It's not about rights or peace

There are many reasons why crimes happen, but let us not get befuddled by the view that we have to sacrifice our rights in order to live in peace.

Murder victims: Police personnel bringing out the bodies of the five men who were gunned down at an apartment in Sungai Nibong.

It is quite nice to hear the Prime Minister declare that any future development in criminal laws will not infringe upon human rights. Well, let’s hope that is true.

The thing is, by this statement there is an unsaid implication that human rights and crime are something that are somehow related. One retiree for example said that the price for more freedom is higher crime.

I wondered if this is true. After all, in our country, we respect the old, so perhaps there is some wisdom in this octogenarian’s statement.

So, I decided to poke around the information superhighway (Hah! Bet you haven’t hear that term for a while), and I chanced upon a study done by the United Nations office on drugs and crime in 2012. The study was a comprehensive survey of homicides around the world.

If greater freedom equates with greater crime (here the crime in question is murder), then we should see countries with the greatest civil liberties leading the pack. Crickey, a place like Denmark should, theoretically, be littered with dead bodies everywhere. You shouldn’t be able to walk to your corner shop to buy your poached cod or whatever is eaten in those parts, without having to step over cadavers riddled with bullet holes.

After all, they have ratified about thirty human rights treaties (including one against the death penalty); their criminals must be running around high on Carlsberg and whacking every Thor, Dag and Hagen that they come across.

But, this is not the case. They have one of the lowest murder rates in the world. 0.9 per every 100,000 people. To give that some sense of perspective, our murder rate is 2.3 per every 100,000 people. In fact, looking at the study, we see that there is simply no correlation between civil liberties and crime. The regions with the highest homicide rate tend to be those which are desperately poor.

Now this is of course a cursory amble of the Internet on my part and not some serious academic study, but it seems to me that it is very clear that to equate more human rights to more crime is simply not supported by the facts.

The reason I raise this is that we are often faced with the argument that it is one or the other. Rights or peace. This is simply not the case.

In the light of the recent spate of high profile and horrific crimes that we have faced and the police force’s “war” on gangsters, let us not get befuddled by the view that we have to sacrifice our rights in order to live in peace.

There are a myriad of reasons why crimes happen and these must be examined and studied so that any “war” on crime has to be fought on the correct “battlefield”.

For example, poverty and the vast disparity of wealth between the haves and the have not’s seem to be one of the things that the world’s most murder ridden nations have in common.

It sure as heck is not their observance of human rights principles.

So, yes, let us make all efforts to ensure that this country of ours has the least crime possible, but leave our rights (what little of them we have) well enough alone.

 Brave New World by AZMI SHAROM
Azmi Sharom (azmisharom@yahoo.co.uk) is a law teacher. The views expressed here are entirely his own.

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Why nations fail or succeed ?

This is much the East can learn from the West on economics

 

AUGUST is the holiday month – the time when we pause to take stock of a hectic first half year, and wonder what lies ahead.

Nestled in the hills of northern Laos, the ancient city of Luang Prabang sits around a bend in the river Mekong, isolated for centuries and renowned today as a city of 15th century Buddhist temples, protected as a Unesco Heritage site. It is a good place to catch up on one’s history to try to comprehend the uncertain future.

The recent best-seller by Massachusetts Institute of Technology economics Prof Daron Acemoglu and Harvard political scientist James Robinson, Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity and Poverty (Penguin 2012), argued that national failure were all due to man-made factors, more specifically, how political institutions became extractive, rather than inclusive.

Acemoglu and Robinson is provocative because they stir up the debate on why Latin American economies never quite made it, even though they are resource rich. They did not succeed despite huge wealth because their political institutions remained extractive, meaning a few hundred families or elite essentially controlled the key resources of the continent for their own benefit.

Another obvious example is the difference between North Korea, one of the poorest countries around, and South Korea, an innovative and dynamic economy capable of challenging the best of the West, by learning from the West.

The Acemoglu and Robinson book touches on a raw nerve because many in the West are unsure whether they will continue to be dominant in the years to come. They argue that China will sooner or later stop growing because the institutions there are becoming extractive. But as one review argued, it cannot be ruled out that Chinese institutions would evolve into inclusive systems. After all, China could not have succeeded without being inclusive – taking more than half a billion out of poverty

In the same genre, Stanford Professor of Classics and History, Ian Morris’ 2011 book, Why the West Rules – For Now: The Patterns of History and What They reveal about the Future, takes also the grand sweep, arguing not only about the factors of biology and sociology, but also about geography.

So instead of Acemoglu and Robinson’s dictum, “institutions, institutions and institutions”, Morris considers that it is more about “location, location, location.” He argues that biology and sociology explain the similaries in development between the East and West, but “it is geography that explains why the West rules.”

This view concurs with Asian historian Wang Gung-wu’s perceptive insight that the West developed maritime and today air and cyberspace technology and power, whereas China remains essentially a continental or land-based power. Geography does shape behaviour and perception.

Personally, I am less persuaded by what caused nations to fail than what caused them to succeed, and not just succeed for a few decades, but remain relevant for centuries.

Most people forget that the first modern economy in the world was not Portugal or Spain, or England, but Holland. Even though the Portuguese and Spaniards opened up the maritime routes to America and the Spice Islands, they remained feudal powers that never evolved the institutions to manage their colonies efficiently and professionally.

Last month in Amsterdam, I was given a copy of Marius van Nieuwkerk’s history of Dutch Golden Glory: The Financial Power of the Netherlands through the Ages (2006). This wonderful gem of a book, beautifully illustrated, attributed the rise of Holland as a conquest of man over water. As we all know, Holland has only a population of 16.6 million, in an area 20% larger than the island of Taiwan, ranked 17th in the world in terms of GDP, and 14th in terms of GDP per capita, at US$46,100 just behind the United States (US$50,000) and Japan (US$46,700), but ahead of old rivals, UK (US$38,600).

Historically, because of constant flooding in its low-lying land, the Dutch learnt to work cooperatively to build dykes, through “poldering” – constant irrigation, drainage and pumping of water. Thus, in their constant struggle against flooding and weather risks, the Dutch developed their infrastructure cooperatively, learning how to manage risks through precaution (high savings), consultation (constant feedback) and inspection (maintenance of strict standards). To do so, they built highly inclusive, flexible and innovative institutions that opened up to global trade.

Their constant struggle against water meant that the Dutch had superior shipbuilding technology, drawing on timber from the Baltic areas and arbitraging the trade with northern Europe. By 1598, the Dutch had established the first Insurance Chamber, the largest trading company by 1602 (VOC), and forerunner of the first central bank, the Amsterdam Exchange Bank in 1609, Merchants Exchange 1611, and Grain Exchange in 1616.

VOC, which had trading monopoly for the East Indies in the spice trade, was so profitable that between 1602 and 1796, the average dividend was 18.5% annually! Indeed, the Dutch were successful because they were not only good traders, but also insurers and bankers to the rest of Europe. One tends to forget that as late as 1750, 30% of the share capital of the Bank of England was owned by the Dutch.

What is remarkable about the Dutch model is not that it has not been taken over by other larger powers, but its sustainability and durability. The Dutch runs one of the largest pension funds in the world, and a recent study has shown that there are over 400 Dutch companies with over a century of history, including one that survived from1530. It goes to show that a country may be small, but through thrift, hard-work, openness, and good governance, the country could succeed despite the odds.

There is much that the East has still to learn from the West. No history is a straight line, and there is nothing inevitable about success or failure. Whether it is Abenomics or Likenomics, the key to sustainable and inclusive growth is about strong social institutions with the right checks and balances.

  
Think Asian by Tan Sri Andrew Sheng

TAN SRI ANDREW SHENG is president of the Fung Global Institute.

Japan on the militaristic path again! Never forget August 15!

Plans are afoot to revise Japan’s postwar peace constitution to assert its right to declare war and rename the self-defence forces.

Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force's helicopter destroyer DDH183 Izumo, the largest surface combatants of the Japanese navy, is seen during its launching ceremony in Yokohama, south of Tokyo August 6, 2013. The biggest warship since World War II, sparking grave concerns about the country's military buildup as observers said the vessel is actually an aircraft carrier

On Aug 6, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe took part in a ceremony marking the anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima in 1945, an event which, combined with the following atomic bombing of Nagasaki, compelled Japan to surrender nine days later on Aug 15, ending the Second World War.

Also on the same day, Japan launched its largest warship since the war. The vessel was launched at Yokohama, where Commodore Mathew Perry came with his US Asiatic fleet in 1853 to open Japan to the West. The 250m-long Izumo looks like an aircraft carrier, though officially it is a destroyer.

Well, it’s a flat-top super-destroyer that carries 14 helicopters with a flight deck where combat aircraft that can vertically take off and land can be accommodated.  

The new vessel shares the same name as the famed Japanese cruiser which played a pivotal part in the Shanghai War of 1937, withstanding repeated Chinese attacks.

In May, Abe offended China and South Korea by tacitly denying Japan’s imperialist aggression toward its Asian neighbours. The Japanese leader stated that there is no established definition of invasion, either academically or internationally.

Around the same time, he posed for a photo in the cockpit of a military training jet fighter emblazoned with the number 731, the unit number of an infamous Imperial Army group that conducted lethal chemical and biological wartime experiments on Chinese civilians. Moreover, Abe has reportedly moved to permit the use of the rising sun banner, a symbol of horror to Asian victims of Japanese colonial aggression.

Plans are afoot to revise Japan’s postwar peace constitution to assert its right to declare war and rename the self-defence forces as the national “defence forces”, the dropping of “self-defence” implying the forces may be engaged in action other than genuine self-defence.

One consequence of these new developments is the serious concern China, South Korea and even the United States are showing for a possible return of militarism in an increasingly nationalistic Japan.

They fear that a militaristic Japan is likely to turn imperialistic and invade its Asian neighbours again.

But their fear is totally unnecessary. The Liberal Democrats may all become ultranationalists like Abe and his mentor, former Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi, but that does not mean they will turn militaristic. Militarism isn’t imperialism.

Japan turned militaristic after the Taisho democracy because of the rise of ultranationalism, which held Western democracy as the source of all evils during the Great Depression. In this period the military was viewed as the only stabilising power.

The militarists became imperialists after they were convinced that the West was purposely choking Japan’s economic lebensraum in Asia.

Moreover, the Japanese militarists had an excellent role model in Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Germany.

Times have changed. There isn’t another Great Depression that may trigger the turning of the Japanese toward ultranationalism, no matter how hard the Liberal Democratic Party and populistic Toru Hashimoto’s Japan Restoration Party may try.

The military isn’t the stabilising power anymore. People have been taught not to blindly obey the powers that be. Besides, what Abe and his Liberal Democrats want is what a “normal state” enjoys under its “non-peace constitution”.

All Abe and company are trying to achieve is to show that Japan is strong enough militarily to resist pressure, diplomatic or otherwise, from China and Uncle Sam in order to win more votes and continue ruling Japan.

Koizumi tried to do so, but failed before he had to step down as prime minister. There was a backlash. The Democratic Party of Japan saw its almost half-century rule of Japan end.

Abe defeated the Democrats last year. He is picking up where Koizumi left off. The Japanese leaders may be ultranationalists, but never will they turn militaristic and start the aggression of a renascent Japanese empire

Sources: Asia News Network - The China Post/The Star

Japanese Empire

Why we must never forget this day August 15, 1945

On August 15, 1945, Japan declared its unconditional surrender, bringing to an end its colonial wars of militarist aggression.

Germany shared Japan's guilt as the cause of World War II, and shared its status as a vanquished country. But after the war, Germany adopted a sincere, clear and thorough attitude to its historical responsibilities - during a visit to Poland former German chancellor Willy Brandt earned admiration from international public opinion when he went down on both knees before the memorial to the Warsaw Ghetto. In contrast, this August 15 large numbers of Japanese politicians went to worship at the Shrine to the worst of Japanese militarists and war criminals, people like Toujou Hideki.

The people of China treasure August 15 as a day of victory. This was the day when a nation that had lived under a century of enslavement to foreign powers finally rid itself of its oppressors. Since then, China has followed the path of unity, peace, and development. Especially since the launch of reform and opening up, national strength has been restored, shame has been put aside, and courage has returned. We must guard against any threat to domestic or regional security posed by the renaissance of Japan’s deviant right-wing extremists. We must have confidence in our moral strength to stand up to the challenges that such people pose, and the provocations they offer.

When we look back, it is for the purpose of better moving forward. China grows by remembering history; the world develops by remembering history. In contrast those Japanese politicians who cling to their country's historical errors will only prevent the Japanese from finding a path to a better future.

Edited and translated by Zhang Qian, People's Daily Online

Read the Chinese version:为什么这一天无法忘记；source: People's Daily Overseas Edition; author: Hua Yiwen


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