In Asia: Weekly Insight and Features from Asia

President Obama will also visit Korea on this trip against a backdrop of tensions between North and South Korea after a naval skirmish and just-announced plans to send special envoy Stephen Bosworth to Pyongyang in the near future. On the heels of the joint vision statement between South Korea’s President Lee Myung-bak and President Obama in June, The Asia Foundation’s Seoul office hosted a seminar last week to explore the challenges and opportunities of what the Hon. Hwang Jin-Ha, Member of the ROK National Assembly, called in his keynote address “one of the strongest alliances in the world.” Three presentations focused on international peacekeeping, overseas development assistance, and maritime security. Co-hosted by the Foundation’s Center for U.S. Korea Policy (CUSKP), this is the second discussion in a three-part series examining opportunities for U.S.-ROK cooperation. Read more about the speakers.

Read more »

From 2002 to 2006, The Asia Foundation implemented a series of exchanges for 80 promising young professionals from Southeast Asia and the United States to help develop a better understanding of one another’s region. This program was initiated by the Foundation because of concern that fewer Americans had been involved with Southeast Asia since the end of the Vietnam War and subsequently were less familiar with the region’s nuances and complexities. Consequently, a younger generation of Southeast Asians had limited exposure to the United States and their understanding has been limited as well.

Read more »

Last week, USAID, Radiohead, and MTV EXIT announced that their music video collaboration had received the prestigious 2009 Asia-Pacific Child Rights Award. The USAID-MTV EXIT (End EXploitation and Trafficking) campaign in partnership with influential UK-rock band Radiohead produced the innovative music video for their song “All I Need” off the album In Rainbows.

All MTV EXIT programming was produced rights-free, allowing for the MTV Europe Foundation to give the programming away for free to any broadcaster or organization, thus maximizing the overall reach of these important anti-trafficking messages. Read the full press release.

The Asia Foundation collaborated to launch the first-ever MTV Exit Campaign in Mongolia beginning in 2007 and dedicated to producing content against human trafficking for a Mongolian audience. Read more about the Foundation’s anti-trafficking work in Mongolia.

The Pacific Islands each have a unique culture but share a common uniting factor – geography has dictated the islands as one of the most disaster-prone regions in the world. According to a U.S. Department of State Travel Alert, the South Pacific region experiences approximately nine tropical cyclones each season, about half of which reach Category 3 intensity or above and have the potential to cause severe destruction. Such fate leaves the region’s inhabitants vulnerable to cyclones, tsunamis, droughts, floods, earthquakes, and volcanic eruptions each season, including economic losses which in the 1990s alone cost the Pacific region $2.8 billion in real 2004 value.

To help build regional government capacity to prepare and mitigate the lasting effects of such disasters, The Asia Foundation, with support from the USAID’s Office of U.S. Foreign Disaster Assistance, has been implementing disaster trainings in the Pacific since 1995. Recently, USAID published two success stories highlighting the effectiveness of the programs. Read the full stories here and here.

Late last month, suicide attacks hit Pakistan’s International Islamic University in relatively peaceful Islamabad, killing at least six people – another violent event that continues to pull the capital further into the fray. In even less secure areas, such as Pakistan’s Swat Valley in the North-West Frontier Province and Baluchistan, Pakistan’s largest province, such targeted violence is well known – militants in mid-January imposed a ban on girls’ schools, claiming that they do not abide by the teachings of Islam. Since then, hundreds of boys’ and girls’ schools have been systematically shuttered or burned down and girls threatened with acid or death for violating the ban and bravely attending school anyway.

This situation, coupled with rising violence as the Pakistani government increases efforts against militant forces, has caused growing security challenges to Books for Asia’s operations in Pakistan. When the program first started back in the 1950s, security posed little risk and books were delivered on the backs of camels across rugged terrain. Now, the danger involved in traveling with a truckload of books to institutions in remote destinations is by far the program’s greatest concern.

When the Books for Asia program began operation in Pakistan in the 1950s, books were delivered by camels, as pictured here.

Read more »

Today, November 4, the Foundation’s office in Seoul opened a seminar there to assess prospects for expanding the U.S.-ROK alliance into new areas of cooperation. Three presentations focused on international peacekeeping, overseas development assistance, and maritime security.

Read more »

On Thursday, November 5, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace will host and stream live a discussion on President Obama’s trip to Asia next week. Asia Foundation Trustee Douglas Paal, who is Vice President for Studies at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, will discuss President Obama’s trip with Michael Pettis, a senior associate in the Beijing-based Carnegie China Program, and Taiya Smith, a senior associate in the Carnegie Energy and Climate Program, and the Carnegie China Program. Expected to be among the most important foreign tours during his first year in office, the president will visit Japan, Singapore, China, and South Korea from November 12 through November 19. During the trip he will attend the annual summit of the Asian Pacific Economic Cooperation in Singapore, where he will be the first U.S. leader to hold formal talks with all 10 heads of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations. Watch the discussion live here at 12:15 p.m. EST on November 5.

In the rugged mountains of Northern Thailand, in a village called Morwakee, there are three classrooms and 62 students. None of the students had ever seen a children’s book. When we invited people from across the globe to “Choose a Book, Change a Life,” by selecting their favorite storybook for each of the students in Morwakee, we didn’t know what kind of response we would get. To our surprise, more than 5,000 people participated in the book campaign in just two weeks.

Read more »

A weekly TV talk show premiers this week in Thailand – Let’s Talk Rights – and will feature debates between policymakers, government officials, academics, and citizens on important and sometimes sensitive issues, such as land disputes, human rights, community rights, and gender equality. The one-hour program will air every Thursday on Thai PBS at 10 a.m. in the Thai language and is supported by The Asia Foundation.

Read more »

From afar, Mongolia and Laos may not have a lot in common. From an environmental point of view, however, both nations share the same concern: water is a precious resource that needs to be protected.

I learned first-hand of that shared concern when I traveled to Mongolia in September. I was there to learn from The Asia Foundation’s impressive Water Quality Monitoring (WQM) program in Mongolia and to find out if the program could be adapted and used in the Lao People’s Democratic Republic, where I am based and where a water quality and environmental monitoring project on a much smaller scale was launched by the Foundation in 2008. Both Mongolia and Laos rely heavily on their water resources and share similar concerns about environmental degradation possibly caused by pressing needs for the countries’ economic development.

Read more »