Kamaria

Kamaria appears on maps as an upside down Tasmania situated around the Philippine island of Mindanao. Often in exercises its forces play the role of an aggressor landing in northern Australia and carrying out special operations like sabotage or harrassment, such as in Exercise Desert Predator where a RAAF air force base was threatened.

The name Kamaria comes possibly from Swahili or Arabic where the word 'Qumar' means moon. By coincidence, Kamaria is also the name of a country on a distant planet in a not very famous science fiction novel called Blibbings, by Barbara Paul. Equally coincidental is that Qumar is the name of a ficticious rogue state that occasionally threatens the Bartlett administration in the television mini-series The West Wing.

Previously the Australian Army used Musoria as another enemy to wargame against. Musoria represented a much larger country that supposively had the ability to carry out a fully-fledged invasion of the Australian landmass, adopting Soviet military doctrine and order of battle. The country was designed in an earlier era when invasions from the north were considered more of a threat than terrorism or low level operations. The country was also named in an era when the military could afford to be less subtle towards Australia's northern neighbours - Musoria comes from the Bahasa Indonesian word for 'enemy'.

In my case, I first heard about Musoria as an 18 year old army reservist stumbling around in the dark in a training course, by being told by my platoon commander that we were under attack by Musorians. For the next few days I wondered what nutter of a general decided to portray the American state Missouri as a potential threat to Australia.