In Asia: Weekly Insight and Features from Asia

On December 16 in Bangkok, The Asia Foundation released the results of its first in-person public perception survey conducted in Thailand’s three southern border provinces. Since 2004, the provinces of Yala, Narathiwas, and Pattani have been the locus of an indigenous separatist movement and communal conflict that has shaken a tradition of peaceful coexistence between the majority Malay-Muslim and minority Buddhist communities of the Deep South.

The conflict has claimed over 4,000 lives, left thousands more injured, and exposed residents of the southern border provinces to a persistent environment of tension, insecurity, and uncertainty.

A variety of peace initiatives have been undertaken in an effort to resolve a conflict whose complexities defy easy understanding or clear practical solution. While government agencies and various interest groups have taken modest good-faith efforts to canvass the views and expectations of ordinary citizens of the Deep South, many southerners have been reluctant to speak candidly in formal settings. Their hesitation reflects a combination of traditional norms, security concerns, and lack of confidence in the sincerity of government efforts to understand the unique cultural identity of the Pattani-Malay community. As a result, while there has been abundant speculation on citizen views and expectations in the southern border provinces, little concrete information has been available from empirical research.

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The Asia Foundation’s first survey of the population of southern Thailand, released December 16 in Bangkok, gives us rare insight into the conflict, from the perspective of those most affected by it. Since the re-emergence of violent conflict almost seven years ago, the region has been notoriously difficult to understand, in large part due to the lack of in-depth, credible information. This survey helps identify the fault lines and critical issues that sustain the conflict, and determine areas where there may be some space for compromise.

Security and police presence is high in Thailand's southern provinces, where a violent conflict has left over 4,000 dead since 2004.

An analysis of survey results indicate that the primary factor driving the conflict is discriminatory governance and the alienation of the southern population from the Thai state. Furthermore, significant differences between the ethnic Malay-Muslim and Buddhist populations in the southern provinces illustrate the contrasting experiences of these two groups. For example, 63 percent of Muslims (who are primarily ethnic Malay) believe that the national government is not concerned about what they think, while only 35 percent of Buddhists in the southern provinces say they feel that way.

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On December 9, The Asia Foundation’s Mongolia office released its 10th Corruption Benchmarking Survey (CBS), the only tool that measures both public perceptions of institutional corruption, and the impact of petty corruption on the day-to-day life of Mongolian households. Through random, face-to-face interviews, a sample of 1,000 adults were asked about bribe requests, frequency, and amount, as well as their confidence in government and public institutions in combating corruption. While some figures suggest that Mongolia is chipping away at its long battle to combat corruption – corruption dropped from the third to the fourth biggest concern of the respondents, and the percentage of households that paid a bribe in a 3-month timeframe decreased to 13 percent – average bribe amounts jumped to an all-time high of MNT 416,000 (approximately $315).

Although there is significant distance to cover before Mongolia eradicates corruption, many signs are pointing in the right direction. Conducted twice a year in collaboration with the Sant Maral Foundation, the Benchmarking Survey provides a unique and robust tool for government policy-makers, enforcement bodies, and civil society groups to observe and assess the impact of government and non-government initiatives to fight corruption in Mongolia.

Read more about the survey.

Don’t tell her she can’t be a doctor, a scientist, a journalist, a pilot, an urban planner, or a stock broker. Tell her she can. So says a stunning new video produced by The Asia Foundation. Watch it right now on our Facebook page. For every “like” the video gets on Facebook through the end of 2010, (up to $15,000) the Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi UFJ will donate $1 to our efforts to educate girls in Asia.

If you’re in New York’s Times Square neighborhood, look up at the CBS Superscreen on 42nd Street, which was generously donated to The Asia Foundation to screen our video every hour during the holiday season, until midnight December 31.

Since 1954, The Asia Foundation has been committed to girls’ education as the single most effective way to empower girls and women.

In 2009, American political scientist and Indiana University Professor Elinor Ostrom became the first woman to receive the prestigious Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for her work on collective action and cooperation: how people work together successfully without regulation by central authorities or privatization. Her 45 years of work extends from studying police departments across the U.S. to extensive field work in Nepal, where she has traveled repeatedly to spend time in rural villages examining how communities share natural resources like irrigation systems and forests.

From December 5-8, The Asia Foundation helped bring Ostrom, at the invitation of the Nepal government and the Ambassador to the U.S., Dr. Shankar Sharma, who is traveling with Ostrom, back to Nepal to discuss her work in local governance with President Ram Baran Yadav and other senior-level officials. While there, she spoke with In Asia about her work and how it has informed the work of policy-makers and non-governmental organizations, including The Asia Foundation, and her thoughts on the importance of emphasizing local governance as the country is in the process of writing its  constitution. Ostrom was accompanied by the Foundation’s Country Representative in Nepal George Varughese, a former doctoral student of Ostrom’s at Indiana University.

Q: How did it feel to be the first woman – especially one who was greatly discouraged from even going into the field of economics – to win the Nobel Prize?

It was a great surprise and a great honor to be awarded the Nobel Prize. I was pleased that I was recognized both for my work and to help recognize the work of many women scientists across the world.

Q: You argue that common control over resources is far more effective than outside control by a governing body or institution. How did you come to that conclusion?

I have found many settings where farmers and rural villagers have organized irrigation and forestry systems that worked better than government systems. That is not a universal finding. It occurs when villagers do have relatively accepted authority to make their own rules, develop a community of users with high trust, and invest in maintaining the system as well as monitoring it.

Q: Nepal is emerging from two decades of political turbulence, and one casualty in this has been attention to local governance and local institutions that communities use to manage themselves and their resources. The Asia Foundation has always considered good local governance as a key determinant of long-term stability and development, and since 2009, has been working with policy-makers to inject local governance into the constitutional process. Where do you see local governance in the constitution process?

It is very important that multiple levels of governance are authorized in the next constitution. The detail of the operational rules that could be used in the local setting should be defined by those governance bodies.

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Although a violent insurgency in Thailand’s three southern border provinces has claimed over 4,000 lives since 2004, very little is known about the views and experience of members of the majority Muslim and Pattani-Malay-speaking community who live in a complex conflict environment 700 miles south of Bangkok. Until now, their voices have been relatively unheard in the national peace process.

To learn more about the views of citizens in the Deep South, The Asia Foundation conducted a first-ever, in-person public opinion poll in the three southern border provinces. The results of this survey of 750 people, which was conducted between July 2 and Aug. 30, 2010, will be released on December 16, in Bangkok, Thailand.

In capturing the opinions of citizens of the three southern border provinces – Yala, Narathiwas, and Pattani – the Southern Survey provides a unique perspective on the unrest that has plagued the Deep South for 16 years. Building on an earlier nationwide survey that The Asia Foundation conducted in 2009, (which excluded the three southern border provinces), the 2010 Southern Survey features chapters on the southern mood, democratic values and institutions, political interest and efficacy, influences on voting choices, causes of the southern conflict, separatism and decentralization, and the role of the unique Pattani-Malay culture in defining southern values, identity, and expectations.

In addition to the full survey, Democracy & Conflict in Southern Thailand: A 2010 Survey of Yala, Narathiwas and Pattani, which will be available on The Asia Foundation’s website, next week In Asia will include on-the-ground analysis on survey findings from Foundation experts in Thailand.

Mongolia, a vast but sparsely-populated country, established centers of urban administration and governance only over the past 60 years or so. Until the mid-1940s, Buddhist monasteries and residences of nobility were the only truly fixed settlements, and virtually all citizens lived in portable structures while herding sheep, horses, and other cattle on the country’s open plains.

More than half of Mongolians now live in Ulaanbaatar, the country’s capital and largest city. Photo by Jon Jamieson.

Now, more than half of Mongolians inhabit Ulaanbaatar, the country’s capital and largest city, while ger, the Mongolian word for yurt, is now also a term for “suburb,” as more and more people gravitate toward the services and jobs available in urban areas.

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The Malaysian state of Sabah on the northern point of Borneo, though resource-rich, has the highest poverty rate in the country. Official figures claim 16 percent, but unofficial sources put the poverty rate as high as 24 percent. Interestingly, the face of the poor in Sabah is quite unlike that of the rest of Malaysia. Sabah’s population is largely non-Malaysian, including many Indonesians and Filipinos who have migrated to Sabah (legally and illegally) for employment and to escape poverty in their own countries.

Since 2006, children in Sabah -- Malaysia's poorest state -- who have no documents to prove their nationality have not been able to access government services, including health and education.

Sabah’s GDP per capita is half the national average. Many of these migrants are employed in the palm oil sector. The demand for cheap labor in Sabah’s palm oil plantations and its labor-intensive production processes have kept the migrants coming since the 1970s. Many come with families or have started families since their arrival. This phenomenon has resulted in approximately 52,000 stateless children in Sabah as of last year.

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While most of the news from Korea focuses on the division between South and North, there has always been another sharp division – that between the political right and left in the South. So deep has been the distrust between the two camps that polls showed that some one-third of the South Korean public did not fully accept the findings of the official government investigation that a North Korean torpedo had sunk the South Korean warship Cheonan in March this year. That deep and persistent division within democratic South Korea has always been a factor that North Korea could play to its advantage in its decades-long standoff with the South.

The shelling of civilian-inhabited Yeonpyeong Island by North Korea on November 23, broadcast in almost real time on South Korean television, has changed all of that. It is not that South Koreans have experienced a sudden upsurge of trust in their government leaders.

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China’s response to North Korea’s artillery shelling of South Korea’s Yeonpyeong Island last week has been relatively rapid compared to the slowness of its response to the sinking last March (it took three weeks for the Chinese government to express its condolences in response to the sinking of the Cheonan). But, as underscored in Sunday’s New York Times Week in Review and Aidan-Foster Carter’s article in Foreign Policy, it is unlikely to satisfy American expectations. China’s proposal of an emergency session of the six parties is a non-starter that confuses form versus substance. Resumption of Six Party Talks would be a way of affirming what President Obama called last June China’s “willful blindness” toward North Korea by perpetuating the illusion that diplomatic efforts to deal with North Korea have not failed.

Read the full piece on the Council on Foreign Relations blog Asia Unbound.

Scott Snyder directs The Asia Foundation’s Center for U.S.-Korea Policy. He can be reached at ssnyder@asiafound-dc.org.