Globalaffairs

Issue 20/April -June 2010
By Javier Delgado

Thailand has been severely hit by a deeply-rooted and now overly exposed social clash. The Red-Shirt demands, the camps’ raising factionalism, and the hidden agendas across the divide could be tracked down into the divisive figure of Thaksin Shinawatra.

His rise in 2001 to the premiership polarised Thailand’s society in a way unseen since the end of the absolute monarchy in 1932. By launching an ambitious range of pro-poor policies, Thaksin gained the unconditional support of north Thailand’s rural and working classes. This popularity posed an outright threat to the elites’ grip on the country affairs, what triggered a succession of questionable manoeuvres engineered to kick Thaksin out.

While in office, Thaksin also used his position to boost his numerous businesses, expanding an already vast fortune in a corrupt race that was eventually picked up by the army to oust him.

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Issue 18/December-January 2010
By Paul Pryce

The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK), more commonly known as North Korea, is fixed with many labels on the international stage. It has been accused repeatedly of “…unpredictable behaviour…” (1) and assigned the nickname of the Hermit Kingdom by American policymakers. (2) The imagery is quite clear. The portrayal of North Korea is one of a madman running amok in the international system, acting irrationally with impunity and bordering on absolute and institutionalized insanity.

Yet is there some form of rationality evident in North Korean foreign policy? Is North Korea truly as capricious as the public rhetoric of diplomats and political leaders would have us believe, or are the actions of the regime based on careful calculations about what kinds of interaction would best serve the state’s interests? If there is some rationality to the manner in which North Korea interacts with its environment, the Northeast Asian region, what can be done to reduce tensions and achieve something approaching normalized relations on the Korean peninsula?

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Issue 17/October-November 2009
By Mauricio Palma Gutiérrez

A couple of weeks ago, Kan Guek Evan, alias Comrade Duch, made headlines as he publicly expressed his remorse for the demise of nearly 12,000 people who died while in his charge as the director of the S21-the most infamous prison camp from the Khmer Rouge era. However, the attention his declarations attracted was minor compared to the more recent events surrounding the bringing to justice of those who are accused of committing war crimes, crimes against humanity or genocide.

The issuing of arrest warrants by the International Court or the mandates of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia have attracted the most attention around the world and thereby the majority of the academic discourse on the matter. Notwithstanding, the case of the Tribunal for the Cambodian Genocide is seen as singular and innovative in its legal constitution and regulation of international legal elements for the statutes and the legal bodies established in the budding international legal order. The declarations of this person have become the perfect excuse to conduct an evaluation of the understandings of the action-taking logic of a peculiar legal body in action, within the context of one of the most remembered genocides of the latter half of the twentieth century, perhaps only comparable to the Rwandan genocide.

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Issue 16/August-September 2009
By Roger Casas

More than one year after ethnic riots rocked the city of Lhasa and other Tibetan-populated areas in the People’s Republic of China (PRC), the inter-ethnic violence recently unleashed in Urumqi, capital city of the Xinjiang Autonomous Region, has brought to light the deep ethnic cleavages and tensions showing the social fabric of the country. According to Uyghur (1) exile organizations, violence broke out when the police tried to dissolve by force what had been so far a peaceful demonstration by a Uyghur group; allegedly in reaction to this, Uyghur attacked the police as well as Han (2) shop-owners and passer-bys. Officially, more than 190 people were killed and almost 1,700 injured in the riots. Strain was also high during the following days, when armed bands of Han civilians patrolled the streets of Urumqi vowing retaliation against the Uyghurs -and forcing the regional government to display an impressive police and military force to avoid new clashes.

Accounts of the riots in Urumqi are in any case confuse and contradictory, due partly to the strong control still exercised by the Chinese government over the media: in spite of the relative openness in relation to similar incidents during the past decade, figures of dead and injured, as well as of their ethnic distribution have been issued by government offices with extreme caution, while attempts for an independent verification of the facts have been blocked.

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Issue 15/June-July 2009
by Esteban del Sar

The past May 18, the President of the government of the Democratic Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka, Mahinda Rajapaksa, announced the end of the civil war that devastated the country for 26 years.

This conflict involved, since 1983, on one side the forces of the government (Sinhalese and Buddhist) and on the other the “Tamil Tigers” (LTTE, Liberation Tigers of Eelam Tamil), an insurgent group that fighted for the independence of a part of Sri Lanka’s territory to establish a state of their own (from the Tamil ethnia and practicing Hinduism). It left behind itself between 75/100 thousand victims and nearly 100.000 refugees, according to United Nations.

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Issue 15/June-July 2009
by Javier Delgado

India is often described as the largest democracy in the world. A label widely honoured last April and May, as the 58 per cent of the 714 India’s eligible voters went to the polls in largely peacefully and internationally praised parliamentary elections. Exceeding even the best previsions, the incumbent Congress Party (‘the Congress’) won a remarkable victory at the Lok Sabha, the lower House of the Indian Parliament, taking over 206 of its 543 seats.

In a country as vast as linguistically, ethnically and religiously diverse as is India, transparent, free and fair elections would have signed a significant achievement by its own right. Instead, India has reached further beyond. Although faced with overwhelming challenges as ingrained poverty, widespread corruption, volatile religious tensions and bloody internal uprisings, Indians have elegantly manifested a surprising political sophistication.

The following article breaks down the importance of last Indian elections’ result by scrutinising the poll’s backdrop. Issues like the shameful failure of literally all voting predictions; the key components of the Congress’ success; the dire prospects of the defeated major political forces; as well as the challenges down the road for the ruling coalition articulate this in-depth but affordable outlook on the so called ‘largest democratic election in history’.

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Issue 14/April-May 2009
Rahul Amola

The free, fair, and peaceful elections in Jammu & Kashmir are a significant achievement. Only a few months ago the state was ravaged by protests over the Amarnath land issue; large demonstrations took place in valley matched by equally vociferous and passionate protests in some parts of Jammu. Articulate columnists had suggested what was hitherto unthinkable: India should give up Kashmir, as the issue at hand seemed intractable. Others had argued that the holding elections at this juncture were a meaningless exercise with a guaranteed low voter turn out. The Huriyat conference—having rediscovered it political relevance through the Amarnath land issue—was on ascendance and had given a call for boycotting the elections.

In sharp contrast to what doomsayers had predicted, Jammu and Kashmir (J &K) recorded a heavy turn out in the recently concluded state elections. Nowhere, not even in the separatist stronghold of Srinagar, voter turn out was in single digits. After the usual political deal making, the state is well on its way to a stable political coalition broadly reflecting the aspirations of the voters.

Elections in Jammu and Kashmir are much more than a democratic ritual. In the popular Kashmiri imagination, they have been powerful symbols: of faith and betrayal; of resistance and accommodation; of hope and disillusionment; of confidence and uncertainty.

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Issue 13/ February-March 2009
By Javier Delgado Rivera

At the end of 2008, the over-populated South Asian state of Bangladesh was featured in the worldwide headlines not for natural disasters, but because it held parliamentarian elections. Since 1991, the political scene of this Muslim-dominated country has been cursed by the rampant corruption and confrontational politics that its two main political figures have been waging.

In January 2007, following the five years-term of shamefully tainted rule of the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), the military reacted to the politically motivated soaring violence that plagued the electoral trail by imposing a Caretaker Government (CTG), charged with clearing up the parties of corrupted policy-makers and organising credible elections.

After being postponed on several occasions, the balloon box was eventually placed in the streets last December 29th. Thanks to a strengthened Electoral Commission (EC) and the electoral reforms launched by the CTG, last month elections has been widely recognised as free and fair. They place as democratically elected prime minister the former premier Sheikh Hasina, chairwoman of the Awami Leagy (AL) and daughter of the founding father and first president of the country.

First of all, this article examines how Bangladesh’s dynastical politics – a phenomenon also rooted in Pakistan and India- have shaped the prospects of this nation, followed by an evaluation of the almost two years of debatable military-backed CTG and its significance in the country’s major political parties. The paper finally tables the challenges the newly elected government will inexorably have to face.

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Issue 13/ February-March 2009
By I.M. Mohsin

About two months back, Bombay (Mumbai) experienced extended devastation which held her hostage for over sixty hours. The prevailing pandemonium produced a bitter harvest of massive killings, trauma and terror. Quite naturally every sane person, regardless of his/her nationality, fell outraged, generally, at the loss of life and sufferings of the people. Accordingly the world media and the world itself, including Pakistan, sympathized with the victims. The Indian media, generally, gave gawky coverage to the on-going gory drama round the clock. Ostensibly this would have been prompted by a sense of mission or the wish to score a point in a highly competitive call wherein the stakes for the Indian audience/viewers were particularly high. However, in hindsight it now transpires that the Bolly-wood psyche played its part in dramatizing such a bizarre event.

The media, specially the TV, gave graphic analysis of whatever was going on till the miserable episode ended. Its projection appeared to be concentrating, generally, on three aspects. First, the major focus was on the rich local people along-with the foreigners reveling in the posh hotels and the Kandahar restaurant. They were projected to have been made to suffer the most. To the money-spinners of Mumbai, it appeared to matter little how many poor people had been gunned down by the terrorists. Second, their detailed accounts of the on-going botch, it is believed, may have provided useful information to the assailants. Third, as pointed out by the Daily Mail Reporter on Dec 1, “And some political observers point out an unhelpful tendency by the Indian authorities continually to blame ‘Pakistan elements’ without solid evidence”.(1)

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Issue 12/December-January 2009
By Paul Pryce

Following reports that Kim Jong Il, Dear Leader of the Hermit Kingdom, had suffered a stroke in September, speculation has abound as to the health of the reclusive dictator. The gossip over the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea’s (DPRK) dictator reached a near crescendo after Kim failed to appear at a parade marking the anniversary of North Korea’s founding on September 9th. (1)

Due to the reclusiveness of Kim Jong Il and the general guardedness of that regime, it is still difficult to tell how extreme Kim’s stroke was and whether the man is close to his demise or still has many years left ahead of him. To discuss his health further at this point, without any proper evidence as to Kim Jong Il’s physical condition from his country, would be to simply add further speculation where the potential for gossip has nigh been exhausted.

However, the secrecy surrounding Kim Jong Il’s stroke brings up an interesting notion which deserves to be explored. That is to say, what if Kim Jong Il will suffer another stroke in a short few years? If the Dear Leader is going to die in the very near future, would the DPRK die with him or would someone step forth from the shadows to assume the mantle of dictator?

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