In Asia: Weekly Insight and Features from Asia

In the Philippines, there is a well-known saying by Jose Rizal:

Ang hindi lumilingon sa pinanggalingan ay Hindi makararating sa paroroonan.

“One who does not look back from where she came will never reach her destination.”

So, as we prepare for the May 10 general elections here, we should review the past – but how far back need we go? The history of elections in the Philippines stretches back to the July 1907 elections to the Philippine Assembly. Having elections that long ago – before the regularization of a Filipino bureaucratic structure – is important to note because it means that Philippine civil servants have, since 1907, always been susceptible to politicization. This has contributed to the weak state structure that we have today.

Elections in the Philippines have long been controversial. For instance, the election of 1949 (incidentally, the year I was born) was condemned as particularly dirty since the military was used against the opposition (producing a sweep for the Liberal Party).

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Below is an excerpt from Mr. Torres’ chapter “Letting A Thousand Flowers Bloom: Clan Conflicts and their Management” in the newly-published Challenges to Human Security in Complex Situations: The Case of Conflict in the Southern Philippines.

Life with rido is being a prisoner in your house. A person without rido can go anywhere. A person with rido is like a carabao tethered to a tree. He can only move around as far as the rope will allow. When you have a rido, you are never stable, you are like a prisoner. You cannot work, you cannot go out of your house, you cannot help anybody, and because you are afraid your enemy may kill you.

– A resident of Lanao del Norte in Mindanao

On August 21, 2008, rival members from the Disalongan and Masigay families gathered to celebrate the end of their feud (rido) which killed one and wounded two persons.

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Special to In Asia

A constable, his uniform freshly pressed, sits elbow to elbow with more than a dozen local residents in a loud, airless office in Pussellawa, a high-altitude hamlet nestled among the tea plantations of central Sri Lanka’s diverse Kandy district.

“We’re limited,” he says. “The area we have to cover is big. We don’t have enough vehicles, and there are not always proper roads.”

This is an unusual admission here in this small, hardscrabble working-class town of mostly estate Tamils, or anywhere in Sri Lanka, where an inherited colonial legacy of rigid, formal police training has long emphasized weapons and checkpoints, not open, constructive conversation.

Language is also an issue. Local police units here, and throughout this island nation typically speak Sinhala, not Tamil. A recent survey conducted door to door here by a local organization and partner of The Asia Foundation found that, because of the language barrier, a significant percentage of Tamils feel nervous or afraid when making a complaint at a police station, or do not report crimes at all. “People [Tamils] still don’t know what will happen to them if they make a complaint,” says Santha Deepalal, of The Asia Foundation.  (A related program developed by The Asia Foundation and the Official Languages Department has trained police officers in Tamil.)

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On Earth Day 2010, Asia has much to be thankful for. While the recent global financial crisis hit Asia hard, most of Asia’s governments acted swiftly and decisively and succeeded, against prevailing expectations, to limit the impact of the financial debacle. They had learned the hard way from the 1997 Asian financial crisis.

Intertwined with the global financial crisis was the food price crisis of 2007-2009: long-term global trends in population growth, rising incomes, competing non-food use of crops, falling investments in agricultural productivity, and lower food stocks were jarred by sudden supply shocks in key producing countries. The panicky procurement and knee-jerk trade bans hurriedly implemented by several governments, particularly India and the Philippines, sparked a food price spiral – that spiraled out of control.

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In Asia speaks to The Asia Foundation’s Deputy Country Representative in Dhaka, Jerome Sayre, on climate change in Bangladesh.

Q: The latest Global Climate Risk Index ranks Bangladesh as the most vulnerable nation in the world to extreme weather and climate change. What does “climate change ground zero” look like on a daily basis?

A: Since floods and cyclones are part of life in Bangladesh, and climate change is expected to contribute to the intensification of these, the average Bangladeshi may experience this as “more of the same,” only more destructive and more frequent. Bangladesh is also grappling with declining water tables and river flows, and salinization of crop lands along the coast due to non-climate change related phenomena. Climate change can intensify these trends.

These are slow but real changes that affect people’s lives, but the more dramatic and visible shift I’ve noticed over my five years in Dhaka is in public awareness of the issue. Members of Parliament, government agencies, NGOs, and the general public are all now much more aware of the potential for losses due to climate change. Bangladesh’s Prime Minister spent a significant amount of her time abroad in her first year in office raising the issue at several international venues.

Q: And, Bangladesh happens to also be one of the most densely populated areas of the world which would make this a humanitarian crisis as well.

A: Over the long term, an estimated 17 percent of Bangladesh’s land area could be submerged, displacing about 20 million Bangladeshis.

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There seems to be a growing consensus that aid to conflict-affected and fragile regions needs fixing. The worsening conditions in Afghanistan have had a sobering effect on the international community, particularly development donors and organizations. If we cannot prevent the slide back to conflict and continued poverty for Afghanistan’s war-weary population, despite our huge investments and commitments, then there must be something that isn’t working quite right.

Criticism of foreign aid is nothing new. Since the release of Graham Hancock’s book The Lords of Poverty: The Power, Prestige, and Corruption of the International Aid Business in 1989, there has been a vigorous debate over the effectiveness of international development assistance in the world’s poorest and most fragile regions. What has changed in recent years; however, is the increasing voice from aid recipient countries questioning the effectiveness of the current aid system, and the wisdom of standard aid approaches.

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The latest BBC/World Service Poll conducted in January and released earlier this week has some results in Northeast Asia that offer some food for thought—at least for anyone who thinks that public views are a potentially decisive influence on foreign policy. The two most notable results in Northeast Asia are the precipitous rise in negative Chinese (and Russian) views towards North Korea and the strikingly positive feelings that exist between the South Korean and Japanese publics toward each other on the one hundredth anniversary of Japan’s annexation of the Korean peninsula.

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.

There is no end to the supply of topics to engage your average Malaysian kopitiam (coffee shop) conversation these days: the mortality rate of our parliamentarians; palace intrigue from any one of our 11 royal households; and even the juicy court proceedings ranging from test cases on civil liberties to plain old criminal proceedings.

But that old mainstay, the state of race relations in Malaysia, gained a new lease on life on March 31, when Deputy Prime Minister Muhyiddin Yassin – in response to a challenge by advisor to the Democratic Action Party Lim Kit Siang – said he considers himself Malay first, before Malaysian. This latest episode in Malaysia’s ongoing serial drama played out as predictably as one would expect from a sequel in an established franchise.

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Over the past four decades, during times of political turbulence in Thailand, King Bhumibol Adulyadej has served as the nation’s unifying force. In October 1973, King Bhumibol supported student demonstrators against violent military action. Subsequently, Thailand’s three top military leaders were forced to seek asylum in other nations. The tempestuous politics that followed – weak, unstable coalition governments, a troubled economy, and an internal communist insurgency; coupled with communist victories in Indochina – alarmed the King who then lent his weight to the return of military rule in October 1976. In May 1992, when a cycle of pro-democracy protests and military repression seemed to fly out of control, the leader of the military junta, General Suchinda Krapayoon, and his principal civilian opponent, Chamlong Srimuang, were summoned by King Bhumibol for a late night audience that was televised live and mesmerized its viewers. His “talk” diffused the confrontation and paved the way for new elections.

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The Bangladesh Parliament Building is a striking combination of cubes and cylinders in pale gray concrete, surrounded by water and a rare expanse of unbroken green in the nation’s otherwise densely congested capital of Dhaka. On a quiet Saturday morning recently, a group of Bangladeshi Members of Parliament came together in the building’s Oath Room to unknowingly create a small piece of history in the global pursuit of health, education, poverty-reduction, and environmental targets known collectively as the Millennium Development Goals, or MDGs. Adopted by 189 nations during the UN Millennium Summit in September 2000, the eight goals set a series of ambitious development targets, measured by 48 separate indicators, to be achieved by 2015.

Bangladesh's parliament building, designed by architect Louis I. Kahn. Photo used under a Wikimedia Commons license.

An active NGO sector working to deliver health, education, and sanitation services, combined with steady economic growth and some successful government initiatives, have all contributed to significant progress on the MDGs in Bangladesh.

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