolation as Haraway’s golden age, without military expenditure or the need for protection from a hostile universe to suck government spending away from the public good, indeed, government its self was limited, with few matters coming before the citizenry for voting, the government’s primary business was to provide necessary resources to all Harawayans and ensure a smooth transition from one job to another. The Truth however is a little more complicated than that.
2100-2120: Town and Country
For the ten years before the recontact in 2110, Haraway had been experiencing a growing political break between the central government created by the mass policy votes conducted via Haraway's network, but whose primary constituency was the cities and suburbs of Landing, New Reykjavik and Barsoom Islands, and the provincial classes of outer areas, especially the land holders and farmers. This tension was exacerbated by the AR links which shrunk the distances, culturally and politically, between the major cities, and by difficulties in accommodating the population increases of the 21st century cloning boom.
In order to open up large amounts of land quickly, Harawayan policy in the 2090s to 2110s (30s and 40s by local calendar) had given large resource allocations to those who could organize the survey and exploitation of new land, including a large portion of that land which they were expected to sell to others. Unfortunately many did not sell their land, and a system of land holders and large farmers began to develop along Haraway's periphery. In Haraway's mostly collectivist economic and political enviroment this naked self interest was viewed with rising alarm.
While presented in many Harawayan sources as greedy robber barons, various revisionist histories have recently suggested a more complicated picture, with prominent rural land owners striking a series of deals with roving Violet nomads, explorers and bush pilots. The violet groups would scout and survey a new set of land, then trade it for industrial goods to one of the large farmers, allowing large areas of the colony to be opened up rapidly.
In rural areas however these landholders were set against the various poor and middle class workers, especially reds and yellows, many of whom suffered fairly brutal economic dislocation due the efficiency of this system, which left most newly developed colonial areas under the control of large land owners. Inevitably this led to a series of political clashes and major land redistributions. These clashes all reached an eventual political resolution, given the demilitarization of Haraway at the time, but outside forces intervened. In 2110 The Stargazer ship [i]John Cabot[/i] landed on Haraway.
2120-2149: Post Contact
Initially recontact changed little on the domestic political front. The central government began to turn more resources into opening up outer areas of the colony, including Beta Continent and far flung islands near the equator to settlement and exploitation. These government programs slowly eroded the power of landholders and large farmers to the benefit of various agricultural collectives and urban run businesses, but were seen as a compromise by most as they ended the need for compulsory land purchase or seizure by collective vote. The decade after recontact was relatively quiet however, though difficulties in assimilating Haraway's massive cloning boom continued in some areas, and tension broke out into several small incidents, especially around the new cities built on what had been once relatively virgin wilderness.
Many land owning families and their violet compatriots didn't see it like this however, and began to seek other ways to gain power and prosperity. Several prominent families, headed by the Asinda family formed a secret society known as the Grey Group, based around a mixture of Objectivist Ideology, anti-casteism (which was extremely popular among many violets at the time) and representative constitutionalism (a doctrine that suggested the power of the people should be limited by mediation through representatives and a constitution). It's little wonder that the Grey Group saw the EU as natural allies, or that many EU companies saw them as allies in turn.
Wary of the Core, and its alliance with the still politically difficult land holder families, the Harawayan government reinforced its police and formed the Harawayan defence force and space program. With an authorized strength of 10,000, the Defence Force (which gives its name to the modern day Harawayan First Division: The Ten Thousand) was initiall fairly lightly equipped, with mostly hand carried arms created by local designs. At first they carried mostly small calibre assault rifles and rocket launchers, (though they rapidly adopted more modern designs) with what heavy weapons they did mount launched from aircraft. The biggest problem was the sheer area they needed to cover and most of the defence force's fabricator cycles were devoted to sub-orbital craft.
In January 2125, Mitzi Asinda, the heir apparent to the Asinda family fortune met with representatives of six large EU pharmaceutical businesses with a proposal that would later be called treasonous by many on Haraway. In exchange for major share holdings for the Grey Group members in the EU companies, and cheap and exclusive access to EU goods that the companies could arrange they would massively undercut the prices of urban based Harawayan agribusinesses which were the EU's current suppliers drugs derived from Harawayan ecosystem. Faced with strikes and protests bought on by this action, Grey Group members bought in large numbers of foreign workers and robot labour to replace striking workers.
Shocking as this was for most Harawayans what came next was worse. When the Harawayan government voted to restrict the import of foreign labour and censor the large families involved, restricting their access to various commonly held state resources such as the Ocean the European Union, influenced both by Group Grey and its own pharmaceutical companies declared Haraway's oceans international waters, open to whoever wished to exploit them.
2149: The Blue Trees Compact
Grey Group and the corporations still needed one another, with the corporations still reliant on local support from the large land owning families, not to mention their expertise in resource extraction, while Grey Group had now fully committed themselves to the European cause (at least as it was seen by most citizens of Landing or Barsoom) and were actively pushing for an end to the caste system and a more representative (vs. direct) form of government. Political scuffles begun almost immediately, with mass protests being launched against the internationalization by various mostly city based groups (though including many lower class rural non-violets).
The level of violence of these protests began gradually to increase, with acts of sabotage against corporate and land holder interests. In response Land holders appealed to their mostly violet allies and off world backers for troops to protect their operations. Many of the Grey Group core members moved too previously uninhabited islands in order to help set up bases there and escape potential arrest by Harawayan security forces. Their main base was set up on the Blue Trees Island Chain, along with a major facility to exploit the rich (and largely unique) natural resources of the area.
With tension running high, a general vote of all Harawayans repudiated the internationalization of the planets oceans, with 60% voting for the repudiation. In the wake of this, Harawayan police moved to raid the Blue Tree's facility with support from the Defence Force. When the police unit landed it was confronted by several corporate security units and asked to leave. After the first corporate security troops were restrained and put under arrest other groups within the facility opened fire.
Despite their transhuman superiority both Harawayan police and defence force units found themselves badly outmatched by the mercenary security forces and violet nomads on Blue Trees and were forced to retreat with heavy causalities. Shortly after their withdrawal, Mitzi Asinda broadcast a long speech in which she laid out the terms of the Blue Trees compact, and launched a long rhetorical attack on the current caste system and state of Harawayan direct democracy, which she called an invitation to the Tyranny of the majority, and called on all right thinking Harawayans to rise up and overthrow the corrupt central government bureaucrats who had led the people astray.
This speech was the signal for a previously infiltrated group of Violet Nomads and corporate security 'advisors' (made up mostly of former EU, South America and Indonesian special forces) to launch a strike against Landing in which they seized control of several government buildings. Unfortunately for them while they correctly judged the Defence Force's initial inability to respond, they misjudged Landings populous. Massive demonstrations isolated the buildings and galvanized Defence Force and Police units into action. Within a few days Landing was clear of hostiles, with few survivors among the attacking force. War had now begun in earnest.
Opposing Forces
The opposing forces that faced one another in the Harawayan civil war were, by the standards of the time not exactly well trained or equipped. Indeed the Harawayan government's inability to stamp out its rebels may have been one of the causes of the overconfidence which pervaded EU forces on the subject of Haraway before the ZOCU war some 30 years later.
On Haraway meantime there is often a glossing over of the side played by Harawayans on the Compact side, though revisionist histories of the modern day have begun to address this trend.
Compact Security
While the name Compact Security raises the idea of a corporate security force, the Compact's army bore little resemblance to most security arms or PMCs, though it included several of the latter. Off world advisors, specialists and even combat troops drawn from earth and various colony worlds flocked to the Compact's banner due to the high salaries it offered. Most were kept in central areas of the compact for training and guard duties, especially given the difficulty in long term operations in Haraway's harsh environment. There were also worries among the Compact's high command that releasing them might cause significant problems with local populations, or even lead to a loss of control, fears which later proved well grounded. However as the war went on, increasing numbers of specialists were deployed to supplement the compacts mostly lighter native forces, often used to operate excellent, though expensive European made artillery and aircraft. Despite this, the Compact found its self unable to meet the industrial might of the Harawayan cities, and turned increasingly to light infantry operations and guerrilla warfare in the war's later half.
It's often forgotten that most of the Compact's leadership and combat forces were Harawayan, and indeed, just as strongly transhuman as their foes. Mitzi Asinda was a Blue, and the Compact's chief strategist, Lora Remno was a Yellow. The Compact used violet caste nomads extensively, especially in difficult terrain, where even the mostly red city based light infantry forced had great difficulty in operating. That said, the Compact did have difficulty filling out its main combat units with reds, as it had little to offer them, and few found any appeal in the mostly pro-landholder propaganda of the compact.
This lack of Red led to an extreme dislike of them among many off world recruited Compact Personnel, and even some of the native violet troops. In the war's later part, this led to many atrocities against Reds, especially Red civilians who couldn't fight back.