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Will Asean follow the EU model?

Anil Netto
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Few people are aware that Asean’s ‘Vision 2020’ of economic integration and competitiveness is to be further developed into the concept of an ‘‘Asean Economic Community (AEC)’’. The AEC is seen as the end-goal of economic integration in Asean and it could become a reality by 2015.

So will Asean follow the European Union route? Not quite.

The EU provides for the free movement of goods, services, capital (including investment) and people across the borders of member nations. Aseans seeks to do the same for goods, services, investment, capital and skilled labour. There is no freedom of movement for the poor, including the migrant workers, who have hardly any rights in Asean member countries. There will be no freedom of movement for refugees, either.

In other words, economic integration is to benefit the corporations and its managers and knowledge workers under a regime of neo-liberal policies. Not the lower-income group and the dispossessed.

This is an article I wrote for Inter Press Service last November.

Critics suspect the lack of public consultation over the Charter could be due to the real intention behind the blueprint. They see the Charter as giving a legal personality to Asean, paving the way for a regional economic framework that would facilitate investment and trade in the region, while the interests of ordinary people — workers, the poor and the marginalised — could come a distant second.

They point to the Asean Free Trade Area (AFTA), which will eliminate tariffs on all products in the region, and the Asean Framework Agreement on Services, which aims to achieve a free flow of services, both by 2015. Meanwhile, the Asean Investment Area agreement aims to facilitate a free flow of investment. Full article: Charter for Asean bloc by-passes civil society.

The great tragedy of our time

Anil Netto
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The Beirut-based journalist Robert Fisk once said, “War is the total failure of the human spirit”.

I know what he is trying to say. War brings out the worst in human nature. Bloodbaths. Torture. Senseless killing. Indiscriminate bombing. Rape.

Then again, I am not sure if it is fair to blame the human spirit as a whole. After all, the decision to proceed with war is often made by a small group of political leaders, often after whipping up patriotic fervour and manipulating their populations into throwing their support for war with the help of a compliant or servile media. Often war is fought to seize control of territory for strategic or economic interests. These wars are planned by the rich, while the victims are largely young soldiers who, for the most part, do not know the real reasons they are waging war. Moreover, in recent times, millions of people have protested against war.

Unfortunately, despite the impressive numbers on the streets, notably in 2003, they have not been able to prevent war.

Iraq is the great tragedy of our time. It is crystal clear that the invasion and occupation of Iraq was to further the economic interests of the United States and its allies. In particular, to seize strategic control of the stupendous reserves of oil in West Asia.

Since World War Two, the world has witnessed several great tragedies. Think of the occupation of Palestine and the displacement of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians after the formation of Israel. The misery from this displacement and occupation continues to this day.

From October 1965 to January 1966, the Suharto-regime massacred close to half a million “suspected communists” in Indonesia. The ‘helpful’ Americans supplied up to 5,000 names from a hit list to Indonesian army generals. And from 1975, the year Indonesia invaded East Timor with a nod and a wink from the US and Australian governments, some 200,000 Timorese – a third of the population – were killed.

In the 1960s and 70s, the killing fields of Vietnam and Cambodia claimed millions more lives. For a decade in the 1960s and 70s, the American military’s operations in Vietnam – through a massive land army, tonnes of bombs and chemical agents – resulted in more than 3 million dead Vietnamese. Then, in the early 1970s, the American bombing of Cambodia killed 600,000 people, raising the curtain for the genocidal Khmer Rouge and Pol Pot to emerge.

Thousands more were tortured and killed in Latin America at the hands of US-trained death squads during the Reagan years in particular. All this to pave the way for neo-liberal economic policies in the continent.

Then, in 1994, as the United Nations dithered and debated, between 800,000 to a million people were killed in a bloody genocide in Rwanda.

More recently, the brutal violence between the Sudanese-backed Janjaweed (“devils on horseback”) militia and the land-tilling tribes in Darfur has led to the loss of 400,000 lives.

But perhaps no other nation has suffered more in recent times from war than the people of Iraq. If you take the deaths from the US-driven sanctions imposed in the 1990s and those following the invasion and occupation of Iraq, the figure easily surpasses one million and could well be reaching two million by now. That’s not counting the couple of million others who have been displaced by the war. And that’s also not counting the dead and wounded Iraqis and Iranians – close to a million in all –  during the Iraq-Iran War in the 1980s, when Iraq was backed by the United States.

Indeed, Iraq is the tragedy of our time. A war based on lies and deception whose perpetrators – Bush and Blair and Howard – are nothing less than war criminals.

This is an excerpt from an article I wrote for the Malaysian Herald last October:

If Saddam was the Butcher of Baghdad, what do you call American and British leaders who were responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis since the 1990s? Think of the first Gulf War, when ‘coalition forces’ took part in a turkey shoot of retreating Iraqi soldiers, even burying some of them alive.

And think of the genocidal sanctions imposed on Iraq under a UN blockade, devised and controlled by the United States and Britain, during the 1990s, which were responsible for more than half of million ‘excess deaths’ involving children. Humanitarian relief that should have gone to Iraq was held back.

When the then US Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright was questioned in 1996 about the loss of so many lives, she callously and infamously replied, “I think this is a very hard choice, but the price– we think the price is worth it.”

Think of the invasion and occupation of Iraq, which according to the prestigious British medical journal The Lancet, has resulted in 650,000 excess deaths since 2003. Every day, dozens of people in Iraq continue to be killed. Think of Fallujah (and the assault and capture of the hospital there) and the torture at Abu Ghraib… and the use of horrific weapons such as depleted uranium (DU) only adds to the crimes against humanity. The use of DU has led to a massive increase in birth defects and cancer among Iraqis.

And don’t forget the 20,000 people killed in Afghanistan, in retaliation for the 3,000 killed on Sept 11. So all in, more than one million dead in recent times.

While all this is going on, people are forgetting the daily Palestinian suffering and the rising death toll in the vast prison camp of Gaza at the hands of Israel, a US ally.

The United States never faced a threat of attack from Iraq. Thus, the US-UK invasion of Iraq was outright aggression. Such a crime was referred to during the Nuremberg trials after World War II as “the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole”. And 650,000 dead Iraqis is the result of the accumulated evil unleashed in Iraq by the Anglo-American invasion and occupation of the country.

A classic PR battle

Anil Netto
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You may not have noticed, but a classic PR battle is being waged between the agrichemical industry and anti-paraquat campaigners.

Round One went to the anti-paraquat campaigners, when they succeeded in getting the Malaysian government to ban the dangerous pesticide.

The industry lobby fought back in Round Two and, using the  immense resources at their disposal, succeeded in getting the ban “temporarily lifted” for “further study”.

But the ‘umpire’ was far from neutral. Why did the government cave in to the industry lobby over the interests of pesticide sprayers, many of them women who are exposed to these hazadous substance? Well, that’s the million dollar question. Actually, lots of millions at stake.

The use of pesticides ties in with the Prime Minister Abdullah Badawi’s emphasis on agrobusiness-driven agriculture, which focuses on lucrative cash crops. Such cash crops not only benefit large corporations but they invariably involve the extensive use of pesticides. It is the estate workers and plantation workers – rather than the fat-cat plantation bosses and their agrichemical counterparts – who are the most vulnerable to pesticide use.

This is an article I wrote for IPS last October:

PENANG, Oct 18 (IPS) – The Malaysian government has stunned activists by ‘‘temporarily lifting” a ban on the toxic weed-killer paraquat so that ‘‘an extensive study” can be carried out.

The move, this month, follows an intensive lobbying campaign by the Swiss agrochemical giant, Syngenta, which markets the herbicide under the brand name Gramoxone, and other industry groups. Full article: Return of paraquat – Activists aghast.

Local democracy or local comedy?

Anil Netto
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Few of us are aware that our country had a thriving system of elections to local councils in the 1950s and 1960s.

Back then, we had 373 local authorities – 40 town councils, 37 town boards, 289 local councils and 7 district councils. Out of some 4,200 local councillors (not including those in the Kuala Lumpur municipality), more than 3,000 were elected. George Town, Ipoh and Malacca were the most prominent of these councils and Penang itself had fully elective councils throughout the state, including the mainland. In fact, the first elections in Malaya were held in George Town in 1951 to elect nine councillors.

The government later abolished local government elections. The deathblow came with the enactment of the Local Government Act of 1976, which effectively killed off local council elections and replaced them with a system of appointments that rewards ruling coalition politicians and supporters with positions in local councils.

This is an extract from a piece I wrote for the Malaysian Herald:

I once watched a hilarious comedy performance by Comedy Court’s Indi Nadarajah and Allan Perera, in which one of them played the part of an elected representative chastising a colleague for not coming up with more ‘creative’ ways of justifying junkets abroad. With these creative justifications, there would be no need to worry about being caught for wasting taxpayers’ money on tours that include, say, belly dancing performances along the Nile. Our two comedians concluded that such foreign junkets could easily be explained away by euphemisms such as “understanding cultural practices” (belly dancing!), “studying the landscape” (a golfing holiday), and “examining consumer spending patterns” (a shopping/sightseeing tour)!

Now you might wonder what local council elections have to do with Christianity. Actually, a lot. Grassroots, bottom-up democracy at the local level is very much in line with Catholic Social Teaching (CST). One of the most constant and characteristic directives of CST is the principle of ‘subsidiarity’, which has been present since the first great social encyclical Rerum Novarum. This principle, which implies participation, means that responsibility for decisions should be as close as possible to the grassroots. This would allow people or communities who are most directly affected by decisions or policies to participate in the decision-making process.

“Participation in community life is not only one of the greatest aspirations of the citizen, called to exercise freely and responsibly his civic role with and for others, but is also one of the pillars of all democratic orders and one of the major guarantees of the permanence of the democratic system” (Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, No. 190 ‘Participation and democracy’).

Do we have such participation in community life as part of our democratic system? The only time we have a say is once every five years during the general election, during which there is an intense media and PR campaign to get people to vote in a certain way. But these elections do not cover town councils.

Surely, democracy is more than that. Authentic democracy means public and popular participation in the decision-making process at all levels. Reviving elections to local councils would go a long way in restoring genuine democracy at the local level….

People in the dark over Asean Charter

Anil Netto
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Few people are even aware that a major development is taking place in South-East Asia. As usual, we are in the dark.

Before long, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Asean) will come up with a Charter. In other words, work is in progress towards coming up with a ‘constitution’ for the regional grouping of 10 nations.

Strange, they are talking about forming an Asean Community by 2015 and yet most people don’t have a clue what’s going on.

Here’s an extract from a piece I wrote for the Malaysian Herald last October:

You would think that on a subject of this importance, the people of Southeast Asia would be consulted and a broad range of views solicited. You would think that our newspapers and television and radio programmes would be discussing this week in and week out to discern what exactly should be included in such a Charter. You would think that our political leaders would be asking us for our views and suggestions.

That’s not happening, is it?

Perhaps that’s because the real intention of such a Charter is to come up with a regional framework to facilitate business and trade. Maybe the ordinary people come a distant second. It reminds me of the high-level secrecy surrounding the negotiations for the Free Trade Agreement between Malaysia and the United States… Not good…

Human rights groups and other civil society organisations are now pushing for the inclusion of certain crucial ideas into the Charter.

They want the Charter to be people-centered as opposed to business- or trade-centred. In other words, the interests of people (labour) should take precedence over the interests of corporations (capital).

Bearing in mind there are quite a few authoritarian and undemocratic governments in the region, they also want the Charter to uphold universally accepted democratic and human rights norms.

In particular, these human rights groups are asking the drafters to ensure that human rights as enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and related Conventions are explicitly upheld in the ASEAN Charter. The recognition of these rights should form the overarching framework of the Charter, which should also be gender-sensitive and oriented towards sustainable development.

But all the fine words in the world will be useless if they remain mere words on paper. Activists want the drafters to ensure that effective monitoring and enforcement mechanisms and institutions are provided in the Charter. These mechanisms could include semi-judicial bodies such as a regional human rights commission and judicial bodies such as a regional human rights court.

Watch what’s happening to your EPF money

Anil Netto
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So now the EPF is set to take over RHB.

The first question that comes to mind is, isn’t the EPF biting off more than it can chew? What does it know about managing a bank – or even supervising the management of a bank?

It already has plenty on its plate just managing its own funds – or rather, the public funds of EPF contributors – and ensuring that Malaysians get a decent rate of return on their pension savings.

If the EPF is so confident about managing a bank, perhaps it can tell us how and why it ended up holding a stake in a banking group which is now saddled with RM3.6 billion in debt.

That’s not all. I say, watch your EPF money closely. The EPF could also end up financing infrastructure projects under the so-called Private Finance Initiatives, which will finance RM20 billion worth of projects under the Ninth Malaysia Plan. I say “so-called” because the money is reportedly expected to come from the EPF, which manages public funds, your money – not private money.

This is the piece I wrote for Asia Times Online last October:

PENANG – Malaysia is poised to experiment with the next phase of its privatization process through the initiation of so-called private finance initiatives (PFIs). But the Malaysian version of the internationally recognized investment vehicles will be unique in that it will be the public rather than the private sector that takes the risks. Full article: Malaysia’s new-fangled privatisation fudge

Heroic martyrs spur Latin America in new direction

Anil Netto
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I find Latin America a fascinating continent, though I have never been there. But I am inspired by the stories of the suffering of countless numbers of ordinary people who resisted the authoritarian rule of US-backed right-wing regimes. Many of these regimes served to protect the economic interests of the local (largely white) wealthy elite as well as the economic agenda of US corporations.

Thousands were killed or tortured – brutally – at the hands of death squads during the Reagan years. Others simply disappeared.

Heroic peace- and justice-loving women and men rose to resist such tyranny and oppression through sheer moral force. And their blood soaked the soil of the continent. People like Oscar Romero (El Salvador), Chico Mendes (Brazil), Ita Ford (El Salvador)… It’s a long list. Today, their sacrifices have inspired a new generation to take a more independent political, economic and social path, rooted in their local indigenous cultures, towards justice and peace.

This is an excerpt from a piece I wrote for the Malaysian Herald last October…

When people wonder about the legacy of the late Archbishop Oscar Romero, who was assassinated while celebrating Mass in El Salvador in 1980, they need look no further than what is happening in Latin America today.

Romero fought for the rights of the peasants in El Salvador and was at the forefront of the Church’s struggle on behalf of the poor. This move of his angered the vested business and economic interests in the region.

Political analyst Noam Chomsky has said the United States virtually declared war on the Catholic Church in South America for taking the side of the poor. The United States would have been so much more comfortable if the Church had remained on the side of the rich and the powerful.

So many priests, activists and community leaders were tortured, murdered or simply ‘disappeared’ during the bloody 1970s and 1980s. In November 1989, six leading Jesuit intellectuals and two of their employees were murdered by a US-trained elite battalion.

Shortly before he was murdered in 1980, Romero wrote a letter to President Carter, pleading with him to end US support for state terror. Chomsky recounts how Romero informed the rector of the Jesuit University, Father Ellacuria, that he was prompted by his concern over a “new concept of special warfare, which consists in murderously eliminating every endeavour of the popular organisations under the allegation of Communism or terrorism…”

Carter never responded and instead sent more financial aid.

This tactic of smearing and targeting those who champion the interests of the people, especially the poor, continues to this day around the world.

Minutes before he was murdered, Romero had read from the Gospel of John: “Unless the grain of wheat falls to the earth and dies, it remains only a grain. But if it dies, it bears much fruit ”(Jn. 12:23-26).

Romero’s funeral was the largest demonstration in the history of El Salvador if not Latin America. The government was so nervous that it lobbed bombs into the crowd attending the funeral, killing some 30 people and injuring hundreds.

Today, Romero’s grain is bearing much fruit in Latin America. An entire continent is rising to resist the might of US-sponsored corporate-led globalisation, which promotes neo-liberal economics that widens the gap between the rich and the poor while fabulously enriching a tiny minority.

Dabbling with the dark side

Anil Netto
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It is something of a joke these days to see the US State Department’s Country Reports on Human Rights Practices. Talk about the pot calling the kettle(s) black.

Since the 11 September 2001 attacks, the human rights struggle has suffered a beating at the hands of the United States. In particular, the obnoxious practice of detention without trial has been given a new lease of life.

The United States is holding close to 14,000 prisoners in Iraq, another 500 in Afghanistan and nearly 500 more in Guantanamo Bay. That’s not counting the unknown number of ‘suspected terrorists’ held by the CIA in secret “renditions” at various locations around the world. God knows how many of them have been tortured.

That’s not counting the hundreds of others held without trial by other countries in their own regional ‘wars on terror’. For instance, in Malaysia, there are close to 100 people being detained without trial at the Kamunting Detention Centre – over 50 of whom are alleged JI members and half a dozen alleged KMM members. Neighbouring countries in Asean too are holding alleged terrorists without trial using similar undemocratic laws.

Torture (whether physical or psychological) and detention without trial violate natural law as well as international law. So why are these “civilised” nations doing it – or turning a blind eye to such practices?

This is an excerpt from a piece I wrote for the Malaysian Herald last October, in which I highlighted the illuminating analysis provided by Middle East historian Juan Cole.

Indeed, militarism, manifested in the “war on terror”, is the dark side of neo-liberal globalisation. Many analysts believe the ‘‘war on terror’’ has been hyped up to mask the United States’ rush into the Middle East to take strategic control of crucial oil reserves as global oil production reaches a plateau in the next few decades.

But why is the United States so keen on allowing torture? ‘‘Boys and girls, it is because torture is what provides evidence for large important networks of terrorists where there aren’t really any, or aren’t very many, or aren’t enough to justify 800 military bases and a $500 billion military budget,” says analyst Juan Cole, a professor of Modern Middle East History at the University of Michigan….

“The Bush administration needs the Terror/al-Qaeda bogeyman to justify the military occupation of strategic countries that have or are near to major oil and gas reserves,” says Cole, in his “Informed Comment” blog. “It needs al-Qaeda to justify the lily pad bases in Kyrgyzstan etc. But the problem is that we now know that serious al-Qaeda is probably only a few hundred men now, and at most a few thousand.”

How do you prove to yourself and others a big terror threat that requires a National Security State? You torture people into alleging it, he says. “Global terrorism is being exaggerated and hyped by torture just as the witchcraft scare in Puritan American manufactured witches.”

Dam-it, what’s going on here?

Anil Netto
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It looks like some of our planners are on a dam-building spree, even though the Bakun Dam is expected to produce electricity that the country does not really need for now.

For one thing, Malaysia has a 40 per cent reserve capacity now – even without including the expected excess electricity from Bakun. Even by 2010, we would still have 30 per cent excess capacity. It is only by 2012 that the excess capacity would drop to around 20 per cent.

With all this surplus electricity floating around, it is surprising that they are even thinking of building more dams – and in Sarawak of all places. Imagine, they haven’t figured out what to do with all that electricity from Bakun, and they are talking of newer bigger dams.

Will Tenaga be forced to buy some of that excess electricity – and at what price? 12 sen per unit (the price recently negotiated with Independent Power Producers)? Or 17 sen per unit (the high price agreed when the original Bakun power purchase agreement was signed in 1996)? In the first place, why should Tenaga buy electricity at these prices when its own power generation plants are among the most cost efficient?

Or will the government approve the construction of polluting aluminium smelters in Sarawak to suck up the excess power from Bakun? Now there is even talk of Tenaga taking up a stake in the highly risky business of sending all that excess electricity by submarine cables to the peninsula.

And what about the catchment areas for Bakun? Is there sufficient protection to ensure they are not stripped?

Perhaps we can say thanks to Mahathir for getting us into this mess in the first place. If only we had the vision to use all that money to carry out research into cleaner, less environmentally damaging, alternative sources of energy. If only we could also think of conservation of energy instead of finding new ways of using up electricity that we didn’t really need in the first place. If only…

KUALA LUMPUR, Oct 10 (IPS) – Even before the problem-ridden Bakun Dam in eastern Sarawak can be completed, officials are talking of plans to build two more hydroelectric dams in the state, one of which could make Bakun look puny by comparison.

Concerns over the necessity for such dams, how the surplus electricity will be used, the resettlement of indigenous people, and the ‘development’ of catchment areas appear to be going unheeded.

The turbines powering the 2,400 Mw Bakun Dam along the Balui River could start churning by 2009, but planners are still mulling over what to do with all that excess electricity.

Should they approve a power-guzzling — and extremely polluting — aluminium smelter plant in Sarawak? Or should they channel the excess power to the more industrialised Malaysian peninsula via submarine cables laid on the bed of the South China Sea?

The former option would require the participation of major transnational corporations with questionable benefits for the rural economy of Sarawak.

The option to lay cables, on the other hand, would be expensive and is fraught with technical uncertainties. Full article: Surplus electricity – But bigger dams planned

How the NEP equity targets miss the point

Anil Netto
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So is the bumi share of corporate equity 18.9 per cent? Or 45 per cent?

Here’s something to think about this weekend.

In many ways, the NEP 30 per cent target has become almost sacrosanct. On it hinges much of the political legitimacy of a party like Umno – for persistent underachievement can be used as a clarion call to mobilise support along racial lines

But is share ownership a really meaningful indicator of economic well-being for most ordinary Malaysians?

This is an extract from a piece I wrote for the Malaysian Herald last October.

To measure economic justice by looking merely at equity ownership – i.e. the ownership of shares – among the various communities is misleading

Whether we use the par (nominal) value or market value of shares in our calculations, whether we use only listed firms or all firms, whether we include government-linked companies in the bumiputra share – all of this misses the point.

The truth is only a tiny percentage of Malaysians actually own shares. And among those who do hold shares, a small group of them control the bulk of the shares, while the rest are just small-time investors.

What about the vast majority who do not own shares or unit trusts? Where do they fit in?

In truth, the gap between the rich and the poor in Malaysia – like in the United States and many other countries in the world – has been widening. Even among the bumiputras, the gap between the rich and poor has grown larger.

According to the UNDP Human Development Report 2005, only nine countries have reduced the gap between rich and poor. On the other hand, 80 per cent of the world’s population have experienced an increase in income inequality.

Could this be the result of the headlong rush into full-blown market capitalism and corporate-led globalisation?

This is what we should be looking at.

So we need to look at how we can empower our own marginalized communities and other people displaced by ‘development’ – through education, through skills training, by creating the means for economic self-sufficiency.

At the same time, we need to develop our rooted-ness in our ancient cultures and spiritual traditions and not succumb to the overwhelming culture and materialistic values of the global market. We need to promote food security through organic, sustainable traditional farming – not through large-scale cash crops using pesticides and low-wage plantation labour. (I see the government has ‘temporarily’ lifted its ban on the toxic herbicide, paraquat.)

At the end of the day, full-blown market capitalism of the neo-liberal variety is deeply flawed and leads to wide income disparities. It focuses excessively on material development – to the detriment of the environment, the ancient cultures we share, the traditional wisdom and our rich knowledge-base in farming, in healing, in the spirituality found around Nature (see how Jesus often went to the hills to meditate), which are all sidelined.

We should go beyond statistics and look at the authentic development of the human person and create a climate that empowers communities by providing them the means to become self-sufficient.

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