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Cluster bombs of the Secret War

Last week I made my first visit to the beautiful and neglected country of Laos to learn about these vicious objects:

. . . unexploded cluster bombs. My story appeared here in Saturday's Times. I attach a longer version below.

Thanks to the many people who helped to organise the trip. Those interested in learning more about the issue can look at their various websites.

I was invited by the International Committee of the Red Cross which is campaigning for an outright ban on all cluster munitions. Our host were the Lao government's National Regulatory Authority UXO and Lao National Unexploded Ordnance Programme which struggles on bravely in the face of an impossible task. The United Nations Development Programme also supports demining in the country.

A fascinating part of the story, which I had too little space to dwell on in my piece, is the effort by the Lao government and UNESCO to aquire World Heritage Status for the  Plain of Jars, a beautiful and mysterious archaeological site which, in my view, was plainly constructed by extraterrestrials.

I encountered two NGOs doing valuable work in Laos - the Mines Advisory Group (which tries to defuse the cluster bombs before they go off), and COPE Laos (which helps the victims after they do). In this picture, Joe Pereira of COPE displays some of the prosthetic limbs which the organisation makes for injured Laos.

All these photographs were shot for the ICRC by the excellent Vientiane-based photographer, Jim Holmes.

Continue reading for my story . . .

Days of The Rat: Predictions for 2008

[Tokyo, late December, the blackest hour of the night. At the door of my apartment, a feeble, scratching knock. Outside stands a man so ancient that it is impossible even to guess his age. His dark skin is papery and wrinkled, his eyes are brown pools, and his earlobes hang loose from the weight of the polished rhinoceros horns which pierce them. He presses an object into my hand, picks up his blow pipe, and melts into the night.

It is a twist of parchment containing three or four lumps of a dried out, woody substance. My sniffs of gratification turn into cackles of triumph. My wishes have been granted. My dreams have come true. The future is mine!

Every year this blog solicits predictions for the year ahead from Asia’s most renowned prophets and soothsayers. The results have been lamentable. The Sage of Singapore, whom I consulted for 2006, was a bit of a disappointment. Madam Sosostris, last year’s featured soothsayer, was a disgrace! What was the fatuous old trout on about?

This year I decided to take matters into my own hands. Through contacts among the Dayak people of Borneo, I acquired certain . . . substances, harvested from the rain forest by the timanggong, or animist wizards. When inhaled, in combination with the correct incantations, they open invisible doors which allow glimpses of the future. Men of weak spirit would be driven mad by such visions, but this is a risk which I am prepared to take for you, my readers.

I drop the woody lumps, as instructed, into a cauldron of snake blood, and heat it slowly, breathing in the fumes and muttering the eldritch syllables inked on the parchment. Within moments, I am transported to the jungle. Faces painted with blood and clay flash before my eyes. My ears are filled with the sounds of insects and the screams of animals and humans. The Great Lord of the Forest taps me on the shoulder and whispers in my ear . . . Here is what I see in 2008, Heisei 20, the Year of the Rat . . . ]

The Killers in the Killing Fields

I have never seen the sites of the Nazi Holocaust, but S-21, the Khmer Rouge prison and torture centre in Phnom Penh, is one of the most impressive and disturbing memorials to a historical event that I've ever visited. I thought of it again yesterday after the arrest of Nuon Chea, "Brother Number Two" to Pol Pot, and the man held by some historians as most responsible for 200,000 executions carried out by the Khmer Rouge.

As a place of commemoration, it derives its power from its modesty: the banal location in the quiet Tuol Sleng suburb; the shabbiness of the concrete cells and the crudeness of the clumsily forged bars and shackles; and above all, the hundreds of black and white photographs (of 6000 which survive) of the doomed prisoners simply displayed on the walls.

Immediately after my own visit I read Voices from S-1: Terror and History in Pol Pot's Secret Prison by David Chandler, which is remarkable for combining scholarship with compellingly personal reflection on the broadest significance of the cruelty which was practised there. "As a historian and a student of literature I have tried over the years to control the data I deal with and to comprehend the writings that I read," he records. "When I have immersed myself in the S-21 archive, the terror lurking inside it has pushed me around, blunted my skills, and eroded my self-assurance. The experience at times has been akin to drowning."

Nakasone: Board Games, not Rape

[Here's a piece that got bumped from Saturday's piece, about Nakasone and his wartime relationship, or lack ofn one. with the "Comfort Women'. There's a lot more to say on this subject, and I hope I'll be able to add to this soon.]

Saturday 26th March 2007

Richard Lloyd Parry, Tokyo

Japan’s most respected elder statesmen was forced yesterday [Friday] to contradict an autobiographical account suggesting that as a young officer during the second world war he forced women to serve as military sex slaves.

Yasuhiro Nakasone, one of Japan’s most distinguished former prime ministers, is the latest politician to be drawn into a bitter controversy about the so-called “comfort women”, which boiled over this month after years of simmering resentment.

At a press conference in Tokyo yesterday [Friday], he admitted that Japanese forces did force women to serve on “comfort stations”, the euphemism for military brothels where many Koreans and Chinese claim to have been enslaved and raped. But he denied allegations, based on an account he himself wrote 29 years ago, that he organised brothels as a military logistics officer in the Imperial Navy in the island of Borneo.

“They were civilian engineers, not military people, and they just wanted a place for rest or entertainment,” he told a press conference in Tokyo. “They wanted entertainment such as [the board game] go or Japanese chess. We simply established facilities where such [diversions] could be offered.”

But this account of innocent games centres seems to contradict a written memoir by Mr Nakasone published in 1978, before the existence of the “comfort women” had become controversial.

Surgery

[By the way, here's my story from yesterday's paper about an old former member of the Imperial Navy who has owned up to carrying out the vivisection of live prisoners of war in the Philippines.

Jeremy Sutton-Hibbert, who took the photpgraphs, tells the backstory of the interview on his blog today.]

Dissect them alive: chilling Imperial Order that could not be disobeyed

Richard Lloyd Parry in Hirakata

For 62 years Akira Makino spoke not a word of what he had done. But to those who knew him well it must have been obvious that he was a man with a tortured conscience. Why else would he have returned so often to the obscure, mosquito-blown town in the southern Philippines where he experienced such misery during the Second World War? He set up war memorials, gave clothes to poor children, and bought an entire set of uniforms for a local baseball team.

Last year, at the age of 83, he embarked on a gruelling pilgrimage to 88 Buddhist temples in Japan. After number 40 he collapsed from heat exhaustion, having permanently injured his knees. “My wife didn’t like me going back to the Philippines — she called me ‘war crazy’,” said Mr Makino, a frail old man who lives alone in Hirakata, near Osaka. “But she let me go anyway. Right up until she died three years ago, I never told her. But over time I think she realised.”

Only in the twilight of his life has Mr Makino begun to talk about the secret he carried for more than 60 years. In 1944, as a medical auxiliary in the Imperial Navy, he was stationed on the island of Mindanao in the southern Philippines. There he was party to one of the most notorious and poorly chronicled cruelties of the Japanese war effort — the medical dissection of living prisoners of war.

I'm not talking to you

My news story about the resumption of the Six Way Talks on North Korea nukes was a little squeezed in this morning's paper, so I attach it below in fuller form. I'm amazed (but then perhaps I'm not surprised at all . . .) how little comment there has been on this about-turn by the Bush administration. For the past four years, despite the pleas of diplomats, Democrats, Korea experts around the world, and the South Korean president, the US government has stood firm in its rejection of any talks with North Korea.

Result: stalemate.

Beginning two weeks ago year in Berlin, and this week in Beijing, it abandoned that policy and held lengthy and detailed bilateral negotiations with the Norks.

Result: things start moving . . .

Days of the Boar: Predictions for 2007

[Madame Sosostris, the renowned clairvoyant, is very bunged up when I call on her, but even dosed up on Sudafed and Flu Strength Lemsip she remains one of the most brilliantly gifted ladies in the expanded Europe Union, and her Tarot pack is (for want of a better word) wicked.

Her parlour is in a narrow gritty street in Shoreditch, a quarter of minicab offices and kebab shops, unencroached upon by rising rents and yuppification. A mute man in his sixties (said to be Madame S's son by a famous matinee idol) answers my ring and leads me into the dim room where she sits, an ancient figure wreathed in scarves, her black eyes sparkling in a mask of powder and mascara. She croaks a greeting, and directs me to the leather armchair at her side. A cup of bitter tea is offered in a brittle China cup. I hand over the agreed amount which she counts with supple fingers.

"So, my dear," she wheezes. "What's it to be? To communicate with Mars, converse with spirits? To report the behaviour of the sea monster? Describe the horoscope? Haruspicate or scry?"

"I seek, Madame, to know what will transpire in the Orient in the twelvemonth ahead."

"In the Orient, eh?" she says, shuffling the Tarot deck. Cards flash and are covered, some of them familiar to me. The drowned Phoenician Sailor; Belladonna, Lady of the Rocks; the man with three staves; the one-eyed merchant. "I do not find The Hanged Man," she says in a tone of puzzlement. "Curious, in the circumstances."

Here, then, are Madame Sosostris's predictions for 2007, the Year of the Boar.]

Podded

In February, I spent a happy few days as a guest of 'Words and Ideas', the writers' and readers' segment of the Perth International Arts Festival, sponsored by Curtin University. One of my contributions, a conversation with the journalist, David Cohen, followed by questions and answers, can be downloaded as a Podcast here. (I hope that this link works - if not download it from this page.)

It last about an hour and consists mostly of a discussion of my book, In the Time of Madness: Indonesia on the Edge of Chaos (click on the image above for enlargement), although at one point, for no very good reason, I also start talking about my career as a teenage UFOlogist. A bit cringe-making in parts, but it could be worse. Interestingly, my voice becomes lower in pitch towards the end of the hour than it is in the beginning. Not smooth and cholcolatey exactly but less ... piping.

Ten minutes from the end, it goes completely silent for a while but that's because some damn fool member of the audience failed to speak into the microphone. The other effect of this is that the reaction of the audience is almost inaudible. You'll just have to take it from me that they were almost constantly applauding or issuing forth chortles of appreciation.

US Amazon link for the book is here, Japanese Amazon (for the English language edition) here. It's also been translated into Dutch as Indonesia: Tijden van waanzin.

Here's a smattering of reviews from The Times, TIME magazine, The Observer, San Francisco Chronicle, The Guardian and a long and well informed one from the Columbia Journalism Review.

Your Christmas present problems, solved at a stroke! Buy, buy, buy . . .

Into the Diamond Mountains

[Here's my piece from yesterday's paper about my trip last week to Mt Kumgang in North Korea.I'll try to post more on this in the next few days, along with some pictures by The Times photographer, David Bebber.]

The cosy, the frightening, the cute and the sinister

From Richard Lloyd Parry

At a tourist resort at Mt Kumgang, North Korea two worlds collide

The journey to Mt Kumgang in North Korea, the world's most bizarre mini-break, begins at dawn in an atmosphere of menace and confrontation. Electrified fences and tank traps line the road on the South Korean side of the border, and the forest on either side is strewn with mines. Travellers are given stern instructions about conduct on the far side: don't take photographs from the coach windows; don't speak to the North Korean officials at immigration; whatever you do, don't talk about politics.

Passports and bags are scrutinised and x-rayed, and one by one we are admitted to the world's most impenetrable country, a rogue state notorious for oppression, xenophobia and most recently, for nuclear proliferation. And there among the granite-faced soldiers, waving his paw in a gesture of cheery welcome, is a man dressed as a giant brown teddy bear.

The morning after

[Below is my analysis piece from today's paper. The splash by James Bone and I is here; plus sterling background and analysis from Bronwen Maddox (on the world's limited options), Richard Beeston (on the potential for a nuclear arms race), Mike Evans (on the technicalities of delivering a bomb) and Jane Macartney (on China's dilemma).]

At times of hunger, when the rice has gone and all the dogs and cats have been eaten, North Korean schoolchildren scavenge the fields around their villages for crows, dragonflies and rats. The countryside is littered with abandoned factories – not only is there no fuel for the machinery, but all the metal from the power cables has been stripped and sold. Diplomats in the capital Pyongyang worry about sending their cooks out to shop for dinner parties because the few hundred pounds they carry with them is the equivalent of several decades’ wages for the average worker.

Economically, North Korea is a husk of a country, poor by the standards of sub-Saharan Africa, let alone those of booming East Asia. But yesterday, despite ideological bankruptcy, growing diplomatic isolation, and a famine in the 1990s which killed as many as 3 million people, it became the ninth member of the nuclear club. Whatever else is true about North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong Il – and there is no doubt that he is a tyrant and a killer on a historic scale – it is impossible to deny his genius in playing the weakest possible hand of cards with maximum shrewdness and skill.

They went and did it

It's just before noon, a misty early autumn day, and I'm waiting to cross the road opposite City Hall in central Seoul. A lot of policemen are standing around, and the lights are taking an unusually long time to change. Suddenly there's a buzz of motorbikes and black-windowed limousines with little Rising Sun flags flapping. It's Shinzo Abe, the Japanese prime minister, just arrived after his rather successful summit meeting in Beijing.

I walk to the bank and change my Indonesian rupiah (the left overs of last week's holiday money) into Korean won. Then back around the corner to meet Dr Andrei Lankov, a North Korea expert from Kookmin University, for lunch. "Did you hear?" he says. "They've gone ahead with the nuclear test."

It's not a surprise (although I hadn't expected it this early). And yet, stepping back a yard or two, how remarkable - that a country like North Korea, a starving, maimed wreck of a country, should have become a nuclear state. From the United States, Russia, China, the United Kingdom and France, down through Israel, India and Pakistan, and now - North Korea. It's like a nuclear armed Cambodia or Albania. Whatever you think of Kim Jong Il, what an amazing thing he has achieved.

How this happened and what happens next will be picked over for years, and I'll be writing more soon. Here's my brief instant reaction, largely based on my conversation with the admirable Dr Lankov, and a few thoughts to bear in mind while picking your way thorugh the self-righteous and inane guff that is already spewing out of CNN et al.

In the next few months there will be endless and tedious tough talking about how bad BAD BAD the Norks are, and what a spanking the "international community" is going to give them. There will be probably be an attempt at sanctions, but they won't make any difference. Nothing the rest of the world can do will make any difference.

There is nothing anyone can do about North Korea's nuclear test.

More from Timmy the Tank

Oh dear, I think I was a little hard on the old Nation the other day. Just trying to do their job in difficult circumstances and all that (although I do think that over the past few months their understandable dislike of Thaksin has compromised their sense of balance). Stiil, I can see now that the phrase "pusillanimous, gun-licking, uniform-worshipping drivel" was a little over-excited. In my own attempt at balance, I draw your attention to this piece by the passionate and always interesting Kavi Chingkittavorn, 'Yellow ribbon coup' was a very high price to pay'.

Not to be outdone, the Banghkok Post has its own tank story on this morning's front page.

TWO KINDS OF POWER

runs the headline, followed by the standfirst:

Armoured tanks can both destroy buildings and enchant children

The Prince and the massacre

I don't share the view that Japan is undergoing an irreversible lurch to the right but the time and the place when this is easiest to believe is the 15th August, at Yasukuni Shrine. For the Japanese right, shusen kinenbi, or 'End of the War Commemoration Day' (what else are they going to call it - Victory Over Us Day?), is Christmas, birthday and Easter all rolled into one, when they get out all their toys and converge on the shrine in a day-long celebration of nationalism, historical revisionism and shouting.

It is a thrilling, amusing and occasionally appalling spectacle. On Tuesday there will be dignified old veterans, sinister yakuza types with bad suits and rolling walks, and lots and lots of unpleasant black trucks with flags and loudspeakers mounted on the top. Last year, I saw the worst violence I have ever witnessed in Japan, when a couple of lefty students, under the eyes of the police, had their mouths stomped in after unveiling pacifist banners. This year the sense of nationalist triumphalism will be all the greater if, as everyone seems to expect, Junichiro Koizumi makes his last prime ministerial visit to the shrine.

But this will disguise the fact that it has been an uncomfortable couple of weeks for the Japanese right, which recently suffered several nasty kicks in the crotch.

Why shouldn't North Korea test the Taepodong?

Taking everything into account, balancing up the pros and the cons, all things considered - I am anti-intercontinental ballistic missile.

Long, metallic, phallic objects, charged up with jet fuel, and mounted with nasty warheads - they give me the willies. When they are in the hands of unreconstructed Stalinists, with bad hair and gulags, then my unease multiplies. Much better all round to melt them down to make Meccano kits for underfunded schools, or spend the money on improved broadband internet access for Pyongyang.

All that said, I can't understand why North Korea shouldn't conduct a long range missile test.

We may not like the North Koreans, but there are certain facts about them that we have to accept. They have a large military, as does the United States. It possesses, and is developing, ballistic missiles (like Britain and the United States). Obviously, it is going to test them - Britain does, and the Americans do too. It may be alarming, but it is hypocrisy to claim that they are not entitled to do so.

The argument then becomes one about proliferation. The rest of the world, it is claimed, is trying hard to limit the spread of powerful and destructive long range weapons; the North Koreans cannot be allowed to flout these principles and make things more dangerous for for everyone else. But legally this isn't true - it is three years since North Korea pulled out of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, and it is certainly not signed up to anything promising not to test conventional weapons (the so-called "ban" on testing in 1999 was nothing more than a voluntary, self-imposed moratorium).

And who really is making the world dangerous? Kim Jong Il is not my cup of tea, but I believe that he is a rational man and I can see that he finds himself in a difficult position. He was already stranded by history, marooned on a shrinking iceberg of communist rhetoric with no obvious way of stepping off and maintaining his power. His economy was failing, his people were starving, and his military was grinding to a halt. Then George Bush appeared and unambiguously announced, in the "axis of evil" speech, that Kim was in his sights. He demonstrated the kind of thing he had in mind by invading Iraq the following year.

In such circumstances, how would you expect a leadership to react? To quietly roll over and surrender (as anti-American resistance was supposed to have done so after the defeat of Saddam)? Or to leverage what few military resources it has at its disposal and at least give its declared enemy something to think about?

Lost in Ukrainian translation

When he first arrived in Japan last week, I took the story of Ishinosuke Uwano at face value. He, you remember, is the 83-year old former soldier of the Japanese Imperial Army who was taken prisoner in Siberia in 1945, officially declared dead in 2001, who unexpectedly popped up in Ukraine a few months ago and flew to Japan last week for emotional reunions with his surviving siblings. You can read the story I wrote for Thursday's paper here.

But in the last couple of days I have started to think that there is something rather fishy about the whole story. I am not alone - the bulletin boards of the Japanese portal Ni-Channeru are full of speculation about Mr Uwano.

Who is he? What has he been up to for the past sixty years? And why is he so reluctant to answer questions?

Read The Village Where Nothing Happened

[Read the next post first - Sing The Village Where Nothing Happened. What follows is the version which I dictated to the copy taker by phone, rather than the edited version eventually printed in the newspaper. There may be small differences.]

Printed in The Independent on 4th December 2001, under the headline, 'A village is destroyed ... and America says nothing happened'

By Richard Lloyd Parry in Kama Ado, Eastern Afghanistan

The village where nothing happened is reached by a steep climb at the end of a rattling three-hour drive along a stony road. Until nothing happened here, early on the morning of Saturday and again the following day, it was a large village with a small graveyard, but now that has been reversed. The cemetery on the hill contains 40 freshly dug graves, unmarked and identical. And the village, so obscure that no one can agree on whether it is called Kama Ado or Mado, has ceased to exist.

Sing The Village Where Nothing Happened

The single newspaper story of which I am most proud was published in The Independent on 4th December 2001. It was a month after the fall of the Taleban, and I was in the Afghan city of Jalalabad close to the border with Pakistan. Anti-Taleban mujahideen, friends of the Americans, were fighting a ragged battle against a remnant of al-Qaeda fighters holed up in the Tora Bora caves in the Spin Ghar mountains to the south. There were a few commandos of the American and British special forces on the ground, but allied support was largely limited to massive air raids on the mountains by B-52 bombers.

I was staying with a group of foreign reporters in a hotel in Jalalabad. Every few hours, the ground shook with the explosion of the massive bombs, 40 miles away. At night the horizon was illuminated with orange fire. We all wanted to go to the mountains to see the battle for ourselves. But the mujahideen, who more or less tolerated us as a necessary and amusing nuisance, said that it was too dangerous.

Then one morning, we were summoned to the Jalalabad residence of one of the mujahideen commanders. I remember arriving there by taxi to see a pick up truck pulled up in the drive. It was full of dead, dusty bodies - young mujahideen fighters in their thin pyjama-like robes and sandals. It was explained that they had been staying in a house, close to Tora Bora which, out of the blue, had been struck by a bomb from one of the B-52s. I remember the face of Haji Zaman, the mujahideen commander as he told us this. He was a hard, sarcastic, unlikeable and wholly untrustworthy man, but as he spoke he seemed to be close to tears.

The same thing happened the next day. Then at the beginning of December, we were told that an entire village had been destroyed by the Americans. From the safety, and relative comfort of our hotel, we reported these claims. They were flatly denied by the Pentagon, in the least ambiguous terms: "it just didn't happen".

We asked once again if we could go down and see for ourselves. Haji Zaman agreed.

Three others went, apart from me: Chris Tomlinson of AP, the photographer Yola Monakhov, and a CNN correspondent whom, for reasons which will become clear, I will not name.

Mask of the Blasphemer

I can't stop thinking about the fury over the Danish cartoons of the Prophet. The craven position of the British and US governments, and the print and broadcast media in both countries, mark this as a moment of shame in the history of the defence of free speech. And the arguments whirling around my head came into focus as I read a fascinating and very apposite letter in this morning's Japan Times.

These are not adjectives that can be applied very often to the JT's letters page, which generally serves as a forum for the frustrations of ex-pats who should have packed up and gone home long ago. But this morning's lead letter, from NAME WITHHELD of Nagoya, presents what, in my reading on the subject, is a unique perspective on the cartoons affair. The anonymous correspondent is a Sri Lankan, and a devout Buddhist. At the moment he (or she) is a very angry Buddhist, because of an incident at the Turin Winter Olympics.

"Probably this televised piece was not noticed by viewers," he writes. "It was shown for only a few seconds." But for NAME WITHHELD, it was an offence comparable with the publication of the infamous cartoons.

A twinkling in every lung

As I wheezed on the treadmill in the gym (Gold's Gym on Omotesando Avenue in Tokyo, the one above the big branch of Zara), the randomly shuffling iPod plucked out a track I hadn't listened to for a while: Breathing by Kate Bush.

It is a creepily disturbing song about an in utero foetus whose mother is exposed to a nuclear explosion. Remarkable that she was 21 when it was released and still younger when she wrote it. If foetuses could sing then I am sure that they would sound like Kate Bush at this stage in her career, with a voice between that of a little girl and Mrs Thatcher at her most indignant: