The Problem of Taiwan
The future of Taiwan may provide the Prime Minister with a most testing challenge, writes Hamish McDonald.
When, three weeks from now, China celebrates the lunar new year and enters the Year of the Monkey, its leaders will see plenty of mischief already afoot in two of the country's fringe territories.
In Taiwan, President Chen Shui-bian's plan to hold a referendum simultaneously with his re-election bid on March 20 is a dangerous tweak at the Beijing dragon's nose, even though the plebiscite only asks the island's 23 million people their predictable opinion about the Chinese ballistic missiles aimed at them.
In Hong Kong, the heightened political awareness shown in last July's half-million-strong march against a new security law will almost certainly carry through into elections for the territory's Legislative Council in August, and will increase pressure for constitutional reform to let the successor to Chinese-appointed "chief executive" Tung Chee-hwa be chosen by popular vote when his term ends in 2007.
Both developments call for determined diplomacy by the many foreign countries with a strong interest in supporting democratic trends in these two Chinese outposts, in the face of intense hostility by Beijing to any outside "interference" in what it asserts to be purely domestic issues.

No country would be more awkwardly caught in the middle of conflicting security and economic interests than Australia if the simmering Taiwan dispute actually flared into war and the United States asked its Pacific allies to join defending the island.
The result of such a conflict is a foregone conclusion, given the ramshackle state of China's military, and the US could probably live with the political and economic damage. But as former Department of Foreign Affairs head Stuart Harris and Canberra defence analyst Hugh White pointed out in an ABC Radio National discussion this week, the fallout would be profoundly negative for Australia.
Quite possibly, it won't get anywhere near the nightmare phone call from Washington. The Chinese were delighted by President George Bush's firm put-down to the referendum plan of Taiwan's Chen. The referendum itself doesn't alter one bit Taiwan's formal position that it belongs to the "Republic of China", even though that entity vanished on the mainland in 1949.
If opinion polls point to an election loss by Chen and a return to opposition by his independence-leaning Democratic Progressive Party, Beijing may be content to sit back and watch it happen.
Yet the fact that Chen's rival candidate, Lien Chan, is now himself drifting to a position that accepts two states within China points to a steady alienation of the island's polity. Lien leads the Taiwan-based remnant of the Kuomintang, the KMT or Chinese Nationalist Party. Although it has long since dropped its pretence of ruling the mainland, along with many of its authoritarian ways, the KMT had stuck to a "one China" line and thus been Beijing's preferred interlocutor in Taiwan. Lien's wavering makes Beijing's offer of a Hong Kong-style "one country-two systems" reunification formula even less of a goer.
With a democracy putting down ever-deeper roots, the Taiwanese are less and less likely to be stirred by appeals to a common Chinese identity, especially when they have managed so far to enjoy a symbiotic connection to the booming Chinese economy without having to bow politically.
Apart from the 15 per cent or so of its population descended from the KMT refugees, the Taiwanese are descended from a Malay population akin to the Filipinos, intermingled with settlers from Fujian on the Chinese coast.
And if the island's people don't care, the rest of the world acknowledges China's claim to Taiwan only because Beijing gets so upset about it.
If the Chinese communists were somehow able to climb down, set aside the reunification goal until better times, and acknowledge a second Chinese state as a temporary reality - as the Germans accepted for a long period and the Koreans still do - the Pacific would suddenly be a more stable region.
But that is unlikely. China's recent rhetoric has been shriller than ever, with Premier Wen Jiabao warning that China would "pay any price" to block Taiwan independence, and a pair of senior military analysts listing those prices: trade and economic damage, an Olympic boycott, chilled foreign relations and casualties. All the things, in fact, that Western commentators have said would make the Chinese shrink from military action.
This week, Beijing removed a deputy head of its Taiwan Affairs Office, apparently as punishment for not having scared Taiwan's politicians enough to make them drop the referendum altogether.
It could still be bluster. A military humiliation and a derailed economy could lead to the one price the communists are not willing to pay: loss of power.
In 1972, Henry Kissinger warned the Chinese the US could not suppress a popular Taiwan independence movement if one emerged.
We are now close to that point, but the choice is no longer one of choosing between the Chinese communists and an anachronistic pet cause of the American right. Taiwan has reinvented itself and is much less easy to sacrifice to trade interests.
We now have a thriving democracy in a sizeable Chinese society, one that could eventually help "roll back" the communist dictatorship on the mainland.
That makes it worthwhile supporting an American deterrent to unilateral Chinese action, while telling Taiwan's politicians to cool it on the symbolism. Second-track diplomacy could harp away at Beijing's rigidity in its one-China interpretation.
Taiwan is meanwhile a powerful argument to make to the Chinese for allowing Hong Kong's people to choose their own chief executive in 2007, since how Hong Kong fares under the system in place since its transfer back to China from British rule in 1997 will greatly influence people in Taiwan.
Australia's voice has been notably weaker than those of its Western friends on this issue. It was the last of the Anglophone democracies to speak out against the contentious security law at mid-year. Both the Americans and British have now supported popular elections in Hong Kong, earning fairly mild, pro-forma rebukes from Beijing. Australia should be saying something too.
John Howard makes a lot of the fact that 10 per cent of people in his Benelong electorate are ethnic Chinese. Of course they all support closer links with China, but he might be surprised at the level of support among them for the democratic movements in Taiwan and Hong Kong as well.
PROBLEMS IN ZAIRE IN AFRICA
Conflicts in Africa—Introduction
There have been over 9 million refugees and internally displaced people from conflicts in Africa. Hundreds and thousands of people have been slaughtered from a number of conflicts and civil wars. If this scale of destruction and fighting was in Europe, then people would be calling it World War III with the entire world rushing to report, provide aid, mediate and otherwise try to diffuse the situation. This article explores why Africa has been largely ignored and what some of the root causes of the problems are.
A Comparison With Kosovo
The international media, NATO leaders and others were very vocal about the plight of the ethnic Albanians in Kosovo and insisted on a new humanitarian based model of military intervention. Because the western mainstream media had so much rhetoric about this new humanitarian nature of NATO, it is worth making some comparisons here to see if and how that has been applied to Africa.
Middle East and North Africa Unrest
A wave of protests has erupted throughout the Middle East and North Africa. A combination of the global financial crisis, rising costs of living, high unemployment — especially of educated youth, frustration from decades of living under authoritarian and corrupt regimes, various document leaks revealing more details about how governments around the world are dealing and viewing each other, have all combined in different ways in various countries, leading to a wave of rising anger.
Some protests have become revolutions as governments such as those in Tunisia and Egypt have been overthrown. Others have not got that far but have sometimes been peaceful, other times met with very brutal repression.
Is this a wave of democracy that cannot be stopped, and will forever change the region, and the global power politics?
The Democratic Republic of Congo
The conflict in the DRC (formerly known as Zaire) has involved seven nations. There have been a number of complex reasons, including conflicts over basic resources such as water, access and control over rich minerals and other resources and various political agendas. This has been fueled and supported by various national and international corporations and other regimes which have an interest in the outcome of the conflict.
Nigeria and Oil
The Niger Delta in Nigeria has been the attention of environmentalists, human rights activists and fair trade advocates around the world. The trial and hanging of environmentalist Ken Saro-Wiwa and eight other members of the Ogoni ethnic minority made world-wide attention. So too did the non-violent protests of the Ogoni people. The activities of large oil corporations such as Mobil, Chevron, Shell, Elf, Agip etc have raised many concerns and criticisms.
Sierra Leone
Sierra Leone has seen serious and grotesque human rights violations since 1991 when the civil war erupted. According to Human Rights Watch, over 50,000 people have been killed to date, with over one million people having been displaced. There have been numerous factors contributing to problems such as the the diamond connection, the gross abuses committed by both rebel and government forces, and the problems of the current peace treaty.
Conflict between Ethiopia and Eritrea
30 years of war and conflict as Eritrea attempted to gain independence, finally resulted in an April 1993 internationally monitored referendum, where 98.5% of the registered voters voted. 99.8% of the votes were for independence, although the borders were not defined clearly. While the two nations seemed to get on fairly well, relations deteriorated into war a couple of years after Eritrea introduced its own currency in 1997. War again resulted over what seemed to be a minor border dispute in May 1998.
Rwanda
It seems that the cause of the Rwanda genocide has typically been explained in simplified terms, such as ancient tribal hatreds, omitting many of the deeper and also modern causes, such as international economic policies, power politics and corruption of the elite, etc. which are also common contributing causes of problems elsewhere in the world today. This article explores the deeper causes of genocide in Rwanda.
AIDS in Africa
AIDS in Africa is said to be killing more people than conflicts.It causes social disruption as children become orphaned and it affects many already-struggling economies as workforces are reduced.As an enormous continent, various regions are seeing different results as they attempt to tackle the problem. Numerous local, regional and global initiatives are slowly helping, despite significant obstacles (such as poverty, local social and cultural norms/taboos, concerns from drug companies about providing affordable medicines, and limited health resources of many countries that are now also caught up in the global financial crisis)