IV. International
(06-02-08)
.
Nepal
has belied prophecies of a post-election upheaval. All
sections of the country and its political spectrum
appears to have accepted the Maoist victory in the polls
to the constituent assembly. No one has rejected the
results. But the same cannot be said of some quarters in
India.
.
Six years ago the area around Samboja in
Borneo
was like much of the world’s tropical rainforest:
denuded. The trees have been cut for timber, the land
burnt, and in place of what should be some of the
richest biodiversity on the planet were thousands of
acres of grass.
.
Many countries are making plans to supply large amounts
of food aid to
North Korea.
The US announced that it would send 500k tone of rice.
South Korea,
after several months of saying it would condition food
aid on removal of nuclear weapons, now says it wants to
talk with North Korea about providing food aid.
. China
will take the brunt of the US economic slowdown that is
still unfolding over declines in home values.
Europe
and Japan
will follow the US downward as their home prices
collapse too. Consumers will give up, and that will hurt
export economies around the world. China’s economy is
heavily export-oriented (38% of its GNP).
.
Part of the problem is income. Just 8% of Chinese earn
enough to affect the domestic economy positively, and
even so, Chinese save nearly a third of their pay. Since
they don’t spend, and state banks pay below-inflation
rates, the Chinese themselves have been driving up
domestic stocks. They cannot now invest abroad at all.
.
China appeared to bend to international pressure as it
announced it would meet with envoys from the Dalai Lama,
an unexpected shift that comes as violent Tibetan
demonstrations in W. China
have threatened to pass a pall over the Beijing Olympics
in August.
.
A new law in
China requires companies
to provide contacts that include pension and insurance
contributions. It also requires companies to pay workers
who are fired a month’s wages for every year worked;
1.5x the normal rate for overtime; double time on
weekends; and triple time on official holidays, putting
an end to exploitation and abuse of workers, e.g.,
forced labor, withholding of pay, unwarranted
dismissals, among others.
. For
companies already struggling with inflation, high energy
costs, the falling dollar and environmental crackdown,
the new law has been devastating, exacerbated by growing
cost of dong business in China in places like Pearl
River Delta in South China,
for 20 years synonymous with cheap labor and the engine
behind China’s
rapid growth.
.
A survey in March by the
American Chamber of Commerce in Shanghai and Booz
Allen Hamilton found that a 5th of companies
with foreign ownership or investment have concrete plans
to move some or all of their operations out of China. In
the Pearl River Delta, an estimated 10k companies are
planning to scale back or shut down, according to the
Federation of Hong Kong Industries.
.
Despite the devastation,
China has
initially rejected of help from foreign aid workers,
including search-and-rescue experts from Australia, dog
handlers from the Czech Republic, and fire fighters from
Japan. This reflected China’s refusal to permit entry to
others reflected its distrust of outsiders, particularly
foreign non-governmental organizations.
.
In Euxin, parents blamed the collapse of a primary
school from shoddy materials which they said were the
result of corruption by officials responsible for making
sure the school was safe. To back up their contention,
they pointed out that teachers’ dormitory on one side
and the administrative office on the other stood firm,
while the classroom in the center buckled immediately,
killing 300 children.
. The
official death toll rose to 42,069 with nearly 200,000
injured. China says it expects the number of dead to
rise to 70,000. Many of the dead are school children.
The scale of destruction is so vast is so vast that it
is difficult to imagine a carefree crowd in Beijing when
the Olympic Games open in August.
.
Tens of thousands of people are living in makeshift
tents along the streets and parks in Dujiangyan alone.
With so much attention focused on the rescue, they say
they have no information about whether the government
will rebuild their homes or when they can move into some
homes and resume their lives.
. Eight
is an auspicious number in Chinese tradition, ad 2008
was supposed to be a joyful year, a time for celebrating
at the Beijing Olympics and basking in
international recognition of the country’s tremendous
program under the leadership of the Chinese Communist
Party (CCP).
.
An uprising in Tibet
focused the world’s attention on China’s abuse of human
rights. The worldwide Olympic torch relay turned into a
magnet for protest embarrassing Olympic organizers,
angering nationalistic Chinese and souring the mood for
the Beijing Games.
.
Pres. Hu Jintao and his
lieutenants appeared to realize what was at stake. The
head of CCP’s Central
Discipline Inspection
Commission
publicly warned public officials that their careers
would depend on how they handled the crisis.
.
The Japanese government
appeared resigned to the possibility that the
US may reach agreement
with North Korea, and remove it from a list of rogue
nations that sponsor terrorism, without addressing
issues that Japan regards as fundamental to its national
interest.
.
A deal based on nuclear issues would not solve the
matter for
Japan and it
would refuse to normalize relations with North Korea,
P.M. Yasuo Fukuda said in a recent interview. The
Japanese government wants North Korea to disable 200 to
300 medium-range missiles that Japanese officials say
are capable of striking virtually any location inside
the country.
.
The Japanese government is also demanding that North
Korean leader Kim Jong Il provide credible
information about the fate of eight Japanese citizens
who were kidnapped in Japan by North Korean agents in
the 1970s and 1980s. North Korea maintains they are all
dead, while Japan says they are alive.
. After WW
II, Japanese men (and women) have been spare the
obligation of serving in the military in any way.
Because their Constitution (written by Americans) says
war is not the Japanese national doctrine for resolving
international disputes or for ensuring national
security, they have enjoyed 60 years of peace.
. North Korea’s
23 million citizens face a devastating crisis of food
shortages and famine and the prospect of hunger-related
deaths occurring in the next several months is
approaching certainty, according to the
Institute for
International Economics in Washington.
. The US
food aid to North Korea reached a peak in 1999 of about
685,000 tons, worth $222 million when the Clinton
administration was seeking its own agreement with North
Korea, according to Congressional Research Service.
US food aid fell dramatically during the Bush
administration before ending entirely in 2005 over a
dispute about monitoring.
.
The Bush administration
said it will restart food aid to North Korea and provide
it with more than 500,000 tons of food, the largest
one-year amount since 1999.
. Burma’s
military government has appealed for international help
in getting the Irawaddy Delta rice farmers back to their
fields after Cyclone Nargis as concerns grew about
future food shortages if cultivators miss the upcoming
plantation season.
.
UN Food & Agriculture Organization has warned
that Delta’s rice farmers, many of whom lost their rice
seeds in the cyclone and the tidal surge, have less than
two months to get back to cultivation.
.
There have been numerous reports that the military has
turned around and sold the supplies for the victims or
has taken it to warehouses and distributed muddy rice
and the like. The earlier ban was revoked and they
started allowing a small number of international aid
workers to deliver the aid themselves.
. Pakistan’s
fragile coalition government agreed to reinstate the
Chief Justice and 60 other judges fired by Pervez
Musharraf—a move almost certain to spell trouble for the
US-backed president, govt. officials said.
. Pakistan’s
army lodged a formal protest with what it termed “allied
forces” in neighboring Afghanistan over a suspected US
missile strike that killed 14 people in Pakistan’s
border village of
Damadola.
.
Pakistan’s ambassador to Afghanistan (Tariq Azizuddin)
returned home 3 months after he was kidnapped on the
main highway through Pakistan’s wild NW border region. A
senior official said he was freed through law
enforcement action & the government made no concessions
nor paid any ransom money.
.
A suicide bomber blew himself up at the gate of an army
base in Pakistan’s troubled NW killing at lest 11
people, including 4 soldiers. It was the deadliest
attack in more than 2 months.
.
Eight bank employees and
a security guard in the
Philippines
were lined up and fatally shot in the head in the worst
ban robbery in the country’s history. Another employee
was in critical condition at a hospital.
.
The chief of
Bangladesh’s
biggest Islamist political party (Jamaat-e-Islami) was
detained over allegations of kickbacks in a port deal,
police said.
.
The world’s last Hindu
kingdom became the newest secular republic last week as
Nepal’s
lawmakers, led by former Communist insurgents, abolished
the monarchy that had reigned over this land for 239
years.
.
Public Health Minister
Chaiya Sasomsaub of
Thailand
will lead a new Team to Burma comprised of physicians,
pediatricians, psychologists, dentists and engineers to
provide assistance to victims of Cyclone Nargis and lay
down future strategies to cope with the aftermath of the
disaster.
