Category Archives: Southeast Asia

by | 23 January 2004 · 10:00 pm

The U.S. Army’s Manchu Regiment

Most people have heard of the British Army’s famed Gurkhas, but how many are aware of the American Manchu Regiment? It played a vital role in numerous key military campaigns.

[World War I:] In early October 1917, the Manchus moved to the front. The Regiment first became involved in the then static warfare in the Sous Reuvrois Sector. When subsequently moved to Chateau-Thierry, it met and stalled the Boche Purge on Paris….

The German’s attempt to make the Bevel Forest one of the fierce, slow defensive maneuvers was thwarted and their lines became utterly disorganized. This was one of three successful night moves or raids made by the Manchu Regiment within a period of days that aided considerably in dealing a death blow to the bewildered Germans.

After the armistice was signed on 11 November 1918, Manchu troops marched into Germany to serve as an occupation force…. The Regiment was awarded battle streamers for Aisne, Meuse-Argonne, Lorraine, Ile de France, St. Mihiel and Aisne-Mame campaigns. In 1918, the Manchus were awarded the French Fourragere for gallantry during the Meuse-Argonne offensive….

[World War II:] On 07 June 1944 (D-Day +1) the Manchu Regiment set foot on the hostile soil of Omaha Beach, Normandy and immediately moved forward to capture Rubercy. Within three days they had intercepted the main rail line between Cherbourg and Paris and had driven through the Carisy Forest….

The Manchus were operating as a hinge on the “Bulge” at the Rocherather Baracken crossroads. The Manchus fought for eighteen hours against overwhelming odds, destroying seventeen German tanks, and repulsing a key drive in the German thrust. This stand enabled two battalions of the 38’h Infantry Regiment to escape encirclement, and coupled with similar stands by other allied units, caused the German counteroffensive to falter, thereby providing time to regroup and defeat this last great German effort.

After Allied lines had been re-established in January 1945, the Manchu Regiment once again spearheaded a drive through the Siegfried Line to begin a dash across Germany. The Rhine River was crossed on 21 March 1945. The Manchu Regiment then continued its drive across Germany and into Czechoslovakia to the outskirts of Pilsen where it was engaged in combat until the last days of the war. The Manchu Regiment remained in that sector on occupation duty until July 1945, when it embarked for the United States with many decorations, including three Presidential Citations….

[Korea:] Manchu troops were the first element of the Indianhead Division to touch Korean soil when they arrived at the Korean port city of Pusan on 31 July 1950. The Manchus were immediately placed on line in defense of the Pusan Perimeter and it received its baptism of fire in the battle of the Naktong Bulge. Later they broke out from that defensive position, and began the attack Northward, when they assaulted and seized Cloverleaf and Obong-Ni Ridge on 1 August 1950….

The Manchu Regiment participated in the breakout from the Pusan perimeter and began the advance north with the rest of the Eighth Army towards the Yalu River. The soldiers thought that the war would be over and that they would be home for Christmas as they neared the end of their push northward. Those beliefs were crushed on 25 November 1950 though, when several Red Chinese Armies attacked the Eighth Army in the vicinity of the Chongehon River…. On 30 November 1950, the majority of the Manchu Regiment began to run the “Gauntlet” to Kunu-Ri with the rest of the 2nd Infantry Division. The 1st Battalion remained with the 23d Infantry Regiment to fight a rear guard action to cover the withdrawal of the rest of the 2nd Division….

After running the gauntlet to Kunu-Ri, the remnants of the Regiment were withdrawn to an area south of the Korean capital of Seoul to refit. Manchus then spent the month of December 1950 on the monumental task of reorganizing, re-equipping, re-supplying and training, while patrolling the roads east of Seoul to Hongchon, Hoengsong and Wonju….

On 18 September 1951 the Regiment was ordered to attack the ridge lines southwest of Heartbreak Ridge in an attempt to relieve pressure on the 23rd Infantry Regiment, which was attacking up the east-west spur of the ridge. After heavy fighting the Manchus secured their objective on 23 September. The North Koreans did not relinquish Heartbreak Ridge and in late September the Manchus were ordered to attack the west-side of the Mundung-Ni Valley in a final attempt to capture the ridge. The attack was successful and Heartbreak Ridge fell on 13 October 1951….

The Regiment earned an additional Presidential Unit Citation for its gallant service in Hongchon, and the Manchus received streamers for the following campaigns while serving in Korea: UN Defensive, UN Offensive, CCF Intervention, First UN Counteroffensive, CCF Spring Offensive, UN Summer-Fall Offensive, Second Korean Winter, Korea Summer-Fall 1952, Third Korean Winter, Korea Summer 1953….

[Vietnam:] April 29th [1966] saw the battalion disembark the ship General Walker at Vung Tau, Vietnam. The Manchus got a taste of what was to come almost immediately. Within hours of their arrival they found themselves under fire as their convoy made its way to the 25th Division base camp at Cu Chi. The next day, a little more than 24 hours after arriving in country, Alpha company engaged the enemy in a firefight – setting the tone of regular contact that would characterize the Manchu experience for the next four and a half years….

On February 22, 1968 the Manchus closed the base at Katum which had served as the large forward base for the 1st BDE near the Cambodian border. After a day at Tay Ninh to prepare, the Manchus moved out to Cu Chi and eventually arrived north of Tan Son Nhut on February 25. The mission was to find and destroy rocket sites that had been used to fire on Tan Son Nhut Air Base since the Tet Offensive began nearly a month earlier. At 9:00 a.m. on March 2, 1968, the Manchus walked into what was to become one of the worst single encounter loss of life incidents in the history of the Vietnam war. Forty nine members of Charlie company were killed and 24 wounded in an ambush by a large communist force on Route 248 north and east of Tan Son Nhut near the small village of Quoi Xuan. In addition, C company suffered 24 wounded while D company suffered casualties in the fighting to reach Charlie company. Manchu Alpha, Bravo, and Delta continued operations in this area and took many more casualties until finally leaving on March 11, 1968. Rocket sites had been destroyed, and a formidable communist force had been weakened, if not destroyed. But, it had come at a great cost to the Manchus and particularly the courageous men of Charlie Company….

In the four years and six months of Service in Vietnam with the 25th Division, the 4th Battalion of the Manchus received two Presidential Citations and added 12 campaign streamers to the Regimental Colors for Combat Operations in the Republic of South Vietnam. It is estimated that 450 4th Battalion Manchus were killed in the Vietnam War. Three Manchus were posthumous recipients of the Medal of Honor, the nation’s highest award for valor….

[Cold War:] On August 2, 1972 the 4th Battalion was relieved from assignment to the 25th Infantry Division and was reassigned to Alaska with the 172nd Infantry [where morale was maintained by daily repetitions of the unit motto: “Keep Up the Fire!”]….

In 1976 the 1st Manchus were deployed into the DMZ to provide security for a focus of the infamous tree-cutting incident. This incident occurred when two U.S. soldiers were killed by the North Koreans when they were attempting to trim a tree which hindered observation of the North Korean border.

Surprisingly enough, the Manchus were one of the oldest infantry regiments in the U.S. Army, first commissioned in 1798. It fought in the War of 1812, the Mexican War, the Civil War, the Little Big Horn campaigns, Cuba, the Philippines, and during the Boxer Rebellion in Peking, where it was awarded the honorary title of “Manchus” and its motto, “Keep Up The Fire.”

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by | 23 January 2004 · 11:08 am

South Korea and the Vietnam-era Mindset

A Vietnam-era mindset still influences many Americans, perhaps especially longtime leftists. The same is true in South Korea. But the Vietnam era meant rather different things to South Koreans than it did to Americans.

For one thing, many South Koreans mapped their images of a divided Vietnam onto a divided Korea, and vice versa. This shows up very starkly in a novel like The Shadow of Arms, by Hwang Suk-Young, whose English translation by Chun Kyung-Ja was published by the Cornell University East Asia Program in 1994. I had the chance to write a review of the book for the journal Korean Studies in 1996.

At one point during a huge antiwar rally in San Francisco that I attended while on a weekend pass from the Defense Language Institute in Monterey in 1969, a speaker standing beneath the flag of North Vietnam began attaching conditions to his hitherto well-received calls for peace. But almost as soon as his “We demand peace” turned to “We will accept no peace until …” the more-alert members of the crowd began to chant “Peace now! Peace now!” More and more people took up the cry until they drowned out the rest of the speech. For the speaker, peace was a step on the road to partisan victory. For the crowd, it was an end in itself. The crowd won that round but, in typical fashion, the partisan peaceniks were better represented among the organizers, while the naive peaceniks were far more numerous among the organized.

Although utterly cynical about the enterprise (and especially the entrepreneurs) of war, The Shadow of Arms is not exactly an antiwar novel. It is written more in the spirit of that partisan peace activist beneath the North Vietnamese flag in San Francisco. Set almost entirely amidst the logistics-and-supply cornucopia behind the lines rather than in the more intense violence of the free-fire zones, it presents the war as essentially a struggle between self-sacrificing patriots (supported by the communist North Vietnamese) and self-indulgent profiteers (supported by the capitalist Americans). This focus on the wartime black market in South Vietnam may well reflect Hwang Suk-Young’s own experience in the 2nd ROK Marine Brigade, which was deployed to Vietnam from 1965 to 1972. But it also appears to reflect his vision of Cold War South Korea, whose greedy and corrupt military leaders presumably abandoned the goals of reunification and independence for personal profit. By implication, North Korea is the preserve of self-sacrificing patriots still wedded to nationalist, rather than capitalist, goals.

This novel thus evokes the shared fate of Korea and Vietnam. It does not explore the motives (other than profit) for South Korean participation in the war, nor the reactions of individual Koreans to the experience. There is no hint, for instance, of the kind of introspection found in Ahn Junghyo’s [war novel] White Badge, where the protagonist is reminded of his own childhood picking through the garbage of the American soldiers when he sees Vietnamese kids sifting through the rubbish of the Korean troops. Nevertheless, Hwang’s novel is an engrossing tale of individuals caught up in blackmarket plunder within a command economy during the chaos of war. (Although Hwang appears to consider such plunder typical of capitalist economies, I suspect–having spent a year in Romania under Ceausescu–that it is typical of any economy in which an elite has monopoly control of crucial resources, whether that elite meets in corporate boardrooms or in people’s palaces.)

For many Koreans, their participation on the American side during the Vietnam War was quadruply shameful. Not only did they fight on the losing side, but they fought to preserve a divided country, they fought for capitalism, and they fought in a mercenary capacity. Many others, of course, were eager to combat communism and to repay a debt to a vital ally.

The mercenary issue is particularly nettlesome. It’s a toxic label. But it’s hard to deny that, to a certain extent, the Vietnam War provided the same kind of stimulus to South Korea’s postwar economy that the the Korean War did to Japan’s earlier postwar economy (and European wars did to the U.S. economy even earlier). That’s why the same review also considered a related book, Mercenaries and Lyndon Johnson’s “More Flags”: The Hiring of Korean, Filipino and Thai Soldiers in the Vietnam War, by Robert M. Blackburn (McFarland, 1994).

The mercenary nature of foreign involvement in the war is the central theme of Robert M. Blackburn’s fascinating nonfiction account of U.S. President Lyndon Johnson’s attempt to beg or buy international support for South Vietnam under “The Free World Assistance Program” (commonly labeled “More Flags”), which began in 1964. Blackburn, like Hwang, is a Vietnam War veteran who “had the good fortune to fight alongside, though never with, some units of the ROK Marines, and was never bothered by what label they wore” (155). He is careful to distinguish the soldiers who fight wars from the politicians who make wars, observing that any stigma attached to the word mercenary belongs to the leaders, not to the soldiers.

However, Blackburn offers a more subtle analysis of the status of mercenaries. He notes that individual soldiers may choose to fight for a foreign country for reasons other than simply pay, although the pay itself defines their status as mercenaries. Soldiers-of-fortune may fight for the thrill of it. Others enlist because they believe in the cause they are being paid to fight for. Much the same can be said for entire military units, or even for nations that inject their own troops into foreign wars. “In the Spanish Civil War of the 1930s, for example, Franco’s Moroccan battalions fought only for pay, while the opposing members of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade fought for a cause. Both units, however, … shared the common status of mercenaries” (146).

Australia and New Zealand sent military units to Vietnam at their own expense (and therefore not as mercenaries) and for their own reasons. In fact their support for South Vietnam began before Johnson’s More Flags program. Both countries had helped fight communist insurgencies in the Malay Peninsula, and both were alarmed by what Sukarno and his Communist Party allies were doing in Indonesia. Each apparently considered it in its own national interest to help assure the survival of a capitalist South Vietnam. South Korea had at least as much national interest in the survival of South Vietnam as those two countries did. But it also had a “debt of honor” (46) to repay to the allies who helped assure its own survival little more than a decade earlier.

Other countries contributed varying amounts to South Vietnam, from Morocco’s “10,000 cans of sardines worth $2,000” to Japan’s “$55 million worth of economic assistance from a World War II reparations agreement” (141). Most contributed medical supplies and equipment. Costa Rica (actually the Costa Rican Sugar Growers Association) sent an ambulance (143), and South Korea’s first military unit to arrive was a Mobile Army Surgical Hospital (MASH) [emphasis added] (159). However, of all the More Flags allies, South Korea committed the most troops (50,000 out of the 65,000 in 1968 [158]), suffered the most casualties (4,407 out of the 5,241 killed [xiii]), and reaped the greatest economic benefits in return. Blackburn (64-65) estimates that South Korean soldiers received about $1 billion just in pay, allowances, and benefits alone in 1967-73. A ROK private with a base pay of $1.60 a month could earn $1.00-$1.25 for each day’s service in Vietnam. Still, each ROK soldier cost the U.S. only about half as much as a comparable American soldier.

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by | 21 January 2004 · 9:35 pm

Tana Toraja: From Ethnogenesis to Ethnotourism

A hundred years ago, the Toraja people did not exist. “Toraja” was merely a derogatory term applied by the Bugis and Makassarese living in the lowlands of the southwest peninsula of Sulawesi (then called Celebes) to any of the many different peoples living in the mountainous regions of the peninsula and central Sulawesi. Today, Tana Toraja (Toraja Land) is an administrative district in the province of South Sulawesi, the people living there comprise one of the four official suku bangsa (ethnic groups) of the peninsula, and the Toraja are celebrated (at least amongst anthropologists, tourists, and television crews) for their fantastic architecture and elaborate funerals. People who have been born in the area of Tana Toraja now call themselves Toraja, bringing this identity with them in their migrations throughout Indonesia and the rest of the world.

So begins a fascinating paper entitled From “You, Toradja” to “We Toraja”: Ethnicity in the Making, in which an anthropology graduate student, Jaida n’ha Sandra, attempts “to trace how a pejorative turned into a people.” The extended quotes below are from the same article. (Read the whole thing.)

Before the arrival of the Dutch, the Muslims in the lowlands had regarded the politically fragmented highlanders as a major source of slaves, as well as coffee and other highland products.

The Dutch had been a colonial presence on Sulawesi since the seventeenth century but had mainly ignored the inaccessible and agriculturally unproductive mountain areas. In the late nineteenth century, however, they became increasingly worried about the growing Islamic influence in Sulawesi. The animist highlanders were viewed as a pool of potential Christians; the company mandate was to convert as many as possible, thereby aligning the highlands with the Dutch should lowland Muslims get too obstreperous.

Starting in 1906, the Dutch influenced the formation of Toraja in four main ways. First, they abolished slavery, bringing peace and relative safety to the area. Second, they introduced Christianity, which would later be adopted as a defense against lowland Islamic fundamentalism. Third, they furthered the cash economy by demanding taxes. And, finally, they drew a line around the Sa’dan area and named it Tana Toraja.

Tana Toraja, like Bali, has since become one of the most intensely anthropologized places on earth. The Toraja are famous for their huge, boat-shaped rice barns and their famously elaborate and gory funeral celebrations, featuring animal sacrifices and often a sizable contingent of foreign funeral tourists. Ethnic identity, however, remains a contentious issue.

The nobility … were satisfied with their power and status under the old system. Lower class Toraja have been less conservative, taking advantage of the egalitarian mores of Christianity, the opportunities presented by education and the cash economy, and the political implications of ethnic identity to contest the authority of the nobility…. Christianity has been increasingly popular as an avenue towards modernity and gaining a transnational identity….

In the 1940s, few Toraja had ever left their village and almost none had left the Indonesian archipelago. By 1978, however, sixty percent of the population was spending extended periods outside Tana Toraja. Many never come back except for the occasional family funeral. Toraja have eagerly pursued education and now work outside Tana Toraja as government officials, professors, medical professionals, and lawyers. At the same time, they have never been above manual labor and so also work in mining and lumber operations on far-flung islands as well as in furniture and clothing manufacture closer to home.

Out-migration has led simultaneously to a greater identification with the Toraja suku (ethnicity) while at the same time facilitated alterations in that identity. On the one hand, Toraja abroad go to great lengths to retain links with family. They follow all the funerals and attendant gossip….

At the same time, there are complaints that the rituals are no longer authentic or “true”. Fewer Toraja can reach a consensus on what aspects of funeral ceremonies are fixed and what can be reinterpreted. There is no longer a shared expectation and experience of ritual. As ritual defines Toraja to the outside world, it is also changing to accommodate outsiders tastes. Some students from Toraja consider having tourists at funerals a travesty and feel tourists should be treated only to staged shows of songs, chants, dances, even sacrifices that are not part of any meaningful ritual. Others feel that removing the ritual practices from the ritual, doing it at inappropriate times or in inappropriate places, is the travesty. The ceremonies should be whole or abandoned, not carved into bits for tourists’ eyes. Discussion groups, seminars, and arguments abound as Toraja try to sort out how they can abide by Church authority and please the tourists while maintaining some meaning in their traditions….

For the sake of tourism, Toraja have also begun to reinvent themselves… They respond to lowland stereotypes of themselves as crude, backwards, non-religious ex-slaves by characterizing themselves as pork-eaters, pacifists, honest, delicate, quick-witted, hard working, and thrifty. At the same time, they discuss at length their own foolishness in racking up huge debts and then wasting wealth on funeral ceremonies….

Meanwhile, the nobility make use of visiting anthropologists to play out family rivalries. Adams reports how she was recruited as a pet anthropologist by one family who asked her to “write a book about the real Torajan identity and history.” What this really meant was a history of that particular family. She came to realize, only later, that she was a pawn in an ancient game. She writes:

[A] rival aristocratic family from another Torajan district visited our village and my Torajan hosts introduced me as “their anthropologist” …. To this, the visitors responded that they, too, had an anthropologist live with them and write about them. After these guests departed, my Torajan family disparaged the other anthropologist’s understanding of Torajan culture and proclaimed that my “book” would be “much bigger and better.”

One of the most famous books on the Toraja, of course, is Nigel Barley’s Not a Hazardous Sport, quoted immediately below.

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by | 17 January 2004 · 9:35 pm

Asian Acronyms: Did you teach at GWYX or at Guangwai?

Discriminating linguists sometimes distinguish between acronyms pronounced as if they were a word, like NATO and UNICEF; and initialisms pronounced as a series of letters, like IBM or the UN. This distinction breaks down in orthographies that write whole syllables at a time, like Chinese.

In Chinese, for instance, acronyms are composed of the initial syllabic characters of (usually) two-syllable words. So, Peking (= Beijing) University, or Beijing Daxue [lit. ‘NorthCapital BigSchool’] becomes Beida [lit. ‘NorthBig’]. In Korean, Korea University, or Koryo Taehak [lit. ‘HighBeautiful BigSchool’] becomes Kodae [lit. ‘HighBig’]. In Japanese, it’s a bit more complicated. Chinese characters can be pronounced not just in their Chinese loan forms, but as native Japanese words that mean (more or less) the same thing. This is what makes Japanese far and away the most complex, least efficient writing system on earth. In either case, each character is usually pronounced as two syllables, since Japanese had to add final vowels to one-syllable Chinese roots in order to pronounce any final consonants, most of which have been lost in modern Mandarin Chinese. (The same thing happens to current Japanese borrowings from English: ranchi < lunch, setto < set, beisubouru < baseball, and so on.) So the acronym for Hiroshima University, or Hiroshima Daigaku [lit. ‘WideIsland BigSchool’] becomes HiroDai [lit. ‘WideBig’]. The name Hiroshima is native Japanese (the Sino-Japanese pronunciation would be Koutou = Ch. Guangdao), but Daigaku is Sino-Japanese [= Ch. Daxue].

After China adopted the supplementary Latin-based alphabetic pinyin writing system, which is increasingly used in computer input, you could begin to see alphabetic abbreviations, some of them rather alarming and most of them quite unpronounceable. Very few Chinese syllables start with vowels: a- is not uncommon, but e- and o- are rare, and i- and u- are nonexistent. Even worse, initial q-, x-, y-, and z- are way too common.

So, if you were to take the first pinyin letter of each syllable, Guangzhou Foreign Language Institute would be abbreviated GZWGYYXY < GuangZhou WaiGuo YuYan XueYuan [lit. ‘WideState OutCountry SpeechTalk LearnYard’]. You would do better to take the first letter of each two-syllable word rather than the first letter of every single syllable, in which case the same school would end up as GWYX < Guangzhou Waiguo Yuyan Xueyuan [lit. ‘Guangzhou Foreign Language Institute’]. However, most Chinese acronyms are more economical than that. The common name for this particular school was equivalent to “GuangFor” (Guangzhou Foreign), namely, GuangWai [lit. ‘WideOut’]. (It has now merged into GDUFS, the Guangdong University of Foreign Studies, which would still qualify for the acronym GuangWai in Chinese. The unfortunate English acronym must certainly be guh-doofs.)

These syllabic acronyms aren’t unique to Chinese. Indonesian (or Malay) uses a Latin-based alphabetic writing system, but is chock full of syllabic as well as alphabetic acronyms (and initialisms). Acronyms seem to proliferate under big bureaucracies–especially if the military has a free hand. Examples of syllabic acronyms in Indonesian include the names of provinces like Sulsel < Sulawesi Selatan [‘south’], Sulut < Sulawesi Utara [‘north’], and Sulteng < Sulawesi Tengah [‘central’] on the island of Sulawesi (Celebes); schools like UnHas < Universitas Hasanuddin in Sulawesi and UnPatti < Universitas Pattimura in Maluku (Molucca); and terms like tapol < tahanan politik [‘political prisoner’].

UPDATE: Like Japanese and Korean, Vietnamese used to be written in Chinese characters and has lots of Chinese loanwords. Judging from the website of Vietnam National University – Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnamese seem to abbreviate by taking the first letter of each separately written syllable. Thus, (ignoring diacritics) Dai hoc Quoc gia Thanh pho Ho Chi Minh [lit. ‘University National City Ho Chi Minh’] is abbreviated DHQG-HCM. Ho Chi Minh City is also abbreviated TP.HCM, which I’m pretty sure is often pronounced Saigon. Otherwise, I don’t have a clue how these abbreviations are pronounced.

FURTHER UPDATE: Korean usage of taehak seems to be diverging from that of its cognates in Japanese (daigaku) and Chinese (daxue). While each term applies to a variety of institutions of tertiary education, Korean now distinguishes between taehak ‘college’ and taehakkyo ‘university’ very much long the lines of American usage. Taehakkyo indicates a larger institution that offers graduate education. So Kodae now stands for Koryo Taehakkyo, as the Chinese characters and Korean title on their homepage shows. I don’t think the cognate forms, Jp. daigakkou and Ch. daxuexiao, even exist, much less serve a similar function.

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by | 10 January 2004 · 8:31 pm

Sukarno’s Sweet Breads

“Now I must admit in my youth I was so terribly handsome that I was almost girlish-looking. Because there were so few female intellectuals in those days, there weren’t many girl members and when Young Java put on a play I was always given the ingènue role. I actually put powder on my face and red on my lips. And I will tell you something but I don’t what foreigners will think of a President who tells such things … Anyway, I will tell it. I bought two sweet breads. Round breads. Like rolls. And I stuffed them inside my blouse. with this addition to my shapely figure, everybody said I looked absolutely beautiful. Fortunately my part didn’t call for kissing any boys on stage. I couldn’t waste my money so after the show I pulled the breads out of my blouse and ate them. Watching me on stage, spectators commented that I showed a definite talent for playing to audiences. I concurred wholeheartedly.”

SOURCE: Sukarno: An Autobiography, as told to Cindy Adams, as quoted in Nigel Barley, The Duke of Puddledock: Travels in the Footsteps of Stamford Raffles (Henry Holt, 1992).

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by | 7 January 2004 · 9:02 pm

The Hikayat Abdullah on the Englishmen in Old Malacca

‘At that time [c. 1810], there were not yet many English in the town of Malacca and to see an Englishman was like seeing a tiger, because they were so mischievous and violent. If one or two English ships called in at Malacca, all the Malacca people would keep the doors of their houses shut, for all round the streets there would be a lot of sailors, some of whom would break in the doors of people’s houses, and some would chase the women on the streets, and others would fight amongst themselves and cut one another’s heads open … Moreover, a great number were killed owing to their falling in the river, owing to their being drunk; and all this made people afraid. At that time, I never met an Englishman who had a white face, for all of them had “mounted the green horse,” that is to say, were drunk. So much so, that when children cried, their mothers would say, “Be quiet, the drunken Englishman is coming,” and the children would be scared and keep quiet.’

SOURCE: The Hikayat Abdullah, as quoted in Nigel Barley, The Duke of Puddledock: Travels in the Footsteps of Stamford Raffles (Henry Holt, 1992).

More extracts from the Hikayat Abdullah are available on the National University of Singapore‘s Resources for Literary Study website.

The author of the Hikayat Abdullah, Abdullah bin Abdul Kadir, grew up in Malacca at a time of British Imperial expansion into the Malay world, and was present in Singapore from the time of Raffles’ arrival in the 1820s onwards. A prolific writer and translator, he is also known as the author of Kesah Pelayaran Abdullah (The Story of the Voyage of Abdullah), an account of a voyage up the east coast of the peninsular in 1837. Abdullah finished his autobiography, the Hikayat Abdullah, in 1843.

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by | 4 January 2004 · 4:55 pm

Context for the Missionary Killings in Palau

Shortly before Christmas, three Seventh Day Adventist (SDA) missionaries were slain in Palau. The Republic of Palau is as close as anywhere in Micronesia to two hotspots of radical Islamist guerrilla violence against Christians: the southern Philippines, where Abu Sayyef has “kidnapped foreigners for ransom, often killing them in grisly fashion” since the 1990s; and eastern Indonesia, where the Laskar Jihad waged holy war against the numerous Christian communities there during 1999-2002. (Laskar Jihad reportedly disbanded in the wake of the Bali bombing, but it appears to have simply relocated to West Papua.)

Do these killings mark the spread of terrorist groups into Palau? Apparently not. Instead they signal the spread of another scourge already well-known in urban parts of Asia and the Pacific: crystal meth. Palau has an ice problem, and the killing seems to fit the all too typical pattern of a crackhead burglar surprised in the act.

More on international borders: The DePaiva family members killed were SDA missionaries from Brazil by way of Andrews University in Michigan. Their memorial service was held in Texas, where DePaiva relatives live. Justin Hirosi, the person charged with the killing, is a Palauan whose surname comes from the Japanese given name of one of his paternal ancestors (a pattern common in Micronesia). Audy MacDonald Maldangasang, the fugitive “ice” dealer wanted in Palau who was just arrested in Saipan had arrived there from South Korea in 2002 after fleeing Palau in 2001.

More on international religions: The Micronesian states allow admirable freedom of religion. The State Department’s latest Religious Freedom Report gives the following breakdowns for the Republic of the Marshall Islands (RMI), the Federated States of Micronesia (FSM: Kosrae, Pohnpei, Chuuk, Yap), and the Republic of Palau.

In round numbers, about 55% of the population of the RMI belongs to the United Church of Christ (formerly Congregational), and about 25% belong to the Assembly of God. Fewer than 10% are Roman Catholic, about 2% are Mormon, and fewer than 1% each are SDA, Full Gospel, and Baha’i. Just under 3% belong to another Assembly of God church, Bukot Nan Jesus. There is a large Marshallese community in Arkansas, where the Assembly of God is “over-represented” and its adherents are more likely than others to migrate between Arkansas and the RMI.

In the FSM, most Protestant denominations, as well as the Roman Catholic Church, are present on the four states of the country. On the island of Kosrae, 99 percent of the population are members of the United Church of Christ. On the island of Pohnpei, clan divisions mark religious boundaries in some measure. More Protestants live on the Western side of the island, while more Catholics live on the Eastern side, and most immigrants are Filipino Catholics. There is a small group of Buddhists on Pohnpei. On Chuuk and Yap, approximately 60 percent are Catholic and 40 percent are Protestant.

In Palau, there are 19 Christian denominations. The Roman Catholic Church is the dominant religion, and approximately 65 percent of the population are members. There are Bangladeshi Muslims in the country, and a primarily Catholic Filipino labor force (approximately 3,700 persons).

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by | 29 December 2003 · 6:56 pm

Still No News from Myanmar

Notice how virtually no news originates in Myanmar (Burma) unless it involves human rights battles? But here’s a fascinating online travelogue by a writer/philanthropist, with helpful maps, beautiful photos, and the English translation of a recent (2002) German book on the reclusive country. An excerpt from the introduction follows.

I first went to Indochina early in my life, to Cambodia before the war and the Killing Fields, to Laos during the “secret” war, and to Viet Nam during the early phase of an already unwinnable war. Myanmar was a different story. Although it had remained apart from the power struggle going on in Indochina, it had entered into a prolonged civil war and isolated itself from the international community. In 1965, my request for a tourist visa for Burma (Myanmar’s name at the time) was denied, but I was able to get in through the back door from Thailand with some smugglers. Although I stayed almost ten days in the Kengtung (now Kyaing Tong) district, I saw only a small part of the country.

Today the governments of Myanmar, Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos are making major efforts to attract foreign tourists. The choices are ours. But to visit more than one country on one trip is not advisable. The good traveler knows that less is more. Having to choose to visit one of the four interesting and attractive countries is not an easy task. All four went through a period in the latter part of the twentieth century of devastating wars that left them poor and underdeveloped. And the current political news from Myanmar is troubling. The country is led by a military junta that shows little willingness to reintroduce democracy to the inhabitants; the opposition appears to be disheartened, weakened, and divided. Any sort of national reconciliation seems years away. However, in February 2001 Aung San Suu Kyi confirmed to foreign visitors that secret talks between her and members of the military junta had begun in October 2000. Whether such meetings will eventually bring about national reconciliation and power sharing is impossible to predict. Then there is the drug problem regarding opium and heroin. Myanmar’s northeast is part of the infamous Golden Triangle, and the country remains the second largest heroin producer in the world.

The causes of Myanmar’s problems are several: the devastating effects of World War II; a failed democracy thereafter; the economic ruin caused by Gen. Ne Win’s policy of socialism, nationalization and isolation; the civil war between the Burmese military and the many insurgent groups and feudal lords; and, last but not least, the emergence of heroin as a valuable export commodity. After Gen. Ne Win took over the country and closed it, the outside world followed developments in Burma with some interest for a while, but because all foreigners were banned from the country and little news found its way into the Western press, over time the rest of the world seemed to lose interest in this isolated country. Several years ago, in the 1990s, the military reopened the country to foreign visitors. Today visas can easily be obtained, and a tourist industry is gradually developing. However, not all areas of the country are open to foreign visitors–only those that the government considers safe to visit.

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