Myanmar and China

The New York Times has an article explaining how China's wealth and relationship with Myanmar is keeping the military junta alive despite US sanctions.

Since the New York Times keeps their articles behind a firewall after a few weeks, I'm posting the entire article after the jump.



Despite Energy Wealth, Myanmar Is Mired in Dark
By JANE PERLEZ
Published: November 17, 2006

SITTWE, Myanmar — In the balmy waters of the Bay of Bengal, just off the coast, an Asian energy rush is on. Huge pockets of natural gas have been found. China and India are jostling to sign deals. Plans are afoot to spend billions on new ports and pipelines.

Yet onshore, in towns like this one, not a light is to be seen — not a street lamp, not a glow in a window — as women crouch by the roadside at dawn, sorting by candlelight the vegetables they will sell for two cents a bunch at the morning market.

Paraffin and wood are major sources of light and heat. People receive two hours of electricity a day from a military government that is among the world’s most repressive.

But attempts at outside pressure to prod the government to address its people’s needs and curb abuses have faltered, in large part because China’s thirst for resources has undermined nearly a decade of American economic sanctions. Critics say that Washington’s policy has handed Myanmar, formerly Burma, to China. Still, as President Bush prepares to meet with leaders at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit meeting in Vietnam on Nov. 17, one topic on his agenda will be how to keep up the pressure. He is not likely to find cooperation, not from rivals like China and Russia, or even countries like Singapore and Indonesia, which trade freely with Myanmar.

The Asian energy rush is the latest demonstration of how the hunt for oil and gas, and China’s economic leverage, are reshaping international politics, often in ways that run counter to American preferences.

In many respects, with the rise of China’s economic power and its unflagging support, the government here has become more entrenched than ever, people inside and outside the country say.

“What can we do about it?” said a well educated man here, when asked about the plans to sell the gas abroad in the face of the deprivation at home. “What good would it do to protest, what would we get?” People were too afraid of the 400,000-member strong army supplied by China, Russia and Ukraine to complain, he said.

In numerous encounters in Myanmar, where most speak with extreme caution to foreigners and almost always anonymously for fear of jail, people joked sardonically that China was the “big daddy” and that soon it would “own” Myanmar. “China is a good friend of the government, not of the people,” one woman said. “They are like brother and brother-in-law.”

The Bush administration has pledged that it will not let up on its sanctions against the government until it releases the opposition leader, Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, who has been under house arrest for 11 of the past 17 years.

Mrs. Aung San Suu Kyi’s political party won an overwhelming victory in elections in 1990, and Washington insists that the government recognize those results, and release an estimated 1,100 political prisoners.

The Bush administration says it plans to file a Security Council resolution at the United Nations in coming weeks condemning the government for its human rights abuses, and tightening sanctions further.

The United Nations under secretary general, Ibrahim Gambari, met with the junta leader, Gen. Than Shwe, on Nov. 11 in Myanmar and urged the government to mend its ways on forced labor and political prisoners. The meeting ended inconclusively, United Nations officials said.

With so much energy and other resources at stake, and given its preference to shun outside interference in internal politics, China’s leaders are seemingly unbothered by what is happening inside Myanmar.

China’s National Development Reform Commission approved plans in April to build a pipeline that would carry China’s Middle East oil from a deep water port off Sittwe across Myanmar to Yunnan, China’s southern province. This would provide China with an alternative to the Strait of Malacca, which it now depends on for delivering its oil from the Middle East.

Though no date has been announced for work on the new pipeline across Myanmar, the military appeared to be getting ready to build the deep sea port on the island of Ramree, to the south of here, local people said.

In another sign of the importance of Myanmar to China, the chairman of the China National Offshore Oil Corporation, Fu Chengyu, said in a speech this year that the company would focus its investment in the medium term on two countries: Myanmar and Nigeria. Cnooc engineers are currently exploring for oil on Ramree, and the company has rights to other oil deposits in central Myanmar, according to Myanmar government reports.

India, thirsty for energy to fuel its own fast-growing economy, sees Myanmar as a place where it needs to contain China. In the late 1990s, democratic India switched its policy toward Myanmar from antagonism to friendship.

And Thailand, Southeast Asia’s largest economy, spends about $1.2 billion a year for Myanmar’s natural gas, giving the military government badly needed hard currency.

In conversations with people in a number of towns, a portrait emerged of a universally unpopular, deeply corrupt government. People told of worsening poverty, a collapsed education system and a health care system that could deal only with those who paid. Tuberculosis, malaria and AIDS were rampant, they said.

The government’s budget for its AIDS program in 2004 was $22,000, according to a recent health survey by John Hopkins University Medical School.

The junta leader, Gen. Than Shwe, 73, whose early military training was in psychological warfare, was described by many here as a master manipulator of his minions. He insisted, apparently out of fear of a coup, that the capital be moved this year from Yangon, formerly Rangoon, to a new site in the jungle, Naypyidaw.

The move, costing millions of scarce dollars, was in step with the general’s belief that he marched in the footsteps of the old Burmese kings — the name of the new capital means “Royal City.” Then, as now, there was a fierce line between the rulers and the ruled.

For the first time, health workers said they were discovering severe malnutrition among children in urban centers, a true anomaly in a lush country that was once the world’s biggest exporter of rice.

In Mandalay, the second-biggest city, almost naked children with distended stomachs scrounged on the riverfront. In one village on the Thwande River on the west coast, nomadic families were too strapped for food to offer any to visitors, a traditional courtesy in Myanmar.

“Why is there severe malnutrition in this Garden of Eden? Because people are poor,” said Frank Smithuis, a physician who has worked in Myanmar since 1994 and heads the Doctors Without Borders, Holland, medical programs. “People are going from three meals to two meals to one meal. One meal a day just isn’t enough.”

In the village of Leat Pan Gyunt, south of Sittwe, villagers said they could afford to send their girls to school for only three years. The local school consisted of one dirt-floored room for all grades from first to eighth. The desks were planks of wood supported on two bricks.

Afraid of protests by students, the government dispersed the University of Yangon to sites outside the capital.

At the new Magway University, the medical students were learning surgery from books and videos, without working on human corpses because the government refused to pay for formaldehyde, two people familiar with the situation said.

In contrast to the deepening poverty — Myanmar’s per capita income is calculated at $175 a year, far below neighboring Bangladesh — the military leaders were amassing fortunes, people said.

The latest evidence was a video leaked to a Web site, www.irrawaddy.org, based in Thailand, of the recent opulent wedding of General Than Shwe’s daughter, Thandar Shwe. The video showed the bride, with her father alongside her, decked out in a necklace of six ropes of large diamonds, her hair looped with diamonds as well.

For those educated people who want change, the path is treacherous.

“I don’t want to waste myself in jail,” said one woman, who had two relatives imprisoned. “They were not the same when they came out.”

In a similar vein to the dissidents in Eastern Europe in the 1980s, the woman said she believed change had to come from inside the country. But unlike Poland under Soviet rule, no unions are allowed in Myanmar, and most kinds of formal associations are considered suspect.

She said she held classes at her home on how to be more confident, how to strategize. She was trying to spread her classes to Buddhist monasteries and Christian churches, she said.

“Only education can change people because people don’t know anything,” she said. “Only about 10 percent of the people know what is going on.” Sometimes she was in such despair, she said, that she believed that the only way to win against the government was “to think like them.”

“But we can’t think like them,” she added, “nobody thinks like them.”

Not all opposition groups that work outside the country believe that Washington’s hard line is serving the best interests of Myanmar or the United States.

With its policy of isolation, the Bush administration was allowing China, and to a lesser extent, India, to have a free hand in Myanmar to the exclusion of the United States, said Aung Naing Oo, who spent a year at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University and who is the author of several books on Myanmar.

“The geopolitical situation favors the Burmese military,” he said. “China and India both want to support it, and the Asian nations have no teeth.”

Still, on a recent trip to Vietnam, a delegation of Myanmar officials heard something that astounded them, he said. They went to find out why Vietnam had become so suddenly prosperous.

“The Vietnamese said one word: ‘The Americans.’ The Burmese could not believe that after fighting a war Vietnam was friendly with the United States.”

Single Mothers and their Sex Offender Boyfriends

Single mothers will be able to ask the police to check the background of a new partner to find out whether he is a sex offender under moves being considered by the Home Office, the Guardian can reveal.

For those of you who like debating about registered sex offenders and pedophiles but are pretty tired of the same issue all over again, this might just be the issue for you.

It is a pretty interesting proposal, especially since single mothers are probably the no. 1 targets of child sex offenders.

At first glance this might seem like a pretty skewed motion. How can you possibly argue against protecting people from these registered sex offenders?

But as the article says (and as the proposal attempts to address), this kind of policy might be open to abuse. You might have these single mothers actively promoting and advertising that Mr. A is really a pedophile. In which case, you will have the whole 'right to privacy' debacle on your hands.

More importantly though, how about these sex offenders? What happens if you were a sex offender but you got help and now you don't stalk children anymore? Are you still considered a sex offender because of your past actions? If so, is it right to continue your punishment through the persecution you're going to get from this kind of policy?

My question is, if this can be the case, what's stopping the government from disclosing the same information schools and other public/private institutions that cater to children? Or do they do so already? I don't really know.

All in all, in a debate like this, you are inevitably going to have to give a discussion the same issues that any pedophile debate might entail. What you have to be careful about is being able to provide the proper nuance that would keep your debate from being generic.

An Oldie but a Goodie

The issue of criminals and their published memoirs is certainly nothing new, but the British government has come up with a new proposal to stop ex-convicts from being able to profit from published works about their crimes.

The operative word here being "profit", the current proposal doesn't seem to restrict these criminals from getting their life experiences published, just that they can't get any kind of profit from them.

Good thing Martha Stewart is American.

By virtue of the fact that this issue is ancient, you won't see this being debated anymore (certainly not in the last few tournaments). This issue is a good one for beginners to train on because it requires more logical thinking and argumentation rather than knowledge on technical matter (although being able to cite a few examples always helps).

For example, why is it so wrong for criminals to profit from publishing their criminal acts? By serving their sentences, they've already paid their debt to society. Why should additional, across-the-board, penalties be accorded to them after the fact?

On the other hand, as the article says, criminals being able to profit from their works goes against the very principles of natural justice, and justice isn't just measured by how much time is served in prison.

One can even argue that the proposal is trying to have its cake and eat it too - they recognize the value of these published memoirs (after all, they're not disallowing it) but they don't recognize the value of compensation for these criminals' experiences. What makes these two values so mutually exclusive? And wouldn't that be self-defeating since without any form of monetary compensation, criminals won't be inclined to share their life stories and thus destroying the value that they so want to protect?

Really good issue. People should start discussing this again.

Linkblogging

David Cameron and the Tories argue that the different rights that we get once we turn 18/21, such as getting a driver's license, being able to drink alcohol, being able to vote, should be contingent on the accomplishment of a national service program (read: NSTP/ROTC). The basic point that they're trying to make is that these rights shouldn't be linked to an arbitrary age requirement but rather to some proof that there's a sense of social responsibility inherent in the young person in question. Then again, doing such a thing removes the whole unalienability of those rights in the first place. Could be quite an interesting debate.

Steven E. Landsburg explains how exactly the existence of Internet Pornography prevents the people most likely to commit rape to go out in the streets and rape someone. It essentially boils down to "Net access reduces rape because Net access makes it easy to find porn."

This would be especially useful in debates such as the one regarding fictional child pornography, or actually pornography in general.

Another thing the article explains is how violent movies reduce the incidents of violent crime.

Juan Cole talks about the idea being talked about in the US Congress about partitioning Iraq to three separate regions of Kurds, Sunnis, and Shiites. One side is arguing that such a move would be "balkanizing" the region. The other side is saying that that's exactly what Iraq needs, considering that the Balkans are pretty stable right now. Either way, the article sheds some light on an old debate.

Gary Kamiya argues that the US should apologize to the Iraqis. His basic point is, "When we smashed into their country, we in effect became their temporary guardians. We were responsible for their well-being. We needed to raise them, take care of them, until they could take care of themselves. And we failed them. This is a deeply shameful feeling."

Then again, is a US apology really what Iraq needs right now, or is it just going to make things worse? Such an apology undoubtedly will accomplish one thing - alleviate the shame that's supposed to be in every American regarding Iraq. But what else would an apology do? Maybe embolden the fundamentalists. Maybe discredit the US as an international mediator. In any case, this is a pretty interesting debate in the long line of "compensation debates".

'Glorifying' terror plan revised

'Glorifying' terror plan revised
A proposed law banning the "glorifying" of terrorist acts has been revised, following criticism of the proposals.

People would have to "intend to incite" further acts of terror to be convicted, Home Secretary Charles Clarke has said.

Opponents had said the original proposal was unclear and could threaten civil liberties. Mr Clarke denied plans were being "watered down".

The plan to detain terror suspects for up to three months without charge would stay, the home secretary said.

Mr Clarke also published new plans to give police powers to temporarily close down places of worship being used by extremists.

Failure of the trustee or registered owner of the place of worship to take steps to stop such behaviour would be a criminal offence.

On the "glorifying" offence, Mr Clarke said: "We believe that glorification of terrorism is wrong and should be outlawed in law - we have made that clear all the way through.


THE NEW OFFENCE
To make a statement glorifying terrorism if the person making it believes, or has reasonable grounds for believing, that it is likely to be understood by its audience as an inducement to terrorism
"But a number of people have made observations to the effect that there were difficulties in the wording we originally suggested, and so we thought bringing together the glorification and incitement clauses in the bill would be the best way to deal with that."

He said it was not a case of "watering down" the new Terrorism Bill.

It would, he said, make it an offence to "make a statement glorifying terrorism if the person making it believes, or has reasonable grounds for believing, that it is likely to be understood by its audience as an inducement to terrorism".

Kevin Martin, the head of the Law Society, which represents solicitors, said the government had been right to amend the "poorly drafted legislation which would have put free speech at risk".

But John Cooper, a criminal barrister, said the legislation remained "totally and utterly unworkable".

"The courts are going to have a great deal of difficulty in establishing what intent is," he said.

'Climb-down'

Dominic Grieve, the Conservative shadow attorney general, said: "It's a climb-down - common sense has finally prevailed."

He said it had been "immediately apparent" when the plans were published three weeks ago that the one relating to glorification of terrorism was "completely unworkable".

Liberal Democrat home affairs spokesman Mark Oaten said: "The new definition is a major improvement.

"It means that cases where people are deliberately trying to provoke terrorism are more likely to stand up in court."

But he said the "case still has not been made" for the detention without charge of suspects beyond 14 days.

'Moderation'

Mr Clarke said he remained convinced the maximum time limit for detention of terror suspects should be increased to three months.

He said that under existing laws, the police were using the maximum 14 day period only in exceptional circumstances - with the suspects charged in all cases.

"The police use their existing detention powers cautiously and in moderation, and I am confident that they would use an amended power in the same careful fashion," he said.

"There would also be proper judicial oversight of detention. Such powers already operate successfully in other European countries - in France and Spain suspects can be detained for up to four years before trial."

The Home Office issued a seven-page Metropolitan Police document defending the three-month detention plan - it contained details of three terror cases yet to come to court, including one described as the largest mounted in the UK.

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/hi/uk_politics/4316326.stm

Published: 2005/10/08 14:53:27 GMT

Schenck v. United States

from Wikipedia:

Schenck v. United States, 249 U.S. 47 (1919), was a United States Supreme Court decision concerning whether the defendant possessed a First Amendment right to free speech against the draft during World War I. The defendant, Charles Schenck, a Socialist, had circulated a flyer to recently drafted men. The flyer, which cited the Thirteenth Amendment's provision against "involuntary servitude," exhorted the men to "assert [their] opposition to the draft," which it described as a moral wrong driven by the capitalist system. The circulars proposed peaceful resistance, such as petitioning to repeal the Conscription Act.

Schenck was charged with conspiracy to violate the Espionage Act by attempting to cause insubordination in the military and to obstruct recruitment. The Court, in a unanimous opinion written by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., held that Schenck's conviction was constitutional. The First Amendment did not protect speech encouraging insubordination, since, "[w]hen a nation is at war many things that might be said in time of peace are such a hindrance to its effort that their utterance will not be endured so long as men fight." In other words, the court argued, the circumstances of wartime permit greater restrictions on free speech than would be allowable during peacetime.

In the opinion's most famous passage, Justice Holmes sets out the "clear and present danger" standard:

"The question in every case is whether the words used are used in such circumstances and are of such a nature as to create a clear and present danger that they will bring about the substantive evils that Congress has a right to prevent."

This case is also the source of the phrase "shouting fire in a crowded theater", a paraphrase of Holmes' view that "The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theater and causing a panic."

Critics of the decision argued that a more apt analogy for Schenck's actions would have been someone getting up between the acts and declaring that there were not enough fire exits, or shouting, not falsely, but truly that there was a raging inferno inside to people about the enter the theater.

As a result of the decision, Charles Schenck spent six months in prison. The "clear and present danger" test was later strengthened to the more inclusive "bad tendency" test in "Whitney v. California". Justices Holmes and Brandeis shied from this test, but concurred with the final result. Both of these cases were later narrowed by Brandenburg v. Ohio (1969), which replaced the "bad tendency" test with the "imminent lawless action" test.

Search and Rescue

By TIM O'REILLY

Sebastopol, Calif.

AUTHORS struggle, mostly in vain, against their fated obscurity. According to Nielsen Bookscan, which tracks sales from major booksellers, only 2 percent of the 1.2 million unique titles sold in 2004 had sales of more than 5,000 copies. Against this backdrop, the recent Authors Guild suit against the Google Library Project is poignantly wrongheaded.

The Authors Guild claims that Google's plan to make the collections of five major libraries searchable online violates copyright law and thus harms authors' interests. As both an author and publisher, I find the Guild's position to be exactly backward. Google Library promises to be a boon to authors, publishers and readers if Google sticks to its stated goal of creating a tool that helps people discover (and potentially pay for) copyrighted works. (Disclosure: I am a member of the publisher advisory board for Google Print. As the name implies, it is simply an advisory group, and Google can take or leave its suggestions.)

What's causing all the fuss? Google has partnered with the University of Michigan, Harvard, Stanford, the New York Public Library and Oxford University. Google will scan and index their library collections, so that when a reader searches Google Print for, say, "author's rights," the results point to books that contain that term. In a format that resembles its current Web search results, Google will show snippets (typically, fewer than three sentences of text from each page of each book) that include the search term, plus information about the book and where to find it. Google asserts that displaying this limited amount of content is protected by the "fair use" doctrine under United States copyright law; the Authors Guild claims that it is infringement, because the underlying search technology requires a digitized copy of the entire work.

I'm with Google on this one. It would certainly be considered fair use, if, for example, I circulated a catalog of my favorite books, including a handful of quotations from each book that helps people to decide whether to buy a copy. In my mind, providing such snippets algorithmically on demand, as Google does, doesn't change that dynamic. Google allows click-through to the entire book only if the book is in the public domain or if publishers have opted in to the program. If it's unclear who owns the rights to a book, only the snippets are displayed.

A search engine for books will be revolutionary in its benefits. Obscurity is a far greater threat to authors than copyright infringement, or even outright piracy. While publishers invest in each of their books, they depend on bestsellers to keep afloat. They typically throw their products into the market to see what sticks and cease supporting what doesn't, so an author has had just one chance to reach readers. Until now.

Google promises an alternative to the obscurity imposed on most books. It makes that great corpus of less-than-bestsellers accessible to all. By pointing to a huge body of print works online, Google will offer a way to promote books that publishers have thrown away, creating an opportunity for readers to track them down and buy them. Even online sellers like Amazon offer only a small fraction of the university libraries' titles. While there are many unanswered questions about how businesses will help consumers buy the books they've found through a search engine for printed materials that is as powerful as Google's current Web search, there's great likelihood that Google Print's Library Project will create new markets for forgotten content. In one bold stroke, Google will give new value to millions of orphaned works.

I'm sorry to see authors buy into the old-school protectionism of the Authors Guild, not realizing they're acting against their own self-interest. Their resistance can come only from a failure to understand the nature of the program. Google Library is intended to help readers discover copyrighted works, not to give copies away. It's a tremendous service to authors that will help them beat the dismal odds of publishing as usual.

Tim O'Reilly, a publisher of computer books, is the co-producer of theWeb 2.0 conference.