A women-led village council prepares a “social map” of the local community. Credit: Naimul Haq/IPS

By Kalinga Seneviratne
BANGKOK, Jun 26 2014 (IPS)

The Bangkok Declaration on Disaster Risk Reduction in Asia and the Pacific adopted at the close of the 6^th Asian Ministerial Conference On Disaster Risk Reduction (AMCDRR) here today emphasised community-based solutions, and reflects a growing global desire to focus more on grassroots actions in the face of catastrophic climate change.

Organised annually in collaboration with the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNISDR), this year’s conference – hosted by the Thai government – marks the last time stakeholders from the region will meet before a global summit in Japan next year brings governments together to draft post-2015 plans.

Margareta Wahlstrom, special representative of the U.N. secretary general for disaster risk reduction, said in her opening remarks to the conference that an inclusive and participatory model is needed, which allows grassroots communities and local government authorities to work together as central players in disaster risk reduction (DRR) efforts.

“The more growth we have, the more problems we create. As Asia grows we need policy coherence, accountability and transparency.” -- Bangladeshi Parliamentarian Saber Chowdhrey
Her words found echo with Harjeet Singh, international coordinator of ActionAid’s disaster risk reduction and climatic adaptation project.

“We should not be developing solutions in boardrooms and conferences like this,” he told IPS. “We should rather work with communities, that know much better how they are effected. Most of the time they have solutions that work best for them.”

Speaking at a media conference later, Wahlstrom pointed out that East Asia serves as a model for the rest of the world, as its DRR policies over the last 20 years have led to significant reductions in fatalities as a result of natural hazards.

She said the conference is addressing the fundamental question of how to bring grassroots communities, who are already doing the hard work of mitigation and adaptation, into conversation with national policy makers in order to influence the development agenda.

In preparation for the 3^rd U.N. World Conference on Disaster Risk Reduction (WCDRR) in Japan in March 2015, the Bangkok Declaration calls upon governments and stakeholders to enhance resilience at local levels by institutionalising integrated community approaches into local development.

In addition, it recommended the inclusion of volunteer and community-based networks and strengthening the role of women as a force in local level resilience building.

The document also stressed the need for strong accountability measures in partnerships between the community and local governments.

Thailand also managed to incorporate King Bhumibol Adulyadej’s philosophy of Sufficiency Economics into the document, highlighting the importance of a people-centered development model that could “reduce the impact of uncertainties and increase the self-immunity of local communities.”

Sufficiency economics, based on the Buddhist principles of moderation, self-sufficiency and sustainability, promotes a grassroots-oriented economic model that rejects greed, overexploitation and waste.

In the Hyogo Framework for Action (HFA2) adopted here as the blueprint for the region’s input to the Japan conference next year, building community resilience to disaster risk management was given top priority.

In the consultation process for HFA2 from March 2012 to May 2013 the emphasis has shifted from reducing vulnerabilities to building resilience. This would involve devolution of authority from a central to a local government level and the use of multi-stakeholder platforms.

This is particularly relevant in the Asia-Pacific region, where – according to a background paper produced for the Bangkok meeting by UNISDR – the number of people exposed to annual flooding has increased from 29.5 to 63.8 million in the past four years, while the number of people living in cyclone-prone areas has grown from 71.8 to 120.7 million.

Invariably, poor people and low-income communities who live in areas most vulnerable to climate change – informal housing settlements and coastal areas, for instance – have been disproportionately impacted.

“We need to be innovative and think out of the box to reform governance [at the] community level,” Bangladeshi Parliamentarian Saber Chowdhrey said at the conference.

He argued that 2015 is poised to be a watershed year with three major international conferences addressing the post-2015 development agenda.

“The more growth we have, the more problems we create,” he noted. “As Asia grows we need policy coherence, accountability and transparency.”

Stefan Kohler, with the sustainable infrastructure group of the United Nations Office for Project Services (UNOPS) told IPS a key component to the whole process is community consultation.

“They are the ones who will be involved in using the (DRR) infrastructure created for them and [we] need to understand their requirements, so that [we] can feed it to the design process.”

Nepal, for instance, has been ranked by the U.N. Development Programme as the fourth most vulnerable nation to the impacts of climatic change.

While the country has been developing national action plans on disaster management since 1996, it is only recently that the government enhanced the role of local-level participation.

Addressing a workshop here, Gopi Khanal, Nepal’s joint-secretary of the ministry of federal affairs and local development, explained that the government has shifted responsibility for DRR management to the community level.

Through Ward Citizens Forums and 3,625 Village Development Councils operating under local government structures, the national government has created an information sharing system from national through district to village levels.

“Mainstreaming of risk management requires coordination between various levels of governance, and the sharing of financial resources,” he explained.

Becky-Jay Harrington of the International Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC), who is based in Nepal, told IPS that this pilot scheme – currently implemented in seven of the country’s 75 districts – has channeled a considerable amount of state financial resources to community-based action on disaster risk management.

The project’s total budget is 2.5 million dollars.

Another example can be seen in the Maldives, a country seriously threatened by rising sea levels as a result of global warming.

Mohamed Zuhair, the country’s national disaster management minister, told the meeting that the central government has given a lot of freedom to communities from far-flung atolls and islands to steer DRR activities, which in turn has influenced national policy.

He also believes that high-risk communities like his need to be innovative if they wish to survive.

“We have a private-public collaboration with the tourist industry to introduce green energy and collaborate in risk management,” he pointed out, adding, “While the Maldives has taken the initiative, bigger countries with more funds need to take responsibility and contribute to these initiatives.

Experts say the shift towards civil society must be encouraged and built upon, as the world prepares for a decade of disasters.

(END)

An old woman stands in front of her house, which was destroyed by flash floods in Sri Lanka. Credit: Amantha Perera/IPS

By Kalinga Seneviratne
BANGKOK, Jun 25 2014 (IPS)

A consortium of faith-based organisations (FBOs) made a declaration at a side event Wednesday at the 6^th Asian Ministerial Conference On Disaster Risk Reduction (AMCDRR), to let the United Nations know that they stand ready to commit themselves to building resilient communities across Asia in the aftermath of natural disasters.

Hosted this year by the Thai government, the conference is an annual collaboration with the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNISDR), with the aim of bringing regional stakeholders together to discuss the specific challenges facing Asia in an era of rapid climate change.

“I have seen the aftermath of disasters, where religious leaders and volunteers from Hindu temples, Islamic organisations and Sikh temples work together like born brothers." -- Dr. Anil Kumar Gupta, head of the division of policy planning at the National Institute of Disaster Management in India
A report prepared for the Bangkok conference by UNISDR points out that in the past three years Asia has encountered a wide range of disasters, from cyclones in the Philippines and major flooding in China, India and Thailand, to severe earthquakes in Pakistan and Japan.

In 2011 alone, global economic losses from extreme weather events touched 366 billion dollars, of which 80 percent were recorded in the Asia-Pacific region.

While the region accounts for 39 percent of the planet’s land area and hosts 60 percent of the world’s population, it only holds 29 percent of global wealth, posing major challenges for governments in terms of disaster preparedness and emergency response.

FBOs believe they can fill this gap by giving people hope during times of suffering.

“It’s not about the goods we bring or the big houses we build,” argued Jessica Dator Bercilla, a Filipina from Christian Aid, adding that the most important contribution religious organisations can make is to convince people they are not alone on the long road towards rebuilding their lives after a disaster.

The FBO consortium that drafted the statement – including Caritas Asia, Soka Gakkai International (SGI) and the ACT Alliance – held a pre-conference consultative meeting here on Jun. 22^nd during which some 50 participants from various faiths discussed the many hurdles FBOs must clear in order to deliver disaster relief and assist affected populations.

The final FBO Statement on Disaster Risk Reduction drew attention to faith organisations’ unique ability to work closely with local communities to facilitate resilience and peace building.

A declaration enshrined in the statement also urged the United Nations to recognise FBOs as a unique stakeholder in the Post-2015 Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction (HFA2) to be presented to the 3^rd U.N. World Conference on Disaster Risk Reduction (WCDRR) in 2015.

It also wants national and local governments to include FBOs when they organise regular consultations on DRR with relevant stakeholders, as FBOs are the ones who often sustain development programmes in the absence of international NGOs.

For example, since 2012 Caritas Indonesia has been working with a coastal community that has lost 200 metres of its coastal land in the past 22 years, in the Fata Hamlet of Indonesia’s East Nusa Tenggar Province, to build community resilience to rising seawaters.

The agency helped community members form the Fata Environment Lover Group, which now uses natural building methods to allow seawater to pass through bamboo structures before reaching the coast, so that wave heights are reduced and mangroves are protected.

Collectively, the three partners to the declaration cover a lot of ground in the region.

Caritas Asia is one of seven regional offices that comprise Caritas International, a Catholic relief agency that operates in 200 countries. SGI is a Japanese lay Buddhist movement with a network of organisations in 192 countries, while ACT is a coalition of Christian churches and affiliated organistaions working in over 140 countries.

All three are renowned for their contributions to the field of development and disaster relief. Caritas International, for instance, annually allocates over a million euros (1.3 million dollars) to humanitarian coordination, capacity building and HIV/AIDS programmes around the world.

“We would like to be one of the main players in the introduction of the DRR policy,” Takeshi Komino, head of emergencies for the ACT Alliance in the Asia-Pacific region, told IPS. “We are saying we are ready to engage.”

“What our joint statement points out is that our commitment is based on faith and that is strong. We can be engaged in relief and recovery activity for a long time,” added Nobuyuki Asai, programme coordinator of peace affairs for SGI.

Experts say Asia is an excellent testing ground for the efficacy of faith-based organisations in contributing to disaster risk reduction.

According to a survey by the independent Pew Research Centre, the Asia-Pacific region is home to 99 percent of the world’s Buddhists, 99 percent of the world’s Hindus and 62 percent of the world’s Muslims.

The region has also seen a steady increase in the number of Catholics, from 14 million a century ago to 131 million in 2013.

Forming links between these communities is easier said than done, with religious and communal conflicts plaguing the region, including a wave of Buddhist extremism in countries like Sri Lanka and Myanmar, a strong anti-Christian movement across Pakistan and attacks on religious minorities in China and India.

Some experts, however, say that the threat of natural catastrophe draws communities together.

According to Dr. Anil Kumar Gupta, head of the division of policy planning at the National Institute of Disaster Management in India, “When there is a disaster people forget their differences.

“I have seen the aftermath of disasters, where religious leaders and volunteers from Hindu temples, Islamic organisations and Sikh temples work together like born brothers,” he told IPS, citing such cooperation during major floods recently in the northern Indian states of Uttarakhand and Kashmir.

Loy Rego, a Myanmar-based disaster relief consultant, told IPS that the statement released today represents a very important landmark in disaster risk reduction.

“FBOs need to be more visible as an organised constituency in the roll-out of future frameworks,” he stated.

Rego believes that the biggest contribution FBOs could make to disaster risk management is to promote peaceful living among different communities.

“Respecting other religions need not be done in a secular way,” he said. “It only happens when they work with other FBOs in an inter-faith setting.”

(END)

Tamils protest Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksa's speech at the U.N. General Assembly, Sept. 24, 2013. Credit: Samuel Oakford/IPS

By Kalinga Seneviratne
SINGAPORE, Jun 12 2014 (IPS)

The recent arrest and deportation from Malaysia of three Sri Lankan Tamils on U.N. refugee status, under suspicion of trying to revive the disbanded Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), has raised questions about regional security and minority politics.

For many, disputes over the South China Sea and the proliferation of Islamic terror networks are the defining peace and security issues in South and Southeast Asia. As a result, the arrests of the three men last month went largely unreported, with the exception of local Malaysian and Sri Lankan media.

But with a large and restive Tamil minority in South India, huge Tamil diasporas in Malaysia, Singapore and Mauritius, as well as unhealed wounds from the recently concluded civil war in Sri Lanka that decimated the separatist LTTE, experts say that Tamil nationalist aspirations could end up shaping regional politics.

“About 90 percent of Malaysian Tamils are ardent supporters of the Tamil freedom movement in Sri Lanka. Is the [police inspector-general] going to arrest more than two million of us just because we support their struggle?” -- P. Ramasamy, deputy chief minister of Penang state
Created in 1976 with the aim of carving out an independent state for Tamil people in the north and east of Sri Lanka, the group quickly went on to become synonymous with suicide bombers and child soldiers, earning it the title of one of the most deadly terrorist organisations in the world.

Considered defunct since 2009, when the Sri Lankan army stormed the remaining rebel-held territory and eradicated its top leadership in the final phase of the country’s 30-year-long civil war, the LTTE still holds a powerful place in the collective imaginary of the region.

Referring to the May 15 arrest of the three Tamil men by Malaysian police under a Red Notice issued by Interpol, a regional terrorism expert speaking to IPS on the condition of anonymity said this was a significant development in thwarting attempts to revive the LTTE in Malaysia under the cover of U.N. refugee status.

The arrests followed hard on the heels of another deportation from Malaysia, in March this year, of the deputy leader of the LTTE’s international network, Nanthagopan, who was arrested in Iran on a tip-off from Sri Lanka and sent back to Malaysia before being subsequently deported to Colombo.

In announcing the arrests, Malaysian Inspector-General of Police Khalid Abu Bakar charged that the suspected persons had “used Malaysia as a base to collect funds, spread their propaganda, and were attempting to revive the defunct terrorist group at the international level.”

Police also seized propaganda material promoting the LTTE and a large amount of cash in over 24 different currencies.

The alleged offenders, registered with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), had been living in the country without visas since 2004.

“We will not allow the country to be used as a place for them to hide or conduct any terror activities in the country or on foreign soil,” the inspector-general stressed, adding that the UNHCR office in Malaysia should undertake a thorough review of its procedures to ensure that terrorist suspects don’t abuse its offices for activities that threaten regional stability.

He also pledged to screen the roughly 4,000 Sri Lankan Tamil refugees in Malaysia in efforts to “flush out” suspected terrorists.

A spokesperson for UNHCR in Malaysia, Yante Ismail, told IPS that while the High Commissioner’s office cannot comment on individual cases, they did urge the Malaysian government not to deport the three suspects until investigations could be completed.

“UNHCR regrets that despite our representations to the Malaysian Government, this group has been deported to a place where they may be at serious risk of harm,” she said.

UNHCR is not alone in its concern – since 1983 thousands of Sri Lankan Tamils have sought refugee status in other countries on the grounds that their rights have been trampled upon by the majority-Sinhalese state.

Unresolved charges that the Sri Lankan army committed war crimes against the minority population during the last days of the conflict, coupled with reports that Tamils have experienced systematic detention in the years following the war, add to the fear that some Tamils are not safe in Sri Lanka.

But since Malaysia is not a State Party to the 1951 Refugee Convention, the government is not bound by UNHCR guidelines.

Others believe the issue runs deeper than just regional security.

P. Ramasamy, deputy chief minister of Malaysia’s northwestern Penang state, who acted as a legal advisor to the LTTE during peace negotiations a decade ago, has accused the Malaysian police of falling into the trap set by the Sri Lankan government to frustrate international efforts to conduct a full investigation into possible rights violations in the country.

“About 90 percent of Malaysian Tamils are ardent supporters of the Tamil freedom movement in Sri Lanka. Is Khalid [Abu Bakar] going to arrest more than two million of us just because we support their struggle?” he remarked in an interview with The Edge.

Roughly eight percent of Malaysia’s population of some 29 million people is Tamil, mainly descendants of indentured labourers brought by the British to work in the rubber plantations in the 19^th century.

At the height of the HINDRAF rebellion in December 2007, the then Malaysian police chief Mussa Hassan accused the group of “actively canvassing for support and assistance from terrorist groups”, including the LTTE.

HINDRAF’s leaders were subsequently arrested and jailed under the Internal Security Act and the movement officially banned in October 2008. However, in January 2013 the ban was lifted and in April HINDRAF signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with the governing Barisan Nasional (BN) coalition to work towards uplifting the Tamil community.

According to Ramanathan Sankaran, a scholar on the Indian diaspora in Malaysia, many Malaysian Tamils are sympathetic to the cause of Sri Lanka’s minority and have thus supported the LTTE. HINDRAF once represented these sympathies but since joining the ruling government has been much more cautious in its message.

“My support for HINDRAF has declined because they did not make any comments on the arrest and deportations,” Sankaran told IPS, adding, “Their failure to act on this matter is a disgrace.”

Some say the Malaysian government’s biggest fear is the reawakening of the sentiment once expressed by HINDRAF, and the radicalisation of Malaysian Tamils.

The government has been particularly concerned about the recent creation of a group calling itself the Tamilar Progressive Team, which is modeled on a similar group in India’s southern state of Tamil Nadu that one of the arrestees – 38-year-old Selvathurai Kirubananthan, also known as Anbarasan – is alleged to have been involved with.

Other experts, like leading Malaysian rights activist Chandra Muzafar, say these fears are unfounded.

“Tamil support for the ruling coalition has been increasing since the last General Election in May 2013,” he told IPS. The more likely scenario, he says, is that the Malaysian government is legitimately apprehensive about Sri Lankan Tamils “using Malaysia as a base to revive the LTTE.”

(END)

Slum populations in the developing world have increased from 650 million in 1990 to 863 million in 2012. Credit: Naimul Haq/IPS

By Kalinga Seneviratne
SINGAPORE, Jun 5 2014 (IPS)

With over 20,000 international participants, a triple summit wrapping up today in Singapore is generating an abundance of ideas on sustainable cities.

Combining the World City Summit, Singapore Water Week and the CleanEnviro Summit into one mega-event (at one venue), the country has brought together urban policy-makers, environmentalists, water experts and business people to discuss the future of urban planning, even as U.N.-Habitat warns that the number of city dwellers could double by 2050 to nearly 6.5 billion people.

“Unless we make a concerted effort to change the way we live and operate, the world is on course to enter uncharted, potentially dangerous territory,” warned Choi Shing Kwok, permanent secretary of Singapore’s ministry of the environment and water resources, addressing a Business Forum at the World Cities Summit here this week.

One of the major themes on the table has been the issue of environmental sustainability and the urgent need for better communication between local government authorities and community members to create more transparent and participatory governance at the grassroots level.

“Unless we make a concerted effort to change the way we live and operate, the world is on course to enter uncharted, potentially dangerous territory." -- Choi Shing Kwok, permanent secretary of Singapore’s ministry of the environment and water resources
Few can miss the significance of Singapore as a location for the triple-header: an island nation of four million people, it is now among the world’s top three richest countries in terms of gross domestic product (GDP), clocking roughly 274.7 billion dollars in 2012, according to the World Bank.

A highly advanced developed nation with sound environmental policies, the Southeast Asian country is always proud to showcase its journey from a third world to a first world country within a single generation as a model for others to emulate.

In a nod to his government’s decision to host the gathering for the second year running, Kwok told the 130 mayors present at the conference, “Governments have an important role to play in steering national development through good public policies and by working with people and private sectors to shape their countries’ future.”

The U.N. estimates that 96 percent of urban growth in the next three decades will take place in developing countries, many of which are already straining to effectively manage their bulging metropolises.

Slum populations in the developing world have increased in number from 650 million in 1990 to 863 million in 2012. More than half of these slum dwellers reside in Asia.

Asia is also expected to shoulder the lion’s share of the burden of city planning, being home to 56 percent of the world’s largest cities, including seven of the top 10 megacities (with populations of over 10 million people).

Most officials are agreed that tackling the challenge of urban growth will require a multi-sector approach that mobilises electronics and technology in the service of poverty reduction and environmental sustainability.

Bindu Lohani, vice president of knowledge management and sustainable development at the Asian Development Bank (ADB) believes that, in order to achieve the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), emphasis must be placed on developing “local governments as the delivery agents of basic services.”

He added that municipal governments in the developing world face enormous challenges due to a lack of autonomy in urban planning, and limited avenues through which to raise financial resources.

China has made strides in overcoming these obstacles, according to Qiu Aijun, deputy director-general of China’s Center for Urban Development.

She drew attention to three rural towns – Longgang, Baigou and Huixian – that have developed into cities in the past 10 to 20 years because the Chinese authorities eliminated multi-tiered approval systems and adopted one localised system for processing community development projects and businesses.

“As grassroots governments did not have approval rights, we reformed laws to give them those rights. Instead of needing eight different chops [approval stamps] to start a business, you now need just one,” she explained.

Several of the mayors in attendance at the summit advocated using social media as a tool in building a sustainable future.

Among them was Ridwan Kamil, mayor of Bandung, Indonesia’s third largest city, who interacts with the community through Twitter, where he currently has 545,000 followers; he has also convinced city officials and other departments to create their own social media accounts.

“In future, a majority of the city’s programmes will be run collaboratively, where citizens participate in improving the quality of public services,” Kamil stressed during a forum discussion earlier this week.

Clover Moore, lord mayor of Sydney, echoed his sentiment, arguing that mainstream media’s focus on negatives could be easily overcome by embarking on smart social media campaigns.

“People don’t want change, [so] we need to take people through change,” argued Moore at a panel discussion entitled ‘Way Forward’. Her campaign to make Sydney a more bike-friendly and pedestrian-friendly city, she said, took years of communicating with the community before people changed their ways.

Others stressed that new forms of communication must be deployed in tandem with the building of solid infrastructure.

As Anibal Gaviria Correa, mayor of Colombia’s second-largest city, Medellin, pointed out, extending public transport systems to the most marginalised suburbs helped to reduce the soaring crime rate in what was once considered the world’s most violent urban center, with a homicide rate of 380 per 100,000 in 1991.

“This allowed the city’s poorest residents to access education, jobs and public spaces, helping in social upliftment, and building a more inclusive society,” he noted. Though still high, homicide rates in Medellin fell by 50 percent between 1990 and 2000.

Waste management was another major issue under the microscope here this week, particularly for the governments of Asian countries, many of which lack effective recycling, treatment and disposal systems.

For instance, only 14 percent of Indonesia’s wastewater is treated, while that number falls to 10 percent in the Philippines, nine percent in India and just four percent in Vietnam.

According to the Asian Development Bank, 23 percent of the population (roughly 850 million people) in the Asia-Pacific Region practice open defecation, causing water and ground pollution and leading to the outbreak of diarrhoeal diseases.

A mere 10 percent of solid waste generated in Asian towns and cities winds up in poorly managed landfill sites.

In an interview with the conference newspaper ‘Solutions’, Chen Hung-Yi, of the Environmental Protection Administration of Taiwan, said that governments should introduce financial incentives for people to generate less waste and thus reduce reliance on landfills.

“In Taiwan, households and businesses are charged for garbage collection, while recycling is free,” Chen said, arguing that such a system will soon prompt people to take more responsibility for their solid waste.

South Korea and Japan have adopted a similar system, though China is yet to follow suit, even though the country is the world’s leading generator of municipal solid waste, creating 150 million tons annually.

The United Nations estimates that cities will generate more than half the rise in greenhouse gas emissions over the next 20 years, highlighting the urgent need for communication and action on smart urban planning.

(END)

U.S. President Barack Obama’s weeklong visit to Asia was meant to reassure allies in the region of American support and re-engagement. But it raised Chinese hackles and failed to dispel doubts over his administration’s ‘pivot to Asia’ strategy.

During his visit to Japan, South Korea, Malaysia and the Philippines Apr. 23-29, Obama repeatedly asserted that the key to prosperity in Asia lay in China playing by the rules, rather than bending them to suit its own interests.Chinese commentators have referred to the Obama visit as an effort to form an Asian version of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO).

His final stop was in Manila, traditionally a staunch U.S. ally that has an ongoing dispute with China over islands in the South China Sea. The Philippines and the U.S. signed an Agreement on Enhanced Defence Cooperation (AEDC) that will allow the U.S. to redeploy military forces in the islands for the first time in over two decades.

“Our territorial conflicts with China are the reason for this new agreement,” noted Walden Bello, a member of parliament writing in the Philippines Daily Inquirer. “AEDC is the mechanism that will make the Chinese respect our rights to Scarborough Shoal, the nine islands and reefs we claim in the Spratly Islands, our continental shelf and our 200 Mile Exclusive Economic Zone. The truth of the matter, however, is that the deal will do no such thing.”

Bello, a long-term critic of U.S. policy in the region, argues, “What we see is Washington’s ‘exhibitionist syndrome’, that is, the imperative it feels to ‘show the flag’ to its allies and to China, and to do so in an inexpensive way, with no rent to the host country.”

Obama said in a speech at the Philippines Army headquarters in Manila that nations and peoples have the right to live in security and peace and have their sovereignty and territorial integrity respected. “We believe that international law must be upheld, that freedom of navigation must be preserved and commerce must not be impeded,” he said.

Critics say such comments have drawn further scepticism in the region because what Obama is preaching is not practised by his own nation – as the history of American foreign policy in the past two decades clearly shows. China has also latched on to such arguments to claim that it is the U.S. rather than China that is trying to destabilise the region.

“Obama’s rhetoric about peace and international law sounds hollow because it contradicts what Washington and (he) himself have been up to,” said the state-controlled China Daily in an editorial on Apr. 29, adding “it is now clear that Washington is no longer bothering to conceal its attempt to contain China’s influence in the region. It is even less convincing to say the U.S. pivot to the Asia-Pacific is not targeted against China.”

Announced in January 2012, the Obama administration’s ‘pivot to Asia’ strategy is a multi-dimensional one that includes improving bilateral relationships in the region, especially with its traditional allies; deepening working relationships with emerging powers, including China; and promoting trade and investment in the Asia-Pacific region.

“Asian allies (such as Singapore and the Philippines) believe a U.S.-centric order is good for the region by and large,” argued Dr Tan See Seng, head of the Centre for Multilateralism Studies at Nanyang Technological University (NTU) here.

“America is one of the major countries that sets the rules and expects others to follow even as it breaks its own rules. China sees that point very clearly and doesn’t accept that,” Tan told IPS.

China Daily says that for a considerably long period, the Chinese have cherished the “naive thought” that Washington will rein in its unruly allies when they go too far. “Obama’s current trip should be a wake-up call that this is just wishful thinking,” it argued. “Ganging up with its troublemaking allies, the U.S. is presenting itself as a security threat to China.”

The troublesome allies China refers to are Japan and the Philippines. The dispute between Japan and China centres around the uninhabited islands that Japan calls Senkaku and China calls Diaoyu. Chinese claims to the islands are based on historical records going back to the Ming Dynasty in the 14th century but, at the end of World War II, Japan officially transferred ownership of the islands to the U.S. and, in 1972, the U.S. transferred it back to Japan, moves seen by China as illegal.

In an interview with Japan’s Yomiuri Shimbun newspaper, Obama has said that the islands fall under the U.S.-Japan Mutual Cooperation and Security Treaty and that Washington opposes any “unilateral attempts to undermine Japan’s administration of the islands.” This comment has ruffled many feathers in Beijing.

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Qin Gang was quoted in China Daily as saying that his country “firmly opposes” actions that place the Diaoyu Islands under the cover of the U.S.-Japan treaty and urged Washington to “speak and act cautiously.” He said, “China’s determination and will to safeguard territorial integrity, sovereignty and maritime interests is unshakeable.”

Chinese commentators have referred to the Obama visit as an effort to form an Asian version of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO).

But Dr Termsak Chalermpalanupap, lead researcher at the ASEAN Studies Centre of the National University of Singapore, told IPS that such an organisation was not necessary.

“Most countries in Southeast Asia don’t want confrontation with China,” argued Termsak, who worked with the ASEAN Secretariat for over 20 years. “China has become the top trading partner for most of these countries and what they welcome is more trade and economic integration with China.”

Dr Evan Resnick, Coordinator of the U.S. Programme at the Rajaratnam School of International Studies in Singapore believes the U.S. is concerned about freedom of navigation in the South China Sea. “It’s a major artery for international commerce and the U.S. is interested in freedom of navigation for trade and military purposes,” he told IPS.

Tan argues that the U.S. has been used to the “hegemonic manifestation” of its power in the Asian region. But with an emerging China and nationalistic pride contributing to growing assertiveness in the South China Sea, the U.S. sees itself as a declining power and is troubled by what it believes is China’s challenge to it.

“Obama’s ‘pivot’ is an attempt to continue and maintain its interests,” he noted.

Border guards in Bangladesh refuse entry to Rohingya refugees from Myanmar in November 2012. Credit: Anurup Titu/IPS.

By Kalinga Seneviratne
SINGAPORE, Feb 20 2014 (IPS)

Two Myanmar Buddhist politicians who were visiting Malaysia narrowly escaped a late night assassination attempt outside a leading shopping mall in Kuala Lumpur this month. The incident has raised fears of an overseas spillover of the religious violence that has engulfed their state of Rakhine in recent years.

Aye Maung and Aye Thar Aung are leaders of the Arakan National Party (ANP), representing the mostly Buddhist Rakhines, the largest ethnic group in Myanmar’s western state of Rakhine, which was known as Arakan during British colonial times. Gunmen riding a motorcycle fired a number of shots at a car carrying them and their companions in a busy shopping area of the Malaysian capital, but no one was injured, according to eyewitness reports.“We have set up a committee of inquiry with Buddhists, Muslims and persons of no religious affiliation to look at the issue and determine what is really happening and provide some solutions." -- Dr Chandra Muzaffar

The Buddhist leaders returned to Myanmar a day after the incident. Aye Maung told a news conference that it was a well-planned terrorist attack. “I strongly believe the attack was a planned assassination attempt on our lives,” he claimed. “Our internal disturbances have now reached overseas, and we can now firmly conclude from this incident that the terrorists are now well established in foreign countries, especially in Malaysia.”

Some Muslim groups in Malaysia, however, claim that the ANP has staged the drama in order to gain the sympathy of Buddhists in Myanmar ahead of the general election there in 2015.

Rakhine state has witnessed several episodes of violence since 2012 between Buddhists and Rohingya Muslims, leaving scores dead and displaced. Many of the victims were from the Rohingya Muslim minority, considered by most Myanmar Buddhists as illegal migrants from Bangladesh.

Thousands of Rohingyas have fled to Muslim-majority Malaysia, where about 250,000 Myanmar nationals – both Buddhists and Muslims – are believed to reside, with many employed in low-paying jobs at restaurants and construction sites.

The Malaysian police have been quick to blame Myanmar migrants for the shooting incident.

But Malaysian political analyst Dr Chandra Muzaffar, head of the International Movement for a Just World (JUST), said a lot of Muslims in the region have been unhappy with the way Rohingyas are being treated inside Myanmar.

“Certain groups must be reacting because of certain perceptions of these politicians,” he told IPS from Kuala Lumpur. “Police need to investigate thoroughly to find out who was behind this.”

Kuala Lumpur’s acting investigations chief Khairi Ahrasa said in a media statement that a special squad, headed by him, has been set up to investigate the case “which has elements of political involvement.”

He also said they are investigating whether the killing of a Myanmar national, Ko Aung Gyi, in the city a day later has any connection with the shooting incident.

Ko Aung Gyi, a member of the 88 Generation Students group who hailed from Rakhine, was killed soon after his meeting with the Rakhine delegation. The former student leader turned political activist from Rakhine had been living in Malaysia with his family for several years. According to his wife, Ma Su Su Myint, he was killed after being called to discuss a business matter.

There have been a number of killings within the Myanmar migrant community in Malaysia in the past year. In late May 2013, violence in the community in Kuala Lumpur left at least two people dead, and was widely linked to the Rakhine state’s troubles. Earlier that month, Indonesian police arrested four men who were later found guilty of attempting to bomb the Myanmar embassy in Jakarta. The bomb plot’s mastermind said the conspirators were trying to avenge the killings of their Muslim brethren in Myanmar.

JUST has been concerned about the escalating tension between Muslims and Buddhists in the region and in November organised an inter-faith dialogue in Kuala Lumpur attended by Buddhists from across Asia and Muslims from Malaysia and Indonesia.

“We have set up a committee of inquiry with Buddhists, Muslims and persons of no religious affiliation to look at the issue and determine what is really happening and provide some solutions,” Muzaffar told IPS.

The six-member delegation of ANP leaders that was visiting Malaysia when the attack took place was basically the core political leadership of Buddhists in the Rakhine state. They were in Malaysia to meet exiled Myanmar Buddhists, collect donations and drum up support for their campaigns.

They were also believed to have held a town hall-style public talk and discussion titled “Reform in Burma and Arakan Politics” in Kuala Lumpur, according to a blog by Myanmar exile Hla Oo, who says Aye Maung is “bitterly hated” by Rohingya Muslims.

Aye Maung’s Rakhine Nationalities Development Party (RNDP) and the Arakan League for Democracy (ALD) – originally two rival groups – formally agreed to merge and form ANP (Arakan National Party) in October 2013, thus making it a formidable force in the state ahead of the 2015 general elections.

RNDP’s former stronghold was northern Rakhine while ALD’s bases were in southern Rakhine. ALD won 11 out of 26 seats in Rakhine in the 1990 general elections. ALD didn’t participate in the 2010 elections but RNDP participated and won 16 seats in Rakhine.

The ANP leadership applied for official registration to Myanmar’s Union Election Commission on Oct. 15 last year, but their application was only granted on Jan. 13 this year.

Muzaffar believes that the Myanmar government is not doing enough to stop the violence in the state and the military may be trying to use Buddhist nationalism to perpetuate military rule beyond the 2015 elections.

Referring to the Association of South East Asian Nations grouping of which Myanmar is a member, he said, “Other ASEAN governments can’t do anything to stop this, but they can get a dialogue going under the ASEAN charter of 2007.

“The international community could also help…but the problem is all are hoping to get a big slice of the Myanmar pie and western governments don’t want to antagonise the Myanmar government.”

Demonstrators in downtown Bangkok. Credit: Kalinga Seneviratne/IPS.

By Kalinga Seneviratne
SINGAPORE, Jan 19 2014 (IPS)

Street demonstrations in the Thai capital reflect the disillusionment of growing middle classes across Asia that see multi-party democracy as a playground for the corrupt rather than a process that elects lawmakers to serve society and the nation.

“For more than 20 years, Thai democracy has seen one incompetent and corrupt government after another,” Thai political and social commentator Voranai Vanijaka wrote in the Bangkok Post this week.“For more than 20 years, Thai democracy has seen one incompetent and corrupt government after another."

“Many protesters in the streets today are frustrated with the democratic process. Many have lost faith and want to start anew by first tearing down the present form of Thai democracy and then building up a new one.”

Anger against corruption expressed by India’s urban middle class resulted in the dramatic rise of the Aam Aadmi Party, or the party of the “common man”, that recently won power in the national capital, Delhi, just a year after it was launched.

There are similar moves afoot in countries like Indonesia, Sri Lanka and the Philippines whose political systems are also producing lawmakers who are seen to come to power to serve themselves and not society.

Thailand’s anti-corruption movement gathered steam two months ago when the ruling Phue Thai Party, led by Thailand’s first female Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra, tried to pass a blanket amnesty bill through Parliament that would have absolved politicians convicted of corruption and serious crimes linked with political conflicts since 2004.

The government dressed it up as a bill of reconciliation and unity after years of fierce political battles between the urban “yellows shirts”, who represent the traditional power elites of Bangkok, and the “red shirts”, or the rural electors, mainly from the northeast of the country, who make up about 70 percent of the electorate that firmly supports the Shinawatra government.

Though the amnesty would have covered all sides of politics, it was widely seen in Thailand as a bill designed to allow former prime minister and Yingluck’s brother, Thaksin Shinawatra, to come back to the country a free man.

The billionaire businessman-turned-politician has a two-year jail term for corruption hanging over him and has been living in self-imposed exile in Dubai after he was overthrown by a military coup in 2006.

The Shinawatras, through their enormous wealth, have created a powerful political machine which, their opponents allege, buys votes from the rural poor by offering them populist policies such as higher prices for rice farmers, village health centres and generally helping improve rural infrastructure.

The traditionally wealthy and powerful urban middle class have felt powerless against this machinery which has been able to deliver one election victory after another and propel the Shinawatras into national power without depending on urban support.

Two months ago this minority was able to mobilise enough people from the wealthy, the middle class and even the poor of Bangkok, and took on Thailand’s most potent political machine. They forced Prime Minister Yingluck to shelve the bill that would have granted amnesty to her brother. Not a shot was fired, no blood spilled, no bombs thrown and no buildings burnt.

Thus the latest incarnation of a Thai anti-corruption movement came about.

“These citizens have diagnosed a worsening corruption problem in Thai bureaucracy and politics and are refusing to tolerate it any longer. Their call for change is justified and credible. Thailand is crying out for a more just society in which the law is fairly enforced,” argued The Nation newspaper in an editorial on Jan. 16.

Propelled by this success, the movement has now embarked on a campaign to shut down government agencies and force the Shinawatra government to postpone elections scheduled for Feb. 2 that the ruling party is certain to win because its rural support base is still intact.

The opposition Democrat Party, which is supporting the protests, is boycotting the elections. By doing so, it has created a scenario where even if the elections are held as scheduled, and the Phue Thai Party wins, it may not be able to form a government.

With 28 constituencies with no candidates and 22 others with only one candidate each, the likelihood is high that the election will not deliver the required 95 percent of MPs in Parliament.

The protest leaders are calling for an unelected “people’s council” of nominees to be set up to reform the electoral system before elections are held. Some city people are even arguing that the one-person-one-vote system does not work, and they deserve more weight for their votes because they are the ones who pay taxes and not the rural voters.

Professor Pasuk Phongpaichit at Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok disagrees with this argument. In a comment published in both the Bangkok Post and Singapore’s Straits Times this week, she noted that in the past two decades Thailand’s per capita income has increased three-fold, and this has benefited rural people, who have also become taxpayers and have been empowered politically.

“Political parties have lagged behind these social changes,” she argues. “They often act like special interest groups which seek political power to benefit themselves.”

There are allegations being made about the leader of the protest movement, former Democratic Party lawmaker Suthep Thaugsuban, such as building business interests in land and rubber while being in politics.

Pasuk is against suspending the political system to craft reforms. She sees hope in the moves behind the scenes by military, academic and business leaders to broker a solution to the current political conflict.

“It is better to keep the parliamentary system in place, and channel the extraordinary energy of the recent protests into ensuring that reforms are real,” she argues. “A major part of reform should consist of measures to make political parties more democratic, more transparent, more accountable, and more open to representing the needs and aspirations of people.”

Mobile broadband services are seen as a key tool of development communication the world over, but people in rural Asia and Africa say telecom companies should cater to their needs and not simply impose technology on them.

Experts say spreading the benefits of the digital revolution to rural areas poses a huge challenge for telecom companies, which have so far focused on urban markets.

“The telecom industry has had an easy ride so far. It hasn’t seen what’s coming to them,” Mark Summers, co-founder of Inveneo, a non-profit company promoting broadband connection in Africa warned at the Telecom World 2013 conference here last month.“The education they want to bring is education that will draw a wedge between me and my way of life."

He was immediately challenged by a Zimbabwean in the audience who said he lived in a rural area and didn’t need the technology they had all been talking about. He wondered if telecom companies ever asked people like him what they wanted before trying to connect them to the technology.

Similar debates had taken place in the 1970s and 1980s when radio was promoted as a development communication tool, mainly by western consultants.

“They talk of us as if we are uneducated,” Reuben Gwatidzo of the Information Society Initiative Trust of Zimbabwe told IPS.

Gwatidzo said it wasn’t necessary to learn someone else’s language or to have high literacy to be a good carpenter, farmer or build one’s own house.

“The education they want to bring is education that will draw a wedge between me and my way of life,” he said. He said he was not against new technology but rural people must be allowed to choose what they want, and not have some “international strategy” imposed on them.

The telecom meet was organised by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) in the Thai capital. The meet picked up on longstanding issues.

ITU estimates there will be over 6.8 billion mobile phone subscribers around the world by the end of 2013, but points out that there are 1.1 billion people who do not have access to the Internet, with 90 percent of them in the developing world.

Telecom companies – which target urban markets – have increased their revenue by 12 percent between 2007 and 2011. The industry is largely driven by private operators.

Many argue that private companies are not interested in rural markets because of low purchasing power and high cost of connectivity and that is why governments should step in to provide connections.

“The real challenge is how to structure spectrum allocation to attract carriers to both urban and rural sectors,” said Safroadu Yeboah-Amankwah, a Ghanaian telecom sector analyst.

“The truth is rural markets are not attractive, but there are mechanisms to address them, including government intervention through which you can tax the urban markets to subsidise the rural markets,” he told IPS.

But not everyone is convinced about the role of the government.

Dhaka-based Abu Saeed Khan, senior policy fellow at LIRNEasia, an ICT policy and regulation think tank, argues that governments can create problems too.

“In Bangladesh, the government has auctioned this bandwidth. It is not cheap, so private operators load the price on the package,” he told IPS.

“When it comes to Internet bandwidth, operators don’t have direct access because the government has erected a barrier – a middleman – so the cost of Internet bandwidth is too high for consumers,” he said.

ITU’s report, ‘Measuring Information Society 2013’, argues that people living outside major cities in developing countries are the ones for whom information and communication technology (ICT) can have the greatest development impact.

In many countries across Asia and Africa, schools and health centres are connected to mobile and broadband technology and farmers are provided information on crop protection and marketing.

For instance, the International Fertiliser Development Centre provides information via mobile phones to farmers in five African countries to protect them from counterfeit fertilisers.

In Malaysia, seaweed farmer Kabila Hassan has set up a successful business – also providing employment to half her village – by using the Internet to market products in China, Japan and the U.S. She received the ITU’s Transformational Power of Broadband Digital Icon Award 2013 here in Bangkok for it.

Brahima Sanou, who is from Burkina Faso and is director of the Telecom Development Bureau at ITU, believes mobile phones can be the new development anchor.

He pointed out several examples of this – such as Senegal where fishermen use mobile phones to find out the price of fish before they come ashore; Rwanda where it is used to follow government services in rural areas; and Costa Rica where it is used to combat non-communicable diseases.

“People who never had access to any technology are now using mobile phones. We have to develop (services) for people (through) what they own already, not bring new tools,” he said.

Dr Rohan Samarajiva, a Sri Lankan telecom expert who is the founding chair of LIRNEasia, told IPS that the findings of a six-country sample survey on how poor people were revealing.

“It is very clear that they are accessing more than voice services through wireless platforms,” he said.

“We were surprised when, while doing research with poor people in Java (Indonesia), they clearly stated they were not using the Internet, but later they started talking about Facebook and various other activities.”

“This shows that they are using mobile phones without necessarily going through the steps they think are necessary to use the Internet,” Dr Samarajiva noted.

He said their sister organisation in Africa had the same findings.

“So it’s a different conception of the Internet,” he said. “The whole world is moving towards mobile devices. We will see an explosion of its use.”

As phones are transforming from merely voice communicators to what is called 3G or 4G, which transmits voice, visuals and data, a large chunk of humanity in rural Asia and Africa is waiting for a transformation in their lives but with technology that is relevant to their needs.

Women at ICT workshop in Namaingo, eastern Uganda. Credit: Susan Kinzi/IPS

By Kalinga Seneviratne
BANGKOK, Dec 4 2013 (IPS)

Only 16 percent of Africa’s population of over a billion is online. But as Internet and mobile phone connectivity grows rapidly, the continent wants to join forces with Asian powerhouses to change its digital landscape.

While offering its vast market, Africa hopes to leverage Asia’s information and communication technology (ICT) prowess to develop sectors as diverse as banking, telemedicine, education and cyber security.

“There is a lot of opportunity for collaboration,” says Safroadu Yeboah-Amankwah, director and leader, McKinsey’s Business Technology Practice, South Africa.“North America, to be honest, is not relevant to our markets. There are very interesting opportunities in terms of South-South collaboration."

“Asia’s experience with the Internet is five or maybe 10 years ahead of Africa. A lot of the talent, skill and technology available (in Asia) may be of great use,” the Ghanaian engineer-turned-telecom strategist told IPS.

He was here to attend Telecom World 2013 organised by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) last month.

A large contingent of African countries led by Nigeria mounted a big roadshow at the event, both to display their growing mobile and broadband communication-oriented economies and to attract Asian investment.

“North America, to be honest, is not relevant to our markets. There are very interesting opportunities in terms of South-South collaboration, especially around banking, education and so forth, where collaborations will allow for bigger markets and therefore more innovation availability,” Yeboah-Amankwah said.

“Larger Asian and African e-commerce players could collaborate to make the opportunities even bigger. For us, integration between large African and Asian players is an exciting idea,” he added.

According to ITU statistics, more than 720 million Africans have mobile phones and some 167 million already use the Internet. And the figures are rising fast as mobile networks are built up and the cost of Internet-enabled devices falls.

But Asia is far ahead. Comparative figures show that a total of 3.5 billion out of the global 6.8 billion mobile subscriptions are from the Asia-Pacific region.

So when it comes to ICT, Africa has Asia on its mind.

“Technology is new to all of us. We are all learners. We can work together to make technology work for us,” said Dr Hamadoun Toure, secretary general of the ITU, who is from Mali.

According to ITU figures, in 2013, there are almost as many mobile subscriptions as people in the world.

Asian countries are world leaders in ICT, with South Korea heading ITUs’ global ICT development index, India known for its IT expertise, and Chinese telecom companies being the biggest global operators.

Ji-Yong Park, senior research associate at the Korea Internet and Security Agency (KISA), told IPS they have been helping African countries improve their Internet security. “Last year we trained over 200 government officials [from Africa],” he said.

India has assisted many African countries in upgrading their IT training facilities, among them the Ghana-India Kofi Annan Centre of Excellence in ICT established in 2003.

Malaysia is helping set up a multimedia university in Tanzania while Thailand is launching a Thaicom satellite with a footprint over Africa to help improve communication within the continent and with Asia.

“We see Africa as the future. They have a lot of land to provide food for people around world. Their weather is the same as ours, so we can use the land of Africa, we can communicate by satellite and we can have e-agriculture and we can communicate with remote sensors,” an advisor to the Thai minister for ICT told IPS.

“African and Thai people are almost the same in terms of development and the type of people. When I go there, I feel this is a nice place, they just lack infrastructure for new kind of technology,” the advisor said.

Rebecca Okwaci, minister of telecommunications and postal services, South Sudan, told IPS, “We look towards Asia because a lot of technology we need is in Asia.”

She said China’s leading ICT firm Huawei has given a lot of technical assistance since South Sudan’s independence in 2011, as has India.

“Our ICT programme is already connected with India. Universities in India have projects with us in e-education and they are training our staff within the ministry,” she said.

Okwaci said they are also looking for assistance from Asia in telemedicine projects. “We can customise their experience for South Sudan,” she said.

African countries see the ICT partnership with Asia as a change from the old model of development assistance from the West.

“Traditionally the relationships have been in terms of grants or loans. Now we have relationships that are fuelling growth in Africa, especially in ICT,” Rwanda’s Minister of Youth and ICT Jean Philbert Nsengimana noted.

He said his country already has a good partnership going with South Korea.

“We contracted Korea Telecom to build our national broadband, which was completed in the last two years. Now we are working together to develop the last mile connections. We get assistance in cyber security. We send our people for training,” Nsengimana said.

He also said they have strong relationships with India and China in the ICT sector.

China’s Huawei has a research and development centre in South Africa and seven training centres across Africa. It employs over 5,800 people in 18 countries and its revenue from African operations was 3.42 billion dollars in 2011.

South Korea’s Samsung Electronics last month said it hopes to corner half the 20 million smart phone sales expected in Africa next year.

The future looks bright for Asia-Africa collaborations in the ICT sector.

Eu-Jun Kim, regional director for Asia-Pacific of ITU, told IPS, “The challenges are similar, namely affordable and sustainable access, especially to broadband, and in both Asia and Africa we have vast land and vast population that could benefit from the application of ICTs.”

A new Pacific islands forum will seek to challenge the dominance of Australia and New Zealand in a regional body. The new grouping’s approach is being billed the ‘Pacific Way’, and also the ‘green and blue’ way for its commitment to environmentally sustainable oceans as well as land.

The new Pacific Islands Development Forum (PIDF) challenges the Pacific Island Forum (PIF), a 16-member inter-governmental organisation which includes 14 Pacific Island countries plus Australia and New Zealand. The PIF is headquartered in Fijian capital Suva. Fiji itself was suspended from the PIF in 2009 after naval commander Frank Bainimarama grabbed power in a coup in 2006 and refused to hold elections.

Pacific Islands Map. Credit: David Jackmanson/CC BY 2.0

Bainimarama, now prime minister of Fiji, said at the launch of the PIDF earlier this month that people “have largely been excluded from the decision-making process,” and that the PIDF would do it differently.

“It has been no secret that Commodore Bainimarama has great distaste for the Pacific Islands Forum, especially over the hypocritical way that the Forum has treated Fiji since the military coup,” Prof. David Robbie, director of the Auckland-based Pacific Media Centre, told IPS.

“Attempts by the Forum to destabilise Fiji have backfired. For all the criticisms of the Fiji regime, there are positive moves to ‘open up’ the region for greater development partnerships with Asia.”

Bainimarama is riding resentment among Pacific island nations that the PIF is dominated by highly-paid Australian, New Zealand and other western expatriates, trying to impose developed country solutions on Pacific problems.

“We’re so sheltered away from the rest of society,” Kiribati President Anote Tong said in an interview with Radio Australia. “We’re a club of our own in retreat and away from questions from people demanding answers.”

At closed-door PIF meetings, leaders usually come dressed in suits, while at the PIDF meeting they were all dressed in the colourful short-sleeve Pacific-style shirts, and all discussions were in open forum.

For the first time in a major Pacific Island forum, business, church and civil society leaders sat alongside national political leaders, and spoke at the same forums. Such interaction is being projected as a ‘Pacific Way’ of consultation.

The PIDF is gaining support, said Robbie. “Bainimarama achieved a coup in successfully getting Timor-Leste Prime Minister Xanana Gusmao to the PIDF in spite of Australian attempts to prevent him going. Having the East Timor leader there was an important bridge for Asia-Pacific relations.”

The launch of the PIDF reflects new realities in the region, where Australia and New Zealand no longer have a stranglehold on aid handouts. In the past decade China and many other Asian countries have begun to give aid to and invest in the region. The PIDF meeting was funded by grants from China, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates.

The leaders of the Solomon Islands, Kiribati and Nauru attended the meeting along with the deputy prime minister of Vanuatu and the vice-president of Micronesia. Senior ministers from most other Pacific nations and territories also attended.

While Australia and New Zealand sent observers to the meeting, special envoys came from China, Russia and a range of countries such as Chile and Cuba. Government ministers were sent to represent the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait and Qatar.

A clear division between Melanesian and Polynesian nations of the Pacific seems to have opened up, with leaders of Polynesian countries like Samoa, Tahiti and French Polynesia boycotting the meeting.

Polynesians are believed to be a mixture of Malay and Taiwanese who moved into the South Pacific islands more than 3,000 years ago. Melanesians are of Papuan stock, and are believed to have moved from parts of Indonesia and Papua New Guinea to other Pacific Islands like Fiji, Solomon Islands and Vanuatu more than 4,000 years ago.

The Polynesian nations have a tendency to side with Australia and New Zealand in regional affairs, but Melanesian nations make up about 90 percent of the Pacific Island population, and the Melanesian Spearhead Group (MSG) is an influential grouping in the region.

Australia blocked Commodore Bainimarama taking over the leadership of the MSG spearhead group within the PIF in 2010 – a decision that seems to have backfired.

“MSG is the real economic powerhouse of the Pacific and is a serious challenge to the old Forum (largely dominated by the Polynesian islands and Australia and New Zealand),” Robbie said. “And now the PIDF is a new threat.”

In an interview with IPS from Suva, executive director of the Pacific Islands Association of Non-Governmental Organisations (PIANGO) Emele Duituturaga said many now expect PIDF to give more value to Pacific expertise and to be founded on Pacific perspectives.

“More importantly the governing and secretariat structures will include all sectors, especially civil society, which the PIF has been overlooking,” she said.

“The new organisation should ensure that the process and structures that are put in place are inclusive,” she added. “It will be a mistake for the governments to just set it up and expect us to go along with it.”

Working Singaporean women are forced to conform to strict gender roles, taking care of children and household chores on top of their 9-5 jobs. Credit: epSos.de/CC-BY-2.0

By Kalinga Seneviratne
SINGAPORE, Jul 17 2013 (IPS)

The play opens with a man and his mother waiting impatiently at the dining table in the family home. A woman rushes in after a busy day at the office with takeaway dinner packets, followed by her son and daughter who walk in expecting their mother to serve them a meal.

The scene continues with the grandmother chastising her daughter-in-law for coming home late and failing to prepare the meal herself, a refrain quickly taken up by the husband. The young daughter is meanwhile pulled up for wearing a short skirt, though she is quick to retort that the grandmother is simply “old-fashioned”.

An undercurrent of tension that threatens to give way to violence runs through the play, which is exactly what the writers and producers intended.

‘Just a Bad Day’, a forum theatre piece designed to explore the struggles of ordinary Singaporean women against stereotyping and gender violence, is quickly making the rounds of this affluent Southeast Asian city-state, highlighting the hunger for dialogue around an issue that often gets swept under the rug.

As Director Li Xie told IPS, “Physical violence is very visible but subtle violence is hard to detect.” Yet it is exactly this latter form of violence that women in Singapore confront on a daily basis.

The 2013 Human Development Report, published annually by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), puts Singapore at 13^th place in the gender development index, above Western countries such as the U.S., UK, Ireland and Austria, and fellow neighbours Japan, South Korea and Australia.

Over 71 percent of women in Singapore have at least a secondary education and 57 percent participate in the labour force.

With such an impressive track record, one would believe that women here enjoy a high social status, but the reality is very different.

Entering the labour force has been both a blessing and a curse, as women are now expected to play the dual role of working mother and traditional housewife, who must cook the family meal and attend to all the domestic chores after putting in long hours on the job.

“We wanted to address these gender stereotypes, prejudices and biases [because] that’s where change starts,” argues Kokila Annamalai, communications executive at the Association of Women for Action and Research (AWARE), the co-producer of the play.

She added that social conditioning of both men and women must be stopped at “an early stage” so as to prevent psychological violence in the future.

AWARE, the leading women’s lobby group in Singapore, has fought for over three decades for equal rights for women in the workplace and at home.

Now, the NGO is taking its campaign to a new level through the use of community forum theatre, a form that allows the audience to actively participate in the outcome of the play.

“Through this intimate performance, we hope to provoke thought and discussion on the less tangible forms of violence against women that continue to be a reality in Singapore,” Annamalai told IPS.

‘Just A Bad Day’, produced in collaboration with the community theatre company Drama Box, is a flagship project of the ‘We Can’ campaign, a global initiative involving 3.9 million people who have pledged not to “tolerate violence against women”.

As the 16^th country to join the movement, Singapore has adopted the mantra “Change starts with me”, and hopes to reach 10,000 people by the end of the year.

A crucial tool in that plan is the performance piece, devised by a team of “change makers” who will spend the rest of this year taking the play to community centres, schools and universities around the country.

First staged on Jun. 26, the play was recently presented at a youth festival called Scape where over 100 youth between the ages of 16 and 25 attended the show and participated actively in formulating a new outcome.

One audience member intervened in the first scene and got into the role of the working mother-housewife by explaining to the grandmother that women today have to work to maintain a family’s standard of living.

The original actress had portrayed a subdued and frustrated character, but the young girl in the audience injected a more aggressive quality into the mother’s role, pushing the grandmother to take a different view of the situation.

Rachel Chung, who originally played the role of the mother, told IPS after the show that she herself has experienced the kind of psychological violence depicted in the scene.

“Violence in my life started with verbal tirades, insults and put-downs from my partner,” Chung said in a recent interview. “He then assaulted me with profanities. Soon, he started shoving me when I ‘stepped out of line’ and this escalated into more physical abuse like slapping and punching.”

Stressing that violence is not “always black and blue”, Chung insisted that the “damage to my morale and self worth caused by the emotional abuse was no less than the physical injuries.”

She pointed out that one in 10 women in Singapore have experienced psychological abuse, and surveys have shown that eight in 10 Singaporeans will not interfere in domestic disputes, even if they know that a friend, relative or neighbour is being abused.

Chung called the campaign a “movement to make change” and invited men and boys to join in, citing their support as crucial for success.

Lupin Tan, who acted as the father in ‘Just a Bad Day’, told IPS that he joined the cast because of a personal connection to the role, having been what he called a “male chauvinistic father”.

He was one among 70 people who responded to a Facebook post calling for volunteers. Twenty were eventually chosen to go through a month-long exercise with Drama Theatre and come up with three scenes that would then be incorporated into the final play.

“It was important for me to reach out to people with [similar] experiences, who are unaware of this type of violence towards women,” Tan told IPS.

According to Xie, the point of the play is to force audience members to ask themselves: “What would I have done?”

Provoking spontaneity and action is important in a society where many perceive calls for help as women “making mountains out of molehills.”

In fact, a survey of over 655 men, conducted by the Ngee Ann Polytechnic School of Business and Accountancy, found that 13 percent of respondents believe women who are raped “asked for it”, while 29 percent of men believe that most women make “false” claims of rape.

It is for this very reason that Annamalai believes theatre can be useful, since it offers a non-threatening opening to a conversation and “shows rather than tells” a way forward, to a more equitable society.

The famous George Street in Liverpool, western Sydney, is almost entirely dedicated to Indian shops, businesses and restaurants. Credit: Kalinga Seneviratne/IPS

By Kalinga Seneviratne
SYDNEY, Jun 8 2013 (IPS)

With a population of over 1.2 million people spread across 14 government districts, the suburbs of western Sydney have long been perceived as the impoverished “other half” of Australia’s economic, financial and political hub, serving as a de facto port of entry for incoming migrant workers.

Excluded from the city’s remaining three million occupants, the “Westies” – as Sydney’s affluent inner city and northern dwellers derogatorily refer to those who reside beyond the city of Paramatta – do not often come under the radar of mainstream political parties.

Schools and medical facilities fall far short of the standards of those in neighbouring areas and the region shows signs of having been forgotten by all but those who live there.

But today, both major political parties in Australia are wooing the western voters, who could well determine the outcome of the upcoming Sep. 14 election.

Historically home to the city’s manufacturing and industrial employees, the region has a distinct working class slant, with its 15 electorates voting solidly and predictably for the trade-union backed Australian Labour Party (ALP) for more than half a century.

Winds of change went unnoticed until the conservative Liberal Party (LP) bagged several seats in the 2011 New South Wales (NSW) state elections, prompting questions about what former ALP Leader Mark Latham famously described as the “aspirational classes” in the 1990s.

According to Gary Paramanathan, a community arts worker in the area, the desire to climb economic and social ladders has turned western suburbanites away from Labour’s working class movement.

For the past decade, western Sydney has experienced an annual average population growth rate of 1.5 percent, as Indians, Filipinos and Vietnamese – now the largest immigrant communities in Australia – flocked here to avail themselves of the country’s open-door policy for skilled workers.

An increasing number of Iraqi, Somali and Afghan refugees fleeing civil wars, government repression and political persecution in their homes are also settling down in the area.

In one suburb, Woodcroft, 25 percent of the population is Filipino while the suburb of Liverpool plays host to 5,000 Indo-Fijians, who arrived here during and after the 1987 coup in Fiji, which toppled an Indian-dominated Labour Party government.

In the last two-and-a-half decades immigrants have built a thriving commercial community here, including the famous George Street in Liverpool that is almost entirely dedicated to Indian clothing stores, restaurants and sweet shops, which attract customers from all over the city.

During these years the ALP championed the aspirations of migrant communities and helped to create the infrastructure necessary for them to succeed, including generous handouts in welfare schemes and support for union demands for better pay.

The realisation of those ambitions bred a fresh political consciousness, according to Philippine-born community media practitioner Annamarie Reyes, who has lived in the area for over 25 years.

Unlike in the 1980s, when immigrant communities basically struggled just to make ends meet, “many Filipinos now send their kids to university and become homeowners” as the dividends of years of hard work pay off, she told IPS.

“As a result, some who were once staunch Labour supporters voted for Liberals at the last elections,” she told IPS.

Perhaps even more shocking to the ALP than a betrayal by a loyal party base were the two Filipino-Australians who stood as candidates for the Liberal Party in two of the safest Labour seats in western Sydney. One of them – 30-year-old Jaymes Dias, from the division of Greenway – came within a whisker of beating out the ALP candidate Michelle Rowlands, who scraped by with an extra 1,409 votes.

Others say corruption and factionalism are partly to blame for dwindling support.

For the past three months the media in Sydney has been saturated with news about the ongoing court cases brought by the Independent Commission Against Corruption to probe corrupt dealings involving former ALP state power broker and upper house member Eddie Obeid and the Primary Industries and Mineral Resources Minister Ian MacDonald over the issuance of coal mining licences in the Bylong Valley.

This case has drawn public attention to the deep-seated corruption within the rank and file of the ALP and the union movement that supports the party.

Furthermore, “Labour stalwarts are the old leaders of the community, and hail mostly from the dominant population (Caucasian),” Filipino community leader Dr. Cen Amores told IPS, adding that the party structure is not welcoming to new and emerging community leaders.

On the other hand, “Liberal Party candidates are fairly young and reflect the changing demographics” in the area, she said referring to selections like 22-year-old Isabelle White to contest the western Sydney seat of Chifley, a labour stronghold.

With the election looming and the ALP trailing badly in opinion polls, Prime Minister Julia Gillard spent five days in March at a local hotel in Rooty Hills, in the heart of western Sydney, to drum up support for her ailing party and secure the nine regional seats that may well determine the next federal government.

But experts like Amores say that these desperate moves in the eleventh hour will do little to win votes.

Instead of hedging their bets with the ALP, immigrants are now paying closer attention to local council and state elections, Govind Sami, a former head of the Fijian Teachers Union and a minister in the government that was deposed in 1987, told IPS.

According to Asha Chand, a former journalist at the English language daily Fiji Times and now a journalism lecturer at the University of Western Sydney, this city has the largest population of Indo-Fijians in any city outside of Fiji. If immigrant communities play their cards right, they have the potential to shape local, and possibly national politics.

But that is not happening largely due to the fact that “political divisions based on race and ethnicity are still very much part of what the community has inherited from its past,” Chand lamented.

Garment worker at a Bangladesh factory. Credit: B A Sujan/Map/IPS

By Kalinga Seneviratne
SYDNEY, May 25 2013 (IPS)

Australia’s largest textile workers’ union and activist groups are up in arms that the country’s leading retail chains, who source most of their fashion labels from Bangladesh, are refusing to sign a legally binding accord that will help to improve labour and safety standards in Bangladeshi garment factories.

Local Bangladeshi unions and international human rights groups have approached international clothing manufacturers to join the global initiative for improved building and safety conditions following the collapse of the eight-storey Rana Plaza on Apr. 24 that killed almost 1,200 factory workers.

“Companies that search the globe to find the lowest labour costs cannot claim ignorance (of) the consequences of that decision.” -- Michele O’Neil
As rescue teams pulled corpses and survivors from the debris in the town of Savar, about 25 kilometres from Bangladesh’s capital, Dhaka, they also found the charred remains of clothing labels bearing the names of major Western retailers like Walmart, H&M, Gap, Primark and many others who outsource their production to Bangladesh to avail themselves of cheap labour in the impoverished country of 150 million.

As a result, the proposed Bangladesh Building and Fire Safety Agreement requires companies to conduct independent safety inspections, make their reports on factory conditions public and cover the costs for needed repairs.

It also requires them to stop doing business with any factory that refuses to make safety upgrades and to allow workers and their unions to have a voice in factory safety.

Major Australian retail chains that source garments from Bangladesh, like Kmart, Target, David Jones and Big W, have not been connected with the Rana Plaza tragedy; but in the spirit of creating a global culture of ethical production, labour unions and rights groups like Oxfam Australia are urging them to sign the agreement.

According to their annual reports, Target Australia’s total revenue in 2012 was about 70 billion dollars, while Kmart, which runs 170 retail outlets across Australia, had revenues of roughly 3.8 billion that same year. Big W (a branch of Woolworths) increased their sales revenues by almost five percent last year to 53 billion dollars.

“Those companies need to (publicise) what they’re making in Bangladesh and they need to be completely transparent about their supply chain,” said Michele O’Neil, national secretary of the Textile, Clothing and Footwear Union of Australia (TCFU).

To date, “No Australian company has agreed to publish the location of their supplier factories,” Oxfam Australia’s Labour Rights Coordinator Daisy Gardener told IPS.

“This is important because it would allow independent verification of conditions by researchers, NGOs or unions who could visit the factory site and speak to the workers about wages, health and safety and other issues.”

She said it was “important that all Australian companies sourcing from Bangladesh” sign onto the accord, which gives workers the right to refuse dangerous working conditions.

It is possible that if the accord had existed prior to Apr. 24, the death toll would have been significantly lower: days before the disaster, huge cracks had appeared on the ceilings and beams of the building, which was intended to house just five floors.

Despite these clear signs, and warnings from engineers that a collapse might be inevitable, factory managers threatened workers with dismissal if they stayed away due to safety concerns.

Thirty international companies, including the Italian fashion brand Benetton, Spanish retailer Mango and British retailer Marks & Spencer, have so far initialed the binding agreement, along with other big names like Tesco and PVH (the parent company of Tommy Hilfiger and Calvin Klein).

In an angry email response to IPS’ queries, Kmart’s general manager of corporate affairs and sustainability, Tracie Walker, said, “We have not refused to sign the accord.” She referred IPS to the company’s “strong ethical sourcing code”, which is supported by “very stringent policies.”

Kmart says that none of the recent tragedies in Bangladesh occurred in factories that make clothes for them. The company says it organised a forum with its suppliers and auditors, and has also visited factories there.

“One of the key outcomes of the audit process was the identification of ‘high risk buildings’, which are those located above market places and factories located in multi-storey buildings with shared ownership,” the company noted. “Kmart no longer places orders with factories in these high risk locations.”

But activists like O’Neill do not believe that “brand-specific codes, self-regulation and private sector audits” will do the job, echoing activists in the U.S. who say refusals to sign the accord amount to admissions that companies “do not want to be held accountable for workers’ safety.”

According to O’Neill, only consumers have the power to force retail chains to sign the labour accord.

“The results of not having strong laws and unions is clear: look no further than Rana Plaza,” O’Neill noted in a statement on TCFU’s website. “Companies that search the globe to find the lowest labour costs cannot claim ignorance (of) the consequences of that decision.”

About 49 percent of Bangladesh’s population lives below the poverty line. Desperation drives many, particularly women, to seek work in one of the country’s 5,000 factories, taking on 10-hour shifts, seven days a week, in exchange for little more than 30 dollars a month.

Speaking on ABC national radio, Bret Inder, a development economist at Melbourne’s Monash University, said that Bangladesh has grown to be the world’s second biggest garments manufacturer precisely because it offers such a cheap workforce.

“Western buyers have been contracting out to producers all over, particularly in Southeast Asia and South Asia, moving from one country to the next (in search of) the cheapest labour,” he noted.

“There’ll be another country waiting in the queue if Bangladesh prices itself out of the market. To make an accord that is specific to Bangladesh doesn’t make any sense at all,” he added.

Others argue that Bangladesh is a special case that deserves targeted policies. Since 2005, at least 1,800 garment workers have perished in factory fires and building collapses, according to research by the International Labour Rights Forum.

The incident on Apr. 24, the industry’s worst disaster in history, came just months after a fire at a different factory, in November 2012, killed 112 workers.

Oxfam believes that the Better Factories Cambodia project, through which Cambodia gets easy access to U.S. markets in exchange for improved working conditions in the garment sector, may be a good model for Australia to follow.

“There have been international calls for garment companies to ensure they are paying factories enough to ensure workers (receive) a living wage,” notes Oxfam’s Gardener. “The Australian government can help educate Australian businesses about their responsibility to uphold the human rights of the people working in their supply chains.”

She added that the labour cost compared to the overall retail price is very small, sometimes just a few cents per garment, meaning Australian retail companies are able to pay their suppliers more without it having a significant impact on their bottom dollar.

Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard faces a tough race in the elections scheduled for September. Credit: Senator Kate Lundy/CC-BY-2.0

By Kalinga Seneviratne
SYDNEY, Mar 18 2013 (IPS)

Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard’s comments about foreigners taking Australian jobs in a speech made last week in Rooty Hill, the working-class heartland of Sydney’s western suburbs, has brought issues of immigration, asylum and race back into election campaigning.

Opinion polls ahead of federal elections scheduled for September have indicated that Gillard’s governing Australian Labour Party (ALP) will likely lose the race by a huge margin to the opposition Liberal Party.

Hostility towards boatloads of asylum-seekers who receive bridging visas to live and work here is on the rise. Meanwhile, the opposition claims that the government has lost control of Australia’s national borders. Gillard has now added yet another dimension to the anti-foreigner sentiments in the community by drawing attention to the abuse of the 457 visa programme by unscrupulous employers.

The programme is uncapped and driven by employer demand. At the end of January, according to recently released statistics from the Immigration Department, 105,330 foreigners were currently working on 457 visas, an increase of 25.6 percent from a year ago.

With 20 percent, Indians topped the list of 457 visa holders, followed by the UK, Ireland and the Philippines.

A majority of these visa holders are believed to be working in the government healthcare system where there is a shortage of skilled personnel including doctors and nurses.

Another area popular among employers and foreign workers is the booming mining industry.

The latest official immigration statistics indicated that, by Jan. 31, the most popular professions for 457 visa holders were as IT specialists, cooks, marketing specialists and medical practitioners.

“We inherited from the former government a 457 temporary foreign worker visa programme that was out of control,’’ Gillard said in a speech in Sydney on Mar. 4. “And every step of the way we have been putting in place new conditions to crack down on the rorts.”

Gillard admitted there were legitimate uses for the visas to address skills shortages but added that, too often, local workers who have the skills are not given jobs. “In those circumstances I want to make sure that Australian workers are coming first.’’

Focus group research being conducted for the governing ALP this month has indicated that Premier Gillard’s “Aussie jobs first” campaign slogan has tested favourably with voters, especially in Labour’s strongholds such as the sprawling western suburbs of Sydney and Melbourne.

Gillard’s comments are linked to the decision on Feb. 23 by Immigration Minister Brendan O’Connor to further tighten the conditions under which the visas are issued amid mounting pressure from the union movement to toughen the rules.

But many political and social commentators here believe that the Prime Minister’s comments were also a veiled reference to local resentment towards the influx of asylum seekers.

As the election campaign heats up with Gillard on the back foot, Andrew Jakubowicz, professor of sociology at Sydney’s University of Technology observes, “The unions are angry over the 457 enterprise agreements with the big miners; the masses are angry about supposedly ‘uncontrolled borders’ penetrated by asylum seekers on unstoppable boats; the working classes are angry about rapidly changing neighbourhoods, inflows of strangers, and poor job and housing prospects caused by too many settlers competing for too few resources; and the ‘bleeding hearts’ are angry about human rights violations (the blocking of asylum seekers’ entry to Australia) and the moral thuggery of the main parties.”

Jakubowicz told IPS that the 457 visa is a human rights question more than a racial or economic issue. But when “everyone in the commentariat says it’s a dog whistle, then it becomes a dog whistle for racism”.

The unions, which back the ALP, have for a long time been at loggerheads with the government over the temporary visa. They are a formidable lobby group, though their power to cripple business has been curtailed by reforms to collective bargaining laws over the past two decades.

In May 2012, they opposed a government decision to allow billionaire mining magnate Gina Rinehart to hire 1,700 foreign workers to be employed in the Roy Hill mining project in the Pilbara region of western Australia.

Meanwhile, opposition leader Tony Abbot has come out in support of the 457 programme.

He said one of the most “jarring” aspects of the prime minister’s approach was the “assault” on foreigners.

“The fact is, people from overseas have made a magnificent contribution to our country. And trying to stir people up against them is the last thing that the prime minister should be doing.”

The opposition leader said a government under his party would make the 457 visa a mainstay of their immigration policy.

His view has found strong echo among the business community. Australian Mines and Metals Association Chief Executive Steve Knott said up to 80 percent of miners had used or planned to utilise the 457 visa programme.

“It’s unfortunate that asylum seeker policy and the need for skilled workers on the 457 visa programme have been combined in the political discourse as they are completely separate issues,” he said, adding, “the prime minister is clearly getting pushed around by the union movement.”

Saleh Saqqaf, a Jordanian who has lived in Australia for over 30 years and is an Arabic language broadcaster here, argues that the debate should focus on the working conditions foreigners face here.

“Are they treated fairly and given the same wages as Australians? Why can’t Australians be trained for these jobs?” he asked.

If foreigners “are brought here to be paid less money than Australian people, then obviously the Australians are upset. This is not racism,” he told IPS. “The Arabic community has the highest unemployment rate in this country and many people wonder why they can’t be trained for these jobs”, rather than having to compete with immigrants.

(END)

The first workers strike in 26 years in this affluent Southeast Asian city-state has triggered some soul-searching about the treatment of migrant labour and the low wages they are paid.

There are some 1.3 million foreign workers in a population of four million people in this small island state, which was recently ranked as the world’s richest country, with a per capita income of 56,532 dollars a year, by the World Wealth Report 2012 by Knight Frank and Citi Private Bank.

But most of the foreign workers – in fact some 931,000 of them according to figures as of June 2012 – are low-paid unskilled labour from neighbouring Asian countries, who earn nowhere near that figure.

The 171 bus drivers from China who went on strike by taking medical leave at the same time on Nov. 26 and Nov. 27 were earning about 980 dollars a month. They were complaining about receiving lower pay than Malaysian and Singaporean drivers, inadequate rest days and poor dormitory accommodation.

The government, well known for its pro-business policies and tough attitudes towards labour protests, acted swiftly by charging five of the drivers for breaking local “no-strike” laws and cancelling the work permits of and deporting 29 of the drivers who went on strike.

Since then, one of them has been sentenced to six weeks in jail, while four others are out on bail and appeared in court Wednesday for a pre-trial conference.

“We cannot let these Chinese workers take the rap for asking only for fair employment. And we cannot agree to their punishment when all the processes that exist in our name denied them the basic right to have their grievances heard,” wrote Vincent Wijeysinghe, an opposition Singapore Democratic Party member and a labour rights activist, in a blog posting which went viral here.

Acting Manpower Minister Tan Chuan Jin said in the immediate aftermath of the strike that “by taking matters into their own hands, the drivers have clearly crossed the line.”

He declared the strike illegal, because public transport is an essential service where an employer needs to give 14 days’ notice of the intent to go on strike. Under this argument, the strikers’ ring leaders were arrested and charged for breaking Singaporean laws.

Economics lecturer Walter Edgar Theseira of Nanyang Technological University argued in an interview with Yahoo Singapore that the strike and its aftermath had demonstrated “potentially serious vulnerabilities” that arise from Singapore’s significant reliance on low-cost foreign labour.

He also added that rather than provide high enough salaries to lure Singaporean workers to unskilled jobs, they offer just enough wages to attract people from countries like China, Myanmar, Bangladesh and the Philippines, thus creating labour conditions almost similar to the conditions in those countries.

John Gee, president of the migrant workers rights group Transient Workers Count Too, told IPS in an interview that the dispute between the Chinese migrant bus drivers and the partly government-owned SMRT bus company has been going on for at least six months. “Though workers may have broken the law, it needs to be taken into account that they may have been provoked,” he added.

Two main issues have come to the limelight as a result of the strike. One is the different wages paid to workers from different countries who do the same type of work, and the other is the hefty job placement fees that agents charge the workers for finding them jobs in Singapore.

A number of drivers told a Straits Times reporter that they paid more than 25,000 yuan (4,000 dollars) to Chinese agents to secure a job in Singapore.

Businesswoman Elsie Kwok defended the Singaporean employers’ policy of discriminating on the basis of nationality in their pay scales. “I have employed many girls from the Philippines, Indonesia, Myanmar and China as sales assistants. There are differences in their knowledge levels and attitude to the job. So it’s fair to pay some lower than the others,” she told IPS.

Gee disagrees. “Government has always said that they leave determination of salaries to market forces. Employers always argue on these grounds (to discriminate on pay scales). But it has to do with national stereotypes,” he argued.

When IPS asked the National Trades Union Congress (NTUC) about the fairness of such wage disparities, a spokeswoman said: “Migrant labour should be paid fair and reasonable wages according to the work they do which commensurate their relevant skills and experience level. A more sustainable way is to enhance the quality of foreign labour so that this can better meet both supply and demand as well as cause our businesses to remain competitive.”

Deputy Prime Minister Tharman Shanmugaratnam warned this month that Singapore was facing a “permanently tight labour market” and business must look to increase productivity to boost business growth. Singapore’s jobless rate at 1.9 percent is one of the lowest in the world.

In an interview with IPS, Wijeysinghe argued that the NTUC, because of its close association with the government, “appears to advocate more for government and corporations than for workers.”

He also said that although the government had recently pushed through legislation to put a cap on the placement fees agents could charge workers, the problem could not be solved without bilateral initiatives, and the “government has systematically refused to work bilaterally, blaming the agency system in sender countries.”

Many labour rights advocates here argue that it is the hefty placement fees charged by the agency system, where agents in both sender and receiver countries are involved, that creates apathy among migrant workers when it comes to discrimination and unfair treatment.

“When workers are sent back home prematurely, we have found many cases where they return worse off than they were before (because of these fees paid to agents),” Gee said. “A regional compact which is enforceable is needed on fees and charges,” he argued, adding that migrant workers also needed to be unionised in independent unions.

“If they (Chinese bus drivers) were unionised, the union worker could go to the boss and discuss complaints without naming the worker – so he couldn’t be sent home,” he said. Under Singapore law, an employer can unilaterally cancel a work permit and send the worker home within 48 hours.

Workers harvesting vegetables from one of Sky Green’s vertical towers. Credit: Kalinga Seneviratne/IPS

By Kalinga Seneviratne
SINGAPORE, Dec 8 2012 (IPS)

With a population of five million crammed on a landmass of just 715 square kilometres, the tiny republic of Singapore has been forced to expand upwards, building high-rise residential complexes to house the country’s many inhabitants.

Now, Singapore is applying the vertical model to urban agriculture, experimenting with rooftop gardens and vertical farms in order to feed its many residents.

Currently only seven percent of Singapore’s food is grown locally. The country imports most of its fresh vegetables and fruits daily from neighbouring countries such as Malaysia, Thailand and the Philippines, as well as from more distant trading partners like Australia, New Zealand, Israel and Chile.

An influx of immigrants has resulted in a rapid crowding of Singapore’s skyline, as more and more towering apartment buildings shoot up. And meanwhile, what little land was available for farming is disappearing fast.

The solution to the problem came in the form of a public-private partnership, with the launch of what has been hailed as the “world’s first low carbon, water-driven rotating vertical farm” for growing tropical vegetables in an urban environment.

The result of a collaborative agreement between the Agri-Food and Veterinary Authority of Singapore (AVA) and a local firm, Sky Green, this venture aims to popularise urban farming techniques that are also environmentally friendly.

With a robust economy that boasts a gross domestic product of 239.7 billion dollars, Singapore has plenty of money. “But money (is) worthless without food,” according to Sky Green Director Jack Ng.

“That’s why I wanted to use my engineering skills to help Singapore farmers to produce more food,” Ng told IPS.

A vertical vegetable tower using the hydraulic rotating system. Credit: Kalinga Seneviratne/IPS

An engineer by training, Ng created the vertical farming system, which he nicknamed ‘A Go-Grow’. It consists of a series of aluminium towers, some of them up to nine metres high, each containing 38 tiers equipped with troughs for the vegetables.

In keeping with Sky Green’s focus on environmental sustainability, the water used to power the rotating towers is recycled within the system and eventually used to water the vegetables. Each tower consumes only 60 watts of power daily – about the same amount as a single light bulb.

Ng knew that if the system was too expensive or complicated, urban farmers would not be able to survive. And given that he designed the project with retirees and other housebound farmers in mind, he tried to create a situation in which “the plant comes to you, rather than you going to the plant.”

The multi-layered vegetable tower rotates very slowly, taking some eight hours to complete a full circle. As the plant travels to the top it absorbs ample sunlight and when it comes back down it is watered from a tray that is fed by the hydraulic system that drives the rotation of the tower.

This closed cycle system is easy to maintain and doesn’t release any exhaust.

Ng says that such towers, if set up on roofs of the many multi-storey residential blocs that house most of Singapore’s population, could provide livelihoods for retirees and housewives, who would only need to spend a few hours up on the roof to attend to the system.

Sky Green towers currently produce three vegetables popular with locals – nai bai, xiao bai cai and Chinese cabbage, which can be harvested every 28 days.

They already supply NTUC FairPrice, Singapore’s largest grocery retailer that has a network of over 230 outlets and supermarkets. The urban-grown vegetables cost roughly 20 cents more per kilogramme than the imported varieties.

The group’s purchasing manager, Tng Ah Yiam, recently told a Straits Times reporter that these ‘sky farms’ are now able to offer their customers quality, locally-grown vegetables “that are fresher because they travel a shorter distance from farm to shelf”.

Sky Green plans to supply two tonnes a day to NTUC by the middle of next year when they expand their farm towers.

Coordinated efforts

A Sky Green farm tower. Credit: Kalinga Seneviratne/IPS

The Sky Green project feeds into a trend that has been underway in Singapore for several decades.

Since the urban expansion of the 1990s Singapore has attempted to respond to the scarcity of land available for traditional cultivation by promoting rooftop vegetable gardens.

A number of local institutions developed hydroponic and aeroponic cultivation systems but none ever took off. “There was always concern over whether or not the rooftops could take the weight of these structures,” Shih Yong Goh, former head of public affairs at AVA, told IPS.

Experts like Lee Sing Kong, director of the National Institute of Education and a long-time advocate of the use of ‘sky farms’, believe there is an urgent need for Singapore to become less dependent on food imports.

Given the increasing frequency of extreme weather events, including “natural disasters such as flooding, which could impact food production, it may be necessary for Singapore to look at producing some of its own vegetables from the food security point of view”, he told IPS.

Kong said that he is currently involved in the development of ‘vegetable factories’, whole buildings designed to grow fresh produce.

“We have (begun) developing a 6-tiered aeroponic system to grow vegetables with the help of LED lights,” he said, adding, “this is in the experimental stage. If the model proves to be successful, then the multi-tiered system can be installed within enclosed buildings for producing vegetables. This will certainly enhance the opportunities for urban agriculture.”

Since 2005, the government has shed some of its reservations about rooftop production. The National Parks Board recently converted the rooftop of a multi-storey residential building in the densely populated Upper Serangoon Road into an educational farm to promote urban agriculture among school children.

Meanwhile, Sky Green has signed an MOU with Singapore’s Temasek Polytechnic technical college. Dr. Lee Chee Wee, director of the School of Applied Science, believes that partnering with Sky Green will expose his students to how technology is used in vegetable farming and make “modern farming so much more attractive as a career choice for our graduates”.

(END)

Politicians are becoming media savvy in Malaysia, using Twitter, Facebook and Youtube to appeal to netizens. Credit: West McGowan/CC-BY-2.0

By Kalinga Seneviratne
KUALA LUMPUR, Nov 11 2012 (IPS)

Malaysia is gearing up for a general election in six months and as the campaigns enter the crucial voter-courting phase many observers are wondering if the political ‘tsunami’, which severely weakened the ruling National Front coalition (BN) at the 2008 polls, might be repeated.

That political tidal wave – which stripped the BN of its two-thirds majority in parliament for the first time since independence and handed five state governments over to the opposition – was precipitated by the spread of Internet-based social media as a campaigning tool, harnessed primarily by the opposition.

“In 2008 neither the government nor opposition expected the result they got,” Ramanathan Sankaran, author of ‘Media, Democracy and Civil Society’, told IPS.

The proliferation of independent websites and blogs such as Malaysia Today and Malaysiakini rendered the ruling coalition’s propaganda machinery less effective during the electoral race, as formidable opponents appeared in the crucial arena of cyberspace.

“Six or seven bloggers, who had been unknown (to most of the ruling coalition) got into parliament. It shocked the BN,” Sankaran added.

Three of these bloggers have now become well-known opposition figures in Malaysia. Former human rights activist and environmental campaigner Elizabeth Wong is now the minister for Tourism, Consumer Affairs and the Environment in the opposition-ruled Selangor state government that covers the capital Kuala Lumpur.

Tony Pua, who defeated a BN parliamentary secretary candidate to win the Petaling Jaya federal constituency, is now the “shadow minister” for Higher Education in the federal parliament.

Meanwhile Jeff Ooi, who won a state assembly seat in Penang, clinching another crucial win for the opposition in 2008, has taken the reigns as senior aide to the Chief Minister.

“One of the first things (then Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad) Badawi said when the results came out was ‘we lost the Internet war. We didn’t realise that was important. We relied too much on mainstream media’,” recalled Steven Gan, editor of the leading alternative news website Malaysiakini.

“When (current Prime Minister) Najib Tun Razak came to power in 2009 there was substantial focus on the Internet. He set up his own Facebook (account), along with other politicians, and he is tweeting as well.”

The Prime Minister also has a website called ‘1 Malaysia’ which is updated daily. According to Sankaran, Razak has instructed other ministers and senior government officials to make good use of the Internet and respond to emails within 48 hours.

Even the former Prime Minister, Mahathir Mohamad, has set up his own blog, ‘Blogging to Unblock’, whose comments are regularly picked up by the mainstream and alternative media.

And long-term opposition member in federal parliament, Lim Kit Siang, who first entered parliament in 1969 and is currently the Chinese-dominated Democratic Action Party’s parliamentary leader, has his own blog through which he has been relentlessly attacking the government on corruption issues for several months.

Nudged by the outcome of the 2008 election, “BN made a concerted move to (mobilise) its own cyber-troopers,” Gan told IPS.

According to Sankaran, BN’s determination to learn from past mistakes is reflected in their decision to field Kamalananthan Panchanathen, a young Internet-savvy candidate, for the seat of Hulu Selangor, an electorate with a large Indian population.

The 40-year-old blogger won back the seat in the by-election of 2010 “partly because of his appeal to young (netizens), and he now has his own website,” Sankaran added.

“The government has opened up the Internet (to encourage better governance),” he added.

Prominent Malaysian political commentator Chandra Muzzafar, a former political ally of opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim, agrees that the Internet will play an important role in coming elections. “It will be a major actor in some constituencies and controlling it is difficult,” he told IPS.

Censorship rears its head

But along with the government’s attempt to become more media savvy ahead of the elections has come a desire to curtail the freedoms allowed to other social media practitioners and rights groups who utilise these channels to spread their message to civil society.

On Sep. 13, the independent Star newspaper reported that the prominent human rights group SUARAM was being investigated by the Home Ministry and five government agencies, including the Registrar of Societies, on allegations that they received funds from the Open Society Foundation (OSF), whose chairman is international financial speculator George Soros.

SUARAM’s membership includes a number of opposition MPs linked to Anwar Ibrahim’s People’s Justice Party (PKR). The rights group has waged a long anti-corruption crusade against the government.

Government-controlled media reported that investigations by the Domestic Trade, Cooperatives and Consumerism Ministry found three letters addressed to SUARAM dated 2007, 2008 and 2010, detailing grants amounting to nearly 189,000 dollars from the OSF.

“Civil society is now continuously portrayed in the media as the enemy who is seeking to overthrow the government at the behest of foreign powers. These accusations have also been hurled at BERSIH (the Coalition for Free and Fair Elections), more so since July last year when we had a successful rally of more than 50,000 people on the streets of Kuala Lumpur, clamouring for clean and fair elections,” Ambiga Sreenevasan, co-chair of BERSIH, said in a commentary published by ‘Malaysian Insider’ last week.

Another alternative media outfit that has been consistently accused of receiving funds from Soros is Malaysiakini.

“While we are non-partisan that doesn’t mean we are apolitical. We are very political. We cover issues we feel strongly about such as corruption, press freedom and human rights,” Gan said in an interview with IPS.

“We will speak for people who do not have access to mainstream media. We speak for the voiceless, those who suffer human rights abuses that are not covered properly by mainstream media. That has always been our position. People see us as pro-opposition because we cover those issues,” he added.

Internet – or economy?

But though active netizens are breaking the government’s “monopoly on truth”, and the powerful Reformasi movement – comprised of a Malay core and based on exposing corruption and abuse of power within the government – is on the rise, experts like Muzzafar believe BN will have an easy victory at the polls.

He believes the economy will be the key factor in determining the outcome of the election. The Malaysian economy is currently strong and stable. Unemployment is at a low 2.7 percent as of August 2012, gross domestic product (GDP) growth was 5.6 percent in the second quarter of 2012 and industrial production was up by 4.9 percent in September 2012, according to the Department of Statistics.

Though Malaysia enjoys a strong alternative media network, a vibrant NGO sector and a robust opposition – the three ingredients necessary to topple a ruling government – Gan believes that BN will win on account of their huge state machinery and state funds – the government’s television and radio networks, along with the government-controlled mainstream newspapers, have a huge influence on Malay rural voters who form the backbone of the electorate.

Although the opposition has been targeting young voters, the recent nationwide university elections don’t bode well. According to Star newspaper, Pro-Aspirasi, a group widely perceived as pro-establishment and pro-government, “won big” in elections at eight out of 15 public universities on Sep. 25.

(END)

Dipping birth rates are a growing concern in Singapore. Credit: Kalinga Seneviratne/IPS

By Kalinga Seneviratne
SINGAPORE, Sep 4 2012 (IPS)

How to get Singaporeans to have more babies has become a major part of the debate about this country’s future, and the government is encouraging people to speak out on the issue.

Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong, in his national day speech on Aug. 26, assured this nation of four million people that the government would make “the most important long-term investments in our people” by increasing spending on pre-school and university education.

His pledge to boost public spending on education, especially at the pre-school level, is in response to concerns that Singapore’s fertility rate has dropped alarmingly in the past two decades as the country has progressed economically. At 1.2 births per woman it is well below 2.1, the figure needed to keep Singapore’s population from shrinking.

The issue was given further momentum when Singapore’s 91-year-old founding father Lee Kuan Yew, addressing a national day dinner recently in his constituency, warned that the country was facing a choice of more babies or more immigrants to maintain its economic prosperity. “If we go on like this, this place will fold up” he warned.

The government has set up a National Population and Talent Division (NPTD), which has invited views from the public on how to bolster Singapore’s sagging birth rate. The new office is expected to come up with recommendations by the end of the year.

Singapore’s leading women’s association, AWARE, argued in a recent submission to the NPTD that quality of life concerns are the main reason that people are not having more babies. The group called for prioritising gender equality in public policy.

Corinna Lim, executive director of AWARE, said in an interview with IPS that there are many issues which the government could address, such as the lower rate of female employment, issues of childcare and dependency on foreign domestic workers, and the pressure on mothers to secure high-quality education for their children.

“Quality of life and having a baby comes in as the most important factor (in people’s reluctance to have babies),” she said. “If you are going to look at it as, oh, if I have children I need so much money, you might end up not having children.”

Research Assistant Sangeetha Madasamy, 24, a sociology graduate, would like to get married and have three children. “I think it would be nice to have more than one child, but this really depends on the cost of living,” she told IPS. “I just started working, and I still have to pay off my student loans and would like to continue my studies.”

Laura Hwang, president of the Singapore Council of Women’s Organisations, recognises that lifestyle aspirations are an important part of young peoples’ decision to create a family.

“More young couples delay marriage and parenthood till after they are able to secure their own nest, whereas previously, couples were more accepting, staying with family before launching off on their own,” she told IPS.

“Other factors are increased anxiety over marriage stability due to job prospects, overseas postings and increased demands on mobility in one’s career advancement,” she added.

Living in a small country where many companies have overseas holdings or are regional headquarters for international operations, many upwardly mobile professionals have to frequently travel overseas on work assignments.

And the strong focus here on academic and career excellence puts added pressure on the mother in terms of education for her children. “We have an education system that teaches at a certain level and examines at a higher level,” notes Lim. “In between is the tuition (and) it’s the mother who has to take the child everywhere.

“We know cases where when the child goes to secondary school and is not doing well, the mother gives up her job. She feels if the child doesn’t do well, she will blame herself for the rest of her life” says Lim.

“Active involvement by both parents in a child’s care and upbringing, as well as a network of support, are what would be the biggest influence on a young professional woman’s decision on having children,” says Hwang. She recommends that workplaces adopt flexi-hour schemes for both parents, so that the parenting load can be shared.

“In Singapore, many companies, especially local ones, are not family-friendly, so women are afraid of losing their jobs when they get pregnant,” complains Jacinta Leow, 33, a communications executive and a mother of a two-year-old. She gave up her job when she became pregnant and started a new one a year after giving birth to her child.

“It would really help if the government could be tougher on companies that fire women for petty reasons after they get pregnant,” she told IPS. “They should also legally ensure that women can take maternity leave for a year to be with their baby without fear of losing their jobs.”

With no mandated parental leave for fathers in Singapore, the “message is that childcare is the mother’s problem,” says Lim. “We must give more support to both parents. We need shared childcare.”

In July, the National Trades Union Congress suggested that the government create paternity leave, and Prime Minister Lee hinted in his national day speech that this may be considered.

But the Singapore National Employers Federation is opposed to such a move.

Ian Tan, a 36-year-old father of two schoolchildren writing in the ‘Today’ newspaper, argued that “a relentless focus on grades and wealth as key measures of success has led to a society where many people want to succeed materially first before they want to start their family.

“If more Singaporeans can have the opportunity to enjoy a more balanced lifestyle while contributing to the nation’s progress, it’s not only the birth rate that will improve dramatically,” he maintained.

The network of light railways known as the MRT and highrise living are the hallmarks of modern Singapore. Credit: Kalinga Seneviratne

By Kalinga Seneviratne
SINGAPORE, Aug 23 2012 (IPS)

Singapore was recently ranked as the world’s richest country. But there is much scepticism about such rankings among average citizens here.

According to the Wealth Report 2012 produced by real estate firm Knight Frank and Citi Private Bank, this tiny Southeast Asian island republic with a per capita income of 56,532 dollars is now the richest country in the world. And in 2010, it was placed third in world wealthiest rankings by the IMF and fourth by the World Bank.

“I feel life remains the same as it has been for the past five to 10 years” George Fu, a corporate communications manager in his late twenties told IPS when asked about his country’s new status as the world’s richest country.

“Despite being rich, common issues still linger on,” he says, adding, “flats are expensive, cars are expensive and education is expensive (for the average citizen).”

He compares Singapore with an equally rich country in the region: the tiny oil-rich Brunei, where the government provides free education, medication and subsidised housing to its citizens. Pointing out that no such subsidies are given by the government to its citizens here, he says “wearing the ‘richest country in the world’ tag doesn’t really improve our lives.”

Manu Bhaskaran, co-author of a recent policy paper on a new social compact for Singapore published by the government-funded think tank Institute of Policy Studies, argues that a country can be rich and still have high income inequality.

“The drivers of growth in Singapore – high finance, high-end tourism and highly capital-intensive manufacturing – tend to benefit high-income earners more than the average worker,” he told IPS.

“Also the growth of the past few years has been driven substantially by extremely large inflows of foreign workers, which have probably helped to keep wages at the lower income levels in check.”

While the Wealth Report estimates Singapore’s per capita income as 56,532 dollars, most foreign workers are paid less than 1,000 dollars a month. The policy paper on a new social impact notes that there has been wage stagnation for the bulk of the workforce here, while the income of the top one to two percent has risen sharply.

“(This) makes inequality today more jarring and potentially more damaging to our social and political cohesion than before,” the report warns.

“A growth model overly focused on achieving high GDP growth fuelled by a huge increase in foreign workers meant that the average citizen has not benefited as much from GDP growth as they desired,” Bhaskaran argues.

According to the Wealth Report, Singapore will see a 67 percent increase in centa-millionaires over the next four years – an uber-wealthy class of people with over 100 million dollars in disposable income. The Boston Consulting Group’s 2012 global wealth report, released in June, said that Singapore had the highest percentage of millionaire households in the world.

In 2011, Singapore was also ranked for the first time as the world’s best country for international meetings, by the Union of International Associations. The country generated over 450 million dollars in tourist receipts last year.

An island of just over four million people, Singapore attracted more than 10 million visitors last year, most from across Asia coming here to enjoy many new entertainment attractions developed over the past decade, as well as for high-end shopping.

With its high density of brand-name boutiques such as Louis Vuitton, upmarket nightclubs and entertainment centres, and luxury hotels such as Marina Bay Sands, Singapore is growing in importance for the world’s high-net-worth individuals.

There is a widespread perception, especially among bloggers and in Internet forum discussions, that Singapore’s wealth ranking based on per capita GDP is not an accurate indication of the population’s wealth, because a lot of this income is concentrated at the top levels and most of it is derived from economic activities off-shore.

One taxi driver who only gave his name as Alwin told IPS “this is a pay and pay country, we have to pay for everything, government gives nothing.” He was referring to the governing PAP (Peoples Action Party) founded by the country’s legendary former prime minister Lee Kuan Yew.

Another taxi driver blogging on the anti-government website ‘The Temasek Times’ argued that the average Singaporean does not earn anywhere near the levels of the average citizen of Norway or Switzerland – two countries ranked just below Singapore in the Wealth Report.

Writing under the name of ‘Displaced Sinki’, he said that despite having an overseas degree and 20 years experience at the executive levels of the professional scale, after the age of 50 he has become “structurally unemployed” and is left to drive taxis, earning less than 20,000 dollars a year.

“Being jobless at an older age is a tormenting experience and one cannot expect any handouts or assistance from our illustrious PAP government during such difficult times because like all things here, everyone has to simply fend for themselves in this unforgiving nation,” he complained.

Corporate communications manager Fu says that everyday he walks to work through Chinatown, one of the poorest areas in this city state, where he sees homeless and helpless senior citizens lying on the streets unattended.

But he sees this ranking as useful to market Singapore as an investment haven. “I do see this survey attracting more millionaires or billionaires from China or other wealthy nations coming and settling down here, and investments and business ventures streaming here to tap the rich segment of the population,” he says.

“It’s the people who make the country, not the government,” argues 72-year-old neighbourhood shopkeeper Venkat, who migrated here from India at the age of eight. He has three sons, all university graduates and earning salaries.

“In India if your son works, parents will expect to be supported and stay at home,” he told IPS. “Here you will see old people cleaning, cooking and selling food in hawker centres (food markets). They earn their living and don’t bother the children. That’s the work ethic which makes Singapore rich.”

The crash of a million-dollar Ferrari driven at high speed by a wealthy Chinese expatriate in the early hours of a weekend morning earlier this month has reignited the stormy immigration debate here, highlighting many Singaporeans’ resentment towards foreigners living and working in this small island nation.  

The deadly accident opened an old wound. The spate of online comments and media reports expressing anger towards Chinese residents was so extreme it prompted the Chinese embassy, in a rare move, to issue a letter – subsequently released to the Straits Times – urging its citizens in Singapore to be conscious of their conduct and abide by local laws.

In February, Forbes Magazine ranked Singapore the third richest country in the world with a per capita income of 56,700 dollars. This affluent island republic, covering just 640 square kilometres, is home to four million inhabitants, of which about 25 percent are foreign workers.

As a result, immigration has become a hot topic in Singapore, with increasing coverage in the local media since last year’s election, where the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) saw its share of the vote drop to its lowest level since independence, largely due to local opposition to the government’s liberal immigration policies.

“Central to the feeling of antipathy (towards foreigners) has been the issue of fairness (towards locals),” said former minister of parliament Viswa Sadasivan.

Local journalist Jaya Prakash argued that the number of foreigners in Singapore has reached an “unacceptable” level. He believes that the government is biased towards foreigners, allowing them to sweep up jobs that should be given to locals and fill places in schools meant for Singaporeans.

As a result, he said, the latter are forced to accept lower pay, for less desirable work, which ultimately results in a lower quality of life for many locals.

In an interview with IPS Sadasivan explained that the two most incendiary issues surrounding immigration are education and military service.

While all young Singaporean men past the age of 17 are required to spend two and a half years in the armed forces, foreign nationals are only obliged to send their sons, while the principal immigration applicant is exempt from compulsory military service.

Meanwhile, a growing number of Chinese and Indian nationals are being admitted to Singaporean universities while many eligible Singaporean students are denied access to higher learning institutions, a situation that has fueled widespread discontent.

“Singaporeans feel shortchanged,” Sadasivan noted, adding, “In many other countries such issues could become emotionally charged enough to topple governments.”

Tang Li, principal consultant of Tang-Asia Consultancy, argues that the root cause of ‘anti-foreigner’ sentiment can be traced back to 2004, when the government opened its doors to immigrants before putting in place the necessary infrastructure to efficiently handle the situation.

“Suddenly you had people competing for the same spaces in buses and trains, for housing and places in schools. When things started to get more crowded and less comfortable, frustrations turned onto the most visible target – the new arrivals,” he told IPS.

The number of foreigners surged after the government relaxed immigration rules in 2004, allowing thousands of people, mainly from places like China, India and the Philippines, to work in professional jobs while over 250,000 workers from other Asian countries entered ‘unskilled’ labour markets such as construction and domestic work.

Prakash pointed out that much of the local resentment stems from the S-pass scheme, a government programme that allows foreign diploma and degree holders to work jobs that pay a fixed monthly salary of at least 1,800 Singapore dollars (about 1,450 U.S. dollars). The minimum salary for a local graduate is usually 1,900 U.S. dollars a month.

The Tripartite Alliance for Fair Employment Practices, a labour watchdog, said in its annual report released last month that complaints about employers preferring foreigners over locals have, for the first time, topped Singaporeans’ list of grievances over unfair employment practices.

Singapore has a multiracial community that includes Chinese, Indians and Malays that have lived here for generations.

Sadasivan, who is an outspoken advocate of multiculturalism, said about the prevailing tension in the country, “Essentially what we are witnessing is a cumulative response to a pent up emotion of citizens feeling that their rights have not matched responsibilities; that their government has ignored their reasonable appeal for (a more) paced inflow of foreigners.”

(END)

The rapid currents moving the centre of economic influence towards an emerging global order headquartered in Asia were evident at the PanIIT’s 2012 annual conference of alumni of the highly prestigious Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), which took place in Singapore over the Easter weekend.

The three-day conference hosted a diverse range of top-notch speakers representing global business, academia and the financial sector, expressing their views on developing strategies to navigate the challenging global economic environment and to create sustainable long-term growth.

Except for one Westerner, all the speakers were Asian, mainly Indian, including heads of formidable global businesses, such as Arjun Malhotra, co-founder of Hindustan Computers Limited and chairman of Headstrong USA; Shekhar Mitra, senior vice president of Procter and Gamble USA; R. Gopalakrishnan, director of Tata Sons Limited; and Ho Kwong Ping, executive chairman of Banyan Tree Holdings, Singapore.

Hosting the meeting in Singapore was a first for a group that, since 2002, has convened alternatively in India and the United States. But there are over 1000 IIT graduates who now work in Singapore, many in high profile jobs such as the provost of the new Singapore Management University, Rajendra Kumar Srivastava.

“Most IITians coming here have had significant work experience and they have filled a gap in Singapore’s existing skills,” S.N Venkat, secretary of Strategic Partnerships at the IIT Alumni Association of Singapore, told IPS.

The high regard in which IIT is held in Singapore was reflected in the fact that the country’s former president S.R Nathan is the patron of the alumni association here, and the current president, Tony Tan, was the chief guest at the gala dinner on Saturday night.

In his keynote speech to the conference, S. Iswaran, minister in the Prime Minister’s Office, said the high number of IIT graduates working in Singapore and across Asia “reflects more generally a fundamental shift in the global centre of gravity from the West to the East.”

Iswaran warned that as manpower costs and energy prices rise, and Western currencies weaken, Asia’s advantage as a low-cost manufacturing base will wane.

“Asian economies need to be able to move on to higher value-added economic activities in order to sustain their economic growth. They will have to leverage on design technology and a skilled labour force to create products and services for their own domestic markets, as much as for the rest of the world,” he noted.

This is where Asian institutions like IIT are expected to play a leading role.

A roundtable involving visiting directors of IITs from around India and four local universities discussed possible collaboration efforts, including the long-standing invitation from the Singapore government to set up an IIT campus here.

“As Singapore becomes an educational hub for Asia, especially for Southeast Asia, (our) emphasis is on having institutes of higher learning of global repute to be based here to attract students from the region,” explained Venkat.

Many speakers pointed out that with economic crises in Europe and the U.S. still unresolved, following the western capitalist model blindly is not the right development path for Asia, which should instead develop its own model, utilising traditional practices.

This was a theme reflected in a keynote speech given by Ho Kwong Ping, whose Banyan Tree Holdings has developed a chain of luxury hotels across the world based on Asian tastes and standards.

Still, he warned that Asia’s rise is not predetermined and argued that the continent must produce a basket of intellectual solutions to address Asia’s chronic social inequality.

“China has a deficit of democracy (while) Indian leaders have realised that democracy is not reducing inequality” and both are unable to “move beyond capital reforms,” he noted.

“As Asia continues its dynamic growth we need to delve into our own history and culture for inspiration to develop Asian values of capitalism. One resource could be the webs of mutual obligations which are present in virtually all civilisations of Asia,” argued Ping. “It is possible for Asia to develop this communitarian capitalism, if properly nurtured and developed, as an alternative to the highly individualistic model of American capitalism.”

Ping singled out India’s Tata model of capitalism, which benefits from being “stakeholder driven and not shareholder driven.”

Tata’s Gopalakrishnan told IPS that most Asian businesspeople have been reading books written by Westerners and adopting their ideas only because there are hardly any books written about good practices by Asians.

“The West is…saying we must become conscious capitalists (though) many people in Asia are saying we have always been doing that,” he said.

He said that Tata used its one billion dollar profits to set up a trust to help the poor, “so part of our profits go back to the community.” The Tata group consists of over 100 companies in seven business sectors operating in more than 80 countries around the world.

In the past two decades IIT graduates have been some of the most successful innovators and entrepreneurs in the U.S.’s Silicon Valley. If they turn their attention to the rest of Asia now, experts believe they could make a big difference.

Jignesh Shah, founder chairman and group CEO of Financial Technologies India, a world leader in creating and operating technology-centric financial exchanges, argues that new business models in Asia are opening up.

“It will create huge opportunities for the best brains from Asia like you (graduates of IITs),” he told the conference. “India and China have huge savings rates and if it gets into share markets rather than remaining in banks … Asia will generate the next Goldman Sachs.”

By Kalinga Seneviratne and - -
SINGAPORE, Mar 20 2012 (IPS)

A routine announcement by the government of this city-state entitling foreign, female domestic workers to a day off each week has sent their affluent employers into a tizzy.

Filipina maids catch a moment together while taking their employers' children and the dogs out. Credit: Kalinga Seneviratne/IPS.

“I had a Filipina maid who found a Bangladeshi boyfriend and got pregnant. I had to send her back home after just seven months and pay for her airfare,” complains Elsie Wong, a businesswoman. “I almost lost my 4,000 dollar bond,” Wong told IPS.

Singapore’s foreign domestic worker (FDW) contracts stipulate that once the hired help gets pregnant she must be deported, with the employer paying her airfare.

Wong was spared having to forfeit the security bond since the ministry of manpower (MOM) has clarified that since January 2010 the employer’s liability has been limited.

“The ministry does not forfeit employer’s security bonds if FDWs violate their own work permit conditions, for instance, if they moonlight or get pregnant,” said Farah Abdul Rahim, director of corporate relations at the MOM, in a letter to the Straits Times, responding to employers’ concerns.

“If you allow your teenage children to have boyfriends or girlfriends, how can you demand that an adult in your employ should not?” argues John Gee, former president of ‘TWC2’, a voluntary agency that has campaigned since 2003 for a weekly day off for FDWs.

“This is totally unacceptable and this is an attitude that has to change,” says Gee. Starting Jan. 1, 2013 Singaporean employers will either conform to the new law or be liable to pay a fine of 4,000 dollars or spend six months in jail.

“Maids are human beings too. They need a day off like other workers,” says Papias Banados, who has worked in Singapore for over 10 years as a FDW and recently wrote a book of short stories on OFW (Overseas Filipino Worker) experience titled ‘The Path of Remittance’.

“There are many OFWs working here in restaurants, offices and as sales assistants and they get a day off. They have boyfriends and parties. So, why should a maid be treated differently?”

Employers and recruitment agents also argue that giving a weekly day off will inconvenience families with small children, invalids or elders.

Singapore, ranked third in Forbes annual richest country list released last month, has a per capita income of nearly 56,700 dollars and employs some 206,000 FDWs in a population of four million.

Most of these women come from impoverished families in the Philippines, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Myanmar (or Burma) and Cambodia. They often work seven days a week and between 10 to 16 hours a day, earning between 250 to 400 dollars a month.

Social workers and rights groups have campaigned for over 10 years to get the Singapore government to legislate for a compulsory day off per week for these domestic workers.

Singapore is among a handful of Asian countries that do not have law providing a day off for domestic workers and these include Malaysia, Thailand, South Korea and Saudi Arabia.

Bridget Tan, president of the Humanitarian Organisation for Migration Economics (HOME), notes that Singapore is now a step closer towards full recognition of domestic workers’ rights on par with other foreign workers.

“The lack of adequate protection has made live-in domestic work a highly stressful occupation and many women in such situations find it difficult to cope with the social isolation and demands of the job,” she argues.

She pointed to the case of an underage Indonesian maid, Vitria Depsi Wahyuno, murdering her elderly employer because she was unable to cope with the latter’s demands and verbal abuse. Wahyuno was sentenced to ten years in jail for the crime on Mar. 7.

“The mandatory day off decision is significant,” says Moe Thuzar, lead researcher at the ASEAN Studies Centre at the National University of Singapore. “It recognises the importance of the domestic worker’s physical, mental and emotional well-being.”

But, Tan warns, the role of recruitment agents needs more scrutiny, especially because the new law allows employers to pay the equivalent of a day’s wage in lieu of a day off, which would come to about 15 dollars.

“The bargaining power of a migrant worker is weak because many of them are indebted to the recruitment agents from the moment they arrive in Singapore.”

“Employers also have the unilateral right to cancel a work permit and terminate her employment without justification,” she notes. “As a result, workers who wish to claim their right to a weekly day off may end up losing their jobs instead.”

Of late, Singapore has been facing a severe shortage of FDWs because many Indonesians and Filipinos, who form the bulk of the FDWs here, now prefer to go to Taiwan and Hong Kong where the wages are higher and working conditions better.

Gee thinks the cost of placement needs to be regulated, pay levels raised and a system of part-time domestic work introduced to encourage locals.

“It could be attractive to locals who cannot take on full-time jobs and also to employers would not have to provide accommodation and may find it cheaper to pay a daily worker to come in, say for two hours a day,” Gee said.

Excerpt:

When a group of about 100 mostly Bangladeshi migrant workers went on strike at a construction site over unpaid wages this month, it created ripples in this affluent and orderly island republic.

Bangladeshi workers at a Singapore construction site. Credit: Kalinga Seneviratne/IPS

The manpower ministry (MoM) quickly stepped in and ordered the concerned private construction company to pay its striking workers back wages owing since November 2011. The strike was over eight hours after it started on the morning of Feb.6.

“MoM does not condone employers who fail to pay salaries on time, or fail to upkeep and maintain the foreign workers they have brought in,” said an official statement.

The strike brought home the fact that a quarter of Singapore’s four million people are low-paid migrant workers from other Asian countries, doing heavy construction jobs that its own affluent citizens will not do.

But, social activists say there is widespread exploitation by unscrupulous recruitment agents who circumvent rules stipulated by MoM and take advantage of impoverished workers from Asian countries like Bangladesh, India, China and Burma.

Last year MoM promised “sufficient deterrence” to ensure that laws are respected by agents. But, Singapore does not have a minimum wage policy and employers may easily terminate contracts when workers demand fair wages.

Government figures suggest that the country already has 240,000 construction workers and will need tens of thousands more to execute planned housing programmes alone.

Jolovan Wham, executive director of the Humanitarian Organisation for Migration Economics, lays part of the blame on rapacious recruitment agencies that charge hefty fees from the workers back home and then take no responsibility for them once they land in Singapore.

“They pay such huge sums of money,” said Wham. “The agents must help the workers when they face problems at the workplace, but they don’t do that.”

Many workers from Bangladesh, India, China and, lately, Burma are known to have paid amounts ranging from 2,400 to 4,800 dollars to agents in their home countries to secure jobs in this city state.

Construction workers earn about 480 dollars a month while skilled workers like electricians and welders get thrice that amount. But, agents and employers deduct money from their monthly pay against ‘compulsory savings’, uniforms, food and accommodation.

Rafiqul (not his real name) came from Bangladesh to work here as a construction worker about two years ago. He paid an agent back home 3,200 dollars to get a job here that paid him 475 dollars a month.

Three months ago when Rafiqul’s work permit was cancelled and he was given a ticket to go back home, he found that his employer would not hand over accumulated compulsory savings worth 1,902 dollars.

“Now he says that I have to pay for the dormitory. This was never said to me before,” he said angrily.

Rafiqul complained to the MoM which extended his work permit to enable him to take his employer to court.

Saravan, an electrician from India, handed 4,756 dollars to an agent in Chennai for a job in a school that pays 1,426 dollars a month.

After working for six months the job stopped in December and he is yet to receive three months worth of pay.

“Agents use shell companies that exist only by name. Agents in Bangladesh coordinate with agents here to set up jobs. They are mostly swindlers and conmen as far as I can see,” says Debbie Fordyce, a volunteer with Transient Workers Count Too (TWC2), a non-government organisation.

Shafik, a Bangladeshi worker who approached TWC2 for help, has worked here for five years and now wants to go back home. During this period, the agent deducted 79 dollars each month as savings.

When Shafik asked for his money, now amounting to 4,756 dollars, the agent refused to oblige.

“I had already given him 6,341 dollars when I came here to work, I don’t want to give him anymore,” he told IPS. But, Fordyce says that he will find it hard to get this money back because the law says any dues from employers must be claimed within a year.

Another issue that rights groups want the MoM to sort out is that of forcible repatriations of workers injured in the workplace.

After Abdul (not his real name) met with an accident, his boss cancelled his work permit and called in a ‘repatriation company’. He was threatened, and when he complained to the MoM and police, beaten up.

Repatriation companies are engaged by employers to get rid of troublesome or inconvenient migrant workers.

When rights groups asked the MoM to crack down on repatriation companies because many of them employ local thugs, it was pointed out that while some 16,000 workers were repatriated last year there were only seven formal complaints.

“When people are forcibly repatriated there is hardly any room for them to go and make a complaint,” explained Wham. “Though repatriation companies are legal their activities are illegal. You cannot confine someone against his will, it’s an offence here.”

Fordyce said that TWC2 sees about 200 workers a month and all have invariably been cheated by one agent or another. Most of the workers have lost large sums of money to agents, collected on one pretext or another.

“MoM is receptive to our complaints, but we can’t do anything to get money back from people who have been given money without documentation,” she said.

A landmark concert featuring artistes from eight of the ten South East Asian Nations (ASEAN) took place here on Jan. 21, in an effort to build a regional community through the common language of music.

A landmark ASEAN concert in Laos on Jan. 21 2012 featured performers from eight of the bloc’s ten member countries Credit: Kalinga Seneviratne/IPS

Still, the performers and the organisers of the event agree unilaterally that regional governments need to play a major role in promoting this shared culture through dedicated national efforts.

“Laos took the initiative in organising this first ASEAN concert and we hope other member countries will take turns hosting the event every year,” Khamphanh Phonthongsy, the Lao representative on the cultural sub-committee of ASEAN’s committee of culture and information (COCI) told IPS.

Organized by the Lao ministry of information, culture and tourism, the concert featured representatives from Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam, Brunei, Philippines, Malaysia, Laos and Cambodia. Singapore and Myanmar were the only countries that did not send performers.

Each country artist sang two songs, one in their own language and one in English.

Though there was no live orchestra, most of the musical numbers were accompanied by dancers adorned in their traditional dress, which added extra colour to an already vibrant evening.

“All the dancers were local,” explained Phonthongsy. “ASEAN performers sent us DVDs of their dance routines and we trained Laotian dancers to perform them.”

The singers and dancers only rehearsed once together the day before the concert. The smooth movement of the Laotian dancers on stage proved that there are deep similarities between the musical cultures of the regions.

“I used to search YouTube for ASEAN music but now I can experience it for myself. I (was) so excited to be part of this first ASEAN concert and think we need to do more,” said Laotian pop star Tee Oudalai.

Vietnamese pop star Lo Ngoc Hau agrees. She said that TV channels in her country do not air musical programmes from other countries in the region. “I have to listen to CDs (to find out about ASEAN music),” she lamented.

The Lao national television network ran a live broadcast of the two-and-a-half-hour concert from the national cultural hall in Vietiane and beamed the show to 20 other countries via satellite feed.

Sadly, the Lao organisers told IPS, no other member country took up the feed to broadcast it on their local channels.

Filipino artist Jan Pablo argues that the common denominator for most ASEAN countries is agriculture, a theme that runs through many of the region’s traditional folk songs. Though most of the performers sang in different languages, Pablo believes this common theme could be exploited to bond the region together via musical exchange.

“We can influence people though music,” he told IPS. “But we need more publicity and promotion. Government radio stations must help in this, since we cannot expect commercial radio to make us popular.”

The concert reflected the rich diversity of ASEAN music, featuring numerous items that could potentially become cultural hits in the region.

Speaking to IPS after the concert, Brunei pop star Putri Noriza said that the audience seemed excited by the songs “because they came for a cultural exchange.”

However, she isn’t sure the time is ripe for introducing the Malay dangdut or joget rhythms – popular dance forms with beats as infectious as Indian bhangra or Latin America’s lambada – as a form of dance music for the region, even though Indonesian singer Indri Tribuana received an encore for her dangdut performance.

“Some say that they don’t like it, but when they hear it for the first time they change their minds,” noted Tribuana. “I chose dangdut because it represents my country and most Indonesians love it.”

Pablo argues that the domination of Anglo-American recording companies in the region has made it very difficult for someone singing in their local language to make it big in the region.

Even within the Philippines, he complained, most commercial broadcasters prefer English music because they believe it will generate the most revenue.

“If you want to become popular singing original Filipino music you have to do it through the pubs and the underground (music scene) – not commercially,” he stressed.

The omnipresence of Western music in the region was a primary reason for organisers’ stipulation that each artist performs one of their two songs in English.

But though this is the official language of communications within the regional bloc, few of the performers were fluent in it. Despite memorizing English songs using CDs, these performances paled in comparison to the numbers done in a local language.

ASEAN has set 2015 as the date for integrating the ten nations into one community, but often music and culture take a backseat while business people and politicians discuss trade and economic integration.

The COCI was set up in 1979 with the aim of promoting regional integration through cultural exchanges. It acts through national committees, which usually function under their respective information or cultural ministries.

However, prior attempts to unify the region through music, like the ASEAN Golden Voice Festival pioneered by Vietnam in 2008 or Thailand’s 2009 ASEAN concert in honour of King Bhumibol Adulyadej’s 60th anniversary of coronation, did not make it onto COCI’s official ASEAN calendar.

Khamphou Phiasakha, secretary for ASEAN COCI said that he was awaiting approval of next year’s concert from the committee of permanent representatives to ASEAN at their meeting in Thailand later this year.

For 25 years, the Association of Women for Action and Research (AWARE) has been Singapore’s most important civil society campaigner for gender justice.

Advocacy by AWARE led to revisions of the penal code, including issues of marital rape (2007), the constitutional amendment to accord the same citizenship rights to children of Singaporean women as for Singaporean men (2004), and the right of women to sponsor foreign husbands for citizenship (1999).

AWARE runs a phone helpline, legal clinic, counselling services including a “befrienders” service which provides support to women in need by accompanying them to police stations, family courts and other help centres.

But gender equality may not be at the centre of its vision for much longer.

AWARE was recently taken over by female members of one of Singapore’s fastest growing churches, the far-right Church of Our Saviour, that is openly anti-gay and pro-family.

At the annual general meeting (AGM) end-March, the old guard, which has spearheaded its advocacy work, was voted out by a new group of women who have joined the association in the previous 3 months. Some 80 of the 120 members present at the meeting were all new members.

Six of the 11 members of the management committee of AWARE, including the president, vice-president, secretary, assistant secretary and treasurer, are new members – all Chinese Singaporean professionals and belonging to the same evangelical church.

“There were many faces I have not seen before, and I found that very strange,” recalls Dana Lam, a former president. “In the past, if there were new members, they would be known to one or more of the older members.”

Says Braema Mathi, a two-time president of AWARE and currently a consultant with the UN women’s agency, UNIFEM, “If you are keen to serve you don’t challenge every position. We do not know who they are!”

After refusing to speak to the media for almost two weeks about their intentions, the new management held a press conference on Apr. 23 at which a leading lawyer Dr Thio Su Mien, who is a former dean of the Law Faculty at the National University of Singapore, said she was the brain behind the take over of AWARE.

Dr Thio, who is 71 years old and a self confessed “born-again Christian”, told reporters she was disturbed by what she saw as signs of AWARE promoting lesbianism and homosexuality, and so, in the past year, she has been urging women she knew to join the group, and challenge AWARE’s attempts to redefine marriage and family.

Singapore is multicultural. Only a quarter of its 4 million people is Christian, but the number of evangelical Christians among them has been growing. Most of these are from the English-speaking professional class. Buddhists and Taoists comprise half the population, while Hindus and Muslims account for the rest.

“Twenty-four years of serious work may now be threatened by a group of women whose religious affiliation may lead to an exclusionary AWARE,” laments Hafizah Osman, an AWARE member, in a letter to the Straits Times daily. “It is sad that veteran members now have to fight against possible marginalisation of women by women.”

On Apr. 24, the veterans held a press conference to counter claims that AWARE was promoting lesbianism.

Founder member Dr Kanwaljit Soin clarified that homosexuality education was only a small part of what they did. “AWARE cannot be an ostrich which buries its head and pretends homosexuality does not exist,” she said. “There are many anguished young people who are bothered by it (their different sexual orientation).”

“(Because) AWARE’s founding principle has been inclusive, we cannot condemn, deny or exclude any woman because of her sexual orientation or because she has been abused by her husband or because she is a single mother,” according to Dr Soin.

Some 160 members of AWARE have called for an extraordinary general meeting on May 2 to discuss the implications of the change of guard at AWARE.

Many people have joined internet chat lines and newspapers are flooded with letters to the editor questioning the nature of “reforms” promised by the new members.

One such reader, Ravi Gopalan, in a letter to the Strait Times seeks clarification that AWARE will be open to people of all religions. “What are the checks and balances, for instance, to ensure that women who are at a low and vulnerable point in their lives, and who turn to AWARE for help, are not turned towards religious rather than practical answers?”

He argued that troubled and abused women who go to AWARE for help “should not have to be targets of proselytisation in order to receive the secular aid they need.”

Says veteran journalist B.N. Balji: “Let there be a clash of ideas and let the members decide what they want … Whether in politics or activism, it is the kind of maturity that Singapore needs.”

This tiny island republic sits on trillions of dollars in foreign reserves. Yet, Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong said in a BBC interview this month that his country cannot spend its way out of the economic downturn, until the global economy heals.

Singapore, which has no natural resources and a population of only four million has been badly bruised by the global economic turmoil and the latest figures by the Development Bank of Singapore says 99,000 people will be laid off this year.

For the first time since its founding in 1965, Singapore has had to dip into its foreign reserves to help fund a 13.7 billion US dollar ‘Resilience Package’ announced in the budget in January.

“(These measures will) help companies to remain viable but we must understand that what we can do is to buffer the impact,” Lee said, in an interview on BBC’s Asian Business Report. “You must wait for the storm to pass,” he added.

During good times Singapore benefited greatly, but when the economies of its trading partners in the West collapsed, this South-east Asian tiger was among the first to be hit. The government believes that it will take at least 2 to 3 years for the economy to recover.

The Asian Wall Street Journal, commenting on the emergency budget, said that the global economic crisis was a wake-up call for Singapore which has depended heavily on export income that has resulted in the growth rate declining by 16.9 percent in the fourth quarter last year. “Singapore’s economy would be more resilient if it were better balanced,” the Journal argued pointing out that consumption was only 40 percent of GDP.

In response to the Journal’s comments Ministry of Finance spokesman Chin Sau Ho argued that Singapore’s economic model reflected the realities of a small country striving to be a modern nation.

“It is diversified across manufacturing and services, but both are heavily exposed to global markets,” he said, arguing that “as a city-state with a population of four million, businesses have far greater incentive to serve global markets than domestic consumption”.

But, the impact of the global financial turmoil on such a strategy has been such that Lee raised the unthinkable here when he said in an interview with the CNBC network, earlier this month, that Singapore might have to rethink its export-led growth strategy.

“There will have to be a global rebalancing because we cannot expect the Americans to be consumers of things made all over the world. And the rest of the world as savers, lending money to the US to buy things from you” he argued.

He acknowledged that this would mean a shift away from Asia’s export-driven economic development model.

A few months ago this would have been blasphemous for a Singaporean leader to say, as the city-state’s economic success with a per capita income of over 24,000 dollars is attributed to its open economy with about three-quarters of its income coming from external trade and investments.

The government’s investment arm Temasek has invested heavily overseas and government- owned enterprises such as the telecom giant SingTel, Singapore Airlines, DBS Bank Keppel Corporation and Semb-Corp derive a large chunk of their incomes from overseas operations or trade. Their share prices and overseas income have plummeted in the current global economic downturn.

“We are part of the world economy. We make chips, we make pharmaceuticals, we make petrochemicals. We consume may be one percent of what we make of these things. Probably less,” said Lee in the CNBC interview. “We are making for the world. We buy from the world, for the world… that’s how we prosper.”

To override this downturn, Singapore Airlines, for example, has grounded 17 planes and is planning to lay off about 9,000 of its workers spread worldwide. The government in its stimulus package has allocated large sums of money for retraining laid off workers for possible future jobs which could be in areas different to what they have worked in before.

There seem to be a shift away from traditional manufacturing jobs to more knowledge- based industries such as multimedia.

At the recent ASEAN Summit in Thailand, Singapore was at the forefront of calls to resist the temptation for protectionism. That led the calls for more open markets in the region and for accelerating the setting up of the ASEAN economic community by 2015.

The ten countries that make up ASEAN (Association of South East Asian Nations) have a combined market of 560 million people, but, their purchasing power varies widely with some members like Laos, Myanmar and Cambodia being among the least developed countries in the world.

One silver lining is that the financial systems of these countries have been relatively unscathed by the global financial crisis.

Other ASEAN countries such as Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia, Brunei and the Philippines have been hit varying degrees.

Former secretary-general of ASEAN, Rodolfo Severino, writing in Singapore’s Straits Times newspaper recently argued that many countries in the grouping benefited by the bubble generated by the “heavily debt-dependent spending binge of American companies and consumers, and clung to the profit-making and job-creating model of export-led growth”.

He argues that ASEAN should do more as a group to develop their economies and be less dependent on such bubble economies and that they should stimulate domestic demand with investments in the health, education and rural sectors.