How the Caamas Document Crisis Began
This was a huge problem beyond the fact that it implicated the Bothans as complicit in a horrifying atrocity: the Bothans, despite their importance to the New Republic, were deeply unpopular along plenty of member worlds, because, for the most part, Bothans are kind of incredibly douchey. When details about the bombardment of Caamas were made public, anti-Bothan demonstrations broke out across the New Republic demanding justice for the relocation of the Caamasi remnants. Member worlds eager to pounce on the Bothans for political gain attempted to use the furor to litigate old planetary grudges and disputes.
In the reign of the Empire, Palpatine’s iron fist could keep all these worlds in line through martial force and fear—but the New Republic, even having shouldered a decade and a half’s worth of crises together, didn’t have either the force or the moral judgement to engage in similar tactics. And so, as tensions rose, so did the threat of a civil war that could’ve torn the alliance apart altogether.
