On June 4, 1989, the world watched in horror as the Chinese government’s crackdown on student protestors took a deadly turn. As Chinese soldiers fired their weapons indiscriminately and Chinese tanks rolled through Tiananmen Square, an unknown number of students and soldiers were killed. The Chinese military continued its campaign of terror throughout the summer of 1989, drawing strong international condemnation.
The agreement reached on November 8, 2006 between the ruling seven-party alliance (SPA) and the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) holds the promise of ending the decade-long bloody conflict in Nepal. For years, the Maoist guerrillas have struggled to seize power by force of arms. Their decision to support a political resolution to the current conflict is comparable to the peaceful transformations of the Irish Republican Army and the African National Congress.
ÂThe world is investing too little, according to one prominent economist. ÂThe current situation has its roots in a series of crises over the last decade that were caused by excessive investment, such as the Japanese asset bubble, the crises in Emerging Asia and Latin America, and most recently, the IT bubble. Investment has fallen off sharply since, with only very cautious recovery.Â
It’s 2 a.m. on a Saturday night. I’m in a Singapore police station. No, this story doesn’t involve alcohol. Fortunately neither the death penalty nor caning is likely. The story begins earlier on September 16, when I arrived in Singapore, the site of the annual meetings of the World Bank and IMF, from neighboring Batam, […]
To the bankers and government officials who descended on the city state for the World Bank and International Monetary Fund annual meetings in September, Singapore may have looked like the perfect model of a globalized consumer society. Tellingly, for the first time, the annual meetings took place inside a giant shopping mall. Corporate logos dominated the venue, shoppers went happily about fulfilling their consumer duties, and the delegates were shrouded in a constant cloud of Muzak.
Even before the military ousted Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra on September 19, Thai democracy was in severe crisis. The country had suffered a succession of elected but do-nothing or exceedingly corrupt regimes. The International Monetary Fund (IMF), which for all intents and purposes ran the country with no accountability from 1997 to 2001, further eroded the legitimacy of Thai democracy by imposing a program that brought great hardship to the majority. Thaksin stoked this disaffection with the IMF and the political system to create a majority coalition that allowed him to violate constitutional constraints, infringe on democratic freedoms, and using the state as a mechanism of private capital accumulation.
The military coup in Thailand is the second high-profile collapse of a democracy in the developing world in the last seven years. The first was the coup in Pakistan in October 1999 that brought General Pervez Musharraf to power. There are some disturbing parallels between the two events. Both coups have been popular with the […]
ÂThe war has returned with a vengeance, a Sri Lankan human rights activist sadly told me. After four years of a shaky ceasefire between the government and the armed secessionist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), better known as the Tamil Tigers, the ugliness that characterized the nearly two decades of fighting prior to 2002 is back.
In recent months, East Timor has witnessed a tragic renewal of violence. In May, after the government dismissed about one-third of the country’s soldiers, fighting broke out among the security forces. Gangs of unemployed youth, possibly manipulated by some political leaders, set much of East Timor’s capital of Dili ablaze. Amid warnings of a full-scale conflagration, a temporary Australian-led international peacekeeping force entered the territory to quell the violence. At least 37 people have died since conflict reignited. About 150,000 displaced persons are taking refuge in camps for fear of fresh fighting.
Even though North Korea’s long-range missile turned out to be a dud, Pyongyang has nevertheless achieved its aim by getting the world’s attention. Governments around the world have rushed to condemn Pyongyang. Japan and the United States want to bring the full weight of the United Nations against the country. North Korea, meanwhile, has argued that it would consider comprehensive sanctions an act of war. It’s threatening a nuclear strike if attacked.