Welcome to Bir Tawil, the land that no country wants

Planting a flag is meaningless, as this article shows.

There are two ways to claim land.

The first is to conjure up some de jure rights (some way to justify legal ownership, such as 500 years ago your ancestors owned the land until someone illegally invaded or you inherited the title to the land from your great-great-great-* grandfather). It can be flimsy (or outright forged), but it needs to be recognized by other countries to be effective. Religious significance was once recognized as basis for de jure claims, but it is not anymore.

Then you have de facto control. If you can exert physical control of the territory, it's pretty much yours. There are companies you can pay who will do this. Reflex Responses might be one, but there are a number of them out there.

Of course having de jure rights without de facto control is pretty useless. It's a long game strategy. Spain one day hopes they will be able to take de facto control of the Gibraltar, but it won't be in the lifetime of anyone alive today.

Its not a case of nobody wants it, but rather they both want something else more. This wiki extract summarises it quite well:

>Egypt claims the original border from 1899, the 22nd parallel, which would place the Hala'ib Triangle within Egypt and the Bir Tawil area within Sudan. Sudan however claims the administrative border of 1902, which would put Hala'ib within Sudan, and Bir Tawil within Egypt. As a result, both states claim the Hala'ib Triangle and neither claims the much less valuable Bir Tawil area

>> But what he was not prepared for was an angry backlash by observers who regarded him not as a devoted father or a heroic pioneer but rather as a 21st-century imperialist.

Neither. The guy is just another adventure tourist. He didn't trek off into noman's land for his daughter. He was out to do something extreme and found something. It's like climbing Everest to "raise awareness" for some disease. You wanted to climb Everest and, like any determined adventure tourist, will adopt any cause that aids you in that quest. "For my Daughter" gets the headlines, but in my book the better parent is the one that doesn’t disappear on dangerous vacations under the guise of fulfilling princess fantasises.

The princess thing is basically what DisneyWorld is all about. The $$,$$$ spent on this trip could buy your daughter the entire princess vacation package, castle included.

This is similar to the pockets on the Croatian side of the Danube which Croatia says are Serbian and Serbia says are Croatian (with the exception that in the European case, Croatia exercises effective control over them).

Great read, thanks.

Instead of enabling his daughter to become a princess, he could have put her on a diet of Studio Ghibli films to teach her there are better things to do with her life:

http://www.wired.com/2012/01/disney-vs-miyazaki/

"No, I'm afraid you aren't quite beautiful and lovable enough, just the way you are, my daughter. I need to take thousands of dollars out of your college fund, traipse halfway through a country torn by decades of civil war and genocide, and drag your name and photograph through the international media, first -- for the sake of an abstraction I looked up on the internet. Then you'll be my precious little princess."