Batang Kali British Massacre Victims have a legal respite

Families of Batang Kali massacre victims finally have legal respite

KUALA LUMPUR: Descendants and families of the 24 civilians who died in the “Batang Kali massacre” of 1948 during British rule finally have a legal respite.

In an unprecedented breakthrough, the families, through their lawyers, will get a chance to argue their case in the British High Court next week.

We want the British government to clear the names of the families. -Tan Hai Kee

 

The judicial review test case on the alleged brutal killings of the unarmed rubber tappers by British soldiers has been fixed for Tuesday and Wednesday.

Action Committee Condemning the Batang Kali Massacre adviser and founder Tan Hai Kee said the hearing would be fully funded by British taxpayers.

“It will be a significant breakthrough for Malaysian civilians and NGOs in challenging the British Government's decision.

“We want the British government to clear the names of the families, as the tappers were branded as bandits and communist insurgents,” he said after a briefing and prayer ceremony at the Kuala Lumpur and Selangor Chinese Assembly Hall yesterday.

On Dec 12, 1948, about a dozen elite Scots Guards went into a village in Batang Kali and separated women and children from the men. They then allegedly executed all but one of the men who pretended to be dead.

Some of the bodies were later decapitated and their genitals smashed. The Guardsmen claimed the victims were armed and tried to escape but the committee countered that this was a cover-up.

The committee submitted a petition to the British government twice, first in March 2008 via the High Commission and another in November 2010 addressed to Queen Elizabeth II.

The first petition sought an apology and compensation of £80mil (RM393mil) but Tan said monetary gain was not the main issue.

By REGINA LEE
regina@thestar.com.my

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The euro crisis just got a whole lot worse

With Europe plunging back into recession and unemployment soaring, Francois Hollande, the French president elect, is calling for growth objectives to be reprioritised over the chemotherapy of austerity. 

Riot policemen lead away a protester holding a placard reading 'Let's get out of the Euro' during May Day demonstrations in Neumuenster, Germany Photo: Reuters

Angela Merkel, the German Chancellor, has meanwhile continued to insist that on the contrary, Europe must persist with the hairshirt. What's needed is political courage and creativity, not more billions thrown away in fiscal stimulus. Stick with the programme, she urges, as the anti-austerity backlash reaches the point of outright political insurrection.

Hollande and Merkel are, of course, both wrong. What Europe really needs is a return to free-floating sovereign currencies. Only then will Europe's seemingly interminable debt crisis be lastingly resolved. All the rest is just so much prancing around the goalposts, or an attempt to make the fundamentally unworkable somehow work.

The latest eurozone data are truly shocking, much worse in its implications both for us and them than news last week of a double-dip recession in the UK.

Even in Germany, unemployment is now rising, with a lot more to come judging by the sharp deterioration in manufacturing confidence. For Spanish youth, unemployment has become a way of life, with more young people now out of a job (51.1pc) than in one. In contrast to the US, where the unemployment rate is falling, joblessness in the eurozone as a whole has now reached nearly 11pc. Against these eye-popping numbers, Britain might almost reasonably take pride in its still intolerable 8.3pc unemployment rate.

There is only one boom business in Spain these days – teaching English and German. No prizes for guessing where these students are heading.

Hollande's opportunism in calling for a growth strategy he must know cannot be delivered looks like being answered only by intensifying recession. Maybe Mario Draghi, president of the European Central Bank, will surprise us after Thursday's meeting with a rate cut and a eurozone-wide programme of quantitative easing. But even if he did, it wouldn't fix the underlying problem, which is one of lost competitiveness manifested in ever more intractable levels of external indebtedness.

To think these problems can be solved either by fiscal austerity or, as advocated by Hollande and others, by its polar opposite of fiscal expansionism is to descend into fantasy.

By reinforcing the cycle, and thereby exacerbating the slump, fiscal austerity is proving self-defeating. Far from easing the problem of excessive indebtedness, it is only making it worse.

But it is equally absurd to believe that countries in the midst of a fiscal crisis can borrow their way back to growth. Who is going to lend with the certainty of a haircut or eurozone break-up to come?

I've been looking at the comparative numbers on fiscal consolidation, and they reveal some striking differences. The hairshirt prescribed for others is most assuredly not being donned by austerity's cheerleader in chief, Germany.

In fact, German government consumption is continuing to rise quite strongly, even in real terms, and the fiscal squeeze pencilled in by Berlin for itself for the next three years is marginal compared with virtually everyone else. Germany is requiring others to adopt policies it has no intention of following itself. What's so odd about that, you might ask?

Right to spend

Germany has earned the right to spend through years of prior restraint. It's got no structural deficit to speak of and, in any case, isn't that the way things are meant to work, with those capable of some fiscal expansionism compensating for the squeeze imposed by others?

All these things are true, but there is something faintly hypocritical about a country prescribing policy for others that it wouldn't dream of imposing on itself. Germany's supposed love of self-flagellation is actually something of a myth.

By the way, despite the rhetoric, Britain is hardly an outrider on austerity either. Now admittedly, the Coalition's plans for fiscal consolidation have been somewhat derailed by economic stagnation. We were meant to be further along than we are. But in terms of what's left to do, the UK is no more than middle of the pack.

On current plans, by contrast, the fiscal squeeze in the US, land of supposed fiscal expansionism, ratchets up substantially to something quite a bit bigger than what the UK has pencilled in for the next two years. It remains to be seen what effect that's going to have on the American recovery. Will renewed growth melt away as surely as it did in early 2011, or is it self-sustaining this time?

Back in the eurozone, the stand-off between creditor and debtor nations shows few, if any, signs of meaningful resolution. During the recession of the early 1990s, there was a famous British Property Federation dinner at which the chairman introduced the then chief executive of Barclays Bank, Andrew Buxton, as "a man to whom we owe, er, more than we can ever repay". It was a good joke, but it also neatly encapsulated what happens in all debt crises.

When the debtor borrows more than he can afford, the creditor will in the end always take a hit. The only thing left to talk about is how the burden is to be shared. The idea that you can force the debtor to repay by depriving him of his means of income is a logical absurdity, yet this is effectively what's going on in the eurozone.

When such imbalances develop between countries, they are normally settled by devaluation, which provides a natural market mechanism both for restoring competitiveness in the debtor nation and establishing the correct level of burden sharing.

Least tortuous form of default

It's default in all but name, but it is the least tortuous form of it. Free-floating sovereign exchange rates also provide a natural check on the build-up of such imbalances in the first place.

The reason things got so out of hand in the eurozone is that investors assumed in lending to the periphery that they were effectively underwritten by the core, mistakenly as it turned out. Interest rates therefore converged on those of the most creditworthy, Germany, allowing an unrestrained credit boom to develop in the deficit nations.

None of this is going to be solved by austerity. For now, there is no majority in any eurozone country for leaving the single currency, but one thing is certain: nation states won't allow themselves to be locked into permanent recession. Eventually, national solutions will be sought.

The whole thing is held together only by the fear that leaving will induce something even worse than the current austerity. This is not a formula for lasting monetary union.

By Jeremy Warner - Telegraph  

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Demise of US dollar as world currency

Experts see demise of dollar as world currency

 By DORIS C DUMLAO and MICHELLE V. REMO

IT may only be a matter of time before the US dollar gets replaced as the main currency in international trade, according to economists attending the meeting of the board of governors of the Asian Development Bank (ADB) in Manila.

Asian Development Bank, ADB

For many years, the dollar “has been almost the sole ‘reserve’ currency,” banked on by the world economy, American economist Jeffrey Sachs said on Thursday in one of the forums held during the ADB annual event. “Going forward, (the dollar) can’t play that role anymore.”

Sachs added that he could not see how the US dollar could remain as the world’s reserve currency when “the role of the United States in the global economy is diminishing.”

Several finance experts echoed Sachs’ sentiment, explaining that, with the greenback expected to weaken further, the world should turn to another currency to facilitate international trade and other commercial transactions.

“Having another reserve currency other than the US dollar is only a matter of time. We don’t know exactly when it will happen, but it will,” Neeraj Swaroop of Standard Chartered Bank said in an interview at the sidelines of the ADB meeting.

In the area of merchandise trading, Swaroop said, countries have actually started to use currencies other than the US dollar.

Sachs also said that some countries could turn to more than one currency in maintaining their foreign exchange reserves.

One currency being considered is the Chinese renminbi (RMB) which, according to HSBC, will inevitably become an international reserve currency.

The renminbi, or yuan, has the potential to become an international reserve currency because China is continuing to post strong growth, becoming an important player in the global economy, Iwan Azis, ADB head for regional integration, said in the same forum.

Also, China is pushing to make the yuan the world’s reserve currency – a move that is seen to hasten the replacement of the US dollar, Azis added.

Already, British banking giant HSBC has mapped out a strategy to be a leading global player in the “renminbi banking” space.

This global strategy has filtered into the Philippine market with the bank’s introduction of RMB-denominated deposit and trade financing facilities, top HSBC officials said in a press briefing on Thursday.

Spencer Lake of HSBC said the renminbi was increasingly becoming an important currency from a trade perspective.

Lake was in Manila as head of the HSBC delegation to the ADB event.

“If it were freely convertible today, it will be the second-largest currency in the world,” Lake said, noting that China has started to liberalise currency systems.

“It’s part of our core strategy to adopt and put in place all of the infrastructure and products to embrace (the renminbi) as a future reserve currency,” Lake said.

Lake said the bank’s strategy appeared to be gaining ground as indicated by a “significant” buildup of the RMB business in Hong Kong, Singapore and other South-East Asian countries.

“The world is getting ready to adopt it as a world currency,” he said. “You’ll see it as a more common language.”

“Reserve” currency, which is currently used to describe the US dollar, is the denomination that accounts for bulk of the foreign exchange reserves of most countries.

A country taps its foreign exchange reserves whenever it needs to pay off the costs of imported products and debts to foreign creditors.

After the United States fell into a recession in 2009, the US dollar began to weaken against emerging market currencies.

The trouble with hanging on to the dollar as the main reserve currency is that it is prone to depreciation given the prevailing economic troubles of the United States.

Depreciation of the US dollar, in turn, may lead to a reduction in the value of a country’s foreign reserves, experts said.

Apart from the yuan, Sachs said other viable currencies that could replace the US dollar were the euro and the Japanese yen. — Philippine Daily Inquirer / Asia News Network