Slept for about 4 hours in the afternoon... missing my Global Governance lecture along the way. But no regrets though cos' I really need the sleep... have been sleeping at anywhere between 3am to 4am these few days rushing through my tutorials and assignments (and at times still going to tutes having read nothing much) and waking up at 8.30am to 9.30am cos' my first lessons are always 9am or 10am.... so it's like only 5 hours of sleep everyday only.
At least I've got no major assignments due in next week, just that next Wednesday is my GG tutorial topic, which is in Genocide in Rwanda, East Timor & Bosnia. Don't really have to do much, just that Roderic will ask you what you "found interesting" through the course of your readings, so it's not really a presentation either.
I have to make a note on my Australian Foreign Policy tutor and lecturer for the first 10 lectures we had this semester. She's totally out of tune with the realities of the region, she bases her remarks on emotions rather than any solid political analysis, she's old enough to my grandmother (that's not part of my resentment, but it does when I'm pissed with people), and she is definitely anti-Asian.
She is, I quote from pg. 281 of M.C. Ricklefs (ed.), "The Howard Years", 2004.
"... like someone living somewhere in nineteenth-century England. Especially when taking over Pauline Hanson's xenophobic strategy, he turned upside down the earlier bipartisan efforts to make Australia part of the region".
(The context here is a senior analyst from the Jakarta Post talking about PM Howard, in the aftermath of the Nov 2001 general elections in which the Tampa incident, terrorism and race had featured strongly in the political campaign).
And may I point out, in any case, Australia is NOT part of Asia.
Today's tutorial was on "why it took Australia so long to support the East Timorese against the Indonesian government". And here she is bitching (literally) about how foolish it was for the Whitlam, Fraser, Hawke, and then later Keating governments to support Suharto's military regime, when Aust. is supposedly democratic and ha-ha what not.
And I interrupted her:
"But, don't you think the primary reason where Aust had went wrong was because by recognising a regime that illegally annexed East Timor in 1975 without UN approval, and running into dispute with the international community and Portugal (who was Timor's former colonial power), rather than its foolish-ness stemming from Suharto's military regime per se?"
"I mean, then I could have said that it was wrong to establish diplomatic relations with China (mainland) in 1974 because it also had its fair share of human rights violation, or even South Vietnam for that matter."
And I remembered the guy sitting next to me nodding in agreement, and he wasn't Asian.
Her reply... I can't remember what it is cos' I was really angry but I definitely didn't buy her response.
I'll end with what Jeremy said:
"If she was the PM of Australia, she'll have a stormy time with every single Asian country."