This is not a film

“This is not a film, it is reality”, says Burmese monk Ashin Sopaka. It’s true that, to us, what happens in Burma is too often seen as a film or TV news.
That reality is now revealed in a short documentary made by the Burma Partnership in collaboration with Kestrel Media. Entitled “This is Not Democracy”, it explains why the Burmese people do not believe that the upcoming elections are a first step towards democracy, but rather a way to reinforce the military regime under a civilian facade. In addition to the accounts given by Ashin Sopaka, the documentary also features interviews with Naw Htoo Paw of the Karen Women’s Organization and U Win Hlaing of the National League for Democracy.
There is much to see and hear, including many disturbing scenes. Especially if we remember that this is not just a film. It is reality.

Burma's 2010 Election: This is NOT Democracy from Kestrel Media on Vimeo.

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The Toilet Man

“I’m interested in the bottom of humanity, in human waste”, laughs Jack. But he isn't joking, he means every word. Jack Sim, nicknamed The Toilet Man, is the founder of the World Toilet Organisation, a non-profit organisation focused on the technologies, development, design and everything else required to provide sanitation facilities where they are insufficient or non-existent. “Often the most difficult thing is overcoming the taboo surrounding this issue”, says Jack. “I usually manage it by saying ‘Would you want other people to see your mother, your wife or your daughter while she's on the toilet?'".
Jack Sim
Jack Sim was one of the main speakers at a conference held in Singapore organised by the think-tank Qi, where new social, cultural and economic eco-systems were studied. All of which are sustainable, environmentally friendly and fair-trade. Some of the most creative intellectuals now working in Asia took part in the conference. But Jack’s presentation was one of the most fun, interesting and, above all, informative in the programme. Perhaps because the toilet is a taboo and embarrassing subject to us too. Perhaps because we can’t imagine what it would be like to live without a bathroom. No shower, washbasin or bath tub. No toilet. But this is what hundreds of millions of people living in the slums and rural areas of under-developed or developing countries put up with. Many of these make up what economists succinctly call the BOP (Bottom of the Pyramid). They are the largest and poorest socio-economic group on the planet. Around 2 and a half billion human beings (according to optimistic estimates) living on less than 2 dollars 50 a day.
Of course, the Qi Global conference presented a number of projects tackling poverty, from IIX Asia (Impact Investment Exchange Asia), a grant raising capital for businesses with social objectives, to rubanisation, i.e. the creation of a new way of living in rural cities, called rubans, which are self-sufficient settlements where individuals, the family and society are integrated, the villages of the next century, where community values are recreated.
In the same vein as these projects, the latest report by Unctad (United Nations Conference on Trade and Development) alleges that ICT (Information and Communication Technology) can be a formula for producing wealth in countries with poor schooling and economies (click here to download the full report). If we put together rubans and ICT, for example, we can foresee delocalized micro-enterprises using the Internet to generate business.
Before all of that, though, living conditions have to improve. Perhaps with the help of Jack, The Toilet Man.
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The bowl is empty

Many see the bowl as full, even overflowing. A kind of magical chalice from which new treasures will spring. This according to financial analysts studying the emerging markets, the so-called BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India and China) and beyond, to Thailand, Philippines and Indonesia.
To the layman their analyses sound as esoteric as they do reliable. The Asian bowl seems to be a source of extraordinary wealth. It’s a shame that, in most cases, geopolitics is not taken into account, often passed off with a quick reference to the risk of instability and corruption. In a recent article entitled The Last Great Hope, The Economist warns that emerging markets may turn out to be the next economic bubble.
But they are not looking at the big picture. The anthropological view is entirely missing. “The image we have of China and of many other countries is that brought back by managing directors and politicians who fly to Shanghai and Beijing and don’t realise what the deeper reality is”, says professor Gordon Mathews of the department of anthropology at The Chinese University of Hong Kong.
The same cultural dystonia is also seen in political analysis. Take the upcoming Burmese elections, for example. According to Human Rights Watch researcher, David Mathieson, “In the EU there is a strange perception that elections are a real step towards democracy”. This has happened because
''EU bureaucrats prefer going to Rangoon to consult with urbane, emerging political elites, and then marginalise and ignore ethnic communities along the borders because it’s too uncomfortable, complex, and 'old hat'.''
This calls for a revolution on the scale of the indetermination principle and the incompleteness theorem, which destroyed our scientific certainties. In a certain sense this is what risk engineering Professor Nassim Nicholas Taleb has done in his book The Black Swan. According to Taleb, we act as if we were able to foresee events, we continue to concentrate on what is known. Instead, the world is dominated by the extreme, the unknown and the very unlikely: The Black Swan.
New global analyses, then, require a higher, more subtle vision that can encompass economic, political and philosophical models. A sort of meta-analysis. This idea was taken up a few years ago by Pietro Citati in his book Le scintille di Dio (The Sparks of God): “Once, wise politicians were accompanied by theology experts or were themselves theology experts. Now theology is despised or practised by no-hopers. For the good of the universe, it’s to be hoped it re-emerges as soon as possible”.
If that should happen, if metaphysics became an evaluation tool, we would realise that, more often than not, the bowl is empty.
It is for the billion or so people suffering from chronic hunger, two thirds of which are in Asia. This is stated in a report by the Asia Society in collaboration with the International Rice Research Institute: Never an Empty Bowl.
Other research presented by the Asia Society and carried out by Doctors Without Borders documents the plight of 195 million children suffering from malnutrition. The Terrifying Normalcy video made by documentary maker Ron Haviv presents their tragic circumstances in Bangladesh.

Of course, this is Bangladesh, a country that no analyst would dare to define as an emerging economy (at least not yet). But scenes of this kind, and often worse ones, are common throughout the region. If only you could venture out of that skyscraper in the financial district and go to the surrounding countryside and villages, or even the slums often found at the feet of these skyscrapers.
Sze Ma Chien, the Chinese historian from the 1st century BC, wrote: “The world rushes where money calls. The world flocks to where earnings are highest”.
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The spider’s web

Once upon a time there were the Drug-Lords of the Shan states, a Burmese territory wedged between Thailand, Laos and China, where the land favours opium cultivation. Some of them, such as Khun Sa, took on almost epic proportions. They were characters with shadowy hearts. They often set themselves up as champions of an ethnic cause. They justified their drug trafficking with the need to finance an army to defend their people from attack from the Burmese army. Then tribal rivalries took hold among the various groups competing for control of the market in opium, heroin and ya baa, the so-called madness drug, a terrible methamphetamine that inundated Asia and boosted its development, enabling men to work as hard as a horse (the original name, ya ma, literally meant horse drug, implying extraordinary power). The Burmese saw their chance, and in perfect “divide and rule” style, proposed a truce to the groups. Many accepted, thinking they could concentrate on more direct adversaries and increase their profits from drugs. As did the ex-headhunters Wa (of Chinese origin), sworn enemies of the Shan (of Thai ethnicity), who, according to a CIA report, became the largest army of drug producers and distributors in the world. But then the Burmese government raised the stakes, asking the militias who had accepted the truce to join the Border Guard Force, which reports directly to the national army. When they refused, attacks against rebel states resumed with even greater violence, the justification being that the state was fighting the war on drugs. “We are fighting for you (westerners). Drugs are not a problem for us”, declared Colonel Hla Min, spokesperson for the SPDC (the State Peace and Development Council, the official name of the organism with which the Burmese military regime governs).
A report by the Shan press agency states that, on the contrary, the aim of this move is not to fight the production and trafficking of drugs, but to try to replace who is controlling them. Taking advantage of the pressure exerted on ethnic groups, the junta has set up local militias (as many as 400 in northern Shan states alone). The militias share the drug profits with the military and help them in the fight against armed ethnic groups. In exchange they are given protection, impunity and business subsidies. Many of their commanders are even standing in the upcoming elections for the Union Solidarity and Development Party, which is being used by the junta to create a new democratic image for itself. They have been dubbed “politically correct drug-lords”.
The story told in the Shan Drug Watch report is only the latest thread of an infinite web woven by spiders of all kinds: tribal groups, communist and anti-communist guerrillas, CIA, mafia, former Kuomintang militants, the Chinese nationalist party, and ethnic separatists. It’s a web that has actually been thousands of years in the making. If it weren’t for the tragedy of victims around the world, it may even be a fascinating story. Leading expert on drug trafficking, Pierre Arnaud-Chouvy, of the French Centre national de la recherche scientifique, told the story in his book entitled Opium.
Today the spider is the Burmese army: through local militias it attempts to control the national territory and, as drug use rises among young people in ethnic separatist groups, operate a subtle form of genocide. But perhaps, in the light of the story told in Opium, in which opium is almost an alchemic element that eludes anyone who wishes to control it, even future Burmese governors will also fall into the same web.

Click here to see the Shan Drug Watch report
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