Merar

Merar was a nation of people who had immigrated from Paba to Subumpam during the late stages of the Vegetable War after they had pushed the battlefronts westward out of Paba. After the war they stayed in Subumpam and married Subumpamese women. THey set up a new government stating that only military officers were allowed to hold government posts. Without irony they told the Subumpamese that they had a history of being submissive to outside powers and that they had come to put an end to it by turning Subumpam into the world's strongest military power. The Merar claimed that they themselves had moved to Subumpam but were here to stay, and held no allegiance to any other nation, and thus were themselves not an "outside power".

History

Politics

The Merar promised the Subumpamese that they would never allow Subumpamese people into their government; Merar had conquered Subumpam, and Merar would rule Subumpam. However, many of the women that the conquerors had married had had previous children from a Subumpamese husband, and these children were adopted into the new families and, provided they converted to the Yiibam religion, were considered as Merar. Thus Merar was no longer a true race but rather a racially mixed but hereditary upper class.

The Merar party made pacifism illegal and required that all males serve in the military. THis did not mean that all males were eligible to serve in the government, however; only soldiers who advanced sufficiently high in the ranks of the military were given roles in the government. This in fact brought Subumpam far closer to democracy than it had ever been before, even though power was restricted to a small subset of males; for the first time in history, the seats of power were not simply handed down from one family to its children. And also, the Merar held to their promise of not allowing Subumpamese people to be promoted in the military, which meant that they could not hold government power. However the primary distinction now was a linguistic and religious one rather than an ethnic one, as Subumpamese people who learned to speak Tarpabappa (the Merari language) and converted from Sisnasi to Yiibam were welcomed as new Merari people.