I’ll be devil’s advocate just to encourage debate.
First up: What no Zimbabwe? Hyperinflation, starvation, eviction, drought, torture, disease and Robert Mugabe.

Indonesia? The only really workable secular islamic country. SBY (as the Prez is fondly known) has done an amazing job of dealing with inflation, soaring oil prices, terrorism (without pissing off the population and this is Indonesia,remember) and what about piracy, high unemployment, tsunami, disease-TB, Avian flu and Aids, to name but a few), the Aceh problem (peace at last and diarmament), human rights and corruption. SBY was as busy as a one armed juggler, so credit where credit is due.

Mikethehack’s up and coming list (I get paid to watch these places):
Venezuela (because Hugo entertains me)
Sri Lanka (as if you didn’t know)
Iran (I love the prez)
Myanmar (weirder and weirder)
China (protests)
Pakistan (or rather Baluchistan-ask about the Peace Pipe)
Zanzibar/Tanzania/Madagascar
Turkmenistan (because it’s a laugh)
Syria and Lebanon (fun with the spooks)
Southern Africa (weird, too much food and no enough at the same time, drought disease and dodgier politics)
Ecuador, Peru and Bolivia (it’s the Real Thing)
Egypt (and why not?)
Philippines (always a coup around the corner)

I just follow the money around in many of these places, so I might as well add that it might be a good idea to watch the UAE for a few surprises as well (heads in the sand apparently)

Did I mention Ecuador?

Ecuadorean Pyramid Scheme Sparks a Panic
By JEANNETH VALDIVIESO, Associated Press Writer 1 hour, 3 minutes ago

QUITO, Ecuador – A 71-year-old provincial notary who died in a luxury hotel room earlier this year left behind a teenage girlfriend — who said he’d been on cocaine and Viagra — and a crumbling $800 million pyramid scheme that has blossomed into a nationwide scandal.

Jose Cabrera’s sudden death sparked panic among thousands of people who gave him a minimum of $10,000 each over two decades in exchange for up to 10 percent monthly interest.

Most were rank-and-file police and military personnel — more than 6,500 of them — and residents of Machala, the port city where Cabrera was based. But the scandal has spread to high-ranking current and former military officials, judges, politicians and their families.

The head judge of the Machala Superior Court resigned after acknowledging that he had invested $15,000. Ecuador’s former commander of the Joint Chiefs of Staff put in $45,000 and the wife of a former defense minister contributed $125,000, local media have reported.

Interior Minister Alfredo Castillo said last week that the scheme was probably linked to money laundering for the drug trade, illegal arms dealing or counterfeiting.

Cabrera died of an apparent heart attack on Oct. 26. His 18-year-old girlfriend of two years told police he had been smoking cocaine-laced cigarettes, drinking whiskey and popping Viagra.

Cabrera’s son and daughter denied their father, a former president of the national association of notary publics, was involved in any shading dealings. They promised publicly to sort out the financial mess, before they disappeared last month as arrest warrants were issued.

Authorities believe they are in the United States and are preparing extradition requests.

Hundreds of investors laid siege to Cabrera’s notary office over three days in mid-November. They were joined by several police and soldiers assigned to guard the building.

Local television broadcast images of police and soldiers leaving the scene with cash stuffed in their pockets, shoes and protective vests.

Criminal charges were lodged against 17 members of the armed forces who allegedly used two Air Force planes to fly from Quito to Machala to search for their money. Another 28 military personnel have been relieved of duty. Eight police officers face graft charges for their alleged involvement in the scheme.

President Alfredo Palacio replaced his three top military commanders earlier this month. His administration has refused to explain the shake-up.

Machala residents who invested with Cabrera dug up his grave on Nov. 14 to make sure he was truly dead and had not faked his demise to get away with their life savings.

Cabrera, who as a notary was prohibited from handling investment funds, “managed around $800 million,” said Congressman Carlos Gonzalez, who is leading a legislative investigation of the case.

That represented more than the $700 million total deposits of the Bank of Guayaquil, Ecuador’s second-largest bank, Gonzalez recently told reporters.

Ecuador is no stranger to financial scandals. Its corruption-riddled banking system collapsed in 1999 after years of financial mismanagement, prompting a switch to the U.S. dollar as the official currency to stem the country’s worst recession in decades.

Hmm, I would have said Malaysia easily takes the mantle of “most workable secular Islamic Country” eons ahead of Indonesia.

Mike – what do you mean you “follow the money” – Can you explain that a little more?

It’s sort of like reading The Economist or the FT, WSJ etc, you will see trouble in the financial pages long before you see them in the standard news pages.

Investors and venture capitalists etc will rush in and out depending on what is going on. The trade papers will tell you more about what is going on in say, Myanmar or Indonesia (timber, mining), Nigeria (oil), Sierra Leone, Botswana (diamonds, gold) or Brazil, China (steel, weapons) etc. Watch out for big and small armaments contracts and vague lingo for certain commodities in the military rags.

Dodgy economic policies will send the currency into freefall, rising unemployment,poverty and civil unrest etc.

Businessmen will invest in high risk zones as well as nice safe places, it just depends what their game is (telecoms in Chechnya). All will use legit companies to avoid the ever tighter anti-laundering rules, and in most cases these businesses are legit to the point they can’t really be touched by any ethical tree huggers.

Want to know who the most informed guys in any DPs are? Those dull, balding, middle-aged guys in suits who know everybody and everything about what is going on, because they have to, given the fact that they have millions invested in the place. All the rest are dumb fools compared to them. These gentlemen are hardly the most exciting or glamorous types you will ever meet in a hotel bar, but they are easily the most up to date and well connected.

Want to stay head of the pack on news about up and coming (and some current) DPs? Read the biz rags and soon enough you will realise that todays news on the wires is in fact yesterday’s, last week’s/month’s/year’s news.

Okay, so you will have to learn several new and complicated languages (it’s all arithmical english really) and wade through a tonne of wishy washy biz-speak, but a clever reader will soon learn to spot gossip about trade agreements, border deals, govt and financial appointments, trade routes and a myriad of other complicated and seemingly dull snippets of news. Sovereign dollar bonds in Manila are interesting at the moment. Shipping rates are also worth watching and it varies by region.

Putin’s economic adviser Illarionov quitting his post is last year’s story (he quit today,btw) but where he appears next and who succeeds him and the realignment of the St Petersburg spook’s coterie will send ripples all the way from Siberia to Chechnya and the Ukraine to DC.

Putin has appointed many of his old KGB buddies to protective positions around him and how some of them will manage to deal with thrilling challenges like education, health and welfare (not to mention the military) should give you an idea of what to expect.

Money and power (better than sex to some people). Wars aren’t charities and need to be funded to the point that the mark-up is worth the investment for those who are willing to back the venture (supply the cash to bankroll my invasion of Kuwait and I’ll give you exclusive rights to 40% of the oil, royalty free).

I’d like to thank Dick Cheney for making Operation Iraqi Freedom possible, because without his savvy economic brain it would have cost us twice as much (outsourcing-what a brilliant idea), especially given that none of the oil rich neighbours were willing to help foot the bill (because they weren’t going to make any money from the trip anyway).

Trust me, by the time you see the human shields, journalists, NGOs and diplomats roll into town, all that’s left are the crumbs (except for the gun runners and their bosses who will own every hotel, bar and brothel in town) and all the supplies will be provided by the clever investors who saw this coming years ago and you will be paying inflated prices for junk you can get at home for 20% of the price. Feel like an idiot now (I do all the time when I’m there-dammit I should have got a loan out and undercut whoever was selling pickups to Mullah Omar)?

The Bush administration is punishing nine foreign companies, six of them in China, for selling missile goods and chemical arms material to Iran.In making the announcement Tuesday, State Department spokesman Adam Ereli said the sanctions were based on “credible evidence,” which he did not disclose.

Two of the companies are Indian and the other is Austrian.The Chinese companies named by Ereli are China Aerotechnology Import Export Corp., the missile exporter China North Industries Corp., Zibo Chemet Equipment Co., the Hongdu Aviation Industry Group, Ounion International Economic and Technical Cooperative Ltd., and the Limmt Metallurgy and Minerals Co.

The two sanctioned Indian companies are Sabero Organics Chemical and Sandhya Organics Chemical. The Austrian firm is Steyr-Mannlicher, which makes assault weapons.

Haiti’s not in the top ten for dangerous, but for sheer misery of its inhabitants it should rank with the best of them. It is however, the kidnapping capital of the America’s and gets more dangerous everyday.

…and you completely forgot about both Congos….. but who am I to complain.

Yeah, I suppose you should have titled it: ‘The top ten most newsworthy DPs’ because places like the Congo’s, Somalia etc are a very hard sell.
You want somewhere with a reasonable amount of wealthy western expats that is going to go totally to hell (nothing sexier than seeing frightened whitey being bundled aboard C-130s with everything they can carry by hard-faced marines and legionaires). All politics (and DPs) is local, to paraphrase the late, great Tip O’Neill.

As for the Malaysia/Indonesia debate?
I always thought of Indonesia as being less opressive (more corrupt, yes) and less given to loudly proclaiming it’s Islamic identity.
Islamic Bonds are the big thing in KL, while Jakarta appears to have a more westernised financial attitude towards it’s markets.

@SRR wrote:

…and you completely forgot about both Congos….. but who am I to complain.

Or the other side. ..I think Haiti is dangerous and deserves to be on the list. Nick does not , yet we have both been there and we both are correct.

I’ve never been to a full-fledged war zone per se. Never one with anti-aircraft artillery, war planes, tanks etc. So, in that sense, I can not compare it to other conflicts like Iraq, or Chechnya. I do know, that it is the most dangerous country in the Americas, along with Colombia. How that ranks up with the African countries and those in the ME and Asia, I don’t know with great certainty other than strong inklings.

Haiti’s definetely dangerous, and the more time that passes between the last coup and the elections the more dangerous and desperate the country becomes. It’s no walk in the park, that’s for sure. It’s gotten even worse this past week.

I have always felt more at risk in the US, UK or Ireland than in places like Israel, Bosnia (back in the day) or Iraq, but I have always found bog standard crime scenes harder to deal with than warzones (because Belfast never really had much of a crime problem compared to places like London or Dublin).

What’s really pathetic is that my experience of crime ridden places is actually quite limited compared to warzones, while some of my most reliable colleagues who actually grew up in rough inner city estates never had any problems working in DPs. Horses for courses. Haiti was to me a place that was poverty and crime in extremis, a sort of carribean Somalia, but without the heavy weapons or pretty girls (or islamic overtones).

No, but if you were to tally up the dead from hurricanes, other natural disasters, AIDS, other diseases, malnutrition, crime, political violence , kidnappings, etc., etc., the number would be very high. In the first week of december alone, there were thirty reported kidnappings. Undoubtedly, there were many more that went unreported as the families of the kidnappees tend to deal directly with the kidnappers.

I once heard from an American soldier that he felt Haiti was worse than Somalia. I think he was there during a coup in which case the violence would have been extraordinary.

When were you there mike? I thought the mulatto women were absolutely gorgeous. Although, that might be because I saw a majority of them at a beach and gangsters have better looking girlfriends. Or at least, they can afford to have the best looking ones.

Based on violent crime levels per capita, property theft levels, corruption, and other factors, apparently Vancouver has been labelled the sixth most dangerous city on the planet.

It’s also the best city in the world to live. So really, if we’re working our way around ‘dangerous’ destinations, it pays to see who’s using PR to gloss over their problems. My beloved town, of course, loves to have people forget about the high rate of violent crime.

So it’s all relative. Remember Scotland was found to be the most violent society on earth. Yet no one thinks twice about a weekend in Glasgow. Except in winter.

Anyway,lots of rumors about Israeli troops being allowed to go on exercise along the Turkish border with Iran, and the Turks have vehemently denied it, but to paraphrase Mandy Rice Davies: “They would, wouldn’t they?”.

The context I find interesting is with regards to the traveler versus the “living there as the general populace” worst. I suppose they’re intertwined somewhat.

Places that come up off the top of my head personally apart from the ones on the list would be:

Brazil: Lots of violence and poverty in the cities plus the hazards of the jungles.

Nigeria: Rampant corruption, lots of people, lots of violence in the cities and just enough religious hatred.

Cote D’ Ivore: Lots of sectarian hatred, with the country divided in half along those lines.

The Caucases: Particularly the smaller ones Ingush, Dagastan, the Ossetias. The fight is eventually going to be taken from Chechnya to these places in a big way.

Niger/Chad: They’re already talking state of war, not to mention famine and grinding poverty.

Haiti: Lots of violence and poverty.

China: Once you leave the big cities. There’s always something bad happening. And in China that more or less means on a big scale. Especially if you’re a native.

KSA: Follow the rules or else.

Best,
Stiv

To wit business as usual:

Brazil: Tourists Targets of Armed Robberies at Sao Paulo Airport
Crime targeting travelers has increased at and around Sao Paulo’s Guarulhos International Airport. In recent months a traveler was robbed at gunpoint inside the terminal in front of a check-in counter; another was assaulted in a bathroom; others were victims of carjackings on the roads near the airport. Part of the problem may be that a police unit that patrols the airport was reduced by 50 percent prior to the incidents.

Posted on December 27, 2005 | Permanent Link
More reports in: Brazil, Scams/Crime, South America

China: Second Toxic Spill in Barely More Than a Month
The second toxic spill into a major Chinese river in barely a month occurred Dec 15 when a smelter dumped more than 1,000 tons of cadmium-contaminated water into the Bei River, which flows through Guangdong province and joins the Pearl River to run through Guangzhou, one of China’s biggest and most important cities. The Pearl River enters the South China Sea just west of Hong Kong. Authorities trapped the contamination in a dam about 60 miles from Guangzhou and dumped neutralizing chemicals and water from reservoirs into the river to dilute the cadmium. By Dec. 25 officials expressed confidence that the spill would pose no threat to drinking water in Guangzhou, but emergency measures were being put in place. Meanwhile, the other toxic spill, on the Songhua River which becomes the Amur in Russia, reached Khabarovsk, where residents stocked up on bottled water despite Kremlin reassurances that the city’s water was safe to drink.

Posted on December 27, 2005 | Permanent Link
More reports in: Asia, China, Disasters