Jeffrey Henderson
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South Asia has been dominated by two military conflicts in past months: Pakistan pounding of the Taliban in the Swat Valley, and the obliteration of the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka. Disturbing as these conflicts are, both may be dwarfed by a wider and more significant trend in the region—the rise of a newly assertive China.
At Hambantota in Sri Lanka, Chinese companies are building a new port that could serve as a refuelling and docking facility for the Chinese navy as it extends its presence (presently confined to helping police pirate activities off the Horn of Africa) across the Indian Ocean. China has also provided much of the military hardware that underpinned the Sri Lankan victory.
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Oliver August
On 3rd October 2007, North and South Korea held what was only their second summit meeting since splitting up in war almost 60 years ago. The most important person in attendance, the one who brought the two sides together, was neither the host Kim Jong-il—Pyongyang’s Stalin—nor Roh Moo-hyun, his democratically elected counterpart from Seoul. Instead, attention was focused on a 52-year-old South Korean woman dressed, as usual, in black and described to me by some people there as a “housewife.” Basking in her triumph during a break in the talks, she stood by the edge of the Taedong river, surrounded by television crews. She stared across the water to the far shore, where smokestacks puffed among Soviet-style housing blocks. “According to my husband, Pyongyang gets brighter with every visit,” she told the cameras, turning around with a girlish twirl, an extravagant gesture for her. “Now I know what he means.”
Hyun Jeong-eun is a reserved mother of three children who says on her website that she likes to cook cheese fondue. She also happens to be the US-educated head of Hyundai, the vast conglomerate founded by her father-in-law as a car workshop in 1946. Hyundai went on to build supertankers, skyscrapers and computer chips, as well as operating department stores, hotels and banks. “Imagine a GM or Ford that offers almost every product or service imaginable,” says Donald Kirk, a US expert on chaebol—family-run conglomerates. Hyundai is the symbol of modern South Korea and its rise to 11th largest economy in the world. It’s no coincidence that the country’s current president, Lee Myung-bak, who came to office earlier this year, is a former chairman of Hyundai. Some refer to South Korea as the “republic of Hyundai,” given the company’s success and power. Or at least they used to. In the 1990s, Hyundai accounted for 16 per cent of South Korean GDP and 12 per cent of exports. Its low-cost cars became a household name in America. But then the Asian financial crisis struck. In 1998, revenues slumped, debts loomed, the founding family’s shareholding was diluted and divisions were sold off. Today Hyundai’s finances have stabilised, but the company is dwarfed by other Asian conglomerates.
A return to glory may, however, be imminent. Chairwoman Hyun is placing a large bet on expanding into communist North Korea, the former heartland of Korean industry and the last great untapped market in Asia. It has the lowest wages in the region, perhaps a tenth of those in China. American worries about cheap Chinese imports could soon seem quaint. Situated at the dead centre of Asia’s three big economies—Japan, China and South Korea—the “hermit kingdom” is the focus of growing foreign investment, and could soon manufacture everything from GE fridges to GM cars at bargain prices.
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Alex De Waal
One month after Cyclone Nargis, millions of Burmese remain with inadequate food, contaminated water and no proper shelter. At least 130,000 have died or gone missing, and the toll from epidemic disease in the coming months could be as high again.
We hear much about the administrative and logistical mire of Burma, of a government denying that disaster has struck and obstructing aid work. We hear about the confiscation of relief supplies. We hear less about the host of local Burmese organisations, often enjoying co-operation from local authorities and supported by a smaller number of international agencies, that are present on the sodden ground of southern Burma. There is an Asian response: experienced disaster teams from India and Thailand are arriving. Expatriate Burmese physicians are flocking home to help in a quiet relief effort. Senior monks have also joined the cause, gaining access to the hardest-hit regions, such as Bogale. Monastic, church and local volunteer networks are able to reach even remote villages inaccessible to international personnel. “Building trust with the military is essential,” said a local doctor. “Without it, the politics take over.”
Most emergency supplies can be procured locally, but relief teams lack funds to purchase fuel, rent vehicles and pay volunteers. Tragically, the first days of the disaster, when emergency logistics were most needed, passed without outside help. With a few days’ warning and the aircraft and boats for an immediate response, many lives could have been saved. It’s a rule of thumb in disaster response that the first assistance comes from the nearest source, and that it is small in scale but efficient. People struck by calamity are responders as well as victims. One of the big lessons from the response to the 2004 tsunami was that official aid efforts should support those local responses rather than—as too often happened—foreign experts arriving and deciding that they knew best.
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Phil Zabriskie
In the weeks leading up to Suharto’s death on 27th January, a parade of Indonesian leaders, including President Susilo Yudhoyono, visited his bedside, showing that the man who ruled Indonesia for 32 years maintained a spectral power over the nation until the end. People wept openly when he died, and Yudhoyono declared a week of national mourning. There was adulation, perhaps some forgiveness. There will never be, however, a reckoning. Suharto will be judged in the hearts and minds of men and women, and in history books, but he will never face accusers in a court of law. His successors dared not demand he be held to account during his lifetime. Instead, they and the Indonesian people tried to grapple with a legacy that hangs over the whole of the archipelago.
Suharto said he ruled “based on the principle that the interest of the nation and… the greater group will be given priority over the individual or single group interest.” The statement reads like mockery, for he is one of the ultimate examples of a personality shaping a nation’s fate. Born in 1921 in Kemusuk, a small village in south-central Java, as a child Suharto was passed from one impoverished relative to the next. His schooling was heavily informed by a mix of the Javanese mysticism prevalent in the area and military training. He served in the Dutch army, then, during the second world war, Japanese-sponsored militias, which he left in 1945 to fight for Indonesia’s independence. He was a good soldier, described as “tough as hell” by one western military officer. While Sukarno—Indonesia’s first president, who ruled the country from independence in 1945 to 1967—was the handsome nationalist hero, the father of the country, Suharto did grunt work, eliminating threats, keeping order. He was demoted, however, when he was discovered running a sugar trading racket.
In September 1965, with Sukarno’s popularity flagging, assassins killed six generals in what was painted as an attempted communist coup. With the CIA providing names of suspected communists, Suharto’s soldiers killed between 500,000 and 1m people, according to most estimates. Simultaneously, he covertly organised anti-Sukarno protests which eventually convinced the president to step down. Suharto dragged the transfer of power out over two years, though, during which the catastrophic cost of instability was impressed on the Indonesian people. For many, the trauma of this era overshadows all that happened after. “Compared to the slaughter of those years, all the lies, corruption and nepotism of Suharto’s regime are a small, trivial manner,” said novelist Pramoedya Ananta Toer, who was imprisoned for much of the 1960s and 1970s (and died in 2006). For those years alone, he judged, Suharto deserved to be called “a criminal against humanity.”
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Nic Dunlop
Last March, I travelled to Burma’s new capital, Nay Pyi Daw. I was among a handful of journalists to be invited to the junta’s annual military parade. It was the first time that the outside world had been granted a glimpse of the city the generals have built. Dumped in the middle of malarial scrubland, some 300 miles north of Rangoon, it is a strange, gleaming confection of official hotels, ministries and government housing set in the baking plains of central Burma (now called Myanmar). The junta has spent billions building this largely empty metropolis—whose name means “Seat of Kings.”
Here, the generals sit in perfect isolation while the rest of the country suffers. Spending on healthcare is, according to the UN, the lowest in the world. Poverty is widespread and a third of children under five are malnourished. Military spending, though, has rocketed. Despite chronic power shortages, leaving much of the country in almost permanent blackout, the junta’s new capital gleams with 24-hour electricity.
When I first arrived in the old capital, Rangoon, on a photographic assignment in 1995, I expected steel helmets and fixed bayonets at every street corner and endless checkpoints—all the sights one associates with military dictatorships. Instead I found a bustling metropolis of colourful markets, packed restaurants and gleaming pagodas. Street hawkers were selling old copies of Life magazine and monks browsed the book stalls next to tea shops. The Burmese army was conspicuous by its absence. I had to “steal” images of soldiers I did see, and often they would hold their hands in front of my lens to stop me. Now, here in Nay Pyi Daw, I was surrounded by thousands of them. And I was permitted to photograph at will.
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William Barnes
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The brave and photogenic protests in Burma have left much of the international community fretting over its inability to rein in a bruising military regime. Yet the conclusion being drawn by many western politicians and media pundits is that Burma needs more of the very policies that have failed to make a noticeable dint in its stony-faced junta’s front for almost two decades.
Sanctions and attempts to cold shoulder the generals do not work because Burma’s neighbours see no reason to join in. Aside from its lush resources and strategic location, the quiet truth is that many governments in the region feel little sympathy for street protestors—even ones dressed in rust-red robes.
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Cheryll Barron
No one could have believed what lay in her future when I met Aung San Suu Kyi, the leading opponent of Burma’s military junta, at a London wedding in the 1980s. “Fragile” and “exquisite” were the adjectives that came to mind—a tiny, straight-backed Asian Audrey Hepburn floating in a close-fitting costume of plain gold silk that began at her neck and skimmed her ankles.
But it is apt that the unofficial head of Burma’s democratic movement should be a woman. Unlike Benazir Bhutto in Pakistan, Suu Kyi’s position is not quite as anomalous in contemporary Burma—even if the decades of dictatorship have been regressive for women’s equality (a small, token number of Buddhist nuns were the only women to join the recent demonstrations).
Because Burma has mostly been ignored by western academics in its decades of seclusion, most western analysis of its core culture—an Indo-Chinese melting pot—is old. But since the country is scarcely modernised, that research still reliably represents basic attitudes. Traditional Burmese or “customary” law, which modern statutes reflect, treats men and women as equals in virtually every respect, even if it is ignored, when inconvenient, by Than Shwe, head of the military junta, and his henchmen.
The 1959 Encyclopaedia Britannica says that, “Burmese women enjoy an amount of freedom unusual in non-European races.” In fact, for centuries, they were actually more independent than western women—and even than women in other predominantly Buddhist southeast Asian countries, who benefited indirectly from the Buddha’s subversion of Hindu caste and other social strictures.
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David Goodhart
Malaysia wants to be a beacon to the Muslim world. It wants to show that a marriage of Islamic piety and liberal modernity—and in particular economic growth—is possible. To hear how it plans to lead Islam out of economic sloth (Islamic countries account for almost 20 per cent of the world’s population but only 6 per cent of income) I flew to Kuala Lumpur a couple of weeks ago to attend a conference with the unpromising title of “Implementing the economic agenda of the Muslim world.”
Can there be a specifically Muslim economic agenda? Surely the problems of Muslim sub-Saharan Africa, of Pakistan and of Indonesia are all so different as to make a nonsense of the idea of a specifically Muslim economic agenda?
Listening to Muslim grandees quoting the Koran at each other on the platform at Hotel Nikko did little to ease my scepticism. But a leading French academic, a veteran of these events, explained to me that at a conference dominated by Muslim norms and concerns it is harder for officials and politicians to spend the whole time blaming the west instead of facing up to their own failings. He also said that between the lines, some very important things were being said from the platform. There was certainly a robust discussion of Islamic patriarchy and women’s rights led by some indignant Muslim women. And our self-effacing host, Malaysian prime minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi, coined the no-nonsense epithet: “A lazy Muslim cannot be a good Muslim.”
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Victor Mallet
The Lost Executioner by Nic Dunlop
(Bloomsbury, £16.99)
Nic Dunlop’s compelling addition to the literature of the Cambodian holocaust examines not only the banality of evil but also its ambiguity, and the resulting doubt and confusion among perpetrators and victims in the aftermath of one of the greatest crimes in history.
Like many of those who visit the Tuol Sleng museum in Phnom Penh, Dunlop was haunted by the display of curiously beautiful individual photographs of some of the 20,000 men, women and children who died there when it was the notorious Tuol Sleng prison. He became obsessed with finding Comrade Duch, the executioner of the title and commandant of the prison, who had disappeared after the overthrow of Pol Pot by the invading Vietnamese army in 1979. Twenty years later, while with a mine-clearance team in a Khmer Rouge zone in rural Cambodia, Dunlop meets a man called Hang Pin wearing a white T-shirt with the initials ARC, for American Refugee Committee. He identifies him as Duch. It turns out that Duch—real name Kaing Guek Eav—is as devout a Christian as he was a Communist. He is now in jail awaiting trial.
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Robert Drummond
Kim Sieng sits in the consulting room with her right arm cradled in her left hand and her body tilted to one side, as if she were holding herself in a permanent state of falling. She is small and frail, and the young psychiatrist feels an odd impulse to reach out and catch her. Instead, since the translator is late, he tries some pidgin Chinese. “Ni hao,” he says. “Ni hao,” replies the elderly lady.
He gestures towards her weak arm, and she allows him to flex the joints. The arm is completely limp. Something is amiss—if she were suffering the after-effects of a stroke, as her GP had at first suspected, her arm would have gradually stiffened. Extending it should have felt more like opening the blade of a penknife. Kim Sieng’s right leg is also partially paralysed, though she can still walk with a debilitating limp. Nothing has been found to explain the paralysis.
The translator arrives, full of apologies. He mumbles that he normally does written work: it’s unusual to come across other Cambodians in Britain. Now the young psychiatrist feels foolish for his “Ni hao” to Kim Sieng. The referral letter makes it clear that she is not Chinese—as does her name. He asks the translator to apologise for his mistake. The translator explains that Kim Sieng is Chinese-Khmer, a large Cambodian minority. After 20 years spent living within a Chinese community in this country, she does speak a few words herself, though not very well. Her husband used to do all the talking.
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