Monday, August 26, 2013

The Irrawaddy Magazine

The Irrawaddy Magazine

Sacking of Naypyidaw Schoolteacher Draws Condemnation

Posted: 26 Aug 2013 05:33 AM PDT

Students study at a private school in Rangoon. (Photo: JPaing / The Irrawaddy)

RANGOON — Teachers associations in Rangoon and Mandalay have condemned Burma's Education Ministry for the sacking of a schoolteacher who attended a commemoration earlier this month of the country's 1988 pro-democracy uprising.

In a statement on Monday, several teachers associations criticized the ministry's Basic Education Department in Naypyidaw, where the director of High School No. 5, a state school, ordered Soe Soe Khaing to resign for allegedly violating a school rule prohibiting teachers from involvement in politics.

"The Education Department is ignoring laws that govern civil servants," five teachers associations –from Rangoon University, Dagon University and Mandalay University—said in the statement. "The ministry is abusing its power to punish someone they don't like."

Than Lwin Oo, a spokesman for a teachers association at Rangoon University's east campus, offered an explanation of the law governing civil servants. "If someone violates the law, first you have to give a warning. Second you give a serious warning, and third you send the person who violated the law to another township or demote them," he told The Irrawaddy.

He said the school in Naypyidaw's Zabuthiri Township forced the resignation because Soe Soe Khaing missed five days of classes and did not ask for permission before traveling to Rangoon, where she met with members of the 88 Generation Students group. "I agree that she violated the rules in these two cases, but the punishment was too harsh—it wasn't fair," he said.

The teachers associations warned that the incident could tarnish the government's widely lauded reform efforts, and they called on the Education Ministry to provide an explanation.

"We will wait 15 days for their explanation. If they do not respond, we will go talk to the ILO [the International Labor Organization] and the UN human rights commission," said Than Lwin Oo.

School authorities informed 48-year-old Soe Soe Khaing of her dismissal on Aug. 15 and offered a small severance pension.

Despite democratic political reforms that have been praised by many over the last two years, remnants of the former authoritarian regime persist, according to Soe Soe Khaing, who was a student involved in the pro-democracy protests that swept the nation in 1988.

"They have closely watched wherever I go, and what I do," she told The Irrawaddy last week. "I had to use another person's identity card to attend the '88 anniversary in Mandalay."

Burma's political activists in Rangoon, Mandalay and other parts of the country this month celebrated the Silver Jubilee of the historic popular uprising on Aug. 8, 1988, when hundreds of thousands of protestors took to the streets demanding an end to the military dictatorship of Gen Ne Win. Widely known as the "88 Uprising," the nationwide pro-democracy movement drew hundreds of thousands of Burmese from all walks of life to join a protest in the former capital Rangoon.

Myanmar Times’ Future Uncertain After Shareholders Call for Its Dissolution

Posted: 26 Aug 2013 05:25 AM PDT

Ross Dunkley, the managing director of The Myanmar Times, addresses a business dispute at the newspaper in Rangoon in January. (Photo: JPaing / The Irrawaddy)

RANGOON — An internal dispute between the owners of The Myanmar Times is threatening the survival of the English-language newspaper, after the company's majority shareholders asked a court earlier this month to dissolve the firm and immediately suspend publication.

The Myanmar Times is privately owned by Myanmar Consolidated Media Co. Ltd. (MCM) and 51 percent of MCM's shares are in the hands of Dr Tin Tun Oo and his wife Khin Moe Moe. Tin Tun Oo is also listed as the paper's publisher.

The couple's lawyer announced in a Burmese-language notification in the government-run newspaper The Mirror on Monday that they are seeking to officially dissolve MCM through a court order.

Dr Tin Tun Oo and his wife "submitted a request at the Western Yangon Court on August 12 to dissolve MCM and there will be a court hearing on September 26," the announcement said, adding that anyone who wants to object in the case should be present at the court on the day.

The 49 percent of remaining MCM shares are owned by an Australian company affiliated with The Times' managing director and English-language editor-in-chief Ross Dunkley, who also publishes Cambodia's Phnom Penh Post.

Khin Moe Moe and her lawyer Kyaw Myint were reluctant to discuss the court case when contacted by The Irrawaddy on Monday.

Asked why she and her husband were seeking to dissolve the newspaper, Khin Moe Moe said, "Because we cannot reach a deal with the foreigner who owns 49 percent. We own the other 51 percent.

"We will agree to any decision by the court," she added, before asking an Irrawaddy reporter to leave her office in downtown Rangoon.

Lawyer Kyaw Myint said his clients had requested an immediate suspension of the paper's publication while their request was pending at the court. "That is what we have requested of the court. The court will consider this proposal," he said.

Kyaw Myint declined to comment on whether or not the majority owners would consider selling their shares instead of seeking the dissolution of MCM through legal action.

Dunkley has had public disagreements with MCM's majority shareholders in the past.

In January, Khin Moe Moe accused the Australian of hitting her son-in-law during an argument at the paper's Rangoon office, and she said she would sue him over the alleged assault. At the time, she also vowed to block Dunkley's plan to turn The Myanmar Times into a daily newspaper.

Currently, the publication appears weekly.

Burma's reformist government lifted restrictions on daily newspapers in April after repressing independent media in the country for decades. All publications remained subject to government censorship until August of last year.

Asked if the legal action regarding MCM was related to Khin Moe Moe's claims of an assault by Dunkley, her lawyer said, "This is unrelated. That is a different case."

Dunkley could not immediately be reached for comment on Monday.

The paper's CEO Sonny Swe voiced concern over the future of The Myanmar Times in a brief interview with The Irrawaddy.

"There are many employees here. If the company has to stop, many will be unemployed. They should not do this, I think," he said, adding that his attempts to buy the majority MCM shares had failed.

"I tried to buy the shares, but I could not reach an agreement over the price," Sonny Swe said.

The Times employs about 300 staff, most of whom are Burmese. It was founded in 2000, when Dunkley entered isolated, military-run Burma to set up an English-language newspaper.

The Australian businessman cut a deal with the hated Military Intelligence (MI) that allowed the paper to appear without passing through the Press Scrutiny and Registration Department, Burma's censorship board. Instead, the paper's content was only screened by the MI.

Sonny Swe, a son of senior MI officer Brig-Gen Thein Swe, was the Times' original majority shareholder. He was arrested during a purge of the MI by then junta leader Snr-Gen Than Shwe in 2004. Tin Tun Oo, a media person with close connections to the junta, took over his shares in The Times. After 2005, The Myanmar Times also went through Burma's censorship board.

Sonny Swe was released from prison in April this year and Dunkley subsequently offered him a position as CEO at The Times.

In January, Dunkley complained that ever since Tin Tun Oo took majority shares in the paper, he and his wife had "sometimes attempted to disrupt the activities of the newspaper."

Apart from these business disputes, Dunkley has also faced criminal charges in Burma. In 2011, he spent 44 days in Rangoon's Insein Prison after he was convicted of physically assaulting a woman and for drug-related charges.

Since April, there have been reports that the Australian is banned from leaving the country because of the court case against him for allegedly hitting Khin Moe Moe's son-in-law.

Karen Leader’s Tale of Escape From Island Prison Makes Burma Debut

Posted: 26 Aug 2013 04:45 AM PDT

Mahn Nyein Maung signs autographs at the launch of his book, 'Against the Storm, Across the Sea,' on Sunday in Rangoon. (Photo: Kyaw Phyo Tha / The Irrawaddy)

RANGOON — Among those who rushed in to take advantage of the end of censorship in Burma, Mahn Nyein Maung is a latecomer.

One year after Burma pulled the plug on its censorship regime, the leading member of the Karen National Union (KNU), an ethnic rebel group that has been at war with the central government since 1949, published his prison break memoir inside the country for the first time. The release of "Against the Storm, Across the Sea" in Burma comes about 19 months after a historic ceasefire agreement between the KNU and government was signed.

"If you were caught with this book 10 years ago, you would end up in a jail," the Karen leader told The Irrawaddy at a book launch ceremony in Rangoon on Sunday. His book was first published outside Burma in 2000.

Formerly an underground activist inside Burma, Mahn Nyein Maung was arrested in the 1960s and sent to one of the Coco Islands, site of an infamous detention center for political prisoners about 300 kms off the Burmese mainland.

In his book, the now 71-year-old documents his prison days as a young Karen activist, detailing daily life on the island and his improbable escape from the place in a small boat. After more than 10 days crossing the Bay of Bengal in 1970, he made landfall in southern Burma's Mon State, but was rearrested shortly thereafter and held until 1973. One year after his release, Mahn Nyein Maung left Rangoon to join the armed guerrilla movement, where he ultimately ascended to the senior KNU ranks.

His extraordinary escape from the Coco Islands earned Mahn Nyein Maung the nickname "Burma's Papillon," a reference to the famous French prisoner Henri Charrière, who made a seafaring escape from a penal colony in French Guiana and later wrote about it. The late Burmese writer Mya Than Tint, who was jailed along with Mahn Nyein Maung, would later create a protagonist of one of his bestsellers that was partially inspired by his former prison mate.

"I just recorded one part of my revolutionary experience in my life thanks to my comrades and friends' urging," said the guerrilla fighter-turned-writer.

Mhan Nyein Maung penned "Against the Storm, Across the Sea" nearly 30 years after his escape from the island. He wrote it in 1998, at a KNU frontline position in southern Burma, while camping near a stream that inspired him to put pen to paper.

"There is a waterfall upstream," he writes in the book. "At night, when the whole world became silent, the only thing I heard was the sound of water falling. It made me think of my days on the high seas and I started hearing the waves, and I couldn't sleep anymore," he recalled.

In March 2012, Mahn Nyein Maung was handed a life sentence by the government after being found guilty of participating in acts of war against the ruling government, and an additional three years for having connections to an illegal organization. The prosecution submitted "Against the Storm, Across the Sea" as evidence of the treason charges.

But he was released less than a week later via a presidential amnesty, in a concession that was a KNU precondition for proceeding with peace talks. The release of the former prisoner of conscience is seen as part of a wider bid by both parties to lay the groundwork for national reconciliation.

"For a rebel like me, it's really good to be here inside the country, talking to you at my book launching ceremony," he told The Irrawaddy. "Don't you think so?"

For Burma’s New Newspapers, a Daily Struggle to Profit

Posted: 26 Aug 2013 03:21 AM PDT

A woman sells newspapers in Rangoon on April 1, 2013. (Photo: JPaing / The Irrawaddy)

RANGOON — As publisher of one of Burma's 12 fledgling private daily newspapers, the Yangon Times, Ko Ko has survival on his mind.

"No newspaper is making a profit," he says, cagey about notions that a news-hungry populace is keen to snap up the array of daily newspapers now on sale, after five decades of a tightly controlled fourth estate.

Starting in April, private daily newspapers have been allowed to operate in Burma. Thirty-one licenses have been issued and so far 12 privately run daily newspapers are publishing, Information Minister Ye Htut told The Irrawaddy.

It's anyone's guess how many of the remaining 19 licensees will end up rolling a newspaper off the presses, in what looks like a tough game to be entering. "Circulation for most of the new dailies is between 10,000 and 30,000 a day. If anyone tells you more, they're lying," the 51-year-old Ko Ko says.

In a country where the GDP per head is reckoned to be around US$800 to US$1,000, according to the World Bank, most people simply don't have money to spare. Faced with such low purchasing power, the country's news media could face a shaky future in which only those newspapers with additional revenue, such as publications run as part of companies with a broader reach, will have the best chance of survival, Ko Ko told The Irrawaddy.

One such outlet is 7Day News, part of Information Matrix, a business that, among other gigs, does IT and website development, including for government clients

That portfolio is a reflection of the background of company founder Thaung Su Nyein, who studied computer science. A son of former Foreign Minister Win Aung, the 36-year-old is at the helm of a multifaceted company based in a plush, airy office in the north of Rangoon—a space likely the envy of fat-walleted transnational corporations struggling to find office locations in what is a strangled, overpriced urban property market.

"Dailies are struggling as an entire category," Thaung Su Nyein concedes, though declining to divulge sales numbers for 7Day's daily publication. It could sell more, he says, if Burma's infrastructure—such as road and rail links—was improved sufficiently to enable timely distribution of the daily to areas outside of Mandalay, Naypyidaw and Rangoon, where most newspaper copies are sold. "It costs so much to distribute. Trucking is very inefficient here, for example," he says.

The presence of weekly newspapers, or journals in the local parlance, is another hurdle for dailies, says Thaung Su Nyein. "Every day there is a different weekly journal available," he says. "People are used to them, they are thicker than dailies, and people here associate that with value."

And though daily newspapers are priced around the 200 kyats (20 US cents) mark—in an attempt to put them within reach of Burma's millions of low-income earners—Thaung Su Nyein says that news readers are willing to shell out the extra for a weekly rather than try out a new daily. "The dailies lose their impact very quickly," he explains. "The weeklies have more in-depth pieces and the content lasts longer, which is another incentive for the newsreader."

Hampered too by spotty telephone and Internet services, and a sometimes flaky electricity supply, the pressure to get news out on daily deadline means that the depth of coverage takes a hit, Thaung Su Nyein acknowledges. "Sometimes there just isn't the time to talk to that second or third source for a story," he says.

Government-backed newspapers have the resources of the state behind them, meaning more cash and a logistical leg-up on private sector media. Those advantages stretch to newsgathering as well, it seems. "The government newspapers get information from the ministries before the rest of us," says Ko Ko. "That is not a level playing field."

Other publications, also new to the private daily realm, are linked to political parties. The ruling, military-backed Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP) has its new Union Daily, while the National League for Democracy (NLD), led by Aung San Suu Kyi, publishes D-Wave.

In a small office near Rangoon's Kandawgyi Lake, Empire Daily founder Kaung Myint Htut says that his publication's obvious links to the Myanmar National Congress party do not mean that the newspaper, which sells for 50 kyats, is party propaganda.

"For me, I actually prohibit writing about me or the party in the newspaper," the former political prisoner and current chairman of the Myanmar National Congress party told The Irrawaddy.

He says he can use the party newsletter, sanctioned by the country's election commission, to campaign. "It would be boring for the reader if I put that kind of material in the newspaper," he says. "We have the freedom now to write, so I want to inform by the newspaper, not try to preach."

Burma's media landscape is undergoing a schizoid opening up that has seen the abolition of the old censorship regime and, now, a wrangle over new media laws, pitting the Ministry of Information against the country's interim Press Council, of which Thaung Su Nyein and Ko Ko are members. The government-drafted Printers and Publishers Registration bill has been passed by the Lower House of Parliament, but is opposed by the Press Council, which says the legislation is too restrictive. The government recently put forward a still-to-be-finessed "social responsibility" code for the country's media, a proposal that comes off sounding like something lifted from stiff press regimes deployed in neighbors such as Malaysia and Singapore.

The country's media liberalization has taken place side-by-side with several outbreaks of violence, mostly directed at Burma's Muslim minority, in several regions over the last year. Some publications have been accused of biased, inflammatory or anti-Muslim reporting, with recurring mentions of "Bengalis" in reference to the country's Rohingya minority—a group of around 800,000 Muslims that the Burmese government and many ordinary Burmese view as illegal migrants.

And locked off from the telecommunications modernization that has brought widespread mobile phone and Internet services to neighboring countries, Burma recently granted mobile licenses to two foreign operators that say they have big plans to connect much of the population within four or five years.

Despite these looming changes—and his own company's background in IT, Thaung Su Nyein is nonetheless adamant that "there is a future for print in this country."

Citing the growth of the now decade-old 7Day weekly, he hopes something similar can happen with the daily. "Initially the weekly sold just 3,000 copies a week," he recalls. "Now it is over 150,000."

But for some, the day of the conventional print newspaper may have passed. Laughing, Ko Ko says that any time he brings home a copy of the Yangon Times to give to his teenage daughter, she usually glances at it momentarily before tossing the publication aside.

"Oh, it's not that she doesn't read the news. She will open the same stories on one of these," he says, holding up his cellphone.

Ko Ko says he can see his daughter's point. "News on an app, on a website, posted on Facebook—people can interact, comment. Print news is passive."

But there's a downside that leaves Ko Ko exasperated. "Burmese people, the younger ones, these days only want to read the headline, the short summary on Facebook. Nobody wants the detail or to enjoy a well-written article."

That is partly a product of the stultifying censorship imposed during military rule, which allowed flippant reading, such as local celebrity gossip, to flourish, while serious news withered. It meant, as well, that a generation of journalists developed bad habits—such as self-censorship or a predilection for yellow journalism

"At 7Day we prefer to hire new graduates, young reporters who are idealistic about the fourth estate and are keen to hunt news," says Thaung Su Nyein. "Some of the older ones are tainted."

Forty of the 60 or so staff working at the Yangon Times are fresh to the business—graduates from a variety of disciplines who get three months' on-the-job training. But notably, there are no journalism degree holders among the ranks.

"We don't take people from the one journalism school here [in Burma], there is funny stuff on the curriculum," says Ko Ko.

Buddhists in Burma Torch Muslim Homes and Shops

Posted: 25 Aug 2013 10:34 PM PDT

A photo published on the Facebook page of Ye Htut, the deputy minister of information and the presidential spokesman, shows buildings burning in Htan Gone village, Sagaing Division, over the weekend. Members of a 1,000-strong Buddhist mob torched dozens of homes and shops in northwestern Burma following rumors that a Muslim man tried to sexually assault a young woman. (Photo: Ye Htet / Facebook)

HTAN GONE, Sagaing Division — Members of a 1,000-strong Buddhist mob torched dozens of homes and shops in northwestern Burma following rumors that a Muslim man tried to sexually assault a young woman, officials and witnesses said, as the country was once again gripped by sectarian violence.

The rioters, who sang the country's national anthem as they rampaged, dispersed after security forces arrived early Sunday, shooting into the air. No injuries were reported.

The hours-long riot in Htan Gone village, located 16 kilometers (10 miles) south of the town of Kantbalu in the division of Sagaing, began late Saturday after a crowd surrounded a police station, demanding that the suspect in the attempted assault be handed over, a police officer told The Associated Press. The officer requested anonymity because he did not have the authority to speak to reporters.

State television reported that about 42 houses and 15 shops were burned and destroyed—most belonging to Muslims.

The predominantly Buddhist nation of 60 million has been grappling with sectarian violence since the country's military rulers handed over power to a nominally civilian government in 2011.

The unrest—which has killed more than 250 people and left 140,000 others displaced—began last year in the western state of Arakan, where nationalist Buddhists accuse the Rohingya Muslim community of illegally entering the country and encroaching on their land. The violence, on a smaller scale but still deadly, spread earlier this year to other parts of the country, fueling deep-seeded prejudices against the Islamic minority and threatening Burma's fragile transition to democracy.

Almost all of the victims have been Muslims, often attacked as security forces stood by.

The Information Ministry said that at the height of the latest round of violence, up to 1,000 people were rampaging through Htan Gone village. The riots were triggered by a report that a Muslim man attempted to sexually assault a Buddhist woman on her way home from work, the ministry said.

The man was brought to the village police station and transferred to Shwe Bo Prison.

"About 100 angry men gathered outside the police station in Htan Gone village to demand that the culprit be handed over," Tin Naing Htun, who lives in the village, told The Irrawaddy. "Since they did not get what they wanted, the mob started destroying shops and torching houses in Muslim areas of the community."

He said police officers who attempted to disperse the mob were attacked, prompting the officers to fire into the air.

"After they [rioters] destroyed the Muslims' shops, they torched a poultry farm, a tea shop and other shops. When they headed to another house to torch it, the police urged them to stop but they threw stones and attacked with slingshots, so the police opened fire into the air," he said.

"Fire engines could not extinguish the fires at first. When the mob started torching the houses, they blocked the way and attacked the fire engines.

"Muslims have now been temporarily moved to other villages, where their relatives live. The situation now is quite stable, as the area is controlled by the police, but we are afraid the problem may come up again."

Aung San, a 48-year-old Muslim man, said his family had to flee when the mob burned down their house. He lives with his parents, who are in their 70s.

"People descended on our village with swords and spears, and sang the national anthem and began destroying shops and burned houses. Police shouted at the mob to disperse, but did not take any serious action," he said. "We hid my parents and two sisters in a cemetery before the mob burned our house, and we fled later."

He and his family were taking refuge Sunday at a Muslim school.

The police told The Irrawaddy that 11 men had been detained for allegedly torching the homes and shops, and that an investigation was ongoing.

State-run media offered a timeline of the events. At 7:30 pm, the crowd gathered at the local police station and called on officers to hand over the suspect, according to the Rangoon-based New Light of Myanmar newspaper. After the crowd began setting fire to shops and homes, the township police commander and other officials arrived at about 8 pm and attempted to control the station. At about 10:30 pm, as rioters continued setting shops alight, the region security and border affairs minister arrived, along with the district police commander.

The first warning shot was fired to disperse rioters at about 1:15 am, the newspaper said, and a second warning shot was fired later to clear a path for fire trucks to put out the fires. A police battalion arrived at 3 am to assist 70 firefighters, who managed to control the fires by about 3:30 am, it reported.

A total of 44 houses, nine stalls and four shops were destroyed, the newspaper reported. It said one firefighter and one civilian were injured in the incident.

The New Light of Myanmar said the region chief minister later formed a committee with local authorities to meet with residents and religious associations, in a bid to deter further violence. The minister made arrangements to open relief camps for the fire victims, the newspaper reported, adding that relief items were being distributed to 50 households.

Myint Naing, an opposition lawmaker who represents constituents in Kantbalu, was outraged by the latest violence. He said Muslims and Buddhists have lived side-by-side in the area for many years.

"There is a mosque in almost every village in our township and we live a peaceful co-existence," he said, adding that at least one mosque was burned down in the violence.

"I cannot understand why the authorities were unable to control the crowd when it originally started," he said.

Hundreds of Muslims in Western Burma Relocated

Posted: 25 Aug 2013 10:50 PM PDT

Policemen stop civilians at one of the road blocks that surround Aung Mingalar, Sittwe's last Muslim quarter, which is home to 6,500 people. (Photo: JPaing / The Irrawaddy)

RANGOON — Hundreds of Muslims trapped in ghetto-like conditions in western Burma after their homes were torched by Buddhist-mobs last year were moved Saturday to a camp for internally displaced people, officials said.

Government spokesman Win Myaing said the relocation from Aung Mingalar quarter in Sittwe Township was voluntary. But one well-known activist said many of the families were worried their conditions would go from bad to worse once they left.

Burma, a predominantly Buddhist country of 60 million, has been gripped by religious violence since military rulers handed over power to a nominally civilian government.

The unrest began last year in the western state of Arakan—home to Sittwe—where Buddhists accuse the Rohingya Muslim community of illegally entering the country and encroaching on their land. The violence then spread on a smaller, but still deadly scale to other parts of Burma, leaving more than 250 people dead—most of them Muslims—and sending another 140,000 fleeing their homes.

More than 5,700 people have been living in Aung Mingalar, a Muslim quarter in Sittwe that spans several blocks, since violence broke out in June 2012, with storefronts shuttered and police with assault rifles blocking entry and exit.

Win Myaing said 577 people who moved into the neighborhood after losing their houses to mob violence were relocated to camps outside of Sittwe on Saturday, with more relocations planned for Sunday. He said new shelters had been built for them.

Thousands more, who didn’t lose their homes, will remain in Aung Mingalar, he said.

"This is a voluntary relocation," Win Myaing said. "We discussed it with them one day ahead of the move."

Shwe Zan Aung, a Muslim elder from Aung Mingalar who is among those who will stay, agreed.

"There were 5,700 Muslim people in Aung Mingalar, but about 1,144 people lost their homes during violence last year," he said.

But Aung Win, a well-respected Rohingya activist, said many were very unhappy about leaving, worrying that they will lose their support system and access to food rations.

Dreamers Work to Create Huge New Park in Delhi

Posted: 25 Aug 2013 11:25 PM PDT

Buildings and roads are seen from the window of an airplane over New Delhi on Aug. 18, 2009. (Photo: Reuters / Fayaz Kabli)

NEW DELHI — In a tangle of forgotten, overgrown brush in the heart of India's capital, a quiet plan has been hatched to change the landscape of one of the world's most populous cities.

An intricate Mughal garden is being created. Crumbling sandstone tombs nearly lost to history are being rebuilt. An artificial lake is being carved out. The renovation of Sunder Nursery is intended to serve as the catalyst for an even more ambitious project: the creation of a mammoth, iconic park that would rival New York's Central Park as a refuge from urban chaos.

"It would be the place where the city descends. It would be an oasis," said Ratish Nanda, project director for the Aga Khan Trust for Culture, and the driving force behind the dream of a mega-park.

To create that park would require the merger of a string of adjoining gardens, heritage areas and a zoo administered by different government agencies, an incredibly complicated task in a land where bureaucratic turfs are fiercely protected. And though some officials are beginning to discuss the plan, no formal proposal has been formulated.

But sometimes in India, it takes tenacious dreamers like Nanda to achieve the seemingly impossible.

Nanda and the Aga Khan Trust have taken on seemingly impossible tasks before. They helped wrest a 17-acre compound in the area, along with a large monument, from India's version of the Boy Scouts. They are currently fighting with railways officials to get them to remove a storeroom blocking access to another monument.

"One single man has to be there, to strive, to go out and achieve this," said Ashok Khurana, a powerful supporter and the recently retired head of Delhi's Central Public Works Department, one of the many agencies that would need to work together to create the giant park.

The payoff would be considerable. Delhi, with a population of about 17 million, is a surprisingly green city, with small parks dotting many neighborhoods and Lodhi Gardens — with a clutch of crumbling monuments of its own—attracting speed walkers and picnickers in upscale south Delhi.

The mega-park would tower over them all.

It would be 480 hectares (1,200 acres), considerably larger than Central Park. It would have 100,000 trees of more than 300 species, Nanda said. It would encompass one of the most impressive collections of medieval Islamic monuments, anchored by the grandiose tomb of Emperor Humayun, a 16th century prototype for the Taj Mahal. It would have an ancient fort, a Buddhist stupa, flocks of exotic birds and white tigers in the zoo.

Nanda imagines families rolling out carpets on the grass in the winter and enjoying a book in the shade of a tree in the summer. He imagines people touring the tombs or just crossing the park on their daily commutes.

The heart of the dream is the restoration of Sunder Nursery, a 40-hectare (100-acre) field adjacent to Humayun's Tomb, both of which are being restored by the Aga Khan's trust. The nursery was founded by British colonists to grow experimental plants. In recent years it was barely functioning, became a dumping ground for construction waste, and was visited by a few hundred people a month.

The trust fought back a government plan to cut the nursery in half—and destroy a garden tomb—to make way for a major road planned for the 2010 Commonwealth Games, Nanda said. It had to remove 1,000 truckloads of construction rubble scattered about the fields.

It restored the 500-year-old Sunderwala Burj tomb from a gray building patched with concrete to the striking burnt orange sandstone and white lime mortar of its original design. A dozen other monuments in the nursery stand testament to the era, half a millennium ago, when the Islamic Mughal emperors from Central Asia ruled over a vast swathe of the Indian subcontinent.

The Sunderwala Burj stands at the entrance to a Mughal garden being built under the inspiration of Persian carpet designs, with squares of grass and flower beds bordering a thin pond that will send water flowing into narrow channels and over intricately carved stone patterns.

Nearby, workers have dug a reservoir to be filled with fish swimming in water from a specially built treatment plant. That water will also flow through streams into areas forested with plants from Delhi's different habitats. There is an amphitheater and a bonsai pavilion and plans for a restaurant.

Peacocks wander through the thick grass, one of the 56 bird species in the nursery.

"That was a kingfisher," Nanda said excitedly as he gave a tour. He pointed to a Mughal-era lotus pond being excavated. To the first fruits growing on a young lemon tree. To the new rose garden and the bright white and red edifice of the newly restored Lakkarwala Burj monument.

"This is beautiful. This is how it's meant to be. Look at this parapet, it's like a jewel," he said.

The nursery project, he said, is intended to turn what had been a dead zone "into a thriving ecological hub."

"The idea here is that this is a magical space that takes people away from the humdrum of daily life," he said.

But this is just a small step he hopes will create a creeping momentum toward the larger park.

He is already eyeing the crumbling Azimnganj Sarai, an early 16th century pilgrim's motel just outside the nursery on zoo land. The Mughal garden, in fact the entire design of the nursery, points directly at the sarai, and he is hoping to get permission to restore it and add it to the park. That would bring him a small step closer to the mega-park dream.

That park, as envisioned by Nanda and his colleagues, would start with Humayun's Tomb and its complex of gardens and monuments. Just to the north is the nursery, then the national zoo, then the Purana Qila, the oldest fort in the city. Running alongside all this is the narrow Millennium Park, which borders the Yamuna River. These areas are so cut off now that a trip from Humayun's Tomb to Millennium Park, only about 100 meters away, would take 5 1/2 kilometers (3 miles).

"These are all things that have been originally linked and these artificial boundaries are just silly," Nanda said, pointing to the walls around a cluster of monuments.

He fears, however, the struggle of getting government agencies to cooperate.

"It takes centuries to get anything done here," he said.

The Archaeological Survey of India runs Humayun's Tomb and the Purana Qila. Delhi's Central Public Works Department controls the nursery. The environment ministry controls the zoo and the Delhi Development Authority runs Millennium Park. Even the railways have land involved.

The agencies would have to pool their budgets, pull down their walls, work together to provide parking and maintenance.

Mohammad Shaheer, a landscape architect who worked on the nursery, said the draw of creating such a unique space where residents of this city of migrants could interact and create memories will be irresistible.

Pravin Srivastava, the director general of the Archaeological Survey of India, said the recent renovation at Humayun's Tomb, which involved about a dozen different agencies, proved such cooperation was possible.

"Everyone has their perceived priorities and their way of functioning. Getting around those certain blocks and mindsets is something that needs to be addressed," he said. Yet he predicted the new park could be inaugurated within five years.

"It can, and it should," he said.

Khurana, the former head of CPWD, predicted the park would be a tourist magnet with 20,000 to 30,000 visitors a day.

"The mindset is, everyone wants it," he said. "When the heart is willing, everything is OK."

At Trial, Chinese Prosecutor Demands Bo Be Severely Punished

Posted: 25 Aug 2013 11:18 PM PDT

China's former Chongqing Municipality Communist Party Secretary Bo Xilai looks on during a meeting at the annual session of China's parliament, the National People's Congress, at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, on March 6, 2010. (Photo: Reuters)

JINAN, China — Chinese prosecutors demanded a heavy sentence for ousted top politician Bo Xilai on Monday, the fifth day of his landmark trial, saying his "whimsical" challenge to bribery, graft and abuse of power charges flew in the face of the evidence.

Bo was a rising star in China's leadership circles when his career was stopped short last year by a murder scandal in which his wife Gu Kailai was convicted of poisoning a British businessman, Neil Heywood, who had been a family friend.

Bo, who was Communist Party chief of the southwestern metropolis of Chongqing, has mounted an unexpectedly feisty defense since the trial began on Thursday, denouncing testimony against him by his wife as the ravings of a mad woman.

He has repeatedly said he is not guilty of any of the charges, although he has admitted to making some bad decisions and to shaming his country by his handling of his former police chief Wang Lijun, who first told Bo that Gu had probably murdered Heywood.

Wang fled to the US consulate in the nearby city of Chengdu in February last year after confronting Bo with evidence that Gu was involved in the murder. Wang was also jailed last year for covering up the crime.

Summing up the evidence on the fifth day of the trial, the state's prosecutor said Bo should not be shown leniency as he had recanted admissions of guilt provided ahead of the trial.

"Over the past few days of the trial, the accused Bo Xilai has not only flatly denied a vast amount of conclusive evidence and facts of his crimes, he has also repudiated his pre-trial written testimony and materials," the court cited the prosecutor as saying.

"We take this opportunity to remind Bo Xilai: The facts of the crimes are objective, and can't be shifted around on your whim," it said, without saying which of the four prosecutors had made the remarks.

The trial has heard many salacious allegations against Bo, with transcripts, although these are probably highly edited, being carried on the court's official microblog.

The prosecution has alleged that Bo took more than 20 million yuan ($3.27 million) in bribes from two businessmen, embezzled another 5 million yuan from a government building project, and abused his power in trying to cover up Gu's crime.

Details have been presented of a villa on the French Riviera bought for the Bo family by businessman Xu Ming, who also paid for foreign trips by Bo and Gu's only son, Bo Guagua, offering a glimpse into the lifestyles of China's elite politicians.

Bo said that he had initially admitted to Communist Party anti-corruption investigators that he received bribes as he had been "under psychological pressure."

Bo also said he been framed by one of the men accused of bribing him, businessman Tang Xiaolin, who he called a "mad dog."

The prosecutor said Bo's lack of contrition would count against him.

"The severeness of the accused's crimes, and that he refused to admit guilt, don't match the circumstances of leniency, and [he] must be severely punished in accordance with the law."

Despite Bo's gutsy defense, a guilty verdict is a foregone conclusion as China's courts are controlled by the Communist Party. State media, which speaks for the party, has already all but condemned him.

Bo could theoretically be given the death penalty for the charges, though many observers say that is unlikely as the party will not want to make a martyr of a man whose left-leaning social welfare policies won much popular support.

Japan Turns Up Pressure on Pro-Pyongyang Schools

Posted: 25 Aug 2013 11:06 PM PDT

Groups of Korean university students living in Japan and visiting North Korea, walk during a visit to pay tribute to statues of North Korean founder Kim Il-Sung and late leader Kim Jong-Il on Mansu Hill in Pyongyang, in this undated photo released by North Korea's Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) on August 25, 2013. (Photo: Reuters)

TOYOAKE, Japan — The high concrete walls of Hwang In Suk's school enclose a world different from the rest of Japan. Another language echoes through the halls. The classrooms, with their chalky blackboards and flimsy desks, look like they haven't been changed since the 1950s, when the school first opened.

The government has begun denying funds to schools like this, and the reason is most evident at the front of each classroom, where portraits hang of North Korea's first leader, Kim Il Sung, and his son, Kim Jong Il.

More than 9,000 ethnic Koreans in Japan go to schools, from kindergarten through college, closely affiliated with North Korea. The schools serve a community that is in many ways stateless, created by the movement of Koreans to Japan prior to the end of World War II, when the Korean Peninsula was a Japanese colony.

Hwang, who commutes four hours a day, six days a week, to attend this aging school with a dustbowl of a playground, considers it a haven. She and her classmates can speak Korean, study their own culture and call each other by their real names, not the Japanese pseudonyms most use to get by in the mainstream.

"This is the only place where we can be ourselves," the 18-year-old said.

In a nation where ethnic Koreans like Hwang have suffered intense discrimination for decades, the schools are a target of rightists and an enigma to the Japanese public. Some have no signs out front saying what lies inside. Their girls stopped wearing Korean-style school uniforms off campus years ago amid harassment and physical threats.

Now, Japan's government is moving to ostracize the schools even further by excluding them—and only them—from subsidies aimed at making a high school education affordable for every child. School officials say the impact of the exclusion, announced earlier this year, is still to be seen but will likely impact enrollment and deepen the stigma the schools already face.

Despite criticism from human rights groups that the government is bullying a vulnerable ethnic group, Japanese officials say they are acting out of concern over the schools' ties to a hostile nation. The solution, they say, is for the schools to become more Japanese.

That, school officials and students say, is exactly what they do not want to do.

___

It's a Saturday afternoon and classes have just let out at the Aichi Middle-Senior High Korean School, which sits atop a hill overlooking a suburb of Nagoya, a city in central Japan.

Teenagers dressed in black-and-white uniforms disperse for their after-school activities. Two girls sit by the playground tuning saxophones. Other students hang back in their homerooms, cluttered with books and backpacks, to kill time before they catch their trains home.

There is a lot of chatter. Though shy at first in the presence of a rare visitor from the outside, the students soon go back to their gossip and games, laughing and flashing peace signs whenever a camera is pointed in their direction.

"We're a community," Hwang said as she changed out of her indoor shoes and placed them neatly in a shoe rack. "We have our own history and our own roots. We support each other."

The schools—one university, 10 high schools and 73 grade schools—survive primarily on tuition and donations from the community. They also receive funds from Pyongyang, but that income stream has largely dried up as North Korea struggles to meet its own domestic economic shortcomings. They received about $30 million a year in the 1970s but get only about $2 million now. That covers the cost of textbooks for younger students and is used to improve facilities and fund scholarships.

When students are about to finish high school, they go on school trips to North Korea. For many of the students, generally fourth- or fifth-generation Koreans in Japan, it is the first and only time they will experience North Korea firsthand.

Officially, most of the students are not North Korean. Some are naturalized Japanese, some have South Korean passports. Many, however, fall into a gray zone, with no passports at all because their families were registered in Japan before North and South Korea separated and declared themselves independent countries.

In the '50s and '60s, North Korea's seemingly bright economic prospects and promise of a socialist paradise prompted many Koreans in Japan to align with Pyongyang—which was quick to support their schools. That legacy continues to be a major factor behind why so many Koreans in Japan associate themselves with North Korea, despite Pyongyang's subsequent decline and isolation. There are only four schools for Koreans in Japan that are aligned with the South and they were not excluded from the government subsidies.

Despite their connections to North Korea, the schools generally use textbooks prepared by their own educators and do not follow the same curriculum as North Korean schools. In a departure that would be unthinkable in North Korea, all the Kim portraits were removed from the classrooms of elementary and middle schools more than a decade ago amid concerns within the community—including parents who do not support the North Korean leadership—that displaying them to small children was not appropriate.

"We receive support from North Korea, and we are grateful for that. But we are not controlled by North Korea," said Principal Woo Oh Byung, likening the "uri-hakkyo" schools like his to Catholic schools or other international schools in Japan.

___

That's not how Tokyo sees things.

Japan views North Korea as a belligerent and dangerous neighbor and officials say the schools are a legitimate target of concern. The two countries have never had diplomatic relations, and as North Korea has moved ahead with its development of nuclear weapons and missiles capable of hitting Japan's major cities, Tokyo has tightened sanctions aimed at isolating Pyongyang and forcing it into international negotiations.

The decision to cut the schools out of the subsidy program is in line with an increasingly tough stance toward North Korea spearheaded by Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, who has long held hawkish positions toward China and North Korea.

Two days after Abe took office late last year, his education minister said the schools would not qualify for the subsidies until North Korea agrees to stop developing its nuclear weapons and missiles and comes clean on what happened to dozens of Japanese citizens who were abducted by North Korean agents in the 1970s and 80s.

Japanese officials say they are also concerned about the schools' relationship with the General Association of Korean Residents in Japan, a strongly pro-Pyongyang group that provides practical services for the Korean community but has also been an important source of foreign currency remittances to North Korea. Japanese officials say that money helps prop up the North's economy and continue its nuclear weapons program.

"I don't think the Japanese public would support including these schools under the current circumstances," Education Minister Hakubun Shimomura said. He suggested that the schools change their curriculums to "become Japanese schools."

Kim Tong Hak, of the nonprofit Living and Legal Center for Korean Residents in Japan, which provides legal counseling to the Korean community but is not directly linked to the schools, said the government's position smacks of pre-1945 nationalism in which Japan forced Koreans there to learn Japanese, study in Japanese-sanctioned schools and use Japanese names.

"The Japanese have long held the belief that if you want to live in Japan, then you must become Japanese. They expected this of the people in the nations they colonized," he said. "This attitude hasn't changed much since the war."

Along with drawing criticism from several groups inside Japan, including the Japan Federation of Bar Associations, the move to exclude the Korean high schools has been questioned by the Human Rights Commission of the United Nations. Amnesty International slammed it as "a politically oriented decision to restrict the right to education among a minority group."

Several Korean schools, including the one in Aichi, are fighting the government in court. A verdict is expected to take more than two years. In the meantime, the schools are cut off from the funding, which ranges from 118,000 yen to 237,000 yen ($1,200 to $2,400) a year, depending on household income.

___

Even without government pressure, the schools are struggling.

Enrollment has been steadily declining for years, in part because of the government-to-government tensions but also because going through the Japanese system is a much more secure path to a good job. Further, for members of the community whose roots in Japan go back several generations, emotional ties to the old country have weakened, despite the frustrations they may harbor with mainstream Japanese society.

In defending the decision to exclude the schools from the government subsidies, Education Minister Shimomura said it doesn't amount to discrimination against Koreans because only a small fraction of the more than 500,000 ethnic Koreans in Japan choose to put their children in the Korean schools to begin with.

Many of those who do, however, fear future generations won't have the option.

"I'm not ashamed to be Korean, and I don't want my kids to be, either," said Che Jonghe, who is the vice president of the Aichi school's mothers association. "I want my kids to have Korean friends. I want them to understand their roots. These schools are about our identity, not about politics."
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