In the Water

The Price of Oil

Oil is supposed to have hit over US$60 a barrel this week, and it's rising. Dubai-based analyst Emilie Rutledge had an interesting commentary on al-Jazeera which mentioned the ongoing US occupation of Iraq as a major contributing factor to the sudden, drastic rises in oil prices over the last two years.

From there, Rutledge brought up a good point about war profiteering in the region, when she noted that increasing oil prices-- thus indirectly the Iraq invasion and occupation-- were resulting in record levels of profits lining the pockets of elites in the Gulf states:

Since the US-led invasion and occupation of Iraq, the price of oil has steadily climbed upwards. A barrel of oil today costs

At the same time all six Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states - Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, and Saudi Arabia - have experienced levels of economic growth not witnessed since the 1970’s.

According to a recent Institute of International Finance report, the GCC's aggregate nominal GDP grew by 17% in 2004 and is likely to grow as impressively this year.

OPEC members Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates pumped 4% more oil in 2004 than in 2003, leading to a huge increase in revenues.

In the past three years, the value of Saudi oil exports has equaled the revenue generated in the 1990s

True to the sort of mammoth spectacles usually preferred by autocracies, the cheers of the Gulf's oil-gorged US-backed emirs, kings, princes, capitalists and other dictators at the mayhem and carnage of continued occupation and violence in Iraq have not tended to be very subtle. In a recent article on Dubai, for example, Mike Davis writes that testimonies to these record oil profits are in evidence all around, in mushrooming, lavish swathes of consumerist excess, and jaw-dropping temples to Futurism that would have made Albert Speer proud:

Dozens of outlandish mega-projects -- including "The World" (an artificial archipelago), Burj Dubai (the Earth's tallest building), the Hydropolis (that underwater luxury hotel, the Restless Planet theme park, a domed ski resort perpetually maintained in 40C heat, and The Mall of Arabia, a hyper-mall -- are actually under construction or will soon leave the drawing boards.

Under the enlightened despotism of its Crown Prince and CEO, 56-year-old Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum, the Rhode-Island-sized Emirate of Dubai has become the new global icon of imagineered urbanism. Although often compared to Las Vegas, Orlando, Hong Kong or Singapore, the sheikhdom is more like their collective summation: a pastiche of the big, the bad, and the ugly. It is not just a hybrid but a chimera: the offspring of the lascivious coupling of the cyclopean fantasies of Barnum, Eiffel, Disney, Spielberg, Jerde, Wynn, and Skidmore, Owings & Merrill...

...Under his leadership, the coastal desert has become a huge circuit board into which the elite of transnational engineering firms and retail developers are invited to plug in high-tech clusters, entertainment zones, artificial islands, "cities within cities" -- whatever is the latest fad in urban capitalism. The same phantasmagoric but generic Lego blocks, of course, can be found in dozens of aspiring cities these days, but Sheik Mo has a distinctive and inviolable criterion: Everything must be "world class," by which he means number one in The Guinness Book of Records. Thus Dubai is building the world's largest theme park, the biggest mall, the highest building, and the first sunken hotel among other firsts.

Of course, to look at the 'price of oil' in terms of profits and dollar value would be to accept a highly flawed ideological construct, one which ignores not only the blood price being paid in Iraq, but also, as Davis writes, the labor of migrant workers who prop up the oil economies of the Gulf States, often facing systematic abuse, racism, and exploitation.

(Meanwhile, on the demand side of things, we might want to start thinking seriously about these issues here in China... as Rutledge sort of alludes to, looking at the current trends of 'development' in China together with theories of peak-oil might suggest that we're setting ourselves up for a big, big fall:

China, which is now the world's second-largest consumer of oil, has over the past few years accounted for approximately 40% of the growth in global demand. The EIA forecasts that Chinese demand will double by 2025.)

'Systematic Exploitation' of Indonesian Migrant Workers

An important report came out a couple of weeks ago regarding the situation of Indonesian migrant workers in Hong Kong. Titled 'Underpayment: The Systematic Extortion of Indonesian Migrant Workers', the report describes the process by which women from Indonesia are hired by recruitment agencies, sent abroad to work in HK as domestic workers, and returned to Indonesia- while being purposely exploited, abused, and ripped off at every stage of the process. It is based on primary research in both Indonesia and Hong Kong by NGOs, unions, and migrant workers' groups, and is perhaps the first extensive report of its kind.

The mainstream media in HK were quite responsive to the report, and a number of articles in newspapers and TV spots were produced on its findings. While most of these media reports were positive, I don't feel that they managed to capture the full implications of what this study reveals, neither about the lives of migrant workers, nor indeed about us.

The underlying point I would stress among all the specifics of the report is that this underpayment, abuse, and exploitation is systemic, meaning that these practices are not the result of 'bad apples', but the outcomes produced by institutions involved in the migration process. Chiefly these institutions are the Indonesian government and the myriad recruitment agencies, which are for all intents and purposes running a thinly veiled gangsters' racket with the trade in migrants, and making a proportionally greater killing with higher levels of exploitation among Indonesian domestic workers in Hong Kong.

One is left with a central theme from Andre Vltchek's film Terlena, recently screened in Hong Kong, about the systematic destruction of Indonesian society and economy under the Suharto dictatorship, leaving the country with a set of ultra-exploitative, super-powerful, and mostly unaccountable institutions ravaging the population... the continuing legacy of Suharto's US-backed 'New Order' regime.

But for us in Hong Kong, it is perhaps easier to bring up this point in the mainstream, as so far we are not talking about ourselves (unless we remind ourselves, as media reports have, that 'we' have better laws and should enforce these to a greater degree).

However, while deep-rooted institutional problems are certainly prevalent in Indonesia, the point also has relevance for Hong Kong and other 'receiving countries'. The active nullifying of workers' rights and power over decision making in Indonesia, after all, makes these 'human commodities' more attractive for our consumption, according to the logic of current economic institutions. In this light, oppressive conditions in Indonesia and other countries are not just distant problems that we can remove ourselves from, but active contributors to our own economy and the choices we make.

Thus, while we can and should act on our responsibility towards enforcing the current minimum standards of employment and human rights for migrant workers, we should also question the underlying economic logic that makes attractive the levels exploitation we are all shocked at.

The other point that wasn't stressed so much, but which is also crucial to the issues being discussed, is that of migrant workers' own organizing. The research and release of this study is only one important action taken by migrant workers of all nationalities in Hong Kong, who have in the past couple of decades, organized in their communities, formed unions, and fought for very concrete changes in their conditions (being able to force the government into adopting a minimum wage for foreign domestic workers is perhaps the most obvious example). This organizing is where the real revelations and changes have come from, a point not addressed by any media report that I have seen.

Another point for us to take from this study, then, is that as migrant workers confront the powerful institutions controlling their lives, they will surely need active solidarity and support from many, many people. Working with them along these lines, while at the same time understanding and changing our own economic institutions, are effective ways in which we can make a difference after reading reports like this.

Bangladeshi Migrants' Direct Action in Kuwait

This is a couple of weeks old, but I forgot to post it earlier... seems that hundreds of Bangladeshi migrant workers in Kuwait, pissed off at their exploitation at the hands of employers and governments, recently attacked the Bangladesh Embassy causing "extensive damage" to the building.

Of course, embassy spokespeople were bewildered and wondered what could possibly have caused such impolite behavior. They didn't know there were any problems, and everything could have been resolved "had the workers filed complaints earlier," they said. Of course, nothing could be wrong in migrant workers' lives,  could it? Those scumbag officials.

At least it seems there is now the prospect of something changing, or at least of debate on migrants' issues coming out into the open. Direct action gets the goods, as the saying goes.

This is the report from Lebanon's Daily Star...

800 storm Bangladesh mission in Kuwait
Non-payment of expat workers alleged, 2 wounded, embassy extensively damaged
Staff Correspondent

Some 800 Bangladeshi workers in Kuwait stormed the Bangladesh embassy in Kuwait City yesterday over 'non-payment of their salaries', injuring two people and causing extensive damage.

The protest was reportedly linked to the workers not being paid by a Kuwaiti cleaning company they work for and the embassy's inaction to resolve the problem, but the embassy officials said they had not received any complaint about it.  "Around 150 workers armed with iron rods, hockey sticks, stones and brickbats attacked the embassy office at around 10:30am. They were part of around 800 Bangladeshi workers who arrived on the embassy premises in seven to eight buses," Nazrul Islam Khan, Bangladesh ambassador in Kuwait, told The Daily Star by phone last night.

The protestors pelted stones and brickbats to damage doors and windowpanes of the embassy office. "They also damaged furniture and tore up documents and passports of the Bangladeshi nationals submitted to the embassy for various reasons," Khan said.

The workers were employed in the Kuwaiti cleaning company Nibraj and living in Amgara area, a suburb of Kuwait City, some 45 kilometers off the embassy located in Surrah area of the capital.  A spokesman for the worker told the AFP that their employers had not paid them their wages for the last five months.

The BBC says the workers were able to get inside the building and damage its property.  The ambassador alleged that the attack was pre-planned and launched by an organsied group of the expatriate Bangladeshis. "The workers claimed they are not getting salaries for several months, but the embassy did not receive any complaint about it."  "We could have resolved the problems through negotiation had the workers filed complaints earlier," Khan said.  The workers might have been misguided by some "miscreants" who want to damage the image of the expatiate Bangladeshis living in the Middle East, he observed.  He said some Bangladeshis who came to the embassy office also tried to stop the workers but failed. Later, the embassy called in police who brought the situation under control.

The police also arrested several intruders and started interrogating them. None of the embassy officials or employees was hurt in the attack. But two Bangladeshis who came to the embassy received minor injuries during the melee, the embassy sources said.

State Minister for Expatriates Welfare and Overseas Employment Mohammad Quamrul Islam told The Daily Star that he has ordered the Bangladesh ambassador in Kuwait to conduct an immediate inquiry into the incident and report the finds to the ministry. The minister said his ministry did not receive any complaints of non-payment of salary of Bangladeshi workers in that company. He observed that the workers should have lodged complaints with the embassy before going for such subversive activities.  "I think some people are doing something against the interest of the country," he said.

Around three lakh Bangladeshis work in the oil-rich Middle Eastern country.  Kuwait's job market remained closed to Bangladeshi workers for several years until 2002. Over 40,000 Bangladeshis got employment there last year. Most of workers are manual labourers.

Power and... Forensic Science?! (1)

I went to a sort of unusual press conference today on the theme of forensics and human rights. It was organized by a pretty big regional NGO called the Asian Human Rights Commission, but they'd got together some interesting people working on interesting stuff. Mostly they were forensic scientists or physicians from a few countries in Asia talking about their work in relation to the wider political context, especially when it involved investigating crimes by state institutions or other 'sensitive' issues. These guys were pretty experienced, and the stuff that some of them had personally dealt with included identifying victims of the tsunami, victims of police 'encounters' and 'killings in custody', identifying people who had been killed by police during crackdowns on mass demonstrations, and exhuming & identifying bodies buried in mass graves.

I managed to ask a few questions to speakers from Sri Lanka, Thailand, the Philippines, and China. We didn't get to talk for too long but some interesting, grim, and frankly shameful details emerged on several issues.

Dr. Perera, a speaker from Sri Lanka, was particularly interesting. He talked a lot about the process of identifying tsunami victims over there- or indeed, the lack of such a process. The first thing that the police and military were ordered to do, he said, was clear all the bodies into unnamed mass grave sites. Thus, of the 45,000 people who were killed by the tsunami in Sri Lanka, he estimated that only 7,000-8,000 had actually been identified.

It gets more depressing. A little while after the tsunami, the Sri Lankan government came under pressure from the ambassadors and high commissioners of European countries, who essentially forced them into exhuming several grave sites and identifying the bodies. The catch was that the group set up to lead the exhumations was named the International Committee for the Identification of Foreigners. As you can probably guess, these investigations were undertaken mostly for the purpose of identifying European tourists, and grave sites were selected according to the likelihood of them containing European bodies.

"What about identification of the tens of thousands of unnamed Sri Lankan people lying in these mass graves?" I asked him.

Well, they did find many Sri Lankans in the selected graves that were exhumed, Dr. Perera said, and they of course also had to be identified in the search for tourists. These people were the lucky ones, "fortunate enough to identified because the foreign high commissions were funding the exhumations," he said.

So if you should ever be killed in a natural or human disaster, let's hope you're "fortunate" enough to be buried with a European. Maybe we in Asia should start a lottery for places such graves, or even add an extra premium to cover this in our insurance policies, just to make sure our friends and families can have some peace of mind in the event of such a tragedy. (And you thought we couldn't get any lower than the emergence of "tsunami stocks" that profited from the disaster...)

Thailand was also one of the countries affected by the tsunami, and forensic scientist Dr. Khunying Porntip Rojanasunan was there to talk about some of her own experiences with identification. Actually the unmistakable Dr. Porntip was all over the papers last year, since she was the forensic scientist who had to identify the 78 Muslim protesters killed in Thai police custody after the crackdown in Tak Bai. She mentioned some grisly details of the deaths, the fact that all the victims died from asphyxiation after being packed onto police trucks, for example, or the fact that the bodies had broken bones and other injuries from when protesters were beaten and forced to crawl, bound and almost naked, by the police and military. She went on to mention the different sorts of pressure that tried to influence her investigation, especially some thinly veiled warnings from military and government officials which tried to prevent her from "doing my best job" as a physician...

All of this reminded me of something Immanuel Wallerstein once wrote on the politicization of science, or as he put it, "the social creation of boundaries for social enquiry." Of course, direct interference by the state is a very explicit example of this, but there are many other external and internal/socialized mechanisms which keep us from exploring important questions, in all fields of study, art, culture, etc.

Maybe I'll mention some details and my thoughts on what the speakers from mainland China and the Philippines said in the next entry... they deserve more than just a passing mention at the end of a long post. But I'll just leave you with a quote from Dr. He, the Chinese speaker, when I asked him about how powerful institutions such as states and corporations could therefore be challenged in defence of the rights of people- not only in terms of scientific inquiry but in very urgent material terms given the current, rampant exploitation of people and the environment in China...

"For people here it seems natural to think about power not rights. So we have a lot of work to do..."

Well, fortunately and unfortunately- as I mentioned to someone in the comments section- I don't think this problem is unique to China or Asia, and is something people could be working on practically anywhere...

Vietnam

A short announcement of a short absence. I will be in Hanoi, Vietnam until Sunday March 13. Hopefully I will be able to speak to people and take some pictures and have something to say when I get back. Well, the pictures will be here, at any rate.

Interestingly, I recently read an incredible first-hand account about Vietnam-- albeit the South-- as it was almost twenty years ago to the month, in the final days of the US invasion and occupation. Written by John Pilger, a veteran British/Australian journalist who reported from Vietnam for nine years during the US war, it reads like some bizarre and bloodthirsty pantomime, profoundly comic were it not for the incalculable suffering it involved... you couldn't make up this passage from the middle:

The thunder had a new sound, dry and metallic. It was gunfire. The city seemed to be exploding with weapons of every kind: small arms, mortars, anti-aircraft batteries. "I think we are being bombed," said the tailor, who flinched from his counting only to turn up the volume on his radio, which was tuned to the Voice of America's Oldies and Goldies hour.

For the next half-hour the shop itself seemed to be a target and I ensured that two walls stood between me and the street. The tailor, however, remained at his post and counted his dollars while the Voice of America played "Cherry Pink and Apple Blossom White", which was barely audible above the gunfire. It is a profoundly witless song, but I sang along with the tailor, and I shall probably never forget the words. In a far corner, like a wounded bird, an old Vietnamese woman clawed at the wall, weeping and praying. A joss stick and a box of matches lay on the floor in front of her; she could not strike the matches because her whole body was shaking with fear. After several attempts I was able to light it for her, only then realising the depth of my own fear.

The loud noises, including the thunder, stopped, and there was now only a crackle of small arms fire. "Thanks to the gentlemen who have bombed us," said the tailor, "the rate has just risen a thousand piastres ..." He opened the steel shutters, looked out and said, "OK ... run!"

And to read more, check out the link!

More from me when I'm back in China.

An Invisible Disaster

While widespread measurements of economic activity such as the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) have been described as inadequate even by some mainstream economists, people on the left have long held it to be significantly worse than this. GDP, many of us have said, is not just lacking in some way, it is in fact an “ideological construct” that reflects the very specific set of values and beliefs that are prevalent under capitalism.

The ideology of GDP is evident in the selectivity of the measure, essentially when we look at what it includes and what it leaves out. So although GDP does measure something, there are many activities, productive tasks, people, and entire communities that do not matter towards its assessment of the state of the world. In this sense the process of calculating GDP reflects some of the more general values of capitalism: despite quite obviously deteriorating conditions and human indicators for the majority of people, for example, one could end up with fantastic GDP figures and a rosy outlook for the future, because the majority of people are, in fact, irrelevant to the assessment.

In calculating GDP, then, one takes into account only that which matters in the logic of the market, and ignores the “idle chatter” of the rabble, those superfluous voices from the poor, the unemployed, the disenfranchised, the elderly, and all those other people who, for most intents and purposes, might as well not exist.

This invisibility of the majority of people has been openly discussed, even celebrated, in some of the recent commentaries assessing the economic impact of the earthquake and tsunamis in Asia

Perhaps the most extreme example was when one Canadian business commentator, in a moment of frenzied callousness, compared these disasters to the neutron bomb, a weapon which can kill thousands of unwanted people through radiation but leaves property and infrastructure untouched:

Although the horrific death toll from the tsunami could go beyond 100,000, infrastructure and property damage [in India, presumably] will be limited to a strip of land along Bay of Bengal coastlines. This was the "neutron bomb" of natural disasters (although not the biggest; the Shansi, China earthquake of 1556 killed 830,000).

(Dead Kennedys fans, remember ‘Kill the Poor’? Altogether now: “away with excess enemy, with no less value to property…”)

If we limit ourselves to India, perhaps Jayanthi Iyengar, writing in the Asia Times, summarized the situation best with this line:

It is the saddest commentary that one of the world's worst human tragedies may actually have limited economic impact.

Note, however, the immediate separation between ‘human tragedy’ and ‘economic impact’. The former refers, of course, to the tens of thousands of people killed in the earthquake and tsunamis. And the latter, from the structure of the above line, has nothing to do with these people.

Thus, to sum up what the ‘sad commentary’ is for me, it seems our values are so warped that the majority of people have been rendered so irrelevant and unimportant to ‘the economic system’ that their being wiped off the face of the earth in their thousands doesn’t even get picked up on the economic radar.

Indeed, what the heck is this sort of economy based on, if it can’t even see most of the people in the world?

Surely, as proponents of Participatory Economics (ParEcon) argue, an economy’s institutions should be based on the promotion of desirable values such as equity, diversity, solidarity, self-management, classlessness, and meeting peoples’ needs, and should actively involve the participation of the community in its planning?

But if not these, then what economic values do institutions currently promote and uphold as ‘important’?

Well, we are told quite explicitly at different stages of Iyengar’s article:

Munich Re, the world's largest reinsurer, announced late last week that it expected its damage claims resulting from the tsunamis that hit Asia to be less than US$135 million.In a press statement issued last Tuesday, it said it did not expect claims related to the world's strongest earthquake in 40 years to change its forecast of 2004 profits of between $2.4 billion and $2.7 billion...

...Chennai's importance stems from its position as an important industrial and information-technology city. It is home to several global auto manufacturers such as Ford and Hyundai. Many global companies also have their research and development centers in Chennai, while global retail chains source material from the city, particularly textiles...

…In terms of tourism, the beach town of Mamallapuram near Chennai is an important destination for travelers, along with Rameshwaram and Kanyakumari in the deep south. However, the east coast of India boasts fewer tourist destinations compared with the west coast, home to Mumbai, Goa and Tranquebar and Tiruchendur in Kerala, which rank high on the international tourist map...

...Further, companies such as the San Francisco-based Levi Strauss & Co that subcontract manufacturing to firms in Indonesia, India and Sri Lanka, have made statements to the effect that the tsunami's impact on its operations would be minimal. "There was no impact to the contractors that we work with in those three countries," Levi Strauss spokesman Jeff Beckman said. However, the firm will have to adjust to shipping delays of three to seven days for orders already scheduled from India and Sri Lanka, he said.

So the deaths of fifteen-thousand or so people is “minimal” to the operation of ‘the economy’. But costs to insurance companies and multinational corporations, effects on the tourism industry, and (gasp!) a three to seven day delay in shipments… such areas are where you’ll find the real impact to ‘the economy’, when its managers start to worry and the business presses start rolling.

That which has importance, it would seem, is a function of the one value that is held most dear: maximizing profit. And whether something is important in a ‘good way’ or a ‘bad way’ would therefore largely have to do with whether it had a positive or negative impact on this value. Since the answer in the case of the deaths of these thousands of people seems to be ‘neither’—because they are poor and/or employed in negligible industries such as fishing-- this fact is not important at all.

But we should also be wary, we are told, because all these invisible and uninsured deaths could eventually start to figure into the grand economic assessment. Not immediately, of course, but later, when the possibility of disease arises:

The concerns in Chennai, however, stem from another quarter. The tsunami has hit the poor in large numbers. If the direct death count was devastating, experts expect the fallout of disease and want to be even more severe. Some analysts predict that disease could impact the ability of the people in cities such as Chennai to work, which could affect the interests of foreign companies, which have invested in India to take advantage of its cost advantage. However, Sujatha Rajagopalan, a microbiologist with Madras Medical College said, "The health service in Chennai is more than adequate to tackle any epidemic."

Disease, of course, could theoretically spread to anybody, which could potentially mean effects on the activities of coordinator and ruling classes… people with roles that are important enough to be visible through the fog of our current economic values. But rest assured, the health service in Chennai—quality based on ability to pay-- is there to protect against this unsightly outcome.

So ‘the economy’ prevails… and while we're at it, why don’t we live up to its current values and make a tidy sum out of this rather unfortunate situation? Let’s magically change the assessment from ‘irrelevant’ to ‘positive’! Yes, the above-mentioned Canadian commentator writes, the term ‘tsunami stocks’ has already cropped up to refer to listed companies that deal in various goods and services relevant to a disaster situation, many of which have seen a surge in the demand for their stocks:

…leave it to the daytraders in North America to turn the bidding for "tsunami stocks" into a buying panic. On Dec. 27, shares in Taylor Devices Inc., a maker of "shock absorber" technology that protects buildings, bridges, and other structures from earthquakes, soared 172% on the NASDAQ. This could be one stock to justifiably sell short at this time as the price-earnings ratio is close to 100…

This tragedy is, after all, only human.

Tourists preferred

Some critical and political reporting on the tsunami and its after effects is starting to trickle out. This is just a quick post to reference this recent article from The Observer... it cites people in Thailand complaining that foreign tourists are being privileged with aid and assistance that is denied to locals:

They are given donations of food, water and clothes, but Surin is still waiting for an operation to remove the debris that has been lodged in his chest since his boat broke apart under the wave. He says that the doctors - like the government - are too busy looking after the 'farang' (foreigners) to care for him.

'I cannot stand on my own two feet. I feel so sad and helpless waiting for the government to assist me. Not one official has come to see me.'

It is an increasingly common complaint in this part of the country, where sympathy for the foreign victims is mixed with resentment at the priority treatment they are given. Although the tsunami hit rich and poor alike, its aftermath has highlighted the sharp divisions between affluent foreign tourists and poor local villagers.

More opportunities for warnings

As an adjunct to the last couple of posts, there is an interesting article from the Times of India today which indicates that there were several opportunities to sound a warning before the tsunamis struck the coast of India...

India's grief over Sunday's tsunami has not yet given way to anger, with most people too stunned by the awesome power of nature to blame their government. But the media are beginning to ask the question -- was the bureaucracy fatally complacent?

Reports say the top brass of the Indian Air Force knew their Nicobar air base had been submerged atleast an hour before the waves struck the mainland coast.

The Indian Meteorological Department knew of the earthquake within minutes of its occurance in Indonesia but it  informed the Home Ministry only after the tsunami had struck, a ministry official told Reuters.

So, the information was in many places apparently...  but not where it needed to be.

Tsunami Help

The previous post has been somewhat updated, seemed more appropriate than writing a new one...
Also, check out this blog, Tsunami Help, for updates on the disaster in Asia, and information on how to help. It seems to be maintained by several different contributors, and has some useful information and interesting articles.

Northeast Asia

I have been posting a lot about Northeast Asia, particularly Korea, lately, and a couple of people have asked me why. Surely, to paraphrase some of the queries, there can't be more to this region than yet another dictator who is starving his own people and threatening the Free World with weapons of mass destruction?

Well, there's too much to say on this topic than I can do justice to, even if I were writing a book and not a blog post. But even for those who can't read Korean, there is a vast amount of excellent English-language material out there that people interested in finding out more must look at.

For a good basic intro to the issues at stake in Northeast Asia, this recording of a Noam Chomsky radio talk on US-Korea relations given in 2003 is definitely worth a listen.

In terms of more extensive treatment of the subject, I'd first and foremost recommend the work of the excellent Korea historian Bruce Cumings. His two-volume work 'Origins of the Korean War' is thoroughly researched and indispensible, in my opinion, and is a defining piece of scholarship on Korean history, at least in English.

His latest piece, as far as I know, is an article in the December 2004 issue of Le Monde Diplomatique, titled 'Korea: Forgotten Nuclear Threats'.

ZNet also maintains a Korea Watch section which has quite a good collection of articles and a few links. Particularly valuable on this site is the work of Australia-based writer and professor Gavan McCormack. An interview called 'Making Sense of the Korea Crisis' and an article titled 'North Korea: Coming in from the Cold?' are very useful for understanding the present situation.

And for Korea-based sources, be sure to check out Base21, a huge indymedia-style website with regularly updated articles, links, videos, and pictures dealing with various issues and movements in Korea...