Unfree Media Asia

By Rory Stewart,
Cool poker-players, we are tempted to believe, only raise or fold: they only increase their bet or leave the game. Calling, making the minimum bet to stay, suggests that you can't calculate the odds or face losing the pot, and that the other players are intimidating you. Calling is for children. Real men and women don't want to call in Afghanistan: they want to dramatically increase troops and expenditure, defeat the Taliban, and leave. Or they just want to leave. Both the disciples of the surge and the apostles of withdrawal found some satisfaction in one passage in President Obama's speech at West Point on Dec 1:
Left, a leg up for the Afghans

By Ahmed Rashid, New York Review of Books
My Life with the Taliban
by Abdul Salam Zaeef, translated from the Pashto and edited by Alex Strick van Linschoten and Felix Kuehn
Columbia University Press, 331 pp., $29.95

For thirty years Afghanistan has cast a long, dark shadow over world events, but it has also been marked by pivotal moments that could have brought peace and changed world history.

One such moment occurred in February 1989, just as the last Soviet troops were leaving Afghanistan. Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze had flown into Islamabad--the first visit to Pakistan by a senior Soviet official. He came on a last-ditch mission to try to persuade Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, the army, and the Interservices Intelligence (ISI) to agree to a temporary sharing of power between the Afghan Communist regime in Kabul and the Afghan Mujahideen. He hoped to prevent a civil war and lay the groundwork for a peaceful, final transfer of power to the Mujahideen.

read on at the NY Review
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By Kenneth Roth
As the world's most populous democracy, India might be expected to be at the forefront of global efforts to promote human rights. In the past, India sometimes took a leadership role in defending rights, such as by opposing apartheid in South Africa and supporting the 1988 democracy movement in Burma. However, its current foreign policy often would make a confirmed dictator proud.

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The moral high ground gives way

Meenakshi Ganguly,

Western colonialism collapsed after the Second World War, leaving much of the world in shambles, resources looted, and people suppressed and impoverished. As Indians know all too well, borders of newly independent states were often carelessly drawn, leading to violence that plagues us generations later. Those most affected by these                        decisions never had a voice at the high table.  more

 HRW senior South Asia researcher

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Commentary: By Kate Saunders
On March 10, 2008, several hundred Tibetan monks from Drepung, one of the 'great three' Gelugpa monasteries of Tibet, began an orderly march to Lhasa. The monks, protesting against political campaigns at their monastery that were impeding religious practice, were stopped by armed police. Some wept as they recited long life prayers for the Dalai Lama. On the same day - chosen because it was the symbolic 49th anniversary of Tibet's National Uprising against Chinese rule - monks in smaller, more remote monasteries in eastern Tibet protested too against China's policies and religious repression.

By THA ZIN, Rangoon
Mental torture the punishment for minor infringements

The cell I was allotted measured about 15 feet square, with a row of metal bars forming o ne wall. It was lit by a 40-watt bulb. o ne corner had a bamboo mat, and there sat my cell-mate, a young woman. I joined her, sitting at o ne corner of the mat and answering her questions: "Who are you? What interrogation center did you come from? How was your interrogation?" We chatted, describing our experiences. I described the beatings and the kicks, and she showed me how her fingers had been injured by her interrogators with a sharp piece of bamboo.

At about 8 p.m., as the prison fell into silence, I heard knocks o n the back wall of the cell. My companion knocked in reply--this was apparently o ne method of communication between the prisoners. We were also able to talk directly through the bars to three young women in a cell facing ours. We talked into the night and finally turned in around 2 a.m. I found it difficult to sleep in these new surroundings and with the light burning all night.
The prison was awake early, and there was activity outside our cell. A plate of warm porridge was served up at 7 a.m.

Around 10 a.m., I heard rhythmic shouts of what sounded like "take" and "pour," accompanied by the splashing of water. The noise came from a yard beyond our cell, and to find out what the commotion meant I unfastened a window at the top of o ne of the cell walls and peered out. Up to 20 women were splashing themselves with water from a brick-built tank, supervised by a cane-wielding warder shouting the commands "take" and "pour." At the command "take," the women would scoop water from the tank and then splash themselves clean with it when the warder yelled "pour."

As I watched that strange scene, I heard a loud voice behind me. "Who opened the window?" asked a warder.

I had unfastened the window by untying a piece of metal wire that secured its two handles and then sliding back a bolt. "I opened it," I confessed.

"Who ordered you to do that?" the warder barked.

It was just a window, I protested. Where was the harm in opening it? But opening a window seemed to be a cardinal crime, for after again haranguing me the warder condemned me to be transferred to the prison's "Death Row."

I picked up my small pile of clothes, bid goodbye to my cellmate and the three inmates of the neighboring cell and followed a warder to my new, ominously named quarters.

Death Row was a brick building, divided by a narrow passageway lined by five small cells and two larger o nes. As its chilling name implied, it housed prisoners sentenced to death. And now I was o ne of them.

I was assigned to o ne of the larger cells, which measured about 20 feet by 12 feet. About 10 women shared the cell, and they gave me a noisy welcome, showering me with questions. Within o ne week, all but two of them had been led away.

The cell in which I was to spend several months had a slop pail in o ne corner and a pot of drinking water in another. We shared three plates and two bamboo mats, surviving o n a diet of boiled peas, spinach, sour soup, fried prawn paste and tamarind. When we were able to leave the cells and cross the yard to take a shower, we collected what vegetables and greens we could find to add some variety to our meals, using a knife fashioned from a hair clip to cut the meager produce.

Sometimes women who received food parcels from visiting family members shared out such treats as homemade curry, fish paste and fried vegetables. I noticed, however, that the parcels weren't as big or as appetizing if they were brought in by husbands of the imprisoned women.

One woman inmate told me: "When men are imprisoned, their wives struggle to visit them, despite many difficulties. But when women are imprisoned, their husbands just try to be dutiful. They offer such excuses as caring for the children, household work and daily chores. Some husbands even take up with another woman."

We had some freedom o n Death Row--freedom to talk and argue among ourselves. And to pray. I still didn't know how long I would have to serve in prison. And why Death Row? It was not a good omen.

There were worse places to be, however. o ne punishment cell was a dark, windowless place with a floor of wet sand. Four or five days in this dank, fetid hole were the punishment for violating prison regulations.

At night, we boosted spirits by singing. Some of the inmates knew the popular songs of performers like Zaw Win Hut and Hay Mar Ne Win, and they had good voices, too. I'm no singer, so I related some of the books I had read.

After four months, just as I was getting used to the routine o n Death Row, my name was called and I was escorted to a jeep parked at the prison entrance. The jeep drove to another prison building, where two intelligence officers, two soldiers and a woman warder accompanied me inside. It was crowded with students, all waiting to appear before a prison court martial.

I can't remember the details of the charges against me--only the sentence. Ten years. At least now the uncertainty was over. As the sun set o n a hot summer day, I was led away to begin my prison term, not o n Death Row but in a special ward for women prisoners.

Tha Zin was a political prisoner in Burma's notorious Insein prison in the 1990s. She now lives in Rangoon. The name Tha Zin is a pseudonym for her protection.
Copyright: The Irrawaddy Journal