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A Tribute to Corazon Aquino – The Philippines Most Unlikely President

By Patricia H. Kushlis

Corazon C. Aquino (1933-2009) was never supposed to be President of the Philippines but she was - from 1986 to 1992. Her candidacy for the country’s highest office – through an election she and her supporters challenged as fraudulent – ultimately broke the back of the seemingly entrenched and generally despised dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos who had been in power since 1965.

This unassuming, attractive, petite, gentle but determined American-educated woman will always be remembered by what came to be known as “People Power” and its symbols: the brilliant yellow color she often wore and Aquino’s own special L-shaped hand sign (which stood for "Laban" or "fight" in Filipino.) The EDSA Revolution as it was also called - named after the major artery where the large anti-Marcos demonstrations were centered - turned into a huge popular outpouring of support – from the left, the poor, the Roman Catholic Church and its leader Jaime Cardinal Sin, the Makati business elite, cultural figures and, of course, academics and students. They came out en masse– especially Manila’s middle classes - when the call came.

The Roman Catholic Church's Moral Authority

The Church’s pulpits and Veritas, its influential alternative radio station, had summoned Filipinos into Manila's streets that February thereby providing the moral force behind the growing opposition to an increasingly unpopular regime. Marcos was already losing power. He had been since at least 1983 when he allegedly instigated the murder of (Ninoy) Benigno Aquino, Cory’s husband, on the tarmac at Manila’s international airport as he stepped off the plane from political exile in the US. Ninoy Aquino became the martyr the revolution needed to galvanize the opposition.

California - Ghost of the Future of the U.S.?

By Guest Contributor Wendi Maxwell

Wendi Maxwell retired after 38 years in California state service. Currently, she is a consultant in adult literacy specializing in long range strategic planning and policy development.

The California Legislature recently enacted an $80 billion budget, cutting $23 billion from the previous year - a tricky process that attempted to save the state’s social safety net without raising taxes. After passage by the Legislature, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger signed the budget and used his veto power to impose an additional $500 million in cuts. The budget relied on $8 billion in accounting maneuvers that some analysts call “kicking the problem down the road.” Mike Moritz, the British venture capitalist and former member of the Board of Directors of Google, Inc., called the state the “ghost of the future of the U.S.”

California’s budget balancing problem used to be a source of local embarrassment, an in-joke. This year, as the eight largest economy in the world teeters on the brink of insolvency with a 20 percent deficit – paying its bills with IOUs, laying off untold thousands of teachers, mandating state employees take three unpaid furlough days a month, and the majority leader walking out of budget talks – people outside the state started to notice.

How did California end up here? We went from being the Golden State to being the state that can’t pay its own way. Partisan politics certainly play a role in our current impasse, but there are structural problems that run much deeper and are more difficult to address. The current legislative impasse is a clear warning of what happens when good intentions go awry.

Judith McHale and the White House Press Corps

By Patricia H. Kushlis

In what turned out to be a less than stellar encounter with the White House Press Corps on July 15, America’s new Public Diplomacy Under Secretary Judith McHale fell just short of flat on her face during the Qs and As.

In contrast, her prepared statement that put a positive spin on America’s public diplomacy efforts during President Obama’s Ghana visit was fine. She did what she had set out to do.

But her responses to all but a single follow-up question were lacking. Not as embarrassing as the high profile Karen Hughes flouncing around town in a mud-colored burqa at an Iftar dinner when she was Bush’s Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy – but too many of McHale's responses were not good enough, nevertheless, for someone who has been in the Under Secretary position since early May and is serious about making a difference in how the US is viewed abroad and in improving this country's public diplomacy efforts.

Minorities, Part Three: The Indian Divide and Retain Strategy

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

Practically everybody expected independent India to fall apart sooner rather than later after that proud midnight moment when the British connection was severed in 1947.  Of course, there was a certain sourness even to that occasion.  Pakistan was born at the same time.  Nationalists in both countries felt that the prize of independence had been sullied by a poor deal when the territory was divvied up.  Even India, which got the lion’s share. 

Actually, in all its years of recorded history, the Indian sub-continent had never been wholly or perhaps I should say uniformly united under one ruler or government.  None of the pre-British empires—whether Hindu or Muslim, whether Gupta, Maurya or Moghul—that had managed to control huge swathes of South Asia, often including most of today’s Afghanistan as well, had managed to subdue every inch of territory right down to Cape Cormorin at the southern tip.  And control at the farthest reaches of empire had often involved  the subordination, not the destruction of preexisting states, states which tended to re-emerge when, after a few generations, an empire began to crumble.  Even the English, who did dominate the whole sub-continent—though famously not Afghanistan—found it useful to work through the puppet rulers of once independent princely states in many parts of their colony.

The Hodgepodge

Thus, post-colonial India inherited a patchwork based on at least 14 major languages—major equating to French or German within Europe—and countless locally-treasured dialects and tribal languages, a consequential cultural divide between North and South and a Muslim minority exceeding the population in any Muslim country except Indonesia.  And that’s not even an exhaustive catalogue of the diversity the Republic of India would have to hold together.  

Was it easy to keep the country together?  Not at all.  Almost from the beginning, India has been jiggering its internal boundaries to keep people happy, and the most important principal of re-organization has been linguistic.  In 1956, the Indian Parliament passed the States Reorganization Act which reduced the hodgepodge of A, B and C states inherited from the English period to 14 statutorily equal states.   Today India has 28 states.  How did that happen?  By popular demand, one might say.  Indians learned how to agitate during the independence movement, and they have never forgotten.  In short, India’s reaction to sub-national linguistic and cultural aspirations, unlike China’s, has been to satisfy them—within the Indian union, of course.  That’s the bottom line.

The Fight for Bombay

Bombay state gave rise to one of the first of these crises.  This state, centered around the financial capital now known as Mumbai, was huge in area and contained two major linguistic groups, Gujaratis and Maharashtrians, who wanted separate states.  That was the easy part. Both groups also wanted the city of Bombay.  That was the hard part.  (In those early days, the fate of Bombay seemed almost as fraught as resolving the status of Jerusalem does today.)  As in all subsequent contests over statehood, there were protests, processions, strikes, police excesses, lives lost, but eventually the Center gave Bombay to Maharashtra—and guess what?  The country didn’t explode.  Each group of language-speakers had a state in which children could be taught the local language (along with Hindi and English) and in which local customs could be honored and passed on to the next generation.  Politics continues in Maharashtra and Gujarat, of course, and often it’s a pretty nasty business, but separatism is not on the agenda.

The original state of Indian Punjab was split, not on linguistic, but on religious grounds: the resulting state of  Haryana has a largely Hindu population and the portion still called Punjab is mostly Sikh.  However, when a Sikh succession movement developed, it was crushed.

Europe Breaks the Microsoft Stranglehold; Time for America to Follow Suit

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

Two fascinating stories on the business front this week.  Neither has terribly good new for Americans.  Here are the headlines:

    Dateline Berlin:  To Avoid a New Legal Battle, Microsoft Offers Europe a Choice of Browsers

    Dateline Washington, D.C.:  Antitrust Chief Hits Resistance in Crackdown

The European Union has long accused Microsoft of abusing its dominant position in the operating system market to foist its media players, browsers and other consumer software products on computer buyers, who might prefer other products, if they could be got to run on XP or Vista or any other Microsoft OS without endless annoying complications, thanks to the bundling process, which tangles up code so hopelessly that the non-nerd hasn’t a chance for independence and sticks, however resentfully, with Microsoft.  Result: smaller competitors haven't a hope of succeeding.  The Microsoft position today verges on monopoly, and the Europeans, thank goodness, object to that.  Under threat of a prodigious fine, Microsoft has reached an agreement with the EU.

From now on, computer buyers in Europe (but not in the U.S. or anywhere else outside Europe) will be presented with a ballot screen that will allow them to choose which browser they want to use.  Explorer will be one of the choices, but it will no longer be confusing and time consuming  to choose a non-Microsoft browser.

Microsoft has evidently also agreed to release “confidential technical information worldwide that would help competitors design software” that works more smoothly with Windows and other Microsoft products.  That’s good news for all of us.

I’ve been using Firefox for years and have been totally satisfied with everything about my choice, except the business of disabling MS Explorer and installing Firefox whenever I buy a new computer.  I have go through all sorts of  stupid rigamarole before I can get on the Web the way I want to get on the Web.  Even so, every so often, Explorer breaks through and tries to take over.  I am not amused.

When are U.S. anti-trust authorities going to have the guts to take on Microsoft so that we American computer users can enjoy the same freedom? 

Minorities, Part 2: Home Sweet Home, If You're Han

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

There was Han-Uighur violence in Urumqi and other Xinjiang cities this past week.  It followed an incident involving Uighur migrant laborers and Han in Guangdong. Chinese officials in Beijing, even so, are insisting there’s nothing wrong with the government’s policies toward ethnic minorities.  The policies are perfectly “effective,” they say, which seems like a brilliantly ambiguous choice of words. Effective for what?  

The Chinese government is never to blame for violence in Tibet, either.  In short, the current rulers of the Chinese empire are never wrong. They are strong. And the ethnics, however numerous, are weak, which means that, even in the absence of "criminal violence," unhappy agitating protesting minorities are always wrong. 

Meanwhile, I’ve just seen a wonderful exhibit of traditional costumes—ceremonial or holiday clothing actually—worn by the men, women and children of ethnic minorities in the southwestern part of China, in this case, Yunan, Guizhuo, Guangxi, Guangdong, Hunan, Sichuan and Hainan Island.    The exhibit (including this Miao headdress and this Yi women's ensemble) came into being thanks to cooperation between the University of Hawai’i and the the Evergrand Art Museum of Taoyuan, Taiwan.  Taiwan, note.  Not the People’s Republic of China, where the heirs of those who once wore these outfits actually live.  Meanwhile, this exquisite collection is currently being exhibited at the International Museum of Folk Art in Santa Fe, where an excellent exhibit centered on wayang kulit, the shadow puppets of Indonesia, is also under way.  The IMOFA is one of the treasures of the museum world, another good reason to live in Santa Fe.

Back to the textile display.  The people who celebrated by wearing these beautifully executed costumes could hardly be called barbarians in need of absorbing and civilizing. But that’s what’s happened over time.  So says the curatorial note posted on the wall at the entrance to the exhibit.  The text, however, approaches the issue of political demographics in China via a language of masterful understatement:  “Although each group attempts to maintain their unique culture, assimilation and acculturation with the Han majority did occur....” 

A & A certainly did occur! An interesting study shows that small minority groups in China are very likely to intermarry with the Han majority, thus hastening their own dilution and disappearance.  Members of the more numerous groups tend to be largely endogamous, however.  Hence, the more tenacious clinging to culture among the Tibetans and the Uighurs, who claim they have not always belonged to  China and do not do so voluntarily now.  The triumph of the Red Army over the Nationalists, which created the “People’s” Republic of China, did not bring liberation to minorities:  “Attention to minority rights took place within the larger framework of strong central control. Minority nationalities, many with strong historical and recent separatist or anti-Han tendencies, were given no rights of self-determination.”   Perhaps mainland China does not dare to publicize the glories of its relatively powerless smaller ethnic groups,  like the Miao, like the Yi, lest they encourage members of the larger, better known minorities to insist ever more stubbornly on their own distinctiveness.

Here is how the assimilation process is supposed to work:

Approximately 93 percent [give or take a point or two] of China's population is considered Han. Sharp regional and cultural differences, including major variations in spoken Chinese, exist among the Han, who are a mingling of many peoples. All the Han nonetheless use a common written form of Chinese and share the social organization, values, and cultural characteristics universally recognized as Chinese.

Mandarin is taught in all Chinese schools as the national language. It’s said that over 70% of the population speak Mandarin as their first language.  There are six other major Chinese dialects including "Cantonese, Chu-Chow, Shanghainese, Fukenese, Taiwanese, and Hainese."    One complaint in Xinjiang is that “the government has severely curtailed the use of the Uighur language in classrooms.”   This is no accident.  When language dies, culture languishes.  When populations languish, as frequently with minorities, languages don’t usually survive.

Remembering Sokolniki Park

By Guest Contributor Hans N. Tuch

Hans Tuch is a retired Career Minister in the U.S. Foreign Service. His latest book is "Arias, Cabalettas and Foreign Affairs: A Public Diplomat's Quasi-Musical Memoir."

The following speech by Mr. Tuch was given on July 9 at Spaso House, the American Embassy Residence in Moscow:

In January 1958, the United States and the Soviet Governments concluded their first Cultural Exchange Agreement. It represented the initial evidence of a developing thaw in the icy relationship that had prevailed between the two countries during the previous forty years. Under this agreement--renewed subsequently every two years--cultural, educational, scientific and informational exchanges would thrive, an early manifestation being the hugely successful American exhibition here in Sokolniki Park in August 1959.

While the U.S. had participated in earlier World Fair expositions, this was the biggest, comprehensive, most carefully planned and executed endeavor the U.S. Information Agency had ever undertaken in its worldwide public diplomacy efforts. Others here will, of course, talk in detail about the Sokolniki exhibition, especially the cooperative involvement of the private sector, represented here today so generously by Pepsi Cola's former chairman Don Kendall. Let me just say here that the impact of this exhibition on the U.S.-Soviet relationship was tremendous.

This initial U.S.-Soviet Cultural Agreement was also a first for the US government. Unlike a number of other nations, the US had traditionally opposed making cultural treaties with other countries. Intercultural relations, we reasoned, flow from normal, friendly relationships between countries and, in turn, contribute to the comity of nations without any need for interference or participation by governments.

Obama in Moscow: That Ice-breaker’s Meaning

By Patricia H. Kushlis

One of the most peculiar aspects of President Obama’s recent visit to Moscow was the paucity of assessment in the major media here in the US. I’ve watched for opeds and round-ups of opeds of follow-up commentary by Russia hands, but thus far the pickings have been surprisingly slim. Or maybe I just missed most of them. That could be.

As I understand it, the Moscow print media did cover the visit well, much of the day-after commentary was favorable, and the initial Russian commentary that was negative was only mildly critical - playing up the “nothing accomplished” version of the story that has been the most widely circulated story in western media reports in the aftermath.

Media gloss-over of nuclear arms control talks

There was the minimal reporting on progress towards a nuclear weapons reductions agreement - a document vitally important to the Russians and one that the Obama administration had placed at the top of its priority list early on as a way of reengaging the Russian government. Why this was glossed over by the media, I can only guess. Is it because nuclear weapons reduction agreements have somehow supposedly become unimportant with the Cold War over? Or is it because progress in nuclear weapons talks doesn’t provide a juicy story fraught with high wire conflict as happened sometimes in the past?