Two Backgrounders on the Separatist Movement in Aceh

The East-West Center has just published two useful backgrounders on the separatist movement in Aceh in northern Sumatra in Indonesia.

The Free Aceh Movement (GAM): Anatomy of a Separatist Organization, by Kirsten E. Schulze. Policy Studies 2. Washington, DC: East-West Center Washington, 2004. ix, 76 pp. Paper, $5.00.

The province of Aceh is located on the northern tip of the island of Sumatra in the Indonesian archipelago. Since 1976 it has been wracked by conflict between the Free Aceh Movement (Gerakan Aceh Merdeka; GAM), which is seeking to establish an independent state, and the Indonesian security forces seeking to crush this bid. At the heart of the conflict are center/periphery relations and profound Acehnese alienation from Jakarta. This paper aims to provide a detailed ideological and organizational "map" of GAM in order to increase the understanding of its history, motivations, and organizational dynamics. Consequently this paper analyses GAM's ideology, aims, internal structure, recruitment, financing, weapons procurement, and its military capacity. The focus of this study is on the recent past as the fall of Suharto not only allowed the Indonesian government to explore avenues other than force to resolve the Aceh conflict, but also provided GAM with the opportunity to make some changes to its strategy and to transform itself into a genuinely popular movement. It will be argued here that the key to understanding GAM in the post-Suharto era and the movement's decisions, maneuvers and statements during the three years of intermittent dialogue can be found in the exiled leadership's strategy of internationalization. This strategy shows that for GAM the negotiations, above all, were not a way to find common ground with Jakarta but a means to compel the international community to pressure the Indonesian government into ceding independence.

Security Operations in Aceh: Goals, Consequences, and Lessons, by Rizal Sukma. Policy Studies 3. Washington, DC: East-West Center Washington, 2004. ix, 58 pp. Paper, $5.00.

Since Indonesia's independence in August 1945, the province of Aceh on the northern tip of Sumatra island has often been described as a center of resistance against the central government in Jakarta. The first uprising-the Darul Islam rebellion-began in 1953 and ended only in 1961 after the central government promised to grant special autonomy status to Aceh. When this promise was not fulfilled, another rebellion erupted in the mid-1970s. Unlike the Darul Islam rebellion which sought to change Indonesia into an Islamic state, the rebellion in 1970s took the form of a secessionist movement led by the Free Aceh Movement (Gerakan Aceh Merdeka; GAM). Despite its defeat in 1977 after the Indonesian military launched a security operation, another GAM-led rebellion broke out again in 1989--and again the Indonesian government responded swiftly with another military crackdown.

This paper examines the purpose, consequences, and lessons to be drawn from the security operations conducted by Indonesian forces in Aceh since 1990. As the vested interests of the TNI and its emphasis on a military solution have contributed to an escalation of the conflict, it argues that the military requires an exit strategy to be followed by socio-economic reconstruction. The paper is divided into four sections. The first outlines the root causes of the conflict and discusses military operations during the period 1990-98 when Aceh was designated a Military Operations Area (Daerah Operasi Militer; DOM). Security operations in Aceh between the downfall of Suharto's New Order regime in May 1998 and May 2003, when the government finally decided to impose martial law and launch a full-scale military crackdown in the province are explored in the second section. The third explores the conduct of the counterinsurgency operation during the first six months of martial law in the province. The final section looks at how the government's failure to consider the wider context of the conflict undermines the relative gains achieved on the military front. While security operations during the 1990s contributed to the aggravation of the problem--due primarily to the failure of Indonesia's litary to protect human rights--the military operation since May 2003 will not end the conflict in Aceh if the government fails to undertake non-military measures to address the root causes of the problem in the province.

The New Economics of Academia: Wanted: Really Smart Suckers

Reporter Anya Kamenetz has a must-read feature in The Village Voice (27 April) for anybody who has ever spent time working in academia--or who ever hopes to. It's entitled Generation Debt - the New Economics of Being Young, subtitled "Wanted: Really Smart Suckers: Grad school provides exciting new road to poverty."

Here's an exciting career opportunity you won't see in the classified ads. For the first six to 10 years, it pays less than $20,000 and demands superhuman levels of commitment in a Dickensian environment. Forget about marriage, a mortgage, or even Thanksgiving dinners, as the focus of your entire life narrows to the production, to exacting specifications, of a 300-page document less than a dozen people will read. Then it's time for advancement: Apply to 50 far-flung, undesirable locations, with a 30 to 40 percent chance of being offered any position at all. You may end up living 100 miles from your spouse and commuting to three different work locations a week. You may end up $50,000 in debt, with no health insurance, feeding your kids with food stamps. If you are the luckiest out of every five entrants, you may win the profession's ultimate prize: A comfortable middle-class job, for the rest of your life, with summers off....

But the Internet means no isolated community has to stay that way. A new group of tortured, funny, largely anonymous websites are providing an outlet for academics who feel like they're getting spanked by their alma mater. They have names like Invisible Adjunct, (a)musings of a grad student, Beyond Academe, and Barely Tenured, and they address the emotional just as much as the practical consequences of competing in, and losing, the academic job-market lottery.

Founded in February 2003, Invisible Adjunct quickly became one of the most popular such blogs. Dozens of regular posters followed discussion threads like "The Old Boy Network" and "Is Tenure a Cartel?" Invisible Adjunct's author—call her IA—is a New Yorker in her late thirties with a Ph.D. in British history, an adjunct for the past two years. "I've spent all these years and I've failed," says IA, who entered graduate school in 1993 and received her Ph.D. in 1999. "You agree to do this five-to-seven-year low-paid apprenticeship because you're joining this guild. And if you end up as an adjunct you think, wow, I'm really getting screwed over."

The also pseudonymous Thomas H. Benton was a frequent contributor to Invisible Adjunct's blog and has penned a series of cautionary columns for the Chronicle of Higher Education. He is even more blunt than IA. "The premise of graduate education in the humanities is a lie: Students are not apprentices preparing for a life of scholarship and teaching," he says. "They are a cheap source of labor and status for institutions and faculty and, after they earn their degrees, most join the reserve army of the academic underemployed." Benton, a professor at a small liberal arts college, warns his students about trying to follow in his footsteps. "My experience as a working-class kid who finally earned an Ivy League Ph.D. is that higher education is not about social mobility or personal enrichment; it is one trap among many for people who are uninitiated into the way power and influence operate in this culture."

---

Grad school applications are up slightly over the last decade, as unemployed college grads seek a haven from the job market. Every winter, a new crop of bright, bookish, maybe slightly fuzzy-headed kids, the kind who cover the sidewalks of the Lower East Side and Williamsburg, decide they're sick enough of the 9-to-5 grind to borrow some money and go back to school.

Unlike trade schools, most graduate programs do not offer prospective students detailed data on job placement, which varies widely from program to program. Tri-State Semi Driver Training School in Middletown, Ohio, for example, guarantees a job before you even start driving, while the American Language Institute in San Diego promises lifetime placement assistance to its teachers of English as a foreign language. Your local Ivy League English department can't offer the same deal: Last year, the Modern Language Association expected some 965 Ph.D.'s to be granted, while only 422 assistant professorships were advertised, a drop of 20 percent from the year before. In the foreign languages, there were only 263 positions advertised (for the 620 Ph.D.'s projected), a drop of one-third from the previous year. The MLA estimates that students who entered English programs in 2003 had a 20 percent chance of coming out with a tenure-track position. The situation is better in history, where the number of new Ph.D.'s in 2003 almost equalled the number of new jobs, after a decade of "overproduction," with growth coming in trendy specializations like the Middle East.

But numbers like these do little to deter the best students. "Top undergraduates are arrogant; they lack perspective," says Benton. "They've been fawned over all their lives, and they think grad school is there to help them realize their potential, not to use them up and toss them out."

The Chronicle (30 April) profiles the Invisible Adjunct at some length. Almost like an obituary.

Now, she senses that the Ph.D. in her pocket has grown stale.

"I have to confront the fact that my shelf life has expired," she says, "and I'm not going to get a job in the academy."

My sentiments match those in the comment posted by Anita Henderson on History News Network, where Ralph Luker noted the Village Voice article.

The reason grad students and adjuncts are taken advantage of is because they can be. And that's because there are too many of them. More than the market needs.

What's amazing is the sense of outrage in academic circles about the system, as if being a college instructor were different from other jobs. I've been through downsizing efforts in industries. Many, if not most, Americans have. People watching their earning potential fall through the floor. What they've worked to achieve for years become devalued in the marketplace.

Ivory tower academics must be oblivious to this, thinking that the old system of establishing yourself and then sitting back and letting the money roll in is in place. Rather than feeling sorry for themselves and their colleagues, they should try getting on with life the way most people do.

Lots of people want to be rock musicians. A few make it big, a few more earn comfortable livings. Most do it as a hobby along with their day job or barely squeak by. Lots of people want to be professional athletes. A few make it big, most don't.

There's nothing unique about academia. Social activists always say we need to tune inner city kids to reality, make them understand that they probably won't become sports stars, the odds against that are too high, so they should have some other plan to fall back on. Maybe we need to let these professor wannabes [learn] the same thing.

Here's my advice, from one who has made the transition out of academia, and back in, several times: Start early. Stay in practice. Avoid irrational optimism.

I first started after finishing high school in Japan (Canadian curriculum, not Japanese). I decided I didn't want to go to college. (I wasn't that eager to immigrate back to the U.S., either.) After working the summer in my uncle's service station--not just pumping gas and checking oil, but changing tires on farm tractors and logging trucks, I acquired a new appreciation for schoolwork. So I applied late to my father's alma mater, the University of Richmond, Va., where I was one of two "foreign" students--both American missionary kids, in fact. The Richmond Collegian interviewed us both, concluding thus.

Joel had visited the U.S. at several intervals before coming to UR. Joel said that his opinion of the U.S. changed each time he came. He said that he likes the U.S. better now than he did. However, he added, "When I read Mad Magazine in Japan, I thought the magazine exaggerated situations, but now that I’m here, I do not think the magazine does!"

I don't think I phrased it quite so awkwardly, but that's pretty much what I intended to convey. My U.S. college experience was not what the Asian edition of Newsweek had suggested it might be. Ferment, no. Boredom, yes. I dropped out in my sophomore year. The draft beckoned. The best I could do was opt for the Army language school. They gave me the 7th language on my list of 8: Romanian. So I spent my Vietnam-era Army days assigned to a stateside Civil Affairs unit that had more officers than enlisted men. I took a couple of extension courses on base, and spent a lot of time in the library and volunteering at the language lab on base: teaching an English class to Korean officers (always careful never to be seen in my enlisted uniform), and to a lovely class of Thai and Vietnamese army wives.

I took advantage of an early out to resume college, and managed to stretch my G.I. Bill benefits out well into my Ph.D. program, thanks to work-study, graduate assistantships, and other temporary or part-time jobs. I swore I wouldn't get married until finishing my dissertation, then did anyway. I swore I wouldn't accept full-time employment before finishing, then did anyway. I did finally manage to finish, mostly writing on weekends. And I finished only $2,000 in debt, which I paid off early! After spending most of the 1970s in grad school, I spent most of the 1980s doing computer support work in the business world (even taking a couple night classes in accounting), then migrated back into academic publishing during the 1990s.

In many ways, I'm a natural-born academic. But my wife teaches. Other friends and family teach. Heck, I've taught. And I know it's not for me. Nor is the long stretch of pre-tenure paranoia and post-tenure burnout. I suppose this blog is now my classroom. Whimsy is my syllabus. Attendance is optional. And there are no papers to mark. My day job pays the mortgage. But I do worry about how to encourage my daughter to pursue her interests--even more academic than mine--while steering her away from a career in academia.

UPDATE: Via an update to History News Network, I see that Erin O'Conner of Critical Mass adds further thoughts and outlines her own answer to "The terrible, horrible, no good, very bad grad school question":

Between the Chronicle of Higher Ed's farewell paean to the Invisible Adjunct, the current Crooked Timber thread attempting to theorize the unconcern and even contempt tenured academics display toward the adjunct labor that sustains their comfortable lifestyles, and yesterday's Village Voice piece on how you've got to be a hell of a sucker to go to grad school in the humanities or social sciences nowadays, I've been thinking a great deal not only about the politics of the academy, but about the politics of lamentation about the state of the academy.

There is something a bit, ummm, noisome in the spectacle of established, tenured academics clucking their virtual tongues and beating their virtual breasts about the terrible lot that has befallen the Invisible Adjunct and all those other adjuncts for whom she has so invisibly stood. What besides clucking are these folks doing to reform the abusive system that chewed IA up and spat her out? ...

You can say that this is a fine case of the pot calling the kettle black. After all, what have I been doing on Critical Mass since March 2002 besides lamenting the state of academe, and devoting considerable space to the corruption of the academic humanities? I've clucked about the exploitation of adjunct labor more than once on this blog, and I've done it from a tenured position whose shape is structurally dependent on all the non-tenure-track lecturers, adjuncts, and grad students that my department regularly employs to round out its course offerings. So where do I get off?

I'll know the exact answer to that question next week, when I decide which of several job offers teaching high school English to accept. In the meantime, I'll simply note that what gives me license to point fingers in this moment is that I am leaving academe--in no small part because I cannot see a way to resolve the many interlinked crises facing the academic humanities, and I cannot reconcile my beliefs in institutional fairness, personal and professional integrity, and, much more basically, education, with a life lived from within a university English department. I'm not sure the problems can be resolved at this point. And, frankly, I'm not sure they should be. The self-discrediting behavior of the humanist "haves" during the past several decades of progressive deprofessionalization, combined with their confirmed collective refusal to take their own disciplinarity seriously (whether as scholars or as teachers), doesn't suggest there is a whole lot worth saving....

There is one market, though, that is WIDE OPEN for humanities M.A.'s and Ph.D.'s, and that is the independent school market. "Independent" is mostly a contemporary code word for "private," though it can also mean "charter." Your Ph.D.--or, if you are ABD, your M.A.--is a very attractive qualification in this market....

Locating and applying for such jobs could not be easier. There are agencies whose entire mission is to match you with schools that are looking for candidates like you. The agencies are entirely free to the candidates. They are not gimmicks. They work.

Why do you hear absolutely nothing about this career option from within academe? Why do academic departments pretend this entirely dignified and deeply meaningful career path does not exist--even though it could be just what many of their otherwise unemployable Ph.D.'s, not to mention their dissatisfied faculty, are looking for? Why do they treat as beneath their notice a type of work that they ought to be embracing as a seriously significant alternative to the dead-end academic career of the adjunct? Do I really have to ask?

Clarence Greathouse, Kentucky's Legal Advisor to King Kojong in Korea

GREATHOUSE, CLARENCE RIDGEBY (c. 1845-Oct. 21, 1899), journalist, lawyer, diplomat, was born in Kentucky, the son of Dr. Ridgeby Greathouse, an early emigrant to Ca1ifornia. In 1870 he went to San Francisco. He practised law with Louis T. Haggin, then, upon the latter's retirement, in the firm of Greathouse & Blanding--finally Wallace, Greathouse & Blanding. He was also active in local politics as a Democrat and in 1883 he became the general manager of the San Francisco Examiner, a Democratic daily. He continued in this position until 1886, when he was appointed consul-general at Kanagawa (Yokohama), Japan. Upon the confirmation of his appointment he left Washington May 31, 1886, and served successfully at his post for four years. At this time events and conditions in Korea were largely an enigma and a challenge to discovery to most foreigners in the Far East. Korea was also the one Asiatic country in which American influence and American participation in governmental affairs was at least the equal of that of any other Occidental nation. The successive American representatives in the Korean capital succeeded in so impressing the Korean King with the friendly and disinterested nature of the policy of their government that he was led to secure a comparatively large number of American advisors and on Sept. 12, 1890, Greathouse was engaged to serve as legal advisor to the Korean government. At that time there were eight Americans serving in Seul in various advisory capacities. The extent of American influence in Korea displeased the Chinese, but despite positive suggestions by the Chinese Resident against the employment of further foreign advisors, on Jan. 3, 1891, the Korean government gazetted Greathouse as a vice president of the home office and gave him charge of matters pertaining to foreign legal affairs. Gen. Charles Le Gendre [q.v.] at this time was a vice-president of the same office as foreign advisor to the King.

It is difficult to evaluate the work accomplished by Greathouse during his eight years in Korea. It is certain, however, that he secured the confidence of the King, and that for a time he was given complete charge of the trial of important political cases. He is also said to have acted as head of the Korean post-office department, but since during most of his service this department was weak and struggling he cannot be said to have accomplished much in this direction. His legal knowledge was often called upon in the drafting of conventions, in the constant negotiations with foreign representatives in Seul, and in the revising of Korean law and the reorganizing, at least on paper, of the Korean judicial system. His best-known work was in connection with the trial of the Koreans implicated in the murder of the Queen of Korea by Japanese and Korean conspirators on Oct. 8, 1895. After the King had escaped from his Japanese and Korean captors to the safety of the Russian legation, he asked Greathouse to supervise the investigation into the circumstances surrounding the death of the Queen. Greathouse attended all sessions of the court, examined the witnesses, and had the trials conducted in a thoroughly modern manner. It was owing to his influence that the trials were free from the gross faults which customarily disfigured the proceedings of all Korean courts, and that for general approximation to Western notions of justice and integrity they were in every way remarkable. During the last few years of his life Greathouse acted as confidential advisor to the King on foreign affairs. As far as the records show, he was never married; his mother remained with him until his death. While he was in Japan he secured the services of a young Goanese, H. A. Dos Remedios, as his secretary. When he went to Korea he took his assistant with him and Dos Remedios came practically to occupy the position of son as well as secretary, although he was never officially adopted. Greathouse died in Seul while still in the service of the government of Korea.

[The only trustworthy sources on the life of Greathouse are in the archives of the Department of State, and in the former American legation in Seul, Korea. Unfortunately, these are very meager. For printed sources see the Korea Repository, Mar. 1896, aud the Examiner (San Francisco), Nov. 18, 1899.] H.J.N.

SOURCE: Dictionary of American Biography. Greathouse was survived by his mother, who donated her diaries and documents to the U. of Kentucky Library in Lexington. I attended first grade at Greathouse Elementary in Louisville, KY, after kindergarten in Kokura, Japan. All I remember about school that year was nuclear attack drills and warnings about not allowing strangers to pick you up in their cars. (I guess nowadays kids are more scared of their classmates.) I never knew until decades later that Clarence Greathouse was a Kentucky notable who provided legal advice to the Meiji government, then to the Korean court. His whiskey-swilling mother was said to be one of the distinctive characters in the diplomatic community in Seoul. I spent some time exploring her diary and other documents in the Greathouse archives at UKy at few years back. Most of her diaries are concerned with diplomatic gatherings, especially this or that "tiffin" (high tea), with increasing worry about her son's stomach ailments. I got the impression he drank himself to death.

A series of letters from other members of the diplomatic community in Seoul during the 1890s is online here.

Mining Muninn: Shanghai in August 1945

While perusing the archives of the Muninn blog I recently discovered, I came across another interesting bit of historical detail posted on 26 March, which describes the content of the newspaper Shenbao in Shanghai in August 1945:

You pick up the most circulated newspaper in Shanghai on August 15th, 1945, the day of Japan's surrender. What do you see? Well, the news of the surrender hasn't made it for the day's issue. Instead, in the days leading up to the end of the war the newspaper focuses on the Russian advances in Manchuria, or the arrival of B29 bombers attacking Japanese targets in China. Of course, you still see the usual advertisements for CPC Coffee, and various brands of penicillin. But how will the newspaper change in the next few days as Japan's control over Shanghai comes to an end? While this wasn't a question related to my research, it was at the back of my mind as I skimmed through an important Shanghai newspaper called 申報 from the second half of the year 1945....

CPC Coffee, which had long had very recognizable, if somewhat boring, advertisements depicting a can a coffee, finally join the victory bandwagon on the 21st by getting rid of the can image and replacing it with three victory slogans for the Allies, China, and Chiang Kai-shek. They scrap this on the 26th and add an image of a caucasian drinking coffee. Prices still look kind of inflated on the 26th. Meimei Si is selling coffee for 18,000 yuan and 'Victory' sundaes for 40,000. Also on the 26th we see the sudden appearance of radio channel advertisements, promising the latest news from San Francisco or India. Not far from Meimei Si's victory sundaes is a very short article noting the mass suicide of a group of Japanese soldiers in front of the imperial palace. The editorial of the day emphasizes the need to preserve social order and reminds everyone that Chiang Kai-shek has ordered that no-one is to show hostility towards the surrendered Japanese soldiers. Thousands of them are still wandering around with their weapons, some have yet to officially hand over control of the cities they control. Most of them are not disarmed until weeks or months later and some of them end up helping one side or the other in the conflict to come. In these early postwar days, the KMT and the Communists are in a mad nation-wide rush to get their troops into each Japanese controlled area to accept the hand-over of power first. While the two sides were nominally allied during the war against the Japan, the country is on the verge of a new civil war between the two. In the first few weeks, however, we see Mao and Chiang inviting each other to tea parties and banquets.

Mining Muninn: 102 Former Soldiers in Nanjing, 1937

Mining some of the historical posts on the Muninn blog I recently discovered, I came across an interesting entry on 19 March, 102 Former Soldiers in Nanjing, 1937:

I went on a used book buying spree last week, finally blocking off some time to roam the stores near Waseda's campus one afternoon. One book I snapped up was a cheap copy of the normally $60 oral history book ... edited by ... (Matsuoka Tamaki). The book is part of a series of new Japanese books coming out which is methodically publishing vast amounts of primary materials on the Nanjing Massacre. Don't read this posting if you are squeamish. I believe the books are associated with a group of historians who are disgusted by the revisionist nationalist scholars who once completely denied that anything horrible happened at the fall of Nanjing and now still claim that there was nothing out of the ordinary by the standard of modern warfare. While mainstream Japanese historians, along with the rest of the world, recognize that the fall of Nanjing was followed by an unusually horrible amount of slaughter and rape, I think most of them are tired of playing games with the revisionists and thereby sustaining the idea that there is some controversy worth debating. Rather than engaging them in futile debates, this particular group of historians seems focused on getting as much raw data as possible into print. The two newest books that I have seen are a collection of statements by Chinese witnesses of the massacre (which of course, the revisionists dismiss as liars or government stooges) and the volume I purchased collecting the statements of the soldiers themselves.

The rest is not pleasant, but really should be read.

Buddhism and the Rise of Written Vernaculars

Why are there so many writing systems in India and and so few in China? In 1994, Victor H. Mair addressed this question in an article in the Journal of Asian Studies. Here's the abstract.

The premise of Victor H. Mair's wide-ranging article is that written Chinese emerged not as transcribed speech, but rather as a special, radically shortened cipher with its own grammatical and expressive conventions. He calls this written form Literary Sinitic (LS) and finds the disparity between it and any form of spoken Chinese, which he refers to under the general heading of Vernacular Sinitic (VS), is of a wholly different nature than the contrast between written Latin and any modern written or spoken Romance language. Indeed, he argues, Literary Sinitic remained incapable of serving as a means of recording spoken Chinese or any other language. Thus, for Mair, the question becomes: How did vernacular written forms emerge in a milieu in which Literary Sinitic dominated intellectual life? He finds the earliest instances of written Vernacular Sinitic occur typically in Buddhist texts. He believes the Buddhist emphasis on teaching through the local dialect (desa bhasa) was a major impetus for the development of written vernacular, but concludes it is difficult to determine exactly which aspects of Buddhism had the greatest influence on the slow maturation of written Vernacular Sinitic.

And here's Mair's conclusion.

We have seen how, under the probable influence of the Indian concept of desa bhasa brought to China by Buddhism, numerous peoples in East Asia created a whole series of written vernaculars. While Chinese authorities stubbornly resisted recognition of any of their own vernaculars as a national language--probably due to the extremely high prestige and power of LS--the Buddhists used the vernacular liberally in their own writings. Once proffered as a functional alternative written language, use of the vernacular steadily grew until, by the late Ming-early Ch'ing [= Qing], it is likely that as many books were being printed in vernacular or a heavily vernacularized literary style as in LS, not withstanding the censure and ridicule of strait-laced scholars. Finally, even the Manchus, who already had their own written national language, which was swiftly dying out because of pervasive sinicization, yielded to the idea that their Sinitic subjects, too, needed a national language keyed to one of the spoken vernaculars. After the agitation of the May Fourth Movement [in 1919] led by progressive Chinese intellectuals and students, many of whom were exposed to radical ideas about language and other aspects of culture and society through the window of Japan, kuo-yü [= guoyu, Mandarin] was publicly proclaimed the official written language of the nation. This marked the formal end of the multimillennial separation between book language (shu-mien-yü [= shumianyu]) and spoken language (k'ou-yü [= kouyu]) in China.

That Buddhism played a crucial role in the evolution of the written vernacular throughout East Asia is beyond any doubt. The question remains, however: Which aspect of Buddhism was responsible for these momentous changes? Was there some religious doctrine belonging to Buddhism that fostered the written vernacular? Was it the fondness for storytelling, preaching, and public speaking by the early Buddhists in the language of the people? Did the ostensible orality of Buddhist scripture have anything to do with the origins of the written vernacular in China? Was the fact that most of the early translators of Buddhist texts into Sinitic were foreigners with a poor command of the literary language a significant factor? And did the phonological sophistication of Indian linguistical science lend credibility to the spoken vis-à-vis the written? What of the elaborate, rigorously defined Indian traditions of chanting and recitation? And may the social values, institutions, and position of Buddhism have contributed to the rise of the written vernaculars? Last but not least, did Buddhist practice have anything to do with the validation of the vernacular? Perhaps I have entirely overlooked some vital facet of Buddhism that contributed to this process. In the end, Buddhist support for the written vernacular may best be identified as a complex combination of diverse factors, all of which were determined by an integrated socioreligous ideology.

SOURCE: Victor H. Mair, "Buddhism and the Rise of the Written Vernacular in East Asia: The Making of National Languages," Journal of Asian Studies 53 (1994): 705, 707-751

UPDATE: The comment thread on this at Language Hat is most interesting.

How Stalin and the Cultural Revolution Preserved a Chinese Tradition

In the 16 & 23 February issue of The New Yorker, Peter Hessler's "Letter From China" (not available online) hints at how close the PRC came to abandoning Chinese characters for an alphabet.

In 1936, as the Communists were gaining power, Mao Zedong told an American journalist that alphabetization was inevitable. When Mao finally took control of China, in 1949, many expected the government to replace characters with Latin letters, as Vietnam had done earlier in the century. But in the summer of 1950 Mao handed down a surprise decision, calling for linguists to develop a "national-in-form" alphabet--a new writing system, whose letters would be distinctively Chinese.

John DeFrancis, a linguist at the University of Hawai‘i at Manoa, has studied this period, and he told me that the inspiration for Mao's order has always been a mystery. DeFrancis recommended that I speak with Zhou Yougang, a ninety-seven-year-old linguist who had worked on the writing reform committee ... [which] considered more than two thousand proposed writing systems. Some were derived entirely from Chinese; others used Latin or Cyrillic alphabets; a few combined fragments of Chinese characters with foreign letters. There were Chinese alphabets in Arabic.... In 1955, the committee narrowed the field to six alphabetic finalists: Latin, Cyrillic, and four completely new "Chinese" systems....

In 1956, Mao and other leaders concluded that the Chinese alphabets weren't yet usable. They sanctioned the Latin scheme, known as Pinyin, for use in early education and other special purposes, but not as a replacement script. And they decided to simplify a number of Chinese characters. This was described as an "initial reform stage": Mao, it seems, wanted more time to consider the options.

But writing reform soon became entangled in politics. In April of 1957, the Communist Party launched the Hundred Flowers campaign, during which intellectuals were invited to speak their minds, however critical.... Then, after only five weeks, Mao abruptly terminated the ... campaign. By the end of the year, more than three hundred thousand intellectuals had been labelled Rightists....

I asked Zhou what had happened to the four Chinese alphabets, and he told me that all records had apparently been destroyed. "It was easy to lose things like that during the Cultural Revolution," he said.

The Cultural Revolution, which lasted from 1966 to 1976, represents the climax of China's disillusionment with its traditions. But, ironically, the upheaval helped protect the characters. When the chaos finally ended, the Chinese no longer had an appetite for radical cultural change, and both the public and the government rejected further attempts at writing reform. Today, almost nobody advocates alphabetization, and Zhou predicts that China won't give up its characters for at least another century, if ever. Even the simplificiation didn't get very far. It reduced the number of brushstrokes that make up some of the most commonly used characters, but the principles of the writing system remain the same. Essentially, it's the equivalent of converting an English word like "through" to "thru." Zhou and others believe that simplification hasn't had a significant effect on improving literacy rates. Taiwan, Hong Kong, and many overseas Chinese communities don't use the simplified system, and traditionalists despise them.

In hindsight, Mao's 1950 command doomed writing reform; without the search for a national-in-form alphabet, China likely would have adopted Latin script before the Cultural Revolution. When I asked about Mao, Zhou said that the turning point was the Chairman's first state visit to the Soviet Union, in 1949. "Mao asked Stalin for advice about writing reform," Zhou said. "Stalin told him, 'You're a great country, and you should have your own Chinese form of writing. You shouldn't simply use the Latin alphabet.' That's why Mao wanted a national-in-form alphabet."

NOTE: The impetus to blog this (after losing track of it) came from reading a post on the fascinating blog Muninn (discovered via Language Hat) about Chinese character reform in Taiwan, where both Chiang Kai-shek and a solid majority of Taiwanese favored it as late as 1954. I wonder if it was abruptly abandoned precisely because Mao adopted it after letting alphabetization--and any intellectuals who opined about it--fall by the wayside.

The Perpetually Invisible Crisis in Darfur, Western Sudan

On 26 July 1985, The Times (of London) reporter Paul Vallely wrote a story about aid efforts in western Sudan entitled "Riding the Lifeline Lorry." Here's what Robert Kaplan has to say about it in his book, Surrender or Starve: Travels in Ethiopia, Sudan, Somalia, and Eritrea (Vintage, 2003): "To my mind, it was the best single feature story I ever read about the famine. It's too bad the U.S. public never got to see it." And here's Kaplan's retelling of the story in his chapter entitled "Aid: Rolling the Rock of Sisyphus" (pp. 195-196).

For weeks the requests had been trickling into the old British garrison post of El Geneina, the furthermost town in the west of Sudan....

These particular requests came from the chief of police at Beida, through the cursive handwriting of the little border town's scribe. At first they were for food. Then last week came a plea for shrouds.

"We have nothing in which to bury our dead, and 15 children died yesterday," said the letter addressed to Peter Verney, the Save the Children (SCF) representative in Geneina.

As Vallely related the story, so little food was coming into Geneina from Khartoum on account of floods and other difficulties that there was not enough to send onward to Beida, about fifty miles south along Sudan's western border with Chad. Those dying of starvation in Beida were all Chadian refugees, and the local Sudanese commissioner Sherife was not cooperating in the release of emergency grain. Finally, however, Verney managed to secure 150 sacks of food and seed. Then the head of the Sudanese haulage firm doubled and tripled the price. Verney did not have enough cash on hand to pay for the lorry and in desperation went to the local army brigadier in Geneina, Ibrahim Muhammad, who told Verney, "This is the situation everywhere. No food is reaching the extremities. It reaches the hands but not the fingers. Of course you can have one of my trucks.

Three hours after leaving Geneina for Beida, the food lorry got caught in a torrential rain. Vallely and the driver whom Verney had rented were stuck for nine hours in the mud; sixty peasants helped to dig the two men out.

It was two days before we reached Beida.... We were welcomed by Muhammad Ahmed Bashir, the local chief of police. Over sweet tea on the rafia mat before his office he was effusive in his thanks for the food.

"I will put it straight into the store with the other food." The other food? "Yes, we already have 140 bags in store but we have had no authority from Sherife or his nephew Ali Mansour to release it."

Because of Sudanese bureaucracy, Chadians were starving to death with food only a few feet away. The next day, Ali Mansour, the executive officer of the rural council, agreed to distribute the grain. "You will take my photograph," he said to a news agency photographer with Vallely. "This will be good for me."

The distribution caused a riot among the refugees. Sudanese soldiers responded by lashing at the crowd with whips in all directions. The news agency photographer started snapping away, even though editors had become bored with pictures of starving Africans. The photographer confided to Vallely that starving Africans being whipped had novelty value that would result in his pictures gaining wide distribution. Sure enough, the photos of the riots in Beida were picked up in Europe.

Nearly two decades later, we're still "rolling the rock of Sisyphus." The Washington Post editorialized on 3 April 2004:

ACCORDING TO THE United Nations, one of the world's worst humanitarian crises now afflicts a Muslim people who face a horrific campaign of ethnic cleansing driven by massacre, rape and looting. These horrors are unfolding not, as Arab governments and satellite channels might have it, in Iraq or the Palestinian territories, but in Sudan, a member of the Arab League. Maybe because there are no Westerners or Israelis to be blamed, the crisis in Darfur, in northwestern Sudan, has commanded hardly any international attention. Though it has been going on for 14 months, the U.N. Security Council acted on it for the first time yesterday, and then only by issuing a weak president's statement. More intervention is needed, and urgently.

The victims of the ongoing war crimes are non-Arab African people who have lived in the Darfur region for centuries. In February 2003, as the Sudanese government began to negotiate a peace agreement with rebel movements representing the non-Arab peoples of the south, an insurgent movement appeared in Darfur demanding more government resources and power-sharing. The Khartoum-based government responded by sending troops and by enlisting Arab tribes in the region as allies. Early this year, after the breakdown of a cease-fire, it launched a scorched-earth offensive in the region that, according to the United Nations and human rights groups, has taken on the character of an ethnic war.

According to a report issued this week by Human Rights Watch, "the government of Sudan and allied Arab militia, called janjaweed, are implementing a strategy of ethnic-based murder, rape and forcible displacement of civilians." More than 750,000 people have been forced from their homes, and 100,000 more have fled across the border to neighboring Chad, an area of desperate poverty and little water. The dead number in the tens of thousands, though no one knows for sure how many: Humanitarian aid groups have had almost no access to the Darfur region.

For years Sudan's government, a dictatorship headed by Lt. Gen. Omar Hassan Bashir, waged a similarly ruthless campaign against the rebellious south. At last, under considerable international pressure -- much of it from the Bush administration -- it agreed to a cease-fire and negotiations that now inch toward a peace settlement. Some of the governments that pushed for that accord are concerned the deal may be disrupted if the international community also presses Mr. Bashir about Darfur. They should take a lesson from the 10th anniversary this month of the Rwandan genocide, which the United Nations failed to stop: Political and diplomatic calculations should never prevent the international community from intervening to stop mass murder.

As usual, the best coverage for this type of out-of-the-way story is not in the international media, but in blogs such as Head Heeb, who has been assiduous in covering Darfur: on 21 April, 18 April, 25 March, 19 March, 16 February, 10 February, 4 February, 30 January, 7 January, and elsewhere.

UPDATE: Foreign Dispatches offers a blistering assessment of the statement by the U.N. "Human Rights" Commission on this tragedy.

Absolutely incredible! Instead of condemning Sudanese actions, the UN "Human Rights" Commission actually decided on a message of solidarity with the Sudanese government! ...

UPDATE: This VOA article entitled "Human Rights Commission Losing Credibility, NGOs Warn" is also worth reading; frankly, I'd say the Human Rights Commission and the parent UN lost their credibility a very long time ago, and only now are the NGOs belatedly waking up to that reality.

UPDATE, 4 May 2004: Sudan has just been re-elected to the UN "Human Rights" Commission. What purpose does this serve?

A Growing Malaria Problem

In honor of Earth Day, last night's NewsHour with Jim Lehrer on PBS showed a segment about the possible danger of global temperatures rising enough to permit bird malaria to wipe out unique endangered species at higher elevations in Hawai‘i. As one who has experienced repeated bouts of human malaria (P. vivax, not the dreaded P. falciparum variety), I thought I might mark the occasion by reminding readers yet again that the human malaria problem is already here and growing fast, and that we do not lack the means to fight it, if we are persistent and careful and rethink old shibboleths about DDT.

Most of what Ellen Ruppel Shell wrote about the Resurgence of a Deadly Disease in The Atlantic back in 1997 still applies.

All but obliterated in the developed world half a century ago, and suppressed in the Third World in the 1950s and 1960s [thanks to DDT!], malaria has since returned in full force to North Africa, India, Southeast Asia, China, South America, and the Caribbean. Worldwide incidence of the disease has quadrupled in the past five years, and resistance to available drugs for prevention and treatment is growing rapidly. Nearly 40 percent of the world's population lives in regions where malaria is endemic, and millions more live in areas that are encountering the disease for the first time in decades....

Nonetheless, the United States has shown little interest in the problem. Malaria is transferable in blood, yet it is not screened for in the American blood supply. The country's Anopheles mosquito population has gone unmonitored for more than fifty years. "We just don't know the potential for transmission," says John Beier, a professor of tropical medicine at Tulane University. Temperature and humidity may well be among the most important factors in the rate of spread of the disease, yet we have only a vague notion of what effect, if any, climate change will have on malaria transmission -- if, for example, global warming can be expected to bring malaria and other mosquito-borne diseases north from Mexico. Most Americans seem to think the disease has been eradicated or, at worst, is confined to the tropics. In fact there are few places on earth that cannot sustain a malaria epidemic.

A much more iconoclastic take on Earth Day appeared in the San Francisico Chronicle, coauthored by Patrick Moore, apostate cofounder of Greenpeace who left to become chairman and chief scientist of Greenspirit, and Nick Schulz, editor of TechCentralStation.com.

Ironically, the very movement that made its presence felt in rallies across this country in 1970 and that thrives in the developed world today must shoulder much of the blame for the developing world's sorry state. It is impeding both economic and environmental progress due to an agenda that is anti-development, anti-technology and, in the final analysis, anti-human.

For example, today's eco-activists boast that they have blocked more than 200 hydroelectric projects in the developing world over the past two decades. It is true that hydro power has a large ecological footprint, creating lakes and filling valleys. But it is a renewable energy that makes it possible to read after the sun goes down, boosting literacy in poor areas. It provides controlled irrigation for better crop yields and mitigates flooding and the loss of life and property damage....

Or consider that the pesticide DDT has been proven to radically reduce malaria in South Africa, while activist groups such as the World Wildlife Fund push for a total ban on its use. It only needs to be sprayed inside houses, where it poses no threat to the external environment, to make it effective. Despite the ability to stop malaria in its tracks with DDT -- as the United States had already done before its use was prohibited here -- 300 million people will become infected every year and at least 1 million will die, according to the World Health Organization.

UPDATE: Abiola Lapite's Foreign Dispatches and Virginia Postrel's Dynamist blog jumped on this story before I did: Abiola on 11 April (where I found the NYT article); Postrel on 19, 20, 21, and again on 21 April (where I found the Atlantic article).

UPDATE 2: Now the Washington Post has weighed in.

A large portion of the blame for the increased incidence of malaria can be laid at the feet of WHO itself, as well as other aid agencies such as the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).

These agencies' mosquito-prevention and drug-treatment policies in Africa are in tatters. A group of prominent malaria experts has even charged the agencies with malpractice for their reluctance to supply new, more expensive and better drugs for treatment [like artemisinin combination therapies (ACTs)], and for sticking instead with essentially ineffective medicines [like chloroquine and sulphadoxine-pyrimethamine]. But if WHO and its partners are serious about reducing the malaria threat, they need to reconsider their approach and start using all the weapons available to combat malaria -- and soon.

While AIDS gets all the attention for destroying the young adults of Africa, few Westerners are aware that malaria kills more children than any other disease....

Preventing malaria means creating a barrier between the mosquito, which is the carrier of the malarial parasite, and the parasite's primary host -- humans. Since malarial mosquitoes bite only between dusk and dawn, WHO's campaign has promoted bed nets, which can protect those who sleep beneath them. But this policy has had limited success. Nets for a whole family are expensive, and mosquitoes can take many blood meals between dusk and bedtime. Also, nets work best if treated with insecticide. But a recent survey in Kenya found that 21 percent of households had one single bed net, and only 5.6 percent of these were insecticide-treated. Moreover, mosquitoes are growing resistant to the type of insecticide with which the nets are coated.

By contrast, South Africa -- which is rich enough to fund its own public health programs and doesn't need to rely on WHO's largess -- has reduced malaria transmission by 90 percent in recent years, by a combination of returning to an old insecticide and investing in a new drug. It chose to spray insecticides, especially DDT, on the inside walls of dwellings to prevent mosquitoes from entering the buildings. This protects everyone inside all the time, not just when people might be sleeping.

Indonesia's Golkar Nominates Possible War Criminal for President

Sonia Kolesnikov-Jessop, UPI Business Correspondent, reports a troubling development for this summer's Indonesian presidential elections:

SINGAPORE, April 21 (UPI) -- The nomination of General Wiranto as presidential candidate for the leading party in the Indonesian general election is adding a new layer of uncertainties for investors in Indonesia.

Wiranto faces a U.N. indictment for crimes against humanity and is partly responsible for a U.S. congressional ban on military ties with Jakarta after mass killings by Indonesian troops in East Timor in 1999.

But on Tuesday, the retired general won the nomination of the Golkar party (former President Suharto's party), pushing ahead of expected winner Akbar Tandjung, the party's chairman. He won by promising "strong leadership" and an end to corruption....

Golkar is leading the results of April 5 voting, with 21.1 percent of the vote, followed by President Megawati's party Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI-P) with 19.5 percent, Former president Wahid's party the National Awakening Party (PKB) with 11.89 percent, the Islamic party of Vice-President Hamzah Haz's United Development Party (PPP) with 8.33 percent and the newly formed party of retired general Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, the Democratic Party (PD), with 7.52 percent.

But, a survey by London-based Taylor Nelson Sofres indicated that 28 percent of the surveyed voters will chose Susilo as president.

For more on the legislative election results, see below.

Nauru: Once Rich in Phosphates, Now Broke

The island nation of Nauru, which once had the highest per capita income in the "developing" world, is now broke. The New Zealand News reports:

Australia has declined to bail out the island nation of Nauru, which is facing almost certain bankruptcy this month.

As receivers moved in on Nauru's key international property assets, President Rene Harris is understood to have approached Canberra for a short-term rescue package....

The tiny island republic is facing both a constitutional and financial crisis, following a deadlock in its Parliament when the Speaker resigned in protest at the Government's failure to pass a budget.

A spokesman for the Harris Government said they were still trying to find a refinancer for a A$236 million loan with America's General Electric Capital.

The loan used the last of Nauru's once $1 billion-plus property portfolio as security.

Nationmaster.com profiles Nauru's economy.

Revenues of this tiny island have come from exports of phosphates, but reserves are expected to be exhausted within a few years. Phosphate production has declined since 1989, as demand has fallen in traditional markets and as the marginal cost of extracting the remaining phosphate increases, making it less internationally competitive. While phosphates have given Nauruans one of the highest per capita incomes in the Third World, few other resources exist with most necessities being imported, including fresh water from Australia. The rehabilitation of mined land and the replacement of income from phosphates are serious long-term problems. In anticipation of the exhaustion of Nauru's phosphate deposits, substantial amounts of phosphate income have been invested in trust funds to help cushion the transition and provide for Nauru's economic future. The government has been borrowing heavily from the trusts to finance fiscal deficits. To cut costs the government has called for a freeze on wages, a reduction of over-staffed public service departments, privatization of numerous government agencies, and closure of some overseas consulates. In recent years Nauru has encouraged the registration of offshore banks and corporations. Tens of billions of dollars have been channeled through their accounts. Few comprehensive statistics on the Nauru economy exist, with estimates of Nauru's GDP varying widely.

But Air Nauru says it will keep flying.

UPDATE: Head Heeb has more.

An Anthropologist's First Impressions of Occupied Japan

The Rare Books and Manuscripts Library at the Ohio State University has made available online a wonderful collection, "Doing Photography and Social Research in the Allied Occupation of Japan, 1948-1951: A Personal and Professional Memoir," described thus:

Photographs taken by anthropologist John W. Bennett in occupied Japan, 1948-1951, (a few were made in the 1960's during his term at Waseda University), with comments on the photos by Bennett. Also included are extensive selections from Bennett's professional journal of the period, and other documents. Consisting of a personal and professional memoir, this site is also a record of a unique experiment in social analysis and research that focuses on a period of particular significance in the development of Japanese and international history, politics, economics, and culture.

Here's an excerpt from First Impressions: A Letter to Kathryn Bennett Composed at Intervals During 1949.

let us list some preconceptions of the writer, which have since been scrapped. More than that, he was totally unaware that they existed, and he an anthropologist, too. But we know that anthropologists are on the whole naïve and eager people, who rarely examine their own prejudices. I discovered after two days that I entered Japan with the unconscious assumption that all Japanese speak in high voices. This is false. 2. I entered Japan with the notion that all Japanese would be embarrassed when spoken to. This is false. 3. I had a half baked notion that Tokyo looked like a large park with museum-like buildings scattered through it (really kind of surrealist dream). This is false. 4. I believed that although most Japanese could read, only a few were literate. This is mostly false. 5. I believed that Japan was amazingly homogenous in physical appearance and behavior. This is completely false and true--see earlier confused remarks. 6. Finally, I had the firm belief that a careful reading of Benedict, Sansom, Embree, et.al. would provide one with the basic knowledge for research here. Maybe-- but today I discovered that my most pressing need for information concerns government bureaus and the patterns of population movement.

To conclude this session, let us ask the question: What is the "Oriental" here? Is this the Orient? The initial Yokohama impression was negative--the damn place looked like part of Seattle, and the docks were so packed with Americans that one could hardly feel strange and eastern. In to Tokyo the impressions were so confused that I can hardly say what I felt; after a while in Tokyo and outside the Orient came in a physical sense--the "Japanesy" look as my dear mother used to say when she saw some bamboo bric-abrac; that is, delicacy, intricacy, retiring-ness, vistas of people in hedged fields, etc., etc. Japanese gardens and prints. For a couple of days I drank this in--every glimpse I could get. Concrete highways and western buildings and railroads didn't figure--I simply didn't see them. I recall one trip into town with Herb Passin in the AM and the only thing that I remember seeing on that trip was an ancient house on a farm with old style thatched roof. Well, all this will return when we go to Kyoto and similar places which retain the traditional appearance, but by now the Japanese feeling and visions have about disappeared, and all I see are the familiar sights of the urban world - the streets look like streets again. "Oriental" becomes not of the bric-a-brac dish garden business but the urban and rural world of the Japanese nation. I regret that I didn't see Japan in my mystic and impressionable teens, when the garden view would have persisted. Not of course that I don't see the differences--this communication is full of them--but the special naïve physical "oriental" look is about gone.

via The Marmot's Hole (in turn via Neilbarker's Seoul)

I suspect I'll have more to post as I explore the archives. Takes me way back to my early childhood in Occupied Japan.

South Korea's New Hybrid News Organization: OhmyNews!

Donata Communications has posted an article about a new type of media organization that apparently helped drive greater participation by normally apathetic younger voters (the "2030" generation, those in their 20s and 30s) during the recent elections in South Korea, the most "wired" society on earth. The article by Terry L. Heaton has a grandiose title--TV News in a Postmodern World: The Genius of OhmyNews--but is well worth a full read.

Whether it was genius, luck, timing or all three, OhmyNews! has become a very powerful media entity in South Korea, and the amazing thing is that its principal tool is a Website. OhmyTV is a very slick streaming online TV station, and their election night coverage would've stunned even the so-called "experts" at the network level in the U.S. The graphics and sound effects alone were enough to make any producer drool. OhmyNews! also publishes a Saturday print edition now, but its bread and butter is the Internet.

According to the UCLA Center for Communications Policy World Internet Report, there are two noticeable differences between U.S. and Korean Internet users. Seven in ten Korean users believe that most or all of the information on the Web is accurate or reliable. That's compared to a little over half of Internet users in the U.S. Secondly, Internet users in Korea spend considerably more time online and less watching television than their U.S. counterparts.

Updates and bulletins can happen at any time, but OhmyNews! "publishes" its content three times a day, 9:30 a.m., 1:00 p.m. and 5:00 p.m. It is, therefore, targeting a largely working audience. It also provides news via cell phones and other mobile devices.

Staff reporters (80% of whom began as citizen reporters) now number over 50 with almost 27,000 citizen journalists contributing. The American-educated Oh has a history of rejecting traditional journalism, having worked for alternative media outlets before founding OhmyNews!.

We do not regard objective reporting as a source of pride. OhmyNews does not regard straight news articles as the standard. Articles including both facts and opinions are acceptable when they are good.

And "good" is in the purview of his editors. It harkens back to the days before the elite "professionalism" took hold in the early 20th century, and it's obviously resonating with the citizenry in South Korea.

via Bill Hobbs via Instapundit

UPDATE: The Marmot's Hole comments, and promises more to come.

2004 Indonesian Legislative Election Results So Far

On 20 April, the Jakarta Post reports the ongoing Indonesian vote tally as of last Friday, with something like 75% of the votes counted.

JAKARTA (JP): Provisional vote tally from the General Elections Commission (KPU) as of 2:45 a.m. on Friday is as follows:

Rank - Party - Votes - %

1. (20) The Golkar Party: 19,287,067 (21.11%)
[former President Suharto's old party]

2. (18) The Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI-P): 17,814,035 (19.49%)
[current President Megawati's party]

3. (15) The National Awakening Party (PKB): 10,886,977 (11.91%)
[former President Gus Dur's (= Abdurrahman Wahid's) party]

4. (5) The United Development Party (PPP): 7,615,482 (8.33%)
[former rural Muslim party]

5. (9) The Democratic Party (PD): 6,879,372 (7.53%)
[Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono's spinoff from PDI-P]

6. (16) The Prosperous Justice Party (PKS): 6,549,961 (7.17%)
["Caring and clean"--and peaceful]

7. (13) The National Mandate Party (PAN): 5,918,636 (6.48%)
[Amien Rais's urban-based reform party]

8. (3) The Crescent Star Party (PBB): 2,345,426 (2.57%)
[sectarian pro-syariah party]

9. (17) The Reform Star Party (PBR): 2,099,182 (2.30%)
[sectarian pro-syariah party]

10. (14) The Concern for the Nation Functional Party (PKPB): 1,945,837 (2.13%)
[Suharto clan party headed by his daughter "Tutut"]

Below the 2% threshold: the Prosperous Peace Party (PDS), which aims to represent the Christian minorities. It seems a good sign that, in a country 88% Muslim and riven by religious strife, the most highly sectarian parties garnered such tiny fractions of the vote.

The parties who win a minimum of 20% of the votes for the parliamentary elections are eligible to nominate their candidate for the presidential election on 5 July 2004.

Holy Warriors vs. the Salvation Army in Poso, Sulawesi, Indonesia

Yet another outbreak of violence hit the area around Poso in Central Sulawesi, Indonesia, over the Easter weekend.

At 7:15 pm, April 10th, three masked men in Ninja-like costumes arrived on motorcycle and stormed the Protestant congregation, opening fire on hundreds of Christians who were celebrating Easter. Seven people were injured, including a four-year old girl who was shot in the right leg. The assailants escaped to a nearby forest.

Three previous shootings in the last month have claimed the lives of three Christians and injured another. The deaths of Rosia Pilonga, a 41-year old dean of Law at the Siontuwunu Maroso University and Jhon Christian Tanalida, who were shot dead by unknown gunmen earlier last month, were followed by the shooting death of a local clergyman, Reverend Freddy Wuisan, in his own home late one evening.

These anonymous attacks have targeted the Christian population in the Poso region even after the 2001 Peace accord was established by the government to end two years of fighting which killed some 2000 people. In the worst bloodshed last October, gunmen killed 10 people in attacks on mainly Christian villages.

Christians so far have not retaliated to any of the attacks with violence.

The violent outbreaks in 2000-2001 were attributed to the Laskar Jihad holy warriors, which officially disbanded in the wake of the Bali bombing in 2002, but is more likely to have relocated to West Papua, well away from international media TV cameras. The most recent violence has been attributed to the Jemaah Islamiya terrorist group apparently responsible for the Bali attack.

One odd irony of the conflict in Poso is that Christianity first came to Central Sulawesi by means of the Salvation Army, which describes itself in military terms but, as far as I know, has never sanctioned violence as a means of spreading its message. A good, concise account of the origins of the Salvation Army and its arrival in Central Sulawesi can be found in the chapter, "Onward Christian Soldiers: The Salvation Army in Sulawesi," in the book Fields of the Lord: Animism, Christian Minorities, and State Development in Indonesia, by Lorraine Aragon (U. Hawai‘i Press, 2000), pp. 116-118. (Author-date references are omitted in the following extract.)

The Salvation Army began as the East London Christian Revival Society in 1865, when a Wesleyan Methodist preacher named William Booth took his message to the street people of East London. Booth quickly discovered that these lower-class individuals, often alcoholics or scofflaws, were unwelcome in established English churches. When their roving street evangelism was discouraged by Methodist Church institutions, Booth and his wife, Catherine, founded their own sect.... They recognized that their prospective audience was not attracted to the staid atmosphere of conventional churches and organ music, so they created a circus-like environment of tents thrown up in public squares with vivacious music played on guitars, banjos, trumpets, and bass drums.... In this context, Booth and his wife preached eternal salvation through Christian faith and discipline to individuals who were considered the most sinful members of British society.

Booth remained doctrinally faithful to Wesleyan principles: faith in both Old and New Testament scriptures, the Trinity, original sin, and the atonement of Jesus Christ.... It was less a matter of doctrine than Booth's constituency and approach to them that made the Salvation Army a distinctive sect apart from Methodism.

Because many of his original followers were alcoholics, Booth eliminated the sacraments, which he saw as tempting his followers with sips of wine. Salvation Army members are forbidden alcohol and tobacco in order to purify their physical and spiritual selves from sinful habits. Booth also encouraged, yet disciplined, the charismatic expression of penitence among his followers by restricting their confessions of faith to moments in the service when all were called upon to volunteer their "witness" to the greatness of the Lord....

The East London Christian Revival Society changed its name to the Christian Mission and then, in 1878, to the Salvation Army. Booth found military references in the Bible evocative of the kind of energetic and disciplined movement that he envisioned.... [This was the heyday of the YMCA and "muscular Christianity."] Hence the organization's chosen processional hymn became "Onward, Christian Soldiers!" Once the Salvation Army name was chosen, the way to structure and clothe the organization's members became clear to "General" Booth, who began to assign military ranks and adopt used British Army garments that later were altered to create a distinctive Salvation Army uniform.

By the late 1880s, Salvation Army congregations, or "corps," were opened in other parts of the British empire and European continent. Given the organization's early statement that "[t]he Salvation Army makes religion where there was no religion before" ..., missionization in Europe's overseas colonies was a natural next step for the Salvation Army's expansion. Methodists already disavowed the high Calvinist view of strict predestination, which made missionary work more purposive, merely another extension of the desired corpus Christianum....

In 1909, A. W. F. Idenburg, the newly stationed governor-general of the Dutch East Indies, contacted Gerrit Govaars, the first Dutch Salvation Army [Du. Leger des Heils] officer ever commissioned and the newly assigned Indonesian territorial "commander." Govaars was assigned to travel from an established Salvation Army headquarters in Semarang, Java, to assess the possibility of opening missions among the "pagan Toradjas" of Central Sulawesi. A 1970s interview with Govaars indicates that once he arrived in the Palu Valley, he met a German named Zuppinger. Zuppinger, who was married to a "native" woman and could speak some local language, accompanied Govaars on a journey to Kulawi's pagan temple, where Govaars became "the first Christian to preach the gospel in Kulawi" .... Of his travels into the interior farther south, Govaars said:

From place to place we hired carriers, and so traversed the country. We spoke to the heads of the tribes. One of them listened interestedly to what I told him about Christ, serving the Lord and not doing bad things. Then he asked, "Are we allowed to eat pig's meat?"

Upon my affirmative he said, "Oh well, that is all right. Wild pigs eat our harvest, so we ought to be allowed to eat pigs." ...

These comments, familiar to all missionaries in Indonesia, encapsulate one of the primary objections that highlanders have to Islam. By initial comparison, the Christian religion seems less of a dietary hardship. Unlike the coastal Kaili, most of whom gradually gave up eating pork to forge alliances with Muslim merchants from South Sulawesi, highland Kulawi people never found a sufficiently good reason to renounce their major feast food in favor of a foreign religion.

UPDATE: Indonesian police say they have "found 17 bombs and scores of home-made guns, knives and bows and arrows in an extensive search of Indonesia's Poso district. Hundreds of police conducted door-to-door searches and combed fields in the Central Sulawesi district from Wednesday to find illegal weapons." ... Local residents "gave police a lot of information."

Burma, TotalFinaElf, and Bernard Kouchner

A blog I only recently discovered via Belmont Club, the Last of the Famous International Playboys, posted back in January a long, detailed, and nuanced report on a scandal involving "Kouchner, Total & Burma":

Good people make mistakes, too. Someone I very much admire, founder of Médecins sans frontiéres Bernard Kouchner, has drawn the wrath of right-thinking people down on his head.

In his long career, the popular Kouchner (click on "afficher ma sélection" to plot his rising and falling poll numbers) has been a champion of human rights and was one of the only public figures in France to express support for the removal of Saddam Hussein.

But according to a few articles, France's illustrious former socialist Minister of Health, Kouchner, has been accused of whitewashing the matter of the complicity of French oil giant Total (which recently merged with its highly corrupt and rapacious competitor Elf, forming the fourth largest oil company in the world) in alleged human rights abuses as part of the construction of a pipeline in the Yadana region of Myanmar.

On 7 April, the "tenth anniversary of the first full day of slaughter in the Rwandan genocide," Last of the Famous posted another long, detailed, and nuanced retrospective on Rwanda, with a follow-up on 11 April. Both fascinating, but grim reading.

19th-Century IT Improvements and Noncorporate Whaling

Alaska-based econoblogger Ben Muse posted a couple of interesting historical observations recently, one on the 19th-century IT revolution and another on why whaling ventures didn't adopt corporate structures.

The first post summarizes data from the book, The New Financial Order: Risk in the 21st Century, by Robert Shiller.

• The cost of paper for record storage drops as a paper making machine is invented in 1800, and the use of wood pulp for making paper is introduced in 1865.


• The cost of data transmission drops when standardized envelopes are introduced in 1849, and as "street addresses proliferated in the late nineteenth century ..."


• The cost of making copies drops with the invention of the letter press in 1780 ("Letters ... were placed before the ink was fully dry between the tissue-paper pages of a blank book, and the book closed and placed in a letter press, which pressed the pages tightly together. The special ink used to write the letter left a mark on the blank page, thereby generating a copy, which, although backward on the tissue paper, could be read normally from the other side."), of carbon paper in 1806, and photographic document copying in 1900.


• "The invention of the typewriter in 1868 was significant not only for the increased speed of data entry but also for the increased reliability of typewritten records ..."


• Industry for producing forms emerges in the 19th Century; carbon forms available by the 1880s.


• Document sizes become standardized.


• In the 1880s and 1890s development of mechanical calculators "sped the operation of the addition of numbers by about six ..."


• Filing systems improved (Dewey Decimal system introduced in 1876).

And then, there is the vertical file: "The vertical file with the associated cardboard file folders appeared at the 1893 world's fair, the Columbian Exposition in Chicago, where it won a gold medal ..."

The second post summarizes data from a working paper by Eric Hilts, "Incentives in Corporations: Evidence from the American Whaling Industry," NBER w10403, March 2004.

U.S. whaling began in the 17th Century as small groups of colonists set out from shore after targets of opportunity. Gradually the business shifted to whaling ships with crews of 30 taking world wide trips lasting years at a time. Despite the 19th Century IT revolution, management of an enterprise like this would pose big challenges.

In the typical whaling enterprise a small group owned shares in the vessel. These persons delegated most management decisions to agents, who themselves had significant shares in the operations. [The agents and owners also tended to know each other very well, both personally and professionally.] ...

In the 1830s some whaling firms incorporated in an apparent effort to become more attractive to large numbers of small investors. But look at what happened to management's incentives. To a great extent oversight responsibility shifted from the investors to a board of directors. These, in turn, delegated management responsibility to an agent....

The corporate structure never became very important in the whaling business. The whaling industry survived into the later 19th Century, but "Of the whaling corporations that were chartered in the 1830s and early 1840s, none survived past the 1840s." [Hilts, p. 12] ...

Hilts thinks the reason is the different incentives faced by agents under the alternative forms of organization. He sought confirmation in a data set on 874 whaling voyages from 1830 to 1849; the data set covered almost 20% of the voyages during that time. For each voyage he calculated a productivity index.Hilts thinks the reason is the different incentives faced by agents under the alternative forms of organization. He sought confirmation in a data set on 874 whaling voyages from 1830 to 1849; the data set covered almost 20% of the voyages during that time. For each voyage he calculated a productivity index. Statistical analysis of the relation between the index and voyage characteristics found that, both statistically, and practically, corporate voyages were less productive that non-corporate voyages. (As a practical matter, organization as a corporation had a greater adverse impact on productivity than the death of the captain on the voyage. [Hilts, p. 23])

Molvanîa: A Land Untouched by Modern Dentistry

Molvanîa, "a land untouched by modern dentistry" according to the Jetlag Travel Guide Molvanîa, urgently needs to enter into a bilateral free trade agreement with an exporter of dental products like, say, Liechtenstein.

(Brobra to polyglot polydont pf, from whose blog this tooth of wisdom was extracted.)

Yuppie Politics and Dog Rights in China

On 11 April, Erik Eckholm reported in the New York Times on political progress in China measured by Yardsticks You Never Thought of:

5. YUPPIE POLITICS The pressures for reform may flare most powerfully not from the downtrodden, but from the new, property-owning middle class, which will demand accountability from officials.

In 2003, the most vociferous illegal demonstrations in Beijing were staged not by desperate workers but by young professionals who said they had been cheated by developers of their apartment complex, abetted by local officials....

7. HUMAN RIGHTS FOR DOGS, AND VICE VERSA This is no joke. Visitors to Beijing and other big cities may notice an eerie absence of dogs on balmy weekend afternoons. This is not because they are regularly eaten; in fact, the Chinese love their pet dogs as much as any people anywhere. But because of outdated and draconian laws, tens of thousands of pet owners in Beijing alone must keep their dogs in the closet, as it were.

In Beijing, dogs are not allowed outside in the daytime; those caught outdoors are confiscated and killed. They are not allowed in parks, on grass or on elevators - even when elderly owners live on the 14th floor. They may not grow taller than knee-high, on pain of death. And licenses are expensive.

(Xiexie ni, Andrés Gentry!)

Old Friends: Mozambique and Timor Leste

The Head Heeb has an interesting post about the especially close ties between Mozambique and East Timor, going back to 1975.

The foreign minister of East Timor is in Maputo laying the groundwork for the first Timorese embassy in Africa. Mozambique may seem an unlikely first choice, but its relative lack of political and economic clout is balanced by its longstanding ties of solidarity with East Timor....

In some ways, the post-independence relationship between the two countries is even more remarkable than what came before, because it illustrates how even one of the poorest countries on earth can be a donor. There are other ways to attack a problem besides throwing money at it - sharing experience and technical personnel, or providing willing hands to get the job done - and a nation need not be rich to aid other countries in these ways. Such aid often has a political purpose, like the Cuban doctors that are ubiquitous in many Third World countries, but it can make a real difference; sometimes, in fact, it can make more of one than a boondoggle project that serves mainly to fill a corrupt dictator's coffers.

Aftermath of Typhoon Sudal in Yap, Micronesia

[This email letter was relayed out from Yap, Micronesia, in the wake of Typhoon Sudal, with the author's permission to reproduce it freely. I've done so verbatim, omitting only one paragraph. My own experience of a hurricane on Yap in 1974 is utterly inconsequential by comparison.]

Dear Friends,

Seok Ha and myself are both shaken, but whole and healthy (minus a nasty head cold that doesn't want to give up) doing much better than OK given the circumstances, but it is with immense sadness I convey these tidings from our tiny little tropical islands to y'all.

Typhoon Sudal may have broken Yap's back, but not its people's spirits.

Nobody ever expected the eye of a super typhoon to hit Yap head on. This was not supposed to happen, traditionally, the Yap sorcerers and magicians have had the powers to divert typhoons. And following the old "badness comes in waves" adage (no pun intended), the peak of typhoon intensity naturally happened to coincide with high tide. Add to that an extreme ocean water surge pushed by Sudal, and these here islands found themselves, as the saying goes, in deeper than usual waters.

We were told, and some of us could learn on the Internet typhoon warning pages, that the "outskirts of Sudal" was, maybe, going to affect Yap. Nobody was mentally, or physically, prepared for the assault that hit us shortly after midnight. Typhoon Mitag, that two years ago I thought was mighty scary, was nothing in comparison. Sudal was not classified as a super typhoon (and I don't know if it was ever officially "upgraded"), but the opinion of everyone here--even people with first hand experience of serious US hurricane damage--is clear: this was, by far, the worst anyone has ever even heard of. Some of the old Yapese people I talked with remembers a strong typhoon that hit in the late forties, but with nowhere near the destructive energy that Sudal packed. But the spirit of the Yapese turns out to be incredibly strong, and resilient. Come to think of it, that may be a mental requirement, in order to live permanently out here.

I know of no actual measurements taken during this intense ordeal, but Sudal was announced as being of typhoon strength, with 120 knots (60+ meter per second) sustained winds, and up to 180 knots (90+ meter per second) gusts. There may be a tendency to overestimate these things when you're in the middle of it all, but judging from the extreme damage that was delivered to Yap on these Easter holidays, and by how it was absolutely impossible to venture outside during the peak hours (the "eye" stayed over Yap, incessantly delivering one blow after the other, for a good six hours), my guess is that by the time Sudal hit Yap proper full force (about 02:00), it had grown well into super typhoon territory. As if the matter of classification really matters.

Power and water went early, leaving all the islands in virtual darkness, and with no drinking water. Thanks to no less than heroic efforts by Tim and Tim (water and power, respectively) and their crews, we got power back already early this morning, and we're promised to have our water back by tomorrow. That is only here in Colonia, though (priority one due to the needs of the Yap State Hospital), the complete grid will probably take some time to get back online.

My personal assessment is that 60 percent of all local businesses, 70 percent of all homes, and 80 percent of all schools, are utterly devastated, completely written off. Gone. Can't even use the rubble left behind as building material, as the pieces are too small. As kindling, yes. Rumung island is reported to be especially hard hit, with zero man-made structures remaining.

The COM [College of Micronesia] campus, as its neighboring Yap High School campus, looks as if a bomb exploded above the area (especially with that old Japanese concrete tower, with all its US battleship and artillery shelling scars from WWII, residing in the middle of it all). Only the admin and the computer lab buildings are still standing. But my guess is that it will be a considerable while before any Yapese students will have any interest in taking night-time computer courses. Rumor has it that the school board has decided to terminate the 2004 school year early.

The airport terminal buildings has sustained some cosmetic damage, but it looks as if there are no structural problems, except for the fire truck shelter (gone) and the PMA hanger (the hanger doors are bulging outwards, from excessive pressure from within). And unfortunately, all the trees and koyengs [shelters] lining the AP parking lot, together with the "Welcome to Yap" sign, succumbed to the awesome powers of Sudal. It looks like a war zone, the aftermath of another bomb attack.

The Save Way store, along with most of Madrich, and all shoreline Baleabaat houses, gone. Videographer Mark Thorpe, who now rents a concrete house across the road from where Save Way used to be, is fine, but his house got a thorough enema administered by seven meter (20+ feet) waves that kept pummeling the shoreline. He considers himself lucky to have lost only a few belongings, while his next door neighbors were being completely wiped out, and with zero means to rebuild. The outer island Madrich residents, already in abysmal conditions in their shantytown, were emergency evacuated to a few schools, and as if to kick them while they were already downed flat, Sudal then proceeded to blow away the roofs of the schoolhouses. When it rains, it pours, indeed.

Seven-to-ten meter waves pounded the Chamorro Bay Bridge for hours (miraculously, it is still standing, with its concrete pillars all knocked to one side or another, and the steel guardrails severely twisted!), and the ocean surges continued past the bridge to seriously damage all houses and businesses lining the Chamorro Bay.

Ace's Mart, demolished, as was the little yellow church up on the hill, and the kindergarten (pre-school?). Professor Caldwell's house (where Carl used to rent) next door was left untouched, as was the Baha'i house--it seems to me as if that particular area received some protection from the Nimar hill.

Pathway's Hotel got lucky, with only thatch damage (on first assessment, anyway), but in need of lots and lots of minor repair work on all eight units, this with their economy already severely strained by recent events.

Many boats were thrown way up on dry land, most smashed useless.

And trees down, everywhere. In many places in massive piles.

Most Yap coconut trees are now asymmetrical, with all fronds facing the head-on direction of Sudal being brutally ripped off. On Guam, not even super typhoon Paka was able to break healthy coconut trunks: here on Yap, there are now many many coconut trees snapped off like so many matches, silent evidence of how much communal power these tiny air molecules are capable of carrying. Many of the steel reinforced concrete power poles are leaning, but only very few got snapped. Incredibly strong wind gusts!

The Angel's Mart (Chinese store) and the bakery next to the ESA hotel got flushed clean from the bay-side, with *all* merchandise and product spread all over the road and neighboring landscape. I do not know the status of ESA hotel itself, but I hope it is in as good shape as it looks (minus its bayside koyengs [shelters], of course).

Trader's Ridge Resort looks comparatively good, but I have no details, as I have not yet ventured past the accumulated debris up the Nimar hills.

The courthouse corner was ripped wide open, and law texts from their library are now littering most of downtown Colonia.

The YCA hardware store/warehouse was demolished beyond repair, battered by both waves and high winds. In contrast, the new WAAB Hardware building, obviously well built, stands relatively undamaged.

The Manta Ray Bay hotel got its newly completed seaside (re-)constructions completely washed away (just as was done by typhoon Mitag, two years ago), and here too, enormous waves were crashing through the hotel and exiting on the parking lot. The proud sailing ship S/V Mnuw is now resting at a 45 degree list, half-way up on dry land, with no conceivable way to get it back into the water. So now the Manta Ray Bay hotel has no bar, and no restaurant, and no glass in most room windows. Bill, traveling, was stuck on Guam until yesterday, when he came back on one of the extraordinary Continental flights. Some of their dive boats were taken to the mangroves before Sudal hit, but since nobody was really prepared for what was coming, some of the fleet was left at the dock, as usual. Together with every trace of the dock, and the beautiful new terrace that replaced the old bar washed away by Mitag, they are now gone. Actually, parts of one of the boats (I think it is the remains of "Betelnut") can be seen sitting on top of the now totally wrecked (sunk in shallow waters) M/V Cecilia--another ugly wreck now permanently lining the Colonia harbor. Sigh.

The Family Chain Bakery is completely leveled. So now Yap has no local commercial source of bread. It is my hope that some Palau bakery will offer increased shipments.

PBC is damaged, but under control. Also, Hiroshi-san (who was also stranded on Guam until yesterday) is one of the very very few that had any form of insurance.

A forty foot container (!) came tumbling through the air (literally, no less!) and came to rest across the road in front of O'Keefe's, blocking through traffic. And speaking of O'Keefe's: all Don Evans' ventures has escaped with only minor damage, as did his house. Don is counting his blessings.

Just past Dugoor village, heading towards Rumuu village, large chunks of the road pavement has been ripped loose and blown clear off the road, and much of the topsoil on the exposed northern shores has been blown off. Yap is bleeding from multiple open and ugly wounds.

Down south, most villages has been flattened, in the true sense of the word. Because I was known to own a digital camera, I was commissioned by the Police Chief to be on the southern damage assessment team, to take early pictures of the mayhem, to try to convince FEMA that this is indeed a disaster area, in great and imminent need of lots of help from the outside. It was a mentally very difficult task, to go from village to village in Chief Cham's (Gregory) truck, to stare all this heartbreak and helplessness straight in its face, all those crushed dreams. Unfortunately, my camera got some typhoon damage, so the result did not come out the best. But better than nothing, I guess/hope.

The Nimgil ("Nathan's") store is demolished, with fifty percent of their betel nut plantation down on the ground, and their pig farm now without a roof (the concrete walls are still standing, and the porkers are scared shitless, but fine). Jim and Debi's place looks OK, somewhat sheltered by the dense surrounding vegetation, but we never took a close look--it looked too good for a check-out stop. Down in Anoth, the beach has yet again doubled in size, their beautiful newly built peebai [meeting house] is still standing, but now with a distinct slant. The loop road is impassable, and it will take a major effort to hack through the massive multiple walls of intertwined broken coco, betel, and nipa palm trunks, mixed with assorted crushed building debris. Regina Thun's house lost parts of its roof, but the (long since closed) store escaped with almost no damage.

At the Destiny Resort, even the ruins from typhoon Mitag's visit two years ago have now been washed away, and Carol and Colin's "new" house on Maap has taken major wind gust hits. As destinies for visiting lawyers go: Peter (Public Defender) and Theresa Steltzer's house at the Queen Bee will be out of the rental circuit until massive roof repairs has been done, plus associated water damage dittos has been undertaken. And trying to find a decent place to stay here on Yap will not be easy, for the foreseeable future.

On the west side, our "home village" (Kadai) has been badly damaged. We were unable to take the road down to Sunset Park, too much debris. Berna and Thomas Gorong, just finishing off a renovation of their hilltop house, had to abandon house for the relative safety of brother Theo's concrete house, but as it turned out their house had sustained very little damage. Wayaan's "vacation house" (the fruit bat hunting lodge Fillmed built for Guam governor Guiterrez) next door, however, is now spread across a sizeable area. Dave Vasalla's house, a stone's throw away, was undamaged, protected by the recess in which it was constructed. Tony Ganngiyang's blue concrete house also gave evidence to the wisdom of building solidly--not a scratch! Otherwise, all houses visible from the loop road (Colonia - Delipebinaw - Fanif - Colonia) were either completely or partly demolished. Churches, schools, Kingtex, Public Transportation, the whole lot got hammered, but badly.

No big tree has been left standing. All mango and breadfruit trees of any size, that I know of, are gone, many taro patches have been ruined by salt water, practically all banana and papaya trees are gone, it is just so incredibly sad. It will be quite some time before local food supplies are back to normal. This may become another big problem, because so many people here are still depending only on local food, having no money to purchase imported "manufactured" food.

Remember how we always used to say, with some pride, "There are no homeless here on Yap, and nobody is starving." Over night, a majority of the Yapese has become homeless, and we can only hope that the food situation will be solved, somehow.

In Gachpar, no house along the shores has survived, in most cases with no trace left behind. Of "our" little beach house, until Good Friday occupied by Michelle and Luke, only the concrete pillars upon which it rested remains. They too (Mich and Luke, that is), way too late realizing the urgency of the situation, got completely wiped out, materially.

James Lukan has just completed a flimsy-looking structure (two-by-fours and corrugated tin sheets) to house my pool table, across the road from the Gagil Elementary School (as most other schools were severely hit, this one got away almost scot free, "only" some roofs gone). For some weird reason, the "pool koyeng" was still intact! The small store, ten feet away, plus the supposedly typhoon-proof "waiting for the bus" shelter the same distance away in the other direction, was completely demolished.

Except for the house where the Munn's used to live (still standing, good solid house: at one point it was standing in water up to the second floor) and the newly-constructed-but-not-yet-moved-into Kensuf main residence (still stands, but with serious roof damage, and with a truckload of cement sacks, for protection brought into the house, now being fused into a single clump of useless concrete, and most of the unlaid tiles crushed and scattered around the surrounding terrain), Kensuf's whole property was leveled. There is no trace of the house "Little Richard" Overy (our ex-archivist) used to live in. It is all way beyond heartbreaking.

Saint Joseph's church is demolished. Again miraculously, the Padre's house, on its dinky stilts, was unscathed (strong message, or fluke?).

Wanyan, same. All houses along the shoreline are gone. Stone money banks, standing for centuries, were broken into by huge waves, breaking and spreading the rai coins and shattered pieces thereof all over the place. The road to Sea Breeze Beach is as yet, and without a major clean-up effort, impassable. I don't know about Bechyal Culture Center, but judging from its location and what happened to all other structures on the northern shores of Maap, I fear the worst.

The Sports Complex was badly hit, and I've already heard rumors about Black Micro being sued for sub-standard construction. Here, too, the "roller" doors were pushed out by pressure from within (just like the hanger doors at the AP). Together with some of the now knocked out schools, the YSC was designated to function as an official "emergency shelter" in case the typhoon happened to hit. People who had taken refuge there were scrambling for their lives as parts of the roof eventually caved in. You know you have a crisis on your hands, when the disaster shelters are getting knocked out by the elements.

Al Ganang, proprietor of the sadly no longer existing Village View Hotel, is happy to be alive. The surge took him completely by surprise. Again, all the buildings along his beautiful beach are gone: the store, the bar, the dive shop, all of the two-unit hotel bungalows. All gone. Insurance? You're kidding, right?

Wanead village, a little further north, was almost completely obliterated. Johnny Chugan told us that the entire village population is now shacked up in a single relatively undamaged building. The Wanead village path is now their new shoreline, facing a huge new beach. Chugan had just completed renovations and spiff-ups of their beach-side home, financed by an BofFSM loan. The house is no more (and the beautiful house he built for Cathy and PJ was blown away with it), but the bank loan remains. It is so very difficult to not burst out crying.

The Kula Place (just before Wanead village) is ravaged badly, all its koyengs blown to tiny little pieces, and substantial parts of the lovely old shady three has been blown down. Not entirely gone, thank heavens, and I do so hope that what remains of this grand ole tree will be able to survive its almost complete defoliation.

That is another thing, and it looks so weird and unreal: almost all leaves has been ripped of all trees. And I'm sad to say that, if anything, I am understating the damage done: the beautiful rolling green hills of Yap were, within a few hours, transformed to ugly brown hills, reminding me of late autumn in Sweden: no green leaves, no green anything, just bare branches, and the brown forest floor clearly visible--all across all the Yap islands. Very depressing. I don't know much about resilience of trees and stuff, and I can only hope that this kind of damage is reversible, that somehow the plants can find the strength and resources needed to survive until a new generation of photosynthesizing green leaves has been produced.

Closer to home, here in Gaanelay village in Colonia: The Yap Agriculture facilities are demolished. Black Micro is a mess. As is some of Gilmar's enterprises (his new pool room, gone), but it looks as if his store and video rental/Laundromat may be salvageable. Do you remember "Yap Wellness Center" just before Gilmar's store? Well, forget it. The Talguw area was lucky, we could only see some roof damaged there. Behind our YCA townhouses, Libyen's brand new two-storey house has been blown off its foundation, coming to rest at 40 degrees off the normal, beyond repair. All that can be done is to try to wreck it gently, in order to get to re-use all the expensive building material. Libyen, stoic, said "I'm too old to get upset by this, but the situation for Yap is really bad." Gurwan was completely wiped out, the concrete sides of her house are still standing, but there is no roof, and nothing is left inside the house (Gurwan said, "It hasn't been this clean since it was built"--making fun of the unbearable situation). The schoolhouse (temporary home for some 120 Madrich "refugees") has lost most of its roof, and is generally beyond repair.

A few seconds of my life I believe has gotten permanently etched onto my retinas: at about 0600, as I was looking out our bedroom window, the huge breadfruit tree growing between our house and Libyen's was finally brought down, and it fell directly towards our house (this tree has been worrying me ever since we moved in, with its potential for wreaking havoc on our house in case it ever fell down in an uncontrolled way). However, and as I watched it, a gust grabbed the huge trunk, raised it back up and then swung it clear in another direction, and nothing came down on our roof. Guardian angel? Maybe, but more likely our luck that the wind direction was away from our house. But it was a remarkable display of typhoon power, I remember it flashing through my head that "this is some kind of special effects trick," to see a falling huge tree like that change direction in mid-fall. Amazing. And yes, we too are counting our blessings.

Countless cars, representing years of working hours for the average Yapese, has been rendered useless by flying debris and falling/flying tree trunks. "Flying guillotines" (corrugated tin sheets, the omnipresent roofing island material) also have done their share of slicing damage--that big water tank that got sliced clear through could, but for the grace of God, have been my belly, as I was forced out in the middle of the night to reinforce the window boarding material that was coming loose. Those wavy sheets of sharp steel were flying everywhere! It was scary as hell, lemmetellya!...

The Yap FM radio and TV station was knocked out early, as its aerial tower lost its supports early on.

The good news is that, unbelievably, nobody got hurt! And there has been no looting reported (I sincerely hope it stays that way). James Lukan said that one person is missing from Gachpar, but he also said that person may be just wandering around somewhere (the individual is of somewhat diminished mental capacities, and Lukan said, "If it turns out he's been hiding in order to get attention, I'm gonna beat him up!"). I hope he will be found, and that he will be spared the beating.

The situation is bad. I'll try again: It is very, very bad. Maybe as many as 5,000 Yapese have lost their homes. A Guam PDN article ... mentions that 1,500 people on Yap are in "homeless shelters" (roofless schoolhouses), but says nothing about the fact that the majority of typhoon-struck Yapese much prefer to stay in whatever way they can in their demolished ex-homes, in their villages, with their clansmen.

And all the Yapese I meet say, "we'll rebuild. Life goes on" and they laugh, and they prepare another betel nut chew.

In all, quite an unforgettable experience. And I sincerely hope that none of you will ever have to go through something even remotely resembling being a mote in the eye of a super typhoon--It is scary.

May your Gods protect, care for, and bless y'all!
Henry and Kim Seok Ha
MicroTech Consulting

Morobe Field Diary, December 1976: Going-away Party

Yesterday, the Sunday before Christmas, we finally had my village party. We had it early to make way for another one next Sunday. By my reckoning it was a good one. The [M.V.] Sago took off for Kuwi early in the morning to get the pig [people tend not to slaughter and eat pigs they've raised themselves] while we got the church service out of the way. About the time the service ended the Sago pulled in. The pig was alive, tied to a pole and large by NG [= New Guinea] standards and well fatted. People gathered under the men's house at this end of the village while the women went to work on the starch and a few men on the pig who died a rather torturous death due to inefficient killers. One girl cried and I would have shed a tear if I weren't at the moment being very detached & scientific (wonderful how science allows you to get beyond your scruples).

[The young, unmarried men's cohort -- my cohort -- took charge of the slaughter and whacked the pig between the eyes several times to stun it before trying to put a pig spear thru its heart, but they had enough trouble finding the heart that an older, more experienced pig hunter stepped in to put the pig out of its misery more efficiently. Its squeals had set the village dogs wild, and the initial butchering had to be done on the platform of a canoe floating far enough offshore to keep the dogs away.]

The plan was to serve the beer with the food to avoid excessive drunkenness but when we had set a preliminary two cartons before the hot, thirsty and impatient crowd of men -- already starting drum-beating -- somehow the momentum started and they got two more, and then two more, before the food came. They were pretty gone for the most part and up singsinging, which they resumed after eating during the mid- to late-afternoon. Within the context of Nu. society we showed rather excessive appreciation (any at all) for the women who prepared the food by distributing a carton of beer among them as well. And a couple of packs of cigarettes. And many shouts of "yowe!" ('well done, bravo, etc.').

After dinner I joined the singsing which went on until dark. Around 7 pm or so we broke for some more food & a wash (my third well-needed one of the day) and to let the guitar-players get their gear together. Then the "play-guitar singsing" began. Again it was my duty to dance and, after a slow start, I danced and danced. At first it was all males though I called for the young women to join in. They were too shy till one town girl started, rather bravely shy at first. Then she came up and danced with me (knowing our strange custom), then her friend asked me. They were both high school girls (grades 7-10) who I didn't know but when I had asked their names I turned the tables & asked them and several other young women to dance -- danced American style the rest of the evening.

I don't know what time it was when we broke up. Most of the village was asleep by then (or trying to get to sleep). Today I have the pleasant melancholy feeling of having met a nice girl at a party and am getting some paperwork done while waiting to count back 11 hours from high tide to figure out when I went to sleep last nite.

Morobe Field Diary, December 1976: Intervillage Conflict

I've had good cause to be ashamed of my village mates lately. While I was in Lae, three who attended a school party in Kuwi chased a bunch of Paiawas looking for a fight with them. They didn't catch any unfortunately. There was little provocation except for the general bad feeling be/ Paiawa & Siboma.

Then the pastor (of Paiewa, Kuwi and Siboma) brought word back from his trip there that the Paiawa were angry and were considering coming over for a brawl at Christmas time (when reinforcements from town will be in both villages). He advised the Sibomas not to go off into the bush separately but to stick together in doing things. For several days following that there has been constant talk of war. It really pissed me off and disappointed me. I'm not particularly worried that anyone would strike me, nor even that the Nus. wouldn't be able to withstand an attack (they outnumber the Paiewas, esp. in young men). But I do have some vulnerable papers and stuff that I'm pretty concerned about preserving anyway.

So today, Dec. 14, the kiap ['patrol officer'] came and told the Nus. (and presumably the Paiewas as well) that if any further trouble came up he would bring 10 police, a large boat, hold summary court and cart the guilty ones off to 6 mos in jail (which people are not fond of being in). Peace may result if Numbamis and Paiewas hold a peace meeting before the kiap in Morobe and straighten themselves out.

DDT Good! Chloroquine Bad!

On one occasion in 1976 when I left my New Guinea village to make a trip into town, my host family asked me to get medicine to kill the head lice their son had picked up while away at school. I did so, and he rubbed it into his hair and then tried to refrain from scratching his scalp as the lice ran around in their death throes. I think he may have had to "lather, rinse, repeat" to get the remaining nits after they hatched, too. It seemed to be effective, but I was horrified at the time to read on the label that the active ingredient was DDT. Nowadays, though, the reputation of DDT seems to have entered rehab.

On 11 April, the New York Times carried a story by Tina Rosenberg headlined, What the World Needs Now Is DDT:

[The book] ''Silent Spring'' changed the relationship many Americans had with their government and introduced the concept of ecology and the interconnectedness of systems into the national debate. Rachel Carson started the environmental movement. Few books have done more to change the world.

But this time around, I was also struck by something that did not occur to me when I first read the book in the early 1980's. In her 297 pages, Rachel Carson never mentioned the fact that by the time she was writing, DDT was responsible for saving tens of millions of lives, perhaps hundreds of millions.

DDT killed bald eagles because of its persistence in the environment. ''Silent Spring'' is now killing African children because of its persistence in the public mind. Public opinion is so firm on DDT that even officials who know it can be employed safely dare not recommend its use. ''The significant issue is whether or not it can be used even in ways that are probably not causing environmental, animal or human damage when there is a general feeling by the public and environmental community that this is a nasty product,'' said David Brandling-Bennett, the former deputy director of P.A.H.O. Anne Peterson, the Usaid official, explained that part of the reason her agency doesn't finance DDT is that doing so would require a battle for public opinion. ''You'd have to explain to everybody why this is really O.K. and safe every time you do it,'' she said -- so you go with the alternative that everyone is comfortable with.

''Why it can't be dealt with rationally, as you'd deal with any other insecticide, I don't know,'' said Janet Hemingway, director of the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine. ''People get upset about DDT and merrily go and recommend an insecticide that is much more toxic.''

So DDT is now making a comeback, but Chloroquine, the antimalarial I took in New Guinea, is now anathema. (And it wasn't all that effective for me. I got a bad case of Plasmodium vivax while there, and another within a year of returning from fieldwork.)

On 8 April, the Independent carried an alarming story by its health editor, Jeremy Laurance, headlined WHO failures led to hundreds of thousands dying from malaria, say medical experts.

Two of the world's most powerful medical organisations have been accused of medical malpractice for knowingly promoting useless drugs that have led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of children.

The World Health Organisation and the UN Global Fund, which was set up to buy drugs for poor countries, have allocated millions of dollars to malaria medicines that are no longer effective against the disease, a group of specialists said. They claim negligence by the two organisations contributed to a rising death rate from malaria, which has doubled in a decade in some parts of Africa because of growing resistance to older drugs.

The WHO launched its Roll Back Malaria programme in 1998 with a target to halve the number of deaths by 2010, but six years into the 12-year programme deaths have risen from between 600,000 and 800,000 to over one million annually, of which 90 per cent are in children under five.

Amir Attaran, of the Royal Institute of International Affairs in London, who made the accusation of malpractice in The Lancet with 12 malaria specialists from Britain, the US, Africa and the Far East, said yesterday: "I am angry because I know hundreds of thousands of kids have died for nothing; possibly millions. It is really negligent for these organisations to have made no progress towards the target in six years. Why should anyone connected with the programme still have their job?"

In 2003 the Global Fund, acting on advice from the WHO, spent $41.4m (£22.5m) on the outdated anti-malarials, chloroquine and sulfadoxine-pyrimethamine, which have been rendered useless by growing drug resistance, but only $18.3m on artemesinin-based therapies, which are effective.

Countries worst affected by malaria in sub-Saharan Africa have proved reluctant to buy the new artemesinin drugs because they are more expensive at $1 to $2 a dose, 10 times more than chloroquine. Although they get help from the Global Fund, they fear they may be left to foot the bill themselves. As a result, patients treated with the outdated drugs in Africa outnumber those given the effective artemesinin drugs by more than 10 to one.

Inside the Information Bubble during the Ethiopian Famine

In 2003, Vintage Books issued a new edition of Robert D. Kaplan's Surrender or Starve: Travels in Ethiopia, Sudan, Somalia, and Eritrea (a collection of his magazine articles published in 1988 by Random House under the title, Surrender or Starve: The Wars Behind the Famine). The only thing added to the new edition appears to be a December 2002 postscript on newly independent Eritrea. But that hardly matters. While reading the book last year, I was struck by how little has changed, either in Western news reporting or in international relief efforts, over the past two decades.

The truth was that many in the Western community in the Ethiopian capital, who served as the West's eyes and ears during the famine and provided the media with much of their information, did not want to admit the truth. Whatever nightmares the word "Ethiopia" may have conjured up in the United States, "Addis" was a nice place to be. (The same could not be said about capitals elsewhere in Africa, where the suffering in the countryside was far less.) The mountain climate was only partly responsible for the pleasant ambiance. As the headquarters of the Organization of African Unity, the Ethiopian capital was relatively clean, with good roads, a plethora of new public buildings, and well-manicured parks. The Hilton Hotel was one of the best managed, centrally located Hiltons in the world; the Hilton's heated, outdoor swimming pool served as a magnet for the foreign community on weekend afternoons.

As for the food, millions may have been starving in the adjacent countryside, but for foreigners, "Addis" was one of the better places on the continent to eat: a well-prepared charcoal-broiled steak, Nile perch, and Italian and Chinese cuisine were always available. Not only was the Hilton equipped with several fine restaurants, but around the city there were several more. No nearby, heartrending scenes spoiled the repasts; just as walls of stone blocked off the sinister reality of the Dergue [the ruling party "Committee"], walls of corrugated iron blocked off the equally unpleasant reality of the slums. Nor were there many beggars in Addis Ababa; far less than in Egypt, for example, where nobody was starving. Christopher J. Matthews, in his article in The New Republic (January 21, 1985), made one of the most insightful comments ever about Ethiopia's capital: "In a country where millions were starving, there was no sign of anyone begging or hustling to survive. I began to wonder. The price of coming into town must be higher than the price of staying away. If the price of staying away in the barren, dying parts of the country is near-certain death, the price of coming into the city must be even more terrible, even more certain."

Matthews, perhaps without being aware of it, had stumbled close to the central fact of 1980s Ethiopia, a fact that many foreigners who actually lived there and many of the journalists who interpreted the famine for the public failed utterly to grasp--Ethiopia, in the manner of Syria and Iraq, was a modernizing and controlled praetorian police state, with a single tribe or ethnic group on top, supported by the most brutal and sophisticated means of repression. For the officers in charge, preserving the integrity of the empire against rebels was a far more uplifting and important goal than fighting famine was. The Soviets, the only great imperialists of the nineteenth century to have survived the twentieth, understood this. They helped, through massive arms shipments, the Dergue achieve its more important goal; the United States helped in the less important one.

As Matthews perceived, like the walls around the palace and around the slums, there was a wall around the famine, too. Destitute peasants were rounded up and arrested even before reaching the city limits. While Eritreans, Tigreans, and others in the northern provinces died by the hundreds of thousands, the markets of the Amhara fortess of Addis Ababa were brimming with grain. The price of it may have risen dramatically, but at least it was there. In Asmara, too, the government-held, fortified provincial capital of Eritrea, food was abundant because it was strategically necessary for the regime to keep the local population pacified. According to a confidential report by a Western relief agency, the "dedicated and efficient" RRC [the Dergue's Relief and Rehabilitation Commission] was virtually starving the worst famine regions in Wollo, while at the same time pouring food into the embattled, militarily vital areas of Tigre and Eritrea and stockpiling it outside Addis Ababa....

The sanitized reality of the Ethiopian capital, a condition that only the most chillingly brutal of regimes could create, helped make the place especially attractive for its foreign residents. "Addis" was a plum posting for a relief official. The situation in the country was "absolutely horrifying" and thus "in the news," which translated into prestige and career advancement for those on the scene. Few seemed to want to rock the boat when rocking the boat could get you thrown out. In the Hilton lobby, it was easier to criticize the Reagan administration than it was to criticize the Dergue.

---

In 1921 the nascent Bolshevik regime in the Soviet Union was shaken by a great famine that its own ruthless policy of crop requisition had caused. Foreign aid was essential and the U.S. proved to be the most generous. Herbert Hoover, who seven years later would be elected president of the United States, spearheaded an effort that put food in the mouths of more than 12 million peasants. The regime survived to inflict even greater famine in the following decade.

But in Ethiopia and in the United States, nobody paid attention to this legacy. In the February 7, 1985, report on the famine, issued by the Senate Subcommittee on Immigration and Refuge Policy and arising out of Senator Kennedy's 1984 visit to the emergency feeding camps, six previous famines were listed in the table entitled, "Famine in Modern History." The famines in the Ukraine, which were the largest of all, were not included in the list.

SOURCE: Robert Kaplan, Surrender or Starve: Travels in Ethiopia, Sudan, Somalia, and Eritrea (Vintage, 2003), pp. 37-39

This is one reason my regular list of news links includes only regional news aggregators, and not any of the major international news media.

The Wider "War on Opium" in Early 19th-century China

David Bello, the author of several works on opium in Qing-dynasty China, has an interesting revisionist take on the Opium Wars (1839-42, 1856-60) that results from looking at the whole expanding Chinese empire and not just at where that empire intersected with the expanding British empire.

The opium-smuggling trade that Britain pursued on the eastern seacoast of China has become the symbol of China's century-long descent into political and social chaos. In the standard historical narratives of both China and Euro-America, opium is the primary medium through which the Qing dynasty (1644-1911) encountered the modern economic, social, and political institutions of the West. Consequently, opium and the Western powers' advent on the Chinese coast have become almost inextricably linked. Opium, however, was not strictly a Sino-British problem geographically confined to southeastern China. It was, rather, a transimperial crisis that spread among an ethnically diverse populace and created regionally distinct problems of control for the Qing state.

Bello notes that opium was a problem for the whole Qing (Manchu) realm, at least as much on its expanding interior borders as in its coastal cities. (He has a book coming out in 2005 in the Harvard East Asian Monographs series under the title Opium and the Limits of Empire: The Opium Problem in the Chinese Interior, 1729-1850.)

The Manchu empire had been rapidly growing, especially under the reign of the Qianlong emperor (1736-95), during which China extended its control into Turkestan (part of which remains in Xinjiang), Burma, and Tibet. This imperial expansion was financed by transferring more money from farflung localities into central coffers, forcing cash-starved local and regional officials to seek alternative sources of income.

By the end of the 1830s at the latest, southwestern opium cultivation had become a part of the network of informal funding that had arisen since the 1720s to compensate for the diversion of revenue from locality to center.

In this manner, the state itself became addicted to opium, and this dependency was a primary reason for the failure of central government prohibition in many interior localities. From the state's perspective, the opium problem ultimately concerned revenue, both in Qing China, which was spurred to action only by its conviction that drug consumption was responsible for a hemorrhage of silver abroad, and in British India, which also made a futile attempt to prohibit "illicit" production and trafficking in order to protect its own state monopoly. Opium, in the form of economic and political power, was as psychologically compelling to merchant-capitalists, bureaucrats, and politicians as it was physiologically compelling to drug consumers.

SOURCE: David Bello, "The Venomous Course of Southwestern Opium: Qing Prohibition in Yunnan, Sichuan, and Guizhou in the Early Nineteenth Century," The Journal of Asian Studies 62:1109-1142.

NOTES:

1. "In 1881 the inspector general of customs in Shanghai, Sir Robert Hart, reported that imperial consumption of native opium equaled that of foreign imports. Most of the reports on which he based this conclusion identified the southwest, particularly Sichuan, as the main source of native opium" (Bello, p. 1134, n. 24)


2. Pierre-Arnaud Chouvy, a geographer at CNRS argues in an article in Crime and International Justice 15 (1999), that opium production in today's Golden Triangle in modern Burma, Laos, and Thailand dates no further back than to the end of the 18th century and that it only began to supply the worldwide market after elements of the Kuomintang took refuge in 1949-50. Since that time the opium industry in the Burma Triangle has only grown as various governments in the region, including Myanmar, have made efforts to reduce or eradicate opium production.

East Timor: The World's Newest Country

The Center for Southeast Asian Studies at the University of Hawai‘i has made freely available online (in PDF format) a brief, 33-page high-school level workbook, East Timor: The World's Newest Country, by Flo Lamoureux.

The purpose of this book is to provide students with an overview the world’s newest nation--East Timor. The narrative begins with a section on pre-colonial Timor and continues through the Portuguese era. It covers the 25-year period when Indonesia governed the entire island of Timor. After a varied and violent past, on September 27, 2002 this little known state became the United Nation’s 191st member. In addition to an accounting of important historical events, the book covers language, education, religion, women’s issues and government. The Center for Southeast Asian Studies wishes to acknowledge Dr. Douglas Kammen who carefully read and edited an early draft of the book. His experiences in East Timor significantly enriched its contents.

The workbook is loaded with provocative discussion questions. Here are the questions for the history section.

• Sandalwood was the major source of income and bartered goods in Timor prior to 1500. How would sandalwood trade in the 16th and 17th centuries have differed if current international regulations related to conservation have been in effect? Compare the economic results of over-cutting sandalwood to the present day economic questions raised in the matter of drift net fishing. (For material on driftnet fishing, see http://www.nwr.noaa.gov/1salmon/salmesa/pubs/fsdrift.htm; and http://www.unescap.org/mced2000/pacific/background/drift.htm)


• The explorer, Ferdinand Magellan, sailed under the Spanish flag. When his crewmembers landed on Timor they did not claim the island for Spain. They had previously landed in the Philippines and claimed those islands for Spain, why do you think they did not plant the Spanish flag on Timor? If Timor had been a Spanish colony and more closely connected to the Philippines how do you think that would have impacted on the island’s future?


• The Portuguese were never able to maintain full control of Timor. The local Christianized Timorese resisted Portuguese rule and dealt with the Europeans only when required by commercial matters. Explain why the Topasses were more successful in their dealings with both the indigenous Timorese and the Portuguese.


• It took well over a hundred years for the Dutch and Portuguese to sign a formal treaty that divided Timor between the two European nations. Since they essentially agreed to an informal division in 1777, why do you think they did not get around to a formal treaty until 1916?


• In 1910 the Portuguese monarchy was overthrown. This was a cause for alarm among the elite class in East Timor who had developed a comfortable working relationship with the Portuguese government there. As a result of this change in the government in Portugal, a plantation economy emerged in East Timor. Compare the plantation economy with its salaried income and taxes to the economy that existed under the Portuguese monarchy where the East Timorese elite collected goods from the peasant farmers and turned them over to the Portuguese government representative.


• Explain why the Japanese Army of occupation treated West Timor differently from East Timor. Compare this to the situation in Vietnam where the French government was an ally of Germany and hence not an enemy of Japan.


• Give three reasons why post-World War II East Timor was such a poor region. Why do you think Portugal neglected it?


• Explain why the Viqueque rebellion in 1959 led to Portugal exiling rebel leaders. What role did Communism play in the Portuguese government’s decision to do this?


• In 1974 the conservative Portuguese government was overthrown and a new liberal government emerged. What policy did the new government implement that had a dramatic affect on East Timor?


• Name the three major parties that vied for power in the newly independent East Timor? Compare their goals.


• In August 1975 Fretilin controlled most of East Timor and the new nation’s independence seemed secure. Explain how the alliance of UTD, Apodeti and Indonesia reacted to this situation.


• Once Indonesian troops forced Fretilin forces into the mountains, guerrilla warfare became the norm. One matter that encouraged East Timorese to join the guerrillas in the mountains was the Indonesian policy of encirclement. Explain how this policy worked.


• Neither Australia, the United States nor Portugal supported East Timor’s struggle for democracy. Compare the reasons why the three countries did not support East Timorese independence.


• If Indonesia built more hospitals and schools in ten years than Portugal did in 400 years, why were the East Timorese so adamant about being a separate nation?


• Many brutal incidents took place in East Timor under Indonesian rule. What made the November 1991 incident outside a church a turning point in world opinion of East Timor’s quest for independence?


• What role did the 1997 economic crisis in Asia play in East Timor’s independence?


• How did the Indonesian military forces (the militia) react when Indonesia declared East Timor an independent nation? Why were the military in East Timor especially angry about it?

Jungle "Hut Cuisine": Smoked Pigeons with Marijuana Sauce

In the evening we would go shooting wood pigeon among wild marijuana fields. The birds were high on the marijuana seeds and barely able to fly but fluttered helplessly in the bushes. Their spasmodic, interrupted flights, together with their strange little cries made me think of drunken people trying to waltz. We stuffed the barrels of our home-made guns with pebbles and shot the pigeons down. Just the sound of gunshots seemed to stun them and they dropped from the trees at our feet. We killed them by seizing them by the legs and bashing their heads against trees. They made an excellent dish. We cooked them with marijuana sauce according to the local recipe. Here it is -- Smoked Pigeons with Marijuana Sauce: 'Smoke the birds with the twigs of marijuana for a day. Stuff them with lemon grass, kaffir lime leaves, garlic, ginger with a pinch of salt and wrap them in banana leaves. Boil or bake according to taste.'

Although we used marijuana for cooking, smoking it was strictly forbidden by the rebels. You could end up condemned to the stocks, plagued by mosquitoes, for three nights if you did that.

When the rainy season began we caught frogs. There was some danger in this, for we were not the only party who preyed on them. We usually made sure of first killing the frog-eating snakes, and then caught the frogs afterwards. Pythons, like frogs, are quite delicious to eat. They taste like smoked salmon. We also hunted moles, guinea-pigs and rats. We hung and smoked the rodents for three days before cooking them. Rat soup, minced moles and roast guinea pigs were our common recipes. The local people liked to hang the meat of porcupines until it stank like that of a corpse before they cooked it with herbs. It tasted delicious, but we had to eat it holding our noses.

At the end of 1988 we were invited by the Karen villagers to share a Christmas meal with them. The main dish had a strange flavour -- the meat in it tasted like dog meat with a strong whiff of garlic and lemon grass. After the meal, our hosts didn't wash their fingers, but sniffed at them for some time. Before we went home they told us that we had been eating monkey. Suddenly, I wanted to throw up. For the Karen, the meat of monkey was a typical Christmas dish, like turkey or goose in the West. They believed it was a gift from God, and that even the smell should not be wasted.

Tender wild banana trunks were available throughout the year, and we used them in soups along with lentils and vegetables. Truffles and wild mushrooms were in season at the beginning of the monsoon. During the cold season, when the bamboo shoots had matured, bamboo mushrooms became available.

We had more than one way of cooking rice without pots and pans, depending on the situation we were in. It could be cooked in bamboo stems: you soak the rice in green bamboo stalks for half an hour, and stuff the open end of the bamboo with grass. Roast the bamboo slowly over the fire until the rice is cooked, then peel off the bamboo skin. In this method, the rice comes in cartridges. Another method we called 'rebel style'. The rice is soaked in a towel, linen or sarong for more than an hour. Dig a hole in the ground, one foot deep, bury the rice bag, then make a fire on top. Steamed rice will be ready within fifteen minutes. We used this method often when the rebels were on the run.

SOURCE: From the Land of Green Ghosts: A Burmese Odyssey, by Pascal Khoo Thwe (HarperCollins, 2002), pp. 215-217

Morobe Field Diary, December 1976: Texts on Tape

Texts on tape have been eluding me and getting me worried as hell. I felt something would turn up but I wasn't sure how and how good it would be. Well, last nite I hit a gold mine. During the day the kansol put out a story of war [WW II] coming to the area that was 1st class -- well organized, clear and slow with good constructions I've wanted and a sprinkling of new vocabulary. And I forgot to press the record button. I was ready to bash in my head but the kansol said, "well, good, now you've heard it so you'll understand it better next time: I've practiced telling it and you've practiced hearing it. Let's go chop some poles for a smoking platform and come back and try again this evening."

Physical labor was, along with less worry about tapes, exactly what I needed to dispel a case of hemorrhoids that was plaguing me. That done, we came back, rested up and that evening after dark I hauled out the tape recorder and the kansol told his story again -- not as good as during the day but covering very much the same material and almost exactly the same length. Before his wife put her account of the preparation of food by women, another fellow came by who is chock full of stories and has a clear slow way of speaking besides. He lives in Paiewa but is visiting thank God. He told a good personal experience war story with Japanese pidgin ["A, banana sabis, ye?" = ('banana free, okay?') uttered by a starving Japanese straggler], conversation and dangerous experiences. He also told a somewhat shorter story about a woman who didn't want to get married, supposedly true from before contact times. His war story is about 35-40 min. (This guy's brother is a truck driver on the Mt. Hagen to Lae [Highlands Highway] run and is such a talker that his cab mates don't get any sleep on the 12 or so hour ride.) Finally the kansol's wife put her piece on tape clearly & concisely. I've got about 70-80 minutes of unbroken talking on the several cassettes I went thru last nite. I want to transcribe as much as I can here so I can get unstuck as I go along.

The day before, in my desperation I recorded some old men who got together to put something on tape after putting me off several times. They got together, bullshat about what they were going to say and decided they would do it better later. I got some revenge by surreptitiously recording them but it's going to be hard to transcribe. That nite I was carrying my recorder to ask a man to tell me about canoe-building (another promise). I started talking with some kids around a fire and secretly pressed the record button. It too will be hard to transcribe but has good mixed language conversation (30 min.). [The two surreptitious tapes remain untranscribed.] So, I'm breathing much easier and my asshole itching less.

Morobe Field Diary, December 1976: Swimming in Fish Names

Things are getting pretty busy for me now. Finishing up the lexicon and trying to get some of the half-dozen or more texts people haven't gotten around to giving me. Only two weeks to work's end and I'm paranoid that I've left out something important grammatically that the texts won't solve for me. Grammatical elicitation the way we did in Field Methods class is nearly impossible with informants as unschooled as most of mine. I don't like it or trust it anyway. I prefer texts but people are very reluctant to give me stuff off the top of their heads, especially if it's cultural info -- they want someone authoritative to accompany them in the telling or else they practice first and wear out their interest in that so they are not keen on repeating it again for the tape.

Lately I've worn out my patience with eliciting fish names from two huge tomes -- one quite authoritative ([Munro's 1967] Fishes of New Guinea) but with inadequate (i.e. only B&W) pictures; the other (Guide to Fishes, an Aussie book) has good pictures (in color and [of] live [fish]) but is not well-arranged and not exhaustive and shows little of the relative size so a snapper can be called an anchovy. Combine that with some hard to distinguish subgroupings of fish (esp. among goatfish, trevallies and sea bass) and imperfect but confident knowledge of most everyone and the result is an incredibly frustrating job trying to match Nu. to genera & species. I am interested in folk classification and its relation to academic classification and was prepared for some difference but mostly the correlation between the two is pretty good (after I've filtered out misnamings which I can often tell are wrong because they cross genus or family lines). In some families there are names for the majority of individual species -- some grouped together, usually on the basis of markings when shape is the same: mottled, banded, striped; and often on the basis of habitat.

The big men [usually elders] are supposed to be the authorities (on everything: even ladies underwear if it was anything elaborate probably) but they often can't see the page clearly. Everyone is convinced that others don't know what they're talking about and that a consensus (20 people going thru 20 fishnames for 3 hours is impossible) will solve everything. I'm well past the point of diminishing returns but some still come volunteer to straighten it all out for me (and give yet another name to some picture beside which I've scribbled 3 names already). For most now I have statistics like 4 for, 2 against (or 2 for 1 name, 1 each for the others) so I've told them I don't want anything more about fish to upset me. One the whole the world of Nu. fish naming is as unsettled as the world of zoological taxonomy when it comes to species. Genera & families work out OK. I figure (or hope) my effort is worthwhile: it not only boosts my dictionary considerably but is an are that is worth comparing carefully with other Austronesian names & classificatory systems since they are most all sea people.

A Burmese Padaung View of the 'Wild' Kayah

Our first contact with the 'wild' Kayah came when we were received into a house on a hilltop owned by a shaman. He squatted by the fireplace smoking a pipe as if he were a guardian ghost of the place. He made me think of an unwrapped mummy, and he neither smiled nor spoke to us. We felt like intruders who had wandered into an ancient tomb, and soon set off to the village spring for a shower.

At the spring we waited for the villagers to finish their own shower. They included some stark-naked young women, who were unembarrassed and unashamed. As we watched them they talked to us with the familiarity of old friends. We felt ashamed at our curiousity about this (for us) novelty. When dressed, these women wore a black tunic which revealed one of their breasts. We were told later that they would not cover the naked breast until they were betrothed.

A traditional 'wild' Kayah woman is like an uninhibitedly colourful work of art. Her clothes are made of home-woven material in which red and black predominate. She wears black-lacquered cotton-thread rings beneath her knees in large lumps that look like twin beehives. Bunches of silver coins dangle from her neck along with a few strings of semi-precious stones. The younger women wear cone-shaped silver earrings that look like bunches of miniature carrots, while the married ones stuff their big earholes with silver cylinders. A married woman also wears a red turban on her head and a white sash around her waist. She walks like an elephant, slow and with jingling sounds at every step, reminiscent of the tinkling bells on a Burmese pagoda top. These gorgeously caparisoned females scratched their bodies liberally and spat copiously. And all the Kayah, children included, continually smoked pipes.

SOURCE: From the Land of Green Ghosts: A Burmese Odyssey, by Pascal Khoo Thwe (HarperCollins, 2002), pp. 203-204

Burmese Views of the Mysterious West

To me [now starting college], Mandalay (a place which, as I later learned, foreign visitors enjoyed as a sleepy backwater that time forgot) was an amazing metropolis, a town of astounding variety and sophistication, a city that never slept. In Mandalay I learned how to use the telephone and the electric kettle....

My first introduction to foreign gadgetry went with the first stories I began to hear about the wonders of the West. I was told that people in the West could cook their meals without pots and pans and stoves. I was puzzled how this could be possible. The few Burmese magazines that were not government-controlled regaled their readers with these strange stories which they gleaned -- in embellished form -- from the British tabloid the Sun, from Newsweek, and from the novels of Jeffrey Archer, one of the few living English writers allowed to be published in Burma.

The beliefs we absorbed about the West strangely resembled the fantastic stories early Western travellers sent back about the Mysterious East. One teacher at school had told us that in the West things were so advanced that pigs could be grown on trees, and that a type of furniture had been developed that could be eaten if ever food supplies ran low. He also explained to us that the West got so cold in winter that if you peed outdoors the urine would instantly freeze so that you had to snap it like a stick. We had a pretty good sense that these were tall tales -- but they made better listening than the equally tall tales of the regime. When we learned that the Americans got to the moon, for instance, we had solemnly been informed by a fanatical socialist-nationalist teacher: 'Our ancestors got there centuries ago on the astounding flying machines that the genius of the Burmese had perfected -- secrets alas now lost.' We learned something important from all this: that the Burmese, after nearly thirty years of isolation from the rest of the world, constantly subject to official propaganda urging them to detest and despise the West, were in fact fascinated by the Western way of life and ignorantly credulous about it.

SOURCE: From the Land of Green Ghosts: A Burmese Odyssey, by Pascal Khoo Thwe (HarperCollins, 2002), pp. 120-121

This reminds me of a conversation I had with an older man in Papua New Guinea in 1976 who had heard something about a conflict in Berlin a decade and a half earlier, and wanted to know how things had finally turned out and who our current Kennedy was. I can't remember if the conversation took place before or after Carter was elected to be our next Kennedy.

Zhao Ziyang Ill

China-based blogger Andrés Gentry calls attention to a recent New York Times report that Zhao Ziyang is ill.

This should be getting more play in the China-blog community.... Why is that important?

... lower-level party officials, or students or intellectuals outside the party, may make Mr. Zhao's death an occasion to press for political liberalization. China's long tradition of paying homage to the dead makes it unseemly for the police to repress mourners, potentially opening a window for people to express grievances along with condolences.

In fact, the 1989 demonstrations first gathered steam after the death of the reform-minded leader who preceded Mr. Zhao as Communist Party chief, Hu Yaobang, who died 15 years ago this month.

"It is clear that leaders will have taken every measure to prevent any protests from happening," said one Chinese political analyst who asked not to be quoted by name. "But the impact of such an event would be very unpredictable and risky for the leadership."

Andrés then adds further insights.

There are other more recent instances of the government getting caught flatfooted in their response to demonstrations. The Belgrade Embassy bombing springs immediately to mind. While there was certainly a lot of anti-foreign/anti-American anger, I know for some people that was simply a vehicle to express their dislike of the CCP. It was a dangerous time for everyone really since if the demonstrations continued it's likely that they would have begun focusing their energy on China at least as much as on NATO/America. However, if they were cut off too soon then the government could be accused of being unpatriotic and anger would definitely have moved on from foreigners to the CCP.

See also his earlier post on the likelihood of massive demonstrations after Zhao's death and the CCP's need to come to terms with the events at Tiananmen in 1989.

Earlier demonstrations in Tiananmen to honor another popular leader, Zhou Enlai (d. 1976), culminated in the Democracy Wall movement.

For some, the Cultural Revolution marked the beginning of an independent political consciousness and the means to express it, as seen, for example, in the controversial wall poster signed by Liyizhe, a pseudonym of its three authors, that appeared on November 7, 1974 in Guangzhou. It denounced the lawlessness, despotism, recklessness, and killings of the Cultural Revolution and called for democratic and individual rights. A larger-scale expression of increasing political independence occurred on April 5, 1976 with a demonstration in Tiananmen Square supposedly to honor Zhou Enlai, who had died in January 1976 without much official note. In actuality, the demonstration was an organized attack on the Cultural Revolution and the tyranny of the Gang of Four and implicitly of Mao. The April 5th demonstration was the first time since 1949 that ordinary Chinese had taken the initiative to launch their own movement and establish a public space where people could freely express their opinions. But it was suppressed after just a few days.Whereas purged party officials and skilled workers had planned the parades and the placards to be carried into the Square months before April 5, 1976, the Democracy Wall movement appears to have begun somewhat spontaneously. Against the background of the party's official repudiation of the designation of the April 5th demonstration as a "counter-revolutionary" movement in the fall of 1978 and the official media's calls for "socialist democracy and rule of law," individuals and groups suddenly began to put up large-character posters and gathered together to discuss political issues at the Xidan wall on a busy street in the middle of Beijing in November 1978.

For more on one of the principal Democracy Wall activists, see this post on Wei Jingsheng.

Out of the Ashes: Deconstruction and Reconstruction of East Timor

The Australian National University's new E Press has placed online a new (2003) electronic edition of Out of the Ashes: Deconstruction and Reconstruction of East Timor, edited by James J Fox and Dionisio Babo Soares, described thus:

Out of the Ashes is a collection of essays that examine the historical background to developments in East Timor and provide political analysis on the initial reconstruction stage in the country's transition to independence. The volume is divided into three thematic sections - background, assessment and reconstruction - bringing together the experiences and knowledge of academic researchers and key participants in the extraordinary events of 1999 and 2000.

After years of Indonesian rule, the people of East Timor voted to reject an offer of autonomy[,] choosing instead independence from Indonesia. This decision enraged pro-integrationist militia who, backed by the Indonesian military, launched a program of violence and destruction against the inhabitants of East Timor. President Habibie eventually agreed to the presence of a United Nations peace-keeping force, but by this stage East Timor had been ravaged by destruction.

The new East Timorese government faced the challenges of the future with an understanding that the successful struggle for independence was both a culmination and a starting point for the new nation. As the events of 1999 recede, many of the issues and challenges highlighted in Out of the Ashes remain of central significance to the future of East Timor. These essays provide essential reading for students and interested observers of the first new nation of the 21st century.

Here are some excerpts from the chapter on historical background.

All the languages of Timor belong to one of two major language groupings: the Austronesian language family or the Trans-New Guinea phylum of languages (see Map 1)....

One striking feature of the socio-linguistics of Timor is the remarkable contrast between the eastern and the western halves of the island. Almeida (1982) lists over 30 different languages and dialects in the East compared with only three languages in the West.... This sociological difference between East and West is, to a large extent, the result of initial Portuguese historical involvement in the western half of Timor, which gave rise to the expansion of the Atoni population. As with much else on Timor, to understand this difference between East and West requires an historical perspective. It is essential therefore to consider the history of Timor over the past 450 years....

The Portuguese were the first Europeans attracted to Timor by th[e] sandalwood trade. It took over 50 years after the Portuguese conquest of Malacca in 1511 to establish a presence in the area....

In 1561-62, the Dominicans built a palisade of lontar palms to protect local Christians but this was burnt down the year after by Muslim raiders, prompting the Dominicans, in 1566, to erect a more permanent stone fortress on Solor. For its first 20 years, the captain of this fort at Solor was nominated by the Dominican Prior in Malacca. Around this fort there developed a mixed, part-Portuguese population of local Christians, many of whom were themselves involved in the sandalwood trade with Timor....

The Dominican fort on Solor had a chequered history. Plundered in a local uprising in 1598, the fort fell, after a long siege, to the Dutch in 1613. According to Dutch sources, their forces were able to take the fort because over 500 of its occupants were, at the time, on a sandalwood-trading expedition to Timor.

Instead of sailing for Malacca, the thousand strong population of the fort, later joined by those from Timor, transferred to Larantuka, a harbour on the eastern end of Flores and from there, established themselves at Lifao on the north-west coast of Timor. With their strongholds on both Flores and Timor, this mixed, part-Portuguese population of local islanders resisted all attempts to dislodge them. This population became known as the Larantuqueiros or as the Tupassi ('Topasses', purportedly from the word for hat, topi, because the Topasses regarded themselves 'Gente de Chapeo': 'People of the Hat') - or, as was common in all Dutch documents, the 'Black Portuguese' (Swarte Portugueezen). In the language of the Atoni Pa Meto population, who had the longest established contact with them on Timor, these Topasses were known as the Sobe Kase: 'The Foreign Hats'. (Yet another variant of this designation, among the Rotinese, on the small island at the western tip of Timor, was Sapeo Nggeo: 'The Black Hats'.)

These Topasses became the dominant, independent, seafaring, sandalwood-trading power of the region for the next 200 years. They were a multilingual group. Portuguese was their status language which was also used for worship; Malay was their language of trade, and most Topasses spoke, as their mother-tongue, a local language of Flores or Timor.

The British buccaneer, William Dampier, visited Lifao in 1699 and has provided a perceptive description of this mixed, multilingual Topass community:

These [the Topasses] have no Forts, but depend on their Alliance with the Natives: And indeed they are already so mixt, that it is hard to distinguish whether they are Portugueze or Indians. Their Language is Portugueze; and the religion they have, is Romish. They seem in Words to acknowledge the King of Portugal for their Sovereign; yet they will not accept any Officers sent by him. They speak indifferently the Malayan and their own native Languages, as well as Portugueze....

Neither the Dutch nor the Portuguese who were loyal to the Viceroy of Goa were able to exert any substantial control over them. On Timor, there were times when the interests of the Portuguese Viceroy and those of the leaders of the Black Portuguese coincided. Just as often, however, the Black Portuguese opposed both the Portuguese Viceroy and the Dutch East India Company with whom they also carried on trade. However often the Viceroy's delegates were rejected, Portuguese friars were always welcomed on Timor and moved freely throughout the island....

In 1777, the Portuguese in Dili regarded Timor as divided into two provinces: a western province called Servião, inhabited by the Vaiquenos (Dawan or Atoni) and consisting of 16 local kingdoms (reinos) and an eastern province called Bellum (or Bellos), inhabited and dominated by the Belu (or Tetun) and comprising no less than 46 small kingdoms. Servião covered much of the area controlled by Topasses....

The Dutch drew a different picture of this same political situation. In 1756, the Dutch East India Company sent a distinguished envoy by the name of Paravicini to order its relations on Timor. This renowned Commissaris returned to Batavia with a contract treaty purporting to have been signed by all of the rulers of Timor in addition to those of the islands of Roti, Savu, Sumba and Solor: 48 signatories on a lengthy document with 30 clauses. Whether, in fact, he obtained the signed agreement of all of these rulers, the contract of Paravicini represented the political geography of native rule more accurately than did Portuguese documents for the same period....

During the Napoleonic wars, the British occupied the Dutch fort at Kupang and laid claim, for a brief period, to Dutch colonial possessions on Timor. When, in 1816, the British returned colonial authority to the Dutch, the Dutch set out to determine their areas of supposed control in relation to the Portuguese. Almost immediately thereafter there occurred the first of a series of disputes over the borders between the two colonial powers....

[T]he Portuguese mounted no less than 60 armed expeditions between 1847 and 1913 to subdue the Timorese. In 1860, even as he was negotiating with the Dutch over 'Portuguese territory on Timor', the Governor of Dili, Affonso de Castro, described the situation with remarkable candour: 'Our empire on this island is nothing but a fiction'....

From the earliest Chinese sources to the final reports of the colonial powers, all commentators agree that Timor was comprised of kingdoms and rulers. Traditional kingdoms dating back to at least the fourteenth century imply well-established, indeed fundamental, ideas about order and political relations. Curiously, however, in the long history of European contact with Timor, virtually no commentator has credited the Timorese with a political philosophy or has sought to explore and to treat seriously indigenous ideas of authority....

Relations among the local polities of Timor were continually changing. Alliances among these polities shifted, especially as internal relations changed; there was regular, seasonal raiding into each other's territories - some in the form of ritual headhunting; and migration of clan groups in search of land and water was common. The Portuguese and Dutch both contributed to this situation.

In return for diverting the sandalwood trade to Lifao and other ports on the north coast of the island, the Topasses formed close alliances with the local Atoni Pa Meto polities and in several instances became the rulers of these polities. They were the first to introduce muskets to the Timorese and they increased the supply of simple iron tools. The Dutch (rather than the Portuguese) introduced maize to the island and promoted its planting, initially in the area around Kupang... This combination of muskets, iron tools and maize, provided principally to Atoni groups, changed the face of West Timor. With a new highly productive crop, the tools to plant it and the firearms to expand aggressively and open new land in others' territory, the Atoni population, previously subordinate to Tetun rulers who controlled the sandalwood trade, rapidly spread through much of West Timor, assimilating other groups to Atoni modes of livelihood and culture.

The language map of Timor today attests to this Atoni expansion over the last 400 years. Only the remnant Helong speakers, now confined to the western tip of Timor and the island of Semau, give some indication of what West Timor may have been like before the Atoni expansion....

It was never just the Topasses, Dutch and Portuguese who influenced developments on Timor. The Chinese, who initiated the earliest trade with Timor for sandalwood, were a major influence as well. Dampier who visited the Topass settlement at Lifao in 1699 noted the presence of 'China-Men, Merchants of Maccao' living among the Topasses. This Chinese connection has long been crucial on Timor and at times has been paramount. As Topass control of trade in the interior of Timor declined, Chinese control increased....

Prior to the Atoni expansion, there was an earlier expansion of the Tetun people, probably from what the Tetun regard as their traditional centre of origin on the central south coast. This expansion was both northward and along the south coast. As a consequence of this expansion, there are several distinct forms of Tetun. These are generally described as different dialects, though there are considerable differences among them....

Writing about the formation of Tetun Dili which is also known as 'market Tetun' (Tetun Prasa or Tetum Praça), the historian and language scholar, Luis Thomaz, admits that 'the origin of the use of Tetun as a lingua franca in East Timor is very obscure'.... Dili is in an area where one might have expected the Mambai language to have been chosen as a vehicle for communication since the town itself is located within an area originally inhabited by Mambai-speakers.

Promotion of Tetun by the Catholic church toward the end of the nineteenth century was an important factor in the eventual establishment of Tetun as a lingua franca....

The everyday Tetun of Dili has a simplified syntax and shows strong Portuguese (and, more recently, Indonesian) influences. It could almost be considered a creole derived from vernacular Tetun....

Dampier's 1699 account of the Topass community portrays a multilingual community: Portuguese, Malay and at least one local Timorese language. Translated into the present, this would suggest a combination of Tetun, Indonesian and Portuguese. This simple translation, however, misrepresents the present situation: Tetun and Indonesian are languages understood by a large proportion of East Timorese whereas the use of Portuguese is still limited. Moreover, for most East Timorese, Tetun is their 'second' Timorese language. Indonesian, whether or not it continues to be taught in schools, will - as in the past - remain the language of inter-island communication. The teaching of Portuguese will inevitably conflict with the need of the East Timorese to learn English to communicate internationally. Whatever solution is worked out over time, the people of East Timor are likely to remain a multilingual population.

Rainforest Gifts: Sago and Sago Grubs

This mouthwatering webpage describes some delicacies that the rice-loving Javanese who've resettled all over eastern Indonesia don't seem fully to appreciate:

Easy meal: Sago Palm (Metroxylon) is far more productive than rice, producing four times more starch, 100-200 kg per palm, enough to feed a family of 4-5 for a month. And it is the least labour-intensive starch to harvest. It takes one person 10 days to process a palm, faster if a group works on it. Sago is the staple carbohydrate for many people in Southeast Asia, Oceania and Pacific Islands where Sago Palms are found.

Asmat sago rituals: For the Asmat, the Sago Palm is the only sure source of calories in their mudflat homelands. They treat the Sago Palm not merely as a human being, but as a life-giving mother, the sago being her child....

Sago grubs are the larvae of the Capricorn Beetle (Rhynchophorus ferrungineus/bilineatus). The Asmat celebrate special occasions, such as the consecration of a new ritual house with an elaborate party featuring the grub. A huge bark container is prepared in the centre of the house and each guest is required to deposit his share of the grub. Each person, however, tries to cheat by giving as little as possible without being caught. Once all have made their contribution, the container is opened, spilling out the grubs, signifying new life emerging from a mother. The grubs are then enjoyed raw or roasted.

The Korowai also have sago festivals. Preparations for such a party lasts for 3 months. The head of the extended family initiates the celebration by sending out invitations to all family members and others with close links to the family. They build a large party house with all the special features needed to enjoy the sago grub: a traditional fire which is always kept burning, special racks to store the grubs. They cut down Sago Palms, sometimes up to 200, and make holes in the trunks for the beetles to enter, then leave the trunks on the ground. The beetles are only attracted to damaged palms, and quickly lay their eggs in the starchy palms. In the meantime, the family also harvest sago in the regular way, in preparation for the party. In about 6 weeks, the beetle larvae are nice and plump and just about to pupate. Each palm may contain up to 100 sago grubs. The family then sends out invitations far and wide to join the party. The grubs are harvested by cutting through the palm. The grubs are eaten raw, or mixed with sago flour and steamed. Often with lots of dancing and merrymaking.

Sweeter than roasted marshmallows. Or so I hear. The related Arthropods: Bugs for Breakfast page is also highly recommended, though perhaps not at mealtime. Here's a sample:

You probably regularly eat bugs, without even knowing it! Insects are a part of all processed food from wheat meal for bread to tomato ketchup. It's impossible to keep mass-produced food 100% insect-free. There are regulations stating the maximum amount of bug bits that food can contain and still be fit for human consumption.

Red about it: the food colouring cochineal is extracted from the crushed bodies of scale insects that feed on the prickly pear. Cochineal is widely used in many popular food items--read the labels!

Morobe Field Diary, November 1976: Demographics

The population figures of nearby villages I obtained from the kiap in Morobe [Patrol Post] follow:

---

Village   Total     Adults      Children    Adults outside province

Buso      108       24m 27f     23m 27f      3m 1f

Kui       333       81m 81f     88m 69f      8m 2f

Sipoma    294       84m 69f     69m 58f     12m 2f

Paiewa    276       69m 72f     70m 61f      4m 0f

Maiama    483

---

[The predominant local language of Kui & Buso is Kela.
Sipoma is the only village that speaks Numbami.
Both Kela and Numbami are Austronesian languages.
The predominant languages of Paiewa and Maiama are non-Austronesian (Papuan),
members Binanderean family.]

This confirms my impression that the eligible young men of this village far outnumber the young women.

More statistics: Two Sepiks are married into the village. They work at the timber co. and so are in the village mostly on weekends. Their children are too young to talk yet but will probably speak Nu. The fathers mostly don't speak Nu. but understand some. One Wain man recently married in -- also works for the timber co. -- no children yet. Two Kui women married in -- both speak Nu. and kids of both do also but I'm less sure about one family. One Kui woman doesn't speak Nu.; neither do her kids though they may understand it fairly well. One Morobe woman speaks Nu., her kids speak Pidgin [Tok Pisin] and their father speaks T.P. to them most of the time too. Also one Markham woman speaks Nu. as do her kids I believe; her husband is Nu. & away a good bit.

Next year one young Nu. is off to do 5th & 6th form at the new national H.S. at Aiyura (where SIL headquarters is), one if off to Sogeri H.S. near Mosbi [Port Moresby], 2 off to Kerevat in Rabaul (brother to 5th form; sister to 6th). One girl and 2 boys will go to Junior High in town. Some people working away from the village:

1 agricultural inspector (Jack S.)
1 malaria service mosquitologist (Tom S.)
1 development bank clerk (Kaukisa S.)
1 N.S.W. bank teller (off to Mosbi for training)
1 teacher at Kaiapit
1 NCO in PNG Army (Igam Barracks)
1 in forestry service (Bing Siga, in Aust. for training)
1 radio repairman in Lae
1 cattleman (half Nu., half Sepik)
1 machine repairman in Wau (half Nu., Peter)
1 policeman at Rabaul (Marawaku's son)
1 assistant kiap at Boana (__ Siga)
1 store clerk in Mosbi (__ Siga)
1 secretary at UniTech (Aga __)
1 medic at Morobe (Dei)
1 in fisheries (Lukas)
1 in transport co. (Panett)
1 teacher at Kui

In addition, Daniel/Siga said that everyone older in the village except his mother has gone to Yabem School (max. 4 years). Evidently they went thru in age cohorts: Abu Bamo's, then Giyasa's, then Yali's, then Siga's. The war disrupted people like Lukas, who claims he's had only about 1 year of school but has a well-respected business head.

NOTE: Blogger doesn't turn off the <pre> tag very predictably. It wouldn't wrap the paragraph after </pre>, so I had to force linefeeds. I initially tried the <table> tag, but blogger added way too much white space above it.

A Motorcycle Ride through Chernobyl's Dead Zone

Impearls, a blog with footnotes and appendixes, reminds me to link to a photo essay in which:

A motorcyclist named Elena, her 147-horsepower Kawasaki “Ninja,” and scientist's access pass provide us with a troubling and unparalleled tour of the ruined landscape about the city of Chernobyl in the Ukraine with its doomed nuclear power plant which, in 1986, devastated the area with radiation, destroying surrounding cities and towns as living communities and leaving the whole region uninhabitable for, it's claimed, six hundred years. Elena's pictorial diary of her visit is eerily reminiscent of films like The Omega Man and post-apocalypse science fiction wherein one navigates through a radioactive landscape as one would through a minefield, armed like a lifeline with geiger counter and dosimeter. The heavily radioactive “magic woods” that Elena regards -- from a distance -- are horrifying. Much of the rest has the melancholy of a recent Pompeii. Don't miss it. (Thanks to Armed Liberal at Winds of Change.)

Fast internet connection recommended.

Essay on Ataturk's Legacy Beyond Turkey

A few days ago, the Head Heeb posted a thought-provoking essay on Atatürk's legacy:

Mention Kemalism, and you're likely to ignite a debate about the history of twentieth-century Turkey. Books have been written about whether Atatürk's reforms were racist and quasi-fascist, necessary to Turkish modernization or both. There has been very little discussion, however, about Kemalism outside Turkey. Although some aspects of Kemalist ideology were unique to the Turkish situation, a case could be made that Kemalism is one of the twentieth century's dominant models for ethnic conflict resolution.

One of the legacies of colonialism is the creation of artificial nations, often including diverse ethnic groups with a history of conflict. The governments of such countries have followed two primary conflict-resolution models. The first involves co-opting pre-existing ethnic identities into the national political infrastructure by ceding each group an official or quasi-official political space. This can take the form of federalism, formal power-sharing arrangements within a unitary state, special legal status or unofficial rotation of senior posts between ethnic groups. Such co-option is not always conducted on a basis of equality - Malaysia [emphasis added], for instance, assigns its Indian and Chinese minorities a distinctly subordinate political role - but it recognizes and supports the continued existence of separate identities within a single nation.

The second model rejects co-option in favor of replacing pre-existing identities with a created nationalism, and this is where Kemalist roots can be seen.... It is possible to construct a model of Kemalism with the following characteristics:

• It generally arises in countries with a history of conflict between indigenous groups or groups that have lived there long enough to indigenize themselves.


• It develops most commonly in post-colonial or post-revolutionary situations where national identity is considered part of a liberation struggle.


• Among its fundamental principles are that recognition of separate group identities is incompatible with conflict resolution and modernization, and that such identities have to be replaced with a created nationwide identity in order to promote public solidarity.


• Given that many indigenous groups will not adopt such a national identity voluntarily, a strong state and repressive measures are necessary to create it.

With this model in mind, the global influence of Kemalist ideology is readily apparent; the echoes of Atatürk can be found in Kenyatta's advocacy of one-party rule as a necessary measure against "tribalism" or Kagame's relentless campaign against "divisionists."

It may be possible to divide Kemalism into two varieties: cultural (or "hard") Kemalism and political (or "soft") Kemalism. Cultural Kemalists argue that any expression of separate group identities, including practice of minority customs or languages, must be repressed as incompatible with national solidarity. Political Kemalists allow purely cultural expression of minority identities, but draw the line at ethnically-based parties or advocacy of ethnic autonomy.

Possibly the most famous example of hard Kemalism is the Turkish state's repression of Kurdish language and folk practices. [Bulgaria's assimilatory policies toward minorities are also described.] ...

The more common form of Kemalist ideology, however, is "soft" or political Kemalism. In some cases, such as Kenya and Tanzania, politically Kemalist policies were adopted pre-emptively as a post-colonial nation-building strategy. Sukarno [emphasis added], who was one of the few post-colonial leaders to openly acknowledge Atatürk's influence on his ideological thinking, likewise considered Kemalist Turkey as a model for a secular Indonesian state....

The debate over global Kemalism can therefore be framed in the same way as the controversy over its role in Turkey: is Kemalist repression an evil or a necessary evil? The answer may be a combination of both.

The whole essay is worth a careful read--as are the comments in response.

Reversing Policies on Rice and Opium Production

With the coming of socialism to our town, farmers were compelled to sell quotas of grain to the government buyers at a very low price. All the good-quality rice produced in Burma was reserved for export or (just as often) sold to the black market merchants. What was left -- rice of the poorest quality -- was then sold to the people. If farmers wanted to eat their own good-quality rice, they had to buy it from merchants at roughly ten times the price that they had been paid for it. As a result, farmers were reluctant to grow surplus rice for sale, preferring to grow only enough for their own families. When there was a bad harvest, they didn't even have enough to feed themselves. Burma, which was the world's biggest exporter of rice before the Second World War, became a net importer. Even leaving aside the flaws in the regime's agricultural policy, sheer mismanagement and rampant corruption began to undermine the economy as early as the mid-seventies. The price of food and domestic goods rose steadily, until inflation ran out of control. Even basic food needs were no longer met. Rice was unavailable at the official rate, and sky-high on the black market.

Some farmers illegally grew poppies in the jungle to support their families in bad years. When they discovered that opium made them much more money, with less effort, than normal crops, they grew more and more -- and eventually poppies outstripped rice and other grains. At first the government tried to eradicate the poppy fields, making use of helicopters, machine-guns, flame-throwers and other technical assistance provided by Western governments. But government officials soon realised that they could enrich themselves by becoming unofficial agents for opium warlords, and so would destroy only a few token fields. The weapons supplied by the West were turned instead on internal enemies of the regime. The alleged fight against drugs became an excuse to attack ethnic rebels and even villagers who showed any opposition towards the government. As a result, the opium trade boomed as never before.

SOURCE: From the Land of Green Ghosts: A Burmese Odyssey, by Pascal Khoo Thwe (HarperCollins, 2002), pp. 56-57

This pattern has been repeated so many times in so many countries that it has become a sad cliché. In order to reduce supplies of opium, the Burmese government should have encouraged farmers to grow it while forcing them to sell it to the government at artificially low prices. This always works so well with food crops. In order to increase food supplies, they just needed to stand aside and skim off (i.e., tax) the profits of growers and distributors. Results-driven policies are always superior to ones driven by ideology (pure intentions), as Deng Xiaoping recognized in the aphorism for which he will always remain famous, "It doesn't matter whether the cat is black or white, as long as it catches mice."

Unfortunately, Deng's other lasting legacy is his decision in 1989 to violently suppress the demonstrations in Tiananmen square, and the Burmese generals will leave the same mixed legacy, even if they decide to "free opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi and invite the National League for Democracy to a May 17 constitutional convention" (as noted by Robert Tagorda).

Morobe Field Diary, November 1976: Trip to Morobe Patrol Post

The kansol's daughter-in-law is going to have a baby so the kansol's wife left us to go attend to her in town. She took her daughter & granddaughter with her so there was no one left to look after the kansol, his son & me, at least not the way she did. She was worried about our meals and arranged with the kansol's sister, who lives next door, to feed us. It turns out however that several families have gotten in on the act so the first week after the kansol's wife left we were getting 3-4 dishes of food (often accompanied by separate meat & vegetable dishes) per meal. One meal we sat down to food provided by 5 different women (5 plates of starch & two meat & vegetable dishes). On top of that several young men caught a load of fish so we were eating fresh fish (including a sizeable lobster) as well.

At the end of the week the kansol & I went to Morobe patrol post for his monthly council meeting (& so I could see the sights). There the ocean is teeming with fish & we ate fresh fish (& lobster again), greens & onions and fresh smoked pig I bought at the market and fresh (tough Oceanic) chicken that our hosts killed and served the day before we left. There are small daily markets there that cater to the gov't workers who must buy their food with cash so my cash was able to keep us in betel nut which we are all very short of in the village.

Our hosts were a Numbami couple. The husband works as a (para)medic. His wife is sister (elder, Aga [1st daughter]) of the kansol's wife (Damiya [3rd daughter]) and there is a special word, goda, to describe the relationship of the medic (dokta boi) and the kansol, who are married to sisters (asuna for females).

Morobe patrol post used to be quite a place with a high radio tower and a notorious jail. The Germans were established there. It is a beautiful spot with a wide protected harbor & good breezes and, like other spots that appeal to European eyes, has lousy garden land. Jungle makes good garden land when cleared. Open land has hard soil and less water.

The kiap (gov't official) received me about as cordially as I received him when he came to Siboma (neutrally) and I spent most of my time with my wantoks. I also got in a good bit of English conversation with the medical officer-in-charge who I told about Hawaii & who told me, among other things, an interesting war story about New Ireland, where was stationed before. I also got a heavy does of American newscaster English on election day. I listened in about 2 hour spurts from 7 am, when the southern states were lining up behind Carter, to about 6 pm, when Carter made his acceptance speech--much more easily endured times than you folks [in the U.S.] had to endure. It all seemed so unreal & faraway that I listened with a good deal of detachment--I wasn't excited that Carter won though I preferred him to Ford.

East Timor issue of Portuguese Studies Review

Portuguese Studies Review, vol. 11, no. 1 is entirely devoted to East Timor, past and present. It sounds as if it could be interesting. The table of contents follows.

David Webster, University of British Columbia
"Non-State Diplomacy: East Timor, 1975-1999." Pp. 1-28

Estêvão Cabral, Lancaster University, UK
"Portugal and East Timor: From a Politics of Ambivalence to a Late Awakening." Pp. 29-47

Jeffery Klaehn, Wilfrid Laurier University
"Canadian Complicity in the East Timor Near-Genocide: A Case Study in the Sociology of Human Rights." Pp. 49-65.

Peter Eglin, Wilfrid Laurier University
"East Timor, The Globe and Mail and Propaganda: The 1990s--Saving Indonesia from East Timor with 'Maoist Shields' and 'Tragic Destiny'." Pp. 67-84.

Robert Everton and James Winter, University of Windsor
"Media Coverage of an Imminent Bloodbath in East Timor: What Was Known, and When?" Pp. 85-101.

David Wurfel, Professor Emeritus, University of Windsor
"Constitution for a New State: Political Context and Possible Problems in East Timor." Pp. 103-121.

Lyn Carson and Brian Martin, University of Sydney and University of Wollongong
"Social Institutions in East Timor: Following in the Undemocratic Footsteps of the West." Pp. 123-136.

Michael Leach, Deakin University
" 'Privileged Ties': Young People Debating Language, Heritage and National Identity in East Timor." Pp. 137-150.

Helder da Costa, Asia 2000 Foundation of New Zealand
"Future Economic Direction of Timor-Leste." Pp. 151-167.

Tim Anderson, University of Sydney
"Self-determination after Independence: East Timor and the World Bank." Pp. 169-185.

Geoffrey Gunn, Nagasaki University
"Rebuilding Agriculture in Post Conflict Timor-Leste: A Critique of the World Bank Role." Pp. 187-205.