Codex: Culture: Batarians in Alliance Space

"Alliance soldiers are to treat Legal Residents with all the respect and courtesies due to any civilian population. All other Residents are to be presumed hostile unless otherwise cleared, with the safety of soldiers and friendly civilians taking priority. Small and large arms fire, physical violence, illegal biotic usage, sabotage, theft, vandalism, and non-compliance to lawful authority will all be considered valid justifications for lethal force."

-Alliance Standing Occupation Orders B-09, AC-116

Of the dozens of billions of Batarians in Human space, no word seems to gloss over their status like the word 'Resident.' The legal status of all Batarians across Alliance space, the protections guaranteed are non-existent on their own: Human inter-species law currently only recognizes and honors protections as agreed to in mutually-binding treaties with other races, of which none was ever signed with the Hegemony. All Batarian Residents fall under Alliance military law and occupational jurisdiction, no matter their location or Resident class.

While Batarian Residents do not enjoy indisputable legal rights, the Alliance has over time expanded the Resident status into an entire system of tiers, based in part on the Turian caste system. There are twenty publicly-acknowledged tiers of Resident Status, not including classified status markers used by the Alliance military. All Batarians are required to register with the Alliance occupational authority, and for the rest of their lives their positions and legal privileges are determined by their Tier status, a sum total of known history, criminal records, compliance, and reliability. A Batarian's tier determines where a Batarian is authorized to live, to travel to, or to work on, as well as a priority for reconstruction aid and other assets.

The Resident system is broken into three categories: Legal, Middle, and Restricted. The Middle tiers are the tiers in which most of the Batarian population resides: civilians who, while not considered a security threat in and of themselves, have no history of exceptional aid or compliance with the Occupation. These tiers are the functional 'middle class' of occupied Batarians: not trusted by the Alliance, but not directly suspected either, they are allowed to live in the slowly recovering cities, are allowed low-risk jobs, and generally receive adequate aid to avoid destitution. While life is not equal to what a free Batarian enjoyed under the Heirarchy, and somehow with even more blatant public surveillance drones overhead, it remains far better than the life of the lower-tiers. Most middle-tier Batarians simply wish to keep their heads down and avoid trouble, but there is a constant level support for the Insurgency in terms of smuggling, spies, and recruitment.

Restricted Batarians occupy the lowest tiers: the security threats, the known anti-Human elements, the former Batarian soldiers and slavers who the Alliance wants to keep an eye upon most. Life for a Batarian in the Restricted Tiers is the life under the full brunt of Human occupation: always the last to receive rebuilding efforts and the first to see patrols and re-occupation by Alliance soldiers, the Restricted Tiers are in a constant level of insurgency as the Alliance continues to concentrate them in the Restricted Districts. Little more than shanty towns and ruins yet to be rebuilt after the war, Batarians in the restricted tiers are as often driven to the insurgency in need as they were already part of it: Batarians of the Restricted Resident Tiers aren't even trusted for menial labor in the rest of the territories. The Restricted Destricts of Khar'shan are considered some of the worst humanitarian districts outside of the Terminus… and some of the most dangerous as well, as even charity and aid groups are wary of entering them. Threats of losing one's Resident tier and being forced into the Restricted Districts is often the single gravest threat the Alliance can leverage against Batarians in higher tiers.

Batarians in the Legal Tiers, by contrast, live something almost approaching a normal life. Freed slaves, civil authorities, and those specialists willing to use their skills for the Alliance, Legal Residents account for nearly a fifth of the Batarian population. Legal Residents are more or less considered 'reliable' by the Alliance, and are left to live their lives with minimal interference and mostly unobtrusive surveillance. Legal Residents are given priority to live in rebuilt cities and districts of Khar'shan, and enjoy the highest standards of living among Batarians. Legal Residents are also the only tiers who are given the concession of civilian trials instead of military tribunals, and enjoy the most rigorous protections against abuses by Human soldiers and civilians. The Alliance takes notable care with how it deals with Batarians of the Legal Tiers, both to preserve their cooperation and in part to protect them against the lower tiers who often view them with suspicion and outright hatred: Legal Residents are perhaps the only group more hated than the Alliance by the Insurgency.

Any Batarian not of the Restricted tiers can apply to join the Occupation Police or even the Alliance military, potentially elevating themselves and their immediate family into a higher tier status. Though most Batarians serve in the occupational authority, serving as police and even paramilitary support, to the surprise of many both in the Alliance and out over five million Batarians currently serve directly in the Alliance military. Despite being subject to extensive background checks, intensive training and testing, and a persistent if informal institutional racism in treatment and postings, many Batarians have served with distinction in the last decade. Though often relegated to unglamorous occupational duties and ground-side colony garrisons, and with very few ever rising above the rank of corporal (and only a few dozen currently as warrant officers), mixed-units that include Batarians have gained notice and respect in recent years as a new generation of Alliance officers is more inclined to use them in actual combat. The two most famous mixed units to date are the 7th Elysium Guard Battalion, which famously rallied to stall and hold the Skyllian Blitz, and the 3rd Shaxni Riaders, a battalion made famous on Torfan.

Author Note:

Five million sounds massive, but it's really peanuts when you remember how many soldiers the Alliance uses on Khar'shan alone. But still, this is a pretty revolutionary advance for the Alliance: during the First Contact War, such a thing would have been unimaginable. Given the stress-tests, background checks, and general difficulty involved in becoming an Alliance soldier as a Batarian, these first few millions are very much analogous to the integration of blacks into the US military: they had to be better than good just to be tolerated. Assimilation Shepards love these guys as proof of integration: Xenonationalist Shepards adopt a tone of 'I am counting the days until your species is removed and you are decommissioned.'

Shepard doesn't get a Batarian on the team in ME1 (there's no Batarian the Alliance trusts enough to risk their first Spectre being betrayed by), but we do meet a small number along the way. The ranking Alliance survivor at the Alliance outpost being overrun by Rachni is a Batarian corporal, for example. In ME3, James Vega would be a Batarian.

That said, who caught the irony of the Alliance making a caste system of sorts for the Batarians? True, it's one with a lot of social mobility (particularly downward), but...

And thus concludes the two-post special about Batarians in Human space.