Pearls and Irritations

In Asia media this week: Myanmar recalls retired veterans. Plus: Race starts for Japan’s new PM; US Gaza stance an obstacle for AUKUS; Kolkata protests over gruesome rape-murder; China-Africa summit strengthens South-South ties; Pope’s Indonesia visit contradicts ‘clash of civilisations’.

Myanmar’s military junta is becoming more desperate and more brutal as it battles to retake territory seized by resistance forces.

It has stepped up deadly airstrikes — aerial massacres — and started recalling military veterans, to replace troops lost in resistance offensives since October last year.

The Irrawaddy, a Burmese exile news site, said junta airstrikes against civilian targets in the first week of this month had killed at least 40 people, including children.

Targets included a school, a bazaar, towns and an internally displaced persons’ camp.

“Resistance groups and rights bodies said the junta was brazenly escalating its campaign of war crimes by targeting civilian populations in retaliation for battlefield and territory loses,” The Irrawaddy said.

On Friday last week, junta fighter jets had dropped two 500-lb bombs on residential areas of a town near the Chinese border, killing at least 13 civilians, including a child and a pregnant woman.

On the same day, a fighter jet had used 300-lb bombs and machine guns to attack a school, killing six villagers, including a child.

Frontier Myanmar, another exile website, said hundreds of veterans had been recalled into military service. It told the story of a veteran who had retired on medical grounds, suffering blurred vision, hypertension and diabetes, but who received an unexpected letter.

“We don’t know where my father is now,” his son said.

The veteran call-up follows the junta’s activation last February of the country’s military conscription law. Frontier reported in a separate story a fifth batch of conscripts had begun training.

Three batches, each of 5,000 men, had finished their training, a military source said.

“Rights groups estimate tens of thousands of young people have fled Myanmar to avoid being called up to the deeply unpopular military,” the story said.

Ruling party looks to reinvent itself

Campaigning has started in the contest for the leadership of Japan’s ruling Liberal Democratic Party, with the winner replacing Fumio Kishida as prime minister.

Kishida, beset by scandals and low popularity ratings, decided last month not to seek re-election.

The Japan Times said his decision triggered an unprecedented chain of events, with nine candidates putting their names forward. The race was the most crowded in the party’s history — and the most unpredictable in decades — the paper said.

Two of the candidates are women and all but two have studied or worked in the US.

“The election is taking place amid falling trust in the LDP after the party found itself embroiled in a large-scale slush funds scandal that implicated over 80 party lawmakers and many of the party’s factions,” the paper said.

The paper published an opinion piece, written by Bloomberg columnist Gearoid Reidy, saying the future of the party that had defined Japan’s postwar stability was at stake.

“That Japanese politics fails to incite the drama seen on the other side of the Pacific is a feature, not a bug,” Reidy wrote.

“To remain relevant, the LDP needs to reinvent itself for a new generation. This time, the LDP wants to rebrand itself with a free-for-all race.

“Party advertising has dubbed the contest ‘The Match’, complete with a poster more suited to a wrestling Royal Rumble and a dramatic slogan: ‘Who do the times demand’?”

The opposition Constitutional Democratic Party is also conducting a leadership race, The Asahi Shimbun noted. There are four candidates.

Polls showed solid public support for a change from the LDP regime, the paper said in an editorial. Yet the CDP’s approval rating was at dismal levels, because if had failed to position itself as a viable alternative.

Backing for Israel weakens ‘international rules’ claim

Joe Biden’s stance on Gaza has dealt a body blow to America’s global leadership and the damage will be felt in the Indo-Pacific, flowing onto the AUKUS pact.

This is the view of Robert Patman, a University of Otago international relations specialist.

In an analytical article published by Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post, Patman says Biden’s support for Israel’s unrelenting assaults on Gaza has severely weakened America’s reputation at a time when its competition with China has intensified.

“The Biden administration has generously supplied the Israeli coalition government with weapons that were used to bombard Palestinians with impunity,” he says.

“At the same time, the Biden administration has continued to provide diplomatic cover and support for the Netanyahu Government.

“The claim that AUKUS is all about safeguarding international law in the Indo-Pacific against Chinese assertiveness sounds hypocritical after Gaza.

“Instead, the perception that the security pact is really a smokescreen for maintaining US primacy appears to be gaining currency in places like Australia.”

If Patman sees Australia as having future diplomatic problems with AUKUS, Australia national security expert Hugh White sees issues with two current diplomatic initiatives – the Australian plan to coordinate policing across the South Pacific and the new defence cooperation agreement with Indonesia.

Writing in Singapore’s The Straits Times, White says no one believes the Pacific initiative is just about policing.

“The new initiative is unambiguously aimed at forestalling further Chinese intrusions,” he says.

“Mr Albanese sought to deflect attention from this reality … but [he] is not fooling anyone.

“By trying to lock China out of the South Pacific — while hypocritically denying that is what it is trying to do — Australia is fighting a losing battle and damaging its standing among its small island neighbours.”

White records Defence Minister Richard Marles as saying the new defence agreement with Indonesia is the most significant pact Australia has had with its neighbour.

“That is plainly untrue,” White says.

“Mr Marles spoke of the new agreement with Indonesia as providing a foundation for working together to promote ‘the rules-based order, which obviously matters to both our countries’.

“But that statement Is not true, either.”

Horrific crime sparks 300 rallies in four weeks

Kolkata is a city of protests – more than 300 rallies over the past month.

The Indian Express labelled it a city of barricades. And even the biggest and strongest barricades have been brought down, several times.

The city rose in protest, the paper said, after 9 August when a postgraduate trainee doctor was raped and murdered at the R.G. Kar Medical College and Hospital, a government teaching hospital.

The brutal crime had challenged women’s faith in their city, the Express said.

The crime was gruesome, the Hindustan Times said in a report last month. There were allegations that the site of the attack had undergone sudden renovations. There were also allegations of lapses in security that could have led to tampering with evidence.

Resident doctors in West Bengal have been on strike in protest and this week they rejected a Supreme Court appeal to return to work, The Hindu newspaper said. They also rejected a state appeal to negotiate an end to their month-long protest.

Doctors had marched to the Health Department carrying dummy brains and eyes, plus brooms.

“With brooms in their hands, the doctors screamed that they were on a ‘Swastha Bhawan Safai Abhijan’ (Heath Department Cleaning Drive)’,” the paper said.

The doctors’ demands included punishing all possible culprits involved in the rape and murder and the alleged evidence-tampering; disciplinary action against the hospital principal; and the resignation of the Kolkata police commissioner.

Beijing hedges against Western decoupling

China has renewed its pledges of financial support for African nations, strengthening its South-South ties despite its home-grown economic difficulties.

Beijing has promised to supply a total of US$50 billion in loans, aid and corporate investment over the next three years.

President Xi Jinping outlined China’s financial promises at the recent Forum on China-Africa Cooperation, held in Beijing and attended by more than 50 African leaders.

A report in the South China Morning Post said China was trying to restructure its overseas investments and loans while continuing to position itself as a global leader committed to developing countries.

China Daily, an official newspaper, quoted Xi as telling the China-Africa summit that their combined pursuit of modernisation would set off a wave of modernisation in the Global South.

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said the China-Africa partnership was a pillar of South-South cooperation, China Daily reported.

SCMP in a separate story said Africa’s strategic importance to China was growing, but Beijing was weighing the opportunities and risks of deeper engagement with the volatile continent.

It quoted Tang Xiaoyang, a Tsinghua University African studies expert, as saying that if developed countries wanted to decouple with China, then Africa and China, as the fastest-growing regions in the Global South, could strengthen their links with each other.

Half of Timor Leste turns out for papal mass, Vatican says

The visit of Pope Francis to Indonesia provides a counter to Samuel Huntington’s “clash of civilisations” thesis, says an opinion piece in The Jakarta Post.

“[T]he visit… comes at a timely and pertinent moment,” the article says. “It heralds a much-needed call for peace and harmony in a world that desperately longs for it.”

The commentary was written by Cut Nury Hikmah Sabry, who is described as a Foreign Ministry Attaché. Pope Francis visited Indonesia as part of an Asia-Pacific tour this month. He also went to Papua New Guinea, Timor Leste and Singapore.

The article notes that the Pope met people of different faiths and toured Jakarta’s Istiqlal Mosque, signing a declaration on religious harmony with Grand Imam Nasaruddin Umar.

“The Pope’s teachings and Indonesia both show how different faiths can co-exist peacefully,” the article says. “They challenge the deterministic view of Huntington’s thesis that pits ‘us’ against ‘them’.”

A second opinion piece in The Jakarta Post says the Pope’s presence in Indonesia carried a powerful message of interfaith unity and environmental stewardship.

“The Pope has consistently highlighted the disproportionate impact of climate change on the world’s poorest populations,” says the author, environmental campaigner Hening Parlan.

“In Indonesia, this reality is stark, with many communities facing displacement because of increasingly frequent natural disasters, such as floods, droughts and heat waves.”

In Timor Leste, some 700,000 people attended the Pope’s mass in Dili, ucanews.com, the pan-Asia Catholic news site, reports. The country’s population is 1.3 million, of whom about 98% are Catholic.

The website says 300,000 people registered for the mass but it cites Vatican estimates that hundreds of thousands more turned up.

Ucanews.com also carries an opinion piece that says Pope Francis owes an apology to the Timorese people because of forced assimilation programs the Church implemented in colonial times.

The article, by Melbourne University doctoral research fellow Josh Trindade, also says the Church is guilty of cultural and spiritual appropriation of symbols of Timorese traditional spirituality.