Day: March 20, 2022

A world struggling to shake off the coronavirus pandemic that has killed millions and clobbered economies–and now fearful about Russia’s brutal war in Ukraine– marked the International Day of Happiness Sunday with many people wondering what to be happy about.  

To observe the now-ten-year-old UN holiday, RFA asked urban residents across the Asian continent, from Seoul to Yangon to the seat of Tibet’s government in exile in India what makes them happy.

No East Asian or Southeast Asian country or territory cracked the top 25 countries in the 2022 World Happiness Report, released Friday and dominated by wealthy northern European states. Pacific nations New Zealand and Australia ranked 10 and 12, respectively.

In Taiwan, whose rank of 26 made it the happiest East Asian region, one resident of that democratic island’s largest city looked to family for contentment.

“Happiness comes from family. We are happy when kids and parents are around. Life has to go on. Happiness is very necessary,” said a resident of Taipei.

In Hong Kong, a special autonomous region of China that has experienced a dramatic cut in civil liberties since Beijing imposed a harsh national security law in mid-2020, resident Mr. Yan finds joy in the cinema.

“I think we all live in the moment and should do our best. If I have things to do, I do them. When I’m off, I watch movies at home. I do something I like to do,” he told RFA. Hong Kong is ranked 81 on the happiness index.

No ‘temporary happiness’

South Korea, which ranks 59, Seoul resident Se-young Lee suggests the pandemic has brought families closer.

“In the past, everyone had dinner at the office and had appointments with friends. Now that we are together all the time, we are much closer than in the past,” he told RFA.

“Maybe this is happiness,” added Lee.

India, which ranks 136 out of 146 countries surveyed for 2022, is home to a large community of Tibetans who fled the Chinese annexation of the Himalayan region seven decades ago.

Ani Tenzin Woesar, Buddhist monk, offered a spiritual take on the question of happiness.

“For me, ultimate happiness is when I can engage myself in helping all the sentient beings in the world. It is more important than temporary happiness,” Woesar told RFA.

“So, Buddha directs us to the ultimate happiness that is achieved when a person can find enlightenment, otherwise it is all temporary happiness.”

Employment are on the minds of many people in Southeast Asia, which has suffered heavy economic fallout from the coronavirus pandemic and is still struggling to contain outbreaks.

“Before the pandemic, people had fun by going out, partying or socializing with friends and others. Now, I’m graduating and feeling discouraged quite a bit because there are no jobs available, nobody is hiring,” said a student who is about the graduate from a college in the Lao capital Vientiane.

“Despite this hard time, I still find happiness by visiting nature, chatting online with friends, talking on the phone with my family back home, listening to music, doing more research, writing essays or reading books,” he told RFA from Laos, ranked 95 on the happiness index.

‘I can’t even imagine’

A 28-year-old Lao woman who lives with her family in the Thai capital Bangkok said she has been unemployed for two years.

“I’m a housewife living with my husband, but I’m happy being at home; the most important happiness for me is happy marriage and looking after my husband, my children and my parents back home in Laos,” she told RFA.

Cambodia ranks a lowly 114^th and some Cambodians blame this lack of happiness to a five-year-old political crisis that a filled jails with activists and opposition figures.

“Even if my husband were to be released, there would still be no happiness, because Cambodia doesn’t have a real pluralism or democracy,” said Prum Chantha, wife of a jailed opposition politician.

“To me, happiness will come when Cambodia has a good leader, respects democratic principles, has free and fair elections and respects human rights,” she told RFA.

A scavenger in the Cambodian capital Phnom Penh, who picks trash for items to sell, “having a decent living, sending kids to schools” represents happiness.

“I don’t want my kids to be scavengers,” she told RFA.

More than a year after Myanmar’s military overthrew the country’s popular elected government in a February 2020 coup and plunged the country into chaos and violence, happiness is hard to find for street vendor Kyi Kyi Myint.

“If I were well-to-do and my family members were still around, I might be happy. But now, since they are all gone, I can’t even imagine what happiness is,” he told RFA.

“Every day, I have to figure out what to do to pay my living expenses. Since I live in squalor, I worry all the time what will happen to me.”

Reported and translated by RFA’s Cantonese, Khmer, Korean, Lao, Mandarin and Tibetan Services. Written in English by Paul Eckert and Chris Billing.

Hong Kong leader Carrie Lam said on Sunday she plans to review COVID-19 restrictions on Monday, just days after acknowledging that many financial institutions were “losing patience” with coronavirus policies in the financial hub.

The Chinese-ruled city has some of the most stringent COVID-19 rules in the world, with a ban on flights from nine countries including Australia and Britain, and hotel quarantine of up to two weeks for incoming travelers.

The city has also imposed a ban on gatherings of more than two people, while most public venues are closed, including beaches and playgrounds, face masks are compulsory and there is no face-to-face learning for students.

Saturday, authorities reported a three-week low of 16,597 new COVID-19 cases, down from more than 20,000 a day earlier.

The coronavirus outbreak has swept through elderly care homes and paralyzed many parts of the city.

In recent weeks, streets in the heart of Hong Kong’s financial center have been eerily quiet, restaurants and bars shuttered or empty, and supermarket shelves bare as people snapped up groceries amid fears of a city-wide lockdown.

Many businesses across the city have been forced to shut, including gyms, restaurants, and bars, while others say they are living on borrowed time and need restrictions to ease immediately in order to survive.

Hong Kong has seen a net outflow of around 50,000 people so far this month, compared with more than 71,000 in February and nearly 17,000 in December before the fifth wave hit.

While Hong Kong is officially clinging to a “zero-COVD” strategy that aims to curb all outbreaks, recent actions and policy tweaks suggest it is pivoting away from that at a time when most other major global cities are learning to live with the virus.

The official policy mirrors that of mainland China which is also facing a huge challenge as a jump in cases restricts the movement of millions of people and affects some of the country’s industrial hubs.

Source: Voice of America

The Biden administration intends to declare that Myanmar’s yearslong repression of the Rohingya Muslim population is a “genocide,” U.S. officials said Sunday.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken plans to make the long-anticipated designation on Monday at an event at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, according to the officials who spoke on condition of anonymity because the move had not yet been publicly announced.

The designation does not in and of itself portend drastic new measures against Myanmar’s military-led government, which has already been hit with multiple layers of U.S. sanctions since the campaign against the Rohingya ethnic minority began in the country’s western Rakhine state in 2017.

But it could lead to additional international pressure on the government, which is already facing accusations of genocide at the International Court of Justice in The Hague. Human rights groups and lawmakers have been pressing both the Trump and Biden administrations to make the designation.

At least one member of Congress, Democratic Sen. Jeff Merkley of Oregon, welcomed the anticipated step, as did Refugees International.

“I applaud the Biden administration for finally recognizing the atrocities committed against the Rohingya as genocide,” he said in a statement released immediately after the State Department announced that Blinken would deliver remarks on Myanmar at the Holocaust Museum on Monday and tour an exhibit entitled “Burma’s Path to Genocide.” Myanmar is also known as Burma.

“While this determination is long overdue, it is nevertheless a powerful and critically important step in holding this brutal regime to account,” Merkley said. “Such processes must always be carried out objectively, consistently, and in a way that transcends geopolitical considerations.”

The humanitarian group Refugees International also praised the move. “The U.S. genocide declaration is a welcome and profoundly meaningful step,” the group said in a statement. “It is also a solid sign of commitment to justice for all the people who continue to face abuses by the military junta to this very today.”

Merkley called on the administration to continue the pressure campaign on Myanmar by imposing additional sanctions on the government to include its oil and gas sectors. “America must lead the world to make it clear that atrocities like these will never be allowed to be buried unnoticed, no matter where they occur,” he said.

More than 700,000 Rohingya Muslims have fled from Buddhist-majority Myanmar to refugee camps in Bangladesh since August 2017, when the Myanmar military launched a clearance operation in response to attacks by a rebel group. Myanmar security forces have been accused of mass rapes, killings and the burning of thousands of homes.

Source: Voice of America

KUALA LUMPUR— The Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) needs to intensify assistance to the Afghan people whose lives are seen to be getting more and more stressful every day, said Geostrategy expert Prof Dr Azmi Hassan.

He said the assistance was necessary to prevent the people in Afghanistan from continuing to face the threat of starvation.

“The United States action early last month seizing funds belonging to the Afghan government that were frozen after US troops withdrew from the country’s soil has had an impact on the people of the country. The majority of them are living from hand to mouth.

“Therefore, the OIC must continue to ensure that this assistance continues to be enhanced from time to time to ensure that the fate of the Afghan people continues to be protected,” the Senior Fellow of the Nusantara Academy for Strategic Research (NASR) told Bernama.

Earlier last month, US President Joe Biden seized US$7 billion (RM29.4 billion) in assets belonging to the Afghan government and said it would be divided between the much-needed aid for the Afghan people and for the victims of the 9/11 attacks.

Biden has allocated US$3.5 billion of Afghanistan’s frozen US$7 billion funds to be used for pending legal proceedings and compensation claims for the 2001 attack on the World Trade Centre in New York.

Azmi added that the Taliban-led Afghan government was now seen to be able to survive for five months to a year despite not having the funds.

“The Taliban government may be able to withstand without the funds, but the victims are the people.

“In this case, the decision is in the hands of the Taliban government itself to convince the international community, including the OIC, that they (the Taliban) would honestly implement their promises, especially in terms of assistance to the people of the country,” he said.

Last Wednesday, Deputy Foreign Minister Kamarudin Jaffar said Malaysia would donate 1.6 million Covid-19 vaccine doses to Afghanistan in an effort to help the country recover.

Following the withdrawal of US troops in August 2021 after occupying the country for 20 years, the Taliban forces overthrew the government of Mohammad Ashraf Gani and took over the administration but faced difficulties due to a serious lack of funds.

Source: NAM NEWS NETWORK