Category: Asia360 News (Singapore)

Less than three weeks before a summit between BRICS powers — Brazil, Russian, India, China and South Africa — the two Asian members of the group are trying to close ranks and resolve their differences.

Yang Jiechi, the Chinese foreign minister, met with his Indian counterpart SM Krishna on March 2 in New Delhi, in a clear bid to reduce tensions between the two countries ahead of the March 28-29 summit.

India will host the BRICS summit for the first time since the bloc’s original meeting in the Russian city of Yekaterinburg in 2009 during the global financial crisis. The fourth summit will focus on managing the still-festering global economic downturn. And each of the participating states will be keen for a successful summit.

On the agenda for the emerging countries is a renewed pitch for reforming the global governance architecture. On the sidelines of a G20 meeting of finance ministers in Mexico City on February 26, BRICS finance ministers agreed to set up a multilateral bank that would be funded exclusively by the five countries, with a view to finance development projects in their states.

Emerging countries complain that the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, which are always led by an American and a European respectively, neglect some of the needs and perspectives of developing and emerging economies. A BRICS bank would fill the gap, the finance ministers said.

The BRICS economies long ago outweighed the US and Europe. The World Bank said in 2011 that the BRICS accounted for 53% of global GDP growth between 2007 and 2010, at a tune of of US$7.2 trillion. US growth during this period, at US$592 billion, was a sixth of the BRICS GDP growth of $3.8 trillion.

In a March 2 meeting with Manmohan Singh, the Indian prime minister, Chinese foreign minister Yang said that the BRICS summit should send a signal of ‘win-win’ cooperation and unity among its members, especially China and India, who will work for world economic growth and their people’s well-being.

He further stated that China is ready to support India to ensure the success of the BRICS summit and would like to use this opportunity to “further enhance coordination and cooperation with India on international and regional affairs and promote regional and global peace and prosperity”.

Clearly, both sides made the right noises during the two-day bilateral meeting. Experts believe that many small steps are needed to address a range of seemingly intractable differences between the two powers.

To this end, India and China — who are not only regional rivals but nuclear-armed neighbours — agreed at the March 2 meeting to hold a dialogue on maritime cooperation, including joint operations against pirates and sharing seabed research technology.

The agreement follows sharp exchanges in October last year, after India’s state-owned oil company Oil and Natural Gas Corporation (ONGC) announced plans to explore for resources near Vietnam, in the disputed South China Sea. China claims exclusive territorial rights over the those waters and sees any exploration by other powers as an encroachment on China’s sphere of action.

For its part, India has raised similar concerns. In November, the China Ocean Mineral Resources Research and Development Association acquired exclusive rights to explore 10,000 square kilometres of seabed in the southwest Indian Ocean, near the coast of Africa — far from China. India’s Directorate of Naval Intelligence feels that a Chinese firm in the Indian Ocean could have strategic security implications.

The maritime cooperation proposal was an attempt at a new start for the two countries. But it is not just on the high seas that China and India disagree over territory.

Border brawls

The mountaineous Sino-Indian border is perhaps the single biggest stumbling block to improving bilateral relations. A recent visit by AK Antony, India’s defence minister, to the northeastern Indian border state of Arunachal Pradesh, provoked a chilling message from Beijing to not “complicate” matters. China lays claim over the state by describing it as a part of south Tibet.

The visit included an aerial demonstration of India’s top-of-the-line fighter jets, the Russian-made Sukhoi-30s, which were stationed just outside Arunachal Pradesh last year to counter the Chinese threat.

Responding in equal measure, Antony called China’s comments “most unfortunate” and “really objectionable”.

India not only rejects China’s claim on Arunachal Pradesh but also challenges China’s occupation of a vast stretch of snow-covered plateau in the Kashmir region. India’s army has deployed roughly 36,000 additional troops near Arunachal Pradesh and plans to raise two more mountain divisions, while its air force has been upgrading landing strips throughout the Himalayas.

Though a full-blown war between India and China is unforeseeable, a small border skirmish cannot be ruled out unless the two sides arrest the slide in relations.

A start in that direction was made when, at the March 1 meeting in New Delhi, the foreign ministers announced the new “Working Mechanism for

Consultation and Coordination on India-China Border Affairs”, with an initial meeting scheduled for the middle of March in Beijing.

But resolving border disputes will inevitably require the two countries to deal with their problems over Tibet. Yang and Krisha, during their meeting, discussed the ever-present possibility that Tibetan protestors — a source of anxiety for the Chinese — could steal the BRICS summit limelight by staging a demonstation in New Delhi.

Tibet troubles

And as if on cue, 14 Tibetan exiles materialised outside the venue where the foreign ministers were meeting, protesting what they called China’s “occupation” of the Himalayan nation. Yang, the Chinese foreign minister, can only expect more of the same for the upcoming BRICS summit.

Holding Tibetan flags, the activists, including women, were draped in green and yellow ‘Free Tibet’ jackets and held placards condemning China. They also shouted the demand, “No border talks without a free Tibet”, in reference to longstanding border disputes between the two countries.

India, for its part, reiterated its commitment to promoting a vibrant society that embraces freedom of expression while expressing disapproval of demonstrations against foreign dignitaries — a balancing act between espousing its own principles and cultivating better relations with the Chinese.

India’s continued cordial relations with Tibet’s exiled spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, and the presence of the Tibetan ‘government-in-exile’ in the north Indian state of Himachal Pradesh, are two of India’s main irritants for China.

China cancelled high-level border talks late last year after India declined to withdraw permission for an international Buddhist conference planned around the same time. The Dalai Lama is also the world’s leading Buddhist figure.

Maritime cooperation is well and good. A new round of border talks is encouraging. But India and China will want to ensure that their wider interests are ensured ahead of the BRICS summit. By squaring away some of their differences, the summit has less chance of being derailed by squabbles in what is arguably the most important bilateral relationship in the bloc. Longstanding disputes give them each plenty of chances to stumble so they must tread carefully.

Modern day socio-political reasons, and not culture, drive today’s extreme protests

In 1963 a Buddhist procession led by Trang Nha Quang Duc stopped at a major intersection in Saigon, Vietnam. The elderly monk then assumed the lotus position, as other monks around him doused him in gasoline. Moments later, he set himself on fire.

A simple monk’s extreme protest against the alleged persecution of Buddhists by South Vietnam government sent shockwaves around the world.

But it was not an impulsive act. Michael Biggs, a lecturer in sociology at Oxford university, wrote in his 2005 paper Dying Without Killing: Self-Immolations, 1963-2002 that the Vietnamese monks worked to maximise the impact of the self-immolation.

“They made sure that there were plenty of media watching, and there was one American journalist who could take photographs. Lots of other Buddhist supporters around him blocked the fire engines from reaching him.”

Within weeks of the event, four other monks and a nun followed his example, and burned themselves to death. Months later, the Vietnamese regime was overthrown.
The success of the act is said to have encouraged people in other parts of the world to believe that the method can be used to achieve a similar result in their society too.

Over the next four decades, incidents of self-immolation moved beyond Vietnam and were recorded in countries including India, South Korea, Hungary, Britain, the USSR, Pakistan, Japan, Algeria and Tunisia.

The last act, by Mohamed Bouazizi, led to the ousting of the Tunisian government and the birth of the ‘Arab Spring in 2011.
Inspired, perhaps, first by Quang Duc and lately by the movement in the Arab world, 23 Tibetan monks have been confirmed to have self-immolated since February 27, 2009 — 15 have died.

Self-immolation has existed in some sections that follow Mahayana Buddhism and Hinduism, and it has been practiced for many centuries, especially in India, in a range of contexts including Sati, which involves a woman joining her husband on his funeral pyre.

But most of those traditions are no longer as prevalent, if at all existing — primarily because of the evolution of the societies, and partly because of stringent laws against them.

The present instances of self-immolations form a modern-day tool of political protest. The widespread coverage in western media of the protest, which is seen as an individual’s supreme sacrifice for the collective cause, has established the method as a newsworthy and effective one.

Biggs says that self-immolation “provides a terrible, gruesome image, but not one that is too gruesome to be shown on television or in a newspaper”.

The tool of protest may be different, but the same realisation about making extreme impact seems to be exploited by people in other parts of the world, too.

Last year in India, social activist and anti-corruption crusader Anna Hazare forced the entire political class to accept the demand of an immediate discussion on a new anti-graft law in the parliament, 12 days after he began his indefinite hunger strike at a public ground in the Indian capital New Delhi.

With over 50 news channels in India and thousands of newspapers and magazines reporting a minute-by-minute account of Anna’s failing health, the spectacle of a 70-year-old being examined on a stage in front of thousands of people sent temperatures soaring in the nation of 1.2 billion — with city after city across the nation reporting people coming on to the streets to support the man who was “willing to die for them”. It was pressure that the government, in the end, could not withstand.

But an ‘indefinite hunger strike’ has long been an essential form of resistance in India, since the early days of the nation’s struggle for independence from the British Empire. Numerous hunger strikes by Mahatma Gandhi, who is credited with making the extreme mode of protest ‘popular’ in India, achieved dramatic results during the period.

Some analysts believe that Gandhi was quick to realise that in a country where hunger was endemic and where it is often said that one cannot (even) pray on an empty stomach (“bhookey pet bhajan nahin hote”), hunger, whether natural or forced, would work as a potent tool to make people sympathise with his cause.

Others, however, say that the theatrical value of Gandhi’s protests, which included his friends and news agencies from overseas in good measure, went a long way in helping his cause.

The fact that extreme forms of protest, but without the same amount of mass support from either people or the media, have not produced quite the same results seems to support this argument.

Last year, while Anna’s anti-corruption movement was at a high in India, a Hindu monk in the holy city of Hardwar died a lonely death after 73 days of fasting. He was protesting against the rapidly deteriorating state of river Ganga — not an issue that has exercised Indians in recent months.

Similarly, 39-year-old Irom Sharmila, who in 2005 was nominated for the Nobel peace prize, has been fasting for the last 11 years to demand the repeal of India’s Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA), which has been in effect in her home state of Manipur since 1958. AFSPA gives India’s federal armed forces absolute powers of search, seizure, arrest, and provides immunity to military personnel accused of abuses against the civilian population.

The Indian authorities have interpreted Sharmila’s fast as a suicide attempt, for which the maximum sentence is a one-year jail term. At the start of each year, since 2000, she has been arrested, kept in a security ward, and force-fed a mixture of vitamins and nutrients twice a day through a nose tube. She is released at the end of each year — only to be arrested again the next day.

The bureaucratic and physical barriers are so overwhelming for the outside world that only a trickle of images and anecdotal stories have managed to escape from the prison ward in Imphal, capital city of Manipur, where she has been in solitary confinement since November 2000.

Sharmila’s resolve has remained unchanged but the strength in her slender frame has diminished to worrying levels over the past decade. But there are no signs whatsoever that her protest is going to yield the desired fruit — perhaps because Sharmila’s protest has not yet embraced the true philosophy of extreme protests.

“As an act of protest, it [extreme protest] is intended to be public in at least one of two senses: performed in a public place in view of other people, or accompanied by a written letter addressed to political figures or to the general public. In addition, this is not always a solitary act; two or more individuals may coordinate their sacrifice,” says Biggs.

It is not unique to Asia, even though the fact that a majority of cases of extreme protest are reported from the region may seem to suggest so.

The fact is that most cases of extreme protests in the region are accompanied by similar factors such as a lack of representation, the intransigence of authorities, and an absolute desperation to do something about it. Making a public statement seems to be the only avenue left for protesters to shake the status quo.

Waiting eagerly for them in public squares is their newest supporter, the mass media.

Malaysia’s struggle to give up the giddy powers of the Internal Security Act illustrates Asian governments’ difficulties in changing their emergency mindset

(9 Dcember 2011) — Two months after Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak declared the repeal of the Internal Security Act (ISA), which — among other emergency-related ordinances — allowed detention without trial, Home Minister Hishammuddin Hussein said a replacement law would carry similar provisions.

Detention without trial would continue under two new laws to deal with terrorism and maintain public order, Hishammuddin said, justifying the decision with examples of the US Patriot Act and Britain’s Terrorism Act.

Even more controversially, the Peaceful Assembly Bill was bulldozed into law on November 29. The law forbids street protests and imposes a slew of stipulations for other assemblies, though it allows gatherings at designated areas away from public or government facilities.

This comes after tens of thousands of people took to the streets earlier this year for the Bersih 2.0 rally on July 9, organised by the Coalition for Clean and Fair Elections.

In November, the government detained 13 people suspected to be members of Al Qaeda-linked Indonesian militant group Jemaah Islamiyah, in Tawau, Sabah, for alleged terrorist activities. The arrests, carried out under the ISA, sparked criticism of a volte-face by Prime Minister Najib.

Home Minister Hishammuddin said the arrests, which included six Indonesians, were in line with the new anti-terrorism law replacing the ISA. The Indonesians would be deported upon completion of investigations, “but the Malaysians will be charged if there is sufficient evidence”, he said.

Critics point out that the existing penal code was amended a few years ago to deal specifically with terrorism.

The original ISA dates back to the Emergency Regulations Ordinance 1948, which was enacted by the British to combat insurgency and communism. Malaysia, then Malaya, kept the law after gaining independence in 1957, passing the ISA in 1960 as the country continued its fight against communism.

The threat of communism faded in the 1980s but the ISA remained on the books.

On October 27, 1987, the government carried out Operasi Lalang, weeding out political opposition with ISA arrests of more than 100 opposition leaders and social activists.

Over the years, the government has increasingly used the act to ensure its political stranglehold. Unsurprisingly, many Malaysians were sceptical when Najib announced the repeal of the draconian law on September 15, a day before Malaysia Day. Consequently, few in Malaysia were surprised by the detention provisions in the new act, which experts described as old wine in new skin.

But Malaysia is not the only country grappling with the ISA. In neighbouring island state of Singapore, 2,460 ISA arrests were made from 1959 to 1990, the government said in November.

The reasons for arrest included involvement in communism-related activities to overthrow the government, racial and religious extremism, Konfrontasi — Indonesia’s violent opposition to the creation of Malaysia in the 1960s, foreign subversion and espionage, and terrorism, said Singapore Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for Home Affairs Teo Chee Hean.

India has also witnessed battles between security forces and civil society groups in the debate to repeal an ISA-prototype, the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA), which grants the military special powers to detain suspected extremists without trial.

The country had a 20-month experiment with emergency powers between 1975 and 1977, when then prime minister Indira Gandhi, in her own words, brought “democracy to a grinding halt” on the pretext of securing the nation from “internal disturbances”. The period not only hurt the evolution of democratic mechanisms in the country, but also severely impacted the socio-economic growth of the nation.

140,000 people were arrested without trial during the period, according to Amnesty International. Along with the abuse and torture of detainees and political prisoners, actions like destruction of slums and low-income housing on the pretext of removing poverty and forced sterilization of men and women under a family planning initiative by Indira’s son, Sanjay Gandhi drew widespread condemnation.

Along with the AFSPA, which is enforced primarily in select pockets of the nation, like Jammu & Kashmir and the North-Eastern states that are grappling with secessionist forces, India had also experimented with laws like the Prevention of Terrorism Act (POTA) on a national level.

From Pakistan’s emergency declaration in 2007 to suppress lawyers’ protests of the sacking of the chief justice, to Thailand’s use of emergency powers in 2005 to combat insurgents in three predominantly Muslim provinces, Asia is replete with examples of the use of emergency powers.

Back in Malaysia, the opposition parties and civil society movements see the ISA as a mere tool for political repression. Increasingly politically astute Malaysians are growing restless over prime minister Najib’s so-called reforms, which they believe are high on rhetoric but light on substance.

Still, it would be foolhardy to expect the government to completely disregard the need for ISA in an era of global terrorist threat. Electoral politics may suggest that the government looks to appease voters but ultimately, giving up the giddy powers of the ISA will not be easy.

Asia’s next arms race may play out underwater as militaries ramp up spending on submarine fleets

(17 February 2012) — Asia’s waterways are becoming more dangerous as a new kind of predator stakes out its territory. Almost every Asian country with a coastline is turning to submarines as a first line of defence.

The race to get deep and deadly in Asian waters entered a new phase on January 23, when India joined an exclusive club of five nations with nuclear-powered submarines, taking delivery of a Russian Akula-2 class attack submarine on a ten-year lease.

The US, UK, Russia, France and China are the only other nations to have nuclear submarines.

China, in particular, is massively upgrading its giant fleet, spurring anxiety among its neighbours, which are increasingly responding by ramping up their own submarine capacities. Australia is preparing a fleet upgrade costing more than US$36 billion. Japan is adding eight subs to its existing fleet of 16. South Korea has been buying German Type 214 subs in recent years, purchasing another batch shortly after a North Korean sub attacked one of its warships in 2010, killing 46 seamen.

Smaller nations in Southeast Asia are also embracing submersibles.

Citing unclassified reports, Ashfaqur Rahman, chairman of the Centre for Foreign Affairs Studies in Bangladesh, told Asia360 News of startling new procurement plans in the region. Vietnam will receive the first of six Russian Kilo-class submarines from next year, while Thailand is buying the same number of German U-206 submarines, he said. Indonesia will soon acquire five submarines and the Philippines is said to be in discussions with the US to buy submersibles. Add to that Singapore’s four Challenger-class submarines and Malaysia’s two French Scorpene-class models, and Asia has become a major market for Western submarine technology.

Beijing’s demand for oil and gas is driving this trend, said Rahman, formerly Bangladesh’s ambassador to China.

Securing sea lanes for energy imports to fuel its economy is another of China’s highest policy priorities, providing Beijing with a compelling rationale for a strong sub fleet. The new US strategic focus on Asia will only reinforce this rationale, said Owen Cote, associate director of the security studies programme at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

A February 10 report released by Japan’s National Institute for Defense Studies said that China, owing to its growing dependence on imported energy resources, is strengthening its military power to ensure its ability to stand up to the US for regional resource development.

Experts believe that this trend is shaping up as a high-tech arms race, made all the more disconcerting by China’s rise and a host of simmering territorial disputes. Asia-Pacific is scattered with disputed islands. Japan has rival claims with China, South Korea and Russia, while more than half a dozen countries claim rights to the remote Spratly Islands, nearly 160 kilometres from the Philippines.

“The Chinese have an interest in using submarines in preventing the US surface ships from intervening on behalf of the one of the nations in the region in such a conflict,” MIT’s Cote added.

“Chinese military modernisation along with the non-transparency of its programmes and objectives has heightened insecurities in Asia,” Dr Rajeswari Pillai Rajagopalan, senior fellow in security studies at the Observer Research Foundation in New Delhi, told Asia360 News.

“This is the first time in several centuries that we see the rise of three or four major powers — China, Japan, India and Russia — simultaneously,” said Rajagopalan. “This has produced major insecurities. The region is plagued by several major boundary and territorial disputes, the baggage of shared history, and a trust deficit.”

Security analysts believe that in previous decades, smaller Asian states were able to compete with China in the deep seas because of the deficient state of Chinese vessels and the sub-standard training of the Chinese navy. But China has since begun to pour unprecedented sums into upgrading its surface and under-surface fleet.

China’s military spending will double to US$238.2 billion by 2015 from last year’s budget of US$119.8 billion, global research consultancy IHS estimates.

The 2015 figure exceeds the combined total of the next 12 biggest defence budgets in the region, including Japan and India, where spending is forecast to hit US$232.5 billion.

Less prosperous Asian countries with long and exposed coastlines can boost deterrence by adding submarines, which means they do not have to spend money building a full-scale navy. “Submarines are like a starter kit for nations when they first feel the need to move beyond the day-to-day maritime missions that coast guards perform and prepare for possible conflict with a more powerful neighbour,” said MIT’s Cote.

“Submarines are valuable because anti-submarine warfare is so difficult that it is out of reach of almost all navies,” he added. “Submarines give a navy certain capabilities that can be obtained relatively cheaply and without regard to the size or capability of the opponent.”

All of which begs the obvious question, will conflict erupt beneath Asia’s high seas?

The increasing popularity of submarines convinces some analysts that a minor spat could escalate into a multilateral dispute, given the interconnectedness of the region’s main actors.

For now, the consensus is that any actual underwater skirmishes are not expected in the near future. It would be naïve, however, to expect this to remain the case indefinitely, given the strategic importance of the region’s waterways for surrounding countries and other powers.

“It’s not certain there will be underwater skirmishes in the Asia Pacific, but it would be naïve for countries not to be prepared,” said Rajagopalan of the Observer Research Foundation.

Another reason to remain wary is the inability of regional security pacts to defuse undersea tensions, given China’s dislike of multilateral negotiations.

“We are not aware of any international mechanism that can help to avoid conflicts under the sea,” said Rahman of the Centre for Foreign Affairs Studies. “Only diplomacy and bilateral negotiations can ward off future submarine engagements.

Corruption in Asian countries like India is an entrenched feature of popular culture, plaguing every level of society

It was dubbed India’s second freedom struggle. Anna Hazare, a frail but fiery social activist, led a nation-wide anti-corruption campaign that riveted the Indian political class and sent shockwaves through the highest corridors of power. He mobilised the middle class, especially the youth, as thousands poured onto the streets in support of the septuagenarian, who demanded a sweeping anti-corruption legislation to combat political graft. His revolution, which drew worldwide attention, was broader and more intense than any other crusade seen in post-independence India.

But that was more than six months ago. The movement was a symbol of a society in great ferment, but it has since lost much of its momentum; the proposed legislation is far from being passed, and the campaign’s supporters have turned away to focus on other more pressing issues like inflation plaguing the economy.

India’s short-lived revolution has also curiously highlighted how the corruption problem goes far beyond the political class. It is a deeply ingrained cultural neurosis that exists on almost every level of society.

A February 6 survey by the Hindustan Times, a national daily, found that the same youth who chanted mera neta chor hai — “my political leader is a thief” — in support of Hazare’s campaign, later said that corruption is a “necessary evil” in India.

In the survey, which covered over 7,000 people aged 18-25 years across more than a dozen Indian cities, 47% admitted they had willfully paid a bribe. Almost 40% said they would not feel ashamed if they had to pay a bribe.

Further, 46% of those surveyed said that illegal downloading of music or movies from the Internet was ‘normal’ and nearly an equal number said they had purchased pirated software at least once.

In a country blessed with a demographic dividend – more than half of India’s 1.2 billion people are below 25 — the survey, observers say, is a troubling sign of the society’s warped moral mirror.

Software mogul NR Narayana Murthy, one of India’s most celebrated business leaders, recently lamented on a television talk show that Indian youth are seeing “the dishonest become wealthy and powerful, and are thinking this is the way to success”.

But it would be unfair to only blame the youth. Corruption is so deeply entrenched in popular culture that Indians even end up paying bribes for things that are rightfully theirs.

Manvendra Singh, who runs a computer supply firm and participated in one of Hazare’s anti-corruption rallies in New Delhi, says that most government employees receive their pay cheques irrespective of their efficiency or performance, and if you are at their mercy to get any work done “you have to pay” a bribe.

It’s a common perception that it is impossible to be corruption-resistant and do business simultaneously in India.

Observers say the problem is rooted in India’s regulatory apparatus that has not kept pace with the speed of economic liberalisation. Navigating the stagnant bureaucracy and opaque power structures is so frustrating that bribing your way through can often seem like an easier option.

“The system is deliberately made inefficient by those who are in power, so that people who can afford to pay can get their work done quickly but the rest continue to suffer. And with time, the administration becomes run down since rather than devising ways to work efficiently, it is busy thinking of ways to make money by setting up roadblocks to efficient functioning,” Arun Kumar of the Centre for Economic Studies and Planning at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi wrote in his August 2011 op-ed in the Indian news daily The Hindu.

But India is not the only nation in the region fighting the menace.

Transparency International’s 2011 Corruption Perceptions Index reveals an alarming level of corruption in the Asia-Pacific region, especially in the public sector.

The index, which covers 183 states and scores countries on a scale from 0, or highly corrupt, to 10, or very clean, declares that the majority of countries in the region score lower than five.

More than a dozen countries in the region score below three – including Vietnam (2.9), Bangladesh (2.7), the Philippines (2.6), Pakistan (2.5) and Papua New Guinea (2.2).

Afghanistan (1.5), Myanmar (1.5) and North Korea (1) rank at the bottom globally.

China and India, the regions two rising giants, are placed 75^th and 95^th in the world rankings. Both countries could stand to considerably improve their efforts against corruption.

The only bright spots in the region are New Zealand, Singapore and Australia, which all feature in the top ten of the index.

Dev Kar, the lead economist at the Washington-based Global Financial Integrity, a research and advocacy organisation working to curtail illicit financial flows from developing countries, says endemic corruption in the region is hard to stamp out.

A recent study found that “on a conservative basis, total illicit financial flows from Asia increased from US$200 billion in 2000 to US$495 billion in 2008, at a rate of 12.9% per annum,” he told <italics> Asia360 News </italics>.

“Illicit flows from the top five Asian exporters of illicit capital — China, Malaysia, Philippines, Indonesia, and India — averaged [nearly] 45% of such flows out of all developing countries during the period 2000 to 2008,” he added.

But Kar offered a glimmer of hope.

“Asia’s share of global illicit flows has been declining in the last decade,” he said. “The top five most corrupt countries transferred just 36.9% of illicit flows in 2008, down from 53.3% in 2000.”

Observers say that transparency in governance is the key to prevent embezzlement of public funds and other forms of corruption.

Finland, Denmark, Sweden and New Zealand – which rank high in the corruption index — perform well on that front.

There also seems be a direct correlation between the corruption index and the United Nation’s Human Development Index. All the above countries that rank high in the former also have a high literacy rate, low inequality ratio, and an enviable human right record.

But for most countries in Asia, it is still a long road ahead to a corruption-free future.

(20 January 2012) — Despite American pressure tactics, Asia’s four largest economies appear set to continue business with Iran’s energy sector, prioritising national interests above diplomacy. The US last week announced embargoes against three Asian companies that have dealings with Tehran, which is overtly belligerent towards the West and Israel.

In recent years, the Islamic republic has alarmed observers by producing near-weapons-grade uranium that it claims is solely for its domestic energy industry. However, many suspect it is developing a covert nuclear weapons programme. Amidst these tensions, Tehran is now threatening to impose a naval blockade on the Strait of Hormuz, in retaliation against Western attempts to isolate it through economic sanctions. The strait is a vital artery through which a fifth of the world’s oil and gas exports are shipped.

Washington’s latest sanctions against the three Asian firms — from China, Singapore and the United Arab Emirates — have ruffled feathers and placed some of its allies on the spot.

China, which already bickers regularly with the US over a range of economic issues, reacted angrily to the American action against its firm, Zhuhai Zhenrong, which the US said is the largest supplier of refined petroleum products to Iran.

“Imposing sanctions on a Chinese company based on a domestic [US] law is totally unreasonable and does not conform to the spirit or content of the UN Security Council resolutions about the Iran nuclear issue,” foreign ministry spokesman Liu Weimin said on January 15.

Earlier in the month, China had refused to reduce its imports from Iran, despite a visit by US Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner at the beginning of the year to discuss the issue.

In the same week, reports from India suggested that the South Asian giant would also continue doing business with Iran’s energy sector.

Japan, meanwhile, has distanced itself from reports last week saying that its finance minister Jun Azumi told Geithner during his visit to Tokyo that Asia’s second-largest economy would immediately seek to cut oil imports from Iran.

Speaking to reporters a day after the reports emerged, Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda said that the comments made by Azumi were a personal opinion and did not reflect his government’s official policy.

Meanwhile, South Korea, which is Asia’s fourth-largest economy and an ally of Washington, sought a waiver from US sanctions on Iran, saying that while its “basic stance is to cooperate with the US”, its economy would be affected if it stopped buying oil from Iran.

The economic restrictions in the region are a result of a New Year’s Eve decision by US President Barack Obama to sign into law tough new sanctions against Iran’s central bank and financial sector, in an effort to force Tehran to abandon its nuclear program.

The sanctions require foreign companies to decide between dealing with Tehran’s oil and financial sectors or the US economy.

No easy alternatives

The responses of Asia’s four largest economies have illustrated how their political decisions are intertwined with their economic realities.

Oil industry analysts Argus Media reported that about 11% of China’s oil imports in 2011 came from Iran, or about 560,000 barrels per day, with the daily average for November increasing to 617,000 barrels — a quantum of supply that China would find difficult to replace in the short term.

Giving an idea of the massive surge in China’s demand for oil, global financial firm Goldman Sachs has forecast that the country will become the world’s largest importer of oil within the next one-and-a-half years.

Japan, the world’s second biggest importer of Iranian crude after China, purchased about 6.85 million barrels in November — or 6.4% of the country’s total imports for the month, according to Japan’s trade ministry.

Japan is also burdened by an increased demand for oil after the earthquake and tsunami last year. The twin disasters caused a number of nuclear power plants to shut down, forcing utility providers to turn to thermal power stations which require oil to operate.

India and South Korea too, are heavily dependent on Iran’s oil and receive 12% and 10% respectively of their overall requirements from the Islamic republic.

The extent of India’s dependence on Iran’s oil is reflected by its intention to send a delegation — including officials from the central bank and finance ministry — to Tehran this week to explore alternative methods of payment that could circumvent US sanctions.

The magnitude of Iran’s importance to the regional energy market is highlighted by the fact that it is the world’s fourth-largest producer of oil with 65% of its exports going to refiners in Asia.