Credit: KUNDA DIXIT

By Kunda Dixit
ABU DHABI, Jan 29 2020 (IPS)

The increased frequency of climate-induced weather extremes and public opinion pressure are forcing even major fossil fuel exporting countries in West Asia to make a big push towards renewable energy.

In January alone, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) hosted the Gulf Intelligence UAE Energy Forum, the World Future Energy Summit, the Abu Dhabi Sustainability Week and a Future Sustainability Summit. February onwards, Dubai will have the International Conference on Renewable and Sustainable Energy, International Conference on Green Energy and Environmental Technology, with a Green Week and a Congress on Biofuels and Bioenergy later this year.

The UAE is the world’s 7^th largest exporter of crude oil, with 5.5% of market share, but is promoting itself as a low-carbon country. Masdar City, a model for sustainable urban living is coming up outside Abu Dhabi which is designed by Foster and Partners architects.

A 10MW solar farm outside the city provides solar power for the office buildings, which includes the regional headquarters of Siemens and IRENA (the International Renewable Energy Agency). Oil industry conclaves that used to focus on global price trends, prospecting and new oil fields now have plenary panels on solar and wind.

“Rising energy needs … climate change pressures and technological innovation mean that national oil companies must gravitate towards renewables for longer-term competitiveness and sustainability.”

Raoul Restucci, Managing Director of Petroleum Development Oman

“We are serious about energy security, and we have a strategy for an energy mix that includes renewables,” said Suhail bin Mohammed Faraj Faris Al Mazrouei, UAE Minister of Energy and Industry at the opening of the UAE Energy Forum earlier this month. That decarbonisation plan would mean the country by 2050 will be producing 38% of its energy from gas, 44% from renewables, 6% from nuclear and the use of clean coal will drop to 12%.

In the rest of the oil-rich Gulf region, petroleum-based energy will drop from the current 91% to 41%, and renewables will go up from 9% today to 59% .

Of the UAE’s 10 million population, 90% are expatriates and the country’s per capita carbon footprint is 23 tons per year. Although a low carbon trajectory would reduce total emissions, the UAE will remain a major exporter of fossil fuels into the future.

Even so, the writing was on the wall in Abu Dhabi throughout January – conference delegates felt there is no option but to move from oil to more a more efficient fossil fuel like gas, and promote utility scale solar and wind.

Even oil industry executives called for a green approach. Raoul Restucci, Managing Director of Petroleum Development Oman says: “Rising energy needs … climate change pressures and technological innovation mean that national oil companies must gravitate towards renewables for longer-term competitiveness and sustainability.”

This year, Oman is commissioning a 100MW solar farm. Saudi Arabia is turning into ‘Solar Arabia’ by integrating Concentrated Solar Power (CSP) with its existing thermal plants to generate nearly 2GW. It is adding 300MW solar photovoltaic and a 400MW wind project, and is thinking big: generate 200GW of solar power by 2030.

Credit: KUNDA DIXIT

The UAE itself is aiming to cut CO₂ emissions by 70% with Dubai installing the largest single-site solar park in the world to produce 1,000MW, which will be upgraded to 5,000MW in the next ten years. Another CSP plant will generate electricity 700MW even after dark with molten salt storage. Elsewhere, solar plants balance the fluctuation in generation by pumping water to hydropower dams, releasing the water through turbines at night.

“However much we shift to renewables from transportation or electricity, we will still have to rely on oil and gas because we have to balance the baseload at night,” explains Jan Zschommler of the DNV GL, the Norway-based sustainability consultant group.

Projections show that although oil will supply 17% of the energy around the world in 2050, petroleum gas will be the primary energy source from the mid-2020s and in the next 20 years there will be a shift to non-fossil biogas.

The cost of solar photovoltaic panels has dropped by more than 90% in the past ten years, and the price of lithium ion batteries have dropped by 80% and onshore wind turbines by 75% in the same period. By 2025, it will be cheaper to build and run electric cars than a petrol vehicle.

However, even if half of all the cars in the world are electric, the demand of oil and gas will grow into the near future. Says Nobuo Tanaka of the Sasakawa Peace Foundation: “Peak oil will not happen before 2040 because even if light vehicles go electric there will be increased demand from aviation, ships and trucks as well as the petrochemical industry. That may be good news for the Middle East, but it’s bad news for the planet.”

This story was originally published by The Nepali Times

Excerpt:

A company in Pokhara has enlarged household digesters into an industrial scale plant that uses climate-friendly technology that could ultimately be scaled nationwide to reduce Nepal’s balance of trade gap.

By Kunda Dixit
KASKI, Nepal, Jan 17 2020 (IPS)

Nepal’s future may not be in hydropower, as most assume, but actually in the dung heap. A new industrial-scale biogas plant near Pokhara has proved that livestock and farm waste producing flammable methane gas can replace imported LPG and chemical fertiliser.

Over the past 30 years, Nepal has become a world leader in spreading locally-designed household biogas digesters. There are now 300,000 of them, helping reduce deforestation, improving people’s health and lifting women out of drudgery and poverty.

Now, a company in Pokhara has enlarged household digesters into an industrial scale plant that uses climate-friendly technology that could ultimately be scaled nationwide to reduce Nepal’s balance of trade gap.

Biogas has a three-fold advantage. It reduces greenhouse gas emissions, and is therefore climate friendly. It allows us to manage raw waste. And it can slash our import bill for LPG and chemical fertiliser

Kushal Gurung’s grandfather was in the British Army, and he also applied for recruitment but failed the eyesight test. So, he set up Gandaki Urja in Pokhara that works with wind, solar and hydropower, but he believes Nepal’s best option for sustainable growth lies in energy from waste.

“Nepal must abandon fossil fuels, but even among renewable energy sources biogas has a three-fold advantage. It reduces greenhouse gas emissions, and is therefore climate friendly. It allows us to manage raw waste. And it can slash our import bill for LPG and chemical fertiliser,” says Gurung. “It is a win-win-win.”

A tipper truck has just arrived from Gorkha at Gandaki Urja’s biogas plant at Kotre near Pokhara, which with its dome digester looks like a nuclear reactor. The truck tilts its container to empty 5 tons of smelly poultry waste into a pit where rotting vegetables and cow dung from a farm in Syangja are all being mixed before being fed into the 4,000 cubic meter digester that is kept inflated.

In the absence of oxygen, bacteria already in the cow dung go to work to break down the waste into methane, carbon dioxide and hydrogen sulphide. The impurities are removed by filters to produce 200 cylinders of bio-CNG a day which are sold to big hotels and restaurants in Pokhara.

Customers pay a deposit for the cylinders and pressure regulators, and usually use up about two cylinders a day. The cost per kg for the bio-Compressed Natural Gas (bio-CNG) is the same as the state subsidised Liquified Petroleum Gas (LPG). However, customers prefer the biogas because it saves them up to 30% cost because it has higher calorific value than LPG, and there is no residue that goes waste.

“So far, the customers are satisfied, and we see demand growing in the future as word spreads,” says Ashim Kayastha, Director of Gandaki Urja.

Half the plant’s revenue comes from bio-CNG and the other half from the effluent which is dried and sold as organic fertiliser. The plant can produce up to 11,000 tons of fertiliser a year and is sold to surrounding farms.

The future of bio-CNG depends on scaling up the technology since any municipality generating more than 40 tons of biodegradable waste per day could have its own biogas plant. Nepal imports 500,000 tons of chemical fertiliser a year, and if each of 100 municipalities produced 5,000 tons of organic fertiliser Nepal could slash its import bill.

This could also significantly reduce the country’s annual import of Rs33 billion worth of LPG from India which grew four-fold in the past 10 years, making up 2.5% of Nepal’s total import bill. But to scale up, industrial biogas needs the same government incentives as hydro, solar and wind power.

At the moment hydropower investors enjoy a 100% corporate tax holiday for 10 years, and 50% for the next five years. There is only 1% tax on imports of equipment for solar, wind and hydropower, there is no such provision for the equipment for industrial scale biogas. Instead, there is a tax on interest, and also VAT on bio-CNG.

“The government should look at this not only as an energy project, but at its multifaceted benefits,” says Kushal Gurung of Gandaki Urja. “There is a waste-to-energy and fertiliser angle, too. If we want to make Nepal fully organic in the next ten years, projects like these need to be prioritised.”

Gandaki Urja got a boost from an unlikely source, Business Oxygen (BO2) in Kathmandu which helps entrepreneurs running Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) to scale up by injecting equity and providing technical assistance.

Says Siddhant Pandey of BO2: “We are always on the lookout for climate investments, and we realised that bio-CNG would be an incredible adaptive resilience investment. It would displace imports of LPG and fertiliser. It was going to be clean, no carbon footprint, and it made business sense because it met our internal return on investment expectation.”

The challenges are ensuring reliable sources of raw material and building knowhow for the technology within Nepal.

Says Pandey: “The Pokhara plant is a drop in the ocean, it can abe replicated in all 7 provinces. We know it is scalable, and it depends how proactive provincial governments will be.”

This story was originally published by The Nepali Times

The people of Nepal are justifiably proud that their country was never colonised, even though most other countries in the region were under the British. The joke in Kathmandu is that the British in India took one look at the mountains to the north, and didn’t bother conquering Nepal because they found it ungovernable. The Chinese, too, invaded Nepal in the 18th century but headed right back because it just seemed like too much trouble to stay.

Given the political brinkmanship of the past month, it doesn’t look like much has changed in the Himalayan kingdom-turned-republic. It is still ungovernable, and Nepal’s giant neighbours, India and China, are getting edgy about the prolonged instability.

Even the international media, it seems, has given up trying to make head or tail of what is going on in Nepal. The reports swing between alarmist and over-simplified headlines like “Nepal on the Brink of Collapse” to news of this year’s mountaineering traffic jam on Mt. Everest.

After a pro-democracy movement in 1990 turned Nepal into a constitutional monarchy, Nepal’s Maoist guerrillas waged a ruinous ten-year war that left 16,000 dead. A ceasefire agreement in 2006 led to the Maoists contesting and winning elections in 2008 for a Constituent Assembly to write a new constitution. The monarchy was abolished and Nepal was declared a secular, federal republic.

With four rickety coalition governments in as many years, and three extensions of the constitution-making body, Nepal’s Supreme Court ruled that the assembly’s mandate couldn’t be extended beyond May 27 this year.

On that day, last-minute attempts to strike a deal between Nepal’s four main political groupings on two contentious points in the constitution failed. Prime Minister Baburam Bhattarai let the Constituent Assembly die a natural death, and abruptly declared elections for November.

So, Nepal is in limbo: it doesn’t have a constitution, it doesn’t have a legislature, it has a lame-duck prime minister and a ceremonial president. The country is sailing into uncharted waters, with only a sketchy interim constitution that can be interpreted every which way. Any move the president or prime minister make now can be interpreted as unconstitutional, and be legally challenged.

There were disagreements on two main provisions in the new constitution that led to the deadlock: on the boundaries and labels of future federal units and on whether Nepal should keep its parliamentary system of government or go for a directly-elected presidential system. Nepal’s political parties have wide disagreements between themselves, and even within individual parties about these provisions.

While the coalition of the Maoists and a group of regional parties from the plains broadly favour ethnic-based federalism and a directly elected president, the centrist Nepali Congress and the moderate left UML oppose federal units named after ethnic groups and fear that a directly-elected president could become a dictator.

Things got so polarised in the month before the constitutional deadline that the western part of Nepal was completely shut down by a month-long strike by groups with rival demands for a federal territory. Kathmandu itself saw an often-violent three-day shutdown in which vehicles were vandalised and reporters attacked.

The debate over the new constitution has boiled down to whether Nepal should have future federal provinces named after indigenous groups (and if so, how many?), or have as few provinces as possible carrying neutral geographical names.

Proponents of ethnic federalism argue that it will devolve power to Nepal’s 100 or so marginalised ethnic groups, bring them into mainstream national politics and encourage autonomy and local self-governance. Opponents fear that ethnic federalism will weaken Nepal’s fragile national unity, fragment the country into warring ethnic fiefdoms, encourage conflict over natural resources and keep the country poor.

A Public Opinion Survey carried out by Himalmedia in May showed that nearly three-quarters of the respondents, including a majority from Nepal’s various ethnicities, thought federalism based on identity was a bad idea. A majority were also fed up with parliamentary democracy, and willing to give a directly-elected president the chance to take charge.

Although there was widespread public disappointment that the new constitution was not written by May 27, many in Nepal also heaved a sigh of relief because the compromise worked out on ethnic federalism would have left everyone unhappy and would have spilled out into rival street protests.

It is doubtful elections can be held by November as announced by the prime minister. But there is an urgent need to end the political uncertainty by cobbling together a government of national unity, and for the parties to go back to where they left off on the constitution to try to find a workable formula on federalism.

This isn’t insurmountable since those for and opposed to ethnic-based federalism had come to a compromise plan on May 27, and tweaking it could address the concerns of both sides. But for this, Nepal’s political parties need to show more responsibility and far-sightedness than they have exhibited so far.

Playing politics with identity is dangerous, but not redressing existing grievances and discrimination in Asia’s most unequal country can be even more so. And that will make Nepal even more ungovernable than it was 200 years ago. (END/COPYRIGHT IPS)

* Kunda Dixit is the editor and publisher of the Nepali Times newspaper in Kathmandu.

By Kunda Dixit and - -
KATHMANDU, May 11 2009 (IPS)

The shaky amateur video shows the leader of Nepal’s Maoist party boasting how he tricked the United Nations into thinking his army was 35,000 strong when it had only 7,000 guerrillas. He goes on to admit how he has lied to everyone about his commitment to democracy and the peace process, and that his real goal is total control of the army and the state.

All that would have been perfectly natural things to say for the leader of a Maoist revolution. But this was Pushpa Kamal Dahal, whose war name is ‘Prachanda’, speaking to his troops last year after signing the peace accord and before he was elected prime minister.

The tape was broadcast over Nepal’s TV stations after Prachanda resigned as prime minister on May 4 following his unsuccessful effort to sack the army chief. Seeing the leader of the Maoists boasting about how he hoodwinked the other political parties and the international community has now made it difficult for the other parties to trust his intentions and to include him in a new coalition government.

The Maoist victory in elections last year represented a triumph for democracy and Nepal was hailed as a model for successful conflict transformation in which a group that had waged a violent revolution had come to government through the ballot and not the bullet. Now, it appears to have been too good to be true.

In the tape, Prachanda says that it was all an elaborate ruse, a tactic to complete the revolution and grab total power: “After we control the army, we can do anything we want.”

And that is exactly what Prachanda tried to do by sacking the army chief, General Rookmangud Katawal, and replacing him with the second-in-command whom they had been grooming. Katawal had been a staunch opponent of the induction of Maoist guerrillas into the Nepal Army, saying the indoctrinated political cadre would destroy the army’s professionalism. Prachanda gave Katawal his marching orders two months before he was supposed to retire anyway. It was obvious that the Maoist intention was to take over by stealth an army that they could not defeat militarily during Nepal’s ten-year insurgency.

When things started going out of hand with the army split down the middle, President Rambaran Yadav intervened and asked that Katawal be reinstated. Prachanda resigned to save face and to attain the moral high ground among his own supporters.

Revelations about Prachanda’s ulterior motives have widened the gap between the Maoists and the other political parties, making it difficult to form a new government. They failed to meet May 9 deadline to forge a coalition, and it looks like it will be a while before Nepal has a new government.

The country can’t afford this delay. Elected representatives of the constituent assembly have to draft a new federal republican constitution by next April, and the process is already delayed. Thousands of Maoist guerrillas in UN-supervised camps have to be integrated, rehabilitated, or demobilised by July when the UN’s mandate ends. Whichever combination of political parties comes to power in the coming days, it has its work cut out.

Aside from the peace process, the new government needs to get development activities cranked up. The obsession with politics on the part of the Maoist-led government in the past nine months has led to a deterioration in the law-and-order situation and development activities have come to a standstill. The only reason the people haven’t risen up again is because they have never expected much from any government in Kathmandu.

Meanwhile, the Maoists have mobilised militant cadre from their Young Communist League to launch street protests against the president and terrorise supporters of other parties. They have threatened “physical attacks” on anyone supporting the president’s move and have tried to stoke nationalistic fervour by accusing India of interfering in Nepal’s internal affairs.

New Delhi, which steered Nepal’s peace process since 2006, had exerted pressure on Prachanda not to sack the army chief. The Indian Army and the Nepal Army have close links and there are 60,000 Gurkhas soldiers in the Indian military. Indian security forces are also engaged in battling their own Maoist guerrillas in six eastern Indian states, and they don’t want a totalitarian Maoist Nepal next door.

After coming to power through elections, there was no need for the Maoists to resort to the use of force, threats and intimidation. In fact, they have become even greater bullies after coming to power. Instead of trying to govern, they have wasted valuable time in extending control. They have tried systematically to undermine the bureaucracy, the judiciary, the army, and the media.

When the president blocked their attempt to take control of the army, the Maoists started attacking the institution of the constitutional president itself and they have now paralysed the parliament. Many find it ironic that a party that has never tried to hide its totalitarian ambitions and fields its own army is now calling for ‘civilian supremacy’ over the military.

Nepal’s media and pro-democracy activists have a lot of experience in struggling against the absolute monarchy and dictatorships in the past. The problem arises when a democratically-elected leader proceeds to dismantle the very institutions that helped him get to power. Nepal’s new challenge is to fight its elected demagogues. (END/COPYRIGHT IPS)

(*) Kunda Dixit is the editor and publisher of the Nepali Times newspaper in Kathmandu.

Excerpt:

By Kunda Dixit and - -
KATHMANDU, Sep 22 2008 (IPS)

Ever since he launched a guerrilla war to topple Nepal’s monarchy 12 years ago, Nepal’s Prime Minister Prachanda used to regularly denounce “American imperialism and Indian expansionism”. In an interview in 1998, he even said his Maoist guerrillas were prepared to fight off an invasion by the Indian Army and that Nepal’s revolution would spread “to India, and then to the world”, writes Kunda Dixit, editor and publisher of the Nepali Times newspaper in Kathmandu. On September 18, Prachanda returned from an official visit to India, stayed overnight in Kathmandu and immediately left for the United States. Dressed in a smart business suit and tie, Prachanda met top Indian leaders and industrialists to tell them they could trust the Maoists and that Nepal was open for big Indian investments in hydropower, manufacturing and infrastructure. Chief Maoist ideologue Baburam Bhattarai is finance minister and a former Maoist guerrilla commander is defence minister. On September 19, Bhattarai unveiled the government’s eagerly-awaited budget. Everyone was looking for signs that the Maoists would be trying to implement their slogans of revolutionary land reform, populist handouts to the poor and hefty taxes on property and luxury goods. But although the $4 billion budget was an ambitious 30 percent bigger than the previous year’s estimate, it was a much more economically pragmatic document than most expected.

On September 18, Prachanda returned from an official visit to India, stayed overnight in Kathmandu and immediately left for the United States. Dressed in a smart business suit and tie, Prachanda met top Indian leaders and industrialists to tell them they could trust the Maoists and that Nepal was open for big Indian investments in hydropower, manufacturing and infrastructure.

The former guerrilla leader is now in New York to address the UN General Assembly, and also have one-on-one with senior State Department officials.

Prachanda’s Maoists launched an armed struggle in 1996, making rapid military gains. In 2005 he forged an alliance with parliamentary parties to successfully sideline the monarchy. The Maoists emerged as the largest party in elections in last April and lead a new coalition government. Only two years ago, it would have been hard to imagine that Nepal would have gone from monarchy to republic without bloodshed, or that Prachanda would become the first Maoist in world history to be elected as a national leader.

Chief Maoist ideologue Baburam Bhattarai is finance minister and a former Maoist guerrilla commander is defence minister. On September 19, Bhattarai unveiled the government’s eagerly-awaited budget. Everyone was looking for signs that the Maoists would be trying to implement their slogans of revolutionary land reform, populist handouts to the poor and hefty taxes on property and luxury goods. But although the $4 billion budget was an ambitious 30 percent bigger than the previous year’s estimate, it was a much more economically pragmatic document than most expected.

Faced with a resource crunch, stagnant tax revenues and a sluggish economy the Maoists seems to have decided that this was not a time to be dogmatic. A hefty chunk of the Maoist finance minister’s budget is going for the reconstruction of infrastructure and government buildings that his guerrillas themselves destroyed during the war. Indeed, Prime Minister Prachanda may actually find that waging war may be easier than fulfilling some of the utopian promises he made during the revolution.

Still, most Nepalis are willing to give the Maoists a chance. Bhattarai’s economic blueprint is to create jobs through huge investments in infrastructure to jumpstart the economy. He plans to increase hydropower generation tenfold in ten years, boost annual economic growth to 7 percent and double digit by 2011, take per capita income -currently $320- to $3,000 in 2020, attain universal literacy in three years, build an east-west railway artery, a new international airport and boost tourism.

The Maoists’ challenge, however, is simply to provide economic relief. More than half of Nepal’s population of 28 million lives below the poverty line, there is a huge food shortage, inflation is running at 20% for foodstuffs. The government can’t afford to subsidise petroleum products and people have endured two years of long queues at gas stations. The government needs to find jobs for the 450,000 Nepalis who enter the labor market every year. About half of them currently emigrate to find work every year, mostly to India, the Gulf states, Malaysia and South Korea. None of this is going to possible without political stability, which is necessary to woo foreign investors.

The Maoists have been addressing meetings of businessmen in Nepal and India for the past month, saying they respect the free market and private property and inviting them to invest in Nepal. Not everyone is convinced. The Maoists’ youth wing is still extorting businesses, and labour militancy has spooked multinationals in Nepal.

Despite these problems, it does look like the Maoist leadership believes in the Deng Xiaoping model more than Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution. The Maoist-led coalition’s final challenge is to ensure the coalition stays intact so that the 601 member Constituent Assembly that was elected in April can start drafting Nepal’s new constitution. The peace process and ceasefire needs to be kept on track until the 19,000 Maoist guerrillas in UN-supervised camps across the country are either demobilised or integrated into the national army.

Over the next two years, the Assembly will also have to figure out how to turn Nepal’s governance structure into federal units so that political and economic decision-making is decentralised. These are enormous challenges, but given the smoothness with which the dramatic political transformation of the past two years was carried out, there is a good chance Nepal’s Maoist-led government can do it. (END/COPYRIGHT IPS)

Excerpt:

By Kunda Dixit and - -
KATHMANDU, Apr 15 2008 (IPS)

Mao Zedong is dead in China, but the Great Helmsman is alive and kicking in Nepal. What’s more, the Himalayan Maoists have come to power not with the barrel of the gun but has been voted to government, writes Kunda Dixit, editor of the Nepali Times newspaper in Kathmandu. When they form the government, possibly with the participation of other parties, the Maoists face immediately the challenge of delivering on their promise of raising living standards. More immediately, they will have to deal with the soaring cost of food. Petroleum prices need to be increased, but the government can’t afford subsidies and will not want to antagonise voters right away. The Maoists will want to push through some showcase legislation to prove to the electorate that they are serious about reform. They will want to get started on the controversial process of integrating their army with the national army. The two fought a bruising war, and there is a lot of resistance within the Nepal Army to combining the two forces. The Maoist leadership will have to balance pressure from their former guerrillas with the reluctance to not open up too many fronts right away.

Nepal’s leftist guerrillas fought a brutal ten-year war from 1996-2006 to try to overthrow the monarchy. They agreed to a ceasefire two years ago and since then had been preparing carefully for elections that were held on 10 April. Results so far show that the Maoists were more successful than even they had ever imagined.

The lesson from Nepal for revolutionaries around the world is this: what the Maoists could not accomplish with ten years of war and 15,000 killed they achieved through a non-violent electoral process.

The rest of the world has found it bizarre that Nepalis should vote so overwhelmingly for an ideology that has been discredited everywhere, and even abandoned in the land of Mao’s birth. But the victory didn’t mean that Nepal’s 17.6 million eligible voters were all Maoists, or wanted a People’s Republic.

Most people voted for the Maoists because they wanted change, they were sick and tired of the incompetence of the other democratic parties. Nepal’s mostly-impoverished people voted for a force that they thought was the most capable of lifting living standards, giving them affordable health care and education, roads and jobs. They also voted the Maoists to government so they wouldn’t go back to the jungles, rewarding them for laying down their arms.

In his victory speech this week, Maoist chairman Pushpa Kamal Dahal, who goes by the nom de guerre ‘Prachanda’, sounded magnanimous and conciliatory. Heavily garlanded and face painted red with vermilion, he said his party’s victory reflected the overwhelming desire of Nepalis for peace and development. He reiterated his party’s commitment to multiparty democracy and asked the international community not to be suspicious of Maoist intentions.

The speech did go some way to allay doubts about the Maoists have really made the complete transition from an armed guerrilla force to a mainstream party. However, Prachanda did not formally renounce violence, something the international community wants him to do.

The fact that Maoist cadre beat up Finance Minister Ram Sharan Mahat two days later after he won the election from his constituency doesn’t bode well for their image. It proved to many who always had misgivings about Maoist intentions that the party still adheres to the tactics of violence and intimidation.

When they form the government, possibly with the participation of other parties, the Maoists face immediately the challenge of delivering on their promise of raising living standards. More immediately, they will have to deal with the soaring cost of food. Petroleum prices need to be increased, but the government can’t afford subsidies and will not want to antagonise voters right away.

This was not a general election, but one that voted for a 601-member assembly that will draft the next constitution. Despite their win, the Maoists are unlikely to attain a two-thirds majority that would allow them to go it alone. The drafting process for the new constitution, which is expected to take two years, will therefore necessarily have to be through compromise and consultation.

The constituent assembly will also serve as a parallel parliament for the new two years, and will oversee a government lead by the Maoists. The first order of business will be to formally abolish the monarchy, and this is supposed to happen soon after the assembly convenes next month.

The Maoists will then want to push through some showcase legislation to prove to the electorate that they are serious about reform. They will want to get started on the controversial process of integrating their army with the national army. The two fought a bruising war, and there is a lot of resistance within the Nepal Army to combining the two forces. The Maoist leadership will have to balance pressure from their former guerrillas with the reluctance to not open up too many fronts right away.

Then there are the longer-term issues that the constituent assembly will have to deliberate on: what kind of federalism the country should have, whether to have a Westminster style system or a bicameral one, how to reconcile the competing demands for representation from Nepal’s 103 ethnic groups.

This state restructuring process is not going to be easy because it is happening in Asia’s poorest country, where people’s expectations are very high. And if people don’t see an immediate improvement in their lives, the election victory for the Maoists could easily turn sour.

But the past two years have shown that the Nepalis value political freedom and democracy and know that they command their own destiny. The Maoists have been given their chance to prove themselves. (END/COPYRIGHT IPS)

Excerpt:

By Kunda Dixit and - -
KATHMANDU, Apr 7 2008 (IPS)

On April 10, Nepalis will vote in elections that will mark the end of their country\’s 240-year-old monarchy and formally bring Maoist guerrillas into mainstream democratic politics, writes Kunda Dixit, editor of the Nepali Times newspaper in Kathmandu. In this article, Dixit writes that the elections represent the last stage of the peace process. The people will vote directly for candidates as well as parties so that the assembly will have members of ethnic and other marginalised groups never represented before in proportion to their population. With voting just around the corner, those who have the most to lose seem to be getting frantic. Absolute monarchists have been carrying out terrorist attacks in an attempt to disrupt polls by provoking communal violence, while radical Maoists, afraid they will do badly in the elections, want to intimidate voters to minimise turnout and so call into question the legitimacy of the result.

The people will elect 575 members to an assembly that will draft Nepal’s new constitution. This is the first election that will be held under a mixed proportional representation system and try to bring into the decision-making process women and ethnic groups that had not previously been fairly represented.

The vote also represents the end of a messy two-year transition since the April 2006 People Power uprising forced King Gyanendra to restore democracy and bring back parliament. The seven parties that have ruled Nepal since have decided to formally declare Nepal a republic during the first session of the elected assembly.

Two years after the war ended, the polls will also bring the Maoists into non-violent politics. This campaign has seen former guerrillas addressing campaign rallies and asking people to vote for them in a move from the bullet to the ballot.

These elections had to be postponed twice because political leaders got cold feet. In the unstable political transition, the government has often been disunited, and even though the war has ended, the Nepali people are still waiting for the peace dividend. The economy is still stagnant, and the country faces extended power cuts every day despite the fact that it is rich in hydropower. There are long lines at gas stations because the country cannot pay for imports, and a dramatic increase in food prices is hurting the poor. Jobless Nepalis are migrating to the Gulf, Malaysia, and India for work, and the money they send home is propping up the economy.

Still, Nepal has seen a dramatic transformation of state structure in the past two years. A Hindu kingdom has been turned into a secular republic, and the absolute monarchy has been sidelined and stripped of its command of the army. The Maoist war has seen a negotiated settlement, the former guerrillas are in UN-supervised camps with their arms, and they are represented in an interim parliament and in the coalition government.

The elections represent the last stage of the peace process. On Thursday, the people will vote directly for candidates as well as parties so that the assembly will have members of ethnic and other marginalised groups never represented before in proportion to their population.

Nepalis are eager to vote because for them it means an end to violence and instability. The process of drafting a new constitution will take at least two years, and the assembly will serve also as a parliament.

To be sure, things won’t change for the better overnight. Nepal’s political parties have often shown in the past that they are better at fighting for democracy than making it work. The big challenge will be to make democracy deliver development. People need to see a tangible improvement in their lives in a country that is the poorest in Asia.

With voting just around the corner, those who have the most to lose also seem to be getting frantic. There are still two spoilers: the radical right and the radical left.

Absolute monarchists have been carrying out terrorist attacks in an attempt to disrupt polls by provoking communal violence. There is evidence that hardline monarchists want to use the Hindu religious card to whip up support from people who don’t agree with Nepal being turned into a secular republic. There is some support for this from the Hindu right in India.

The other threat is from radical Maoists who want to intimidate voters for fear that they will do badly in the elections. They want to minimise turnout and so call into question the legitimacy of the result.

Despite these problems, most Nepalis want to get out and vote because they are convinced that the elections will finally bring peace, stability and development. (END/COPYRIGHT IPS)

Excerpt:

By Kunda Dixit and - -
KATHMANDU, Jan 21 2008 (IPS)

After much bargaining and dithering Nepal\’s governing alliance, which includes the former Maoist guerrillas, has finally agreed to hold its twice-postponed elections in April, writes Kunda Dixit, editor and publisher of the Nepali Times newspaper in Kathmandu and the author of the book, A People War. In this article, Dixit writes that a lot of things can go wrong between now and then. Maoist hardliners could try to sabotage polls in which they feel they will have a poor showing. The radical right, still loyal to sidelined King Gyanendra, could provoke violence. Militant groups in the plains bordering India may prevent voting. Or all of the above. It looks likely that although Nepal is a republic on paper, the monarchy will still be an issue in elections. This would distract voters from the real issues of a new constitution. But many Nepalis now think the king is just not worth the trouble to keep any more. April\’s elections will bring closure to this prolonged transition, and hopefully clarity to the political process so that Nepal\’s new rulers can at last turn their attention to lifting the living standards of Asia\’s poorest people.

A lot of things can go wrong between now and then, as has happened in the past. Maoist hardliners could try to sabotage polls in which they feel they will have a poor showing. The radical right, still loyal to sidelined King Gyanendra, could provoke violence. Militant groups in the plains bordering India may prevent voting. Or all of the above.

Indeed, it was one or more of these reasons that caused the postponement of polls, first in June and again in November. But this time it looks like everyone has run out of excuses. The elections are to vote representatives to an assembly that will have to draft a new constitution and is the result of a ceasefire that brought an end to the year-long Maoist insurgency and a UN-monitored peace process.

An alliance between the underground Maoists and the mainstream political parties mounted a peaceful pro-democracy uprising in April 2006 that ended three years of absolute monarchy under King Gyanendra. Since then, the parties and the Maoists have been struggling to build a new political structure for Nepal brick-by-brick: trough 2006 and 2007 they signed a peace agreement ending a war that had killed nearly 15,000 people, sidelined the monarchy, set up an interim parliament that passed a transitional constitution. Then the Maoists joined the government.

But the goal of conducting constituent assembly elections has proved more difficult. The distrust level between the parties was so high that they have preferred to keep putting off facing voters rather than hold an election in which they would not do well. Bridging the trust gap hasn’t been easy in a country that has been ruled by a feudal monarchy for much of the past 240 years. The ruling alliance has found that fighting for democracy was easier than working together to make it work.

Thus, nearly two years after the king was removed from power, Nepal is still in limbo, neither a republic nor a monarchy. The interim parliament has passed a resolution saying that Nepal is a republic, but the king is still in the royal palace and is being paid by the tax payers.

There are three main parties in government: the moderate communist UML, the centre right Nepali Congress (NC), and the Maoists. The NC has been hedging its bets on keeping some form of ceremonial monarchy despite a republican wave among the younger cadre. The Maoists fought a war to turn Nepal into a republic and have been pushing for the declaration of a republic before elections because they say the king might otherwise try to interfere with the process. The compromise between the NC and the Maoists took more than a year to work out, with former US president Jimmy Carter even travelling to Nepal twice to mediate. The two parties agreed to get the interim parliament to pass a resolution on declaring a republic to be ratified by the first session of the constituent assembly. That opened the way for the Maoists to agree to participate in elections.

But, as is usual in Nepal, an agreement never means it will be honoured. Both the Maoists and the NC leadership are still under pressure from hardliners within their respective parties who fear moderate democrats more than they distrust each other. And there are other obstacles. The return of democracy in 2006 has led to an eruption of identity politics with many of Nepal’s 103 ethnic groups demanding fairer representation in governing the country. Foremost among these is the Madhesi people, about one-third of the population that lives in the southern plains bordering India. The Madhesis feel discriminated against by successive hill-dominated governments in Kathmandu. They are represented by moderate regional parties and militant groups. Both have announced new anti-government protests from Saturday unless their demands for electoral reforms and representation are met.

Analysts say the danger now is that reactionary royalists will seize on the unrest in the plains to incite violence so elections cannot be held. Prime Minister Girija Koirala of the NC has appointed his daughter Sujata to the cabinet and seems to be grooming her as heir apparent. She has been speaking out in favour of the monarchy, probably to attract a block vote of the electorate which doesn’t want the present king to continue but would like to retain some form of ceremonial monarchy.

It looks likely that although Nepal is a republic on paper, the monarchy will still be an issue in elections. This would distract voters from the real issues of a new constitution. But many Nepalis now think the king is just not worth the trouble to keep any more. April’s elections will bring closure to this prolonged transition, and hopefully clarity to the political process so that Nepal’s new rulers can at last turn their attention to lifting the living standards of Asia’s poorest people.(END/COPYRIGHT IPS)

Excerpt:

By Kunda Dixit and - -
KATMANDU, Sep 19 2007 (IPS)

After the heady excitement of last year\’s pro-democracy uprising in Nepal that forced King Gyanendra to restore parliament, Nepal\’s eight-party coalition has fallen apart with the Maoists quitting government on Tuesday. The move did not come as a surprise, since the ex-guerrillas had been warning of just this for months. But it does put in doubt the fate of elections for the constituent assembly scheduled November 22, writes Kunda Dixit, editor of the Nepali Times newspaper and author of A People War. In this article the author writes that most of the estimated 15,000 ex-guerrillas are interned in camps supervised by a UN monitoring mission in Nepal and their weapons are under lock and key. On Tuesday, the UN expressed concern about the Maoists quitting the government, saying this would jeopardize the peace process. The hope now is that behind-the-scenes negotiations currently underway will produce an agreement that the first meeting of the constituent assembly after elections will declare Nepal a republic. It remains to be seen whether the Maoists will agree to this, and if they do elections may still be possible. Otherwise they may be postponed. Nepal\’s peace process is not in jeopardy, and the Maoists are not about to go back to war. But it is proof of just how difficult it is for a group that has pursued armed struggle to transform itself into a pluralistic, non-violent political party.

The rebels joined forces with an alliance of seven parliamentary parties against King Gyanendra which led to the people power protests in April 2006. Since then, the Maoists have joined an interim parliament, helped write a transitional constitution, and six months ago were allotted five portfolios in the new cabinet.

But the transition has not been smooth. The former guerrillas have found it difficult to go from the jungles to parliament. There have been problems in the alliance, and the Maoist leaders who supported the peace process were being heavily criticized by their rank and file for having sold out on the revolution. On Tuesday, the Maoist ministers resigned en masse and the party announced a nationwide protest to put pressure on Prime Minister Girija Koirala to agree to their two main demands: declaration of a republic before elections and introduction of a system of proportional representation. The Maoists fear that the king will destabilize the country before elections and want him out of the way. They also fear that they won’t fare all that well at the polls and want proportional representation so that they would be guaranteed at least a few seats.

By quitting the government, the Maoists have tried to kill three birds with one stone. They have stolen the thunder back from ethnic groups that have recently become even more radical than they are; they have appeased the hardliners within their own party who were critical of Maoist ministers for not doing anything while in government; and they’ve managed to put alliance partners who are ahead of them in election preparations on the spot. The Maoists now obviously recognise the advantage of being seen as an opposition party during campaigning so they can tap anti-incumbency sentiment. They will try to project themselves as a force for change in contrast to the traditional parties which are seen as part of the status quo.

More worrying to the Maoist leadership is disgruntlement within its own ranks. Party chairman Pushpa Kamal Dahal, better known by his nom-de-guerre of Prachanda (Fierce One), came under intense criticism at the party plenum last month from former commanders who blamed him for everything from living in luxury to being too soft on the alliance partners.

Withdrawing from the government was probably the minimum demand of the radicals. One standby option for the Maoists could be provoking street protests in the coming month so that elections would not be possible in November. In an internal review, the Maoists have concluded that they may not win more than 15 percent of the seats in a constituent assembly, and they would like very much to postpone voting. Their thinking must be that putting off elections to April would allow them to prepare better and improve their chances. But even this is doubtful. In the past 18 months of the ceasefire, instead of trying to behave like a mainstream party the Maoists have been high-handed and have deployed their young cadre to threaten businesses and political critics.

Most of the estimated 15,000 ex-guerrillas are interned in camps supervised by a United Nations monitoring mission in Nepal and their weapons are under lock and key. On Tuesday, the UN expressed concern about the Maoists quitting the government, saying this would jeopardize the peace process. The hope now is that behind-the-scenes negotiations currently underway will produce an agreement that the first meeting of the constituent assembly after elections will declare Nepal a republic. It remains to be seen whether the Maoists will agree to this, and if they do elections may still be possible. Otherwise postponement is likely.

Nepal’s peace process is not in jeopardy, and the Maoists are not about to go back to war. But the current situation is proof of just how difficult it is for a group that has pursued armed struggle to transform itself into a pluralistic, non-violent political party. (END/COPYRIGHT IPS)

Excerpt:

By Kunda Dixit and - -
KATHMANDU, Feb 2 2007 (IPS)

If all goes well, in the next few weeks Nepal\’s Maoist insurgents will join the government of Prime Minister GP Koirala, writes Kunda Dixit, editor and publisher of the Nepali Times newspaper in Kathmandu. In this analysis, Dixit writes that with the restoration of democracy, it was as if the lid came off and all pent-up grievances and demands of groups that had been marginalised or excluded from decision-making wanted their say. The latest complication is an eruption of demands for fair representation and self-rule from many of Nepal\’s 103 ethnic and caste groups. Despite the peace process, Nepal is in ferment. There are strikes, shutdowns, and highways blockades every day by various groups. The unrest has caused a crippling shortage of fuel. The government has held several rounds of negotiations with representatives of these groups, but has not been able to stem the agitation. As the first anniversary of the victory of People Power approaches in Nepal, there is no doubt that a compromise has to be reached and quickly before another fire ignites from the embers of ten years of war.

It has been a dramatic transformation from underground war to surface politics for this revolutionary group that launched an armed insurrection eleven years ago and decided to set weapons aside last year.

The Maoists realised that a military victory was not realistic and that neither Nepal’s giant northern neighbour China, the homeland of Mao Zedong, nor India to the south would ever allow them to capture state power by force. So last year they joined hands with the political parties to force autocratic king Gyanendra to roll back his coup.

After three weeks of a People Power uprising, the king finally restored parliament in April 2006. Since then, the ruling seven-party alliance has signed a peace treaty with the Maoists, got the United Nations to monitor the internment of the rebel army and their guns, pass an interim constitution, and swear in a transitional parliament that included Maoist members.

The next step is to set up a new government made up of also Maoist ministers that will prepare for an election to an assembly that will draft Nepal’s new constitution later this year.

The road so far has been bumpy, the process has been deadlocked and delayed several times but the ceasefire has held and the peace process is on track. This time last year, more than 40 people were being killed in the conflict and the future looked bleak. The war has ended but this hasn’t meant that Nepal is at peace.

The latest complication is an eruption of demands for fair representation and self-rule from many of Nepal’s 103 ethnic and caste groups. With the restoration of democracy, it was as if the lid came off and all pent-up grievances and demands of groups that had been marginalised or excluded from decision-making wanted their say.

Since January, the inhabitants of Nepal’s narrow strip of plains bordering India have risen up against centuries of discrimination by the country’s hill-dwelling rulers, and they want representation in parliament to reflect the size of their population. The densely populated plains is home to half of all Nepalis. Last month, nearly 30 people were killed as police tried to quell violent street demonstrations that lasted three weeks.

In addition, various indigenous groups that have been traditionally under-represented in governance because of their lack of education and unequal opportunities have been staging strikes and rallies. Members of the ”untouchable” castes have also been demanding fair representation as has an aboriginal community in the south.

Taken together, and despite the peace process, Nepal is in ferment. There are strikes, shutdowns, and highways blockades every day by various groups. The unrest has caused a crippling shortage of fuel, and transportation has been severely hit. The government has held several rounds of negotiations with representatives of these groups, but has not been able to stem the agitation.

Having come so close to their goal of being in government, the Maoists have now found themselves being blamed for mishandling the restive south. Their cadre has been involved in a series of clashes with activists. Being used to the certainties of revolution and getting what they want by pointing their guns, the Maoists are finding it difficult to adjust to the ways of parliament and the politics of compromise. And it will take even more getting used to being in government. The latest controversy this week was over a Maoist member of parliament trying to enter the chambers carrying a pistol.

The Maoists have shown insecurity by blaming the plains agitation on right-wing supporters of the king. Rebel leaders have been trying to distract attention from their debacle by demanding an immediate proclamation of a republic. Several recent public opinion polls have shown that Nepalis are split 50-50 about the retaining the monarchy even though they don’t like the present king. Surveys show they are more concerned about political instability and disruptions to their lives than about whether Nepal is a republic or a monarchy.

The Maoists have said repeatedly that they are not going back to the jungles, and they most likely mean it. With many of their fighters now living in UN-supervised camps and their guns in locked containers, there doesn’t seem to be a danger of a return to war. But there is a worry that if political accommodation is not found for the demands of ethnic groups, there may be an even more virulent war in future.

Most analysts agree that given the way Nepal’s nationalities are enmeshed, ethnic federalism would not work; a federal state structure with political power decentralised to viable geographical units would be the only way to govern such a rugged and diverse country. More immediately, the government is under pressure to meet demands for proportional representation and re-delineation of constituencies.

As the first anniversary of the victory of People Power approaches in Nepal, there is no doubt that a compromise has to be reached and quickly before another fire ignites from the embers of ten years of war. (END/COPYRIGHT IPS)

Excerpt:

By Kunda Dixit and - -
KATHMANDU, Sep 1 2006 (IPS)

It has been five months since Nepal\’s Rhododendron Revolution forced autocratic King Gyanendra to restore parliament and hand power back to an alliance of parliamentary parties. Since then, a restored parliament has carried out one of the most dramatic transformations of state structure ever realised without violence or bloodshed, writes Kunda Dixit, Publisher and Editor of the Kathmandu-based newspaper, Nepali Times. In this article, Dixit writes that Nepal still faces the larger challenge of resolving the insurgency. A ceasefire has been in force since April, and negotiations are underway between the government and the Maoist rebels. In the past month, the peace process has been stuck over disagreement on the issue of what to do with Maoist weapons. The rebels are under pressure from their rank and file who don\’t want to give up their guns, and the government is under pressure from the United States and India not to bring the Maoists into an interim administration until their weapons are laid down. There is a good chance that Nepal can come out of this having resolved not just the conflict but also the social injustices that are at the root of it. But it needs all parties to look beyond immediate strategic gain to ensure peace and stability so that Nepal\’s long-suffering people can finally hope for economic progress.

It has been five months since Nepal’s Rhododendron Revolution forced autocratic King Gyanendra to restore parliament and hand power back to an alliance of parliamentary parties. Since then, the parliament has carried out one of the most dramatic transformations of state structure ever realised without violence or bloodshed. It stripped the 237-year-old monarchy of all its powers: the king no longer has control over the national army; royal succession will now be decided by parliament’s state affairs committee; female succession will be allowed; and the king has to pay all taxes.

”Royal” has been removed from the name of Nepal’s national airline, it is no longer ”His Majesty’s Government”, and Nepal is no longer a Hindu kingdom but a secular state. In fact, the king of Nepal is now no more than a tourist attraction. The parties restored democracy through a largely non-violent three-week street protest in April, something the Maoist insurgents couldn’t do in 10 years of fighting and 14,000 deaths.

But although the movement succeeded in removing the king from the picture, Nepal still faces the larger challenge of resolving the insurgency. A ceasefire has been in force since April, and negotiations are underway between the government and the Maoist rebels. The United Nations has been invited to monitor the peace process and demilitarisation ahead of elections to a constituent assembly some time next year.

In the past month, the peace process has been stuck over disagreement on the issue of what to do with Maoist weapons. The rebels are under pressure from their rank and file who don’t want to give up their guns, and the government is under pressure from the United States and India not to bring the Maoists into an interim administration until their weapons are laid down.

In the past week the Maoists have tried to exert pressure on the government through huge rallies in the capital as a show of force. Prime Minister Girija Prasad Koirala is adamant that armed Maoists must not be admitted into the political mainstream. After his party’s recent central committee meeting, rebel leader Prachanda said there is no question of going back to the jungle. But he has warned of another people power uprising in the streets if the government insists on his party laying down weapons.

Koirala is planning to meet face-to-face with Prachanda to resolve the stalemate, and they probably will. If that happens the next step will be for the government and the Maoists to form an interim government to prepare for the election to an assembly that will draft a new constitution. That election will essentially be a referendum on the monarchy, and judging from the headlines in the Nepali media these days, campaigning has already started. The anger in the streets in April was such that many young educated urban Nepalis feel the monarchy has to be done away with once and for all. Because of this pressure, most parliamentary parties have changed their manifestos to state that their goal is a ”democratic republic”. The Maoists feel that the parties have stolen their republican slogan and that even though they helped topple the king in April, the parties are getting all the credit. Since they have no representation in the restored parliament they want it dissolved and replaced with a new interim house.

Nepal is not out of the woods yet. But luckily the conflict is not intractable. It is not an ethnic or separatist war, and there is now political will on both sides to sort things out through the current peace process. Everyone agrees that Prachanda needs time to convince his warriors to lay down their arms. But he is under even more pressure from the international community –including India, which brokered the deal between them and the parties– to lay down arms before they join an interim government.

Two earlier ceasefires broke down because both the army and the Maoists used the truces to rearm and regroup, which made the Nepali people wary of peace overtures. But this time it may be different. The Maoists know they can never capture state power through military means and are convinced they can exploit the disarray of the political parties to gain parliamentary supremacy. The Nepali Army has been bogged down in a messy war in which it has earned a bad reputation for human rights violations, and knows it may never be able to defeat a determined guerrilla force in Nepal’s rugged jungle terrain.

There is a good chance that Nepal can come out of this having resolved not just the conflict but also the social injustices that are at the root of it. But it needs all parties to look beyond immediate strategic gain to ensure peace and stability so that Nepal’s long-suffering people can finally hope for economic progress. (END/COPYRIGHT IPS)

Excerpt:

By Kunda Dixit and - -
KATHMANDU, Apr 1 2006 (IPS)

After three weeks of a growing people power movement, Nepal\’s King Gyanendra finally yielded on Monday and restored parliament, which he dissolved four years ago. That met the key demand of an alliance of seven opposition parties, who will now sit in the reconvened parliament on Friday, writes Kunda Dixit, Editor and Publisher of the Kathmandu-based weekly newspaper, Nepali Times. But it doesn\’t go all the way to addressing the demand of the Maoists for elections to a constituent assembly. The Maoists have been fighting a guerrilla war for the past ten years to overthrow the monarchy. On Friday, parliament will immediately deliberate on the Maoist demand, which would pave the way for them to renounce violence and join the political mainstream. This compromise deal was brokered by the Indians and gave the king, the parties, and the Maoists a face-saving way out of the impasse. In the end it took three weeks of nationwide non-violent people power to achieve what the Maoists couldn\’t get with years of armed struggle.

After three weeks of a growing people power movement, Nepal’s King Gyanendra finally yielded on Monday and restored parliament, which he dissolved four years ago.

The king vacillated until it was almost too late. On Saturday a crowd of a hundred thousand protesters got to within a stone’s throw of the royal palace in Kathmandu. The police fired rubber bullets and used bamboo sticks to beat demonstrators, injuring hundreds.

But faced with increased international isolation, the threat of having aid cut off, and pressure from neighbouring India, the king finally relented.

“Sovereignty,” said the sombre-faced monarch in his midnight address, “rests with the people.”

That met the key demand of an alliance of seven opposition parties who will now sit in the reconvened parliament on Friday.

But it doesn’t go all the way to addressing the demand of the Maoists, who have been fighting a guerrilla war for the past ten years to overthrow the monarchy.

The Maoists wanted an election to a constituent assembly to craft a new constitution and got a promise from the parties that they will take the process through parliament.

King Gyanendra had sacked an elected prime minister in October 2002 and since last year had taken over all executive powers. The king justified his move saying he needed to defeat the Maoists, but he has instead dismantled democracy. His takeover isolated the king internationally and turned Nepal into a pariah state. Donors stopped aid, and Britain, India, and the US suspended military aid to the army.

Opposition to the king was spearheaded by the political parties, civil society, and the media, which defied strict lese majeste laws to criticise the king’s absolute rule. Increasingly desperate, the political parties entered into a loose alliance with the Maoists and last month launched a joint protest programme to pressure the king. The country was crippled by blockades and strikes.

Police crackdowns on pro-democracy protesters killed ten people and injured hundreds, and fed the rising anti-monarchist feeling in the streets.

The parties were walking a fine line: they needed to keep up the pressure on the king but couldn’t let the protests get out of control and create anarchy. It worked beyond their wildest dreams, as tens of thousands of doctors, civil servants, journalists, lawyers, and labour unions spontaneously took to the streets to protest. Even the staff in the Ministry of Interior went on strike.

On Friday, parliament will immediately deliberate on the Maoist demand for a constituent assembly election, which would pave the way for the Maoists to renounce violence and join the political mainstream. This compromise deal was brokered by the Indians and gave the king, the parties, and the Maoists a face-saving way out of the impasse.

In the end, three weeks of nationwide non-violent people power achieved what the Maoists couldn’t get with years of armed struggle. Restoration of democracy will now end Nepal’s international isolation, free up foreign aid, and with peace the task of rebuilding and rehabilitation can begin. Perhaps then Nepal can turn its attention to improving health, education, and nutrition for its 26 million people. (END/COPYRIGHT IPS)

Excerpt:

By Kunda Dixit and - -
KATMANDU, Mar 31 2006 (IPS)

Nepal these days feels like it is in a double time warp. A medieval king who wants to be an absolute monarch is battling it out with guerrillas inspired by Mao Zedong\’s 1960s China, writes Kunda Dixit, editor and publisher of the Nepali Times newspaper in Kathmandu. This week, an alliance of seven political parties has been leading a nationwide street agitation to pressure King Gyanendra to restore democracy and roll back his February 1, 2005 military-backed coup. Protesters have fought pitched battles with riot police for five straight days. Four people had been killed and dozens wounded. Hundreds of activists and journalists have been arrested all over the country. This week is critical in resolving Nepal\’s three-way power struggle between the king, the democratic parties and the Maoists. The king has a chance to offer an olive branch during his traditional Nepali new year address to the nation on Friday. If he doesn\’t, it will only be a question of time before Nepal becomes a republic.

Nepal these days feels like it is in a double time warp. A medieval king who wants to be an absolute monarch is battling it out with guerrillas inspired by Mao Zedong’s 1960s China.

Squeezed in between is the moderate, modern face of Nepal promoted by pro-democracy political parties, civil society and media. But they are being hounded and are struggling to survive.

This week, an alliance of seven political parties has been leading a nationwide street agitation to pressure King Gyanendra to restore democracy and roll back his February 1, 2005 military-backed coup. Protesters have fought pitched battles with riot police for five straight days. Four people had been killed and dozens wounded. Hundreds of activists and journalists have been arrested all over the country.

For the past year, most Nepalis had shied away from anti-king protests. They didn’t trust the political parties whom they blamed for mismanagement and corruption after a people power uprising in 1990. Disillusioned with democracy, the Maoists launched their armed struggle in 1996 to turn Nepal into a people’s republic.

King Gyanendra took over last year saying the parties were making a mess of things and he needed to “tame” the Maoists and restore peace. But instead of going after the rebels, he has systematically dismantled democratic institutions and put political leaders behind bars. This has pushed the political parties to reluctantly forge an alliance with the Maoists. The rebels back the parties’ agitation to pressure the king to restore democracy.

In the past week, Nepal has crossed a threshold. Ordinary people who till a month ago were watching from the sidewalks are pouring out into the streets to support the party-led pro-democracy rallies. Doctors, academics, journalists, civil servants and ordinary citizens have defied curfews and threats to join rallies.

A public opinion poll last month showed that Nepalis overwhelmingly want the Maoists to renounce violence. They reject both an absolute monarchy and a republic, and most prefer a ceremonial monarchy even if they don’t like the present king.

But the king isn’t listening. Despite this week’s street uprising he appears determined to stick to his plan of being an interventionist monarch with direct control over the country.

The Maoist leadership, under pressure from the political parties and some arm-twisting from big neighbour India, appear now to be willing to join the political mainstream. The comrades seem to have been persuaded that since an outright military victory over the army is not possible after ten years of fighting and 13,000 deaths, they have a better chance to get to power by forging an alliance with the political parties.

The king and his army regard the party-Maoist alliance as a threat and have warned the parties that they will be treated like “terrorists” if they don’t ditch the armed rebels. There are misgivings, most vocally from the US ambassador in Nepal, over the Maoist-parties pact which is seen as a rebel trick to march into Kathmandu.

Party leaders say they are convinced the rebels want a face-saving way out and accuse the king of trying to sabotage a possible ceasefire and peace process. Indeed, under the king Nepal is firmly on a militaristic path and has become notorious for human rights violations topping the international list of countries with the most disappearances.

This week is critical in resolving Nepal’s three-way power struggle between the king, the democratic parties and the Maoists. The king has a chance to offer an olive branch during his traditional Nepali new year address to the nation on Friday. If he doesn’t, it will only be a question of time before Nepal becomes a republic. (END/COPYRIGHT IPS)

Excerpt:

By - - and Kunda Dixit
KATMANDU, Apr 1 2005 (IPS)

On February 1 Nepal\’s King Gyanendra sacked the prime minister he had appointed, took power himself, and declared a state of national emergency, and Nepal\’s vibrant and free press was suddenly muzzled, writes Kunda Dixit, editor and co-publisher of the Katmandu-based weekly newspaper, Nepali Times. In this article, the author writes that constitutionally the emergency will lapse next week unless reimposed by parliament. But there is no parliament and no elected prime minister. There are strong calls from political leaders, activists, the media and the international community to have the emergency lifted and the press freed. King Gyanendra said his army needed the emergency to concentrate on defeating the Maoists. But muzzling the media has actually helped the Maoists because the censored press has lost credibility and few believe it even when the government is telling the truth. In addition, the media\’s reporting of Maoist atrocities are also not getting reported, and in the absence of facts wild rumours are rife. Prolonging the emergency will just bolster the argument of those who believe that it was not really designed to curb Maoism, but to put down pluralism. Lifting the state of emergency is in the interest of this country, its people, and its monarch.

Up until January 31, 2005, Nepal’s media was one of the freest in the world. The next day it was plunged back into the dark ages.

On February 1 King Gyanendra sacked the prime minister he had appointed, took power himself, and declared a state of national emergency. Nepal’s vibrant and free press was suddenly muzzled.

For many younger journalists who had not known a time of censorship it was a shock to be shackled. They had got used to the freedoms, and perhaps had taken it for granted. But for more veteran editors who had lived and worked through the days of censorship before the 1990 People’s Movement restored democracy to Nepal, there was a strong sense of déjà vu.

The restrictions were unprecedented even by pre-1990 standards. Armed soldiers were in the newsrooms, reading and approving everything before it went to press. Radio stations were instructed not to broadcast news, only music. Cable TV operators were told to take out Indian news channels, including a Nepali-language station uplinked from New Delhi. The BBC’s Nepali Service, which used to be relayed by ten local FM stations all over Nepal, was taken off the air. Soldiers guarded Internet service providers and subscribers were blocked for a week. Land lines and mobile phones were cut off.

The media immediately started looking for ways to get the story out. Imaginative forms of resistance cropped up. Newspapers printed blank editorials, others left white holes where paragraphs were expunged. Others wrote editorials on arcane subjects like smelly socks that ridiculed the censors with the absurdity of it all. Some resorted to metaphor, lamenting the chopping down of trees along Kathmandu’s streets and calling for an urgent ”restoration of greenery”. New websites and bloggers hit the web after the Internet was restored, censored paragraphs were put on the sites as white spaces that could be read after being highlighted with the mouse.

It has now been three months and there are signs of some relaxation. Land phones have been restored, the Internet is back, mildly critical editorials are now tolerated, and self-censorship is the order of the day. But mobile phones are still out, the curb on news over radio stays, Indian TV channels are still blocked, a recent issue of The Economist was seized, and shortwave radios are once more in great demand as people turn to the BBC Nepali Service broadcast from London to find out what is really happening in their own country.

Constitutionally the emergency will lapse next week unless reimposed by parliament. But there is no parliament and no elected prime minister. There are strong calls from political leaders, activists, the media and the international community to have the emergency lifted and the press freed.

King Gyanendra said his army needed the emergency to concentrate on defeating the Maoists. But critics say this is like using a stick when a carrot would do. Muzzling the media has actually helped the Maoists because the censored press has lost credibility and few believe it even when the government is telling the truth. In addition, the media’s reporting of Maoist atrocities are also not getting reported, and in the absence of facts wild rumours are rife.

Prolonging the emergency will just bolster the argument of those who believe that it was not really designed to curb Maoism, but to put down pluralism. Lifting the state of emergency is in the interest of this country, its people, and its monarch. (END/COPYRIGHT IPS)

Excerpt:

By Kunda Dixit and - -
KATMANDU, Feb 1 2005 (IPS)

Every time we in Nepal think things can\’t get any worse, they do, writes Kunda Dixit, editor of the weekly Nepali Times. Last week, King Gyanendra sacked his prime minister, declared a state of emergency, and suspended civil liberties. Nepal\’s 15-year experiment with democracy now seems over. With complete press censorship, one of the last remaining freedoms from the 1990 People\’s Movement is gone. King Gyanendra\’s move has been welcomed by many Nepalis disenchanted by the instability caused by fractious and corrupt parliamentary leaders and by an insurgency which has cost 12,000 lives in nine years. If this is what the king had to do to restore peace, they say, so be it. In the long run, however, the answer to Maoist totalitarianism is greater and more inclusive democracy, a vibrant free press, and civil liberties. Curtailing freedom polarises society between two radicalisms and wipes out the middle ground. And even as a strategy against the Maoists it could be counterproductive.

Every time we in Nepal think things can’t get any worse, they do.

As the Maoist insurgency intensified in 2001 and casualties soared, almost the entire royal family, including King Birendra, was massacred. The next year, parliament was dissolved and local elected bodies disbanded. As political parties bickered, King Gyanendra, who succeeded his brother, sacked the prime minister in 2002 and ruled through nominated ministers.

Last week, King Gyanendra sacked his prime minister again, declared a state of emergency, and suspended civil liberties. Nepal’s 15-year experiment with democracy now seems over, at least for the present. With complete press censorship, one of the last remaining freedoms from the 1990 People’s Movement is gone. Since February 1, Nepal’s press, until then one of the freest in the world, has been subjected to absolute censorship. Nothing critical of the king’s move, in letter or spirit, is allowed to be printed or broadcast, and action will be taken against anyone who violates this ban.

Armed soldiers sat inside newsrooms this week, vetting the galleys before they went to press. Sometimes, they changed headlines that they thought were critical of the royal move. Nepal’s vibrant FM radio stations, which were models for decentralised public service broadcasting and community radio, have been prohibited from broadcasting on current affairs; some FM stations have been closed and locked. The BBC’s Nepali service, which used to be broadcast over a network of twelve FM stations throughout the country, has been stopped. All Indian news channels have been dropped from cable networks. On Saturday, two senior journalists were detained for issuing statements critical of the crackdown.

Newspapers and magazines are blandly reproducing official pronouncements and reports from the state-run news agency. Some have taken the risk of resorting to metaphors and allegory while others poke fun at the whole situation by writing editorials on ballet dancing or bee-keeping. At least one newspaper came out with its news pages completely blank.

Most of the younger journalists, especially those in radio, have been shocked by the censorship. The freedoms that they were so used to, and maybe even took for granted, have now been snatched away. But for older journalists like me, there is a strong sense of déjà vu: the controls hark back to the times of the partyless absolute monarchy that existed before 1990 when self-censorship was the order of the day. Irrational news decisions, sycophancy, and propaganda passed as journalism. Even in those days, editors, reporters, and columnists played a cat and mouse game with the authorities, resorting to satire, humour, or metaphor.

But punishment could be harsh. Many journalists spent time behind bars, and there was a price to be paid even when accidental typos appeared in the morning newspapers — like the time a headline about a royal birthday read “suspicious” instead of “auspicious”.

Old jokes from the pre-1990 days have come back, like this one: a man was walking down a Kathmandu street shouting, “Down with dictatorship in Pakistan.” A policeman grabbed him and took him in. At the police station, he asked the protester: “Why are you denouncing dictatorship in Pakistan when it exists here?”

To be sure, King Gyanendra’s move this week has been welcomed by many Nepalis who were disenchanted by the instability caused by fractious and corrupt parliamentary leaders and by an insurgency which has cost 12,000 lives in nine years. If this is what the king had to do to restore peace, they say, so be it. After all, the king has staked all and gambled his own throne by taking over power.

They have a point. And many expect the king to pull a rabbit out of the hat and restore peace so that the country can start lifting the living standards of Nepal’s 25 million people, most of whom live below the poverty line. In his speech on February 1, King Gyanendra said the Nepali people would have to temporarily give up democracy in order to save democracy, and many Nepalis will go along with that. For a while. The king has a window of opportunity in which to deliver.

In the long run, the answer to Maoist totalitarianism is greater and more inclusive democracy, a vibrant free press, and civil liberties. Curtailing freedom polarises society between two radicalisms and wipes out the middle ground. And even as a strategy against the Maoists it could be counterproductive.

But maybe the king does have something up his sleeve. (END/COPYRIGHT IPS)

Excerpt:

By Kunda Dixit and - -
KATMANDU, Sep 1 2004 (IPS)

Nepal\’s first explosion of religious violence last week has shocked the country, and prompted calls for reviving the kingdom\’s traditional values of tolerance and compassion, writes Kunda Dixit, editor of the weekly newspaper Nepali Times in Kathmandu. As Kathmandu returns to normal this week after the riots, the government will have to tackle the longer term problem of restoring peace. Everyone in Nepal agrees there is no military victory in this conflict. A negotiated solution needs to be found to address the main political demand of the Maoists: set up a constituent assembly to get rid of the monarchy. The Maoists have hinted in the past that they may be willing to live with a constitutional monarchy and their demand for republic is to leave some flexibility in negotiation. What complicates the government\’s dealings with the Maoists is that the parliamentary parties are at loggerheads with the king. The three-month old government of prime minister Sher Bahadur Deuba of a centre-right faction of the Nepali Congress has cobbled together a shaky coalition made up of the moderate left United Marxist-Leninist. But four other parties have refused to join, saying King Gyanendra wants to take the country back to the days of absolute monarchy. The king has repeatedly denied this, but says the parties need to mend their behaviour and be more accountable.

Nepal’s first explosion of religious violence last week has shocked the country, and prompted calls for reviving the kingdom’s traditional values of tolerance and compassion.

When 12 Nepali contract workers were kidnapped by the Ansar al-Sunna group in Iraq on 18 August everyone thought they would soon be released. The government in Kathmandu made appeals on Al Jazeera television through its diplomats in Riyadh and Doha, but since the hostages were security personnel and Nepal is not a member of the US-led coalition in Iraq officials seemed to feel its nationals would not be harmed.

It soon became clear that the kidnappers had no demands and intended to kill the hostages all along. Ten days later on 31 August came the first gruesome images on a website purporting to show the slow beheading of one of the hostages and the execution style shooting of the rest.

Back home in Nepal, the shock gave way to outrage and the anger spilled out into the streets. Overnight, Kathmandu saw its worst anti-Muslim riots in history. No Muslims were killed, but mosques were attacked, Muslim-owned shops destroyed, offices middle eastern airlines ransacked and burnt down and even media offices attacked. But worst of all, the anger of the mobs was directed at the offices of recruitment offices for Nepali migrant labour going to the Gulf and East Asia, most of them were destroyed in a span of six hours on 1 September.

Although some of this anger was spontaneous, it is now becoming clear that the attacks on Muslim targets and the recruitment agencies were planned to inflict maximum damage on Nepal’s economy. The riots snuffed out what was left of Nepal’s tourism and by destroying the recruitment firms Nepal’s biggest source of foreign currency has been put in jeopardy. Remittances from overseas workers brought an estimated $1 billion into the country last year.

The riots came on top of a raging Maoist insurgency in which 10,000 people have been killed in the past eight years. The Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) embarked on its armed struggle in 1996 with the aim of overthrowing the monarchy and replacing it with a peoples’ republic. The inspiration comes from China as well as Peru’s Shining Path. The Nepali comrades say they want to finish Mao Zedong’s incomplete revolution in his homeland, and have strong solidarity with revolutionary movements worldwide and with Maoist groups in north and central India.

Nepal’s poverty and social inequities, the neglect and apathy of its rulers and the failed promise of democracy are at the root of the insurgency. The Maoist built on this popular frustration and grew rapidly not because they were particularly strong but because they used the weakness of the state in a step-by-step strategy of escalating violence. The state made the classic mistake of reacting with harsh crackdowns on the poverty-stricken mid-western districts that pushed many villagers into the Maoist fold.

Then came the massacre of Nepal’s royal family by Crown Prince Dipendra on June 1, 2001. The whole country was plunged into shock, and the Maoists took this as an opportunity to accelerate their revolution, making a bid to capture state power quickly. They took on the army, which had till then remained outside the conflict, and the casualty rate spiraled. Nepali Gurkha soldiers may be famous the world over for bravery, but they have found it difficult to fight a guerrilla war against their own people in one of the world’s most difficult terrain.

The army has nearly doubled in size in three years and has received weapons and helicopters from India and the United States, Britain and even China.

The Maoists have used safe havens in India to hide, and pass easily back and forth across Nepal’s porous southern border. But New Delhi seems to have realised that there is a danger of a spillover of the revolution to its poorest states bordering Nepal where its own Maoist insurgents have been active. India has recently captured senior Maoist leaders and is waiting for an extradition treaty to be signed before handing them over.

Within Nepal itself, the Maoists have squandered much of their early support after its cadre engaged in brutal executions of teachers, village elders and others who don’t agree with them. They are also feeling the heat from the army’s improved intelligence and undercover work especially in the area around Kathmandu, and are under pressure to abandon training areas. The Maoists now seem to need breathing space which is why they have been trying to put pressure on the army and government to agree to a truce by blockading the capital for a week last month.

In eight years, the insurgency has brutalised Nepali society, ruined the country’s economy, displaced hundreds of thousands of people and ravaged tourism. This has increased pressure on Nepalis to migrate abroad for work. There are now an estimated 1.5 million Nepalis in India, Malaysia, Japan, Korea and the Gulf.

As Kathmandu returns to normal this week after the riots, the government will have to tackle the longer term problem of restoring peace. Everyone in Nepal agrees there is no military victory in this conflict. A negotiated solution needs to be found to address the main political demand of the Maoists: set up a constituent assembly to get rid of the monarchy. The Maoists have hinted in the past that they may be willing to live with a constitutional monarchy and their demand for republic is to leave some flexibility in negotiation.

What complicates the government’s dealings with the Maoists is that the parliamentary parties are at loggerheads with the king. The three-month old government of prime minister Sher Bahadur Deuba of a centre-right faction of the Nepali Congress has cobbled together a shaky coalition made up of the moderate left United Marxist-Leninist. But four other parties have refused to join, saying King Gyanendra wants to take the country back to the days of absolute monarchy. The king has repeatedly denied this, but says the parties need to mend their behaviour and be more accountable. (END/COPYRIGHT IPS)

Excerpt:

By Kunda Dixit and - -
KATMANDU, May 1 2003 (IPS)

Suddenly, after years of hostility and mistrust, peace seems to be breaking out all over the South East Asian subcontinent, writes Kunda Dixit, editor and publisher of the Nepali Times newspaper in Kathmandu. In this analysis the author writes that India and Pakistan are, once more, trying to make up, a fragile ceasefire in Sri Lanka has now held for more than a year, and in Nepal the government and Maoist rebels are trying to find a negotiated settlement. The olive branch appears to have come from Indian prime minister Vajpayee\’s effort to go down in history as a man of peace and not someone who oversaw a wasteful nuclear arms race with Pakistan and the rise of Hindu revivalists. When he dramatically announced in parliament last month that he was willing to give peace \’\’a third and last try\’\’, the offer was immediately seized upon by the Pakistani side.

Suddenly, after years of hostility and mistrust, peace seems to be breaking out all over the South Asian subcontinent, home to 1.5 billion people.

India and Pakistan are, once more, trying to make up, a fragile ceasefire in Sri Lanka has now held for more than a year, and in Nepal the government and Maoist rebels are trying to find a negotiated settlement.

What is going on?

Many analysts give the United States credit for the Indo-Pakistan rapprochement, and say this is the direct fallout of the global ‘war on terror’ because Washington does not want its allies to be at each others’ throats. And it is true that senior US diplomats have been doing the Islamabad-New Delhi shuttle. With the Taliban not yet vanquished in Afghanistan, the war in Iraq coming to a messy end, and Al Qaeda alive and kicking around the world, the Americans do not want another war between these two nuclear armed neighbours.

But America gets too much credit. This time, the olive branch appears to have come from the effort of Indian prime minister Atal Behari Vajpayee to go down in history as a man of peace and not someone who oversaw a wasteful nuclear arms race with Pakistan and the rise of Hindu revivalists. The poet-statesman has always been a pacifist, as the verses he has penned in the past nuclear war and violence attest. At a deep personal level he must feel uncomfortable with war-mongering.

So when he dramatically announced in parliament last month that he was willing to give peace ”a third and last try”, the offer was immediately taken up by the Pakistani side. Gen Pervez Musharraf is trapped between the devil and the deep blue sea. After he seized power from an elected government in 1999, all hell has broken lose in his neighbourhood with the war in Afghanistan and its aftermath. Al Qaeda and Taliban remnants have taken shelter along the western border regions. The American military has set up bases in Pakistan, and despite serious domestic opposition, Musharraf has hitched his wagons to the American anti-terror caravan.

Obliged to navigate between Islamic parties, which showed a strong performance in elections earlier this year, the supporters of the erstwhile parliamentary parties of Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif, and the need to address America’s concerns make, Musharraf has been performing a highwire act.

The general knows that his salvation lies in foreign investment and rapid economic development to create jobs to lure the youth away from fundamentalism, as has happened in moderate Muslim countries like Malaysia and the United Arab Emirates. For this, it is essential that there is peace on his eastern flank with India.

To be sure, mistrust between the two leaders runs deep. Vajpayee considers Musharraf the architect of the Kargil offensive in 1998 that wrecked his previous peace foray. He blames the Pakistani military establishment for backing separatists in Kashmir and in audacious terrorist attacks like that on the Indian parliament last year. The current rapprochement is still threatened by militaristic hotheads on both sides, and there are plenty of hardliners in India and Pakistan who do not want peace. But public opinion is turning against this state of perpetual war.

Another direct fallout of the September 11 attacks was the Sri Lankan peace deal to end the Tamil war, which has claimed 70,000 lives in the past 18 years. After the Tamil Tigers were put on terrorist lists in the West, the separatist militants suddenly found that their vital source of diaspora dollars had dried up.

This left them with no option but to start a dialogue. Luckily, Sri Lankan prime minister Ranil Wickremasinghe had just been elected on a peace platform, and he regarded a resolution of the conflict as a cornerstone of his political strategy.

Brokered by Norwegian peace monitors, the ceasefire has largely held. But the process is on hold at the moment as the Tigers wage psy-war to pressure the US to lift the terrorist tag. Nevertheless, most analysts believe that this hurdle can be overcome.

In the Himalayas, Nepal’s seven-year insurgency war is also on hold after a ceasefire went into effect in January. The underground Maoist party has surfaced and even opened an office in Kathmandu, negotiations are into the third round, and across the country long-suffering Nepalis are taking advantage of the lull in fighting. King Gyanendra is credited with restoring peace, but he is regarded with deep suspicion by the parliamentary parties which believe he is taking the country back to the days of absolute monarchy.

But Nepal’s peace process has the blessings of the international community. Delhi doesn’t want Nepal’s revolution to spill over into the Indian states of Bihar, Andhra Pradesh and Orissa, where its own Maoist movements are active. The US and Britain have also contributed military hardware and training for the Royal Nepal Army to battle the insurgency. This is a war that Nepal, which has one of the lowest per capita income levels in Asia, could ill afford.

In all four South Asian countries –India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Nepal– the political leadership has realised that peace is the first pre-requisite for economic progress, which in itself is the guarantee of long-term peace. All four countries deserve the full backing of the international community. (END/COPYRIGHT IPS)

Excerpt:

By Kunda Dixit
MALE, Maldives, Feb 22 1997 (IPS)

The mid-day tourist rush is just beginning at the island airport of the Maldivian capital.

Germans are queuing up at security check for their flight back to Dusseldorf after a week’s vacation in this archipelago of atolls in the Indian Ocean and trundle trolleys piled high with scuba gear and duffel bags.

On top of the heap of luggage, each tourist carries an identical white plastic satchel. In it are used batteries, empty bottles of sunblock cream, disposable razors and other garbage that they are taking home to Germany.

Nothing is quite so symbolic of the importance that the Maldives attaches to its environment than tourists lugging all their trash back home with them. Indeed, 1997 is ‘Visit Maldives Year’ and the slogan is: “Sustainable Development Through Tourism”.

With a population of just above 250,000, the Maldives received about 350,000 tourists last year and they are the backbone of the country’s economy — forming 40 percent of the annual revenue for the exchequer.

The country has 1,190 islands and 26 atoll formations enclosing azure lagoons, a stupendous variety of marine life and pristine beaches. Atolls are the tops of submerged mountains and the word is derived from the Maldivin language, Dhivehi. There are 1,150 islands and 26 atoll formations in the Maldives, and uncontrolled tourism could have devastated the fragile lagoons and coral reefs.

By deliberately pricing itself at the upper end of the market, the Maldives has made sure that it gets the maximum monetary benefit without the negative environmental impact. It has also minimised the social and cultural side-effects of mass tourism by confining tourists to resort islands where there is very little interaction with the local population.

“There is tremendous awareness of environmental issues at the highest levels of government,” says Narinder Kakar, resident representative here of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), co-sponsor with the World Tourism Organisation (WTO) of an Asia-Pacific ministerial meeting that began here last Sunday.

Kakar hopes the conference will underline to top planners from the region that “tourism must be ecologically bearable, economically viable and socially equitable”. UNDP has been helping the Maldivian government with hotel training and resort management. The Maldives has also been the training ground of tourism instructors for South Asia’s leading hotels.

This week, the Maldives has shown off what it has achieved to the visiting delegates so that other Asia-Pacific can learn from the country’s tourism development model.

“We want to ensure that tourism brings long-term benefit to the country so that the natural resources for tourism do not deteriorate. We want to promote tourism in such a manner that a sustainable future for tourism is ensured,” says the Maldivian tourism minister, Ibrahim Hussain Zaki.

Tourism ministers from most of the 22 Asia-Pacific members of the WTO attended the Maldives meeting, which was titled: ‘Tourism 2000–Building a Sustainable Future for Asia-Pacific’. On Wednesday, delegates announced their ‘Male Declaration on Tourism and Environment’, the development strategy for the region.

“Tourism will need to increasingly adopt a more ecologically- based approach, particularly on islands and fragile destinations, if it is to ensure its own long-term sustainability,” said Francesco Frangialli, secretary-general of the WTO. Otherwise, Frangialli said, “we may continue to be surprised by events and developments beyond our control”.

Tourism experts have hailed the Maldives as a model of just this kind of sustainable tourism development, and they say that is why they chose it as the venue for this meeting.

Resort development is allowed on only 75 uninhabited islands, although 14 more licenses are about to be granted. Only one-fifth of the area of any island is allowed to be built on, and no construction is allowed to exceed the the height of the coconut trees.

Garbage and waste disposal is a big problem. And aside from plastic trash bags for tourists to take home, every resort has an incinerator that burns excess rubbish, bio-degradable waste is turned into compost, sewage is treated before it is piped out into the deep sea outside the lagoon area.

The UNDP-WTO conference was attended by international tourism experts and discussed issues such as sustainable tourism planning and management, market trends in tourism in South Asia.

Also attending were Adrianus Mooy, executive secretary of the U.N.’s Economic Commission for the Asia pacific (ESCAP) and Shridath Ramphal, the co-chairman of the Commission on Global Governance and the South African Environment Minister, Dawie J. De Villiers.

Says Kakar: “We hope the Male Declaration will be a guideline for adopting pragmatic policies and strategies essential to strike the right balance between the economy and the environment.”

Excerpt:

By Kunda Dixit
MALE, Maldives, Feb 22 1997 (IPS)

The mid-day tourist rush is just beginning at the island airport of the Maldivian capital.

c

Excerpt:

By Kunda Dixit
MALE, Maldives, Feb 21 1997 (IPS)

The mid-day tourist rush is just beginning at the island airport of the Maldivian capital. Germans are queuing up at security check for their flight back to Dusseldorf after a week’s vacation in this archipelago of atolls in the Indian Ocean and trundle trolleys piled high with scuba gear and duffel bags.

On top of the heap of luggage, each tourist carries an identical white plastic satchel. In it are used batteries, empty bottles of sunblock cream, disposable razors and other garbage that they are taking home to Germany.

Nothing is quite so symbolic of the importance that the Maldives attaches to its environment than tourists lugging all their trash back home with them. Indeed, 1997 is ‘Visit Maldives Year’ and the slogan is: “Sustainable Development Through Tourism”.

With a population of just above 250,000, the Maldives received about 350,000 tourists last year and they are the backbone of the country’s economy — forming 40 percent of the annual revenue for the exchequer.

The country has 1,190 islands and 26 atoll formations enclosing azure lagoons, a stupendous variety of marine life and pristine beaches. Atolls are the tops of submerged mountains and the word is derived from the Maldivian language, Dhivehi. There are 1,150 islands and 26 atoll formations in the Maldives, and uncontrolled tourism could have devastated the fragile lagoons and coral reefs.

By deliberately pricing itself at the upper end of the market, the Maldives has made sure that it gets the maximum monetary benefit without the negative environmental impact. It has also minimised the social and cultural side-effects of mass tourism by confining tourists to resort islands where there is very little interaction with the local population.

“There is tremendous awareness of environmental issues at the highest levels of government,” says Narinder Kakar, resident representative here of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), co-sponsor with the World Tourism Organisation (WTO) of an Asia-Pacific ministerial meeting that began here last Sunday.

Kakar hopes the conference will underline to top planners from the region that “tourism must be ecologically bearable, economically viable and socially equitable”. UNDP has been helping the Maldivian government with hotel training and resort management. The Maldives has also been the training ground of tourism instructors for South Asia’s leading hotels.

This week, the Maldives has shown off what it has achieved to the visiting delegates so that other Asia-Pacific can learn from the country’s tourism development model.

“We want to ensure that tourism brings long-term benefit to the country so that the natural resources for tourism do not deteriorate. We want to promote tourism in such a manner that a sustainable future for tourism is ensured,” says the Maldivian tourism minister, Ibrahim Hussain Zaki.

Tourism ministers from most of the 22 Asia-Pacific members of the WTO attended the Maldives meeting, which was titled: ‘Tourism 2000–Building a Sustainable Future for Asia-Pacific’. On Wednesday, delegates announced their ‘Male Declaration on Tourism and Environment’, the development strategy for the region.

“Tourism will need to increasingly adopt a more ecologically- based approach, particularly on islands and fragile destinations, if it is to ensure its own long-term sustainability,” said Francesco Frangialli, secretary-general of the WTO. Otherwise, Frangialli said, “we may continue to be surprised by events and developments beyond our control”.

Tourism experts have hailed the Maldives as a model of just this kind of sustainable tourism development, and they say that is why they chose it as the venue for this meeting.

Resort development is allowed on only 75 uninhabited islands, although 14 more licenses are about to be granted. Only one-fifth of the area of any island is allowed to be built on, and no construction is allowed to exceed the the height of the coconut trees.

Garbage and waste disposal is a big problem. And aside from plastic trash bags for tourists to take home, every resort has an incinerator that burns excess rubbish, bio-degradable waste is turned into compost, sewage is treated before it is piped out into the deep sea outside the lagoon area.

The UNDP-WTO conference was attended by international tourism experts and discussed issues such as sustainable tourism planning and management, market trends in tourism in South Asia.

Also attending were Adrianus Mooy, executive secretary of the U.N.’s Economic Commission for the Asia pacific (ESCAP) and Shridath Ramphal, the co-chairman of the Commission on Global Governance and the South African Environment Minister, Dawie J. De Villiers.

Says Kakar: “We hope the Male Declaration will be a guideline for adopting pragmatic policies and strategies essential to strike the right balance between the economy and the environment.”

Excerpt:

By Kunda Dixit
COLOMBO, Feb 20 1997 (IPS)

The Second World War was just over, Asian countries were emerging out of colonialism, and the Cold War was about to begin. It was 1950, and ministers of the British Commonwealth, meeting for the first time after the war decided that a major development effort was required for Asian countries.

They met in the capital of Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) and decided that Asia needed something like the Marshall Plan that had just helped rebuild Europe after the ravages of war.

Rather grandiosily, it was called The Colombo Plan for the Economic and Social Development of South and South-east Asia, and was the first international effort in foreign aid in Asia. The key movers were Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Britain and the United States and originally included Asian members of the Commonwealth like India, Ceylon, Pakistan and Burma.

For the next decade or so, the Colombo Plan helped Asian developing countries with thousands of development projects, skills training and scholarships to a staggering 350,000 Asian students. By the late 1950’s membership had expanded to include non-Commonwealth members like Thailand, Nepal, Indonesia, Laos, South Korea, Iran and Afghanistan.

But with the growth of the United Nations, the Colombo Plan’s role was soon eclipsed and duplicated by better-endowed agencies like the Bangkok-based Economic Commission for the Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP), the Asian Development Bank (AsDB) and regional groupings like ASEAN and SAARC.

Britain, and Canada soon lost interest and pulled out in the 1980’s. Funding failed, and the Colombo Plan was in danger of becoming extinct. At a meeting in 1989, remaining donor members put it diplomatically, and said the organisation should consider “retiring graciously from the international scene”.

But, in a move that also symbolises the shift in the world’s economic centre in the past 50 years, the East Asians stepped in. Japan and Korea, which were once beneficiaries of the Plan are now putting in money to revitalise the organisation.

The strongest indication of the new East Asian interest in the Colombo Plan is the appointment in 1995 of South Korean economist, Hak Su Kim as the new secretary general of the Colombo Plan.

In his office in the Plan’s small secretariat in a sleepy side-street of Colombo, Hak points to a wall map of Asia and says: “We are in transition. We want to see how the industrialised countries of the Far East, the newly- industrialised South-East Asian countries with the South Asian region can learn from each other.”

Hak believes the Colombo Plan could be the right vehicle for this new pan-Asian cooperation in training, technological knowhow and information exchange and could cooperate with the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and other regional organisations.

The prime mover of the new Colombo Plan is Japan, and it would like to promote South-South cooperation within the Asia-Pacific and is prompting Korea, Thailand, Singapore and other East Asian member countries to be more active members.

“Japan was strongly behind the revitalisation, and it has a very strong attachment to the Colombo Plan,” adds Hak.

Tokyo appears to have sentimental reasons to return to the Colombo Plan. When it joined as a member in 1954, its post-war rehabilitation was in full swing back home. Japan became a donor nation for the first time when it provided small grants for technical assistance under the Colombo Plan to developing Asia.

The revitalisation plan approved at a meeting in Seoul in 1994 sought to make the Colombo Plan a primary agency for South-South cooperation within Asia for exchange of technical expertise.

Most East Asian members of the Colombo Plan have now become tiger economies themselves and need no more need aid. So the plan decided to focus on the most-vulnerable countries: the least developed, the landlocked, the transition economies of Indochina and tiny island states.

Japan’s support has gone to a programme to upgrade public administration skills in cooperation with the Tokyo-based Asian Productivity Organisation (APO). South Korea is helping with a campaign to develop the private sector in Asian developing countries — especially for small and medium scale enterprises.

The United States and Japan are continuing to support the Colombo Plan’s advisory programme for drugs to coordinate region-wide efforts to reduce supply and demand for narcotics in Asia.

Excerpt:

By Kunda Dixit
BANGKOK, Dec 9 1996 (IPS)

An international free market in food under new World Trade Organisation (WTO) rules could undermine Asia’s ability to feed itself at a time when the world’s most populous region is already facing an unprecedented drop in food stocks.

So say critics of the free trade thrust being pushed by Western member countries of the Geneva-based WTO which is holding its first ministerial conference this week in Singapore.

The five-day meeting, which started Monday, will discuss a range of free trade initiatives, with agriculture expected to be one of the areas where developing and industrialised nations will not see eye to eye on the pace and extent of the liberalisation process.

“The trade regime that is being pushed is going to undermine food security in developing countries,” warns Gurmit Singh of Malaysia’s Environment Protection Society.

He says free trade will put poorer nations at the mercy of the markets at a time when international cereal prices have soared due to shortages and falling stocks.

As Asia prospers economically, it is emerging as a major market for the world’s main food exporting nations like the United States, Canada and Australia.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture says that East Asian countries import 50 million tons of grain a year — more than any other region in the world.

But this will be nothing compared to the expected demand from China, in the next century.

China’s cereal production is plauteauing off at a time when the gap between production and demand is widening. China, with a population of 1.2 billion people, imported five million tons of grain in 1990, and according to the Worldwatch Institute, imports are expected to top 480 million tons by the year 2030.

The reason: the growing consumption of an increasingly-affluent population for meat, milk and beer, which puts added demand on cereals.

The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) says that Asia is the fastest growing market for agricultural imports, accounting already for 65 per cent of the total world share.

At the same time, agriculture’s share of the gross domestic product (GDP) of East Asian economies is falling sharply, resulting in an increasing dependence on food imports.

Bangkok-based FAO Director for the Asia-Pacific region, Obaidullah Khan, says the region has been seeing the steepest rise in prices of cereals in the past year and he predicts further increases.

“Prices of staples are up to 40 per cent above the years of food shortages of 1973, this is a threat to food security,” says Khan.

In a report prepared for the World Food Summit in Rome in November called ‘Towards a New Green Revolution’, the FAO says that Asia has 500 million hungry people — nearly double the number of all other regions combined. Most are in South Asia, where two out of every three children are underfed.

The last time mass starvation threatened Asia 25 years ago, researchers came up with the miracle ‘Green Revolution’ rice that staved off famine.

This time, technological fixes to boost grain production are at least 10 years away. In addition, indiscriminate use of agro- chemicals for high yields of Green Revolution seeds have destroyed soils and urban sprawl is eating up farmlands.

On top of this, trade liberalisation and the indiscriminate entry of foreign cereal producers is going to further reduce the capacity of Asia’s poorer nations to feed themselves, critics say.

At a meeting in the Thai capital before the Food Summit, Asian non-governmental organisations (NGOs) urged a freeze on further liberalisation of agricultural trade until the impact of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) accord was studied and its impact on subsistence farmers carefully explored.

The Geneva-based WTO is the successor organisation of GATT.

“It might be important to put a food security clause in the World Trade Organisation,” says Toni Quizon of the manila-based Asian NGO Coalition for Agrarian Reform. “The right of countries to protect their food security at the national level must be protected.”

Asian activists say that watered-down resolutions agreed at the Food Summit undermined FAO’s own efforts in the Asia-Pacific region to take a progressive stance on food security and the effect of market liberalisation.

They have welcomed FAO’s efforts to consult farmers’ organisations and community groups in the region and urge FAO to “listen to the rising and increasingly organised voices of the poor and the marginalised”.

In its report, FAO underlines the urgent need for a second ‘Green Revolution’ in Asia. But instead of a technological fix that would benefit only rich farmers, this time the organisation says the solution is in making agriculture sustainable, and restoring the ability of small farmers to feed themselves.

Says Khan: “The effects of the first Green Revolution are still being felt today. But that experience is unlikely to serve as a pattern for the next one. The Second Green Revolution must focus on the poorer farmer, herder of fisherfolk.”

But the danger is that poorer farmers, already marginalised by technology-driven, industrial agriculture and hurt by government neglect, will be further undercut because of the threat of cheap imports allowed under WTO rules.

Farmers will be forced to give up their livelihoods, migrate to cities in search of jobs. The process could be irreversible, and permanently affect agricultural production.

And as Susan George of the Netherlands-based Transnational Institute said at a meeting in Manila earlier this year: “You can make a worker out of a peasant, but you cannot make a peasant out of a worker.”

Excerpt:

By Kunda Dixit
MANILA, Nov 24 1996 (IPS)

The leaders of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum (APEC) gather in the former U.S. naval base of Subic Bay Monday for a summit aimed at doing more than simply reaffirm the vision of free trade in the Pacific Rim.

The Summit will finally put the international stamp of approval on the Philippines’ dramatic economic recovery and the stability of its democratic political system.

In the past five years, Subic Bay and the Philippines literally have risen from the ashes – the devastation caused by the eruption of Mt Pinatubo and the withdrawal of two big U.S. military bases.

In 1992, when the Stars-and-Stripes were lowered for the last time at Subic Bay, north of Manila, and the huge U.S. Air Force base at nearby Clark , many here and abroad predicted that the loss of jobs and rental would wreck the stagnant economy.

There was good reason for pessimism: the country was emerging from nearly two decades of plunder under the Marcos dictatorship. And democracy under President Corazon Aquino was constantly threatened by a series of coup attempts by ambitious young military officers, which in turn scared away foreign investors.

But not only did the Philippines recover, it prospered beyond the wildest dreams of most financial analysts. The U.S. pullback also gave a new sense of independence and identity to Filipinos who were used to being treated as a trans-Pacific kid brother.

Subic Bay’s recovery from volcanic and economic devastation is symbolic of the emergence of the Philippines itself to “tiger- hood” — a term reserved for East and South-east Asian nations that have recorded strong economic growth.

With a Gross National Product (GNP) growth rate that has topped seven per cent this year, a falling inflation rate, booming foreign investment, and soaring export revenues, it all seems too good to be true.

And yet it is. Which is what has made some of the critics of Philippine democracy, notably Singapore’s former prime minister, Lee Kuan Yew, who told Filipinos three years ago that they needed less democracy and more discipline, eat their words.

Lee’s detractors in the Philippines and abroad cannot hide their glee. They are using the APEC summit to thumb their noses at autocrats gathered here.

East Asia’s economic miracle had given more clout to the argument of countries like Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia and China that curtailment of political and individual freedoms was a pre-requisite to rapid economic progress.

It was not a coincidence that all vocal exponents of these ‘Asian values’ were authoritarian states which used the arguments to suppress dissent and curb the Press at home.

Even when militarised autocracies like Taiwan and South Korea emerged into full-blown democracies three years ago, the doctrine of discipline-for-growth was still respectable.

Now, the Philippines has become the latest showcase in the clash between Asian and Western values, and it is getting glowing media reviews, especially from the Western Press:

The ‘Economist’ says: “Yesterday’s sick man of Asia looks pretty perky today — and without the help of an autocratic ruler.”

“Filipinos used to despair of their poor, corrupt country. Now they think it can be the next Asian Tiger,” – ‘Newsweek’.

The ‘New York Times’: “This year, the Philippines, more democratic than ever, is growing faster than Singapore…the new growth statistics challenge a familiar argument made by several Asian rulers that political freedom hinders economic growth and is alien to Asian values.”

The ‘Financial Times’: “Manila Chalks Up Several Tiger Stripes.”

Manila newspapers have re-printed congratulatory editorials verbatim as world leaders gathered here over the weekend, and haven’t been able to suppress their pride at being taken seriously at last.

APEC is thus turning out to be a coming-out party for Filipinos.

There is the smell of both broken promises and sweet success in the air. Till 1965, polls among businessmen used to show the Philippines as the country most likely after Japan to attain industrialised status.

Columnist Amando Donornila says: “The windfall of good news from the foreign press comes at the right time, and more than makes up for the more sceptical assessment of some of the Philippine media.”

Manila newspapers have been giving wide play to anti-APEC meetings and demonstrations and have negatively highlighted the ‘Friendship Lanes’ that allow APEC delegates to whiz past gridlocked traffic in the capital’s snarled streets.

For others who had been itching to get back at Singapore for Lee Kuan Yew’s lecturing and its execution of a Filipino maid last year, favourable foreign media coverage was the right ammunition.

Manila’s ‘Today’ newspaper in an editorial entitled ‘Take a Bow’ said Philippine president Fidel Ramos has “taken the case for a democratic road to development into the tiger’s lair, Singapore itself”.

The presence here of 18 heads of state and their delegations, more than 500 top business executives from the Pacific Rim countries gives Ramos an ideal public relations opportunity to not only showcase what he has achieved, but also to drum up more investments and goodwill.

To be sure, not everything is bright and rosy.

Many Filipinos douibt whether hitching their country’s wagon to the Pacific Century and an era of barrier-free trade will benefit the weaker members of trade blocs. Farmers, especially, are concerned that this will benefit the cash crop plantations that have driven them of the best lands.

Despite six years of democracy, the Philippine polity is still patronage-dominated. Legislators tend to be provincial landlords and traditional oligarchs who have become even more entrenched. Land reform is stalled because they will not vote it into law.

Foreign investors have flocked in, but not into labour- intensive manufacturing that would create enough jobs so that the estimated four million Filipinos do not have to migrate overseas to seek work.

The four years of political stability under President Ramos may also come to an end with the next presidential elections scheduled for 1998. Ramos is barred, by the constitution, from a second-term and prospective candidates (some of them traditional politicians of the old mould) are jockeying for leverage.

Ramos approached his government’s inherited woes with the meticulousness of a military campaign: Resolve insurgencies in the countryside, solve the power crisis, restore foreign investor confidence and bolster the economy while making sure that economic growth benefits poor Filipinos.

With two years to go, Ramos must move quickly to keep his last promise to the 40 per cent of Filipinos still living below the poverty line. In addition, there is no guarantee that the post- Ramos political free-for-all will not bring out the worst traits of Philippine politics – corruption, divisiveness and patronage – and wreck the gains of the past four years.

Philippine expert Paul Hutchcroft writes in a recent paper for ‘Asia Society’: “Although democratic institutions do indeed appear to be consolidating themselves more firmly, many sectors of Philippine society remain marginal to the overall democratic process — and decidedly undemocratic forces hold sway in many localities.”

Hutchcroft says economic liberalisation by itself will not solve the country’s woes without stronger political and institutional foundations to democracy.

Excerpt:

By Kunda Dixit
SYDNEY, Nov 21 1996 (IPS)

An Australian TV expose alleging financial links between a Singaporean government firm and a branded Burmese drug lord has embarrassed the strict city state, and made a maverick opposition leader in Singapore the target of ire.

‘Singapore Sling’ was an investigative report aired last month on the ‘Dateline’ programme of the domestic Australian TV channel, SBS, and was retransmitted last week by Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) on its Asian satellite feed.

The programme said that the Government of Singapore Investment Corporation (GIC) had sizeable investments in the Myanmar Fund in which an accused Burmese heroin kingpin close to the military is also said to have a stake.

SBS quoted Singapore opposition leader Chee Soon Juan as saying that he was alarmed by the links between Singapore and the Burmese military junta, which is known by the acronym SLORC (State Law and Order Restoration Council).

Chee said: “Why we engage with the SLORC when they are in some way or another connected with drug trafficking that’s going on in Burma. And when drug traffickers pass through, come through Singapore, when they are caught, we hang them. It’s a moral question that I think we have to ask ourselves.”

Singapore is well known for its strict laws against drug- trafficking: people caught with as little as 15 grammes of heroin or 500 grammes of cannabis face capital punishment if convicted. So far in 1996, 35 drug traffickers have been hanged and 280 have been executed in the past two decades.

In the introduction to ‘Singapore Sling’, Dateline reporter Mike Carey says: “This programme is not about illegality, more about hypocrisy.”

In Singapore, Chee’s remarks on the Dateline programme have landed him in even more hot water than he already was.

Chee is secretary general of the Singapore Democratic Party (SDP) and the most outspoken critic of the People Action Party (PAP) which has governed Singapore nearly unopposed for the past three decades. The SDP holds three of the four opposition seats in Singapore’s 81-seat parliament.

He had stood against Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong in elections in 1992, and since then the government has hounded Chee, sacking him from his lecturer job at the National University of Singapore and suing him for defamation and contempt of parliament to the point that he had to sell his house to pay legal fees.

Goh described Chee’s remarks on the Australian television programme as a sign of disloyalty and said the opposition leader had “failed to instinctively defend the country”. Chee has also been attacked by Singapore’s state-controlled media for sullying the country’s international image.

In ‘Singapore Sling’, Australian reporters spent a year tracing GIC investments in the Myanmar Fund: following the paper trail from Singapore to Rangoon to Hong Kong to the Irish Stock Exchange in Dublin and the tax-free haven on the Channel Island of Jersey.

Singapore’s economic miracle has given the tiny nation a massive foreign exchange reserve estimated at anywhere between 80 to 100 billion dollars, much of it from the country’s compulsory pension savings.

The GIC is entrusted with investing these funds, and a lot of it goes to countries in the region — Vietnam, China, Thailand and India. It was the core shareholder in the Myanmar Fund when it was set up in 1994 to generate funds for Burma’s tourism infrastructure.

After Britain, the former colonial power, Singapore is the biggest investor in Burma (also known as Myanmar). According to Burmese government estimates, by the end of May 1996, approved Singaporean investments totalled 606.38 million dollars.

Soon after the Australian programme was aired, the Singapore government confirmed the GIC held 21.5 per cent stake in shares in the Myanmar Fund worth 10 million dollars, though the shares had been transferred from GIC’s name to another Jersey-registered company.

The Myanmar Fund is incorporated in Jersey, listed in the Irish Stock Exchange and it has stakes in hotel chains in Burma in which prominent Burmese businessman, Lo Hsing Han also has interest.

Lo Hsing Han and his son, Stephen Law have been tracked by U.S. and other anti-drug trafficking squads. In 1993, the Office of the Narcotics Control Board in Thailand described Lo as being protected by SLORC strongman Gen Khin Nyunt in drug running operations at Tachilek on the Golden Triangle region of the Thai- Burma border.

Law has been denied a visa to enter the United States because of his alleged involvement in narco-trafficking. But he has travelled frequently to Singapore.

Dateline showed that GIC had invested money in a Fund in which the Lo family had interest. It also indicated that the Myanmar Fund had given Lo Hsing Han options to buy 10 per cent of shares in a hotel venture in Burma, and the Fund itself had an option to buy 25 per cent of shares in another Lo-owned company.

The Singaporean government said the GIC’s dealings had been bona fide commercial transactions and there was “nothing mysterious” about it.

Yet, Australian journalists involved in the investigative report are intrigued that just six weeks after being named the major shareholder in the Myanmar Fund, the GIC name and the Singapore government no longer have any official links with it.

In another development, the Singaporean representative in the investment committee of Myanmar Fund, Taw Cheng Kong was charged earlier this month with eight counts of bribery worth 1.7 million dollars to investment GIC funds into preferred companies.

In a letter to SBS, the Singapore government said Dateline’s “innuendos are preposterous”, adding: “It is absurd to suggest that the GIC would undermine our efforts to keep Singapore drug- free by knowingly supporting or condoning activities connected with the illicit drug trade.”

In Sydney, SBS said the Singapore government had failed to answer the question about the Myanmar Fund’s links with Lo Hsing Han.

Excerpt:

By Kunda Dixit
CANBERRA, Nov 20 1996 (IPS)

Australia has always suffered a bit of an identity problem: it is located in the South but has always been seen as a part of the North, it is in the East but is regarded as Western country.

Today, as this vast nation-continent seeks to make the transition from its British settler heritage to be a part of an East Asian neighbourhood, there are signs of ethnic fissures and xenophobia.

Australia’s northern coast lies only 400 kms across a narrow strait from Indonesia and, even if white Australians may not admit it openly, many are concerned they may one day become a minority if citizens of the populous Asian countries to the north are allowed to emigrate freely.

And when a newly-elected politician used her maiden speech in parliament two months ago to declare that Australia was in danger of “being swamped by Asians” it unleashed a media firestorm that is still smouldering.

Pauline Hanson owns a fish-and-chip shop in an outback town in Queensland. In elections earlier this year, Hanson used a xenophobic platform to catapult herself to the federal parliament in Canberra. And when she got here the first thing she did was to give a speech calling for a halt to Asian immigration and a reduction in subsidies to Australian aboriginal groups.

The ensuing row has polarised Australians between populist and liberal opinion, ruffled newly-elected politicians, strained Canberra’s ties with Asian countries and rattled the country’s tourism industry which depends on Asian visitors.

A stray remark by a novice legislator could perhaps have gone unnoticed, but the reluctance of Prime Minister John Howard to immediately denounce the remark added fuel to the fire.

The international media reported on the spreading racial bushfire. This was picked up by newspapers in Jakarta, Bangkok, Kuala Lumpur and Hong Kong, triggering angry editorials.

In a stinging commentary, the Bangkok Post wrote: “How the Australian government, opposition and people handle this debate from here on remains to be seen (but) Asian eyes will be watching.”

In Australia itself, not a day has gone by without newspapers, radio talk-back shows or television news reporting on the aftershocks of the Hanson bombshell.

Although most coverage has been critical of Hanson and accuses her of being racist, radio and television talk-backs have been predominantly pro-Hanson. One Sydney talkshow host reported 71 per cent of its callers supporting Hanson and echoing her anti-Asian sentiments.

In Canberra, senior foreign ministry officials seemed to be in damage-control mode when they met a group of Asian editors last week: they blamed the media for blowing the Hanson remark “out of context” and “fanning the flames” of racism.

Citing the virulent anti-Australian editorials in Asian newspapers one ministry official pointed out: “If an Australian newspaper had written even half of what is in some of these papers, all hell would have broken loose.”

He has a point. Australia’s whites-only immigration policy which was scrapped 30 years ago had earned the country the label “Asia’s South Africa”.

But since then Canberra’s strong stand on multi-culturalism and open immigration has made it one of the most racially-tolerant countries in the world. Some Asian countries, on the other hand, have official policies that are blatantly racist or favour ethnic majorities.

Only 4.6 per cent of Australia’s 18 million people are of Asian origin. In 1995, Asians made up 40 per cent of the 110,000 foreigners who emigrated to Australia. At present rates, Asians will still make up less than eight per cent of the country’s population in the next 35 years.

Still, more than half of Australians polled by a Sydney newspaper after the Hanson remark said they wanted Asian immigration reduced.

The reason for this could be that though they still make up a small portion of the population, the number of Asian immigrants in Australia more than doubled in the past 10 years to 700,000. Asians also tend to congregate in preferred city neighbourhoods instead of dispersing throughout the country, thus making them more visible.

Some Asian-Australians, like Ramesh Thakur who is head of the Peace Research Centre at the Australian National University, admit that Hanson’s remarks fed racism because they were based on ignorance. But governments can legitimately reduce migration when multicultural peace is fragile, he says.

“No government policy can afford to move too far ahead of community attitudes. On balance, it is more important to ensure fair and equitable treatment to those already in than to insist on enlarging their proportion in the face of hostile opposition, even if racist and ignorant,” Thakur wrote in a commentary.

Even so, what has shocked many Asian Australians is the rise in racial abuse after the Hanson debate flared up. A survey by the Chinese Australian Forum showed that the incidence of racially motivated attacks and harassment had doubled after the Hanson speech.

Vietnamese Australian Dai Le, who works as a television researcher in Sydney, was walking with her sisters recently when men in a car shouted “Asians get out” as they raced past. She says this had never happened to her before.

“In the 17 years that I have spent growing up in Australia, I’ve never witnessed so much fear and loathing against migrants, Asians particularly,” she adds.

Racism and xenophobia are always the first symptoms of economic bad times. Australia is just coming out of recession and one in every three young Australians of working age does not have a job. In this situation, race becomes the easy scapegoat.

Another reason is ignorance. Many Australians simply do not know that despite what Pauline Hanson said, only five in every hundred Australians is of Asian descent.

At the end of the October, when the Australian parliament passed a bipartisan motion rejecting the Hanson line the number of racist calls on talk-back radio programmes dropped by half.

Media analysts saw this as a good sign that once politicians made a statement denouncing racism, it resulted in an immediate shift in public opinion.

If that is true, then part of the blame for the xenophobia getting out of hand was the reluctance of the Australian government to come out early and strong against the Hanson remarks.

Media analyst Mike Seccombe summed up the lessons: “Public opinion is very fluid and can be modified by reasoned argument from political leaders and by reasoned argument in the media …phenomena like Hanson can only survive in the factual dark.”

Excerpt:

By Kunda Dixit
LIUMINYING, China, Aug 24 1996 (IPS)

The poplar-lined road turns off from the main highway 50 kms south of Beijing, slices through neat rows of vegetables, along irrigated fields of rice and passes poultry factories to the reception hall for visitors.

In a country of socialist traditions where the rest of the nation has always been told to fulfil quotas and emulate the shining example set by ideal over-achievers, Liuminying is a demonstration farm.

Since the days of the 1966-1976 Cultural Revolution when then Communist Party leader Mao Zedong sent millions of young people into rural China “to plant grain everywhere”, Liuminying has been a cut above other farms — in terms of raising production, diversifying crops and experimenting with new technology.

Back then, Liuminying was a model of a socialist commune.

Adapting adroitly to the post-Mao era, it became a model for China’s contract responsibility system that gave private farmers incentives to produce more. And today, in liberalising China, it has become a model enterprise, even setting up a joint venture factory to export sleeping bags and tents to Germany.

Liuminying is such a success story that the farm now has a separate unit just to show visitors around. Many foreign dignitaries in China find Liuminying included in their itinerary by their local hosts. In the past ten years, some 190,000 visitors, local and foreign, have toured the farm.

Zhang Shanao is now 70, and a retired farmer. “Our success is due to the hard work that the villagers have put into making Liuminying a model village,” he says.

The village’s small population of 900 today has a standard of living much higher than the national average. It is not difficult to see why: the farm gets full support from the government to serve as an example and a showcase.

At the visitor centre, officials rattles off the statistics: the farm produces 100,000 chicken a year, 5,000 pigs, 200,000 roast ducks for Beijing’s restaurants, 200,000 kgs of milk a year and it has recently bought 30 trucks to start a driving school.

But most importantly, Liuminying is today presented to visitors as China’s response to the challenge of feeding its huge 1.2 billion population — not through commercial industrialised farming of the North American variety, but using ecological agriculture.

Ecological farming maximises solar energy use by plants and promotes recycling of organic nutrients. It is less energy intensive, does not rely on chemical fertilisers and pesticides and is suited to self-reliant, low-investment small farms. It is more sustainable and does not destroy the soil.

“Ecological agriculture has transformed Liuminying,” says Bian Yousheng, an agronomist with the Beijing Municipal Institute of Environmental Protection. “And it holds the answer to raising food production all over China.”

China’s grain production shot up after farm reforms, raising harvests from 200 million tons in 1977 to 300 million tons in 1984. Since then, the growth has not been as phenomenal.

Meanwhile, China has to feed an additional 15 million people every year and to satisfy the higher meat consumption of newly- affluent Chinese it uses more grain — cancelling out past gains. By 2030, China’s consumption of grain is expected to hit 480 million tons: nearly double the projected growth in production.

After initial denial, even the Chinese leadership is now taking dire predictions of the looming food crisis seriously.

Last year’s pessimistic report by the Washington-based Worldwatch Institute which concluded that China was losing the capacity to feed itself has reportedly been translated into Chinese and circulated to high officials.

Not everyone is pessimistic. The U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) says China’s rice yields have doubled to six tons per hectare since 1980, and it says this can go up to eight tons. There is still a vast potential for marginal land to be brought into cultivation.

Although farmlands are being devoured by expanding cities, highways and dams, China still has 60 million hectares of farmlands where yield could be increased by better irrigation.

Chinese experts like Bian Yousheng are convinced that ecological agriculture is not only environmentally friendly, but can give sustained high yields and also makes economic sense.

In Liuminying, for instance, almost nothing is wasted. The slurry from the piggeries, poultry farms, the dairy and even human excreta from public toilets are fed into a giant bio-gas system that generates methane gas for cooking and heating in the village, the digested material is used as fertiliser in fields.

The farm has managed to save 100 tons of coal use annually, and it has reduced chemical fertilisers from 250,000 kgs per year in 1982 to less than 70,000 kgs last year. Pesticide use has been reduced to a minimum.

With the help of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), Liuminying has also built a large-scale high temperature bio-gas units to replace smaller ones. Methane from the new digester is piped to each household.

Liuminying has obviously benefited and prospered because of its showcase status, and its proximity to Beijing has turned the village into a demonstration project.

The real challenge for the Beijing Municipal Institute of Environmental Protection is to replicate Liuminjing’s success in more remote Chinese villages, in households and not just on a collective farm.

Says Bian Yousheng: “We have tried to take the lessons from Liuminying to more than 1,600 farms all across the country.”

Excerpt:

By Kunda Dixit
LIUMINYING, China, Aug 24 1996 (IPS)

The poplar-lined road turns off from the main highway 50 kms south of Beijing, slices through neat rows of vegetables, along irrigated fields of rice and passes poultry factories to the reception hall for visitors.

In a country of socialist traditions where the rest of the nation has always been told to fulfil quotas and emulate the shining example set by ideal over-achievers, Liuminying is a demonstration farm.

Since the days of the 1966-1976 Cultural Revolution when then Communist Party leader Mao Zedong sent millions of young people into rural China “to plant grain everywhere”, Liuminying has been a cut above other farms — in terms of raising production, diversifying crops and experimenting with new technology.

Back then, Liuminying was a model of a socialist commune.

Adapting adroitly to the post-Mao era, it became a model for China’s contract responsibility system that gave private farmers incentives to produce more. And today, in liberalising China, it has become a model enterprise, even setting up a joint venture factory to export sleeping bags and tents to Germany.

Liuminying is such a success story that the farm now has a separate unit just to show visitors around. Many foreign dignitaries in China find Liuminying included in their itinerary by their local hosts. In the past ten years, some 190,000 visitors, local and foreign, have toured the farm.

Zhang Shanao is now 70, and a retired farmer. “Our success is due to the hard work that the villagers have put into making Liuminying a model village,” he says.

The village’s small population of 900 today has a standard of living much higher than the national average. It is not difficult to see why: the farm gets full support from the government to serve as an example and a showcase.

At the visitor centre, officials rattles off the statistics: the farm produces 100,000 chicken a year, 5,000 pigs, 200,000 roast ducks for Beijing’s restaurants, 200,000 kgs of milk a year and it has recently bought 30 trucks to start a driving school.

But most importantly, Liuminying is today presented to visitors as China’s response to the challenge of feeding its huge 1.2 billion population — not through commercial industrialised farming of the North American variety, but using ecological agriculture.

Ecological farming maximises solar energy use by plants and promotes recycling of organic nutrients. It is less energy intensive, does not rely on chemical fertilisers and pesticides and is suited to self-reliant, low-investment small farms. It is more sustainable and does not destroy the soil.

“Ecological agriculture has transformed Liuminying,” says Bian Yousheng, an agronomist with the Beijing Municipal Institute of Environmental Protection. “And it holds the answer to raising food production all over China.”

China’s grain production shot up after farm reforms, raising harvests from 200 million tons in 1977 to 300 million tons in 1984. Since then, the growth has not been as phenomenal.

Meanwhile, China has to feed an additional 15 million people every year and to satisfy the higher meat consumption of newly- affluent Chinese it uses more grain — cancelling out past gains. By 2030, China’s consumption of grain is expected to hit 480 million tons: nearly double the projected growth in production.

After initial denial, even the Chinese leadership is now taking dire predictions of the looming food crisis seriously.

Last year’s pessimistic report by the Washington-based Worldwatch Institute which concluded that China was losing the capacity to feed itself has reportedly been translated into Chinese and circulated to high officials.

Not everyone is pessimistic. The U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) says China’s rice yields have doubled to six tons per hectare since 1980, and it says this can go up to eight tons. There is still a vast potential for marginal land to be brought into cultivation.

Although farmlands are being devoured by expanding cities, highways and dams, China still has 60 million hectares of farmlands where yield could be increased by better irrigation.

Chinese experts like Bian Yousheng are convinced that ecological agriculture is not only environmentally friendly, but can give sustained high yields and also makes economic sense.

In Liuminying, for instance, almost nothing is wasted. The slurry from the piggeries, poultry farms, the dairy and even human excreta from public toilets are fed into a giant bio-gas system that generates methane gas for cooking and heating in the village, the digested material is used as fertiliser in fields.

The farm has managed to save 100 tons of coal use annually, and it has reduced chemical fertilisers from 250,000 kgs per year in 1982 to less than 70,000 kgs last year. Pesticide use has been reduced to a minimum.

With the help of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), Liuminying has also built a large-scale high temperature bio-gas units to replace smaller ones. Methane from the new digester is piped to each household.

Liuminying has obviously benefited and prospered because of its showcase status, and its proximity to Beijing has turned the village into a demonstration project.

The real challenge for the Beijing Municipal Institute of Environmental Protection is to replicate Liuminjing’s success in more remote Chinese villages, in households and not just on a collective farm.

Says Bian Yousheng: “We have tried to take the lessons from Liuminying to more than 1,600 farms all across the country.”

Excerpt:

By Kunda Dixit
LIUMINYING, China, Aug 22 1996 (IPS)

The poplar-lined road turns off from the main highway 50 kms south of Beijing, slices through neat rows of vegetables, along irrigated fields of rice and passes poultry factories to the reception hall for visitors.

In a country of socialist traditions where the rest of the nation has always been told to fulfil quotas and emulate the shining example set by ideal over-achievers, Liuminying is a demonstration farm.

Since the days of the 1966-1976 Cultural Revolution when then Communist Party leader Mao Zedong sent millions of young people into rural China “to plant grain everywhere”, Liuminying has been a cut above other farms — in terms of raising production, diversifying crops and experimenting with new technology.

Back then, Liuminying was a model of a socialist commune.

Adapting adroitly to the post-Mao era, it became a model for China’s contract responsibility system that gave private farmers incentives to produce more. And today, in liberalising China, it has become a model enterprise, even setting up a joint venture factory to export sleeping bags and tents to Germany.

Liuminying is such a success story that the farm now has a separate unit just to show visitors around. Many foreign dignitaries in China find Liuminying included in their itinerary by their local hosts. In the past ten years, some 190,000 visitors, local and foreign, have toured the farm.

Zhang Shanao is now 70, and a retired farmer. “Our success is due to the hard work that the villagers have put into making Liuminying a model village,” he says.

The village’s small population of 900 today has a standard of living much higher than the national average. It is not difficult to see why: the farm gets full support from the government to serve as an example and a showcase.

At the visitor centre, officials rattles off the statistics: the farm produces 100,000 chicken a year, 5,000 pigs, 200,000 roast ducks for Beijing’s restaurants, 200,000 kgs of milk a year and it has recently bought 30 trucks to start a driving school.

But most importantly, Liuminying is today presented to visitors as China’s response to the challenge of feeding its huge 1.2 billion population — not through commercial industrialised farming of the North American variety, but using ecological agriculture.

Ecological farming maximises solar energy use by plants and promotes recycling of organic nutrients. It is less energy intensive, does not rely on chemical fertilisers and pesticides and is suited to self-reliant, low-investment small farms. It is more sustainable and does not destroy the soil.

“Ecological agriculture has transformed Liuminying,” says Bian Yousheng, an agronomist with the Beijing Municipal Institute of Environmental Protection. “And it holds the answer to raising food production all over China.”

China’s grain production shot up after farm reforms, raising harvests from 200 million tons in 1977 to 300 million tons in 1984. Since then, the growth has not been as phenomenal.

Meanwhile, China has to feed an additional 15 million people every year and to satisfy the higher meat consumption of newly- affluent Chinese it uses more grain — cancelling out past gains. By 2030, China’s consumption of grain is expected to hit 480 million tons: nearly double the projected growth in production.

After initial denial, even the Chinese leadership is now taking dire predictions of the looming food crisis seriously.

Last year’s pessimistic report by the Washington-based Worldwatch Institute which concluded that China was losing the capacity to feed itself has reportedly been translated into Chinese and circulated to high officials.

Not everyone is pessimistic. The U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) says China’s rice yields have doubled to six tons per hectare since 1980, and it says this can go up to eight tons. There is still a vast potential for marginal land to be brought into cultivation.

Although farmlands are being devoured by expanding cities, highways and dams, China still has 60 million hectares of farmlands where yield could be increased by better irrigation.

Chinese experts like Bian Yousheng are convinced that ecological agriculture is not only environmentally friendly, but can give sustained high yields and also makes economic sense.

In Liuminying, for instance, almost nothing is wasted. The slurry from the piggeries, poultry farms, the dairy and even human excreta from public toilets are fed into a giant bio-gas system that generates methane gas for cooking and heating in the village, the digested material is used as fertiliser in fields.

The farm has managed to save 100 tons of coal use annually, and it has reduced chemical fertilisers from 250,000 kgs per year in 1982 to less than 70,000 kgs last year. Pesticide use has been reduced to a minimum.

With the help of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), Liuminying has also built a large-scale high temperature bio-gas units to replace smaller ones. Methane from the new digester is piped to each household.

Liuminying has obviously benefited and prospered because of its showcase status, and its proximity to Beijing has turned the village into a demonstration project.

The real challenge for the Beijing Municipal Institute of Environmental Protection is to replicate Liuminjing’s success in more remote Chinese villages, in households and not just on a collective farm.

Says Bian Yousheng: “We have tried to take the lessons from Liuminying to more than 1,600 farms all across the country.”

Excerpt:

By Kunda Dixit
JAKARTA, Aug 15 1996 (IPS)

It is a chicken or egg situation: Will Indonesia have to wait for a change in the political system for a freer media, or will the media be itself the catalyst for change?

The question has become even more relevant in the aftermath of the rise in recent months of a vocal political opposition led by Megawati Sukarnoputri which has been trying to capitalise on leadership uncertainties and chronic income disparities that have persisted despite Indonesia’s rapid economic growth.

Recent street protests turned violent, and on Jul. 27 at least three people were killed in the riots that ensued after police raided the Jakarta headquarters of the Indonesian Democratic Party (PDI) that was occupied by Megawati supporters.

Indonesia’s state-controlled media has largely been giving the official version of events, with the government’s ‘TVRI’ portraying the attacks on businesses on Jakarta’s main boulevard after the raid as political hooliganism.

Private television has been freer to show footage of the unrest in news feature programmes, but this may be because some of the five biggest private stations — ‘RCTI’, ‘TPI’ and ‘SCTV’, belong to companies part-owned by President Suharto’s relatives.

Indonesians with access to satellite dishes have followed coverage of events in their own country through international news channels like ‘BBC World’, ‘CNN’ and Australia’s ‘ABC’.

In recent days, local stations have been re-broadcasting TVRI’s evening news blaming the violence on ‘communists’ as a way to justify its crackdown on all opposition. Singled out has been Budiman Sujatmiko of the small Democratic Peoples’ Party for being behind a plot to topple the government.

Budiman, who was in hiding, was arrested earlier this week, but not before his tearful parents were put on state television over the weekend and shown asking him to give himself up.

Most political experts do not think the PDI has the organisational base, and Megawati may not have the leadership qualities to galvanise a nation-wide opposition movement. But uncertainties persist about who will succeed Indonesia’s 75-year- old president Suharto and there is also a widespread perception of corruption that appears to be giving the unrest its momentum.

Suharto came to power in 1967 after a 1965 abortive coup, blamed on the since banned Communist Party of Indonesia, led to the downfall of late President Sukarno — Indonesia’s charismatic post-independence leader, and Megawati’s father. The military- backed take-over came after anti-Chinese and anti-communist pogroms in which an estimated 500,000 people were killed.

The government is using the spectre of a return to violence and massacres to justify its present crackdowns on opposition figures and labour leaders and to put the lid on what it considers indiscriminate media coverage.

Indonesia’s outspoken television journalists, like Wimar Witoelar, have no doubt that media has to take a leading role in bringing political change. He made the point last month at a Jakarta seminar on broadcast media sponsored by AJI with the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ).

“People who hope for politics to change the course of communications have a long wait in store. The political mechanism is totally within the control of the power elite and limitations to free communications is an effort by the power elite to maintain the status quo,” he said then, his observation made just as the PDI unrest was heating up.

Wimar has reason to be bitter. Last September, his immensely popular weekly talk show ‘Perspektif’ was taken off without warning by the independent station, ‘SCTV’.

To those familiar with Indonesia’s media scene, the banning of Perspektif came as no surprise. Wimar had been rocking the boat by interviewing people not exactly in the good books of the government and Perspektif prided itself in being “a forum where people get away from slogans and standard euphemisms”.

It covered issues like the split within a branch of the PDI that preceded the July unrest with greater insight than any of the other broadcast channels, and since the ban Perspektif has transformed itself into a radio and print syndication service.

Ironically, even media groups in which Suharto’s family have interests have not been spared the axe. ‘Trijaya Radio’ which is owned by Suharto’s son Bambang Trihatmodjo’s the Bimantara Citra group was stopped last year from broadcasting its live talk show, ‘Jakarta Round Up’.

The censorship is not direct, but media managers are warned not to exceed certain unspoken thresholds. Said one: “It is mostly self-censorship. We know what the limits are, and we are often reminded to be careful.”

The hardening of the government’s attitude towards the media is a trend that followed the dramatic closure of three popular and money-spinning publications in June 1994: ‘Tempo’, ‘DeTik’ and ‘Editor’.

Reporters suddenly out of a job set up the Alliance of Independent Journalists (AJI). Four of its members, including AJI chairman Ahmad Taufik, are now in jail.

The government’s liberalisation of the broadcast media has ensured that networks owned by business interests will not jeopardise their licences by being too bold with their news programmes.

Bimantara Citra, for instance, is negotiating with CNN, HBO and ESPN to broadcast to what many regard as Asia’s most important audience after China and the Indian sub-continent: Indonesia’s 190 million people. Ownership of satellite dishes in Indonesia is estimated at 1.2 million: one of the highest per capita in Asia.

In its report ‘Muted Voices: Censorship and the Broadcast Media in Indonesia’ published in June, the international media watchdog ‘Article 19’ says that liberalisation of media ownership has not encouraged pluralism, but placed private broadcasting under the direct control of the ruling elite.

It added: “In Indonesia today there is no sense in which state- run radio and television stations can be seen as true public service broadcasters, while those commercial stations which take some, albeit limited, efforts to air views other than those furnished by the government run the risk of incurring undefined sanctions.”

Most Indonesian intellectuals today recognise the need for change, but are averse to the kind of instability and violence that rocked the country three decades ago. This is where the media’s role in promoting social values and political reform may be key.

Wimar sums it up: “Public and political processes will interact in unpredictable ways, but journalism must be a beacon for seekers of reform.”

Excerpt:

By Kunda Dixit
NEW DELHI, Jun 14 1996 (IPS)

Its the time of year in the South Asian sub-continent when farmers look nervously at the sky for signs of the approaching monsoon.

Their health, the health of their families and even the health of the national economies of South Asian countries depends in large measure on these annual rains. If they are inadequate or fail, it can mean disaster.

South Asia, except Sri Lanka, has had five years of healthy monsoons, and the region’s granaries are bursting.

In fact, the region has proved Malthusian soothsayers predicting mass starvation wrong. Green Revolution seeds boosted harvests in the 1970’s and continued to push grain production higher.

Except for Sri Lanka, grain production in South Asia exceeded population growth throughout the 1980s. While the average population growth for the region was 2.1 percent, food production grew at 4.3 percent per year.

India has amassed huge grain surpluses and even exported rice this year to deficit areas of south-east Asia and capitalised on high world prices.

However, agronomists warn that in the 1990s, South Asia is slipping as grain output declines. India’s annual growth of 4.3 percent has come down to 1.6 in the 1993-94 period. Bangladesh’s annual food production growth declined from 2.8 percent in the 1980s to 0.6 in the past two years.

“If these trends continue, the gains made in the 1980s will be eroded very soon,” says Bangladeshi agronomist Mahabub Hossain, who works at the Philippine-based International Rice Research Institute.

Hossain says the two countries most at risk are Nepal and Bangladesh where population pressure is most serious, the expansion of arable land is limited and the countries cannot afford to import food in case of shortfalls.

Pakistan has the highest population growth rate in the region, but Hossain says it has more possibilities of expanding arable land. And in India, there are still enormous possibilities to expand irrigation so that crops are not as dependent on the vagaries of the monsoons.

New hybrid rice seeds that would make the Second Green Revolution possible are still at least five years away, till then South Asians must find other ways to feed their one billion people.

The irony for many health workers and planners is that at a time when South Asian granaries are full, the level of malnutrition in South Asia is unnaturally high.

They offer this as proof that undernourishment is not really a problem of scarcity, but of distribution.

“South Asia may be doing well in food production, but it is a very bad situation as far as the vulnerable groups are concerned,” the head for the Asia-Pacific region of the the U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) told IPS in an interview in Bangkok

In its ‘Progress of Nations’ report released last week, UNICEF compares malnutrition levels in South Asia and Africa. Not only is the sheer numbers of undernourished three times higher in Asia, but the percentage of children who are underweight in South Asia is 51 percent, compared to 31 percent for sub-Saharan Africa.

“The countries of the South Asian region must now face up to the fact that they have the worst nutritional levels in the world, and that the roots of malnutrition run deep in social soils,” says the UNICEF report.

It adds that the main social factor affecting the high malnutrition levels is the inequality between men and women which has a direct link to low-birth weight, high maternal mortality, breast feeding, food and disease.

Says the report: “The women of sub-Saharan Africa, and particularly poor women, have greater opportunities and freedoms than the women of South Asia.”

These are differences not about female literacy rates or age of girls at marriage in the two regions, but how much independence and decision-making women in the two regions are granted. And it seems South Asian women are way behind.

UNICEF says 60 percent of the women in sub-Saharan Africa are involved in some kind of economic activity outside the home while

only a quarter of Indian, Pakistani or Bangladeshi women do so.

But government planners tend to look at the macro-economic figures and they are worrying about grain harvests declining below population growth rates.

And the prospects of non-staple grains like pulses (which is the most important source of proteins in vegetarian diets) is declining. India’s annual pulse harvests have stagnated for the past 20 years, and have become a luxury only the rich can afford.

Says Obaidullah Khan: “FAO projects that through 2010 food production will grow but at a much slower pace. The food security situation is going to be much more fragile.”

Asia-Pacific non-governmental organisations which met in Bangkok recently to formulate policy for the upcoming Food Summit in Rome in November say market liberalisation and the pressure on farmers to go for export cash crops is hurting food production.

Says Tony Quizon of the group of 100 Asia-Pacific NGOs: “It is time to reintegrate agricultural production into the local ecology. It is time to abandon such techno-fixes as the Green Revolution. It is time to bring farming once again into control of local communities.”

Excerpt:

By Kunda Dixit
COLOMBO, Apr 10 1996 (IPS)

On the face of it, the Sri Lankan government’s decision this week to extend the state of emergency appears to be a response to the continued offensives in the north and south of the island against rebel Tamil Tigers. The country is, after all, at war.

But the move does give the government of President Chandrika Kumaratunga the excuse to postpone crucial local government polls scheduled for May.

The polls would have served as a referendum on the rule of her three-year-old People’s Alliance government. With crippling daily power cuts, price increases of basic commodities and the failure to end the Tamil war either militarily or through negotiations, Kumaratunga’s image may have been tarnished.

“Even though this government is in power, it is still in an opposition mentality,” says Sasanka Perera, a professor of sociology at Colombo University.

He says the government is not so worried about the continuing civil war: “People are more interested in bread and butter issues like jobs, inflation, housing. What makes the government nervous is that the people are not satisfied.”

After two years of five percent GDP growth, the economy this year is expected to slow down. The suicide bomb attack that devastated the heart of Colombo’s financial district in February killed 120 people and injured thousands. It badly hurt the economy, particularly the tourism industry.

Then, a drought in the uplands dried up all the main reservoirs of the massive Mahaweli scheme, forcing six-hour daily power cuts islandwide.

Energy planners had been warning of a crisis since January when the rains failed. But power was needed during the day-long cricket matches last month so Sri Lankans could watch their team win the World Cup. Says one Colombo businessman wryly: “We’re paying now for having used up all the water to watch cricket.”

Ironically, Chandrika Kumaratunga has gone further than any previous Sri Lankan leader to try to end the Tamil separatist war by offering a daring devolution package to the Tamils that was sure to be unpopular with rightist elements within the island’s majority Sinhala community.

The package would give unprecedented autonomy to the Tamil- dominated areas of the north. The Sinhalese radicals feel it gives away too much to the Tamils, while the moderate Tamil parties appear too intimidated by the Tigers to come out openly to support it.

There is nothing new in the devolution offer — parts of it were proposed by Kumaratunga’s father, Solomon Bandaranaike back in 1956. Bandaranaike was later killed by Sinhala zealots for selling out to the Tamils.

It was this rigidity that led Sri Lanka down the path to civil war. The anti-autonomy rhetoric in Colombo today shows that neither the Sinhala nor Tamil radicals have learnt the lesson — after 13 years of war and nearly 90,000 deaths.

“Our failure to lay down the constitutional foundations of a multi-ethnic society based on equality, ethnic pluralism and the sharing of power has exacerbated the ethnic conflict,” says Neelan Tiruchelvam a Tamil member of Parliament.

Tiruchelvam says the package as offered by the government needs to be fleshed out, special on sensitive issues like land, jurisdiction on disputes and law and order.

Details of the package are being discussed by a Select Committee in parliament while Kumaratunga herself pushes her “war for peace” campaign.

She has kept up the military pressure on the Tigers even after the rebels’ northern Jaffna stronghold was overrun by the government four months ago. The conflict has now shifted to the eastern province, where ambushes and savage fighting occur daily.

Still, some military analysts in Colombo doubt if the military strategy of capturing ever more Tiger territory will work. Indian peacekeepers learnt how difficult that was in 1988 when they tried to pacify the Tigers. The Sri Lankans would need a force many times its present size to hold on to the areas it has overrun.

But the military is modernising desperately. Huge Russian heavy-lift Antonovs land regularly at Colombo airport to disgorge Mi-24 helicopter gunships. And after the Tigers shot down several planes with missiles, the air force has acquired Israeli Kfir warplanes equipped with anti-missile systems and laser-guided bombing capability.

Kumaratunga is betting on the Tamil people distancing themselves from the Tigers and opting for devolution and democracy.

She told an Indian newspaper in an interview last month: “It is up to the Tamil leaders, the democratic Tamil leaders to prepare their people to accept (the devolution package) wholeheartedly. They are still only half-hearted.”

Kumaratunga’s peace initiatives has won her admirers in the Western donor community, but like Mikhail Gorbachev she seems to be less popular at home. But we will not know how unpopular since she has just postponed local polls.

Excerpt:

By Kunda Dixit
NEW DELHI, Jan 17 1996 (IPS)

When the World Cup cricket tournament gets underway in South Asia next month, among the cricket balls being used by players from 12 participating teams will be ones made in Pakistan by Grays of Cambridge.

But although the balls are regarded as the best in the world, they are not officially exported to India. Even after the South Asian Preferential Trade Agreement (SAPTA) went into effect on Dec. 7, the Pakistan-made balls will not be competitive because sports goods are not in the list of items for which tariffs have been reduced.

South Asian countries are trying to use SAPTA to overcome years of protectionism — and in the case of India and Pakistan outright hostility — to forge closer regional trade ties. But as with the cricket balls, there is long way to go.

“Our cricket balls are the best in the world, and if everything was normal, it should have been selling in India,” said Mohammad Aslam Manda, chairman of the Pakistan Sports Goods Manufacturers and Exporters Association.

Manda was among hundreds of Pakistani businessmen and companies from other South Asian countries who came to India to take part in the first ever trade fair of South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) which ended in New Delhi on Sunday.

SAARC groups Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka. Together, the South Asian countries have a population of 1.4 billion people — one-fifth of the world total. But they make up only 1.3 percent of global output and less than one percent of international merchandise trade.

Increasingly worried by the globalisation of the world economy and the marginalisation of their region by trading blocs in their neighbourhood, SAARC countries have been trying to get over political problems to streamline intra-regional trade.

Commerce ministers from the seven member countries agreed in New Delhi last week to bring forward the timetable for trade liberalisation to establish a South Asian Free Trade Area by the year 2000.

The newly-formed SAARC Chamber of Commerce and Industry organised the trade fair so that countries in the region can start taking advantage of the new SAPTA rules.

But critics point out the list of tariff-free items announced by SAARC countries show even more glaringly that they are trying to protect domestic industries from competition. Between them, SAARC countries have announced tariff cuts on less than 230 items — mostly low-volume goods from smaller SAARC countries.

For instance, Bangladesh will reduce by 10 percent duty concession on items like dental cement, glands and organs for transplants and fresh grapes. Pakistan will cut import duties on ornamental fish, bamboo and lamb skin. Nepal will reduce duty on only 14 items including chewing gum, fruits and canned fish.

Many of these cuts do not apply to Indian exports, only to products from smaller SAARC countries. But befitting its size, India’s concessions are the largest with tariff cuts in 106 items like paper and fertiliser.

Says SAARC Chamber vice-president from Nepal, Padma Jyoti: “We have to start somewhere and I think the trade fair is a start. It was not just a symbolic exercise, it opened up channels for trade by building contacts.”

Most regional experts agree that intra-regional SAARC trade will not get anywhere unless the two South Asian heavyweights, India and Pakistan patch up their political differences.

And in both Islamabad and New Delhi there is now a growing realisation in the bureaucracies of the two countries that freer trade will be mutually beneficial. In fact, trade could be the balm that may ultimately soothe political tensions.

“Politics used to come first and trade followed. But with India and Pakistan, if trade leads politics will follow,” Pakistan’s commerce minister Ahmad Mukhtar said at a conference that coincided with the SAARC Trade Fair here last week.

Proof of this was the fact that Pakistani products destined for the trade fair — including a gleaming metallic green Honda Civic assembled in Pakistan — travelled overland from Pakistan to India across the tense frontier. And Indian officials went out of their way to allow Pakistani businessmen to visit the Taj Mahal even though their visas were valid only for New Delhi.

And under new World Trade Organisation (WTO) rules, India automatically granted Pakistan most-favoured nation (MFN) status on Jan. 1. As WTO member, Pakistan is supposed to do the same but

sensitivity to domestic opinion has made Islamabad cautious.

Still, Pakistan’s Friday Times newspaper said: “Let us not be paranoid. There is no danger that India will swamp Pakistan. The bureaucrats in Islamabad trying to negotiate better terms are not about to abandon our national security interests.”

On this side, The Times of India echoed the view: “Political and military tensions have been allowed to cast an unhealthy shadow over economic relations right from 1947. The people of the subcontinent have been the main losers … it is tragic that greater economic cohesiveness in South Asia has been stymied by political grandstanding on all sides.”

Two-way trade between the two countries is officially only worth 100 million dollars annually. But estimates show that smuggling and indirect trade through third countries amounts to two billion dollars a year.

Indian and Pakistani businessmen say regularisation of this trade would benefit both governments, help normalise political ties and spread the free trade mantra in the rest of South Asia.

Excerpt:

By Kunda Dixit
DUBAI, Nov 25 1995 (IPS)

‘By the Third Millennium, Mega City had become a seething urban jungle with 65 million people. There was an explosion of crime and block wars.’

That is the blurb in Hollywood’s latest futuristic block- buster ‘Judge Dred’ about how human society degenerated into savagery and slaughter. Right is might in these cities, and only the fittest (like Sylvester Stallone) survive.

But it’s not all science fiction. Similar cities exist even today. And as urban areas across the globe agglomerate, experts say, more will follow. The question is, what can be done to prevent cities from sliding further into anarchy?

The United Nations is preparing for a big City Summit in Istanbul next year which will discuss the problems of urban settlements, and how to bring social and ecological equilibrium back to cities.

A meeting in Dubai this week to prepare for the Istanbul meeting heard good examples of efforts being made around the world in urban renewal and decided that the only hope was to give more power to local authorities and communities to rebuild.

“The Istanbul conference should not be a meeting of governments, but a meeting of people,” said Jaime Ravinet, mayor of the city of Santiago in Chile.

The Nairobi-based United Nations Centre for Human Settlements (known by its acronym HABITAT), which is preparing for the City Summit says more than one and a half billion people in the world’s cities will face life and health-threatening environments by the year 2025.

With more and more people migrating to cities, the number of people living in the world’s urban areas will overtake those living in villages by the year 2000 — for the first time in human history.

Overcrowding and competition for resources contributes to the rise in violent crime, gang wars and political unrest spilling over into the streets: as in the decaying urban core of U.S. cities, Medellin or Karachi.

“We are ending up with street warfare instead of safe neighbourhoods. Uncontrolled urban growth has created the conditions for violence and ethnic conflict,” Klaus Toepfer, the German Minister of Housing, Construction and Planning told the Dubai meeting.

Although this correlation is clear, urban activists say it is important to understand that the most vulnerable victims are not the street fighters and the gangs, but families, women and children. Women are the poorest of the poor in most societies.

Excerpt:

By Kunda Dixit
DUBAI, Nov 25 1995 (IPS)

An international conference on housing and human settlements that ended here this week officially launched a worldwide search for 500 best efforts to improve urban living conditions as a way to curb the environmental and social degradation of the world’s cities.

The Nairobi-based U.N. Centre for Human Settlements (HABITAT- UNCHS) calls it the Best Practices Initiative, and will give the awards to the winning candidates at a big conference in Istanbul next year – The City Summit.

“The Best Practices Initiative will create a global network that will work by setting an example. I have not seen a better idea, a more concrete outcome of the birth of this new culture of sharing,” says Waly N’Dow, who heads HABITAT.

The Dubai meeting was attended by 600 municipalities, mayors, national government officials, urban experts and non-governmental organisations (NGO’s), and adopted the Dubai Declaration which set out the guidelines and criteria to search for best practices.

Delegates in Dubai got a preview of some 28 exemplary initiatives undertaken by municipalities, local governments and activists to better living conditions for city and town dwellers.

Some examples: how Hong Kong has managed to provide low-cost housing for millions of its citizens, how the city of Cebu in the Philippines is bringing better health care and education to slum dwellers, or how Gothenburg in Sweden has controlled industrial pollution.

The HABITAT office has already received 300 entries from 86 cities around the world for the contest, and expects at least a thousand more in the next few months.

An independent technical committee will pick 500 of the best entries and short list 100 for the Best Practices List. The other 400 will get honourable mention as “good practices”. And from among these, the Top Ten most outstanding efforts to make cities more liveable will be selected.

As a parallel initiative, HABITAT has also started work with a New York-based voluntary group on a five-year plan to build up a database of best practices for easy reference by the INTERNET or CD ROM.

“The Best Practices Award is basically recognition of a job well done, but the more important long-term process is the database which will give a chance for other cities around the world to learn from the experience of others,” says Nicholas You of HABITAT who is helping with preparations for the Istanbul meeting.

Excerpt:

By Kunda Dixit
DUBAI, Nov 25 1995 (IPS)

The central Chinese city of Benxi used to be so polluted it became invisible in satellite pictures for at least four months in a year. But a decade-long effort by city authorities to curb industrial and vehicle emissions means the air there is breatheable again.

There are about 50,000 families in Colombia who earn a living scavenging urban waste and recycling plastics, metal scraps and paper. Since 1986, a local voluntary group has helped ‘recicladores’ improve working conditions and meet their medical, schooling and housing needs.

Twenty years ago, a quarter of Bangkok’s population lived in slums. Today, thanks to a unique bank that mobilises public savings to give the poor housing loans, only nine percent of Bangkok’s seven million people live in shanty-towns.

United Nations statistics about the growth of the world’s cities are frightening, and indicate a bleak future of over- crowding, crime and deteriorating living conditions. But the above three stories show there is still hope.

Ahead of a big international conference in Istanbul next year, the United Nations is trying to publicise the good news so that others around the world can learn and replicate them.

The Chinese success in Benxi, for instance, is now being emulated by other heavily polluted cities like Teheran and Kathmandu.

Colombia and the Philippines are learning from each other about raising living standards of scavengers, and housing authorities in India and Indonesia want to copy the Thai success story.

The Istanbul conference, called HABITAT II or The City Summit, is being organised by the Nairobi-based United Nations Centre for Human Settlements (UNHCS) which wants to make a list of 500 such success stories.

Called the The Best Practices Initiative, the search for good news will catalogue the best urban practices so that other parts of the world with similar problems can benefit.

“Best Practices will help those who need it most. Utilising the knowledge it makes available can make a house liveable, reduce poverty and pollution, or create safe, green space allowing children to be children,” says Waly N’Dow, who heads preparations for the Istanbul conference.

By June next year, a panel of judges will have short-listed 500 of the most worthy efforts to improve urban living conditions. Some 100 will be called Best Practices and publicised internationally.

Excerpt: