Banyan

AS TOKYO sizzles in the summer heat, ordinary consumers are scrimping to save energy, in dutiful hopes of offsetting the shortages caused by the outage at Fukushima and other nuclear plants. Meanwhile luxury boutiques are snubbing their noses at such plebeian pastimes. The fancier shops are propping their doors wide open—in the belief that their air-conditioned cool will increase foot traffic. Their power-hungry largesse is left to stream wastefully out onto the pavement.

The culprits include Louis Vuitton, Dior, Ralph Lauren, Burberry, Donna Karan, Ermenegildo Zegna and Emporio Armani. At Gucci's store in Omotesando, a draught of cold air can be felt as far away as 15 metres onto the sidewalk. Brooks Brothers is possibly divided on the matter: it keeps just one of its double-doors open.

Last week Tokyo temperatures reached 31 degrees Celsius (88 Fahrenheit). The power utility, TEPCO, said it had reached 90% of total capacity, a dangerous level. Companies and households throughout the north-east have been asked to cut 15% of their electrical use at peak times to prevent a blackout. Much of the region’s power-generation capacity was lost to the tsunami even before the reactors at Fukushima went offline.

Among the worse offenders we might rank those who portray themselves as the most globally responsible corporate citizens, such as Body Shop, Neal's Yard Remedies, l'Occitane, Benetton and The Gap.

Other brands with an open-door policy include apparel makers like Bottega Veneta, Tod’s, Fendi, Furla, Kate Spade, Tumi, Longchamp, Max & Co and Coach. Also, jewellery brands like Chaumet, Samantha Tiara, Georg Jensen. Britain's Hackett, Alfred Dunhill and Paul Smith are energy-wasters too, as are Japanese department stores like Mitsukoshi and Matsuya.

One would have thought that the doors of Tokyo could be kept shut this summer. Or if the doors must be open, the retailers might reduce the level of air-conditioning. But from the shopping district of Ginza and elegant Marunouchi to the tree-lined boulevard of Omotesando, neither has been the case.

Tokyo's posh boutiques are not unique. Stores of all sorts in many places keep their doors open in winter and summer, believing that a burst of comfortable air will draw in customers. Britain's "Close the Door" campaign was endorsed last winter by a gaggle of politicians and even industry. American utility companies have tried to emulate its success, to no avail. According to a study by the University of Cambridge, a high-street retailer's open door is responsible for 50% of its energy consumption.

It makes the Tokyo boutiques' "business as usual" approach all the more noticeable. And in a society that values shared sacrifices, it is strikingly at odds with the ethos of the Japanese public who are otherwise sweating in their homes and offices to save power.

At Royal Copenhagen, a fancy pewter store in the Marunouchi district, a saleswoman said that customers complain the door is too heavy to open. (Your correspondent tried it and it seemed of ordinary weight.) Even the Apple store in Ginza keeps its doors open and air-conditioning blasting—though unlike the luxury boutiques, it has so much foot traffic that it is hard to see how they could do otherwise, without a physical tent and curtain extending onto the sidewalk.

Japan is one of the most energy-efficient countries, but the simple data do not tell the whole story. Japanese industry has made extraordinary gains in energy-efficiency over the the past 40 years—since the oil shocks in the mid-1970s. But the residential and corporate sectors (which include retail) have not. Where industry uses the same amount of energy as it did in the 1980s—even as the size of the economy has more than doubled—the other sectors' energy use has actually increased at a faster rate than the overall economy.

Impressively, a handful of boutiques keep their doors closed (though this may be as much for exclusivity as energy-savings). Luxury brands that merit a nod this season include Chanel, Bulgari, Cartier, Georgio Armani, Loewe, Céline and Tiffany.

China's continued economic success is under threat from a resurgence of the state and its resistance to further reform

WHEN Hiroshi Mikitani, one of Japan's most successful entrepreneurs and richest men, considered leaving Japan's prestigious business association, Keidanren, he announced it via Twitter—symbolically bypassing the old guard. This morning he followed it up by sending the group a formal letter of resignation.

"This is not what I should belong to. I am doing business to drive Japan to new Japan, and they want to protect old Japan. So I felt that for fundamental issues, I don't share the values of the current Keidanren," he said in a telephone interview. Mr Mikitani is the founder and chief executive of Rakuten, an innovative retailer and by now an established household name in Japan. "Rakuten is a very value-oriented company, and we challenge many things," he says. "If they were trivial issues, I could live with it. But if it is a fundamental philosophical difference, I don't think it's right to stay there."

Though Keidanren's opposition to energy-market liberalisation is high on his list of reasons why, it goes beyond that, he says. The problem extends to a variety of areas, from accounting standards to the way Keidanren protects big business. It is not the same organisation that he joined in 2004, he says.

When Rakuten became a member, the country was racing forward under a bold reform agenda spearheaded by Junichiro Koizumi, then the prime minister. The Keidanren, too, had adopted a stance of modernising the Japanese business community by undoing old protections and liberalising industries. But since then, the reforms have stalled or gone in reverse.

Mr Mikitani is a prominent symbol of the new Japan: a Japanese Jeff Bezos. Armed with an MBA from Harvard, he left his job at the staid Industrial Bank of Japan in the 1990s to set up Rakuten. The company acts as the online shopping mall for tens of thousands of small and mid-sized businesses. Rakuten handles almost one-third of e-commerce transactions in Japan.

"Maybe we will start a new industry group, but I don't think that will have a strong impact," he says. "We feel trying to start a new trend through our business is the most effective." By being successful and being global, Rakuten can be a role model for other companies, and shift core Japanese values and the educational system to be more globally oriented, for example.

"Most business people fundamentally agree with me," he says. Though his tweet received thousands of replies, almost all of them encouraging him to leave the Keidanren, few business leaders have had the courage to publicly back him. Mr Mikitani is not surprised. "That's Japan and that's what we need to change. Anybody should be able to stand up and say whatever they think."

INDONESIAN prosecutors and anti-terrorism officials spent nearly a decade trying to put away Abu Bakar Basyir, so they didn’t much mind waiting an additional four hours and 45 minutes on Thursday. That’s how long it took a panel of judges at the South Jakarta District Court to read the guilty verdict against Mr Basyir, on charges of terrorism, and to sentence him to 15 years in prison. The old firebrand is now 72 years old, and ailing. Several hundred of Mr Basyir’s supporters who had gathered outside the courthouse since the early morning—most of them angry young men in white—dispersed without incident after the verdict was announced. Widespread fears that they would ransack the courthouse and local churches, or target the judges with bombs (as had been threatened via Twitter and SMS messages) proved unfounded.

Whether due to fatigue from their long wait, or the fact that they were outnumbered better than 3-to-1 by 3,000 armed police and soldiers, Mr Basyir’s young followers didn’t muster for a fight. The same might be said about Mr Basyir’s entire movement at present. It had drawn widespread attention and even some admiration within Indonesia in the wake of the 9/11 attacks on the United States, but since then it has slowly and steadily deflated, like a hot-air balloon after touching down. The Indonesian public tuned in to catch the news of Mr Basyir’s guilty verdict, in the world’s largest Muslim-majority nation, most citizens have long since tuned out his call for an anti-Western Islamic state. As they showed with their indifference to his trial since it opened on February 14th, they prefer watching “American Idol” and local reality shows copied from Hollywood, or updating their Facebook accounts (which as of this week stood at 38.1 million—the second-most in the world).

Mr Basyir emerged from self-exile in Malaysia amid Indonesia’s pro-democracy movement in the late 1990s, and used the country’s newfound freedoms to praise Osama bin Laden and lambast Indonesia’s secular government and its friendship with America. The frail-looking cleric, constantly wearing a toothy grin and a bristly white beard, became the poster child for Indonesia’s radical Islamists. Even then they were tiny in number, amid a country of 237m, but they dominated the headlines with their rhetoric and intimidation tactics. After the Bali bombings in 2002, which killed 202 tourists and Indonesian citizens, Mr Basyir claimed that the American CIA was behind it—just as the CIA and Israel’s Mossad took down the World Trade Centre in New York the year before. The fact that Mr Basyir didn’t back his wild claims with a shred of evidence didn’t matter: he found listeners among some Indonesian politicians and intellectuals, and on university campuses.

Local and international media were always ready to publish Mr Basyir’s most outrageous rants: he once declared that the naked female form was more immoral than the Bali bombings. His statements infuriated America, Australia and Britain, all of whom lost citizens in the 2002 Bali attacks. But they were perhaps angrier with Indonesia’s judicial system, for its inability to lock him up and throw away the key—or put him before a firing squad. America and Australia have long accused Mr Basyir of being the spiritual leader of Jemaah Islamiyah, the South-East Asian offshoot of al-Qaeda, which carried out a string of terrorist bombings in Indonesia dating back to 2000, including the Bali bombings, which altogether have killed more than 240 people.

Mr Basyir’s arrest in West Java on August 9th 2010 was his third on terrorism-related charges: he was first arrested after the Bali bombings, but then prosecutors botched the case and he ended up serving only 18 months, on a dubious immigration-violation charge. He was immediately re-arrested upon his release from prison, this time in connection with the bombing of the J.W. Marriott Hotel in Jakarta in 2003, but then he did only 30 months, because he hadn’t been an active participant in the plot; he was, after all, in prison at the time. So Mr Basyir was released again.

But even then the Indonesian cleric had begun to lose his public appeal. Shocked and repulsed by the suicide-bombing of the Australian embassy in Jakarta in 2004, and by a second set of attacks on Bali in 2005, and then again by the (second) bombing of the Marriott and another upscale hotel in 2009, the silent majority of Indonesia’s 190m Muslims began to murmur that enough was enough. Nearly all the victims in those later attacks were Indonesian Muslims. Indonesian voters also continued their pattern of choosing secular candidates in presidential and parliamentary elections in 2004 and 2009, further cementing the country’s democracy and leaving Mr Basyir nothing beyond small clusters of followers in rural villages across Java.

As al-Qaeda’s attempt to trigger an Islamic revolution in the Arab world failed, so did Mr Basyir’s movement to create an Islamic state in Indonesia. Like Osama bin Laden, all the Indonesian cleric had left was terrorism, an ugly tactic. Despite his public renunciation of violence in 2006, Mr Basyir’s conviction on Thursday was for organising and funding a terrorist-training camp in the Indonesian province of Aceh, on the northern tip of Sumatra. The 100 or so militants who had trained there were allegedly plotting to assassinate the president, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, and carry out Mumbai-style attacks on Western hotels and embassies in Jakarta.

While the judges who sentenced Mr Basyir to 15 years in prison—prosecutors asked for life—have been accused of taking the easy road to avoid further alienating Indonesia’s few thousand hard-line radicals, Mr Basyir faces additional charges in connection with the suicide-bombing of a mosque inside a police compound in Central Java on April 15th. He is all but certain to spend the rest of his life behind bars. Police say they have linked the bomber and the attack’s arrested planners to Jemaah Ansharut Tauhid, or JAT, a legally-recognised group that was founded by Mr Basyir.

But this hardly marks the end of Indonesia’s struggle with violence in the name of religion. Despite the curtains falling on Mr Basyir’s one-man sideshow, surveys taken over the past 10 years show that religious intolerance in Indonesia has been growing at an alarming pace—in both rural and urban areas. Mass organisations such as JAT and the infamous Islamic Defenders Front have in recent years attacked churches and blocked the construction of new ones, usually claiming that they failed to win the approval of local Muslims. Cowed local officials and police have done nothing to stop them. Last year, a Christian pastor was stabbed in the stomach by a local radical leader as he led a congregation to a Sunday service. Christian Solidarity Worldwide recently called on Mr Yudhoyono’s government to tackle Islamic extremism as attacks on Christians and their houses of worship proliferated. The head of a Christian group in Jakarta has said there were 14 attacks on churches in the first five months of 2011, and 46 last year.

Radical groups have also been involved in lynchings, including numerous attacks against the minority Ahmadiyah sect. On February 6th, a mob of hundreds of people in rural West Java, incited by local radical religious figures, attacked the homes of local Ahmadiyah leaders, killing four people. Graphic footage of Ahmadiyah members being beaten and hacked to death were seen everywhere on YouTube. Analysts say Indonesian radical groups are using exploiting push-button issues such as the Ahmadiyah (who don’t believe that Muhammad was the final prophet of Islam) because they resonate with rural villagers. Mr Yudhoyono’s government seemed paralysed, standing back and doing nothing as attacks continue and church close their doors.

The president, a retired Army general who might fear being painted as un-Islamic by his political opponents, has since made vague statements calling radicalism a threat to the nation. He has called for expanding the study of pancasila, the Indonesian state ideology which regards the country’s six recognised religions as equals. But he’s also spoken of a “middle way” in which radical groups might be tolerated as a proper part of the country’s democracy. This despite the fact that some of them have openly stated their intention to overthrow Mr Yudhoyono’s government and form an Islamic state, using violence if necessary.

Terrorism remains a grave threat to Indonesia. The now-defunct Jemaah Islamiyah has many splinter cells actively plotting attacks, as well as “lone wolf” terrorists such as Muhammad Syarif, the bomber of the mosque in Central Java. He was among the protesters who gathered outside the South Jakarta District Court when Mr Basyir’s trial opened four months ago. Police are still searching for 15 suicide vests that are supposed to be in circulation, as well as remaining co-conspirators in the attack. On Tuesday police arrested 16 people for plotting to poison officers’ food with cyanide, as well as kill them with pen guns. Mr Basyir’s conviction will remove a venomous voice from Indonesia’s internal debate on the place of Islam, but in everyday terms it will not make the country any safer.

“HAPPY the country that never makes the front page” we said recently of Australia. Even more apt for its smaller sibling across the Tasman Sea, where usually only stories of rugby, hobbits or whale-strandings trouble even the inner sections of the papers published abroad. A run of earthquakes in Christchurch, New Zealand’s second-largest city, has changed all that. The first, last September, was notable mainly for its miraculous outcome (zero deaths vs 7.1 magnitude and much destruction).  No such luck on February 22nd, when a 6.3 magnitude tremor killed 181 people and destroyed the already weakened city centre.

Christchurch is a city under siege, its inner heart crumbling and cordoned off. Aftershocks abound, always bringing with them the reminder of the next big one: there is supposedly a 25-30% chance that it will come sometime soon. A couple of particularly big shakes on Monday collapsed many more buildings and ruined much of the recovery, both in structure and spirit, that had begun to emerge. Further damage befell the massive stone Anglican cathedral after which the city is named, narrowing the prospect of its symbolic restoration.  

I’m an Aucklander myself but my love for this most English of New Zealand cities has survived even many years in England. I’m in town ostensibly to investigate how Christchurch is coping, but mostly I’m hoping I can relocate some of the excitement of my youth, when I’d stop by here as I hitchhiked south or north. Painters, musicians, writers and their hangers-on have thrived in Christchurch since the 1920s. The local counterculture is New Zealand’s strongest. Many of the city’s most passionate advocates started life elsewhere.

As is often the way, all feels strangely normal on the drive from the airport through the western suburbs, although the road has become bumpy. Life goes on, and it would be easy to miss the Sunday afternoon feel about this weekday mid-morning. Many residents have fled, to stay with relatives or friends elsewhere, and schools all over the country report a boost to enrolments. Others, with equity tied up in damaged houses, await insurance settlements and vow they will head for Australia at the first opportunity, as many New Zealanders do anyway.

It is the central and eastern suburbs which took the heaviest blows. These areas sit on sandy alluvial soil, and the quakes churned the ground beneath them into a morass of bubbling, glutinous stinking slime, swamping streets and houses alike. This is “liquefaction”, a term no longer needing explanation in these parts. Much of Christchurch now floats on a boggy layer. Almost certainly, a lot of land is beyond rehabilitation and likely to be abandoned.

But many still live here. The mud monster has been swept aside by armies of civil-defence workers and volunteers. In the riverside suburb of Avonside (“Avonslide”) however, the streets are still washed out and rutted, dykes of gravel and silt keeping the river at bay. Drainage gratings and manhole covers are upended, posing hazards to drivers. Once again the Avon, much cleaned up late last century, is an open sewer, thanks to broken pipes and effluvium from the chemical toilets that remaining residents must use. The tanks that were hauled in for depositing their horrid contents are emblazoned with grim warnings of “splashback”. They are ubiquitous, along with apocalyptic portaloos for brave passersby.

Every third or so house seems uninhabited, many bearing the red sticker that signals their likely doom, while many others are simply gone, front steps and letterboxes leading up to vacant lots and piles of rubble. Still, there is life about. Joggers, builders and residents hail one another. Community spirit, I’m told, has grown, as it does in adversity. I’m also warned that photographing damaged houses still occupied would be a bad idea. Best not to push it.

I borrow a bike from David Haywood, a local journalist and writer who hails from Auckland (he remains a patriotic southerner even as he points out the cracking foundations of his Avonside home). Cycling and Christchurch go together: it is a flat city with stunning gardens and riverside paths. Pre-quake, it felt like Cambridge, with punts cruising the Cam-like Avon. Now the damaged roads and cordons give a bike the edge in efficiency, as long as you are prepared for undulating paths.

It is a bucolic, if melancholy ride along the riverside. I’m pleased to see the fecal flow hasn’t driven the ducks and cormorants away. My first aftershock: not unlike a double-decker thundering past my London flat. Most locals, I’m told, don’t even flinch through these. Yet others speak of waking up regularly at 2am since February or September, rumbling or not. Until now, I’ve hardly felt in danger.

I reach the cordon—the “red zone"—around the inner city and catch a glimpse of the hundreds of structures destined for a wreckers’ ball. There’s the cathedral, but without its proud spire. Along the way, I’ve passed the remains of the many small stone Anglican churches that formed the basis of the original 19th-century Anglican settlement. Few, if any of these are to rise again, the congregations lost even before September.

At the Madras Street end of the cordon, alongside the ghostly massage parlours and saunas, a handwritten sign—“Christchurch Economic Recovery Abandoned”. Here, the Canterbury Earthquake Recovery Authority, the government agency established to co-ordinate Christchurch’s rehabilitation, is widely hated by the many small-business operators who have been unable to access their premises, even to retrieve enough equipment to set up elsewhere. As insurers and reinsurers negotiate, anger is growing. A government subsidy to allow shut firms to continue paying salaries has already run out, and layoffs are legion.

I cycle through the old suburbs south of the red zone, where life again feels normal, despite the holes in the ground. On a picket fence, “Keep Calm and Carry On” recalls olde England again. But it’s crossed through: “Now Panic and Freak Out”.

An evening spent in the company of a group of impassioned locals—journalists, writers, musicians, designers, civil servants, engineers—underlines the depth of ideas for the future of Christchurch. My own heritage sentimentalities—if it is old, it should be saved—are put firmly in place. Fair enough: once I’m out of here, that important piece of our colonial past isn’t likely to land on my head. But no-one wants any Auckland-style carbuncles. Instead the talk is of decentralisation, low-rise, green buildings, light rail, sustainability. With a hard practical edge. There’s real visionary thinking here, real possibilities to do something amazing. If the political will and money are there, and if the ground settles.

The following day, a visit to the Christchurch City Council offices, temporarily operating from the art gallery, heightens my optimism. A roomful of architects and designers, all collaborative and open-plan, buzzes with ideas for the future of Christchurch, eager to present a programme to the government by the end of the year. Consultation is wide, and is generated by the Share An Idea website, reaching out to Christchurch locals. The co-ordinators report thousands of ideas per day, most of them being workable, to a point.

In a borrowed car, I take a spin to Lyttleton, the charming and cultured port town across the hills from the city, to where I used to idly dream of retiring to. This was the epicentre of February’s quake. Half of its handsome colonial stone structures are gone. Above the town, the old timeball station, which used to signal the arrival of ships in port and the time to mariners, is a ruin. Its tower still stands: talk is that it will be restored and partially preserved to mark the disaster.

Would I still retire there? Probably.

Back in Auckland, I tune in to news of Monday’s aftershocks, which top 6.3 magnitude. Inside the cordon, they’ve saved wear and tear on the wreckers’ ball, for about 50 buildings. Once again, most houses have no power, and more sewers and pipes have burst. In Lyttleton, what was left of the timeball station has fallen. The liquefaction is back: for the third, heartbreaking time, many streets are stinking, bubbling rivers.

I ring around, relieved to discover that all I’ve spoken with are okay. But shaken in every sense of the word. The airwaves are abuzz with anger at perceived delays in governmental decisions about which areas will be abandoned, where the new town could be built. David is on the radio, outlining the collapse of his garage, from which I retrieved his bike only days before. At the same time, offering a plea for no rushing to “half-arsed” plans.

And this morning, another aftershock, 5.0 this time.

TEASING out the consequences of Osama bin Laden’s killing by American special-forces in Pakistan is an increasingly complicated business. Relations between Pakistan and America have been in flux over the past month, despite a recent visit by America’s secretary of state, Hillary Clinton. The Americans have followed up their assault on bin Laden’s compound with an important second important strike, a drone attack that may have killed another al-Qaeda leader, Ilyas Kashmiri, in South Waziristan (his death has not been confirmed). Yet al-Qaeda and its allies have also lashed out at the Pakistani state, notably with a prolonged and deadly attack on a Karachi naval base.

The political impact of bin Laden’s killing, however, is becoming clearer. An opinion poll conducted inside Pakistan shortly after the American raid found that many Pakistanis, who are prone to conspiracy theories, were sceptical that the killing had actually happened. Anyway, many said they were more bothered by the American violation of Pakistani sovereignty.

A new poll, published on June 10th by Gallup International Association (different from Gallup Inc), has tried to fathom the world’s opinions on the same. After surveying more than 17,000 respondents on each continent, in recent weeks, the poll suggested that over half of them broadly supported the killing of bin Laden, although an additional quarter would have preferred to see him detained. Europeans, in particular, would have liked to have seen al-Qaeda’s chief arrested and tried, rather than killed summarily: 50% of Finns, 45% of Italians and 42% of Russians preferred this option, while just 18% of Americans thought bin Laden’s arrest would have been a better outcome than his being shot dead.

More surprising is that the Pakistanis’ fondness for conspiracy theory—in this case the doubt that the Americans really killed bin Laden in Pakistan—is shared quite widely, notably in the Muslim world. Thus 50% of Algerians, 54% of Bosnians and 58% of Tunisians all said that they did not believe bin Laden had really been killed in the American raid. Perhaps few of these would have been persuaded even if the Americans had decided to publish a photo of bin Laden’s bloody corpse.

One man who clearly gained from the bin Laden raid was Mr Obama. Though 51% of Pakistani respondents took a dimmer view of the American president because of the raid, in many large countries his popularity has only grown. Indians, for example, were fond of his tough move, with 42% viewing him more favourably as a result of the raid. Similarly, 32% of Americans said they viewed their president more positively because of the special forces’ killing of bin Laden. Europeans, on the whole, were less moved, perhaps because they were already fond of the American president and perhaps because they would have preferred to see a less bloody outcome.

TO SEE Indonesian shoppers strolling along Singapore’s Orchard Road, or to overhear their Bahasa Indonesia in the elevators of some of the city-state’s most exclusive medical centres is unremarkable. After all, the countries are only a short plane ride part, and more affluent Indonesians often take shopping trips or seek medical care in Singapore.

But some Indonesians who lurk around Singapore these days give new meaning to the phrase “weekend escape”. A delegation from the Democratic party of Indonesia’s president, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, were in Singapore this past weekend in a bizarre attempt to persuade the party’s former treasurer, Muhammad Nazaruddin, to return home to face questioning over allegations of corruption. Mr Nazaruddin, who is also a member of Indonesia’s parliament, had been sacked as treasurer last month after being accused of taking kickbacks from the winning bid to build athletes’ dormitories for the upcoming South-East Asia Games. A few days before this, the chief justice of Indonesia’s constitutional court publicly claimed that Mr Nazaruddin had given a court official an unsolicited payment of 120,000 Singapore dollars ($97,000) last year “as a gift”.

Perhaps fearing that his goose was cooked, Mr Nazaruddin followed the well-worn playbook of Indonesian corruption suspects: he caught a flight to Singapore on May 23rd, one day before Indonesia’s Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK) could secure a travel ban against him. Meanwhile the KPK has been attempting to track down another corruption suspect, Nunun Nurbaeti. Mrs Nurbaeti, an Indonesian businesswoman, left for Singapore last year after being implicated in a bribery scandal involving dozens of lawmakers. Her husband claims she has been there for medical treatment, for a rare condition that “makes her forgetful”. She may have travelled to Thailand and then Cambodia in recent weeks to avoid meeting a posse of KPK officials in Singapore, according to Indonesian authorities. For his part, Mr Nazaruddin claimed to journalists that he was in Singapore for a medical check-up. Democratic Party officials reported on Monday that Mr Nazaruddin told them he was ill, having lost 18 kilograms in just two weeks.

Indonesia remains among the most corrupt countries in Asia, despite a high-profile anti-graft campaign by Mr Yudhoyono. On June 6th the president ordered Indonesia’s foreign ministry to do whatever it takes to arrest Mrs Nurbaeti and bring her back to Indonesia. The weekend confab with Mr Nazaruddin wasn’t the first time that an Indonesian government team was sent to Singapore to locate a high-profile corruption suspect. Last year members of a task force appointed by Mr Yudhoyono found a mid-level tax official, Gayus Tambunan, who allegedly bribed senior Indonesian police, prosecutors, and a judge after being caught with millions of suspicious dollars, at a shopping centre on Orchard Road. They persuaded him to return voluntarily to Jakarta to face trail.

However, Mr Tambunan’s return is quite the exception. The recent daily headlines about the hunt for Mr Nazaruddin and Mrs Nurbaeti have once again highlighted the uncomfortable fact that Indonesia and Singapore don’t have an extradition treaty. Numerous Indonesian corruption suspects have passed through Singapore over the years, include bank owners who are alleged to have stole billions of dollars in state bailout funds during the 1997-1998 Asian financial crisis. In 2007 Indonesia submitted more than a dozen extradition requests with Singapore that are still pending.

The strange thing is that the countries actually did sign a joint extradition-and-defence agreement in 2007. But then the Indonesian parliament refused to ratify it, claiming that the defence pact would compromise Indonesia’s security by giving Singapore the right to conduct military exercises in Indonesian airspace and maritime territory. Some critics have charged that lawmakers blocked the extradition treaty so that Singapore could remain a safe haven for the sort of Indonesian corruption suspects who donate to their campaigns—or even a refugee for themselves. An interesting statistic could support the latter claim: In 2010, 37.7% of all Indonesians named corruption suspects by the KPK were current or former members of parliament, according to Indonesia Corruption Watch.

None of this of course has stopped Indonesian officials and politicians in recent days from trying to deflect criticism by blaming the Singaporean government for not ratifying the treaty. This is yet another well-rehearsed call from the Indonesian playbook: a former vice-president, Jusuf Kalla, once accused Singapore of not wanting to part with billions of dollars that fugitive businessmen keep in its banking system; and the former president B.J. Habibie once accused Singapore of harbouring “economic criminals”. According to a wealth report by Merrill Lynch and Capgemini in 2006, around one-third of the 55,000 millionaires who lived in Singapore at that time were Indonesian, with assets totalling a staggering $87 billion.

The Singaporean government has flatly rejected such claims. One Singaporean official told The Economist that his government signed the extradition treaty back in 2007 and has been waiting ever since for the Indonesian parliament to ratify it, along with the defence pact. The official also noted that Singapore has repeatedly expressed its willingness to consider sending Indonesian corruption suspects home—even without a treaty in place—if the Indonesian government provides adequate evidence that they had committed crimes. Meanwhile Singapore has yet to arrest or extradite any of Indonesia’s current white-collar fugitives.

Whether these latest fugitive scandals are goad enough for Mr Yudhoyono’s government to push the extradition treaty through parliament remains to be seen. Though the president has won two elections on a platform of zero-tolerance for graft, his stance on this issue looks markedly lacking in determination. Other disturbing questions remain: why do high-profile corruption suspects always seem able to slip out of Indonesia, just before a travel ban is issued? And why don’t the Indonesian government and parliament make the extradition treaty a national priority? Until these questions are answered, it’s likely that both the fugitive suspects and the Indonesian government teams that cajole them will have reason to carry on skulking about Singapore. There may be billions of purloined dollars at stake.

(Picture credit: Wikimedia Commons)

RIGHTS groups had called it an attempt to whitewash war crimes. Many of the delegates who attended this three-day seminar, conducted by Sri Lanka’s army, were of course hoping for something better than that. Its panels were supposed to help teach the world’s counter-insurgency boffins how Sri Lanka’s army defeated the Tamil Tiger rebels while pursuing a “zero civilian-casualty” policy that supposedly forsook the use of heavy weapons. But few of the truly difficult questions were raised, and in the end none were answered.

The seminar ended on June 2nd, only a day after a UN special investigator at the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva showed video of Sri Lanka soldiers in the war’s final days, apparently executing civilians. He called it “trophy footage” and evidence of serious human-rights abuses.

And it doesn’t stop. On June 3rd, on the margins of sessions held by the UN Human Rights Council, Britain’s Channel 4 is set to screen a special one-hour investigation that it says will feature “devastating” new video evidence of war crimes and crimes against humanity, committed by both the Sri Lanka government’s forces and by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (the LTTE).

The government’s response to every suggestion that it may be culpable for war crimes has been one of enraged denial. The seminar was like a prolonged exercise of the same. Ground commanders who had led troops in the scrutinised final battle against the rebels in 2009 were fulsome with self-congratulatory speeches claiming that the number of civilians killed by military fire was minimal.

As they would have it, the Tigers launched barrages of artillery and mortar fire at their troops from among civilians cowering in the congested no-fire zones declared by the army. And the army refrained from retaliating in kind.

But when members of the audience questioned the panellists about how they managed to crush the Tigers without killing civilians—given that the rebels held hundreds of thousands of people hostage, a massive human shield against their rapidly advancing forces—the replies were, at best, unconvincing.

One of the panellists, Major-General Shavendra Silva, who now serves as Sri Lanka’s deputy envoy to the UN in New York, said the army used “position targeting” as well as marksmen and snipers to identify and shoot only rebels and rebel targets.

But the army has long maintained that the Tigers fought in civilian clothes towards the end. So how could the snipers have picked out their men from the innocents? General Silva did not explain. Just when the questioning seemed like it was about to be trained on the subject of civilian casualties, the moderator hastily announced lunch.

The only speaker to address head-on the allegations of human-rights abuses—and the army’s implausible waffling about them—was not a Sri Lankan. David Kilcullen, an Australian consultant on counter-insurgency, said it was difficult to see how the international community could accept the Sri Lankan model without a frank and honest discussion of these allegations of abuse.

Mr Kilcullen offered that Sri Lanka might argue that whatever it took to defeat such an enemy, and so to end the conflict, was morally justifiable in the special circumstances of the final campaign. But even at the end of this seminar’s third day, Sri Lanka was doing nothing of the sort. 

SENDING shiploads of live animals to slaughter in faraway lands is a big business for Australia. Last year, exports of about 4m cattle and sheep to Asia and the Middle East earned almost A$1 billion ($1 billion). Between 2003 and 2009 annual exports of live cattle to Indonesia nearly doubled, to 773,000 head. Till recently, Australia’s primary concern was to prevent Indonesia from capping the trade to protect local cattle-breeders.

Many Australians are extremely sensitive to animal rights however. Activist groups have long called for bans on the trade, on the grounds that the poor creatures endure these voyages (or not) under conditions that would never be tolerated at home. Australians have now seen vivid evidence for this claim from Indonesia, their giant neighbour to the north, where Australia sends more than four-fifths of its live cattle exports.

Two months ago Lyn White, an official with Animals Australia, a welfare group, shot harrowing footage when she visited ten abattoirs in Java and Sumatra where Australian cattle go to be slaughtered. “Four Corners”, an Australian Broadcasting Corporation television programme, broadcast it on May 30th. The horrendous scenes revealed cattle being whipped, stabbed and gouged. Some of the cattle, subjected to crude methods of throat-cutting, took as long as 13 minutes to die.

Ms White tracked down the abattoirs through the boxes Australia producers supply to Indonesians to restrain cattle before their slaughter. About 100 such boxes were delivered courtesy of Meat and Livestock Australia, a trade body, and Livecorp, an outfit representing livestock exporters; the federal government supported their donations. Livecorp claims to promote “the highest standards of animal welfare” in Australia’s livestock industry, including operations overseas that receive Australian animals. The videotaped revelations make a mockery of the claim.

Australia prescribes that cattle at home be stunned first, to render their slaughter painless. Not so for the 957,000 cattle that left Australia in the fiscal year starting 2009. Cameron Hall, Livecorp’s chief executive, says Australia has encouraged stunning in Indonesia too, but that friction with the halal code for slaughter under Islamic law has made the going difficult. Some challenge this excuse. Bidda Jones, chief scientist with the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA) in Australia, which helped to expose the scandal, says some Islamic authorities in Indonesia accept stun methods: they know of at least four abattoirs that stun before slaughter.

Ms Jones says most of Australia’s overseas customers have no enforceable rules to protect animals during handling and slaughter. Five years ago, Ms White exposed another scandal that prompted Australia to suspend livestock exports to Egypt. But the Indonesia imbroglio has surpassed any earlier outrage. Ms White was able to stroll into the offending slaughterhouses and film openly; workers made no effort to cover up their crude methods.

Questions are being asked how Australia’s bureaucrats and beef exporters could have remained ignorant for so long. In the face of public fury, the federal Labor government at first promised an inquiry. When some of its own parliamentarians threatened a revolt Joe Ludwig, the agriculture minister, agreed to suspend live cattle exports to 11 of the approximately 100 Indonesian abattoirs that kill Australian cattle. Some parliamentarians want exports be stopped altogether. That would take political courage. In northern Australia, where most cattle are shipped out, the industry is a big employer. Ben Callcott, mayor of Charters Towers, a cattle town in Queensland, says Australia should “butt out” of telling other countries what to do: “We’ve got to keep that live export trade at all cost.”

THE old Padam Road, on the way from the regional centre of Birgunj, was resurfaced only last year, but you would not know it to look. Rutted and worn away in parts it seems like it has not been maintained in decades. An old man by the roadside, who laboured to build it from scratch during his youth, offered a few choice oaths to describe the resurfacing contractor, who was paid for this mess with funds earmarked for local development.

Further down Padam Road the badly jolted traveller reaches a set of concrete foundations known as Sri Ram Janki Primary School. It was also supposed to be built with local-development funds—provided by the government and Nepal’s permissive foreign donors—which were stolen outright before the building could be completed. Nevertheless money for the school’s operating budget was paid regularly to a bank account. It was withdrawn from the account too, on behalf of a school that existed only on paper, until a local journalist exposed the scam. 

Such cases are legion across Nepal. Rampant corruption, at all levels of government, is becoming the definitive characteristic of the country’s rocky transition to peace, after a decade-long civil war between Maoist rebels and the state. 

The process of writing a new constitution is stalled, with the deadline to complete the charter now postponed to September. The past year marked scores of killings, threats and beatings, linked to control of state resources and carried out by armed groups and political parties of all stripes. Corruption is thought to be at record-level intensity. Income inequality is already the highest in Asia (beating out China and the Philippines) and rising. Disillusionment with the political system runs high. 

To many observers these problems seem to share a common cause: politicians enjoy freedom to plunder with impunity. The most visible abuses are in local government. Each year municipalities receive funds designated for development which are equal to about 10% of the government total budget. A group of 14 foreign donors, chaired by the Asian Development Bank and Britain’s Department for International Development (DFID), is contributing $200m over four years under a scheme called the Local Government and Community Development Programme (LGCDP).

Along the way of a road trip crossing seven districts, local officials, politicians, journalists and activists told a series of remarkably consistent stories. Each was marked by systematic fraud, the financing of political networks to benefit powerful local figures and, indirectly, criminal gangs. The accounts the storytellers gave of individual scams became repetitive: buildings paid for but never built, or simply repainted and passed off as new. The same roads were supposedly rebuilt—as if from scratch—every year. A commonly reported trick is to record as one item the construction of a road from A to B and then again, on a separate line, the road from B to A.

Local NGOs applying for grants are said to pay “commissions” of up to 50%. Gross irregularities are alleged everywhere in tendering processes, which sometimes involve violence between rival party cadres. Local governments often pass most of their annual budgets in the last two weeks of the financial year, the better to avoid scrutiny. Local development officers say auditing procedures are easily circumvented. Over and over they complain that “there is no effective monitoring”.

The donor-backed scheme depends on local “user groups” and “consumer committees” to provide accountability. But informants say these tend to be captured by political interests. Indeed, struggles between political parties for control of these bodies are a cause of violence in some districts.

The picture varies in different regions. In the southern plains, an area called the Terai, even senior officials estimate that as much as 60 to 90% of all funds are misused. “If I take action against corruption,” said the chief government officer in one Terai district, “there will be a mob outside and inside my office.”

Among the worst offenders in the Terai are the national and regional parties that formed the previous government, which was replaced in February. 

In hill districts informants estimate that between 25 and 50% of all development funds are misused. Here the Maoist former rebels, who back the new government, are the strongest single faction. The misappropriations help pay for a constant cycle of political rallies as well as the upkeep of their paramilitary organisation, the Young Communist League. Accounts of rampant corruption from the provinces are echoed by officials at the finance ministry, at the government’s anti-corruption bodies and the National Planning Commission, and by members of the donor community who would only speak off-the-record. 

The only sustained denial comes from some senior aid officers and donors who insist there is only “low-level”, “petty” and “isolated” corruption in local bodies. Their own auditing processes say as much. Officials at the United Nations Development Programme and DFID argue that accounts of widespread malpractice are merely anecdotal and unsupported by data. On the contrary, they say, their project is a relative success.

According to DFID, which has a £12.1m ($20m) stake in the scheme, Britain would not be supporting it if the abuses were as bad as alleged. Of the eight out of 75 districts that failed the donors’ minimum conditions last year, most were guilty of nothing worse than late completion of paperwork.

Yet the donors were concerned enough to request a series of meetings with the finance ministry last year. Nepali officials saw those as being unusually serious. If accounts of corruption in local bodies are true, the LGCDP may be in breach of the donors’ own Basic Operating Guidelines concerning transparency and contributions to political parties.

Corruption in the provinces mirrors the system at the centre, where it is also perceived to have increased during the peace process. Government and donor budgets have swelled thanks to a sort of peace dividend, while institutions remain weak and unaccountable. 

There have been recent stirrings in the Supreme Court. In March Chiranjivi Wagle became the first former government minister to be jailed for corruption since democracy arrived in 1990. Mr Wagle’s case was an easy one—he had been living at large despite having been convicted in 2004.

More cases are pending, but the hard-charging chief justice has since retired and it is not clear the momentum will be sustained. Less encouragingly, the chief official at the finance ministry resigned in March, reportedly owing to political pressure from tax-evading businessmen.

Meanwhile the government’s anti-corruption body, the Commission for the Investigation of the Abuse of Authority (CIAA), has languished without a chief commissioner for four years; in the past year no commissioners have been appointed at all. Aid accounts for 22% of the government budget and half of government’s capital expenditure. Including aid not routed through government accounts, which is difficult to measure, total foreign support is estimated in the region of $1 billion per year and rising. In March Britain announced its support would increase by 80% to reach £103m ($170m) in 2014.

According to a former finance minister, Devendra Raj Pandey, donors face a dilemma: to withdraw from underperforming projects would require reducing aid, yet they measure their success mainly by their ability to expand and disperse their budgets. Similar arguments are privately made by other people who still serve in senior government posts and in donor agencies. 

There is a well-recognised annual bonanza in Kathmandu, as agencies scramble to spend what remains of their budgets before the end of each year. Despite their profligate reputation most say they almost never detect malpractice in the projects they fund. Senior donor officials present their dilemma differently. They say working in such countries always involves the risk of further fraud and they claim it would be ineffective to push anti-corruption measures on the government harder than they already do. And for them to withdraw from a difficult working environment would betray the poor people who depend upon their support.

FOR those who pay more attention to English football than Thai politics, Thaksin Shinawatra might be best known as the former owner of Manchester City Football Club. He ran the club for one season, splashed out on new players, then sold it in 2008 to the ruling family in Abu Dhabi—who promptly pumped it full of petrodollars. Their payoff came this past season with an FA Cup victory, the club’s first trophy in decades, and third place in the Premier League.

Mr Thaksin, a telecoms tycoon turned politician, is rich. But the sheiks of Abu Dhabi are richer. He jokes that they do not have merely deep pockets, they have many pockets. It certainly takes serious dosh to run a top European club. Mr Thaksin insists that he is no longer in that league, if he ever was. His legal troubles in Thailand have not helped: the country’s supreme court last year seized $1.3 billion of his frozen assets.

Now Mr Thaksin has his eye back on a less-than-beautiful game: Thai politics. He is banking on a political party headed by his younger sister to win elections on July 3rd and score another blow to the Thai establishment that tried and failed to bury his career. At his luxury villa in Dubai, Mr Thaksin receives a constant flow of visitors, including your correspondent, who joined him recently for tea and conversation.

Mr Thaksin is upbeat about the election. He predicts that his Pheu Thai party could win 270 out of 500 seats in parliament and form the next government. Opinion polls suggest that no one party will cross the threshold for single-party rule; the winner will have to form a coalition. But it is clear that Pheu Thai poses a stiff challenge to the Democrat Party led by the prime minister, Abhisit Vejjajiva, who was installed with support from the army.  

Ever since Mr Abhisit called elections last month, Thais have been speculating as to whether the establishment might pull the plug on the whole process, in order to stop Mr Thaksin’s party from taking power. The ultra-nationalist (and anti-Thaksin) yellow shirts have urged a suspension of democracy under a royalist government. Asked by reporters about coup plots, hawkish army generals serve up boilerplate denials—just as they did before ousting Mr Thaksin in 2006. 

Mr Thaksin seems untroubled by such chatter. Elections will go ahead, he insists, and cheaters beware. “If you rig the elections, then the people know,” he warns. He wants Pheu Thai to invite smaller parties into a coalition, even if the party’s numbers were sufficient to support a single-party government. They would be the “ferns” in a flower arrangement to make it more beautiful, he says.

For Thailand’s royalist generals, a victory for Mr Thaksin’s allies is a queasy prospect. Their red-shirt supporters have vowed to punish those who ordered and carried out last year’s crackdown on their protests. Pheu Thai also wants to amend the current constitution, which was drafted under military rule. If there were any doubt about the ties between the party and the man in Dubai, consider one of its campaign slogans: “Thaksin Thinks, Pheu Thai Acts”.

And that is not all. Pheu Thai has pledged that it would bring Mr Thaksin home. He recently told supporters that he would return in November 2011, and this remains his goal. “When I say something, I mean it,” he said. For now, though, he is a fugitive from Thai justice. He travels on a passport not from Thailand but from Montenegro. A two-year jail term passed in absentia for corruption awaits him in Thailand.  

So the party has proposed an amnesty for participants in Thailand’s recent political struggle, including, no doubt, their spiritual leader, Mr Thaksin. “If you really want to reconcile, you have to forget the past and look ahead for the future,” he says.

Easier said than done. The former prime minister is loved and loathed by roughly equal proportions of the electorate. Reconciliation is a hard sell in the zero-sum game of Thai politics. Even harder, perhaps, than turning Manchester City into the champions of the Premier League.