20051221

Doggone Comfortable

A dog stretches by the side of the road in Taichung City yesterday. The Central Weather Bureau announced yesterday that another cold front would hit the nation today.

India is worried about reports that regional rivals China and Pakistan are giving Nepal military help, Defense Minister Pranab Mukherjee was quoted yesterday as saying.

"There is a problem," Mukherjee said in New Delhi when asked for comment on military aid from China and Pakistan to Nepal to help its army crush a Maoist insurgency, the Asian Age newspaper said.

The remarks were believed to be India's first public comments that it is concerned by military help from China and Pakistan to Nepal, traditionally seen as New Delhi's diplomatic backyard.

New Delhi was trying to settle the issue at the diplomatic level, the newspaper quoted the minister as saying.

New Delhi, which had been Nepal's biggest weapons supplier, cut off non-lethal arms shipments to Nepal after King Gyanendra fired the government and seized power in February.

Gyanendra said his takeover was necessary to stem a Maoist revolt that has claimed 12,500 lives since 1996 but his move has drawn international criticism.

Analysts have suggested that New Delhi has become increasingly alarmed about growing Chinese and Pakistani influence in Nepal since India, Britain and the US, suspended arms supplies.

An opinion poll this week showed Prime Minister John Howard out of step with the three-quarters of Australians who believe that underlying racism helps explain last week's ethnic violence on a Sydney beach.

"I do not accept that there is underlying racism in this country," Howard said in a week which saw a crowd of 5,000 white people cheer on youths beating up any dark-skinned visitor to Cronulla they could find.

Howard is in good company: the Labor Party's Kim Beazley, leader of the opposition and the alternative prime minister, also refused to subscribe to the view that racism runs deep in a country where one quarter of the 20 million population was born abroad and six million have been settled since the end of World War II.

Of the mob violence and equally vicious retaliatory attacks by ethnic Arabs, Beazley said: "It's just criminal behavior, that's what this is."

Howard used the same poll -- an ACNeilsen survey commissioned in the wake of 162 arrests and dozens of people injured in the worst ethnic violence on record -- to back his argument that tolerance is more prevalent than intolerance.

The poll showed 81 percent of people supporting the 30 years of a color-blind immigration stance that has constituted a multi-racial society and only 16 per cent wanting to go back to the all-white world before 1973.

If Australians were racist, Howard asked, "why would we have accepted people so well?"

In 1988, as he is often reminded, Howard said that the rate of Asian migration might be too high. It was a remark he now regrets.

Since becoming prime minister in 1996, he has presided over an increase in immigration and has gone out of his way to praise Asian immigrants for the entrepreneurial flair they bring with them.

It wasn't Asians that the rioters in Cronulla targeted. Those draped in the national flag did not demand a cut in immigration. What they were enraged about was having to share a beach with Muslim youths of Lebanese background who they claimed arrived in gangs and behaved badly.

But as Stepan Kerkyasharian, the president of the state-financed Anti-Discrimination Board, warned: "Once you let the racist genie out of the bottle you get violence, and you get retaliation from other racists."

The worry is that, just as when right-wing rabble-rouser Pauline Hanson let the genie out of the bottle in 1996 with her claim in parliament that Australia was in danger of "being swamped by Asians", the stopper is going to be hard to get back in.

Only one-third of those polled by ACNeilsen thought that immigration was too high. That, and the generalized support for a multiracial society, have commentators saying that the Cronulla incident was symptomatic of the majority's frustration with a perceived reluctance of Sydney's Muslim Lebanese community to fit in.

Andrew Bolt, writing in the Herald-Sun, said "Middle Eastern immigrants have brought with them a religion that too often preaches rejection of the very society they've joined and too often glorifies violence."

His argument is that earlier waves of settlers -- Italians, Turks, Greeks and Vietnamese -- were keener to assimilate and get on and that their experience informed the embrace of multiculturalism.

Nadia Jamal, herself of ethnic Muslim Lebanese stock, denies a religious component to the beach suburb rioting or that Islam is an impediment to Middle Easterners fitting in.

Writing in the Sydney Morning Herald, Jamal nevertheless noted that "some men of Australian Lebanese Muslim background seem to be so aggressive and violent ... This has everything to do with culture and patriarchal attitude, and nothing to do with religion."

But there can be no doubt that recent arrests in Sydney and Melbourne of supposedly home-grown Islamic terrorists, nightly pictures of the mayhem in Iraq and the bombings in New York, Bali and London have heightened suspicion of all Muslims in Australia.

If we regard the way people take to the streets as a showcase of a nation's democracy, the recent protests against the WTO in Hong Kong have sent a message to the international community. Unfamiliar with international protesters, the Hong Kong riot police mobilized armored vehicles, tear gas and water cannons to disperse protesters trying to break through the barricades. Many protesters were arrested, unsettling many WTO delegates.

In recent years, many countries have attempted to resolve trade differences via the WTO. However, the media have also given extensive coverage to anti-globalization activists eager to voice their displeasure. Although tens of thousands of Hong Kongers protested proposed amendments to Article 23 of Hong Kong's Basic Law and the inability to elect their chief executive, that performance seemed rather passive in comparison -- chanting a few slogans before dispersing, rather like weekenders out for a stroll.

On the other hand, quite a few of the WTO protesters were well-trained and experienced. South Korea is a nation where people often take to the streets and its democracy was built upon such protests. Moreover, South Korea's student and labor unions are even more radical than its farmers. It is quite routine for them to protest against Japan, the US and their own government. In Hong Kong, South Korean farmers only made a token demonstration and called it quits when they felt their opinions had been heard, because they did not want to embarrass the police.

Taiwan's democracy was also won via street protests. And although protests in Taiwan tend to be noisy and rumbustious affairs, they always hold back from the point of bloody confrontation, for whoever incites direct violent conflict will not be tolerated by the media or the public. Therefore, Taiwanese protest groups in Hong Kong exercised restraint and did not look particularly active.

At the beginning of December, 200,000 people in Hong Kong marched to demand direct elections. Some warned that the demonstrators would be rioters, and seemed unaware that demonstrations are part of daily life in democratic countries. Last week's anti-WTO demonstrations were a revelation, and might even have altered the perception of democracy for many Hong Kongers. Democracy is about hearing the people's voice, and demonstrating is one way of making that voice heard. If people are the masters, then it is for them to directly elect their representatives and administrative chief. Reducing the number of appointed assembly members and calling it reform is not substantive and shows that the Hong Kong government still has a long way to go to achieve real democracy.

Although the WTO protest scenes were dramatic, this was certainly preferable to the recent deaths of protesters in Dongzhou in Guangdong Province at the hands of the Chinese police. But during the Hong Kong protests, the authorities arrested 14 people on charges of illegal assembly. This is quite ridiculous as thousands of people were involved. If these 14 were in fact guilty of rioting or assaulting a police officer, then of course charges should be pressed. That's how other democratic countries handle demonstrations. Otherwise, they should be released. How the authorities handle the aftermath of last week's protests and the subsequent treatment of the 14 prisoners looks likely to provide further insight on the prospects for further democratic development in the territory.

I read with great pleasure Bob Kuo's article ("Chen must cultivate a Taiwanese personality," Dec. 16, page 8). In it Kuo encourages President Chen Shui-bian to promote Taiwanese art and culture as a means of revitalizing the spirit of democracy in Taiwan. This, in my view, is the very epitome of wisdom.

Kuo's point is basically that culture -- the indigenous, native Taiwanese culture of this island republic -- should be the driving force behind the President's campaign to revitalize faith in Taiwanese democracy.

The indisputable fact is that Taiwan already has a unique cultural identity and history which is distinct from any other in the world. The problem is that for many politicians, and often the average Taiwanese person, it appears that Taiwanese culture is still considered something of an embarrassment -- and frequently treated like some proverbial "redheaded stepchild" of Chinese civilization.

As a result, Taiwanese politicians and leaders often neglect to talk too much about what Taiwan really is. This is apparent even in everyday life. If you ask the typical Taiwanese student whether they are Chinese or Taiwanese, more often than not they simply cannot respond or become confused by what is actually a very simple question. This need not be the case.

As schoolchildren in the US, we all had to take "Civics" classes, which explained to our young minds the workings of US democracy. We learned what the Constitution is, who Benjamin Franklin was, and why the US didn't fall from the sky but was formed by events concerned with our revolt against English rule.

In the process we learned many a valuable thing about how to become good US citizens by participating in elections, civic organizations and the overall process of democratic citizenship.

Kuo's article highlights the need for improved teaching about what it really means to be Taiwanese, and I heartily join him in encouraging President Chen to promote a specifically Taiwanese identity through museums, the arts and educational reform. If Taiwan's democracy is to continue to flourish -- and avoid a collision with Chinese authoritarianism -- the young people of Taiwan must learn what it means to be Taiwanese, and to be proud of that.

Isn't it time students started learning the truth about who they are -- despite what a minority might think -- and what they might one day be called on to fight for?