Month: May 2005

Burmese human rights activist James Hla Saw sat across from me at a teahouse in New York City. I’d met the 29-year-old Columbia University graduate a week before, on July 15, when he and fellow Burmese human rights activists gathered near the UN to protest Special Envoy Razali Ismail’s recent trip to the Asian nation.

The protesters included Australians from the All Burma Student Democratic Organization (ABSDO) in Sydney, a Japanese Buddhist monk, and activists from across the US. It was the first time that various organizations, including the Free Burma Coalition and All Burma Students League (ABSL), had converged with leaders from Australia, Belgium, Canada, San Francisco, New York, Japan, and India. One concrete result was the formation of the Democratic Federation of Burma, a new network of pro-democracy groups. read more

Pakistan is one of the Bush administration’s close allies in the war against terrorism. Yet anti-American sentiment there has been growing with unprecedented force since the US conducted a war in Iraq, another Muslim country in the neighborhood.

In March, tens of thousands of people took to the streets to oppose the start of the war. While the coalition of Islamic parties in the United Council for Action (MMA) led the opposition marches in major cities, they won considerable support from secular forces. The anger has been growing since 2001, when hundreds of ordinary Pakistanis living in the North West Frontier Province lost their lives in the US-led military operation against the Taliban in neighboring Afghanistan. read more

International financial institutions like the World Bank, which erroneously assume that economic growth automatically benefits all members of society, tend to concentrate on increasing GDP. But the assistance they provide trickles down to the poor in slow, halting drops. In fact, according to one recent study, 75 percent of the world’s poor live in rural areas, yet the vast majority of international aid goes to developing mega-cities. Further, such aid often does little more than create bureaucracies and export markets. For example, 75 percent of the $30 billion in foreign aid sent to Bangladesh over the past 26 years ended up elsewhere, spent on equipment, luxuries, and consultants. read more