John Chalmers

By Sara Webb

It takes India weeks to complete an election and it never passes without flashes of violence.

But the much younger democracy of Indonesia voted calmly for their president on Wednesday and got the voting over in five hours with a good indication of the result -- a second term for the reformist ex-general Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono -- out just a couple of hours later.

"Faster, Better," was the racy campaign slogan of Jusuf Kalla, one of Yudhoyono's challengers. He trailed in a distant

third, but his rally cry somehow seems fitting for the country's remarkable journey since the chaotic coda of President Suharto's authoritarian rule a decade ago.

And yet if you talk to many Indonesians, they'll tell you that the whole campaign, which kicked off in January and encompassed parliamentary elections before Wednesday's vote, has been one long bore.

The series of televised debates by the presidential and vice presidential candidates were so polite and deferential, so Javanese really, that it was hard at times to believe that here were three teams actually competing against each other. Perhaps it's unfair to mention it on his victory day, but Yudhoyono himself has been known to send listener's off to sleep with his speeches.

Maybe "boring" is good, a sign that democracy isn't a novelty anymore -- just a fact of Indonesian life.

Still, there were moments during the election campaign when things got a little bit edgier in this predominantly Muslim country, where religion is increasingly a sensitive subject.

There were snide remarks about whether the wife of Yudhoyono's running mate, Boediono, was a Catholic (she is Muslim), and whether the wives of Yudhoyono and Boediono ought to wear a headscarf, like the wives of their opponents.

And while Wednesday's vote was an illustration of how much Indonesia has changed in the 11 years since Suharto's ignominious exit, there were many reminders of that less glorious past.

Yudhoyono's rivals, Megawati Sukarnoputri and Kalla, picked Suharto-era generals with terrible human rights records -- Prabowo Subianto and Wiranto -- as their running mates.

Prabowo, who was married to one of Suharto's daughters, was responsible for the kidnapping and torture of some of Megawati's supporters in 1998. Now, the two are the best of friends and Prabowo, a rousing speaker, most likely has his eye on the 2014 election.

"I think Indonesia needs a decisive military man. SBY? He is so Obama. When he speaks, he sounds exactly like Obama!," said Lilik S. Wardi, a housewife in Surabaya after she had cast her vote. "So I chose Prabowo. I didn't want a president who copies Obama's style."

By Jonathon Burch
 
"Contact at Woqab. They've made contact," says Devos calmly before running to the edge of the rooftop to have a better look into the distance with his binoculars.

"What do you mean they've made "contact"?" I ask, trying to see where his binoculars are pointed. "Small arms fire at Woqab," he says pointing beyond a line of trees in the distance. Suddenly I feel exposed, standing in the open, three storeys off the ground.
 
The place is Musa Qala in Afghanistan's southern Helmand province and Devos is a 26-year-old soldier from Nepal serving in the British Army's 2nd Battalion Royal Gurkha Rifles. His job is to man the lookout on top of the British base inside the district centre, about a 30-minute helicopter flight across the desert from Camp Bastion, the main British base in Helmand.

Helmand lies in the heartland of the growing Taliban insurgency, which the United States has vowed to stamp out as part of a new strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan.  Barack Obama brings that plan with him to Europe this week to win support from NATO allies. Washington says the fight cannot be won by military means alone, but bringing insurgents in from the cold will be no easy task.
 
But Musa Qala DC (District Centre), as the base is called, might as well be thousands of miles away from Bastion, consisting of little more than a few tents, a helicopter landing pad and tall, sand-filled blast barriers that line the perimeter.
 
In the middle of the base, however, stands a decrepit two-storey concrete building -- nicknamed "Taliban Hotel" after its former inhabitants who used to control the town -- that now serves as the centre for British military operations in the area. It is on top of this building that Devos and I are standing.
 
Minutes earlier Devos let me use his binoculars to see a group of Afghan women he had spotted, gathered outside a compound, one kilometre or so from where the sound of gunshots now echoed. "I think something is up," he said, "I think something is going to happen. Why do you think they're gathered like that?"
 
"They're probably just coming from a wedding," said Omar, our Afghan photographer, reassuringly. But Devos wasn't so sure. And he was right. The women, it turned out, had fled towards the town centre, knowing there would be an attack.
 
Dotted around Musa Qala DC, are more than a dozen smaller patrol bases, manned by British and Afghan soldiers, keeping a lookout for insurgents and trying to extend their, and ultimately the Afghan government's, sphere of control.
 
Woqab marks the most northern of these patrol bases in the Musa Qala district and, therefore, the "frontline" between British troops and the Taliban. It comes under frequent attack, normally around the same time every afternoon.
 
Musa Qala itself is a small dusty town sitting on the edge of a shallow river that cuts through the dry desert, providing a strip of lush green on either side. It is a traditional opium-trading town and poppy fields in full bloom grow undisturbed only hundreds of metres from the British base.

 After the Taliban were driven from power in 2001 following the Sept. 11 attacks, the extremely light presence of international troops in Musa Qala and Helmand, and the near-absence of the Afghan state, allowed the insurgents to regroup and turn the town into one of their major centres of power.
 
British troops entered Musa Qala in mid-2006, only to pull out again in October the same year, after daily Taliban attacks that at times reached their perimeter defences. They left the collection of shabby concrete shops and houses under the control of tribal elders in a truce criticised by their U.S. allies.
 
But the Taliban seized the town again in February 2007 and proceeded to set up a shadow administration and their own courts. Ten months later, thousands of British and U.S. troops launched an offensive to capture Musa Qala from several hundred Taliban fighters, paving the way for the Afghan army to move in and seize the town.
 
Since then, British and Afghan forces have been trying to extend their area of control to the north and south of Musa Qala DC. The strategy has so far been a success, the British army are keen to point out, saying roadside bombs and small arms attacks within the town centre have decreased over the last few months as the insurgents have been pushed further out.
 
But success is always relative. While attacks in and around the town centre have indeed dropped -- although there was a suicide bombing in the main bazaar in December last year which killed the deputy district police chief -- the area the British and Afghan forces "control" measures no more than 10 km from north to south. An important and strategic area, no doubt, but a dot on the map in terms of scale.
 
"Do you see those trees over there? Beyond that is Taliban. And those over there? Taliban!" says Afghan army captain Sabir, standing on the rooftop of the base and pointing off into the not-too-far distance.
 
Meanwhile the QRF, or Quick Reaction Force made up of three British armoured Warrior vehicles, screams out of base towards Woqab. News of a casualty has come over the radio. After firing a few mortar rounds to push the insurgents back, the QRF returns to base.  On board is an Afghan policeman with a gunshot wound to his chest. He is stabilised in Musa Qala DC, and then airlifted by Chinook to Bastion for surgery.
 
He will probably live, but the pot shots at the patrol bases and the roadside bombs will continue.
 
The Gurkha Regiment lost their first casualty in Afghanistan last November. The soldier was shot by insurgents during an operation to extend British control to the south of Musa Qala.
 
"Did you know him?" I ask. "He was my cousin," says Devos, "I was there."

It is ironic that 30 years after they gave birth to the reforms that transformed China into an economic powerhouse, the country's vast hinterlands are still dogged by poverty.

The breathtaking growth of the economy since the pro-market reforms launched by Deng Xiaoping has led to an extraordinary increase in real living standards and an unprecedented decline in poverty. According to World Bank estimates, more than 60 percent of the population lived under the $1 per day poverty line at the beginning of economic reform. This had fallen to 10 percent by 2004, so - on this narrow measure at least - about 500 million people were lifted out of poverty in a single generation.

"Only development makes hard sense," said President Hu Jintao in a December 18 speech to mark the anniversary of reform, reviving a slogan that Deng used to spur on investment and spending. 

And yet vast swathes of China's countryside were bypassed by the economic boom that transformed its cities and eastern seaboard. Agriculture now accounts for only about one-tenth of China's GDP even though it supports more than half the population.

Much of the rural poverty problem in China can be traced to the inadequacy of the land reform introduced after 1978 and the fact that, even today, rural land is still legally under "collective" ownership. 

Although collectivised farming was replaced by a system that assigned 30-year, non-transferable land-use contracts to households, peasants were not given marketable ownership rights to the land they farmed or the freedom to use it as security on which to borrow and invest. Worse, land was not necessarily allocated to the most efficient farmers and the vast majority worked on so-called "noodle strip" patches that were too small for economies of scale. One of the biggest failings of the de-collectivised system, however, was that it did not shield farmers from the threat of expropriation by officialdom, a major disincentive to investment.

This led to local governments exploiting the countryside as a source of money and power, with the weak legal foothold that farmers had on their land only making life easier for unscrupulous and corrupt officials. According to the International Food Policy Research Institute's Xiaobo Zhang in a speech "land is being grabbed at a fraction of its market value for supposed public purposes, and then being provided to private investors to promote local economic growth".

The rights and legal weakness problems associated with rural land have persisted until today, in large part because of ideological taboos in Beijing.

Conservatives have clung to the view that the state should retain control of arable land, allocating it for the greater egalitarian good. Reformers, on the other hand, have been too weak to challenge a central tenet on which the legitimacy of the Communist Party was founded.

Dodging the central issue and tinkering at the edges, the government has sought for years to address rural poverty through, as the Wall Street Journal puts it, "agricultural subsidies, tax cuts for farmers and massive rural infrastructure spending".

China's foot-dragging meant that it eventually fell a step behind fellow Communist Vietnam, which introduced a legal market in land-use rights in 1993. Vietnam's experience, according to a paper in the IMF's Finance and Development magazine, achieved a more equitable outcome than one might have expected from free market allocation: while there were both winners and losers, the gains in fact tended to favour the poor and those who initially had too little land.

When China's Communist Party agreed to new rural land policies this October, it looked for a moment as though radical change was on its way at last. The new plan means farmland can be leased over an unspecified "long term" rather than 30 years, and farmers will be allowed to "sub-contract, lease, exchange or swap" their land-use rights.

Local media reports said the government had laid the ground for the creation of larger and more efficient farms, some cited estimates that the move would double  disposable incomes in the countryside to more than $1,200 per person a year by 2020, and others suggested that it would give farmers better protection against official land-grabs.

Independent commentators, however, have brushed off the initiative as a pragmatic response to deal with wider social and economic problems rather than an ideological shift within the ruling party.

First, the Party faced the prospect of mounting unrest among its vast rural population. In the past two years there has been a rash of protests over land seizures for mining and other industrial uses, and growing resentment at the widening wealth gap between cities and the countryside.

Second, the government has been faced with a sharp slowdown in its export-driven economy due to recession in the OECD world. The economy slipped into single-digit growth in the third quarter of 2008, just above the level of 8 percent many analysts say is the minimum required to soak up the millions of people entering the labour market every year.

According to some reports, the new rural land-use plan will unleash some $500 billion in land assets. This would fill the pockets of disgruntled peasants, perhaps cooling unrest, and it could help offset the economic impact of an export slowdown by giving a shot in the arm to domestic demand.

But there may actually be much less to the latest reforms than official reports pretend. The geopolitical intelligence group Stratfor concludes that they "might turn out to be a symbolic gesture, used to appease the masses while … (China is) compelled to focus on growth".

Indeed, it would appear that the new land-licence regulations merely codify what is already happening in practice. As Yu Jianrong, a leading researcher on social conflict in Beijing, told the Southern Metropolis Weekly: "there's actually little new here".

Without bolder moves towards full-fledged private ownership of land, China's farmers will always be peasants. But China's leaders always play a very long game. The Economist notes that even the epochal reforms of 30 years ago tended to come in baby steps rather than great leaps, and often were
formulated retrospectively. 

"In tiptoeing gingerly around one of the last Maoist shibboleths - collective landownership - the Party may yet be sowing the seeds of the rural transformation it promises."

America caught a cold and now China has one too. 

IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn said on Monday that the Fund could cut its forecast for China's economic growth in 2009 to around  5 percent. To think that only last year China was galloping at a double-digit clip. It's staggering, and it's worrying.

Worrying, for one thing, because  - as the Heritage Foundation's Derek Scissors puts it - "the American economic slump is running into the Chinese economic slump, creating the conditions for a face-off between Beijing and the U.S. Congress, possibly leading to destabilization of the world's most important bilateral economic relationship". 

He argues that the new U.S. administration, confronted with a record-breaking bilateral deficit and soaring unemployment, could impose prohibitive tariffs or erect other barriers to Chinese goods. The EU, Japan and others would then be permitted by WTO rules to raise barriers against a diversion of Chinese goods to protect their markets, and "some form of Chinese retaliation is certain".

"If intemperate, such retaliation will prompt further action by the U.S. and perhaps other countries, threatening the global nature of the trading system," Scissors concludes.

Michael Pettis, a professor of finance at Peking University, blogged on the same theme last month, warning that Smoot Hawley, the notorious U.S. tariff act that contributed to the Great Depression of the 1930s, could return in a different guise.

Pettis says that while everyone is watching to see if Washington re-enacts new versions of Smoot-Hawley, the real threat may come from current-account-surplus countries which seek to support their export sectors.  There are indeed signs that China is looking to export its way back to vigorous growth through subsidies, raising import tariffs and perhaps currency depreciation (see the grumbling from France's Anne-Marie Idrac only yesterday on the yuan). 

The bitter lesson from the 1930s is that not all countries can export their way back to economic health at the same time. And if they try, there will be a fight.

The concept of a televised war was born in January 1991, when news networks reported live on the missiles slamming into Baghdad and millions watched from the comfort of their living rooms as tracer fire lit the sky above Iraq's capital. A decade later,  the world watched in minute-by-minute horror as the twin towers came crashing down in New York. 

Now, with the ferocious militant attacks in Mumbai, we have arrived in "the age of celebrity terrorism". Paul Cornish of Chatham House argues that apart from killing scores of people, what the Mumbai gunmen wanted was "an exaggerated and preferably extreme reaction on the part of governments, the media and public opinion". 

It's too early to tell if governments will respond with extreme reaction, but the saturation coverage of the drama in the world's media would suggest that, at least on this level, the killers were successful.  

"Almost within minutes, television screens showed harrowing scenes of pools of blood where people had died or been injured, hotels ablaze, Indian army snipers firing at distant targets, and CCTV images of the attackers," Cornish writes.

The first reports of shooting in the streets of India's financial capital did not actually come from the mainstream media.  A BBC news technology blog suggested that the social networking site Twitter  "came of age" during the attacks because it carried messages on the shootings some time before television networks and news agencies started reporting them. Indeed, according to a Reuters report, blogs fed an information frenzy on the 60-hour gun rampage and siege, underlining the emergence of citizen journalism in news coverage.  

However, the live coverage that followed on television networks, particularly Indian ones,  was shrill, sensationalist and bordering on the hysterical. As the Financial Times points out, this is not new in India's competitive television market, where some channels flash the words "Breaking News" all day and "the only thing that matters is to be 'first', even if first is wrong".  The blizzard of reporting inaccuracies over this incident was astonishing. In a despatch on why we should take reports from the scene of a massacre with a grain of salt, Jack Shafer catalogues the instances from Mumbai of what he calls "crap masquerading as authoritative news".

How does high-octane reportage like this feed into the popular mood, and how far could that influence the hands of policy makers in New Delhi and Islamabad?

To find out, watch for Breaking News.

As journalists, we spend a lot of time watching politicians and policies to guage their impact on financial markets and economies. Now, as recession takes an inexorable hold in the Asia-Pacific region, we're watching for the impact on politicians themselves.

 So far there has been no repeat of the political upheaval triggered by Asia's economic crisis a decade ago, which culminated in the ignominious resignation of President Suharto in Indonesia and the ouster of Thailand's prime minister (see previous blog). There are no food riots as there were back then, and Asians are not crowding at  banks' doors to rescue their savings.

The Economist magazine argues this week that Asia's economic downturn will be milder than the one it endured a decade ago, when Asian governments begged households to be hand over their jewellery to be melted down to bolster official reserves.

That seems to be the consensus view. The president of the Asian Development Bank, for instance, argued in a speech this month that the region was well positioned to weather the global downturn and predicted that it should "avoid a full-fledged financial crisis".

So can the region's politicians breathe easily? Probably not.

In New Zealand earlier this month, Helen Clark's nine-year-old Labour government was bounced from power by voters. Analysts reckon she was always heading for defeat at the hands of an electorate ready for change, but any hopes that she would make a last-minute comeback were dashed by the economy's slide into recession.

In India politicians too face a tough year, with national elections due in early 2009 after a difficult 12 months, first of soaring inflation and now of global economic turmoil. Jobs are disappearing, factories are putting expansion plans on hold and even the country's tourism boom is coming to an end.

For more on India, take a look at Reuters' investment summit stories this week.

The Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party lost power in 2004 after its "India Shining" message of economic liberalisation and growing corporate confidence failed to connect with the millions of voters for whom a first car, apartment or refrigerator is once again moving out of reach.  Will Sonia Gandhi's Congress Party face a similar fate? There's a test of the political waters in the central state of Madhya Pradesh this week.

Indonesia also goes to the polls next year. Will voters reward Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, a respected reformer who has brought the economy back from the brink, by re-electing him as president? Or could the financial crisis, which has savaged the rupiah, bring his rival, Megawati Sukarnoputri, to power again?

Could the economic downturn even have a political impact on Singapore, which last week published figures confirming the city-state is in recession? The Financial Times' take was that the downturn may prompt Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong to call an early election "in case economic pain leads to a backlash against the People's Action party that has ruled Singapore for 50 years".

It even speculated that "the severity of the downturn could determine the continued durability of the Singapore model, seen as a pioneer of authoritarian capitalism, in which the public gives up some civil liberties in return for economic prosperity".

That may be over-stating the case. 

But for sure Asia's political landscape could look very different when the current economic downturn is over.

I knew something was up when an official abruptly announced that the women's 100 metres final news conference had been postponed.

Comments made by the two American sprinters on their way off the track had already rung an alarm bell.

"Man, I swear somebody jumped, someone got out before the gun. I've never had a bad start like that, ever," said Muna Lee, who took fifth place. Torri Edwards, who came at the back of the field, admitted: "I think I moved a bit there at the start, and I thought they would call it. I think I false-started, I moved a little bit -- my foot. There was no call back so I went."

Sure enough, the Americans appealed against the result of the race, in which Jamaica had taken a clean sweep of the medals, claiming there had been a false start.

For 20 tense minutes it looked like the blue riband event of the evening might have to be re-run, until word came through that the International Association of Athletics Federations had rejected the Americans' appeal.

Why, if even one of the Jamaican medallists said she had noticed the false start, did the appeal fail?

A false start is declared when an athlete moves any part of his or her body prior to the sound of the starting gun while in 'set' position. For races up to 400 metres, where hundredths of seconds make all the difference, electronic starting blocks are used to detect any pre-gun movement.

If a competitor applies any pressure to the blocks initiating a reaction time of less than 0.1 seconds after the warning gun is fired -- in other words so fast that the athlete must have been moving before the gun -- a warning sound is sent into the earphone of the chief starter, who has the option of recalling the race and starting again.

The decision not to recall the race on Sunday may have been because Edwards had not applied enough pressure on the blocks to trigger the warning, or because she had applied the pressure after the 0.1 second had elapsed. Or she might have twitched her upper body but left her feet solid.

Although she thought she had false-started, Edwards actually had a reaction time of 0.179 seconds, and that wasn't the fastest or the slowest of the eight runners.

For the Jamaicans it was all a storm in a teacup.

"I felt the false start," joint-silver medallist Kerron Stewart said when the news conference finally got underway. "But the race is over. There's nowt we can do about it. Jamaica came out on top."

PHOTO: Shelly-Ann Fraser of Jamaica (R) celebrates winning the women's 100m final as she crosses the finish line in the National Stadium at the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games, August 17, 2008. REUTERS/Jason Reed

Yesterday I took a mean swipe at sports journalists for the vacuous questions they put to athletes. I must tip my baseball cap today, however, to the reporter who asked Usain Bolt how the fastest man in the world had spent his day.

It seems the Jamaican did a lot of time sleeping, and in between feasted on "nuggets".

It took Bolt senior, speaking from Jamaica, to put the record straight -- and perhaps deter millions of adoring young athletes from a lifetime of fast food. His son's gold medal, Wellesley Bolt said, was the result of a diet rich with the vegetable yam.

I can see it now: the McYam Happy Meal.
 
Maybe there is something special in root vegetables like yam. The secret of Samoan weighlifter Ele Opeloge's strength, according to her coach, is a variety known as taro.
 
No doubt the majority of other Olympians in Beijing are eating an exemplary diet packed with fruit, vegetables, tasty tubers and other unprocessed food. Still, the McDonald's restaurant at the athletes' village has been doing brisk trade.

Take Jay Lyon, Canada's best hope for an archery medal, who admits he is probably not the archetypal Olympian.

"I'm not much of an athlete -- I eat a lot of McDonalds," he said ahead of the Games. "I'm probably overweight for an athlete." Lyon weighs 96 kilograms (212 pounds).

Lyon only has to stand behind a line and shoot some arrows, so "probably overweight" is probably okay.

But what about the athletes who have to break a sweat for their medals? No problem. Just ask U.S. sprint and long jump gold medallist Carl Lewis, who had this to say at a McDonald's burger-making contest in Beijing: "I eat McDonald's. I've always eaten McDonald's. I even worked at McDonald's. It was my first job."

PHOTO: Usain Bolt of Jamaica poses with his gold medal during the men's 100m medal ceremony of the athletics competition in the National Stadium at the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games August 17, 2008. REUTERS/Wolfgang Rattay

Eight could be Michael Phelps's lucky number if he can trump Mark Spitz's Olympic haul of of seven golds at the 100m medley relay in Beijing on Sunday.

If so, he would have something in common with many host team athletes, who are big on the number 8 because in Chinese it sounds like a word for prosperity (fa). That's why the Olympic Games opened on the 8th day of the 8th month at 8pm.

However, British marathoner Paula Radcliffe is counting on number 17 to banish memories  of her disastrous run in Athens and claim her first Olympic medal.  She was born on the 17th of the month, as was her grandmother and her daughter. According to a report in Britain's Sunday Telegraph, the coincidence goes even further: her grandmother got engaged on a 17th and was married on a 17th too. 

Specially designed running shoes that Radcliffe will be wearing in the race on Sunday have 17 17 17 written vertically at the back.

And guess what the date will be? August 17.

PHOTO: British long distance runner Paula Radcliffe is interviewed in Beijing August 15, 2008. REUTERS/Gil Cohen Magen

Journalists don't generally address politicians by their first name, they tend to ask them searching questions and it's rare to see them fawning. Not so, sports reporters.

For the vacuous, how about this, heard in the handball mixed zone at the Beijing Games: "Congratulations, Anita. Fantastic match. How did you feel in the last 10 minutes?"

(Who are these people who seem to be on first-name terms with athletes of second-tier sports anyway)?

Or take the killer question thrown at the men's kayak bronze medallist this week: "Benjamin, I saw you go over and hug your mum. What did you say to her?"
 
Imagine if the rest of the journalistic fraternity adopted the same fascination with touchy-feely trivia I've found while covering the Games. The White House press corps, for example:

"Hey, George, great speech! How did you feel as the applause went up at the end?"

And let's imagine the U.S. president gets with the programme.

Question: "Are you looking forward to your encounter with Chinese President Hu Jintao in Beijing?

Answer: "Well, it's going to be a discussion of two-sides, Randy. He's a very good politician, but I've been preparing for this meeting for months and as long as I keep my concentration I should be able to come out on top."

John Chalmers is Reuters editor for political and general news, Asia. He is on first name terms with very few world leaders.

PHOTO: U.S. President George W. Bush throws out the first pitch to U.S. team catcher Lou Marson before practice while visiting the U.S. Olympic baseball team at the Wukesong Cultural and Sports Center in Beijing August 11, 2008. REUTERS/Larry Downing