Many separatists and anti-federalists have spoken on the Intaki system’s low security status as unjust or insulting. However, the true weight of this situation seems clouded by this rhetoric. For Empire Space (that is: space under the direct control and defense of the four major nations or CONCORD), a 0.1 security status is the lowest possible rating for CONCORD jurisdiction without the system becoming completely lawless and unclaimed. Usually such a status merely restricts contraband cargo (namely slaves) but customs vessels will only apprehend customs violators and do not police the area.
In Intaki, all known contraband drugs are not deemed illegal. Furthermore ectoplasm, toxic waste and protein delicacies are not illegal in Intaki space. The only goods the Federation deems contraband in Intaki space are slaves and viral agents. It should be noted that there are no active Federation customs checkpoints in Intaki to search and confiscate these goods, and there are no customs agents active in the area to capture those responsible.
The only distinguishing feature that separates Intaki from the lawless space is the few automated Gallente sentry guns around the stargates. I find it strange, however, that the citizens of Intaki pay the same taxes for the defense of their space lanes but find no such support from the Federation. Petty pirates, namely from the Serpentis Corporation, frequent an area not dangerous enough to lure professional pirate hunters but dangerous enough to dissuade travelers and shippers from entering.
Most contraband goods are free to pass through the Intaki homeworld while deeper in the Federation each individual system is protected by its own fleet of customs officers. This is to say that Federation Customs does not place checkpoints at the entry points to Federation space. Rather, they assign officers to each “core” system and seems to ignore fringe systems such as our home for hundreds of generations of Intaki.
Such diplomacy from the Federation sends a clear message to Intakis: You are not important, you are expendable, you are forgettable, and you are alone. The security status of Intaki is long past the point of insult. It constitutes an ongoing Federal project of lasting Intaki alienation.
Intaki space effectively becomes a ghetto through these measures: trapping those within its borders and scaring away those outside. Our trade routes are undefended, our interstellar markets unguarded, our home is abandoned by the Federation that promised to protect it. As Federalists spew propaganda of democracy and diversity they sit on an institution that propagates an imposed ghetto on a supposedly free and equal population.
However, the solution is not the eventual federal increase of security status supplemented by an increased naval presence. Such politics would merely gloss over the consistently oppressive and marginalizing ideological apparatus of the Gallente Federation. The Gallente know what they are doing to our space, their politicians are well aware of the implications of these politics, and they sit in Luminaire idling their fingers, waiting for us to forget.
We will not forget. If we, the Intaki, need to plead each time with a Gallente government over such a fundamental and basic issue as freedom, then our culture and identity will be long gone before the Federation even implements any visible change. It must be our own prerogative to assign our homeworld its own status. Our home for millennia must be ours to control, directly and popularly, or we will never know freedom.
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Reprinted with author’s permission.