Necessary Scapegoats? The Making of the Khmer Rouge Tribunal

Necessary Scapegoats? The Making of the Khmer Rouge Tribunal: Stéphanie Giry

David van der Veen/AFP/Getty Images
Cambodia's Prime Minister Hun Sen (left) shaking hands with former Khmer Rouge foreign minister Ieng Sary, October 22, 1996

This spring, almost a decade after its difficult birth, the joint Cambodian-UN tribunal set up to prosecute the officials who orchestrated the Khmer Rouge’s worst crimes seemed finally to be gaining momentum. In February, the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia sentenced Duch, the head of the regime’s most notorious torture center, to life in prison. A month later, Duch appeared as a key witness in the court’s second and most important case, the trial of the only remaining members of Pol Pot’s immediate entourage: Nuon Chea, the Khmer Rouge’s chief ideologue; Ieng Sary, the foreign minister; and Khieu Samphan, the head of state. At last, the tribunal appeared to be making real progress toward finding out why, or at least how, the Khmer Rouge killed some 1.7 million Cambodians between 1975 and 1979.

Outside the courtroom, though, a crisis was erupting. On the very first day of Duch’s testimony, a Swiss judge tasked with investigating other former Khmer Rouge officials resigned, citing “egregious dysfunctions” at the court. As a mixed tribunal, the ECCC performs its most important functions—investigating, prosecuting, defending the accused, judging—with teams that include both Cambodian and international appointees. As he quit, the judge said that for months his Cambodian counterpart had stonewalled his efforts to pursue two cases against five mid-level Khmer Rouge officials, each one thought to be responsible for 40,000 to 100,000 deaths—far more than even the more than 12,000 deaths ascribed to Duch. The judge’s dramatic announcement was the strongest accusation yet that the Cambodian government has been trying to sabotage the tribunal’s work.

Behind this story of remarkable breakthroughs and confounding setbacks stands Cambodia’s protean leader, Hun Sen, one of the longest-serving prime ministers in the world. Hun Sen has long been keen to go down in history as the man who brought the surviving leaders of the Pol Pot regime to justice. But as a one-time Khmer Rouge battalion commander, he knows only too well that important members of the governing Cambodian People’s Party (CPP) have complicated ties to the former regime and that more investigations down the Khmer Rouge chain of command could expose their own shady pasts.

No less responsible for the ECCC’s zigzagging course are the UN, which co-runs the court, and the court’s major donors: Japan, the European Union, Australia, and the United States. The ECCC’S foreign backers have largely let Hun Sen have his way, despite much talk of accountability and universal values. They, too, seem eager to present themselves as guardians of international justice for as small a political price as possible.

Although international criminal tribunals often serve the specific needs of a few powerful players, the Khmer Rouge tribunal may stand apart for so effectively dispensing justice in the service of political expediency. The ECCC may have the formal trappings of an independent institution, but it is best understood as the judicial chapter in the awkward, and often dirty, story of political accommodations that Hun Sen, the Khmer Rouge, the United Nations, and major states have been making with one another for almost forty years.

Digital Archive of Cambodian Holocaust Survivors
Khmer Rouge in Phnom Penh, April 17, 1975

When in 1997 Hun Sen asked the UN for help setting up a court to try the Khmer Rouge, he had already distinguished himself as a master political operator. Though he had been a mid-level Khmer Rouge cadre, in 1977 he defected from the movement to Vietnam, Cambodia’s enemy at the time. Two years later, when the Vietnamese invaded Cambodia, he was installed as Cambodia’s foreign minister. He remained in the government throughout the Vietnamese occupation during the 1980s.

Then the USSR collapsed, and by 1990, Vietnam, a Soviet ally, had withdrawn from Cambodia. Over the next few years, the UN helped broker a peace settlement; Cambodia was to become a model for state reconstruction. In 1993, elections were held. From those Hun Sen once again reemerged at the top, first as co-prime minister and then soon enough, after wresting more power still, as sole prime minister.

It was the late 1990s, and remnant factions of the Khmer Rouge were still waging sporadic attacks on government forces. One of Hun Sen’s strategies was to bring some of these groups over to the government’s side; in 1996, he even obtained a royal amnesty for Khmer Rouge foreign minister Ieng Sary. But he knew that formally prosecuting top members of Khmer Rouge would be a chance to cast himself as a savior-statesman, the leader who would pacify Cambodia after decades of conflict. It would also be an opportunity to burnish his credentials with Cambodia’s foreign aid donors. During the final years of the Cold War, despite wide knowledge of the Khmer Rouge’s atrocities, Pol Pot’s group had held on to Cambodia’s seat at the United Nations, thanks to support from the West, China, and ASEAN, the economic group of Southeast Asian states. (Better to carry on diplomacy with mass murderers than Soviet proxies, the reasoning went.) But the late 1990s were the heyday of special criminal courts, and by then Cambodia’s foreign backers, too, were ready to bring the Khmer Rouge to justice.

Hun Sen’s plan was to have only the Khmer Rouge’s leading figures prosecuted; the movement’s lower officials and rank and file would be reintegrated into Cambodian society, no questions asked. But he faced one particular challenge: how to separate out the members of Pol Pot’s “genocidal clique”—as goes a still-favored expression—from mid-level Khmer Rouge who had had some measure of authority, like himself and some of his colleagues at the CPP.

AP Photo/Heng Sinith, Munshi Ahmed/Bloomberg, Khem Sovanara/AFP/Getty Images
Cambodian leaders with Khmer Rouge ties, from left, Deputy Prime Minister Keat Chhon, Senate President Chea Sim, and National Assembly Chairman Heng Samrin

Drawing that line has been tricky. Cambodia’s current finance minister and deputy prime minister, Keat Chhon, worked in the Khmer Rouge’s foreign ministry—under Ieng Sary, who is now on trial despite the 1996 amnesty—and occasionally acted as an interpreter for Pol Pot. Heng Samrin, the chairman of the National Assembly, was the commander of the Fourth Division of the so-called Eastern Zone, which is suspected of committing war crimes during incursions into Vietnam in 1977. Chea Sim, who has been President of the Senate since 1999, was the party secretary of Sector 20, also in the Eastern Zone, where vast purges are known to have occurred.

There’s also the troubling story of Hor Nam Hong, Cambodia’s long-time foreign minister. He was ambassador to Cuba for the regime of General Lon Nol, which was overthrown by the Khmer Rouge in 1975; Pol Pot’s people called him home, arrested him upon arrival, and sent him to Boeung Trabek, a reeducation camp for diplomats in Phnom Penh. But he was spared—reportedly thanks to the intervention of his former schoolmate Ieng Sary—and is said to have then helped run the camp. A 2002 US embassy cable released by Wikileaks last summer says that Hor Nam Hong and his wife may have “collaborated in the killing of many prisoners.” Last year in France he lost a final appeal in a defamation suit he had brought regarding such crimes.

Hun Sen as a Khmer Rouge battalion commander, 1970s

And then there is Hun Sen himself. In 1975, he headed a battalion that oversaw a brutal crackdown against the Cham, a Muslim minority group in Cambodia that opposed the Khmer Rouge. He has said that he sat out the attack in a hospital, recovering from earlier battle injuries. Historians have yet to contradict him, but some have doubts.

With so few degrees of separation between the crimes of yesterday and the leaders of today, establishing the ECCC was predictably tortuous. It wasn’t difficult for the Cambodian government to agree with the UN and other international negotiators that the tribunal should prosecute genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and violations of Cambodian criminal law. But while UN lawyers favored creating a fully international court–-much like the tribunals for Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia—Hun Sen insisted it be Cambodian.

Even more controversial was the question of who would be prosecuted. In December 1999, with negotiations still under way, Hun Sen announced that only four or five members of the Khmer Rouge regime would be tried. His short list did not include Pol Pot, who had died in 1998, but it included Duch, who had just been arrested, as well as the three senior leaders now on trial. Stephen Heder, a leading American expert on Cambodia, and David Scheffer, at the time the US Ambassador-At-Large for War Crimes Issues, have since said that no such understanding existed. According to them, international negotiators assumed that ten, maybe even fifteen, people might eventually be tried.

Yet correspondence from that time reveals that top UN lawyers repeatedly suggested it was up to the Cambodian government to define the court’s reach. Throughout 2000, they variously wrote to Sok An, who is today arguably Hun Sen’s most powerful deputy prime minister, that determining the ECCC’s ambit was “an internal Cambodian matter,” “a political decision to be taken at the national level,” and “of course for the legislature to decide upon.” The two sides eventually agreed to grant the court authority to try both the senior leaders of the Khmer Rouge and “those most responsible” for the regime’s crimes. Settling on these three vague words may have been necessary to get the court off the ground, but when the UN endorsed them, it was embarking on a joint venture that its own negotiators knew, and acknowledged, the Cambodian government had every reason to control.

ECCC Pool/Mak Remissa
A pre-trial hearing at the Khmer Rouge tribunal, Phnom Penh, February 11, 2010

Duch’s trial (known as “Case 001”) and the investigation against the leaders (“Case 002”) proceeded largely as expected. These were the uncontroversial files, after all: everyone involved could get behind trying the regime’s emblematic torturer and its top brass. And so the ECCC stumbled along, overcoming with more or less grace the hurdles inherent in cases of this magnitude, investigated more than three decades after the facts, run by a mixed Cambodian and international staff, and operating under a combination of common law and civil law.

The court struggled with low-level corruption and an elaborate kickback scheme benefiting a senior administrator. There was also resistance from the Cambodian government whenever the investigating judges came too close. In 2009 six witnesses who had been subpoenaed to talk about Case 002 simply refused to meet the judges. Among them were four of the senior government officials known to have ties to the Khmer Rouge: Keat Chhon, Heng Samrin, Chea Sim, and Hor Nam Hong. Still, the case against Duch went to trial, and in 2010 a formal indictment was completed against the surviving Khmer Rouge leaders.

When it came to other suspects—names not on Hun Sen’s original list—it was a different story. Laurent Kasper-Ansermet, the Swiss judge who resigned this spring because of “constant and active opposition” from his Cambodian counterpart, was trying to investigate the five mid-level Khmer Rouge officials targeted in Cases 003 and 004. As soon as the court had officially opened those cases back in 2009—at the instigation of the international prosecutor and the international investigating judge then in those posts—Hun Sen had declared that civil war would break out if they were allowed to proceed.

Khmer Rouge suspects Meas Mut (left), the former army chief, and Im Chaem, a former regional leader

This wasn’t a very plausible threat: most Khmer Rouge fighters are now well into their 50s or older and were disarmed years ago. But the hyperbole revealed both Hun Sen’s real unease and his skill at manipulating the court to placate his cronies in the ruling party. The suspects in Case 003—Meas Mut, the Khmer Rouge’s army chief, and Sou Met, its navy chief—are now well-connected two-star generals. Although the three suspects in Case 004—Ta An, Ta Tith, and Im Chaem, all regional leaders under the Khmer Rouge—are not powerful today, some influential members of the CPP arguably had as much authority under the former Khmer Rouge as they did. If those three can be tried, who might be next?

Taking the hint, the Cambodian prosecutor and the Cambodian investigating judge, You Bunleng, quickly found legal obstacles to slow Cases 003 and 004 to a crawl. At first, the UN and the court’s foreign backers hardly complained; they were focused on seeing through the cases against Duch and the senior leaders. And as long as the court’s international staffers pushed for investigating the two additional cases in the face of local resistance, donors could gesture at the process’s semblance of integrity, at least on their side.

But then something bizarre happened: the court’s foreign investigating judge came out against pursuing Cases 003 and 004. In 2011, just four months after taking over the international slot in the investigating judges’ office, the German judge Siegfried Blunk announced that he was formally closing the inquiry for Case 003. (Case 004 remained open, but no work was being conducted.)

This was a puzzling decision. A considerable amount of evidence already suggested that the two suspects, Meas Mut and Sou Met, had orchestrated vast purges within their ranks. And documents made public during Duch’s trial indicated that Sou Met had transferred prisoners into Duch’s custody to be tortured and executed. The international prosecutor asked for more field investigations; Blunk refused. Half of Blunk’s team resigned, including Heder, who had been assisting the ECCC for several years by then. Blunk’s motivations were so unclear that his colleagues and court observers started trading theories about incompetence and disloyalty, unhappy coincidences and ungodly conspiracies.

When I met Blunk in Phnom Penh last July, he had been refusing to speak to the press. To me, he would say only that he had applied no “fanciful notions” and had relied on the precedent set by the special court that is examining major crimes committed in Sierra Leone between 1996 and 2002. If a suspect’s “authority in the command structure” was limited, if he had “little room to maneuver,” Blunk told me, “no amount of further investigation will change that—no matter how many mass graves are opened or crime scenes are investigated.”

Whatever the judge’s logic–-and officially no one knew what it was since he hadn’t made any public statements—diplomats from donor countries didn’t seem particularly troubled. The week I saw Blunk, Stephen Rapp, the US Ambassador-At-Large for War Crimes Issues, was in Phnom Penh for the official opening of the trial in Case 002. One day at a press conference, even as he was fielding tough questions about how Hun Sen seemed to be dictating the court’s agenda, Rapp said that “reasonable people” could disagree about which suspects fell within the ECCC’S mandate. He explained that in 2007, while he was chief prosecutor for the special Sierra Leone tribunal, he had decided to indict only people at the “top level in command,” not regional or divisional operatives. Rapp couldn’t have given Blunk a better way out of Cases 003 and 004.

When Blunk eventually did resign, last October, it was just days before a procedural ruling criticizing him for secretly backdating orders under appeal. He looked worse than ever. Still, the UN and the ECCC’s foreign backers showed little interest in examining his work. During a special visit to Cambodia, the UN’s top legal officer, Patricia O’Brien, gave a press conference in which she explained why there would be no inquiry: too complicated and too cumbersome. At a meeting with NGOs in Phnom Penh days later, according to the Cambodia Daily, O’Brien said that if anything were uncovered after a probe, the defense teams would “have a field day” and “undermine Case 002.” The message was clear: whatever impropriety the investigating judges may have committed, better to leave it be. Save Cases 001 and 002 and bury the rest.

The tribunal's former international investigating judge, Laurent Kasper-Ansermet

By early this year, it was difficult to imagine how Cases 003 and 004 might proceed. Still, Kasper-Ansermet, the Swiss judge who had replaced Blunk in December, threw himself into the task; he even tweeted about wanting to do the job right. Immediately he got into trouble. Cambodia’s Supreme Council of Magistracy, on which both the Cambodian investigating judge You Bunleng and the ECCC’s Cambodian prosecutor sit, said it could not recognize Kasper-Ansermet’s appointment: apparently, his tweets violated ethics rules.

Scheffer, who is now the UN Secretary-General’s special adviser to the court, promptly protested that by getting in Kasper-Ansermet’s way the Cambodian government was breaching the ECCC’s foundational treaty. The Secretary-General’s office added that this was sufficient legal ground for the UN to pull out of the entire project. It was also a lot of puffing. Taking this stance so loudly and so publicly left the Cambodian government with no face-saving way to reverse the decision of the magistracy council. In other words, the UN’s move was less a negotiation gambit than an attempt to regain some credibility with disheartened NGOs and victims’ advocates.

Then, in February, the appeals chamber of the court issued its final verdict against Duch. Touted as a historic victory for the Khmer Rouge’s victims, the decision was more remarkable for delivering everything Hun Sen and his supporters might have wanted. It took a severe position—at least by international standards—against the regime’s most recognizable torturer, making little allowance for Duch’s admissions and cooperation or for his illegal detention by a military tribunal from 1999 to 2007. And while the verdict said nothing that might undermine the case against the three senior Khmer Rouge leaders—the court’s, and Hun Sen’s, big prize—it was a death knell for Cases 003 and 004.

Duch had appealed the sentence of the court’s trial chamber by claiming, somewhat implausibly, that he was not among “those most responsible.” The appeals judges might simply have ruled that he was: after all, he did supervise the killing of more than 12,000 people. But in the final verdict they claimed instead that it was neither for them nor for the trial judges to decide whom the court should try. That matter was “exclusively” a “policy decision” for the prosecutors and the investigating judges—precisely some of the people who have been blocking Cases 003 and 004 for more than two years.

This was extraordinary. Judges rarely give up the prerogative to determine the scope of their own authority and in this instance abdicating that power would have major implications. Considering Hun Sen’s adamant opposition to these cases, it was also hard not to interpret the appeals judges’ decision as a political concession. And with no dissenting opinion—not even from any of the three international judges, who have dissented on other matters—it looked like all the key players were agreed on pocket-vetoing Cases 003 and 004.

There’s little reason to expect much change. Kasper-Ansermet, who left his post on May 4 stating he thought the suspects in Cases 003 were among “those most responsible,” has not yet been replaced. In a confidential order addressed to his colleagues at the court, he also recommended that the prosecutors’ office investigate crimes committed during Khmer Rouge incursions into Vietnam in 1977. In particular, he advised interviewing National Assembly Chairman Heng Samrin and Senate President Chea Sim—and intimated doing more. But the prosecutors swiftly issued a press release stating that the relevant facts had already been investigated in Case 002 and that, in any event, it was their “established public position” that “no further cases would be initiated following Cases 003 and 004.”

Preventing the court from embarking on more investigations remains a paramount concern for Hun Sen, who continues to consolidate his power. Cambodia currently chairs ASEAN, and it is trying to secure a seat as a nonpermanent member of the UN Security Council. There were local elections in June—dominated by the CPP—and National Assembly elections will take place next year. Having largely succeeded in neutralizing the Cambodian political opposition over the past few years—by way of anticorruption investigations and defamation lawsuits—Hun Sen is now even more concerned than before with shoring up his patronage network within the CPP.

At the same time, the UN and the court’s international backers are likely to continue invoking high-minded principles while disavowing their unspoken understandings with the Cambodian government. Having come this far on Case 002—and paid much of the $160 million or so tab the court has racked up since 2006—they won’t want to pull out before sentences are secured against Nuon Chea, Ieng Sary, and Khieu Samphan.

Bruno Barbey/Magnum Photos
Killing field south of Phnom Penh, 1996

The only open question, it seems, is whether the controversies rocking the court could derail the leaders’ trial. Lawyers for Nuon Chea—the Khmer Rouge’s chief ideologue—have filed a criminal complaint in a local Cambodian court against Hun Sen and assorted Cambodian government officials for “interfering with the administration of justice at the ECCC.” That won’t go anywhere, of course, but the trial judges in Case 002 issued a statement in May saying that Hun Sen’s various references to Nuon Chea as a “killer” and a perpetrator of “genocide” were “incompatible with the presumption of innocence to which Nuon Chea is entitled.”

The trial judges also added that such accusations by the government would not influence them in “the exercise of their duties.” This assurance, which would have been unnecessary at a properly functioning tribunal, sounded more like an entreaty to ECCC watchers: please believe that this made-to-measure court can be impartial even if it is not entirely independent. That’s a tall order, especially in view of the final verdict against Duch, which has all the makings of a double standard. How can Duch, but not the suspects in Cases 003 and 004, be among “those most responsible” for the Khmer Rouge’s crimes when each of them is thought to be accountable for four to ten times as many deaths as he is?

One lawyer at a prominent NGO in Phnom Penh justified the disparity by calling it “unequal but not unfair.” Or, as a longtime government adviser said to me, considering the “singularity” of Case 001 (Duch’s secret prison was the regime’s most important) and the “sufficiency” of Case 002 (the leaders’ trial is supposed to reveal the workings of the entire regime), “it would be wasteful to prosecute more suspects.” Raoul Jennar, a Cambodia expert from Belgium and until last fall also an adviser to Hun Sen, cast both the problem and its solution like this: “Yes, Duch is a scapegoat, but that’s a political necessity. One cannot afford the luxury of proceeding on the basis of justice alone.”

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Not enough staff to teach three new subjects:
Despite good intention by the Ministry of Education (ME) to introduce three new subjects into the national curriculum there aren’t enough teachers to teach them.

“Previously 15 subjects were offered in the curriculum however this has increased to 18. The only problem is there aren’t enough teachers to teach the new ones,” said Francisco da Costa Fernandes, Secretary General for the Timor-Leste Teacher’s Union, from his office in Farol, Dili.

TAUR CONCERN WITH THE VIOLANCE AND SAY SORRY TO THE COUNTRY

TAUR CONCERN WITH THE VIOLANCE AND SAY SORRY TO THE COUNTRY:

Tempo Semanal, July 17th 2012

The parliamentary election, which ran on the 7th of July, 2012, were very successful and our nation chose and voted for 4 political parties. Even though after the CNRT Conference on July 15^th the CNRT members rejected the party to coalition with FRETILIN the violence erupted the capital of the nation and several districts of east Timor. 

During last monday violence almost one hundred cars been stones more then dozens hospitalize, one dead, some house been burnt including schools building after CNRT vote for FRETILIN to remain as the opposition party for the second term.

During the recent parliamentary electoral process the international community and the President of the Republic saw the following concern – of whether the outcome of this election will be accepted by those who may not be successful.

“Sadly, the violence that took place on July 15th did not come from those who were unsuccessful in the parliamentary elections but rather have come from those who won. This is something that the President was not prepared for and therefore is concerned,” Taur express his concerned.

A day after (16/07) the violence erupted in several districts in East Timor, President of the Republic met with the President of CNRT, the President and Secretary-General of FRETILIN, the Secretary-General of PD and Deputy President of FRENTE- MUNDANSA which successful parties of the parliamentary election). The President of the Republic shared with them his concerns of the violence which took place and asked for their support to appeal to their members to each contribute to a calm and peaceful situation in our country.

Taur Matan Ruak said, “violence is not the way to democracy! We all condemn violence!”

Former East Timor Defence force commander furthermore stated, “there is no justification to use violence as a measure to resolve issues. There are political and democratic means to find a way to move forward.”

The four political parties leaders have all pledged to support the President to maintain a calm situation so that once again Timor- Leste can truly show to the world that they are able to move forward on theur own as a nation.

The President Taur, expresses his solidarity with those victims in the violence and apologises to all those who have felt offended, and felt effected in this stage where Timor-Leste is strengthening her democracy to move ahead.

As the President I ask once again that we all are understanding and help each other. What has already passed to put behind us and move forward, to walk together, to raise the profile of our nation and to elevate our dignity.

Once again, I thank you all.

Answered the questions from the journalist on the issue of coalitions between the parties may changed after the violence, Taur said, “President of the Republic does not influence political parties to choose whatever options they may want to choose to lead the nation in the coming five years. The President, in accordance with the mandate, swears in the new Prime Minister and the government of the people - the most voted party with the coalition they may want to choose. The final results shall be declared and published in the nations Official Bulletin. Soon we may see what will happen, whether if what has come out of the CNRT conference will be maintained or otherwise - the President is available. From there the President will announce accordingly. However, all of this will be based on the mandate the Constitution has afforded him.”

He continues, “very soon we are embarking on the process for our new Legislature and the next Constitutional Government and this will begin next month, in August 2012.”

Despite the violence Taur confident that UNMIT still going to leave in the end of this year. “Following this will be the negotiations and subsequent mandate of the UN’s next missions which will be very different to the current one.”

East Timor President thanks to the contributions of everyone – political parties, state institutions, the international community, civil society, religious convictions, security and defense institutions and the people - all have contributed greatly.

“As the President of the Republic, I thank you all. And I ask that the entire nation, all institutions, in collaboration with the President continue preparing for the processes to come to be successful in Timor-Leste’s history,” said Taur.

East timor President also congratulates the four parties who’ve won during the recent parliamentary elections. And the President expresses his admiration and solidarity and complete respect to all the political parties and coalitions that were unsuccessful in this race to maintain their presence in the coming legislature.

During the electoral campaigns of the parliamentary elections were contested by 18 political parties and three coalitions and they were able to go out to the entire nation to inform them of their respective programs and policies.

Seoul on a budget: Cheap, cheaper and cheapest

Seoul on a budget: Cheap, cheaper and cheapest:
AT first glance, Korea doesn’t look to be the cheapest place to travel. As one example, take a walk down Gangnam’s main drag and peruse the sky-high prices for clothes (they want how much for a t-shirt?!). Get away the luxury clothes and pretentious restaurants, however, and a surprisingly cheap side of Korea emerges. It’ll never be as cheap as Vietnam or Cambodia, but you can confidently make it on US$40 a day and have enough left over for souvenirs.

Pic: From Yoshi on Flickr. http://www.flickr.com/photos/yoshis_world/

Accommodations: the biggie for most people.

Cheap: If you’re traveling with some other people, you might find a love motel to be exactly what you need. They’re clean, comfortable, and surprisingly modern – a growing number sport 42″ TV’s and desktop computers with internet. Rooms all have private bathrooms, and the amenities can be surprisingly nice. Expect to pay 30,000 – 60,000 won (US$26-53) a night – split two, three, or four ways that comes out pretty nice. There’s quite a few in the Sinchon area (line 2).
Cheaper: Hostels / Youth hostels / backpacking guesthouses. If sharing a room with other people is fine, 15,000 – 20,000 won (US$13-17.50) gets you a bed for the night – often in a great location. If you like a bit of privacy, 20,000 – 30,000 won (US$17.50-26) nets you a private room. Note that most prices are quoted as per person rates – a group of three or four might find a love motel to come out cheaper!
Cheapest: Jimjilbang it! Essentially a public bathhouse with sleeping areas and segregated bathing facilities, jimjilbang provide a great place to clean up and crash for the night. If coming to Seoul, check out this post on some of the better ones across the big city. Expect to pay between 8,000 – 12,000 won (US$7-10.50) per person. The biggest drawbacks: a relative lack of privacy, and you’re sleeping on a mat on the floor. Most are open 24 hours, but double-check before you pay the admission fee.
They’re fairly easy to spot – just look for the ‘three rays of water coming from a bowl’ icon below:

Photo credit: http://alanainkorea.blogspot.kr

I’ll also note that CouchSurfing is alive and well in South Korea – and there’s an interesting range of people that host their places on AirBnB as well.

Food – because everyone’s gotta eat.

Cheap: Korean food is already pretty cheap without any tricks – most Korean meals I’ve enjoyed have been less than 10,000 won (US$9) (not including alcohol, of course). As a standard course, consider the samgyeopsal, or strips of pork grilled at your table. Between the meat and the banchan (side dishes), you’ll be full before you know it.
Cheaper: There’s more than a few franchises offering food about as cheap as it comes – Jaws Food and Gimbap Cheonguk are the two that come to mind. For 6,000 won (US$5.25) or less, order some gimbap (rice and veggies in dried seaweed), don-gga-seu (pork cutlet), or head to any college campus area. Hongdae AKA Hongik University (line 2 and the AREX) has a trendy nightlife scene, while Konkuk University (line 2) in southeast Seoul has plenty of food amongst the side streets. It’s not uncommon to have your entire meal cost less than a trendy cup of coffee. Drawback: no candlelight or violins sweetly playing in the background.
Cheapest: Street food! Almost anywhere you go around Seoul, there’s street food a-plenty. See this post for some pictures and what to get. Suffice it to say a few thousand won will get you back in the game. I’ll steer the vegetarians to the ddeokbokki (cylindrical rice cakes cooked in red pepper paste), which may be a bit spicy. The meat-lovers can enjoy the hot dogs or corn dogs, although the shish kebabs are wonderful as well.

Sights – why you decide to travel in the first place.

Cheap: It’s really only the private museums that have expensive admission fees. At 3,000 won (US$2.60), Gyeongbokgung is the closest thing Korea has to a main attraction. The location in central Seoul makes it close to almost everything, and the palace can take the better part of a day to thoroughly enjoy. The National Folk Museum is nearby – and free.
Cheaper: A subway ride across town – if you’re the sort that prefers the journey to the destination, you might just enjoy a random ride around town. Seoul Sub>urban has made it a point of getting off at random subway stops throughout Seoul and seeing what’s around.
Cheapest: It’s pretty hard to beat free – and that’s precisely the price of most parks, art galleries, shopping centers, indoor spaces like The Story of Sejong, outdoor spaces like Gwanghwamun Plaza and Insa-dong, and a palace like Gyeonghuigung. There’s also Buddhist temples, the National Museum of Korea, and Olympic Park, just in case your stay turns into a second week.

Nightlife - what to do after the lights go down.

Your biggest cost is likely to be alcohol, which correlates with the ambiance and admission – no surprise there. Where and how you enjoy it is up to you.
Cheap: Plenty of live shows are around the 5,000 – 10,000 won (US$4.50-9) price range, which seems to be a sweet spot for Hongdae. Keep your eyes peeled for posters, or check out koreagigguide.com to know what’s happening in advance.
Cheaper: Plenty of bars have specials from Sunday to Thursday – not exactly prime time for party-goers, but there’s usually a crowd around Itaewon (Itaewon station, line 6) or Hongdae.
Cheapest: With locations open all night, Club FM serves up drinks in an unpretentious atmosphere at a better price you’ll find in any other club. In case you haven’t heard the inside joke, the ‘FM’ stands for ‘Family Mart’, the nationwide chain of convenience stores. Quite a few of them have an outdoor patio complete with chairs and tables for your party’s drinking or eating pleasure. It’s a great way to people-watch as well.
When you’re finished at Club FM, Hongdae Park has a multitude of shows, from rappers to drummers to tap-dancing jam bands – it varies according to the night, of course.
Readers, how do you enjoy Korea on the cheap?
Author’s note: This article is part of my ‘Coming to Korea’ series, posts that are aimed at tourists and those still new to Korea. If you have a more experienced voice, please share in the comments!

Tips for dealing with extreme pollution in Beijing

Tips for dealing with extreme pollution in Beijing:
NO ONE would ever accuse Beijing, China of being a clean city. Spit, urine, fecal matter and trash are not uncommon to see blobbed on sidewalks and the smell of sewage pervades pockets of the city. More disconcerting than any of that, however, is the air pollution, which has lately made the city look downright apocalyptic. A smog blankets the city, clinging so close to the ground that it’s difficult to see past more than a few blocks away. As this author writes, Beijing’s air quality index, or AQI, stands at a filthy 262, or “Very Unhealthy (at 24-hour exposure levels).” Beijing’s air pollution is made up of dust and harmful chemicals from factories and engines that can cause health problems after sustained exposure.

A haze of smog hangs over Tiananmen Square.

While staying inside with a high-powered air purifier may seem the only logical course of action on one of these extremely polluted days, for most people that’s unrealistic. For those who live in Beijing, there’s work, social engagements, errands to be run. And for travelers, well — who wants to say they spent their entire summer trip to Beijing hanging out at the hostel bar due to the air pollution?
There are steps you can take to limit your exposure while still seeing the sites and getting to know the city.
Invest in a face mask. Companies such as Vogmask and Respro offer masks that filter the pollution, dramatically decreasing how much filth and chemicals make it into your lungs. Respro’s city mask, designed for urban commuters, has a certain Darth Vader-esque look to it that may appear intimidating at first but does the job well with an activated charcoal filter and exhaust filter. Respro also offers free shipping anywhere on the planet. Vogmask’s options have a slightly friendlier look to them and are made of microfiber and organic cotton. While spring and autumn tend to see beautiful blue skies over Beijing and generally better air quality, having a mask during a summer visit is a wise investment.
Plan excursions carefully. Get up early to visit tourist attractions or wait until the sun goes down to do your souvenir shopping or go for a city stroll. Sunshine exacerbates the problem on highly polluted days and being outside when the sun is strongest increases your risk of being affected by the dirty air. Bear in mind that Beijing summers are quite hot and humid, so spending afternoons indoors feasting on a traditional lunch or visiting a museum will also spare you hours in the extreme heat.

Polluted skies give an ominous look to Beijing.

Keep your exercise regimen indoors. If you’re the type of person who likes to maintain your fitness schedule while traveling, consider seeking out a hotel that has a gym inside. Or consider dropping in for pay-as-you-go fitness classes around the city, such as yoga or Heyrobics, which will allow you to stay healthy without filling your lungs with pollutants at every turn.

A rare blue sky day summer day in Beijing

Get outside the city. When making plans to visit the Great Wall, opt for one such as Jiankou, which is less touristy than, say, Badaling and will afford you a nice break from the crowds and pollution of the city. Or plan a day-trip to the Fragrant Hills, a lovely park that will, if nothing else, give you  a chance to appreciate a lovelier, greener side of China (there are no guarantees that you’ll find exceptionally cleaner air there, but it will be a good change from the traffic and claustrophobia of downtown areas).
Casey Hynes is a writer, editor and photographer living in Beijing, China. A 2008 graduate of Columbia Journalism School in New York City, she has been published in Roll Call, The Wall Street Journal, and numerous publications in China. You can see samples of her work and photography at caseyhynes.com. 

One great reason to visit Indonesia: Helping orangutans

One great reason to visit Indonesia: Helping orangutans:
SOME very smart simians live in Southeast Asia. I am of course referring to orangutans; our orange, hairy and wise cousins are the only great apes that live solely in Asia. They are native to Malaysia and Indonesia. In the wilds of Indonesian Borneo, these gentle “people of the forest” have even been observed using mime to communicate with human researchers and other orangutans.
I told you they were smart. Don’t judge all orangutans by that smoking one that’s been getting all the attention lately. Actually, don’t even judge her, but you can judge zoo-goers, or at least the ones who throw cigarettes at her to keep her smoking.

Tanjung Puting National Park, Central Kalimantan, Indonesia; pic: Daniel Murdiyarso/CIFOR

Here’s what Daniek Hendarto, a conservationist at the Centre for Orangutan Protection has to say about the situation at the Taru Jurug Zoo in central Java, Indonesia:

We are working with the zoo’s management to try and move her to an island, in a big lake in the middle of the zoo, away from the other orangutans and where visitors can’t toss her any more cigarettes. Until we get approval from the zoo to move her, a guard has been placed outside her cage to make sure she doesn’t smoke and she is undergoing therapy. She will have to go cold turkey.

Sounds a bit ridiculous, doesn’t it? Read more in the Australian.
Besides smoking, orangutangs have it pretty rough at the moment due to both legal and illegal development projects including the palm and paper industries and generally ignorant and/or cruel human behavior. To counteract some of the damage we do, visiting and volunteering at orangutan sanctuaries spreads awareness of the plight of these remarkable and critically endangered apes.
If you are concerned that tourists gawking at orangutans may also be contributing to their demise as a species, you are right to be worried. However, where nature tourism and conservation thrives, illegal logging is far less likely and it is both legal and illegal logging that is destroying the ecosystems that the orangutan depends on.
For more information on ways to help orangutans in Indonesia visit the Centre for Orangutan Protection (COP) website.
For a list and explanation of places to observe wild orangutans in both Malaysia and Indonesia see this post on the Lonely Planet forums.
Though a far cry from seeing these glorious apes in the wild and quite frankly, probably a bit different from going to a sanctuary, students from Holland have been visiting and volunteering to take care of orangutans at an animal park in Yogyakarta, Indonesia. So far this year two batches of Dutch high schoolers learned orangutan care, cleaned cages and fed fruit to the orangs.
From the Jakarta Post:

Koesoemo said Yogyakarta Animal Park was deliberately chosen for the students to stay at because of the park’s excellent conservation service. The conservation service is helping to rescue endangered animals, mostly seized from illegal owners by the local Natural Resource Conservation Agency (BKSDA), before releasing them back to their natural habitats.

If you’re more interested in the legends or mysteries of the Indonesian jungle, maybe you’d like to search for the fabled orang pendek, meaning “short man” in Malay. Indonesian folklore and contemporary eyewitness accounts are full of stories about the orang pendek, a small ape-like creature who walks upright and lives on the forest floor, unlike the tree-dwelling orangutan.

sanctuary in Malinau, East Kalimantan, Indonesia; pic: Eko Prianto/CIFOR

Local Sumatrans accept the existence of the orang pendek and even some zoologists are believers. Is it the Indonesian version of Bigfoot, just an orangutan mistaken for something else or could it be a undiscovered species of ape? Crypto zoologists and connoisseurs of the weird, your dream holiday awaits!
In closing, to see just how smart or human-like orangutans are, check out my favorite orangutan video – yes, I have a favorite orangutan video!
Here’s David Attenborough on the BBC Earth program hanging around a female orangutan who uses a canoe, washes socks and does a bit of DIY with her kids. No kidding.

Review of Revolution Interrupted

Review of Revolution Interrupted:

Tyrell Haberkorn, Revolution Interrupted: Farmers, Students, Law, and Violence in Northern Thailand. 
Madison : University of Wisconsin Press, 2011. Pp. xix, 230; appendix, bibliography, index.  With a foreword by Thongchai Winichakul.
Reviewed by Nicholas Tapp.

Questioning received notions of revolution, this book offers a passionate and rigorous reconsideration of the period in Thailand between October 1973 and October 1976 from the vantage point of the struggle for land-rent reform spearheaded by the Farmers’ Federation of Thailand (FFT) in Chiangmai and Lamphun provinces.  It thus speaks to the 30-year silence which has shrouded the perpetrators of the political assassinations and violence that proved somehow able to “stop a movement over one million people” (p. 23). As Thongchai Winichakul’s Foreword pithily notes, the reconciliation of the early 1980s has meant the “suspension of the rule of law” and an organized forgetting which it is the purpose of this book to challenge. Haberkorn argues that there has been a “foundational exclusion” of marginalized people, on which governance in Thailand has depended since the 1932 coup (p. xi).  Inspired by Guha and others, she seeks to resurrect those people’s views and presence through a detailed examination of a whole range of official and unofficial archival sources supplemented by personal interviews with former student and farmer activists. This examination relates to a wider period than just the mid-1970s, stretching from the early 1950s up to the late 1970s, and the book also makes occasional, pointed references to the contemporary conjuncture.

As Haberkorn notes, the 1932 transition to a constitutional monarchy was hardly a revolution but clearly a coup. Nor was the overthrow of the military dictatorship in 1973 a “revolution” since the King played so crucial a part in it. What has been, and is, genuinely revolutionary, is – for academic understandings as well as on the ground – the redefinition of politics away from the “affairs of the state”, aided by Gramscian notions of hegemony (pp. 14-15), towards a realization that political actors include those on the margins of society. Politics is not only “state administration and protests on the streets”, but it is also “the desire and will to imagine a different, more just society and the courage to take the risks necessary to bring it about” (p. 14). An interesting foot-note here cites Gloria Anzaldúa: “Nothing happens in the ‘real’ world unless it first happens in the images in our heads”. So it was the actions of farmers and students in the period under review which represented “the imagination of a different future” (p. 14). And it was this above all which was revolutionary in those years, in the sense of making new ways of relating and new social identities, and which has also proved part of an ongoing process, up even until today.
Haberkorn denies that hers is a “unifying narrative” of the type which would for example see a direct passage from the nineteenth- and early- twentieth-century peasant rebellions through the FFT up to today’s United Front for Democracy against Dictatorship.  She is concerned to draw attention to the constant interruptions of this revolutionary process, but there without doubt nevertheless a narrative here, one which importantly concerns an “ontological struggle”(p. 50) over who has had the power to name the truth about farmers’ lives. The argument is that recourse to the law, in the form of the campaign for the implementation of the Land Rent Control Act (LRCA) finally passed by the Sanya Thammasak government for the whole country in November 1974, was in fact a far more subversive activity than the armed struggle of the Communist Party of Thailand could ever have been.  Such recourse directly challenged the assumed benevolent relations of interdependence between tenants and landlords, as poor farmers became political actors themselves. This was not at all James C. Scott’s “weapons of the weak”, but rather a challenge to the system of domination in its own terms and strategies. “Law itself became a tool of revolution” (p. 20).
The October 1951 LRCA redefined landlord-tenant relations and promised significant reductions in the standardized land rents (p. 31), but the Ministry of the Interior was left in charge of deciding to what provinces it should be applied.  The following year a royal decree applied it to the 18 Central Thai provinces with high rates of land tenancy; even in 1973 tenancy rates of only 3.27% were reported in the Northeast. Chapter I examines the struggle of farmers in Chiangmai, which had rates of tenancy comparable to the Central provinces, to have application of the decree extended to Northern Thailand. Haberkorn traces the debate around the “non-decree” of this Act and the ways in which images of the farmers as the “backbone of the nation” were first challenged at this time, to be replaced more by fears that provoking class antagonisms between landlords and tenants would foment Communism than by direct accusations of Communist sympathies.
By the time of Sarit Thanarat’s coup of October 1958, as Chapter II (“From the Rice Fields to the Cities”) notes, possibilities of such open dissent had all but vanished.  Yet, throughout the 1960s, as the Cold War intensified, agrarian crisis mounted in the form of exorbitant land rents, landlessness and indebtedness. During the exciting, heady years of free speech, open publications, agitation and new forms of social organization in the years following October 1973, farmers transformed themselves into “a new kind of dissenting political subject” (p. 55) as protests escalated between March and November of 1974. Central Thai farmers’ protests in March on Sanam Luang, in the heart of Bangkok, led to the ironic use under the Sanya government of Article 17 of the Thai constitution (described by Thak as the modern legal basis for Sarit’s style of leadership) in the farmers’ favour, intended to empower the investigating committee into farmers’ grievances (pp. 60-61). Its ineffectiveness led to the June 1974 demonstrations on Sanam Luang and, as Haberkorn shows, in the space of a few days the power of the new alliance of students, farmers and workers led to the protesting farmers’ being seen as “chaotic” rather than as the “backbone of the nation” in one newspaper (p. 59). By August there were farmer threats to hand in identity cards and renounce Thai citizenship, stop paying taxes and declare a “liberated zone” (p. 65). It was around this time that the FFT was established.  By October 1976, it boasted a presence in 41 out of 72 provinces and was headquartered in Chiangmai. The farmers’ march on Chiangmai in March 1974 specifically repeated the calls for the application of the 1950 LRCA in Chiangmai and Lamphun which had been made earlier in the year. It was in December that the government decreed a new LRCA for the whole country, rather than extending the 1950 Act to the Northern provinces alone.
Chapter III (“From the Classrooms to the Rice Fields”) uses oral histories and written texts to provide a detailed examination of the panic caused by the subsequent and continuing alliance of intellectuals from the universities (and some schools) with farmers, and how a genuine Freirian pedagogy of solidarity was established. Of particular interest is the consideration of Chiangmai University’s Volunteer Development Assembly (VDA, founded in 1966) in comparison with the Sanya government’s Return to Rural Areas Programme as precursors to the “Farmer Project” (khrongkan chaona).  The latter was to work closely with the FFT and help to spread news and education about the new LRCA.  For Haberkorn, the impact of working with farmers may have been even more radicalizing for students than the radicalizing effects of students on the farmers stressed in Andrew Turton’s 1987 critique.
Chapter IV dives into the main theme of “Violence and Its Denials”, revealing through a re-examination of the complex politics surrounding the assassination of the northern FFT president Intha Sribunruang, “how the political became devastatingly personal” (p. 28). The unholy alliance between right-wing and paramilitary forces is considered in terms of a Gramscian crisis of authority, and with reference to Žižek’s “revolutionary micro-politics” (very much not Scott!) against the backdrop of events in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. It was though their work together that students and farmers “actively imagined and created the possibility of a different, shared future” (p. 105) and that a radical restructuring of rural-urban relations occurred, as signified by the large-scale protest organized by the FFT in Bangkok in March of 1975. Mounting protests and actions against injustice led to increasing official surveillance, harassment, local-level violence and the well known assassinations of prominent FFT leaders. More alarming than the trangressive behaviour of middle-class students charted by Anderson (1977), Haberkorn stresses the threat posed by farmers like Intha who “understood and used their legal rights” (p. 121). She is not arguing that other rural issues such as mining and forestry were unimportant but rather that it was in the arena of struggles over the LRCA that rural conflicts were most focused and acute.
Chapter 5 (“A State in Disarray”) demonstrates that this disunity of the Thai state should be seen not as a “temporary aberration, but rather as constitutive of the state and its violence(s)” (p. 131). The book is full of vivid and striking vignettes, pulled from dusty archives or from the reluctant memories of those who have been subjected to the “production of unnameability” (p. 132). One of these recalls the remarkable behavior of Premier Kukrit Pramot after his home had been ransacked by marauding police in August 1975. Kukrit’s apparent magnaminity in dropping charges and “forgiving” the offenders is seen, as others have seen it, as a sign of the final abdication of state responsibility in the face of extra-judicial violence marshaled in the name of enforcing the very law it transgressed. Here were the police on strike, and threatening to use force to buttress the “law”. Indeed, this was a struggle over the control and definition of the law, and yet Kukrit’s actions could be seen as masterly, albeit paternalistic, compromise rather than as mere weakness.
Towards the end of the book, in the first of two imaginary scenarios of possible futures, Haberkorn quotes Thanin Kraiwichian’s vision of a Communist future, in which courts and political parties would disappear, there would be no more freedom of speech or of the press, land and valuables would become state property, religion would be dismantled, the importance of ancestry would vanish, children would spy on their parents and be killed in front of them, the words of the Communist Party would be law, and so on….Well indeed, just “imagine”… Still, as Haberkorn shows, the material fear of such things was a very real one. And finally, most importantly, “…what could not be imagined was landowners and farmers meeting on shared, equal terrain” (p. 154; reviewer’s italics).
The Conclusion of Revolution Interrupted also speedily charts the terrible events of 1976 including the fateful killing of Dr Boonsanong Punyodyana, general secretary of the Socialist Party of Thailand, by two gunmen as he returned home one night. Violence “remains unnamed”, and “justice and law remain selective” (pp.156-57), as recent cases have shown. We should not remain immobile, like “one-legged rabbits”, as Jit Phumisak had put it (p. 158).
Throughout the book there is discussion of textual sources which is original and compelling. The discussion of variant dictionary entries for images of farmers as the “backbone of the nation” in Chapter I (“Breaking the Backbone of the Nation”) is amusing and instructive, and the critique of an early article by a “Mister Bumbam” in Prachathippatai newspaper in 1951 talking about the “already cracking” backbone (pp. 39-42) sheds further light on the nature of this “fractured” backbone. Also in Chapter I, the correspondence considered between Thongdee Isarachiwin (Chiangmai MP at the time of the debate over the original enactment of the LRCA) and the central government, is valuable in illuminating contrary images of the countryside at this early time. Between the two tenancy struggles, the importance of Jit’s analysis of feudalism—which was published in 1957 and banned in 1959 and which then of course resurfaced in the 1973-76 period—is well considered in Chapter II, citing also Reynolds’s work on Jit. Chapter III considers the prophetic six short stories published in 1970 and introduced by Nidhi Eoseewong in terms of their questioning of Thai society and imaginings of possible futures (p. 85), and then other publications of the 1973-76 era such as Thak’s introduction to a collection of Thammasat University student essays in 1975. There is also a fascinating extended discussion of a book published in 1971 by the VDA documenting its activities in 1969-1971, in which the notes, drawings and poems (one a translation of Mao’s poem “Snow”) inserted between the narrative accounts of trips to the countryside provide a revealing sub-text, and 1971 issues of the Chiangmai University student publication Walanchathat.
The argument in Revolution Interrupted about the threat posed by the transgressive appropriation of the law, along with the emphasis on the continued violence and continued silence about it in the Thai political system, raises urgent regional comparisons with other state systems and systems of justice, such as China’s. Extra-judicial executions have been defined as killings carried on outside the law by, or with the consent of, public officials. Haberkorn writes of Walter Benjamin in the “Theses on the Philosophy of History” and refers to Abrams (1977) on the nature of state formations, which is all helpful; to articulate the past historically must mean to “seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger”, as Benjamin splendidly put it, and, as Abrams showed, the state is not a monolith, exactly in the way Haberkorn points us. But I note that it was also Benjamin in the same work who, revising Carl Schmitt, first suggested that the “state of exception” might have become the norm, and since the popularity of Agamben’s Homo Sacer it might be said that talking about the state of exception has now become the norm. Now, Flora Sapio’s Sovereign Power and the Law in China: Zones of Exception in the Criminal Justice System, has built on Agamben’s insights to argue that the authorities in China have effectively institutionalized an exception built into the legal system, under which anyone on the streets can be stripped of his or her rights as a citizen and sent to extra-legal camps (Fiskesjö 2012). This forces us to see the “seemingly extra-legal together with the  formally legal” as part of a single institutional apparatus and challenges the assumption that police lawlessness and arbitrary detention are some sort of aberration which will eventually disappear as a more perfect rule of law develops (Fiskesjö 2011). “A zone of lawlessness is part of the legal order”, says Sapio (p. 3). This may be the other, more gloomy and pessimistic, side of the coin to Haberkorn’s vision of an enlightened future. The question that she raises half-way through the book, “What was the nature of the relationship, official and unofficial, between state actors and often violent parastate groups?” (p. 133), which Bowie (1997) also sought to address, is therefore truly crucial for the contemporary as well as for the historical. In that sense the book may resonate with others on the southern violence (for example, McCargo 2008) and on lese majesté (for instance Streckfuss 2011).
Nicholas Tapp is Professor in the Department of Sociology at East China Normal University, Shanghai, and Professor Emeritus at the Australian National University, Canberra.
References
Abrams, Philip. “Notes on the Difficulty of Studying the State”. Journal of Historical Sociology I, 1 (1988): 58-89.
Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1998.
Anderson, Benedict R. O’G. “Withdrawal Symptoms: Social and Cultural Aspects of the October 6 Coup”. Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars IX, 3 (1977): 13-30.
Anzaldúa, Gloria. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. San Francisco: Aunt Lute, 1987.
Benjamin, Walter. “Theses on the Philosophy of History”.  Illuminations: Essays and Refections, ed. Hannah Arendt. New York: Schocken Books, 1968.
Bowie, Katherine. Rituals of National Loyalty: An Anthropology of the State and the Village Scout Movement in Thailand. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997.
Fiskesjö, Magnus. “Review of Sapio’s Sovereign Power and the Law in China”. The Journal of Asian Studies LXX, 4 (2011): 1143-1144.
_____ . “Outlaws, barbarians, slaves: critical reflections on Agamben’s Homo Sacer”. Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory II, 1 (2012): 161-180.
Jit Phumisak [Somsamai Srisudravarna]. The Real Face of Thai Sakdina Today. Translated and edited by Craig Reynolds. Thai Radical Discourse: The Real Face of Thai Feudalism Today. Ithaca: Southeast Asia Program, Cornell University, 1987.
McCargo, Duncan. Tearing Apart the Land: Islam and Legitimacy in Southern Thailand. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008.

Nidhi Eoseewong. “Introduction”. His Name is Tongkwao: Writings of Young Men in the Flats at the Edge of the Mountains, ed. Young men in the Flats at the Edge of the Mountains. Chiangmai: Chiangmai University, 1970. [In Thai].
Reynolds, Craig.  Thai Radical Discourse: The Real Face of Thai Feudalism Today. Ithaca: Southeast Asia Program, Cornell University, 1987.
_____ , ed. National Identity and Its Defenders: Thailand Today. Chiangmai: Silkworm, 2002.
Sapio, Flora. Sovereign Power and the Law in China: Zones of Exception in the Criminal Justice System. Leiden: Brill, 2010.
Streckfuss, David. Truth on Trial in Thailand: Defamation, Treason, and Lèse-Majesté. Abingdon: Routledge, 2011.
Thak Chaloemtiarana. Thailand: The Politics of Despotic Paternalism. Ithaca: Southeast Asia Program, Cornell University, 2007 (1979).
_____ . “University Life”. People of the New Generation, ed. Thammasat Student Union. Bangkok: Thammasat University, 1975. [In Thai].
Turton, Andrew. Production, power and participation in rural Thailand: experiences of poor farmers’ groups. Geneva: UNRISD, 1987.
Zizek, Slavoj.  “Introduction: Between the two revolutions”.  Vladimar Ilych Lenin, Revolution at the Gates: A Selection of Writings from February to October 1917, ed. Slavoj Zizek. New York: Verso, 2002.

Thailand’s Royalists Rely on the Courts

Thailand’s Royalists Rely on the Courts:

by Pavin Chachavalpongpun, Wall Street Journal, 24 July 2012

The Constitutional Court’s verdict could later destabilize Thai politics.
On July 13, Thailand’s Constitutional Court decided to allow the current government to continue making minor amendments to the 2007 constitution, but forestall a complete rewriting. Thais from both sides of the political divide have welcomed this ruling as a compromise that would calm the tense atmosphere. But it actually sets a precedent that could later destabilize Thai politics.
The opposition Democrat Party earlier accused the government of Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra of scheming to use the constitutional amendment process to topple the monarchy. This would violate Article 68 of the constitution, which restricts attempts “to overthrow the democratic regime of government with the King as Head of State.” But the Court clearly rejected this argument and ruled that the government’s move to amend the constitution was not “unconstitutional,” thus allowing the amendment process to continue.
However, the opposition Democrats welcomed another part of the court’s decision. The government is not allowed to rewrite the whole charter without a prior referendum. The need to seek public approval would give the opposition an opportunity to manipulate public opinion.
It’s true that moving forward with a new constitution without a nationwide vote might have brought on a new round of street protests by both sides. But at the same time, the delay in charter amendment will deepen the sense of political uncertainty.
The Yingluck government wants to reduce the power of appointed bodies it thinks are undermining elective institutions to serve the interest of royalists who backed the 2006 military coup. So amending the constitution is an urgent task.
By not allowing this, the court has again had a direct impact on Thai politics, signalling that enemies of the Yingluck government and her brother, former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, will continue to resist the Thai electorate’s demands for a new political order. In 2008, the Constitutional Court ordered two pro-Thaksin governments, those of Samak Sundaravej and Somchai Wongsawat, to step down on absurd grounds. Mr. Samak was disqualified because his appearances as a celebrity chef supposedly created a conflict of interest, and Mr. Somchai was forced to resign because a member of his party had been found guilty of electoral fraud.
There is nothing to stop the court from doing the same to the Yingluck government. However, the royalists are reluctant to unseat Ms. Yingluck so soon after her resounding victory in last year’s election. They want her to see the Constitutional Court’s decision as a warning shot to dissuade her from challenging the royalist establishment.
The problem is that this intervention sets a new precedent that could have longer-term effects. The court determined that it has the authority to accept petitions directly from the opposition and indeed any Thai citizen, instead of solely from the attorney-general. This represents an expansion of its power.
Growing anti-military sentiment following the last coup means that the generals are unlikely to be willing to stage another coup, as their public statements confirm. So the establishment must rely even more on cases in the Constitutional Court to control, and if necessary remove, Thaksin-backed regimes. The court’s ruling may have allayed fears of violence for now. Yet the next step in Thai politics will depend on the extent to which amendments to the constitution attempt to reshape a political structure dominated by the palace-military alliance.
Ms. Yingluck and Mr. Thaksin have so far executed an effective double game, with the former frequently bowing to the traditional elite while the latter maneuvers behind the scenes to consolidate power at the expense of establishment interests. The thrust to amend the constitution is part of Mr. Thaksin’s carrot-and-stick tactics, which are splitting the establishment camp.
The military has remained conspicuously silent about the government’s plan to pass reconciliation bills to grant amnesty for crimes committed during political upheavals. That would allow Mr. Thaksin to return to Thailand, reclaim assets confiscated by the courts and re-enter politics. Given that the military staged a coup in 2006 to remove him, its acquiescence now might seem surprising.
But the military would be one of the main beneficiaries of an amnesty, since it would be “off the hook” for any culpability in the deaths of almost 100 pro-Thaksin protesters in 2010. In May, state prosecutors said that they had compiled enough evidence to implicate the military in as many as 18 of 92 protest-related deaths. One military insider has said publicly that the top brass and all generals in line for promotion want the reconciliation bills to move ahead.
With the military reluctant to stymie the Yingluck government’s legislative agenda, the royalist elite have had to rely on the courts to defend their status. But this also comes with a cost. Many Thais have supported the latest campaign recently launched by a group of law professors from Thammasat University called Nitirat to dissolve the Constitutional Court. More could become disillusioned about the rule of law.
This trend of ruling institutions discrediting themselves could put Thailand on a path to lawlessness. It is especially dangerous because the country is approaching an uncertain royal transition. When the final conflict comes, who will be left to referee the democratic process and prevent a descent into civil war?
Mr. Pavin is associate professor at Kyoto University’s Centre for Southeast Asian Studies. He is also associate fellow at Singapore’s Institute of Southeast Asian Studies.

SPEAKING FREELY : India's Muslims and Hinduism's moksha

SPEAKING FREELY : India's Muslims and Hinduism's moksha: Anti-Muslim sentiment in India, marked by fears over terrorism, has corrupted crucial steps towards Hinduism's moksha, the end of the death and rebirth cycle and the religion's ultimate goal. Suspicion has eroded Hindus' ability to perceive the world correctly and to regard all others as fully equal; this is now bleeding into official state policy. - Dallas Darling (Jul 24, '12)

AN ATOL EXCLUSIVE : Pakistani Taliban chief warns Islamabad

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Syrian envoy to Cyprus defects

Syrian envoy to Cyprus defects: Defection brings to three the number of top diplomats who have quit and comes amid heavy fighting for control of Aleppo.

Egypt's Morsi names new prime minister

Egypt's Morsi names new prime minister: Former irrigation minister Hesham Qandil has been named PM and tasked with forming a new government.

China slammed over sea garrison plan

China slammed over sea garrison plan: Vietnam and Philippines say plan to station troops in disputed island in South China Sea "violates international law".

EU rejects request to blacklist Hezbollah

EU rejects request to blacklist Hezbollah: European bloc denies Israel's appeal to add Lebanese group to its list of terror organisations.

Daily Number: 65% - About Two-Thirds of U.S. Hispanics Speak English Proficiently

Daily Number: 65% - About Two-Thirds of U.S. Hispanics Speak English Proficiently: About two-thirds of U.S. Hispanics speak only English at home or speak English very well, compared with 91% of the total U.S. population

Asian Americans and Religion

Asian Americans and Religion: As their numbers rise, Asian Americans have been largely responsible for the growth of non-Abrahamic faiths in the U.S., particularly Buddhism and Hinduism. At the same time, most Asian Americans belong to the country’s two largest religious groups: Christians and people who say they have no particular religious affiliation.

Exodus continues from Syria, including some 10,000 Iraqis

Exodus continues from Syria, including some 10,000 Iraqis: Many of the Iraqi returnees are worried about going back to the country they fled, but feel they have little choice given the security situation in Syria.

NEPAL: Chepang struggle to educate their children

NEPAL: Chepang struggle to educate their children:

SHAKTIKHOR, 24 July 2012 (IRIN) - The Chepang, one of Nepal's most disadvantaged and marginalized indigenous groups, are struggling to educate their children. While many parents are managing to keep them in school, they worry that poverty will put an end to education.

SLIDESHOW: Liberian refugees’ future uncertain

SLIDESHOW: Liberian refugees’ future uncertain:

LIBERIA-COTE D'IVOIRE, 24 July 2012 (IRIN) - Volatile western Côte d'Ivoire may not seem a likely place to seek refuge, but for nearly 20 years it has hosted tens of thousands of Liberian refugees who fled across the border during civil wars (1989-96 and 1999-2003) in their country.

PAKISTAN: Pressure mounts on Afghan refugees

PAKISTAN: Pressure mounts on Afghan refugees:

PESHAWAR, 24 July 2012 (IRIN) - Pakistan is putting pressure on the estimated 2.8 million Afghan registered and unregistered refugees to return to their homeland by the end of 2012.

MALI-NIGER: Locusts spawning disaster

MALI-NIGER: Locusts spawning disaster:

BAMAKO, 24 July 2012 (IRIN) - Swarms of locusts encouraged by early rains are breeding in the north of Mali and Niger, bringing a second generation of insects that could increase 250 fold by the end of this summer and put the livelihoods of up to 50 million people in the region at risk.

SYRIA: Anticipating a hungry winter

SYRIA: Anticipating a hungry winter:

BEIRUT, 24 July 2012 (IRIN) - The fields in the fertile al Ghab plain stretching across eastern Syria would normally be full of crops at this time of year, but this summer some are lying fallow.

Stirring up the South China Sea (II): Regional Responses

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Drug Detention Centers Offer Torture, Not Treatment

Drug Detention Centers Offer Torture, Not Treatment:

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Hundreds of thousands of people identified as drug users in China and across Southeast Asia are held without due process in centers where they may be subjected to torture, and physical and sexual violence in the name of “treatment.” International donors and United Nations agencies have supported and funded drug detention centers that systematically deny people rights to effective HIV and drug dependency treatment, and have ignored forced labor and abuse.

Hundreds of thousands of people identified as drug users in China and across Southeast Asia are held without due process in centers where they may be subjected to torture, and physical and sexual violence in the name of “treatment,” Human Rights Watch said in a briefing paper released today.

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Money Tips for All Ages: Your Finances at Different Stages of Life | Publications.USA.gov

Money Tips for All Ages: Your Finances at Different Stages of Life | Publications.USA.gov

Timor-Leste: A dream of a better road | Making development work for all

Timor-Leste: A dream of a better road | Making development work for all

Obama's Character Edge Offsets Romney's Economic Advantage

Obama's Character Edge Offsets Romney's Economic Advantage: Americans generally view Mitt Romney as better able to handle economic issues than President Obama is, but Obama wins on most character dimensions. The competing strengths help explain why election preferences are virtually tied.

Afghanistan’s Anna Karenina

Afghanistan’s Anna Karenina:

A woman is publicly executed in the name of “honor”

Footage from the execution. Photo: youtube user AussieNews1

Last month in the Afghan village Qol-i-Heer a 22 year-old woman named Najiba was shot to death in a Taliban-style public execution. The execution was filmed and circulated by the Taliban and shows Najiba, clad in a gray shawl, squat in front of a ditch. She is shot nine times by an orange-capped, Kalashnikov-bearing man, believed to be her husband. After the third shot she slumps onto the ground, to shouts of “Allah hu Akbar” and cheering. The video also shows 150 men perched on a nearby hill to witness the execution.

1. 
2. Pakistan is a country of contradictions – full of promise for growth, modernity and progress, yet shrouded by political, social and cultural issues that undermine its quest for identity and integrity. My bi-monthly column “Pakistan Unveiled” presents stories that showcase the Pakistani struggle for freedom of expression, an end to censorship, and a more open and balanced society.
3. 
4. Bina Shah is a Karachi-based journalist and fiction writer and has taught writing at the university level. She is the author of four novels and two collections of short stories. She is a columnist for two major English-language newspapers in Pakistan, The Dawn and The Express Tribune, and she has contributed to international newspapers including The Independent, The Guardian, and The International Herald Tribune. She is an alumnus of the International Writers Workshop (IWP 2011).

Allegedly Najiba was executed because she was married to one man but had an affair with a Taliban commander. The two men were in dispute over what to do about her, so they accused her of adultery and killed her to save their honor.
The real story might be more complicated than this. The woman’s alleged Taliban lover was shot for giving information to the government and her supposed husband was a member of a local village militia that killed a Taliban leader (although I’m not sure if it was the same one). Najiba may have been executed under the charge of adultery to avenge that killing. The man who executed her may not even have been her husband. Afghan officials have given varying, conflicting accounts of the whole story. However, what is true is that a woman is dead because two men had complete control over her life.
I can’t help but be reminded of Anna Karenina, the heroine of Tolstoy’s classic novel about love and adultery in feudal Russia. Highborn Anna is married to the bureaucrat Karenin, but falls in love with a count and leaves her husband for him. Eventually her lover, Vronksy, abandons her too. Dishonored, bereft of her children and unbalanced, Anna commits suicide by throwing herself under a train.
In the novel, Karenin debates about granting Anna a divorce, and then decides that the blow to his honor would be too great. Though Vronsky pursues Anna and persuades her to leave her husband, he resents her because his actions and Anna’s flight to him have left him vulnerable to a loss of position in the upper-class society of Imperial Russia. In the end, both men put themselves first and Anna’s life second. Anna’s husband devises various ways to punish her, but ultimately Anna finishes the job for him by ending her own life.
Critics accused Tolstoy of misogyny for portraying a woman who chooses personal happiness over self-sacrifice and dies as a result. Perhaps he was just portraying the reality of the time, when women were expected to remain in unhappy marriages for the sake of society and convention. Nevertheless, Anna Karenina can be read as a cautionary tale, or a compassionate and empathetic portrait of a woman who tried to break free from the prison of tradition that she was born into.
Although Najiba was a poor village woman and Anna Karenina a wealthy aristocrat, both women were equally helpless in the face of tradition, honor, society, and the patriarchal structure of their environments. But who will write the tale of Afghanistan’s Anna Karenina, who died because two men used her and then killed her in the name of “honor”? Even if the accusation of adultery was unfounded, Najiba still paid the price as a piece of property owned by men who decided to get rid of her to assuage their need for revenge and retribution. Public execution by Kalashnikov or suicide under the wheels of a train—the method hardly matters when the madness is the same.

Letter Rejects Suicide Report

Letter Rejects Suicide Report:
Ten lawyers from mainland China and from Hong Kong have sent an open letter to China’s parliament seeking a reinvestigation into the circumstances surrounding the death of Chinese dissident Li Wangyang, charging that police unlawfully concluded that he committed suicide by hanging.

In the letter to the National People’s Congress (NPC), they pointed out what they called illogical conclusions of a police report on his June death, including a claim that Li, who had almost no vision and was very weak, had performed “complicated movements” needed to end his life,  signatories told RFA on Monday.

The lawyers also noted that security officials had hastily cremated Li’s body after his death in spite of his family’s opposition. This, they said, blatantly violated China’s criminal code and laws.

Li, a veteran activist based in southern China’s Hunan province, was found hanged in a hospital room on June 6, one year after his release from prison.

A few days before, he had called in an interview with a Hong Kong television network for an official reappraisal of the pro-democracy Tiananmen Square protests of 1989, in which hundreds were killed in a government crackdown.

In their open letter to the NPC’s standing committee, the lawyers called for a reinvestigation of Li’s death and an immediate end to what it called the extralegal police custody of Li's sister Li Wangling and her husband.

Authorities in Shaoyang city, where Li lived, initially called his death a suicide, but later changed the cause of death to “accidental death” following an autopsy.

Widespread doubt

From June 19 to July 9, the Hunan provincial police department conducted an investigation into Li’s death, but its concluding report published on July 12 upheld the earlier verdict of suicide, despite widespread public doubts over the claim that the severely disabled 62-year-old had hanged himself.

Wang Quanping, an attorney and signatory to the letter based in southern China’s Guangdong province, said he doesn’t believe that Li killed himself.

“He was a staunch fighter for freedom and had been jailed for more than two decades, but he never gave up his ideals and dreams,” Wang said in an interview on Monday.

“Now, after his release, why would he commit suicide?”

Li served 21 years in prison on charges of counterrevolutionary propaganda, incitement, and subversion because of his role in organizing protests in Hunan province during the 1989 pro-democracy movement.

After Li’s death, police took away his sister Li Wangling and her husband Zhao Baozhu, and family members  are still unable to contact them.

“If the police authorities are doing things in a transparent and open way, they should allow family members to speak out,” Wang said.

Similar cases

Another lawyer said he had come across cases where his clients had died under mysterious circumstances, with their deaths later described as suicides.

“I have dealt with cases similar to Li’s,” said Lin Qilei, a Beijing-based lawyer who also signed the petition.

“Clients of mine have died mysteriously in detention centers or other places, and their deaths were then labeled ‘suicides.’”

“After Li Wangyang’s death, these fallacies can no longer be accepted. We have to initiate systematic measures to eliminate these kinds of wrongs,” Lin added.

Xiao Guozhen, another Beijing-based signatory, explained why she signed the appeal.

“As a legal practitioner, I feel obliged to take more social responsibility in pursuing justice and rectifying social maladies,” she said.

Other lawyers who signed the letter include Liu Weiguo in Shandong province, Jiang Tianyong in Beijing, Tang Jingling in Guangdong, and Albert Ho, a member of Hong Kong’s legislature.

Reported from Hong Kong by Qiao Long for RFA’s Mandarin service. Translated by Ping Chen.

Letter Rejects Suicide Report

Letter Rejects Suicide Report:
Ten lawyers from mainland China and from Hong Kong have sent an open letter to China’s parliament seeking a reinvestigation into the circumstances surrounding the death of Chinese dissident Li Wangyang, charging that police unlawfully concluded that he committed suicide by hanging.

In the letter to the National People’s Congress (NPC), they pointed out what they called illogical conclusions of a police report on his June death, including a claim that Li, who had almost no vision and was very weak, had performed “complicated movements” needed to end his life,  signatories told RFA on Monday.

The lawyers also noted that security officials had hastily cremated Li’s body after his death in spite of his family’s opposition. This, they said, blatantly violated China’s criminal code and laws.

Li, a veteran activist based in southern China’s Hunan province, was found hanged in a hospital room on June 6, one year after his release from prison.

A few days before, he had called in an interview with a Hong Kong television network for an official reappraisal of the pro-democracy Tiananmen Square protests of 1989, in which hundreds were killed in a government crackdown.

In their open letter to the NPC’s standing committee, the lawyers called for a reinvestigation of Li’s death and an immediate end to what it called the extralegal police custody of Li's sister Li Wangling and her husband.

Authorities in Shaoyang city, where Li lived, initially called his death a suicide, but later changed the cause of death to “accidental death” following an autopsy.

Widespread doubt

From June 19 to July 9, the Hunan provincial police department conducted an investigation into Li’s death, but its concluding report published on July 12 upheld the earlier verdict of suicide, despite widespread public doubts over the claim that the severely disabled 62-year-old had hanged himself.

Wang Quanping, an attorney and signatory to the letter based in southern China’s Guangdong province, said he doesn’t believe that Li killed himself.

“He was a staunch fighter for freedom and had been jailed for more than two decades, but he never gave up his ideals and dreams,” Wang said in an interview on Monday.

“Now, after his release, why would he commit suicide?”

Li served 21 years in prison on charges of counterrevolutionary propaganda, incitement, and subversion because of his role in organizing protests in Hunan province during the 1989 pro-democracy movement.

After Li’s death, police took away his sister Li Wangling and her husband Zhao Baozhu, and family members  are still unable to contact them.

“If the police authorities are doing things in a transparent and open way, they should allow family members to speak out,” Wang said.

Similar cases

Another lawyer said he had come across cases where his clients had died under mysterious circumstances, with their deaths later described as suicides.

“I have dealt with cases similar to Li’s,” said Lin Qilei, a Beijing-based lawyer who also signed the petition.

“Clients of mine have died mysteriously in detention centers or other places, and their deaths were then labeled ‘suicides.’”

“After Li Wangyang’s death, these fallacies can no longer be accepted. We have to initiate systematic measures to eliminate these kinds of wrongs,” Lin added.

Xiao Guozhen, another Beijing-based signatory, explained why she signed the appeal.

“As a legal practitioner, I feel obliged to take more social responsibility in pursuing justice and rectifying social maladies,” she said.

Other lawyers who signed the letter include Liu Weiguo in Shandong province, Jiang Tianyong in Beijing, Tang Jingling in Guangdong, and Albert Ho, a member of Hong Kong’s legislature.

Reported from Hong Kong by Qiao Long for RFA’s Mandarin service. Translated by Ping Chen.

Few gains for new gov't in Thailand's far south

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VIDEO: The Chinese left behind by growth

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Crowds mourn Bangladeshi writer

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Thousands flee rioting in Assam

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VIDEO: Pakistanis light up broken bulbs

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The costs of Indonesia's democracy

The costs of Indonesia's democracy:
Peter McCawley is a Visiting Fellow at the Indonesia Project, ANU, and former Dean of the Asia Development Bank Institute, Tokyo.
Stephen Grenville ('Democracy and Indonesia's economy') notes that government decision-making has become much more difficult in Indonesia since the end of the Soeharto era. One of the standard gripes in the business sector these days is that 'at least corruption was centralised under Soeharto; with democracy the system is so chaotic that you never know who to pay to get things done!'

Another standard gripe is: 'People say that we have democracy in Indonesia, but what we really have is "democrazy".'
It's true that it's often hard to get things done in Indonesia. There are delays at every turn. But there are two fundamental aspects of this problem that the international development commentariat often doesn't seem to think about very carefully: corruption and 'money politics'.
Corruption has received enormous attention in Indonesia in recent years. An impressive stream of big names has been caught up in corruption inquiries conducted by the well-known 'KPK' (Corruption Eradication Commission or Komisi Pemberantasan Korupsi). The latest big fish to be caught is the former senior deputy of the central bank (Bank Indonesia), Miranda Goeltom. In what has turned into a remarkably high-profile case, Miranda has been charged with corruption in connection with the payment of more than $2 million to MPs for vote-buying during her election as Deputy Governor to Bank Indonesia in 2004. She will come to trial this coming week.
But there have been downsides to the intense campaign against corruption in Indonesia.
One is that many public servants have become fearful of campaigns against corruption which sometimes verge on witch-hunts. Senior officials fear being noisily charged with corruption over even trivial misdemeanors and have thus become extremely risk-averse. Many government approvals – including many quite reasonable business approvals – are now often badly delayed because officials are reluctant to sign anything with the faintest whiff of risk.
The second problem is the way that the growth of democracy in Indonesia has led to an expansion of 'money politics'. As Stephen Grenville notes, the election campaign for the governorship of Jakarta has been accompanied with all sorts of expensive populist activities. Somebody has to pay for all of this fun. Fund-raising is now a major challenge for any aspiring politician in Indonesia.
It's not clear what to do about the huge problem of money politics in Indonesia. In fact, the international development commentariat hasn't come up with many answers to the key question of how to fund democracy in developing countries.
The operations of a vigorous political industry cost money. In Indonesia there are now over 20,000 politicians in central, provincial and district parliaments. All of them need to run offices, keep supporters happy, and support frequent campaigns. The major political parties often hold big jamborees in grand Jakarta hotels with up to 1000 delegates flown in from all parts of Indonesia. The delegates attend dinners for several days and spend up big on generous expense accounts.
There is now widespread agreement in Indonesia that the high cost of politics is a major problem. The former deputy head of the Corruption Eradication Commission recently said that 'the commercialization of authority for the sake of winning elections and building and sustaining power and wealth' is causing great harm. He pointed out that, among other things, this problem contributes to the 'rampant issuance of mining concessions' because regional politicians find it easy to raise the money they need by selling mining and plantation concessions.
Nobody disagrees that democracy is flourishing in Indonesia or that the campaign against corruption is a vital part of good governance. But it would be a useful step forward in the international development debate if it was more widely recognised that democracy and anti-corruption measures bring new challenges.
One of the major challenges is that, in some important ways, the management of government becomes much harder. The old ways of cutting corners were an unacceptable way of running a country, but they were fast. When modern ideas about good governance bring ever-growing layers of bureaucracy, the system clogs up. Purists wouldn't be happy but there is a lot to be said in favour of Merilee Grindle's practical idea of focusing on 'good-enough governance'.
Photo by Flickr user Shanghai Daddy.