In 2003, the first such award was presented to the late J.B. Jeyaretnam. This year it will go to social worker Wham, whose organisation HOME advocates for the rights and welfare of migrant workers – low-waged transient labourers and others like domestic workers who lack the full range of legal and humanitarian protections while working in Singapore.

From TC’s website:

Post 2011, the “new normal” recognizes human rights and workers’ rights in a “caring and sharing” ASEAN which is becoming more people-oriented. Since ASEAN began to engage with civil society, significant changes have happen. ASEAN has already set-up the AICHR (ASEAN intergovernmental commission on Human Rights). Civil society organizations based in ASEAN have set up the Task Force on ASEAN and Human Rights (TFAHR) and Task Force on ASEAN Migrant Workers (TFAMW) to engage the various ASEAN process in the protection and promotion of human rights and labour rights including the rights of the migrant workers.

Think Centre’s Human Rights Award seeks to identify and honour these individuals and organizations that strive to promote human rights practices. The AWARD hopes to foster a sense of duty to participate in the promotion and protection of human rights.

It is thus, a great honour for TC to confer the third Human Rights Defender Award 2012 to Jolovan Wham, in recognition of his contribution to the protection and promotion of the rights of migrant workers.

TC invites you to attend the Human Defenders Award 2011 to be held on:

Date: Saturday 14 January 2012

Time: 4.00 pm to 5.30 pm

Venue:Oxford Hotel Cafe, 218 Queens Street,Singapore 188549

Please kindly email your RSVP to: thinkcentre@hotmail.com by 12.00pm, 14 Jan 2012.

One confirms his Realist view that international politics – that is, political relations and decision making affecting people – between states – is most times a zero-sum game, but with a novel twist.

Quoting Chinese scholar Yan Xuetong writing in a New York Times op-ed piece with the provocative title ‘How China Can Defeat America’, he considers the statement that “the central attribute of political power was morally informed

by Edel Rodriguez

leadership” and that competition between the United States and China will be won by the state that has “human authority”, which Walt explains as “material power fused with moral principle”.

Yan elaborates that “Humane authority begins by creating a desirable model at home that inspires people abroad.”

It’s an intriguing idea, and the beginnings of a concept that bears serious watching.

This is especially in light of two other linked pieces – his ‘Is America Addicted to War?’ and ‘Hawks who learned nothing’ (from Salon.com).

Happy new year. Hopefully it’s going to be a good one.

Friends, family, and fellow Singaporeans.

At this GE, I voted for change.

I voted for the poor, the less fortunate, and the underprivileged among us.

I voted for accountability, for responsibility, and for humility.   

I voted for those in despair, for those in fear, and for those wrongly accused.

I voted for our greater humanity, that we may not just look out for ourselves, but also for those around us with hopes, aspirations, and dreams.

I voted for human rights, social justice, and equality.

I voted for the dignity of my fellow citizens, as well as the dignity accorded to us that is our right as human beings.

I voted for Singapore, and for my fellow Singaporeans.

My fellow Singaporeans…what did YOU vote for?

There were four of us in the rattling Soviet Army jeep, known endearingly as a UAZik, pronounced wahzik, in the common parlance. Lord knows what image we projected to the well-muscled, sunburned, and deeply suspicious Russian soldiers at the checkpoints. Sometimes they were drunk. Nearly always they were scared. In Chechnya, I’d learned, checkpoints were the measure of one’s day. People did not ask, “How far it is?” [sic] but “How many checkpoints are there?” Each day we crossed at least a dozen.

On this sweltering morning in July, we had already passed seventeen. The posts were the center of activity amid the ruins of the city. Conscripts maintained the constant vigil, checking the cars and their passengers, while their officers, hands on radios, sat in shaded huts off the road. But this post was nearly empty, and the OMON officers who stopped us, a pit bull from Irkutsk, was not in a good mood. His arms and neck glowed with the burned pink skin of a new arrival. He wore wraparound sunglasses and a bandanna over his shaved head. Tattoos, the proud emblem of Russian soldiers and prisoners, covered his biceps. “Slava” (“glory”) adorned the right one. It could be a name or a desire. He wore no shirt, only a green vest fitted with grenades, a knife, and magazine clips to feed the Kalashnikov he held firmly in both hands. His fingers seemed soldered to it.

We may have looked legit, but we were a fraud. Issa ostensibly was a ranking member of the wartime administration in Chechnya, the Russians’ desperate attempt at governance in the restive republic of Muslims, however lapsed, Sovietized, and secularized. He had the documents to prove it, but the man who signed them had since been fired. Issa knew the life span of his documents was limited. At any checkpoint his “client,” as he had taken to calling me, could be pulled from the jeep, detained, interrogated, and packed off in the next flight to Moscow.

At fifty-one, Issa boasted a resume that revealed the successful climb of a Chechen apparatchik. Born in Central Asian exile, in Kyrgyzstan, five years after Stalin had deported the Chechens in 1944, he had graduated from the Grozny Oil Institute in 1971. For twenty-one years he worked at Grozneft, the Chechen arm of the Soviet Oil and Gas Ministry. He spent the last Soviet years, until Yeltsin clambered up onto the tank in 1991, in western Siberia, overseeing the drilling of oil wells in Tyumen. He spoke a smattering of French, a bit of Arabic, and a dozen words in English — all learned, he liked to tease, during stints in Iraq and Syria.

Before the war, few Chechens would have claimed their vision of Islam, so thoroughly diluted by seven decades of Soviet Atheism, was orthodox. The principal rules and regulations of society were set by adat, the Chechen’s centuries-old customary law. The years of war would change all that. During the republic’s isolation, Moscow did all it could to undermine the Maskhadov regime, while the Russian General Staff, humiliated by the retreat from the south, yearned for a grudge match. In the vacuum, a new religious force took hold — Wahhabism, the austere strain of Islam that emanates from Saudi Arabia. Its teachers, in the main, were young men with long beards, stern gazes, and shadowy sources of funding. On the scorched earth of Chechnya, among a generation raised on war and little else, the movement found a fast and impassioned following.

If in the first war, the Chechen rebels were freedom fighters in the Reagan mold, yearning for independence in a classic war of decolonization, the war that began anew in the late 1999 — Putin’s War that continues to this day — marked a sharp turn. It began with the invasion by forces from Chechnya into Dagestan to the east, and the series of apartment bombings in Moscow and two other Russian cities. The sparks that reignited the conflict, and provided a welcome platform to catapult an unknown retired KGB lieutenant colonel to Yeltsin’s throne, are detailed in the pages that follow. But whatever its cause, the “second” Chechen war differed markedly from the first. For the Russians, the new campaign would be even more brutal, with far more troops, sorties, and bombs. For the Chechens, in turn, the talk of sovereignty now gave way to an urge for little but revenge. And among the most militant, as Russia entered the twenty-first century under Putin, the rebellion in Chechnya would take on a new name, jihad.

NO ONE CAN JUSTIFY TERRORISM, of any species. Neither can anyone explain mass murder, whether sponsored by a state or a half-crazed gang of criminals or soldiers. It is beyond the powers of reason to comprehend how men could shoot children in the back. That is not to say we should not try.

Under Putin, Russia remains a land in upheaval. There are troubles with restive oligarchs, old epidemics of corruption and alcoholism, new ones of HIV and tuberculosis. Chechnya, however, remains the wound that unites the country in anguish. The true tally of the dead will never be known — more than one hundred thousand combining both sides is the modest estimate. The Kremlin has called the attack at Beslan “Russia’s 9/11.” The Russian president has looked to Washington and pledged to adopt George W. Bush’s doctrine of “preemption.” The Chechens, to be sure, have won no friends by the recent campaign of terror. But Putin, too, has yielded no ground, steadfastly refusing to concede that his prosecution of the war could have fueled the rebel fire.

Putin did not start the war in Chechnya. He inherited it from his enfeebled predecessor. However, under his tenure the conflict has become more radicalized and militant. Only under Putin did the Chechens devise a new weapon: suicide bombers bent on killing as many Russian civilians as possible. In June 2000, during the first summer of his reign, and days before I entered the republic, the first Chechen shakhidka blew herself up, detonating a truck bomb at an army checkpoint. By now, the evidence is clear: the Kremlin’s unyielding policy, coupled with the ineptitude and brutality of its armed forces, has only played to the hand of its most radicalized opponents.

RUSSIA’S TROUBLES with Chechnya, despite what Putin and his appeasers in the West would claim, did not begin with September 11. The Chechens have yearned for freedom since the days of Catherine the Great. The present troubles have flitted on and off America’s television screens for a decade now. On November 26, 1994, Boris Yeltsin and the heirs of the KGB staged a proxy attack in Grozny against the wayward province’s newly risen separatist ruler, a recently retired Soviet air force general names Djokhar Dudayev. As the Soviet monolith disintegrated, and independence movements rent the old empire, Dudayev had come  home to lead a rebellion. In late 1991, backed by a crew that was part criminal, part partisan, and all nationalist, he unilaterally proclaimed an independent Chechen republic.

Moscow’s counterinsurgency proved hapless and bloody, a post-Soviet Bay of Pigs. Yet it was only a prelude to the onslaught that followed. On December 31, 1994, when Yeltsin then sent hundreds of tanks into the center of Grozny, the “first” war commenced. It would be, Yeltsin was assured, “a small, victorious war,” in the words of a minister under the Romanovs. It was a campaign of blundering Russian generals and ardent Chechen guerillas, waged with little attention on either side to the niceties of the Geneva Conventions. For the Russians, the war soon turned into a costly, and deeply unpopular, quagmire. In 1996, a Russian provincial governor would circulate a petition demanding its end, and promptly collect a million signatures. For the Chechens, however, it was a war of infinite passion and pride. It was a time of ascendant heroes, men who rose from obscurity to find fame in the bloodshed. Men like Shamil Basayev, a young commander born under Khrushchev, and named in honor of the Caucasus’s most fabled warrior, Imam Shamil, leader of the mountaineers’ nineteenth-century campaigns against the tsars.

The first campaign would end in 1996, with a desperate cease-fire. The truce was called in the town of Khasavyurt, in the neighboring republic of Dagestan. The Khasavyurt Accords brought a measure of stability, but both parties had skirted the critical question of sovereignty, leaving it to be determined in five years’ time. Chechnya, in the years that followed, gained the veneer of de facto independence, but the central question of status lingered.

Aslan Maskhadov, a former Chechen field commander, and Soviet artillery officer, was elected president of the new Chechen Republic of Ichkeria, as the triumphant separatists christened their homeland. But no one, save the Taliban in Afghanistan, gave the statelet official recognition. Islamic jurisprudence would be introduced — Shari’a courts and public lashings. Separated by an economic quarantine from the rest of the Russian Federation, the local GDP seemed driven by the kidnapping trade. The interregnum lasted a volatile three years, as the republic languished without any genuine legal, economic, or law enforcement infrastructure. The Chechens had won the day, but their homeland had devolved into a lawless enclave, a magnet for Islamist extremists, and a time-bomb in the center of the North Caucasus.

Then came Beslan, the most horrific attack yet. In the far-off capitals of the West, the realm Russians have taken to calling “the civilized world,” the headlines would scream in shock. The terrorists had descended to a circle of evil without precedent. To target a school – taking hostage more than a thousand innocent civilians, the majority of them women and children, was a nadir in the annals of terrorism. Russians watched the climax of the fifty-two-hour siege at Middle School Number One in horror. They remembered their Dostoyevsky. Etched in the collective memory was Ivan Karamazov’s nihilist dictum: he could not believe in any God who would allow children to suffer at the hands of sadists.

We may never know the identities of all the men who held the school in North Ossetia hostage. At first, the FSB, the post-Soviet heirs of the KGB, said that “ten Arabs” had taken part in the attack. Vladimir Putin even repeated the claim, before his defense minister, Sergei Ivanov, a fellow KGB alumnus and the president’s closest confidante, refuted it. Among the terrorists’ corpses identified, Ivanov said, there were no Chechens. Yet that statement too, in the days that followed, was amended. Like the implausible turns of a Gogol short story, the Kremlin line seemed forever shifting, an account under construction with each new proclamation.

Under pressure, Putin made a rare concession: he vowed to open the siege’s disastrous resolution -  the deaths of more than 350 civilians, half of them children – to an inquiry. Even in the loyal hands of the upper house of the Russian parliament, the investigation would mark a first for Russian history. In the wake of the seizure of the Moscow theater in the fall of 2002, when all 41 terrorists were killed but 130 hostages died from a military gas, Putin rejected any public reckoning. Instead, he promised an internal accounting that, somewhere in the years since it quietly stalled, was never to be completed.

Westerners look to a parliamentary inquiry and hope that the tragedy of Beslan may yield a salient lesson. Russians, however, being Russian, and still suffering the sins of Kremlin rulers past, have little faith in the state’s powers of self-examination. Putin, they knew, would rage on about the toll of terror. But the families of the hundreds who died at Beslan, and the millions of Russians who now faced a new fear from St. Petersburg to Vladivostock, expected little to change. The state would redraw its hard line across Chechnya, proclaim yet again a promise of protection, and, all too predictably, leave the survivors alone to search for solace. Putin, at the same time, in the name of the antiterrorism fight, would grab yet more power.

Foreword: a few things worth a lot of attention This post is about an idea that came some time ago and that I’d like to share; before  getting to the point there are a few concepts I’d like to introduce. I’m writing this post mostly for myself and my friends, but I hope if it can inspire people to dig into the concepts I bring here, if they are new to them, and enjoy the very early stage of a crazy idea (yes, yes, another one). Videogames matter! … Read More

via hungry4thoughts

Today, the balancing act that is life, highlighted by poignant examples of the strength, and resilience of the human spirit, is happening on opposite ends of our earth. The people of North Africa and the Middle East continue to mass, and protest for basic democratic reforms that I take for granted. Beginning w … Read More

via Cyclelogical

Like many, I have been captivated by the news and images coming from the Middle East over the last month or two.  It has been fascinating to watch the virus of vocalized dissatisfaction spread from city to city, region to region, country to country.  I say with a bit of shame and awe, it took me completely by surprise.  I never had the thought in my head that things in that region might change so dramatically over such a short period of time. I w … Read More

via the annotated zoetrope