Month: August 2017

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Central Visaya

Millisphere (abstract noun). A discrete region of approximately one-thousandth of the total world population – around seven million people. A lens through which to examine human geography.

This month I ran into a former Whanganui man who had just emerged from the millisphere of Central Visaya (pop six million) in the Philippines (pop 101 million).

My Maori acquaintance had worked in Australia before traveling in Asia and settling down in Lapu Lapu, Mactau Island – connected by a causeway to the island of Cebu in the Visaya island group. The Mactau-Cebu airport is the busiest in the Philippines after Manila.

Nicknamed “Ceboom”, Cebu is one of the more developed parts of Philippines and is estimated to have over half a million call-centre operators. My contact had run into a spot of “competition” there trying to start a call-centre and had to beat a hasty retreat. It’s the sort of place where, “if you don’t have a gun, you’d better go out and get one,” he told me.

Lapu Lapu is named after the 16th century ruler of Mactau who is remembered as the “first native to resist colonisation.” Lapu Lapu’s warriors, in 1521, had killed Magellan in the surf there. Magellan, after crossing the Pacific was the first European to land in the Philippines and had presented an image of the Holy Child to the ruler of Cebu. The “Santo Nino de Cebu” is still the centre of an annual Catholic festival in Cebu.

The Philippines is a Christian country with only about 5% Muslim (Moro), mostly in Mindanao in the south. Many of the Moro have been displaced from their original lands and have moved to the slums of Manila, Cebu and Davao (the home city of the president of the Philippines, Rodrigo Duterte).

Duterte’s father was a Chinese/Filipino from Cebu and his mother is of Moro descent.

In 2013 Duterte was elected mayor of the Mindanao capital, Davao, which in 2016 had the highest murder rate and second highest rape rate and is one of the top five areas for child prostitution and sex tourism in the Philippines. Ironically, in 2009, Duterte had promoted the empowerment of Filipina women with his “Magna Carta for women.”

While Duterte was mayor of Davao, 1400 drug users, petty criminals and street children were summarily executed by police and vigilantes. “The man is barking mad and has a history of violence,” my contact said. Duterte put a ban on fireworks, smoking in public places and the sale of alcohol between 1am and 8am. He reduced the speed limit in Davao and made all malls install high definition CCTVs at all entrances and exits.

In 2016 Duterte campaigned for the presidency on “putting drug dealers in funeral parlors not prisons” and getting rid of crime and corruption in government and the police. “In Cebu the police carry two guns, one to leave with the body to look like they were shot at,” my contact told me. “The wider population is fantastic though” he thought. Many of the people were very poor with barely enough money for food and some were ill-nourished and the infrastructure was poor. There were power “brown-outs” and sewage spills in  the street, he told me.

Since Duterte became the president, Philippines police have killed 3500 “drug personalities” and thousands more have been killed in unexplained circumstances. Last week after one of the bloodiest nights in the Philippines war on drugs Duterte said “I will kill another thirty-two every day, then maybe we can reduce what ails this country.”

Indonesia is following the Philippines example with 60 killings of drug dealers so far this year compared with 18 in 2016 and Donald Trump praised Duterte for “doing an unbelievable job in his anti-narcotics campaign.”

Duterte admitted that police were “corrupt to the core” but has vowed to issue “a thousand pardons a day” to protect police who commit human rights abuses and to issue a presidential pardon to himself for mass murder at the end of his six year term.

A more accurate translation from Hebrew of “thou shalt not kill,” apparently is “you shall not murder”. In the Philippines Rodrigo “the punisher” Duterte ultimately decides what is killing and what is murder.

 

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Papua

Millisphere (noun). A discrete region of roughly one-thousandth of the total world population. Around seven million people but anywhere between 3.5 and 14 million will do.

This weekend the protracted elections in Papua New Guinea (PNG) finally came up with a winner. Peter O’Neill’s People’s National Congress (tainted with accusations of corruption) won – but with a reduced majority.

The ABC commented that the average Australian knew more about “what Donald Trump had for breakfast” than they did about their neighbour PNG – partly due to the number of ABC journalists covering PNG being slashed from six to one.

Pre-European contact the Sultan of Tidore in the Mollacas included the western “bird’s head” end of New Guinea in his sultanate – collecting a tribute of tortoiseshell and bird of paradise feathers – which were then traded all the way to China and Europe.

.The first recorded European contact was in 1528 when a Spanish ship kidnapped three men from Manus Island and took them to the Philippines. One year later the ship passed Manus Island again and the three islanders jumped overboard and swam for shore.

In 1494 the world’s maritime trade had been divided between the Portuguese and the Spanish by the “Tordesilla Line” along the 321st meridian, dividing South America. In 1529 the circle was closed at the anti-meridian on the 141st meridian – the north/south line that divides PNG from Papua in Indonesia to this day.

Before World War One PNG was divided into German New Guinea to the north and British Papua in the south. Administered as one by Australia from 1914 until independence in 1975 and with a population of 7.1 million PNG qualifies as a millisphere. Another option is to combine the various tribes and languages into the one millisphere of “Papua” covering the entire island (total population 11.5 million).

The previously Dutch territory, once known as Irian Jaya, now the Indonesian provinces of Papua (3.5m) and West Papua (0.9m), could equally qualify as a millisphere. Before annexation by Indonesia in 1969 Papua/W Papua was almost entirely Melanesian, now, because of migration, the population is almost half Indonesian/Malay, colonising the lowlands for palm-oil, while the Papuans are still the majority in the highlands.

Indonesia claims to have eleven million Melanesians, counting the Melanesian/Malay inhabitants in the Moluccas and East Nusa Tenggara, and there are another million Melanesian/Polynesians in the millisphere of Te Moananui (covering the Pacific) giving a total nearing 20 million.

The “Melanesian Spearhead,” was formed in 1986 by Fiji, PNG, The Solomon Islands, Vanuatu and the Kanaks of New Caledonia to create a united Melanesian voice. The Melanesian Spearhead has a HQ funded by China in Port Vila (Vanuatu) and it calls for a “free West Papua,” a position endorsed by New Zealand Maori and Australian Aboriginals.

Because half of all “Melanesians” are Indonesian, Indonesia has applied to join the Melanesian Spearhead and have appointed Tantowi Yahya as their ambassador to  NZ and the Pacific.The son of a plastic recycler from Sumatra, Tantawi rose to become a TV presenter and country music singer before turning to politics. His job, he says, is to correct the “misperception” about the Indonesian presence in Papua.

Meanwhile in New Zealand this month a small group of MPs from National, Labour, the Maori Party and the Greens signed a  declaration calling for “ an internationally supervised self-determination vote in Papua.”

The Free Papua Movement  was formed in 1963. “We do not want modern life! We refuse any kinds of development: religious groups, aid agencies and government organisations, just leave us alone!” they said at the time.

On YouTube you can find “Everything can be burnt,” a video by RNZ’s Johnny Blades and Koroi Hawkins about their recent trip across the border from PNG into Indonesia’s Papua province, to report on the campaign for Papuan independence there.

“You should go to the highlands,” Johnny told me, “the gardens there are amazing.” Agriculture is said to have started simultaneously in Asia, Europe and the Papuan highlands – where gardening is still practiced in the old way. Melanesians are to this day differentiated by altitude and their true homeland is in the New Guinea highlands – on both sides of the 141st meridian.

 

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Changchun

Millisphere (noun): A discrete region of around 7 million people. A sphere of interest of roughly one-thousandth of the total world population.  

Liu Xiaobo (1955-2017) the poet, literary critic and Nobel Peace Prize winner, who died recently in prison, was born in Changchun, in China’s north-east, near the border with North Korea. Changchun has a metropolitan/urban population of 7.5 million and is known as the “Detroit of China”.

Changchun’s mayor, Liu Changlong, shares the Liu family name but the real power lies with the party-secretary, Wang Junzheng. Wang is a typical communist party operative; with doctorates in social science and management.

Changchun started as a minor siding on the Russian railway-line before being captured by the Japanese who made it into the capital of their Manchurian domain. Unlike most Chinese cities, whose layout evolved from antiquity, Changchun was laid out by the Japanese in the 20th century on western lines; built to be a symbol of Japanese rule: progressive, beneficent and modern.

Liberated by the Russians in 1946 it was briefly held by the nationalist Kuomintang before falling to Mao Tse Dung’s army in the “siege of Changchun” when 80% of the town’s residents were deliberately starved to death.

Liu Xiaobo completed a PhD on Aesthetics and Human Freedom and rose to the top of Chinese academia, lecturing at Beijing University and abroad. He set up and was the president (2003-2007) of China’s PEN (an international writers organisation) and flew back from overseas to negotiate on behalf of the protesters in Tiananmen square.

Liu Xiaobo had a moment of epiphany in the Museum of Modern Art in New York. He reasoned that he could use western civilisation as a tool to critique China and to use his own creativity to critique the west. “Islamism” he called  extremely intolerant and bloodthirsty and he called Chinese intellectuals search for rationalism and harmony in Marxist materialism and Kantian idealism: “slave mentality.” All it would take for China to come right was “300 years of colonisation and to make the Dalai Lama the next leader” he said, using intellectual shock tactics.

Liu Xiaobo got himself locked up the fourth time for drawing up “Charter 08”, a list of nineteen changes Liu thought necessary for the future of China. These included an independent legal system, freedom of association and  the elimination of a one-party state. Liu advocated a federated republic, like the United States, with elected public officials instead of centrally appointed functionaries, like party-secretary Wang. Liu Xiaobo was arrested in 2009 for “inciting the subversion of state power”.

Liu Xiaobo was awarded the Nobel Prize in 2010, while in prison, “for his long and nonviolent struggle for fundamental human rights in China.” Faced with international criticism the Chinese government’s bottom line was that Liu was imprisoned “to make sure a society of 1.4 billion runs smoothly.” The dissident artist Ai Wei Wei (exiled in Germany) said: “Liu was imprisoned for his words.”

Liu Xiaobo said the internet was “God’s gift to the  Chinese people” calling it the first medium the Chinese Communist Party can’t control. The internet makes traditional  media more truthful by giving Chinese citizens a place to “meet while not meeting,” he reasoned.

From the centre of accademia Liu Xiaobo told the Party and the Chinese people that all was not rosy-red. The “Red and the Black”, the government and the underworld, had become one, he said. China had no ideology other than vulgar conspicuous consumption and ultra-superficial patriotism, full of blind self-confidence, empty boasts and pent-up hatred. The Chinese Communist Party was a 19th century authoritarian violent government where corruption was pervasive, Liu concluded. “China has no freedom, therefore Tibet has no autonomy,” he once said.

In his condolences to Liu’s widow, Liu Xia, the 14th Dalai Lama said that the people of China should honour Liu Xiaobo by carrying forward the principles he long embodied, which would lead to a more harmonious, stable and prosperous China.

Liu Xiaobo’s ashes were spread at sea so as not to create a shrine where people might pay homage to this poet, but in his leafy hometown of Changchun, Liu Xiaobo’s ideas would have been discussed, if not in public then on the internet.