Last winter, when Jeremiah Heaton’s daughter Emily asked
him if she could be a real princess, the doting father didn’t have the
heart to refuse. Even though he didn’t want to raise her hopes or make
any false promises, he found himself agreeing to the outlandish request
of a six-year-old.
“Over the winter, Emily and I were playing, and she has a
fixation on princesses,” he said. “She asked me, in all seriousness, if
she’d be a real princess someday. And I said she would.”
So Jeremiah spent hours scouring the internet for a
suitable piece of unclaimed territory. He focused his search on the
Latin term ‘terra nullius’, which means ‘land belonging to no one’.
After several months of searching, he has now managed to locate an
800-square mile desert in Africa, thousands of miles away from his home
in Abingdon, Virginia.
The desert in question is unoccupied territory, claimed by
both Egypt and Sudan, but belonging to neither, due to a land dispute
dating back over 100 years. Located along the Sudanese border, about
halfway between where the Nile crosses into Sudan and Egypt’s coast
along the Red Sea, the strip of land is locally known as ‘Bir Tawil’. It
is one of the last pieces of unclaimed land on Earth.
There have been several online claimants to the property,
and Jeremiah knew he had to do something special to make sure his claim
stood out from the rest. So he actually gained permission from Egyptian
authorities and travelled all the way to Africa. And on June 16 –
Emily’s seventh birthday – he planted a blue flag with four stars
(designed by his children) on a rocky hill, after a 14-hour caravan
journey through the desert.
Jeremiah even renamed Bir Tawil; he’s now calling it the
Kingdom of North Sudan, where he is the undisputed King and his
daughter, the princess. “It’s beautiful here,” he said. “It’s an arid
desert in Northeastern Africa. Bedouins roam the area; the population is
actually zero.”
“As a parent, you sometimes go down paths you never thought
you would,” Jeremiah explained. “I wanted to show my kids I will
literally go to the ends of the earth to make their wishes come true.”
So he made the journey, even though he was ‘fearful of going into a
toxic environment’.
And when he got back home, Jeremiah and his wife got Emily a
crown – she is now addressed as Princess Emily by family members. “It’s
cool,” said the little girl, who sleeps in a custom made castle bed. As
princess, she wants to make sure that all people in the region have
enough food. “That’s definitely a concern in that part of the world,”
agreed Jeremiah. “We discussed what we could do as a nation to help.”
Jeremiah now plans to make his ‘conquest’ official by
reaching out to the African Union for assistance. He wants to formally
establish the Kingdom of North Sudan , and he’s quite confident that
they will welcome him. “I do intend to pursue formal recognition with
African nations,” he said. His first step is to get Sudan and Egypt to
recognize the kingdom.
Surprisingly, Jeremiah is quite sure that his claim over
Bir Tawil is legitimate. He explained that planting a flag is exactly
how other countries, including the United States, were historically
claimed. The only difference here is that his is conquest is an act of
love, not war. “I founded the nation in love for my daughter,” he
declared.
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