Hegemony of Khar'Shan
From FABT
  The Batarian Hegemony at its greatest extent by 2175 CE prior to the Skyllian Blitz.
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| Political information | |
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Type of government: |
Unitary Ragbastarist one-party totalitarian military dictatorship |
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Founding document: |
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Constitution: |
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Head of State: |
Supreme Regent Edhagrom Brapsalok (first) |
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Commander-in-chief: |
Supreme Regent Edhagrom Brapsalok (first) |
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Executive: |
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Legislative: |
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Judicial: |
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Military: |
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| Societal information | |
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Capital: |
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Official language: |
Farhi (official) |
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Currency: |
Proy (spending currency until 917 CE, remained as internal currency) |
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Official religion: |
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Holidays: |
Ragbastar Day |
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Anthem: |
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| Historical information | |
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Formed from: |
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Dates: |
18 July 1538 CE - 14 February 2198 CE
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Preceded by: |
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Succeeded by: |
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- "The Regent stands, and the Hegemony endures forever."
- — Motto of the Batarian Hegemony.
The Hegemony of Khar'Shan, simply known as the Hegemony, named in batarian state propaganda as the Batarian Empire, historically as Ragbastarist Khar'Shan, and more commonly known as the Batarian Hegemony, was the representative body of Khar'Shan, its nations and batarian colonies from 1538 CE to 2198 CE. The seeds that would eventually grow into the Batarian Hegemony would be sown before the fall of the Batarian People's Republic, at the height of the batarian supremacist movement. Rising to prominence when the Batarian People's Republic was at the height of its power, Iceth Ragbastar was a career military commander in the Batarian Liberation Army, having served with distinction during both Artemis wars, and personally commanded the forces responsible for crushing a rebellion on Aratoht that resulted in a massacre and half the colony being wiped out. Ragbastar's most infamous action however was during the War for Ramo in 1320 CE when tensions between the Vol Protectorate and Batarian People's Republic ended with the Batarian Navy attacking a volus trade fleet and the Batarian Army subsequently invading and annexing the Ramo system, triggering a full military response from the Turian Hierarchy, who sent their own fleet, along with several infantry divisions, to retake the system by force. After managing to isolate and cut off an entire turian infantry regiment and part of a volus auxiliary company, Ragbastar eventually forced them to surrender, but upon realizing turian reinforcements were about to cut them off and that his own men didn't have the provisions to feed these prisoners (the system was blockaded by the turians already and the Batarian Navy was in the process of trying to break it to relieve their forces), he had every single prisoner executed and hastily pulled his army out. This would only be one of Ragbastar's many atrocities that he would go on to commit during the Ramo conflict, and despite the conflict ending in a batarian withdrawal, Ragbastar was able to escape justice: in order to satisfy the turians, the batarian leadership had Ragbastar was dishonorably discharged and subsequently exiled. Ragbastar resented this, believing that his people had betrayed him and tossed away all of his years of service to satisfy the turians, and cited his execution of the turian prisoners as an "us or them" situation where he refused to sacrifice batarian lives needlessly. Despite this, Ragbastar went into exile willingly, but would later write and publish a book called The Crime of Patriotism and Victory of Appeasement, where he explained that he believed the batarian people had a glorious destiny where they were destined to lead the other races to greatness, but that the People's Republic had become rotten and dysfunctional, and that a new regime was required, one predicated on achieving nothing but the batarian destiny and manifesting themselves as the master race, to replace the Republic with one where "batarian hegemony was preserved and maximized to its full potential, for the will of the people." While Ragbastar would die before the Klencory Winter War, and the subsequent Quarian-Batarian War, his book became extremely popular back home, especially amongst the more radical elements of the military, who began to see it as a call for revolution: the ideology of Ragbastarism followed and began to grow, and as the Quarian-Batarian War continued and the early victories the batarians won fizzled out to be replaced with defeat after defeat, the movement only grew in strength, until eventually even people within the government itself began to support it.
All it took for a civil war to break out within batarian territory was the Battle of Logan, where a smaller quarian force humiliated the Batarian Navy when it managed to hold off a fleet several times its size long enough for reinforcements to arrive, and with the fall of the Attican Beta cluster to the quarians, the Ragbastarists, now possessing a paramilitary arm known as the Premsathgolok (Farhi for "Blood Brothers"), seized their chance to begin an open revolt against the People's Republic, which only worsened the war situation with the quarians as they now had to fight both the quarians and their own people. The First Batarian Civil War lasted for six years, with the People's Republic forced to sue for peace with the quarians in the second year of the civil war in order to concentrate their forces, but in the end the Ragbastarists would be victorious, with the government overthrown and the People's Republic dismantled, replaced by what would be known as the Batarian Hegemony, a tyrannical military dictatorship. What followed was years of reorganizing the batarian empire to more accurately represent the dictatorship it had now become, with sweeping political reforms and the military given greater power over affairs of the state. A supreme leader, the Supreme Regent as he would be called, was made head of state, creating an absolute monarchy that had the full support of the military and was free to impose the will of the Ragbastarists over the batarian people. It would take another ten years before the Hegemony's infamous institution of slavery began, with slaves needed to maintain the economy the Hegemony needed to field its fleets and armies for future conquests. Despite all of this however, the Hegemony was a mere shadow of what the People's Republic had been, and its rise to power was in fact the beginning of a slow decline in the batarian empire as it fell behind technologically, philosophically and politically. What had once been a promising new nation that, aside from its aggressive nature and militaristic tendencies, held a potential for cultural, social and technologically progress that began to seep away as the Hegemony became a backwards dystopia intent on separating itself from the larger galaxy and imposing its cruel and unforgiving will upon those under its rule. A sophisticated intelligence and surveillance apparatus was constructed to keep the people under tight control, with the flow of information heavily restricted and a devious and manipulative propaganda machine constructed to control the facts and feed the batarian masses a flow of heavily condensed, filtered and mass produced information that was favourable to the batarian state. "Slavery" was seen as "liberation", freedom was stripped away in the name of "security", wars justified for the "preservation of batarian destiny." Decades, centuries, went by and what remained of the proud People's Republic was long gone, replaced by an iron curtain surrounding an aging, rotting empire intent on concealing itself from the rest of the galaxy in order to control its corner of the galaxy through any means necessary. Rebellions, especially slave revolts, were common in the Hegemony, and most of the wars fought by the Hegemony in the succeeding centuries was against its own people or against rebellious slaves who wanted to be freed of the sadisitic and cruel conditions the batarian taskmasters placed them under. All of them failed however, due in large part to Hegemony's incredibly efficient propaganda machine and its intelligence networks, coupled with the brutal expediency of the batarian military crushing any and all signs of resistance, often with extreme force and little to no mercy. Slave raiding became such an instrinsic part of the batarian military's operational philosophy that an entire branch of its military, the Hegemony Slaver Corps, would be created for this very task. While the Hegemony was smart enough to know it couldn't pick a fight with the larger powers, it knew it could abuse other loopholes, and the Terminus Systems and the outskirts of quarian space were ripe slave harvests primed and ready to be plucked, and the batarian slave markets raked in an enormous cash flow that bankrolled much of the Hegemony's spending. By the 17th Century CE, the batarian slave empire was infamous across the galaxy, rightfully feared and utterly despised by all civilized nations who had outlawed the morally contemptuous institution. The Hegemony would engage in border disputes and brief conflicts as well, but none on the scale of its predecessor, with the Hegemony picking its battles very deliberately in order to avoid provoking its already volatile and hostile neighbours. The Hegemony's presence in the Terminus Systems became so prevalent that the main batarian language, Farhi, became lingua franca in the region.
The government of the Hegemony was fairly simple, but incredibly ostentatious in its intent to intimidate and project strength, to both its own people and outsiders. The government itself was based on a rudimentary one-party system where one party held power for eternity, with no competing parties and no chance for a fair and honest election process to oust them if the people didn't like them. Censorship and silencing of dissent was heavy and enforced without exception, with the infamous and feared Feksogar secret police mercilessly eliminating those deemed to be enemies of the state and silencing those who dared to criticize the Supreme Regent, the government or their ideology: defeatism during the Skyllian Blitz, even amongst the ranks of the military, was punished severely with many disappearing for spreading defeatist sentiments, including those that contradicted established "facts" pumped out by the propaganda ministry. Organizations like this kept the Supreme Regent in power, as did the military, whose very approval of the Regent was intertwined with the fact that mandatory conscription existed within the Hegemony from the age of 13 and over for all males, and therefore the Supreme Regent had to have served in the military for a length of time, guaranteeing them military sympathies. The Supreme Regent sat at the top of government as the supreme head of state, unquestioned in their authority and who held absolute power, as commander-in-chief of the military and monarch of the Batarian Hegemony. Despite this, the Supreme Regent still required a cabinet to enforce and carry out his edicts and policies, so the Supreme Regency's Advisory Council was composed of Regent-appointed ministers and military commanders who each held a specific duty they would be charged with carrying out, such as defense, education, agriculture, infrastructure, etc. The powers of the Advisory Council were entirely perfunctory and whose powers and capabilities were entirely at the discretion of the Regent, and could change from Regent to Regent: their power was constantly nebulous, and totally subject to change. Being a military dictatorship, a huge amount of attention was given to the Hegemony Armed Forces, to the neglect of other vital sectors of the state, creating the illusion of a power nation when in actuality it was teetering on the brink of collapse almost constantly. This focus on expanding and maintaining such a large military put enormous stress on the Hegemony's economy, which relied heavily on its slave empire to bankroll its military operations and endeavors, but by focusing on its defense forces, areas such as agriculture and infrastructure were neglected, and many areas on Khar'Shan fell into poverty. While this allowed the Hegemony to maintain the image of a nation state capable of projecting strength, it meant that in actual fact it was bordering on the definition of a failed nation-state, being impoverished and virtually destitute in its inability to feed its own citizens properly. This was compensated by the propaganda ministry, which managed to convince the batarian people that they were actually a prosperous and thriving nation, and that the outside galaxy envied and coveted their glory and wealth, justifying the exorbitant Hegemony military spending as needing to protect their citizens from the outside world and provide them security, and with only one source of news being from the Hegemony itself, there was no way for their people to fact-check this, ultimately leaving them as docile, obedient servants of the batarian state. The focus of the Supreme Regent on affairs outside of Khar'Shan also meant that the batarian homeworld itself and the affairs that occurred on it was largely ignored, and wars between subservient nation-states on Khar'Shan was common place even by 2186 CE, although the Regent would step in if things got too out of hand.
The Hegemony, despite remaining a member state of the Citadel Council and having an embassy on the Citadel, was not popular with the Council and the Hegemony was largely treated as a pariah state, often acting outside the interests of the other Council races and deliberately provocative in its actions, and it didn't help that the Hegemony's institution of slavery directly violated Council law prohibiting its practice. In 1785 CE, the Hegemony Navy bombarded and destroyed an important salarian cultural site on Mannovai whilst the CFMCCN summit was taking place, with an argument breaking out between batarian and salarian officials when the batarians took offense to a comment made and departed angrily, bombarding the site out of anger: after the incident, the Salarian Union barred the Batarian Hegemony from ever coming near Union space ever again, and if they did, the Union wouldn't hesitate to retaliate. These tensions briefly escalated when Hegemony warships began patrolling the salarian border, with salarian warships ghosting them, but the Hegemony eventually backed down, although it claimed in state propaganda that it had "taught the salarians a valuable lesson". When the Greater Quarian Republic collapsed following the First Morning War in 1896 CE, the Batarian Hegemony didn't hesitate to spin it as "divine revenge for the Quarian-Batarian War", and made numerous attempts to claim former quarian colonies, although the Council was quick to bar them from doing so, citing the Treaty of Etamis and the possibility of Terminus Systems intervention. In 1913 CE, the asari colony of Esan was annexed by the Hegemony and renamed Lorek, but due to Esan being in the Terminus Systems, the Thessian Republics did nothing about it, and the Hegemony ultimately reduced Lorek to client status, relinquishing direct control of the planet and making it a satellite state. Possibly the largest provocation was in 2115 CE when the Batarian Hegemony claimed the planet Enael after teams from the Asari Republics, Salarian Union, Elcor Courts and Vol Protectorate had already claimed it. When the Hegemony declared martial law on the planet and took the Citadel teams into custody, the Citadel immediately demanded their release: the Hegemony refused to comply and all-but enslaved the civilian colonists. This lead to an asari-led military coalition that deployed to the planet to take it back by force: the asari, salarians, elcor and the turians dedicated troops to this operation, and the resulting conflict became the Enael conflict, where the Hegemony would be defeated within three months in a series of skirmishes that decisively defeated the Hegemony Army and left the Hegemony Navy helpless to bring in reinforcements: in order to save face, the Hegemony finally agreed to withdraw their forces, but later claimed they had achieved victory, using vastly inflated statistics of having killed thousands of Council troops in the process when the real numbers were much smaller and under a hundred. Following the conflict, heavy sanctions were placed on the Hegemony by the Turian Hierarchy, Salarian Union and Asari Republics, forcing the Hegemony to increase trade with the Terminus Systems.
Despite all of these provocations and the Hegemony's flourishing slave empire, it was an empire on the brink of collapse, and as one human political analyst Howard Cayman pointed out in 2158 CE, "the Batarian Hegemony is a paper tiger of an empire that fits all the definitions of an empire about to fall: corruption is rampant, it uses slaves to keep its economy afloat, the military is a blunt instrument that exists solely to project power in order to hide its obvious insecurities, and its surveillance network is dedicated to silencing a people who are kept docile in an effort to smother the fires of a turbulent rebellion that is all but inevitable. This is a failed state, not an empire. The empire died with the Republic, and what's left is an impostor. A copy-cat. And once the system realizes that, it'll come undone. And I think I'll live to see it." His premonition was eerily correct, although not for the reasons he would have initially posited. The Hegemony believed it had struck gold when humanity joined the galactic community in 2157 CE, as new species were vulnerable and easy to exploit, and humans made excellent slaves: the problem was that the Systems Alliance was quickly rising in power, and thanks to lessons learnt in the First Contact War, it was quickly mastering interstellar war at an unprecedented rate. War between them was inevitable, but when it finally came in 2176 CE, the Hegemony was left humiliated and brutally beaten, its military decisively defeated within a year and parts of its territory annexed for the first time in its history since the Quarian-Batarian War, and its Navy temporarily neutered. This proved to be the beginning of the end for the Hegemony, as it took them years to recover from this, and instead of trying to build the Navy back up, they doubled down on their slaver operations and continued to invest in the Slaver Corps: by this point, they had also finally dissolved their embassy on the Citadel and seceded from the Council. Slave rebellions continued to be prevalent, and this only continued to stretch the Hegemony's already battered resources to their limit.
In late 2185 CE, the Bahak Incident and destruction of the Bahak system led to heightened tensions with the Alliance once more, with the Hegemony demanding Shepard's head for what they perceived to be unprovoked mass murder from a man who hated batarians. This only made the eventual Reaper invasion that transpired on 2 June 2186 CE all the more devastating, as initial confusion from the invasion saw both sides initially mistook the invasion as an attack from the other. The Reapers emerged within Hegemony space, and their attack was so swift and efficient that the Hegemony still hadn't fully realized what was happening by the time Khar'Shan had already fallen, with the Hegemony military utterly obliterated and fleeing in all directions: what was left of the Hegemony followed into a brutal Reaper occupation, with the remnants of the Hegemony military regrouping to join the United Galactic Confederacy later, and eventually achieving victory at the Battle of Sol. In spite of all expectations to the contrary, the Hegemony did not collapse as a result of the Reaper War, although it did only manage to hold on by a thread, with the remnants of its military just barely holding onto control over remaining Hegemony space, and only because the aftermath of the Reaper War left many reluctant to fight another war so long after the last one. Initially, there was hope for the Hegemony, as reconstruction efforts were initially prioritized over rebuilding the military, but then the status quo resumed and it became clear the Hegemony was not going to change, even as battered and nearing death as it was. The Hegemony slave wars began in 2194 CE and continued well into 2198 CE when slaves and Hegemony citizens (now having been exposed to the outside galaxy after being displaced as refugees by the Reaper War) alike had finally had enough and rose up in rebellion. This atmosphere was ripe for Ocrolya Khabcass to take advantage, spreading his religion of Apexism to thousands of followers and secretly preparing to demolish the Hegemony and build a new batarian state free of the old one's flaws and corruption. Khabcass enacted his plan in 2197 CE by attacking the human colony of Fargone and sparking the Border War: now having to fight a war with the full might of the Systems Coalition as well as internal slave rebellions, the Hegemony was effectively finished. By 2198 CE, Coalition forces had reached Khar'Shan and laid siege to it, and the Hegemony finally collapsed under its own weight. With the death of the Supreme Regent during the Storming of the Sancotor and the end of the Border War, his successor formally surrendered and later signed the Treaty of Khar'Shan, effecting the extinction of the Batarian Hegemony and its replacement by the New Batarian Republic, a client state of the Systems Coalition. Around the same time, Khabcass took the tens of thousands of batarians who had converted to Apexism and went and founded a seperate, independent batarian state known as the Titan Hegemony, a "perfected and flawless" successor to the original Batarian Hegemony.