Burundi
Current Conditions: As of late July, 2005, the Burrowing Nation of Burundi was suspected to be 300 km west of Montevideo, Uruguay. Gravimetric surveys suggest that it is tunnelling to the north-northwest at a depth of 2300 meters, with an estimated speed of 203 km/h. Various tribesmen within the tunnel were used to verify this information.
History[edit | edit source]
In 1996 Burundi was a landlocked little country in the malarial hills of central Africa. Poverty stalked the average Burundian like a Nile crocodile with the munchies. Average lifespan was 13 years, and the median income was equivalent to a small piece of gravel. The Minister of the Miniscule Interior, Jacques Ngadjembola, proposed that the entire nation dig in and establish not just an underground economy but a completely underground existence.
Burundi's neighbors reacted angrily, forbidding the tiny nation to burrow anywhere beneath their borders. However, Ngadjembola had a plan: he proposed that Burundi start digging along the shoreline of Lake Tanganyika instead of along a national frontier.
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And so on November 12, 1996, Burundi disappeared under the bed of Lake Tanganyika. The government of the Congo declared an emergency military alert, fearing that Burundi would trespass underneath its national borders. Zambia, claiming that Burundi had turned south beneath the lake and was encroaching beneath its borders, bombed its own lakeshore. Refugees streamed south to Mbala, but army personnel assumed the Zambian fisherfolk were invading Burundians and massacred them all. No one is sure just what route Burundi followed, but two years later the tiny nation surfaced off the coast of Morocco. Burundian traders sold several hundred tonnes of gold and upward of fifty thousand carats of diamonds on the international market. Congo furiously claimed that these had been pilfered from beneath its sovereign territory, and Botswana registered a similar claim. However, nothing could be proven. Burundians also flooded the world market with edible mushrooms. The little nation then burrowed under the Atlantic seafloor and disappeared again. The country resurfaced again in mid-March 2010 in the middle of the Pacific and has been groring in size day after day. It has been approximated that its size is doubling each other week. At that pace it has been calculated that it could grow in a continent as big as South America in just two and a half years. As of today, governments of Europe and the US are preparing to invade the continent-to-be country, enslave it's people, devise it and lastly settle and colonize. In the waiting of finding important minerals have it been said. |
Geology[edit | edit source]
The basement rock of Burundi itself is volcanic. Modest deposits of uranium, nickel, brie, and charcoal exist, but prior to 1996 mining contributed little to the economy. Post-submergence, the roof-rock of Burundi is of course that of the area beneath which it burrows. Thus Burundi can, in effect, pick and choose among the mineral resources of the world. This has unsettling implications, as we shall see. Maybe. If we get that far.
Politics[edit | edit source]
The current state of Burundian politics is uncertain. Observations gleaned from Burundi's very occasional surfacings suggest that Jacques Ngadjembola has extablished a Marxist-Absurdist dictatorship, albeit in the face of considerable opposition.
As of the surfacing off Morocco, Ngadjembola had declared himself the Great Red Rabbit and established a government based on the "Alice-in-Wonderland Model" proposed by Fredrick Engels, Chico Marx, and George Bernard Shaw in Alice im Märchenland der Sozialistischen Arbeiter (1884).
However, the vast majority of Burundians were farmers before 1996. Post-burrowing many turned to growing matsutake, shitake, portobello, and similar mushrooms; others, however, longed for sunshine and green fields. Adopting the Beatles song Here Comes the Sun as their anthem, these malcontents formed the Grande Armée de Libération de Soleil or GALS.
A later surfacing in the mid-Atlantic seems to have been the result of a coup attempt by the GALS. The leader, Marjorie Ganjadogo, announced that henceforth Burundi would become a Disneyland Democracy. (This form of government has been extensively analyzed by US genius Donald Rumsfeld and his brilliant protogé, Paul Wolfowitz, and was officially declared by them to be the Best Form Of Government Short Of Christian Heaven.) However, a counter-coup by the Socialist Wonderland forces re-established Ngadjembola's distatorship. In considerable disarray, Burundi again burrowed out of sight.
Threat to World Peace[edit | edit source]
(World peace, ha! What a laugh. The only people who invoke "world peace" are the ones that are actively engaged in beating the crap out of some other people. But we digress.)
Anyway, purchases made by the Ngadjembola regime during Burundi's latest appearance suggest a troubling development. The Burundians bought cheese-refining apparatus from a Wisconsin firm, and Swiss centrifuges which could be used to enrich the milk-fat content of brie to fissile levels. Given Burundi's unique access to underground brie deposits, it seems very likely that Ngadjembola is developing nuclear cheese capability in order to maintain his hold on power.
At a 2005 summit meeting British Prime Minister Tony "Kiss Me Quick" Blair vowed to oppose any attempt by Burundi to gain the brie bomb, and allocated £2.50 to study the problem. Russian leader Vladimir "Putaine" Putin responded by rhetorically championing the Socialist Wonderland model as superior to the Disneyland Democracy but agreed in private that a Burundian brie bomb was unthinkable. Romanian President Traian Băsescu, whose national assets consists of five pieces of cardboard and a half-grown goat, was told to shut up and sit down. US President of Vice, Dick "Head" Cheney, called for invasion and regime change in Bolivia because "...Ngadjembola might be thinking of going there, so we must kill the Bolivians in Bolivia or we will have to kill them at home." Japanese diplomats pleaded for sanity, the Australians proposed a game of rugby, New Zealand objected, the Swedes objected on principle, and the Italians sent out for Chinese food. Ironically, the sole Chinese delegate ordered a pizza.
The international community remains split on the question of salad versus steamed vegetables, and cannot agree on wine selection. The problem of Burundian brie enrichment also remains unresolved (as does damn near everything in international politics).
Economy[edit | edit source]
People in Burundi usually deal in pick axes and blow torch and in some regions of the tunnel virgin girls are accepted as a form of currency .
| North Africa |
Algeria · Assyria · Egypt · Morocco · Sudan · Western Sahara |
| West Africa |
Burkina Faso · Ghana · Liberia · Mauritania · Niger · Nigeria |
| Central Africa |
Angola · Cameroon · Belgium · Chad · Democratic Republic of the Congo · Republic of the Congo · Equatorial Guinea |
| East Africa |
Afwirka · Burundi · Djibouti · Ethiopia · Kenya · Madagascar · Malawi · Mauritius · Mozambique · Rhodesia · Rwanda · Somalia · South Sudan · Tanzania · Uganda · West Kenya · Zambia |
| Southern Africa |
Botswana · Donkey Kong Island · Empire of the Four Squares · Eswatini · Lesotho · People's Glorious Republic of Uukumbamabahalarata · South Africa · Zululand |
