On March 23, hundreds of thousands of people from all over India converged in Delhi to express their anger at the killing of peasant protesters on March 14 by police and thugs aligned with the West Bengal Left Front (LF) government. Those killed were resisting eviction from their land in Nandigram. Similar killings also happened on January 7. The mass rally was preceded by two days of cultural protests.
Eva Cheng
To no-one’s surprise, the Beijing-anointed incumbent Donald Tsang was returned in Hong Kong’s March 25 “election” for the territory’s chief executive — the third such election since the territory’s reversion to Chinese rule in 1997. What was surprising was that the rival candidate, lawyer Alan Leong — billed as representing the politically moderate middle-class democratic camp and the first ever challenger in this highly managed ballot — secured a respectable 123 votes compared to Tsang’s 649.
Beijings drive since the early 1990s to pursue the restoration of capitalism in China received a boost on March 16, with the introduction of the controversial Property Law. Ironically, the law will take effect on October 1 exactly 58 years since the founding of the Peoples Republic of China. The law will safeguard the property of Chinas burgeoning capitalist class, giving private property the same protection as state-owned assets. This includes the large number of formerly state-owned assets converted to private property in sleazy and underhand deals.
In an effort to attract investment, the Left Front (LF) government in the state of West Bengal has tried to drive thousands of petty landowners, poor cultivators and wage labourers out of their homes and off their fields, despite this depriving many of them of any means of livelihood. When they resisted, it sent in gun-toting police, killing more than 20 people on January 7 and March 14.
In 1989, 39 pharmaceutical giants sued the government of AIDS-stricken South Africa, seeking to stop it from implementing a law to improve the poors access to life-saving AIDS drugs. That aggression sparked a public outcry within South Africa and elsewhere, leading to an international campaign that only ended in 2001 when the 39 companies dropped their case.
The Netherlands-based Royal Philips Electronics NV, one of nearly 40 chemical majors sued by Vietnamese victims of Agent Orange for supplying the defoliant to the US military, is now also being sued by its insurers. The US made extensive use of Agent Orange during the Vietnam War.
After promising during his 2000 inauguration not to push for Taiwanese independence, a commitment reaffirmed after his 2004 re-election, President Chen Shuibian reversed his stance hours before Chinas annual parliamentary session the National Peoples Congress started on March 5.
On the eve of Chinas annual parliamentary session the National Peoples Congress (NPC) on March 5-16, Beijing announced plans to increase its military spending for 2007 by 17.8% to 350 billion yuan (US$45 billion), provoking immediate concern from Washington.
China’s much increased economic activities in Africa in recent years — investments in energy and natural resources extraction and loans to African governments — have provoked accusations that it is becoming a new neocolonial power in the continent.
Through its Vietnam ambassador, the Bush administration announced on February 9 that it will fund 40% of a US$1 million plan to study how to clean up a former US military base in Vietnam that is contaminated by dioxin, a class-one human carcinogen. Dioxin was a key ingredient in Agent Orange, a defoliant that Washington used extensively in the Vietnam War from 1961 to 1971.
Nepalese PM Girija Prasad Koirala has vowed to amend the country’s constitution to meet the key demands of Madheshi protesters from the country’s southern plains, BBC News reported on February 8. He pledged to introduce a federal system of governance and more representation of the southern plains in the parliament.
On January 31, Bangladeshs acting electoral commission chief Mahfuzur Rahman and his four deputies resigned, paving the way for the countrys caretaker government to appoint new commission members as demanded by the main alliance of opposition parties.
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