Tibet is a living hell - 50 years of suffering and endurance

Armed riot police confront Drepung monks on March 10, 2008, after monks began an orderly march to Lhasa to protest about restrictions on religious freedom. The protest began a wave of dissent that swept the plateau. The whereabouts of many monks from Drepung is not known.



Today, Tibetans around the world—in Tibet and in exile—mark 50 years of suffering and extraordinary endurance.

Today, we remember the 50th anniversary of the 1959 Lhasa Uprising when the Dalai Lama fled Tibet and the spontaneous demonstrations that began last March across the Tibetan plateau.

Reports of peaceful protests and harsh response from Chinese authorities continue to reach us. Last Thursday, two young Tibetan women were detained in Kardze, following a protest. The two women, a nun and layperson, handed out leaflets and called for the return of the Dalai Lama, respect for Tibetans’ human rights, and religious freedom. The women were detained and their whereabouts remain unknown.

For the latest news and updates about the developing situation inside Tibet, please visit ICT’s website.

Imagine living in constant fear of the authorities finding out about your religious and political views—and possibly being detained and tortured because of them.

Now multiply that by the cold, harsh facts over the past 50 years:

Tens of thousands killed

Hundreds of thousands imprisoned

Over 6,000 monasteries, nunneries and temples, pillaged and destroyed
Last year alone, thousands more Tibetans disappeared or were imprisoned, and more destruction was directed against monasteries and precious religious objects.

The free Tibet movement needs your support now to help the people of Tibet, and to help protect their unique heritage and culture. Contact the Australia Tibet Council for more information.

Global human rights - 'trickle down' and other obscenities

As the world's economic commentators pontificate on the rights and wrongs of speculative trading in fancy debt products such as collateralized debt obligations, it strikes me that a significant paradigm shift is in the air.

Some mega-rich financiers and neo-conservative economists are appalled by government interventions in the market, expecting the unsuccessful players to go bankrupt, never mind the collateral damage that might wreak. Whilst it is easy to be swayed by this 'survival of the fittest' mindset, especially as it applies to egregious corporate executives who have farmed their wealth from dodgy speculations and self-serving short term credit strategies, the 'better to burn out than fade away' nostrum that works for US marines may not be the right prescription for these times. If the AIGs and CitiGroups of this world collapse in a smoking heap what will be the consequences for struggling working people and the poor? Many of the commentators just don't care about these groups.

Trickle down economics has been with us for several decades. As the middle classes in developed (and recently in developing) countries expanded, the moral bankruptcy of this stratagem has been veiled. The parallel realities which the aspiring 'player' classes and the legions of poor inhabit do not overlap in meaningful ways. In some countries the poor do not register on the human development index. They have dropped off the statisticians’ radar. They leave so little evidence of their daily struggle to exist.

As the industrial developed world and its middle class aspirants in developing economies such as China and India got richer, the poor in developing regions retreated into ever more grinding poverty. The spatial reality of third world urban landscapes symbolizes this cruel dichotomy more starkly than most city-scapes in the West (although examples from the US rust and cotton belts and inner-city ghettos must be writ large).

Dominant elites in developing countries tread the familiar track of comfortable jobs, serviced environs, nice houses, mod cons and domestic help. Behind this facade the poor make their way, as they always have, along rough tracks out of sight of comfortable residential enclaves, across barrens into slums and shanty towns. Their circumstances are getting worse and their story is repeated over and over again in the post-colonial world. The vast majority are either underemployed or unemployed, barely eking a living in market economies that have left them behind, housed cheek by jowl in squalid conditions with little or no services or amenities. Alternatively, they are part of the legions of rural poor, living hand to mouth on marginal land or with no land at all.

Let me put my cards on the table. Except in special circumstances, I don't like charity aid, which is a populist form of 'trickle down' to salve the collective social conscience. Intense media coverage of natural disasters invariably leads to a rush of charitable dollars and material aid, while less publicized structural poverty is largely ignored. In emergency situations this type of charity can have an immediate effect but it rarely leads to lasting change. In Western countries the line that money spent on overseas aid would be better spent at home is a common refrain heard across the political spectrum, while countless millions of people are on the edge of starvation or disease because their own domestic elites and international power brokers lack the will to redistribute resources to meet their basic human needs.

When so much aid is charity based it is little wonder that well-meaning middle class families get drawn into schemes run by religious groups utilizing manipulative media techniques. Many of these schemes do not address the underpinning structural circumstances of poverty but use aid to proselytize religious beliefs and leverage undue influence over vulnerable communities. Individual donors get vicarious comfort from the notion that someone is doing something, somewhere, for the poor, but it is typically at arm’s length and detached from the grinding reality of those in need.

The score card was bleak and going backwards. A sense of superiority pervaded the relationships of the developed and developing worlds. The hectoring of client states to conform to the West's security and governance templates became strident during the Bush years. Economic clout is used to bully weaker countries into accepting interference in their domestic affairs. Aid is provided to repressive regimes to shore up trade interests. Aid became more politicized and compromised as a means to strengthen relations with partner countries.

Now, the global economic crisis will see some serious questioning of the dominant paradigm that brought us to this precipice. Those that suggest the market driven global greed fest might not have been the best way forward for the planet may now do so without being labeled neo-Marxists, social misfits, or, just mad.

All is far from lost if notions that we engage the economically weak in our own society and in other cultures from a position of superiority can be put aside. In Australia we can wallow in the illusion that our resource base, acquired through colonial imperialism, and our institutional inheritance imbues us with greater wisdom and understanding of the human condition, and seek to project our 'superiority', but we will have missed a great opportunity to be chart makers and bridge builders in a fourth world, where the constructs of ‘developed’ and ‘developing’ no longer apply.

A fourth world would celebrate cultural difference; the dignity and worth of all labour; and the universality of human rights. We all have a stake in peace and security. The moribund ‘polarities’ and parallel development paths of the last century, blind us to the potential of shared horizons. Let 'trickle down' be replaced by notions of a fair redistribution of wealth and resources and the forging of real partnerships underpinned by mutual respect, joint security and genuine global community.

Human Rights in China: Olympic movement should bow its head in shame over worsening human rights record of China.

The US State Department has got off on the right foot under Clinton by telling China its human rights record stinks. Of course her first visit to China did'nt put human rights front & centre in terms of the bilateral relationship, and you would not expect that from a first visit by a new administration. However, Clinton has signaled human rights will be taken seriously by the Obama administration, most particularly at home where the US needs to model what it preaches abroad.

China reacted badly to the State Dept report as expected, denouncing US human rights violations, which it has to be said have been many over the period of the Bush administration.

The cynical disregard for human rights underlying the Olympic movement's dalliance with this regime beggars belief. I can still hear commentators banging on about 'children being fed' and a 'stellar economic performance', justifying repression and brutality on a wide front. Apologists for totalitarianism eventually have their collective noses rubbed in their own excrement - for instance, where was that economic miracle when 20 million people were recently made jobless and forced to return to rural squalor? Where are the worker protections? Where are their human rights?

Australian Federal politics - some gratuitous advice for the Liberal Party

While you keep banging on about jobs, desperately trying to make political mileage out of economic harsh times, you reveal yourselves to be opportunistic buffoons and should stay in opposition.

Your 'work choices' fiasco further 'casualised' and 'atomised' the workforce, leaving many workers more vulnerable to an economic downturn. Do you actually think the electorate has already forgotten your policy hubris in this area?

On carbon trading you are equally challenged, with various rumps of your party so confused on the subject of climate change it runs like a french farce.

You need to take a constructive role in this time of national insecurity or you will be condemned to opposition for a long time!

Your current leader thinks he should be PM yesterday without doing the hard yards, and he has never been a team player! Good luck and good night!

Plaudits to a great blog - Road to Surfdom is winding up

I was saddened to click to the Road to Surfdom blog and find a post informing us of the winding up (temporarily I hope) of this great blog.

My blinkered efforts on behalf of refugees and other belaboured souls have trailed off since the election of the Rudd govt, which has a notional grasp on the universality of human rights, something the Howard govt singularly failed to understand.

I felt at the time of starting my blog that the mainstream media was largely inept in its analysis of human rights violations on Howard's watch. Although most bloggers with a political bent wear their hearts on their sleeves, they have battled to fill a vacant lot abandoned by media insiders in their slavish determination to be paid up members of the political club.

As Tim puts it so eloquently:

"The fact is, Australia’s mainstream media is moribund. Although there are great journalists and other contributors out there, the institution itself is stuck in a hopeless, self-serving, tenured cul-de-sac and is failing in its job to properly inform, discuss, debate and entertain. Not to mention, reinvent itself. The form is dominated by a handful of insiders who have grown so content with their own lot that they are immune to sensible criticism and lack the self-awareness to reassess what it is they are doing. They are supported in this self-satisfied loop by a political class that is happy to exploit the status quo, feeding them leaks and other tidbits to keep the whole charade ticking over in such a way that nothing really changes.

The narratives, the memes, the discussions of our political and social life are set in concrete and endlessly recycle. We have learned to accept the daily, largely manufactured, controversies of political and social discussion in lieu of genuine examination. The same voices — and there are only about 20 of them — continue to define what is important or useful or worthy of discussion and the few organs of the mainstream media keep churning them out. Their lack of seriousness is only matched by their lack of courage."

I'm a bit late but bon chance Tim in your next endeavours. Thanks for your brave insights comrade.

Beautiful NZ - images for the soul

I have recently been in picturesque NZ. What a fabulous feast for the eyes and the bruised soul. I decided to go the black and white route as brilliant colour shots abound and the stark contrasts of B & W speak to me of mystery and the unknowable...

Alert & Alarmed: Human haemorrhoid calls PM Rudd a toxic bore, polls suggest public contemplating painful surgery!

And as for that other Corey, I loved this piece in the SMH!

Kraken is back from extended hols!

A tale of a humanist who loves books - Looking for a Good Book - a memoir of a life spent in Australia and Papua New Guinea

My earliest memories of my father are permeated by books. They were an integral part of the daily rhythms of his life. Books arrived constantly in boxes or cardboard sleeves, by ship and by air to our tropical outpost [in Papua New Guinea]; they were forever being stacked or rearranged in hall cupboards as protection against the ubiquitous threats of pests and damp. During his waking hours he was happiest musing over book catalogues or perusing the literary gold within his latest acquisition. It was a highly infectious affliction that he willingly passed on to his son. [Looking for a Good Book] is his 'tale of a gentle madness', written by my father during his sixties and seventies, the story of a book collector thrown hither and thither by tumultuous events beyond his control.

To set the scene of a quest for the roots of 'madness' like no other, the author dwells on several dramatic episodes from history (the battles for Troy, Gallipoli and the Aztec empire) that cast light on the sometimes fickle nature of literary records of human folly, frailty and fragility. He ponders the vital role chroniclers of history and creative writers perform in enriching our appreciation and understanding of past events. We are taken on a whimsical exploration of the 'anatomy' of collecting, and asked to consider the pathology of this 'madness' through the lens of anthropologists, psychologists, logisticians and historical informants.

The author was born in Victoria in 1919. The memoir casts back over his childhood in Golden Square and Eaglehawk in the Bendigo region. He remembers key influences on his early development as a reader and on his lifelong passion for book collecting. He left school at thirteen to work in a series of jobs in rural Victoria, joined the YMCA, and enlisted in the Australian Army in 1941. I once asked him whether his parents collected books. He replied they had none but the family next door lent him books. This part of the tale provides a snapshot of growing up in a small rural Victorian township in the 1920s and 1930s. We are told of his apprenticeship as a butter maker, membership of the YMCA, and aspirations to become a journalist. His increasing interest in and knowledge of writers and books is woven into all aspects of retelling his story: 'The progress from a desire to read, to a similar urge for ownership, indicates the affliction is now gathering momentum'.

The author describes the years following his demobilisation, during which he gained admission to the University of Adelaide under the Commonwealth Reconstruction Scheme. On completion of a Diploma in Social Science he joined the colonial administration in Papua New Guinea as a junior education officer. In preparation for his colonial service in early 1949 he was admitted to the Australian School of Pacific Administration (ASOPA) located in Sydney. His association with the school lasted for 24 years, both as a student and later as a sometime lecturer. The first-hand account of studying at the ASOPA is a highlight of the memoir.

In late 1949 the author began his long career in Papua New Guinea, where he quickly climbed through the ranks to serve with distinction in a number of positions including Executive Officer for Social Development and Director of Child Welfare. He describes journeys into isolated areas, indigenous communities he visited, his appreciation of the work of colleagues and his own role in key actions of the Australian colonial government. Writers on PNG are canvassed, several of whom were personal acquaintances of the author. He retired from the PNG administration in 1973. In 2000 he received recognition for his contribution in a 25th Year of Independence award from the Government of Papua New Guinea.

My father survived wartime injury and illness and dangerous journeys in post-war PNG, and throughout his long and eventful life, books have remained a passion. In this book he tells us of his philosophy of book collecting, the methodology he applied in putting his collection together and historical antecedents to his 'madness'. The book finishes as he started, with my father musing on the nature of this affliction. He quotes Holbrook Jackson to advise fellow travellers about the joys of reading and collecting books. The rich and varied library he has collected is a fine testament to his continuing search for a good book.

‘Looking for a Good Book’ by Reginald Thomson. Order your copy [hardcover, 152 pp, $20 including postage] by contacting me by email: thomwil@homemail.com.au

Following is a recent review posted by Keith Jackson on his website, PNG Attitude:

"Reginald Thomson has written a book about books or, to be more precise, about his love of books.

Coincidentally Looking for a Good Book (Copyright, Brisbane, 2008) comes from the same publisher who brought us Gail Burke’s Meeting the Challenge.

While, unlike Challenge, this is not a book solely about PNG, it contains much that offers fresh insights into life in PNG between World War II and Independence. Which is not easy given the body of expatriate literature, published and unpublished, about the then Australian territory.

Reginald lived in PNG from 1949-73, beginning his career as a teacher and ending it as a distinguished public servant in the exacting post of Director of Child Welfare.

The central characteristic of Looking for a Good Book is the quality of the prose and of the extensive literary and life experience of the author. This, in short, is a book to read in phases – first for the savouring and then retained on the shelf for the occasional foray.

Reginald Thomson was born near Bendigo in Victoria in 1919. He left school at 13 to work for the YMCA and enlisted in the Australian Army in 1941. The book describes his Army training and his initial war service in New Guinea and at Balikpapan on Borneo.

After World War II, Reginald took a Diploma in Social Science, soon moving on to ASOPA. In the introduction to the book, his son Dr Mark Thomson writes: “The firsthand account of studying at ASOPA is a highlight of the memoir.” I agree. This is historic stuff and the cost of the book (just $20 including postage) is worth these reminiscences alone.

If you’re looking for a good book, Looking for a Good Book is for you. It is a well written and acutely recalled memoir. And underpinning everything is the author’s obsession with books. Made all the more poignant, as many of us who found ourselves in far flung parts of PNG would understand, by the largely unacknowledged part that books, precious books, played in our lives."