Swazi king chooses another wife

Swazi king chooses another wife BBC

Mswati chooses a new wife every year Africa's last absolute monarch, King Mswati III, has chosen a 16-year-old beauty queen as his latest bride-to-be. The Miss Teenage Swaziland finalist appeared at last week's annual reed dance during which 20,000 bare-breasted virgins parade in his honour. The 36-year-old king's behaviour has been criticised in a nation with one of the world's highest HIV/Aids rates. He already has one fiancee and 11 wives. Campaigners had hoped the king would be satisfied with 12 wives. His father had more than 60 wives. In line with Swazi tradition, a fiancee becomes a wife once she falls pregnant. Plans to build new palaces for each of his wives are also draining the tiny country's resources, with the IMF urging cut-backs as poverty and food shortages hit ordinary Swazis. His 10th wife, Zena Mahlangu, was controversially abducted two years ago when she was 18. Her parents failed to get their daughter returned after taking the king's aides to court for unlawfully detaining her.

Chinese Tourists: China prepares to see the world

 

China prepares to see the world
By Alexandra Harney
Financial Times

Published: September 1 2004 21:31 | Last updated: September 1 2004 21:31

When Zhang Huili and her boyfriend Li Yunpeng got married earlier this year, the groom's parents gave them an entirely new kind of gift: a honeymoon in Europe.

Ms Zhang, who works as an assistant computer engineer in Beijing, has been reading up on Paris, the first stop in a three-country tour arranged by her travel agent.

“It's a pity that we have to stop there first,” she says. Her friends have inundated her with orders for French perfume and chocolate, and she has bought an extra suitcase in anticipation. “We'll have so much stuff to bring with us for the rest of our trip that we'll be exhausted just carrying it around.”

Ms Zhang will not be alone on her honeymoon. Starting this week, mainland Chinese tour groups will be allowed to visit 27 European countries that were previously off-limits to all but business travellers. Overnight, countries such as France, Italy,Switzerland, Spain, Belgium, Sweden, and Greece will gain Beijing's imprimatur as “approved destinations”.

The opening of Europe is the most dramatic since China began loosening restrictions on international travel in the early 1980s. Industry analysts believe it could set the stage for further liberalisation, whetting the popular appetite for overseas travel and widening the door to the outside world for hundreds of millions of Chinese.

“They have never opened more than 20 countries at one time,” says Zhang Wenjia, chief representative for Switzerland Tourism in China. “It is a big milestone.”

And this is just the beginning. The World Tourism Organisation forecasts that, by 2020, China will send 100m tourists overseas, making it the world's fourth largest source of tourists after Germany, Japan and the US. Last year, the number of mainland Chinese travelling outside the country rose 21 per cent to 20.2m, surpassing the number of Japanese tourists - previously Asia's most avid travellers - for the first time. This year 24m Chinese will travel abroad, according to DPS Consulting, a Beijing-based group. An explosion in Chinese tourism has big implications for the world's hotel, airline, retail and travel industries. Anecdotal evidence already suggests that Chinese tourists are not shy about opening their wallets. Mainland Chinese spend more in Hong Kong than visitors from any other country.China's relaxation of rules on travel to the territory, which started last summer, has helped lift per capita spending for overnight visitors to HK$6,018 (US$772, €634 or £428) in 2003. Americans, by comparison, spent HK$5,477. Even though the UK is not an approved destination, mainland Chinese tourists spent £127m ($227m, €188m) there last year, according to Visit Britain, the UK's tourism body.

Globe-trotting tourists from Asia are not new. Camera-toting Japanese took the world by storm starting in the 1980s, forcing hotels around the world to stock yukata robes and green tea and encouraging retailers and restaurants to hire Japanese-speaking staff.

“It's exactly the same thing we experienced with the Japanese 20years ago and we experienced with the Russians since 1999, but with a big difference: the size of the market,” says Serge Ragozin, executive senior vice-president for international support at Accor, the Paris-based hotel chain.

The other difference is the speed at which the Chinese market has grown. Chinese companies have started to give their workers paid holidays only in the last decade. “The first headlong rush is very dramatic and occurring over a relatively short period of time compared with the Japanese,” says John Koldowski, managing director at the Pacific Asia Travel Association's strategic intelligence centre in Bangkok.

Until recently, because of Chinese government controls on the sector,the number of destinations open to Chinese tour groups was limited. In the early 1980s, Beijing began permitting groups from the southern province of Guangdong to visit relatives in Hong Kong and Macau, then British and Portuguese colonies, respectively. China gradually expanded the number of destinations to include several south-east Asian countries, Australia and Japan.

Today, Chinese travel agents can organise group tours only to countries that have signed an “approved destination status” (ADS) agreement with Beijing. These pacts control the flow of Chinese tour groups: only authorised travel agents, which have agreed to bear responsibility for scanning visa applications, can arrange trips to ADS countries. But loopholes in the system have enabled Chinese groups to visit Europe and other non-ADS countries for years on business visas. And because ADS agreements apply only to group tours, individuals have been able to apply for tourist visas to non-ADS countries.

Countries must apply to the Chinese government for approved destination status. Their application is reviewed by several government bodies and, if it is approved, Beijing and the host country negotiate an agreement. This process can be time-consuming: the UK, for example, is still waiting to sign an ADS pact. The US, widely acknowledged to be the largest potential destination for Chinese tourists, has not signed an ADS pact, although it does issue visas to Chinese tourists.

Nevertheless, the Chinese tourist is already changing the way hotels, airlines and travel agents around the world do business. Germany's Lufthansa, the leading European airline in China, has increased the number of its flights in and out of China from 26 to 41 this year, adding frequencies connecting Munich with Beijing and the wealthy southern city of Guangzhou. Chinese passengers arriving in Frankfurt and Munich are greeted by the Chinese Welcome Service, a Chinese-speaking team in dark blue uniforms that directs them to hotels, rental car services or a connecting flight.

“Chinese travellers have become an important part of the momentum driving our business, and we anticipate the demand for air travel from China will continue to grow,” Lufthansa says. China accounted for 15 per cent of the carrier's revenue in Asia last year.

In June, Nevada, home to Las Vegas, the gambling mecca, became the first US state to open a tourism office in China. Chen Hongxia, who runs the office, says more Chinese visit Las Vegas than any other city in the US.

The hospitality industry has been similarly moved. The Sheraton Park Tower in London, a five-star hotel, said last week that it now offers China Central Television, the state-owned national network, in all its 280 rooms. Accor, which owns the Ibis, Sofitel and Novotel hotel brands, is also trying to ensure its Chinese guests feel more at home: some of its three- and four-star hotels in Paris now offer Chinese tea sets and TV channels and serve white rice and soup at breakfast. When the mayors of Chinese cities visit France, Accor executives make it a point to see them. “We ask them, ‘What do you need, what do you want?'” says Mr Ragozin.

“Assign your Chinese guests rooms with twin beds,” reads a brochure entitled “Hello China” that has been distributed to hotels and tour operators in Switzerland hoping to attract Chinese customers. “The members of the group travelling together will, in general, not have known each other before starting the trip.”

China's own travel industry is gearing up for the boom. Travel agents have launched intensive advertising campaigns to promote tours to Europe, and are beefing up their overseas departments. CYTS, a leading agency, spent nothing on promoting tours to Europe last year; this year, it has earmarked Rmb1m (£67,000, $121,000 or €99,000) for these advertisements. “We have expanded our European section,” says Sun Changwei, general manager of the outbound department at CYTS. “Before, we had five staff there, now we have 12.”

Agents are focusing their efforts on France, Italy and Switzerland, which they expect will be the most popular destinations. But many of the packages on offer will take Chinese tourists to nearly a dozen countries in about as many days, shuttling them around the continent on coaches. Chinese travel industry officials are keen to ensure that tourists are not defrauded in Europe as they have been in Thailand. Tour operators there have been collaborating with agencies on the mainland to offer deeply discounted packages known as “zero-dollar tours”, in which Chinese tourists were forced to shop for goods at inflated prices instead of sightseeing.

There is evidence to suggest that these practices may spread to Europe. Zhou Tong, general manager for overseas travel at BTG International Travel & Tours in Beijing, describes with dismay the discount packages promoted by rival agencies. “In Beijing, the current price for a trip to Europe with 11 countries in 15 days is Rmb12,000 or so. Trips that tour five countries in nine days cost about Rmb9,000. You do the maths: at Rmb12,000, after deducting the cost of the flight and 15 days' accommodation, tour guide fee and other transportation expenses, how much is left over [for profit]?” The answer: very little.

Chinese tourists may not spend as much on hotels and restaurants as the travel industry is hoping: many prefer to sleep and eat cheaply to leave money for shopping, often for luxury goods. In 2003, mainlanders visiting Hong Kong spent 12.3 per cent of their budget in hotels and 68.5 per cent of their budget on shopping, according to the territory's tourism board.

Some observers argue that the growth in Chinese outbound tourism will be constrained for other reasons. For one, despite the fact that the number of flights connecting China with the rest of the world has increased dramatically, there are still not enough seats to meet demand during peak travel seasons.

Another obstacle is the cumbersome procedure for getting a visa to go abroad as part of a tour group. Although the process will be streamlined after September 1, cutting down on the paperwork that prospective tourists must provide, travellers will still need to show evidence of financial stability such as certificates of car or home ownership. As part of China's efforts to prevent illegal immigrants to other countries, Beijing residents must also deposit Rmb30,000 with a travel agent or provide proof that they have the equivalent in a bank account to cover the cost of retrieving them if they overstay their visas, according to CYTS.

Gao Zhong, a Beijing executive who is planning a trip as part of a package tour to the UK, Switzerland and Italy, says: “They asked for certificates from my company, signed by my boss. They are too sensitive.”

A further concern is how quickly Beijing will loosen restrictions on where Chinese tour groups can go and how much they can spend. China is concerned about controlling capital flows out of the country: officially, Chinese can only take the equivalent of US$5,000 (€4,100, £2,775) outside the country. While there are easy ways around these rules - many wealthy Chinese now have overseas bank accounts and credit cards, for example - some wonder how much leakage Beijing will tolerate as the number of tourists leaving the country increases.

“[They] never want to get into the position where [they've] got a net outflow of funds due to travel,” says Mr Koldowski.

For now, however, travel agents are worried about managing the cultural differences between Chinese and Europeans. Chinese tourists are known to be boisterous, and practices considered rude elsewhere are common in China. “It is not appropriate to speak loudly, spit or throw rubbish everywhere,” says a brochure from CYTS. “It is impolite to clean [your] teeth, touch [your] belt, lift up [your] trousers and take off [your] shoes in public,” the brochure adds.

Ms Zhang of Switzerland Tourism has been coaching Swiss hotels on Chinese tourists' preferences while trying to correct misunderstandings about Europe in China. Some Chinese visitors to Europe “complain that the rooms are too small [for the price they are paying], that European lifts are too small, that they don't have a huge lobby in the hotel,” she says.

Continental-style meals with several courses have also not proved popular with some Chinese tourists, Ms Zhang adds. “In China, if you order something, in 10 minutes the table is full [of dishes]. If you order a French meal, it's three hours, with three courses. For Chinese, it's so difficult to convince them to sit there.”

Mr Koldowski, for his part, has been warning airlines, tour operators and hotels not to lose sight of the need to provide good service to their growing ranks of Chinese customers. He says: “If you are doing everything right, and this year you have 40 tour groups [from China], next year you could have 400. Are you ready for that?”

Taken for a ride in Thailand
By Amy Kazmin
Published: September 1 2004 21:31 | Last updated: September 1 2004 21:31

The building in Bangkok's gritty Huay Khwang neighborhood has blackened windows, a water-stained white facade, and nothing to identify it as a store selling medicinal snake products, ostrich-leather handbags and crocodile-skin shoes.

But the store owners are not interested in attracting casual passers-by. They cater almost exclusively to mainland Chinese tourists travelling on “zero-dollar” package tours.

Zero-dollar tour organisers prey on the Chinese lured by prospects of a foreign holiday at rock-bottom prices. The holidaymakers buy cheap package tours of Thailand - mostly paying less than the cost of an airline ticket - for what they expect to be an all-inclusive trip.

But once in Thailand, the tourists, most of whom speak only Chinese and have never been abroad before, are pressed into paying for expensive activities and excursions and buying products at inflated prices from shops closely linked to the tour operators. Visitors who leave the stores empty-handed or who resist paying for extra activities - such as sex shows and parasailing excursions - can be subjected to strong-arm tactics. Chinese tourists have been threatened with abandonment on highways and denied hotel room keys at night, according to Suwat Jutakorn, director of the Beijing office of the Tourism Authority of Thailand. In February, tourists from China's Yunnan province protested by refusing to board their return flight for nearly 24 hours.

Of the nearly 5m Chinese who have travelled to Thailand since 1997, the overwhelming majority went on zero-dollar tours, Mr Suwat says. China's outward-bound travel agencies are believed to be well aware of what awaits those who buy cheap Thai tours. Chinese agencies even collect fees from Thai tour operators to place visitors on such trips, according to people in Thailand's tourism industry.

The Chinese central government has pledged to crack down on zero-dollar tours but officials in the provinces - who license and regulate the outward-bound tour companies - have been slow to act, Mr Suwat says. The Thai authorities have also failed to crack down on unscrupulous local players, who have structured the operations so that they fall into grey areas of the law. The driving force behind the zero-dollar tours is a handful of big Thai gem companies that sell jewellery and gemstones. They also own the coaches that carry the tourists, the shops to which the visitors are taken and even some of the hotels where they stay, according to Wirot Sitaprasertnand, president of Thailand's Professional Tourist Guide Association.

Suparerk Soorangura, president of the Association of Thai Travel Agents, estimates that at least half the Chinese visitors to Thailand in recent years have travelled with Thai tour operators fronting for the gem companies. The schemes have put pressure on more professional tour operators to lower prices, driving down standards for the inward-bound Chinese tourist market.

Thailand's image has taken a beating recently in the Chinese media. Chinese arrivals to Thailand fell to around 600,000 in 2003 from around 800,000 in 2001, and dropped another 14 per cent in the first quarter of this year.

To reverse the decline, Thailand's tourism industry has launched promotions and advertising campaigns aimed at educating Chinese tourists and pointing them towards more reputable, but expensive, tour operators. Prospects for massive growth in the number of Chinese visitors, Thai authorities insist, remain bright.

“We see the Chinese not just as friends but as relatives,” says Juthamas Siriwan, head of the Tourism Authority of Thailand. “It seems that when they come, they come to visit us as their cousins.”

'Approved' Europeans expect Chinese tourist groups
By Alexandra Harney in Hong Kong
Published: August 30 2004 03:00 | Last updated: August 30 2004 03:00

A wave of Chinese tourists is expected to hit European cities this week as Beijing lifts its restrictions on group travel to nearly 30 countries.

China's designation of most of Europe as an "approved destination", taking effect on Wednesday, is expected to trigger a flood of tour groups to the region. Until now, only business travellers and individuals who were able to obtain visas were able to travel there.

The number of Chinese travelling overseas is expected to swell in coming years as Beijing relaxes rules on foreign visits, creating a substantial new source of business for the world's hotel, airline and travel industries.

The World Tourism Organisation estimates that by 2020 the number of Chinese tourists will reach 100m. Last year, there were 20.2m tourists. "International travel is no longer something that's once in a lifetime," says John Koldowski, managing director of the Pacific Asia Travel Association's strategic intelligence centre. "Travel is a part of [Chinese people's] lives."

China and 27 European countries have agreed to set up a system for handling Chinese tourists, allowing the European countries "approved destination status". The countries include Belgium, Denmark, France, Greece, Italy, the Netherlands, Ireland, Spain and Switzerland. The UK has negotiated but not signed an approved destination pact.

The first flight to Europe carrying Chinese tour groups will leave Beijing for Paris at noon on Wednesday. Travel agents expect the most popular destinations to be France, Italy and Switzerland.

Chinese tour groups are currently allowed to visit 26 countries, including much of south-east Asia, Australia, New Zealand and South Korea and Japan.

Hong Kong, which returned to Chinese sovereignty in 1997 but is still considered an overseas destination, the former Portugese colony of Macao and Thailand have historically attracted the largest number of Chinese tourists.

Travel agents say Europe's different culture will prove attractive. Vivian Li, a bank treasurer from Shanghai who is planning a trip to France and Italy in September, said: "I have always wanted to realise my dream of relaxing in a sidewalk coffee shop on the Champs Elysées and watching the handsome men walk by."

 

 

 

 

Can Singapore shareholders expect happier returns?

Commentary: Can Singapore shareholders expect happier returns?

Andy Mukherjee Bloomberg News Wednesday, September 01, 2004

The commercial success of Singapore's government-linked companies has always been something of an enigma, chiefly because experiments in state socialism have been glaring failures in China, India, and elsewhere in Asia.

To what do companies like Singapore Airlines, Asia's most profitable air carrier, owe their success, especially when International Monetary Fund researchers find no evidence that companies controlled by the state's investment arm have benefited from privileged access to cheaper bank credit, the telltale sign of political patronage?

Commercial success is just one of the many ways to judge Singapore's public sector. For companies that are now co-owned by individual and institutional shareholders, however, it certainly isn't the best measure.

A more critical question is: How do these companies fare in terms of shareholder returns?

To begin to answer that question, a CLSA researcher, Atul Goyal, looked at company annual reports and corporate Web sites.

Out of 15 companies he chose to study, as many as eight do not seem to communicate a strong commitment to shareholder returns.

For example, DBS Group Holdings, Singapore's largest bank by assets, says it is "well positioned to tap exciting growth opportunities." Is the bank as well positioned to deliver exciting shareholder returns? It most probably is, though it doesn't explicitly say so, according to CLSA.

Chartered Semiconductor Manufacturing, the world's third-biggest provider of made-to-order chips, has a mission to "provide world-class silicon wafer manufacturing." A noble goal that's of little consolation to investors who have seen the shares slump about 38 percent this year.

Or take Singapore Airlines, which thanked its management, staff, unions and the board for helping the company cope with the travel slump following the outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome. Shareholders who held on to their investments amid a slide in airline stocks didn't rank a mention.

"Interestingly, in the letter to shareholders for some companies," Goyal and his boss, Prabodh Agarwal, note in their study, "customers, employees and board members seem to take precedence over shareholders."

The commercial success of Singapore's public sector may have done little for minority shareholders. CLSA estimates that over the past 20 years, government-linked companies have given investors an annual return of just 6 percent. The return was minus 1.6 percent over the past 10 years, and minus 4 percent over the last five years.

By comparison, private companies in Singapore and state-owned enterprises in Malaysia have done a lot better.

Curiously, Temasek Holdings has earned 16 percent annually over the past 30 years on its investments in government-linked companies. Temasek is the Singapore government's investment arm, which controls seven of the island's 10 biggest publicly traded companies by sales.

Why did it fare better than other shareholders? Possibly because a large part of its investments was in the nature of riskier "private equity," for which it got a premium.

Now that Temasek itself is driving the companies in its stable to deliver shareholder value above all else, minority investors also can look forward to better returns.

Unlike in the past, business decisions are no longer to be made with only market share or sales growth in mind.

The new catchphrase at Temasek-linked companies is "Economic Value Added," or the profit they earn over and above the cost of capital. Some of the public sector companies have linked executive pay to EVA.

"The power of EVA," the Temasek chief executive, Ho Ching, explained in February, "is not simply the potential for staff to share the wealth creation with shareholders. It is more importantly a mind-set change toward ownership."

Returns have already started improving.

According to CLSA, Temasek-linked companies, as a group, have given an impressive 33 percent return to shareholders over the past year, and not just because the stock market has been favorable.

Will the momentum last over the next five years, or 20? Perhaps, at least for some of the companies.

Making shareholder returns a key objective is only the first, easy step. Aligning the interests of employees and shareholders is the harder part. As the following excerpt from the annual report of a U.S. company shows, it's quite possible for a management to say one thing and do another:

"We plan to leverage all competitive advantages to create significant value for our shareholders," the chairman and chief executive of the company wrote in 2000.

That was one of the last promises Kenneth Lay and Jeffrey Skilling ever made to Enron shareholders.

Bloomberg News

Jiu Li Dong - Day 3

Went there at 8+pm and left about an hour later.  As with Saturday, there was a group of Taoist priest in the inner sanctum and a group of Buddhist monks in the outer compound.  In addition, there was action at the wayang stage outside the temple complex.  So you can imagine the NOISE LEVEL in that area!

 

Not quite sure if the Taoist priests were performing the same rites, but the Buddhist monks were performing a "chao du" ceremony to "rescue" the soul of a mother who died of child birth some years ago.  Her husband and son were the "main players" in the ceremony, with an abbot and groups of monks helping out.  Unfortunately I do not know the specifics of the ceremony.  Maybe Ronnie can help explain it - and thanks Ronnie for telling me all these.  Basically the ritual took quite a while, with a lot of bowing, kneeling and praying round a tower full of paper effigies.  The "abbot" went round and round and at various points broke some bowls and glasses, sometimes using a stick to hit them.  The father and son pushed the paper tower, in the process raising an effigy representing the mother, perhaps bringing her away from the lower level of Hell.

 

Out there at the wayang, a group of all-men troupe was performing, with a huge statue of Tua Yeh Peh standing at one end of the stage "watching".  A signboard on the stage says "Woman and 'Kai Ren' not allowed onto stage"  [Kai Ren literally - "Open Persons"  - does anyone knows what's that?].  In front of the stage was a huge tentage with hundreds of "ling wei" plus offerings dedicated to individual dead persons.  It's like the dead watching the wayang!  Amazing sight!  There is a little structure to the side of the tentage which holds more ling wei's and offerings, plus statues/effigies of Tua Yeh Peh, Li Yeh Peh and other deities.

 

So much happening!  I will definitely try to drop by tomorrow as well!

 

And yes, met Ronnie for the first time - we must organise a proper meet one day!

 

To the bed now!

 

 

Wee Cheng

 

 

 

 

 

Asia bends history to fit national myths

Asia bends history to fit national myths

Philip Bowring

IHT

 

Thursday, August 26, 2004

 

 

Rewriting the past

 

HONG KONG History is a two-edged sword. Almost 60 years after the 35-year Japanese occupation of Korea, the issue of collaboration with the Japanese is roiling South Korean politics and bringing some embarrassing reminders. But it is not just Koreans who could benefit from looking back at what actually happened in Asia before and during the Pacific war, rather than pretending that all were part of heroic struggles against the Japanese.

 

In South Korea, nationalism is especially directed at Japan, whose crimes as occupier are forever being recalled. A leader of the governing Uri party has had to quit for allegedly trying to cover up the fact that his father had served in the Japanese military police.

 

This fracas has served as a reminder, however, that the relationship was always ambiguous. Japan was a harsh colonizer but also brought education, railways and industry. So it was not surprising that an ambitious Park Chung Hee assumed a Japanese name and graduated from a Japanese military academy in Manchuria in 1944. As President Park, his subsequent pivotal contribution to South Korean modernization is revered. So could the great Korean patriot have also been a collaborator? History says he was both.

 

China surpasses Korea when it comes to reminders of the war and Japanese brutality. Beijing never loses an opportunity to remind Chinese people of the Nanjing massacre and complain about lack of Japanese contrition. Meanwhile China not only prefers to forget that the Communist Party subsequently inflicted even greater misery on the Chinese people but also likes to forget the extent of Chinese collaboration with Japan.

 

The West is also fond of accusing Japan of not being contrite. But Asians could well ask why Europe and the United States have never apologized for their imperialism in the region. European and American rule was much less harsh than Japan's, but it lasted longer.

 

In Asia, little about the Pacific war is black and white. Chinese communities in Southeast Asia were generally fiercely anti-Japanese and suffered accordingly during the occupation. But much of Asia did see the Japanese, initially at least, either as liberators or no worse than the previous rulers.

 

A significant part of the ever-opportunistic Philippine elite did not oppose the new occupier, and President Ferdinand Marcos later invented a role as an anti-Japan guerrilla fighter. President Cory Aquino's father-in-law was wartime ambassador to Tokyo under Japan's collaborator president, J.P. Laurel, whose son Salvador later became Aquino's vice president.

 

In Indonesia, a young Suharto served in the Dutch and Japanese forces before joining the independence struggle. Elsewhere in Southeast Asia, Thailand not only officially sided with Japan for a while but used this alliance to grab back parts of Malaya, Burma and Cambodia, which it had lost to the European empires. It had to return these in 1945. In Malaya, the Japanese occupation increased tensions between Chinese and Malays, who had a more neutral view of the Japanese. After the Japanese surrendered, many Malays accused of collaboration were killed. Even in mainly Chinese Singapore, working for the Japanese was unavoidable. Lee Kuan Yew, later the founder of modern Singapore, learned the language and worked for Japan's propaganda agency.

 

Taiwan, meanwhile, was little touched by the Pacific war and in many ways benefited from its 50 years of Japanese rule, which brought education and infrastructure. That experience laid the groundwork for Taiwan's subsequent success, and helps explain why its view of Japan is profoundly different from China's and has fueled Taiwan separatism.

 

Given the histories of Taiwan and Singapore, it was remarkable last weekend to hear Singapore's new prime minister, Lee Hsien Loong - Lee Kuan Yew's son - lecturing Taiwan on the dangers of aspiring to independence. Singapore would not recognize any such claim, he said. Taiwan's people might like to remind the younger Lee how fortunate it was in 1965 that Malaysia, acknowledging the wishes of the majority led by Lee Kuan Yew, allowed Singapore to secede without a fight. Singapore was part of the Johore sultanate for longer than Taiwan was part of China, so for many Malaysians, the 1965 separation remains a matter for regret - and possible reversal.

 

History may not teach us much about the future or how to act in the present. But its perspective can be a useful antidote to propaganda based on ideological myths - especially at a time when Asian alliances and rivalries, driven by national and personal interests that have changed since the end of the cold war, are again in flux.

 

 

Ming China and Southeast Asia in the 15th Century: A Reappraisal.

This is an interesting essay reappraising or revising the conventional view that Admiral Zhenghe's voyages to Southeast Asia and Indian Ocean in the 15th century.

 

=========

http://www.ari.nus.edu.sg/pub/wps2004/abs028.htm

 

Ming China and Southeast Asia in the 15th Century: A Reappraisal.
 

Geoff Wade
 

The 15^th century was a period of intense interaction between Ming China and Southeast Asia. The period saw the Ming invade ÐaÌ£i Việt, expand the scope of the Chinese polity by exploiting and then incorporating Tai polities of upland Southeast Asia, and launch a succession of hugely influential maritime armadas which travelled through Southeast Asia and the Indian Ocean.  It is argued that these three aspects of Ming policy can be seen as differing types of Ming colonialism greatly affecting Southeast Asia during the 15^th century and beyond. A chronological study of the policies relating to Southeast Asia of the successive Ming rulers is followed by a thematic overview of how the Ming policies actually affected Southeast Asia in the 15^th century. This includes reference to effects in the political, economic and cultural topography of Southeast Asia The beginnings of a non-state-sponsored maritime trade between China and Southeast Asia is also investigated.

 

Keywords:  

Ming, Southeast Asia, 15^th century, Zheng He, Dai Viet, Tai, Malacca

Click here to see full text (507Kb)

http://www.ari.nus.edu.sg/docs/wps/wps04_028.pdf

Ancient Gods, Rituals and Spirit-Mediumship - Part 3 (Last Part)

The Ritual

First, the tanki, performs prayers to the Jade emperor and other main gods and deities.  Then he sits on elaborately carved “dragon chair”, so named due to the motifs of flying dragon, Chinese mystical symbols of power and fortune.     

The possession begins

Possessed now

Possessed by Na Zha, the tanki walks around with a pacifier

Worshippers feeding the Na Zha possessed medium with milk and sweets

He lets his head down with their legs wide apart, chanting and calling the gods to possess him, while gradually falling into a trance.  The moment of sacred possession is often signaled by increasingly fast gyration of his head, violent twitching of his body, and sometimes followed by sudden movements, such as a hop onto a table or chair.  Often, the movements are so violent that the medium might hurt himself, and the temple assistants have to hold him tight, and then helped him to put on brightly coloured embroidered aprons which proclaim the name of the temple and the “visiting” deity. 

A deity often represented by such rituals is the Qi Tian Da Sheng (literally meaning The Saint Equal With Heaven) or the Monkey God famous in the great Chinese classic, Journey To The West (Xi-You-Ji), which some say is the Chinese equivalent of the Hindu Monkey God Hanuman.  The tanki who is possessed by Qi Tian Da Sheng often jumps around with great agility like a monkey.  His followers would follow him around, sometimes feeding him peanuts or bananas.     

Another “popular” god is the child-god Ne Zha (also known as San-Tai-Zi or the Third Prince), who is often seen holding a large magical ring and spear while standing on wheels of fire.  Once possessed by Ne Zha, the tanki would be sucking a pacifier and wandering around the venue with followers who pass him sweets like one would do to children.  Tankis are also often possessed by deities such as Guan Yin, Guan Di Yeh, Ji Gong, Hei Bai Wu Chang, Da Er Bo Yeh, etc. 

As the ceremony progresses, the tanki wanders around the temple compound amidst loud gong clamps and sacred music, followed by devout worshippers.  The tanki’s assistant walks ahead of the tanki, waving a whip and occasionally hitting the ground with it.  This whip, known as the fa-shen (“Whip of the Power”), usually has a wooden handle carved in the shape of a snake’s head.  It drives away the evil spirit and clear the way for the god-possessed tanki.

 The Sacrifice

====

The Sacrifice

 Then the self-mortification begins.  The tanki performs mortification using a few ceremonial weapons.  These could include swords which he uses to beat or even slash his body.  Occasionally he pierces his tongue with skewers to draw blood, or metal poles or spikes through his checks.  Another commonly-used equipment is the “prick ball”, a metal ball with 108 spikes protruding from its core.  The tanki usually swings the ball around via a metal chain, hitting his body with it, cutting his back in the process.  Quite a bloody affair indeed! 

To the believers, the drawing of blood signifies personal sacrifice and the powers of the deities in possession of the tanki.  Some scholars, somewhat skeptical, often observe that the tankis tend to slow the momentum of the swinging weapons just before they hit the skin.  This means that any wound or cut sustained by the tanki is largely superficial, hardly more than a scratch.   

The medium mutilates himself as proof of possession

Further mutilation

The Monkey God manifesting himself through the medium

The possession ends

In some major ceremonies, however, the tankis may pierce their cheeks and tongue with skewers, drawing copious quantity of blood and yet appearing to feel little pain, as evidence of providential protection.  Practitioners say that the wounds are real though they hardly feel pain when possessed by the gods; the pain comes immediately after they recover from the trance.  Even then, these wounds tend to heal fast, and rather miraculously as well. 

The blood drawn from the piercing is ued to scribble words representing messages from the gods on charm paper and embroidered cloth pieces or flags.  Followers sometimes bring the charm paper home, burn them, and then drink water with the ashes of the charm paper in it. 

Eventually, the tankis, still in their trance, would return to their dragon chair.  The gongs would be beaten and the tankis gradually return to their “unpossessed” or “natural” state.  As sudden as it began, the ceremony would come to an end.  The tanki would open his eyes, wipe his body with rags and proceed to keep his tools. 

Just another day of work for tankis and shamans in Singapore.

KL's gesture of friendship

I used to pass by this sign with great disdain.  Sometimes, the patriotic part of me called on me to spray paint on that ridiculous signboard.  Finally this signboard has been removed.  Let's toast to an eternal friendship between Singapore and Malaysia!

 

W.

 

====

 

KL's gesture of friendship

 

Thursday • August 26, 2004

 

Singapore-Malaysia ties are on the upswing and one sign of this was taken off its hinges to make the signal clearer.

 

The sign is a 20-metre "Welcome to Malaysia" board at the Keretapi Tanah Melayu's (KTM) Tanjong Pagar railway station. Though in the heart of Singapore, the land and the station belong to Malaysia.

 

And since the 1980s, it has stood out as a reminder of less-than-cordial patches in cross-Causeway relations.

 

In 1998, Singapore moved its Custom Immigration and Quarantine facilities from Tanjong Pagar to Woodlands, expecting Malaysia to do the same. But when that did not happen, it became a point of friction.

 

But things have changed.

 

Malaysia's High Commissioner to Singapore, Mr N Parameswaran, said the sign had been removed to improve ties.

 

"We want to remove whatever irritations there are, however small they may be," he said.

 

The instruction to remove the sign came from Kuala Lumpur. And Today understands that a more positive sign -- possibly exhorting Singaporeans to visit Malaysia -- might replace the old one.

 

"We are sincere about wanting to bring down old walls," said Mr Parameswaran.

 

Alluding to Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong's call to citizens to write Singapore's next chapter with him, the envoy said: "Let's work on the next chapter in the Malaysia-Singapore story. It needs both of us." He hoped that the "gesture" of friendship would be reciprocated. — Raymond Andrew

 

 

 

Another (Asian) look at China-Korea ties

Another (Asian) look at China-Korea ties

By Yu Shiyu

Asia Times

 

Speaking Freely is an Asia Times Online feature that allows guest writers to have their say. Please click here if you are interested in contributing.

 

Recent reports about Sino-Korean relations and political developments on the Korean Peninsula have often contained views that can be termed Eurocentric regarding the history of that part of Asia. For example, both the Chinese academic establishment and the South Koreans from their government on down have been criticized for having engaged in "historical revisionism", a tendency that, according to these reports, reflects some myopic visions if not something even worse on the part of the "historical revisionists". In addition, both Beijing and the entire South Korean society, including the once arch anti-communist military, have been accused of turning a blind eye to North Korea's "crimes against humanity" in their respective efforts to appease Pyongyang.

 

Enormous changes are indeed happening in and around the Korean Peninsula that will fundamentally alter the geopolitical balance of the region. Many of these changes are in general rather damaging to the United States' interests, hence perhaps the aforementioned alarming criticism of both China and South Korea. However, this author ventures to opine that a more Asiacentric perspective on the long history of that part of Asia, especially that of Sino-Korean relations, is called for before one addresses what are frankly mostly Eurocentric concerns quoted above.

 

Sino-Korea relations - the past

One of the most important current trends in Northeast Asia is the rapid Sino-South Korean rapprochement, despite several real or made-up difficulties such as the North Korean refugees and the recent controversy concerning the history of the ancient kingdom of Koguryo. This trend has led some Western observers to conclude that China has never been as important to Koreans as it is today.

 

Such an observation could not be more fallacious from an Asiatic perspective. The fact of the matter is that in the past China has, on occasion, been a lot more important to Koreans than it is today - and not just once, but a few times. Furthermore, these experiences still influence, much more heavily than the history of the hapless kingdom of Koguryo does, current and future events in Northeast Asia.

 

To start with, there was the devastating invasion of Korea (1592-98) by the Japanese warlord Toyotomi Hideyoshi. This author has had the opportunity to read in their entirety all the "veritable records" of the Yi dynasty (Yijo silrok) related to this invasion, written in elegant classical Chinese. These first-hand Korean documents, whose reading is a prerequisite in my opinion for any discussion of past Sino-Korean relations, demonstrate beyond any doubt China's then critical importance vis-a-vis the very existence of the Korean state, from which the current nuclear crisis in North Korea is a far cry.

 

One also begins to realize after reading these records why the Hideyoshi invasion is still central to Korean people's collective consciousness today, second only to their even more traumatic experience under the more recent Japanese colonial rule.

 

At least one Western author, Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times, understands the historical relevance of this experience. In a cover story published several years ago in the all-too-authoritative Foreign Affairs journal, Kristof mentioned the famous "Ear Mound" in Kyoto, in which the ears and noses of tens of thousands of the Korean victims of the Hideyoshi invasion were buried. Such a macabre monument of historical atrocity would no doubt play a much more important future role than whatever controversy surrounds the kingdom of Koguryo, Eurocentric wishes notwithstanding.

 

The Hideyoshi invasion was also one of the critical factors leading to the Ming Dynasty's demise just a few decades later, as China's help to the Koreans greatly exhausted the Ming regime, weakening its ability to fend off the imminent threat of the Manchus. The Yi Dynasty's staunch loyalty to the Ming during this period, often at great risk to its Korean subjects themselves, led to many interesting stories and is also an active area of historical research.

 

This chain of events was to repeat itself near the end of the Qing Dynasty - except a weakened China was unable to help defend and maintain the existence of Korea as a state, whose disappearance on the world map demonstrated again China's then much greater importance than that of today.

 

Japan colonization more interesting than Koguryo

Incidentally, this history of the brutal colonization of Korea by Japan is apparently attracting a lot more interest than that of the ancient Koguryo, as evinced by the recent South Korean legislation to investigate the history of Korean collaborators in this process. And a palpable "Anglo-Saxon" role in supporting Japan's conquest of Korea may turn out an even bigger issue, hence probably the Koguryo distraction we are witnessing today.

 

It is well known that the rise of Japan concurred with a growing Anglo-Japanese alliance officially sealed in 1902 after long percolation. It is reported that the late US president Theodore Roosevelt, a politician famously known "to speak softly but carry a big stick", was once a "secret member" of this alliance. At least one Korean-American historian has studied possible "Anglo-assistance" in the navy battles during the First Sino-Japanese War triggered by the Japanese encroachment of Korea.

 

This "Anglo-Saxon role" became all too apparent when Japan's annexation of Korea accelerated during and after the Russo-Japanese War (1904-05), culminating in Roosevelt dispatching his secretary of war (later the 27th president of the US) William Howard Taft (1857-1930) to conclude the famous (or infamous, depending on one's perspective) Taft-Katsura Agreement, with Japanese prime minister Katsura Taro (1847-1913), acknowledging the two countries' respective annexation of the Philippines and Korea. One will no doubt hear more about these Anglo-Saxon "historical sins" in Japan's colonization of Korea, as once hinted by the French daily Le Monde, and to the even greater dismay of some Eurocentric observers.

 

On the other hand, despite the reversed fortunes of both Koreans and Chinese, their leaders never stopped striving to restore the state of Korea. This started with Yuan Shikai (1859-1916), the commander of the Chinese forces in Korea during the First Sino-Japanese War, who had married a Korean woman. Yuan later became the first formal president of the Republic of China after the Qing Dynasty collapsed not long after losing that war, and earned the unflattering epithet "the grand thief who stole the Republic". Yuan enthusiastically supported the restoration of the Korean state nonetheless.

 

This was followed by all Chinese Republic leaders, Sun Yat-sen (1866-1925) and Chiang Kai-shek (1886-1975) in particular. Chiang became a staunch supporter and financier of the provisional government of the Republic of Korea, mobilizing, for instance, all Chinese resources in sheltering and protecting its leader Kim Koo (1876-1949) after the attack (or one may say "terrorist act") in 1932, by the Korean activists including the famous Korean independence martyr Yoon Bong-kil, against the top Japanese military leaders in the colonial concession in Shanghai. During the darkest days of the Second Sino-Japanese War, Chiang made sure that Kim Koo received ample funding from the Chinese government. Small wonder that the entire generation of Korean independence leaders on both the left and the right had close relations with China.

 

Moreover, Chiang Kai-shek vigorously and in fact single-handedly promoted the establishment of an independent and unified Korea during the Cairo Conference (November 1943) and other international preparations for the post-World War II world order, whereas all other major powers, the Soviet Union and the United States in particular, were only interested in some sort of the United Nations' trusteeship and de facto partition of the Korean Peninsula. This partition later became a sorry reality, especially after the assassination of Korea's greatest son in modern history, Kim Koo, in 1949, "by pro-American elements" as many claim.

 

Closer to unification, this unsavory part of history and the US role therein will undoubtedly be attracting a lot of attention, Koguryo controversy or no Koguryo controversy.

 

The mutual importance of China and Korea to each other continued after the partition of the Korean Peninsula. It is universally agreed that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) lost its historical chance to "liberate Taiwan" due to Josef Stalin's order to Mao Zedong to rescue the Kim Il-sung regime during the Korean War. Otherwise, Chiang Kai-shek would have lived out his years much the same way as did Rhee Syngman (1875-1965) in a foreign country.

 

Sino-Korean relations - the future

Nobody in his or her right mind today still questions the gradual implosion of the Kim dynasty in North Korea. Not even the CCP has any illusions on the long-term survival of its erstwhile "lips and teeth" little-brother regime. Everybody is juggling and maneuvering for the eventual and inevitable unification or rather absorption of North Korea by South Korea. The only question is when - and how.

 

Meanwhile, a much bigger geopolitical game is being staged in the broader Asian theater. In the words of David Shambaugh, noted China expert at George Washington University, "China [is] rapidly returning to its traditional role as the central actor in Asia." The International Herald Tribune this year described this as "two fundamental trends - a new security environment that resembles the ancient Chinese tributary system, and the rise of China's soft power". In other words, back to the "bad old days" when the Son of Heaven in Beijing called the shots in Asia.

 

However, this time "China's soft power" is no longer Confucianism, but the even more influential economic and trading power in this rapidly globalizing world economy. And Koreans, befitting their ancient proud self-appellation of being a "mini-China", have certainly caught the tide early on. The world has just witnessed the epochal event in 2003 when two-way Sino-South Korea trade exceeded that between South Korea and the No 1 economy on earth, the US, barely 10 years after the establishment of diplomatic relations between the two Cold War ideological and battlefield enemies. According to Chosen Ilbo, more and more unemployed young South Koreans are swarming to China, regrettably not to help their famished Northern brethren, but to seek their personal fortunes in the booming Chinese economy and the ever-expanding Sino-Korean trade.

 

It is of course not only the South Koreans who have jumped on this "back to traditional Asia" bandwagon, the Korean diaspora in the rest of world has sensed it too. One of its members, Soon Bum-ahn, a lieutenant-colonel in the US Army and a research fellow at US RAND, the mother of all think-tanks, published an insightful article in Current History magazine in 2001, properly titled "China as number one", prophesying "the return to Sinocentrism" in East Asia, a future that will leave the US armed forces few prospects for remaining in the Korean Peninsula.

 

It is therefore quite understandable that some outside observers start to worry about "South Korea's perilous historical revisionism" in its many efforts to reconcile with North Korea. Worse still, the so-called historical revisionism now pervades the entire political spectrum from left to right in South Korea, including even the military, all allegedly turning a blind eye to the North's "crimes against humanity".

 

N Korea is odious, but Koreans should decide future

This author has no intention whatsoever to defend the North Korean regime. I agree that it is one of the most odious regimes on Earth, and wish for its quick and peaceful demise. But I also have high confidence that the Korean people themselves in both South and North have the best knowledge and ability in navigating through this difficult time.

 

While acknowledging the current dreadful living conditions of most North Koreans in their communist utopia, let us not forget that, according to the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) country books, as late as 1976, the year of Mao's death, North Koreans still enjoyed a higher per capita income than that of the South Koreans. On the other hand, even the current "trickle" of North Korean political and economic refugees reaching South Korea has already created major financial and societal burdens in the form of settlement costs and the reported high crime rate among the refugees, according to the rather conservative Chosen Ilbo.

 

And talking about "crimes against humanity", in addition to what was committed in Kwangju in 1980 under the watch of the US, should one conveniently forget the massacre of the unarmed and innocent villagers at No Gun Ri, or the US Air Force's saturation bombing of North Korean cities, the use of napalm, the attacks on irrigation dams to cause flooding, to list just a few, during the Korean War, as bravely raised in the New York Times by an American professor working in South Korea. This list will surely get longer as the "historical revisionism" progresses in Korea.

 

War, preemptive or otherwise, is always hell. It is thus interesting to see the reference to the 1961 Treaty of Mutual Assistance between China and North Korea as a basis for China's possible military intervention in the Korean Peninsula. Not by coincidence, it is widely reported in Chinese media that North Korean leader Kim Jong-il constantly reminds China of the treaty obligations when Beijing is trying very hard not to "remember" them, so to shirk all the obligations therein. The current Chinese government may still be authoritarian and politically strong-armed, but it is not brainless. With China's exponentially growing trading power and its huge geopolitical returns in East and Southeast Asia, much less a pending military crisis in the Taiwan Strait, who in Beijing would be stupid enough to open an Iraq-type quagmire in the Korean Peninsula?

 

Finally let us turn to the current nuclear crisis in the Korean Peninsula. If we follow Samuel Huntington of Harvard University, then this is no more than a crisis for the US and Japan only, as Huntington described in Chapter 8 of his famous book, The Clash of Civilizations: many in South Korea would only love to inherit the "Korean bomb" after the inevitable unification of the two Koreas.

 

Therefore, why should the South Koreans, from ordinary folks to the military, not engage in "historical revisionism" to reduce the enmity and to build up reconciliation between the two Koreas? Or as summarized alarmingly by a recent report, "Most South Koreans no longer view the North as the primary threat to their security. That designation is increasingly reserved for the United States." This is because Koreans know full well that, once a "preemptive" war starts to relieve the US (and to a lesser extent Japan) of this nuclear threat, the blood spilled would be mostly that of the Koreans.

 

This author for one would never call such "historical revisionism" South Koreans' myopia.

 

Yu Shiyu has been appointed visiting scholar in East Asian Studies by a major university in North America. He is writing a book on Asian history to be published by a US Ivy League university. He is a regular columnist for Singapore's United Morning News (Lianhe Zaobao).

BBC: Cheney rejects gay marriage ban

Cheney rejects gay marriage ban - BBC

Mr Cheney acknowledged he and his wife have a gay daughter US Vice-President Dick Cheney has said he does not support a federal ban on gay marriage, apparently contradicting President George W Bush's stance. Mr Cheney was addressing a campaign audience in Iowa that included his daughter, Mary, who is openly lesbian. He said the issue of legalising gay unions should be settled by individual states rather than by Washington. However, Mr Cheney said he accepted the views of Mr Bush, whose opposition to gay marriage is well publicised. 'Gay daughter' President Bush recently backed a motion calling for a federal ban on gay marriage, prompted by attempts in some US states to have same-sex unions legalised. The motion was defeated when Republican senators sided with Democrats on the issue. Vice-President Cheney said he and his wife "have a gay daughter, so it's an issue our family is very familiar with". Regarding the issue of same-sex relationships, he said, "my general view is freedom means freedom for everyone". He said individual states have historically decided "what constitutes a marriage". 'Mixed message' Mr Cheney has said his views are personal and have no bearing on White House policy. However, says the BBC's Dan Griffiths in Washington, they strike at the very heart of President Bush's thinking and should revive debate around the issue just days before the Republican convention in New York. While gay rights activists welcomed Mr Cheney's comments, there was criticism from some conservatives. Genevieve Wood of the Family Research Council said Mr Cheney's remarks were disappointing and sent out "a mixed message to voters".

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Countercurrents.org: What exactly Is So "Radical" About Moqtada Sadr?

http://countercurrents.org/iraq-hitmat210804.htm

 

An alternative view:

 

What exactly Is So "Radical"
About Moqtada Sadr?

By Sharif Hikmat Nashashibi

21 August , 2004
Arab Media

As US forces run amok once again in Iraq, faithfully aided by the puppet regime of Iyad Allawi, the spotlight has again fallen on rebel Shia cleric Moqtada Sadr. While the media cannot resist calling him "radical", it is in fact very difficult to find any basis for this description.

A consistent centerpiece of his policies has been his staunch opposition to the occupation of his country. "There can be no politics under occupation, no freedom under occupation, no democracy under occupation," he said this month. What is so radical about that? If his Mehdi Army were patrolling and bombing London, New York or Washington, I would be astonished to find media descriptions of US and British resistance as "radical".

His opposition to foreign occupation cannot be explained away as support for Saddam Hussein, who persecuted the Shias so ruthlessly. Sadr and his family were vehemently opposed to the dictator and his regime, and for this they paid a heavy price – Sadr's uncle was executed in 1980, and his father and two brothers were shot dead in February 1999, forcing him to go underground.

Although Sadr's opposition to occupation has been consistent, he only turned to armed resistance over a year after the invasion of his country. During that time, his sermons called for non-violent resistance and he stopped short of invoking a jihad against occupation forces.

While death and insecurity have reigned in Iraq, when Baghdad fell Sadr supporters took control of many aspects of life in the Shia sector of the city and in the south of the country, appointing clerics to mosques, guarding hospitals, collecting garbage, operating orphanages, and supplying food and essential supplies to Iraqis hit by the hardships of war. I cannot imagine anything less "radical" than garbage collection, hospital security, the welfare of orphans or feeding the hungry, especially since the occupation authorities resolutely failed in their responsibility under international law to provide such basic and vital services.

Indeed, the media overlooks the fact - as it does with many organizations that happen to have a military wing, such as the Palestinian Hamas or Lebanese Hezbollah - that Sadr runs a network of schools and charities built by his father. What is he possibly thinking, providing impoverished Iraqis with education and social welfare as their country descends ever-faster and deeper into turmoil?!

Sadr was not provoked when a cleric associated with him was arrested in September 2003. When Paul Bremer, the head of the Coalition Provisional Authority, formed the Iraqi Governing Council, Sadr did not turn to violence, but instead on October 10, 2003, announced the formation of an alternative government to replace those handpicked by foreign occupiers.

When coalition forces closed his Al Hawza newspaper in March this year, Sadr's supporters staged peaceful protests against this blatant infringement of the media freedom the invaders claimed to be trying to foster. Peaceful protests also followed the arrest on April 3 this year of his senior aide Mustafa al-Yaqubi, and threats to arrest Sadr himself.

The response from the occupation forces was armed and fatal for numerous Iraqi civilians, after which the protests turned violent and Sadr proclaimed on April 4 that his peaceful means "have become a losing card" and that "we should seek other ways…terrorise your enemy, as we cannot remain silent over its violations." Bremer, whose administration undertook an illegal war against Iraq, called him an "outlaw".

Mike Whitney, writing for Counter Punch, put it well in an article on May 11, 2004: "His call to arms only occurred after he had exhausted the conventional democratic methods of expression. This being the case, the appellation of 'radical cleric' is just another of the ‘unproved assumptions’ brandished by western journalists to promote the overall goals of the occupation. It is another illustration of the manipulation of language to mold public perceptions. It is tantamount to ideological warfare."

Even through armed resistance to occupation, Sadr has stuck to well-defined limits. He has denied involvement in car bombings and assassinations; he denounced the August 2003 attack on the UN headquarters in Baghdad; he had urged his followers not to attack Iraqi security forces, until their current involvement in US onslaughts; he is opposed to the taking of journalists as hostages, though when he arranged the release on August 13 of Daily Telegraph reporter James Brandon, the newspaper cynically called it a "propaganda opportunity" and has continued to describe him as "radical"; and in a sermon in July this year he condemned the beheading of foreign workers:

"There is no religion or religious law that punishes by beheading. True, they are your enemies and occupiers, but this does not justify cutting off their heads."

Sadr's eventual use of armed resistance has certainly not been viewed as "radical" by his compatriots. In a June 2004 poll conducted by the CPA, 81% of Iraqis said their opinion of the cleric was "much better" or "better" after his first uprising than before. The reason for this, if any were needed, is that in the same poll, a whopping 92% of Iraqis considered the US-led forces as "occupiers" and only 2% viewed them as "liberators", while 55% wanted them out of the country immediately.

Sadr has condemned Allawi as an extension of the occupation, and has dismissed the June 2004 "handover of power" as a farce. He is simply stating fact – the interim prime minister was appointed by the US, has wholeheartedly supported US acts of aggression in his own country, has had links with British and American intelligence services, and supports the continued presence of foreign troops in the newly "sovereign" Iraq. Allawi's heavy-handed, compliant rule has not gone down well with the population – the Financial Times reported a recent poll showing his approval rating at just 2%, tied with Saddam Hussein!

Sadr condemns those who cooperate with the occupiers, and has expressed solidarity with the Palestinians: "The fate of Iraq and Palestine are the same." While the US regularly threatens Syria and Iran, further destabilizing the Middle East, Sadr has vowed not to allow any attack on his country's neighbours from Iraqi territory. He has called for unity between Sunnis and Shias, and Iraq's territorial integrity. These policies surely meet with overwhelming approval from the Arab and Muslim worlds, war-weary Iraqis and others globally.

But the adjective "radical" still sticks, though this defies the widespread popularity Sadr has gained nationally and regionally. He has the allegiance of the followers of his late father, Grand Ayatollah Mohammed Sadi Sadr, who was one of the most powerful clerics in Iraq. He is able to mobilize the masses throughout southern Iraq and the Shia sector of Baghdad, home to 2 million which was renamed Sadr City after Saddam's fall. His armed resistance has drawn support from Sunnis and Shias throughout Iraq, the Middle East and beyond, as well as condemnation of US heavy-handedness, even from within Iraq's interim government.

Despite this, Sadr has sought diplomacy. He agreed to a truce in June this year which ended his first uprising, and during the current fighting he has invited mediation from the Vatican, and expressed his willingness to accept a UN force in Iraq. Contrast this with Allawi's uncompromising stance that there can be "no negotiation" with militias.

Sadr is also prepared to disband his army and form a political party to contest next January's elections. Fuad Maasum, chairman of the committee organizing Iraq's current national conference to which Sadr was invited, said this is "a positive step and his movement has roots in the country."

How far Iraqi leaders have been willing to accommodate Sadr is evident in the fact that they are ignoring a decree passed in Baghdad which prevents individuals from entering the political process unless they have been out of their militia for three years. Sadr, who does not fit this profile, is being invited anyway.

Calling him "radical" is not only a misrepresentation of his policies, it is an insult to all those who oppose foreign occupation and domination, religious in-fighting and regional instability. One does not have to be Shia, Iraqi, Arab or "radical" to see that.

Sharif Hikmat Nashashibi is the chairman of Arab Media Watch. He can be contacted at sharif@arabmediawatch.com

Darfur’s darkest chapter

Darfur’s darkest chapter

By William Wallis

Financial Times

Published: August 20 2004 18:19 | Last updated: August 20 2004 18:20

 

One Friday after prayers in May 2000, as many as 1,000 copies of an unremarkable A4 manuscript appeared mysteriously in mosques and other public places in Khartoum, the capital of Sudan. And not just in public places. Omar Hassan el-Bashir, the president of Sudan, found one on his desk when he returned from his devotions. Thereafter, the document, in its Arabic original, was in and out of photocopying machines across Sudan. One Sudanese academic who was involved in its translation claims that as many as 50,000 copies were eventually circulating - reaching remote and undeveloped parts of the country, where the internet was as yet science fiction.

 

 

The “Black Book” as it was called, or “al kitab al aswad” in Arabic, struck at the heart of one of Africa’s least tolerant regimes. Only a handful of Sudanese knew how its anonymous authors produced such an explosive document without falling foul of the security services. The mystery surrounding its appearance, and the controversy over its content, grabbed public attention at a time when only the most cautious literature made it past the state censors. In it were the seeds of the rebellion in Darfur - an austere western territory of desert plains and rocky outcrops larger than Iraq, neglected by successive governments, where a tragedy of epic dimensions is playing out.

 

World opinion is now polarising around the question of how to halt a gathering catastrophe in Sudan - a country that has already been afflicted by civil war and unrest for the best part of half a century. But what to do? Armed intervention is not especially popular in the wake of Iraq. The threat of UN sanctions has raised alarm in the Middle East, where there is deep, popular hostility to western interference in the affairs of a fellow member of the Arab League. Suspicion about what is motivating public outrage in the west is now so intense that reports of systematic rape and killing in Darfur are mistrusted in parts of the Arab media to the same degree as US and British claims last year about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction. The government of Sudan has proved resilient in its denials, and resistant to international efforts to resolve what is both a human rights and humanitarian crisis. If there is an international conscience (see The Media Department, page 10), it is more wary now about involvement in conflicts of deep complexity.

 

The war in Darfur certainly resists easy cataloguing. But the Black Book is as good a place to start as any. Like Sudan as a whole, Darfur is at the crossroads between the Arab and African worlds - a land at the south of Saharan trade routes, where pilgrims wandered through from west Africa on their way to the haj in Mecca, and where camels chew the leaves of mango trees. Islam found a footing there in the 16th century, and took on the more mystical, Sufi forms common to other parts of sub-Saharan Africa. Over the centuries, black African farming communities, and the mostly Arab or Arabised nomadic tribes who grazed their herds on its dusty plains, grew inter-reliant. The destruction, over the past 18 months, of the social fabric and physical resilience of these communities - hardened to life on the fringes of the desert - is only the latest manifestation of a failing police state. In the near half-century since it won independence from Britain and Egypt, Sudan has enjoyed little peace. The Black Book offered an explanation why.

 

To compile the book, a group calling itself “The Seekers of Truth and Justice” had - over a period of five months and with many clandestine meetings in which each member kept his own network of collaborators to himself - somehow plucked sensitive records from state archives. From these and more public information, they catalogued iniquities to rival apartheid in South Africa, documenting the narrow ethnicity of senior officials in successive governments, and castigating the moral bankruptcy of the incumbent regime that had based its legitimacy on Islam.

 

The Black Book was a call to action, though not (then) to arms. It laid out, in figures and graphs, facts that aimed to show, as it put it, “the imbalance of power and wealth in Sudan”. It was an anatomy of Sudan that revealed much more disease than health. It showed - occasionally in indignant prose but more often through careful attention to statistics - how Sudan’s post-independence administrations have been dominated by three tribes hailing from the Nile valley north of Khartoum - select even among Sudan’s Arab or Arabised populations in the north. A region that represented about five per cent of Sudan’s population, according to the official census, had occupied between 47 and 70 per cent of cabinet positions since 1956, and the presidency for all that time. It was also overwhelmingly dominant in the military hierarchy, the judiciary and the provincial administration. Although the figures showed a loosening of the stranglehold under an elected government in the late 1980s, under all rules - military, elected and theocratic - this elite had concentrated wealth and power to varying degrees in a tiny slice of Africa’s largest nation. From there, they attempted to impose a uniform Arab and Islamic culture on one of the continent’s most heterogeneous societies.

 

After a few twists and turns, I managed to trace one of its authors. Idris Mahmoud Logma is now a representative of the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM), one of two rebel groups that took up arms in Darfur at the beginning of last year in a loose alliance against the government. He is now living in exile in Ireland and we spoke by telephone. When the Black Book was distributed in 2000, he was a trader in Khartoum. It was there that he and 14 others - including one former state minister, prominent among Islamists - developed the idea for the analysis. Most of them were young Muslims from black African tribes in Darfur who had graduated from Khartoum universities. Logma says their experience at close hand of the injustice with which Sudan was being ruled drove them to take risks. Their message, he says, was designed to appeal to all marginalised Sudanese - whether of Arab, Afro-Arab or African identity, Christian or Muslim.

 

To their critics in Khartoum - largely in, or connected with, the ruling administration - “The Seekers of Truth and Justice” were motivated by political ambition and were prepared to stir up ethnic hatred to meet their ends. In fact, the appearance of the Black Book did coincide with a deep split in the regime, which has exacerbated tension in society. Hassan al Turabi has been a force in Khartoum politics since the 1960s - and when a coup ended Sudan’s last experiment with elected rule in 1989, he became the new administration’s eminence grise and Islamist ideologue. He played a central role in the bloody purges that established the authority of the current regime, ensuring the apparently absolute rule of General el-Bashir and a cabal of security chiefs in his shadows. But he lost a prolonged power struggle with the president, and with it his pre-eminent position in 1999.

 

Logma refutes government claims that Turabi, who has since been in and out of jail, was the godfather of the Darfur rebellion. He says that Turabi didn’t have anything to do with writing the Black Book, nor did he use it as part of attempts - which he has made since - to rebuild a constituency among Sudan’s black African Muslims. The JEM has publicly embraced a more moderate form of political Islam than Turabi espoused when in power; at the same time, it is Islamist, and it does differentiate itself from the main rebel group in Darfur, the Sudan Liberation Movement (SLM), which is firmly secular - as are the rebels who have kept the civil war in Southern Sudan going since 1983.

 

Logma says members of the Black Book’s original group of 15 have now found their way into both the Islamist and the secular movements in Darfur. Like other graduates who have joined the rebellion, they were driven by their desire to reshape Sudan - and purge it of the failures of past generations. “During that time when we were writing the book,” he says, “we were not thinking of rebellion. We wanted to achieve our aims by democratic and peaceful means. Later we realised the regime would only listen to guns.”

 

My first sight of the consequences of that choice was from the murky window of an antique Sudan Air Antonov as it plunged down to the airport at Nyala, capital of South Darfur. On display was an arsenal of Russian helicopter gunships and MiG jets, assembled as part of the counter-offensive that has driven more than a million black Africans from their homes.

 

I was there during a ceasefire, but while fighting between the government and rebels had ebbed, attacks against civilians were continuing. A few days later, the helicopters were deployed to a market further north. According to witnesses, 10 local traders died in the attack.

 

El-Bashir was due in Nyala at a rally. Thousands were flocking into the sandy central square to hear what he had to say - travelling by foot, donkey and camel, and on remarkably svelte-looking horses. Temperatures that day reached more than 45 deg C, but the heat was no deterrent.

 

General el-Bashir’s rule has been ruthless and radical since the outset. During it, the Khartoum regime became an international pariah for hosting Islamic terrorists and using terror itself to crush dissent. But any account of Sudan has to recognise that its president has been caught between many competing agendas.

 

The US, Britain and other states engaged with Sudan have been pushing his government to end the civil war in the south of the country - where Christian and other non-Muslim African groups have fought the central government for 21 years, with a toll estimated at 2 million deaths. Under sustained international pressure, both Khartoum and the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM) rebels seemed ready, last year, to sign a comprehensive peace agreement. The deal, it was hoped, would change the face of Sudan, setting it on a path to less uneven development and ending Khartoum’s international isolation.

 

For both western peacemakers and the Khartoum government, Darfur was getting in the way. For different reasons, both tried initially to keep it out of the picture. On the part of the Sudanese government this meant restricting media and humanitarian access as Darfur rapidly became engulfed in flames. For the diplomats it involved promoting the idea that the problems in Sudan’s many other regions could be more readily addressed once Khartoum had made peace with the south, and there was the best chance of that in 50 years. This was roughly the argument that - perhaps unfairly - earned Alan Goulty, Britain’s former special envoy to Sudan, the nickname of “Mr Guilty” among some Darfurians. Both the diplomats and Khartoum apparently underestimated the consequences of maintaining this position. For, in retrospect, the international focus on finding peace in one region may inadvertently have aided atrocities in another.

 

The ruling National Congress in Khartoum was divided on the settlement of the civil war in the south. Nearly half of its members were opposed to an initial compromise which would give Southern Sudan a chance to vote for independence after a six-year power and wealth-sharing transition. Faced with hardline pressure from some of their closest supporters, neither El-Bashir nor his powerful vice- president, Ali Osman Taha, wanted to make concessions to another rebellious region. With the US and its allies preoccupied by negotiations over the South, they apparently felt they could prosecute the war in Darfur how they chose.

 

By the time I came to Nyala and saw El-Bashir waving his stick at the crowds and railing against the “enemies of Sudan”, the cost of the counter-offensive was becoming huge, both in civilian lives and in terms of his government’s credibility. Flanked by religious and tribal elders and with the gunships patrolling the skies, he called on the region to lay down its arms. His speech was punctuated with references to Islam. Like the mixed-race Darfur audience to whom he delivered it, the speech was also full of contradictions. To some he promised peace and development. There were no “Arabs or Africans” there, he said, only Sudanese.

 

But he had a different message for the Arab militias who have helped prosecute the war on the government’s behalf, destroying in the process much of what little “development” Darfur had. To them he offered his blessings. At one point, hundreds of irregular horse and camel-borne fighters rode past him in procession, some in tribal regalia, some in military uniform. El-Bashir appealed to their faith, saluting them as the “Mujahideen”. In the crowds, there was no confusion as to who these horsemen were.

 

Officials in Khartoum have always denied that the government has armed and supported these militia, known colloquially as Janjaweed - a derogatory term for outlaws - and internationally now as the harbingers of Darfur’s ruin. They deny that the Janjaweed have been given a free rein to spread terror. But on the ground officials are hard-pressed to hide the close relations that have evolved between them. In several places, not just in Nyala that day, I saw regular security forces mixing freely with militia.

 

I travelled west, accompanied by a government minder. Khartoum had begun to respond to international pressure to allow aid agencies and reporters in. At the time, the regime’s representatives had yet to develop a consistent line to explain the mass destruction all around them. Official efforts at persuasion involved, variously, cordial hospitality - an invitation to lunch with members of the state government, or the offer of a government car. Or intimidation. We were subjected at various places along the road to hours of questioning by security officers. Soldiers on the edge of the volcanic Jebel Marra mountains, from where the rebels launched their first attacks, were particularly hostile and blocked the road. Most officials were prone to denial and blamed atrocities on the rebels. But there were others who seemed to be doing everything they could to smooth our way.

 

One thing was very clear. Insofar as Logma and his fellow Black Book authors had hoped to further the interests of their people by taking up arms, their project was failing catastrophically. On the journey from Nyala to El Geneina, 350km west and on the Chad border, there was barely a building standing among the dozens of villages we visited and passed. The homes, mosques and schools of the ethnic Fur and Masalit farming communities were smashed and looted - both those on the main roads and off the beaten track. This was no outburst of communal anger. The scale of the destruction suggested it could only have been part of a systematic and planned operation.

 

Hundreds of thousands of villagers had fled into larger towns, where they grew hungrier and weaker by the day. There were few young men among them: witnesses said they had either been executed or joined the rebels. Some of the women and girls I met had been raped so many times they could barely walk.

 

It was at the garrison town of Nyertete in the shadows of the Jebel Marra that the ruthless military logic behind what has happened first came home. When the rebellion started, it caught the army unawares. The rebels were able to sweep across large swathes of territory. In one spectacular attack on the provincial capital of El Fasher in April last year, the SLM occupied the airport after destroying government helicopters and Antonov bombers and killing 75 government soldiers. They even briefed university students before pulling back into the mountains, taking an air force commander with them as hostage.

 

There was a real danger that the rebels were gaining the psychological upper hand and that their initial success would galvanise other disenfranchised groups into a wider revolt against the Khartoum regime. Throughout this year and last, there have been persistent reports that the Beja tribe in the east was also readying for war. As the Black Book argued so forcefully, few regions in Sudan have cause to feel satisfied with the status quo.

 

Forgoing advice from the governor of El Fasher, who believed a political solution was still possible and was sacked for saying so, El-Bashir promised to “unleash” the army and crush the rebellion. But he could not do so easily with the conventional forces at his disposal.

 

Weakened by prolonged deployment in the south, and by the concentration of powers in parallel security services, the Sudanese army was unable effectively to counter another threat. Moreover, many lower and middle-ranking officers hail from Darfur as well as a significant proportion of the rank and file. There was and still is opposition in the army to the way the war has been carried out. It was risky to rely on it to counter the rebellion.

 

So, one former senior ally of El-Bashir in the regime told me, the security services under the control of a cabal of officers close to vice-president Taha chose to let loose the Janjaweed. Their strategy may have looked something like this: conventional troops, such as the ones at Nyertete, defend large towns with tanks and artillery. From there they curb the immediate danger of the rebels developing into a conventional fighting force, as their counterparts did in the south, by occupying towns and large chunks of territory. Outside the towns, and often accompanied by bombing raids, camel and horse-borne Arab militia have wiped out the villages from which the rebels could wage a guerrilla war. Huddled into sprawling, makeshift camps, the displaced populations I came across were under close government or Janjaweed control. Most of them were too terrified to forage for food, let alone grow it to feed guerrilla fighters.

 

It has been a brutal and in some ways effective operation. By February it had driven most rebel bases across the border into Chad in the west, and forced the political leadership into ever-longer spells abroad. However, as the horror of events in Darfur plays out on global television screens and public outrage fuels threats of intervention by the UN and western governments, the rebels, having lost the military advantage, have been regaining the moral one. Even militarily, they now appear to be rebounding.

 

During many episodes in the civil war in the south, the government used irregular ethnic militia in parallel with conventional forces to devastating effect. The primary goal in replicating this strategy in Darfur may have been to win the war. But there is widespread suspicion, both within Sudan and abroad, that a more sinister agenda has been stirred into the mix.

 

Whether by coincidence or design, the counter-offensive has given certain nomadic Arab tribes the upper hand in the struggle for control of land and pasture. Across Darfur, I saw vast herds of camel and cattle grazing their way across fields that farmers would in normal years have been preparing to sow. In some areas, established orchards as well as mud brick huts have been brought down, lending an air of permanence to the destruction. Those who might once have defended them have lost everything for now, including their ancestral land.

 

In the crowded market town of Zalingei, I heard something of Darfur’s past - seen now, through the eyes of a prominent tribal elder, as a golden time. Sultan Fadel Seasy Mohamed Ateim is a chieftain of the Fur farming people, from whom Darfur got its name. He spoke with injured pride of a 100 years of history, his eyes hidden behind thick tortoise-shell dark glasses.

 

He traced the territorial aspect of the conflict back to the 1970s and 1980s, when creeping desert and drought drove nomadic pastoralists further south at the same time as farmers were expanding production on available fertile land. But where before social mechanisms existed to resolve tribal disputes, by the 1980s relations between the tribes were breaking down.

 

Left alone, he suggested, the peaceful co-existence of Darfur’s tribes might have continued even in adversity. But external interference from Khartoum and further afield has taken its toll. Towards the end of the 1980s, groups of Arab fighters were returning home with weapons after participating in Colonel Muammer Gadaffi of Libya’s failed attempt, during the civil war in neighbouring Chad, to annex the semi-desert belt south of the Sahara to his pan-Arab cause. Arabised militia from Darfur and next door Kordofan had also been hardened to battle after their deployment by Khartoum to fight the rebellion in southern Sudan.

 

It was a period of scattered conflict and an arms race between competing tribes. During it, said the sultan, a small minority of political and tribal leaders among Darfur’s Arab clans began promoting expansionary political ambitions. These crystallised, according to documents from the time, around an openly supremacist agenda, which they allegedly carried around Darfur. In a letter written to prime minister Sadiq el Mahdi in 1987, the group - calling itself the Arab Alliance - demanded control of the state government and called more broadly for the subjugation of the “Zurga” or blacks. It was the first time that a political project in Darfur revolved explicitly around race.

 

Traditional leaders and politicians from various of Darfur’s tribes and from within the National Congress are convinced the shadowy Arab Alliance has seized the opportunity provided by last year’s revolt to regroup around the same supremacist agenda. If this is true, it goes some way towards explaining the cruel and brutal humiliation inflicted on African villagers, and lends some weight to those who call it “ethnic cleansing”.

 

So far, no thorough independent investigation has been carried out to determine the true intent behind Darfur’s ruin. If it was indeed “genocidal”, as the US Congress decided in a vote last month, the “genocide” may have been arrested early in its tracks by foreign pressure. US secretary of state Colin Powell was more cautious after the Congress vote, saying the administration would examine the issue. But, addressing the Khartoum government, he said that “since they turned it on, they can turn it off”.

 

Back in Khartoum, I visited a former close collaborator of El-Bashir at his home. He shared Powell’s view, and named a cabal of hardliners within the regime who have promoted the Janjaweed, channelling support for them through the security services. He was more circumspect, however, about their ability now to control the monster they helped unleash. They are driven, he suggested, not only by the politics of Darfur. There is the wider prospect that their power base will continue eroding if foreign and domestic pressure leads, eventually, to a more pluralist and open style of government in Khartoum. “When a political movement is weakened, people resort to the most primitive allegiances,” he said. In Darfur’s case, these were tribe and race.

 

The intractable conflict in southern Sudan suggests that strategy is doomed. Sudan’s diversity is born of centuries of interaction at the confluence of the Arab and African worlds, and a territory of 2.5m sq km that stretches from the Sahara desert to the jungles at Africa’s heart. It is represented in many shades of brown and black and many different faiths. Although some may choose now to forget, the 17th century founder of the Darfur sultanate, Suleiman Solong, was himself of mixed descent - the son of an Arab father and Fur mother.

 

Technology too is aiding the resistance. From Khartoum, sympathisers text pay-as-you-go codes from scratch cards to the satellite phones of rebel commanders. Two volumes of the Black Book are now published on the JEM’s website, extending the rebels’ message well beyond the reach of photocopying machines.

 

”It is difficult to rule Sudan with an iron fist,” said El-Bashir’s former ally, speaking partly, I sensed, from experience. The question at the heart of Sudan’s future as one nation is whether the Khartoum regime is prepared to give up trying.

 

wwallis@africaonline.co.ke

 

William Wallis is the FT’s Cairo correspondent.

 

 

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Darfur’s darkest chapter - The Rebel Sympathiser

By Nima el-Baghir

Published: August

Financial Times

 

 20 2004 18:19 | Last updated: August 20 2004 18:19

 

Ali is in his late 20s. He is a Zaghawa, sympathetic to the rebellion but no longer directly involved. He meets me in an anonymous office in downtown Khartoum.

 

 

He talks in fits and starts, speaking first of his cousins who were raped by militiamen.

 

He is suddenly quiet and then says: “I remember the first time I saw a headless body. It was 1997 and I was 20. For years we had heard of attacks in the night and villages being burnt, but no one knew where these men came from or who they were.

 

”People said they were looters, Janjaweed, but all the villagers would find in the morning - if they survived - were the headless bodies of the attackers who had fallen in the fighting.”

 

Outside a dust storm is raging and until it stops we know we are trapped with the creaky fan and the sand that is seeping in. So he takes his time.

 

”For years no one could understand what was happening. We were being driven off our land by ghosts that came in the night and left headless corpses. Then when they came to the village of Orshi, I was there.”

 

He stops again, looking away. “We fought them off and gave chase. The gangs rode horses, so they could not take the corpses with them. But they cut the heads off so no one could trace them. We found them burying the head of one of their men who fell in battle.”

 

He smiles briefly as he tells this. “He was identified by his tribal markings. We knew then that it was a plan, a strategy, to take our land. Of course this was before the government call-to-arms gave impunity to [Janjaweed leader] Musa Hilal and his people. There was no need any more for secrecy.”

 

 

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Darfur’s darkest chapter - The Troubled Officer

By Nima el-Baghir

Financial Times

 

Published: August 20 2004 18:19 | Last updated: August 20 2004 18:19

 

West Darfur has become horrible since I last was there. A transport breakdown has left me sleeping to the sound of rain in a tea lady’s lean-to while I wait for the next bus. My sleep is disturbed by armed men marching through to the mud room behind where the tea lady serves dinner. One of them jolts me awake.

 

 

I get up and try to chat but people feel watched. Before I fall asleep again, a police patrol is sent to bring me in for questioning.

 

I have been noticed. The officer escorting me has to cut short his lectures when he finds the interrogation room is being used by other officers, due to go on leave the next day, to iron their clothes “Does this look like a washer-woman’s whorehouse?” he shouts.

 

I suppress giggles with my headscarf, and the tension is broken. After we fill in my security questionnaire, I ask him about the Janjaweed that patrol the area with regular forces.

 

”We were told by them [the senior government officials] not to speak to the militiamen, so now we do not question the actions of anyone in any kind of uniform, regular or not. The ones that are government allied should have ID cards but not everyone has been given them. They don’t wear any insignia, so how are we to know if they are allied to the government or not? What if they’re just bandits?” He looks pained, like a man trying to believe that orders from on high are misguided, but not necessarily ill-intentioned.

 

”We see them break into houses saying there are rebels there, and leave with loot, but we have been told to do nothing.” He assesses me for a moment. “We were told by a visiting government delegation that this is a price the government is willing to pay not to lose land to the rebels. Afterwards things will be fixed.”

 

The officer does not want to be named. His precinct is four hours from the Chad border in the west of Darfur. He stays on although he knows that if the rebels come he will be risking his life for a government he doesn’t trust.

 

He admits there are many among his men who have stolen away to join the rebels. “Many of them could no longer look on, but I think some of us must stay to try and fight the insanity. Someone must stay here to tell what it is that has happened.”

 

Lured to Jerusalem By Religion, Luxury

Lured to Jerusalem By Religion, Luxury
Foreigners Fuel Boom Around Old City

By Molly Moore
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, August 21, 2004; Page A13

JERUSALEM -- Take in the $3 million views of the Jerusalem skyline from the fifth floor of the new, luxury Talbiye Residence: charming red-tiled roofs, historic limestone buildings, graceful cedars. On a distant hill to the south is Bethlehem.

Just beyond a cluster of greenery barely three blocks away is the site of the city's last suicide bus bombing. But the proximity has not deterred buyers.

"One family bought the entire floor," all 4,949 square feet of it, boasted Ishai Levy, project manager for Talbiye Residence, one of Jerusalem's most upscale new apartment buildings. "The buyer is an American lawyer from New York with a wife and five kids. Religious. Modern Orthodox."

Encouraged by religion, wealth and a slowdown of violence inside Israel, Jews from abroad are snapping up luxury Israeli real estate, driving prices to levels rivaling those of the 1990s, during periods of relative peace.

Whether it's garden apartments near the ancient walls of Jerusalem's Old City or high-rises looming above Tel Aviv's Mediterranean shore, affluent Jews in the United States, Europe and South America are latching on to posh properties here. The buyers want to acquire spots for vacation trips during religious holidays, buy property out of solidarity with Israel or just acquire a trophy house in an exotic location, according to real estate agents and builders.

While most of the Israeli economy is hobbled by the pressures of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, foreign property purchases leapt to $464 million in 2003 -- nearly triple the amount for the previous year and more than double the amount for the pre-conflict year of 1999, according to the Bank of Israel, the country's central bank. Real estate brokers say residential property sales are driving the numbers; commercial investors continue to shun the country.

Many of the properties are within sight of recent suicide bombings or just a few miles from the war zone in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, where Israeli attack helicopters and tanks battle Palestinian fighters. Even so, in the last year the pace of violence inside Israel has subsided enough to lure well-heeled Jews from around the word.

"There was a feeling that things were bad in Israel, that people didn't come here because it wasn't safe," said Corrinne Davar, who has been in the real estate business in Jerusalem for 22 years. But she said that after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in the United States, "people are saying, '. . . It's unsafe everywhere -- why not buy in Israel?' "

"Some people said we were crazy," confessed Marvin Schick, 70, a retired New York professor who recently purchased a three-bedroom apartment with no view in a prestigious neighborhood for "more than $500,000." Schick, a Modern Orthodox Jew, described his primary motivation for buying property in Jerusalem: "To reinforce the notion of identifying with Israel."

Like most of the foreigners purchasing high-end properties, Schick has no plans to move to Israel. He'll visit on Jewish holidays and lend the apartment to family members and friends touring Israel, he said.

"They come for Sukkot and Passover, meet all their friends, then go back to the good life in the States," Isaac Levy, manager of Ambassador Real Estate, said of his foreign clientele. "Most are religious, Modern Orthodox and they're coming and buying for one reason -- emotion."

While religious motivations run high, property consultant Alan Deco, who deals exclusively with Orthodox clients, said some of his wealthiest buyers also want a new and different status symbol.

"It's social and spiritual," said Deco, 54. "The rich holiday together. They cluster. They want to be walking distance from friends and the synagogue. They're willing to spend $975,000 on a one-bedroom to show they have a trophy flat."

He stood on the balcony of one such apartment, which he recently sold, in David's Residence, a group of 36 limestone-faced apartment houses overlooking the ancient stone walls of the Old City of Jerusalem. A separate set of 120 apartments, David's Village, stretches nearly to the base of the wall. The apartments are some of the fanciest housing in one of the best locations in the city. Almost all are owned by foreigners, he said. And they are empty most of the year.

"At night you look out and see two lights -- it's a ghost town," Deco said.

"Most of these people have at least one more expensive home in the U.S., maybe two," said Ishai Levy, the Talbiye Residence project manager, who broke ground on the pink limestone apartment house one week before the Sept. 11 attacks in the United States. "This is like their place in the Hamptons."

Unlike most houses in the Hamptons, however, apartments in the Talbiye Residence come with air-conditioned, concrete-reinforced safe rooms built to withstand bomb blasts, missile attacks and chemical and biological agents.

For many wealthy European Jews, a strong Euro currency and, for French Jews, a rise in anti-Semitism have also increased the interest in Israeli luxury housing, which was decimated during the early years of the Palestinian uprising, or intifada. Prices plunged.

Last year, intrepid buyers looking for cheap deals ventured back into the market, real estate agents said. With the dramatic decline in suicide bombings that occurred at about the same time, the sudden spurt in demand for expensive places in the best neighborhoods collided with a shortage of available properties because of war-driven slowdowns in new construction.

As a result, sellers' prices now match runaway Washington real estate costs. Top-of-the-market apartments are selling for $560 a square foot or more -- equivalent to premium locations in Washington.

When businesswoman Ruth Max recently put her Jerusalem house on the market, the offering prices exceeded $700,000 for the 1,550-square-foot home she and her husband bought and renovated 20 years ago for $200,000.

But it wasn't the price tag that stunned Max. "Every single person who has come to see our house has been religious," she said, noting that her neighborhood is not overwhelmingly Orthodox.

"It was the first time in my involvement with real estate here that someone asked me, 'Where would I put the sukkah?' " said Max, a former Jerusalem resident who now lives in Amsterdam. "I thought he was out of his mind. I'd never dealt with stuff like this."

Across Israel, Orthodox and other observant Jews construct a small hut, a sukkah, in their gardens or on balconies or rooftops during the holiday of Sukkot, which commemorates the 40 years ancient Israelites spent roaming the deserts after their exodus from Egypt. Religious edict demands that no roof or balcony can overhang a kosher sukkah.

Orthodox Jews have become such important buyers of Jerusalem's most expensive properties that builders tailor new construction projects to their special demands.

Multilevel apartment buildings are equipped with "Sabbath elevators" that move continuously on the Jewish Sabbath, beginning at sundown on Friday, so that residents don't have to touch buttons in violation of religious restrictions on the operation of machinery. Kitchens are built with two sinks and include two dishwashers to accommodate kosher cooking requirements. Sinks are installed in the dining room for Sabbath meal hand-washing rituals. Balconies are positioned to allow for Sukkot huts.

In contrast, Tel Aviv real estate agents said their booming luxury market tends to attract secular Jews more interested in traditional vacation amenities, such as swimming pools and proximity to the beach.

"The buyers here are religious because Jerusalem has a strong spiritual flavor," said property consultant Davar. "There isn't another place in the world that is Jerusalem, but Tel Aviv could easily be in the south of Spain."

Researcher Hillary Claussen contributed to this report.

© 2004 The Washington Post Company

Iraqi footballers' fury at Bush

Iraqi footballers' fury at Bush   News @ BBC

Sadir said he wanted the US to withdraw its troops from Iraq Iraq's successful Olympic football team has launched an outspoken attack on US President George W Bush. Midfielder Salih Sadir said the team - which won its group stage in Greece - was angry it had been used in Mr Bush's re-election campaign ads. One accused the US leader of committing "many crimes", and another said he would be fighting US troops if not for Athens. Their comments were made in a US Sports Illustrated magazine interview. Salih Sadir said he was angry at Mr Bush's campaign adverts showing pictures of the Afghan and Iraqi flags with the words: "At this Olympics there will be two more free nations - and two fewer terrorist regimes". What is freedom when I go to the stadium and there are shootings on the road? Coach Adnan Hamad "Iraq as a team does not want Mr Bush to use us for the presidential campaign," said the Iraqi player. "He can find another way to advertise himself." He called for US troops to be withdrawn from Iraq. "We don't wish for the presence of the Americans in our country. We want them to go away." Another star player, 22-year-old Ahmed Manajid, asked: "How will [Mr Bush] meet his god having slaughtered so many men and women? He has committed so many crimes." 'Best people' Mr Manajid, from Falluja - a hotbed of armed opposition to the US-led occupation in Iraq - said if he was not playing football "for sure" he would be fighting as part of the resistance. "I want to defend my home. If a stranger invades America and the people resist, does that mean they are terrorists?" he asked. "Everyone [in Falluja] has been labelled a terrorist. These are all lies. Falluja people are some of the best people in Iraq." Iraq's Olympic pride The team said they were glad Iraq's former Olympic committee head Uday Hussein - Saddam Hussein's notorious son killed by US forces after the invasion - was no longer in charge. But coach Adnan Hamad said he was concerned with what the Bush administration was doing in Iraq. "My problems are not with the American people. They are with what America has done in Iraq: destroy everything," he said. "The American army has killed so many people in Iraq. What is freedom when I go to the stadium and there are shootings on the road?" Mr Bush's spokesman defended the war on Iraq and the campaign adverts. "The ad simply talks about President Bush's optimism and how democracy has triumphed over terror," he was quoted by the Press Association as saying. "Twenty-five million people in Iraq are free as a result of the actions of the coalition."

Ancient Gods, Rituals and Spirit-Mediumship - Part 2

Tanki: Divining Youth

Among some of these seemingly ordinary working class men or women, manifestations of their gods and deities appear from time to time, and turn a few into their chosen messengers.  These people are known as mediums, more commonly known among the Hokkien people as tanki (jitong in Mandarin Chinese).  The tanki is an ordinary person like you and me.  Being a tanki may or may not be a full-time profession.  Indeed many tankis hold an ordinary day job like we do, and perform their sacred duties in the evenings, over the weekends, on festive occasions or whenever the gods summon them. 

Every tanki, literally meaning “divining youth”, has his story of how the duty came to him.  Some have received messages from the gods in their dreams after suffering from a major illness or accident.  Others were suddenly possessed by a supernatural being one day, spoke in strange tongues they weren’t known to be able to speak and then convinced the people surrounding them that the gods have possessed them.  

Medium in trance - manifestation of the Monkey God

Medium representing Lian Hua San Tai Zhi

The Medium in trance

Medium representing Er Bo Yeh praying to the Jade Emperor's altar

Most tend to describe the experience as something he hadn’t chosen – in fact many say that they have tried to “escape” from this onerous calling but fate nevertheless got hold of them and convinced them that they were the one chosen by the gods as an intermediary between the gods and their followers on Earth.  However, there are some anthropologists argue that mediumship often bestow the individual with enormous, often unquestioned authority over the worshippers, not to mention benefits from donations and material offerings from the followers. 

Even then, some studies show that whatever a tanki receives is out of free-will from the followers, at their absolute discretion.  It is often said that many tankis live a rather ordinary life.  They get enough to live, but hardly enough to lead a comfortable, wealthy existence.  In fact, any tanki who leads an enviable lifestyle would have raised many suspicions about his character and piety. 

Tankis hold court sometimes in temples, sometimes at their own homes.  Many of them stay in HDB (Singapore government public housing) flats, and homes of the popular tankis often resemble mini temples or shrines, full of visiting worshippers over the weekends.  They act as intermediaries with the gods or deities.  They help to cure illnesses, or advise on careers, family problems, relationship issues, or in fact any human problem under the sun. 

In short, the tankis provide help to the local community in resolving problems that neither the family, the mainstream organized religion, health authorities nor the state can resolve.  Bizarre as it seems in a modern society like Singapore, folk Taoism, complete with mediums and the supernatural, flourishes.  Ironically, with rising incomes and standard of living, this ancient religion is given an added impetus as its followers have more to spare for their beliefs.

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Ceremonial Setting

On the birthdays of major deities or gods, larger scale temple festivals may be held during which the tankis become possessed by the deities and elaborate self-mutilation rites to demonstrate the power of the deities.   

A huge oblong-shaped tentage would be set up on an open ground, with elaborate altars installed within.  The actual geographic direction of altars aren’t very important in Singapore. Given the acute land constraints, festival organizers make do with what they have though relative positions within every festival tent tend to be fairly similar.  I would use the example of a festival setup at Sago Street, Chinatown, Singapore, in late 2003 as an illustration. 

At the eastern end of the tentage, an altar was set up dedeicated to the Jade Emperor (Yu Wang Da Di), supreme god of the Taoist world, and key heavenly gods, with food offerings laid out in front of the statues or paintings of these gods.     

A festival tent, with the altar of the Jade Emperor ahead

At the western end would be an altar to the key patron deity of the temple together with other heavenly gods and deities.  Statues of deities from other “friendly” temples are often brought to a festival as guests of honour (- one reason why many temples have two statues of the same god – one to be at the temple at all times and the other to serve as “ambassador”), and the mediums of these temples sometimes turn up to be possessed by their respective “visiting” deities.   

Table of feast for the Gods of Hell, at the entrance to the shrine to Hell

Shrine of Hell

The Five Heavenly Protector Gods & their Horses

Horse belonging to a Protector God

To the north of the western altar is an altar dedicated to the Protector Gods - “Wu Yin Jiang Jun” (Generals of Five Camps)  – military corps of the Taoist Heaven.  Apart from an equally elaborate altar with statues, paintings and offerings, one would expect to see paper statues of the horses representing the Marshals of the North, South, East, West and Central, well fed with pots of grass on the ground.   

The most interesting shrine lies to the south of the western altar.  This is the shrine of the hell deities – normally a self-contained room of its own, sometimes extended into a further room within the tentage.  The entrance to the shrine is sometimes shaped like a gateway into hell.  It is normally dark, with gory painting of the Taoist hell.  Images of gods, deities are painted with luminous colours which glow in the dark, which makes the shrine even more eerie.  Mats and umbrellas are sometimes laid out on the ground – visitors beware! Do not step onto these for you may just step onto the invisible visitors from hell! 

It is important that the concept of hell for the Taoist world is very different from that of Christianity.  The latter regard hell as a dead end, where evildoers are condemned for all eternity.  Taoism, however, sees hell as a kind of boot-camp where most people would go through in the almost eternal cycle of birth, life, death and reincarnation.  The good guys would pass through the 10 “courts” of hell and its 18 levels with little or no suffering while the evildoers would get their due, such as being burned by fire, boiled in hot water, tongues cut, etc – images of these processes are duly represented in the many paintings hung in the shrine of hell.  In addition, the God of Hell, in Taoism, is not evil Saturn, but a mere administrator who have to perform the task of reforming the evildoers.

  The Ritual

The Ancient Gods, Rituals and Spirit-Mediumship of Folk Taoism in Modern Singapore

It's the start of the Month of the Hungry Ghosts!  The Taoists believe that, for the next one month, the Gates to Hell are open and the spirits are out for fun!

 

I have completed a new website about folk Taoism in Singapore and the incredibly bizarre and fascinating blood sacrifical and spirit possession rituals.  Yes, Taoist mediums and priests who believe and behave that they are possessed by gods and deities.   All these in modern Singapore.  I have in this website articles about these as well as numerous photos taken at various Taoist festivals in the last one year.

 

Have fun!  Here's the URL:   http://weecheng.com/singapore/tanki/index.htm

 

 

TANKI   |

The Ancient Gods, Rituals and Spirit-Mediumship of Folk Taoism in Modern Singapore

---

Tan Wee Cheng, Singapore   weecheng.com

   

In one of the most modern cities of the world, an ancient faith flourishes, with rituals involving gods, spirits, and their human mediums who glorify the powers of the gods through personal sacrifices.  This website contains a collection of articles and photos about one of the world's most unusual cultural and anthropological phenomena in a surprisingly modern and ordinary setting.

Why This Site: Statement of Objectives 

Background:   Folk Taoism in Southeast Asia   |  Divining Youth  |  Ceremonial Setting  |  The Ritual  |  The Sacrifice

Encounters:   Festival of the Nine Emperor Gods October 2003  |  Chuan Gong Dian - Chinatown 18 October 2003  |  Lin Hoon Din 凌云殿 - Geylang Lorong 27A June 2004  |  Xia Sheng Gong - Lengkok Bahru June 2004  |  Long Chuan Dian - Alexandra Rd 25 June 2004

Discussions:   Future of Folk Taoism in Singapore  |  Taoism as one of the Symbols of Indigenous Chinese Culture in Singapore  |  Awareness of Folk Taoism Among Singaporeans  |  Folk Taoism for Tourism

Links:   Chinese Deities Web - Calendar of Events Here |  SPI: Close Encounters with Tangki  |  Lorong Koo Chye Shen Hong Temple Association   |  Gods, Ghosts, & Ancestors: Folk Religion in a Taiwanese Village  |  A Medium's First Trance

Mailing Lists:  SingaporeHeritage - Devoted to the rich heritage of Singapore  |  Taoism-Singapore - Taoism and traditional ceremonies in Singapore - Calendar of Events Here

Acknowledgements: A million thanks to them: Andi, Jave Wu, Victor Yue, Eng Teck 

 
===================

Folk Taoism in Southeast Asia

Chinese are commonly described as Buddhists or Taoists, although there are large number of Chinese Muslims and Christians in China as well as in the Overseas Chinese communities scattered across Southeast Asia and the rest of the world.  What is seldom said is that in the deep southern Chinese countryside as well as in Taiwan and Overseas Chinese communities worldwide, an ancient and mysterious faith prevails. 

That mysterious religion is the worship of spirits, gods and lesser deities, whose commands are transmitted through ordinary humans who act as messengers of gods.  This is variously called Shamanism, Shenism (after Shen, or gods in the Chinese language), Tankism (after Tanki, or mediums, in the Hokkien dialect, also known as Southern Fujian /Taiwanese dialect), spirit-mediumship or traditional Chinese religion. 

As I wrote in my essay on the Festival of the Nine Emperor Gods:

Southern China was once the land of the Min and Yue tribal kingdoms, whose inhabitants were experts in magic, spells, and the art of communication with the dead, spirits and Gods.  Fujian and Guangdong were incorporated into the Chinese Empire during the Qin and Han dynasties 2000 years ago, and in the following millennia, its indigenous culture merged with that of the Taoist Han Chinese settlers from the North.  The result is a hybrid, exuberant mix with a rich spiritual as well as architectural and gastronomical heritage that is evident in southern China today. 

With the emigration of the Fujian (or Hokkien) and Guangdong (also known as Cantonese) peoples to Southeast Asia, Taiwan and the rest of the world during the last five hundred years, these mystical manifestation of communication between the man and the mysterious divine spread with the Diaspora to other parts of the world. 

Here in Singapore, where the early peasant immigrants from southern China found themselves in a foreign urban environment, they recreated temples devoted to their gods back at home in order to find solace and security in a new environment.  Since then, these beliefs have continued by the descendants of these immigrants and prospered even though many of the traditions have disappeared in the old homeland through social upheaval, revolutions and wars; and that Singapore itself has become a prosperous, modern and technologically driven city-state which is also an international financial centre.

  Divining Youth

Tolerance can lead to prosperity

Tolerance can lead to prosperity

By Marcus Noland    Financial Times

Published: August 18 2004 21:04 | Last updated: August 18 2004 21:04

 

Tolerance pays. This is the lesson emerging from a growing body of evidence on public attitudes toward globalisation. The responses to the 2003 Pew Global Attitudes Project, in which 38,000 people in 44 countries were interviewed, and in smaller-scale surveys done by other groups, make fascinating reading. Public support for globalisation was highest in Senegal, where90 per cent of respondents indicated that it was a good thing, while disapproval was greatest in Jordan where64 per cent registered opposition. Eighty-nine per cent of Turks thought local culture should be protected from foreign influences, while less than half of the French felt this way.

 

 

More specifically, when asked whether they supported free markets, 95 per cent of the Vietnamese interviewed said Yes, with even more favouring stronger cross-border business ties. So much for creating the New Socialist Man.

 

At the other end of the scale, only48 per cent of Jordanians approved of growing cross-border commerce. Nearly two-thirds of Czech respondents were willing to see large inefficient factories close, but more than three-quarters of the Indians surveyed opposed such moves. Attitudes toward international economic institutions - the International Monetary Fund, World Bank, and World Trade Organisation - varied widely as well: five out of six residents of Côte d'Ivoire thought the multinational institutions were a beneficial influence, while two out of three Argentines believed they had a negative influence, perhaps with reason.

 

Statistically, the patterns of these responses are correlated with economic performance. That relationship is unsurprising in and of itself. What is intriguing is that the pattern of responses is independently correlated with economic performance even when adjusted for fundamentals such as the level of per capita income and inflation. The responses seem to be telling us something beyond what can be explained by the fundamentals.

 

Perhaps the most surprising result is that attitudes towards homosexuality are highly correlated with economically relevant phenomena such as the ability to attract foreign investment and the level of sovereign bond ratings. The cross-national divergence on this issue is enormous, with 83 per cent of Czechs and Germans supporting societal acceptance of homosexuality, more than 90 per cent of the respondents in six countries opposing it, and three governments - China, Egypt and Tanzania - not even permitting the question to be asked.

 

The statistical correlation between tolerance of homosexuality and better than expected economic performance echoes similar results obtained previously for US cities, where a higher homosexual share of the population is associated with more high-technology activity. The question is why?

 

In both the US and international data, there is a correlation between acceptance of homosexuality and other characteristics such as acceptance of immigrants and the absence of a desire to protect traditional culture, which in turn are correlated with improved economic performance. It could be that attitudes toward homosexuality are part of a broader package of social attitudes towards difference and change, especially change that comes from non-traditional sources.

 

For potential investors, domestic or foreign, particular attitudes ought therefore to sound alarms. Public xenophobia may find expression in a mild form through unhelpful official behaviour and, in the extreme, through attacks on foreign-affiliated facilities or staff. Examples range from the occasional vandalism of McDonald's outlets around the world or last year's rioting that destroyed $50m in Thai-owned property in Cambodia to targeted attacks on foreigners, which have claimed more than 30 lives in Saudi Arabia this year.

 

For home-grown entrepreneurs, xenophobia should not be an issue (except, perhaps, for members of ethnic minority groups), but pervasive distrust of difference may inhibit innovators whose behaviour deviates from social norms.

 

What would happen, therefore, if the people of countries such as India, Jordan and Russia - which score poorly on the surveys' globalisation questions - adopted more tolerant attitudes? The effect could be substantial: growth in foreign investment, improvements in borrowing terms, and increased risk-taking by local entrepreneurs.

 

Popular attitudes have real effects on economic outcomes. Tolerance affects the terms on which globalisation proceeds. The question is how it can be fostered.

 

The writer is senior fellow at the Institute for International Economics

Soaraway price of the high life

Soaraway price of the high life

By Martin Baker

Financial Times

 

Published: August 17 2004 19:03 | Last updated: August 17 2004 19:03

 

Earlier this year Douglas McWilliams, chief executive of the Centre for Economics and Business Research, a London-based consultancy, dealt a body blow to the self-esteem of the nation's wealthy.

 

 

“Millionaires will be 10 a penny by 2010,” he said. “I think we will no longer be able to class millionaires as rich people. They won't be that unusual any more.”

 

He has a point. Soaring property prices have made millionaires of many people even if their assets are not exactly liquid.

 

How different life was in 1954. Then, £1m ($1.8m) would buy you much more than a house. A contemporary song by Cole Porter, Who wants to be a millionaire?, which was a hit in 1956 when Frank Sinatra sang it in the film High Society, helpfully lists the essential trappings of the super rich - including the country estate, the yacht and even the marble swimming pool.

 

“Who wants to have flashy flunkies everywhere?” crooned Ol' Blue Eyes. The answer is anybody with enough money. In 1954 the services of a senior resident butler would have cost you £850 per annum.

 

According to Jane Urquhart of Greycoats Placements, which supplies trained staff to the wealthy, that same butler would now cost £30,000. “But the seriously rich will also have a cook, head housekeeper and two under-housekeepers, a head gardener, a chauffeur, at least one nanny and a PA,” says Ms Urquhart. “Accommodation would also be included.” In 1954 the annual wage bill for that lot would be £2,300. Ms Urquhart estimates that in today's market their employer would be looking at £200,000.

 

Frank Sinatra went on to claim that he did not want a “supersonic plane”, but now no self-respecting millionaire would be without an executive jet. How else can you visit all your homes around the world?

 

In 1954 magnates such as Howard Hughes would have owned a Marketeer - a large, fast ex-bomber that would have been kitted out with a bed, bar and stewardesses. It was a favourite of Hollywood moguls and a snip at £71,500. Today's equivalent, the Gulfstream V with its television sets and gold taps in the bathrooms, is considerably more at £26m.

 

As for a luxury yacht, in 50 years the price tag has jumped from £10,000 to £500,000 for a 48ft sloopbuilt by Camper & Nicholson, the old English boat manufacturers.

 

Of course, if you are Roman Abramovich, the Russian billionaire, and own a 355ft floating palace with its own dry-cleaning facility, it is going to cost a lot more.

 

It is clear from these figures that a millionaire's lifestyle has suffered from hyper-inflation. In fact, every item associated with luxury living has increased in price at an astonishing rate. To put it in proportion, take a look at the price increases of more mundane goods. In 1954 a pound of butter would have been the equivalent of 10 pence, a pound of coffee 15p and a dozen eggs 23p. Over the past 50 years, according to the National Statistics Office, the retail price of these “essentials” has increased by 1,700 per cent. But the cost of a millionaire's lifestyle has increased by 101,113 per cent.

 

There are no exemptions from luxury hyper-inflation. Take, for example, couture clothes. Back in 1954, Coco Chanel showed her first collection for 15 years and was the talk of Paris. Then, about £380 would buy a bespoke outfit. Now, £15,000 would be a conservative estimate for a couture piece. The annual cost of a bespoke wardrobe, comprising six evening dresses and three day suits for two seasonshas gone up from £6,840 to £2.7m.

 

Perhaps not surprisingly, jewellery has also been subject to dizzying increases in value. Nicholas Wainright, managing director Boodle & Dunthorne, the 200-year-old jeweller, estimates that prices have increased 25-fold in the past 50 years. So the equivalent of their current £204,000 Waterfall Suite - a necklace, earrings and bracelet set with 42 carats of diamonds - would have cost £8,160 in 1954.

 

Jewellery and fashion are all very well, but what about the more serious matter of culture? Any millionaire worth their salt will have an old master tucked away, but they really should have bought it 50 years ago.

 

In 1954 Christie's, the auctioneer, sold a number of classic paintings at prices that would make today'sart collectors weep with envy.

 

Rembrandt's Portrait Of Old Man In Red Cloak And Black Hat went under the hammer for £71, while Caravaggio's John The Baptist was sold for £27. In 2000, Rembrandt's Portrait Of A Lady Aged 62 sold at auction for £20.5m, while last year a self-portrait by the same artist went for £4.4m. Not a bad return on a 50-year investment.

 

Another mark of taste is a collection of fine wines. Today, wine is seen as an investment but, according to Paul Milroy of Berry Brothers & Rudd, customers in 1954 bought wines with the aim of drinking them rather than selling them on later. “Back then wealthy customers would have been buying mainly first growth Bordeaux and vintage ports, as well as champagnes such as Bollinger, Louis Roederer and Perrier-Jout,” he says. “Two famously good years were 1947 and 1949, so that's what would have been snapped up. But these were bought more for consumption than investment.” A bottle of top-flight 1949 Bordeaux would have cost the equivalent of £1.24 in the 1950s, so stocking a cellar with 3,000 bottles would have meant splashing out £3,720. It is a different story today.

 

“There are clients who spend anything from half a million to £6m a year,” Mr Milroy explains. “But around £100,000 would get you a well-stocked cellar [3,000 bottles] with a good selection of Burgundies, Rhônes and Bordeaux, and New World wines from top South African and Californian producers.”

 

For those who want to enjoy the high life in 2004, the bad news does not stop at luxury goods. Millionaire hyper-inflation has also affected the financial assets that underpin an indulgent lifestyle.

 

Take, for example, shares. In 1954 stockbrokers would recommend that only about 15 per cent of a millionaire's net wealth should be invested in stocks and government bonds. So what would the equivalent of that £150,000 be now? “It's a little bit tricky to say exactly, since the modern indices we use to measure the markets didn't exist then,” says David Schwartz, a stock market historian. “But if we retro-fit the index, we can say that the FTSE All-Share index would have been at 35.59 in January 1954. Right now it stands at 2231.71. That's an increase of more than 60 times.” But, generally speaking, a 1954 millionaire had less of an appetite for shares - possibly because the market was something of an insiders' club comprising a mix of private school old boys and barrow traders. Instead, they preferred to sink their money in land.

 

A 1954 millionaire would invest in tenanted land, as this would combine income with capital growth. “They would be looking to buy at about £41 an acre,” says Desmond Hampton, a property expert at Cluttons, an independent partnership of chartered surveyors. “A millionaire-sized estate would be about 17,500 acres - it would be a parcel of land on the same sort of scale as the Duke of Norfolk's estate in the 1950s. That would have cost you a fraction under £720,500.” If our modern-day millionaire wanted to buy an estate of the equivalent size, it would cost in excess of £30m.

 

But the real body blow for today's millionaire comes from home ownership. Fifty years ago, a wealthy family would have had a London home, a weekend house in the country and a villa in the south of France. But they could easily afford to.

 

“In 1954, £10,000 would have bought a townhouse in Kensington or Knightsbridge,” says Simon Tyler, managing director of Chase de Vere Mortgage Management. “Now you'd need £10m to get an equivalent house.” That is a home with at least one bathroom per bedroom, off-street parking, a swimming pool, home cinema and a continuous-surveillance security system. But that is only an entry-level millionaire home. Lakshmi Mittal, a steel magnate, reportedly paid Bernie Ecclestone, the chief of Formula One motor racing, £70m for a 15-bedroom mansion in Kensington Palace Gardens.

 

There is no better news on the weekend residence. “I have data going back 50 years that show some startling increases,” says Mr Tyler. “Let's say your millionaire bought a mansion in Surrey, which has seen some of the sharpest growth outside London. That would have cost around £5,000 back then.” Today it would set you back £1m.

 

As for the place in the south of France, in 1954 a villa with six bedrooms and a pool in Cap d'Antibes would have been yours for £3,000. Now you would get no change from £1.25m.

 

So what is the new million? If you add up the cost of the trappings of wealth, plus those all-important assets, the final figure is an eye-popping £102,113,000.

 

A version of this article appears in the September issue of The London Magazine

James Boyle: The Apple of forbidden knowledge

 

James Boyle: The Apple of forbidden knowledge

By James Boyle    Financial Times

Published: August 12 2004 13:27 | Last updated: August 12 2004 13:27

 

You could tell it was a bizarre feud by the statement Apple issued, one strangely at odds with the Palo Alto Zen-chic the company normally projects. “We are stunned that RealNetworks has adopted the tactics and ethics of a hacker to break into the iPod, and we are investigating the implications of their actions under the DMCA [Digital Millennium Copyright Act] and other laws.” What vile thing had RealNetworks done? They had developed a program called Harmony that would allow iPod owners to buy songs from Real’s Music Store and play them on their own iPods. That’s it. So why all the outrage? It turns out that this little controversy has a lot to teach us about the new economy.

 

Apple iPods can be used to store all kinds of material, from word processing documents to MP3 files. If you want to use these popular digital music players to download copy-protected music, though, you have only one source: Apple’s iTunes service, which offers songs at 99 cents a pop in the US, 79p in the UK. If you try to download copy-protected material from any other service, the iPod will refuse to play it. That has been the case until now. Real’s actions would mean that consumers had two sources of copy-protected music for their iPods. Presumably all the virtues of competition, including improved variety and lowered prices, would follow. iPod owners would be happy. But Apple was not.

 

The first lesson of the story is how strangely people use the metaphors of tangible property in new economy disputes. How exactly had Real “broken into” the iPod? It hadn’t broken into my iPod, which is after all my iPod. If I want to use Real’s service to download music to my own device, where’s the breaking and entering? What Real had done was make the iPod “interoperable” with another format. If Boyle’s word processing program can convert Microsoft Word files into Boyle’s format, allowing Word users to switch programs, am I “breaking into Word”? Well, Microsoft might think so, but most of us do not. So leaving aside the legal claim for a moment, where is the ethical foul? Apple was saying (and apparently believed) that Real had broken into something different from my iPod or your iPod. They had broken into the idea of an iPod. (I imagine a small, Platonic white rectangle, presumably imbued with the spirit of Steve Jobs.) Their true sin was trying to understand the iPod so that they could make it do things that Apple did not want it to do. As an ethical matter, is figuring out how things work, in order to compete with the original manufacturers, breaking and entering? In the strange netherland between hardware and software, device and product, the answer is often a morally heartfelt “yes!” I would stress “morally heartfelt”. It is true manufacturers want to make lots of money, and would rather not have competitors. Bob Young of Red Hat claims “every business person wakes up in the morning and says ‘how can I become a monopolist?!’” Beyond that, though, innovators actually come to believe that they have the moral right to control the uses of their goods after they are sold. This isn’t your iPod, it’s Apple’s iPod. Yet even if they believe this, we don’t have to agree.

 

In the material world, when a razor manufacturer claims that a generic razor blade maker is “stealing my customers” by making compatible blades, we simply laugh. The “hacking” there consists of looking at the razor and manufacturing a blade that will fit. But when information about compatibility is inscribed in binary code and silicon circuits, rather than the moulded plastic of a razor cartridge, our moral intuitions are a little less confident. And all kinds of bad policy can flourish in that area of moral uncertainty.

 

This leads us to the law. Surely Apple’s legal claim is as baseless as their moral one? Probably, but it is a closer call than you would think. And that is where the iPod war provides its second new economy lesson. In a competitive market, Apple would choose whether to make the iPod an open platform, able to work with everyone’s music service, or to try to keep it closed, hoping to extract more money by using consumers’ loyalty to the hardware to drive them to the tied music service. If they attempted to keep it closed, competitors would try to make compatible products, acting like the manufacturers of generic razor blades, or printer cartridges. The war would be fought out on the hardware (and software) level, with the manufacturer of the platform constantly seeking to make the competing products incompatible, to badmouth their quality, and to use “fear, uncertainty and doubt” to stop consumers switching. (Apple’s actual words were: “When we update our iPod software from time to time, it is highly likely that Real’s Harmony technology will cease to work with current and future iPods.”) Meanwhile the competitors would race to untangle the knots as fast as the platform manufacturer could tie them. If the consumers got irritated enough they could give up their sunk costs, and switch to another product altogether All of this seems fine, even if it represents the kind of socially wasteful arms race that led critics of capitalism to prophesy its inevitable doom. Competition is good, and competition will often require interoperability.

 

But thanks to some rules passed to protect digital “content” (such as copyrighted songs and software) the constant arms race over interoperability now has a new legal dimension. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act and equivalent laws worldwide were supposed to allow copyright owners to protect their content with state-backed digital fences that it would be illegal to cut. They were not supposed to make interoperability illegal, still less to give device manufacturers a monopoly over tied products, but that is exactly how they are being used. Manufacturers of printers are claiming that generic ink cartridges violate the DMCA. Makers of garage door openers portray generic replacements as “pirates” of their copyrighted codes. And now we have Apple claiming that RealNetworks is engaged in a little digital breaking and entering. In each case the argument equates the actions required to make one machine or program work with another to the actions required to break into an encrypted music file. For a lot of reasons this is a very bad legal argument. Will it be recognised as such?

 

There the answer is less certain. In the United States, there are exceptions for reverse engineering, but the European copyright directive bobbled the issue badly, and some of the efforts at national implementation have the same problem. In the legitimate attempt to protect an existing legal monopoly over copyrighted content, these “technological measure” provisions run the risk of giving device and software manufacturers an entirely new legal monopoly over tied products, undercutting the EU’s software directive and its competition policy in the process. Pity the poor razor manufacturers. Stuck in the analogue world, they will still have to compete to make a living, unable to make claims that the generic sellers are “breaking into our razors”.

 

Though this is an entirely unnecessary, legally created mess there is one nicely ironic note. About 20 years ago, a stylish technology company with a clearly superior hardware and software system had to choose whether to make its hardware platform open, and sell more of its superior software, or whether to make it closed, and tie the two tightly together. It chose closed. Its name: Apple. Its market share, now? About 5 per cent. Of course, back then competition was legal. One wishes that the new generation of copyright laws made it clearer that it still is.

 

James Boyle is William Neal Reynolds Professor of Law at Duke Law School, a board member of Creative Commons and the co-founder of the Center for the Study of the Public Domain

 

McGreevey Reveals Shift in Views on Gays

McGreevey Reveals Shift in Views on Gays

Sunday, August 15, 2004

By Robin Wallace - Fox News Editorial

New Jersey politics are notoriously nasty, bizarre and corrupt, but not even the most seasoned or cynical operative or observer was prepared for Gov. Jim McGreevey’s admission on Thursday that he was gay, had cheated on his wife with a man, and was resigning.

It was encouraging and heartening, however, that my fellow New Jerseyans — even while reeling from the shock of it all — were able to separate the issue of McGreevey's sexual orientation from the political and practical realities that compelled our governor's resignation.

But the tolerance and sympathy expressed by McGreevey's constituents is a relatively new cultural development. The governor grew up and charted his career in a world in which being true to his sexual identity and fulfilling his professional ambitions were largely mutually exclusive goals. One can imagine the pain and suffering that could have been spared had that not been the case.

Reading between the lines of all the news reports Friday, it seems a fair assumption that the invaluable political clout the governor was willing to expend — much to the frustration and bafflement of his advisers — to keep the man said to have been his lover in a series of lucrative, well-connected jobs in both the public and private sector, may not have been acts of support for a romantic partner but payoffs to a blackmailer. Golan Cipel’s lack of qualifications and work ethic eventually exhausted even McGreevey's considerable connections, apparently forcing Cipel to seek the easy money — reportedly through a $5 million “sexual harassment” lawsuit.

As of Friday afternoon, the suit had not been filed. It has already been branded extortion, and given the facts of the relationship known so far, it's hard to imagine the suit will be viewed as anything more than that. (The governor took a preemptive strike and outed himself ahead of the inevitable.)

But one cannot be blackmailed unless one has a secret to hide, and hidden secrets denote shame. Again, had McGreevey not felt compelled — by his blue-collar upbringing, by his Roman Catholicism, by social and familial expectations, by the incontrovertible requirements of a political career of the times — to deny and repress his natural inclinations, he might not have had anything to hide. At least not in his personal life.

But corruption and criminality are different matters entirely, and McGreevey’s administration has been embroiled in investigations and scandals completely unrelated to his startling personal revelations. Close associates and members of his administration have been indicted, and McGreevey himself is part of a federal investigation. There was much speculation in New Jersey that McGreevey would not be able to hold on to his office until the end of his term, and that New Jersey Democrats would block him from seeking a second term and replace him on the ticket in 2005.

For this reason, McGreevey is an imperfect poster boy for the injustice of intolerance destroying a career. His career was in serious trouble already. In fact, it could be argued that his admission on Thursday deflected attention from the cloud of corruption hanging over his administration; for sure, it engendered public sympathy and support that had been seriously lacking in his approval ratings.

No one is suggesting that anyone, let alone McGreevey, would choose this particular path out of office. But for a while Thursday, his adversaries were teetering on a tightrope of political correctness, tempering their usual brutal attacks on the governor so as not to appear anti-gay.

But instead of shielding his questionable public life with his sensational private one, the governor handed politicians across the country the opportunity to become gay rights activists. And for the most part, they made the most of it.

He didn’t resign because he was gay, his critics said. He resigned because his administration was crumbling. We don’t care that he’s gay; we care that he’s corrupt. On the same day that the Supreme Court of California invalidated the same-sex marriages that had been performed in San Francisco over the winter, the embattled governor of New Jersey had politicians across the country tripping over themselves to express and confirm their tolerance and understanding.

For McGreevey, the efforts of his adversaries to distance themselves from the gay issue will likely result only in more vigorous attempts to find criminal evidence against his administration that is unrelated to the sex scandal.

That politicians, when cornered, were loath to say or do anything that could be construed as anti-gay, however, also reveals an interesting shift in our culture: Young gays today are coming of age and into professional prominence in a world radically different from the one that produced McGreevey.

For gays of McGreevey’s generation and those who came before, society had the option of accepting and benefiting from their talent, work and contributions without accepting them. We have always had gay school teachers and soldiers, politicians and sports heroes. We've also had the option to pretend otherwise. Society no longer has this option, because today’s generation of gays will not stand to be forced to choose between their personal happiness and their professional ambitions.

The McGreevey episode is just further evidence of the fallacy of the assumptions we make about who “is” and who is not, and the pain and pointlessness of the personal choices he had to make.

We’re either going to have to accept openly gay men and women as our elected officials, school teachers, soldiers, sports heroes, business leaders and parents, or we’re going to have to deal with the consequences of doing without them in those areas.

And if we ever deplete the ranks of our best and brightest by that much, we won't be left with much.

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Imperfect Unions

Imperfect Unions

New York Times Editorial on the Scandal Surrounding the Resignation of New Jersey Governor

By JONATHAN RAUCH

Published: August 15, 2004

ARTICLE TOOLS E-Mail This Article Printer-Friendly Format Most E-Mailed Articles READERS' OPINIONS Forum: Join a Discussion on Op-Ed Contributors TIMES NEWS TRACKER   Topics Alerts Homosexuality Governors (US) McGreevey, James E Rauch, Jonathan

ashington — What happened to Governor McGreevey - that is, James E. McGreevey, the Democratic governor of New Jersey, who announced his resignation on Thursday because he was secretly gay and had "shamefully" conducted an extramarital affair - was strange, to say the least. Pundits wondered whether there would be broader ramifications for gay civil rights, same-sex marriage or American politics. I doubt it. A rich and seemingly unique concatenation of homosexuality, adultery, suspicions of political featherbedding, and rumors of extortion and sexual harassment made the McGreevey scandal look like an aberration.

What happened to Mr. McGreevey - the man, not the governor - was not strange at all. It was familiar to almost every gay American of Mr. McGreevey's generation. Marriage, not homosexuality, lies at the heart of it.

Mr. McGreevey is 47. I am 44. We have in common being among the early members of the post-Stonewall generation. We came of age in the 1970's, when overt expressions of anti-gay animus were becoming unacceptable in polite company. The worst of official repression was past. Vice-squad raids and scandalous arrests and federal witch hunts were not central fears in our lives. There was still plenty of unofficial discrimination and ugly and ignorant rhetoric, and we all feared the low-grade terrorism known as gay-bashing. But on the whole we were free, as no previous generation had been, to get on with our lives.

There was one thing, however, we knew we could never aspire to do, at least not as homosexuals. We could not marry.

By that I mean not just that gay couples could not marry. Self-acknowledged gay people - coupled or single, adult or adolescent, open or closeted - also could not hope to marry. The very concept of same-sex marriage had yet to surface in public debate. We grew up taking for granted that to be homosexual was to be alienated and isolated, not just for now but for life, from the culture of marriage and all the blessings it brings.

Social-science research has established beyond reasonable doubt that marriage, on average, makes people healthier, happier and financially better off. More than that, however, the prospect of marriage shapes our lives from the first crush, the first date, the first kiss. Even for people who do not eventually choose to marry, the prospect of marriage provides a destination for love and the expectation of a stable home in a welcoming community.

The gay-marriage debate is often conducted as if the whole issue were providing spousal health insurance and Social Security survivors' benefits for existing same-sex couples. All of that matters, but more important, and often overlooked, is the way in which alienation from marriage twists and damages gay souls. In my own case, I did not understand and acknowledge my homosexuality until well into adulthood, but I somehow understood even as a young boy that I would probably never marry. (Children understand marriage long before they understand sex or sexuality.) I coped by struggling for years to suppress every sexual and romantic urge. I convinced myself that I could never love anybody, until the strain of denial became too much to bear.

Others coped differently. Some threw themselves into rebellion against marriage and the bourgeois norms it seemed to represent. Some, to their credit, built firmly coupled gay lives without the social support and investment that marriage brings. And some, determined to lead "normal" lives (meaning, largely, married lives), married.

At what point Mr. McGreevey realized and acknowledged he was gay I don't know. I do know that many gay husbands begin by denying and end by deceiving. Perhaps that was so in his case.

Opponents of same-sex marriage sometimes insist that gays can marry. Marriage, they say, isn't all about sex. It can be about an abstinent, selfless love. Well, as Benjamin Franklin said, where there is marriage without love there will be love without marriage. I'm always startled when some of the same people who say that gays are too promiscuous and irresponsible to marry turn around and urge us into marriages that practically beg to end in adultery and recklessness.

For most human beings, the urge to find and marry one's other half is elemental. It is central to what most people regard as the good life. Gay people's lives are damaged when that aspiration is quashed, of course. Mr. McGreevey can probably attest to that. But so are the lives of spouses, of children. Mr. McGreevey can probably attest to that, too.

The country is still making up its mind about same-sex marriage. Massachusetts has it. Most states have pre-emptively banned it. On Thursday, the California Supreme Court invalidated about 4,000 same-sex marriages performed by the city of San Francisco, but gay-marriage advocates hope that this is a temporary setback. Through litigation now working its way through the system, California's highest court may yet overturn the state's gay-marriage ban.

The McGreevey debacle suggests why all Americans, gay and straight alike, have a stake in universalizing marriage. The greatest promise of same-sex marriage is not the tangible improvement it may bring to today's committed gay couples, but its potential to reinforce the message that marriage is the gold standard for human relationships: that adults and children and gays and straights and society and souls all flourish best when love, sex and marriage go together. Nothing will ever make the discovery of homosexual longings easy for a young person. But homosexuality need not mean growing up, as Jim McGreevey and I and many others did, torn between marriage and love.

Jonathan Rauch is the author of "Gay Marriage: Why It Is Good for Gays, Good for Straights and Good for America."

---

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As Repression Lifts, More Iranians Change Their Sex

New York Times:

 

August 2, 2004

As Repression Lifts, More Iranians Change Their Sex

By NAZILA FATHI

EHRAN, Aug. 1 - Everything about Amir appears masculine: his broad chest, muscled arms, the dark full beard and deep voice. But, in fact, Amir was a woman until four years ago, when, at the age of 25, he underwent the first of a series of operations that would change his life.

Since then he has had 20 surgical procedures and expects another 4. And Amir, who as a woman was married twice to men - his second husband helped with the transition and remains a good friend - is now engaged to marry a woman.

"I love my life and I'm happy, as long as no one knows about my past identity," said Amir, who asked that his full name not be published. "No one has been more helpful than the judge, who was a cleric and issued the permit for my operation."

After decades of repression, the Islamic government is recognizing that some people want to change their sex, and allowing them to have operations and obtain new birth certificates.

Before the Islamic Revolution in 1979, there was no particular policy regarding transsexuals. Iranians with the inclination, means and connections could obtain the necessary medical treatment and new identity documents. The new religious government, however, classed transsexuals and transvestites with gays and lesbians, who were condemned by Islam and faced the punishment of lashing under Iran's penal code.

But these days, Iran's Muslim clerics, who dominate the judiciary, are considerably better informed about transsexuality. Some clerics now even recommend sex-change operations to those who are troubled about their gender. The issue was discussed at a conference in Tehran in June that drew officials from other Persian Gulf countries.

One cleric, Muhammad Mehdi Kariminia, is writing his thesis on transsexuality at the religious seminary of Qum.

"All the clerics and researchers at the seminary encouraged me to work on the subject," he said in an interview. "They said that my research can help change the social stigma attached to these people and clarify religious decrees on the matter."

One early campaigner for transsexual rights is Maryam Hatoon Molkara, who was formerly a man known as Fereydoon. Before the revolution, under the shah, he had longed to become a woman but could not afford surgery. Furthermore, he wanted religious guidance. In 1978, he wrote to Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who was to become the leader of the revolution but was still in exile, explaining his situation.

The ayatollah replied that his case was different from that of a homosexual and therefore he had his blessing.

However, the revolution intervened and men like himself or those who had already changed their sex were harassed, even jailed and tortured. "They made me stop wearing women's clothes, which I had worn for many years and was used to," Ms. Molkara recalled. "It was like torture for me. They even made me take hormones to look like a man.''

It took him eight years after the revolution, in 1986, to get government permission to proceed with surgery. But he could not afford the surgery and did not have it until 1997, when he underwent a sex-change operation in Bangkok. The Iranian government covered the expenses. Four years ago, Ms. Molkara established an organization to help those with gender-identity problems. Co-founders include Ali Razini, head of the Special Court of Clergy, a branch of the judiciary that only deals with clerics, and Zahra Shojai, Iran's vice president for women's affairs. An Islamic philanthropic group known as the Imam Khomeini Charity Foundation has agreed to provide loans equivalent to about $1,200 to help pay for sex-change surgery.

To obtain legal permission for sex-change operations and new birth certificates, applicants must provide medical proof of gender-identity disorder. The process can take years.

It also involves considerable expense. In Tehran, the initial male-to-female surgery runs about $4,000. So far, Amir has spent $12,000 on medical procedures.

The people who pursue this route come from many different backgrounds.

Dr. Bahram Mir-djalali, one of Tehran's few sex-reassignment surgeons, said one of his patients had been a member of the Revolutionary Guards who served five years in the war with Iraq. His operation was paid for by a Muslim cleric he had worked for as a secretary. After the surgery, the man-turned-woman divorced, and then married the cleric.

"When she came to see me years later, she was wearing a chador," the doctor recalled, referring to the black head-to-toe garb worn by religious women. "She took off the chador, and there was no sign of the bearded man I had operated on."

But many who cannot deal with the legal and financial obstacles to a surgical solution have to deal with humiliation in their daily lives.

One 27-year-old man said he ran away from home at the age of 14 because he did not dare tell his family of his urge to become a woman. He wants to be known as Susan and wears women's clothes at home but only emerges dressed that way at night. He says the constant need for secrecy has left him severely depressed, and he has attempted suicide several times.

"I have suffered all my life,'' he said, constantly adjusting his long curly hair to cover his sideburns. "People treat me as though I have come from Mars. Women pull my hair and laugh at me on the street. Most men I am attracted to reject me."

In a society where men enjoy a higher status than women, the stigma against any man who wants to be a woman is especially strong.

"They compliment a girl who behaves and dresses like a man as a strong person, but they look down at us and despise us," said Assal, who was disowned by her father for having surgery to become a woman.

Dr. Mir-djalali said he had to fight on many fronts to help more than 200 patients who had consulted him in the 12 years he had performed sex-change operations. Even if Iran's Muslim clerics are more understanding now of transsexuals' needs, others lag behind.

"We have a problem even deciding at which hospital to do the surgery because society considers these people deviant," he said. "Hospital officials have reacted negatively because they say other patients do not like the looks of my patients."

He said one patient's father pulled a knife on him in his office, and threatened to kill him if he touched his son. "What we really need to help these people,'' Dr. Mir-djalali said, "is a serious cultural campaign."

From Swatow to Chinatown to Olympic glory/ Not too late to reward Howe Liang

If you want to look for a Singapore hero, go to National Stadium gym...

 

To: "[singaporeheritage]"
From: Chua Ai Lin
Date: Fri, 13 Aug 2004 14:42:31 +0800
Subject: [singaporeheritage] ST: From Swatow to Chinatown to Olympic glory/ Not too late to
reward Howe Liang

From Swatow to Chinatown to Olympic glory

Tay Cheng Khoon
5 August 2004
Straits Times
(c) 2004 Singapore Press Holdings Limited

But Singapore's only Olympic medallist wants to be left alone in his gym

EVERY four years, we drag Tan Howe Liang out of his National Stadium gym, wanting him to relive that glorious September evening when he won a silver weightlifting medal at the 1960 Rome Olympics.

But Howe Liang's now 71 years old and just wants to be left alone with his bars and benches. Whatever memories he has, he wants to keep them for himself.

Some say he is bitter that his Olympian efforts 44 years ago have not been appreciated by a nation lacking sporting heroes, by a nation now prepared to fork out $1 million for an Olympic gold and half that for a silver.

He has received no pot of gold for his medal, just a job which he thankfully still has despite silver hairs.

Howe Liang will not breathe a controversial word, and not because he is a gym supervisor. He is a gentleman. He even finds it tough turning away friends from the media whom he has known for years. He offers to take us to a coffee shop next door, he even suggests giving some lifting tips to a portly scribe to help lose weight.

'But, please lah, don't interview, no pictures. What for? So many young sportsmen for you to interview. I'm old already,' he says.

All the while, he is smiling. Howe Liang looks good. In fact, he looks even better than when I last saw him some five years ago.

So we left and headed for the archives. And there, the faded clippings, the sepia-ravaged newspaper articles, tell the story about how a boy from Swatow, China, and then Chinatown Singapore, kept his word to a father he hardly knew.

'One day,' he had promised, 'I will be the strongest man in the world.' No one knew why he made that vow. His Teochew dad had died in a Sago Lane death-house when he was 14.

His mother returned to Swatow, leaving the young boy under the care of his granduncle and grandaunt.

Howe Liang's Olympic initiation came in 1956, in the middle of a bitterly cold Melbourne night, when he blacked out midway through the competition, never to complete his three lifts.

But he put the setback aside and won the 1958 Asian Games and the Commonwealth Games. And in 1959, he completed a hat-trick of titles at the South-east Asian Peninsular Games.

But it was the Olympics that Howe Liang was craving for, his only theatre to deliver that promise he had made.

The Chinatown boy was actually tipped to win the lightweight category in Rome.

Two targets were set for him: Get the gold and the clean-and-jerk world record which he had set during the Commonwealth Games.

In June 1959, he had also bettered Russian Viktor Bushuyev's world lightweight record of 390kg when he totalled 403kg at an exhibition at the old New World Park.

However, this could not be ratified as it was not achieved during competition.

So Singapore was hoping that Howe Liang would use the bigger Olympics platform to set the records again.

But everything went wrong for him in Rome, save his courage and determination.

First, the judges were unfriendly. Three of his lifts were deemed 'incomplete', though Singapore officials thought otherwise.

One protest was upheld, another turned down. The third ruling could not be appealed as all three judges had voted red.

The weightlifting competition then comprised three lifts: press, snatch and clean-and-jerk.

Bushuyev tore apart the record books. He equalled the mark of 125kg in the press, raised it to 122.5kg in the snatch and matched the jerk's 150kg.

His 397.5-kg total was a new world record.

After the first two lifts, Howe Liang and his managers realised the gold was gone. But with lifts of 115kg (press) and 110kg (snatch), he was sure of a bronze.

Iraq's Abdul Wahid Aziz was also ahead of the Singaporean with 117.5kg and 115 kg respectively.

Howe Liang had a 90-minute wait before the jerk. While hanging around, he suddenly whispered to manager Chua Tian Teck in Malay that his legs were hurting. Chua and

Malayan lifter Chung Kum Weng then helped him to the changing room.

Chua sought advice from American weightlifters Bob Haufman and Johnny Terpak. Two doctors and a nurse were summoned and they started massaging him.

There was only an hour left to show time.

Terpak and one of the doctors suggested that he be taken to the Games Village hospital and have the thighs bandaged. That would mean quitting the competition - for the second Olympics.

Howe Liang cried and asked Chua not to do that.

Both prayed. Recalled Chua: 'He was deeply troubled. But half an hour to go before he had to appear on stage, a miracle happened. While he was lying down, he felt the
cramp leaving him.'

Chua and Chung helped him to sit up on the bench. Then they watched as Howe Liang stood up slowly.

'Boleh,' he told them.

Howe Liang failed his first attempt at 150kg. Disgusted, he turned towards Chua and asked what was needed to beat Wahid: 155kg.

As Chua said: 'That would mean breaking the Olympic record of 150.'

Howe Liang did it. His total tied Wahid's 380kg but the Singaporean won the silver on lighter body weight.

But the 'wayang' was still not over.

During the prize-giving ceremony, Games organisers hoisted the Japanese flag.

Then his flight home arrived a day earlier, the telegram officials sent from Rome not reaching anyone over the weekend. So the wild welcome back never materialised. Howe Liang was feted at the Istana by the then-head of state Yusof Ishak and later awarded the Meritorious Service Medal.

It is almost 50 years since that September day in Rome.

It may be argued that it is perhaps a little late to reward him financially. But what about this: You know that little gym at the National Stadium where the champ still works out daily? Why not call it the Tan Howe Liang Gym?

The Ministry of Community Development and Sports should consider it.

---

ST FORUM
AUG 13, 2004
Not too late to reward Howe Liang

I READ Tay Cheng Koon's nostalgic reminiscences on Tan Howe Liang in 'From Swatow to Chinatown to Olympic glory' (ST, Aug 5) with mixed feelings of pride and sadness.

That, after all these years, we are still just paying homage to Howe Liang - a household name by now - in words rather than in deed does not speak well of a nation that has gone out of its way to encourage sports excellence.

Howe Liang's 'tragedy' - for want of a better word - was to be at the wrong place at the wrong time. Empathising with the man is easy and costs nothing. But there is nothing to stop us from rewarding, albeit belatedly, a true sportsman who has become, in a sense, the nation's conscience.

The suggestion to name the gymnasium at the National Stadium after Howe Liang is indeed a noble gesture that the Singapore Sports Council (SSC) should consider seriously. I am sure he would appreciate the recognition and honour that come with it.

It pains me to read that, at 71, Howe Liang still needs to be on SSC's payroll as a gym assistant to make ends meet. One would have thought that the country that so revered his accomplishment in Rome in 1960 would have made this quite unnecessary, notwithstanding his wish to be close to the sport.

Cheng Koon felt that it might be too late to reward the Olympic silver medalist monetarily. This is like saying: Too bad, old chap, we have millions of dollars for those who want to be like you, but you don't qualify because you are from another time. I wonder how he is taking it.

Let me hasten to add that it's nobody's fault, least his, that Howe Liang did not get his dues. The more important question now is whether we are magnanimous enough to do what should have been the right thing to do more than 40 years ago.

It's not too late to reward him retrospectively for he is indeed one of a kind, and his achievement, though pale by today's standards, was a dream come true for a man who had but one aim: to be the strongest man in the world.

Let's show the man from Swatow that the Singapore of today has a big heart, not only for the young who dare to dream the Olympic dream but also for the 'giants' whose shoulders they must stand on to realise that dream.

LEE SECK KAY

Copyright @ 2004 Singapore Press Holdings. All rights reserved.

Can Philip Yeo reinvent Singapore as a hothouse of innovation?

Face value

Singapore's man with a plan

Aug 12th 2004
From The Economist print edition


Can Philip Yeo reinvent Singapore as a hothouse of innovation?

SINGAPORE, one of the first Asian economies to be called a tiger, is
roaring again. In the second quarter of this year its GDP was 12.5% higher
than in the same period in 2003?when, admittedly, SARS took its toll on an
already lacklustre economy. The government is now forecasting growth this
year of up to 9%, perhaps second only to China in Asia. Much of this growth
is due to manufacturing exports, above all of
pharmaceuticals?second-quarter output of which was 51% higher than a year
earlier. Drug-making is the latest industry to blossom thanks to the
country's unique cocktail of state planning and capitalism?though some no
longer blossom as they once did (see article).

In the past decade, the city-state has turned itself into one of the
world's leading pill producers, helped by strong intellectual property
laws, an educated workforce and lengthy corporate-tax breaks. Most of the
world's leading drug firms make products in Singapore for global
consumption. Revenues of $7 billion are expected from biomedicine this
year?some 8% of its total manufacturing revenues?and its all-powerful
government has ambitious plans to generate $12 billion from the sector by
2010. If that happens, it will ease the pain as jobs in electronics and
petrochemicals move to China and other lower-cost neighbours.

The man who is trying to bring about this transformation is Philip Yeo,
head of A*Star, a government agency in charge of co-ordinating Singapore's
plunge into biomedicine. He also co-chairs the Economic Development Board
(having chaired it alone between 1986 and 2001), which is in charge of
developing high-value industry in the country. His main challenge is to
turn Singapore into a centre of biomedical innovation, moving upstream from
merely making drugs to inventing and testing them.

Singapore is a long way from the drugmaking centres of America and Europe.
It has little tradition of academic research in biomedicine and few private
investors schooled in the risks of biotech. Yet Mr Yeo is undaunted.
Singapore itself defies economic logic, he says. "We have no markets, no
raw materials. All the industry we've created is illogical. But what choice
do we have?" Indeed, Mr Yeo's own career is a tale of moving up the value
chain, from manufacturing to more lucrative activities. An engineer, Mr Yeo
joined the Ministry of Defence in the 1970s and helped to create what is
now called Singapore Technologies Group, turning a struggling maker of
bullets and rifles for Singapore's army into an international arms
supplier. His interest in electronic warfare led him to the business of
semiconductors, which drove Singapore's economy for much of the 1980s. In
the early 1990s, he spearheaded Singapore's move from what he calls the
"lousy business" of refining crude oil into being a leading producer of
petrochemicals. Singapore's lack of land for the facilities required for
this was no obstacle to Mr Yeo, who spent $4 billion to build Jurong
Island, a 3,200 hectare offshore chemical complex that produced $22
billion-worth of goods in 2003.

In Singapore, it is often hard to tell where government ends and the
private sector begins. Mr Yeo has combined government service with success
as an entrepreneur in electronics and the internet. Above all, he says,
this experience has taught him to learn enough about a field to identify
the best people, then give them the freedom, and the money, to do what
needs to be done.

So he is spending a fortune to attract the best in the biomedicine
business. The government is investing nearly $2 billion to make Singapore a
global centre of excellence in several fields, including cancer and
regenerative medicine. The symbol of this goal is Biopolis, a new
state-of-the-art campus that clusters five public research
institutes?specialising in genomics, nanotech and other cutting-edge
disciplines?together with facilities for big drug firms and biotech
research. Last month, Novartis moved its new research institute for
tropical diseases into Biopolis, attracted to Singapore by its combination
of rich-world facilities and proximity to poor-world afflictions, such as
malaria and dengue. Eli Lilly has also set up a research centre in
Singapore, as have some biotech firms, such as Paradigm Therapeutics, a
British drug-discovery company. Singapore is attracting stem-cell firms
too, in part thanks to its liberal bioethical regulations.



Go get 'em, tiger
But China, Taiwan, Malaysia and other countries in the region are also
laying on mice, money and machines in a bid to strike it rich in biotech.
What Mr Yeo hopes will make Singapore different is its characteristic
long-term planning and focus on the one detail that can make or break an
innovative industry: manpower. Currently, most young Singaporeans aspire to
be engineers rather than biomedical researchers. The government is trying
to change that, with glitzy advertising campaigns and scholarship
programmes. The whole curriculum?from early education to university?is
being revamped to promote study of the life sciences. By 2010, Mr Yeo hopes
to create 1,000 PhD-qualified researchers from Singapore.

Meanwhile, he spends much of his time on the road, visiting biomedical
centres around the world, trying to learn from their mistakes and, above
all, finding talent to lure to Singapore. He has recruited as advisers over
20 of the world's leading researchers, including a couple of Nobel
laureates, and persuaded several top scientists to set up shop in
Singapore, among them Edison Liu, a former top executive of America's
National Cancer Institute, by promising them and their teams ample
long-term resources and the opportunity to fashion a new institute to their
own design. Singapore's authoritarian and traditionally risk-averse culture
can deter some people from living there. Mr Yeo has even devised a
share-a-scientist programme that allows prominent researchers to keep two
labs, one in Singapore and one at home. But will even that be enough to
attract the still greater influx of talent needed to keep the tiger
roaring?



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Yasukuni War Shrine, Tokyo

 

This is the website of the controversial Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo, basically Japan's War Memorial:
http://www.yasukuni.or.jp/english/index.html

 

Asian countries have always expressed unhappiness that the Japanese have never admitted to their crimes during WWII and the repeated visits of Japanese leaders to this shrine which is also dedicated to convicted war criminals. 

 

Whilst I personally accept that Japanese leaders can pay respect to the country's war dead, I find it disturbing that this shrine also honours the wartime leaders that committed so much atrocities across Asia.  My beliefs are reinforced when I visit this website, whose first page carries articles about the country's war dead, as well as shocking statements (attached below) which basically imply that Japan had not committed war crimes and that the Japanese invasion of Asia during WWII was sought after by Asian countries:

"Japan's dream of building a Great East Asia was necessitated by history and it was sought after by the countries of Asia. We cannot overlook the intent of those who wish to tarnish the good name of the noble souls of Yasukuni. When I was a student at the preparatory school for the military academy, our chief of corps often lamented the fact that the good soldiers died early while speaking about his experience on the China front."

 

Tell me, how can we Asians ever trust Japan?

 

We need a new fuel to power the world economy

We need a new fuel to power the world economy

By Wolfgang Reitzle

Financial Times

Published: August 10 2004 19:33 | Last updated: August 10 2004 19:33

 

Global warming and the decline in fossil fuel reserves are eroding one pillar of economic development - energy consumption. The energy needs of increasing populations and growing economies can no longer be met by uncertain supplies of oil. Recently the US, Japan, China and the European Union have focused on hydrogen technology as the most likely mainstay of continued economic development - and for good reason. Hydrogen, the most abundant element in the universe, has excellent properties both as a fuel and as an energy carrier. When combined with a fuel cell, hydrogen offers quiet and highly efficient electricity production for both large and small applications. More significant is that it could pave the way for zero-emission energy everywhere, from our homes to our cars. No single technology offers such broad opportunities.

 

Hydrogen fuel cell technologies are complex. A recent review by the National Academy of Sciences of the US's $1.2bn commitment to the technology contained a number of misgivings about parts of the programme and provoked negative headlines. But the 500-page report's fundamental conclusion was that “hydrogen has the potential for replacing essentially all gasoline and eliminating almost all CO from vehicular emissions over the next 50 years”, and that a research programme aimed at this goal was “important” to the US. It went on to add that hydrogen should be part of a “balanced portfolio of R&D efforts” incorporating further research into all-electric vehicles, hybrids and synthetic fuels. This is a just and valid conclusion. All new technologies will have their part to play as we leave the petrol pump behind - but industry is putting its long-term money on the hydrogen fuel cell.

 

 

Substantial investment by automotive manufacturers, gas companies, including Linde, the energy sector and governments has improved the performance of hydrogen fuel cell vehicles. Following the success of trials in Europe, fuel cell bus services will begin in Beijing next year. Even with existing knowledge, any centrally fuelled commercial fleet could run on hydrogen in the near term. Fuel-cell-powered aircraft, trains, boats, trucks and forklifts are in development. In April, HDW, the shipbuilder, launched the first in a new series of submarines, part-powered by fuel cells.

 

Where does this leave the world's 500m cars? In many countries, the greatest increases in CO emissions come from light vehicles. The number of cars is forecast to increase to more than 2bn by 2030, largely due to growth in Asia. In the US and Japan, initial sales of hybrid cars have demonstrated that there is already consumer demand for green technologies. Governments are right to pursue hydrogen as a potential replacement for car fuel.

 

Critics argue that hydrogen storage and production are not sufficiently developed for fuel cell vehicles to catch on and for these technologies to be economically viable. While hydrogen will have a role in the second half of the century, they argue, significant challenges need to be overcome. This is true - particularly for cars. But raising cost objections to a technology that is still in development makes little sense as the oil price climbs.

 

Never mind interruptions in supply, if oil production is to peak before 2010 - as forecast by the Oil DepletionAnalysis Centre, an independent UK institute - supply pressures will increase exponentially. Feverish acquisition of remaining stocks could unplug the engine that drives the world economy. At the rate we are guzzling, the barrel is not half-full - it is half-empty. If we leave decisions on an alternative to the second half of the century it will be too late. Hydrogen is the most viable replacement.

 

Critics may balk at estimated costs of a hydrogen infrastructure - $12bn to supply 70 per cent of the US population, according to General Motors - yet consider that last month the US House of Representatives proposed a $275bn budget for highways upgrades over the next six years. The initial hydrogen infrastructure would require 20 to 30 years' investment. The gargantuan oil infrastructure - from rigs to petrol stations - may have served us for the last 80 years, but will have cost the world trillions of dollars. The result of the first few billion dollars' research, a fraction of these sums, will allow us to plan the way forward. Every dollar spent on hydrogen will save us many more when the final rush for oil begins. The peak in oil production will be the high water mark for the economy, and the environment - unless we act now.

 

The writer is chief executive officer of Linde, whose gas division is involved in the production, storage and distribution of hydrogen

 

No money, no honey, no more

No money, no honey, no more

 

It's time to say goodbye to the ang moh con artists

 

Monday • August 9, 2004

 

THERE have now been several changes in leadership. Some were considered benign: Others more costly, with the man on the street feeling the pinch.

 

But no one really cares who calls the shots as long as life continues with little disruption.

 

I'm referring, of course, to the high turnover of bars in Boat Quay.

 

For many of my ang moh brethren here, little else matters. As long as there is cheap beer and fast women, or preferably, fast beer and cheap women, why should they care who rules the roost in the Istana?

 

Yes, I'm still about as popular with the Padang party people as Nick Leeson is around the banking authorities.

 

But as we move from one Prime Minister to another, there remains a sizable group of expats who are stuck in a previous era – the Stamford Raffles era where the gins were cool, the sideburns were long and the wives were oblivious.

 

Of course, the governing powers want foreign talent and that kind of ang moh breeds local resentment.

 

So, Singaporeans must endure those patronising "expatriate features" in major newspapers now and again.

 

Smiling expats are churned out, and in their best kindergarten voices, say: "I love Singapore because it is clean. And it is green. And it is safe. And it has nice food. And its people are nice. And its government is nice."

 

For some, this can be translated into: "I'm here because the economy in my country is crap and/or I'm crap at my job. But, I have a degree in bullshit and I'm an A1 conman. I'll be a loyal employee until my own country or China offers more money.

 

"Now, where can I find the seven floors of whores?"

 

Not every expat can be described in this fashion. That would be irresponsible stereotyping.

 

In eight years, I must have met at least four ang mohs who didn't fall into this category.

 

An exaggeration? Last month, I was in Portugal for Euro 2004 and a well-known British TV producer boasted: "I worked in Singapore back in the 90s.

 

"Slept with more women in three months than I have in my entire life."

 

He then described his sexual conquests in graphic detail, which was entertaining because he was a major contender for the ugliest man on the planet.

 

Built like a stick insect, with nostrils that could catch small birds, he had a face like a smacked arse.

 

Which was rather apt because he spent most of his time talking out of it.

 

Sceptics could argue that he was a by-product of the early 90's — a time of expat packages and condos with an SPG in every room.

 

But post-Sars, expats have been super downsized. Employed on local terms, they are more socially aware now, right?

 

Not quite.

 

In Malaysia recently, I encountered an ang moh who was a major contender for the stupidest man on the planet.

 

Standing among Sabah's orangutans, it was difficult to pick him out from the crowd.

 

One ape made funny noises and scratched his anatomy. The other was the orangutan.

 

But this sweaty sotong was no ambassador for foreign talent.

 

After a tiring day of trekking, he said: "Maybe we should get a local to do the walking for us, ha! South-east Asians are so cheap, you can get them to do anything for peanuts."

 

The peanuts reference was interesting because one suspects that, along with bananas, they made up most of his diet.

 

And it's questionable what these folks actually offer to Singaporean society.

 

The network of bored expat housewives seems to be expanding and you have to wonder if Singapore Immigration might not have granted green cards to something more productive.

 

Like a tortoise.

 

A British expat wife once stopped me and said: "I liked what you wrote about maid abuse. It's terrible how many hours they're forced to work."

 

She was right, of course, but she then conceded she employed a maid, even though she had neither a job nor children. And she also required the services of a personal trainer.

 

I was desperate to shout: "What do you need a maid for? Ditch the expensive trainer, mop your own bloody floor and watch those extra pounds on your bum just fall off. It's a revolutionary new diet. It's called housework.

 

"And yes, your bum does look big in those leggings."

 

As we move into the Lee Hsien Loong era, I'm not suggesting western expats give up their maids, condos and trips to Orchard Towers.

 

But certain ang mohs could integrate more into the society that pays for that lifestyle.

 

Undoubtedly, many do appreciate that Singaporeans are not paying them peanuts.

 

But there remains a blur minority whose actions suggest we should be throwing them peanuts.

 

Neil Humphreys writes a humour column for Weekend Today every Saturday 

 

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