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ASIARIGHTS JOURNAL | ||||
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Issue 9 Editors Note# This Issue is a carefully selected collection of insights into the background & alternative views on some of the breaking events in the Asia Pacific Region, it departs slightly from the usual format of AsiaRights. Focus on Tibet From the Archives: the 1959 Tibetan Insurgency Most reports on the recent riots in Tibet agree that the unrest began with small protests against Beijing on March 10 in Lhasa. These protests commemorated the 49th anniversary of the failed uprising in March 1959. That year The Far Eastern Economic Review reported on the violence and ensuing Chinese crackdown that led to the Dalai Lama's departure for India. Here are three articles from their archives that detail the events of March 1959, the ensuing crackdown and the tightening of Chinese control in Tibet over the following year. The Economic Story behind Tibet and China Tibetans' rage is directed not at communist rule, but the consumerist threat to their traditions and sacred lands... The view from the day the protests started... An on-the-ground look at what happened in the first days of protest Open letter by Chinese pro-democracy activists,led by writer Wang Lixiong and dissident Liu Xiaobo Twelve Suggestions for Dealing with the Tibetan Situation... FOOD CRISES Three countries in the Asia Pacific Region are on the list of those countries globally facing a food crisis, the top of the list is North Korea: North Korea
In 2007, catastrophic flooding wiped out anywhere from 10 to 25 percent of North Korea's staple corn and rice crops. Earlier this month, the regime announced it was suspending the food ration system in its capital for six months, a sign that leader Kim Jong Il's administration is bracing itself for another crisis. The North regularly produces only about 80 percent of what it consumes, a figure likely to shrink to about 60 percent this year. But that hasn't stopped the regime from alienating the very donors—international aid organizations, the West, and South Korea—that have aided it in years past. Kim has annoyed his counterparts in the West and South Korea with harsh rhetoric and continual delays in nuclear negotiations. Responding to the tough stance of new South Korean President Lee Myung-bak, Kim's party newspaper Rodong Sinmun vowed that North Korea “will be able to live as it wishes without any help from the South.” Maybe that's true for Kim and his associates, but for the 6.5 million North Koreans who live with chronic food insecurity, it spells trouble. Prediction: The current food crisis could be the worst the country has ever seen, according to an unnamed North Korean official quoted in USA Today. That's saying a lot, considering that famine during the 1990s killed an estimated 2 million people. Pakistan
We're used to hearing about political unrest in Pakistan, a nuclear state at the center of the U.S.-led war on terror whose military president last year suspended the judiciary, spawning weeks of protests, and whose charismatic former prime minister was assassinated last December. But when President Pervez Musharraf's party was voted out of power during February's parliamentary elections, the most likely reason was the rising price of wheat. The population had grown increasingly suspicious of government leaders, believing them to be in collusion with mill owners, to be smuggling food commodities into Afghanistan to make bigger profits, and perhaps even to have artificially created shortages to deflect attention away from the assassination of Benazir Bhutto. Half of Pakistan's 160 million people now face food insecurity, with the number of people suffering from food insecurity rising 28 percent during the past year. As average food prices have risen 35 percent in the last year, workers have seen only an 18 percent rise in the minimum wage, prompting government officials to deploy troops to protect food stores and to reinstate a food rationing program for the first time in 20 years. Prediction: The U.N. World Food Program predicts the price of wheat flour may shoot up 40 percent or more in the coming months. Perhaps the worst is yet to come. Indonesia
It's little wonder that protests are growing more frequent as the Indonesian government scrambles to pacify citizens outraged by their inability to afford basic staples: Indonesia depends on imports to meet 70 percent of its food demand. The World Bank estimates that half the population lives in poverty, and Indonesia's poor spend around 70 percent of their income on food. In January, thousands took to the streets to protest soybean prices, resulting in a cut in soybean import taxes. Protests erupted again in March when the media reported that a pregnant mother had starved to death. And in April, students led protests against skyrocketing commodity prices, wearing strips of black tape over their mouths to signify their inability to afford food. The government is well aware of Indonesia's history of price-related political upheavals. A similar crisis in 1965 resulted in the installation of the country's famous dictator Suharto, and another in 1998 led to his ousting. But although the government seems to be in full crisis mode now, the agricultural sector has actually been in decline for decades, with population growth outpacing rice production for at least the last 10 years. And though the amount of capital made available by banks from 2001 to 2006 has more than quadrupled, the proportion of those loans going to the agricultural sector has dropped a quarter. Prediction: An economist with an Indonesian think tank told Agence France Presse, “If in three months there is no action from the government, I really worry there is going to be social unrest.” (Source: Foreign Policy http://www.foreignpolicy.com April 2008)
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A chronology of key events in Tibet's history 12th Century Indian Buddhists come to Tibet to flee Muslim invasion.
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