Myanmar is opening up to foreign donors after 60 years of civil war, but locals urge discretion. Credit: A. M. Shein/IPS

By Johanna Son
TOKYO, Oct 14 2012 (IPS)

Foreign donors are rushing into Myanmar (formerly Burma), whose government has been pushing the right political buttons as part of its democratic reform process. But development planners and local activists caution that  the best approach should still be ‘easy does it’.

“Please (…) don’t rush in,” Khin Ohmar, coordinator of the Thailand-based Burma Partnership, said at a discussion organised by civil society groups led by the Washington-based Bank Information Centre at the International Monetary Fund (IMF)-World Bank (WB) Annual Meetings in Tokyo on Friday.

Burma has been torn by civil war for more than 60 years and is yet to resolve many of its internal ethnic tensions, she pointed out. “So it’s worth it to step back and ensure that we start with the right stuff.”

“A lot of people still feel sceptical (of the civilian-led government’s promise of a people-centred government),” said Thein Swe, a Myanmar professor who works at Thailand’s Chiang Mai University and who has also worked with the Myanmar government.

“Yes, a lot of changes are coming in. (The government has started) using all the right terminology and development jargon, but on the ground the mindset remains the same,” he said. “Policymakers use the right words, but this has not trickled down to the bureaucracy.”

Ohmar and Swe spoke after officials from the WB and Asian Development Bank (ADB) said they were treading carefully for now, studying programmes to pursue or fund, through their recently opened offices on the ground.

Japan is Myanmar’s largest creditor so far, and has said it will give priority to aid to Myanmar, where elections led to political and economic reforms after the emergence of the civilian-led government of President Thein Sein in March 2011.

On Oct. 11, Japanese Finance Minister Koriki Jojima said Japan would resume yen loans to Myanmar early next year, after clearing that South-east Asian country’s loans of 500 billion yen (6.3 billion dollars) to help it get back on its feet.

In April, Japan agreed to cancel some 60 percent of Myanmar’s loans.

Tokyo will also give bridge loans to help Myanmar refinance its loans to the World Bank and the ADB that have been in arrears for a decade.

Annette Dixon, World Bank director for South-east Asia, explained that these bridge loans would give Myanmar a longer time to pay the outstanding amounts. “But Myanmar is unlikely to be eligible for debt relief,” she pointed out.

Overall, she said, Myanmar has had a “massive donor influx but very weak receptive capacity” and thus needed good donor coordination. The government has set up a foreign aid coordination committee.

The World Bank’s engagement is “very preliminary”, she explained, although the Bank has opened an office that it shares with the ADB and the International Finance Corporation, and is now recruiting staff.

“We had no country operations in the past, so we have decided we will take a step-by-step approach to ensure that our assistance in the future will be effective in addressing huge challenges ahead,” said Kunio Senga, head of the South-east Asia department at the Manila-based ADB. It is quite “premature to specify and commit to specific country programmes” at this point, he added.

Instead, the ADB has been doing economic and sector analyses and consulting stakeholders as it prepares an “interim country partnership strategy” for the next 18 to 24 months, Senga explained.

But Dixon said that the Myanmar government has undertaken radical reforms in the economic, financial and political spheres.

The government is drawing up a development plan and made public the IMF’s assessment of the economy. Also, for the first time, the government discussed the budget, passed it in parliament, and aired the whole process on national television.

The changes underway in Myanmar are “an enormous challenge for the government, which has to get an idea of the sensible sequence of how to do things”, such as combining the “need to show results quickly to its population, which has high expectations, (while simultaneously embarking) on a process that we know takes decades,” Dixon explained.

But the picture from outside can be somewhat different from realities inside the country, according to Swe. He expressed worries about experts entering the country in droves along with aid programmes, stressing, “We don’t want external-driven aid. Consultation with the grassroots community is crucial.”

In terms of foreign investments, he conceded that banks consider Myanmar the “last frontier” as it opens up. “A lot of investors are rushing in – there is big potential but we must be very cautious about what kind of investments we would like to embark on.”

Swe also said that while the government has made improvements in transparency, the fact remains that the lower house of Parliament in August rejected a motion that would have required all government officials to publicly reveal their assets. “It is shameful,” he argued.

Both Ohmar and Swe agreed that the human rights environment in Myanmar could not be separated from development plans for the country.

“The development agenda cannot be a substitute for a political settlement,” Ohmar said.

Both raised questions about the military’s continued role in the country, and said citizens need to get used to more political space and start speaking up.

“We have to make sure that the role of the military will remain a positive one,” said Swe. Under Myanmar’s constitution, the military get one quarter of seats in each chamber of Parliament.

Ohmar added that many citizens have yet to learn to speak their minds, which is a result of decades of military dictatorship.

She questioned the effectiveness of gestures like airing parliamentary discussions on television when large parts of the country have no access to electricity.

*This article first appeared on IPS TerraViva

The past, centred around the democratic records of his popular politician parents, may have sent Benigno Aquino III to the Philippine presidency, but it is now also biting at his heels, less than two months after he assumed office.

Aquino sought the presidency amid the crest of public sympathy after the August 2009 death of his mother Corazon, who became president after the bloodless ‘People Power’ revolt against the dictator Ferdinand Marcos in 1986. That revolt, in turn, has its roots in Filipinos’ anger after the August 1983 assassination of Benigno Aquino Jr., the new president’s father and namesake.

President Aquino’s campaign was anchored on pledges to continue his parents’ legacy and the integrity of former president Corazon Aquino. Stickers, posters, and T-shirts had the images of his parents, which attracted many Filipino voters disenchanted with then President Gloria Macagapal Arroyo.

Thus far, Aquino has scored political points through steps such as keeping a promise to stop public officials’ use of sirens to cut through Manila’s traffic jams, refusing to live in Malacanang Palace, and ordering photographs of him around the city removed.

“His style of presidency rings a very good tone to majority of the Filipinos,” said Juan Santos, a businessman who voted for Aquino. “No ‘wang wang’ (Filipino slang term for sirens), sincerity, and simplicity strike a good chord versus the old (Arroyo) presidency of power and privilege.”

For sure, the 50-year-old Aquino remains extremely popular. He took office on Jun. 30 with a record-high trust rating of 88 percent in this country of 94 million people, according to the respected pollster Social Weather Stations.

But the political capital he has will be sorely tested in a daunting list of challenges that have surfaced this early despite, or perhaps because of, Filipinos’ high expectations of him.

These include the thorny issue of land reform at Hacienda Luisita, the 6,500- hectare sugar estate in northern Tarlac province owned by his mother’s family, where he has adopted a hands-off policy though he goes there during weekends.

Then there are yet another attempt at peace talks with a separatist group in the south, where most Filipino Muslims live, calls for genuine autonomy by indigenous groups in the north, and an armed communist insurgency that has persisted since 1969.

Aquino has named a new negotiating panel with the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) to discuss expanded autonomy for a Moro homeland. Seeing this, leaders of indigenous groups say they are also thinking of reviving failed attempts to get an autonomous region in the north.

The 1987 Constitution provides for autonomous regions in the country’s north and south to address long-festering resentment about poverty, identity, resource use and human rights.

But the autonomous region in southern Mindanao ran into problems of governance and the MILF, one of several rebel groups, continues to engage the Philippine military in clashes.

These challenges, now up before President Aquino, relate to issues of social equity and justice that his mother’s government had tried to address after the 1986 Revolution.

The most emotive issue, however, is Hacienda Luisita and how the new president will act – or not act – regarding this political minefield. A case questioning its land ownership deal with its 10,000 farmers is pending before the Supreme Court, and stems from a controversial aspect of the 1988 land reform law passed by the Corazon Aquino government.

That law allows the distribution of stocks in Hacienda Luisita to farmers as an option to land ownership, a mechanism that critics say watered down agrarian reform in a country where huge swathes of land have been owned by a few families and worked on by landless workers for generations – as well as fuelled the communist insurgency.

Hacienda Luisita Inc (HLI) had offered the stock option in 1989, but the government’s agrarian reform council shelved it, saying it did not benefit the farmers. HLI now says that 70 percent of the workers who participated in a referendum it called last Aug. 6. chose stock options over getting a piece of land from the estate. Some of the farmers, however, have brought another case questioning this before the Supreme Court.

“If I get involved, it will appear that I am interfering,” said Aquino, who added that he has divested his HLI holdings. To the farmers, he said: “They have interest there and they should tell me which direction they would like to take.”

But deciding not to act is no less a decision, some say. A hands-off policy “is a horrible misconception of his responsibility,” a reader, Cesar de los Reyes, wrote to the English-language ‘Philippine Daily Inquirer’.

“It is his moral responsibility to correct the injustice done to the farmers, more so that he belongs to the family that caused so much grief to the farmers,” De los Reyes added. “People expect him to do this not because he is a member of the family that owns Hacienda Luisita, but because he is the president of the people.”

Apart from these, Aquino’s first six weeks have seen lawsuits arise from four of his earliest orders, including one creating a ‘truth commission’ to look into corruption under the previous government, another that has resulted in civil servants losing their jobs, and a third increasing a road toll tax.

Announcing this truth commission may have made headlines, but legal expert Joaquin Bernas recently said that the legal basis for creating it is at best unclear. “Rhetoric can have its value if it does not backfire,” he counselled in a commentary this week.

Commented Ricky, who works as a family driver: “Well, Noynoy (the President’s nickname) has stopped the use of ‘wang wang’, sure, but our problems are so much bigger than that.”

The charred skeletons of buildings in central Bangkok will be rebuilt after this week’s violence, but repairing the gaping fissures in Thai society – deepened further by the army crackdown on anti-government protesters – remains a far harder task.

In the short term, many Thais fear the onset of underground and guerrilla attacks by those frustrated by the end of the protests led by the United Front for Democracy against Dictatorship (UDD), whose leaders surrendered on May 19 as troops moved into their rally site.

The period between now and the latest time by which the next election should be held in December next year – voting has been a core issue in this crisis – bears watching after the mayhem that in the last eight days has led to 52 deaths and 407 injured, going by official figures.

In the longer term, tough questions arise over how the frayed political consensus around the parliamentary electoral system – and room for resolving grievances – can be fixed given the divisions since the 2006 coup that ousted the fugitive ex-prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra.

Beyond the violence seen in troops clashing with armed UDD supporters and arson attacks after their leaders’ surrender, protesters’ demands centred on a new election under the parliamentary system in this country of 67.8 million people.

Elections are a tool for seeking fresh mandates during crises. But how much confidence is now left in them as a way of changing leaders and pushing change within the system – in the process letting off steam – has yet to be seen.

“I don’t think you can get back the hearts of these people (rural protesters) with so many killed like this,” said Chulalongkorn University professor Puangthong Pawapakan. “The government can never go to the north and north-east now.”

Those regions, which include this South-east Asian country’s poorest, are where the UDD draws much of its backing from, though a mix of city residents also backed the protests.

The north-easterners’ presence at the rally at Rajprasong commercial district was clear from the strains of local ‘luk thung’ music, the baskets of ‘khao niao’ (sticky rice), grilled chicken and ‘som tum’ (papaya salad), and their accent.

After the violence, “I don’t think it (Democrat Party-led government) can win an election whenever it will be held,” said a Thai activist who did not want to be named.

This reflects the disconnect between the rural heartland, home to majority of the population, and the capital, seat of the political elite. “There are two societies in this country, and they have little contact with each other. They don’t know each other and they don’t understand each other,” Puangthong said.

This gulf may well have widened after May 13, when the army moved to block off the protest site ahead of the final crackdown on May 19.

Pledging to pursue reconciliation, Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva said Friday: “We recognise that as we move ahead there are huge challenges ahead of us, particularly the challenge of overcoming the divisions that have arisen in this country.”

Meantime, emotions remain high. “Do you think that your government would be as tolerant as the Thai government has been?” business owner Reungvit Nandhabiwat asked foreigners in the English-language ‘Bangkok Post’ newspaper.

“These protesters from the countryside didn’t know any better, they have no education,” said one company manager. In the months since they began their protests in March, UDD protesters – called red shirts due to their protest colour – have been disdainfully called ‘red buffaloes’.

But some disagree. “Dozens of people have died today, and hundreds were wounded, for the crime of standing up to a government that denies them the right to shape their own destinies,” wrote one resident. “And yet wealthy citizens of Bangkok mourn the loss of a shopping centre,” he said, referring to the torching of the upscale Centralworld mall.

These differences have cut across academia and civil society as well.

They go back to the days around the 2006 coup that ousted the exiled Thaksin, who has been convicted of corruption and who is the UDD patron. His role has often been a liability for the red shirts, because many see him as discrediting any cause.

Puangthong says rural red shirts back Thaksin’s pro-poor programmes, and do not care much about the corruption many detest him for. “They feel that they have been treated badly by the Bangkokians,” she said. “Their power in choosing and voting in an election has been blocked several times.”

Elections have been a key part of the political upheaval here in recent years, including when the Democrats boycotted the 2006 vote that then incumbent Thaksin had called to seek a new mandate amid protests by the yellow shirts and a furore over his business dealings.

Thaksin’s party won most of legislative seats, but results were later nullified. His political party was disbanded for electoral violations.

In the first election after the military rule in 2007, rural voters voted into power another pro-Thaksin party. Two prime ministers from this party then lost their offices through court verdicts. Their brief tenures were marked by rallies by the yellow shirts, who occupied the Suvarnabhumi international airport in 2008.

With a changed configuration in parliament in December 2008, the Democrats won a parliamentary that the UDD argues was maneuvered by the military – and negated the results of votes that pro-Thaksin groups had won.

This cycle led to calls for a new social contract to respect the results of elections, as the UDD launched its protest this year – its second since the April 2009 one.

Abhisit has said that a new election would not solve these problems, but critics say the government fears losing to pro-Thaksin groups. In early May, a month after the red shirts occupied Rajprasong, Abhisit offered a Nov. 14 poll date with a roadmap of reforms that addresses social and economic inequalities.

Protest leaders were divided over the offer, the rally continued, and the government revoked the poll date. By the time the UDD leaders offered unconditional talks in exchange for a ceasefire on May 18, the government said this was not possible without ending the protest.

There are calls for a new poll and electoral and constitutional reforms, but the government faces a credibility issue since its crackdown led to a casualty count consisting almost totally of civilians, says Thitinan Pongsudhirak, director of the Institute of Security and International Studies at Chulalongkorn University.

He says that working with moderate red shirts and fixing “parliamentary and constitutional processes,” including laws that banned elected politicians, could bypass Thaksin’s clout and allow real dialogue.

A new election at this point is needed – not because it is a UDD demand – but because the government must take “political responsibility” for the deaths in the crackdown and the deep wounds these have caused, says Tep, a doctoral student.

If there were any hopes that Wednesday’s surrender by the leaders of Thailand’s biggest anti-government protests in decades would instantly ease tensions, these were dashed by the ugly spasms of violence that wracked this capital soon after they turned themselves in.

In this television grab shortly after his surrender at Thai police headquarters, protest leader Natthawut Saikua asks rallyists to return home. Credit: Johanna Son/IPS

If anything, the attacks by protesters, who were angered by the end of the rally and set fire to buildings and shopping malls, confirmed what everybody knows – that while the protest site of the United Front of Democracy Against Dictatorship (UDD) has been cleared and its leaders detained, the political crisis is far from over.

The sprawling and glitzy Centralworld mall, beside which thousands of UDD protesters had camped out for six weeks to demand a new election but never broke into, was in flames on Wednesday afternoon.

At least 27 buildings and locations were on fire as of 9 p.m. local time, including the Thai TV 3 building, the Metropolitan Electricity Authority, Siam Theatre, several banks and part of the Stock Exchange of Thailand, officials said.

Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva imposed a curfew from 8 p.m. to 6 a.m. to allow the military, which has been carrying out a blockade against the red- shirted UDD protesters since May 13, to put a stop to the mayhem that had central parts of the city burning. On national television, he said, “We’re confident and determined that we will solve” the unrest.

Earlier, government spokesman Panithan Wattanayagorn said the military would “initiate operations throughout the night” and control “a few pockets of trouble in several areas of Bangkok.”

Curfew was declared in 23 provinces, including those around Bangkok and in the north-east, from whose rural regions the UDD draws a lot of support. In a sign of more anger in the anti-government movement, thousands of red shirts, called such following the UDD’s protest colour, attacked government and other targets in the north-eastern provinces of Khon Kaen and Udon Thani and in northern Chiang Mai.

“There are remaining radical elements embedded in the demonstration for weeks, with war weapons, and they may come out and try to do something not good to the public, like try to set fire to buildings,” Panithan said, asking Bangkok residents to stay home.

Once again, Panithan spoke in English after making the same announcement in Thai in order to address the foreign community.

But the black smoke hanging heavy over the Bangkok skyline, caused by arson and burning tyres, matched the feeling among many that this South- east Asian country was moving into uncharted territory.

“I really don’t know what to expect now, I can’t say any more. I’m not a fortune teller,” signed the owner of an eatery. “It will end, but look at that,” she said, pointing at the television news.

“At least the red-shirt leaders have shown responsibility (in the UDD) by (surrendering),” said Tosporn Patanaviroj, a 29-year-old steward. “But without the leaders, a large number of protesters still want to continue their fight.”

“Now it has become a war between people and soldiers, and it could be worse because people’s call has been neglected,” he added, referring to the UDD demand for a new election that is now in tatters. “And especially now, the angry crowd (is) without effective and strong leadership – I could not imagine more.”

After the curfew announcement past 4 p.m., residents rushed to stores to find others stashing up on food and supplies. “It’s good that I’m selling my goods fast so I can go home too,” a male vendor of street food muttered while packing up his trolley.

Early on Wednesday, Bangkok woke up to news that the army had started to move into the Rajprasong area that the UDD protesters have occupied since Apr. 3, using armoured personnel carriers to break through barricades from the Lumpini area.

A little past 1 p.m., UDD leaders went up to the Rajprasong stage and told thousands of protesters, including women, that it was time to end the rally due to the high casualties among red shirts in the six days since the army blockade began.

UDD leader Natthawut Saikua was quoted as saying: “I can no longer tolerate the cruelty inflicted on us.” Added another UDD leader, member of Parliament Jatuporn Promphan: “I apologise to you all, but I don’t want any more losses. I am devastated too. We will surrender.”

Since May 13 when the lockdown of the more than four square- kilometre Rajprasong rally area began, some 42 people have died and more than 282 injured. Many casualties have been civilians and protesters.

Soldiers and groups of red shirts have been engaged in pitched battles around the perimeter of the rally site since Thursday last week.

Concern has been expressed about the use of heavy weapons against protesters outside the Rajprasong area, who have been trying to prevent the army from getting to the protest site. Photos and footage have showed some soldiers shooting bullets, as well as some protesters with guns and homemade firebombs, apart from using slingshots, rocks, and Molotov cocktails.

The last attempt at talks fell through Wednesday after a Senate offer to mediate between the government and the UDD, whose patron is the fugitive ex-prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra, was revoked.

Soon after the UDD leaders addressed their followers, they turned themselves in to the authorities along with four others.

Wednesday’s events bring to a violent peak the latest chapter in a crisis that goes back to 2006, when Thaksin, popular among the poor whose support he had courted through populist programmes, was ousted in a military coup.

In the next years, Thaksin-allied political parties won national elections but the UDD says these were negated by the Bangkok political elite when they found ways to throw elected leaders out of office. It wanted a new election to replace the Abhisit government, questioning his legitimacy because they said the military had manoeuvred parliament in order to make him prime minister in 2008.

In early May, a resolution seemed near after Abhisit offered a Nov. 14 poll date. But differences among UDD leaders, some of whom found the offer acceptable, led to the continuation of the rally. By last week too, and under pressure from citizens tired of the protests, Abhisit had revoked his offer.

“Now I’m scared,” said security guard Ong, on duty at a condominium here, on what is sure to be another restless night. (With reports from Nattharin Kitthithaweepan.)

Amid gunfire and street battles here and heated, divided emotions playing out in Thailand’s worst political crisis in decades, there has been little room for discussing human rights, restraint and finding a middle ground.

This is despite cautious hope amid yet another attempt at talks between the government of Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva and the United Front for Democracy against Dictatorship (UDD) to put a stop to the violence that has wracked the Thai capital since May 13, when the army started a lockdown of the protesters’ rally site.

On Tuesday, both sides said they found acceptable an offer by Senate speaker Prasopsuk Boondej to mediate in the bloody crisis that has so far led to 37 dead and 282 injured.

But the two sides disagree on how to get back to talks. The UDD says it will enter into talks and leave its rally site in Rajprasong district only after the military stops its operation to block off the protest camp. On national television, Sathit Wongnongtoey from the Prime Minister’s Office said talks can happen only after the rally ends.

The latest discussion comes after a government official’s conversation Monday with UDD leader Natthawut Saikua, one that did not offer much hope. The talk took all of five minutes, government negotiator Korbsak Sabhavasu told Thai television.

Meantime, five days since the army operation started, affected residents are protecting their homes from looting after power and water supplies were cut Thursday last week.

The government and the army appear on television several times a day, giving updates and warning of “terrorists” among protesters. The government’s Centre for the Resolution of the Emergency Situation (CRES) shows video clips and photos of some UDD protesters with guns.

Many simply want the mayhem to end.

“This is just dragging on with nothing clear out there. We just have more fellow Thais dead and we don’t know really who is who any more,” said one elderly man, scouring through newspapers full of bloody images of the crisis at a newsstand.

Adding to the uncertainty is the rollercoaster sequence of events since Sunday, when the government gave UDD protesters, called red shirts due to their protest colour, until 3 p.m. Monday to leave Rajprasong or face two years’ imprisonment.

The deadline passed, triggering speculation about differences among authorities about proceeding with a crackdown on the rally site itself, where 5,000 protesters remain.

The operation to cordon off the more than four square-kilometre area around the Rajprasong camp has been far from easy. In the English-language daily ‘The Nation’, writer Avudh Panananda called it “clumsy” and said the government and the military, whose chief had said he did not want to use violence, were working “in an atmosphere of mistrust.”

Pitched battles continue between protesters and soldiers around barricades of burning tyres or near army checkpoints. The fear of snipers, caught in photos as clad in black garb and whose identities remain unknown, persists.

There have been a few voices of concern about civilian casualties, stressing the need to keep to human rights standards.

While the UDD has gone “far beyond the limits” of exercising the right to protest, “this in no way provides the Government with any licence to use firearms nor to kill, which resulted in the loss of lives and injuries,” Sriprapha Petcharamesree, Thai representative to the Association of South-east Asian Nations (ASEAN) Intergovernmental Commission on Human Rights, said in a statement.

“We’d say to the Thai authorities that recognising that you face a serious challenge, this doesn’t mean – this is not a war situation – that everybody on the other side is a combatant,” Phil Robertson, deputy director of the Asia division of Human Rights Watch, said in a phone interview from New York.

“Part of our concern is that Thai army troops are not trained in policing but are undertaking a mission they have not been trained for,” he said.

He cited United Nations (U.N.) principles on law enforcers’ use of force and firearms, which say that they must “exercise restraint in such use and act in proportion to the seriousness of the offence.”

CRES head Col Sansern Kaewkamnerd said Tuesday: “The military are tasked only to cordon off the protest area and set up blockades, but not to harm the people.”

Robertson and Sripapha said the UDD leaders – who say that they are a peaceful movement – must rein in anyone using weapons. “They should take responsibility and stop the attacks with war weapons coming from their side,” Robertson added.

The government should stop its operation and set up a fact-finding team with “regional and/or international members” to look into the dispersals of protests, Sripapha added. “Any team appointed by the government shall not enjoy any credibility.”

“Regarding U.N. mediation, the United Nations always stands ready to help. However, both sides must be in agreement to the U.N.’s involvement,” Choi Soung-ah, a spokesperson for the U.N. secretary-general, said in reply to a question by IPS in New York. U.N. chief Ban ki-moon had earlier called for restraint and talks.

Since March, the red shirts – whose political patron is the fugitive ex-prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra – have been demanding the dissolution of Parliament and a new election.

Drawing support from rural protesters, they said the Abhisit government came to power in 2008 through manoeuvring by the military instead of an election, after the Bangkok elite found ways to boot out or make ineligible for office the political parties – allies of Thaksin – who had won previous polls.

In May, Abhisit offered a November poll date. But some UDD leaders made new demands, including Abhisit’s accountability for an Apr. 10 crackdown. The protest has since continued, though more moderate leaders were willing to accept the poll offer. Abhisit then revoked the election offer and the army blockade started last week.

“I can’t imagine it,” a Thai lawyer, speaking on condition of anonymity, said of troops breaking up the main Rajprasong rally site. Yet many are tired of seeing daily lives affected by the protest. “Abhisit already made an offer and has been gentle,” said one city resident.

But then again, another resident says he could not find a soldier or police officer to help guard an area that has been evacuated and where robberies have occurred. “I’m not red, but the government seems unable to handle this, so maybe it’s better if it left.”

Burning tyres and buses with plumes of smoke billowing from them. Sniper shots and grenade attacks. Deaths and injuries. No-go zones in the Thai capital.

Smoke billows from street bonfires set by anti-government protesters to drive away military helicopters. Credit: Natharin Kittithaweepan/IPS

These are what Bangkok residents have been seeing since the evening of May 13, when the Thai government blockaded the area that anti-government protesters have occupied since early April in order to pressure them to end their campaign.

The clashes have taken place around the perimeter of the more than four square-kilometre protest area that soldiers sealed off, after power, water and mobile phone networks were cut off on Thursday.

Though other parts of Bangkok are unaffected, the army has declared a few areas “live-fire” zones, where clashes continue. On Sunday, the government gave protesters a new deadline to leave the Rajprasong site by Monday.

Since Thursday, 29 people have been killed and at least 221 injured, many of them civilians, officials said Sunday.

“Perhaps this was really coming, I don’t know,” sighed Lek, an employee. “But how did we let it come to this? And how can this continue for long?”

“The unidentified armed men, including snipers, are most scary for me,” added Pakorn Lertsatienchai, a researcher at Chulalongkorn University. “I’m afraid the situation will turn to anarchy.”

Journalist Sujane Kanparit said he feared more casualties, reaching a point where the military could intervene, and “guerrilla warfare” after the crackdown. “Thailand has reached a point of no return,” he said.

Loud silence hangs over what used to be the bustling financial and shopping districts of this city of more than six million people, who have been living with the protests by the red-shirted United Front for Democracy against Dictatorship (UDD) aimed at having a new election held in this South-east Asian country.

Entry has been barred to the Rajprasong shopping district, which is barricaded with rubber tyres and sharpened bamboo poles and where officials say some 6,000 protesters, many from the poorer regions of the Thai north- east but much fewer than the tens of thousands before, remain.

On national television, Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva said Saturday the lockdown was “the only way to restore law and order in this country, as we earlier attempted to use other methods, such as holding negotiations.”

“We cannot retreat because we are doing things that will benefit the entire country,” he said.

Government spokesman Panithan Wattanayagorn said, “We hope in the next few days to return to normalcy.” He spoke in English on television Saturday, a rare move to address foreign audiences as well.

The government hopes that tightening the noose around Rajprasong will force an end to the protests, which began on Mar. 12 at a different protest site in old Bangkok.

UDD leaders have said they will stay till the end, but asked the government to stop using force. “This call is for preventing unarmed red shirts from being killed or injured,” red-shirt leader Natthawut Saikua said, saying talks can resume if the crackdown stops.

But officials said they were asking women, children and the elderly to leave the protests and take the buses provided to go back to their homes outside Bangkok.

There have been reports of a split among UDD leaders, saying the more moderate ones have left because they found acceptable Abhisit’s offer of an election on Nov. 14 and since the protests were alienating the public. Some high-profile leaders, like Veera Musikapong, have not been seen in the protest site since last week. Others said he had a cold, denying a split among the leaders.

After Abhisit made his poll offer in early May, many expected the protests to end. But UDD leaders, whose patron is the fugitive ex-prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra, have continued with them after seeking accountability by Abhisit and his deputy for deaths in the Apr. 10 dispersal of protesters.

Last week, Abhisit revoked his election offer. Thus far, opinions on the blockade seem divided. A survey released Saturday by Suan Dusit Poll showed that 51.33 percent of Thais supported the move to reclaim Rajprasong and a little over 40 percent disagreed because it had led to deaths.

At the start of its protests in March, the UDD demanded a new election, saying the Abhisit government came to power in 2008 not through an electoral mandate but by manoeuvring by the military. This, they said, occurred after the elite threw out leaders – allies of Thaksin – that they voted in through elections in recent years.

At one point, more than 100,000 people, many from the north and north- east who feel deprived of real representation by the Bangkok-based elite, had joined the red protests.

Confusion remains about the clashes and ‘third forces’ in them. The government says some red shirts are armed and Abhisit warns of “terrorists” among them, but UDD leaders say protesters do not have guns.

Television footage shows troops’ encounters with red shirts hurling rocks, slingshots or Molotov cocktails, as well as protesters blocking army trucks and assaulting soldiers.

Sniper fire and grenade attacks continue but those behind them are unknown. On Thursday, tensions rose after a sniper shot a renegade general with the red shirts, Khattiya Sawasdipol, in the head.

Independent website accounts report troops shooting at protesters who take them on, but the government says soldiers use live fire only in defence. A journalist reported seeing some red shirts with handguns.

In an atmosphere with few rules, some find a resumption of talks hard to imagine. In the same survey by Suan Dusit Poll, 53.25 percent of respondents said if they were the prime minister, they would continue talking to the red shirts.

“I don’t think hope for talks is possible,” said Pakorn. “Apart from Thaksin, I don’t see anyone who can be the representative for the UDD to hold talks with the government.”

Added Sujane: “I have no clue on how and in what way this bloodshed is going.”

Very few things – not even the political gridlock that erupted into violence a few days ago – can prevent Thais from celebrating the traditional New Year, marked by drenching one another with water. But this year’s festivities were more muted than usual amid the uncertainty around the anti-government protests, which have lasted for more than a month now.

As in the past Buddhist new years, people stood out in the streets or drove through the city to throw water at each other, using weapons of revelry ranging from colourful plastic guns to pails on the back of pick-up trucks.

Passers-by had their faces smeared with white paint as part of fun and greetings that marked the traditional New Year in this South-east Asian country.

But uneasiness hung over the festivities as many followed the latest news relating to the crisis, sparked by the red-shirted protesters’ demand that the government of Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva dissolve Parliament and call for a new election.

“Another Songkran (New Year) like this,” a cab driver sighed, hitting the driving wheel with his hand. “This is really bad now.”

The UDD protesters say the Abhisit government should go for a new vote because it did not get into power through an election but through a political deal made possible by the military 16 months ago.

“It looks like another Songkran (New Year), another songkraam,” remarked Bangkok employee Jew, playing on the Thai words on the New Year festival – ‘songkran’ – and the word for battle, ‘songkraam’.

Under the summer heat that has exceeded 40 degrees Celsius, a feeling of watchfulness hovers all around. Residents are going about their normal lives in an abnormal political environment, knowing full well that things could change in a snap.

That was what happened on Apr. 10, three days after a state of emergency was declared, when the shoving between Army troops and red shirts in old Bangkok, plus the throwing of a grenade from somewhere, soon led to mayhem and bloodshed that killed 23 people.

The bloodiest political upheaval in the country since 1992, the violence has been followed by debates about who is responsible for the clash and fresh calls for talks as the government comes under intense pressure from different quarters on different ways to proceed.

The rumour mill is on overdrive, speculating on rifts in the ruling coalition and the military as the country awaits the next chapter in this political saga. The UDD demanded Parliament dissolution in 15 days and shortened this to an immediate one, while the government at first floated dissolution in nine months and lately said six months. The UDD rejected this.

Sudden changes are also what employees in Rajprasong commercial district, which tens of thousands of red shirts have occupied since Apr. 3, are learning to get used to.

While the mall beside the protest site remains closed, others nearby have opened with shorter hours because business industry losses are estimated to have reached 40 billion baht (133.3 million U.S. dollars) to date.

On Wednesday afternoon, the management of Siam Paragon mall announced that it would close at 2 p.m. A restaurant attendant explained: “Oh, changes are now normal. Today, it’s because more red shirts are coming.”

She was referring to news that red shirts at Phan Fa bridge in old Bangkok – the first protest site the UDD occupied near the site of the Apr. 10 clash – had begun to leave in order to join the group at Rajprasong.

While waiting, red shirts in Rajprasong indulged in water splashing on the second day of New Year revelry. They sang and danced to protest music and cheered their leaders’ anti-government diatribes, while sitting below tall billboards advertising Prada and Louis Vuitton.

But reminders that this was not one’s usual revelry came up now and then.

At one point, the protest leader on stage teased the crowds much like a show host would. “Tired?” he bellowed into the microphone. “Oy, we musn’t get tired because that means what if the soldiers come, we wouldn’t be able to face them. At another point, wooden batons were being distributed to protesters.

Looking out at the blocks of streets occupied by protesters with electric fans and chairs, Tou, who works at a local condominium, muttered: “I don’t really know how long this can continue. Does it really need to take the blood of our own people?”

Near the Victory Monument meantime, groups of people gathered for a second day in support of the Abhisit government.

In the English-language newspaper ‘The Nation’, Atiya Achakulwisit said that in Thailand’s colour-coded politics – the reds are against this government, and the pro-establishment yellow shirts had been against the previous government – there was now a new colour, black.

Even if Parliament is dissolved or the government “miraculously manages to disperse the crowds,” she wrote, “this immense feelings of antagonism and divisiveness among fellow citizens . . . will see our country plunge deeper and deeper into an abyss that has no colour because it will be black as pitch.”

Lost in the deluge of accusations that China’s dams are the culprit in the Mekong River’s unusually low levels is the fact that Beijing has actually become much less tightlipped about thorny issues with its neighbours than in the past.

Some years ago, China would have been unlikely to discuss such matters at a multilateral, official forum where it would be found fault with.

There was a time in the mid-nineties when just about the only response South-east Asian nations could get from China about the high-profile dispute at that time – the spat over the Spratly islands in the South China Sea – was a statement saying it wanted only bilateral fora to discuss it.

Those days are far different from China’s current diplomatic offensive in South-east Asia, as downstream Mekong communities angrily blame it for pushing the river to record low levels and exacerbating the worst drought they have seen in decades.

The sight of dry, cracked earth and sandy stretches of riverbed is now common in north-east Thailand and Laos down to the Mekong Delta in Vietnam. China’s south-west Yunnan province, where its Mekong dams are located, is itself hurting from the drought.

“It is as if the river has gone mad,” said Niwat Roykaew of the Chiang Khong Conservation Group in northern Thailand.

The resentment against China for the Mekong’s low levels rivals the anger that peaked in 2008, when downstream countries blamed it for record-high floods.

Indeed, the Mekong’s erratic behaviour is an emotional issue for the 65 million people who depend on it for survival. It is also a major public relations headache for China, which has a ‘good neighbour’ policy toward the countries it shares the Mekong with.

Seeing that the issue will not go away, China sent Vice Foreign Minister Song Tao to attend the two-day Mekong summit that ended in Hua Hin, Thailand on Apr. 5, one where the drought and China’s dams took the limelight.

China is not even a full member of the Mekong River Commission (MRC), which groups the downstream countries of Thailand, Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam. As an upstream country like Burma, China is an observer.

Song told the prime ministers of the Mekong countries that China’s three dams in the upper reaches of the river, which it calls Lancang, and a fourth that is in the reservoir-filling stage, were not bringing water to a trickle downstream.

He repeated Chinese officials’ statements that China is responsible for just 13.5 percent of the Mekong’s volume downstream and cannot possibly cause the impact being attributed to its dam projects. It is the drought that is drying up the Mekong, he said.

“Quite the contrary, by way of the regulating effect of the water dams, hydropower development of the Lancang River can improve navigation conditions and help with flood prevention, drought relief and farmland irrigation of the lower reaches,” Song said.

His words echo what Chinese Assistant Foreign Minister Hu Zhengyue said when he visited Thailand in March: “China would not do anything to damage mutual interest with neighbouring countries in the Mekong.”

Yao Wen, first secretary at the Chinese embassy here, told a Mekong forum just before the Hua Hin summit that a few weeks ago, China released 5 million cubic metres of water from its dams to help ease the drought’s effects.

MRC Chief Executive Officer Jeremy Bird told the same forum: “We can’t say that the severe drought from this year is from dams in China.” MRC data show that there is decreased rainfall in the lower Mekong region – the last rainy season ended earlier than usual – as well as the lowest tributary flows in 50 years, Bird explains.

In March too, China said it would share “until the end of the drought” data on water movement from the Manwan and Jinghong dams in Yunnan. Until the downstream protests peaked, China only shared data about water releases in the flood season.

While Bird called this “very positive” news, critics say that what China should share is hydrological information from before Manwan, the first Lancang dam, was completed in 1995 in order to study changes in water levels.

They add that more than data about Manwan and Jinghong, what is key is how China is filling the Xiaowan dam, which is the most upstream of the Lancang dams and where most of the water would presumably be stored.

Set to be the world’s highest dam at 300 metres when it starts operation in 2012, critics suspect it plays a role in the Mekong’s low levels. Chinese officials have said they are filling the reservoir only during the wet season.

“But it isn’t rocket science to realise that those latter two stations (Manwan and Jinghong) alone provide essentially zero information as to how much water is presently being retained much further upstream to fill the new Xiaowan reservoir,” Alan Potkin of the Centre for South-east Asian Studies at Northern Illinois University said in a published commentary.

China’s difficulty in getting heard reflects a problem of trust, but it wants to avoid major damage to its ties with South-east Asian nations. After all, these countries, which used to see China as a threat, now view it as a friendly power.

“Perhaps this is the price of being a superpower, to have all your actions analysed and criticised,” remarked a Chinese journalist.

Witoon Permpongsacharoen of the Mekong Energy and Ecology Network concedes that the Chinese seem more willing to engage these days, but says much remains to be seen. Chinese activists, he said, say that China works in different ways and that “it moves very slowly, but when it moves, it moves”.

But this matters little to those who are nervously watching the Mekong River they thought they knew.

“We cannot rely on governments, national and international organisations, high-level authorities, and all big bureaucrats to solve this Mekong crisis any more,” Niwat argued. “It is enough!”

Powerful neighbour. A rising power. Old friend. Big, secretive investor. Big boy of the region. These were some of the terms participants at the just-finished Mekong Media Forum here used, when asked to share the images of China they get from the media.

At a talk-show discussion here, several participants said they had mixed feelings about the country that is the big power in the Mekong region, among the biggest investors in their countries and has built three dams on the upper reaches of the Mekong River.

“There are two Chinas,” said Cambodian journalist Nguon Serath, editor of ‘Rasmei Kampuchea Daily’ newspaper. One is the country that has put in the biggest investments in Cambodia and “that is a good picture,” he explained.

The second is the builder of dams in the Mekong river – the Manwan, Dachaoshan and Jinghong dams and some more to come – that has sowed discontent among communities in downstream countries of Lao PDR, Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam and triggered letters of protest from grassroots groups.

These comments, which came up again and again through the different sessions at the four-day forum, reflect the depth of resentment by neighbouring countries that see China as having run roughshod over their concerns about the impact of its dams on water levels of the Mekong River, salination, worsening floods and their livelihoods. Some 60 million people in lower Mekong basin rely on the river for food, transport and water.

Chinese diplomats and engineers, including at an October consultation held by the Vientiane-based Mekong River Commission (MRC) in the northern Thai province of Chiang Rai, maintain that these problems are not due to its dams. The Lancang, as the upper reaches of the Mekong is called, contributes just 16 percent of the flow of the river, so damming cannot have such a huge impact on it, they have pointed out.

The 4,880-kilometre river flows from its headwaters in Tibet and on to Laos, Burma, Thailand, Cambodia before it goes into Vietnam, and out into the South China Sea.

At the height of the record-high floods in the Lao capital Vientiane last year, the Commission also issued a statement saying that based on a study of the volume of water involved, they could not have been caused by China’s dams.

But China’s views are not always read or heard much in the media of other Mekong countries as well in China’s own media. There is an information gap between upstream and downstream countries and communities, and this is perhaps part of why some Chinese journalists at the forum and audiences inside the country are surprised by the extent of the anger over its dam projects.

Over the years, it has become increasingly common for media reports in downstream countries to carry as ‘fact’ statements that China’s dams are behind uneven water levels and other water-related problems.

Media reports in Vietnam now carry articles criticising the dams. In June, Ngo Dinh Tuan, chair of the scientific council of the South-east Asia Institute of Water Resource and Environment, told ‘Tuoi Tre’ newspaper: “(Chinese) dam construction now joins hands with climate change to worsen droughts, salinity intrusion, landslides and land erosion.”

He added: “The Vietnamese government must create a national strategy for protecting the river downstream, not only for the Mekong but the Red River (in Vietnam’s north), as China has started to build dams on it as well.”

The scrutiny given to China’s moves is a reflection of its soft power in the region.

This has been taking root since the nineties, as a more confident China signed cooperation accords with South-east Asian countries that had previously found these impossible to discuss with Beijing – including the matter of the contested Spratly islands – except on a bilateral basis.

Gradually, China’s image changed, from one of a threat to a power that had a ‘good neighbour’ policy toward South-east Asia. Today, the story angle of the ‘China threat’ is gone.

But its behaviour in the Mekong region, especially in the years since the first Mekong mainstream dam was built, has been judged heavily against the backdrop of these hydropower projects.

The Manwan dam was built in 1993, followed by the Dachaosan that was completed in 2005 and then the Jinghong dam. The fourth dam, the Xiaowan one, will be the world’s tallest dam when completed in 2012. At least a fifth dam, the Nuozhadu dam, is to follow by 2014.

Journalists say it is far from easy to get the views of China or Chinese officials in their stories, though Chinese journalists at the forum also explained new trends that point to more accessibility these days. Language is also a challenge because it makes it harder for Mekong country journalists and audiences to access perspectives from China.

Likewise, Chinese journalists have pointed out that the dam issue does not make much news inside the huge country of 1.2 billion people, including in the capital Beijing, which is at the other end of the country from Yunnan, where the Lancang flows through.

Perhaps all the attention paid to China – and the depth of uneasiness toward its behaviour in the Mekong – is the price to pay for its large political footprint. “America in Asia,” in fact, was a phrase that Beijing-based journalist Lin Gu cited at one forum session to refer to China’s power in the region.

He said that China is learning the ropes of being a power, and is concerned about how it is viewed by the outside world. “The (Chinese) government should understand that being beaten is part of the price to pay for being strong,” Lin Gu said. At the same time, it still lacks confidence and can thus be “sensitive” and “overreacts” to criticism.

A barrage of questions about China’s dams also arose at the MRC meeting in October, from hydrologists, engineers, water researchers and academics and campaigners. In an interview there, Chinese diplomat Lu Hai Tien said “we will bring all these concerns back” to Beijing.

Lu, who is from the Department of International Organisations and Conferences of China’s foreign ministry, conceded that there were many concerns about China, and “that’s why we are here”. Told that Mekong journalists had difficulty getting the Chinese government’s views, he said: “Maybe there has not been a proper platform for China to express its views.”

By Johanna Son
MANILA, Oct 2 2009 (IPS)

Pushing Muslims’ long-held aspirations for genuine self-determination in mainly Catholic Philippines is a complicated struggle “because we are not a priority issue” for the central government.

Thus argues Nasser Marohomsalic, an activist and convenor of the Philippine Council for Islam and Democracy.

Author of the book ‘Aristocrats of the Malay Race: A History of the Bangsa Moro in the Philippines’, Marohomsalic speaks candidly in this interview about the struggle of Filipino Muslims, one that he calls a political problem with “religious undertones”.

Among the factors that complicate the issue are a lack of understanding of the ‘Bangsa Moro’ (Moro or Muslim people) identity by the majority of 92 million Filipinos, a lack of priority by national governments and corruption among some of the Muslim community’s own leaders, says Marohomsalic, a former member of the Philippine Human Rights Commission. (Muslims are estimated to make up some 5 percent of the Philippine population.)

Unrest in the Philippine South goes back a long way, starting from Muslim resistance against the Spanish conquest in the 16th century and later on inclusion in the Philippine republic. Armed conflict raged in the seventies, led by the Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF) that had sought a separate homeland for Filipino Muslims.

Several attempts have been undertaken to address the insurgency and unrest that simmers unresolved in the country. There was the 1976 Tripoli Agreement brokered by Libya, peace talks with the Philippine government after the 1986 ‘People Power’ revolution, the creation of an autonomous region for Muslim Mindanao, and the resumption of conflict with other Muslim groups such as the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF).

Several more rounds of peace talks, cessations of hostilities and agreements took place under several Philippine governments through the eighties until today, including some negotiations with the intervention of the Organisation of Islamic Conference, as well as Indonesia and Malaysia.

Marohomsalic, a lawyer who chairs the Muslim Legal Assistance Foundation, also tells Johanna Son that many in the Filipino Muslim community are unhappy about the ongoing joint Philippine-U.S. military exercises in southern Mindanao island.

He calls the exercises proof that the central government uses “every justification (like this exercise) to decimate the rebellion”. Many wonder why these undertakings are being focused on Mindanao and not Luzon, the northern part of the Philippines.

“Why are they not doing the exercises in Luzon? The MILF and MNLF are not listed as terrorists, but the communists are,” he argued. (The Philippines has faced a communist insurgency since the sixties.)

Marohomsalic points out that residents in some parts of Mindanao protested plans for the military exercises, arguing that the Abu Sayyaf bandit group, which is in the U.S. list of terrorists, is active mainly only in Sulu and Basilan, island provinces in Mindanao. (On Sep. 29, two U.S. soldiers along with a Filipino soldier were killed in a landmine explosion in Indanan, Sulu.)

IPS: Would you call the unrest in the Southern Philippines a political problem, a representation problem, a cultural problem or a religious one? NASSER MAROHOMSALIC: Almost all the scholars would prefer to describe it as a political problem, although it has religious undertones, we being Muslim and the government of the majority, Christian. So it is a political problem dressed in religious garb, see?

To some degree it could also be described as a religious problem because the people discriminated against here, the people being deprived of their right to self-determination are Muslims.

We’re addressing all these problems through the government, which is a government of the majority. But this government of the majority was not willing to, and still is not willing, to give us our right to self-determination. So it has acquired a religious colour, because the protagonists are Muslims and Christians.

IPS: Looking at the Muslim issue in the Philippines since the seventies and after the 1986 Revolution, we all thought that with democracy, the country should be able to address an old issue. Since then, there have been elections, creation of a Muslim autonomous region, several rounds of talks, interventions by the Organisation of Islamic Conference, Indonesia and Malaysia at some points. Why is it taking so, so long to address the issue? NM: Because there is no continuity of policy by our government. Every leader who assumes the presidency has his own different perception, perspective on the ‘Bangsa Moro’ problem. It seems as if we are not a priority issue.

If our economy is being dragged down, it’s because of the insurgency of the ‘Bangsa Moro’, but it’s not a priority problem or interest. I really cannot fathom the minds of these leaders. Why not give priority to this Moro insurgency when it is one of the major problems facing the country?

IPS: Some outsiders might say you already have an autonomous region. NM: That’s not an autonomous region; that’s farcical autonomy.

IPS: Because? NM: Because everything is controlled by the national government. We do not have control over our natural resources. . . and national leaders are using autonomy for their own electoral interests.

IPS: You mean as vote banks? NM: Yes, when elections come, they would manufacture votes there for the candidates of the powers that be. That’s the problem – we’re just used as tools.

IPS: You were saying this is also an internal challenge for Muslims, that this is not all the fault of people outside? NM: Yes, because of graft and corruption. Our leaders, national leaders, turn a blind eye or a deaf ear to the shenanigans committed by our leaders, local leaders who are Moro themselves. And they could not wash their hands like Pontius Pilate because these people are their own people — they ran under their own party and they are part of government. They are the local manifestation of the national leadership.

IPS: You were also saying that Muslims do not speak out enough about this? NM: The problem is the centres of power in the autonomous region are very strong. They have no qualms about using force and violence on people who are crusaders, you know, exposing graft and corruption. Many incidents have happened in the past where religious leaders were mauled because of exposing graft and corruption.

IPS: Looking ahead five, 10 years, where do you think the Muslims’ search for real self-determination within the Philippine context will be? NM: I’m pessimistic, I’m pessimistic. Every six years, we change our leaders and these leaders have no proper appreciation of the plight of the ‘Bangsa Moro’ people.

IPS: Have you seen any potential candidate in the 2010 presidential elections who could be sympathetic to your cause? NM: All these Christian leaders are faced also with the problems of the majority. We have a Congress that is dominated by congressmen who belong to the majority and every one of them is eking out concessions from the President, for example, and how many Muslims are there? Only eight or 10 (in the lower House).

In the Senate, we do not have one representative. What do you expect from these people? Even if they try to be a rabble-rouser or really crusading Muslim representatives, they could not swing things.

The point is the minority has to be militant in order to assert itself. Do you think there would be peace talks or some concessions if we didn’t have the MILF or the MNLF?

Nothing, nothing. The government is insensitive, or the majority does not even understand enough what the ‘Bangsa Moro’ are, their aspirations. Or even if they understand, they are not sympathetic.

IPS: You mean there had to be war for these concerns to be heard? NM: Yes, that’s now the perception of the ‘Bangsa Moro’, because this government cannot be tickled into listening to us if we just speak at the top of our voices.

IPS: That is what people feel now? That is scary. NM: Scary — that’s right, yes, it’s scary. They don’t even listen to our representatives but our representatives are co-opted. They are only looking after their own vested personal interests.

Excerpt:

Why is the popular drug Viagra so praised for its virtues, while the condom is vilified by conservative religious groups among others the world over?

Both are ‘external’ technological interventions that relate to sexual activity. They are among the most prominent tools in the area of reproductive health and sexuality.

But it is the gender and sexual ideologies behind them – especially when combined with conservative religious forces and aspects of patriarchal culture – that put them on opposite ends of the spectrum of public acceptance.

The result is a paradox that has huge implications for public health, especially in relation to the HIV and AIDS pandemic that is now entering its third decade and affects 33 million people worldwide.

As Michael Tan, a reproductive health activist and chair of the University of the Philippines anthropology department put it: “Why is Viagra so desired and condoms so repulsive in many cultures?”

Tan stressed, condoms are in the World Health Organisation (WHO) list of essentials – unlike Viagra. In other words, the social and institutional acceptance levels of Viagra and condoms are “totally opposite to the biomedical truth.”

As has been stressed over and over in the hundreds of sessions at the 9th International Conference on AIDS in Asia and the Pacific (ICAAP) that ended here this week, condoms remain the most effective way today to have safer sex, which is key to curbing the transmission of HIV and AIDS.

Condom usage campaigns have been central to efforts by countries like Thailand to slow the transmission of the virus and to achieve a reduction in the number of new cases.

But in many countries, including in Asia, condoms continue to be a loaded word, a magnet for conservative groups that say they corrupt values and encourage early sexual activity or go against religious teachings that sex should go with procreation.

Condoms and pills are also often linked to their contraceptive roles – which are of course absent in marketing for Viagra, packaged by pharmaceutical firms for improved sexual experiences.

There is also the argument by many men that condoms diminish sexual pleasure. This feeds into the gender and cultural bias that societies often have, that men’s pleasure is most important, Tan added.

“Condoms and pills tend to be resisted and demonised, blamed for promoting promiscuity and are sometimes even said to fuel HIV itself,” Tan explained at a discussion organised by the Institute of Population and Social Research at Mahidol University.

In India, studies show that condom use tends to be linked more to educated men, according to Jayashree Ramakrishna of the National Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences in Bangalore, India.

While religion may not be such a big factor in this debate in India, Ramakrishna added that the focus on condoms in fighting the epidemic eased a bit after the Indian government revised its HIV prevalence figures some years ago.

Likewise, she says, taboos remain on the open discussion of sex, which makes it harder to deal with reproductive health and HIV and AIDS. “Women say ‘we might have sex, but we don’t talk about it,'” she said. Officials argue that sex education materials should not be too frank. Eight states in India have banned sex education in schools, Ramakrishna added.

In mainly Roman Catholic Philippines, the Church and religious groups argue that condom use breaks religious and moral values because it prevents pregnancies when sex is for having children within marriage – and that the its health benefits cloak the fact that it promotes free sex.

This controversy is the reason why proposed laws on reproductive health in the Philippines – where the population growth rate is a high 2.1 percent in a country of 92.2 million people – ignite a firestorm of campaigns by pro- church groups saying such are “anti-life.”

In the conservative Catholic context and in Philippine society, Tan explains, the importance attributed to extending the family line is key to male gender roles. Thus, “being ‘baog’ – the Tagalog word for both impotence and infertility – is to many a fate worse than death” because it is linked to male sexual prowess.

But this same focus on the need to reproduce also generates the view that men are the ones ‘responsible’ for it, and women are mere receptacles in this process. Tan explained, “Males are seen as the source of life and are therefore privileged when it comes to pleasure, and women are seen as a source of pleasure or of men’s babies.”

In sharp contrast to the controversies around the condom, Viagra – a drug that was meant to cure erectile dysfunction but is also used to enhance sexual performance – is widely accepted. It has not drawn attention from conservative quarters that say they are worried about promiscuity or free sex, reproductive health activists say.

The most number of spam email messages these days are even about Viagra- type medication, Tan says, pointing out how widely known and popular this has become.

The obsession with male reproduction and pleasure in many societies leads to undercutting the usage of “life-saving devices” such as the condom, Tan said. “Shrill voices have been head about condoms, but they have been too silent on Viagra,” he argued.

Drug approval institutions in countries like the United States and Japan have also been quick in approving Viagra, which is manufactured by Pfizer, but slow in approving other reproductive health-related items.

For instance, Tan said, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration took six months to approve Viagra in 1998, but four years to give its approval for the abortion pill. In Japan, authorities approved Viagra for public use in a few months, but it had taken 35 years to approve the use of the oral contraceptive for women.

Some published reports allege that Viagra, or sildenafil citrate, was first being clinically tested to treat angina, but that it was finally marketed for erectile dysfunction after trials showed this as the stronger result.

Looking into the Viagra versus condom paradox goes far beyond just these two particular products in order to show that “technology is much more than just a tool,” explained Rosalia Sciortino, a professor at Thailand’s Mahidol University and gender and reproductive health expert who chaired the session on this topic at ICAAP.

These two well-known tools offer a lens that show how gender values influence expressions of sexuality and how these can in turn have key impacts on public health risks like HIV and AIDS, Sciortino stressed.

*TerraViva at ICAAP 09 (http://www.ipsterraviva.asia)

By Johanna Son
BALI, Aug 14 2009 (IPS)

Geeta Rao Gupta, president of the Washington-based International Centre for Research on Women (ICRW), explains to TerraViva’s Johanna Son why gender needs to be weaved more tightly into the response against HIV and AIDS.

”The epidemic is just feeding on the fault lines of inequality and discrimination that already existed in our society,” she said at the 9th International Conference on AIDS in Asia and the Pacific, which was held Aug. 9-13 in Bali, Indonesia.

TERRAVIVA: There has been a conscious attempt at ICAAP to look at the social aspects and gaps behind the HIV/AIDS epidemic. Is this expected, or normal, that the focus on AIDS would first be very much on the biomedical aspects and only after some time does it go into the other aspects such as inequities? GEETA RAO GUPTA: My point is that those technical solutions (to HIV and AIDS), each of them independently, will have impact – but only on what technical intervention is meant for.

You need many of those happening simultaneously and all of those have to happen in the context of HIV treatment, prevention and care, the standard package of services…You can’t do one thing here and something else there in your country and hope to dismantle gender inequality. It is not going to happen.

All you will do is you will give some women access to credit (in the case of such programmes), which is what that programme is intended for. But will that access to credit reduce the vulnerability to HIV? No, because they have violence against them, you have men who don’t believe in equality, they have no access to education.

TERRAVIVA: You were saying that part of the weakness in the whole effort is that gender is often only seen as being about women and that this is a mistake women themselves make? GRG: Yes, all of us have all done it.

TERRAVIVA: What’s the role of that in the HIV context? GRG: So far, the way we have developed the understanding about gender and equality is by talking about women’s reality of that, how women experience inequality and how disadvantaged they are in access to productive resources like land, credit, employment, education. That was not wrong. That is good; that is true.

But it is also time now to see the other part of the equation because if you’re talking about sexual transmission of HIV, it’s two individuals, not one, right?

If a lot of the disadvantages that women are experiencing in sexual relationships is because of men in some ways, because of the way masculinity is constructed, then while we’re trying to help women, we also need to change the norms of masculinity, male sexuality, work with men to understand the ways in which gender puts pressure on them to be a particular way, just as it puts pressure on women to be a particular way.

So (the thinking is) men must be providers, men must be assertive in sexual interactions, men must know about sex – these are things that society perpetuates. And so men, in order to be seen as men, have to live up to those norms, and when they do so, they actually fuel the epidemic.

So how can we begin to have the community see that relationship and its negative consequences and begin to see how we can change? How can we make them more nurturing, more caring? They have to understand that the consequences of violence against women are not just against women; they’re against everybody.

TERRAVIVA: You’re saying that there has not been enough focus on looking into… GRG: On looking at both men and women, and helping men and women to come together to come up with solutions. We don’t live in communities of only women. We live in communities of women and men.

TERRAVIVA: Is that like saying that it helps perpetuate the notion of women as victims, as objects? GRG: As objects, and it puts all the pressure on them to come up with the solution. But there is this other half of the equation that you’re not holding responsible.

TERRAVIVA: There’s been a lot of discussion here about the biomedical approach where you say, ‘this is the problem, this is the drug.’ But there is no drug for changing stereotypes. GRG: There is no single magic bullet, but we do know what the ingredients are. You can identify what are the ingredients to lead to social change and success.

One ingredient is a legal enabling environment, so you cannot be criminalising and discriminating and stigmatising because then no matter what you do, you’re not going to succeed, because the environment is against you, right?

So you need laws that decriminalise, that protect people’s rights, a human rights framework, that’s the first precondition. (It’s) necessary, but not sufficient. The second precondition is that you need services available to all, so treatment, care, all the AIDS services. The third precondition is that communities be involved in coming up with solutions.

TERRAVIVA: But isn’t changing society’s prejudices like asking us to, in a way, go against human nature? GRG: No, why? I’ve seen this happen in some small local communities in Mumbai, India. For example, I have seen a poor community of people start out by saying ‘no, no, no, women cannot be made equal to men, it will ruin our social fabric, this is the way society is organised.’

And then we started explaining to them that if your daughter gets married, if she doesn’t have information about how to protect herself, if she cannot leave a relationship that she knows is risky, if she does not have a way to stay economically independent and her husband is HIV-positive, she’s stuck. She’s going to get ill, and she’s going to die.

And then your grandchildren will be orphaned. When you lay out the links with women’s empowerment and its implications for their community, people want to change. I have seen those same fathers stand in a line to say ‘please educate my daughter, please educate her about sex, please tell her about condoms.’

It’s not difficult to bring about social change. I think we don’t give enough credit to communities and to people. We get stuck with politicians at the top who talk about ancient cultures and how we must be. However, in everyday life, we are not living by that ancient culture, but by the realities of our lives.

*TerraViva Coverage of ICAAP 2009 (http://ipsterraviva.asia/)

Excerpt:

The prescription that thousands of participants effectively issued at a just- ended AIDS conference here was clear: It is time to fight social and political inequities so that the medical gains in curbing HIV and AIDS can work with maximum efficacy.

The recognition that it is time to look far beyond the medical and scientific dimensions of the region’s battle against HIV and AIDS is the theme that flowed through the more than 200 sessions at the 9th International Conference on AIDS in Asia and the Pacific (ICAAP).

There were many more sessions in the Aug. 9-13 conference addressing issues such as stigma and discrimination, sexuality and gender, resource shortages, community involvement, harm reduction, human rights, men who have sex with men, drug users, and laws that criminalise behaviour by certain groups – rather than medical therapies.

In closing ICAAP at the Bali International Convention Centre, World Health Organisation Regional Director for Southeast Asia Samlee Plianbangchang, dedicated more time to the social aspects of the epidemic rather than the biomedical ones during his remarks.

“Equity and social justice are of paramount importance for responding to the HIV/AIDS epidemic,” Samlee told the some 3,600 participants at the conference. His remarks reflected how HIV is as much as social and development disease as it is a medical one.

“HIV remains one of the most formidable public health challenges of our times. In the Asia-Pacific region, HIV affects mostly vulnerable and difficult- to-reach populations, especially sex workers, men who have sex with men and injecting drug users,” he said.

It is because of this characteristic of the epidemic – there are 5 million people living with HIV and AIDS in the region – that special efforts need to be made to change societal attitudes so that hard-to-reach groups get the same opportunity to know about and be treated for the infection.

“The main message has been that to address AIDS, we need to tackle the socio-political and economic inequities that drive the epidemic and restrict access to information, treatment and care,” Rosalia Sciortino, professor at Thailand’s Mahidol University and the chairwoman of the social track of ICAAP, said in an interview.

Addressing the “structural conditions” of the epidemic would help reduce the gaps between North and South, rich and poor, women and men, among diverse sexual communities, majority and minority populations, among citizens and non-citizens, and among migrants and refugees, she said.

“Social change is needed to control AIDS,” Sciortino pointed out. “Groups are not born vulnerable, but are made vulnerable by societies that marginalise and exploit them.”

Groups like drug users, sex workers and men who have sex men – often stigmatised as not deserving of attention or treatment or as bring social ills – have been falling through the cracks, despite major gains made over the last decade in increasing the numbers of people with HIV who have access to anti-retroviral therapy.

The discussion around HIV and AIDS used to be more along the lines of ‘access for all,’ which was the theme of the International AIDS Conference in Bangkok, Thailand in 2004.

Overall, the Asia-Pacific has seen the number of people getting anti- retrovirals increase more than threefold from 2003 to some 565,000 today, according to Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) figures. Worldwide, the number of people on anti-retroviral therapy stands at 4 million.

Many U.N. officials stressed this week that the region is poised to meet by next year the targets of universal access to treatment – agreed upon by the world’s governments in 2006.

Among the better performers are countries like Thailand, Laos and Cambodia, where more than 80 percent of the people who need anti-retrovirals get them.

In many countries too, Samlee explained, progress in national response to the AIDS epidemic over the last two decades is being reflected in declines or levelling off of HIV prevalence, and longer life spans among those with the virus.

But, alongside the positive overall figures, statistics also show worrisome trends. These include increasing infections especially among men who have sex with men, and also among intravenous drug users.

About a third of men who have sex men report having been harassed in some way, studies say, making it difficult for them to be reached by prevention and treatment campaigns. In Asia, Indonesia has the highest proportion of drug users infected with HIV, at 60 percent, followed by Burma at nearly 50 percent.

Then there are groups like women, especially those in intimate relationships whose partners engage in risky behaviour and infect them.

Women make up 35 percent of all new infections among adults in Asia, up from 17 percent in 1990. UNAIDS also says that more than 90 percent of women living with HIV acquired the virus from their partners in long-term relationships.

Looking ahead, Samlee encouraged HIV researchers to be aware of social gaps in working on responses to the pandemic. “Research addressing equity and benefitting marginalised populations should receive high priority,” he added.

ICAAP also saw discussions around conservative approaches to religion and gender biases that make it even more difficult to reach and address the needs of the weakest, most shunned groups.

However, there were not many representatives from conservative religious groups at the conference, or many representatives from the pharmaceutical sector – which drew a lot of flak here this week. For instance, activists staged lightning protests Wednesday to demand a stop to patents on HIV drugs.

For future conferences, Sciortino proposed a more open and “more daring” discussion of sexuality and touchy issues such as condoms and safe sex.

But participants like Monica Abo from Fiji said that AIDS conferences over the years have already done a lot of talking, referring to past ICAAPs such as the last one in 2006 in Colombo, Sri Lanka, where the theme was ‘Waves of Change, Waves of Hope.’

From the theme of this year’s ICAAP here in Bali, which is ‘Strengthening Movements, Empowering Networks,’ she suggested that perhaps the next ICAAP should have the slogan ‘Less Talk, More Action.”

Held once every two years, the next ICAAP will be held in Busan, South Korea.

*TerraViva at ICAAP 09 (http://www.ipsterraviva.asia)

Pharmaceutical firms have developed drugs that have lengthened lives and cut death rates from HIV and AIDS, but their financial clout in no way overrides their social responsibility in fighting the pandemic, a key advocate argued at an Asian conference on AIDS Wednesday.

Activists at ICAAP. Credit: Johanna Son/IPS

At the 9th International Conference on AIDS in Asia and the Pacific (ICAAP), Javed Jabbar, a former senator and minister from Pakistan, called on governments and communities to remind drug firms of the fundamental difference between owning patents on goods – such as designer items or mobile phones – and life-saving HIV drugs.

“These are medicines that make for life and death,” argued Jabbar, also global vice president for the International Union for the Conservation of Nature. By applying the patent system to the drug product and the process, “we create inherently unjust monopolies and block knowledge transfer” that could save so many lives around the world.

It is time to rewrite the rules of intellectual property rights, a pillar of the world trade system, critics like Jabbar argue. “In the context of HIV and AIDS, we need a new concept of people’s property rights instead of intellectual property rights.”

Toward the end of his remarks, activists pushing for the removal of drug patents trooped in front of the hall and unfurled banners that said ‘no patents on AIDS drugs.’ Lambasting several drug companies for refusing to let generic versions of HIV drugs be made, they chanted, ‘Shame on you!’

Jabbar expressed support for a proposal by economist Joseph Stiglitz to recognise people’s property rights. He suggests setting up a fund to pay fees to scientists who come up with cures for key diseases – after which the drugs would go into the public domain instead of being ‘owned’ by pharmaceutical companies.

In an interview, Jabbar said that the idea of people’s property rights would include giving drug companies payments to continue producing needed medication.

Echoing criticism by many activists here at ICAAP, he cited studies saying that only 15 percent of the cost of drugs actually goes to their development, the rest goes to marketing. Quoting from academic studies, he said that patent protection pushes up drug prices by an average of 400 percent and often exceeds 1,000 percent.

“They can make money but they don’t have to make 400 percent profit,” said Jabbar. “It’s greed, it’s shameful.”

At the same time, Jabbar says there are signs that the “concept of the people’s will” is gradually making some headway in putting some pressure on drug firms.

In July, the drug firm GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) granted a free voluntary licensing agreement to a South African company to produce abacavir, a second-line anti-retroviral drug, on a generic basis. Earlier this year, it put several of its patents on tropical diseases into a free pool – but excluded drugs for HIV and AIDS.

Then, there are the examples such as Brazil, India and Thailand taking key roles in producing more affordable treatment for HIV.

“These [drug] corporations are being forced to acknowledge that there is public demand, that there is hostility,” he said.

Ironically, Jabbar observed, it is the “great gains” in science and medical health – including HIV/AIDS in the past – that have given drug companies such strong clout in virtually shaping public health policies for the world.

While World Trade Organisation (WTO) rules allow room for breaking patents and resorting to compulsory licensing for public health needs, including HIV and AIDS, many health advocates say that these are far from enough today.

The world trade regime has also put in place a system where corporate intellectual property rights – especially those of pharmaceutical firms – are “strongly enforced” at the expense of the public good, Jabbar maintained.

Those breaking patents or making generic formulations of drugs attract strong action from companies – much more than when copies are made of movies or books – even if the public health interest in the case of medicines is crystal clear, Jabbar added.

While the idea of people’s property rights is not something drug firms will embrace, “it doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t campaign for it.”

“Today’s fantasies become tomorrow’s facts,” Jabbar stressed.

To drive home the seriousness of the pandemic nearly three decades after the first HIV cases were reported and despite huge medical leaps made in the last decade, Jabbar used the analogy of a ‘sexy’ development term these days: climate change.

“What climate change means for our planet’s survival, HIV/AIDS means for human health,” he said.

*TerraViva at ICAAP 09 (http://www.ipsterraviva.asia)

By Johanna Son and Lynette Lee Corporal
BALI, Aug 10 2009 (IPS)

The failure to reach the neediest, often the most stigmatised, people and the global financial crisis, loom as Asia-Pacific’s biggest challenges in coping with HIV and AIDS at this point, despite the major headway it has made in expanding the number of people with access to treatment.

This was the assessment of a mix of experts Monday at the 9th International AIDS Conference on Asia and the Pacific (ICAAP), the region’s biggest conference on the pandemic that is being attended by more than 4,000 people. Attended by public health experts, researchers, community organisers, advocates and development agencies, ICAAP held its first full day Monday and will run until Aug. 13.

The recognition that the Asia-Pacific has made major strides toward the goal of giving universal access to treatment for whose living with HIV and AIDS has been a common thread through the simultaneous sessions here.

The number of patients getting anti-retroviral therapy (ART) has risen to 565,000 people today. This is a three-fold increase from the figure in 2003, according to the Joint United Nations Programme on AIDS (UNAIDS).

Given this progress in the last two years, “meeting this (universal access to treatment) is not an aspirational goal,” remarked JVR Prasada Rao, director for UNAIDS Regional Support Team-Asia Pacific.

“The progress shows that universal access is possible, not a utopian deal in this region,” added Michel Kazatchkine, executive director of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, said at a discussion Monday.

In 2006, the world’s governments committed themselves to the cause of achieving universal access in HIV prevention, treatment, care and support by 2010. Countries like Thailand, Cambodia and Laos account for a good part of this progress in access to treatment, because they are able to provide 80 percent of those who need ART the drugs they need.

But while headway in access to treatment may be a reason for optimism, experts also said the Asia-Pacific could do much better in access to prevention, care and support – the other components of the goal toward universal access.

Across the region, prevention and care and support in HIV and AIDS are undercut by stigma and discrimination, lack of legal protection that put groups such as drug users, sex workers and men who have sex with men at more risk — and as well as resource constraints that governments face at a time of recession.

“We need to reach men who have sex with men, intravenous drug users and sex workers and have the right legal environments to achieve universal access for them,” Kazatchkine said.

But this cannot happen if drug use is still subject to the death penalty in many Asian countries, even as sharing of needles is a major mode of HIV transmission, he added. In 2007, Indonesia had the highest figure in Asia of drug users having HIV at 60 percent, followed by Burma at nearly 50 percent. Afghanistan has one million drug users, of which 120,000 are injectors.

Likewise, 12 countries in the region have laws that criminalise on the basis of sexual orientation, same-sex relations and sodomy.

There has been some good news though, such as the decision by the New Delhi High Court to strike down a section of the Indian Penal Code on male to male sex. Taiwan has a new law granting sex workers the same rights as their clients. Nepal recognised constitutional rights of sexual and gender minorities.

“Out-of-school youth, street children, young sex workers, including youth men who have sex with men have different needs. But they have the same rights,” said youth campaign coordinator Liping Mian. She added that her research in 2007 showed that sex workers are getting younger at the age of 15 or 16.

Women, including pregnant ones, and young people also need to be reached better by prevention and treatment efforts in Asia. Fifty million women, comprising 34 percent of all infections in the region, are put at risk by their male partners, UNAIDS says.

But a respected medical professor, David Cooper of the National Centre in HIV Epidemiology and Clinical Research, University of South Wales, tempered some of the optimism stated here by official development institutions.

He pointed out worrisome gaps, such as the fact that those with lesser financial resources getting less of the benefits of medicine and care that have been extending the life spans of those living with HIV and AIDS by 12 to 20 years.

“We now have all the drugs available but we’re not treating HIV-positive infants and those that belong to middle and lower income brackets,” Cooper said. “We’ve to do better and right now, we’re not doing well with pregnant women and children. The prevention strategy should be increased.”

“We’re nowhere near universal access in this region,” he added.

Discussions on how to improve responses to HIV and AIDS nearly 30 years into the pandemic — and on the eve of achieving the goal of universal access to treatment in HIV and AIDS — are occurring against the backdrop of concerns about how the financial crunch puts additional pressure on developing countries’ already tight resources. The response to AIDS is “in competition with the global financial crisis” and the fact that more countries are being affected by conflict and displacement, Rao added. Still, he said, UNAIDS expects “much larger funding” from the Global Fund that can help more people get access to treatment in Asia.

But those like Samsuridjal Djauzi, an Indonesian doctor who is ICAAP co-chair, says “we should (already) discuss how to mobilise other resources in order to continue our programmes” and reach the universal access goals that countries like Indonesia expect to meet in 2010.

HIV prevalence in Indonesia remains low at 0.2 percent and the death rate from AIDS has decreased from 46 percent in 2006 to 17 percent in 2008 due to anti-retroviral treatment.

“The financial crisis cannot be an excuse to spend less on health. It’s important that we do not lose the gains we made,” Kazatchkine pointed out.

At the formal opening of ICAAP Sunday night, Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono said that leadership is key to preventing and coping with HIV and AIDS. “The best way to strike a blow against AIDS is through leadership. Without leadership, the fight against AIDS becomes sporadic, reactive, without focus, lacking resources, and will eventually lose steam,” he said.

*IPS Asia-Pacific’s TerraViva at ICAAP 2009 (http://www.ipsterraviva.asia)

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A Habitat II global Plan of Action moved a crucial step toward completion Tuesday, after international negotiators on housing rights agreed to oppose “forced evictions” which violate human rights.

Governments agreed that the right to adequate housing covers protection and redress from “forced evictions that are contrary to the law,” thus clearing the last hurdle to the resolution of the long running housing rights debate here.

The forced evictions issue, which comprises problems ranging from mass evictions to make way for development projects, ethnic cleansing and raids on squatters, had proved one of the most intractable problems at the conference.

But with world leaders scheduled to arrive Wednesday to approve the action plan, diplomats cleared a major hurdle by agreeing firmly to protect people from ‘forced’, and not merely ‘illegal’, evictions.

Governments negotiating the Habitat Plan of Action had agreed over the weekend on the “full and progressive realisation of the right to adequate housing”, but yesterday’s accord puts the final touches on the contentious issue of housing rights.

Housing rights activists would have wanted stronger language in the action plan, but Minar Pimple of the Bombay-based Youth for Unity and Voluntary Action said: “It’s not total happiness. But with this compromise, the draft Plan of Action is very much on course.”

“I see the opening of a space that can be used by different communities,” Pimple said. “This means the right to adequate housing also means not being forcibly evicted from your home.”

As agreed by the working group on housing rights, the compromise language now says governments must “protect all people and provide legal protection and redress from forced evictions that are contrary to the law, taking human rights into consideration”.

And “when evictions are unavoidable”, governments must “ensure that as appropriate, alternative suitable solutions are provided”, meaning communities must be consulted and agree to relocation and rehabilitation.

While the language does not go beyond international law on forced evictions, Pimple said it does emphasize three things: “It clearly accepts that there are forced evictions, that forced evictions are violations of human rights and that suitable alternatives and rehabilitation is to be provided.”

Similar language is found in a listing of what adequate shelter entails, apart from “providing legal security of tenure” and includes new wording that says homeless people should not be “penalised for status”.

The agreement settles a debate on how to protect people against “illegal” or “forced” evictions, with activists saying that reference only to illegal evictions would have given governments room to invoke national law when violating housing rights.

“Saying ‘forced’ is clearer language because one can say these evictions ‘can’t be illegal because it’s legal in my country’,” said Joanna Weschler, U.N. representative for the U.S. based NGO Human Rights Watch.

“Always, governments can claim that eviction is going under national laws… because sometimes the local laws are illegal (in an international context)”, argues Mohammed al-Zeidan of the Israel-based Arab Association for Human Rights.

He says that in Israel, some 60,000 Arabs live in ‘unrecognised villages’, mostly in the Negev, all vulnerable to forced relocation under Israel’s 1965 Planning and Development Law.

The concern about repressive laws is addressed by part of the section on forced evictions that says human rights must also be taken into consideration, activists say.

Just days earlier, governments had been unwilling to oppose ‘forced’ evictions entirely, leaving open the option that they would only seek to block evictions that were “illegal…in the context of national and international law”.

Though the European Union backed strong language seeking protection against forced evictions as a human rights concern, sources tell IPS that the United States opposed such language.

U.S. concerns about property rights, and doubts by some developing nations about how far they want to go to protect squatter communities or oppose projects to relocate them, sparked demand for a compromise.

The agreed version is “a watered down version” of language proposed earlier, acceptable to the EU, Group of 77 and India, Pimple said.

Still, some delegates say it has to be clear that while forced evictions are to be abhorred, some relocation is needed for communities in danger zones like garbage dumps, or near railways or riverbanks after following due process of law.

In an interview, Vicente de la Serna, head of the Philippines delegation, said moves to remove these communities made following the law, “should be respected”. Pimple agreed that people living in dangerous areas “must be relocated with their consent; people will not want to stay in these dangerous areas anyway”.

Housing rights campaigners have expressed doubts about national laws. The Philippines, among others, still has on its books an old law that makes squatting a crime.

De la Serna says the Philippines wants that law repealed, adding: “We should decriminalise squatting. It is a social problem. The remedy is not to send them to jail, but for them to be assisted so they can get access to better housing.”

Still, he stressed, protection must be given to property owners. “Otherwise let’s just throw all laws on property down the river,” he added.

But Fides Bagasao of the Manila-based NGO Urban Poor Associates said the test of U.N. agreed language would come in the governments’ compliance with those words.

“They didn’t give up anything,” one human rights activist said of the U.S. and other opponents to housing rights. “At the end of the day they didn’t commit themselves to anything new.”

By Johanna Son
MANILA, Nov 9 1994 (IPS)

In 1949, Filipino doctor Abelardo Aguilar was testing micro-organisms he had isolated from soil samples in his back garden when he chanced upon bacteria that would later lead to the development of the antibiotic erythromycin.

Aguilar was then working for the U.S. pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly Co., which has since earned billions of dollars by marketing the drug under its brand-name, Ilosone.

For Third World experts Aguilar is a symbol of the double- standards in international patent laws that let Western transnationals profit from patent laws derived from indigenous knowledge, scientific expertise or biodiversity found in developing countries -- all in the name of intellectual property rights

The Filipino doctor tried but failed for 40 years to get some royalty for his work. He died last year at age 76. Now, his family wants Eli Lilly to pay up to 500 million dollars in royalty and says it will set up a health care trust for rural Filipinos.

For Third World experts Aguilar is a symbol of the double- standards in international patent laws that let Western transnationals profit from patent laws derived from indigenous knowledge, scientific expertise or biodiversity found in developing countries — all in the name of intellectual property rights.

Erythromycin is used to treat respiratory and skin and soft tissue infections. It can also be administered to patients suffering from primary syphilis but are allergic to penicillin.

Eli Lilly Philippines has declined to comment on the case, but a spokesman, Amador Astodillo, said he had sent newspaper reports on Aguilar’s story to the firm’s U.S. office. Astodillo told local press the Manila office has no jurisdiction over royalty payment issues.

Aguilar’s fate was made public this week by Philippine Health Secretary Juan Flavier. Aguilar’s kin had approached the official for help in their bid to collect royalties from Eli Lilly for the deceased doctor’s scientific contributions.

“Dr Aguilar has contributed so much in the discovery of erythromycin. It is sad to hear that he got nothing out of it,” remarked Flavier, who said he would write to Eli Lilly’s headquarters in the United States to back the Aguilar family’s claim.

The case has acquired added significance at a time when the Philippine Congress is still mulling on whether or not to ratify the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT).

Filipino activists oppose GATT ratification, citing loopholes in the rules for intellectual property rights. Some say Aguilar’s case is a stark example of what can happen when the North is allowed to gain the upper hand in such matters.

Excerpt: