[Beginning with this issue, AFPC Vice President for Policy Ilan Berman and Research Fellow Jeff Smith will assume editorial duties for the Asia Security Monitor. Many thanks go to outgoing editor Stephen Yates, who remains the Council’s senior scholar on Asia. Thanks also go to outgoing Associate Editor Jennifer Schuch-Page, who has left AFPC to pursue her academic studies abroad.]
November 11:
According to the Los Angeles Times, Japan has begun to require all foreign travelers to be fingerprinted and photographed as they pass through immigration checkpoints. Defended by the government as a necessary security measure aimed at preventing a terrorist attack, the measure has been condemned by critics as a thinly veiled attempt to keep a closer watch on foreigners. "The Japanese government has a long history of not wanting long-term foreign residents, and they really feel they need more control over foreigners. The government just wants to gather as much information as possible on people," says Sonoko Kawakami of the Japanese chapter of Amnesty International. While the new system is modeled on the U.S. program of the same function instituted in 2004, it goes even further by imposing photograph and fingerprint requirements on foreign visitors as well as foreign residents, exempting only diplomats, children younger than sixteen, U.S. military personnel, and long-term residents of Korean or Chinese descent.
November 15:
With an official “demarcation” and a peace agreement in the works, the long-running struggle between the Philippine government and Muslim separatists in the southern Mindanao region may finally be coming to a close, the BBC reports. Negotiators from the government and the 12,000-strong Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF), meeting in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, recently came to an agreement on expanding the borders of the Mindanao autonomous region, with negotiators “hopeful” about a permanent peace deal by the middle of next year. The deal is designed in part to assuage the concerns of officials in both Washington and Manila that Mindanao could become a base for al-Qaeda-linked militants.
November 16:
One of the most important side-effects of the recent denuclearization deal struck between North Korea and the United States has been a flurry of bilateral agreements between Pyongyang and its southern neighbor. The International Herald Tribune reports that, with tensions easing on multiple fronts, North and South Korean officials have signed a landmark agreement to open up cross-border cargo train service for the first time in 50 years – a line that the South hopes could eventually be linked to Russia’s trans-Siberian railroad. Seoul also won the rights to begin a number of construction projects within the DPRK, and secured a pledge from the North Korean regime to designate disputed waters as a “peace and cooperation zone.”
Despite all the optimism, however, an upcoming election in the South could alter matters considerably. There, according to the paper, conservative candidates who take a much harder line on the North are on the ascent, raising fears the deal could unravel under pressure from a new administration in Seoul.
November 30:
Just days after being elected in a landslide victory, Australia's new Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, is already signaling a change in his government's foreign affairs priorities. Channel News Asia reports that, as one of his first public pronouncements, Rudd has committed to an Australian exit from Iraq by mid-2008. "The combat force in Iraq, we would have home by around the middle of next year," Rudd told a radio station in Melbourne shortly after his inauguration. The decision, moreover, appears to be a unilateral one. "We've not begun our discussions with the United States on that," Rudd confirmed to reporters. "We'll have a meeting with the United States ambassador before too long to set up the appropriate processes for discussing that."
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