Events and Developments around the World

A lot has been going on in the world recently, too much for me to adequately cover myself. In addition to some brief commentary of my own on a few things, I've included a large number of links to news articles and commentaries that I've assembled over the past few weeks and months.

The most recent big international news story is what might reasonably be considered the Egyptian equivalent of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre in Beijing. After numerous threats, the Egyptian military violently cleared the camps of pro-Morsi Muslim Brotherhood protestors in Cairo, resulting in hundreds of deaths. The government made dubious claims that all violence was initiated by the protestors, and a few governments that were particularly hostile to the Muslim Brotherhood made supportive statements, but for the most part outside observers, including the US, condemned the violence, though the strength of their condemnations and the degree of blame they ascribed to the army varied. Notably, Mohamed El-Baradei, the liberal Interim Vice-President and one of the few relatively admirable prominent figures in Egyptian politics, resigned over the massacre. For my part, while I don't agree with anything the Brotherhood represents and I think their overthrow was probably on the whole a good thing, since they were governing not only badly but undemocratically, there is really no excuse for a slaughter on the scale that took place. It is an unfortunate reflection of the extreme polarization of Egyptian society nowadays that many ordinary Egyptians unreservedly supported the crackdown.

Elsewhere in the Mediterranean world, Tunisia has also been facing a political crisis. While theirs has not been as violent or chaotic as Egypt's, we can only hope that they find a resolution (preferably Ennahda agreeing to a technocratic transitional government) before it gets worse. Turkey's government, despite demonstrating an authoritarian streak in its response to protests in Istanbul, has also made positive moves to expand Kurdish rights.

Thanks to various radical Islamic groups in the Middle East, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Nigeria and elsewhere, a lot of people nowadays associate religious extremism exclusively with Islam. Not only does this ignore the long history of Christian extremism (including the rhetoric of some fundamentalists in the US today), it ignores contemporary situations in which Muslims are the victims of violent religious extremism. The most prominent example in the last year has been the massacres of Muslims in Burma (Myanmar) at the hands of Buddhists (while in a few instances individual Muslims helped start the violence, the vast majority of victims have been innocent Muslims, including women and children). Fortunately, a few Burmese have begun to speak out against those who encourage anti-Muslim prejudice. Unfortunately, despite Buddhism's peaceful reputation, Burma isn't the only country with violent Buddhist extremists, as a recent incident in Sri Lanka shows. Actually, I had heard of Buddhist extremists in Sri Lanka many years ago, as around the time I visited the country groups of radical Buddhist monks were among those pushing for a renewal of hostilities against the Tamil Tigers. In that case the victims (not so much the Tigers as the Tamil civilians, though the Sri Lankan military committed human rights violations against captured Tigers as well) were Hindus, though of course there are Hindu extremists as well, such as the ones that perpetrated the horrible massacre of Muslims in India a number of years ago. Also, of course, there are plenty of peaceful and idealistic Muslims, even in places like Yemen.

Going back to Southeast Asia, this article about Myanmar brought back memories of our trip there. When we were in Bagan (aka Pagan), we happened to come across a National League for Democracy office. There were a few guys sitting around outside on motorcycles who told us we could go in and take a look (the office was open but there was no one inside). It seemed obvious to us that the men outside were secret police, just like the ones described in this article. Unfortunately such a massive security apparatus can't be expected to disappear in a short space of time, though one might hope that some individuals would repent of their previous deeds and join in efforts to reform the country. Past misdeeds and their perpetrators are also an issue in Thailand. Unfortunately in this case neither side of the political divide exactly excites admiration, though certainly Thaksin shouldn't be allowed back in power. It's a little easier to favor the opposition in Cambodia, which managed to do fairly well in the country's recent parliamentary elections, despite the obstacles to a free and fair election created by the government of premier/dictator Hun Sen. Of course, if the elections had actually been free and fair, there's a good chance that the opposition (which, though certainly preferable to the authoritarian Hun Sen, does have a regrettable tendency to use nationalist rhetoric) would have won outright.

But while Hun Sen didn't succeed in completely stealing the Cambodian elections, Robert Mugabe seems to have managed to steal the elections in Zimbabwe. In retrospect, his statement on the eve of the election that he would willingly give up power if he lost was not surprising. No doubt he felt he could afford to sound conciliatory, since he knew that thanks to his party's manipulation of the voting rolls and so forth, the election was already in the bag. Many Zimbabweans have already started to resign themselves to more years of mismanagement and stifling of opposition voices.

Returning again to Asia, I've seen numerous interesting articles in the past few weeks on the continent's biggest and most rapidly growing imperialist power, China. Domestically, despite occasional good signs such as this or this, overall there is little indication that the human rights situation will improve in China under Xi Jinping – if anything, it may be getting worse. There is some reason to hope that the environmental situation may start to improve in the country, with positive consequences for the world, but even about this I'm not entirely optimistic. It seems to me that often the Chinese government only takes positive action on environmental and similar issues when it is almost forced to by Chinese public opinion, and in some cases only after things have reached an absurdly extreme state, such as this case of a wealthy Chinese building an artificial mountain complete with villa on top of an apartment building. Even in more open Hong Kong, the Beijing government's recent version of responsiveness sent decidedly mixed messages.

China's influence is being felt more and more outside the country, often for the worse, including in such places as Africa, Myanmar, Nicaragua, and the South China Sea, with the last one being the most obvious case of naked aggression. But China's influence is not limited to economic and military power. For instance, though this very interesting article about how Hollywood went out of its way to avoid offending the Nazis in the period before World War II might seem to have nothing to do with China, I was immediately reminded of some things I have read recently about Hollywood films being cut differently for the China market, often for political reasons. This is a highly disturbing trend.

This in turn brings to mind some of the similarly disturbing trends we've been seeing here in Taiwan. One that I have mentioned before is the cross-strait agreement covering service industries, including for example the film industry and hairdressing. I recently saw a government ad in an MRT station promoting the benefits of the pact, and they mentioned how China has a big market, blah blah, without mentioning that there's no guarantee Taiwanese companies will be able to successfully compete, not to mention issues such as political censorship which will affect such things as Taiwanese films even more than Western ones. But at least as disturbing are some of the recent actions of the KMT government in Taiwan itself. First there have been numerous instances of people having their land confiscated or their houses torn down in the name of "development". In many cases this "development" blatantly favors private developers. For instance, the government may confiscate land for a "public" project (often a clearly unnecessary one), in which the compensation they provide will be less than market value. Then they rezone the land and sell it to private developers at a profit to the government (not to mention individual officials who may pocket some of the proceeds). In several cases, the local government has used heavy handed methods to remove protestors and tear down buildings that they have targeted for these projects. The increasing tendency of the police to be heavy-handed with protestors is another bad trend, as is repression of dissent by methods such as the designations of restricted areas (for instance in the general vicinity of the president), where the police claim the power to check IDs without probable cause and even to arrest people shouting slogans for "endangering public safety". [Update: Here's a news article about a big recent protest against the government's handling of development projects, and here's an animated video on the topic, focusing on a development project in the central part of Taipei.]

In virtually all of these situations, the government's favorite response is that they are acting "according to the law". Now there is no question that operating under rule of law is preferable to a situation where government actions are entirely arbitrary and often in blatant violation of the countries own laws, as is still the case in China (whose constitution actually guarantees many rights that the Chinese people have never enjoyed in practice). But simply following the letter of the law is no excuse for perpetuating obvious injustices. What's more, many laws, in Taiwan and in countries such as the US as well, are written in ways that strongly favor the wealthy, large corporations, or others with power. Legalized theft is still theft. One can only hope that more ordinary people become aware of these issues and not only pressure the government to follow principles of justice rather than the letter of the law, but also put people in power who will make laws that benefit the disadvantaged as much as the powerful.