Thanks for forwarding it Rajen.
I looked up the Statesman site. I know SH is very knowledgeable
about NE issues, and was thus looking forward to seeing something
informative to be updated with.
But aside from the name-dropping I learned precious little more.
Did I miss something?
c
At 11:30 PM -0600 11/7/05, Barua25 wrote:
Making Sense of the NE in Washington DC
Sanjoy Hazarika writes:
Dear Barua:
We had an excellent discussion at Brookings, the first
such public event on the NE in decades (perhaps ever
in DC) and we could press a few home truths and
outline concerns and issues. You may looknat my
column on the event at www.thestatesman.net (link is
NE page and my column, North by North East). The nE
Page appears every Saturday ion the Statesman and is
the only rpt only platform for the NE that is read the
same day in Delhi, Kolkata, Bhuvaneswar and Siliguri
and on the net, unlike other papers which publish NE
supplemnts for circulation in the NE only
Sanjoy Hazarika:
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
You may see more of his activities by visiting his web page www.c-nes.org (Center for NE Studies)
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
From the NE Page of the Statesman
North by North East: Sanjoy Hazarika: Making sense of the N-E in Washington
At 3-30 pm on Thursday evening, Washington hosted its first public event on the North-East (at least I do not recall, in 23 years of travelling to the US capital, of a similar event) and I was privileged to be among those who made presentations on the situation in the region.
The others included Lieutenant-General VK Raghavan, former DG Military Operations of the Indian Army, and Samir K Das of Calcutta University. The discussions were held at the Brookings institute and drew a range of academics, serving and former officials from the US administration, journalists and human rights activists.
We covered the Naga imbroglio and Ulfa as well as the role of the military, the region and its neighbours, the Look East Policy, economics, ethnicity and migration. It was a fairly comprehensive list and participants asked good, sharp questions on several issues, including the earlier CPI-M support to migration from Bangladesh, which it has since discontinued.
Whenever we cover the North-east to a new and especially Western audience, one is concerned that we may end up confusing the audience instead of clarifying the situation, of such complexities is our region.
The discussion was co-hosted by Stephen Cohen, a friend of India, who is at Brookings, and Mutthiah Alagappa of the East-West Centre; the latter had just concluded an exhausting four-day workshop elsewhere in the capital on armed conflicts in Asia.
In the past days, one has talked with persons from other countries who are going through similar if not worse crisis than what the North-east is struggling with: Nepal and Sri Lanka, Thailand and Myanmar (Burma).
In each of these nations, the peripheral borders cause the maximum trouble to the states. One was struck by the difficulties faced by ordinary researchers in gathering information; a Thai professor even went so far as to say that it would be unsafe for a Thai researcher to work in a Muslim-dominated belt in non-Thai areas in southern Thailand where vigilante groups and political and religious pressures dominate.
In the North-east, the threats to ordinary citizens and professionals as well as media still exist. We have seen reference to this, and take encouragement from the position of the Manipur media which recently passed a resolution saying it would not be browbeaten by the underground.
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