[NV Greens] Fwd: USGP-INT Fw: Deccan Herald: "Australia in Asia" problem

Tue May 31 22:40:03 PDT 2005

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>Subject: USGP-INT Fw: Deccan Herald: "Australia in Asia" problem
>From: vivek ananthan <viveka at juno.com>
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>For information.   Vivek
>Date: Tue, 31 May 2005 00:33:49 -0400
>Subject: Deccan Herald: "Australia in Asia" problem
>
>Deccan Herald (Bangalore, India)
>May 29, 2005
>
>SUNDAY SOLILOQUIES
>The ‘Australia in Asia’ problem
>By N J Nanporia
>
>A tiny news item the other day told us about a rally organised in Sydney
>by the Timor Sea Justice Campaign which condemned Australia for
>“bullying” its neighbour to seize the lion’s share of undersea oil
>resources. It was liable to be overlooked and it was. Yet it has a direct
>bearing on one of the major unresolved issues in our part of the world,
>namely, the Australia in Asia problem. Oil is central to the ongoing
>negotiations between Dili and Canberra but lurking behind it is the
>question whether Australia has an interest in truly “belonging”.
>
>Shortly before Timor’s independence it made a calculated and self-serving
>withdrawal from the International Court of Justice’s jurisdiction on
>maritime boundary issues. This implied a rejection of the median line as
>established under international law and subjected the determination of a
>boundary to whatever pressures could be brought on the Timorese
>government. Timor is one of the poorest countries in the world; and
>according to Oxfam Australia, one in 10 children will die before the age
>of five. Against this is the fact that Australia has received 10 times
>more from Timor sea oil and gas revenue, than the aid it gave since 1999.
>
>Clearly there is here an enormous mismatch, made all the more disturbing
>by Canberra’s emphasis on “all we have done for East Timor.”
>
>Revenue matters apart, it is Australia’s attitude that is under critical
>scrutiny by its Asian neighbours. If in Tony Blair, Bush has a faithful
>disciple in the West, he has in John Howard an equally dedicated
>attendant in the East. Australia in Asia has cast itself in a role that
>is an almost comic simulacrum of Bush’s dealings on the global stage.
>Despite large demonstrations against involvement in Iraq, Howard’s
>commitment to Bush on this issue is absolute. He claims the right to
>launch a pre-emptive strike anywhere in the region.
>
>He has intervened not in Timor alone but in Fiji, the Solomon islands,
>Panua, New Guinea and Vanuatu. And although in the service of his
>country’s economic interests, he has sought closer economic ties with
>Asean and in particular with Singapore and Thailand, there is no
>perception of a sense of “belonging”.
>
>“I don’t know,” Mahathir Mohammed of Malaysia has said, “whether
>Australia is Asia”; and an identical sentiment was echoed in the former
>Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser’s comment that “Australia must not be seen
>as a US lackey in Asia”.
>
>Yet Howard has aliened his country with America in support of Taiwan’s
>independence with an enthusiasm that has left, not Beijing alone, but the
>Pacific region in a daze. If he knows what he is doing, he is indeed a
>maverick leader about whom the last word has still to be said.
>
>An agitated Asean is hoping that military-ruled Burma will voluntarily
>surrender its right to hold the chair at the Association’s meetings.
>There seems to be an emerging consensus that given its human rights
>record it is not qualified for the job. True, some sort of a question
>mark is in order. But it is a mark that should hover, not just over
>Burma, but over other countries as well, including the United States
>about which Amnesty has commented caustically on the treatment of
>prisoners at Guantanamo. Yet an ever blithe Washington continues to sit
>in judgment on the human rights record of 98 countries.
>
>In contrast, as Kofi Annan has revealed, the 53-member UN Commission on
>human rights has suspended judgement on suspected violations in China,
>Chechnya, Iran and Zimbabwe because it has decided to “start from
>scratch”. This is here surely a belated acknowledgement that human
>rights, their definition and how they should be judged are together an
>open question urgently in need of a collective rethink.
>
>America’s human rights report, ceremoniously released from time to time,
>is a blatant form of unilateralism; and if it is not designed to do so,
>it prompts the UN body to fall in line with its own decisions. That, as
>Kofi Annan has said, explains the UN Commission’s “credibility deficit”.
>The prevailing code of human rights was put together by a coterie of
>western powers some decades ago. If reform of the Security Council is
>urgent, the same applies to human rights. Too often it has been
>subordinated to political manipulation which is no longer tolerable in
>the post 9-11 world.
>
>BJP’s divine connection
>
>L K Advani struck an off-beat note when he spoke of the BJP as “really
>the chosen instrument of the divine”. Even more oddly and interestingly
>he said this in English in a speech otherwise delivered in Hindi. This
>off-and-on use of English is a form of linguistic italicisation,
>underlining a selected point to give it the required emphasis. That
>apart, what are we to make of this invocation of divine intervention?
>
>Post 9-11, Bush has injected into his mission to democratise the world, a
>religiosity that has invited a mix of incredulity and amusement. God, he
>implied, had almost taken up residence in the White House. Amidst the
>BJP’s current troubles, Advani seems to have drifted from ideology to
>good governance, to humouring the Sangh, to obliquely defying it and now
>to a kind of evangelism that is as confusing as the debate on the
>generational succession. As a party at sixes and sevens with itself, the
>BJP could hardly do better than it is doing now.
>
>Perhaps to start with, it would help to go back to basics, the most
>important of which is the party’s original definition of itself as a
>party with a difference. The difference being that it has the makings of
>a true ideology but has failed to explain it and adapt it to the
>conditions of a steadily modernising India. This search for identity has
>yet to be taken up if, indeed, the party is even remotely aware of this
>need.
>
>Once defined with conviction, everything else can be expected to fall
>into place including the party’s muddled relations with the Sangh. That
>is the kind of quality conviction the BJP presently doesn’t have and it
>can’t be obtained by invoking God.
>
>Feelings of West and East
>
>When will the advertising and PR people in the West including cartoonists
>understand that there is a difference, qualitatively and in degree,
>between the feelings with which the East and the West react to
>provocations. The West reacts with a mix of argument and indignation, the
>East with tsunami feelings. Washington’s neos were flabbergasted by the
>intensity of feeling that spread so quickly throughout the Muslim world
>in response to the Quran-in-toilet affair. Would Bush have leaned so
>heavily on Newsweek for a retraction if the Muslim response had been low
>key?
>
>The West’s capacity for strong feeling has been weakened to the point
>where it has almost ceased to exist. Which is why the new Pope’s
>immediate and urgent concern is to restore to the Church a quality of
>belief and the feelings that go with it as the basis for a religious
>rejuvenation. Meanwhile the West continues to assume that its home-grown
>values and standards are also those of the entire globe.
>
>A cartoon of an American soldier patting a dog (Pakistan) which has
>caught a terrorist and directing it with good boy encouragement to “go
>find bin Laden” is a bit of fun in the West but a recipe for burning
>anger in the East. Similar insensitivity and self-centredness explain why
>a Californian brewery found nothing amiss in naming his new beer after
>the elephant God Ganesh. That there is a strand of innocence in all this
>doesn’t excuse it.
>
>Unthinking or deliberate denigration of the Christian religion very often
>causes no more than a lifting of the eyebrows in the West. An uncommitted
>people just do not care, barring a few exceptions in America’s Bible belt
>where religious belief surfaces in the oddest ways. Which, incidentally,
>also explains why Bush’s America is bewildered by the seemingly endless
>army of suicide bombers in Iraq.
>
>A belief that encompasses a willingness to die is beyond its
>comprehension. So they have been dismissed as thugs and deadbeats and
>hooligans, and the Americans, as always, are left without a clue. If this
>isn’t the special sadness of an impersonal tragedy what else can it be?
>
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-- 
Paul Etxeberri

"Forests precede civilizations and deserts follow"   ---Chateaubriand