Global News Blog

A woman looks up as a dust storm hits Kashgar, Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region, last week. Xinjiang, once a predominantly Muslim province in China's far west, has seen massive settlement by ethnic Han immigrants in recent decades. (Reuters)

Mystery clouds deadly clash in western China with 'suspected terrorists'

By Peter Ford, Staff Writer / 04.24.13

Mystery surrounds official Chinese reports Wednesday of a violent clash between “suspected terrorists” and the authorities in the restive Muslim province of Xinjiang yesterday that left 21 people dead, including 15 officials.

According to a statement on the provincial government website, a group “planning to conduct violent terrorist activities” armed with knives seized three local officials who had surprised them in a house near the city of Kashgar (see map).

They then killed the three hostages and 12 of the policemen and local community workers who came to the rescue, setting fire to the house before armed police regained control of the situation, killing six of the suspects and arresting eight of them, the statement said.

The Chinese authorities have given only sketchy details of the incident, and have not accused any particular group of responsibility. Beijing has previously blamed Islamist separatists for earlier violent attacks on officials.

Xinjiang, once a predominantly Muslim province in China’s far west, has seen massive settlement by ethnic Han immigrants in recent decades. Local people complain that their culture and language are being eroded and that Han now outnumber original inhabitants, who are ethnic Uighurs, with linguistic and cultural ties to central Asian peoples.

Violence flares sporadically, despite a stiflingly heavy handed police and army presence. In 2009 almost 200 people were killed – mostly ethnic Han – in deadly rioting in the provincial capital of Urumqi. Last month the government announced that courts in Xinjiang had sentenced 20 men to prison terms as long as life for plotting jihadi attacks.

The men “had their thoughts poisoned by religious extremism,” according to the Xinjiang provincial website, and had “spread Muslim religious propaganda.”

Determining the truth behind such allegations, and incidents such as Tuesday’s clash, is difficult. Chinese media are not allowed to carry reports other than those by the state-run news agency Xinhua and foreign reporters have found themselves restricted and harassed when trying to work in Xinjiang.

A leading Uighur activist, Dilxat Raxit, who lives in Germany, questioned the official account, telling the AP that local residents had reported that the police sparked the incident by shooting a Uighur youth during a house search.

It was not clear how the suspects, armed only with knives, had managed to kill 15 policemen and local officials before they were subdued.

China has often accused a shadowy group known as the East Turkestan Islamic Movement of being behind violence in Xinjiang, but foreign observers are dubious, with some saying that Beijing deliberately exaggerates the terrorist threat in order to justify the iron grip it keeps on Xinjiang.

The US State Department put the group on its terrorist watch list in 2002, but has since removed it amid doubts about whether the group is a real organization. 

South Korean President Park Geun-hye, left, shakes hands with Microsoft founder Bill Gates before their meeting at the presidential Blue House in Seoul, South Korea, Monday, April 22, 2013. Gates has his left hand in his pocket. ( (AP Photo/Lee Jin-man)

Bill Gates sets South Korea abuzz with 'rude' one-handed shake

By David Clark Scott, Staff writer / 04.23.13

Global etiquette can be tricky. Just ask Bill Gates.

The Microsoft chairman (who is also co-chair of one of the world's biggest charitable organizations)  is no stranger to international travel or meeting heads of state. But, on Monday, when he shook hands with South Korea's first female president, Park Geun-hye, Gates made a serious faux pas, which resulted in a cultural kerfuffle.

Gates shook her hand with just one hand. In South Korea, and much of Asia, that's only done in casual settings, with good friends. To top it off, Gates had his left hand in his pocket, signaling his superiority.

"How rude!" was the response in South Korea media. Almost every news organizations carried the photo on the front page.

The proper way to show respect would have been for Gates to clasp the South Korean leader's hand with both of his hands.

Was Gates sending a blunt signal of political disapproval to the new government leader? Was Gates ignorant of Asian etiquette? 

There was enough media buzz that the South Korean president's office felt it needed to issue an official statement on the matter: "Bill Gates took a similar pose for a picture when he met former President Lee Myung-bak five years ago. Just think of it as an American style of greeting," according to Dong.com, the website of Dong-a Ilbo, a leading newspaper in Korea with daily circulation of more than 1.2 million. 

[Editor's note: Since publication, the president's office contacted The Christian Science Monitor to say that it had issued no official statement about the Bill Gates handshake.]

The first part of that statement is true. In fact, the Atlantic Wire compiled a series of Bill Gates One-Hand Shaking, One-Hand-in-Pocket photos from previous meetings with other world dignitaries, including UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, China's President Xi Jinping, and French President Nicolas Sarkozy.

Apparently Gates is consistently casual about his handshakes – with whomever he meets.

While the one-handed Western handshake has become more common in Asia, business etiquette also suggests that one never looks directly in the eyes of the person you're meeting. An exception to that rule is the Philippines. And in many places, a bow is also part of the greeting.

In Cambodia, for example, if you meet a prominent businessman, the proper way to show respect is to place your palms together at chest height and bow at your waist.

There's also a culturally correct way to exchange business cards in Asia, too. Each card should be in English on one side, and the recipient's native language on the other. You present your card with both hands, native language side up and readable to the recipient. When you receive a card, it's also a two-handed affair. Look at it, thank the person, and put in gently in a coat pocket.

For more tips on global etiquette, check out The Christian Science Monitor's quiz on the globally savvy traveler.

Chinese surveillance ships sail in formation in waters claimed by Japan near disputed islands called Senkaku in Japan and Diaoyu in China in the East China Sea Tuesday. (Kyodo News/AP)

China sends largest fleet yet to disputed islands

By Ralph Jennings, Correspondent / 04.23.13

Spats between Asia’s two most powerful nations, China and Japan, have grown uncomfortably routine since Tokyo nationalized a group of disputed islands in September. On Tuesday tensions reached a new and potentially worrisome high.

China sent eight surveillance vessels into Japanese territorial waters, apparently to track a flotilla of Japanese activists who had gone to look at the contested area. China’s presence – an effort to exercise authority in the region – is its largest since Japan nationalized the uninhabited islets, Kyodo News reported.

China’s use of ships in disputed waters isn’t expected to cause a war, but it raises the specter of a miscalculation at sea that could in turn create a new diplomatic row, set off more protests in Chinese cities, and strike another blow at Japanese business caught in the crossfire. Hopes of polite negotiations are also off the map for now.

"Only when Japan faces up to its aggressive past can it embrace the future and develop friendly relations with its Asian neighbors," Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying told a news conference on Monday.

As if the 80 pro-Tokyo activists weren’t enough to upset Beijing, that same day 168 Japanese lawmakers visited a Shinto shrine that’s reviled elsewhere in Asia for memorializing World War II heroes. Japan occupied parts of China from 1931 to 1945. Three cabinet ministers had already visited Yasukuni Shrine over the weekend, causing calculated reaction.

In protest, a high-level Chinese military official bailed on a trip this week to Japan as the Foreign Ministry lashed out. 

And China’s surveillance vessels probably weren’t loaded with olive branches. The Communist country has increasingly jousted with Japan since around 2005 as it rose to become the world’s second largest economy.

“Such an intrusion [in the East China Sea] was certainly not undertaken spontaneously, but would have been planned and coordinated some time in advance for execution as soon as an opportunity presented itself,” says Scott Harold, associate political scientist with US-based think tank the RAND Corporation.

Japan controls the disputed islets, which it calls the Senkaku, despite 40 years of competing claims from China and a wave of destructive anti-Japanese street protests in Chinese cities last year. China criticizes the Shinto shrine visits because a memorial at the venue also honors 14 major war criminals.

The two sides are also disputing rights to an undersea natural gas field, while China periodically accuses Japan of not apologizing for the war of the 1940s. Japan says it has apologized. 

China and Japan, as the world’s No. 2 and No. 3 economies, also mean a lot to each other trade-wise. The number of Japanese subsidiaries in China has grown eight times since the 1990s, and they sold $147 billion worth of goods to the country in the 2011 fiscal year.

Will the two keep meeting, along with South Korea, to discuss a three-way trade agreement? After momentum last month, the latest events raise concern that this puts progress on ice.

“Both sides need to be more flexible,” suggests Ralph Cossa, president with US think tank Pacific Forum Center for Strategic and International Studies. “Japan needs to acknowledge that the territory is in dispute, at least from a Chinese perspective, and the Chinese need to acknowledge that they are under Japan’s administrative control and that a military solution is unacceptable.”

RCMP Assistant Commissioner James Malizia said on Monday in Toronto, that police had arrested and charged two men with an Al Qaeda-supported plot to derail a VIA passenger train. (Aaron Harris/Reuters )

Two arrested in Al Qaeda US-Canada train plot – directed from Iran (+video)

By David Clark Scott, Staff writer / 04.22.13

Two men were arrested Monday and charged with plotting a "major terrorist attack" on a Canada-US passenger train.

Chiheb Esseghaier and Raed Jaser, who live in Montreal and Toronto, were acting alone, but were operating with support from Al Qaeda in Iran, according to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.

Al Qaeda in Iran?

Assistant RCMP Commissioner James Malizia, the officer in charge of federal policing operations, said the plot was supported by “Al Qaeda elements in Iran.”  He also said that Al Qaeda provided "direction and guidance" to the alleged plot.

The link to Iran is a curious one. Al Qaeda leaders and Iran's leaders have not been known allies. Al Qaeda is a Sunni-based movement. Iran is predominantly Shiite. Canadian officials made clear that they weren't connecting the alleged plot to the Iranian government. But the presence of Al Qaeda leaders, who fled from Afghanistan to Iran after September 11, 2001, has been known for some time.

As Peter Bergen, wrote for CNN last month, "According to US documents and officials, in addition to [Suleiman] Abu Ghaith, other of bin Laden's inner circle who ended up in Iran include the formidable military commander of al Qaeda, Saif al-Adel, a former Egyptian Special Forces officer who had fought against the Soviets in Afghanistan, as well as Saad bin Laden, one of the al Qaeda's leader older sons who has played some kind of leadership role in the group."

What prompted the Bergen "Strange Bedfellows: Iran and Al Qaeda" article was the recent capture of Osama Bin Laden's son-in-law, Suleiman Abu Ghaith. As Reuters reported, "he was captured on Feb. 28 and brought secretly to the United States ... Law enforcement sources say he was detained in Jordan by local authorities and the FBI after was believed to have been expelled from Turkey." But for most of the past decade Abu Ghaith had been living in Iran.

"Current and former US officials said that group, known to US investigators as the Al Qaeda "Management Council," was kept more or less under control by the Iranian government, which viewed it with suspicion."

Bergen describes the life of Al Qaeda members in Iran is a loose form of house arrest.  They are allowed to go out shopping, for example, but with restrictions.

This latest example of an Al Qaeda-Iran tie will raise some eyebrows.

And how serious was this latest terrorist threat in Canada?

Charges include conspiring to carry out an attack against, and conspiring to murder persons unknown for the benefit of, at the direction of, or in association with a terrorist group, according to the RCMP press release. "It was definitely in the planning stage but not imminent," RCMP chief superintendent Jennifer Strachan told reporters. But she declined to give more details.

Neither men were Canadian, and Canadian law enforcement officials did not state their nationality, but some media reports described them as Tunisians.

US officials told Reuters that the attack plotters were targeting a rail line between New York and Toronto, but Canadian police did not publicly confirm which route was the target.

Canadian law enforcement officials praised the cooperation between various agencies, including the FBI, the US Department of Homeland Security, Canadian Security Intelligence Service, Canada Border Services Agency, and various local Canadian police departments.

The CBC News says that it's "highly placed sources" tell them that the suspected terrorists have been under surveillance for more than a year in Quebec and southern Ontario.

The two men are reportedly to appear in a Toronto court Tuesday, and more details may be forthcoming in that hearing.

How a Quaker missionary from Philly became India's Johnny Appleseed

By Vaishnavi Chandrashekhar, Correspondent / 04.22.13

A community hall in rural India is not the place you would expect to find a garlanded portrait or statue of a Quaker missionary from Philadelphia. But both those things can be found at the farmers’ hall in Thanedar, the “apple bowl” of the Himalayan state of Himachal Pradesh in India.

Every farmer here can – and will – tell you about Samuel Evans Stokes, or Satyanand Stokes as he came to be known. He was an American missionary who settled in this area in the early 20^th century, participated in India’s struggle for independence as a co-traveller of Mahatma Gandhi, and became the Johnny Appleseed of the northwestern Himalayas.

Stokes seeded a horticultural revolution when he planted five saplings of Red Delicious – bought from the Starks Brothers nursery in Louisiana – on his farm here in 1916, and helped convert locals to apple farming.

Stokes’s extraordinary journey began in turn-of-the-19^th -century Philadelphia where, at a church meeting, he heard an American doctor talk about working with lepers in India. Inspired, this son of a wealthy Quaker family (the founders of the elevator manufacturers, Stokes and Parish Machine Company) gave up his post-graduate studies at Cornell University and joined the doctor on a steamship to Bombay in 1904.

For a time, according to family accounts, Stokes worked at the doctor’s home for lepers in the plains. He fell ill and was sent to recuperate in the hills near Shimla, then the summer capital of the British Raj, at a cantonment village called Kotgarh.

Smitten by Kotgarh – which Rudyard Kipling called “mistress of the hills” – Stokes stayed on. He experimented with renunciation, living in a cave like an Indian sadhu, and founded the Brotherhood of Imitation of Jesus, traveling from village to village preaching. A few years later, he married an Indian woman, bought a former tea estate in Thanedar, and focused on farming.  In 1914, he took local soil samples to America, returning with Red Delicious stocks.

Stokes spent years trying to persuade his neighbors to grow apples, giving away plants freely, says Vidya Stokes, who married Samuel Stokes’s son, Lal Chand, and is the current horticulture minister of Himachal Pradesh.

Initially, few farmers listened, she said. They knew only the cooking apples the British had brought – Granny Smith and Pippin varieties that were too sour for Indian tastes. 

Stokes taught the boys in the school he established how to graft the plants, says Vidya Stokes. “Their parents were skeptical, so the boys planted the saplings on the borders of their family farms,” she says.

When the first crops of Red Delicious came, however, “everyone came to see,” she says. “The apples were sweet. People realized they could make money from this.”

And they did – Himachal’s apple orchards are valued today at around $550 million and provide a livelihood to more than 100,000 farmers.

Farming wasn’t the only way in which Samuel Stokes sought to help society, however. A believer in racial equality and social justice, he campaigned successfully to end a colonial system of forced labor in the hills and joined the Indian freedom struggle: signing petitions, engaging in debates on strategy with Gandhi and other nationalists, and adopting Indian clothes.

In 1921, he was the only non-Indian to be invited by Gandhi to sign a nationalist manifesto calling on Indians to quit government service – he signed – and was imprisoned for six months on charges of sedition.

In his later years, Samuel Stokes became more contemplative. In 1932, he and his family converted to Hindusim and changed his name to Satyanand. The temple he built – without idols – as well as Stokes’s home can still be seen today on his 200-acre estate in Thanedar. Most of Stokes descendants now live in America.  

Stokes’s portrait also hangs in the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library in New Delhi, alongside pictures of Mahatma Gandhi and other leaders of the Indian independence movement.

But it’s the farmers of Himachal Pradesh who remember him – as the man who transformed the region and their lives – with apples from America.

Chechen fighters celebrate the withdrawal of Russian troops from their republic in August 1996. (Clara Germani)

Fundamentalism and the Chechens' fighting history

By Marshall Ingwerson, Managing editor / 04.19.13

The Chechnya from which the Tsarnaev family traces their roots became in the 1990s a battered and violent place undergoing an ideological shift.

Already, it was home to a warrior culture, down to the very bone.

Throughout the mountain towns of the Caucasus, gymnasiums were full of wiry teens and young men learning to box, wrestle, and practice Asian martial arts. Speed bags hung from trees the way basketball hoops decorate American driveways.

Caucasians were heavily overrepresented in the combat sports on Russian, and before that Soviet, national teams.  It’s not surprising that Tamerlan Tsarnaev was a boxer and the younger Dzhokhar a wrestler.

For at least two centuries, Chechens and their neighbors have been fighting to throw off the yoke of Russian domination. When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, that fight heated up again.

Chechnya was pummeled brutally in the process. The main city of Grozny was largely reduced to rubble. People hand carried their water in buckets even to high-rise apartments. Few windows were left unshattered. Gas flares from ruptured pipes created huge torches on block after block. Garbage piled up on empty or pulverized lots and cows grazed through it. In the buildings where families still lived, they spray painted “zhivoot” – living – on the outside walls, hoping to dissuade Russian soldiers from blowing it up.

But through all that the Chechens radiated toughness. The young men kept to the mountains, coming down to buy rifles from demoralized and poorly paid Russian soldiers – and then to attack them with their own guns.

But by the time the Russians agreed to withdraw their troops from Chechnya in 1996, a change was visible in Chechen attitudes. The region had been Muslim for centuries, but Islam was moving more to the center of the Chechen fight. A few Arabs – some of them veterans of the war against Soviets in Afghanistan – came to set up madrasas to teach a fundamentalist, Wahhabi version of Islam. It made some rapid inroads, dividing mountain villages with sometimes murderous results.

When the Russians withdrew their tanks from Chechnya, long lines of them rumbling out of the mountains, men who appeared to be Arabs, with long beards, black flags with Arabic characters, and Korans held open for all to see, rode on the gun turrets.

The nationalistic flavor of the Chechen war seemed to be taking on the character of an Islamic jihad.

In the years since, Chechens have once again been suppressed by the heavy hand of Russia and in retaliation, Chechens have claimed credit for a series of horrific acts of terror against Russians – including the massacre of schoolchildren at Beslan, the taking of an entire Moscow theater audience hostage, and a series of apartment building and subway station bombings with scores of fatalities.

From the days of Catherine the Great to the early 1990s, Russian soldiers showed a grudging respect for the great warriors of the Caucasus who fought, soldier to soldier, for their independence.

One can only imagine what the legendary Shamil – a Caucasian hero of the 19th century – would think of the last decade of attacks on children and other noncombatants.

• Marshall Ingwerson was the Monitor's Moscow correspondent from 1995 to 1997.

Felix Baumgartner jumped out of a space capsule 130,000 feet above Earth. (Red Bull Stratos/AP/File)

Good Reads: China's 'cyber cage,' millennium goals update, toddlers and tech, space diving

By Allison Terry, Correspondent / 04.19.13

Freedom is the ethos of the Internet, allowing people to express opinions and organize in the digital sphere. That is, unless you live in a country that manipulates users’ online experiences with a “cyber cage.”

China, at the top of this list, has allowed its citizens to benefit from the Internet’s economic mobility while still controlling its political and social impact. As some dissidents have said, “freedom is knowing how big your cage is,” reports The Economist.

It’s a method of governing the Internet that is antithetical to the Western model of free speech. Further, China’s “adaptive authoritarianism” is serving as a model for other countries (such as Russia, Kazakhstan, Belarus, and Ethiopia) looking to profit from the Internet even as they control it. But even with this paternalistic approach, The Economist argues that the Internet may still have a destabilizing impact on the foundation of China’s authoritarianism. As online access spreads – especially via mobile phones – the democratic nature of the Internet may eventually bring political change to China.

“When, many years from now, history books about this period come to be written, the internet may well turn out to have been an agent not of political upheaval in China but of authoritarian adaptation before the upheaval, building up expectations for better government while delaying the kind of political transformation needed to deliver it,” states the report. “That may seem paradoxical, but it makes sense for a party intent on staying in power for as long as it can.”

Planning for progress

The number of people living in extreme poverty (less than $1.25 a day) dropped from 43 percent in 1990 to about 21 percent in 2010, one indicator that the United Nations Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) have had some measure of success. Reducing extreme poverty by half was achieved five years before its 2015 deadline.

Before governments, multilateral institutions, and nongovernmental organizations set new international development agendas, the accomplishments and shortcomings of MDGs need to be closely examined, writes John W. McArthur in Foreign Affairs.

“The MDGs have helped mobilize and guide development efforts by emphasizing outcomes. They have encouraged world leaders to tackle multiple dimensions of poverty at the same time and have provided a standard that advocates on the ground can hold their governments to,” writes Mr. McArthur. “Even in countries where politicians might not directly credit the MDGs, the global effort has informed local perspectives and priorities. The goals have improved the lives of hundreds of millions of people. They have shown how much can be achieved when ambitious and specific targets are matched with rigorous thinking, serious resources, and a collaborative global spirit.”

Looking forward to the next generation of development, McArthur said that low-income countries must have a greater voice in outlining the goals, and government accountability must be a priority.

Too young for a tablet?

To some parents these days, it may seem as if their toddlers – or in some cases, infants – are increasingly tech savvy, especially when it comes to tablets. With more than 40,000 kids’ games and applications in iTunes and Google Play, it’s no surprise that such young children have mastered technology, writes Hanna Rosin in The Atlantic.

“It did not seem beyond the range of possibility that if Norman Rockwell were alive, he would paint the two curly-haired boys bent over the screen, one small finger guiding a smaller one across, down, and across again to make, in their triumphant finale, the small z,” Ms. Rosin writes.

On the downside, however, is the extra worry that parents have about what impact technology is having on their children’s development.

“Parents end up treating tablets like precision surgical instruments, gadgets that might perform miracles for their child’s IQ and help him win some nifty robotics competition – but only if they are used just so,” she writes. “Otherwise, their child could end up one of those sad, pale creatures who can’t make eye contact and has an avatar for a girlfriend.”

A superhero fall from space

What does it take to jump out of a space capsule 130,000 feet above Earth? Lots of coaching, according to Felix Baumgartner, the man who set the record for highest human free-fall last October, while also breaking the speed of sound.

In a Vanity Fair profile, William Langewiesche describes how Mr. Baumgartner spent five years preparing for the feat with a team of veteran aerospace engineers, test pilots, and a sports psychologist. Baumgartner struggled with the idea of wearing his spacesuit, so his psychologist told him to think of it as a superhero outfit.

“If you put it on and look in a mirror, you look like a hero, you know? There aren’t many people in the world who have their own suit,” Baumgartner said. “Even astronauts, they don’t have custom-made suits.... It protects me. It gives me the right to be there at 130,000 feet.”

Pakistan's former President and military ruler Pervez Musharraf leaves the High Court in Islamabad, Pakistan, Thursday. Musharraf and his security team pushed past policemen and sped away from a court in the country’s capital on Thursday after his bail was revoked in a case in which he is accused of treason. (B.K. Bangash/AP)

Pakistan won't have Musharraf to kick around anymore

By Robert Marquand, Staff writer / 04.18.13

Pervez Musharraf, Pakistan’s former Army chief and national ruler today escaped a set of judges and an Islamabad arrest order, climbed in a black bullet proof SUV, and sped red-faced away for the protection of home.

For General Musharraf, who once held all the reins of power in Pakistan, it seems a spectacle of humiliation and miscalculation, or as the BBC calls it “high drama and farce.” 

The Islamabad judges that Musharraf sought to muzzle and dismiss in 2007 now appear to have muzzled him – ultimately thwarting his aim to run for high office May 11, in what will be the first formal civilian transfer of authority in Pakistan’s history.

Musharraf’s lawyers will likely appeal the charges of malfeasance against him for ordering 60 judges to be removed in 2007. But for Musharraf, born in New Delhi before the partition of India and Pakistan, and who of late has been living in self-imposed exile in Dubai and London, a chapter may have closed.

He long dreamed of himself as Pakistan’s Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, forging a path similar to the Turkish military ruler that secularized that Muslim country.  He hoped to be a moderating force of reason, a “chief executive,” a secular reformer with clout in a land of Taliban and madrassas, the guy that could keep things together and running while the nation modernized, someone that impressed US Pentagon chief Colin Powell.

But last week Musharraf’s much-touted return to Karachi did not excite crowds; efforts to run his All-Pakistan Muslim League party failed in four districts. And he’s ended up looking more like Don Quixote than an Ataturk.

The Guardian describes Musharraf’s bid to return home as doomed and offers today that the general is:

...politically what Imran Khan was in the mid-1990s, when the famous cricket-turned-philanthropist launched his own career in politics: a high-wattage name that grabs a disproportionate share of the media spotlight but has negligible traction with the voting public. Now that he has been barred from contesting the upcoming general election by a judiciary that has not forgotten Musharraf's attempt in 2007 to sack Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry, Musharraf still faces a sea of legal trouble, brought into sharp focus by Thursday's refusal to extend the bail granted to him last month. Musharraf may yet be able to return to life abroad …but his political obituary has long been written.

Musharraf now finds three criminal cases thrown against him: He’s charged with not providing enough security to prevent the 2007 assassination of former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, allegations that he ordered the killing of a Baloch nationalist leader in 2006, and the court case he walked out of today.

Whether Musharraf, who in court brushed past police on his way out, will finally be made an example in his own country and put behind bars is unclear. The Los Angeles Times quotes a prosecuting attorney:

“The security he has been given is only meant to safeguard his life, not to allow him to avoid the law,” said senior lawyer Chaudhry Muhammad Aslam Ghumman, the complainant in the judges' detention case against Musharraf. “They are flouting the law. The people responsible for implementing the order of the court are facilitating the culprit.” 

But Musharraf’s lawyers said today that the Islamabad court ruling against him wasn’t about law and order, but was "seemingly motivated by personal vendettas."

Though many Pakistanis started to loath Musharraf by the time he stepped down and he may not have stood a chance at actually securing the position of prime minister, fair questions may be asked about whether Pakistan is better served by fewer candidates running for the high office. 

And unlike ostensible current front-runner Nawaz Sharif, who hails from the Punjab, and who in the late 1990s as national leader was unable to reign in the growing jihadis in places like Lahore, Musharraf could crack down. He is one of about two current candidates for high office not part of the small coterie of regional family dynasties that rule the nation. 

While Musharraf gets called a former “military dictator,”  anyone who has watched Pakistani politics might think the term overly harsh, considering the Muammar Qaddafi or Bashir al Assad end of the “dictator” spectrum. Unlike those dictators, after all, Musharraf stepped down.

Future of Pakistan

Pakistan may be just about rid of Musharraf, but in a country where judicial authority has been distorted so often, it remains unclear what kind of future leadership Pakistan will see.

The nation is fractured, faces a need for more IMF bailouts, has an uncertain but powerful military influence, grudges are rife in every direction.  

Though today it is a different world than when he last held power, it is worth remembering that at one point Musharraf may truly have been within striking distance of peace with India over the jewel of Kashmir. Steve Coll asked Musharraf about it in an interview he wrote up in 2009 the New Yorker:

"I've always believed in peace between India and Pakistan," [Musharraf] replied. "But it required boldness on both sides. . . . What I find lacking sometimes is this boldness – particularly on the Indian side." He then reviewed a long negotiating session he had had, many years before, with former Indian Prime Minister Vajpayee, in which the pair had tried and failed to agree on a particular joint statement. As he recounted the incident, the pitch of Musharraf's voice rose slightly; he seemed to be reliving his frustration.

He returned to the subject of the 2007 talks. "I wasn't just giving concessions – I was taking from India as well," he said, a touch defensively. Then he calmed. He fixed his gaze and added, "It would have benefitted both India and Pakistan."

China's President Xi Jinping speaks during a meeting with Bill Gates (not in picture), on April 8, 2013. (Tyrone Siu/Reuters)

Was that the president in my Beijing taxi?

By Peter Ford, Staff Writer / 04.18.13

When was the last time the Chinese president hailed a Beijing taxi?

Just a few weeks ago, if taxi driver Guo Lixin is to be believed. Mr. Guo told a Hong Kong newspaper on Thursday that President Xi Jinping took an incognito ride in his cab last month, and chatted about – what else? – air pollution.

The news sparked enormous interest on the Chinese Internet, with most of those posting comments on Twitter-like social media platforms apparently believing the tale, but many skeptical about the value of the president’s alleged outing.

Stories about Chinese emperors passing disguised amongst their subjects, so as to learn first hand about their lives, are a staple of Chinese TV soap operas. The official media have recently made a point of presenting Mr. Xi as a “man of the people.”

According to Ta Kung Pao, the Hong Kong daily to whom Mr. Guo gave his account, two men got into his taxi on the evening of March 1. One of them, he said, looked uncommonly like Xi, head of China’s ruling Communist Party and on the verge of being elected the country’s president.

When he commented on the fact, his mystery passenger replied “you are the first taxi driver to recognize me,” Guo said, before writing a note wishing the driver “safe and smooth journeys.”

There are those who saw the story as a PR exercise, pointing out that Ta Kung Pao is a strongly pro-Beijing paper. Official Chinese websites ran the story, too, giving it a degree of credibility, or at least of government approval.

Other observers were dubious about the real identity of Guo’s passenger because the handwriting of his note had nothing in common with handwriting that the verified President Xi has left in visitors’ books around the country.

The story sat well, however, with the Communist Party’s propaganda efforts to build the president’s image as a forthright, honest fellow with the common touch. Xi has attracted attention by ordering the police not to block the traffic near places he is visiting just to let his motorcade past. Last week he mingled with fisherfolk on the southern island of Hainan, discussing their catch in the same way that a Western politician might on a flesh-pressing jaunt.

Not everyone is impressed, however. “The most effective plainclothes visit is to look at Weibo every day,” commented Feng Xincheng, a well known newspaper editor, referring to Sina Weibo, a censored but nonetheless lively Twitter-like service where public criticism of the authorities is common.

It did not seem from taxi driver Guo’s account that Xi (if it was indeed he) learned much that he did not already know. As soon as he recognized his passenger Guo broke out in a cold sweat, he said, and told the distinguished man in the front passenger seat that he thought the Communist Party and government policies were correct, if not always well implemented.

“Xi,” meanwhile, fed his ordinary citizen interlocutor the same pap as government officials feed the public about how long it will take and how hard it will be to clean up Beijing’s pollution.

Neither the alleged president nor his driver ended up much the wiser, it seems. And then on Thursday evening, the official Xinhua news agency stamped on all the speculation with a terse one line announcement.

Ta Kung Pao’s report, said Xinhua, “has proven to be a fake story.”