Secret memo proves Israel knew occupation was illegal: report
LONDON - A secret memo proves that the Israeli government knew that its occupation of Palestinian land was illegal after it won the Six Day War in 1967, a British newspaper reported Saturday.
Theodor Meron, who wrote the memo as the Israeli foreign ministry's legal advisor at the time, said "I believe I would have given the same opinion today," according to The Independent newspaper.
With Israel now celebrating the 40th anniversary of the war, the 76-year-old Meron, who went on to become a leading international jurist, challenges Israel's long-held argument that settlements do not violate international law.
The Independent said it obtained a copy of his legal opinion, which was marked "Top Secret" and "Extremely Urgent."
Quoting its author, the newspaper said the memo concluded "that civilian settlement in the administered territories contravenes the explicit provisions of the Fourth Geneva Convention."
Meron also told the newspaper that then foreign minister Abba Eban was "sympathetic" to his view that civilian settlement would go against the Hague and Geneva conventions governing the conduct of occupying powers.
But the Labour government at the time progressively approved the settlements in the captured West Bank despite the secret legal opinion which had been passed on to then prime minister Levi Eshkol.
Such actions paved the way for at least 240,000 Israelis to settle in the the West Bank.
Meron, who served as president of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia until 2005, was also quoted as telling the Independent that the settlements have proven to be a real stumbling block.
"It's obvious to me that the fact that settlements were established and the pace of the establishment of the settlements made peacemaking much more difficult," he was quoted as saying.
In the Six Day War in June 1967, Israel captured the Sinai peninsula from Egypt, the Golan Heights from Syria and the West Bank and East Jerusalem from Jordan.
Agence France-Presse
WHO backs use of compulsory licensing
The annual meeting of all 193 member states of the World Health Organisation (WHO) ended yesterday in Geneva with a resolution to endorse the use of compulsory licensing to increase access to medicines.
The resolution came after a 10-hour heated debate between developed and developing countries. The resolution was welcomed by Thailand and Brazil as it was the first official WHO stance on the controversial issue since Thailand utilised the World Trade Organisation's (WTO) agreement on overriding intellectual property rights last November, followed by Brazil recently.
In its statement released yesterday, the WHO said its assembly resulted in commitments from its director-general to provide technical and policy support to countries to use compulsory licences to make existing medicines more accessible and to draw up a global strategy and plan of action on the issue.
"I am fully committed to this process and have noted your desire to move forward faster... We must make a tremendous effort. We know our incentive: the prevention of large numbers of needless deaths," said Margaret Chan, the WHO's director-general, in the statement.
A representative of Thailand's Public Health Ministry who attended the assembly said the resolution was very good news for Thailand.
"We have fought to the last minute to convince other countries to agree with us," said the health official, who asked not to be named.
He said Thailand and Brazil, the only two countries to issue compulsory licences to manufacture cheap generic versions of expensive drugs, played crucial roles in the debate to support the resolution, while the United States led the opposition. The US, he said, was the only country to voice its dissent on the resolution and was angered when its words were not heeded by other countries.
He said the Public Health Ministry would officially announce the good news to Thais today.
The WHO's resolution came just three days after Thailand failed to clarify the use of compulsory licensing to the US government. The US commerce secretary took an aggressive stance and acted like a representative of US drug firms in demanding the cancellation of compulsory licences when Thai Health Minister Mongkol na Songkhla met him on Monday in Washington.
Kannikar Kijtiwatchakul, a campaigner from Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) Belgium in Thailand, said the resolution was a great success for developing countries in their battle to get access to medicines.
"The fundamental problems of high drug prices caused by the reliance on patents for research and development on drugs should be explored as a next step," she said.
Kannikar claimed that the assembly also adopted a resolution to explore R&D incentive mechanisms and to address the link between R&D costs and the price of medicines, vaccines and diagnostic kits.
Besides agreements on public health, innovation and intellectual property rights, the WHO's member states also reached resolutions on pandemic influenza preparedness and access to vaccines and other benefits that would be shared among the members.
Chan, head of the WHO, said the sharing would flow from improved international cooperation and preparation.
The resolution requires the WHO to establish an international stockpile of vaccines for H5N1 bird-flu and other influenza viruses of pandemic potential and to formulate mechanisms and guidelines aimed at ensuring fair and equitable distribution of vaccines at affordable prices.
Pennapa Hongthong
The Nation
Wolfowitz's departure unlikely to save World Bank
By ADIL NAJAM
Paul Wolfowitz _ former US Deputy Secretary of Defence, one of the most influential neo-conservatives of President George W. Bush's administration and a key architect of the Iraq war _ has been forced to resign in disgrace from his current post as president of the World Bank. Technically, his resignation comes because of "ethical lapses" concerning favouritism and financial benefits to his girlfriend, Shaha Ali Riza. In reality, this is not just the story of a bad manager who was reviled by his staff and become a pariah in his own institution. This is also the story of an institution that plays with the destiny of hundreds of millions of people around the world but remains unsure of and unable to shape its own identity.
Mr Wolfowitz should never have been appointed to the job. His tenure as World Bank president has been disastrous and he will leave behind deep and lasting scars on an already troubled institution. While his departure is, generally, a good thing for the World Bank and while it provides a perverse but real sense of satisfaction to the critics of current US foreign policy, it will do little to solve the structural problems that the World Bank faces. Indeed, it may even exacerbate some of these problems.
Controversially appointed in 2005, Mr Wolfowitz was a terrible choice for the post. A long-time security-hawk, he had no background in development or poverty alleviation. His claim to fame was as one of the principal proponents of the neo-conservative strategy to go to war in Iraq as a way to reshape the Middle East. By the time he was nominated, that strategy had already resulted in disaster and his boss and mentor, Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, was himself politically isolated. For the ambitious Wolfowitz, being elevated to Defence Secretary or to National Security Adviser _ posts that he had been eyeing _ were no longer viable options.
The presidency of the World Bank offered Mr Wolfowitz an opportunity to test out his grand theories about shaping the "hearts and minds" of populations in developing countries who were becoming increasingly distrustful of US foreign policy goals. It also allowed President Bush a chance to install the most hawkish of his hawks at the helm of the one international institution that can intrude deeply into national economic, social and knowledge institutions that do, in fact, have the capability to shape the "hearts and minds" of people around the world.
Following, within weeks, the equally unpopular nomination of John Bolton as US ambassador to the United Nations, Mr Wolfowitz's nomination in 2005 shocked the international community. Coming without any international consultations, it was seen as one more example of American arrogance and unilateralism. As the single largest shareholder of the World Bank (with some 16 percent of the vote in the Executive Board), the United States has traditionally held the right to nominate the president. The European Union whose members control a cumulative 30 percent of the vote made clear that they did not like the choice.
Eventually the Europeans agreed to stick with tradition. As it turns out, their first instinct was correct and the arrangement has crumbled after barely two years. It was not just the scandal about Ms Riza. It was also his dictatorial management style, his self-promotion, his aloofness, and his suspected hidden agendas.
Now that he has been made to resign, does that mean that all will be well at the World Bank?
Not really. Apart from the collateral damage that he has inflicted upon the institution's reputation and staff morale, there is the fact that the World Bank was a dysfunctional institution even before Mr Wolfowitz came to it. Its staff seems forever stressed, its public image forever tarnished, its shareholders (rich countries) forever dissatisfied, and its clients (poor countries) forever unhappy.
It would be a pity if the Wolfowitz affair pushes the World Bank even deeper into the abyss of institutional angst. It would be equally sad if the opportunity for serious reform at the World Bank that is afforded by this turn of events were to be missed.
Like most international institutions, the World Bank is reform-resistant. In particular, it has failed to resolve its own identity crisis: is it a "bank" or a "development institution"? It likes to call itself not just "a" bank, but "the" bank; but it is not. Its employees are encouraged to act as if they were bankers; but they are not. Many do not even want to be. The result is that it ends up being neither.
Resolving this schizophrenia is not going to happen overnight. But what can happen immediately is to change the process for selecting World Bank presidents.
Traditionally, the president is an American and is chosen by the US government. Maybe it is time to change this tradition.
The US has been quick to lay claim to the next appointment. Others have suggested European alternatives. At the very least it will get a conversation going on imagining the possibility of putting the "world" back into the World Bank. Later, we can also start thinking about taking the "bank" out of it.
Prof Adil Najam teaches at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University, United States, and is author of the book "Global Environmental Governance: A Reform Agenda"
Berrigan, U.S. Takes Gold in Arms Olympics
Tomgram: Berrigan, U.S. Takes Gold in Arms Olympics
Hey, aren't we the most exceptional nation in history? George Bush and his pals thought so -- and they were in a great American tradition of exceptionalism. Of course, they were imagining us as the most exceptional empire in history (or maybe at the end of it), the ultimate New Rome. Anyway, explain this to me: Among all the exceptional things we claim to do, how come we never take credit for what may be the most exceptional of all, our success of successes, the thing that makes us uniquely ourselves on this war-ridden planet -- peddling more arms to Earthlings than anyone else in the neighborhood? Why do we hide this rare talent under a bushel? In the interest of shining a proud light on an under-rated national skill, I asked Frida Berrigan to return the United States to its rightful place in the Pantheon of arms-dealing nations. Tom
We're # 1!
A Nation of Firsts Arms the World
By Frida BerriganThey don't call us the sole superpower for nothing. Paul Wolfowitz might be looking for a new job right now, but the term he used to describe the pervasiveness of U.S. might back when he was a mere deputy secretary of defense -- hyperpower -- still fits the bill.
Face it, the United States is a proud nation of firsts. Among them:
First in Oil Consumption:
The United States burns up
20.7 million barrels per day, the equivalent of the oil consumption of China, Japan, Germany, Russia, and India combined.First in Carbon Dioxide Emissions:
Each year, world polluters pump 24,126,416,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) into the environment. The United States and its territories are responsible for 5.8 billion metric tons of this, more than China (3.3 billion), Russia (1.4 billion) and India (1.2 billion) combined.
First in External Debt:
The United States owes $10.040 trillion,
nearly a quarter of the global debt total of $44 trillion.First in Military Expenditures:
The White House has requested $481 billion for the Department of Defense for 2008, but this huge figure does not come close to representing total U.S. military expenditures projected for the coming year. To get a sense of the resources allocated to the military, the costs of the global war on terrorism, of the building, refurbishing, or maintaining of the U.S. nuclear arsenal, and other expenses also need to be factored in. Military analyst Winslow Wheeler did the math recently: "Add $142 billion to cover the anticipated costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan; add $17 billion requested for nuclear weapons costs in the Department of Energy; add another $5 billion for miscellaneous defense costs in other agencies…. and you get a grand total of $647 billion for 2008."
Taking another approach to the use of U.S. resources, Columbia University economist Joseph Stiglitz and Harvard Business School lecturer Linda Bilmes added to known costs of the war in Iraq invisible costs like its impact on global oil prices as well as the long-term cost of health care for wounded veterans and came up with a price tag of between 1 trillion and $2.2 trillion.
If we turned what the United States will spend on the military in 2008 into small bills, we could give each one of the world's more than 1 billion teenagers and young adults an Xbox 360 with wireless controller (power supply in remote rural areas not included) and two video games to play: maybe Gears of War and Command and Conquer would be appropriate. But if we're committed to fighting obesity, maybe Dance Dance Revolution would be a better bet. The United States
alone spends what the rest of the world combined devotes to military expenditures.First in Weapons Sales:
Since 2001, U.S. global military sales have normally totaled between $10 and $13 billion. That's a lot of weapons, but in fiscal year 2006, the Pentagon broke its own recent record, inking arms sales agreements worth $21 billion. It almost goes without saying that this is significantly more than any other nation in the world.
In this gold-medal tally of firsts, there can be no question that things that go bang in the night are our proudest products. No one makes more of them or sells them more effectively than we do. When it comes to the sorts of firsts that once went with a classic civilian manufacturing base, however, gold medals are in short supply. To take an example:
Not First in Automobiles:
Once, Chrysler, General Motors, and Ford ruled the domestic and global roost, setting the standard for the automotive industry. Not any more. In 2006, the U.S. imported almost $150 billion more in vehicles and auto parts than it sent abroad. Automotive analyst Joe Barker told the
Boston Globe, "it's a very tough environment" for the so-called Detroit Three. "In times of softening demand, consumers typically will look to brands that they trust and rely on. Consumers trust and rely on Japanese brands."Not Even First in Bulk Goods:
The Department of Commerce recently announced total March exports of $126.2 billion and total imports of $190.1 billion, resulting in a goods and services deficit of $63.9 billion. This is a $6 billion increase over February.
But why be gloomy? Stick with arms sales and it's dawn in America every day of the year.
Sometimes, the weapons industry pretends that it's like any other trade -- especially when it's pushing our congressional representatives (as it always does) for fewer restrictions and regulations. But don't be fooled. Arms aren't automobiles or refrigerators. They're sui generis; they are the way the USA can always be number one -- and everyone wants them. The odds that, in your lifetime, there will ever be a $128 billion trade deficit in weapons are essentially nil.
Arms are our real gold-medal event.
First in Sales of Surface-to-Air Missiles:
Between 2001 and 2005, the United States delivered 2,099 surface-to-air missiles to nations in the developing world, 20% more than Russia, the next largest supplier.
First in Sales of Military Ships:
During that same period, the U.S. sent 10 "major surface combatants" like aircraft carriers and destroyers to developing nations. Collectively, the four major European weapons producers shipped thirteen. (And we were first in the anti-ship missiles that go along with such ships, with nearly double (338) the exports of the next largest supplier Russia (180).
First in Military Training:
A thoughtful empire knows that it is not enough to send weapons; you have to teach people how to use them. The Pentagon plans on training the militaries of 138 nations in 2008 at a cost of nearly $90 million. No other nation comes close.
First in Private Military Personnel:
According to bestselling author
Jeremy Scahill, there are at least 126,000 private military personnel deployed alongside uniformed military personnel in Iraq alone. Of the more than sixty major companies that supply such personnel
worldwide, more than 40 are U.S. based.Rest assured, governments around the world, often at each others' throats, will want U.S. weapons long after their people have turned up their noses at a range of once dominant American consumer goods.
Just a few days ago, for instance, the "trade" publication Defense News reported that Turkey and the United States signed a $1.78 billion deal for Lockheed Martin's F-16 fighter planes. As it happens, these planes are already ubiquitous -- Israel flies them, so does the United Arab Emirates, Poland, South Korea, Venezuela, Oman and Portugal, not to speak of most other modern air forces. In many ways, F-16 is not just a high-tech fighter jet, it's also a symbol of U.S. backing and friendship. Buying our weaponry is one of the few ways you can actually join the American imperial project!
In order to remain number one in the competitive jet field, Lockheed Martin, for example, does far more than just sell airplanes. TAI -- Turkey's aerospace corporation -- will receive a boost with this sale, because Lockheed Martin is handing over responsibility for parts of production, assembly, and testing to Turkish workers. The Turkish Air Force already has 215 F-16 fighter planes and plans to buy 100 of Lockheed Martin's new F-35 Joint Strike Fighter as well, in a deal estimated at $10.7 billion over the next 15 years.
$10.7 billion on fighter planes for a country that ranks 94th on the United Nations' Human Development Index, below Lebanon, Colombia, and Grenada, and far below all the European nations that Ankara is courting as it seeks to join the European Union -- now that's a real American sales job for you!
Here's the strange thing, though: This genuine, gold-medal manufacturing-and-sales job on weapons simply never gets the attention it deserves. As a result, most Americans have no idea how proud they should be of our weapons manufacturers and the Pentagon -- essentially our global sales force -- that makes sure our weapons travel the planet and regularly demonstrates their value in small wars from Latin America to Central Asia.
Of course, there's tons of data on the weapons trade, but who knows about any of it? I'm typical here. I help produce one of a dozen or so sober annual (or semi-annual) reports quantifying the business of war-making. In my case: the Arms Trade Resource Center report, U.S. Weapons at War: Fueling Conflict or Promoting Freedom? These reports get desultory, obligatory press attention -- but only once in a blue moon do they get the sort of full-court-press treatment that befits our number one product line.
Dense collections of facts, percentages, and comparisons don't seem to fit particularly well into the usual patchwork of front-page stories. And yet the mainstream press is a glory ride, compared to the TV News, which hardly acknowledges most of the time that the weapons business even exists.
In any case, that inside-the-fold, fact-heavy, wonky news story on the arms trade, however useful, can't possibly convey the gold-medal feel of a business that has always preferred the shadows to the sun. No reader checking out such a piece is going to feel much -- except maybe overwhelmed by facts. The connection between the factory that makes a weapons system and the community where that weapon "does its duty" is invariably missing-in-action, as are the relationships among the companies making the weapons and the generals (on-duty and retired) and politicians making the deals, or raking in their own cut of the profits for themselves and/or their constituencies. In other words, our most successful (and most deadly) export remains our most invisible one.
Maybe the only way to break through this paralysis of analysis would be to stop talking about weapons exports as a trade at all. Maybe we shouldn't be using economic language to describe it. Yes, the weapons industry has associations, lobby groups, and trade shows.
They have the same tri-fold exhibits, scale models, and picked-over buffets as any other industry; still, maybe we have to stop thinking about the export of fighter planes and precision-guided missiles as if they were so many widgets and start thinking about them in another language entirely -- the language of drugs.
After all, what does a drug dealer do? He creates a need and then fills it. He
encourages an appetite or (even more lucratively) an addiction and then feeds it.Arms dealers do the same thing. They suggest to foreign officials that their military just might need a slight upgrade. After all, they'll point out, haven't you noticed that your neighbor just upgraded in jets, submarines, and tanks? And didn't you guys fight a war a few years back? Doesn't that make you feel insecure? And why feel insecure for another moment when, for just a few billion bucks, we'll get you suited up with the latest model military… even better than what we sold them -- or you the last time around.
Why does Turkey, which already has 215 fighter planes, need 100 extras in an even higher-tech version? It doesn't… but Lockheed Martin, working the Pentagon, made them think they did.
We don't need stronger arms control laws, we need a global sobriety coach -- and some kind of 12-step program for the dealer-nation as well.
Frida Berrigan is a Senior Research Associate at the World Policy Institute's Arms Trade Resource Center.
Chavez seeks papal mea culpa for native slaps
President Hugo Chavez sought Benedict XVI's apology for offending native peoples during the pope's recent attempt to reach out to Latin American Roman Catholics.
"As a head of state, I beg your holiness to apologise to the peoples of our Americas," said Chavez, speaking late on Friday.
"I believe it is the right thing to do."
Bendedict XVI made quite an impression on his first visit to Latin America, home to about half of his flock, when he said last week that "Christianity was not imposed by a foreign culture."
"Christ was the Savior (America's natives) silently yearned for," the pope said in Brazil.
Benedict also called a recent resurgence of pre-Columbian religions "a step backward," drawing protests from native peoples as far away as Mexico.
Natives in Ecuador also questioned Benedict's version of events.
"Surely, the pope does not know that representatives of the Catholic Church of those times, with honourable exceptions, were accomplices, deceivers and beneficiaries of one of the most horrific genocides of all humanity," the Confederation of Indigenous Nations said in a statement on Saturday.
The pope's statements were still on Chavez's mind on Saturday: "How could you say that they came -- when they came with arquebuses (firearms) to evangelise -- with no sort of imposition?"
The conquest of Latin America by Europeans "was something far worse than the Holocaust in the Second World War and no one can deny it, not even your Holiness can deny the Holocaust of the natives of our land."
"Christ arrived much later to America; he did not arrive with (Christopher) Columbus. That was the arrival of the anti-Christ," said Chavez, whose speeches frequently rely on Christian teachings and baseball metaphors.
Chavez and the Roman Catholic Church have had rough relations, which have improved in the past year, with new Caracas archbishop Jorge Urosa.
Chavez has met once with Benedict, in May 2006.
Copyright AFP (Agence France-Presse), 2007
Point of no return for southern Thailand
By Shawn W Crispin
BANGKOK - It is now violently apparent that Thailand's military-appointed government's policy of reconciliation toward its three insurgency-hit majority-Muslim provinces Pattani, Narathiwat and Yala was never really implemented on the ground.
Instead, southern Thailand's three-year-old conflict is veering in a dangerous new direction, where the government is establishing a growing number of loosely regulated local militias, and in response ethnic-Malay Muslim insurgent groups have commenced attacks against the economic lifelines of certain urban districts in an intensified effort to empty the restive region of ethnic-Thai and Sino-Thai Buddhists.
Yala province is emerging as the showcase and test case for the insurgents' new strategy, which, according to on-the-ground monitors who regularly communicate with insurgent leaders from the BRN-Coordinate group, aims soon to seize total control of the province, including the central government's administrative hub and the police's forward command center in the region. (The BRN-Coordinate is known to be the political arm of the traditional BRN - Barisan Revolusi Nasional or National Revolutionary Front - separatist organization.)
That strategy has been most visible in Yala's Betong district, [1] where recently insurgents and insurgent sympathizers blocked road access to the area and cut electricity and mobile-telephone signals for four straight nights. The blockade, which resulted in severe food and fuel shortages, was the first overt economic attack of the conflict. At the same time, the insurgents have increased the ferocity of their attacks on the civilian population, including a series of gruesome beheadings and burnings of their victims.
These harsh tactics have caused new waves of displaced Buddhists from both rural and semi-urban areas into Yala's main township, where they have established shelters in a number of Buddhist temples. The insurgents' aim "is no longer to just empty villages of Buddhists, but whole districts", said Sunai Phasuk, Thailand representative of the US-based rights lobby Human Rights Watch. "Their strength is rising each day and they are confident they can win what they are fighting for - a separate state."
With the controversy surrounding the military's new draft constitution, mounting tensions between hardline coup leaders and their appointed civilian administration led by Prime Minister Surayud Chulanont, and exiled former premier Thaksin Shinawatra's rear-guard propaganda offensive aimed at turning international opinion against the junta, dealing with the conflict in southern Thailand has fallen down on Bangkok's agenda.
Surayud still speaks of reconciliation, including a recent amnesty offer for insurgents who have not been involved in any crimes against the state. But the military's tactics on the ground have hardened in recent months, attended by a new rash of rights groups' allegations of mass arrests, state-sponsored disappearances and torture of detained militant suspects.
People in contact with the insurgent groups say they view Surayud's recent amnesty offer as a cynical government ploy to identify, arrest and even extrajudicially kill their members. All of the loosely aligned separatist groups operating across the region have given up hope of negotiating an autonomy settlement until a new government takes power after democratic elections scheduled for mid-December, they say.
Communal tipping point
The fear among those monitoring the conflict is that in the intervening seven months the restive region could tip toward full-blown communal violence. And both sides' tactics are aggressively pushing the conflict in that direction.
A series of violent incidents, including a mid-March assault on a minibus where passengers were removed from the vehicle and shot at point-blank range, and recent armed assaults on mosques and Islamic schools, were more likely the dirty work of Thai Rangers associated with paramilitary groups than Muslim insurgent groups - as the government has contended (see Arm thy neighbor, Asia Times Online, May 11).
Human Rights Watch contends in a recent report that on April 9 a government-backed village defense volunteer unit opened fire without provocation on a crowd of Muslim funeral-goers in Yala's Ban Nang Sta district, resulting in the death of four students and several injuries. The incident followed the military-related paramilitary Unit 4202's opening fire on a civilian vehicle and killing a 15-year-old student passenger in Yala's main township.
"It looks like the policy is kill enough people and hopefully the violence will stop," said a representative with another international group monitoring the situation.
Last week, top coup maker and army commander General Sonthi Boonyaratklin approved another increase of the number of militias active in conflict areas. The move to arm and deploy more paramilitary groups would appear to mark a sense of official desperation. Historically, the Thai military has deployed loosely regulated militias to conduct its more controversial operations, which because of their quasi-government status gives the state a degree of plausible deniability for abuses perpetrated by the units. [2]
The insurgents' hit-and-run tactics - including the use of armed gunmen riding on the back of motorcycles and the deployment of remote-controlled improvised explosive devices - have frustrated Thai troops who are trained more for conventional than urban-based warfare. Some security analysts believe recent militia abuses are part of a deliberate government policy to inflame local tensions and lure the shadowy insurgent groups into the open to fight through more conventional means.
One observer claims that at least one paramilitary group has vowed that for every insurgent attack committed against state targets in the morning, they will have avenged it by that evening. If true, that would seem to indicate that the Thai military has abandoned its earlier stated aim of trying to win over local Muslim hearts and minds and is now more overtly coming to the defense of the area's threatened minority Buddhist population.
The army is now actively recruiting young Buddhist men, including a conscious effort to sign up those who have recently lost family members to the region's violence, to join its paramilitary forces. The military is also actively recruiting local Muslims to join, though significantly with considerable less success.
Thailand has a long history of supplying and relying on armed proxy groups to shore up national security and provide intelligence on regional adversaries. That includes the ethnic Mon in the 1800s who helped to repel Burmese invaders, right-wing groups such as the Khmer Serei in the 1950s to guard against Phnom Penh's perceived territorial ambitions in Thailand, and the Chinese Nationalists (Kuomintang) in the 1960s and 1970s to counteract the Beijing-backed Communist Party of Thailand.
The Communist Party of Malaya provided Thai armed forces with invaluable intelligence on the armed Muslim separatist groups that were active in southern Thailand in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. Now, the Thai military lacks an ethnic proxy group to help counteract the new generation of Muslim insurgents, which unlike their forebears are situated under cover as civilians in villages rather than as uniformed guerrillas in jungle-covered redoubts.
The lack of reliable intelligence, people closely tracking the conflict say, has hobbled the military's counterinsurgency strategy and wrong-footed Thai soldiers. The military has recently stopped patrolling certain border areas where insurgents are active and scaled back plans to increase the number of road checkpoints it maintains because security personnel are reluctant to man the posts, which have been especially prone to hit-and-run attacks.
Meanwhile, the insurgents are bidding for the first time to take total control of large swaths of territory in Yala province, and apart from using paramilitaries to swing back wildly, the Thai military seems increasingly at a loss over how best to respond.
Notes
1. The recent insurgent assault on Betong would appear to be both strategic and symbolic. The local government had recently allocated a 164 million baht (US$5 million) budget to construct a model "sufficiency economy" village, in line with King Bhumibol Adulyadej's inward-looking economic concept. The 70-unit village is populated mainly by former communist insurgents who laid down their arms in the 1980s and now work nearby farms.
2. Rights groups note that throughout Thai history, no military officers or paramilitary members accused of human-rights abuses have ever been convicted or punished. That includes the present conflict, notably the commander in charge of the April 2004 military siege of the Krue Se Mosque in Pattani province that resulted in the military shooting to death 32 lightly armed Muslims holed up in the shrine.
Shawn W Crispin is Asia Times Online's Southeast Asia editor.
Clinton salutes Thai drug stance
CELIA W. DUGGER, NYT NEWS SERVICE and APIRADEE TREERUTKUARKUL,
BANGKOK POST 10 May 2007
New York - Former US president Bill Clinton yesterday gave his backing to Thailand and Brazil's recent moves to break Aids drugs patents held by US pharmaceutical companies to reduce the cost of treating the disease.
Mr Clinton also announced that his foundation had negotiated steep price reductions for generic versions of costly, second-line Aids drugs needed when the original medicines fail, as well as for less toxic, easier-to-use first-line medicines combined in a once-a-day pill.
Standing next to Thailand's Public Health Minister Mongkol Na Songkhla, Mr Clinton forcefully endorsed the decision to break patents held by US pharmaceutical companies charging prices the former president described as exorbitant.
"No company will live or die because of high price premiums for Aids drugs in middle-income countries, but patients may," he said.
The new prices would halve the cost of the drugs for better-off developing countries in Latin America and Asia and cut prices by 25% in poor countries, which were already paying lower prices, the foundation said.
The second-line medicines will be bought with more than $100 million (3.47 billion baht) raised by a group of countries led by France. The improved first-line therapies will largely be financed by the Global Fund to Fight Aids, tuberculosis and malaria and other donors.
Second-line drugs have typically cost about 10 times as much as first-line therapies. Costs have ballooned in Brazil and Thailand, which began programmes to provide universal access to Aids treatment years before African countries did, as patients have developed resistance to generic first-line treatments and moved to brand-name second-line drugs.
The Clinton Foundation's willingness to buy the generic drugs from the Indian manufacturers Cipla and Matrix will give developing countries leverage in bargaining with American companies for lower prices on branded anti-retroviral drugs and may embolden some to follow Brazil and Thailand in overriding patents.
Speaking from New York, Dr Mongkol said he believed the support from the former US president was credible enough to clear doubts over the country's motives in challenging the patents of drug firms.
It also boosted his own confidence as he prepares to address the issues of compulsory licensing and the downgrading of the country to the Priority Watch List by the US Office of Trade Representative in Washington on May 21 and 22.
Dr Mongkol said Thailand would also hold out against pressure for it to submit to US demands on several issues in exchange for an upgrade back.
These included permission to patent not only drugs but also diagnostic, therapeutic and surgical procedures for the treatment of humans or animals, which would inevitably force Thais to shoulder high medical treatment costs.
The US has also called for an extension of the patent protection on drugs and agricultural chemical products from two to four years, and compulsory licensing to be used only in emergency situations.
Dr Mongkol and his team travelled to New York early this week to sign an agreement with the Clinton Foundation to buy the generic versions of Aids medicine from India in bulk.
Singapore PM warns US over China
Mr Bush agreed to attend the ASEAN summit in September
Singapore's prime minister has urged the US to maintain ties with both China and Japan because south-east Asian nations do not want to "choose sides".
Lee Hsien Loong told President George W Bush the two countries have a major impact on the region's prosperity, after bilateral talks in Washington.
He also encouraged the US to strengthen ties with members of the Association of South-East Asian Nations (Asean).
Mr Bush responded by agreeing to attend the organisation's summit in September.
The president will stop in Singapore for his first visit to the 10-nation meeting on his way to the Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation (APEC) forum in Sydney.
"I talked to Prime Minister Lee about America's desire to stay in close contact with not only Singapore, but our partners in what we call the Asean nations," Mr Bush said.
"To this end, the prime minister has invited me, and I've accepted, an invitation to go back to Singapore to talk to our partners and friends about trade and security, and we'll do so on my way to the APEC meetings in Australia."
'Friends with both'
Mr Lee welcomed Mr Bush's acceptance of his invitation, but warned him not to try to push Southeast Asia into choosing between the region's two dominant powers.
"We discussed America's relations in Asia, with China, with Japan, and Korea," he said.
"Those two are important to south-east Asia because they set the context within which south-east Asia can prosper."
"Good relations between America and the major countries... are critical because the south-east Asian countries want to be friends with both, and do not want to have to choose sides with either."
Singapore's prime minister also warned Mr Bush that it was vital that his administration worked to bring about peace between Israel and the Palestinians.
"It affects America's standing in Asia and the world, and also the security environment in Asia because extremists, the jihadists, watch carefully what's happening in the Middle East and take heart, or lose heart, depending on what's happening," Mr Lee explained
