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The Greatest Game

bassifondi — 2011-12-12T10:45:10+01:00

The term Great Game – reused in a recent book by Peter Hopkirk – referred originally to the drawn-out conflict, involving mainly diplomacy and secret services, which pitched Great Britain against Russia in Central Asia in the XIX century. ...But one of the most interesting documents, even in its apparent simplicity, is the article published in the US Naval War College Review by Andrew Erickson, Abraham Denmark and Gabriel Collins: Beijing’s ‘Starter Carrier’ and Future Steps: Alternatives and Implications. ..."At 5:40 AM local time on Wednesday, 10 August 2011, more than eighty years after the idea was originally proposed, China’s first carrier disappeared into the fog under tight security from Dalian harbor’s Xianglujiao Port, in northeast Liaoning Province, to begin sea trials in the Bohai and northern Yellow Seas. ...Tianjin, one of the country’s four municipalities, plans to do its part in October 2011 by opening China’s first aircraft carrier–themed hotel, based on Kiev, once the Soviet Pacific Fleet’s flagship and now the centerpiece of the Tianjin Binhai Aircraft Carrier Theme Park. ...China’s starter carrier—a vessel originally purchased incomplete from Ukraine in 1998—is of very limited military utility; it will serve primarily to confer prestige on a rising great power, help the Chinese military master basic procedures of naval airpower, and project a bit of military power—perhaps especially against the smaller neighbors on the periphery of the South China Sea. ...He insisted that he was not China’s Alfred Thayer Mahan, but his concept of “Near Seas defense” was roughly comparable to Mahan’s views on U.S. naval strategic requirements (i.e., dominance of the Gulf of Mexico, the Caribbean, Panama, and Hawaii). The key to the realization of Liu’s vision was an aircraft carrier, and Liu reportedly vowed in 1987, “I will not die with my eyes closed if I do not see a Chinese aircraft carrier in front of me.” ...Pacific Command, said in April 2011 that he was “not concerned” about China’s first carrier going to sea, but allowed, “Based on the feedback that we received from our partners and allies in the Pacific, I think the change in perception by the region will be significant.” ...Yet while the Asia-Pacific region is hotly debating the implications of China’s aircraft carrier, there should be little surprise that a Chinese aircraft carrier has finally set sail. ... Given the discussions about an aircraft carrier that have percolated in China’s strategic community for decades, it should have been clear to the entire region that this was a long time coming.

Three men in a boat…

bassifondi — 2011-11-28T15:09:21+01:00

These three men are the last members of the crew of the Magellanic, the latest in a long line of ghost ships off the cost of Thailand. They haven’t been paid for months, they have no money to buy food and get by on what they can fish, and they can’t disembark because their Visas for Thailand have expired. The men are from the Philippines but it doesn’t look as though their embassy is very interested in repatriating them. The situation doesn’t even seem to interest the authorities in Panama, which is where the Magellanic is based. The ship-owners are Greek and their Manila-based agent is keeping a low profile. All this information comes from the only person who is showing any concern for these men, a woman already mentioned on this blog: Apinya Tajit, from the local Apostleship of the Sea. She has sent a string of e-mails from which one surreal truth emerges: these men are trapped in an inextricable net with seemingly no way out. The Magellanic is one of those ships that sail on an ocean with no name. This is not a funny story and maybe not one that people find particularly interesting. ...I don’t think so, but I’ve done it anyway.

Flows, Part II

bassifondi — 2011-11-07T09:02:37+01:00

“Free Flow”, the theme announced by the Bangkok Design Festival, sounds ironic considering that the disastrous flood that recently hit Thailand – and especially its still potentially devastating consequences – isn’t over yet. But the festival’s Flow intends precisely to contrast the one that has devastated the country. It’s already happening, thanks to the power of intelligence and creativity, with the exhibition organised at the Bangkok Art and Culture Centre, called “Let’s Panic”. The exhibition has a great impact on the public, turning survival in a monsoonal country into a show, highlighting the positive. ...These are the streams and flows of consciousness that cross paths in the midst of chaos and, in spite of the surrounding catastrophes, generate energy and form a current of seeming coincidences. And so, after the flows of innovation in Singapore, here come the flows of Bangkok, which are unavoidably interconnected. And the cover of the art, architecture and design magazine art4d, which titles its latest editorial “Free Flow”, is dedicated to Gaia Scagnetti – a young Italian researcher who specialises in information design. She teaches in the Faculty of Architecture at Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok, and has recently concluded an exhibition on human interrelations and on the flows of reciprocal knowledge. Speaking with her – perhaps because of her background in complexity science – helps us to understand the beauty of the collapse of this megalopolis, which doesn’t change either on the wave of globalisation or with the rains, but metabolises and regenerates these flows, giving beauty to chaos. ... But it’s a way of detaching ourselves from the Western World’s inescapable linear logic.

The Naga's Journey

bassifondi — 2011-10-28T12:04:45+02:00

You are tempted to stay inside your penthouse apartment on the river and write, like a city-dwelling hermit; sometimes writing, sometimes taking a break to swim in the pool or just to gaze out over the city. ...But it all depends on your vantage point: from up on high, they all seem quite removed and distant, as if they belong to another world. If, on the other hand, you go down there and dare to leave your own small world behind for a moment, you are immediately struck by the fact that the earth has vanished. ...Your world might very soon, in the next few hours or days, become a prison from which you will be forced to leave to look for food and water. ... Suddenly, being up above it all means that you will discover what it is like to climb up thirty flights of stairs. ...You get an immediate sense of the fraility of a global system whose disasters can be traced directly to a sacrilegious mismanagement of nature. Then you think of the even more fragile Asian system, which was perhaps too quickly hailed as the up and coming power of the new century that would see the decline of the West. ...Finally, though only because it takes time to come to the unpleasant reality at hand, you realize just how weak you are yourself. ...At the moment I am translating a book by the Thai author, Tew Bunnag, titled The Naga's Journey (the Italian edition to be published in 2012 by Metropoli d’Asia). The Naga, in the form of a disastrous flood which wreaks havoc on the fragility of Bangkok and its populace - "Fragile does not mean weak, it means that it breaks easily" says Bunnag - is the underlying character of the book.

Flows

bassifondi — 2011-10-20T13:08:56+02:00

In the meantime, I spent a few months in the west and no stories appeared on the Bassifondi blog. ... Quite the contrary, the bottom rung of society is getting longer, it’s becoming a swamp where ideas stagnate and rot. ... As though our minds were too busy thinking only about the pros and cons of someone or something. ...Quite the contrary, crises often take on catastrophic, biblical proportions in this part of the world. ... It’s just that here you feel part of a flow, a current of ideas, far-off horizons can be perceived and people are curious to get there and see for themselves. This is going on, for instance, at a small Bangkok art gallery which is holding an exhibition in which artists from India of Hindu, Muslim and Christian religion interpret Ramayana. ...In Singapore, colossal projects that change the very concept of urban planning are taking shape, such as Gardens by the Bay. ...Such as the amazing calligraphic images by Frenchwoman Fabienne Verdier, exhibited at the Art Plural Gallery. ...So, in the end, perhaps we can still hope that this flow will reach the West, so that we can take to the seas again. ...title=0&byline=0&portrait=0" width="400" height="225" frameborder="0" webkitAllowFullScreen allowFullScreen>

teaser : fabienne Verdier : flux: un film de philippe chancel from philippe chancel on Vimeo.

The ghost ship

bassifondi — 2011-07-13T04:10:36+02:00

An old rusty tramp steamer, one of those boats that go wherever there is cargo to be loaded. ...At the moment it is moored off a long beach on the edge of a large city. ...They would like to disembark, feel the sand under their feet, walk amongst the buildings or buy something at one of the local eateries lit up with coloured lights. ...They would be put in jail and would probably stay there for a long time. ...They are waiting for the ship owner to pay them and send them back home. ...He wants to convince him to move elsewhere, where they will be able to repair the ship and set sail with a new cargo. ...For now, the woman and the crew still hope that the ship owner will decide to pay them. ...This is just one of many stories of abandoned ships, of crews betrayed and replaced by other equally desperate people. ...In the meantime many other stories are ending or still going on. There are people working like slaves on fishing boats, and they are the ones that vanish into thin air.

Hysteria

bassifondi — 2011-07-07T10:54:23+02:00

Everyone knows it’s down to Thaksin”, declared Sutada Mekrungruengkul, director of the Gender and Development Research Institute of Thailand, to the AFP news agency. Indeed, Yingluck’s success is largely due to her being the younger sister of Thaksin Shinawatra, the former prime minister overthrown after a military coup in 2006, and as adored by the poor as he was hated by the elite. Yingluck’s success has, however, gone beyond all expectations, which is a sign that she managed to convince not only her brother’s followers but also many undecided voters. Without counting that, if she won because of being Thaksin’s sister, she could easily have lost for the very same reason. ...It falls into the ridiculous with a comparison to Aung San Suu Kyi, who, they say, «has fought for twenty years and is still not prime minister of Myanmar». ... The comparison also ignores the fact that Aung San Suu Kyi succeeded in becoming leader of the opposition because she was the daughter of general Aung San, the founder of independent Burma. ... Not Gandhi’s (her husband, no relation to Mahatma Gandhi), but her father Nehru’s, the Indian Prime Minister between 1947 and 1964. ...Not because hysteria is to be considered as a solely female condition (the term derives from the Greek hystera meaning womb). But because, as many psychologists maintain, it is the manifestation of a crisis that a person expresses in a coded representation that he/she knows. Yingluck’s victory could positively be interpreted as the recognition of female qualities, such as moderation and reconciliation, on which she based her election campaign.

The Banality of Evil

bassifondi — 2011-07-05T05:42:42+02:00

That’s how I describe the four defendants in the second trial of the Extraordinary Chambers set up by the UN at the Cambodian Tribunals to pass judgement on the crimes committed by Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge. ...In “those 3 years, 8 months and 20 days”, as that period is defined, roughly two million people died in Cambodia, either from starvation or exhaustion, or directly at the hands of the Khmer Rouge. ...These old men are: Khieu Samphan, 79, still the official head of the Democratic Kampuchea; Nuon Chea, 84, Khmer Rouge’s ideologist; Ieng Sary, 85, the foreign minister, and his wife, Ieng Thirith, 79, the social affairs minister. ...Nuon Chea is mounting a defence on the basis that you cannot judge those events outside of their historical context: American bombings, threats from Vietnam. ... In pursuit of that dream, Sary admitted, although in secret, that the Khmer Rouge aimed to cut the Cambodian population from 7 million to 1, to attain perfect equilibrium. ... That dream came about in the project hatched by Saloth Sar, known as Pol Pot, or “Brother Number One” of the Khmer Rouge: an extreme hybrid of Marxism, Maoism and archaic ultra-nationalism. ...The preliminary hearings were held last week, but the trial will only begin in earnest in a few months’ time and may go on for years: there are almost 4000 plaintiffs and legal processes amount to over 450,000 pages. ...One man who will perhaps outlive his sentence is the man found guilty at the first trial of the Extraordinary Chambers of Cambodia, which concluded last year. Kaing Guek Eav, 68, known as “Comrade Duch”, was first deputy and then director of Tuol Sleng, the prison and interrogation centre of S-21, the Angkar security service. ...title=0&byline=0&portrait=0" width="400" height="300" frameborder="0">

Cambodian Citizens React to ECCC Hearing on Application for Release of Indicted Khmer Rouge Officials from Cambodia Tribunal Monitor on Vimeo.

If you’re a father

bassifondi — 2011-06-30T10:38:06+02:00

The UNODC, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, has issued the World Drug Report 2011. The global situation is largely stable: “opiates on a downward trend, increases in the use of cocaine and synthetic drugs” it writes, just like a financial statement. ...In Burma opium growing and production have risen (580 metric tonnes in 2010). “A toxic mix of problems” is how Gary Lewis, UNODC representative for East Asia and the Pacific, puts it. ... The situation with food shortages in the Shan states is terrible. If you’re a father you do what you can for your family". Aside from any consideration about the results and the efficacy of the UN agencies, men like him provide some hope. Because they don’t speak in abstract terms, they don’t judge; they try to act. ... “We can’t talk of eradication”, he said, referring both to plantations and to the issue in general. ...(Click here to download the summary of the report)

Emotional times

bassifondi — 2011-06-20T11:06:05+02:00

We had just a few words on a very bad phone line. The interference was probably due to someone listening in. The time we had, though short, was very emotional for me. The voice of Daw, an honorific name given to the lady, is beautiful clear and strong (article published in Il Sole 24 Ore. ...The next morning I worked on a different story. I went in search of the last glimpses of the old Bangkok harbour. I walked along a very long and rickety wooden jetty over a muddy canal. And I came upon a wharf where an old tramp steamer was moored. It was just the place I was looking for. ...If you keep looking for them, you will feel and see stories.