By Kim N. B. Ninh

Kim N. B. Ninh, Country Representative for The Asia Foundation in Vietnam. She can be reached at kninh@asiafound.org.

In a country of 83 million, one third of Vietnam’s population is between the ages of 10 to 24. It is popular now in Vietnam to refer to the young generation as “Generation 8X” for those who were born in the 1980s, which means that they grew up in a country that was fully unified and at peace, enjoying strong economic growth and widening regional and international interactions. Their Vietnam is far different from that of their parents, who grew up in a time of war and when life was tightly organized. “Generation 8X” is really the first generation to benefit fully from 1986’s doi moi policy, although the hardship and privation endured by their parents’ generation is barely in the past.

With GDP growing at an average of 8% this past decade, the rapid pace of change is transforming the country. Visitors, particularly those from the West, are often surprised at the dynamism they see. A closer examination reveals Vietnam’s steadfast effort to develop a market-based economy and broaden relations in the region and the world, having successfully repositioned itself as a competitive place to do business and as a responsible member of the global community.
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By Steven Rood

Steven Rood is The Asia Foundation’s Country Representative in the Philippines. He can be reached at srood@asiafound.org.

The Philippines is often called the “texting capital of the world,” since perhaps the main means of interpersonal communication is sending SMS “text” messages. The average cellular user sends 10 texts for each time a voice call is made, so it is not surprising that the bad news about typhoon “Frank” (Fengshen is the international name) began to spread through text messages.

First, on Friday, messages came from Mindanao ” a friend explained how his school was chest deep in water, ruining everything that couldn’t be moved quickly to the second floor. Bus service was suspended to the capital of the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao. Rice and corn lands in southern Mindanao were inundated. Fishermen were charging 20 pesos (about $0.50, a sizable sum of money for those earning minimum wage) per head to ferry people through the floods.
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By William Foerderer Infante

William Foerderer Infante is The Asia Foundation’s Country Representative in Mongolia. He can be reached at binfante@asiafound.org.

Late in 2007, at a meeting of senior government officials and development partners, Member of Parliament S. Oyun commented, that “how Mongolia develops its mining sector is a matter of national security.” In other words, the choice of which foreign partner will help develop Mongolia’s vast minerals resources is a material concern for Mongolia’s government, its people, and for the international community.

Mongolia shares borders with only two neighbours: Russia and China. For foreign policy and economic reasons, how and to whom mine licenses are granted has regional, and potentially international, implications. Mongolia has an avowed third neighbour policy, which means that it wants to balance relations with its immediate neighbours, China and Russia, and with those of “third” countries in North America, Europe and East Asia.
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On June 20th, Barnett Baron, The Asia Foundation’s Executive Vice President, moderated the World Affairs Council panel, Afghanistan ” Progress or Decline, in honor of World Refugee Day. The panel included Khaled Hosseini, UNHCR Goodwill Envoy and Author of The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns; Ewen MacLeod, Deputy Representative, UNHCR Afghanistan; and Fariba Nawa, Afghan-American Journalist. For Bay Area residents, KQED’s It’s Your World will air the program in its entirety on Monday, July 7 at 8pm. For more information, click here.

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By Silas Everett

Silas Everett is The Asia Foundation’s Country Representative in Timor-Leste. He can be reached at severett@asiafound.org.

The United Nations leaked this week that the UN police in Timor-Leste (UNPOL) will hand over responsibility to the national police force (PNTL) by early next year. The government is currently considering the draft proposal ” a seven stage withdrawal which will begin on July 31, 2008 and end with a full handover on May 20, 2009. After that time, 600 UN police officers plan to remain as monitors and backup.

Local media reports indicate, however, that the handover is imminent. UN insiders claim that UNPOL’s gradual withdrawal is not because the national police force wants the UN police to go, but because UN security is needed in other parts of the globe.
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Jointly hosted by Asia Research Institute and

Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, National University of Singapore

Supported by The Asia Foundation and the Centre on Asia and Globalisation

Speakers will include:

Steve Rood, The Asia Foundation’s Country Representative in the Philippines

&

Thomas Parks, The Asia Foundation’s Regional Director for Conflict and Governance

Description: 

Over recent decades, a number of South and Southeast Asian states have been troubled by intensifying armed separatist conflicts. Various forms of autonomy have been promoted by scholars and policy-makers as the most democratic way of accommodating separatist insurgents in ethnically, politically, religiously, economically and socially divided states. Despite this, very few states have successfully ended their armed separatist conflicts through offers of autonomy or self-governance. This raises difficult questions about how much freedom nation-states are willing and capable of granting their nationalist minorities without releasing control over their sovereign territories.

This international workshop promotes a multidisciplinary approach towards understanding national identity problems in seven South and Southeast Asian countries: Indonesia, Burma, Sri Lanka, Philippines, Thailand, India and Indonesia’s former province of East Timor. It explores the political, economic, legal, security and other compromises that have been offered by national governments to negotiate shared-rule outcomes with their separatist movements through the devolution of central state authority and resources. These attempts to achieve conflict resolution through autonomy have met with varying degrees of success, ranging from Indonesia’s successful offer of self-governance to Aceh to the ongoing separatist insurgencies in Indonesia’s Papua, southern Thailand, the Philippines, India, Sri Lanka and Burma.

Location: Manasseh Meyer Building, Level 3 Seminar Room
(MM03-01) Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy
469C Bukit Timah Road, Singapore

For more information on the program, abstracts, and how to register, click here.

By Kim McQuay

Kim McQuay is The Asia Foundation’s Country Representative in Bangladesh. To watch a video featuring the Bangladesh Community-Oriented Policing program, click here.

It was a remarkable scene: a mix of faces from across Asia crowding a small conference room whose walls reverberated with the ring of different languages. In each of the four corners of the room, teams of visitors from Cambodia, Mongolia, Sri Lanka, and Timor-Leste stood huddled in half-circles around flip charts, recording bullet points and sketching diagrams, conferring among themselves, and inviting program planning inputs from teams of resource persons from Bangladesh, Indonesia, and the Philippines. On the projection screen at the front of the room, an electronic slide show flashed dozens of colorful images of team members in rural Bangladesh, interacting with police officers, local leaders, representatives of civil society organizations, and ordinary citizens.
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Alexander Tarnoff, Director of Field Operations for Southeast Asia with The Asia Foundation, joined a panel on “Grantmaking Within the Legal Constraints of U.S. Foreign Policy” at the Grantmakers w/o Borders annual conference in San Francisco on June 10. As the Foundation does not operate in Burma, Mr. Tarnoff spoke from his four previous years experience as Country Representative with Save the Children in Burma on how American non-for-profit organizations can effectively deliver humanitarian aid and development assistance in compliance with restrictions imposed by US economic and diplomatic sanctions. On the panel were also two experts on development in Iraq and Palestine. To read about the Foundation’s charity affiliate, Give2Asia’s humanitarian work in Burma, click here.

Yesterday, the Wall Street Journal published an op-ed by The Asia Foundation’s Marielle Sander-Lindstrom, Chief of Party, Counter Trafficking in Persons Project (C-TIP), about Cambodia’s first-ever national efforts to collect standardized data on human trafficking. Trafficking statistics are notoriously difficult to gather, and consistent, accurate data and analysis will help ensure that Cambodia’s policies and programs respond to real needs.

To read the full article, click here.

By John Brandon

John Brandon is Director of The Asia Foundation’s International Relations program and head of America’s Role in Asia.

With our election cycle, every four years American foreign policy has a fresh opportunity to be re-examined and re-strategized. Come 2009, U.S. policy towards Asia will continue to directly affect 60% of the world’s population. Many Asians tell me they’re concerned that decisions affecting them, and their countries’ security, are being made unilaterally in Washington. Many say they believe the Global War on Terror tops the U.S. foreign policy agenda, trumping all else. Asian policymakers I’ve spoken to say repeatedly they have little input in decisions made in the U.S. and that their domestic interests are rarely if ever taken into account. Given the political, economic, and security interests of the U.S. in the region, it is essential that both Americans and Asians contribute to solving problems of mutual concern.
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