• This Day (Nigeria) aagm: Political Economy of Sustainable Democracy in Nigeria (2)

Uganda recalls envoys for briefing on "economic diplomacy"
325 words

17 January 2005

06:08 AM

BBC Monitoring Africa

BBCAP

English

(c) 2005 The British Broadcasting Corporation. All Rights Reserved. No material may be reproduced except with the express permission of The British Broadcasting Corporation.
Text of report by Felix Osike, "Government recalls envoys for 10-day seminar", published by Ugandan newspaper The New Vision web site on 17 January
All heads of Uganda's diplomatic missions abroad have been recalled for a 10-day orientation seminar to review the country's foreign policy.
Fifty-two ambassadors, heads of missions and their deputies are already in Kampala to attend the meeting, which opens today at the Ministry of Foreign affairs headquarters.
Uganda's foreign policy is shifting from the traditional foreign relations to economic diplomacy. "They were called long before and they will be getting a briefing on economic diplomacy and other issues," the newly-appointed foreign affairs minister, Sam Kutesa, said on phone yesterday.
Uganda's envoys to Belgium, EU, Canada, China, Denmark, Egypt, Ethiopia, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, Kenya, Libya, Nigeria, Russia, France, Rwanda, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, South Africa, Tanzania, UK, the UN and USA are attending the seminar.
Sources said the seminar was organized following persistent complaints from President Yoweri Museveni that some of the ambassadors were not doing a good job of marketing the country to attract foreign investments.
Among the topics to be discussed include economic diplomacy in exports promotion, tourism, investment promotion, technology transfer and resource mobilization.
The ministry and its diplomatic outposts abroad have in conjunction with the Uganda Investment Authority been engaged in frantic promotion of the country as an attractive investment destination.
They will also discuss the political and security diplomacy, general management and administration.
It is not clear whether the former trade and industry minister, Prof. Edward Rugumayo, who was last week appointed ambassador to France, will attend the seminar.
The envoys will on Friday [21 January] travel to northern Uganda to assess the situation and be briefed on the peace negotiations with the LRA [Lord's Resistance Army] rebels.
Source: The New Vision web site, Kampala, in English 17 Jan 05
Document BBCAP00020050117e11h000ji

World News & Analysis

Aftermath Mapping; Commercial satellite imagery guides tsunami relief, reconstruction work

Frank Morring, Jr. Michael A. Taverna

1,243 words

10 January 2005

Aviation Week & Space Technology

AW

25

Volume 162, Number 2

English

(c) 2005 McGraw-Hill, Inc.
Satellite images gathered over the tsunami-ravaged coastlines of the Indian Ocean are supporting what promises to be a years-long international rebuilding effort, just as they helped target future rescue efforts even before the waters receded.
Commercial remote-sensing spacecraft have given relief personnel high-resolution color views of coastal plains scoured by the waves, while wide-field civil spacecraft like the U.S. Landsat 7 have started mapping areas literally reshaped by the massive Dec. 26 earthquake off Sumatra.
"Commercial imagery is unclassified, it's color, and it's easily shared with allies, NGOs, relief workers," says Mark Brender of Space Imaging, which generated images with its Ikonos satellite covering some 10,500 sq. mi. around the Indian Ocean in the first 10 days after the disaster. "You cannot do that with imagery from [secret] national systems."
The U.S. National Geospatial Intelligence Agency (NGA) is distributing high-resolution data collected by Space Imaging, DigitalGlobe, Orbimage and Spot Image, while the Pacific Disaster Center in Hawaii set up a web site to disseminate Landsat and other data from the affected region to disaster managers.
In New Delhi, the Crisis Management Group coordinating rescue efforts along India's southeast coast uses images provided by the country's IRS 1-C, 1-D and Resourcesat-1 remote-sensing satellites and the Kalpana-1 meteorological satellite.
ARCHIVAL IMAGERY from Europe's Spot satellite system and the European Space Agency's Earth observation network, including Envisat, has allowed relief agencies to study disaster areas before and after the tsunami. That imagery, provided through the United Nations' international charter on natural disaster management, was requested by the U.N. Office of Outer Space Affairs, France's Civil Protection Agency and the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO). The ESA member states, the U.S., Canada, Argentina, India and Japan, are signatories to the U.N. disaster management charter.
The first relief personnel to reach devastated areas found the infrastructure in shambles, with port facilities unable to accommodate ships and runways cracked or covered with debris. Satellite imagery provided some advance warning for rescuers as to what they could expect, and what facilities remained in usable condition.
"Anybody that's committing personnel is trying to give them up-to-date maps of what they're going to be landing on," said Clark Nelson of Spot Image's U.S. affiliate. "That's what the State Dept.'s doing, that's what the Australian military's doing, that's what the Singapore military's doing. You know, what does the shoreline and the land look like now? Where is the most damage that you're going to need to deploy to?"
The magnitude 9 earthquake that triggered the deadly sea surges was so powerful that it shifted the Earth's axis of rotation by 8 cm. and shortened the length of a day by almost 0.1 millisecond, according to preliminary NASA calculations. The U.S. space agency, which relies on spacecraft tracking stations across the region, found that the station in Singapore shifted about 2 cm. to the west.
Early imagery offered graphic testimony of the tsunami's power: DigitalGlobe captured a scene over Sri Lanka within an hour after the first wave hit that showed offshore turbulence as the water rushed back into the Bay of Bengal. But in the long run, satellite data will be used to guide reconstruction on the altered coastlines. "Value-added" processing of multispectral data can highlight croplands damaged by seawater and other factors planners must take into account.
"The image is not what's important to the countries," said the NGA's Dave Burpee. "What's important is the image and then we do value-added. We either right on it put little arrows with notations that say 'bridge out,' 'road weakened,' 'buildings destroyed,' or we figure out from the image where that damage is . . . and then we can overlay that on a map."
The NGA has an open-ended "ClearView" contract with the U.S. commercial providers--Space Imaging, DigitalGlobe and Orbimage--allowing it an unrestricted license to share the data with U.S. government agencies that can use it and/or pass it along to relief agencies on the ground. Big "customers" for NGA in the early days after the disaster included the U.S. State Dept. and the Pentagon's Pacific Command.
Specialists at NGA headquarters near Washington began processing the raw imagery coming in through the ClearView channels "within hours" of the disaster, Burpee said. Officials at French space agency CNES were preparing to provide special data and cartographic products drawn from the Spot network, Canada's Radarsat, the Indian IRS network, Envisat and other space assets belonging to signatories of the U.N. disaster charter. The data will be used to support French civil security staff in Sri Lanka, among others.
India's ministry of environment and forests was using pre- and post-disaster satellite imagery to assess the impact on the coastal environment, including mangroves and wetlands, forests and groundwater. In Surrey, England, one staffer at Surrey Satellite Technology Ltd. (SSTL) went to work immediately massaging data from the devastated region from the Disaster Monitoring Constellation, a fleet of Surrey-built small Earth-monitoring satellites operated cooperatively by Algeria, China, Nigeria, Turkey and the U.K. Delivered to the International Red Cross, the wide-angle imagery gives a broad look at the affected area (AW&ST Dec. 8, 2003, p. 46).
Not all of the satellite support involved imagery. With the telecommunications infrastructure heavily damaged, satellite links were often the only way for emergency personnel to communicate their logistics requirements. France's CNES also was providing telemedicine services to the stricken region through a two-year-old cooperative effort with Medes, Indocomputech of India and an Indian hospital network.
The services, covering epidemiology, water management, food aid and population movements, rely on three Inmarsat stations in India's Chennai and Nicobar and Galle, Sri Lanka, along with five alert facilities. The latter consist of portable satellite phones and graphic notebook tablets allowing data to be collected and transmitted from remote sites.
For the commercial imagery companies, the Indian Ocean disaster could prove a financial windfall. While the raw civil spacecraft data is generally provided free of charge, the commercial product usually comes with a fee specified in preexisting contracts like NGA's ClearView or its separate agreement with France's Spot Image. However, the open-license nature of the NGA arrangements should make the data free to many of its users in the field, while the Surrey disaster consortium agreement includes a pro-bono provision.
"Part of the disaster-monitoring consortium agreement that each of the members have agreed to is that 5% of the data that they transmit and use will be provided free of charge to aid agencies," said SSTL's David Frampton. "[And] they can increase that usage."
And while the commercial operators are in business to make money, that motivation seems to have taken a back seat in the face of such widespread devastation.
"We're not waiting for purchasing orders," said Brender of Space Imaging. "We're providing the imagery immediately, and then worrying about the bookkeeping later."
image | Two-meter before-and-after images of a portion of Aceh province, Indonesia, from the Ikonos satellite, highlight tsunami damage.
Document AW00000020050113e11a00029
The "War On Terrorism" Comes To Southeast Asia
Glassman, Jim

15,357 words

1 January 2005

Journal of Contemporary Asia

PJCA

3

Volume 35; Issue 1; ISSN: 00472336

English

Copyright (c) 2005 Bell & Howell Information and Learning Company. All rights reserved.
[Abstract:
The victims of 9/11 include not only those killed in the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon but the numerous innocents who have perished either in the US-led "war on terror" or as a result of the war's less immediate consequences. Among such consequences are the seeming reversal of processes of democratization and de-militarization in Southeast Asia-processes that had taken root and made significant strides in many countries of the region since the end of the Cold War. This article examines how US geo-political economic ambitions have interacted with the geo-political economic ambitions of elites in the Philippines, Indonesia, and Thailand to affect such a reversal.]
Guy picked up his file on the Red Chinese. It was the file he saved for quiet times of the day, the final nightmare file, to be brooded over slowly. Red Chinese troops are being dropped into the Baja by the fucking tens of thousands. Mobilizing, massing, growing. Little red stars on their caps. In fact there was nothing new in the file. The same old rumors and suspicions. They are down there in the pale sands in their padded jackets, gathered in one great silent sweep, waiting for the word. It didn't need elaboration or update. There was something classic in the massing of the Chinese. He wanted to believe it was true. He did believe it was true. But he also knew it wasn't. Ferrie told him it didn't matter, true or not. The thing that mattered was the rapture of the fear of believing. It confirmed everything. It justified everything. Every violence and lie, every time he'd cheated on his wife. It allowed him to collapse inside, to melt toward awe and dread. That's what Ferrie said. It explained his dreams. The Chinese caused his dreams. Every terror and queerness of sleep, every unspeakability-it is painted in China white.
- Don DeLillo, Libra
The Bush administration's response to the catastrophic loss of life in the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 is nothing short of catastrophic. The loss of civilian life in the US attack on Afghanistan that followed exceeded the loss of life on 9/11, and the subsequent use of 9/11 as an implied pretext for the removal of Saddam Hussein's regime and the US occupation of Iraq has led to yet greater numbers of civilian dead, along with dangerous instabilities throughout the Middle East. Moreover, the effects of 9/11 and the US response to it have not been confined to the Middle East and Central Asia but have rippled to other corners of the world, indicating not only the deeply interconnected character of contemporary geo-political economic processes but the continuing centrality of both US foreign policy and the politics of energy resources (Chomsky 2003; Harvey 2003; Johnson 2004).
The centrality of US foreign policy ventures to the lives of people around the world is, of course, nothing new, and in many respects the US response to 9/11 looks as if it might mark the beginning of the end of an era in which the US government was able to exercise unquestioned imperial leadership-at least within the capitalist world. If "hegemony" is taken, as in Gramsci's conception, to mean the ability to exercise a dominant leadership role by securing the consent of those who are subordinate, then surely the vast global opposition to the US occupation of Iraq and the original inability of the Bush administration to secure support for the venture from most of the capitalist world's leadership manifests a loss of hegemony and the entry into a more insecure era of US unilateralism (Mann 2003; Wallerstein 2003; Kolko 2004). Yet in another sense, the events that have followed 9/11 manifest a certain tenacity to US imperial power, or perhaps simply a slow decay, one in which the remnants of US hegemonic power are deployed in still meaningful-if ultimately antediluvian-fashion.
US policies in Southeast Asia illustrate perhaps better than policies anywhere else in the world this slow decay. Southeast Asia was once the scene of one of the most intensive-and portentious-US imperial venture of the 20* century, the Vietnam War, a disaster for both the Vietnamese people and the US foreign policy establishment, which ushered in an era in which the US military's attempt to patrol and reconstruct the world in its own image was deeply criticized around the world and forced under reconsideration at home. The US withdrawal of troops from Vietnam was followed by an economic transformation that brought most of the US' former Southeast Asian allies more fully under the sway of Japanese and overseas Chinese capitalists, and the loss in 1992 of rights to the Clark Air Base and Subie Bay Naval Base in the Philippines seemed to place an exclamation mark at the end of the sentence proclaiming the demise of US hegemony in this corner of the world.
Yet post-9/11 events have seen a significant, if strained and contested, revival of the US imperial project in Southeast Asia, and it is in this context that I speak of three Southeast Asian victims of 9/11. These victims are not Southeast Asians who died in the collapse of the World Trade Center (though there were some), and indeed they are not even Southeast Asian people. Rather, the victims that I discuss are social processesthe interconnected processes of democratization and demilitarization in the Philippines, Indonesia and Thailand. These social processes, very much like the civilians who have died in the Middle East in the aftermath of 9/11, are victims of the US attempt to restore or refurbish a threatened or fading hegemony. The fact of the victimization is itself testimony to the continued centrality of US foreign policy in world affairs and thus to the fact of continuing imperial power. But more importantly, the ways in which that imperial power has been exercised manifest both the real limits and conundrums of this power and the ways in which local realities upon which imperial power is imposed are shaping both the maintenance and decay of US hegemony.
I will argue that the Bush administration's post-9/11 ventures into Southeast Asia demonstrate a will to regain the position of hegemony lost since the end of the Vietnam War and the subsequent rise of a more autonomous Pacific Asia region. The ventures are rooted in a project that is entirely distinct from the terrorist attacks of 9/11 or its agents and are thus being imposed in a fashion that reflects more about US ambitions in the region than about terrorist organizations within the region. This situation is itself nothing new: during the Cold War, the US imposed its own favored political framework on a set of complex and distinctive local conflicts, turning an array of Left-backed but fundamentally nationalist and anti-imperialist struggles into emblems of the struggle between US-backed capitalist development agendas and Soviet/Chinese-backed attempts at socialist transformation. Moreover, as during the Cold War, there is a parallel today in the behavior of national elites within Southeast Asia. While during the Cold War many such elites understood well the local specificity of the struggles in which they were engaged and attached their projects to the Cold War agenda as much out of opportunism and desire for US support as out of belief in anti-communism, so today many of these elites are cooperating-if sometimes hesitantly-in packaging locally-rooted conflicts as exemplars of the global terrorist threat in order to take advantage of the climate created by the US response to 9/11.
This interaction of US and Southeast Asian elite ambitions produces a complex and heterogeneous geography of conflict on the ground in Southeast Asia, one which illustrates well the challenges of the US attempt to reconstruct hegemony. I will explain this heterogeneity by noting the distinctive ways in which US imperialism is being mediated by the distinctive contexts of social struggle in the Philippines, Indonesia and Thailand. In the Philippines, this context leads to an expression of US imperialism that has clear elements of neo-colonialism. In Indonesia, by contrast, US practices have become linked more to what could be described as a Javanese sub-imperial project. Finally, in Thailand, US imperial practice is mediated by local realities in a yet more complex fashion, leading to Thai state practices that I will refer to as quasi-hegemonic. Each of these manifestations of US imperialism speaks to a distinctive kind of relationship between the US imperial project and the unruly specificities of local conflicts upon which the US project is being imposed. Since it is only the homogeneity of US political discourse about terrorism in Southeast Asia-along with the underlying motivations of the US project in the region-that provide a patina of uniformity to the regional imperial venture, it is with the underpinnings of this US project that I will start.
The Bush Administration and Southeast Asia: The Agenda for Reconstructing Hegemony
The most noteworthy feature of the Bush Administration's anti-terrorist agenda in Southeast Asia is that its basics were articulated long before 9/11, and in ways illustrating that the project is entirely independent of alleged Islamic terrorist threats. An easy way to discern this is to scan the Project for a New American Century (PNAC) report, "Rebuilding America's Defenses" (Kagan et al. 2000). PNAC is, of course, well-known as a bastion of the sort of neo-conservative thinking which has animated the Bush administration's domestic and foreign policies, and has been supported since its inception in the 1990s by well-placed figures such as Dick Cheney (Vice President under Bush II), Donald Rumsfeld (secretary of Defense under Bush II), Paul Wolfowitz (Deputy Secretary of Defense under Bush II) and the President's brother Jeb (Governor of Florida). The report on "Rebuilding America's Defenses" was authored by Donald Kagan, Gary Schmitt and Thomas Donnelly (principle author) and published in September 2000, before Bush became president. Typical of its genre, the report is primarily an advertisement for the military industry and shows little insight into realities on the ground in the corners of the world that the PNAC proposes the US police. However, it does provide valuable insights into the thinking of neo-conservative policy planners and the projects they have launched.
Basing their arguments on the assumptions that the United States currently has a "historic opportunity" as "the uniquely powerful leader of a coalition of free and prosperous states that faces no immediate great power challenge," yet is inhibited in exercising such leadership by the fact that its "military forces limp towards exhaustion" for lack of governmental commitment (Kagan et al. 2000, 1 ), the authors go on to outline a vision for rebuilding the military in ways that will enable the United States to capitalize on this historic opportunity. By the second page of the report, the authors outline the major strategic shift that they think must underpin the rebuilding project. In their vision, the Cold War era can be described as featuring a "security system" that was bipolar (the United States and the Soviet Union), a US "strategic goal" of containing the Soviet Union, a "main military mission" of deterring Soviet expansionism, a "main military threat" of potential global war across many theaters, and Europe as the geographic "focus of strategic competition." By contrast, in the post-Cold War 21st Century, with the collapse of the Soviet Union, the "strategic system" has become unipolar, the "strategic goal" is to preserve the Pax Americana, the "main military missions" are to secure and expand zones of democratic peace, deter the rise of a new great power competitor, defend key regions, and exploit the transformation of war made possible by new technologies, while the "main military threat" is potential theater wars spread across the globe. Crucially, the geographic locus of strategic competition has shifted, not to the Middle East but to East Asia (Kagan et al. 2000, 2-3).
Expanding on this last point, the authors suggest that "despite increasing worries about the rise of China and instability in Southeast Asia, US forces are found almost exclusively in Northeast Asian bases" (Kagan et al. 2000, 4). The authors thus recycle the Cold War notion of a threat from China that demands substantial military attention to Southeast Asia. Thus, while they assert the need to maintain US military bases in South Korea and Japan (Okinawa), they also assert the need for expansion of the US military presence in Southeast Asia, where, they note, "American forces are too sparse to adequately address rising security requirements, particularly since the withdrawal of its troops from the Philippines in 1992" (Kagan et al. 2000, 18). Moreover, the authors argue, "the East Timor crisis and the larger question of political reform in Indonesia and Malaysia highlight the volatility of the region," which "has long been an area of great interest to China" (Kagan et al. 2000, 18-9). The authors conclude their overview of the challenges in East and Southeast Asia with a summary that is worth citing in full:
In sum, it is time to increase the presence of American forces in Southeast Asia. Control of key sea lines of communication, ensuring access to rapidly growing economies, maintaining regional stability while fostering closer ties to fledgling democracies and. perhaps, most important, supporting the nascent trends towards political liberty are all enduring security interests for America. No US strategy can constrain a Chinese challenge to American regional leadership if our security guarantees to Southeast Asia are intermittent and US military presence a periodic affair. For this reason, an increased naval presence in Southeast Asia, while necessary, will not be sufficient; as in the Balkans, relying solely on allied forces or the rotation of US forces in stability operations not only increases the stress on those forces but undercuts the political goals of such missions. For operational as well as political reasons, stationing rapidly