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Strategies & Market Trends : Asia Forum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: tom who wrote (3477)	5/11/1998 12:52:00 PM
From: Worswick	Read Replies (4) \| Respond to of 9980

Tom thanks for your input it is much appreciated as we recast and reinvent the world here on our discussion foruum. If I could impose on you and add a few observations about these uncharted waters we are headed off into. My own bent is towards deconstructionist Asian scenarios that will inevitably take place in whatever place in the world colonial European powers erected Asian/AFrican "model societies". In brief in former colonies things do change.... with emergence of "new" political and economic "players". This part is easy. It is a sine que non of common understanding. After a too long study of post-Colonial Asian politics and history, however, simply stated my opinions broadly speaking are that nation states created by colonial authorities in the 19th and early 20th centuries simply won't adhere. They will devolve into smaller "states". If not from anything else simply from Malthusian population increments and religious, ethnic, cultural tensions. In Indonesia we are still in the "strongman/military leader/dictator" phase of the disintegration of the colonial structure. Burma is somewhat further ahead on this path and witness what is happening there. India and "Pakistan" are not too far behind Sri Lanka (formerly Ceylon) on another sort of deconstructionist road. My opinions on the subject go so far as to think that even Siberia will split off from Russia (as it did in the 1905 revolution under the leadership of Ossendowski and others). If I might add something as a European what we see in Asia is paved streets, power plants that work, distribution aparatus that work(light, ower, water), hotels, car repair shops... infrastructure in short. Underneath this infrastructure in Africa and Asia is a cultural, emotional and religious "infrastructure"... that is possibly unknown and unknowable by Europeans. Ask Stitch. In a very long study of Asian history and colonial eras in particular I have come to the conclusion that the more things change the more they are the way they were. My particular epiphany came when my best friend in India a wonderful Muslim gentleman, a leading Gujerati poet and film maker, was beseiged in his high rise by a Hindu mob howling for his blood and wanting to chop him up into little pieces. One can jot this down as "social tensions" but this sort of anti- social behavior is symptomatic of something much deeper. These untaught things are something our history books do not teach us in he west, nor do investment seminars, or bank conferences with joint partners "on the ground", or even the briefing books made up by our state department. Wintness the bafflement of what was happening in Iran when the Shah was overthrown. Absolute befuddlement on he part of "experts" people who had learnt their licks in our academic instututions like Harvard. I remember my former colleagues. They were twisted into pretzels over the "irrationality" of the new regime. So. As an expat...read up on your history. You might not get it all or even just some of it... most of the history of Asia isn't written in books it is writeen in people's hearts. And unfortunately you just don't want to know how dark some of those hearts are. I fear you're going to learn however. Pol Pot after all wasn't a European despot... he was an Asian despot of, to us, an unimaginable quality. My best, * I shall add this as a postscript Fopr Private Use Only (C)Sidney Daily Herald City paralysed as Muslims try to storm Christian area By MUZAMMIL PASHA in Faisalabad Thousands of Muslim extremists screamed slogans against the United States before attempting to force their way through police to reach a Christian-dominated area of a strife-torn Pakistani city yesterday. Police used tear gas to keep the rioters away from churches and Christian homes and arrested 50 people. Crowds of Muslim demonstrators, some carrying automatic weapons, have paralysed the centre of Faisalabad just a kilometre from the church where Catholic Bishop John Joseph was buried on Sunday. Bishop Joseph shot himself in protest against the death sentence given to a Christian accused of insulting Islam. Muslim leaders called for a strike in the city and threatened to bring down the Government if any concessions were made to the Christian community. The Christians are campaigning for a change in the controversial blasphemy laws which make insulting Islam punishable by death. "We are not against Christians but we will not allow anyone to disgrace the name of the Prophet," said Mullah Zia-ul Haq Quazni, the leader of the extremist Muslim Sipa-e-Sahabah group. The group has been linked to hundreds of sectarian killings. Mullah Quazni called for the immediate arrest of any Christians who desecrated the name of the Holy Prophet. Police in Faisalabad had blocked roads leading to the church where the bishop was buried and taken up positions around other churches fearing attempts by Muslim extremists to burn them down. The bishop's funeral sparked widespread violence and rioting in the city. Police fired tear gas to restore order, then arrested 16 Muslim militants and five Christians after a number of houses and shops in a Christian neighbourhood were set ablaze. In the southern port city of Karachi on Sunday, about 1,500 Christians set buildings ablaze and shouted protests against the blasphemy law. There are 2 million Christians in Pakistan but most of the country's 140 million people are Muslim. Ayub Massih, the Christian sentenced to death, remains in jail pending an appeal. He was accused of speaking favourably of Salman Rushdie, the British author who has lived in seclusion since Iranian religious leaders sentenced him to death for his allegedly blasphemous novel, The Satanic Verses. Several Christians have been sentenced to death under Pakistan's blasphemy law, but the convictions were overturned by higher courts. There are dozens of people awaiting trial on blasphemy charges. - Associated Press