Vikas Bajaj in the New York Times:
Hambantota, Sri Lanka: For years, ships from other countries, laden with oil, machinery, clothes and cargo, sped past this small town near India as part of the world’s brisk trade with China.
Now, China is investing millions to turn this fishing hamlet into a booming new port, furthering an ambitious trading strategy in South Asia that is reshaping the region and forcing India to rethink relations with its neighbors.
As trade in the region grows more lucrative, China has been developing port facilities in Pakistan, Bangladesh and Myanmar, and it is planning to build railroad lines in Nepal. These projects, analysts say, are part of a concerted effort by Chinese leaders and companies to open and expand markets for their goods and services in a part of Asia that has lagged behind the rest of the continent in trade and economic development.
But these initiatives are irking India, whose government worries that China is expanding its sphere of regional influence by surrounding India with a “string of pearls” that could eventually undermine India’s pre-eminence and potentially rise to an economic and security threat. More:
Thanks to Sanjoy Narayan of the Hindustan Times for this brilliant link to 64 for Aung San Suu Kyi. The website is a place where you can leave words of support for Burma’s imprisoned democracy leader who turned 64 on June 19 this year.
Writes Sanjoy: Already, the website has garnered messages from people from around the globe-politicians, actors and celebrities but also individuals who have pledged their support and demanded the release of Suu Kyi who has been under detention for much of the past 19 years.
You can visit the site to read, hear and watch the hundreds of messages left by people, including luminaries from the world’s power list like actor George Clooney, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Czech leader Vaclav Havel, football star David Beckham, actor Daniel Craig, the British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, President of the Maldives M Nasheed, author Salman Rushdie, actor Julia Roberts, UK Conservative Party leader David Cameron, Madeleine Albright, Steven Spielberg, Orhan Pamuk and several others.
There are tweets from Yoko Ono, a video from Richard Branson plus a blog that’s regularly updated on the website.
To send your own message or to link to the site click here.
Aung San Suu Kyi made the world take notice of Burma’s struggle for democracy. But her failure to react to recent key crises means that many of her followers now question her ability to lead the fight against the military junta. Cathy Scott-Clark and Adrian Levy in the Guardian:
Aung San Suu Kyi, the pro-democracy activist and leader of the National League for Democracy (NLD) in Burma, is the world’s most famous political prisoner. She has spent the best part of the past 20 years under house arrest, detained by the military dictatorship she opposes. Her current imprisonment began in May 2003, when her convoy was attacked and 70 of her supporters killed by a militia of government-sponsored thugs known darkly as the Masters of Force. She has been confined to her Rangoon home ever since.
Suu Kyi was born into the family that drove Burma’s independence movement: her father was General Aung San, who was murdered by his political rivals in July 1947, shortly after negotiating his country’s independence from Britain. Suu Kyi was pushed into politics in 1988 after thousands of students protesters were gunned down on the streets of Rangoon – when she delivered her inaugural speech at Rangoon’s Shwe Dagon Pagoda on August 26 that year, a crowd of 500,000 came to hear her. A nation held in a headlock by a junta since 1962 fell behind her gutsy message of hope, and she led the NLD to a landslide election victory in May 1990, winning 392 out of 485 seats.
More:
Sequestering tigers in nature reserves may doom them to a slow, genetic death. To save them, conservationists want to give them freedom to roam. Lily Huang in Newsweek:
Alan Rabinowitz has spent nearly three decades in a pitched battle to save the world’s few remaining havens for predator cats. He’s turned the Coxcombe Basin in Belize into the world’s first jaguar preserve, and built the largest nature reserve in Taiwan, the first national park in the Himalayas, and the world’s largest tiger reserve in Burma. Nevertheless, he knows he is losing.
The problem, Rabinowitz and other leading biologists now know, is that the classic conservation strategy of preserving habitat is in fact no defense against extinction. Twenty years ago, the devastation of natural forest was a visible danger. What went unseen was the damage sustained on a larger field of battle: the gene pool. A reserve may be a refuge for wildlife, but it is also a genetic sink. When a population of large predators is confined to pristine island of wilderness over time, they fall to inbreeding, leaving the species with weaker young and fewer defenses in an environment increasingly distorted by climate change. This is the deepening lesson of wildlife conservation from the post-industrial age to the genomic age: you can’t save animals without saving their homes, and you can’t save species without saving their genes.
More:
Travel to Myanmar has slowed to a trickle. But a decade ago, with great fanfare, the government launched a new tourism campaign. Stephen Brookes, then Rangoon bureau chief for Asia Times, remembers its bizarre launch ceremony. From World Hum:
The 7-foot dolls had taken their papier-mâché heads off and were milling around behind the stadium, smoking cigarettes and chatting up the dancing girls from the Ministry of Culture.
You could hardly blame them-the enormous heads were hot and airless, and the guys inside had to peer out from two little eyeholes cut into the mouth. Besides, the dancing girls were cute and had jasmine flowers in their hair, and they weren’t due in the stadium for another 15 minutes, to do their part-along with more than 5,000 other costumed performers-for a massive ceremony to usher in “Visit Myanmar Year.”
It was November 18, 1996, and at 5:30 that morning, Myanmar’s military junta had rounded up the few foreign journalists in town and bussed us to a stadium just outside Rangoon, for what they promised would be the media event of the year. Now, two hours later, most of us had managed to sneak out of our assigned seats and were wandering around on the field, trying to figure out what was going on. I stumbled into a makeshift staging area, where I found the gigantic papier-mâché dolls. One of them offered me a Marlboro.
More:
Children in Burma separated from their parents by Cyclone Nargis, continue to survive on their own, very often because they simply cannot afford the bus fare that will reunite them with their families. Heather Mark reports for the Sunday Times.
IN a filthy destitute village, half an hour outside Rangoon, three-year-old Than Than Nues was dumped days after Cyclone Nargis had ravaged her home in Burma’s Irrawaddy delta and made her an orphan.
The toddler, who lost both her parents when 12ft waves swept through their home in Bogalay, a coastal township, was carted off in a government lorry and handed over to strangers. Villagers, who struggled to feed their own families from their meagre rice paddies or from working in a factory on a daily wage of just 75p, were forced to provide for the extra mouths.
Last week underfed children played in the mud-filled main street, still trying to forget the traumatic night in May when they saw their closest relatives swept to their deaths.
more
While the bulk of Failed States are located in Africa, South Asia doesn’t fare much better with Afghanistan, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Burma, at #7, 9 and 12 (Bangladesh and Burma tied at #12) respectively, making the grade. Sri Lanka weighs in the annual list at #20, while Nepal figures at #23 and Bhutan, which just embarked on its road to democracy registering at 51 of the List’s 60 Failed States.
Both Pakistan and Bangladesh registered a fall from last year’s status, with Bangladesh featuring the worst fall of all Failed States, set off by postponed elections, deadlocked government and the continuance of emergency rule that has dragged on for 18 months (not to mention November’s devastating cyclone which left 1.5 million people homeless). Nearby Pakistan didn’t do much better with the assassination of Benazir Bhutto.
For the complete list and the whole story in Foreign Policy click here.
The transfer of Myanmar’s junta to Naypyidaw, a relatively remote location, has drained the country’s finances and widened the gulf between the rulers and the ruled. From The New York Times:
The bamboo forests and sugar cane fields that once covered the gently sloping hills here have been replaced by hulking government buildings, roads so long and straight they resemble runways and a vast construction site marked by a sign: “Parliament zone. Do not enter.”
Naypyidaw is Myanmar’s new capital, built in secret by the ruling generals and announced to the public two and a half years ago, when it was a fait accompli.
A nine-hour drive north from the former capital, Yangon, it looks like nothing else in this impoverished country, where one out of three children is malnourished and many roads are nothing more than dirt tracks.
More:
Twenty-one days after Cyclone Nargis, Burma finally seems to have agreed to allow all aid workers in. Red Cross volunteers are there already, but there’s still miles to go, writes Markku Niskala in The Guardian’s Comment is Free
Now that the Burmese government has finally indicated it may allow all aid workers into the country, the task of reaching Burma’s remoter regions becomes even more pressing. Every night, the dire situation facing hundreds of thousands of cyclone survivors grows more and more desperate. Solutions tailored to Burma just have to be found.
At least one and a half million cyclone survivors remain homeless, many of them hungry, many of them weak, ailing or exhausted. As the rain pours down there is some relief: people can harvest drinking water. But the misery grows, along with the burgeoning health threats. The homeless – a portion of the 2.4 million people the UN estimates have been affected – are facing their 21st night since Cyclone Nargis swept in from the Bay of Bengal and crossed the Irrawaddy delta. Each night is more wretched than the last. Conditions are worsening all the time, and the need for basic lifesaving aid becomes more urgent.
more
[Pic: Portraits of cyclone victims hang on what is left of their home in the Irrawaddy delta, Burma. Getty]
Reuters photographer Adrees Latif won the breaking news photography Pulitzer Prize for his shot of a Japanese videographer killed during anti-government protests in Burma (Myanmar). Read this riveting account of how he got the shot:
Bangkok: I landed in Yangon with some old clothes, a Canon 5D camera, two fixed lenses and a laptop.
For four days in September last year, I went to the city’s historic Shwedagon Pagoda and waited for the Buddhist monks who gathered there to lead the biggest protests against Myanmar’s military rulers in 20 years.
Since I was at the same pagoda every day, dozens of people, including monks, asked me who I was and what I was doing.
More:
In Slate, Anne Applebaum says shaky cell-phone videos from Tibet foretell doom for the Chinese empire
Cell-phone photographs and videos from Tibet, blurry and amateur, are circulating on the Internet. Some show clouds of tear gas; others burning buildings and shops; still others purple-robed monks, riot police, and confusion. Watching them, it is impossible not to remember the cell-phone videos and photographs sent out from burning Rangoon only six months ago. Last year Burma, this year Tibet. Next year, will YouTube feature shops burning in Xinjiang, home of China’s Uighur minority? Or riot police rounding up refugees along the Chinese-North Korean border?
more
In Boing Boing, Xeni Jardin on blogger reaction and growing protests even as China blocks YouTube. Read that post here.
Finally, Kadfly is a tourist currently in Lhasa and has been posting despite problems with the Internet
Today people returned to the streets of Lhasa in droves. There are tons of Chinese police and army in the city but they are letting people wander without too much difficulty. Schools were also open today – hopefully all this means that there will not be any further escalation of the situation. Since the 14th things have quieted down dramatically – aside from a few booms and bangs we haven’t been able to hear much from where we are.
more
Monks who were at the forefront of September’s demonstrations against the Junta in Burma have been under constant surveillance by authorities, writes Kyi Wai in The Irrawaddy
A 35-year-old, slender, dark man with a long face wearing a white shirt and longyi is sitting in a teashop opposite a A-Nauk Taik, a famous monastery in western Pakokku.
Many people, including the teashop owner, notice him. They know he is an undercover police officer assigned to watch the monks’ activities in A-Nauk Taik, also known as Mandalay Monastery.
Pakokku residents said that since the September monk-led protests, the authorities have assigned various officers in plain clothes to areas surrounding Buddhist monasteries, many of which are also monastic schools that train monks in the higher Buddhist scriptures.
more
The planned constitution, referendum and 2010 elections look to be a grand — if empty — show, writes Daniel Ten Kate in Asia Sentinel
Constitutions, elections and a multi-party democracy are often welcome news among the international community, but the terms mean little coming from Burma’s generals, especially in a new “democratic” process that will likely turn the current junta leader into an all-powerful president.
While the constitution has yet to be completed or made public, exile groups say the “basic principles” that guide it specifically preclude anyone from serving as president who has a spouse, children or spouses of children that are citizens of a foreign country—a rule designed to exclude Aung San Suu Kyi, who was married to a British academic and has two children who live in the United Kingdom.
In a sign of how secretive the constitution-drafting process has been so far, many people both inside and outside Burma were surprised when the junta announced over the weekend its plan to quickly draft a constitution, put it up for a referendum in May and then hold elections in 2010.
more
Less than a month after he wrote of his hopes for the new year, Burmese blogger Nay Phone Latt has mysteriously gone missing. His distraught mother, Daw Aye Aye Than said her son’s whereabout could not be confirmed as authorities have denied detaining him. But on January 29, 2008, Nay Phone Latt left his house at 12 noon, and hasn’t been seen since. A police party visited his house a few hours later, apparently searching for something though it did not say what. Meanwhile, Latt’s blog http://www.nayphonelatt.net has been blocked with practically nothing on it left readable, barring a first post titled, Happy Birthday… Mr Pooh. And this poem:
Hopes accompanied us to the next year’s dates
All what we have done are also with us as a shade
Pure the heart for knowing the true rights
Pure the mind for making the best times
You are the one who can manage to earn both cold and warm
New Year is the one that remind u to value the length of time
Every change won’t be same what you want to gain
We have to try again to attain the various aims
Your view can be changed according to your brain
Every point of view can make you in sane
A man should be a man who can take responsibility of his stand
Remember that you can’t pass clearly to the new year if you have the unfinished affairs in the old year.
The dictators call it Myanmar. For the first time since they crushed the Saffron Revolution, Adam Karlin traveled to the country he calls Burma-and home. His dispatch on World Hum.
I was on my way home to visit my grandmother when she had a stroke.
Home. That’s a relative term when home refers to Burma. Because I’m half-Burmese, Burma-which I prefer to “Myanmar,” a name conjured up by the nation’s dictators-has always felt a little like home.
My relatives, even Burmese I’ve never met, treat me like a long lost son. I see elements of myself-my passivity, my faith, my taste for rich, oily hot food, and whatever capability I have for empathy-realized in this country and its culture. It’s a self-centered worldview, but travel can be narcissistic, especially in countries like Burma, which seems to naturally lend travelers a sense of self-discovery.
More:
Joel Stein takes a look at the new Rambo film for Time magazine
Sylvester Stallone has memorized a lot of Procol Harum lyrics, and for the next two minutes I’m going to hear them. Because if you want to know what inspires a man to write a movie in which hundreds of people are blown up and which, by his own estimate, contains only three pages of dialogue between the two main characters, apparently you have to listen to the lyrics of a psychedelic 1968 song called In Held ‘Twas in I: Glimpses of Nirvana. This is the song that made Stallone want to be a writer, which is surprising because while it contains one Zen koan and mentions the Dalai Lama three times, it does not allude to firing a rocket launcher through a helicopter window.
more
The junta blames insurgents and shadowy foreigners for several blasts, but analysts suspect the military itself, writes Brian McCartan in the Asia Sentinel
Burma’s ruling State Peace and Development Council has accused Karen ethnic minority insurgents and a “major group from abroad” for a series of bombings over the past 10 days, raising suspicions that the junta itself is behind the violence in an effort shore up unity in the armed forces or as an excuse for crackdowns against the pro-democracy movement and ethnic resistance groups.
more
