Folks You must check this out. 1) Go here www.agendamalaysia.com 2) Scroll down and click on "The Asean People's Assembly" 3) Scroll down Rehman Rashid's article and click on "sponsors." 4) Scroll down and click on Open Society Institute Development Fund and voila! you get an error on the http://www.soros.org/"target=new Web site. Of course yes, the specific Web page is no longer on the Soros Foundation Web site but why was it there in the first place. Why is the Soros Foundation sponsoring the ASEAN "Peoples'" Assembly? Moreover, who ever voted for the NGOs to represent the ASEAN people? What right do NGOs have to appoint themselves as "representatives of the people" while they criticise elected ASEAN governments (however imperfect their election might have been) for discussing the building of intra-Asean roads and bridges -- ie. intra-Asean infrastructure development. Rehman Rashid cites criticism at the ASEAN "Peoples'" Assembly that the Asean meeting in Singapore as a meeting where decisions are made by Asean governments without consulting the people. Yes, that would be highly desireable, including more intra-ASEAN people-to-people contact and initiatives but just look at the list of sponsors of the ASEAN "Peoples'" Assembly: at http://www.agendamalaysia.com/pages/ASA_sponsors.htm. Who and what are they? ========================================================= Organisers: Asean-ISIS Sponsors: Batam Industrial Development Authority (http://www.batam.go.id) Canadian International Development Agency (http://www.acdi-cida.gc.ca) Japan Official Development Assistance (http://www.mofa.go.jp) Open Society Institute Development Fund (http://www.soros.org) The Asia Foundation (www.asiafoundation.org) ...and voila!, apart from the Batam Industrial development Authority, there are two non-Asean government agencies and the Asia Foundation which according to its stated mission at http://www.asiafoundation.org/about/index.html is:- "The Asia Foundation is a private, nonprofit, nongovernmental organization working to advance the mutual interests of the United States and the Asia Pacific region." Oh wow! So it's apparently OK for this ASEAN "Peoples'" Assembly to be sponsored by non-ASEAN governments and the Soros Foundation but "not OK" for the governments of ASEAN to meet and confer on further strengthening regional ties through material initiatives like intra-Asean roads, railways and communication links which will facilitate more intra-Asean trade and people-to-people contact. Setting aside Dr. Mahathir's accusation that George Soros is solely responsible for mounting an economic attack on the Asian countries in 1997, George Soros still is a fund manager and fund managers use resources like the Internet to move their investments around at a mouse click to where they can get the highest return on their investment. Besides that, they also use the global reach afforded them by the Internet to manipulate economies and currencies around the world. After all, finance capitalism and speculation are means to scoop up the wealth created by the labour of workers who create the real value in any economy without putting in any effort on their part to create wealth themselves. Lenin described it as the most parasitic form of capitalism in his 1916 pamphlet, "Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism." In short, these fund managers and speculators are like absentee landlords who rape their land till it lies fallow but the only difference is that once they have finished doing that, they don't have to live with nor see their piece of fallow land but instead can just skip off somewhere else with a mouse click, leaving the citizens of the country to live with the desolation they've created, while they rape some other part of the world. This my friends is the reality of imperialist globalisation and despite what the imperialist mouthpieces say about it being "unstoppable," on the contrary, it can be stopped and besides Dr. Mahathir's currency controls which have managed to partially contain the forces of globalisation -- since Mahathir is not totally against it. However, the forces opposing it have shown themselves in Seattle, Davos, Australia and most recently in Washington and it's growing. Meanwhile, ASEAN-ISIS does not appear to have a Web site but a statement of its purpose can be found on the Agenda Malaysia Web site at http://www.agendamalaysia.com/pages/asean-isis.htm Rehman Rashid's article follows:- ==================================================== @ The Asean Peoples' Assembly (29/11/2000) By Rehman Rashid On 24-26 November 2000 on Indonesia's Batam Island, some 300 academics, activists, intellectuals, journalists and officials from all 10 Asean member nations gathered at the Purajaya Beach Resort for the inaugural Asean Peoples' Assembly (APA). Their meeting was held simultaneously with the Asean heads-of-government summit taking place in Singapore, 40 minutes north-by-northwest by fast ferry. The Peoples' Assembly, organised by the regional consortium of think-tanks, Asean-Isis, and funded by an equally thoughtful consortium of sponsors, saw itself as a counterpoint to the senior summit in Singapore. Asean, it was widely felt, had been behaving more and more as an 'Association of Southeast Asian Governments', not of nations. "For three decades Asean has been driven by its political elites," charged Prof Carolina Hernandez, founding president of the Philippines' Institute for Strategic & Development Studies. "They determined priorities and beneficiaries. Target peoples were rarely consulted. Asean is more relevant to outsiders than to its own peoples." Thus, the APA represented a certain maturation - 33 years after the formation of Asean, the peoples represented by the five founding states in 1967 had grown up, even as the grouping itself had doubled in the number of participating nations. It was remarkable evidence of Asean's success, in fact; of the material progress and intellectual development the region had undergone in the intervening generation. Not unrelatedly, however, this also meant that the now educated, aware, less economically immobile and more globally conscious peoples of Asean were increasingly dissatisfied with their governments' effectiveness in truly representing them. There had been in these three decades a burgeoning of non-governmental organisations, lobby and pressure groups, citizens' watches and independent media in all our countries, even as our governments had all declined, to greater or lesser degrees, in their popular support or legitimacy. Asean today represents a region of 500 million people, two-thirds of them under 45, recognising that whatever the successes or failures of the past, the future mattered considerably more. Whether that future portended a closer comity of nations or, as some delegates feared, a reversion to tribalism, depended more than before on the nexus between Asean's citizenries and their policymakers. While the region's grey eminences were meeting in Singapore, exciting themselves with the prospect of transnational roads, railways and bridges (and talking tough nostalgia on their childhood enmities), their successor generation was talking in Batam. The Assembly packed some 70 speakers into an intense couple of 14-hour days. At any given moment there were up to three concurrent panel sessions of as many as half-a-dozen panellists each; it made for a constant buzz of scuttling between meeting rooms. Audiences were nonetheless attentive; floor speakers often outshone panellists. The panels discussed globalisation, women, the media, human rights, civil society, poverty, education, the environment - and, of course, Asean itself. Asean, scoffed Kavi Chongkittavorn, editor of Bangkok's The Nation newspaper, was "five hundred officials for five hundred million people! They meet usually on golf courses with metal detectors. There's still no sense of us being 'Asean citizens'. There's still too much reliance on institutions." The Assembly, admitted its own organisers, was in part an effort to pre-empt the outright confrontationalism of the 'alternative' conferences that are now familiar sideshows to significant multilateral meetings. The pressures of independent popular viewpoints among Asean societies had grown altogether too insistent, organised and downright intelligent to ignore. With the APA's semi-official status, and the participation of such pillars of the establishment as Asean secretary-general Rodolfo Severino and former Indonesian foreign minister Ali Alatas, there was the chance that the sentiments of the Peoples' Assembly might more readily filter upward to the region's administrators. "I hope our voices can be heard by our governments," said Smita Notosusanto of Indonesia's Centre for Electoral Reform. It was at times an incoherent babble of voices, but amid the cacophony one message did ring clear. If there is a single principle on which the governments of Asean diverge from their peoples as represented at the APA, it is on the policy of 'non-interference'. Even the affable Ali Alatas, who otherwise seemed to be hugely enjoying himself, would not compromise: "It is a cardinal principle," he said. Emphasised Severino: "Non-interference underpins the entire system. The Asean Secretariat has no supranational authority." To Indonesian president Abdurrahman Wahid, stopping by at the Batam Assembly on his way home after stirring the pot in Singapore, the policy seemed indeed an article of faith. "Foreign policy is based on observations of daily life," he avuncularly told the Assembly; "social justice, rule of law, mutual development and the principle of non-interference." To the governments of Asean, staying out of each others' internal affairs is a principle rooted in the ideas of sovereignty and self-determination - the holiest of grails to the struggling new nations that in 1967 formed Asean. All were then racked by the pains of independence's adolescence, and it was clear at the time that Asean's Founding Five could either hang together, or hang separately. Yet, each national experiment was so fragile that the pledge of mutual 'non-interference' was the sine qua non of their agreement. For it to have been otherwise, in 1967, would have been tantamount to acknowledging defeat as nations. Such positions, however, only underscored the terse statement of Miriam Coronel-Ferrer of the Philippines' Third World Study Centre on what the hands-off policy had become: "A dogma worshipped by Asean political elites." There is a clear focus of this conflict. Although Asean peoples have much cause to laud the farsightedness and statesmanship of the region's leaders of a generation ago, they now want to know. what about Burma? Admitted into Asean in 1997, seven years after the Myanmar 'State Law & Order Restoration Council' ignored free elections that gave 82% of the elected seats to Aung San Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy, that nation's membership of Asean is the prickliest bone in the region's craw. "I fully support the policy of non-interference," declared Debbie Stothard, coordinator of the Alternative Asean Network on Burma, "when there is interference that provides legitimacy to the regime." So unbridgeable was this gulf that the Assembly found itself adopting a lexical distinction: the state in question was called 'Burma' when referring to its suppressed electorate, and 'Myanmar' in reference to its ruling military regime. It became necessary for the Assembly to acknowledge this sorest of Asean's sore points and set it aside, in search of more hope in the bigger picture. "With all our diversities between countries and within countries," mused Hadi Soesastro of Jakarta's Centre for Strategic & International Studies, "we have to move towards open economies and open societies. It's not easy, but we have to. Perhaps people-to-people dialogues can create a forum to prevent abuses." There was support for the idea of an Asean Court of Justice, and for the proposal to hold future APAs before Asean official summits, the better to influence the policymakers' agendas. Ali Alatas struck a pensive note in his concluding remarks to the Assembly. "Is Asean an association in search of people," he pondered, "or people in search of an association? NGOs have been active, but it's still the political elites who have been communicating with each other, not the common people. It cannot be said that we have reached our goal of a peoples' Asean." Recalling the words of his predecessor Tun Adam Malik 20 years earlier - "the shaping of the region is far too important to leave to governments" - Alatas recommended "down-to-earth, mundane projects to encourage the participation of the common people." He suggested annual 'Asean Festivals' of music, art & culture, rotating among the 10 national capitals. (With the possible exception of Burma's or Myanmar's, depending, perhaps, on whether it would be held in Yangon or Rangoon.) If the First Asean Peoples' Assembly was determined to end on an upbeat note, it did. The fact of its having been successfully convened at all was, for the moment, enough encouragement for the 'people-to-people' connections now seen as a critical element of Asean's interrelationships. It was Indonesian analyst Rizal Sukma, however, who provided the event with its most plangent perspective, simply by quietly reminding the Assembly that Asean's founding wish, 33 years ago, had been for "a peaceful and stable Southeast Asia, at peace with itself, with the causes of conflict eliminated." Nothing else said at the Assembly more clearly crystallised how far we still had to go. © 2000 AgendaMalaysia ========================================================== Folks, Based on the fact or regionalisation as I have described earlier, there are western imperialist interests out to thwart the formation of a strong Asean and the East Asia Economic Caucus as a regional grouping in Asia by using their fifth columnists and running dogs in Asia. These fifth columnists and running dogs serve the geopolitical interests of their imperialist masters and you will find them in Internet-based publications, NGOs, the Reformasi movement in Malaysia and you'll even even find them worming their way into labour unions and real peoples' organisations. BEWARE of NGOs calling for "human rights," "press freedom" and so on. They are the enemy within and their "human rights" is the "human" right for imperialists to penetrate and dominate the economies of the developing countries. Charles F. Moreira _______________________________________________ Marxist-Leninist-List mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.wwpublish.com/mailman/listinfo/marxist-leninist-list
