It was the striking picture of Mao Tse-Tung--with ‘slashes’ of black paint across his face--that caught my eye as I was perusing the CS Monitor this morning. And I was pleasantly surprised to discover that the image is actually from the cover of the latest book by Denise Chong, from my hometown of Vancouver.

Chong, an economist working for the Canadian government, changed careers in the 1980s and ended up an award-winning writer. She is also the author of The Girl in the Picture (2000), a biographical and historical account of Kim Phuc, the young girl whose screaming and naked image taken during the Vietnam War is still known around the world.

Chong’s much anticipated latest book is Egg on Mao: The Story of an Ordinary Man Who Defaced an Icon and Unmasked a Dictatorship, and it has already been getting some good reviews.

The Montreal Gazette calls the book a ‘gem,’ saying, ‘While telling this highly charged political story, Chong never loses sight of the human factor, nor of the toll that an authoritarian society takes on the individual.’ Meanwhile, the Quill and Quire also praises the book, noting: ‘Chong is a masterful storyteller. . . .Egg on Mao is a lovely and fascinating look at not only China, but also the power of friendship and human decency.’

Egg on Mao is, like The Girl in the Picture, a historical and biographical tale centered on Lu Decheng, a rural bus mechanic who in 1989, along with two friends, infamously defamed a portrait of Mao Tse-tung in Tiananmen Square with paint-filled eggs. The Canadian Newswire describes the account as an exploration of ‘whether repression and imprisonment, or even time itself, can douse the flame of desire for human rights.’

I managed to catch up by e-mail last night with our Pakistan correspondent, Mustafa Qadri, who’s been trying to find a way into the Waziristan region to cover the big military offensive by Pakistani forces that started last weekend. He says he hasn’t been able to enter the area so far as there’s a blanket ban on journalists. But he said there seem to have been some early signs of successes. He told me:

‘Already security authorities have managed to get key Taliban leaders from neighbouring North Waziristan Maulvi Nazir and Gul Bahadur to defect to their side, along with many rank and file members of Pakistan Taliban Movement now headed by Hakimullah Mahsud.

‘But the country is under the grip of extreme tension as the Army commences its most anticipated of operations. The Army has fought several wars in Waziristan over the past five years, only on each occasion to be given a bloody nose and compelled to sign ceasefires that emboldened the Pakistani Taliban. But this time there’s a sense that things will be different.’

 But he also cautioned:

‘South Waziristan is a guerrilla fighter’s dream turf. With its jagged peaks, densely wooded forests, and remote location, Waziristan has proved to be the ideal place for the Taliban, al-Qaeda and other Islamist fighters from around the world, and especially from Arab countries and Uzbekistan, to train and prepare for their attacks.

‘I’ve been in close contact with government and humanitarian agencies in an attempt to understand what is going in over there, but authorities have placed a blanket ban on journalists visiting the region. Still, in Pakistan, nothing stays secret for too long...’

I’ll keep you posted when I hear more from him.

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Agus Purnomo, considered a rising young star in Indonesia’s abstract art scene, is going international--including to Tokyo, where his work is currently on display. His accolades already include the Nokia Art Award, the Jakarta Art Award in 2007 and being selected for the International Print and Drawing Biennale in Taiwan in 2006.

For some captivating details on Purnomo’s background, there’s no better person to turn to than Asian Collection gallery owner Robert Tobin. Tobin, who also goes by the moniker ‘Tokyo Art Guy’, explained to me recently how an ill-fated trip by Purnomo to the supermarket some years ago actually became the catalyst of the young artist’s career.

According to Tobin, after being overcharged for his groceries, Purnomo went back to the store to complain, but couldn’t get his money back. ‘He thought “everything is being reduced to numbers today”--and then took out his frustration on the canvas,’ Tobin told me. ‘At [that] time he did more figurative works [but] the irony is that the numbers in his work are now a way for us to rediscover our humanity.’

Tobin added that Purnomo uses his pieces to express a wide variety of emotions, and says the process is both cathartic and like a diary for him. Visitors also have said they find his work joyful and engaging.

And Tobin says some of his own assumptions have proven wrong when it comes to Purnomo’s art. ‘I thought they would be most popular with people in banking and finance--numbers people,’ he said. ‘But they’re much more universal. Some people don't notice the numbers until we point it out.’

Purnomo’s work is currently on display at Asian Collection in Tokyo.

Some interesting post election news today. First up is Afghanistan, where President Hamid Karzai has agreed to a run-off following the controversial August election. This seems like the only credible thing to do with a UN-backed commission having said as many as a third of Karzai’s were fraudulent. It should also make it easier for the US to align itself with him if, as is almost certain, he wins the run-off.

One of the most interesting elements of this story, though, is not that Karzai gave way and agreed to a run-off (that was pretty much inevitable under such heavy US pressure), but who was putting the pressure on--US Sen. John Kerry and not the special envoy to the region, Richard Holbrooke.

Jamie Fly, blogging for The National Review, has a good look at why Holbrooke has apparently been marginalized:

‘The subtext here appears to be that Holbrooke, who reportedly engaged in several shouting matches with Karzai in recent months, has so undermined the US relationship with Karzai that he had to be sidelined.’

But he goes on to say that despite Kerry’s apparent shuttle diplomacy success, the fact that it was Kerry and not Clinton mediating suggests some real underlying problems with the Obama team’s civilian efforts in the country:

‘Clinton’s notable absence on Afghanistan policy has led many experts to express concerns that the calibre of the US civilian team working on Afghanistan does not match that of the likes of Gen. David Petraeus, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, and other military leaders handling this issue. There has been no comprehensive civilian assessment or plan put forward by Ambassador Holbrooke and his army of staffers on the seventh floor at State to accompany General McChrystal’s assessment. US political goals for the country are unclear.’

Still, credit to Kerry for getting the job done this time. Though this of course begs the question of where this leaves Obama’s Afghan diplomacy. This isn’t going to be the last time someone is going to be needed to put out a fire there. So who’ll do it next time?

Shifting focus to Southeast Asia meanwhile, the re-vamped cabinet of re-elected President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono has disappointed reform-minded analysts, according to a New York Times piece that suggests politics has trumped expertise:

‘With the liberal former general having won re-election in a landslide victory in July, anticipation had been high that he would fill his cabinet with effective technocrats who could tackle persistent issues like endemic graft, crumbling infrastructure and an unreliable judicial system.

‘Instead, the president appears to have reserved only the economic posts for technocrats, while doling out others, like the key Ministry of Law and Human Rights, to members of the handful of political parties that supported his re-election bid.’

Five times as many people have died from heroin overdoses in NATO nations over the past 8 years than the total number of NATO soldiers killed in Afghanistan, according to the UN's Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC). This week the group released their report on the issue: ‘Addiction, Crime and Insurgency: The transnational threat of Afghan opium.’

It says 100,000 people die from opium abuse each year, out of an estimated 15 million users worldwide. Europe tops the user list, with China, Pakistan, India and other parts of Asia also ranked as major consuming nations. Aids/HIV are cited as a closely related problem.

In quite a vivid statement, UNODC chief Antonio Maria Costa describes the situation in the region: ‘The Silk Route, turned into a heroin route, is carving out a path of death and violence through one of the world's most strategic yet volatile regions.’

Afghanistan now produces 92 per cent of the world's opium in a market worth around $65 billion, and the production of the substance has surged in the past decade, exceeding worldwide consumption levels.

The report also notes an interesting fact: there is an unaccounted stockpile of 12,000 tons of opium believed to be stored in Afghanistan and possibly also in transit.

But in an interesting opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal some time back, Theodore Dalrymple questioned the conventional wisdom on opium consumption (‘Poppycock’). He basically argued that quitting opium is perhaps not as tough as some would like to make it out to be, and came up with some unique perspectives to try and back this up, including one which actually credits Chairman Mao as a drug therapist for the masses:

‘Thousands of American servicemen returning from Vietnam, where they had addicted themselves to heroin, gave up on their return home without any assistance whatsoever.’

‘…In China, millions of Chinese addicts gave up with only minimal help: Mao Tse-Tung's credible offer to shoot them if they did not. There is thus no question that Mao was the greatest drug-addiction therapist in history.’

This week a study revealed possible good news for type 2 diabetics…of drinking age. The new findings suggest that a compound contained in red wine may work to moderate insulin levels, as was shown in experiments with mice. Resveratrol, found in red wine, is a plant substance that is also sold as a nutritional supplement for claimed potential anti-cancer, anti-inflammatory and blood-sugar-lowering effects. This is just another in a steady flow of pro-wine reports.
 

And certainly for reasons beyond just its potential health benefits, Asian markets have been rapidly taking up the wine trend in recent years. This week alone, two major spirits events are taking place in Hong Kong and Singapore.

Wine for Asia, an annual three-day wine and spirits show runs from October 22 to 24 at the Sun-Tec City in Singapore. Organizers are said to be very upbeat despite the global recession. At last year’s event, they reported a growing Thai, Indian and Chinese presence, judging from the number of country delegates in attendance.  

Wine & Gourmet Asia in Macau will also run between October 22 and 24, and is a large-scale industry event that is supported by organizations like the Macau Trade and Investment Promotion Institute and the Macau Government Tourist Office. This event is expected to draw in over 10,000 visitors.

And coming next month is the 2009 Hong Kong International Wine and Spirits Fair which will be held from November 4 to 6 at the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre and feature ‘the world’s first truly Asian wine competition.’

The Asian market for wine, minus Japan, is forecast to grow at an ‘extraordinary 10 to 20 per cent’ rate per year over the next 5 years according to Allen Gibbons, who is the executive director of the International Wine and Spirit Competition in London.

Since Hong Kong and Macau dropped their taxes on wine in 2008, the overall price of wine has fallen in both regions, while foreign imports and sales have soared. For some local information on HK, there’s an article of interest in the Wall Street Journal this week (‘In Hong Kong, The Stirrings of a Serious Wine Scene’). Jake Lee asserts: ‘…venues for wine—shops, tasting bars and even a winery—now flourish in the city’ and goes onto describe some of the ‘best and most interesting sites’ for wine to be found right now in Hong Kong.

An interesting piece in The Hindu newspaper this week about the perils of tying your policy toward a country (in this case India toward Iran) too closely to a close ally (the United States).

The writer argues that India should have seen what it describes as a thaw coming (though it’s perhaps a little early to call it that), and that events have left it diplomatically flat-footed:

‘India needs to prepare a frank estimation of its own insipid regional policies with regard to Iran. Clearly, it has been a policy disaster of stupendous proportions that the UPA government allowed the US (and Israel) to dictate the tempo of India-Iran relationship. Whereas most countries foresaw a US-Iran thaw and readied for it, the Indian establishment buried its head in the sand. Belying all logic, India stopped supplying petroleum products to Iran a few months ago, anticipating a “tightening” of US sanctions on Tehran. (China, of course, stepped in to meet Iran’s needs.)’

Relations between India and the Middle East are generally under-reported in Western media, so with our India correspondent Madhav Nalapat travelling to Qatar for a few days this week, I asked him, basically, how things stand.

Interestingly, he says that warming ties with the US have had what he describes as a ‘spinoff of closer ties with the Gulf sheikhdoms,’ and he added that ties between India and the region were multiplying, with India having joined the US and the EU in being a strategic partner of the Gulf Cooperation Council.

He says this shift has come after years of drift in relations, and I’ll quote at length here from his email as I think it’s good to put some of these issues in context:

‘Throughout the five decades that spanned the period since the nationalisation of the Suez Canal and the normalisation of ties between Egypt and Israel, India was an outlier in the Gulf, so far as official contacts were concerned. The indifference of the ruling families there to a country that once had been their closest partner was matched by a similar attitude on the Indian side, which saw the sheikhdoms as anachronisms.

‘Indeed, India was the only major non-Communist country to assist the PLO since the 1950s in the setting up of a Palestinian state, even allowing a full-fledged diplomatic mission to be set up in Delhi. Interestingly, as soon as he got western (and Mideast) partners after the 1992 handshake with Yitzhak Rabin, Yasser Arafat dumped India within months and thereafter adopted the western position on Kashmir, which in effect was that the state ought to go to Pakistan. Such fickle behaviour helped nudge then Prime Minister Narasimha Rao into allowing Israel to open an embassy in Delhi in 1992, and for setting up an Indian mission in Tel Aviv--forty-two years after the Jewish state had been officially recognized by India in 1950.’

On Saturday, 250 or so Sri Lankan refugees ended their 2-day hunger strike at an Indonesian port. And while they continue to appeal to Kevin Rudd for permission to seek asylum in the land down under, the Australian PM is standing firm in his resolve to uphold current national anti-smuggling policies.

It’s ironic that this show of resistance coincided with World Food Day on Friday, Oct 16. The day was created 64 years ago to mark the founding of the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).

This year’s World Food Day theme is: ‘Achieving food security in times of crisis.’ The day is now often dubbed ‘World Hunger Day’ to reflect current reality--the FAO estimates that the number of people going hungry could increase by 100 million this year and therefore pass the 1 billion mark for the first time in history.

The seriousness of the situation is underscored in the 50-plus page 2009 Global Hunger Index (GHI) report released this month by the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI). Congo tops the list of hungry nations this year while Bangladesh, India, Cambodia and Pakistan stand out in the Asia-Pacific region as being in the ‘alarming’ level category. An overall tool for calculating hunger and malnutrition around the world, this year’s report focuses heavily on the idea that a key part of the solution is increasing gender equality. The evidence presented shows that higher levels of hunger are associated with lower literacy rates and access to education for women.

The World Summit on Food Security will take place in Rome, Italy, between November 16 and 18 this year.

Meanwhile, Australia continues to see a huge increase in asylum seekers as of late--the Sri Lankans assert that the recent defeat of the Tamil Tigers has put them in danger of becoming victims of genocide. Harry Purwanto, an immigration chief in West Java attests to this, saying, ‘You got to ask yourself why these women and children...men risk their lives coming over this ocean, stay in the jungle for one month…It is out of desperateness to run away from genocide.’

Leading terrorism analyst Peter Bergen has an interesting piece in the New Republic today. Bergen argues that a gradual merger is going on between the Taliban and al-Qaeda, a development he says goes well beyond the former adopting some of the latter’s tactics. This section is worth quoting at length, especially with the launch at the weekend of Pakistan’s latest military offensive against the Taliban in South Waziristan:

‘Today, at the leadership level, the Taliban and al-Qaeda function more or less as a single entity. The signs of this are everywhere. For instance, IED attacks in Afghanistan have increased dramatically since 2004. What happened? As a Taliban member told Sami Yousafzai and Ron Moreau of Newsweek, “The Arabs taught us how to make an IED by mixing nitrate fertilizer and diesel fuel and how to pack plastic explosives and to connect them to detonators and remote-control devices like mobile phones. We learned how to do this blindfolded so we could safely plant IEDs in the dark." Another explained that "Arab and Iraqi mujahedin began visiting us, transferring the latest IED technology and suicide-bomber tactics they had learned in the Iraqi resistance." Small numbers of Al Qaeda instructors embedded with much larger Taliban units have functioned something like U.S. Special Forces do-as trainers and force multipliers.’

I’m hoping to get our Pakistan correspondent’s take on this later this week. But in the meantime, an analysis in the Christian Science Monitor yesterday says that even if this latest offensive is successful, it won’t actually cut the number of attacks in Afghanistan on the US (which announced last week it was ramping up the supply of military equipment to back the offensive).

The latest militant attack in Pakistan’s Swat valley is only the most recent in a series of violent acts in the region over the past several weeks. In the heat-of-the-moment, it is understandably difficult to get exact numbers for the killed and injured--the NY Times has so far reported 30 casualties, while the BBC cited 40 for yesterday’s incident. But in such crises, tragedies get boiled down to statistics, raising the prospect that we are inevitably going to be objectifying human lives.

In contrast, a current BBC series called ‘Hunger to Learn’ does the opposite. The reports focus on highlighting the voices of individuals, taking the unique angle of showing the extraordinary ‘lengths children go to get an education’ around the world.

The newest story, ‘Swat Valley Girls,’ investigates the issue of Pakistani girls who are being targeted by Taliban militants for receiving an education. Three hundred schools in the Swat region have already reportedly been destroyed by militant attacks. And one student paints a terrifying picture of the current situation: ‘They said if we didn't close the school they would blow it up with all of us in it.’ This reminded me of a CBC article from earlier this week (‘Afghan Women’s Freedom in Jeopardy’) which reported that even with two million Afghan girls attending school, women there still face rates of violence that are ‘are among the highest in the world.’

Another ‘Hunger to Learn’ report (‘The Youngest Headmaster in the World’) earlier this week featured the story of a 16 year-old West Bengali teenager who runs free afternoon classes for 800 poverty-stricken children out of his backyard.

One comment in response to the piece speaks for itself:

‘Babar Ali gives me hope that there is an India that is fighting and beating the odds…gives me hope that one day millions of such Indians will be empowered through education to take charge of their own destiny. I salute every Babar Ali that pushes India forward every single day.’ (India)

And another:

‘A little ray of light in all that darkness. I reckon this guy deserves the Nobel Prize for peace right now. Obama could have waited a year.’ (Japan)