| October
1998
Building barricades, building institutions
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You
can't help but think about the common denominators when three Southeast Asian
countries erupt in mass demonstrations in the same month, all followed by
heavy-handed government reactions.
September 1998: The Deputy Prime Minister of Malaysia was ousted. He began to hold rallies. The police then threw a tighter and tighter cordon around him, finally arresting him and many allied leaders under the Internal Security Act, which allowed for indefinite detention without trial. For 12 days, no one was allowed to visit him in jail, not even his lawyers. Then when he appeared in public again, arraigned before a court, he had a black eye and other bruises. Aung San Suu Kyi of Burma held one protest after another. She drove her car to a bridge and refused to budge, to draw attention to her campaign to restore democracy to her country. Other supporters of the National League for Democracy ("NLD") held protests elsewhere in the capital Rangoon, and many were arrested. The military government had seized power after mass protests almost brought down the Ne Win government in 1988. Somehow, in 1990, the generals felt confident enough to hold an election, expecting it to legitimatise their position. Unfortunately, they miscalculated. Aung San Suu Kyi's NLD won 392 out of 485 seats. Faced with this defeat, the military government just simply refused to convene the new parliament, making mass arrests under some pretext or another ever since. September 1998 was one more month in 9 years of protests. Prince Ranaridh and Hun Sen shared power in Cambodia until 1997. Then Hun Sen threw the Prince out of the government, charging the Prince with colluding with the Khmer Rouge. To help settle the constitutional mess, a new election was held in July 1998, paid for by the European Union and Asean countries. Hun Sen's Cambodian People's Party won a simple majority of the seats, with the Prince's Funcinpec party and Sam Rainsy's party sharing the rest. The two opposition leaders cried foul over the election process and vowed to boycott the new Assembly. Street protests erupted. Add to these the Indonesian riots and protests in May this year that brought down the Suharto government and we have an unusually angry year in this region. Unusual not because there were mass demonstrations and heavy-handed responses: such things happen every year in Southeast Asia. Unusual simply because there were a few more than before, occurring at the same time. Despite the rhetoric by Asian leaders about the virtues of consensus in Asian societies, the claims of legitimacy through longevity, and a good economic track record (now doubtful) justifying the way the states are structured, look at the newspapers over the years and you'd see there is a big unresolved problem here. The problem is this: dissent and opposition in Southeast Asian countries all too often take place outside the constitutional process, spilling easily into violence. Why? Simply because, in most countries, the so-called constitutional order is too constricted to offer a channel for opposing views. It is too much in the service of the ruling power to have any credibility as a process for an orderly transfer of power, even if popular opinion wants it. The ultimate test is this, looking at any example of a Southeast Asian country: does the set up as practised make it conceivable that the present government could be successfully challenged by an opposition, and gracefully hand over power to a more popular opponent? If the answer is generally no -- "well, in theory it can happen, but nobody seriously believes it will ever happen in a smooth constitutional way, at least not while the incumbent is in charge" -- then you have a constitutional problem. You have a situation where the constitutional process is not free from the machinations of the protagonist. His antagonists would naturally refuse to play by those rules. They would take to the streets. Political combat in Southeast Asia is too often combat to the death, maybe not physical death, but at least political obliteration. Only two countries, Philippines after Marcos, and Thailand, have a tradition of conceding defeat with the chance to fight again another day. Everywhere else, it is stay in power or be ground into the dust. Lose your grip on power, and you'd be jailed, hanged or shot. With such an unappealing future, no incumbent can resist rigging the process to prevent any challenger from getting close to toppling him. He makes sure he controls all the levers in the legislature, the party, the police, the army, the media, even the judicial process. He rewrites the constitution to raise insurmountable hurdles for any half-serious challenger. Every door must be bolted and guarded by loyalists. It is not totalitarianism, not in the Soviet sense. The ruling power does not need to control every aspect of people's lives. He just needs to make sure his own fortress is rock-solid, and unassailable. His insecurity is compounded, in the case of many countries, by corruption. Every additional year he continues to stay in office, he and his cronies are sucked deeper and deeper into the lucre. The richer they get, the more vulnerable they become to backlash from a successor government, especially an unfriendly one. At some point, it becomes unthinkable to leave office. It would be too perilous to your life. The only avenue open to a challenger is then popular force. He can't promote his case through persuasion because the press is muzzled. He can't win elections easily because the electoral system has been stacked against him. So he has to demonstrate his strength through calling out the supporters. Ideally, they would show up in such force of numbers, that he can credibly threaten an economic shutdown of the country. The ruling clique would be compelled to think it wiser to concede at least some points. But more often than not, their reply is to bludgeon the movement into silence. The tools are many: water cannons, tear gas, batons, electric prods and bullets, followed by mass arrests, disappearance into indefinite detention, beatings, torture, or signed confessions avowing remarkable changes of heart. And unexplained killings. These confrontations resolve nothing. The two sides only engage in physical violence and intimidation. There is no dialogue. The ideas and demands do not engage with each other. No matter how successful the authorities are in suppressing street dissent, they still have the issues raised by the opposition unanswered. Either they use the time they have bought, to quietly deal with the issues -- for example, China after Tiananmen is doing this in a way -- or more often than not, the ruling powers think they have won and continue proudly as before. That is why many of these countries eventually reach a breaking point. The Marcos regime ultimately cracked 1986. The Ne Win regime gave way, not to the protesting students in 1988, but to the army junta who feared widespread chaos as the old man lost his grip. (Some say however, that the coup was itself engineered by Ne Win, who then continued to pull the strings from retirement). South Korea's army rule eventually surrendered to the demands for democracy. The last of a series of military governments in Thailand yielded earlier this decade but not till after its troops had fired on civilian protesters, generating mass revulsion. Suharto exited this year. Which country next? It is false to confuse a strongman having an iron lock on power, with stability. There are too many examples of them leading their countries to chaos when they finally crumble. America would say, "you see, that is why democracy is important." Yes, it is important, but it is not enough. American human rights idealism is often too hung up on countries going through the motion of elections, without enquiring too deeply about the substance. It is also too focussed on individual cases of torture and imprisonment. Sure, these prisoners of conscience are deserving of every effort to free them from their captors, but the newsbites of their releases do not add up to a rebuilding of stronger political societies. For that, we must shore up the institutions. This is my checklist. Basically I am looking for integrity in the constitutional process, and freedom from manipulation by the incumbent ruler.
But how do societies build such institutions? The more you think about it, the more bleak the outlook. Such institutions do not grow naturally. Rather, they need to be consciously built, by political leaders behaving like statesmen rather than insecure politicians. In nurturing such institutions, the leaders have to forswear their own power, entrusting it to autonomous parties like judges, editors and electoral commissioners, and giving more scope to their political opponents to operate. This is almost alien to Asian political tradition. You need a society with a middle class, caring about issues beyond economic survival, and who have minds open to ideas and examples from abroad. The middle class, because they have a stake in the economic progress of a society, are instinctively unextremist, which is a comfort to the incumbent leaders. Yet, they have the clout to gradually push for a fairer political order. One of the problems with Southeast Asia may be that with endemic corruption distorting the economies and huge income gaps between rich and poor, it's a slow process creating a middle class that would be numerous enough and autonomous enough economically (that is, not collusive of the endemic corruption) to act as a political force. Thirdly, pressure from other countries can help. They should use their leverage to get countries to build the necessary institutions rather than just freeing dissidents. There is more long term security for the West when Asia is stable and economically comfortable, than when countries lurch into hysteria and violence every decade or so. Left alone, the most common lesson from history is that they go into recurrent cycles of strongman rule, then misrule, then mass demonstrations, brutal suppression, failure and collapse. And oh, by the way, if you're Singaporean, look
at that checklist again. How many ticks, how many crosses, would you give
Singapore? © Yawning Bread
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Footnotes None Addenda None
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