Politics and Governance

Christine Loh is the founder of Civic Exchange, a Hong Kong based think tank focused on environmental, social, and economic issues. She visited the New York offices of EastWest institute on September 16th 2010 to discuss her new book Underground Front: the Chinese Communist Party in Hong Kong. Her talk, featured in this two-part video series, is followed by a Q & A session. To watch, simply click on the links below:

Christine Loh Book Presentation (Part I)

Christine Loh Book Presentation (Part II)

The Center for Media Freedom and Responsibility lists 36 media killings in 2009, when the Maguindanao Massacre occurred. This year, four cases of media killings have been recorded. Over 1,000 cases of extrajudicial killings were recorded under the Arroyo administration. Barely a hundred days into the recently installed Aquino administration, seven activists have been killed. Activists and militants, as well as the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial Killings, attribute this to the government’s counter insurgency program, Oplan Bantay Laya (Operation Freedom Watch), a policy that remains in place to date.

Indeed, the prospects for peace and security in the Philippines and the Asia Pacific are, to say the least, unpromising. Social injustice remains the biggest obstacle to peace and security in the Philippines. We are a backward agricultural economy that, to date, has failed to concretely recognize in practice the right of tillers to own the land. 70% of the Philippines’ peasants do not own the land they till. Some 10,000 farmers working the land owned by the king of the Philippines, President Benigno Aquino III, are in the middle of a legal battle to lay claim to the land. At least 2.7 million Filipinos are unemployed, while those who managed to find work remain among the lowest paid workers in the region, deprived of job security and benefits. 

Poverty remains high and the rich-poor gap continues to widen. According to the Forbes Asia list, the net worth of just the twenty richest Filipinos reached $20.4 billion, an amount that is roughly the equivalent to the combined income of around 12 million Filipino families. Efforts of previous administrations to court multinational companies and other investors with the hopes of bringing in employment and boosting the economy have not had much impact on the poorest communities. In the first quarter of 2010, the Philippine economy posted an impressive 7.3% growth, which was attributed to an increase in remittances from overseas Filipino workers and election-related spending. But the supposed growth in the economy trumpeted by the government has not trickled down to the impoverished sectors. This has not translated to improved services for health and education; it has not translated to socialized housing, higher wages or improved benefits, or to an improved, modernized agriculture.  

This situation of immense poverty and social injustice is a situation that inevitably breeds conflict. As a matter of fact, the most war-torn areas in the Philippines, the Autonomous Region of Muslim Mindanao is the most impoverished region in the country. Poverty incidence in ARMM is at 56%, a far cry from the national poverty incidence level of 32%. The region is also home to tens of thousands of evacuees who have been forced to leave their communities as a result of armed conflict and intensified militarization. Armed groups like the Moro Islamic Liberation Front as well as the New People’s Army which led three decades of rebellion, persist in the far-flung rural communities of Mindanao. 

Intervention from countries like the United States has not helped at all in the peace process with both the MILF and the National Democratic Front. In 2008, the US government has managed to encroach in Mindanao communities and manipulate a supposed peace agenda and a Memorandum of Agreement on Ancestral Domain with Congress-funded organizations like the US Institute of Peace. An assured protection of US interests in the mineral rich lands of Mindanao was part of the deal. The MOA-AD was later deemed unconstitutional by the Philippine Supreme Court. 

On the other hand, peace negotiations with the NDFP conducted with previous administrations have been bogged down repeatedly. While a Comprehensive Agreement on the Respect for Human Rights and International Humanitarian Law was achieved during the administration of former President Fidel Ramos, the succeeding governments of Joseph Estrada and Gloria Arroyo did not recognize this landmark agreement. Both governments adapted an all out war policy in compliance with the US Counter Insurgency Guide which instructs governments to disarm, dismantle and reintegrate revolutionary forces instead of addressing the root causes of conflict.

Several moves have been initiated by parliamentarians, non-governmental organizations, civil society groups and church organizations as well as local government units towards the resumption of peace talks. This year, the Philippines became the 17th country to adopt a national action plan for the United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325 which emphasized the need for governments to specifically address the impact of war on women and girls and recognize women's contributions to conflict prevention. It also emphasized the need to support local women’s peace initiatives and indigenous processes for conflict resolution. 

Peace negotiations with the three month old Aquino administration have yet to begin but barely 100 days into the Aquino presidency the prospects are dim. In President Aquino’s first state of the nation address, preconditions have been set for the resumption of talks and revolutionary groups like the NDFP see these preconditions as moves towards bringing revolutionary movements to capitulation. Philippine parliamentarians have, in various venues brought forth the issue of peace and security in the country. Legislation is being proposed and laws like the Anti-Torture Law have been passed to help address issues of peace and security in the country.  International bodies like the United Nations as well as the Inter Parliamentary Union have been very helpful in compelling the Philippine government to take action against extra judicial killings, political persecution and human rights violations. Many sectors are looking forward to the immediate resumption of peace negotiations, and towards the implementation of concrete measures that will put in place comprehensive social and economic reforms.

For indeed, the road to peace goes far beyond negotiations and talks. It goes beyond the passage of legislation and the campaign and intervention of independent bodies and international human rights organizations. A people will know no peace in the midst of poverty, injustice and aggression.

Rep. Luzviminda C. Ilagan, Representative to the 15th Congress, Gabriela Women’s Partylist

“An attack on Russia would be regarded as an attack on NATO!” In November 2013, ten months after being sworn in as President of the United States for a second term, this is President Obama’s declaration to the NATO summit.

The United States and NATO had provided a similar security guarantee to Japan for decades, which in the 1980s was often called the “sixteenth member” of NATO. In 1969, the United States gave a similar private assurance to the Soviet Union when Moscow was considering nuclear retaliation against an increasingly belligerent China in the grip of the Cultural Revolution.  

In 2009, under a new wave of military reforms instituted by President Medvedev, and backed by Prime Minister Putin, Russia began dismantling what was left of its capability for protracted conventional war. By 2012, Russia certainly needed NATO, and the latter needed reassurance that Russia’s almost exclusive reliance on nuclear weapons alone for its defence would not be called into play in potential conflicts in Northeast Asia.
The 2013 decision to align so closely with Russia grew out of three broad commitments in NATO’s 2010 security concept.

The first was affirmation that while NATO is a defensive regional military alliance, there were several “out of area” developments that directly brought into play its security interests. This had been evident even before 2010. In the 1987 war on shipping in the Persian Gulf, several NATO allies used the fig-leaf of the moribund 1948 Western European Union defence treaty to provide legal cover for a joint military operation to protect oil tankers “an ocean away” from NATO territory.  The direct security interests of NATO in remote areas had also been manifested in the acceptance by it in 2003 of the UN mandate to undertake defence of the Afghanistan government. As one diplomat put it prophetically in 2010, “Afghanistan changed NATO forever”.

In this vein, NATO came to understand that its explicit commit to “exporting security” was a deeper commitment than a temporary, “out of area” deployment of troops or the coordination of security sector reform in what were then called “partner” countries. In fact, the idea that NATO involvement in reforming the military establishment of distant countries was somehow apolitical had by 2012 become widely acknowledged as a big illusion. There is nothing more profoundly political and more potentially entangling in security terms that a commitment by one country to shore up the military establishment of another.  The second stream of policy development that contributed to the NATO decision to offer a security guarantee to Russia was the determination to respond positively to the growing demand from “out of area” countries for close ties that represented, as for Japan, de facto but non-voting membership of NATO. Kuwait and Saudi Arabia had been de facto members since 1990 when NATO forces joined those of many others in Operation “Desert Shield”, which a year later became the “Desert Storm” that liberated Kuwait. By 2012, other tiny and defenceless Arab states were all too willing to sign up as “partners”, and NATO’s heavy dependence on their oil and the value of their investment capital sealed the deal.

The third stream of NATO policy development that led to the security guarantee for Russia was not as explicit in the 2010 security review, but the seeds of it were there in several ways. The foundation was recognition of the treaty commitment of all NATO countries to finding security “with Russia”, not “against it”. If NATO was the cornerstone of European security and European security (including Russia) was “indivisible”, then NATO had to be at least one cornerstone of Russian security. But that was only a “legal” explanation. NATO extended the security guarantee to Russia in 2013 because of a shared sense of urgent need to protect common security interests in the Korean peninsula, Central and South Asia, the Red Sea hinterland – and cyber space.

“No one seemed sure about how trust in governance could be restored in Pakistan, only that anything, or anyone, would be better than our present rulers,” writes Sehgal of recent discussions.

Exploring possible avenues for change, Sehgal considers the army, whose image has been bolstered by its response to the recent floods. Although Pakistanis widely oppose martial law, many are resigned to it as a last resort against total anarchy, Sehgal observes. And while Army Chief Kayani apparently has no ambition to grab political power, “stranger things have happened.”  

Taking stock of the country’s political dysfunction, Sehgal writes about the perceived corruption of President Zardari’s government and the concern that the Supreme Court may be unable to administer rule of law, particularly in tumultuous regions like Balochistan, which was swamped by diverted flood waters. Remarking on the possible reemergence of unpopular former president Pervez Musharraf, Sehgal predicts that Zardari “may possibly suffer the same fate as the person he deposed, someone who now fancies himself as the ‘Comeback Kid.’”

For Sehgal, the only hope for constructive change lies in principled bureaucratic officers at the lower end of the political spectrum. If there is no change within the system, Sehgal warns, the result will be anarchy.

Click here to read this article online.

Don’t be fooled by the recent signs of a thaw between the Koreas. Pyongyang and Seoul have discussed more family reunions on the divided peninsula, and $8.5 million in aid from the South to help the North cope with devastating floods. But the underlying trend suggests a fundamental shift toward confrontation, as South Korean President Lee Myung-bak sounds more and more like Ronald Reagan and his attack on the “evil empire” of communism.

Since taking office in 2008, Lee has largely reversed the course of his predecessors, who pursued a “sunshine” policy of warming relations with the North. Lee criticized his predecessors for lavishing money on Kim Jong-il’s dictatorial regime and getting only belligerence in return. North Korea continued to push its nuclear program, missile tests, and other provocative behavior. After a South Korean warship was torpedoed in March, killing 46 sailors, Lee’s government threw off the gloves. It blamed the attack on the North, and called Pyongyang its “principal enemy,” an epithet Seoul had not used in six years. It also vowed to cut off aid until Pyongyang apologizes, which of course it refuses to do.

The modest new aid offer doesn’t resolve the standoff. In fact, Lee raised the stakes last month, issuing what sounded like an outright challenge to the legitimacy of the Pyongyang regime just as it was preparing a ruling-party conclave, at which Kim was expected to begin passing power to his youngest son, Kim Jong-un. Lee appeared to envision the end of the Kim family reign when he proclaimed that “the time has come” for the South “to start discussing realistic policies to prepare for” reunification, including a “reunification tax” that would help the South absorb the North. On a visit to Moscow last week, he claimed that he was only envisaging a gradual process of peaceful unification, not the collapse of North Korea. But his backpedaling seemed to confirm that he had indeed been thinking about the end of the Kim regime.

The call for a reunification tax is a wonky way of echoing Reagan’s call to the Soviets to “tear down” the Berlin Wall. The message: you are presiding over a doomed political system, and we are preparing to absorb you. Last week, the Federation of Korean Industries put the likely cost of reunifying the two Koreas at roughly $3 trillion, or $1 trillion more than West Germany spent on reuniting with East Germany. Why the difference? East Germany had a reputation as the most isolated and repressive of the Soviet satellites, but North Korea is even more isolated, and in even sharper economic decline. One third of North Korean children under the age of 5 are malnourished, and mortality rates for both infants and adults rose about 30 percent between 1993 and 2008. A currency devaluation in November 2009 and the replacement of the old won with a new won effectively robbed people of their meager private savings. There are reports of growing popular resentment and black-market dealings, but no real sign of resistance to the iron control of the Kims.

One lesson from Eastern Europe is that the more repressive the regime, the harder it falls. The closest analogy to North Korea was Romania, where Nicolae Ceausescu the (“Genius of the Carpathians”) built a cult of personality almost as ludicrous as Kim’s, and worked with his wife to set up their son Nicu as the heir apparent. Instead they were both executed in the only violent revolution of 1989, and Nicu was dispatched to prison.

South Korea now has two options. It can help North Korea stay afloat, since a rapid collapse could unleash chaos, and hope that the Kim regime will slowly fade away. Fearing a flood of refugees, China is committed to that route. Or, like Reagan when he dealt with the Soviet Union, it can continue to negotiate, making agreements that help both sides whenever possible, but demanding real accountability and not hesitating to challenge the legitimacy of a political system that is brutal and dangerous.

Lee isn’t as openly confrontational as Reagan, but his instincts are pulling him toward a more subtle Reaganism. It’s a rational calculation, because another unpredictable Kim regime is in no nation’s best interests.

Click here to read this article in Newsweek.

Andrew Nagorski is vice president and director of public policy at the EastWest Institute. A former Newsweek foreign correspondent and editor, he is the author of "The Greatest Battle: Stalin, Hitler, and the Desperate Struggle for Moscow That Changed the Course of World War II."

“Biblical scale” is the phrase in English, at least for those whose identify with the Bible as a reference point for catastrophe. There may be a similar term from other religious traditions. By any measure, the inundation in Pakistan in July was a force of nature that humankind could not have wrought. But the allusion to divine power, evoking memory of “the great flood”, should alert us to the possibility that nothing will be the same again, either for Pakistan or the world as a result of this most recent tragedy. To get a sense of the political power of nature, one might recall the inundation of East Pakistan in 1970 that fueled the political revolt by the Awami League, resulting in the break-up up of Pakistan and the creation of Bangladesh in 1971.

Though far fewer people died in the recent floods than in the 1970 inundation (some 2,000 compared with an estimated 400,000 in 1970), the physical damage this year was far greater and far more widespread. Five times as many people have been displaced in the recent floods compared with 1970, and in 2010 prices, the damage this year is estimated to be 30 times greater.    

Politics is not ordained by nature (thankfully). Choices will be made by people and quite different medium term pathways for Pakistan can still be imagined. But the country has not really known peace and stability for much of its brief political history. Even though Pakistan has produced and benefited from a degree of economic prosperity and advanced culture, the darker periods and underlying fragility in the political system give reason to wonder whether the country will pull together to rehabilitate the affected people and communities.

One political factor in 1970 was key. It was the failure of the government of Pakistan to respond to the catastrophe. It was irrelevant to the critics whether this was the result of indifference or incapacity. But the government did not cope.

Forty years on, given the scale of the recent disaster, other pressures on the government of Pakistan and other demands on international sources of relief, it is easy to imagine a scenario where within six months, we see a similar situation, with a groundswell of political opposition reacting to inadequate government support.

Other analysts have issued similar warnings. My aim here is to draw a bigger picture. The world is not prepared for what may result if there is a serious revolt. The countries with greatest demonstrated capacity to respond are those of NATO and the EU. Yet even they do not have enough money, enough military or even the mentality to be a force for good in a Pakistan facing generalized political unrest among its poorest communities least able to recover from the floods. India, China, Russia and Japan will similarly be left in sideline roles.  

In terms of resources, both material and spiritual, there is only one group of benefactors left who can come through in the long haul – the wealthy oil-producing Muslim countries. They are already disposed to emergency relief in Pakistan but it is unlikely that any of them is yet seized fully with a view of the dire consequences that might await them at home within ten years if they fail to move beyond emergency relief to long term rehabilitation of Pakistan.

The rehabilitation will not just be an infrastructure exercise, but a political and social trial to underpin the political cohesion and internal security of the Pakistani state. Who will step up from the Muslim world to lead this unprecedented effort of global strategic import? Will Europe and the United States follow that lead? 

As readers of this newspaper will know, the OSCE spans three continents, brings together about 15 per cent of humanity, has 56 members, and has four out of five permanent seats in the UNSC. There is another regional organization that also spans three continents, represents the aspirations of a bigger slice of humanity (about 25 per cent), and has 57 countries as members, but none with a permanent seat in the UN Security Council.

The group in question is the Organization of Islamic Conference (OIC), the world’s only “regional organization” based around a religious attribution. Apart from its 57 members (Muslim majority states), there are a number of states or entities as observers: Bosnia and Hercegovina, Thailand, Russia, the Central African Republic and the Turkish Cypriot government.

The OIC has its own Development Bank, its Islamic UNESCO (ISESCO), the Islamic International Court, the International Islamic News Agency, and a host of subsidiary and affiliated organizations. It does not of course represent in a direct political sense all Muslims, but it does purport to speak on behalf of the “umma” (the community of Muslim believers worldwide).

Osama bin Laden wrote often of the Umma, expressing on occasion the hope that it would rise again to a prominent place in world political affairs, and be recognized again for high achievement in the arts and sciences. I mention that not to credit the source in any way, but to demonstrate that the sentiment about an organized Islamic resurgence is seen as a good mobilizing tool. That aspiration is shared by many leaders in the Islamic world, and it is captured in the Charter of the OIC: “to work for revitalizing Islam’s pioneering role in the world”. This vision, one I share, is the departure point of this analysis.

There are other high ambitions expressed in the OIC charter, including the more familiar idea of a “common market”, albeit an “Islamic Common Market”. Turkey, also an aspirant for EU membership, is actively promoting both parts of this OIC agenda: scientific and technological advance and regional economic integration.

The OIC revised its original 1972 Charter only in 2008. At the time, Indonesia’s President, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, declared that as a result of the new charter "the possibility of an Islamic Renaissance lies before us".

The OIC is a leading force in the fight globally against violent extremism.  In 2008, the conference declaration noted: “We continue to strongly condemn all forms of extremism and dogmatism which are incompatible with Islam”. The OIC is also leading a global campaign against rising Islamophobia around the world, a phenomenon documented by independent sources.

To many observers, the OIC is an imperfect organization, to be faulted for its internal divisions, for its hostile attitude to Israel, for what some see as its ingrained anti-semitism, and for its extreme political diversity (from monarchies, dictatorships, and radical regimes to democracies of varying stripe).

That view does not capture the essential dynamism and progressive character of the evolutionary path on which the OIC has been set for number of years. Nor does it speak to the sense of injustice over Palestine that for its part, it carries into many political forums.

A full assessment of the trajectory of this interesting organization would be very useful. One thing is clear. The OIC wants a new partnership with the West, and some countries are beginning to respond to that. The path to regional and wider international power and authority may be long and rocky, but the OIC and its member states have a vision for regional and global economic and scientific development that is definitely beginning to change the world for the better. Let’s work with them.

The bill, which finalized the civil nuclear agreements between the United States and India begun under the Bush administration, has drawn heated criticism domestically and internationally -- particularly among U.S. nuclear suppliers. Spurred by collective memory of the 1984 Bhopal disaster, in which thousands of people were killed by poisonous emissions from a pesticides factory, Parliament crafted a bill that would hold suppliers liable in case of nuclear accident. Ordinarily, only operators are held liable.

Much of the controversy over the bill stems from the fact that India is re-writing international civil nuclear law, notes Sibal. But the main thrust of criticism is that suppliers from United States, France and Russia, fearful of risk exposure, will not help bring new nuclear power plants to India. Sibal argues that this is not the case:  “It is not chest-thumping to say that foreign suppliers will find it very difficult to ignore India’s large nuclear market, and ways to adapt to the Indian legislation will eventually be found.”

Some of suppliers’ worst fears about legal repercussion are baseless, according to Sibal: by the new law, a plant’s liability is not automatic, but would need to be established in court, and insurance amounts would be capped at a “tiny percentage” of a nuclear plant’s budget.

Despite critical reception to the bill, Sibal writes that the bill is ultimately a positive indicator for Parliament’s ability to seek consensus through compromise. As for whether India -- the nuclear community’s newest member-- should be able to alter international civil nuclear law, Sibal points out that for better or for worse, it already has.

Click here to read Sibal’s article in Mail Today.

In The Changing Political Utility of Nuclear Weapons: Nuclear Threats from 1970 to 2010, Samuel Black offers historical evidence against the idea that nuclear weapons are “weapons of peace”: first, there have been twice as many nuclear threats since the end of the Cold War than there were from 1970 to 1990; second, Pakistan, the U.S. and India were the leaders when it came to making those threats.

“One could quibble with the methodology of the study, yet there is no contesting the somber finding,” Sidhu writes. “States possessing nuclear weapons actually find the political utility of these deadly weapons increasing.” Sidhu points out that the nonchalance with which threats are issued can discredit the seriousness of a nuclear threat and allow more room for casual errors.

“While there is, clearly, a temptation to create the comforting legend of nuclear weapons as manna from heaven that will end the scourge of war for evermore, it is a dangerous delusion,” Sidhu concludes.  “The stark reality is that nuclear weapons by themselves cannot ensure peace.”

Click here to read Sidhu’s article on livemint.com