Filed under: International Affairs
The protests by Tamil demonstrators at Parliament Square this week have had the effect of at last drawing the media’s attention to the appalling plight of Tamil civilians caught behind the lines in the war in Sri Lanka.
By contrast, in January a massive 100,000-strong march in London by the Tamil community demanding a ceasefire attracted virtually no media coverage at all. It is depressing to think that the killing of innocent people in Sri Lanka becomes newsworthy here in the UK only when it results in the disruption of traffic across Westminster Bridge.
Tens of thousands of civilians are now trapped by the fighting between the Sri Lankan army and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, who launched an armed struggle for an independent Tamil homeland more than a quarter of a century ago.
According to the United Nations, over the last two months more than 2,800 civilians have been killed and 7,000 injured. The army continues to shell the small coastal area still held by the Tigers, apparently without regard for the fate of non-combatants.
Only yesterday it was reported that 22 people, including an 18-month-old child, were killed and 283 injured after shells landed near two health facilities, one of them a mother and baby clinic where 500 people were queuing for milk powder and food rations.
If the Sri Lankan government insists on continuing with its military campaign until the LTTE forces have been destroyed, the number of civilian casualties does not bear thinking about.
Perhaps Sri Lankan president Mahinda Rajapakse calculates that a crushing military victory over the Tigers will enhance the standing of his Sri Lanka Freedom Party among the Sinhalese majority population, thus ensuring a comfortable victory in the parliamentary elections due early next year.
If so, this is not only immoral but extraordinarily short-sighted. The military defeat of the Tigers, accomplished at the cost of so much bloodshed, will only pile up yet more bitterness among the Tamil population and inevitably produce further armed conflicts in the future.
Without an immediate ceasefire, followed by a political solution addressing the long history of oppression suffered by the Tamil minority that is the root cause of the war, Sri Lanka will remain locked in bloody conflict for generations to come.
I am pleased to see that David Miliband has called for a ceasefire and I fully support the proposal by Keith Vaz that the crisis should be debated as a matter of urgency by the United Nations Security Council.
The text of a letter I sent to the Sri Lankan High Commissioner on 18 March can be consulted here.
April 9, 2009
In my last blog l suggested that the most important meeting to be held during the G20 London Summit would be the G2 meeting for the first time between US President Barack Obama and the Chinese President Hu Jintao, a point also made by the Economist.
Now, what do you think is uppermost in the minds of the Chinese? Well, it is not the regulation of global finance, particularly hedge funds, as it is for the French and the Germans. It is not a continued fiscal stimulus to the global economy, as it is for the United States and United Kingdom. Nor is it how the G20 can prevent a retreat into protectionism and promote free trade, in circumstances where many economic historians point out the parallels with the 1930s. Nor is it how the IMF will need more money to bail out countries going bust like Iceland, Hungary and Ukraine – since the Chinese have already agreed to help as long as the IMF is reformed and China has more say. Nor is it a clampdown on offshore tax havens, as governments desperately attempt to bring as much revenue as possible back onshore to boost state coffers. Nor is it environmental and development concerns, as the Chinese are starting to pursue a low carbon future and have already become a major source of funds to the developing world.
No, it’s China’s plan to end the dollar era. In China it appears to be a debate between the likes of Zhou Xiaochuan, governor of China’s central bank, who has put forward a credible proposal for a reserve currency to rival the greenback (Financial Times, 24 March), and the likes of Professor Yu Qiao of Tsinghua University discussing how Asia can protect itself from a dollar default (Financial Times, 1 April). The latter response is not surprising given that the Chinese are the largest holder of US dollar financial assets and they express the same anxiety as savers who fear a run on a bank. So it is understandable that China wants to replace its mountain of dollar assets with heaps of other currencies. It would be in China’s interest to have another safe reserve currency and take an active role in the reshaping the world monetary economy.
So while the focus during the next day or so will be on all the other issues mentioned above, in the long run the G20 London summit is going to be remembered as the beginning of a process, possibly taking up to 20-odd years, to replace the greenback and a world economy working for the Yankee dollar.
April 1, 2009
Boris Johnson demonstrated his neo-liberal credentials once again in his latest Daily Telegraph column by suggesting that the slogan for the G20 protestors (or “the G20 mob” as he prefers to call them) should be “What do we want? Free trade!” My response would be “Jobs, justice and climate” – the banner under which tomorrow’s G20 demonstration in London has been organised.
The dual challenge for the G20 Summit, the main thrust of which is a major fiscal stimulus and banking reform to counter the global recession, is to promote economic recovery without further damaging the environment and to limit the impact of the economic crisis on the developing world.
It is crucial that development assistance should be maintained, at a time when aid and Foreign Direct Investment have fallen and the populations of developing states increasingly rely on money transfers from migrants in the developed world.
Also, the developed world must keep to its commitments made at the 2007 Bali conference on climate change, in preparation for the negotiations over the post-Kyoto agreement in Copenhagen at the end of this year – that is, to trim our own lifestyles while allowing poorer countries to develop without strings and conditions, and assisting them with technology transfer and innovative finance.
As Nicholas Stern and his colleagues have recently pointed out (in An outline of the case for a ‘green’ stimulus), in the developed world the best way to boost employment during a recession while at the same time reducing carbon emissions is to invest in new green industries like renewable energy projects. We should put more money into energy efficiency rather than exporting our waste to the developing world.
Examples already exist. In the USA, Obama’s economic package proposes to put billions of dollars into green jobs. A third of China’s recovery programme is in creating green jobs. And Germany is directing 19 per cent of its recovery expenditure into new green industries.
London needs to show that we can do this as well. With just over 50 per cent of humanity now living in cities, which are responsible for 75 per cent of CO2 emissions, we could make a real difference. The commitment of our current Mayor to the ideology of neo-liberalism is of course a major obstacle here.
That said, the main show at the G20 will be Obama’s first meeting with the Chinese premier. At the end of the day, it’s the G2 who will determine what really happens to the world economy.
March 27, 2009
Painting by Lakshmi Shree, India
Asian countries have an important stake in this year’s climate change negotiations and, as a result, a critical part to play in the negotiations.
Climate change is hitting the Asian continent already and big global decisions will be made this year. An agreement to cut greenhouse gases emissions will hopefully exceed what the Kyoto agreement previously negotiated.
The negotiations over the rest of the year will culminate in the new Copenhagen Agreement in Denmark in December 2009 at the 15th conference of the parties (COP 15) on the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).
The main focus, agreed just over a year ago at the 13th conference of the parties in Bali, Indonesia, consist of four building blocks, of which two – “Mitigation” and “Adaptation” – are considered major.
The former denotes actions by the major emitting countries to reduce their emissions and to prevent that future dangerous climate change. The latter seeks to ensure that countries vulnerable to the adverse impacts of climate change are duly assisted with technology and funding to cope. The other two building blocks include technology transfers for both mitigation and adaptation and innovative financing for mitigation and adaptation.
The most immediate concern for Asia is the issue of Adaptation and funding for it. Estimates of global adaptation funding range from tens to hundreds of billions of dollars a year. These funds will need to come from “new and additional” sources not from previously rolled out development assistance.
A number of proposals to raise such significant sums for adaptation already exist, including a proposal by Bangladesh and formally adopted by the least developed countries (LDC) group at the Poznan meeting to charge an “adaptation levy” on all international air passengers. Estimates put the total figure at more than $10 billion a year.
Even if the LDC proposal ultimately falls over, at least it gives the group a strong card to play against other countries. They will need to assure funding in the tens of billions of dollars for adaptation to be acceptable to the LDC group, as well as other vulnerable countries and Africa group.
Asian countries need to use their strong presence within the LDC Group to build bridges and establish a common negotiating position with these other groups of most vulnerable countries, and the African group.
The focus on adaptation, however, should not distract us from also paying attention to the other major building block, mitigation, and formulating a clear strategy on the issue.
At the moment the strategy of countries like Bangladesh, together with the LDC group, is to call for a target temperature rise of “well below two degrees centigrade”. While not avoiding some damage, this will enable the world to survive climate change. Such an ambitious global temperature target is still far from certain as it will require very strong mitigation actions to be undertaken first by the developed countries and then also by some of the major developing countries.
Published in China Daily, 17 March 2009
Mainland Asia has a common source of water – the Tibetan glacier
March 19, 2009
When “mutiny” is mentioned in the UK, the word usually conjures up images like the mutiny on the Bounty on the high seas. On the Indian sub-continent it is usually a reminder of the Sepoy mutiny of 1857, or rather the first war of independence as it is known to Indian nationalists. For Bangladeshis a mutiny sends alarm bells ringing, raising fears that the military have once again taken control of the country. Indeed it was in this vein that l initially responded to the news of the Bangladesh Rifles (border patrol) mutiny, coming as it did so soon after a successfully run election in December 2008 had brought back a civilian government with a huge mandate for change in the country.
As it turned out, this was a mutiny amongst the ranks against their officers over the terms and conditions of their employment, such as food rations and the opportunity to take UN assignments abroad as the army officers do. Nevertheless, the news is grim, with mass graves of officers and often their family members as well found in the heart of Dhaka, more bodies found in the sewerage system and many still missing. The mutiny also reflects the general alienation of public servants, though the lot of the Bangladesh Rifles living in a posh part of Dhaka is considerably better than that of civil servants, who have not risen up with them – nor, come to that, have other sections of the armed forces in the army and the navy. Far from being “underfunded”, as is claimed in the Guardian editorial of 2 March, the military has the best take of public resources in Bangladesh, as is the case in many other Asian countries. So to all intents and purposes it is a very localised conflict between the Bangladesh Rifles rank and file and the army officers. That has still has not stopped rumours going around that the mutiny could be party-political or even Islamist-inspired.
These past few days have been a real test for the civilian government led by Sheikh Hasina’s Awami League. Thankfully the army command has come out in support of the government, though differences exist over the promised amnesty for surrender and consideration of better terms and conditions of employment, while the army will push for the mutineers to be court marshalled – and we all know what the legal penalty for mutiny can be, though of course civilian courts too can impose the death sentence. While conflicts emerge around who has jurisdiction over the mutineers, it will all hang in the balance for a while yet, but a return to the barracks is the least we can expect.
March 2, 2009
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