Amid those anniversary moments, US president Joe Biden flew to Vietnam in September, the fifth sitting American president to visit since Bill Clinton re-established diplomatic ties in 2000 and “drew a line under a bloody and bitter past.”

In Hanoi, Biden and Communist Party general secretary Nguyen Phu Trong “hailed a historic new phase of bilateral cooperation and friendship,” creating a strategic partnership that expressed US support for “a strong, independent, prosperous, and resilient Vietnam.”

With such flourishes, history delivers irony garnished with diplomatic pomp. Expect many shades of irony in April 2025, the fiftieth anniversary of the end of the war, when Saigon fell to North Vietnamese forces. (Note the way the war is named: Australia joins America in calling it the Vietnam war; the Vietnamese call it the American war, the concluding phase of a thirty-year conflict.)

The shockwaves that ran through Asia after the second world war were driven by geopolitical fears that imagined nations as dominos toppling into communism. As France fled Indochina and Britain retreated from Southeast Asia, the United States stepped in to stabilise what it saw as a series of tottering states in Southeast Asia.

The proposition that the Vietnam war was “fought for, by, and through the Pacific” was the focus of a conference at Sydney’s Macquarie University that is now a book with nineteen chapters from different authors.

The editors of The Vietnam War in the Pacific World, Brian Cuddy and Fredrik Logevall, describe a wide gap between US rhetoric and the military reality of the region. The US claimed it was acting to save the whole of Southeast Asia, they write, but “the documentary record suggests that Washington lacked a suitable appreciation of how the war in Vietnam was linked to the politics of the wider region.”

In a chapter on “the fantasy driving Australian involvement in the Vietnam war,” the historian Greg Lockhart, a veteran of the war, writes that the “red peril” rhetoric of the Menzies government “disguised its race-based sense of the threat from Asia.” By 1950, he writes, Australian policy had been shaped by an early British version of domino thinking and the “downward thrust of communist China,” a thrust that linked the perils of geography to the force of gravity.

Just before the defeat of French colonial forces at Dien Bien Phu in 1954, US president Dwight Eisenhower proclaimed the fear that drove US policy: “You have a row of dominos set up, you knock over the first one, and what will happen to the last one is the certainty that it will go over fairly quickly.” The theory held that the Vietnam domino, with pushing by China, would topple the rest of Indochina. Burma and Malaya and Indonesia would follow. And then the threat would cascade towards Australia and New Zealand.

Lockhart scorches the way these fears led Australia to Vietnam:

Between 1945 and 1965, no major official Australian intelligence assessment found evidence to support the domino theory. Quite the reverse, those assessments concluded that communist China posed no threat to Australia. Shaped by the geographical illusion that “China,” or at least “Chinese” were “coming down” in a dagger-like thrust through the Malay Peninsula, the domino theory was the fearful side of the race fantasy, the nightmare that vanished once it had fulfilled its political function.

The US strategic ambition of containing communism in Asia “had been very largely achieved before the escalation of US forces in Vietnam in 1965,” Lockhart concludes, because Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, the Philippines and Indonesia were already “anti-communist nation-states.”

The same quickly became true of Indonesia, where the military takeover in 1965 was a decisive shift towards the United States, destroying the largest communist party outside the Eastern bloc. Yet US president Lyndon Johnson used Indonesia to proclaim what American historian Mark Atwood Lawrence calls “the domino theory in reverse.” LBJ’s argument by 1967 was that the Vietnam war was necessary as a “shield” for a virtuous cycle of political and economic development across Southeast Asia.

Lawrence laments that few in Washington followed the logic that “Indonesia’s lurch to the right, far from justifying the war in Vietnam, made that campaign unnecessary by successfully resolving Washington’s major problem in the region.” He cites evidence to a Senate committee in 1966 by a legend of US diplomacy, George Kennan, that events in Indonesia made the risk of communism spreading through the region “considerably less.”

In 1967, the US Central Intelligence Agency appraised the geopolitical consequences of a communist takeover of South Vietnam. Lawrence says a thirty-three-page report “concluded that the US would suffer no permanent or devastating setbacks anywhere in the world, including even in the areas closest to the Indochinese states, as long as Washington made clear its determination to remain active internationally after a setback in Vietnam.” The study, as he observes, had no discernible impact on LBJ’s thinking. Instead, Washington stuck with its “iffy” and “problematic” assumptions about falling dominos and the interconnections among Southeast Asian societies.

For the new nation of Singapore, separated from Malaysia in 1965, the era offered the chance to build links with the United States and hedge against bilateral troubles with Malaysia and Indonesia. S.R. Joey Long writes that prime minister Lee Kuan Yew used Washington’s Vietnam focus to cultivate America for both weapons and investment: “The inflow of American military equipment and capital enhanced the Singaporean regime’s capacity to defend its interests against adversarial neighbours, further its development strategies, distribute rewards to supporters, neutralise or win over detractors, and consolidate its control of the city-state.” A later chapter quotes a CIA report in 1967 that 15 per cent of Singapore’s gross national product came from American procurements related to the war.

During his long leadership, Lee Kuan Yew always proclaimed the one remaining vestige of an argument for the US war — the “buying time” thesis, which claims that the US provided time for the rest of Southeast Asia to grow strong enough to resist domino wobbles.

Mattias Fibiger’s chapter on buying time calls the idea a “remarkably durable” effort to transmute US failure into triumph. What president Ronald Reagan later called a “noble cause” is elevated to a constructive breathing space. “America failed in Vietnam,” according to the Henry Kissinger line, “but it gave the other nations of Southeast Asia time to deal with their own insurrections.”

From 1965 to 1975, the region “became far more prosperous, more united and more secure,” Fibiger notes, and he finds “some truth to the claims that the Vietnam war strengthened Southeast Asia’s non-communist states, stimulated the region’s economic growth, and led to the creation of ASEAN — all of which left the region more stable and secure.”

The creation of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations in 1967 (with an original membership of Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore and Thailand) is a milestone in the region’s idea of itself. ASEAN’s greatest achievement is to banish — or bury deeply — the danger of war between its members. This is region-building of the highest order. Earlier attempts at regional organisation had failed. Indeed, Fibiger notes, conflict seemed so endemic that a 1962 study was headlined, “Southeast Asia: The Balkans of the Orient?” ASEAN has helped lift the Balkan curse.

The founders of ASEAN certainly looked at Vietnam and knew what they didn’t want. While the war inspired “fear of American abandonment,” Fibiger thinks any relationship between the conflict and the strength of the region’s non-communist states is indirect. American military actions had little bearing on the ability of governments outside Indochina to command the loyalty of their populations.

Commerce, not conflict, became the region’s guiding star. In the quarter-century after 1965, the economies of East and Southeast Asia expanded more than twice as quickly as those in other regions. The eight “miracle” economies — Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia and Thailand — grew more prosperous and more equal, lifting huge numbers of people out of poverty.

Fibiger writes that the Vietnam war served as an engine of economic growth in Southeast Asia and fuelled exports to the US market. Growth legitimised rather than undermined authoritarian regimes in ASEAN, and deepened oligarchy. The war, he says, helped create strong states, regional prosperity, and ASEAN.

Beyond that summation, Fibiger attacks the buying time thesis as morally bankrupt because it is a metaphor of transaction, “implying that the Vietnam war’s salutary effects in Southeast Asia somehow cancel out its massive human and environmental cost in Indochina.”

America’s allies joined the war to serve alliance purposes with the United States. South Korea sent 320,000 troops to South Vietnam between 1965 and 1973, Australia 60,000, Thailand 40,000 and New Zealand 3800. The Philippines contribution was a total of 2000 medical and logistical personnel. Taiwan stationed an advisory group of around thirty officers at any one time in Saigon but sent no combat troops for fear of offending China.

For their part, Australia, New Zealand and South Korea fought “not for Saigon,” writes David L. Anderson, “but in keeping with their established practices of protecting their regional interests and constructing their national defence with allies.” By 1970, Australian opinion was divided over the war, Anderson notes, but the alliance with the United States still had popular support:

The war polarised the politics of the US, Australia and New Zealand. Antiwar sentiment in the three countries did not alone bring an end to their military engagement, but protest movements conditioned the political process to accept negotiation and withdrawal when government strategists decided national security no longer required the cost and sacrifice of the conflict.

In the years after the Vietnam war, Anderson says, the former junior partners maintained friendly relations with Washington even though the United States “was seen as a less reliable partner.” The new need was “greater self-reliance and independence from the US.”

Editors Cuddy and Logevall conclude that studying the regional dynamics of the Vietnam war is not purely of historical interest: “American foreign policy is turning its attention — even if haltingly and haphazardly — back to the Pacific… Understanding how the region reacted to the American war in Vietnam and how the war changed the region might help the United States and its Asia-Pacific partners navigate the currents of competition in the future.”

The Vietnam history offers cautions about the new competition between the United States and China. The United States again seeks regional allies and is gripped by vivid fears about the threat China poses to the system. The region again ponders the level of US commitment and its reliability.

The two giants compete to hold friends close and ensure no dominos fall to the other side.

Vietnam is a haunting demonstration that the Washington consensus can misread or even obscure Asian understandings and the complex politics of the region. Those truths from history matter again today. As America’s greatest strategic blunder of the twentieth century was in Asia, so in this century America’s greatest strategic challenge is in Asia. •

The Vietnam War in the Pacific World
Edited by Brian Cuddy and Fredrik Logevall | University of North Carolina Press | US$29.95 | 382 pages

The post Domino days appeared first on Inside Story.

Coming just as candidate registrations opened for the 2024 presidential elections on 16 October, the five–four majority decision of the court created a loophole exempting elected officials from a rule that barred those aged under forty from joining the contest. It was all too convenient for the ambitions of thirty-six-year-old Gibran Rakabuming Raka, who had followed in the footsteps of his father, president Joko Widodo (known as Jokowi), by being elected mayor of their home city of Surakarta in 2020.

In recent months momentum had been gathering behind the idea of Gibran as running mate of defence minister Prabowo Subianto, the controversial former Soeharto henchman now widely seen as the frontrunner in the race to replace Jokowi. The court gave Jokowi, Prabowo and Gibran just the loophole they needed. Legal experts and the broader commentariat were scathing of its poorly reasoned decision, and of the crucial role played by the chief justice — who happens to be the president’s brother-in-law and Gibran’s uncle. Family Court, indeed.

But Jokowi didn’t become Indonesia’s most powerful president since Soeharto by caring much about the intelligentsia’s ideas of propriety. In brushing off criticism of the court’s decision and his son’s candidacy he struck a populist tone, declaring that “the people are the ones who mark a ballot, not we elites.” With approval ratings exceeding 80 per cent, he’s the most popular of any outgoing president in Indonesia; his endorsement provides a strategic advantage to any candidate looking to replace him.

Despite his disingenuous claims to neutrality, Jokowi is now well and truly off the fence in the contest between Prabowo and his main rival, Ganjar Pranowo, who — like Jokowi — is affiliated with the nationalist PDI-P party controlled by former president Megawati Soekarnoputri. The president’s disillusionment with the former Central Java governor — whom he sees as lacking independence from PDI-P and Megawati — has drawn him closer in recent months to Prabowo, who has carefully courted Jokowi’s favour by consulting him on key strategy decisions.

Prabowo and Gibran officially appeared together for the first time as running mates on 25 October, upstaging their rivals with a flashy stadium rally in Jakarta before leading a parade towards the electoral commission to submit their paperwork.

The unveiling of the Prabowo–Widodo alliance has changed the race to succeed Jokowi in important ways yet changed very little. Neither the constitutional court’s controversial ruling nor the nomination of Gibran appears to have had any immediate impact on any candidate’s popularity.

Polls still point to a two-round presidential election, with the likely elimination of former Jakarta governor Anies Baswedan after an initial vote on 14 February giving way to a 26 June runoff between Prabowo and Ganjar. Prabowo’s success in the runoff will depend on the support of Anies’s voters, who mostly comprise the determinedly anti-Jokowi, and especially conservative Muslim, part of the electoral coalition Prabowo assembled at the last election in 2019. He’s counting on them voting for him, despite his accommodation with the Widodo family, out of antipathy to PDI-P and its secularist tendencies.

Jokowi’s support for Prabowo flies in the face not only of PDI-P’s preferences but also those of his own electoral base: about 55 per cent of those who voted for his re-election in 2019 tell pollsters they prefer Ganjar, while only 25 per cent have shifted to Prabowo. A key goal of pairing Gibran with Prabowo is to draw more Jokowi voters — largely concentrated in PDI-P’s Central and East Java heartland, where Ganjar has a sizeable lead — into Prabowo’s electoral coalition.

Nor is the vice-presidency the only front in the fight for a Widodo dynasty. In late September Gibran’s twenty-eight-year-old brother Kaesang Pengarep was appointed chairman of PSI, a minor party astroturfed into existence early in Jokowi’s presidency by sympathetic business and political figures, which recently endorsed Prabowo. The hope is that with the Widodo family halo above PSI, it will for the first time win the 4 per cent of the vote required to be awarded seats in the national legislature — and, now it has formally endorsed Prabowo, be rewarded with a share of cabinet seats if he wins. Speculation suggests that Gibran’s elevation to Prabowo’s ticket will be accompanied by his own defection from PDI-P to Golkar, the one-time regime party of Soeharto and another key member of the coalition supporting Prabowo’s campaign.

Take a moment to appreciate the sheer chutzpah Jokowi is showing in all this: putting one of his sons in control of a party whose principal strategy is to steal votes from PDI-P and putting another into a presidential campaign whose strategy involves poaching votes from PDI-P’s candidate — all while he himself is still a card-carrying member of the party.

PDI-P has little choice but to hold its fire. As one analyst puts it, Jokowi and the party are in a “mutual hostage situation” ahead of legislative elections to be held concurrently with the first round of the presidential vote on 14 February. For now, it’s not in PDI-P’s interest to have an acrimonious public split with a president who, even if his relationship with the party is becoming untenable, is still its most popular and influential cadre.

While Gibran’s candidacy has yet to change the state of the electoral horse race, it nonetheless has significant implications for Jokowi’s approach to the elections, and the political significance of their outcome for him.

Even as he became Indonesia’s most powerful post-reformasi head of state, Jokowi’s roots in the country’s political institutions remained quite shallow. His authority has rested not on direct control of a party, a social movement, a large personal fortune or even a particularly coherent band of cronies, but rather on the deterrent effect his huge popularity has on would-be opponents of his policies, and his willingness to use the legal system to coerce elites into cooperating with his political goals.

A key question that loomed over all this was his likely ability to wield influence after losing office. His efforts to engineer a constitutional amendment to delay the election, or allow himself to run for a third term, resulted in a rare defeat. Jokowi now seeks to anchor his post-presidential influence in a political dynasty the likes of which Indonesia has never seen at the national level, succeeding where former presidents Megawati and Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono have failed in their efforts to secure presidential or vice-presidential candidacies for their children.

Has Jokowi accurately judged the risks and rewards of this strategy? If Ganjar can eke out a win, Jokowi will surely be exposed to withering revenge from PDI-P for his alliance with Prabowo. But even if Prabowo prevails, Jokowi might prove to have overestimated the payoffs. On paper, a Prabowo presidency would place members of the Widodo clan not only first in succession to a septuagenarian president but also potentially heading a debutante parliamentary party (PSI) and a new power base in an established one (Golkar), both of which are members of the nominating coalition that would have the pick of key cabinet posts.

But the real-world influence of all this is uncertain. Once he has settled in as president, Prabowo would have no compunction about sidelining Jokowi as part of any effort to assert his dominance over the political scene. A likely scenario is that the Widodo clan comes to resemble the Soekarnos or the Yudhoyonos: just one among many factions in a political oligarchy whose collective power, especially under Prabowo, would be checked by the overbearing presidency that Jokowi has given rise to.

It’s also important to set this within the record of Indonesian dynastic politics more generally. While a rising proportion of parliamentarians and local leaders have family ties to other elected officials, these dynasties have remained localised and small-scale, with little of the staying power of those in the Philippines, India or Thailand — or even consolidated liberal democracies like Japan and Taiwan.

The emergence of a Widodo dynasty as part of the national political furniture doesn’t on its own imperil Indonesian democracy. The worry is that Jokowi’s decision to take such a large stake in a Prabowo victory gives him a powerful incentive to use all the levers of incumbency to help bring it about. This could encompass his influence over the bureaucracy, local governments, big business, the police, the military — and if recent events are any guide, perhaps even the constitutional court, which adjudicates legal challenges to the results of elections.

In the end, the hazards for democracy that lie in Jokowi’s dynasty-building might have less to do with the ends than with the means. •

The post Flying too close to the son? appeared first on Inside Story.

It’s true that the country’s military-authored 2008 constitution gave the civilian government no effective oversight of the military and other security services. But while Suu Kyi’s lamentable defence of its actions before the International Court of Justice in 2019 did her no harm domestically, it brought her international celebrity to a shuddering halt, alienating democratic governments around the world. Foreign aid continued to flow, but Western investment dried up as corporations registered the reputational risk of operating under a regime tainted by horrific human rights abuses.

At the time, like other Myanmar analysts, we considered a military coup unlikely given the cosy, profitable arrangement the military had designed for itself under the 2008 constitution. But a more general principle should have given Suu Kyi pause for thought before she travelled to the Hague: authoritarian leaders, and bullies more generally — including Myanmar’s military leaders — see compromise or acquiescence as weakness.

We weren’t surprised when the National League for Democracy was re-elected with a thumping majority and seemed set to consolidate its power. In the light of the hardship and abuse of the long years of miliary government, Suu Kyi’s win offered at the least a glimmer of hope.

Yet her government’s second term was cut short even before it started. On 1 February 2021, the first day of the new parliament, the military commander-in-chief, Min Aung Hlaing, ended a decade of reforms and semi-democratic rule and returned the country to the authoritarianism of the pre-2011 era. Suu Kyi was arrested and returned to her former role as political prisoner, as were the president and other National League for Democracy leaders.

As we wrote on the day of the coup, Myanmar’s people had enjoyed a decade of increased political and economic freedoms. The military was therefore likely to encounter “uncooperative subjects” as it sought to reimpose authoritarian rule.

That proved to be an understatement. The early opposition to the coup, nonviolent, almost festive, filled the streets of Yangon and other cities and towns around the country. The protesters were watched closely by the police, and sometimes the military, but little action was taken. A civil disobedience movement took hold, with striking or uncooperative workers paralysing major parts of the economy. Doctors, teachers, university lecturers: they all voiced their opposition to the military’s strangling of the government.

A month into these nonviolent protests the security services launched a more forceful response. Indiscriminate live fire into the crowds killed and injured protesters. National League for Democracy politicians and other protesters were arrested and tortured to death. A grim new chapter of reprisals and crackdowns had begun.

Under these conditions, opposition to the junta transformed from open, nonviolent action, with the risk of being abducted or shot, to an armed underground movement. The disparate militias of the newly formed People’s Defence Force are playing the key role, often supported by ethnic armed groups long opposed to the military.

The country descended into civil war — not only in the remote borderlands, where fighting led by ethnic armed groups has smouldered since independence in 1948, but also in the main cities and, perhaps most importantly, in the normally docile central dry zone populated by the numerically dominant Bamar (Burman) majority. This is the heartland from which the military usually draws much of its political strength and recruits.

A parallel National Unity Government was established, and the National League for Democracy’s UN ambassador managed to retain his position despite repeated attempts by the military junta to remove him.

The Myanmar people, their dreams having been so brutally dashed, are unlikely to accept a return to the uncomfortable compromises of the 2008 constitution. The army, having so carelessly discarded its comfortable and lucrative relationship with Suu Kyi’s League, now faces a popular and determined opposition implacably opposed to allowing it any role in government.

The catastrophic error of judgement by Min Aung Hlaing and the military leadership hasn’t only devastated much of the country. It has also destroyed any chance of peaceful coexistence between military and civilians for the foreseeable future.

This unravelling of constitutional rule made it necessary to revise our book. Our assumption had been that the National League for Democracy would govern for another five-year term, in coalition if necessary with some of the ethnic minority parties. The chance that another party would emerge to dominate Myanmar politics seemed remote, particularly while Suu Kyi remained at the League’s helm, and nor were the military-backed parties likely to cobble together a governing coalition.

We had a provisional agreement with our publishers to issue a second edition in the lead-up to the anticipated 2025 election, but these decisions are always conditional on first edition sales and other factors. Now the book required much earlier updating. Routledge accepted our proposal to accelerate the process, and the result is a fully revised second edition, just published, with extra chapters on education, health and the coup in historical context.

One difference in the new edition is that it draws on (and links to) articles published by the growing number of open-access policy outlets that provide fast — in some cases almost instant — research findings and analysis of regional issues. For Australian academics working on Myanmar politics these include the Australian Strategic Policy Institute’s Strategist, the Lowy Institute’s Interpreter, the Australian Institute of International Affairs’s Australian Outlook and the Australian National University’s East Asia Forum. The Conversation also provides an invaluable space for academics to reach a more general audience with short research-based articles, and Inside Story publishes longer essays.

While these outlets don’t provide all the rigour of refereed journal articles, they overcome the delays in traditional academic publishing that can be frustrating for academics analysing contemporary events. Having this political analysis available much more quickly and free of charge is crucial, particularly when dealing with a region like Southeast Asia where local academics, analysts and members of the public are much less likely to have access to paywalled journal articles and books.

We are particularly pleased that help from our contributors’ institutions has enabled us to make the book available for download free of charge. We see it as a crucial social justice issue that the contributors’ analyses are freely available to readers in Myanmar, Southeast Asia and the rest of the world.

Meanwhile, with much of the world’s focus understandably on conflict in Ukraine and the Middle East, the Myanmar crisis has been relegated to footnote status. Although the United States’ BURMA Act earlier this year raised hopes of more international support for the opposition movement, little progress is evident.

Myanmar’s military continues its brutal campaign of attacks on civilians, including the burning of villages and indiscriminate air strikes on civilian targets. A single attack in central Myanmar in May killed more than 160 people, including children.

While the privations and suffering of the Rohingya that we described three years ago have spread across much of the rest of the population, we should not forget the terrible situation of that community. Over a million Rohingya refugees have spent more than six years in Bangladeshi border refugee camps at the mercy of criminal gangs, their already tiny food rations further reduced in recent times.

As investigations of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity slowly wind their way through the International Court of Justice, International Criminal Court, and courts in Germany and elsewhere, the Rohingya and Myanmar’s wider population experience no respite.

The top generals have been excluded from most diplomatic engagement, and are only welcomed by Russia, China, North Korea and a few other authoritarian regimes. Even ASEAN, which has tended to tolerate a fair bit of bad behaviour in Myanmar, recognises that the military regime in Naypyitaw presents a reputational risk for the entire region. An empty seat at ASEAN symbolises much wariness about legitimising the violence and devastation unleashed by the coup and sends a signal, albeit a weak one, to other autocratic regimes.

Like Ukraine, Myanmar is suffering the consequences of terrible decisions by ruthless, isolated leaders. As we look ahead it is crucial that we don’t ignore the crimes of these despots and the need to find just outcomes.

The answers will usually be found on the ground, in the hard slog of defying dictatorial rule. But let’s not ignore the contributions that can be made by democratic states prepared to resolutely oppose these dictatorial regimes. A concerted international effort to support the National Unity Government materially, diplomatically and militarily could easily alter the dynamics in Myanmar. •

The post While the world looks elsewhere, Myanmar’s civil war grinds on appeared first on Inside Story.

Often acerbic and sometimes irascible in public, Hayden had a fine sense of humour, a passion for political intrigue and a liking for journalists. As Geoff Kitney noted in a tribute in the Australian Financial Review, he loved to hear and trade gossip, preferably salacious.

After a tour of the private quarters of Ferdinand and Imelda that day in 1986, Hayden emerged to present us newshounds with a global scoop. Imelda might have been famous for her vast wardrobe of shoes, but she also had another collecting passion. Her rooms, he gleefully reported, contained a formidable stash of pornographic cassette tapes.

Hayden is mostly remembered as the Labor leader whose keys to The Lodge were snatched by Bob Hawke; as the fleeting but steadying treasurer in the last inglorious days of the Whitlam government; and as a principal architect of Medicare and the landmark economic reforms of the 1980s. He should also be celebrated as one of Australia’s most determined and effective foreign ministers.

When he fell on his sword, enabling Hawke’s unstoppable ascendancy to the Labor leadership to go unchallenged on the cusp of the 1983 federal election, Hayden had already anointed Paul Keating as the next treasurer and instead took foreign affairs as his consolation prize.

In his five years in the job, he would lay the groundwork for a peace settlement in Cambodia, strengthen the campaign against South Africa’s apartheid regime during Australia’s tenure on the UN Security Council and weather a period of bruising conflict with France over nuclear testing at Mururoa atoll, the Rainbow Warrior scandal and Paris’s intransigence on self-determination for its Polynesian subjects. He worked hard to build closer and deeper ties between Australia and its Asian and Pacific neighbours.

Hayden brought a stubborn determination and moral clarity to a job that saw him open talks over Cambodia with Vietnamese prime minister Pham Van Dong in defiance of the United States, face down French bullying, and oversee a sensitive review of the ANZUS treaty. Through it all, he consistently spoke out in defence of what he saw to be Australia’s best interests.

In the same year as his visit to Manila, Hayden embarked on a grand tour of the nations of the South Pacific — if a two-week island-hopping expedition aboard an ageing Royal Australian Air Force Hawker Siddeley turboprop aircraft can be considered grand. At Funafuti, the tiny main island of Tuvalu, I vividly remember the plane almost getting bogged on the short grassy runway.

I missed another of the ports of call. The night before departure, a greatly amused Bill Hayden announced to his entourage over drinks, “We’re all off to Tonga tomorrow, but not Mr Baker, who has been declared persona non grata!” This is the first I knew of a ban imposed after I had detailed the extravagant lifestyle of the feudal court in Nuku‘alofa during an earlier visit to Tonga.

I rejoined the caravan in time for Western Samoa. On a free day, the travellers set off with togs and towels to a beautiful but treacherous beach on the north of the main island. To the consternation of his retinue, Hayden ignored the warnings, dived straight into the surf and swam far out to sea. Mercifully, Harold Holt’s fate was not replicated.

During the trip there was some engagement between the travelling journalists and the locals that went beyond the conventional scope of diplomatic intercourse. Hayden revelled in the gossip. At his first press conference at Old Parliament House after returning to Canberra he began by serenading one of the journalists with a variation on “I Left My Heart in San Francisco.”

Hayden was also notorious for collecting outsized souvenirs on his global travels, many of them of dubious artistic merit. It was said that the garden of his Ipswich home was a Disneyland of kitsch, many of the pieces acquired on his travels around the world.

During a visit to Papua New Guinea Hayden alarmed his advisers by taking a particular shine to a large garamut, a slit drum fashioned from a tree trunk, that he spotted in the garden of the Mount Hagen hotel where his party was staying. Such was his enthusiasm that the hotel owner appeared to feel compelled to offer it as a gift to his distinguished guest.

The minders and the media — and perhaps the hotelier — concluded there was little risk of the gift being accepted given its great size and weight. Not so. By early the next morning it had been loaded aboard the VIP jet and found its way back to Ipswich via RAAF Amberley.

Throughout the tribulations and triumphs of his long political career, Hayden’s devotion to Dallas, his wife of sixty-two years, was a constant. In 1987 he was poised to travel to the frontline states of southern Africa at the height of the campaign against apartheid. It was a trip at the heart of Hayden’s determination to see an end to the racist regime in Pretoria — with the bonus of some exotic sightseeing and the chance to augment the Ipswich artefact collection. Days before departure, Dallas suffered a mental health episode and without hesitation Hayden cancelled the trip to stay with her while she recovered.

Among many fine tributes paid to Hayden in recent days was one by Laurie Oakes, former doyen of the Canberra press gallery. “They don’t come much better than Bill Hayden,” Oakes tweeted. “He would have made a great PM. Inheriting Bill’s policies and the people he’d put in key roles gave Hawke a head start. A politician in the finest Labor tradition. Humble, decent, clever, game as they come, Bill’s contribution was immense.”

Prime minister Anthony Albanese singled out Hayden’s achievements as foreign minister for particular praise: “Without Bill Hayden’s instinctive grasp of the relationship between facing our nation to the world and securing our prosperity for the future, the government in which he served might not have achieved the same degree of engagement in our region that still benefits Australia today.”

Had that vision been embraced and effectively driven by all of those who followed Hayden as foreign minister, Australia might not be struggling with some of the formidable challenges it now faces with its neighbours, not least in the South Pacific. •

The post Imelda Marcos’s videotapes appeared first on Inside Story.

Ahead of an American presidential election that might return to power an isolationist and avowed admirer of dictators, Australian national security insiders have been assured during their regular “leadership dialogue” with their American counterparts that, yes, protection and patronage remain. But whether or not Donald Trump returns, says Lowy Institute analyst Sam Roggeveen, the Americans will inevitably pull back from trying to maintain strategic primacy in the Western Pacific.

Eventually, Roggeveen argues in his important new book The Echidna Strategy, the Americans will come to terms with a power balance involving its adversaries — China, North Korea and Russia — facing off against strong friends like Japan, South Korea and Australia, with independent emerging powers Indonesia and India in the middle.

Roggeveen doesn’t envisage a sudden US withdrawal from the Asia-Pacific. But Australia will gradually lose great-power protection, forcing it to take a more independent path. “There won’t be a principled declaration of independence, but a hesitant and gradual process of separation triggered by America’s declining interest and motivation to protect Australia.”

Since this shift could conceivably happen over the first half of this century — during the next twenty-five or so years, that is — he believes it should be influencing the defence investments and foreign policy decisions we are making right now. Instead of placing a “big bet” on the United States remaining dominant, and acquiring nuclear submarines to assist, Australia should adopt a version of the porcupine strategy — by promising to inflict too much pain on the aggressor to justify any gains they may anticipate — for its own defence and go all out to keep Indonesia on side and help build its strength.

In a little over 200 pages of elegant logic, Roggeveen, who has led the security team at Lowy for the last fifteen years and before that worked in the Office of National Assessments, delivers a broadside at Canberra’s bipartisan consensus on the AUKUS agreement. He adds to the case made by figures like James Curran, historian and Australian Financial Review international editor, that the agreement still hasn’t been explained — and probably can’t be, except as a political fix.

As former ONA head Peter Varghese says, Roggeveen’s book “defies the echo chamber of current strategic policy” — the chamber that takes in the two main parties, the defence and foreign affairs departments, ONA’s successor the Office of National Intelligence, the Australian Strategic Policy Institute and the ANU National Security College, and a federal press gallery captivated by gee-whiz weaponry and China panics.

Roggeveen builds on the thinking of strategic analysts Hugh White and the late Allan Gyngell, who could see an era of power contestation developing in Asia. Far from “appeasement” — the cheap slur thrown by junior minister Pat Conroy at Labor’s national conference last week — they urge a bristly defence of Australia and its approaches combined with efforts to avoid being roadkill if the big vehicles start moving.

Roggeveen looks first at America’s national will. So far, the cost of its post-1945 security presence in Asia has been manageable and the risks low. But China’s rise and North Korea’s nuclear weaponry are changing the calculus. “When it comes to taking on China, the costs are too high and the stakes too low,” Roggeveen says.

The United States is uniquely secure, he points out, buffered by wide oceans east and west, and by benign neighbours north and south. It has the world’s largest military, its largest nuclear arsenal, and a young and growing population. With foreign trade only 23 per cent of its GDP, it can be economically self-sufficient.

“When Donald Trump said what was previously unsayable for a US president — that America’s allies are free-riders, that NATO had passed its use-by date, and that America gains nothing from its forward military presence in East Asia — the response from the US security establishment was swift and predictable,” Roggeveen writes. “America’s alliances, they said, are the backbone of global security.”

But Trump had grasped an important point. “America’s alliances are not a service the US offers to its allies and the world. Ultimately, they need to make the United States safer. If America’s alliances with Japan, South Korea and Australia cease to have any benefit for the US, then it will stop making sacrifices for them.”

Cold war justifications for alliances are crumbling. East Asian allies are starting to question the “extended deterrence” of US nuclear forces and thinking about acquiring their own. “The US has learned to live with French, British and Israeli nuclear weapons. It can do the same for South Korea and Japan,” Roggeveen says.

And unlike Washington’s old enemy, the Soviet Union, China lacks an exportable ideology. “Communism in China is little more than a series of slogans (such as the ‘China dream’ and a ‘community of common destiny’). To be a communist in China today is to be committed not to the global spread of Marxist-Leninist ideology but simply to the preservation of Communist Party rule at home.”

Realistically, no nation of China’s economic weight would ever be content for its rival to be the leading strategic power in its own region, “any more than the US would tolerate China being the leading strategic power in North and Latin America. Imagine tens of thousands of Chinese troops based in Canada, an aircraft carrier permanently stationed in Cuba, and Chinese spy planes routinely patrolling just off the US east coast, and you get the idea.”

Should Trump be re-elected, or a “Trump-like figure” take the Republican Party back into the White House, his agenda would return, and probably with less institutional resistance. Trump might have been unexpected but he isn’t anomalous, says Roggeveen. His rise injected a new uncertainty into Australia’s strategic future.

The result will be “a long sunset of American power in Asia, in which China emerges as the leading nation but not the dominant one.” Australia’s alliance with the United States won’t be formally abrogated or repealed: too many people in both countries have a stake in its preservation.

“The treaty will remain,” says Roggeveen. “So will the troops, and the joint exercises, and the Five Eyes intelligence-sharing arrangements, and the arms sales. What will erode is the credibility of the alliance. Australia and the region in general will simply stop believing that the alliance represents an implicit promise that the two countries will fight on each other’s behalf.”

Yet Australia is doubling its bet on the United States staying on top. The planned eight nuclear-powered attack submarines, or SSNs, more than the British or French navies possess, will operate as a one-eighth addition to the US navy’s SSN force. Aside from being able to fire Tomahawk cruise missiles with a 1500 to 2000 kilometre range, their role will be to find and chase China’s ballistic missile submarines, or SSBNs.

For nuclear powers, such SSBNs are the guaranteed “second strike” capability against a successful “first strike.” Roggeveen could have said more about the fact that China has only six SSBNs, five operating from a base in Hainan island facing the South China Sea and one near Qingdao in the Yellow Sea. Maintenance and training mean that only one or two are likely to be on patrol at any time. The relentless “freedom of navigation” patrols in these waters by US and allied forces seem designed to stop those SSBNs slipping out into the open ocean, from where more of the continental United States would be in missile range. Or perhaps they are poised to destroy the subs before they can launch. Either way, are we out to remove this stabilising element of mutual assured destruction?

This is a case of capability determining defence policy rather than the other way round, Roggeveen says: “Once we have the capability to send a fleet of boats thousands of kilometres to our north around China’s coast, and the capability to fire missiles at the Chinese mainland, we are going to have to come up with reasons why we are choosing to withhold that capability in the event of war.” Equally worryingly, “by the time this question arises Australia will have been enculturated and integrated with the US Navy over decades. It is too much to expect that our leaders would turn their backs on all that in the decisive moment.”

Any sense that the United States might have to compel Australia into helping in a future conflict is contradicted by the continuing willingness of both major political parties to lock military planning into US thinking. As Roggeveen puts it, the AUKUS agreement shows that “Australia didn’t need to be talked into anything.” And from an American perspective, what’s not to like when Australia comes offering to pay hundreds of billions of dollars for US weapons?

All the costs of AUKUS weaponry will be carried by Australia, with no hard promises in return. “It is a project of vaulting ambition that is out of step with Australian tradition as a military middle power, wildly at odds with our international status and, most importantly, a wasteful expenditure of public money that will make Australia less safe,” Roggeveen says. “But having cancelled the French project and inaugurated AUKUS, Australia is now proposing to manage not two but three submarine designs. The Collins upgrade is still going ahead, and we are adding two nuclear-powered designs as well, a technology with which Australia has no experience. It will surely shock no one if this initiative fails entirely, or is severely cut back over time.”

Meanwhile, Canberra’s advocates of more defence spending are vague about what exactly Australia needs to defend itself against. At the same time, they assume that China is or will be so powerful that resisting it without US help is pointless.

Waging war on Australia wouldn’t be easy, says Roggeveen, and Australia can relatively cheaply raise the stakes even further. “Australia’s security commentators project their anxieties about Australia, their lack of confidence in it, onto China. They think we can’t manage the challenge of China alone because we’re not strong or mature enough. I say we are, and I say we can.”

The invasion scenario put up by defence hawks like late army general and Liberal senator Jim Molan are laughably implausible. “Contrary to popular belief, we don’t need to defend ourselves against invasion,” says Roggeveen. “[T]his will remain beyond the capabilities of any rival military force for the indefinite future, and even if it becomes achievable, it will remain unnecessary and even counterproductive for the aggressor.” The only plausible reason to attack Australia would be to strike facilities being used to attack China — the US strategic bombers at the Katherine air base, for instance, and the SSNs at the Fremantle naval base.

Instead, Australia should rely on distance to put huge restraints on any Chinese military action. “Put simply, distance is Australia’s single biggest defence asset,” Roggeveen says, reminding his readers that Beijing is closer to London than to Sydney. That distance is invariably played down in the Australian defence debate in favour of a view that Australia is on the front line of military competition with China, or on China’s doorstep.

Australia should invest in forces that can punish and repel any antagonist who comes close — an antagonist gaining a military base in the Pacific islands, for example — but not attempt to project power any further. In other words, no capabilities aimed explicitly at hitting Chinese territory. Submarines, yes, long-range air power, yes, some missiles, yes, a lot of troops for restoring peace or providing disaster relief in the region, yes — but no heavily armoured army. Backing these capabilities would be hardened military bases, stockpiles of fuel and strategic materials, and deeper protection against cyberattack and other “grey” threats.

This is the “echidna strategy” of the book’s title — a version of which Roggeveen suggests for the defence of Taiwan. (He doesn’t favour a simple surrender of this democracy, and perhaps could have made this clearer.) It is essentially a strategy of denial.

“[This means] we are essentially planning to inflict the bare minimum damage on China so that we can persuade Beijing to stop but not give it a reason to hit us even harder,” Roggeveen says. It may not be heroic, “but such is the lot of a middle power when facing a great power. The alternative, which we are now pursuing, is a defence strategy which incentivises China to pay more military attention to us.”

Roggeveen does explore the ultimate defensive spike — nuclear weapons for Australia — but concludes that as nuclear weapons haven’t been used against non-nuclear adversaries since 1945, the chances of China raising the stakes that far against a much smaller, distant power are slim enough to discount.

But this doesn’t mean Australia should withdraw into a ball like a threatened echidna. It should be ambitious, but by using diplomacy and defence support. The focus should be Indonesia, the only emerging big power in the most contestable region around China capable of pushing back against the Chinese. “All the threat inflation, all the fever dreams conjured by our security pundits about China’s military threat to Australia — we are at risk of being surrounded; there is danger on our doorstep — would suddenly become real if Indonesia was ever hostile towards Australia.”

Then there is preserving Australia’s sphere of influence in the Pacific by doing more: more aid, more infrastructure, more investment, more labour mobility, more diplomacy and more defence cooperation. Though the smaller nations might be reluctant to surrender their China leverage, a European Union–style economic and political pact could cement island relations with Australia and New Zealand, with free trade, open borders, shared services, a regional airline and perhaps even a regional bank with a single currency.

This initiative could build on Roggeveen’s argument for a doubling of the Australian population to create a bigger economic base. With Papua New Guinea’s population now put tentatively at 11.8 million, and another three million or so in the other Pacific island nations, the region is there for us all to bulk up.

Roggeveen also puts the case for strong regional organisations. Not the Quad so much — its members are too dispersed, too divergent and too invested in China to agree to a NATO-style common defence, or even to explicitly mention China — but the much-derided Association of Southeast Asian Nations and its appendages. Instead of being disappointed about what ASEAN fails to do, we should look at what it’s been able to prevent — namely, wars between its members.

The Albanese government might sincerely believe in AUKUS, or it might be using it to help gain time in office in the expectation it will collapse on someone else’s watch. Either way, this book from such a seasoned and centrally placed figure in the defence and foreign policy sphere shows that our national future is being decided in panic and haste. •

The Echidna Strategy: Australia’s Search for Power and Peace
By Sam Roggeveen | La Trobe University Press/Black Inc. | $32.99 | 232 pages

The post Spiky questions about the US alliance appeared first on Inside Story.

A cluster of six state elections in Malaysia last Saturday supported neither view. Instead, it showed that two equally competitive coalitions remain engaged in a sharp political contest, and neither can fully meet all its supporters’ diverse and often contradictory expectations.

One side is projecting images of a postcolonial national cleansing that will subjugate Malaysia’s minorities and deliver an Islamic state, sealing Malay Muslim majority dominance forever. The other is slowly working up an argument that only it can deliver a modern economy, social harmony and national repair after years of political upheaval. Locked in battle with each other, neither has been able to stake out the nation’s direction decisively.

Saturday’s elections were all held on the Malay Peninsula: in Selangor, Penang and Negeri Sembilan on the industrialised, multiracial west coast, and in Kedah, Terengganu and Kelantan, purported “Malay heartland” states, in the north and east. All of them returned incumbent governments.

In the west, the states in question are aligned with prime minister Anwar Ibrahim’s federal Pakatan Harapan, or Alliance of Hope. Those in the north and east align with the main rival coalition, former prime minister Muhyiddin Yassin’s Perikatan Nasional, or National Alliance. While the results produced no major surprises, they provide plenty of insights into the narratives used by the contending forces to frame and conduct their struggle for the national state and its institutions.

That struggle was at its most naked in November last year, when Anwar Ibrahim finally became the nation’s prime minister after twenty-five years’ worth of attempts. In the final days of the campaign, Muhyiddin and his Islamist running mates in the Pan-Malaysian Islamic Party, or PAS, drew on every racial and religious trope they could find to turn voters away from Anwar’s Pakatan.

They argued that Christians and Jews would use victory as a Trojan Horse to colonise Malaysia. Malaysian TV actor Zul Huzaimy expressed a wish to “slaughter kafir harbi,” or enemy infidels, at a pro-PAS rally in the eastern peninsular state of Terengganu. (The term is borrowed from classical Islamic jurisprudence to anachronistically demonise Malaysian racial and religious minorities for participating in the political life of the modern nation-state.)

Then, when it became clear that Anwar would form a government, PAS supporters used TikTok to call for a “new May 13” — the date in 1969 when a post-election massacre of Chinese Malaysians took place across Kuala Lumpur.

The Perikatan Nasional coalition had hoped to use similar messages and tactics to topple Anwar-aligned state governments on Saturday and trigger the federal government’s self-destruction. The Malaysian and international media pitched in, framing the elections as a “referendum” on the federal government.

PAS, which has the greatest grassroots reach of all the Perikatan parties, had been keeping its supporters in a state of constant mobilisation for exactly this purpose. It has worked hard to frame its aim as a kind of Malay Muslim decolonisation.

In February this year, for instance, a group of PAS youth caused widespread concern when it organised a rally in Terengganu in which a column of Malay Muslim men marched down a main street in white robes, brandishing swords, scimitars and shields that appeared loosely (and badly) modelled on those carried by troops of the Ottoman Empire. The Ottoman sultan was the caliph of Islam until the caliphate was abolished in 1924 after the Ottoman Empire’s postwar dismemberment and Kemal Ataturk’s rise to power.

PAS’s message is that Anwar’s federal government — which includes members of Malaysia’s Chinese and Indian minorities — is a legacy of colonialism and must be toppled. PAS appears to be drawing on tales of Malay rebels who built an Islamist coalition against colonial rule in 1920s Terengganu, some of whom also wore white robes and raised the Ottoman flag over their uprising against the British. (The similarity makes me wonder if Malaysia’s Islamists have been reading my own historical work on the subject.)

The Ottoman references didn’t stop with Terengganu. Later, in May, the acting PAS chief minister of Kedah, Muhammad Sanusi, compared Penang, a Pakatan stronghold, with Constantinople, and Perikatan with the Ottoman sultan Mehmed II (“the Conqueror”), who wrested it from the Byzantine Empire in 1453. The Byzantines collapsed from the impact, allowing the Ottomans to expand their empire into Christian Eastern Europe.

These messages no doubt helped Perikatan shore up its strongholds. Terengganu’s state assembly, for example, is now entirely made up of PAS members; in fact, PAS won 109 of the 127 seats it contested across the six states, slashing the total held by the once-dominant Malay party, UMNO, from forty-one to nineteen.

UMNO’s poor result has further weakened the party that led the winning coalition in every federal election from Malaya’s first, in 1955, until 2018. UMNO ruined its own fortunes so badly with the infamous 1MDB scandal, which began in 2015, that it is hard to imagine it playing a prominent role in any future election. Nationally, it is in the ironic position of being a junior partner in Anwar’s government.

PAS and the other Perikatan parties also made gains in the Pakatan Harapan states, ensuring PAS in particular even more national prominence. Gone are the days when UMNO prime minister Mahathir Muhammad could isolate PAS by associating it with “the Taliban” and promising that only his coalition could deliver development. Mahathir didn’t deliver for the PAS states, though, and people remember that well. Perikatan parties also benefit from Malaysia’s notorious electoral malapportionment, which favours Malay-dominated rural seats.

Anxious not to appear anti-Muslim, Anwar’s Pakatan government has had to pick its battles carefully. It may well have been waiting for these elections to pass before its members risked mounting an overt defence of its policies. But the alliance has nevertheless been using two sets of messages to build momentum for a victory at the next federal election, which is still more than four years away.

First, there is Pakatan’s longstanding message of racial and religious tolerance. During the 2022 election campaign that finally delivered him his victory, Anwar’s team circulated footage showing him defending the rights of minorities at a mosque in Adelaide’s Gilles Plains, where he gave a Friday sermon as a side event to his lecture at the 2013 Adelaide Festival of Ideas. Kuala Lumpur’s Malay-language radio stations reinforced the video’s message in the week after the election, playing a steady stream of commentary on how Muslims have always treated non-Muslims with respect.

One after another, religious experts and authorities discussed Islamic teachings on minority rights, dating back to Islam’s early expansion in Arabia. US-based Turkish scholar Mustafa Akyol issued a statement suggesting that Malaysians should study the Ottoman constitution of 1876, which argued that “all subjects of the empire are called Ottomans without distinction, whatever faith they profess.” Further, “they have the same rights, and owe the same duties towards their country, without prejudice to religion.”

Whatever the details, the moral was the same: there is no excuse for demonising minority groups in contemporary Malaysia, or for using the Ottomans as a means of doing so. This argument has clearly not delivered Pakatan enough protection, however, and in the lead-up to the state elections, Anwar’s federal government made a spectacle of seizing “gay” rainbow Swatch watches from the shops. It also shut down a music festival in Kuala Lumpur after a British rock band, The 1975, performed a same-sex kiss as an onstage statement. (Malaysian LGBTI activists decried the band’s “white saviourism” and ignorance of local political dynamics.)

Pakatan’s leadership must now be calculating that PAS, having done everything it can at this point, will begin to lose momentum. After all, nobody wins elections on TikTok alone, and Ottoman dreams and claims of racial supremacy won’t create new, well-paid jobs in an economy battered by the pandemic and runaway food price inflation.

This is the second of Pakatan’s themes: its focus on jobs and economic development. Deputy investment, trade and industry minister Liew Chin Tong has been urging colleagues to support nation-building measures, including policies to promote new industries that Anwar set out in SCRIPT, or MADANI, a manifesto he recently published. Anwar and his colleagues have also led work on Malaysia’s climate response, and efforts are under way to upgrade the nation’s care economy, a huge employer of underpaid women.

Anwar must also be hoping that some of the lads who love PAS will also be fans of Elon Musk, whom he recently convinced to establish Tesla’s regional headquarters in Selangor. Bringing in Tesla will force a rethink of some of Malaysia’s restrictive business regulations, which tend to protect rent-seekers and prevent economic reforms that could deliver much-needed high-wage jobs.

A fair share of new economic opportunities will also need to be directed into PAS states, one of which, Kelantan, has brown, undrinkable water running out of its taps, a travesty when contrasted with Kuala Lumpur’s fancy spas (some of which, perhaps coincidentally, are modelled on hammams similar to those used by Ottoman courtesans).

As well as pursuing economic reforms, Anwar has positioned himself as someone who can bridge the divide between Islamic State hopefuls and a multiracial Malaysia. He promises that debates about Malaysia’s future will be performed as “polylogues,” reflecting the nation’s diversity and his own ability to code switch between competing political registers.

Liew is also arguing that Perikatan, having pushed so hard on religious race-war rhetoric, won’t be able to win multiracial federal seats at the next election, and that PAS’s strength inside the coalition increasingly marginalises Perikatan’s other parties and denies them a nationalist disguise for its true aims. Perikatan also risks a tussle with Malaysia’s royal families, none of which appreciates Islamist critiques of its members’ lifestyles or their historical accommodations with the colonial state.

Amid the fierce contest over which coalition can best repair Malaysia after years of instability, it’s important to remember that the nation is not, after all, a liberal democracy but an electorally competitive authoritarian regime. Power is centralised in the federal government and the institutions of the national state, which place limits on how far challengers can push. These limits worked for UMNO for decades.

While Anwar and Pakatan are in power now, the underlying structure hasn’t changed, and there is no telling whether or how it will. For the time being, it supports the current federal government.

For PAS, meanwhile, Constantinople still stands. •

The post Malaysia’s history wars at the ballot box appeared first on Inside Story.

The symbolism lay in the fact that 27 June is the anniversary of the day in 1932 when Thailand promulgated its first-ever constitution. By gesturing towards that milestone, almost as much as in any of its policies, Move Forward demonstrated why it is on a collision course with Thailand’s two most powerful conservative institutions, the military and the monarchy.

The new party is on a mission to reclaim the legacy and promise of the 1932 revolution, which formally ended Thailand’s absolute monarchy but merely marked the beginning of a long struggle between progressives and an alliance of royalists and military officers. That struggle has seen thirteen coups, twenty constitutions, and rule by the military or its proxy parties for seven out of every ten years since 1932.

Move Forward’s quest to end that cycle — in the same way South Korean and Indonesian reformers ended their periods of authoritarian rule — will mean redefining the meaning of “constitutional monarchy” to ensure that the monarchy truly is above politics and below the law, in the same way that constitutional monarchies are in Japan and England. If the party is successful, it will settle a fundamental question unresolved in Thailand to this day: where does sovereignty lie, with the people or the monarchy?

Move Forward’s extraordinary support — a doubling of its vote compared with the 2019 election, when it arrived on the scene as the Future Forward party — indicates its project is increasingly resonating with many ordinary Thais, and especially young people. They wish their country to be “normal,” well governed and prosperous, and their leaders to be modern and accountable, perhaps in the manner of wildly popular Bangkok governor Chadchart Sittipunt, a hardworking politician who has set precedents in transparent and efficient governance.

Since the ascent of Rama X and the rule of military dictator General Prayuth Chan-ocha, Thailand has headed in precisely the opposite direction. Following Prayuth’s 2014 coup and Vajiralongkorn’s 2016 ascent to the throne, signs of absolutist monarchical rule and a wish to erase memory of the 1932 revolution have proliferated. Even the historic plaque commemorating the 1932 revolution disappeared, replaced by another that proclaimed: “Loyalty and love for the Triple Gem [Buddha, Dharma and Sangha], one’s clan and having an honest heart for one’s king is good. These are the tools to make one’s state prosper!”

The new monarch appointed, dismissed and then reappointed a royal consort (the first since the era of Rama V, 1868–1910), seized control of the monarchy’s financing organisation, the powerful Crown Property Bureau, and set about establishing a private army with two personally controlled regiments. Future Forward, which boldly opposed the last of these in 2019, was marked as a potential hotbed of lom chao (those who would overthrow the monarchy) and dissolved by a Thai Constitutional Court in the same year.

Prayuth, for his part, rammed through a new constitution with minimal public debate or consultation. To increase the scope for conservatives to dictate the country’s direction without resorting to coups, it gave 250 junta-appointed senators an equal say in appointing the prime minister, harking back to the “half-baked democracy” of the 1980s when Thai military officers retained seats in parliament. Prayuth refused to swear allegiance even to this illiberal constitution following the 2019 election, reserving his pledge of loyalty for the monarch.

The illiberal constitution and its appointed Senate worked exactly as intended after the election in May this year. Although Move Forward’s leader, young former businessperson Pita Limjaroenrat, assembled a 312-seat coalition — a clear majority of the House of Representatives — his nomination for the prime ministership was denied on 13 July. Senators were able to block Pita simply by abstaining from voting, depriving him of the votes he needed for his coalition of 312 to reach 376, a simple majority of both houses. In the end, a paltry thirteen senators ventured to support him.

The joint sitting was Thai politics in microcosm, showing vividly the divide between those who speak for average Thais and those who place the monarchy above all. On one side was a coalition representing more than twenty-five million voters (out of thirty-eight million) in the party-list count and more than twenty million (also out of thirty-eight million) in the constituency seat count. On the other side stood a group primarily representing the former junta, the military, the monarchy and the business oligarchs who have benefited from the absence of transparency and accountability of a junta-led regime.

The chasm was apparent in the statements made by Pita and his foes. Pita offered a vision based on his party’s campaign promises, with plans to break up the monopolies that stifle the Thai economy, undertake educational reform to end archaic practices like rote learning, and institute political reform to devolve more power to the regions and security reform to look afresh at the bloody two-decade-long conflict in Thailand’s south.

The senators, along with the parties aligned with the military, offered but one reason for their opposition to Pita: his party’s pledge to reform the notoriously draconian and illiberal section of the Thai criminal code law known as section 112. Intended to prohibit lèse-majesté — insults to the monarchy — the section has been used to imprison minors and other Thais “liking” the wrong post on Facebook. Anyone can make a section 112 allegation, trials are held in secret and penalties go as high as fifteen years’ jail. The provision has been used to silence political debate on the monarchy’s role in Thai politics, including its validating of Thailand’s coup-makers.

The joint sitting saw the pro-monarchist minority parties launch a ferocious and at times wildly hyperbolic attack on Move Forward’s claim to the country’s leadership. If section 112 was reformed, one Bhumjaithai party MP ranted, he would introduce a new law allowing people to shoot those who insult the monarchy.

Most of the Senate, in contrast, were coolly indifferent. Some forty-three senators didn’t even attend the session. All of Thailand’s military commanders, granted Senate positions in the 2017 constitution, were indisposed; many Thais wish they would exhibit the same indifference to politics when enjoined to conduct coups.

Of the thirteen senators who crossed the floor to support Pita, none were from the three armed services, despite many retired soldiers making up the Senate. Indoctrinated throughout their military education with the belief that monarchy is sacred, inviolable and indispensable to their country’s security, they are implacably opposed to any notion of monarchical reform, no matter how moderate. If the democratic coalition achieves government, reform of military education will surely be a priority.

In response, speakers from the democracy coalition sought to allay concerns about the section 112 reform proposal. Some pointed out that the section had been amended many times; others noted that the policy belonged only to the Move Forward Party and was not included in the agreement between the eight parties making up the coalition. Their arguments fell on deaf ears, as did Pita’s final plea to the senators, “May your decision reflect the hopes of the people, not of your own fears.”

With characteristic pragmatism and resilience, Move Forward then set out a new roadmap. It would appeal to the Senate once more in a repeat session on Wednesday 19 July and thereafter seek an amendment to section 272 of the constitution, which gives senators a role in selecting the prime minister. If this fails, as it is likely to, they will then move aside to allow the party with the second-greatest number of seats, Pheu Thai, to nominate one of its candidates for the prime minister. [In the event, Pita was suspended from parliament by the constitutional court on 19 July pending a judgement on his alleged holding of shares in a media company, in violation of election law.]

Will Pheu Thai’s nominee gain Senate support? It will be irony indeed if senators endorse the party torn down by coups in 2006 and 2014.

What does seem certain is that the conservative parties, including Prayuth’s United Thai Nation Party and his former deputy and military comrade Prawit Wongsuwan’s Phalang Pracharat, won’t attempt to form a minority government with Senate backing. Prayuth has declared an intention to retire from politics, and such a government would be only theoretically possible, even with Senate support. It could not pass laws or survive a no-confidence vote unless it could quickly pull members across from the democratic coalition, a prospect that seems unlikely.

Many twists and turns remain on the road to a new Thai government. If the constitutional court were to rule that Pita’s alleged shareholding disqualifies all Moving Forward members, a government more palatable to the monarchy and military could yet return. In an era of sophisticated authoritarianism, regimes have many ways of cloaking their authoritarian impulses beneath the trappings of democratic process, with the courts a favoured method of disabling political opponents.

In the meantime, Move Forward won’t retreat from its goal of revitalising the vision of the 1932 revolutionaries against the seeming tide of absolutism. On the eve of the Senate vote, one of its leading figures, MP Rangsiman Rome, advocated that Thailand’s national day should revert to 24 June, the date of the 1932 revolution. While some decried this as inflammatory and tactically wrong-headed, Move Forward knows that younger voters are far less reverent of the monarchy and want their country to modernise. With each election bringing in roughly four million young voters, can Thailand’s conservative elites continue to resist this change?

As the biggest economy in mainland Southeast Asia, Thailand exerts significant influence. All its neighbours are authoritarian regimes well practised in denying their people a real say in governing their countries. Will Thailand continue, along with China, to be an authoritarian centre of gravity, legitimising dictators and sharing authoritarian tools and techniques? Or can it represent something more hopeful? •

The post Thailand’s battle for the future continues appeared first on Inside Story.

A huge domestic market, favourable demographics and vast reserves of newly “critical” minerals mean the fundamentals are there for Indonesia to become one of the world’s five biggest economies by mid-century. Despite its enormous governance and development problems, there’s a sense that the facts of Indonesia’s economic and geopolitical importance are finally catching up with its elites’ pretensions about their status as leaders of a negara besar — a great, important country.

It’s in this feel-good atmosphere that Indonesia is set to choose a replacement for Jokowi, who’s constitutionally limited to two five-year terms, in presidential elections scheduled for February next year.

Spare a thought for the opposition’s candidate, the former Jakarta governor Anies Baswedan. Once a close ally of the president, Anies stoked Muslim grievances to win the 2017 gubernatorial polls in Jakarta after the Chinese-Christian incumbent was accused of blasphemy. Anies’s standing among religious minorities — about an eighth of the national electorate — has been at rock bottom ever since. That’s a big enough problem on its own without the strategic challenges involved in running as a repudiation of a president whose approval ratings are hovering in the high 70s.

Those numbers aren’t the only ones posing a problem for Anies. Indonesia’s electoral laws apply a “presidential threshold” that requires candidates to be nominated by a party or coalition of parties that won either 20 per cent of the popular vote or 25 per cent of seats at the previous legislative elections. Anies has secured the backing of three parties that together meet this threshold, but if he loses just one he’ll be off the ballot.

The one party for which the nominating threshold isn’t a problem is PDI-P, the nationalist party Jokowi is at least officially a member of. Having won just over 20 per cent of the popular vote in 2019, it’s unilaterally put forward its star cadre Ganjar Pranowo, the telegenic governor of Central Java province.

Ganjar has charted a Widodo-like path to national popularity, having used local politics as a platform to build a national profile based mostly on his personal charm, competent administration and avoidance of scandal. Not for nothing have Indonesian pundits been pre-emptively labelling a Ganjar presidency as Jokowi jilid dua — “Jokowi volume two.”

Just like Jokowi, PDI-P is also Ganjar’s biggest liability. The party’s chair, former president Megawati Soekarnoputri, feels that Jokowi hasn’t repaid her with the obedience she considers to be her due given her role in making him president in 2014. Determined not to have another of her cadres assert their independence once in office, Megawati has tested Ganjar’s loyalties by forcing him into taking a high-profile stand against the government while publicly belittling him as a “party functionary.” Ganjar’s poll numbers have stagnated as many voters — not to mention Jokowi — have come to see him as a cipher for Megawati, who remains a polarising figure outside the PDI-P base.

This is all to the advantage of defence minister Prabowo Subianto, the candidate polls suggest would be the favourite if the election were held now. Having fought and lost two brutal presidential campaigns against Jokowi before being co-opted into his second-term cabinet, Prabowo is in the unique position of being able to promise continuity while remaining the lesser of the two evils for Anies’s voters in the event their candidate doesn’t make it on to the ballot or is eliminated in the first round of Indonesia’s two-round voting system.

Eight months out from the election, in short, Jokowi has got all three likely candidates exactly where he wants them: Anies struggling while Ganjar and Prabowo compete for the aura of being the president’s natural successor. Which raises a question: with the opposition weakened and the contest likely to involve two government-linked candidates promising more of the same, is anything at all at stake in this election?

To say these elections are a “test of democracy” might be too much of a cliché, but it’s telling that twenty-five years after the fall of Soeharto every Indonesian national election is still routinely described in those terms. Certainly, despite the resilience of Indonesian democracy in the face of unfriendly odds, Jokowi leaves some of its foundations looking unsteady.

That 2024’s polls are even taking place as scheduled shouldn’t be taken for granted: Jokowi, despite public denials, lent behind-the-scenes support to an unsuccessful push in 2021–22 to extend his term in office via constitutional amendment. And if Anies Baswedan’s candidacy falls over before it can be officially registered in November 2023, it will be an open question whether it was because his coalition lost confidence in his ability to turn around his polling numbers or because his bid was sabotaged by the government sabotage. His nominating parties have been rocked by suspiciously timed corruption investigations and lawsuits, while Anies himself is a potential target of corruption charges relating to financial decisions he made as governor of Jakarta, despite dubious evidence of illegality.

Even if unsuccessful, a president’s efforts to evade term limits and his authorities’ harassing the opposition with legal threats aren’t exactly the hallmarks of a healthy democracy. But underhanded tactics like this are of a piece with Jokowi-era democratic backsliding, wherein the president’s “personal distaste for contentious politics” has dovetailed with the illiberal reflexes of the cops, soldiers, religious leaders and Soekarnoist ideologues who surround him.

One reason to doubt that Ganjar Pranowo would oversee a rehabilitation of democratic norms is that PDI-P looms large within this illiberal milieu. The party has demanded that Ganjar allow it to appoint its cadres to a suite of senior cabinet positions if he is elected. On his watch PDI-P would seek to entrench its influence at the commanding heights of the Indonesian state, continuing to push a “hyper-nationalism” it sees as the antidote to the increasing influence of conservative Islam in society.

Ganjar’s likely response to the threat of being dominated by PDI-P would be to do what Jokowi has done for nine years: counterbalance and dilute its power by co-opting as many parties as he can into his cabinet (with the implicit promise that they can siphon money out of the programs they administer) and cosying up to the police force and military — none of which spells good things for the quality of governance.

The disappointments of the Jokowi years and the dim prospects for democratic renewal under Ganjar provide the backdrop for relitigating the question of whether Prabowo Subianto still represents a unique menace to the system, and whether he ever did.

It helps the cause of Prabowo revisionism that he’s been on his best behaviour since being appointed defence minister. He’s moderated his angry-outsider pose and distanced himself from the Islamic radicals he previously courted, while getting sympathetic press for his efforts to boost Indonesia’s military capability. It might be intuitive to assume that his support is concentrated among older voters nostalgic for the Soeharto era, but Prabowo’s voter base in fact skews young. To many in a generation too young to remember his New Order incarnation, he looks like a worldly, straight-talking patriot beholden to nobody.

Those with longer memories know what lies below the surface: an explosive temper; a penchant for demagoguery, risk-taking and rule-breaking; and, as a former special forces officer in Soeharto’s army, a comfort with the use of violence as an instrument of politics. These features of his character could make Prabowo unpredictable in a domestic or international crisis.

But what Prabowo might do patiently and deliberately could be just as insidious. In the Jokowi years, corruption has become a central talking point for conservatives, who say that the immense cost of running for office in Indonesia encourages politicians to monetise their positions once elected — and for this reason direct elections for local executive positions (and, a few say, the presidency) ought to be limited or abolished.

It’s this context that had me in a suspicious frame of mind when I saw Prabowo say, in a recent interview, that “frankly, we have to study the democracy we’re implementing… the cost of doing politics is too expensive.” He agreed with his interviewer’s observation that this expense was incentivising corruption, saying that “instead, in the end, our political system isn’t making Indonesia a great, advanced and prosperous country, but could wreck it.”

He went on to call for “political parties, social organisations, religious leaders [and] intellectuals” to come together to “study and [consider] what do we want to fix” about the political system. He compared such an effort to the BPUPK, a body set up in the dying days of Japan’s wartime occupation to “prepare” Indonesia for independence, which became a central site for negotiating the constitutional underpinnings of the Indonesian republic proclaimed by Soekarno in 1945: not only between Islamists and secularists, but between democrats and their adversaries.

Prabowo’s offhanded invocation of this formative period in Indonesia’s political history could merely be pretentious — or it could be a hint of the scale of the political changes he imagines himself leading as president. At stake in February’s election, then, is the chance for Indonesia to find out. •

The post Will Prabowo’s patience pay off? appeared first on Inside Story.

That fact alone sums up the futility of the Thai establishment’s two-decade effort to suppress wishes expressed by Thai voters at elections in 2001, 2005, 2007, 2011 and 2019. Each time, populist parties backed by former prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra were the biggest winners thanks largely to the support of voters from Thailand’s populous rural northeast.

Because the opposition Democrat Party couldn’t win elections in this notionally two-party system, conservatives resorted to dissolving Thaksin’s parties in 2007, 2008 and 2019, or staging military coups in 2006 and 2014. They did so because Thaksin’s rapid ascent to power and electoral popularity threatened Thailand’s patrimonial power structures and the establishment’s vested interests and privileges.

Now, though — despite the benefits they gain from an undemocratic post-coup constitution adopted in 2017 — Thailand’s conservatives face a bigger threat than Thaksin ever posed. The biggest winner in this month’s election was not Thaksin’s Pheu Thai party, but newcomer Move Forward, a party contesting only its second election.

Move Forward’s agenda is radical for Thailand. It seeks wholesale democratic reform to limit the military’s role in politics, an end to military conscription, reform of the lèse-majesté law that prohibits criticism of the monarch, and changes to Thailand’s hierarchical and outmoded education system. Its leaders, including prime ministerial hopeful Pita Limjaroenrat, are young, dynamic and often internationally educated, and frequently have a background in business.

Rather than just appealing to young people, Move Forward has attracted support from across different demographics in Thailand’s urban areas. It swept all but one of Bangkok’s thirty-three electorates, gaining 42 per cent of the vote there, and performed strongly in other urban centres — even including traditional Pheu Thai strongholds such as Chiang Mai in the country’s north.

For the establishment, these gains suggest troubling times indeed. The military-backed government, meanwhile, fielded two proxy parties at the election, both of which were trounced.

Yet conservatives still have live options if they wish to prevent Move Forward from taking power. The 2017 constitution allows 250 military-appointed senators to vote on the prime minister, meaning that any coalition will need a super-majority of 376 votes in the lower house to ensure their preferred candidate gets the job. So far, the Move Forward–Pheu Thai coalition has secured around 315 votes for Pita, a strong majority in any normal democracy but perhaps not enough in Thailand.

If Pita does secure sufficient support, perhaps from more independent-minded senators, he still risks being banned from politics or having his party dissolved. Thailand’s referee institutions — the Constitutional Court, Election Commission and National Anti-Corruption Commission — have a history of acting against popular politicians.

Either of these options would only be a temporary fix for the political establishment. The dissolution of Move Forward’s predecessor party in 2020 led to protracted youth-led protests on Bangkok’s streets, many of which attracted tens of thousands of demonstrators. This time, sympathy for the military is even thinner on the ground. Heavy-handed steps against Move Forward are likely to attract a significant backlash.

Perhaps more importantly, Thailand’s big businesses and corporate conglomerates wouldn’t necessarily support the military. The Thai Chamber of Commerce, for example, has already said that a transition to a younger generation of leaders isn’t necessarily a bad thing, and that political stability was important.

They are undoubtedly concerned by the state of the economy. Over nearly a decade, prime minister Prayut Chan-o-cha has failed to lead any meaningful economic reform. Thailand has lagged Vietnam and other neighbours in attracting investment. It hasn’t participated in the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership and other trade deals. Long-term challenges, including an underperforming education system and an ageing society, haven’t been tackled in any meaningful way.

Move Forward’s and Pheu Thai’s leaders say they want to do things differently. Their leaders include successful figures who understand the need for Thailand to adapt to the changing global and regional economy. Pita is one of them — he is a former executive director of technology business Grab Thailand — and his predecessor as party leader was vice-president of Thailand’s largest automotive parts business. Pheu Thai’s Srettha Thavisin was a real estate mogul before entering politics.

Another area where Move Forward could quickly make a mark is the crisis in neighbouring Myanmar. Since a coup there in 2021, the country has slid ever more deeply into civil war. With close ties between the two countries’ militaries, Thailand has been reluctant to criticise the Myanmar junta or support tougher action within ASEAN. Thailand has even undermined ASEAN unity on this issue by giving the junta a platform at sub-regional diplomatic dialogues and meetings.

Move Forward has already flagged that it would approach Myanmar differently. Following the election, Pita foreshadowed a humanitarian corridor to provide assistance to the people of Myanmar. A Move Forward government also seems likely to engage with opposition groups in the country, as advocated by Indonesia and other countries in the region.

Relations with the United States would probably also improve. Although dealings have long been normalised since the 2014 coup, little love has been lost between the two notional treaty allies. The Biden administration’s framing of the world as democracies versus autocracies was always going to sit uncomfortably for a Thai government that had its roots in a military coup. By contrast, Move Forward and the Harvard-educated Pita are likely to see Washington as broadly sympathetic to their aims.

If Thailand’s establishment decides not to respect the result of this election, the future for the country will look very different. In this scenario, Pheu Thai might decide to ditch Move Forward and join forces with smaller conservative parties, but the resulting coalition would have little ideological or policy coherence. As has happened under the outgoing government, each party would seek lucrative ministries in order to dispense largesse to would-be voters.

Even if the country didn’t face international isolation for this sub-democratic outcome, the absence of impetus for domestic reform or regional leadership would make Thailand increasingly irrelevant to its international partners.

Pheu Thai itself would likely be punished by voters in future elections. (One of the reasons for its electoral underperformance in 2023 may have been the rumour that it would join forces with the military.) Support for Move Forward would grow stronger and Thai politics would become even more polarised. The risk of political conflict and violence would rise.

While the battle between Thailand’s popular and establishment forces is far from over, this election looks to be an inflection point. If the establishment can recognise the futility of its efforts to subvert democracy and allow this one to stand, Thailand may finally move a step closer to the stable democratic system its people deserve. But if they choose once again to intervene and confound the outcome, the country risks a political impasse more intractable than any it has faced before. •

The post Thailand’s watershed election appeared first on Inside Story.

As Dan Slater and Joseph Wong remind us in their new book, Development to Democracy: The Transformations of Modern Asia, authoritarianism also tends to die not with a bang but with a whimper. They set out to understand the political effects of economic transformations in Asian countries where state-building and rapid economic modernisation have been the mutually reinforcing goals of government.

This “developmental Asia,” as the authors call it, has borders that are stark but porous: no South Asian government has driven capitalist industrialisation seriously enough to be considered part of it, but former laggards like China, Vietnam and Myanmar have been able to enter after socialist economics proved a dead end.

The starting point of Development to Democracy is the observation that democratisation in developmental Asia has not been prompted by a perception among authoritarian elites that their regime faces a revolutionary threat or a looming collapse. Rather, these elites have developed a “well-founded expectation of continued stability and even continued outright victory after democratisation takes place.”

The epitome of “democratisation through strength,” as Slater and Wong call this process, was Taiwan’s transition from one-party rule in the 1980s and 1990s. Facing rising demands for reform from civil society, a growing Taiwanese-nationalist opposition and the end of the cold war, the ruling Kuomintang lifted martial law and introduced contested elections. The gamble paid off not just for Taiwan’s people — who today enjoy the highest-quality democracy in Asia — but also for the Kuomintang itself, which now forms half of a stable two-party system alongside the Democratic Progressive Party, which has its roots in the opposition movement of the 1980s.

What we should want, Slater and Wong imply, is for authoritarian regimes to act like the Kuomintang or its contemporaries in South Korea: concede from a position of strength, just past the apex of their power and popularity, giving the regime’s legatees the opportunity to compete in free and fair elections by boasting they not only made the country rich but also made it free.

Democratisation through strength is Asia’s signal contribution to the global political landscape, having given birth to robust liberal democracies in Japan, Taiwan and South Korea, and to a flawed but stable electoral democracy in Indonesia. Yet it also produced failed experiments with democracy in Thailand and Myanmar, and has been resisted in Singapore, China, Indochina and — until only recently — Malaysia.

Despite the book’s concern with the relationship between economic development and democratisation, Slater and Wong aren’t offering warmed-over modernisation theory: the puzzle they seek to explain is why “levels of economic development are not clearly correlated with levels of democracy in developmental Asia.”

In theory, the legacies of authoritarian developmentalism make it safe for regimes to concede democratic reforms. Having transformed the living standards of the average voter, these regimes believe that their popular legitimacy will transfer to their own party or its successor(s) in free and fair elections. The poverty reduction and social safety nets they initiated — as well as their repression of the left — means that they need not worry about distributive conflicts spiralling out of control once democracy arrives.

This “victory confidence” and “stability confidence,” per the book’s shorthand, are needed for regimes to democratise, but they don’t on their own provide the impetus for reform. Instead, Slater and Wong emphasise the contingencies that come into play when pressures for reform from below interact with the regime’s perceptions of its own strength.

Reform pressures can come in many forms, and can come simultaneously. A regime can be confronted with signals of declining legitimacy, including gains by opposition parties in stage-managed elections, the defection of middle-class groups to anti-regime movements, or nudges from democratic security benefactors (essentially, the United States).

As the case of Malaysia shows, a regime’s ability to read the signs of its incipient decline makes all the difference to its capacity to engineer a transition to democracy on its own terms. In 1998, seventeen years into his economically successful twenty-three-year stint as prime minister, Mahathir Mohamad chose to repress rather than accommodate the reformasi movement that emerged after he sacked and prosecuted his politically ambitious finance minister Anwar Ibrahim amid a dispute over the Asian financial crisis.

Mahathir’s party, UMNO, endured as the cornerstone of the Barisan Nasional government for another twenty years, but electoral gerrymandering masked a gradual erosion in its popularity. The party’s decay reached its terminus in the extravagantly corrupt prime ministership of Najib Razak, who oversaw Barisan Nasional’s first-ever election loss in 2018. The victor in that election was an opposition coalition led by Mahathir, who’d become embittered in his retirement. Najib is in jail, and after a thrashing in last November’s general election the party has been reduced to a supporting act in a coalition government led by none other than Anwar Ibrahim.

Singapore — the place where modernisation theory goes to die — could go either way. The People’s Action Party, or PAP, is exceptionally well equipped to anticipate the signs of decline and position itself to thrive in a democratic system. It has a luminous track record of economic development and competent governance. Tightly controlled elections and grassroots “consultation” processes give it regular health checks on its popular support.

But the PAP reckons those feedback mechanisms haven’t set off enough alarm bells to incentivise it to embrace reforms. Slater and Wong suggest the PAP is taking a risky path: the slump in its vote in the 2020 general election might be written off as a pandemic-era aberration, but if the government underperforms in polls due by 2025 — by which time a leadership transition is also due — the PAP will be at a fork in the road: democratise from a position of dominance or risk going down the UMNO route.

China has a quite different set of problems. Conceding to demands for political reform in 1989 would have represented what Wong and Slater call “democracy through weakness” — the precipitous collapse of an authoritarian regime — to a degree never before witnessed in developmental Asia. With China’s turn to capitalism having yet to generate broad-based prosperity, and the traumas of the Mao era still fresh in elites’ memories, a fragmented and poorly institutionalised Communist Party regime couldn’t be confident of maintaining power or stability in a more competitive system. Too weak to concede, it cracked down violently.

The tragedy of today’s China, by contrast, is that the regime has become too good at repressing dissent to receive reliable signs that its own legitimacy, and political stability more broadly, would be better served by conceding reforms. Without even the ersatz electoral processes that marked East Asia’s other developmental authoritarian regimes, or their conditional tolerance of liberal civil society, Xi Jinping’s party-state is trapped in a black box of its own making, so paranoid about its hold on power that it can’t tell the difference between politically innocuous forms of civic activity and bona fide threats to its rule.

The idea of democracy as something vouchsafed by self-interested elites doesn’t readily gel with our more romantic ideas about how political freedom is won. The notion that democracy can be fortified by the socioeconomic legacies of dictatorship can be hard to swallow, too. But Slater and Wong’s work is part of a growing body of scholarship that analyses democracy not as the outcome of a zero-sum contest between authoritarian incumbents and “people power” movements but as a product of intra-elite pacts.

Slater and Wong’s book doesn’t break new ground in terms of fresh interviews or archival research. It’s a drawing together of their own and other scholars’ work into a big-picture framework for understanding the political economy of democratisation in East Asia — one that is compelling in its analysis and thought-provoking in its implications for how governments and civil society can support democracy across the world.

Fitting democratisation ­— an intrinsically complex and contingent process — into one neat explanatory framework has its risks, of course. While Slater and Wong stress the critical role that popular pressures put on regimes in developmental Asia to reform political systems, I suspect that some country experts and scholars of social movements will feel that they overstate how much room for manoeuvre Asia’s authoritarians actually had once pressure for reform grew.

Even in the exemplary cases of Taiwan and South Korea, sustained popular protest presented elites with the choice between reform or a campaign of repression that may well have triggered greater unrest. Different observers look at the same set of facts and ask: did these regimes jump, or were they pushed?

And for a work so explicitly grounded in theories of the relationship between socioeconomic and political change, I was surprised by the minimal discussion of the ambiguous role middle classes have played in both demanding democracy and sustaining it after experiments in “democratisation through strength” are launched. Witness the highly problematic role of Thailand’s middle classes in its post-Thaksin politics, or how Indonesia’s intra-middle-class culture wars are eroding the quality of democracy there.

Slater and Wong could have enriched their analysis with more serious consideration of how popular preferences and agency augment the elite machinations they examine. After all, the middle class needs “victory confidence” and “stability confidence” too.

Yet my familiarity with Indonesia predisposes me to agree with Slater and Wong’s emphasis on the self-interested calculations of elites as a decisive factor in the emergence of durable democracies. While profound political change in Indonesia was almost inevitable once protests and riots threatened to make the country ungovernable by May 1998, the experiment with democratic reforms in the years thereafter was an “inside job” overseen by New Order holdovers. Slater and Wong are on solid ground when they observe that Indonesian democracy has survived against the odds in no small part because the old regime’s elites were assured of their ability to thrive in the new system.

But as Thailand and Myanmar make clear, democratisation through strength is a “reversible experiment” that doesn’t always bear fruit for those running it. Attempts to democratise through strength collapsed in Thailand (after Thaksin) and in Myanmar (after the National League for Democracy’s landslide election victories) because the conservatives who oversaw liberalisation realised they couldn’t effectively compete in the new system.

So what do we do with the insight that an essential precondition for democracy to take root in Asia has been authoritarian elites’ belief that democratisation won’t spell their political obsolescence?

Slater and Wong aren’t shy about taking their arguments to their logical conclusions. As they acknowledge, “one way to interpret the argument and evidence offered in this book is that democracy should only be pursued through strength.” They reject that sweeping idea, noting that it is possible for durable democracy to be born of people power movements.

Yet evidence from developmental Asia suggests that, on the probabilities, “by laying a stronger foundation for eventual stable democratic transition, gradual authoritarian strengthening is generally a preferable outcome to sudden and total authoritarian collapse” and the often-brittle democracies that emerge from the ashes.

For this reason, “we” — presumably, Western academics and policymakers — “should be looking at authoritarian regimes through lenses other than the standard lens of ‘democracy promotion.’” Instead, “authoritarian regimes that make genuine collective efforts to promote economic development, improve popular welfare, and build more predictable and durable political institutions should be offered the international community’s conditional encouragement rather than unrelenting pressure.”

As Asia feels the chill of a new cold war, it’s perhaps apt that Slater and Wong strike a retro note about the importance of encouraging state-building and development and hoping that, with a bit of luck, democracy might emerge as a side-effect. But their prescription seems oddly less relevant to Asia than to other parts of the world; indeed, it probably already describes what Western governments are doing in the region. Western aid programs and private foundations might still pay the bills for liberal civil society across developing Asia — supporting the “demand side” of the democratisation equation — but when it comes to top-level government engagement, Western policy already reflects the realpolitik that competition for influence with China demands of them.

Slater and Wong are less explicit about what their arguments offer to opposition parties and civil society. But the implication is that any struggle for change ought to prioritise reassuring authoritarian elites about their prospects in a democratic system. Perhaps one of this book’s most important contributions is to leave us with the unanswered question of how movements for democracy might thread that particular needle. •

From Development to Democracy: The Transformations of Modern Asia
By Dan Slater and Joseph Wong | Princeton University Press | $62.99 | 368 pages

The post Dictating democratisation appeared first on Inside Story.

“Justice is courage, the courage of conviction,” Anwar seethed on that day in July 2002. “God willing, the day of justice will return, and I call on the friends of justice to remain steadfast. We shall clear the rubble — the corruption and injustices Dr Mahathir left in his trail — and we will build a democratic and just Malaysia.”

Moments earlier, the judges had delivered a preposterous verdict, unanimously rejecting Anwar’s final appeal against a fifteen-year prison sentence for corruption and sexual misconduct. It was a verdict that ignored emphatic denials by the supposed victims of abuse, a police report dismissing the allegations as baseless and the discrediting of critical forensic evidence. It was roundly condemned by legal experts around the world and by foreign governments, including in Washington.

Anwar’s defiant words seemed more pitiful than prescient in that moment. It would take more than twenty years for his promised day of justice to return. His appointment this week as Malaysia’s tenth prime minister after the mid-November general election closes the circle on a titanic struggle between the man once called the father of Malaysian politics and his wayward son that has consumed the country’s politics for a generation.

In 1997, Mahathir Mohamad had been Malaysia’s prime minister for sixteen years. Anwar Ibrahim was the deputy he had recruited, groomed and anointed as his successor. Their partnership fell apart spectacularly in the aftermath of the 1997 Asian financial crisis.

As finance minister, Anwar had committed to austerity measures suggested by the International Monetary Fund to rescue the battered Malaysian economy. But Mahathir, who claimed the cause of the problem was a conspiracy by global financiers, backed a slew of lavish bailouts for failing Malaysian corporations, not least his son’s shipping company. Anwar also angered Mahathir by beginning to tackle widespread corruption in the government and — as many Malaysians cheered the fall of Indonesia’s Suharto regime in May 1998 — embracing political and social reform.

Mahathir abruptly sacked Anwar that September. Three days later, police used tear gas and water cannons to break up the biggest protest rally in Malaysia’s history as more than 50,000 people took to the streets of Kuala Lumpur in support of Anwar. Malaysia’s reformasi movement was born.

That night, Anwar was arrested and detained. A week later he appeared in court with a black eye, the result of a beating in prison by police inspector-general Rahim Noor. (Rahim was later jailed for two months for the assault.) Anwar was eventually sentenced to six years’ jail for supposedly abusing his ministerial position by directing police special branch officers to pressure witnesses to retract allegations he’d had sex with his family’s driver and an illicit affair with the wife of his private secretary. (Both homosexuality and adultery are criminal offences in Malaysia.) A subsequent trial saw him also convicted for the alleged sexual offences themselves.

The Federal Court decision to uphold those verdicts in 2002 came despite evidence that Anwar’s driver had three times denied having sex with his employer and compelling evidence that police had threatened witnesses and manipulated evidence. The appeal judges also ignored an admission by police special branch chief Mohamad Said bin Awang that in 1997 — a year before Anwar’s sacking — he had sent a report to Mahathir dismissing the allegations of sexual misconduct as a whispered smear campaign.

Mahathir’s confected crucifixion of Anwar would do much more than brutally derail the career of a charismatic leader who had promised, since his earliest days as a student activist, to build a cleaner, fairer and more racially egalitarian Malaysia. It paved the way for even greater levels of cronyism and corruption within the ruling Malay elite, culminating in the kleptocracy of Najib Razak’s nine-year prime ministership from 2009 that presaged a twelve-year prison sentence. It also robbed the country, Southeast Asia and the world of a democratic and West-friendly Muslim leader committed to building a better order.

The day after emerging as leader of the most successful coalition in Malaysia’s latest general election, the now seventy-five-year-old Anwar told reporters gathered outside his home, “This you need to learn from Anwar Ibrahim — patience, wait a long time, patience.” Patience indeed. And extraordinary determination.

Anwar would spend a total of almost ten years in prison and be double-crossed a second time by Mahathir Mohamad before achieving what he believed was his destiny, and what his legions of devoted supporters among younger Malays and the country’s often marginalised Indian and Chinese minorities had long hoped for.

Anwar’s first years of imprisonment ended in late 2004, a year after Mahathir stood down as prime minister, after Malaysia’s Supreme Court overturned his conviction for sodomy. On his release, Anwar was still barred from politics but resumed de facto leadership of a resurgent opposition that went on to make a strong showing in the 2008 general election. The United Malays National Organisation, which had dominated Malaysian politics since independence in 1957, lost fifty-eight of its seats while the People’s Alliance, led by Anwar’s wife Wan Azizah, increased its numbers by sixty-one. After his ban ended, Anwar was returned to parliament in a by-election in April 2008 and resumed formal leadership of the opposition.

During the 2013 general election campaign Anwar drew massive and jubilant crowds to his rallies across the country. As I travelled with him on part of the journey, he spoke eloquently about his determination to change Malaysian politics. “The last fifteen years have certainly changed me,” he said. “You talk about freedom or reform. It is not the same when you understand what it is to be denied your freedom. My passion for justice is far more pronounced now… I can’t allow this to continue.”

His alliance would win the popular vote in that election with 50.9 per cent against 47.4 per cent for the ruling coalition, but was again thwarted by an entrenched gerrymander and allegations of widespread electoral fraud.

Nationwide protests led by Anwar rattled the government. Early the following year, as he was poised to contest and capture the premiership of Selangor State, Najib Razak dusted off the old Mahathir political playbook. On 7 March 2014, the Court of Appeal overturned Anwar’s earlier acquittal, unanimously declaring the High Court had failed to “critically evaluate” the evidence submitted by a government chemist. It rushed through a fresh sentence of five years’ imprisonment, once more disqualifying Anwar from political office. A year later, the Federal Court upheld the decision and he was sent back to jail.

Three years later, the man primarily responsible for Anwar’s torment came in search of a breathtaking favour. Now at war with the rest of the UMNO old guard, Mahathir Mohamed cut a deal with Anwar to unite their followers in a new coalition to contest the 2018 general election. Under the agreement, Mahathir would return to the prime ministership but would hand over to Anwar after an interim period.

Mahathir’s strategy worked. The new alliance led by Anwar’s Pakatan Harapan (Alliance of Hope) — its leader still behind bars — won a simple majority and Najib’s Barisan Nasional coalition was relegated to opposition. After being sworn in as prime minister, Mahathir engineered a royal pardon for Anwar. But it surprised few — including most likely Anwar himself — when Mahathir stalled and then reneged on his promise to surrender the leadership. Their coalition collapsed after twenty-two months.

If Anwar’s path to power has been strewn with landmines, the road ahead may be similarly treacherous. While his reformist Pakatan Harapan coalition won eighty-two seats in this general election to emerge as the largest political grouping, he remains well short of a majority in the 222-seat national parliament. After days of wrangling in which the rival conservative Malay alliance Perikatan Nasional, with seventy-three seats, claimed it too was poised to forge a majority with minor parties, Malaysia’s King Sultan Abdullah stepped in and appointed Anwar as prime minister.

While incumbency gives Anwar a clear advantage, and he is a highly skilled negotiator, the deep and often bitter divisions in Malaysian politics mean success is not guaranteed when the numbers are finally put to the test in the parliamentary vote of confidence the new leader has promised to call on 19 December. Not least of his challenges will be the strong electoral showing of PAS, the Malaysian Islamic Party, which is opposed to the development of a more pluralist society, an essential element of Anwar’s vision for the country.

It is more than poetic justice that Anwar’s final ascent to the top of Malaysian politics has coincided with the end of Mahathir Mohamad’s political career. The general election was a humiliating repudiation of the man who had been an irrepressible force in the country’s politics for more than half a century, including serving a total of twenty-two years as prime minister.

The ninety-seven-year-old Mahathir — who had boldly proposed himself for a third term as leader and boasted to journalists that he had a good chance of winning — came fourth in a five-way contest in his electorate on the resort island of Langkawi, this time running under the banner of his own Pejuang Party. In his first election defeat in fifty-three years in politics, Mahathir also lost his candidate’s deposit after failing to secure a minimum of 12.5 per cent of the vote. •

The post Anwar closes the circle appeared first on Inside Story.

For most of the time I was working on the book, Wong and I — and most other observers — expected her to become foreign minister after the May 2019 election, which all the polls and most pundits were tipping Labor to win. She had been preparing for the job not only for the three-plus years she had held the shadow portfolio, but also during her previous term as shadow trade minister. She had always made clear that she didn’t seek to be prime minister; foreign minister was the job she wanted and the height of her ambition.

The plan was for Indonesia to be her first post-election stop-off as minister, followed by a made-for-media return to the city of her birth, Kota Kinabalu, in Malaysian Borneo. As a powerful illustration of her story and connections and an affirmation of Australia’s place in Asia, it was a public relations coup out of reach of any previous Australian foreign minister.

But then came the election defeat, and Wong had another three years to prepare. The pandemic set in, Donald Trump lost the American presidency and Xi Jinping’s grip tightened in Beijing. Among Australia’s Pacific neighbours, Chinese influence became even more apparent.

On 2 August this year Wong, now foreign minister, gave an unpublished address to staff at the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. Acknowledging that the department had lost influence under the previous government, she declared that Australia needed DFAT to be “more central and more persuasive” in an increasingly uncertain world. To do that, she said, required “frank advice, good decisions, courageous effort, focused advocacy, and me to do my job.”

She appealed to staff to “be ambitious for Australia,” to work with her to bring foreign affairs “back to the centre of the Australian government… We need to be creative; we need to be bold… to advance Australia’s interests and values.”

It was one of a series of speeches reflecting the new minister’s vision of what she had described in opposition as a “transformational” foreign policy. Australia can’t afford to be caught passively in the slipstream of the contest between the big powers, she argued, picking up a phrase used by foreign policy analyst Allan Gyngell. Rather, it is in the “influence game” and must use all available tools of statehood to negotiate the most uncertain time in recent history.

This means DFAT staff must lift their ambitions and the quality of their advice. “I think that starts with clarity of purpose,” she told them. “What is our purpose? To explain Australia to the world and the world to Australia. To clearly articulate our place in the world — as it is, as it should be — and deliver plans to bridge that gap… We’re not here to occupy the space. We’re not here to admire the complexity of problems we face. We’re not here to mollify. We are here to advocate.”

An urgent need to visit the Pacific and a succession of other overseas trips had stopped Wong from speaking to DFAT staff sooner. Her immediate focus had been the Solomon Islands government’s decision to sign a security pact with China — a development she described during the election campaign as “the worst Australian policy failure since the second world war.”

As it turned out, her first trip as minister was to the North Pacific rather than Indonesia. The day after she was sworn in, Wong and prime minister Anthony Albanese were in Tokyo for the Quad leaders’ summit. Then, over the subsequent ninety-nine days, she made four trips to Pacific nations (to Fiji, Samoa and Tonga, New Zealand and the Solomons, and July’s Pacific Islands Forum summit in Fiji) and three to Southeast Asia (to Vietnam and Malaysia, Singapore and, twice, Indonesia).

In speeches during those visits she signalled her ambition to change how Australia is seen in the world — and her view that this is the starting point for an ambitious foreign policy agenda in which Australians will become “more than just supporting players in a grand drama of global geopolitics.”

At the Pacific Islands Forum, she avoided telling island nations what to do, instead suggesting they act regionally, as a “family,” to decide matters for themselves. The speech appeared designed to encourage a kind of peer pressure, elevating the sometimes shaky forum (from which Kiribati had just withdrawn) as a venue where the concerns of Pacific Island nations could be brought to bear externally, on larger powers, and internally on the China-friendly Solomons prime minister Manasseh Sogavare and others.

Without explicitly mentioning China, Wong said that Australia was “a partner that won’t come with strings attached, nor impose unsustainable financial burdens. We are a partner that won’t erode Pacific priorities or institutions.” She acknowledged that Australia had “neglected its responsibility” on climate change, “disrespecting Pacific nations in their struggle to adapt to what is an existential threat.” That would change, she promised, with the creation of an Australia-Pacific Climate Infrastructure Partnership to support projects in Pacific countries and Timor-Leste. She also won the leaders’ support for a joint pitch to co-host the UN’s COP29 climate summit in 2024.

This is what Wong calls “listen first” diplomacy: meeting people where they are rather than where you want them to be. It is far from easy.

A blow-up with Sogavare came when he announced he would delay the Solomons’ 2023 election because the country didn’t have the funds to run the poll in the same year as it hosts the Pacific Games. Wong’s offer of Australia’s help to pay for the election wasn’t novel — similar assistance has been given before — but its timing while the relevant bill was before the Solomons parliament provoked a furious reaction. Wong was attempting to “directly interfere into our domestic affairs,” Sogavare thundered, though he went on to accept the funding and delay the election regardless.

The federal opposition portrayed the incident as a blunder on Wong’s part. But others in the foreign policy community point out that she rarely speaks without calculation and may well have wanted Solomon Islanders to know that Sogavare’s excuse for the delay had been removed.

More broadly, Wong wants to engage with other small and middle powers in the region to define and articulate a common interest in building a “peaceful, prosperous region in which sovereignty is respected.” She hopes this will ultimately help shape how the superpowers behave.

In dealing with the countries of Southeast Asia, Wong has emphasised the centrality of ASEAN, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations — the body that Kevin Rudd has described as the “swing state” in the battle for regional dominance between China and the United States. As Wong said last November, “the countries of Southeast Asia have made clear they don’t want to choose between the great powers — but want to exercise their own agency in how the region is being reshaped.”

As Allan Gyngell wrote in his 2017 book Fear of Abandonment, Australian foreign policy has always assumed dependence on a great power — first Britain and then the United States. The fear in Gyngell’s title has never been more keenly felt than now. Australia watched as the United States under Barack Obama promised to “pivot” to Asia but then failed to deliver. It tried to decipher the chaos of the Trump administration, which seemed to be abandoning America’s global mission to defend an international order on which the security of middle powers like Australia depends.

These shifts underlined Gyngell’s view about the dangers of being caught in the great powers’ slipstreams. Australia’s historical preference for hunkering down in the company of allies no longer serves the times, he argues. Gyngell is one of the foreign policy analysts Wong most admires.

Has Australia in any sense punched above its weight in foreign policy over the decades? The answer would certainly have been “yes” in the 1970s and 80s, when prime minister Malcolm Fraser played a role in creating a post-apartheid future for South Africa by using the Commonwealth as a venue for the defence of human rights. Fraser’s government also brought a practical end to the White Australia policy, changing the face of the nation with migrants from Southeast Asia.

“Yes,” as well, under the succeeding Labor government of Bob Hawke, when the man generally regarded as Australia’s most successful foreign minister, Gareth Evans, increased Australia’s engagement with Asia and articulated the concept of Australia as a middle power. His achievements included initiating a UN peace plan for Cambodia and helping establish both the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum and the ASEAN Regional Forum.

But most observers would have answered “no” in recent years, as Australia became a laggard in climate policy and lost credibility in its natural sphere of influence, the Pacific. For island governments, rising sea levels are an existential issue.

Coming into this mix, Penny Wong is an extraordinary package. She is a self-conscious intellectual and policy wonk. As well as foreign minister she is the leader of the government in the Senate, and is generally regarded as the intellectual leader of Labor’s left, which is also Anthony Albanese’s faction. She is one of the prime minister’s closest allies and friends.

As she told Singapore’s International Institute for Strategic Studies in one of her first speeches after the election, she is far from the first Australian foreign minister to recognise the importance of relationships with Southeast Asia. “But I am the first to make these statements as an Australian foreign minister who is from Southeast Asia.”

Wong’s history binds together central themes in Australia’s development. On both sides of her family she is the product of British colonialism and its impact on the region. On her mother’s side, she is as deeply rooted in Australia as is possible for someone not of Aboriginal ancestry. Her great-great-great-grandparents migrated from Britain to what became the colony of South Australia in 1836, refugees from the exigencies of the industrial revolution. On her father’s side, she is the descendant of Cantonese Chinese recruited to labour on the vast tobacco and timber plantations and in the tin mines by the British North Borneo Company.

Wong’s most powerful understanding of her Chinese ancestry comes from the experiences of her Hakka grandmother, Lai Fung Shim, who singlehandedly ensured the survival of the family line during the brutal Japanese wartime occupation of Borneo in the early 1940s. Francis Yit Shing Wong, Penny Wong’s father, was Lai Fung Shim’s oldest child.

Francis Wong was a beneficiary of the postwar Colombo Plan, which sponsored academically able Asians to study in Australia. His decision to enrol in architecture at the University of Adelaide meant that — as Wong put it in a speech in Kuala Lumpur in late June — “a charming young Malaysian man could meet a bold young Australian woman.”

With the White Australia policy still in force, the newly married couple couldn’t stay in Australia. They settled in Francis’s hometown of Kota Kinabalu, where Penny Wong was born in 1968. North Borneo had been a British protectorate when Francis left for South Australia; by the time he returned it was part of the new nation of Malaysia.

After the marriage broke down, Wong’s mother took her and her brother back to Adelaide. They were the only Asian faces in their suburban primary school. The racism Wong suffered, and the strength she developed in surviving it, became a defining feature of her personality.

Only when prime minister Paul Keating declared in 1992 that the fall of Singapore was as important to the Australian story as Gallipoli, and the war casualties in Malaysia and Borneo as important as those in Europe, did Wong conclude that Australia was her home. When her plane touched down in Adelaide after a visit to her father that year, she thought to herself, “This is my country now. This is my place.”

It is this sense of the nation that Wong describes as central to an effective foreign policy. The time has come to stop championing the Anglosphere, she has said: “Foreign policy starts with who we are.” Australia, she told the Pacific Islands Forum, is a country with 270 ancestries, including the world’s oldest continuous culture. “This gives us the capacity to reach into every corner of the world and say, ‘we share common ground.’”

Wong has urged the leaders of Pacific Island nations and the countries of ASEAN to join Australia in attempting to shape a “settling point” between the United States, Australia’s most important ally, and China, its biggest trading partner. She has also referred approvingly to Kevin Rudd’s view that Australia and the countries of the region should seek “managed strategic competition” between China and the United States “within a set of minimum guardrails to reduce the risk of escalation, crisis, conflict and war.”

Wong has talked of moving Australia beyond reliance on the United States to a more activist role: unapologetic and robust in defending core democratic values, retaining the centrality of the alliance but seeking cooperation with China where possible. More than this, and although it is not explicitly stated, Wong clearly hopes to provide the United States with ideas about how to engage with the countries of the region without playing into Chinese narratives about arrogant, interfering white colonialists.

In Kuala Lumpur, she described ASEAN as “holding the centre of the Indo-Pacific.” Its strength, she said, “lies in its ability to speak for the region and to balance regional powers. All countries that seek to work with the region have a responsibility to engage constructively and respectfully with it.”

Wong first articulated the “settling point” concept during a speech to the Centre for Strategic and International Studies in Jakarta in September 2019, when she was still in opposition. US leadership would be most effective, she said, “when it is conceived in terms of leading a community of nations, with all that entails.” Beijing, too, should recognise that “most of us in the region are not comfortable with an authoritarian China becoming the predominant power.”

With Donald Trump still in the White House, she went on: “It’s fair to say that many countries in the region are unclear about what precisely it is that the United States is seeking to achieve… Absent that clarity, China will assume the worst… Great powers will do what great powers do to assert their interests. But the rest of us are not without our own agency.”

A “settling point” would mean the United States embracing a multipolar future for the region “with countries like Indonesia, India and Japan playing increasingly important leadership roles… Defining a realistic settling point will also help the United States recognise and accept that decisions relating to China will vary depending on the issues and interests at stake.” It would also remind Beijing that “when we make decisions that defend or assert our national interests in ways that may not reflect China’s views it is not due to a cold war mentality.” People who value the United States’ leadership, she said, “want the US to retain it by lifting its game, not spoiling China’s.”

She has repeated those ideas in several speeches, though since taking government the language has been more subtle. “Settling point” is still mentioned, but the emphasis has shifted to “strategic equilibrium.”

Another strand of Wong’s thinking, not yet fully articulated, is a promise to put the history of Australia’s Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people at the centre of foreign policy. She has appointed a First Nations ambassador within her department, and when she was accompanied to the UN General Assembly in September by senator Pat Dodson, who hosted a roundtable on First Nations foreign policy involving Canada, New Zealand and other countries with Indigenous populations.

Wong has also indicated that Australia will be following a more active investment policy in Southeast Asia — with more detail clearly to come. This move recognises that China’s pitch for influence is overwhelmingly economic rather than military or cultural, and any response needs to be in kind.

China will continue to be a key challenge. Wong neither endorsed nor criticised US House speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan, but she labelled China’s response as excessive and called for “restraint and de-escalation.” She described a new UN report on China’s detention of the Uighurs as “harrowing reading” and acknowledged it had found allegations of torture to be credible; but she also said that Australia’s response would be decided in consultation with other countries. Unlike the previous government, she is not putting Australia on the front line of conflict with China, but nor is she taking a backward step on key values.

Equally significant is what she doesn’t do, and doesn’t say. In the days after those comments, every serious current affairs program in Australia sought her out for an interview. That she declined them all might have created a background level of frustration, but it enabled her to duck the inevitable question about Taiwan. Would Australia, push comes to shove, join the United States in a military conflict with China?

The former government’s defence minister, opposition leader Peter Dutton, said last November that it was “inconceivable” Australia would not join in. But Wong has been keen to dial down the rhetorical heat. “More strategy, less politics” is her strategy. “Talk less, do more.”

With the Pacific dominating her first weeks in power, it was June before Wong made that long-planned return to Kota Kinabalu. The visit came complete with the perfect photo opportunity: the minister and her Chinese Malaysian half-siblings eating fish ball juk and noodles in the cafe she loved as a child. The message was explicit: this was her story, but it was also contemporary Australia’s.

Given that opinion polls suggest the Albanese government has increased its popularity since its election win, Wong is likely to have at least two three-year terms to enact and develop her foreign policy approach.

Will it work? Perhaps, in these bellicose times, it is optimistic to suppose that middle powers can have the agency Wong seeks. One strand in Australian foreign policy commentary doubts that the United States is really committed to the region — and believes Washington might well conclude its essential interests are not at stake there. Having accepted the Asia-Pacific would become a sphere of Chinese influence, it would then depart, leaving a friendless Australia carrying the can for the United States’ China containment policies.

In a recent Quarterly Essay Hugh White suggested the battle is already effectively over and China has won. Australia should tell the United States to surrender Taiwan to Beijing and then begin to talk to China about its role in the new hegemony.

On the other hand, foreign policy scholars and politicians agree that Australia does have influence in Washington. As the head of the US Studies Centre at Sydney University, Michael Green, put it in a response to White, “the strategic community on Asia policy in DC is pretty small and also very impressionable. If there are good ideas from trusted partners like Australia, they go right to the top.”

The good idea, from Wong and the thinkers she respects, is to listen first, shun binary thinking, and accept a multipolar region in a rules-based world. All this, and attempt to maintain mutual respect.

If Wong is successful in shifting the dial, Australia will once again have punched above its weight, claiming agency in the region, allied to but not necessarily always following the United States. It will have helped shape the behaviour of regional forums and the superpowers, and perhaps even contributed to avoiding war. •

Funding for this article from the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund is gratefully acknowledged.

The post Making up for lost time appeared first on Inside Story.

Few of those foreign students spend more liberally than the 6000-odd Singaporeans who study in Australia each year, arriving from one of Asia’s wealthiest nations. In splashing their cash, they’ve contributed to the $40 billion bounty enjoyed by Australian colleges and universities in return for educating some of Asia’s brightest.

Curiously, these Singaporeans are unlikely to have been such good earners for Optus, the Australian telco they ultimately part-own. Like citizens and taxpayers back home, they help buttress the state-owned corporate colossus known as “Singapore Inc.,” which owns Singtel, Singapore’s dominant telco and Optus’s parent. No, they haven’t suddenly joined Australia’s horror at Optus’s mishandling of its customers’ intimate information: the company appears to have been cancelled by Singaporeans long before embattled chief executive Kelly Bayer Rosmarin became a household name.

These Singaporeans come to Australia knowing their leaders back home in Singapore are champion snoopers and might like to keep an eye on them even when they go abroad. For many Singaporeans, studying in Australia gives access to the intellectual liberties fundamental to our centres of learning: open debate, pluralism, privacy, an untrammelled internet and freedom of speech, some of the stuff Singaporeans don’t get profound experience of back home.

With its Singapore Inc. ownership, though, Optus’s reach creates a Hotel California for some Singaporeans. They might be able to check out of the island state any time they like, but if they choose Optus for their digital needs they may never really leave official Singapore’s reach. There’s never been any evidence of Optus snooping for Singapore, but its critics take no chances, choosing anyone-but-Optus for their SIM cards in case the tentacles of the regime catch them doing, saying, reading or studying something self-preservation dictates they don’t risk back home.

Surveillance has helped keep Singapore’s ruling People’s Action Party in uninterrupted power for sixty-three years, and being monitored is presumed a part of daily life in the highly wired city-state. Singaporeans have normalised this intrusion, assuming their autocratic government tracks their movements, their contacts and calls simply because it can, in a circular system that advances efficiency and suppresses dissent because it sees dissent coming.

This widespread belief gives rise to a curious tic common to many Singaporeans, which I came to call the Singapore Swivel when I was based there as a foreign correspondent through the 2000s. It occurs when small talk advances to an opinion and the interlocutor whispers “off the record” as his or her head pivots left-to-right-to-centre, scanning to see who’s in earshot. Singaporean authorities don’t mind their citizens thinking they are monitoring them, even as they strenuously deny it happens; it’s all part of the machinery. One memorable TV ad promoting Singapore’s navy even showed a submarine crew busily going about tasks onboard before raising the periscope to monitor Singaporeans on land going about theirs.

Control is everything, and Singapore is so skilled at it that snooping has turned into a good little earner for Singapore Inc., generating millions from the sale of surveillance expertise, equipment and systems to despotic regimes like Myanmar’s military junta. But sometimes controllers slip up and get exposed, like when Singtel and Singapore’s home ministry were discovered sifting through the computers of 200,000 SingNet subscribers, their clumsy intrusion detected by a subscriber operating basic anti-hacker software. Investigators of the Optus leak might wish to note Singtel-Optus’s argument with Canberra about how sophisticated — or not — that breach was.

Singapore’s snooping instinct also extends to surveilling its own citizens abroad. One of the world’s leading authorities on Singapore, Australian academic Garry Rodan, knows this concern all too well. “If I was a Singaporean critic of the PAP who was an international student in Australia, and I’ve met quite a few of them over the years, then taking out an Optus account would not have been a natural choice,” he told me last week. “Many students probably headed straight for Telstra or someone else because, even before the advent of sophisticated media and surveillance, these students suspected plants in tutorials reporting to offices and agencies about their criticisms of the Singapore government whilst in Australia. Against this background, signing up with Optus was perceived by some as potentially amplifying the risk of surveillance.”

For years, Singapore’s behaviour in Australia was an open secret that didn’t much stir anyone except its targets. Singaporeans might wonder who ratted on them if they get pulled aside for “random” drug testing upon returning home. But when Singapore’s snooping gets too egregious, Canberra quietly tells it to cut it out. Diplomatically, it does so also knowing that Singapore’s patriarchal philosopher-king Lee Kuan Yew was Australia’s most reliable friend in an often-peevish region dominated by corrupt Suhartos, recalcitrant Mahathirs and their wobbly successors.

Singapore is hardly a democracy (only the ruling parties of China, North Korea and Cuba have been in power longer than the Lees’ People’s Action Party) but it doesn’t kill its own dissidents like China, Burma and Thailand have. A pivotal ASEAN member, it didn’t arc up at Australia’s intervention in East Timor after 1999 either, risking its own interests in a resentful Indonesia. And though a red-for-Chinese dot in a green-for-Islam archipelago, nor did it wobble after 9/11 and Bali in the war on terror.

Yes, the nannyish PAP runs what is effectively a one-party state with a carefully cultivated facade of democracy (traceable ballots anyone?) and a separate legal system, but it has been a benevolent dictatorship in the main, even as its leaders sue domestic critics and opponents into oblivion. And, besides, there’s the food, the hotels and the shopping that makes oh-so-clean Singapore such an easy, cordial place to visit. How can it possibly be sinister?

Singapore Inc. — the expression of Singapore’s state-as-corporation governance model — centres on two state-owned enterprises, Temasek Holdings and the Government Investment Corporation, or GIC. Since 1959, the island has been a Lee family fiefdom, led for decades by Lee Kuan Yew himself and, since 2004, by his eldest son Lee Hsien Loong. During its decades in power, the PAP has largely delivered for Singapore, economically at least. With no natural resources apart from an energetic population and its strategic location where the Indian and Pacific oceans meet, this tiny island is hailed internationally as a swamp-through-semiconductor-to-skyscraper success.

LKY, who died in 2015, was much admired internationally, and his leadership model imitated by authoritarian regimes around the world. It’s evident in Putin’s Russia, Modi’s India, Xi’s China, Duterte’s and now Marcos Jnr’s Philippines, across Africa and among the central Asian ’stans, among the many who’ve beaten a path to Singapore for tips. The Lee model has many Western admirers, too, particularly among chief executives of the Fortune Global 500. Britain’s apprentice prime minister Liz Truss has her own low-tax Singapore-on-Thames aspirations, though they became more like Harare-on-Thames on delivery in late September.

The Singapore model holds that a citizenry is best served by an appointed elite in charge of a smooth-running corporate state, and that sustained economic success can be achieved without meaningful political liberalisation. Democracy doesn’t feature much. If that elite happens to include members of the ruling family then so be it; Singapore Inc.’s boosters insist it’s a meritocracy, and will threaten legal action against anyone who says otherwise.

By that measure, current PM Lee Hsien Loong’s wife Ho Ching — who ran Temasek for almost twenty years and one of its major offshoots, the arms-maker Singapore Technologies, for five years before that — was clearly the best person for both those jobs. Just as Hsien Loong’s brother Hsien Yang was the right man to run Singtel for twelve years — he presided over the Optus deal in 2001 — before he fell out with his PM brother and became a dissident of sorts. And obviously, PM Lee himself is the best person to also chair the GIC, the world’s third-largest sovereign wealth fund with more than $25 billion invested in Australian shares, infrastructure and property alone, just as his father was before him.

Profits are maximised, and dissent minimised, if trusted aides run things without their rule being challenged or even questioned. When Singapore Inc. spinners insist their empire is run according to world’s best practice, Singaporeans are obliged to believe that, and the markets are too. No matter that GIC director and Singapore Inc. lion Koh Boon Hwee once sat on forty-seven boards, including the state governance outfit that made recommendations about how many boards people like him should be allowed to sit on.

Singaporeans get little chance to decide or even debate who will manage their national nest eggs, or how, or call them to account if required. But don’t suggest Singapore Inc. is nepotistic or cronified, or that the country’s politics and business are interconnected or dynastic, lest it draw a libel lawsuit that history suggests, if it’s tried in Singapore, the defendant is sure to lose. A dependable legal system is another cornerstone of Singapore Inc.

When I reported from Singapore, an anonymous samizdat document would often be exchanged among diplomats, correspondents, academics and the tiny band of locals who would bravely question how the national finances were being managed. Entitled “Why It Might Be Difficult for the Government to Withdraw from Business,” it listed the hundreds of senior posts in Singapore Inc. enterprises held by members of the ruling family, by current and former government officials, by members of parliament, and by past and present military commanders. Well-researched and cross-referenced, it became a handbook of Singapore Inc.

That who’s who of the island state’s corporate elite might inform the Australian regulators probing Optus that Singapore Inc.’s clubbishness is evident at Optus’ parent Singtel too, where members can’t help but bump into each other. Singtel’s chairman is local lawyer Lee Theng Kiat, a long-time colleague of Singapore PM Lee Hsien Loong’s wife Ho Ching at another Temasek offshoot, Singapore Technologies. Lee Theng Kiat is also a director at Temasek, which owns Singtel and Optus.

The lead “independent” director on Singtel’s board is Gautam Banerjee, investment giant Blackstone’s chairman in Singapore. Banerjee also sits on Singtel’s risk committee, the one with the Optus headache. Blackstone is 4 per cent owned by Temasek, and the two companies co-own and run a $1 billion investment fund. Like Koh Boon Hwee, who was chairman of Singtel when it did the Optus deal, Banerjee is a director of the GIC sovereign fund that’s chaired by Singapore’s PM Lee, whose wife now chairs the Temasek Trust.

A fellow director of Lee and Banerjee and Koh’s on the GIC’s board is Loh Boon Chye, the chief executive of SGX, Singapore’s stock exchange. Koh is also on the SGX board, and will become chairman in January. SGX’s major shareholder is — you guessed it — Temasek, along with Banerjee’s Blackstone.

Singtel is the SGX’s second-biggest listed company after another Temasek satellite, DBS, one of Asia’s biggest banks, chaired by Peter Seah Lim Huat. Seah is a former chairman of Temasek-controlled Singapore Technologies, which PM Lee’s wife Ho Ching also chaired. And Seah is yet another director of the GIC’s state sovereign fund with Koh, Banerjee and Loh, with PM Lee serving as chair. Conflicts of interest? Nothing to see here.

Singtel’s Optus deal in 2001 attracted much concern. Critics feared an authoritarian foreign regime was buying a strategic Australian communication asset that had defence contracts. Seven Network owner Kerry Stokes said then that if Canberra’s Foreign Investment Review Board allowed the deal, it would demonstrate a “naive approach to national security.” Australia’s communications minister of the day, Richard Alston, was disquieted about the role the Singaporean government might play in managing Optus. Ross Babbage, a former defence secretary and now an international security consultant, articulated the view of many in Australian defence circles concerned about Singapore’s “congenital” inclination to secretly collect and pass on information.

But Coalition treasurer Peter Costello’s FIRB jogged on. Costello had turned down Royal Dutch Shell’s bid for Woodside on national interest grounds months earlier, and some within the Howard government were worried another FIRB refusal might affect Australia’s reputation as being open for foreign investment. It also helped Canberra thinking that Optus’s vendor was already foreign, the British company Cable & Wireless. (Melbourne Liberal Party stalwart Charles Goode, then the chairman of ANZ Bank, was also Woodside chairman at the time and had been on Temasek’s Singapore Airlines board for two years, a power network that suggests it’s not only the Singapore corporate elite that get cosy.)

Singapore got its Australian asset, and two decades later Singtel controls an Asia-Pacific regional communications network that includes an Australian military satellite.

Australian commentators noted in 2001 that this was Singapore Inc.’s first major deal in a robust Western democracy and that Singapore might learn from Australia’s corporate culture, with its mandated transparency reporting procedures, its open media and its shareholder activism. All that might lead tightly wound Singapore into loosening up, they hoped.

On the evidence of its initial instinct to turn inward during the data leak drama, holding back information and trying to shift blame, the opposite appears to have happened. Quickly lawyering up in Singapore, Singtel implored its shareholders to ignore media commentary on the Optus scandal as “speculative,” insisting a class action would be “vigorously defended” even as it was announcing an “independent” review to determine what actually happened.

Also revealingly, Singapore’s state-controlled press has tended to publish straight international wire reports on the scandal instead of reports from its own reporters and commentators — as Singapore’s editors tend to do when they’re unsure about where their government masters will land.

So much of Singapore Inc. is about control. We won’t know for some time how the Optus leak will be resolved, but Singapore’s elite will be discomfited that it has a huge asset it can’t fully control. And that it has shone an unwelcome spotlight on Singapore Inc. that might, just might, throw more light on how it operates. •

The post Singapore swivel appeared first on Inside Story.

I rode up an escalator from Somerset station into a small park shaded with trees — another thing Singapore does well. In the distance I saw an old man standing on a path, holding up a pile of books for sale. As I got closer, I recognised him: Singapore’s long-time opposition leader, J.B. Jeyaretnam. Bankrupted and driven out of parliament by repeated defamation suits from the Lee family rubber-stamped by compliant courts, the former London-trained barrister was now reduced to selling his own books in a park. Thank God Australia’s not like this, I thought.

Twenty years on, I found myself in Singapore again, a tourist seeking to escape Australia’s long lockdown and rejoin the world. We’re free to fly anywhere, but in fact there are fewer than fifty flights a day out of Australia, and almost a third of them are Singapore Airlines and its budget carrier Scoot flying to and from Singapore. Well, I thought, why not? The Covid paperwork was demanding but not oppressive, and everything we’ve come to like about Singapore is still there: the sheer efficiency of the place, the buzz of modernity in its architecture and technology, the trees everywhere deflecting the heat, the range of experiences on offer, great food and even great coffee just around the corner.

I had a ball. But my mind kept coming back to the place itself: it must have changed, but how? It’s thirty-one years since its formative leader, the bullying genius Lee Kuan Yew, stepped aside to become “senior minister” to his successor, Goh Chok Tong. In 2004 Goh in turn stepped down for Lee’s eldest son, Lee Hsien Loong, who remains Singapore’s leader today.

The Lee dynasty will end with him. The mere suggestion of a third generation evoked so much opposition that his children (all of whom spell their names Li) ruled out careers in politics. But rule by the People’s Action Party appears set to continue indefinitely. It has not lost an election since 1955, and it has no intention of allowing that to happen anytime again.

Singapore, writes commentator Cherian George, is still a country where you have to weigh up the potential consequences for your career before expressing opposition to any government action. (And George speaks from experience: his own criticisms of the government led to his being repeatedly rejected for permanency at the prestigious Nanyang Technological University.)

It is not feasible for a tourist to organise interviews while on a trip, so books became my way of discovering how Singapore has changed. Interesting to note that Singapore’s government allows itself to be criticised in books, but not on film. You can find books on the political opponents monstered by Lee Kuan Yew in Singapore’s bookstores, but a much-praised film interviewing some of them, To Singapore, with Love, remains banned. The rationale? Ordinary people don’t read books on politics, but they do watch films.

Four books came home with me: three by people who want Singapore to be more open and  democratic, and one examining how Singapore got many things right by doing them its own way.

Jeevan Vasagar, a British journalist of Sri Lankan Tamil ancestry, was the Financial Times correspondent in Singapore, and his Lion City: Singapore and the Invention of Modern Asia is an excellent introduction to today’s Singapore. Chua Mui Hoong, a columnist for Singapore’s main paper, the Straits Times, is a wary social critic whose Singapore, Disrupted brings together some of her favourite columns. And Cherian George, once her colleague, has recently published a collection of more substantial essays as Air-conditioned Nation Revisited. (Lee Kuan Yew once famously said that the air conditioner was the greatest twentieth-century invention because it allowed people in the tropics to keep working rather than fall asleep in the heat.)

Within Singapore’s establishment, legal academic and diplomat Tommy Koh is a prominent figure at the liberal reformist end of the spectrum. In editing Fifty Secrets of Singapore’s Success, he celebrates things Singapore has done well: from monetary policy to its national airline, fighting corruption, the Singaporean maths system, parks, public toilets, Changi airport… There’s a long list, all worthy, even if some chapters are superficial.

Singapore has a lot to celebrate. It also has a lot that needs changing. Its rulers have a great appetite for celebrations, but very little appetite for political reform.

Singapore in 2021 is a richer version of Singapore in 1981. Economic success cohabits with political repression. Its economic choices have become more complex as it has become a rich nation, but it remains a stand-out performer. Yet there has been little growth in social and political freedom, where it is a stand-out non-performer, lagging far behind its potential.

Take the economy first. On the usual measure for comparing countries, real GDP per head, Singapore sure is a stand-out: the International Monetary Fund ranks its GDP per head, adjusted for price differences, as the second-highest in the world, behind only Luxembourg, and twice Australia’s.

But that is meaningless. The scale of corporate profit-shifting means tax havens now dominate the top of that IMF ranking — and Singapore is one of them. Comparisons of household consumption per head, though imperfect, are a better measure of real living standards.

On the World Bank’s measure, Singapore in 2020 enjoyed the seventh-highest consumption of goods and services per head of any country, in real terms, behind the United States (first) and just ahead of Australia (ninth). I’d take that with a grain of salt too, but there is no question that what was once an impoverished colony has become a rich country, and is on track to become one of the richest.

The title of an old book on how Singapore did it, Strategic Pragmatism, sums it up well. Rather than follow the precepts of eighteenth-century economic liberalism, Singapore has carved out its own way, testing what works and designing its own solutions. Taxes are low, but as Vasagar puts it, whereas in Hong Kong the tycoons used to dictate to the government, “it is the government that is supreme in Singapore.” Through its investment arm, Temasek Holdings, it is the major shareholder in a third of the companies on Singapore’s Straits Times index. And its reach is everywhere.

You want to buy a home? Well, the vast majority of Singapore’s housing is owned by the government and simply leased out to buyers. You can buy a home, but only for the remaining length of its ninety-nine-year lease, and then you have to surrender it to the government. (At least that’s the official line: it will be interesting to see whether they stick to it when the crunch comes.)

Singapore has 5.5 million people on an island of just 729 square kilometres, so 95 per cent of homes are apartments. If you want to buy one, you need to check first that doing so would not disturb the racial balance of the apartment complex. Apart from its worker dormitories for those it calls “non-residents” (we’ll come to them), Singapore enforces a racial mix in every block, to break down racial stereotypes and prevent ghettos forming.

You want to buy a car? Well, you’ll have to bid for a licence to own one. That alone will set you back around $50,000 (the Singapore dollar currently is virtually on par with the Aussie) because the government enforces a quota on car ownership. That effectively means only the well-off can own a car. Again, it’s for good reasons: roads already occupy too much of Singapore’s limited space, so the government has invested to create world-class train and bus services instead.

You want to go on strike for a wage rise? Think again: Vasagar tells us the last legal strike was in 1986. Singapore’s core economic strategy has been to make itself a haven for foreign investment. It has tailored its economic policies to make itself irresistibly attractive as an operational centre for global players. Allowing strikes, or rapid wage rises, doesn’t fit with that goal.

It is true that Singapore practises small government in one sense: there are few welfare payments — no pensions, no unemployment benefits — and healthcare is basically user-pays unless you run into really big hospital bills.

But the government can avoid those costs because it requires workers to put 20 per cent of their modest salaries into the government-run Central Provident Fund. You can dip into those savings, on certain conditions, to buy a home or pay hospital bills. The system also originally served a second goal by providing the government with cheap funds for its large infrastructure agenda, but gradually the focus has shifted more towards meeting the saver’s needs.

The common thread in all of this is that government plays the central role. Since it was divorced by Malaysia in 1965, Singapore’s government has established or expanded centralised systems to deal with issue after issue. It runs one of the world’s most activist industry policies: it decides which industries it wants and what it will offer to get them, and then pursues the big global players to get them to locate some of their operations in Singapore.

Initially, the focus was on establishing Singapore as a base for manufactured exports, and that remains a core part of its policy. Singapore’s manufacturing output has swollen threefold since the turn of the century, whereas Australia’s has grown barely at all. Singapore remains a big producer of semiconductors and other IT and electronics goods, a huge centre of oil refining and petrochemicals, and a growing global pharmaceuticals hub. Manufacturing still comprises 20 per cent of Singapore’s economy, whereas it has shrunk to just 6 per cent of Australia’s.

But over time, Singapore’s focus has expanded to logistics and services. Having inherited a great seaport from the British, Singapore has kept investing heavily to expand and modernise the port to make it the best in the world. It applied the same attitude in reclaiming coastal land at Changi, building a new airport and constantly upgrading it to keep it the world’s best.

The books by Vasagar and Koh explain well how its leaders realised in the mid 1980s that manufacturing alone was not enough; Singapore must equally become a leader in service industries. Its traditional role as the commercial hub of Southeast Asia was expanded to make it one of the logistics centres of the world. It wooed global service companies as keenly as it had sought manufacturers, offering tax holidays and permanently low taxes if they set up regional operations centres in Singapore. (That’s the policy that led to its becoming a tax haven.) And it set out to make Singapore the financial centre of Asia.

Another crucial decision Singapore made around that time was to change the goal and methods of its monetary policy. At a time when countries like Australia were allowing financial markets to set the value of their currency, and telling their central banks to target low inflation, Singapore went in the opposite direction. It decided its monetary policy should aim to provide stable exchange rates, reducing the risks for industries competing in global markets. The Monetary Authority of Singapore built up a large war chest it could use to prevent the markets taking the dollar outside its comfort zone.

It is the polar opposite of the policy successive Australian governments and the Reserve Bank adopted when they allowed the mining booms to send the Aussie dollar skyrocketing, at the cost of firms competing in global markets. From the start of the first mining boom in 2004, Australia’s manufacturing output per head slumped by an astonishing 25 per cent over the next fourteen years, as the inflated dollar made otherwise viable firms uncompetitive.

Even now, on the IMF’s estimates, Australia’s price level is the seventh-highest in the world, comparable to prices in Scandinavia and remote Pacific islands. By contrast, Singapore’s dollar has been held at levels that keep down production costs. The US dollar buys 83 per cent more goods and services in Singapore than it does in Australia.

This did not happen by accident. The best chapters in Koh’s book — including Peter Wilson’s chapter on monetary policy, and Gopinath Menon’s on transport policy — provide a quick sketch of the choices policymakers faced, and why they chose the policies they did. I wish the book had fewer, longer chapters that might have explained the same process in other areas; some former policymakers who contributed chapters used their pages simply to pat themselves on the back.

Vasagar sums up lessons from Singapore’s success that we should never forget. “Singapore works because it appoints diligent and talented people to positions of leadership,” he concluded. “The system roots out corruption. Its leaders are unabashed about stealing effective ideas from elsewhere… There is a strong emphasis on managerial ability rather than effectiveness at campaigning or winning battles of ideas.”

And that is the link between Singapore’s advanced economy and its retarded democracy. Its ministers don’t need to worry about campaigning or trying to win the popular argument, because the system makes them electorally invulnerable. And so, as Lee Kuan Yew put it memorably in his 1986 National Day speech, “We decide what is right — never mind what the people think.”

The common theme of the books by Vasagar, George and Chua is that Singapore’s leaders need to cast off that mindset. The rule of Goh Chok Tong and Lee Hsien Loong has softened the way Singapore’s authoritarianism is applied, but without changing its fundamental role. The state is just as powerful as it was twenty years ago. The people are just as powerless.

Every institution with power in Singapore is effectively an arm of the government. There is no free press: the media is either government-owned or controlled by the government’s right to appoint its boards, and the opposition has little access to it. There is no independent judiciary; no minister has ever lost a defamation case in Singapore’s courts. There are no trade unions independent of government. The relatively few NGOs must operate warily to avoid incurring the wrath of the ministers and officials whose decisions they comment on.

There is no right of assembly: to hold a meeting of five or more people requires a permit from the police. There is no ombudsman, no charter of human rights, no freedom of information legislation. Singapore has world-class engineering infrastructure, but little of the infrastructure of democracy as we know it.

It does have free elections. But even they are held on boundaries drawn up by the government to maximise its chances, including a strange system of dividing most of the city into seventeen winner-take-all wards electing four or five candidates on a single ticket. (That partly backfired at last year’s election when the Workers’ Party won two of the wards, and opposition slates came close in two others.) And those elections are held in an environment in which the government has all the power, and has shown ruthlessness in using it to maintain its control.

Cherian George cites a telling example. In Europe, Australia and elsewhere, governments have been grappling with ways to deal with fake news and baseless slanders on the internet. Singapore has acted — but solely to give the government the right to require Facebook and the rest either to post its response to any online posts it considers inaccurate alongside the original comment, or to remove the posts. Only the government is protected against fake news, and only it can decide what is fake news.

Initially, the government allowed debate on the fake-news legislation. But when it appeared it was losing the argument — with even the publishers of the Straits Times urging that an independent regulator rule on disputes — it cracked down. The debate suddenly ended, critics were shut out of the media, and their patriotism was questioned by government MPs. George adds: “Such nationalist dog whistles unleashed troll attacks, in a style reminiscent of… populist movements overseas.”

Why doesn’t the government trust Singaporeans with the freedoms people have in countries like Taiwan, South Korea, Indonesia and the democracies of Europe, America and the South Pacific? George argues that most Singaporeans would re-elect it anyway, because they think it’s mostly doing a good job. Perhaps it is the lack of crisis that explains its refusal to open up: since it likes having all the power, and faces no threat of defeat, why bother with popular reforms?

George cites another example: the succession. Lee Hsien Loong will turn seventy in February, and has had serious health issues. In the previous parliament, one of his two deputy prime ministers was a widely admired Tamil economist-turned-politician, Tharman Shanmugaratnam. Chosen by his global peers to chair the ministerial committee overseeing the International Monetary Fund from 2011 to 2015, Tharman was seen by Singaporeans as a progressive reformer. A poll in 2016 found 69 per cent of Singaporeans would support him to be prime minister, twice as much as any other candidate. Why not do so?

“Tharman is uniquely equipped to guide Singapore,” George writes. “He is a world-class policy wonk who also happens to be extremely popular. He has won over the public, not with empty rhetoric or simplistic solutions, but through his palpable sincerity in wanting to build a country where people are treated with dignity and (their needs met), whether those needs are economic or more intangible.”

But to appoint a Tamil as prime minister of a predominantly Chinese country? It was too much for the People’s Action Party. In late 2018, Lee announced that Tharman, then just sixty-one, would step down to become senior minister, and the new deputy prime minister — effectively the heir apparent — would be fellow minister Heng Swee Keat. Too honest for his own good, Heng later told a university forum that the older generation was not ready for a non-Chinese prime minister.

It was a near-fatal misreading of a proudly multiracial people. At the 2020 election, Heng almost lost his seat, while Tharman’s slate won the highest vote in the country. A year later, Heng stepped down, and the succession is now unclear. Another opportunity to move forward was lost.

Let’s close by noting three interrelated issues confronting Singapore’s society and government.

The first is common to all the new rich countries of Asia: South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and even China. The workaholic culture and rising expectations that have fostered their economic success have also seriously eroded their fertility rate — so much that Chinese Singaporean women now give birth at the rate of just 0.94 babies over their lifetimes, and Indian Singaporeans 0.96. (Malay Singaporeans, who tend to be less well-off, have a far higher fertility rate of 1.82.)

The overall fertility rate of 1.10 is barely half the rate needed for zero population growth. It comes despite a hefty baby bonus: $8000 for the first two children of a marriage, $10,000 for subsequent ones. Falling fertility is a problem in Australia too, but at least our rate is 1.58 — a record low, but far higher than in any of our rich neighbours.

Doubtless other factors contribute. Singapore is far from having gender equality, low wages surely deter some would-be parents, and politicians and society frown on anyone having children outside marriage. But when women feel forced to choose between having a career and having children, increasingly they are giving priority to their career.

For Singapore, the risk of a falling population is exacerbated by a dirty little secret: the city hosts a vast underclass of “non-resident” workers on temporary visas. Some are in well-paid jobs (and resented by locals for that), but many others do dangerous or low-status jobs as construction labourers, factory hands and domestic servants.

There are about 1.5 million of them among Singapore’s 5.5 million people, more than a quarter of the population. But that was all I could find about them in the statistics. These workers reside in Singapore — the labouring men and factory workers often in crowded dormitories that have become an ideal environment for spreading Covid-19 — but they have no path to permanent residency and are expected to return to their home country when the job ends.

Vasagar tells us these temporary workers, mostly men from China, India and Bangladesh, and women from Indonesia and the Philippines, make up three-quarters of the construction workforce that builds Singapore’s world-class transport infrastructure and apartment towers, and most of the workers on its factory lines: relatively low-paid jobs that Singaporeans don’t want. The migrants the locals resent are the skilled ones who take the well-paid jobs they do want.

But as Chua Mui Hoong points out in Singapore, Disrupted, even the low-income workers put downward pressure on wages for locals in the lower half of the income range. She too wants a more democratic Singapore, and keeps trying to persuade ministers that giving the people more power would not see the country collapse. But she also crusades against what she sees as rising inequality in a once-egalitarian land where almost everyone lived in government-built flats, relied on public transport, sent their kids to the local school and had similar incomes.

That is not the Singapore of today. The government’s latest statistics show median wages for full-time workers range from $14,167 a month (including superannuation) for in-house legal counsel down to $2000 for factory hands and shop assistants, $1535 for baristas, $1400 for waiters and $1300 for office cleaners and the assistants at food and drink stalls. And that’s monthly pay, for full-time work, with 20 per cent of it going straight to your super account. It’s not much to live on.

Australia has its versions of these problems: the workaholic culture, the plunging birth rate, a policy of importing temporary workers rather than raising wages, and low incomes in many jobs. Singapore has excelled in devising solutions to economic problems. But political stagnation may be impeding its ability to solve social problems requiring subtle and flexible minds. •

Postscript: The prime ministerial succession became clearer in June 2022 when Lawrence Wong — profiled for Inside Story by Michael Barr — was named as Lee Hsien Loong’s successor.

The post The Singapore grip appeared first on Inside Story.

The Myanmar armed forces, the Tatmadaw, overthrew the civilian government of Aung San Suu Kyi following its sweeping electoral victory, bringing to an end the constitutional progress started a decade ago by Min Aung Hlaing’s military predecessors. Since the coup, soldiers have killed more than 800 demonstrators.

Adding to the cynicism of the whole affair, Min Aung Hlaing seems to have calculated that Suu Kyi’s lowered international standing — an ironic result of her defence of the Tatmadaw’s ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya minority — meant her toppling would not be greatly regretted by the outside world. The general’s claims of election fraud were a Burmese translation of those being made by Donald Trump. Myanmar was facing no national crisis at the time: the coup was all about his ambition and the Tatmadaw’s dominance.

Coming up to six months after the coup, the Australian government is still in two minds what to do. Should it join the United States, Canada and European nations in applying sanctions against Myanmar military figures and military-controlled businesses? Should it go as far as the Czech Republic, which has recognised the National Unity Government declared by the ousted civilian leadership? Should it work alongside the Association of Southeast Asian Nations’s softly-softly engagement while using bilateral contacts as leverage?

So far, the government has inclined to the last, safest option. But ASEAN is split between those with elected governments, like Indonesia and Singapore, urging harder pressure on their fellow member, and those with authoritarian regimes taking a tolerant attitude to the coup.

Australia’s military was directed to maintain contact with the coup leaders. Vice-admiral David Johnston, the deputy defence force chief, has had two phone conversations with his Myanmar counterpart, vice-senior general Soe Win, urging restraint and pressing for the release of the Australian economist Sean Turnell, an adviser to Suu Kyi. Turnell remains in Yangon’s Insein jail, now formally charged with revealing state secrets, one of the crimes with which Suu Kyi is also charged. The Tatmadaw trumpeted the conversations with Johnston as a step towards Australia’s acceptance of the coup.

An Australian version of the “Magnitsky Act” — the US legislation that initially applied financial sanctions to Russian leaders and kleptocrats but has since been used against figures in Myanmar and elsewhere — is yet to come before parliament, despite the bipartisan recommendation of a joint parliamentary committee last December. And the government doesn’t appear to have wielded its existing migration and foreign investment powers.

The listless response is not for lack of interest in Australia. About thirty federal members and senators across party lines belong to a Myanmar friends group, and the joint committee was quickly set up to analyse Australia’s response to the coup.

“That’s a level of parliamentary activity which is rare in this country,” says Chris Lamb, a former ambassador to Myanmar and president of the independent Australia Myanmar Institute, which is backed by several universities. “And there’s been very little response to that. It’s a country that probably has more political engagement at backbencher level than any other.”

The policymaking rooms of Canberra appear to be gripped by doubts that sanctions have any point beyond symbolism. In a joint committee hearing in April, Defence official Hugh Jeffrey saw no “silver bullet” in sanctioning the military. “The Tatmadaw is an institution that has been remarkably impervious to international influence,” he said. “We also need to provide options that incentivise the return to liberal-democratic governance.”

In the prime minister’s office, Scott Morrison’s national security adviser, Michelle Chan, is a former ambassador to Myanmar. Her term there in 2008–11 covered the transition from outright military rule to the present constitution, which gives the Tatmadaw blocking powers in parliament and control of key security ministries. An internal backlash against Chinese influence had prompted military overtures to Suu Kyi as an alternative to continuing Western ostracism.

“Targeted sanctions mostly do not work — they’re very much a political response,” says Trevor Wilson, one of Chan’s ambassadorial predecessors in Myanmar. “Look at the history, look at the facts,” he adds, citing Yugoslavia and other examples. “There’s no evidence whatsoever that targeted sanctions work.” But he admits he doesn’t have a better solution. “Certainly I don’t think we should go the other direction of approving the military coup,” he says.

Among the supporters of targeted sanctions is the Australia Myanmar Institute, which is aware that figures within government believe sanctions achieve no results and remove the possibility of leverage. “To which my answer is: what leverage?” says Lamb. “When you see Vice Admiral Johnston speak to his counterpart in Myanmar and see nothing happen, where is the leverage and where is the benefit?”

In fact, says Lamb, it’s hard to see what would be lost by applying sanctions. “The kind of sanctions we are talking about would be pretty narrowly targeted to a pretty small group of leading people in the military and their assets,” he adds. “I think you get your best leverage by showing the decent people in the army that there is a future for them in the country.”

Janelle Saffin, a former federal MP now in the NSW state parliament, is a long-time friend of Suu Kyi and influential in Labor policymaking. She thinks that if sanctions reduced Australia’s leverage in relation to cases like that of Sean Turnell, any loss would be insignificant.

“If I want sanctions I’d want them to be directed, targeted and meaningful,” she says. “I wouldn’t even go for Min Aung Hlaing; I’d go for the coterie around him who all get wealthy through him. I’d put judges in it, like the judge hearing the case against Suu Kyi. Other people, diplomats who spread slander that protesters are terrorists. If I was doing sanctions I’d do them so they hurt people who were culpable.”

While not going as far as formal recognition of the provisional anti-coup government, Saffin says Australia could step up “engagement” with the ousted civilian government. It could lobby the United Nations to maintain the accreditation of Myanmar ambassador Kyaw Moe Tun, who came out strongly against the coup.

In the meantime, says Saffin, Canberra is “hiding behind” ASEAN, and not even speaking as clearly against the coup as Indonesia and Singapore. If and when the regional grouping gets to appoint a special envoy on Myanmar — a step adopted at an ASEAN summit in April but since stalled — she believes Australia should weigh in.

Lamb agrees. “There’s no reason why Australia shouldn’t be speaking like the Indonesians and Singaporeans,” he says. “Both of them have their ministers out there saying things. Not us.”

If the chosen envoy is a Thai, as rumour suggests, Canberra should not assume this would lead to a whitewash of the coup, says Saffin. The current Thai prime minister, Prayut Chan-o-Cha, is a former general who came to power through a coup himself. The Thais would not want to be seen as a “pushover,” says Saffin. Australia should be using its considerable influence in Bangkok, enhanced by the new “strategic partnership” signed last November by Prayut and Morrison.

All these experts lament the rupture of bilateral dialogue with China, which has maintained relations with the Tatmadaw but must be alarmed to see its southern neighbour drifting deeper into domestic conflict and potentially transnational crime. One sign of China’s hedging was an invitation to Myanmar’s National League for Democracy to send delegates to the recent centenary celebrations of the Chinese Communist Party, which it did.

“It ought to be possible for grown-ups like Australia and China to separate the bilateral things that cause us so much grief and talk sensibly about a country like Myanmar,” says Lamb. “And if not directly, to do it through surrogates.”

Australia did have a call for a return to democracy inserted in the statement by the “Quad” summit in March, notably putting India and Japan more firmly on side against the coup. It is also understood to have helped extricate a number of political fugitives from Myanmar.

The position of some 1500 students from Myanmar here on study visas is meanwhile fraught with uncertainty, with Home Affairs proposing to transfer them to temporary protection visas when their study visas expire. No post-Tiananmen Bob Hawke gestures here. Within the Myanmar community, some finger-pointers are targeting the children and other relatives of figures working back home with the military regime.

Canberra’s diffidence is sending signals of its own. “I don’t see that having no discussions about sanctions, or producing the kinds of answers that Australia does, can do anything more than give some reassurance to the generals in Myanmar,” says Lamb. “What we do is also the counterpart to what we don’t. Not doing something is itself a statement.” •

The post “Not doing something is itself a statement” appeared first on Inside Story.

Even in power, the former army general had been a much blander, if more successful, dictator than his predecessor Sukarno or contemporaries like Burma’s Ne Win, Zaire’s Mobutu Sese Seko and the Philippines’ Ferdinand Marcos.

So has David Jenkins’s long-awaited multi-volume biography missed its moment, at least for the wider reading public? This first volume suggests not. Written with Jenkins’s characteristic clarity and verve, and painstakingly sourced, it is an enthralling read. As the list of acknowledgements shows, he managed to speak with most of the key surviving figures from the Soeharto era before they died.

The knowledge Jenkins has garnered since he arrived in Jakarta in 1969 as correspondent for the old Melbourne Herald has been a long time brewing. The two scholars whose endorsements appear on the cover of Young Soeharto, Benedict Anderson and Jamie Mackie, both died some years ago. Rather than some Javanist feat of posthumous telepathy, their approval came from their close reading of the draft and their guidance as it proceeded.

There’s also a second question: does Soeharto deserve such a long and detailed study? This volume runs to some 500 pages and covers only the first twenty-four years of his life. Two more will follow, surpassing Herbert Bix’s Hirohito biography and equalling Ian Kershaw’s study of Adolf Hitler, though nowhere near Robert Caro’s biography of Lyndon B. Johnson (four 800-page volumes so far). Even then, Jenkins plans to take us only to 1966, when Soeharto pushed Sukarno aside.

The answer is yes. Soeharto ruled Indonesia for thirty-two of the seventy-six years since the republic was declared in 1945. Despite the subsequent shift to a popularly elected leadership, the country retains many important elements of the system he presided over: a military not entirely back in the barracks, powerful business conglomerates, and an ideology that stands in the way of a hard look at the violence of 1965–66 that enabled him to take power. Even now, Soeharto’s former son-in-law and present defence minister, ex-general Prabowo Subianto, could make a third try, perhaps this time successful, for the presidency.

The core of this volume is a highly readable narrative of some 300 pages, with debates and digressive detail pushed to the 200 pages of notes that most readers can skip. It shows how Soeharto overcame a troubled and impoverished childhood to become a “polite, clever and capable young man” at the forefront of Indonesia’s emerging military in 1945.

Dubbed “the smiling general” by one early hagiographer, Soeharto came out snarling in 1974 when a magazine called POP ran a cover article suggesting that, rather than being the simple anak desa (village boy) of the official story, he was the son of a member of the Yogyakarta royal family. His young mother, the story went, was married off to a village official when Soeharto, who accompanied her, was six.

Jenkins teases out this version, along with other speculation at the time about Soeharto’s origins, and even the improbable suggestion that he was the son of the Yogyakarta sultan himself. (The sultan was studying in Holland at the time, though some Javanese believed their semi-divine rulers capable of remote impregnation.)

The POP article appeared at a touchy time for the president. His ambitious internal security chief, General Soemitro, had allowed a clamour to build up about corruption and favouritism towards Japanese and local Chinese investors. Using the tried and tested method of pouring petrol on a fire, rival general Ali Moertopo’s Opsus (special operations) group pointed Islamic hotheads at a Toyota showroom. Neither general came out well in Soeharto’s eyes.

The article was Moertopo’s effort to regain favour through flattery. It failed miserably. Soeharto saw it as a slur on his mother that branded him illegitimate. As he had when students mocked his wife Tien as “Madame Ten Percent” in the belief she took a cut of government projects, he lost his cool, calling a press conference to denounce the story as unfactual and subversive.

The real story — long intriguing to psychopolitical analysts — is that Soeharto’s mother, aged sixteen, disappeared when he was six weeks old and was found hiding in the roof-space of a village house. She and his father split up, and the baby was placed with a village midwife. There followed a childhood during which the boy was shuffled between the households of father, mother and relatives.

Barefoot and sarong-clad, Soeharto gained a rudimentary secular education in Javanese-language primary schools, but also — while apprenticed to the noted faith healer Romo Daryatmo — a deep immersion in Javanese mysticism and, through the wayang (or shadow) theatre, a smattering of classical Hindu thought. Though nominally Muslim, Soeharto inclined to spiritualism until late in life, when the increasing piety that accompanied Indonesia’s growing prosperity impelled him to be more visibly Islamic.

This upbringing left the young Soeharto a cool, outwardly respectful but always distrustful person, observing traditional precepts to keep emotions in check and accepting the Mahabharata’s teaching that sometimes a prince has to kill in order to do the right thing.

His big chance came at nineteen, when Holland’s neutrality was swept aside by Hitler, and the Netherlands East Indies desperately boosted its defences against Japan. Accepted into the colonial army, he rose quickly over the next twenty-one months, completing a sergeant’s course just as the Dutch were surrendering in March 1942.

Discarding his uniform, he disappeared back to central Java, where a few months later he joined the Japanese-run police force. Again he excelled, winning the trust of his superiors. Then, towards the end of 1943, the adventurous intelligence officers of the Japanese Imperial Army’s Nakano school — partly inspired by T.E. Lawrence’s stirring up an Arab revolt against the Turks — set about raising a local military force, known as the Peta. Again, Soeharto advanced rapidly to become a company commander, with a rank equivalent to captain, by early 1945.

While many of the other volunteers saw the Peta as the nucleus of a future army for an independent Indonesia, Soeharto showed no sign of such feelings, though he was to claim otherwise later. He had signed up to the two armies keeping Indonesia under control for the pay, the food, the uniforms and a sense of belonging. When a Peta battalion revolted against its brutal and dissolute Japanese officers at Blitar in February 1945, the Japanese swept in, executed some of the Indonesian officers, and put Soeharto in charge of the disarmed troops. He stayed with them in a remote corner of East Java until Japan surrendered.

The disbanded Peta did indeed become the core of the Indonesian National Army that resisted the return of the Dutch. “Soeharto, blessed by luck and a born survivor, had had rather a good war,” Jenkins says. “He had served in two armies, first on one side, then on the other.” By August 1945, now aged twenty-four, he had “more military training by far, and more military experience, than perhaps 98 per cent of his fellow Peta officers, the men who would form the backbone of a new Indonesian army.”

Soeharto stood out from his contemporaries, most of whom were from the priyayi (gentrified) class, many of them educated in the Dutch language and European ways. Though his ability got him far, he was still an outsider, an aspect that Jenkins will no doubt show to be important later on.

This saunter through Soeharto’s childhood and its many settings, set against the last years of the Netherlands East Indies, is engaging. Most striking is its exposition of Japanese influence on the shape and doctrine of the Indonesian military. Jenkins was able to interview many of the Japanese officers involved in the Peta, including some who knew Soeharto personally, greatly illuminating a connection previously mapped by American and Japanese scholars.

The Japanese influence includes an emphasis on what they call seishin and Indonesians call semangat (spirit), and rigid obedience to compensate for any lack of firepower. It also, unfortunately, includes a lot of violence, by officers to their soldiers, and to civilians. As with Burma’s Tatmadaw and the South Korean army to some extent, the Imperial Army lessons live on.

David Jenkins’s second volume will cover the 1945–49 revolutionary war against the Dutch, with a third volume to deal with Soeharto’s career in the new Indonesia. Many will be looking forward to his account of the dramatic events of 30 September and 1 October 1965. On the pretext of an alleged plot against President Sukarno by an American-aligned “council of generals,” Lieutenant-Colonel Untung bin Syamsuri, one of Soeharto’s former underlings, led a pre-emptive coup by palace guards. The Indonesian Communist Party, or PKI, endorsed Untung’s coup while Soeharto was in the process of quelling it, giving him an excuse to unleash the anti-communist purge that killed more than half a million PKI followers.

For more than fifty years, scholars have picked holes in Soeharto’s claim that the PKI made the first move. Benedict Anderson and Ruth McVey soon uncovered Untung’s former closeness to Soeharto and the role of a mysterious PKI agent called Kamaruzaman. More recently, the opening of the archives has revealed more detail. John Roosa’s Pretext for Mass Murder showed how the army and the PKI were each waiting for the other to make the first move, at Sukarno’s feared imminent death if not before. In Beijing’s archives, Taomo Zhou found that PKI secretary D.N. Aidit had been telling Chinese foreign minister Zhou Enlai about plans to form a “military committee” to head off and confuse an army move. In The Army and the Indonesian Genocide: Mechanics of Mass Murder, Jess Melvin showed how the army was primed to kill the PKI membership.

So, whodunnit? Did the PKI’s Aidit tell Untung to move? Or was Kamaruzaman a double agent for the army who convinced the suggestible Untung that a council of generals existed and was about to make a move? Did Moertopo’s Opsus light the fire as well as pour on the petrol? If so, did Soeharto, perhaps channelling Prince Arjuna in the Mahabharata, see the six generals murdered by Untung’s troops as a necessary sacrifice? That they included the more worldly, more senior-ranking contemporaries from Peta days did leave the field much clearer for him.

We await Jenkins’s verdict. •

The post Born survivor appeared first on Inside Story.

When I recently showed the paintings to a group of University of Tasmania students, they examined them closely and then made a striking observation: over the decades, Myanmar’s top generals have added layer upon layer of “bling” to their uniforms. The founder of Myanmar’s modern army, Aung San, is pictured in a spartan commander’s coat. Ne Win’s cap and jacket are embellished in gold. Than Shwe, who led the armed forces — the Tatmadaw — into the twenty-first century, glitters with layers of medals and insignia.

Min Aung Hlaing, the current commander-in-chief, takes his cue from this acceleration in military pomp. After ten years at the top, his February 2021 coup against the elected government is defined by hubris and personal ambition.

On this year’s Armed Forces Day, always an exercise in militaristic bombast, his subordinates organised drones to illuminate the night sky in a coordinated show of support for the top man. And when he left Myanmar for the ASEAN summit in Jakarta last week, he was farewelled by a line-up of dignitaries ordered to demonstrate their fealty as the top commander boarded his plane.

Whatever medals the military men award themselves, though, the verdict of Myanmar’s people on this year’s coup is clear. Their preference for the National League for Democracy, whatever its faults, was first demonstrated when Aung San Suu Kyi was elected to the Pyithu Hluttaw in 2012 and resoundingly confirmed at the 2015 and 2020 general elections. They want civilian leaders who can freely implement a federal union, bring peace between ethnic groups and shape a more inclusive economy.

The fact that such preferences often count for little among the ASEAN countries frustrates Southeast Asia’s democrats. Vietnam, Laos and Brunei remain autocracies; electoral processes in Cambodia, Thailand and Singapore are tightly controlled. Politics in Indonesia, the Philippines and Malaysia might be more competitive, but many of their citizens are understandably bemused when their systems are presented as models of more inclusive governance.

And so, when he arrived in Jakarta, Min Aung Hlaing could be confident that the instincts of Southeast Asia’s decision-makers would tilt comfortably away from condemnation and towards gentle compromises and the logic of inaction. With consensus an abiding ASEAN objective, his strategists would not have fretted about the prospect of heavy-handed intervention from the neighbours.

For the regional grouping, democratic practices and principles are never primary considerations, even in the wake of a coup. Myanmar’s policy elite knows that it was the internationally condemned violence against protesters ordered by the top generals, and the potential for even more horrendous humanitarian calamity, that finally pushed ASEAN to respond.

ASEAN will send a senior representative to begin discussions with the Myanmar government and, ideally, with a wide range of elected and ethnic political interests. It will be one of the toughest jobs in diplomacy — especially in the face of continued crackdowns and a more aggressive pushback from protesters and some of Myanmar’s heavily armed ethnic groups.

One risk for ASEAN is that its feeble diplomacy will only reinforce demands for a revolutionary outcome. And a push for revolution in Myanmar, even if it fails, will have consequences elsewhere too.

General Prayuth Chan-ocha in Bangkok, the communist hardmen in Vientiane and Hanoi, Hun Sen in Cambodia, the Sultan of Brunei — all share a mutual survival pact framed by ASEAN’s preference for “non-intervention” in sensitive domestic affairs. The ASEAN club’s habit is to protect its own.

The ASEAN club has minimal leverage, a patchy track record and an ingrained caution about the scope of Myanmar-focused diplomacy. Even the serious prospect of a spiral into a decade of war and misery has generated only a modest plan for diplomatic engagement.

Yet without a negotiated settlement — and there seems little immediate prospect of Min Aung Hlaing sitting down with his opponents, let alone striking a deal — ASEAN will face at least some of the flow-on from Myanmar’s deteriorating political, economic and health conditions.

There is now no doubt that Myanmar’s people will need to fight for their futures against a top general who will manipulate international opinion to forestall any diminution of his own status. Some of Myanmar’s protesters are showing their determination to fight back with whatever weapons they can muster. Guerilla warfare tactics — targeting government bases, soldiers and aircraft — drown out ASEAN’s calls for restraint.

Attacks by well-established ethnic armed groups are part of this pattern, but more worrying for government security personnel are the ambushes they face in some urban areas. Brutal fighting continues.

Some troops will get shiny medals for their loyalty to Min Aung Hlaing, but they are also earning the hatred of the Myanmar people. Where ASEAN usually prizes restraint and reconciliation, Myanmar’s revolutionaries are striking out to completely upend the established order. Only the victors will keep their portraits on the wall. •

The post ASEAN’s mutual survival pact appeared first on Inside Story.

The numbered paragraphs of the communiqué of that twenty-second ministerial meeting ranged over refugees, drugs, southern Africa, Afghanistan, Asia-Pacific cooperation, disarmament, the search for a settlement in Kampuchea… on and on it ran. By the time I got to the end of the eighty-seven-paragraph document my puzzlement had turned to astonishment. That 4 July statement said nothing at all about what had happened in Tiananmen a month earlier.

The word “China” wasn’t used, although paragraph 12 welcomed the Sino-Soviet summit that had been held during Mikhail Gorbachev’s visit to Beijing in May. Not a word, though, about the bloody crushing of the democracy movement in June, which will always be the grim counterpoint to that November’s fall of the Berlin wall.

With document in hand, I wandered over to one of the senior correspondents gathered in Bandar Seri Begawan. His ranking as an old Asia hand had been established at breakfast when he’d piled sliced chilli on his plate. The advice he offered was similarly astringent: “You’re not in Canberra any more, mate. This is ASEAN. The silences say as much as the statements.”

ASEAN had only six member countries in those days, so the next time the foreign ministers gathered in Brunei was in 1995. By then, the ASEAN Regional Forum had been established, so this was a much larger jamboree, with foreign ministers coming from all over the Asia-Pacific.

China was a presence as well as a factor. My most vivid memory of the gathering was the ceremony to enrol Vietnam as the seventh member of ASEAN. That country’s foreign minister, Nguyen Manh Cam, walked on stage to be greeted by the other ASEAN foreign ministers. Sitting impassively in the front row of the audience was his Chinese counterpart, Qian Qichen.

As the Vietnamese minister turned to face the audience his eyes went directly to the Chinese minister. Vietnamese grin met icy Chinese stare. Here was a moment with a Sino-Vietnamese prehistory of thousands of years. Here, too, was a triumph of Southeast Asian regionalism: a grouping born amid fear of communism during Vietnam’s war was welcoming communist Vietnam into its midst.

In my notebook, I scribbled “China–Vietnam eyes lock.” Below that I wrote some commentary (which never made it to air) conjuring a version of Nguyen beaming out a message in incongruous Cockney-speak: “Hey, me old China, look at me with all my new mates.” Qian’s stony response I imagined as: “You’ll keep, and so will they.”

Journalists often start with a great headline, and two fine journalists have hit on the same defining image — China’s “shadow” — to frame what Southeast Asia faces. Murray Hiebert and Sebastian Strangio confront the same quandary: how does Southeast Asia embrace all that China offers without being crushed by its embrace? Each of them describes how China is flooding all aspects of Southeast Asia’s existence — how, in dealing with the push and the pull, the ASEAN countries are infinitely careful in talking to the giant, much less touching it.

The scale of China’s economic impact can be seen in Chinese tourism: twenty-eight million Chinese citizens travelled to ASEAN countries in 2017, Strangio reports, up from 2.2 million in 2000, making China the region’s number one source of foreign arrivals. And he gives that figure an Australian dimension: “In addition to Thailand, mainland Chinese are the top visitors to Vietnam, Cambodia and Singapore, and recently surpassed Australians to become the number one nationality visiting the Indonesian island of Bali.”

In Bali, China now matters more than Australia. That’s a long shadow.

China is the largest trading partner of every country in Southeast Asia, Hiebert writes, and policymakers “see their economic destinies hitched to China.” But while China’s “economic miracle” helped propel growth to its south, he adds, Southeast Asia “is determined never to let itself be dominated,” viewing China with a mixture of “expectation and fear, aspiration and frustration.” How to navigate a destiny hitched to China without being dominated?

China is resurgent and assertive, says Hiebert:

China’s growing involvement in Southeast Asia prompts a blend of anticipation and uneasiness among its smaller neighbours as Beijing mounts its drive south with an assortment of tools. China’s toolbox is loaded with diverse instruments from “soft power” — economic, cultural, and education diplomacy — to “hard power,” ranging from threats of military force in the South China Sea to arms sales and military exchanges. Some of Beijing’s tactics verge on “sharp power” when it aims at distraction and manipulation in the political and information space.

Strangio writes of Southeast Asia’s “fraught” attitude to China’s rise as their most important economic partner, making it “their thorniest foreign policy challenge.” The region needs China, but respect for China’s power is flavoured by distrust:

Its wooing of the region was based not on natural attraction, nor on appeals to its rich and fascinating history. These various initiatives rather involved variations on China’s predominant theme: its economic strength. True to the Chinese Communist Party’s materialist roots, many Chinese strategists have assumed that China’s economic weight would exert an inevitable and irresistible pull on the small nations along its periphery… if a foreign country’s policy ran counter to its interests, China could cut off trade or employ other forms of economic coercion. Buried in China’s talk of mutual prosperity was a stark choice: flourish within a Chinese orbit, or languish outside of it.

China has a “tin ear” for public opinion, says Strangio. It is adroit at dealing with states and governments but “congenitally clumsy at its dealings with people.” Thus, Beijing rages that any opposition it encounters must be caused by “recalcitrance, ill-intention, or the malign influence of outside powers.”

China’s missteps, writes Hiebert, must be set against the huge advances it has made by using its “physical proximity, its mountains of cash, and the fact that it does not hector countries on democracy and human rights.” For Strangio, the ten countries of Southeast Asia have all been “promiscuous in tilting, balancing and hedging their bets.” Collectively, ASEAN has tried “to bind the Chinese Gulliver with a thousand multilateral threads,” to socialise it to the ASEAN way of “glacial consensus-based diplomacy.”

While ASEAN tries to mediate and socialise, China looms as the great change agent. “As China’s power increases,” Strangio writes, “it thus poses fundamental challenges to ASEAN’s cohesion, and perhaps, in time to the very idea of ‘Southeast Asia’ itself.”

In the Dragon’s Shadow and Under Beijing’s Shadow are ambitious books on the same big theme. Two fine reporters from different generations, both beguiled by Southeast Asia, apply all the tools of the trade to try to capture this cornucopia of countries.

Sebastian Strangio plunged in as a reporter on the Phnom Penh Post in 2008, after being “initiated into the journalism racket” as co-editor of the student magazine Farrago while doing his BA and master’s degree in international politics at Melbourne University. He’s now Southeast Asia editor of the Diplomat.

Murray Hiebert’s enchantment began when he was an aid worker in Vietnam in the closing days of the war. A career as a correspondent for the Wall Street Journal and the Far Eastern Economic Review included postings in China, Thailand, Vietnam, Malaysia and Singapore. He’s now with the Southeast Asia program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.

Strangio and Hiebert follow in the tracks of other journalists who have tried to cram modern Southeast Asia between covers. Reporters have been heading to the region for headlines since it was declared Britain’s “South East Asia Command” during the second world war. (The sardonic American view was that the initials SEAC stood for Saving England’s Asia Colonies.)

It takes journalistic brio and brashness — plus skill fuelled by stamina — to find unifying themes in this exhilarating contrast of countries. As Strangio comments, the term “Southeast Asia” suggests a “misleading degree of unity” for a region of bewildering diversity: Muslim, Buddhist, Catholic and Confucian-Taoist.

The tradition that Hiebert and Strangio are updating got going during the Vietnam war with two books — The Last Confucian: Vietnam, Southeast Asia, and the West (1964), by Denis Warner of the Melbourne Herald, and South-east Asia in Turmoil (1965), by Brian Crozier of the Economist. The London Observer’s Far East correspondent for a quarter of a century, Dennis Bloodworth, wove the magic twice, with An Eye for the Dragon: Southeast Asia Observed, published in 1970, and a revised edition in 1987.

Then, in the decade after the United States departed, Nayan Chanda from the Far Eastern Economic Review explained the third Indo-China war in Brother Enemy: The War After the War (1986). The Australian journalist Wilfred Burchett was already churning out books from the communist side (giving what he called the “anti-imperialist” view), including Grasshoppers and Elephants: Why Vietnam Fell (1977), The China-Cambodia-Vietnam Triangle (1981), and his memoir At the Barricades: The Memoirs of a Rebel Journalist (1980).

Michael Vatikiotis (initially with the BBC, then correspondent and eventually editor of the Far Eastern Economic Review) produced two impressive efforts in different periods, with Political Change in Southeast Asia: Trimming the Banyan Tree (1996) and Blood and Silk: Power and Conflict in Modern Southeast Asia (2017). (Inside Story’s review of Blood and Silk headlined ASEAN as a “bloody miracle.”)

After the Asian financial crisis of 1997, Victor Mallet of the Financial Times weighed in with The Trouble with Tigers: The Rise and Fall of Southeast Asia. The journalist-turned-historian Martin Stuart-Fox makes the list with his 2003 book, A Short History of China and Southeast Asia: Tribute, Trade and Influence. That sits on my bookshelf alongside Milton Osborne’s Southeast Asia: An Introductory History, which has gone through eleven editions since 1979, and The Paramount Power: China and the Countries of Southeast Asia (2006).

In this century, the books see the region as a cockpit for great-power contest and potential clash: Robert Kaplan with Asia’s Cauldron: the South China Sea and the End of a Stable Pacific (2014), Humphrey Hawksley’s Asian Waters: The Struggle Over the South China Sea and the Strategy of Chinese Expansion (2018), and Richard Javad Heydarian’s The Indo-Pacific: Trump, China, and the New Struggle for Global Mastery (2019).

Strangio and Hiebert follow the journo’s tradition with vivid headlines and a mix of on-the-spot observation, travel tales and big-picture geopolitics. Writing about Southeast Asian countries as a group takes you only a little way along the understanding track, so Strangio and Hiebert trek the country-by-country trail, delivering much of the meat in separate chapters on each of the diverse cast of ASEAN.

Strangio argues that Vietnam’s fate reflects “in highly concentrated form” that of the region: “Today’s Vietnam stands at the confluence of the various strategic challenges pressing in on Southeast Asia. It faces China’s expanding power both on land and on water, and is impacted by its stranglehold on the upper Mekong River and its actions in the South China Sea.” Some superpower tensions work to Vietnam’s advantage, he says, and Hanoi’s greatest hedge against China is its former wartime enemy, the United States.

Hiebert starts his chapter on that country with a 2015 quote from China’s leader, Xi Jinping: “China and Vietnam have the same political system, share the same [ideals] and belief[s], have common strategic interests, we should be good comrades [with] mutual trust and mutual assistance.”

Vietnam might be China’s largest trading partner in Southeast Asia, Hiebert notes, yet this is an intimacy beset by constant strains:

China’s relations with Vietnam are more fraught than with any other Southeast Asian nation, given the more than two millennia of history between the countries. This history also colors the perceptions of Vietnamese people about China, even though Vietnam has more traits in common with China than any of its neighbours. More than two-thirds of Vietnamese words are borrowed from Chinese, and both countries are heavily influenced by Confucianism.

Both authors note the advances China has made in Thailand since the 2014 military coup. “Thailand today has the deepest and most longstanding military ties with China of any country in Southeast Asia,” Hiebert writes, “even though Thailand is one of five US treaty allies in Asia.” US–Thai relations began to rebound under Donald Trump, writes Strangio, because his administration downgraded the promotion of liberal values in favour of a transactional approach: “Thailand’s improving ties with Washington demonstrated how a cultivated flexibility and ambivalence could act as a reliable bulwark of Thai sovereignty.”

Like Thailand and Vietnam, says Strangio, Myanmar seeks balance, an “update of its older neutralism” for a new era of superpower competition:

Unlike many Western governments, [China] is willing to engage Burma’s troubled realities in order to push forward vital strategic interests. As long as they persist, Burma’s dynamics of ethnic conflict and division will therefore continue to exert a steady pressure in China’s direction. All this puts the Burmese government in a liminal bind. Apprehensive about China’s intentions, yet unable to escape its magnetic power, it remains stuck partway between the poles of fear and attraction, moving only so far in one direction before events send it sliding back.

Hiebert notes that China has worked hard on its “prickly” connections with Myanmar’s military. Despite decades of dependence on China for aid, trade and investment, he says, Myanmar’s “fiercely nationalist population” is wary and distrustful of Beijing’s intentions. “As the numbers of Chinese migrants in northern Myanmar soars,” he writes, “locals wonder why China does not do more to stem the flow and are anxious that the growing Chinese population will transform the country’s ethnic makeup and social dynamics in the decades to come. In Myanmar (like in Vietnam), China has its work cut out in overcoming the deep anti-Chinese sentiment and distrust of Beijing.”

China’s closest ally in ASEAN is Cambodia. But it wasn’t always so. As Hiebert writes, Cambodian prime minister Hun Sen called China “the root of everything that is evil” in 1988. By 2006, though, Hun Sen was describing China as Cambodia’s “most trusted friend.” “Fear of Vietnam and Thailand may have been a factor pushing Hun Sen into the arms of Beijing early on,” writes Hiebert, “but more recently he appears to be seeking China’s help to serve as a counterweight to the West. He is looking to China to prop up his rule and, from his point of view, hopefully keep his family in power for the long term — and with the lifestyle to which they have become accustomed.” Having ruled for three decades, Hun Sen is grooming his son Hun Manet to take over.

Strangio says Cambodia embraces China because it is more worried about its immediate neighbours. For most of Cambodia’s history, he notes, the greatest threats to its survival were from Thailand and Vietnam, not the more distant China:

Although Cambodia presents an extreme case compared to the other Southeast Asian countries, it showcases China’s main appeals to the region’s governments: its deep pockets and broad adherence to the norms of national sovereignty and “non-interference.” This is especially the case for small developing nations, which often fail to command much attention in far-off Western capitals. The Sino-Cambodian relationship also highlights the divergent ways in which ASEAN states see China. What for one is a threatening presence is for another a protective giant from the distant north. For small countries like Cambodia, for which dependency has been an historical norm, choosing the form of one’s dependency — one’s patron — was one way of exercising agency in a dangerous world. With some notable differences, much the same is also true for Laos, the other small satellite being drawn into close orbit around the red planet.

For Laos, says Strangio, China’s technical prowess is expressed in the railway due to be completed this year. The link from the Chinese town of Boten to Vientiane is 417 kilometres long, including 198 kilometres of tunnels and sixty-one kilometres of bridges: “These engineering challenges have done much to contribute to its controversial $6.2 billion price tag, equivalent to around 37 percent of Laos’s GDP in 2016 — or around $15 million per kilometer.”

The standard-gauge single-track line (carrying trains with a top speed of 160 kilometres an hour) serves China’s plan for an Indo-China railway running all the way to Singapore. Along with China’s Mekong dams, it is part of what Hiebert calls “the dramatic transformation” of the Lao landscape. Chinese companies are investing in plantations near the border, where “giant swathes of farmland are covered with rubber trees, bananas, pumpkins, and other crops for export to China.” Laos is “sacrificing sovereignty for prosperity,” Hiebert observes, although Laos has a bit more political space than Cambodia because of its deep ties with Vietnam.

The money–sovereignty equation has gyrated in Malaysia, where China’s role reached new heights under the now-disgraced leader, Najib Razak. In betting on Najib, Strangio observes, Beijing took “a long position on an over-leveraged asset.” As elsewhere in Southeast Asia, though, “Malaysia’s cronyism and patronage could not simply be put down to Chinese influence”; its leaders have always operated “a tight nexus between politics and business and the distribution of patronage.” Chinese money is only one element of the amazing political rollercoaster of recent Malaysian politics.

Across the causeway, meanwhile, Singapore struggles with how Beijing views the only country in Southeast Asia with a majority ethnic Chinese population. Hiebert quotes the warning of Singapore’s former top diplomat, Bilahari Kausikan, that multiracial Singapore must resist having a “Chinese identity” imposed by a China that “does not just want you to comply with its wishes” but “more fundamentally… wants to shape your thinking so that you will do [what] it wants without having to be told what to do.”

In 1979, Strangio notes, Singapore adopted Mandarin Chinese as one of its official languages in place of regional Chinese dialects like Hokkien and Teochew, with the aim of creating a unified Chinese community “from the country’s myriad dialect and clan allegiances.” The Speak Mandarin campaign built a linguistic bridge, Strangio writes, increasing the reach and penetration of Chinese broadcasting networks. Add to this the arrival over the past two decades of hundreds of thousands of mainland Chinese who have settled in Singapore as part of a migration drive to boost the birthrate.

Hiebert labels the Philippines’ approach to China as “bipolar,” not least because of the way the country swings between the poles of the United States and China. The deep emotion in these swings is directed at the United States: the former colony is Asia’s flamboyant American replica, a nation shaped by Catholic beliefs and Hollywood habits. President Rodrigo Duterte’s election in 2016 signalled a major turn away from the United States, highlighted when Duterte declared that he’d “set aside” Manila’s victory in the Permanent Court of Arbitration, which judged China’s claims in the South China Sea to have no legal basis.

Beijing’s disregard for The Hague ruling is matched by the lack of much regard or reward for Manila, Hiebert writes. “Despite Duterte’s pivot towards China, Beijing has given him anything but an easy ride in the South China Sea. The list of China’s continuing encroachment against the Philippines is long and almost nonstop.”

While Duterte has smashed a taboo with his rough treatment of Washington, says Strangio, that doesn’t mean the Philippines will drift fully into China’s orbit. Filipinos will elect a new president in May next year, and the dance will start anew: “The very things that granted Beijing its opening — the nation’s weak institutions and idiosyncratic, personalised political culture — would limit its ability to maintain influence over the long term. The same political structures that gave Duterte the power to wrench foreign policy in the direction of China would give his successors the power to reverse course.”

Characteristically, neighbouring Brunei is the quietest of the claimants in the South China Sea, showing what Hiebert calls “a high level of equivalence to the reclamation activities of all parties in the dispute.” ASEAN’s smallest member (population 430,000) was the last to normalise diplomatic relations with China, in 1991. Economic ties were slow to take off, Hiebert writes, but by 2018 China was Brunei’s largest trading partner, its largest foreign investor and its most important source of tourists.

But signs indicate China’s attempts at behind-the-scenes influence. Brunei’s ruler, Sultan Hassanal Bolkiah, offered no explanation for an abrupt cabinet reshuffle in 2018 that replaced six top ministers. “But Brunei-based diplomats attributed the move to allegations of corruption,” writes Hiebert, “including senior officials granting family members contracts linked to Chinese-backed projects.”

From ASEAN’s smallest to largest member, the need is the same — to juggle and balance. As Hiebert writes, “Indonesia has managed in recent years to do what its neighbours bordering the South China Sea have had trouble doing: stand up to an increasingly assertive China without incurring the full wrath of Beijing and while still keeping the Chinese investment pipeline open.” Like previous investors in Indonesia, China is frustrated “by how slow it has been to get projects off the ground,” while President Joko Widodo “has been surprised at how much blowback he got at home for becoming so friendly with China.”

Because Indonesia is a G20 member that controls almost half of Southeast Asia’s economy, says Hiebert, it has enough strategic heft to hold both the United States and China at arm’s length. Lingering Indonesian distrust holds back military ties, he adds, and China’s crackdown against Muslim Uighurs hinders any attempt at “courting hearts and minds” in the nation with the world’s largest Muslim population.

As the quintessential “Indo-Pacific” nation, Strangio says, Indonesia has led ASEAN’s effort to formulate a response to the new construct of the Indo-Pacific. The US policy pushback at China is built on its call for a Free and Open Indo-Pacific. Indonesia took the lead in drafting ASEAN’s “Outlook on the Indo-Pacific,” steering a middle course between the giants.

Strangio says Indonesia’s “sometimes toothless multilateralism has given rise to the perennial claim that Indonesia has failed to evolve into the regional power that its geographic and demographic size might suggest. To many outside observers — particularly in the US — it has long been conventional wisdom that Indonesia ‘punches below its weight.’”

But Indonesia’s very mildness — its reluctance to throw its weight around — is at the heart of what has made ASEAN a success. “Indonesia’s approach to the mounting regional tensions is unlikely to change for the foreseeable future,” writes Strangio. “Despite its maritime geography, the orientation of the Indonesian state remains overwhelmingly inward-looking, consumed with the challenge of unifying its fissiparous regions and delivering prosperity to its 267 million citizens.” In the end, he says, “it may well be decisions made in Beijing and Washington, rather than in Jakarta, that determine whether Indonesia holds to its middle path, or runs aground on the reefs.”

Whether we face a “new cold war” or a “new hot peace,” Southeast Asia is a vital arena for the great US–China contest that is just getting started. The era of engagement fades; superpower rivalry returns. Great power challenges great power. The world’s biggest economy faces off against the second-biggest. And now a pandemic accelerates history. “If power corrupts, then crisis reveals” is an aphorism for our times from Southeast Asia analyst Huong Le Thu, who says the region sees that it can’t rely on either the United States or China as the “external protector.” If non-alignment is the answer, it will need a lot of work, not just words.

Strangio judges that Covid-19 will not alter China’s central role, based on the fundamentals of size and proximity: “Southeast Asian nations would find themselves in the same conflicted position as before, in which apprehension about China’s power was balanced by a strong stake in its continued stability and growth.”

Hiebert may be based in Washington, but he’s clear on the size of the challenge to the United States and the limits to Washington’s power: “Because of their proximity to China and their dependence on its mammoth economy, no country in Southeast Asia would back a US effort to try to push China off its recently constructed outposts in the South China Sea. Many regional countries also have lingering doubt over the US longterm security commitment to the region.”

Strangio says the “erratic nature of American engagement has been compounded by the increasingly zero-sum language with which some US officials were framing American competition with China.”

Where Hiebert describes a region not willing to back the United States in the South China Sea, Strangio casts that in wider terms, arguing that “Southeast Asia is too economically intertwined with China to enlist in a US-led coalition aimed at curbing its rise.”

Strangio writes of Southeast Asia’s understanding of the flaws of the two giants as much as their power. The sharp turn in American policy towards China, he says, “stems as much from American anxieties and self-perceptions as it does from Chinese actions.” China’s relationship with Southeast Asia is based on “an increasingly tense contradiction between the Chinese Communist Party’s self-image as an aggrieved victim of Western designs and the reality of its own burgeoning imperial potential.”

China’s primary challenge to the status quo in the Indo-Pacific, Strangio writes, is not military or ideological but economic. Understanding that core fact, he says, should shape Washington’s response: “An effective American approach will be one that addresses the region’s development challenges and increases its ability both to avoid an unhealthy overdependence on China and to stand up to Beijing when necessary.”

The hot peace in Southeast Asia will be more about dollars than democracy. That reality rests on the values and interests of the ten governments (if not their peoples), as Strangio says:

If governments in Southeast Asia happen to be corrupt, illiberal, or non-democratic, that says less about China than about the particular conditions — political, economic, and social — of the countries in question. The region’s authoritarianism might be a worrying phenomenon, but it is an overwhelmingly Southeast Asian one. Instead, the Chinese government presents itself as a conservative defender of national sovereignty and self-determination: two ideas with deep resonance in postcolonial Southeast Asia. Unlike the US and many Western powers, China seldom lectures ASEAN governments on how to run their societies, and asserts the right of every nation to choose its own political path.

Choosing their own path now involves constant calculations about when and where to follow China. The shifting calculus of power means that Southeast Asia, as always, wants the United States to help play a balancing role.

Both books illustrate the region’s reluctance to line up too forcefully with America to set the balance. ASEAN’s constant, loud refrain is that it must not be forced to choose between Washington and Beijing. Beneath the not-choosing language, though, Southeast Asia has an expanding area of no-go zones. Implicit choices are being made, as much by a refusal to act as by any ability to act.

China’s gravitational and magnetic effects — to push and pull simultaneously — play differently on each nation of Southeast Asia. But China puts new meaning into an old line for ASEAN: hang together, or hang separately.

So powerful has China become, it draws a diverse region together with a common cause and a united interest: the need to embrace China without being crushed, to navigate a destiny hitched to China without being dominated. •

The post The power and proximity of the dragon appeared first on Inside Story.

I woke to the cries of my one-year-old son, but my eyes were immediately drawn to my phone, which was glowing with notifications in the early-morning darkness.

The previous week had been one of high tension between Myanmar’s military, the Tatmadaw, and Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy government. Staring at the phone, I knew immediately that our world had just been upended.

At around 3am, just hours before Myanmar’s new parliament was due to meet following the November election, the Tatmadaw had begun rounding up senior officials from the NLD government in the capital, Naypyitaw, as well as Yangon and provincial cities. By the time I read the messages from my colleagues at Frontier Myanmar, a Yangon-based independent media organisation, the Tatmadaw was in full control.

I immediately opened Facebook — by far the most popular social media platform in the country — and watched a livestream of a regional minister being detained, a small group of gun-wielding soldiers just visible in front of her house. More photos, videos and testimonies were coming in from around the country by the minute. The coup was playing out on social media.

Then, at exactly 7.38 that morning, we got a taste of what this new era would be like: the internet suddenly went down. With the news channels also taken off the air, and the military-run station playing a Buddhist sermon, we were abruptly in an information vacuum. We would learn later that the newly installed acting president — a military appointee — was in the process of handing over power to the Tatmadaw commander-in-chief, Senior General Min Aung Hlaing, under a one-year state of emergency. After a decade, the military was back in charge.

This coup wasn’t supposed to happen. Like most observers, I’d assumed that the constitution the Tatmadaw carefully drafted over the course of fifteen years was enough security against any electoral outcome. The ability to nominate one of the three presidential candidates and another three seats in cabinet, complete autonomy over military affairs, 25 per cent of seats in parliament, an effective veto over constitutional change — surely it was enough. Discontent had been rumbling since the November election, which the NLD won in a landslide over the military’s proxy party, and the military had launched a campaign to discredit the outcome. But it was only in the week before the coup that we began to take these threats more seriously, after a military spokesman refused to rule out the possibility of the Tatmadaw seizing power.

The coup still didn’t make sense for the military as an institution, and right until 1 February there was optimism it wouldn’t happen. What we misjudged was how Min Aung Hlaing’s ambitions, with his retirement looming in mid year, and the personal enmity between the senior general and Aung San Suu Kyi could push the country into new and dangerous territory.

For all its flaws, the constitution had delivered a stable if uneasy power-sharing arrangement between the military and the NLD. It had enabled Myanmar to continue an imperfect transition that combined new political freedoms and rapid economic growth with a faltering peace process and, of course, the expulsion of the Rohingya to Bangladesh. With the civilian government now toppled, the future seemed deeply uncertain. That first day passed in a haze of confusion; the people I spoke to still seemed to be in shock.

The Tatmadaw portrayed its power grab as simply a temporary hiatus on the path to democracy. On previous occasions when it has seized power, in 1962 and 1988, the military abolished the constitution and introduced sweeping political and economic changes. This time, it was at pains to point out not only that the constitution would remain in force but also that Min Aung Hlaing’s temporary government would continue many of the NLD government’s initiatives. It appointed former ministers from the Thein Sein government, which preceded the NLD and won international plaudits for its reform agenda, and began negotiating with minority political leaders disgruntled at perceived NLD arrogance. It promised to hold elections and hand power to the winning party.

The military seemed confident that post-coup Myanmar would be business-as-usual. But it wasn’t long before everything began to fall apart.

Yet again, the Tatmadaw had badly overestimated its support in the community and underestimated the rage that its removal of Aung San Suu Kyi and the NLD would unleash. This proved a potent cocktail for an uprising.

The resistance began with a bang — literally. The nightly banging of pots and pans, an old ritual to drive out evil spirits, started at 8pm on 2 February, and has continued every night since. The next day, thousands of medical workers joined the “civil disobedience movement” and walked off the job, insisting they wouldn’t return until the civilian government was reinstated.

By that first weekend, thousands were on the streets of Yangon, and when the police made little attempt to stop them the protests quickly began to grow and spread, first across the central plains of Myanmar and then to its minority-dominated uplands. On 22 February — dubbed the “22222 uprising” — millions marched across the country, calling for an end to military rule. Tens of thousands of public and private sector employees joined medical workers in their boycott, crippling the health, logistics and banking sectors and bringing much of the machinery of government to a grinding halt.

As editor-in-chief of Frontier, I’ve spent most of the past month behind a computer screen — coordinating assignments with our reporting team, downloading photos, videos and news updates, writing liveblog and social media posts, and editing and writing features — rather than on the streets. But during one of the first days of mass protests, I walked along a main road through Yangon’s suburbs with thousands of students heading to downtown Yangon to meet up with other groups. Residents lined both sides of the street, holding placards and giving the three-finger salute that has become a symbol of the resistance. A lot of the protesters were clearly NLD supporters — some people held “Free Aung San Suu Kyi” posters — but they seemed to be united by a bigger cause: removing the military from power.

“We’re here to show the military that we will never accept them back in charge,” a woman in her thirties, Ma Shwe, told me through her black face mask. Standing beside the road, a twenty-three-year-old man explained that he could only vaguely remember what military rule was like, but he knew what it represented. “If we’re under the military, we have no future,” he said. “We have no choice but to fight.”

Medical staff protesting in Yangon last Saturday as security forces intensified their response. Nyein Chan Naing/EPA

For all that determination and anger, the protests in Yangon initially felt more like a carnival. Police were few, except at a handful of strategic locations, and not particularly threatening; people called out pyithu ye, or people’s police, in an effort to entice them to join the demonstrations. When I visited the barricaded area in front of Yangon’s city hall in mid February, there seemed as many people taking selfies in front of the police as were protesting. It was colourful, joyous, creative.

Gradually, though, the atmosphere has become more menacing. The military has shown no signs of yielding; rather, its position hardens by the day, as seen in the detention of politicians and activists, enactment of harsh new laws and use of ever-greater violence against protesters. On 28 February, when particularly large demonstrations erupted across the country, security forces killed at least eighteen people across six cities, the United Nations said, and as of 4 March fifty-four protesters had lost their lives in total, the United Nations said. Many are young and have died from gunshot wounds to the head or back, which indicates the security forces have adopted a “shoot to kill” policy to suppress the protests. As a result, the protesters are increasingly young and male, and are arming themselves with home-made shields and even bullet-proof vests.

Prisons are also swelling with political detainees. Since the coup, the slow trickle of arrests has grown to a flood, with detained protesters — who initially were being released without charge — now being sent directly to prison. Close to 1300 had been arrested up to 2 March, local rights groups say.

This is all intended to intimidate. So far, though, it has had the opposite effect — for many, the violence against peaceful protesters has only reinforced why the military must be removed from power.

The security forces are waging what must seem like a never-ending war against thousands of young, determined opponents of the regime. The confrontations in Yangon all more or less follow a similar pattern. The police fire tear gas, stun grenades and rubber bullets and charge towards the demonstrators’ makeshift barricades; the protesters take shelter in nearby apartments and re-emerge after the police have left. My colleagues, brave Myanmar journalists and photographers, have spent the past week being gassed and shot at, and hiding in strangers’ homes to evade arrest, in order to document this struggle for the world.

Time moves differently in a crisis; more has changed in our lives over the past month than in the average year. What was once strange becomes normal.

We’ve had to quickly adjust to a strange new reality — a reality in which banks are shut because rank-and-file staff are on strike, laws can and will be changed overnight without any consultation, and we consider it a duty to spend fifteen minutes each night filling neighbourhoods with the clang of metal on metal.

We’ve learned new acronyms, like CDM (civil disobedience movement) and CRPH (Committee Representing the Pyidaungsu Hluttaw, the NLD’s rival government), and worked out the difference between tear gas canisters and stun grenades. We use VPNs and the messaging app Signal as a matter of course. Facebook feeds that were once full of photos of family and friends and inane thoughts are now dedicated solely to political struggle. We’ve chafed at 8pm curfews and nightly internet shutdowns, and burned with anger at livestreams of activists and politicians being arrested, and videos of police brutality.

As a foreigner, I’m an outsider — this is not my fight. But I am not totally detached from the struggle, either. Having lived in Myanmar for more than thirteen years and made a life here — a career, a family and a home — I can certainly empathise with the loss, anger and hopelessness propelling the protest movement.

But as a journalist, the coup has also brought a renewed sense of purpose. Many other journalists in Myanmar feel the same, I suspect, even as the risks continue to mount.

The media had been an important stakeholder in the early years of Myanmar’s unexpected liberalisation, but the NLD’s ascension to power — widely celebrated by journalists — had unexpected consequences for our industry. The party essentially ignored independent media, preferring its own state-run outlets, and had no compunction about locking journalists up under ill-defined laws if they challenged its political interests. Many journalists felt disappointed, even betrayed, by the NLD.

The Rohingya crisis took this to a new level. The tsunami of negative coverage that it unleashed prompted a huge public backlash against the media. Disinformation campaigns on social media, fuelled partly by government statements, painted journalists as foreign-funded stooges. After the government prosecuted two Reuters reporters for exposing a massacre of Rohingya by the Tatmadaw, journalists came to be seen as untrustworthy at best and potential traitors at worst. It felt as though we were slowly being ground down by a hostile public and government.

Now, inadvertently, we find ourselves back on the side of the people. It has been energising, revitalising.

Slowly, gradually, though, the military has turned the screws. It began with a letter demanding we refer to it as the State Administration Council, and stop calling it a “regime,” “military government” or “coup government.” In an unprecedented show of unity, almost sixty media organisations, including Frontier,  signed a joint statement pushing back against these demands, and insisting that we will continue to report freely and in line with media ethics. Our refusal to comply has resulted in further warnings; the latest included a threat to revoke our licences if we do not submit.

Meanwhile, amendments to the colonial-era Penal Code and the Electronic Transactions Law have heightened the legal risks for journalists and media organisations. In addition to the myriad laws already used to lock up journalists, it’s now an offence to “cause fear, spread false news, agitate directly or indirectly against a government employee” or distribute “fake or inaccurate news online that could create panic, loss of trust or social division.” Both carry a three-year prison term.

In recent days, close to twenty journalists have been arrested while covering the demonstrations, of whom at least six have been hit with these charges.

We all know what may be coming. The military is determined to hold on to power at any cost, and anyone or anything that gets in its way is unlikely to be tolerated for long. Until then, though, we’ll just keep doing our jobs. It’s the only thing we can do. •

The publication of this article was supported by a grant from the Judith Neilson Institute for Journalism and Ideas.

The post The resistance that began with a bang appeared first on Inside Story.

At the last national elections, in 2015, most of the world was looking forward to a government spearheaded by Aung San Suu Kyi. Her longstanding resistance to the army’s stranglehold on power had elevated her into an exalted group, adorned with all manner of international prizes.

But since 2017’s brutal massacres of Muslim Rohingya and their exodus to Bangladesh refugee camps, global sentiment towards Aung San Suu Kyi and her governing party, the National League for Democracy, or NLD, has deteriorated sharply. Having failed to sidestep responsibility for what many fear was genocide, she is much diminished on the world stage. Many want to see her stripped of earlier accolades.

In the three years since the expulsion of the Rohingya, Myanmar’s diplomats have been busy seeking to undo the damage to national prestige. Yet this Sisyphean task has left a frustrated and exhausted elite with no easy answers about how to maintain democratic practices while the economy falters. Most Western tourists and investors are likely to continue resisting Myanmar’s attractions, even after the ravages of Covid-19 have faded.

Both at home and internationally, decision-makers are confronted by a blunt reality. In the country’s nascent democratic culture, policies to exclude the Rohingya are an election-winning strategy, garnering support not only from hardline Buddhist chauvinists but also from a much broader coalition of democratically minded, even liberally oriented, opinion-makers.

The loudest chorus, and the one amplified by the pronouncements of Aung San Suu Kyi and other government figures, argues that Myanmar’s efforts — which they portray as a defence against Rohingya terrorists — have been utterly misunderstood. The nasty local politics of Rakhine State, where the central government is also fighting a brutal counterinsurgency against a well-armed Buddhist militia, are used as further evidence that Myanmar is a victim of naive global attitudes.

Not surprisingly, international opinion will count for very little when Myanmar’s voters go to the polls on 8 November. Local concerns and preferences will determine the country’s direction over the next five years.

Faced with a constitution that reserves a quarter of parliamentary seats for uniformed military personnel, Aung San Suu Kyi’s NLD (or any NLD-led coalition) needs 67 per cent of the available seats to form majority government. Three-quarters of parliamentary votes are needed to approve any constitutional changes, a handbrake on changes that might threaten the military’s influence and priorities.

While the NLD is still expected to perform well at the election, the glow it experienced after the 2015 result won’t be repeated. Covid-19 lockdowns, the constitutional restrictions, some dubious cancellations of local elections around the country, and a climate of heavy-handed government censorship all raise troubling questions about the future of democratic governance in this Southeast Asian country.

In this difficult context, the treatment of the Muslim Rohingya in Rakhine State is a lightning rod for global scrutiny. The Rohingya have experienced pogroms and population-control measures for decades, with major crackdowns resulting in hundreds of thousands fleeing into Bangladesh in the 1970s and 1990s.

They have also been pawns in recent elections. As recently as 2010, Rohingya used their right to vote to undermine the various ethnic Rakhine Buddhist parties, instead directing their support to the military-backed party, the USDP, which went on to form government. Remarkably, five Rohingya politicians were elected to national and state parliaments: an outcome that is barely conceivable in the current climate.

Following communal violence in 2012 and 2013, mainly perpetrated by Rakhine Buddhists, the Rohingya (and Muslims in general) once again faced a national backlash, and their political representatives were forced to keep a low profile. Then the government withdrew the Rohingya’s right to vote. Despite nominally supporting ethnic and religious diversity, the NLD failed to put up a single Muslim candidate at the 2015 poll.

But the worst was still to come. The well-documented massacres and sexual violence, and the resulting exodus of the Rohingya in 2017 are currently the subject of legal cases at the International Criminal Court and the International Court of Justice, or ICJ, where Myanmar has been accused of genocide by The Gambia. The Gambia’s full submission — 500 pages of argument supported by 5000 pages of evidence and interpretation — was deposited with the ICJ in late October.

While around a million Rohingya languish in refugee camps on the Bangladesh side of the border, more than half a million Rohingya still live in Rakhine State. At least 130,000 of them are held in internment camps with extreme limits on their ability to work, travel or receive an education. Even those outside the camps face a range of health and employment restrictions.

Despite the Myanmar government’s attempts to deflect attention away from the Rohingya crisis, The Gambia’s full submission to the ICJ will refocus attention on the issue, highlighting the fact that the Rohingya are disenfranchised in a number of ways.

Internet access — and therefore political campaigning — has been severely limited for more than a year in parts of Rakhine State, primarily because of conflict between the Myanmar military and the Arakan Army, a militant group comprised of Buddhist Rakhine, the largest ethnic group in Rakhine State.

The death toll is high on both sides, and the conflict has spilled over into the election, with the Arakan Army abducting three NLD candidates. As a result, on 16 October the Union Election Commission cancelled voting in nine of the seventeen townships in Rakhine State and restricted it in a further four. At least thirty-seven of the sixty-four national and state parliamentary seats in Rakhine State will remain vacant, virtually wiping out the ethnic Rakhine parties from parliament. The NLD holds three of the four national parliamentary seats in the townships where voting will still take place.

The decision to go ahead with elections in Paletwa, in neighbouring Chin State, only exacerbated feelings of injustice among ethnic minority parties. Paletwa, the scene of intense conflict, is cut off by road, leaving it short of food and accessible to election staff only by helicopter. But it is deemed a fortress of the NLD, which holds all five seats and will sweep the elections there.

On 27 October, following widespread criticism of these decisions, the commission reinstated elections in some parts of Rakhine State and cancelled some elections in Paletwa Township. But the damage was done. The commission’s appetite for interventions that benefit the NLD — its decisions are “based on the recommendation of the government,” acknowledged one of its officials — makes it hard to convince ethnic minorities of the existence of a democratic level playing field. Incumbency is key.

Elections have also been cancelled in parts of Shan, Kachin, Kayin and Mon States and Bago Region, but the decisions regarding Rakhine State could leave that poor and isolated region acutely lacking in local representation from Buddhist or Muslim communities. Much of its population, including almost all Muslim Rohingya and at least half the Buddhist Rakhine, will be disenfranchised, further entrenching the commitment to armed struggle.

Adding to the complexity is a second Covid-19 lockdown, now in its second month, in Yangon, the commercial capital. This year’s pandemic has made survival more challenging than ever for many of Myanmar’s people, with inequality deepening in what is still one of Asia’s poorest countries.

It now also risks greater isolation at a time when once-generous international aid donors often have pressing concerns closer to home. One exception is China, which is seeking to use Myanmar’s precipitous drop in reputation as a chance to consolidate its strategic partnership. The NLD might be reluctant to fully embrace Beijing, but it has fewer alternatives than before.

A path towards effective national renewal, of the type outlined so eloquently by Thant Myint-U in his recent book, The Hidden History of Burma: Race, Capitalism and the Crisis of Democracy in the 21st Century, looks improbable in the near term. There appears to be no appetite for shaking up the conversation about belonging, citizenship and identity to find an opening for the Rohingya to return, in large numbers, from across the border. Without accepting the need for bold policy change on the Rohingya, a new NLD-led government will find it must fund more of its economic and political priorities from its own limited resources.

In such a contested landscape, finding space for all of Myanmar’s voices, including the Rohingya, requires patient, creative and open-minded work, and such liberal ideas are not going to be rewarded by voters any time soon.

Indeed, the government’s ongoing attacks on journalists and anti-war campaigners appear to have barely dented its popularity. Understandably, the NLD is focused simply on winning the election and securing a new mandate that provides a patina of democratic legitimacy for its approach to national management. But longer-term acceptance of NLD rule, both internationally and domestically in the ethnic minority periphery, will require greater adherence to democratic and human rights norms.

In the short term, when the votes are counted after this election, NLD voices will again demand that the world accepts the local verdict on handling the Rohingya crisis. But the ICJ proceedings will continue to frustrate Myanmar’s efforts to rehabilitate its shattered reputation. Legal arguments are likely to roll on for years, providing frequent reminders that one million Rohingya are condemned to a vulnerable existence at the margins of Bangladeshi society.

This time around, with Aung San Suu Kyi and her sclerotic senior team committed to staying in charge, the election’s victors will wait in vain for any strong endorsement from leading democracies. The government’s treatment of the Rohingya is a dark shadow over any hopes for a fresh tick of approval. •

The post As the world watches, Myanmar votes appeared first on Inside Story.

King Bhumibol’s final years were punctuated by concerns, often only whispered, about his heir’s suitability. The succession itself proved mostly uncontroversial: King Vajiralongkorn, the tenth in the Chakri dynasty, took the throne and then, as had become his habit, disappeared from the kingdom.

This created a void that was previously filled by a carefully calibrated royal aura. The void has grown larger, fuelled by rumours about the king’s lifestyle and temper, and concern about the royal family’s political role.

Under King Bhumibol, even palace critics tended to grudgingly accept the benevolent work of royal charities and the sacred centre’s steadying influence. Nobody sees King Vajiralongkorn as a guiding hand, and now, for the first time in many years, young Thais are openly defying palace prerogatives.

The protesters, many still in their teens, are testing the boundaries of public discussion with strongly worded placards and a meme-filled digital marketplace of subversive content. Facebook, so often a rallying point in Thai society, has become a battleground for opposing narratives.

The government of former military chief Prayuth Chan-ocha, who took power in the 2014 coup, draws an elected mandate from heavily stage-managed 2019 elections. And although the Constitutional Court has banned political parties that have tested Prayuth’s patience, he has not succeeded in eliminating all dissent. Indeed the pandemic’s economic disruption has offered an opening for some of his fiercest critics.

These critical voices now line up to undermine the long-cultivated story that the military and palace only intervene in politics when there is no other choice. In Bangkok and Chiang Mai, protesters are confronting this narrative of reluctant national saviours with an alternative story about an unaccountable, and undemocratic, consolidation of power and wealth.

It is an awkward time for rulers who have benefited significantly from the bounty of globalisation. For two generations, Thailand’s reputation as a playful, welcoming and well-priced destination has sustained a tourism boom. Few corners of the kingdom have escaped the flows of cashed-up visitors from all around the world, eager to sample delicious cuisine, partake in lively nightlife and explore the beaches, mountains and islands that make for a picture-perfect holiday escape.

Alongside tourism, Thailand built up sizeable manufacturing, service and agricultural sectors, offering good quality at reasonable cost. Medical tourism, automotive production and highly prized rice varieties bulked out an impressive portfolio of exports to the wider world.

It is no surprise that the pandemic hit Thailand hard. Fleets of aircraft were grounded, airports deserted, taxi fleets idle, hotels empty, nightclubs shuttered. While the story has been the same worldwide, first from Wuhan to Milan and now almost everywhere, the Thai economic model has specific vulnerabilities.

In response to the crisis, the government pushed aid to hard-hit households and struggling firms, anxious to avoid financial disaster in a society in which many people sailed close to the wind even before this year’s economic crash. Families often rely on energetic and youthful members to send money back from the big cities or from abroad. Where there is wealth in the most impoverished rural communities, it tends to have been harvested far from home.

Many of the opportunities that have been available to recent generations of entrepreneurial and creative Thais have faded significantly in recent months. Under these troubling conditions, the government has naturally wanted to paint a positive picture of its own response, but not everyone wants to listen.

The young protesters who have called for a new constitution and for the king to step away from politics are betting that the wider public is also fed up with the royalist–military nexus under an uncaring and distant king. It is a risky bet, not only because many Thais harbour deep affection for the palace and its players but also because violence is so often used to settle the country’s most profound disputes.

It is worth remembering that the ongoing civil war in southern Thailand, which reignited back in 2004, shows no end. Muslim separatists have proved resilient on the insurgent battlefield.

Nor is there any expectation that the fault lines exposed by almost two decades of political brawling can disappear. Deposed former prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra, elected in 2001 and 2005 but booted out in the 2006 coup, is still a lightning rod for strong emotions, with many Thai “reds” eager for his brand of populist politics to return. The ascendant “yellow” royalists, who count the current military leadership as key backers, have worked assiduously to avoid that outcome.

But time doesn’t stand still, especially amid so many other disruptions. The current generation of street protesters, many of whom are in their teens, may not even have been born when Thaksin first took power. The contrast between their expectations and those of their parents and grandparents is a stark one.

This is the first generation of Thais to grow up in an information-saturated digital environment, one in which technology provides ready solutions and ready distractions in so many spheres. While young Thais may have switched off from the official story of royal and military munificence, they have tuned in to an alternative story about Thailand’s history and its future.

And while thousands of protesters are no match for the armed forces or the palace’s power, they benefit from an implicit appreciation, spread all across Thailand, that King Vajiralongkorn is a poor substitute for King Bhumibol. The new king’s long absences and apparent lack of interest in his subjects’ lives are now fodder for ridicule on the streets and online.

Where Thailand goes next will depend on whether decision-makers can apply what has often been an impressive capacity to manage political disquiet. The government will hope that the young protesters, mostly students, will grow tired or perhaps fearful.

Yet the government probably underestimates the depth of feeling and the apparent tactical sophistication of the protesters. Many of them look for inspiration to Hong Kong, where their own generation has gone toe-to-toe with one of the world’s most formidable security establishments. Hong Kong’s student protesters have yet to surrender.

The same can be said of the many popular movements — whether in the United States, through Black Lives Matters, or in Belarus in response to a rigged election — whose opposition to entrenched elites has drawn strength from the turbulent and often tragic events of 2020. The Thai students are, in the same style, asking themselves what they have to lose.

The answer to this question is fraught with the potential for miscalculation and grief. Historically, when Thailand’s powerful forces have been confronted by defiant opposition their response has often proved vindictive and violent. In this case, a campaign to lock up young protest leaders is under way. They are exposed to prosecution under draconian laws that forbid critical reflection on the royal family and heavily restrict online communication.

There is a further X factor. King Vajiralongkorn has never before faced such a confluence of bad news. We don’t know how he will ultimately react. His apparent lack of interest in the kingdom’s affairs may mean that the protests can carry on without a direct response. Right now, we don’t even know whether he cares that he is a target of public scorn.

But if there is a firm response, especially a violent one, the palace risks further undermining its diminished reputation and leaving Thais wondering about royal power’s rightful place. While every Thai constitution has insisted on the king’s exalted position, many Thais simply want a peaceful, prosperous and predictable lifestyle for their families.

The astonishing wealth of the royal family is also getting attention. The bottom line is that during an economic calamity like the one facing Thailand in 2020, lowly subjects with mouths to feed feel that they should also have a chance to share in the spoils. •

The post Thailand’s X factors appeared first on Inside Story.

Once an election is called in Singapore, the next big event is Nomination Day, in this case on 30 June. There was a time when the PAP used to win the election at that point in the cycle, simply because the opposition offered candidates in fewer than half the seats. But this time we can expect opposition parties to contest all of the ninety-three seats, and with sufficient cooperation to minimise three-cornered contests.

This year, the big Nomination Day questions revolve around a son and a grandson of the city-state’s first prime minister, Lee Kuan Yew.

The son is Lee Hsien Yang, estranged brother of prime minister Lee Hsien Loong, and the question is whether he will nominate as an opposition candidate in his father’s old seat of Tanjong Pagar. He announced on 24 June that he had joined the new Progress Singapore Party, helmed by the affable and immensely popular Tan Cheng Bock. Dr Tan is a general practitioner who spent decades as a government MP but thinks the PAP has betrayed Lee Kuan Yew’s legacy. If Lee Hsien Yang stands, he will ensure that the PSP is the most talked-about opposition party in the contest.

The grandson is Li Hongyi, son of prime minister Lee Hsien Loong, and the question is whether he will nominate as a PAP candidate. Li’s entry into politics would be just as riveting as Lee Hsien Yang’s, but he may decide it is prudent to wait. Even if he sits out the election, he might still be parachuted into parliament under the peculiarly Singaporean practice of each new parliament selecting a few unelected people to join them as Nominated MPs.

Beyond the intrigues of the Lee family, we also need to look out for retirements among members of cabinet. None has been announced so far, but one or two seem likely at very senior levels.

Beyond Nomination Day, all eyes will be on deputy prime minister Heng Swee Keat. His performance as Lee Hsien Loong’s understudy has been disappointing, even embarrassing, and poor campaigning on his part could see him bypassed for the top job — or at least force Lee to stay beyond his planned retirement in the next year or so.

The actual conduct of the election campaigns will also be of interest. The government has chosen to go to the polls early ­— it could have waited until April next year — despite Singapore’s Covid-19 infection rate being stuck at nearly 200 people a day (in a population of 5.6 million). Lockdown rules will provide no more than a modicum of safety for the population, but they put the opposition at an even greater disadvantage than usual. They mean no rallies (which are the opposition’s rice bowl), severe restrictions on “walkabouts” by candidates, and the only compensatory measures being candidate statements on the English-language television channel, but no others. The lack of opportunities for outreach via Malay, Tamil or Chinese broadcasters, which have a huge combined viewership, won’t concern the incumbents but will muffle the opposition badly.

Much of the campaigning will be done online, but the internet is subject to new restrictions. For the first time, the government will have the power to censor alleged “fake news” on the internet, and we don’t know if this option will be used with a light touch or a sledgehammer.

In ordinary times each cabinet minister has the power to issue directives against websites he or she deems to have propagated a falsehood. It is a power that a minister exercises unilaterally and with no practical oversight, and it has been mostly used against critics of the government. During the election campaign, this power will be delegated to a permanent secretary of each ministry, but this doesn’t remove the conflict of interest. No one gets to be a permanent secretary unless they are thoroughly loyal to the PAP; indeed, a successful career in the civil service is a standard stepping stone into politics and cabinet.

Beyond the government’s ham-fisted management of the second wave of Covid-19, it is hard to know which campaign issues will be most important. A bedrock of dissatisfaction exists about immigration, housing, the reliability and cost of public transport, healthcare, hospitals, data security, access to retirement savings and even freedom of speech, but they all seem to have been swamped by the pandemic.

The government will be keen to increase its share of the vote and win back some of the six seats currently held by the sole opposition party represented in parliament, the Workers’ Party, but neither seems likely.

The Workers’ Party will obviously be keen to hold on to its six elected MPs and maintain its status as the major opposition party, perhaps even hoping that a new star candidate, Nicole Seah, might help it make some gains. All of its MPs seem likely to retain their existing seats, but you can never tell, especially since five of the six are in a single winner-takes-all multi-member constituency, and for years the government has been relentlessly trashing their reputations.

But the real wild card is Lee Hsien Yang and Tan Cheng Bock’s PSP. If there is major upset on 10 July, it will most likely come from the PAP’s former allies. •

The post Singapore goes early appeared first on Inside Story.

Yet, in the midst of a global pandemic that originated in the region, and at a time when China’s rise is shaking geopolitical certainties throughout the world, one of our major national institutions has decided to turn away from Asia. Ironically, the same institution was a pioneer of Asian engagement.

For almost seven decades, the National Library of Australia has been building one of the world’s most extensive collections of Southeast and Northeast Asian material. The legacy of accumulated investment and collecting by specialist curators, its store of Asian newspapers and periodicals, books, government documents and other rare materials is among the great treasure troves of Asian studies, and the most extensive Asia collection in the southern hemisphere. Researchers visit from around the world, and the collection is a foundation stone of decades of effort to build sustained and deep knowledge of Asia at Australian universities.

Now, much of this is to be abandoned. In a new “collection development policy” — the document that lays out what and how the library will collect — the library has dramatically downgraded its emphasis on overseas collecting. It has removed key Asian countries from its list of priorities; it has closed its Asian Collections Room; it has cancelled subscriptions to hundreds of Asian periodicals.

Several specialist librarians with Asian language skills — crucial for managing existing holdings to say nothing of extending them — have recently retired and not been replaced, or have been replaced at a lower level. The future of current specialist staff working on Asian language collections is in doubt. Though the library maintains it will still prioritise three Asian countries — China, Indonesia and Timor-Leste — signs suggest that this collecting will be severely downgraded.

As its own website explains, the National Library has been developing its Asia collections since the 1950s. They are a legacy of the Menzies era when, learning from the deadly experience of the second world war, Australia’s federal government decided it needed to build deeper knowledge of the region in which Australia is located. Even as the White Australia policy continued to restrict Asian immigration, the library began to collect materials from Asian countries and in Asian languages. It was thus the forerunner of a broader Asian turn that followed in other Australian institutions, including universities, schools and, eventually, the private sector.

Even as the vision of Australian engagement with Asia has waxed and waned at the federal level down the years, the library has kept its eyes firmly fixed on the region. It has built up a rich collection, including — in the case of many of the Southeast Asian collections, as well as the remarkable North Korean collection — newspapers, political documents and other materials that are now difficult if not impossible to obtain in those countries.

The new collection development policy makes it clear that the library is turning inward, sharpening the focus on Australian materials. Thankfully, the Asia-Pacific will remain the priority in overseas collecting, but the scope of the reduction leaves only part of the previous Asia strategy intact. Countries that have been a major focus for decades — notably Japan and Korea, and also all the countries of mainland Southeast Asia — have been dropped altogether from the list of priority countries for collecting. Collections that have been developed over decades will now wither on the vine of neglect.

From a national interest perspective, this makes little sense. Of course, Australian collections must be the centrepiece of Australia’s national library. But if we accept that Australia’s fate is inextricably linked to our region — as all Australian governments since Menzies have believed — then we must recognise that knowledge of the region is important too. Understanding Australia requires that we understand our Asian context. This is the approach that has guided the library in the past.

Nothing in the external environment has changed. Asia has become more not less important to Australia: note, for example, that two of the countries just dropped as priorities (Korea and Japan) were among the top four trading partners of Australia last year. One of the digital subscriptions cancelled by the library covered local newspapers throughout China, including in Hubei province, the epicentre of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Given this context, and with so many sunk costs in an Asia collection that rivals the best in the world, why walk away now? The main reason is depressingly familiar: funding cuts. Many years of “efficiency dividends,” as well as major cuts under prime minister Tony Abbott, have severely curtailed the library’s budget. It now barely has enough money to manage basic functions such as providing shelf storage for its constantly growing collection or maintaining its ageing ventilation systems. The shift to digitisation has placed new pressures on the library’s budget, which it has been able to cover only partly with special purpose grants (which don’t fix the underlying problem).

The decline in base funding has been relentless. According to my calculations using data in the library’s annual reports, it experienced roughly a 15 per cent cut in government income (adjusted for inflation) in the years between 2009–10 and 2017–18 alone. (Take out a special grant for a Captain Cook exhibition held in 2018 and the decline is even steeper.) In the same period the population of Australia grew by 14 per cent, further increasing the library’s domestic collecting burden, but the number of library staff fell by 20 per cent, from about 500 to 400.

No institution can survive cuts like this without paring back basic programming. Something had to give. Given the library is statutorily obliged to build an Australian collection, it decided the deepest cuts would be in overseas collecting, of which the Asia-Pacific has always been a major component.

Government spending is an expression of political priorities, of course, and the library has obviously lacked effective champions in government. This becomes clear when we realise that not all of the national cultural institutions have suffered in the same way. In 2018, for example, the government announced a funding boost of $498 million to redevelop the Australian War Memorial. Where there is political will, funding can be found.

The irony in all of this is that the federal government remains rhetorically committed to building Asia knowledge. Government documents proclaim that Australia needs to promote its “soft power” in the region, in part by demonstrating seriousness about Asia. A National Library that is increasingly inward-looking points in exactly the opposite direction. •

The post Asia illiteracy appeared first on Inside Story.

Yet an old leader was the face of the revolution. Mahathir Mohamad was back on top. Across the causeway, in Singapore, this was the joke of the times:

A Singapore man goes to bed in May 1988 and sleeps for three decades. In May 2018, he awakes to be astonished by the length of his beard and the age of his wife. His grown children are called and the grandchildren introduced. Then he asks, “Who is Singapore’s leader now?”

When told that it’s Prime Minister Lee, he muses: “I knew Lee Kuan Yew would never go away. What about Malaysia?”

Malaysia’s leader is Dr Mahathir.

The awakened one shakes his head: “Still Lee and Mahathir! I’m going back to sleep. Wake me up when something changes around here!”

One version of the joke has a coda:

The eldest son steps forward and says, “Don’t go back to sleep, Dad. Everybody else has just woken up too!”

Would Malaysia’s election be a political tsunami that changed everything, or merely a giant version of political musical chairs? Was this a passing moment or a rearranging of how history is understood?

Dr Mahathir’s place in history was suddenly in flux. Malaysia’s fourth and longest-serving prime minister (1981–2003) had become Malaysia’s seventh PM as well. And the seventh PM had pledged to undo much of the fourth PM’s institutional legacy while trying simultaneously to defend his personal legacy.

The sleeper joke chimed with me because when I arrived in Singapore as the ABC’s Southeast Asia correspondent in January 1989, there was a lot of speculation about the leadership succession timetables for those two entrenched leaders, Mahathir and Lee Kuan Yew.

In 1989, Dr M had just had a heart-bypass operation. Leaving aside wry surprise in KL that Mahathir actually had a heart, how much longer could he go? Well, that bypass lasted eighteen years before another was needed. He’s also had a few heart attacks.

Whatever the state of his heart, the defining feature of this elder elder-statesman is his will to power. That iron will was a feature Mahathir shared with Paul Keating, which makes it hardly surprising that they clashed over conflicting visions of Asia. The system-level difference is that in Australia, losers go to the opposition benches but in Malaysia they can go to jail.

Part of the sharp point of the Singapore joke was the role of political dynasties. Back in 1989, Lee Kuan Yew had a succession plan for his son, Lee Hsien Loong, and for the country. He stepped down as leader in 1990, handing the prime ministership to Goh Chok Tong, but stayed in cabinet — and stayed as the power monitoring the power. In 1990, LKY’s agonising choice between beloved country and beloved son was made in favour of the beloved country. The beloved son had to wait another fourteen years before he became the country’s third prime minister.

Today Prime Minister Lee, like his father, is edging slowly towards that moment when he hands control of the family business to someone who isn’t a family member. The choice of Singapore’s fourth prime minister will be made, as always, by a Lee.

Dynasties and democracies, though, are a volatile mix. Asia well understands that dynasties in business or politics can be a major force multiplier — until that moment when the dynastic line falters or overreaches.

The case in dramatic point in 2018 was Najib Razak, the prime minister  Mahathir overthrew. Najib, too, is the son of a prime minister, so the born-to-rule sensibility of dynastic inheritance was added to the hubris of leading the party in power for sixty-one years.

In taking up the reins again, Mahathir gave Singapore some characteristic flicks along with the same lashing he administered to Malaysia’s establishment. The sharpest reminder of Mahathir’s sardonic force, delivered via a Financial Times interview, was his taunt about what Malaysia’s revolution would mean in Singapore: “I think the people of Singapore, like the people in Malaysia, must be tired of having the same government, the same party since independence.”

Part of the uneasy symbiosis of Malaysia and Singapore had been that neither democracy ever voted to change its soft-authoritarian government. Now that mirror image of a party holding permanent power had been shattered.

We were asked to junk memories of Mahathir as the champion of distinctive Asian values, of strong government based on hierarchy and respect. That was all so last century. The 2018 Mahathir was the champion of democracy in all its glorious unpredictability, promising to dismantle much of the history he created.

Now those great hopes have been dashed and Mahathir is again a departed leader. But the meaning of Malaysia’s great political experiment is still to be written.

Malaysia is one element of Southeast Asia’s wondrous experiment in comparative politics. Perhaps a galactic professor peers down, testing a spectrum of political systems, from the Malay Muslim monarchy of Brunei to the world’s largest Muslim democracy in Indonesia.

The Universe Uni professor mixes in variations on monopoly themes, from one-party communist (Vietnam, Laos) to one-party democracy (Singapore). Intrigued by the intimate dance between democracy and dynasty and authoritarianism, the professor pushes to see whether regimes can become more responsive and more repressive at the same time.

The variations produced by a system combining soft authoritarianism and electoral authoritarianism make Malaysia a special study.

A simple lesson — taught again by Malaysia — is that ballot-box revolts can change governments, but changing a regime is a tough task needing much time. Kleptocracy takes a lot of killing. The 2018 electoral revolution was overturned this year by an old-politics counterrevolution.

As seen in the distinctly different cases across Southeast Asia, powerful elites have many ways to play elections. Add in the combustibles of individual ego and ambition and you have the drama that this year remade Malaysia’s government again.

Before dwelling on the disappointments, underline the achievement of that seminal election of May 2018, when Malaysia ceased to be a one-party democracy. After having won thirteen elections in sixty-one years, Pertubuhan Kebangsaan Melayu Bersatu (the United Malays National Organisation, or UNMO) and its Barisan Nasional (National Front) coalition were cast out by the people.

It was morality play as Shakespearean drama, with tragedy lurking just offstage. Surely only a great bard or a bizarre galactic professor would dare to create a character like Mahathir Mohamad, now a ninety-four-year-old who puts the noise into being a nonagenarian.

The man who made and remade UMNO during his twenty-two years as prime minister returned to cast it from the citadel at the head of the Pakatan Harapan coalition, the Alliance of Hope. The alliance joined Mahathir with Anwar Ibrahim and other politicians he’d previously jailed. Then, in in February this year, Dr M brought the alliance crashing down.

Mahathir, the master manipulator, masterminded his own downfall. He’s played many Shakespearean roles: Caesar, Brutus, Cassius and several of the ghosts. Finally, he was Falstaff.

To understand these tumultuous years, turn to Kean Wong, a fine journalist and editor who can be claimed by both Malaysia and Australia. Kean — as he’s known to all — qualifies at all levels for an honoured title of Oz hackdom: an old Asia hand.

As contributing editor for the Australian National University’s web journal on Southeast Asian politics and society, New Mandala, Kean brought together a range of writers to describe the 2018 revolution. That coverage is now published in a book, Rebirth: Reformasi, Resistance, and Hope on the Road to New Malaysia.

The book poses a poignant question: “Was Malaysia saved from kleptocracy by the world’s oldest prime minister, and does it finally transform itself into a sustainable democracy with another longstanding putative leader? Is there a younger generation of Malaysians with the gumption to make that difference?”

The unfortunate answer is in: not yet, professor, not yet.

Editors have many nightmares. One is publishing a book overtaken by events — bringing out a tome on a revolution as the counterrevolution arrives. Kean’s response is to do what journos always do. When the facts change, they file anew. So the book now has update chapters, carried by Melbourne University’s Asialink. The book captures the excitement of the new Malaysia. The updates describe problems confronting its birth.

In his introduction to the updates, Kean comments: “[O]rdinary Malaysians did the extraordinary thing in Asia of using the ballot box and voting out a government in power since 1957, only to see a return in 2020 of its modern cabal, many of its current leaders still facing the courts for grand corruption charges.”

The book carries excellent on-the-ground descriptions of that ballot-box moment. Among the gems, see Dina Zaman’s piece, published just before the 2018 election, on life in one kampong in Sabah — a village facing the push and pull of modernity and the stricter teachings of freshly minted Islamic scholars.

Greg Lopez sets the scene for the cabal comeback by arguing that the 2018 result didn’t amount to regime change. The rules of the game for Malaysia’s competitive authoritarian regime haven’t altered, he writes, because there were “no fundamental alterations in the institutions that constitute the regime.” Nor was there “substantial movement to establish free and fair elections and broaden civil liberties.”

Another gem is a chapter by Clive Kessler (a grand Oz warhorse who has spent more than fifty years studying Malaysia) pondering why he got the 2018 election wrong. As he wrote before it happened: “Democratic transition under electoral democracy is not easily achieved in Malaysia. The bar is set very high. Inordinately high. The bottom line here is that, while it is not easy for an opposition to win an election in Malaysia, it is far harder for them, even having done so, to assume power and rule.”

Those truths about ruling and regime change were played out as political musical chairs in February when Mahathir tore apart the governing coalition.

The aim was to cement Dr M’s hold on power and ditch his promise to hand the prime ministership to Anwar Ibrahim. The personal struggle between Mahathir and Anwar has run through Malaysian politics for three decades. Dr M botched the coup against his own government — Machiavelli meets the Marx brothers — and ended up stabbing himself in the front. Tragedy and farce, treachery and infighting.

Mahathir’s party deputy, Muhyiddin Yassin, was appointed prime minister by the king at the head of a new Perikatan Nasional “national alliance” government. Anwar is opposition leader. Mahathir lurks, promising to rise a third time. The Covid-19 crisis has, for the moment, frozen the players in place.

Muhyiddin’s PN government, Kean writes, “is widely cast as a dubious coalition of parties mostly underpinned by a politics of race and religion, untested in and perhaps saved from parliamentary legitimacy thanks to the postponement for a few months of parliament amid the pandemic.”

Hew Wai Heng writes that Mahathir’s government was partly undone by “Muslim majoritarianism,” the always potent claim that “Islam is under the threat” and “Malays are being sidelined.”

In an update essay on politics in a parlous time, Meredith Weiss notes that Malaysia’s political system sets it apart from the rest of Southeast Asia because the parties are “coherent, enduring, distinct, and allowed to contest.” Yet the parties are also prone to fracture under the weight of heavy egos.

The short-term costs of Mahathir’s debacle and the rise of Muhyiddin’s PN government, Weiss judges, will be “institutional reforms and political house-cleaning foregone, likely investments diverted, and general frustration,” while the long-term costs “could be citizen disillusionment and disengagement, should votes seem not to matter and other institutional checks to be ineffective.”

Galactic professors and venerable warhorses understand that winning elections in Southeast Asia is tough. Then, having got the power, to actually govern… •

Copies of Rebirth: Reformasi, Resistance, and Hope on the Road to New Malaysia can be ordered by email in Australia for $25 each, postage included.

The post Malaysia’s amazing political rollercoaster appeared first on Inside Story.

The prime minister is correct: Indonesia’s success is indeed Australia’s success. Two-way trade between Australia and Indonesia is almost $12 billion a year. Each year, Indonesians pour almost $7 billion into Australia’s universities, mining companies and agricultural sector, and maintain another $1 billion worth of investment in Australia. It cuts both ways. Australian households and businesses have more than $10 billion invested in Indonesia. Australia’s prosperity and Indonesia’s have grown together.

The Indonesian story has been an amazing one. If it keeps doing well, it is on track to become the fourth-largest economy in the world by 2050. Since trade and investment are more about geography than anything else, the benefits to Australia from Indonesia’s rise will be massive. But if Indonesia does badly, the huge financial, economic and security costs will reverberate back onto Australia and around Asia.

Which way will it go? Australia will help decide. The Australian government will soon need to make a choice about whether or not it helps Indonesia. Emerging markets have seen the largest capital outflows in history during the Covid-19 pandemic — larger than those experienced during the global financial crisis — and Indonesia is at the front line in Asia. Indonesia’s exchange rate crashed almost 20 per cent from January to early April as investors fled its economy. Its international debt, more than US$410 billion, is denominated in foreign currencies, meaning that as its exchange rate falls the size of the debt increases. To make matters worse, the income it normally uses to finance these debts has evaporated as global trade, tourism, and oil and commodity prices have collapsed. Around US$44 billion of foreign-denominated debt needs to be refinanced in the next twelve months alone.

None of this is Indonesia’s fault. Indonesia has spent more than two decades substantially strengthening its economy and financial system. Its reliance on short-term foreign-denominated debt has fallen steadily in real terms. But it remains stuck in the catch-22 situation in which all developing countries find themselves: they need to borrow internationally to finance economic development, but borrowing internationally makes them more exposed to financial risks. Economies can hedge against these financial risks, but that costs money. Every dollar spent hedging is a dollar that isn’t spent alleviating poverty. The trade-off between poverty alleviation and financial stability is real, and brutal.

What can Australia do to help? Some might argue that Indonesia should fend for itself. After all, it isn’t helpless. Very wisely, it has spent the last few decades accumulating US$125 billion in foreign-exchange reserves to use for a rainy day. It can use its stock of US Treasury bonds to borrow US dollars thanks to a new facility provided by the New York Federal Reserve.

But these resources are finite, and the markets know it. They will buy Indonesia time, but not much else. Unless the underlying dynamics change, and there’s little prospect of that in the short run, Indonesia will remain in a vicious cycle that will only get worse. While it burns through its foreign-exchange reserves to allow its government and companies to service their foreign debts, its foreign income will remain blocked for as long as Covid-19 keeps tourists, buyers and investors at bay. A weak healthcare system means the impact of the virus will be particularly nasty, hurting Indonesian citizens and keeping investors and tourists away for even longer.

Indonesia needs a circuit-breaker, and Australia can provide one at virtually no cost. The Reserve Bank of Australia has what’s called a bilateral currency swap line with Bank Indonesia, Indonesia’s central bank. This allows Bank Indonesia to swap rupiah for Australian dollars at an agreed rate. The arrangement works like this: Bank Indonesia gets Australian dollars, which it can then use to pay its foreign debts, and Australia gets rupiah, which it holds as collateral until Indonesia repays the Australian dollars in the future. This stops a crisis in its tracks. It sends a crystal-clear signal to markets that Indonesia can access foreign currencies as needed and can thus keep repaying and refinancing its debts. It stops investors from creating a self-fulfilling prophecy — an Indonesian default — by withdrawing their money, which would push down the exchange rate, increase borrowing costs and bring on the very default they feared in the first place.

The existing swap line has two limitations. First, the Reserve Bank has said that it would not be open to Indonesia in a crisis. It would only be available in a situation where companies and banks were unable to exchange currencies for some other reason. The second problem is that, even if the swap line were available during a crisis, it’s too small. At $10 billion, it is less than a quarter of Indonesia’s foreign debt owed in the next twelve months, and less than 3 per cent of its total foreign debt.

With the backing of Treasury and parliament as necessary, the Reserve Bank should change its policy and make it clear that this swap line is available during a crisis. It should then double it. What’s the risk to Australia? In any realistic scenario, there is none. The absolute worst-case scenario is that the Indonesian economy and financial system completely collapse, and its currency loses all value. If this happened, the Reserve Bank would be temporarily stuck with worthless rupiah and would have temporarily lost the money it provided through the swap. This scenario is incredibly improbable. If the Indonesian economy were to collapse, Australia would have much bigger problems to contend with, and the last thing anyone would care about is a writedown on the Reserve Bank’s balance sheet. And even if it did occur, it would simply mean that Australia would be repaid later than expected once the Indonesian economy recovered.

The much more likely scenario is that this swap line sends a vital signal of reassurance to markets, helping to stabilise the Indonesian financial system, and never needs to be used. This is the historical experience: the swap line goes unused and Australia looks like a helpful neighbour. Either way the cost is zero. It’s rare to be able to strengthen bilateral relationships at zero cost.

Indonesia is in a bind and it needs help. Indonesia’s finance minister and central bank governor are already asking other countries for help, and soon they will ask Australia, if they haven’t already. If Australia were a true friend, they wouldn’t need to ask. •

The post Will Australia turn its back on Indonesia? appeared first on Inside Story.

Singapore learned from that bitter experience, and is now being applauded by journalists and politicians across the world for its response to Covid-19. The government’s prompt and thorough imposition of social distancing — and even its Big Brother–style contact tracing — is the envy of health authorities across the world.

I was living in Singapore, researching a book, during 2003 and vividly remember the government’s slow response to SARS. I watched the epidemic unfold day by day and could see that the response was woefully inadequate up until at least halfway through the crisis.

The outbreak began on 13 March 2003, but it was not until 20 April 2003 that the government started taking it seriously. During those five weeks, the government lost valuable time that could have kept the death toll below the thirty-three lives that were eventually lost.

During the first phase of the crisis, I attended a government-sponsored anti-SARS rally in Singapore. The local authorities put up a small marquee in a housing estate, set out hundreds of seats side-by-side, and hosted the family-oriented event in the high afternoon humidity. The throng listened as government-sponsored speakers (not doctors) gave lectures on the risks of contagion. Social distancing didn’t occur then — nor a week later, when the same marquee hosted a crowded concert with a local band.

This rudderless period only came to an end when SARS threatened Singapore’s aristocracy: the family of its founding prime minister, Lee Kuan Yew. Kwa Geok Choo, wife of Singapore’s first prime minister and mother of the current prime minister, was rushed to hospital with a fever in mid April. Although she was quickly diagnosed as SARS-free, the scare galvanised the government. Lee Kuan Yew, still a member of cabinet, kickstarted the response by creating two ministerial committees (“combat teams” in the government’s parlance) to handle the crisis, sidelining the health minister and putting the response on the most serious footing.

Once the government focused, it learned quickly. Thermal-imaging scanners were set up at the airport and at the bridge connecting Singapore with Malaysia. Like everyone else, I wasn’t allowed to enter a public building without a temperature check. Schoolchildren had their temperatures taken every morning and any child with a fever was sent home immediately. Some measures were more theatrical than practical, designed to build awareness and change personal habits, but the media and government conveyed a clear and consistent message.

When I wrote about my experiences in a book about health policy in the Asia-Pacific a couple of years later, I noted that the SARS experience meant that Singapore was likely to handle the next threatened epidemic much more effectively. Singapore introduced stringent quarantine laws and protocols, enforceable by large fines and public humiliation. The Communicable Disease Centre, once a rundown, low-tech facility designed to cope with HIV/AIDS, now includes state-of-the-art isolation wards.

Now, the military, police and myriad other social instruments are geared to track the movements of suspected disease carriers, and those who they might have been in contact with. And the uniquely Singaporean system of social monitoring has been expanded to facilitate routine temperature taking, at short notice, of people with high fevers.

But while Singapore learnt from its experience, recent signs suggest that it risks letting politics undo much of its good work. Last week prime minister Lee Hsien Loong set the worst example by going on a walkabout through his constituency, only to be mobbed by a crowd of supporters seeking some of the — wait for it — hand sanitiser he was distributing. The walk, which took place during an uptick in Covid-19 infections, is likely to be a prelude to calling a general election in or near May, a year earlier than required.

Regardless of the conduct of Singapore’s politicians, though, Australia and the rest of the world would do well to learn from the actions of the city state’s service and health professionals. Covid-19 is a much more serious threat than SARS and the cost of dealing with it will be much higher.

It would have been better if the Australian government had sent out clearer messages about the pandemic weeks ago. Singapore has shown how the threat can be managed, and no doubt Australian policymakers have been watching closely. •

The post Singapore’s early warning appeared first on Inside Story.

As 2019 came to an end, questions were being asked about who would be the first to leave — prime minister Mahathir Mohamad, prime minister–in-waiting Anwar Ibrahim, or Anwar’s party rival Azmin Ali — and how much longer the Pakatan Harapan coalition could last, especially after the government almost imploded in October last year.

This week’s disintegration, which created headlines around the world, came earlier in 2020 than many thought, but it had come to seem inevitable. How did a government that won such a convincing victory only twenty months ago become so unpopular? The answer is important, because it shapes what happens next.

The biggest question mark over Pakatan Harapan’s 2018 election win was whether Mahathir would follow through on his promise to allow Anwar Ibrahim to eventually take over the prime ministership. The Malaysian media, free for the first time to cover intra-party strife and leadership tensions, vigorously reported the factional machinations within the coalition and the unfolding Mahathir–Anwar succession story. The lack of a clear and agreed-on transition date meant this was always going to be a big story, even more so with the government struggling in the polls and Anwar’s faction increasingly determined to see a change at the top.

The inevitable revival of the decades-long competition between the two men gained intensity and meaning for two reasons. The first was Mahathir’s continuing vagueness about the dates and details of the succession. The initial plan seemed to suggest that Mahathir would step down sometime around May this year. But individuals within Mahathir’s circle have denied such a timeframe existed, while Mahathir himself has been coy about an exact date. In late 2019 he settled on “after APEC,” which will be held in November 2020, but in one interview he suggested that he would not be stepping down this year. Despite turning ninety-four in July, he has managed to keep the support of key allies within and without his coalition.

Perhaps more importantly, he seems to be enjoying his second tenure as prime minister and keen to continue in the role. In August he showed off his physical prowess by riding a bicycle for more than eleven kilometres around Putrajaya. Photos of the feat were widely circulated and discussed in Malaysia’s social media. In September he went horseriding amid smog and received yet another honorary doctorate, this time from Japan’s Doshisha University.

The leadership transition issue has also been kept alive by the potential for a third candidate to be the next prime minister. Mahathir has long played political rivals off against one another in order to hold on to power. As he remained stubbornly noncommittal on a handover date, pundits and others began to look for an alternative Mahathir-endorsed successor. The result was a rollcall of Malaysian politicians, of which economic affairs minister Azmin Ali, Anwar’s most formidable rival within his own party, was considered to be Mahathir’s favourite. Anwar became correspondingly concerned about his support within the ruling coalition, going as far as to claim that “traitors” were trying to keep him from being Malaysia’s next prime minister.

The infighting within Anwar’s own party, Parti Keadilan Rakyat, or PKR, became more pronounced, reaching a sensational height with the surfacing in July last year of a video clip allegedly showing Azmin Ali in a compromising situation. When Anwar said that Azmin should resign if he proved to be the man in the clip, Azmin responded by telling him to “look at the man in the mirror.”

The factionalism became so overt that moves were made to hold rival party gatherings at the PKR’s national congress in December. In the event, Azmin and his supporters sensationally walked out of the congress, claiming they were being attacked in speeches by pro-Anwar members and that Azmin was being portrayed as a “traitor” to the party. One former PKR member has described the factionalism as “tearing [the party] apart” and likely to bring on a defeat at the next election.

Mahathir had a choice. He could bring Anwar into the cabinet and choose a reasonable succession date. Or he could continue to keep Anwar in the dark, making the factions more paranoid and restive. Mahathir chose the latter, and a showdown became inevitable.

While the end of the sixty-year reign of the Barisan Nasional coalition in May 2018 was indeed momentous, Pakatan Harapan’s electoral legitimacy relied heavily on fulfilling a broader national transformation. Among the sixty pledges in its 194-page Buku Harapan (“book of hope”) manifesto were reforms to the Anti-Corruption Commission to ensure “transparency and robustness of our election system,” moves to “abolish oppressive laws” and “enhance the transparency and integrity of the budget and budgeting process,” a “decentralisation of power to Sabah and Sarawak,” measures to make “government schools the best choice” and a pledge that Malaysia would “lead efforts to resolve the Rohingya and Palestine crises.”

It would be easy to highlight the unfulfilled promises of the manifesto. No major education reforms have been introduced at any level, no progress has been made on decentralisation, and the plight of Orang Asli (indigenous peoples) has only partially been tackled. With global fund managers signalling their concern about the lack of reform, the economy has been buffeted by capital outflows and a weak ringgit. Even Malaysians who were initially part of the reform process have become despondent.

In the face of these criticisms, senior government politicians have spent much of their time defending their track record. Some of them have argued that “reform takes time,” others have chosen to blame the “high expectations” of voters. Mahathir himself believes that he and his ministers are “victims of our own manifesto.”

This is not to say that no progress has been made since Pakatan Harapan came to power. Driven by opposition figures at federal and state level who had long yearned for better governance, some reforms have passed through parliament, including the abolition of the country’s draconian anti–fake news law and a reduction in the voting age from twenty-one to eighteen. New parliamentary committees have been established, and efforts made to ensure parliamentary oversight of important institutions. Politicised prosecutions of opposition leaders — a feature of Najib Razak’s Barisan Nasional government — are less prevalent.

The delays in Najib’s corruption trial over the past year suggest that the government preferred an independent, evidence-based judicial proceeding to a political show trial. Moves were made to professionalise and boost the independence of the Attorney General’s Chambers and the Anti-Corruption Commission. There have been signs of reform in electoral and parliamentary procedures, including the Electoral Reform Committee’s recommendation for a proportional representation voting system for parliamentary seats.

But reformists claimed throughout last year that Mahathir’s resolve to undertake important changes remained weak. For him and many others within the governing coalition, they said, politics remained a matter of holding power and winning elections by maintaining the status quo.

Of serious concern is the lack of measures to reduce corruption and patronage politics, and of institutional mechanisms to make politicians and political parties more accountable for the way they acquire and spend money. As economist E. Terence Gomez and others show in Minister of Finance Incorporated, a key conduit for corruption and patronage politics under the previous government was the finance ministry, which came under Najib’s jurisdiction as finance minister. In the current government, the Democratic Action Party’s Lim Guan Eng is finance minister, but Gomez argues that “covert” reconfigurations have allowed the prime minister’s department to control key government enterprises. According to Gomez, the “entire corporate sector” is under the control of Mahathir’s Parti Pribumi Bersatu Malaysia, which has the power to appoint political appointees to head government-linked companies.

These arrangements suggests that the government, and Mahathir’s party in particular, has retained the same system of patronage used by its predecessor to channel resources to key constituents. In response to such criticisms, a deputy minister from Bersatu declared, on the one hand, that the new government had never committed to getting rid of political appointees in government-linked companies while, on the other hand, arguing that people should “not pluck words and phrases” from Buku Harapan promises. As an analyst privately remarked, “When the fox is in charge of the sheep, why change anything when it’s good for the fox?”

Meanwhile, the past twenty months have been a period of introspection for the UMNO party, which dominated the decades-long Barisan Nasional government. Many cadres blame Najib for the 2018 loss, and rightly so, but party president Zahid Hamidi has remained loyal to the ousted PM. (Both men are under criminal investigation in connection with the 1MDB scandal.) Under Zahid there has been little internal reform, though a decision has been made to ally more closely with conservative Islamic voters.

In September, UMNO and the Islamic Parti Islam Se-Malaysia, or PAS, signed a unity pact, the Muafakat Nasional (or National Cooperation Charter). Over the years, UMNO and PAS have gone through various official and unofficial alliances (PAS actually competed under the Barisan banner in the 1974 elections) but this latest “marriage” marks a more concerted focus on the rights and privileges of Malay Muslims, which the two parties claim have been increasingly threatened under the current government. That this narrative has attracted the support of the Malay community is evinced by the 50,000-strong prayer rally held at the National Mosque in Kuala Lumpur in late 2018, calling for Malay rights to be preserved and Islam to continue as the national religion.

The decision by UMNO and PAS to focus on Malay identity politics has raised concerns among many Malaysians about the potential for greater ethnic and religious tensions. These concerns were heightened when four public universities organised the controversial Malay Dignity Congress in October last year. The congress advanced ideas associated with Malay racial supremacy and featured speeches demanding the abolition of vernacular schools and the reservation of top government posts for Malays.

Mahathir delivered a speech about non-Malay foreigners, lamenting how his ability to defend the Malays has been weakened by the Pakatan Harapan coalition but denying hearing the lead organiser proclaiming that “Malaysia is for Malays.” The congress was not a partisan affair, with some Bersatu MPs involved in key organising roles, but notably absent was Anwar Ibrahim, who claimed his invitation arrived too late. Azmin Ali stood shoulder-to-shoulder at the congress with Mahathir and the top Malay opposition figures in PAS and UMNO.

Malay support is clearly a pre-eminent concern for Mahathir and many of his fellow Bersatu cadres. In late 2018, Mahathir reversed his government’s decision to ratify the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination after weeks of protests organised by UMNO and PAS and fear-mongering about the loss of bumiputra (or Malay) rights.

Under Mahathir, Pakatan Harapan has been primarily concerned with defending itself against the charge of being “anti-Malay.” The result is a government reluctant to change how money is collected and distributed. Deliberations about reforms in areas like schools, university admissions, government scholarships, poverty and rural development continue to be narrowly framed in terms of their impact on Malays.

While no one expected the nonagenarian Mahathir to become an outspoken advocate for racial harmony, these decisions highlight the ideological diversity of the Pakatan Harapan coalition and its supporters, as well as Mahathir’s commitment to a narrative that had served him in the past. A more pluralist Malaysia seemed to have beckoned, even if Pakatan Harapan’s choice of Mahathir as leader was made strategically to woo more conservative Malay voters.

Scholars are now arguing that the country appears to have evolved into four different Malaysias: a pluralist domain concentrated around the west coast of the Peninsula, a conservative Malay heartland based along the east coast of the Peninsula, and the two increasingly diverging Borneo states of Sabah and Sarawak. Rather than uniting under Mahathir and Pakatan Harapan, Malaysia has seemingly become more fractured and divided.

If a transition were to occur in Malaysia, political scientist Larry Diamond wrote in 2010, it would arise from “the coalescence of an effective opposition and the blunders of an arrogant regime.” And so it happened in 2018. While “clean elections” campaigning and the legacies of the Anwar-led reformasi movement played an important role, Pakatan Harapan came to power largely because of the protest vote against Najib’s corruption. Its problem was an inability to consolidate in the absence of an “arrogant regime” to oppose. Many voters had chosen Mahathir not for the prospects of a “new” Malaysia but because he represented the promise of the “old” Malaysia of his first prime ministership: a time of economic growth and pro-Malay policies, of which local patronage systems and cronyism were a feature, though not on the massive corrupt scale of the Najib years.

In power once again, Mahathir has spent most of his time as prime minister manoeuvring over his succession, blocking the reform of draconian laws, and reiterating his support for Malay rights. Despite all this politicking, however, he has failed to increase his support among the Malays and has alienated a large percentage of the non-Malay electorate. No one person is responsible for the declining satisfaction of the government, but Mahathir must take the bulk of the responsibility.

At the same time, sober commentators know that an Anwar prime ministership won’t solve all these problems. Even reformists who have worked with Anwar for many years have been concerned about his judgement throughout the crisis, and his faction has often made rash decisions.

Pakatan Harapan has at least been attempting a more democratic form of governance, and a return of UMNO to power would signal a halting of that push. Malaysians would be left more disillusioned with the political system and increasingly likely to think that politicians have little to offer them. In this regard, they would be part of a global trend, though that’s likely to give them little solace. •

The post Mahathir’s choice appeared first on Inside Story.

The diplomatic jousting in New York symbolises the crisis facing the government of Indonesian president Joko “Jokowi” Widodo. In the 1990s, Jokowi’s predecessors lost the support of the generation of young Timorese who had grown up under Indonesian occupation and joined the campaign for independence. Today, a new generation of West Papuans is protesting in the streets of Jayapura, Wamena and other towns in the region Jakarta views as the Indonesian provinces of Papua and West Papua.

Since the withdrawal of the Netherlands from its Melanesian colony half a century ago, West Papuans have only known Indonesian rule. The young people facing off against Indonesian soldiers are responding to a crisis generated by Indonesia’s failed development model in West Papua, which has brought in hundreds of thousands of workers and farmers from other parts of Indonesia, converted customary Melanesian land into freehold, and encouraged commercial extraction of gas, copper, gold and timber.

Human rights groups have long reported violations by Indonesian police and military, but concern escalated in December last year when the army extended its operations around Nduga district, following the shooting of construction workers on road-building operations. This year, West Papuan monitoring groups have reported more than 180 deaths in the district, and more than 40,000 people displaced. Healthcare facilities, churches and schools have been damaged, and families have fled into the bush with limited food and shelter.

A further upsurge in conflict began in Surabaya, East Java, in August, prompted by West Papuan student protests against Indonesian racism. Falsely accused of showing a lack of respect for the Indonesian flag and angered by taunts against Melanesian “monkeys” and pigs,” thousands of students across Indonesia launched mass demonstrations against racism, which soon expanded into street protests in West Papua.

Since September, protests have continued in towns across the western half of the island of New Guinea. Indonesian police and military have shot dead at least thirty West Papuan protesters, and many others have been injured in Jayapura and Wamena. In Wamena, killings and violence against non-Papuan migrants saw people fleeing to police barracks for protection.

Chanting “We are not white and red, we are Morning Star,” young Papuans have flourished the illegal West Papuan flag, first raised in December 1961 when West Papuan nationalists were seeking to create their own government under 1960 UN General Assembly resolutions on decolonisation. But US cold war support for Indonesia led to the 1962 New York agreement to introduce a UN transitional administration, opening the way for Indonesia’s military to move in. Then came August 1969’s widely criticised “Act of Free Choice,” when 1022 carefully selected Papuan leaders voted under pressure to accept Indonesian rule.

The current repression in West Papua rolls back the peaceful diplomacy Jokowi attempted during his first term of office. A regular visitor to West Papua, the Indonesian president won early plaudits by granting amnesty to key West Papuan prisoners and launching a series of development projects. Progress looked so promising that the leaders of the Melanesian Spearhead Group — Fiji, Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands, Vanuatu and the Kanak Socialist National Liberation Front of New Caledonia — declared in 2015 that Jokowi “is someone whom the MSG can dialogue with.”

Five months into the president’s second term, Indonesian politics is more polarised. There are worrying signs of a regression towards authoritarianism: last year’s blasphemy charges against the mayor of Jakarta, for instance, and the appointment of the well-known former general, Wiranto, as coordinating minister for political, legal and security affairs, despite his role in human rights violations in East Timor during the 1990s. Recent attempts to weaken Indonesia’s anti-corruption institutions and last month’s legislation promoting fundamentalist rules on culture and sexuality highlight the ugly turn.

Contributing to the shift in Indonesia’s diplomacy on West Papua has been the death of former independence campaigner Franz Albert Joku in June this year. Over the past decade, the charismatic West Papuan — a prominent landowner who lived in exile for many years in Papua New Guinea — had joined fellow activist Nick Messet to advise and represent the Indonesian government.

When I met Joku and Messet at a Pacific Islands Forum meeting in Kiribati in 2000, both men were supporters of independence. Their organisation, the Papua Presidium, had emerged during a surge of West Papua nationalism after the collapse of Suharto’s dictatorship in 1998, a period dubbed the Papuan Spring. A national congress in Jayapura had remobilised the independence movement and brought in a new generation of activists under the leadership of customary chief Theys Eluay.

The Papuan Spring was supported by Abdurrahman Wahid, Indonesia’s president at the time, who was seeking to chart a path to democracy and de-fang Indonesia’s military after decades of repression in Timor, Aceh and West Papua. But Wahid lost the presidency in 2001, and incoming president Megawati Sukarnoputri crushed the Papua Presidium. Indonesian special forces soldiers murdered Eluay.

Abandoning his support for independence, Joku returned to Jayapura, the capital of Papua province, in 2008. Jakarta’s 2001 Special Autonomy Law, he declared, provided a pathway to greater autonomy and peaceful development. In recent years, Joku and Messet served as frontmen for Indonesian diplomatic efforts, seeking to blunt growing international support for the United Liberation Movement for West Papua.

Joku was the garrulous and good-humoured voice that argued Indonesia’s case on the international stage: travelling in Indonesian delegations to the MSG and Pacific Islands Forum, lobbying in UN corridors, even briefing Indonesian student groups at universities in Australia and New Zealand. He put a human face on the ugly rhetoric of Indonesian military leaders who have long benefited from their business interests in the eastern provinces of Indonesia.

“I believe I am still working for the emancipation of my country,” he told me when we crossed paths in Wellington last year. “The Special Autonomy Law, however incomplete it may be, is an acceptable political compromise. We need to grab hold of it and make it serve our interests.”

Security minister Wiranto and defence minister Ryamizard Ryacudu are much less diplomatic when they push back against Pacific island governments and human rights advocates. Visiting Australia in November 2016, Ryamizard chastised island nations that had spoken at the United Nations in support of West Papuan rights. “Please tell Solomon Islands and those six nations never to interfere or encourage West Papua to join them,” he said. “Those countries better keep their mouths shut and mind their own business. It is better that Australia speaks to them gently. If it was left up to me, I would twist their ears.”

Indonesia has joined the UN Special Committee on Decolonisation, alongside Fiji and Papua New Guinea, partly to block any move to have West Papua relisted as a non-self-governing territory by the United Nations. Indonesian diplomats, like their French counterparts, were horrified when Tuvalu, Nauru and Solomon Islands successfully moved a motion through the UN General Assembly in 2013 adding French Polynesia to the list.

In July this year, Indonesia hosted a trade and tourism conference in Auckland as part of its Pacific engagement effort. Looking beyond current trade negotiations with Papua New Guinea and Fiji, Indonesian foreign minister Retno Marsudi said that Jakarta was seeking to extend its influence in even the smallest island nations: “We are connecting the dots between the 17,000 Indonesian islands and the thousands of Pacific islands, Australia and New Zealand. One of the steps that we are taking to connect is by opening diplomatic relationships with Cook Islands and Niue.”

But charm only goes so far. The Indonesian government is clearly hostile to any country that raises its voice in global institutions. When island nations promoted a resolution at the UN General Assembly in August on cooperation between the United Nations and the Pacific Islands Forum, it was adopted in a vote of 137–0, with Indonesia abstaining. Its UN representative regretted that “one member of the Pacific Islands Forum continued to interfere with Indonesia’s domestic affairs,” a not-so-subtle reference to Vanuatu.

No doubt mindful of possible repercussions in other parts of the region, Pacific Islands Forum leaders aren’t calling for independence for West Papua. At their most recent meeting in Tuvalu in August, they reaffirmed their recognition of Indonesia’s sovereignty over the two provinces, but also acknowledged reports of escalating violence and human rights abuses and “agreed to re-emphasise and reinforce the Forum’s position of raising its concerns over the violence.”

In their final communiqué, they called on Jakarta to facilitate a long-mooted visit by the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Michelle Bachelet. They “strongly encouraged” Indonesia and the commission to agree on timing for a visit that Indonesia has stalled, calling for “an evidence-based, informed report on the situation” to be published before next year’s Forum leaders meeting in Vanuatu.

“This is the first time that Forum leaders have called for a United Nations human rights visit,” West Papuan leader Benny Wenda told me in Tuvalu. Wenda chairs the United Liberation Movement for West Papua, and was in Funafuti with spokesperson Jacob Rumbiak to lobby island leaders for support. “This is step by step,” he added. “This is the starting point and the fact is that the resolution is a really, really important step for us to go to another level.”

Efforts to extend support to West Papuans have often been stymied at the Forum by Australia, New Zealand, Fiji and Papua New Guinea. The two larger Melanesian nations have also defended Indonesia’s interests at the Melanesian Spearhead Group, backing associate membership for Jakarta. After rejecting a West Papuan bid for full MSG membership at their 2013 summit in Noumea, Melanesian leaders agreed to “invite all groups to form an inclusive and united umbrella group in consultation with Indonesia to work on submitting a fresh application.”

In December 2014, Vanuatu churches and customary leaders hosted a meeting in Port Vila aimed at transcending longstanding divisions between three key strands of the nationalist movement: the West Papua National Coalition for Liberation, the Federal Republic of West Papua, and the National Parliament of West Papua (which includes the National Committee for West Papua that has mobilised most of the recent protests). The meeting was successful, and these groupings came together as the United Liberation Movement for West Papua.

But there’s still a way to go in gaining stronger support from the largest countries in the regional organisations. Both Australia and Papua New Guinea border Indonesia and have a range of strategic reasons — from trade and investment to anxiety over the movement of refugees — for maintaining good relations with Jakarta. In recent years, their stand has been backed by Fiji under prime minister Voreqe Bainimarama, who led a coup in 2006 and then oversaw Fiji’s return to parliamentary rule in 2014.

Since the post-coup regime was suspended from the Forum and Commonwealth in 2009, Fiji’s international diplomacy has expanded beyond its traditional partners. In recent years, Indonesia has been a key ally in Fiji’s bid for leadership roles in bodies like the Non-Aligned Movement, the G77-plus-China group and the Asia-Pacific bloc within the United Nations.

“Indonesian sovereignty over West Papua cannot be questioned,” Bainimarama declared at the MSG’s 2015 summit. “The best hope for improving the lives of the people of West Papua is to work closely with the Indonesian government, one of the most vibrant democracies in the world.” Despite this, the 2015 summit gave observer status at the MSG to Wenda’s United Liberation Movement for West Papua, the first major diplomatic breakthrough.

In contrast to Papua New Guinea and Fiji, Vanuatu has long championed self-determination for West Papua. Lora Lini, daughter of Vanuatu’s first prime minister Walter Lini, has been appointed as special envoy on decolonisation of West Papua to the Pacific island states. Ralph Regenvanu, Vanuatu’s foreign minister, is a key international champion of the West Papuan cause.

Vanuatu is supported within the MSG by the Kanak independence movement, FLNKS, which reaffirmed its longstanding support for its fellow liberation movement as the Indonesian repression mounted in September 2019. The Solomon Islands, under prime minister Mannaseh Sogavare, has also appointed a special envoy on West Papua.

With decisive action within the Forum and the MSG blocked by the larger powers, a separate Group of Seven has been taking initiatives in support of West Papua in international forums. Vanuatu, Solomon Islands, Tonga, Tuvalu, Nauru, Palau and the Marshall Islands presented a joint statement on West Papua to the African, Caribbean, and Pacific Council of Ministers in Brussels in May 2017. Leaders of these island nations have spoken out at the UN General Assembly, and Vanuatu and Solomon Islands have lobbied this year at the UN Human Rights Council. Pacific church and community groups have ensured that West Papua remains on the Forum agenda, using their annual dialogue with island leaders to promote action on human rights.

Pacific nations, however, are facing a changed geopolitical context. As with other Asian powers — China, Taiwan, Korea and India — Indonesia is a new regional player, extending its diplomatic and political relationship with Forum members and providing new pathways for aid, trade and investment. Not surprisingly, Jakarta is seeking a diplomatic quid pro quo in the form of silence on human rights abuses and public acceptance of Indonesian sovereignty over the western half of the island of New Guinea. Jokowi’s administration is wooing or threatening those who speak out on the issue.

Next year, forty years after Vanuatu gained independence in 1980, the Melanesian nation will host the fifty-first Pacific Islands Forum. Foreign minister Ralph Regenvanu hopes that meeting will build on this year’s call for an urgent visit to West Papua by the UN human rights commissioner.

“In the last few years, the resolution has been about constructive engagement with Indonesia on the issue,” he says. “But I think the leaders realised that the open and constructive engagement had not necessarily achieved the improvements in human rights that are desired. I think the situation in Nduga over the last year has caused Forum leaders to elevate the tone of the resolution.”

The UN’s Michelle Bachelet could provide an “honest and frank account” before the next Forum leaders’ meeting, Regenvanu told me. The Forum secretariat and member states “need to make sure the commissioner gets to go,” he said. “Indonesia should see that there is a very clear concern and we hope this this statement will make them come to the table and work with the commissioner to make sure this mission does happen.”

But time is short. “The situation in West Papua is getting worse and worse,” says Benny Wenda. “This is the next East Timor — it’s beginning. Sixteen thousand additional Indonesian troops have now been deployed to bring violence to West Papua, working with the new nationalist militias. How long does the world need to watch my people being slaughtered like animals before they intervene? Fifty-seven years of this is enough.” •

The post “This is the next East Timor” appeared first on Inside Story.

Chakra (Sarm Heng) is a fourteen-year-old Cambodian boy from a large family who works in his uncle’s rice fields. He would like to earn money of his own. He would like to court a girl he knows from the village. He would like to know the world beyond this round of endless labour. Maybe work in a factory in the city? He’s heard of others who have done this. From the rice paddy he watches the buses speed by, and one day he is on one of them.

The way Chakra is taken across the border, tricked and trafficked, is predictable enough to be ominous, and he isn’t stupid. But after that first hopeful yet anxious bus ride, his choices diminish at every stage of the journey. He is among other slaves and there is no escape because there is nowhere to escape to.

Writer–director Rodd Rathjen is a VCA graduate whose 2013 short film, Tau Seru, made it to Cannes. It too told of a boy — this one herding in the Himalayas — who watches buses go by and wants to find his way to a wider world.

Along a journey that becomes ever more dislocating, Chakra bonds with an older man, Kea (Mony Ros), a fellow Khmer who has set out to earn money for his family. They catch only the barest glimpses of Bangkok, through their bus window. Not till they are at sea do they learn that this sea, this old fishing boat, is their destination.

Rathjen has shot the film with actors speaking both Khmer and Thai. Few of them were professionals. Sarm Heng was found through the Green Gecko project, which helps educate former street kids in Siem Reap in Cambodia. As Chakra, he has an attentive stillness; he will need to know every detail of the boat and the habits of its captain in order to survive.

Thai actor Thanawut Kasro, who has played a number of genre roles in Thai films, takes to his role as the captain, Rom Ran, with such ferocity I was startled. But the menace plays well against the silent wariness of Heng’s Chakra and the other shocked workers. Rom Ran’s task is to keep bringing in the cargo. He and his two henchmen must keep these frightened workers, many of whom don’t speak Thai, working as many as twenty hours a day before they crawl below for a few hours’ sleep. They haul load after load of small fish and scrapings — so-called trash fish — from the sea bottom, to be used in the pet food sold to us here.

The brutality is shown matter-of-factly, without relish. Rathjen’s gift is simplicity: there is such clarity in his storytelling that I was with Chakra almost every step of the way. There are also, thankfully, quiet passages, green, soft and soothing, when the boy can slip over the side into the water.

When Australian feature filmmakers look to Asia or the Pacific for their stories, they have often wanted films with “bankable” stars — American, Australian or British, and usually white.

This has made for a strange circle of imagining about Australians in Asia, and particularly in India. In 1999, in Jane Campion’s Holy Smoke, Kate Winslet went to India in search of enlightenment. In 2010, in Claire McCarthy’s The Waiting City, Radha Mitchell and Joel Edgerton went to India in search of a baby. By 2016, in Garth Davis’s Lion, an Indian man brought to Australia as an adopted child is returning to India in search of his mother.

At least Lion had Dev Patel in the lead, with Nicole Kidman as his Australian mother, in a wig seemingly from the wardrobe of Shaun Micallef’s Mad as Hell. Yes, Holy Smoke was a satire. And in The Waiting City the couple found an Indian orphanage and decided they wouldn’t adopt. But look, can’t we move on from this Westerner-encounters-the-exotic-East stuff?

Alongside these big films, more modest Australian features have tried to tell Asia-Pacific stories from within Asian or Pacific cultures. Benjamin Gilmour’s Son of a Lion (2007), for example, was set in one of the Pashtun administrative provinces of Pakistan, where guns are reverse-engineered by villagers to arm the warlords. Martin Butler and Bentley Dean’s Oscar-nominated Tanna (2015) laid a Romeo and Juliet story over the top of conflict between two tribal groups, one resisting the changes brought by encroaching Western culture, another embracing them.

Buoyancy takes another leap, laying bare the workings of a particular form of gangster capitalism serving a global industry. Rathjen doesn’t lecture, he simply shows a system in operation, and what one smart, mostly silent boy learns in order to survive.

Rathjen began researching this film in 2015 after journalists with Associated Press exposed the plight of slaves held in an Indonesian island village called Benjina. There were hundreds of them, some in cages and some who had escaped into the jungle. It had been many years since they had been home. Some were from Cambodia; others were Rohingya from Myanmar or rural Thailand. Rathjen was able to interview some of them, and their stories helped shape this film.

Benjina was not the only “slave” village so very close to Australia. Laws, regulations, inspections and tighter policing alone will not abolish this appalling trade. Australia last year passed modern slavery legislation that requires businesses with an annual turnover of a million dollars or more to specify their supply chains. But in international waters, beyond the scope of officialdom, a process called “transhipment” — transferring the catch into “clean” vessels to take to port while the slave ships stay out at sea — can help the slavers avoid scrutiny. Or else slaves may be dumped on remote atolls when word spreads about a crackdown. Anti-slavery campaigners are adamant that consumer action is needed too. They want us to ask persistent questions about the pet food and fish product companies we use.

What makes his film so oddly appealing are the memorable images, the clarity of story and the way all the elements — performance, image and sound — work together. The cinematographer is the inventive Michael Latham (Casting JonBenet, Island of the Hungry Ghosts), whose work is striking. Sound, too, is used very effectively, at times amplifying the claustrophobia the exhausted men feel as they crawl below to try to snatch some sleep. Sam Petty (Sherpa, Animal Kingdom, The Boys) is the seasoned sound designer, and I should declare an interest here: I’m his mum.

Buoyancy is Australia’s nominee for best international feature film at the 2020 Academy Awards.

The Colombian filmmakers Ciro Guerra and Cristina Gallego had a hit in 2015 with Embrace of the Serpent, a film examining the impact of two explorers, in different times, on the indigenous people of the Colombian Amazon. It was gorgeously shot in black and white and the tragedies it found upriver were evoked with forceful simplicity.

Birds of Passage (screening from 3 October) is a more ambitious film on a comparable theme. It tells the story of how the drug trade enriched, corrupted and eventually destroyed a clan from one indigenous group: the Wayuu, who live between the desert, the jungle and the sea on the Guajira Peninsula in Northern Columbia. In five chapters across the sixties and seventies, the film is shaped as an epic. It is also a fascinating portrait of a matriarchal society.

Carmiña Martínez plays Úrsula, the matriarch of one of the Wayuu clans, and Natalia Reyes her daughter Zaida. José Acosta is Rapayet, who comes seeking Zaida’s hand. When Úrsula, hoping to deter him, sets a bride price apparently beyond his reach, he and his lowland friend Moisés seize an opportunity to raise it, selling marijuana to American peace corps volunteers. They soon find themselves in a very profitable business. But Moisés, from the lowlands, is considered dangerous by the Wayuu, who call him Alijuna, the one who does damage.

The film draws heavily on Wayuu rituals: ways of upholding honour and of organising births, deaths and debts; ways of managing conflict between families. As Rathjen did with Buoyancy, Guerra and Gallego have consulted indigenous people and cast some in supporting roles or as extras. The lead actors are professional, though some have connections to the culture, and they speak both Wayuu and Spanish. The performances — especially those of Acosta and José Vicente Cote as Peregrino — are very strong.

With all this, I found it hard to sustain belief. One reason may be visual: Guerra and Gallego have built two of the three main sets — a traditional Wayuu dwelling and compound, and a dazzling white hacienda — standing alone on hard-baked desert soil. The abstraction is intentional, and maybe this decision also solved problems of location and permission. It’s certainly arresting.

But from the opening dance onwards, the theatricality of actors performing various Wayuu rituals and greetings in these settings was unsettling. At times the tragedy gripped — it’s an extremely powerful story — but by the time a pair of white bird legs began appearing in dreams, I stopped believing. It’s an image I’ve seen before, in Asian cinema, signifying ghosts.

This really did feel like cultural tourism, or ersatz anthropology with a dash of magic realism thrown in. Beware those all-white dream sequences, I say. They might have worked for Kubrick in 2001: A Space Odyssey, but now, like galloping white horses and giant bird legs, they signal danger: magic realism ahead. •

The post Silent witnesses appeared first on Inside Story.

Singapore’s next general election isn’t due till next year — and could be put off until April 2021 — but there is a widespread feeling that the city-state is coming to the end of a political cycle. The People’s Action Party government of prime minister Lee Hsien Loong appears to have lined up all its ducks and is ready to call an election at any time, but it is not an energised, forward-looking sense of readiness. Rather, there is a palpable sense that those at the highest levels are overly keen to hand over to a new generation. Consider the signs.

After years of Byzantine manoeuvres, prime minister Lee finally elevated his chosen successor, Heng Swee Keat, to deputy prime minister on 1 May this year. Three days earlier, Heng had made it known that he saw himself taking a supportive, big-picture role rather than being proactive and managerial. He planned to help Lee “in reviewing Singapore’s longer-term policy measures to take the country forward in the next decade.”

The next day, though, Lee disabused him of this notion, making it clear that he expected Heng to assume the hands-on political and administrative leadership of the government, “setting the agenda, setting out the government’s position and policy to the people and building his team.” This sounds awfully like the job Lee is paid US$1.6 million a year to do. Which raises the question of how much Lee is vacating the field.

An incident a year before had given an early clue that Lee was beginning to leave the heavy lifting to other people. In March last year, law minister K. Shanmugam took the lead role in savaging one of the government’s critics during a public hearing. Thum Ping Tjin, an Oxford-trained historian with no links to any political party, is hardly likely to rouse any dangerous rabble, but he has been devastatingly effective as a private citizen in challenging many of the political orthodoxies on which the People’s Action Party’s hegemony is built.

When Thum was invited to appear before a select committee considering the problem of “deliberate online falsehoods” in March last year, Shanmugam interrogated him over six hours, live streamed, in what amounted to sustained bullying and character assassination. Months later the committee formally and spuriously declared Thum to be a liar for claiming credentials as a historian, implying it speaks with more authority about Oxford University’s credentialling than does the university itself.

The public humiliation of the government’s opponents is hardly new in Singapore. But when Lee Kuan Yew was prime minister he used to do his own dirty work. The more politically aware sections of the population were gripped by the spectacle of Shanmugam taking the lead, but what intrigued me was what former prime minister Goh Chok Tong said on page 115 of his authorised biography, Tall Order: The Goh Chok Tong Story, which was published a few months ago:

[I]f you have a very difficult opposition… the PM must have the ability to fight back. If the PM is a gentleman, then get somebody who can. That means you get a hatchet man. Your DPM or Minister for Law — that is the hatchet man, who can fight with you.

Goh made this observation to a room of journalists-cum-biographers, and I would love to know if he was smiling when he referred to a hypothetical law minister as a hatchet man and a hypothetical gentleman prime minister in need of protection.

Just before Heng Swee Keat’s elevation, the two most senior members of cabinet after PM Lee, Tharman Shanmugaratnam and Teo Chee Hean, stepped down as deputy prime ministers and became mere “senior” and “coordinating” ministers. I can’t imagine either of them retaining any fire for politics after this demotion, especially Shanmugaratnam, who is easily the most popular and highly credentialled politician in the country. He obviously and justly held prime ministerial ambitions until Lee Hsien Loong — his political patron and protector — declared in 2008 that the job was reserved for an ethnic Chinese for the foreseeable future because Singaporeans were not ready for a non-Chinese prime minister.

Lee reinforced the point in 2015 by saying that, even in the longer term, a non-Chinese politician would have to speak Mandarin to be a contender. Lee seems oblivious to the fact that it was his own government that made Mandarin so important in Singapore yet nearly impossible for a non-Chinese to learn at school. But that is another story.

In case Shanmugaratnam missed the point, Heng Swee Keat confirmed his exclusion from contention in March this year. He did so a month before he was elevated to deputy PM, notably after edging out five other ethnic Chinese candidates, all of whom are better qualified than him (and none of whom has had a stroke during a cabinet meeting, as he has). He declared that the “older generation of Singaporeans” is not ready for such a radical move. Presumably he means older Chinese Singaporeans. Significantly, he made the observation in answer to a question that noted Shanmugaratnam’s popularity.

Generational change is generally welcomed in management, and if the prime minister and his most senior colleagues really do have one foot out the door then maybe it can’t come too soon. But it must be said that generational change is not usually so precisely targeted or so carefully navigated in a system that claims to be a meritocracy. This handover has all the hallmarks of picking a favourite rather than picking the best.

Meanwhile, the political opposition has been undergoing its own rather unusual form of self-renewal, with a brand new party, the Progress Singapore Party, emerging as the creature of the seventy-nine-year-old former government backbencher Tan Cheng Bock. Tan caused an upset in 2011 when he almost defeated the government’s preferred candidate in the island-wide vote for president of Singapore, only to be excluded from the subsequent ballot in 2017 when a constitutional change made him ineligible to stand.

Tan is trying to use his personal profile and undisputed popularity to give a leg-up to younger and lesser-known activists to whom he wants to pass the baton, but the most interesting supporter he has attracted is Lee Hsien Yang, the younger brother of PM Lee Hsien Loong.

Lee Hsien Yang is neither young nor unknown, but he has a message that resonates neatly with Tan’s: that the party founded by Lee Kuan Yew has lost its way under the leadership of Lee Hsien Loong and does not deserve continued support. The domestic print and electronic media have exhibited a decided reluctance to report any of Lee Hsien Yang’s public statements or activities since he started supporting opposition and civil society causes, but this media blackout will be impossible to maintain if he becomes a candidate for parliament. And if he stands as a Progress Singapore Party candidate in the same constituency as his brother or his brother’s son, Li Hongyi, then Tan Cheng Bock’s last political venture will upend the political rules in Singapore by pitting Lee against Lee.

I don’t know if Lee Hsien Yang will stand for parliament, nor whether his candidature would translate into votes and seats, but it would certainly reshape political debate and contestation. Lee Hsien Yang and his sister, Lee Wei Ling, have already rewritten the rules of political debate once: in 2017 they broke the taboo on using the “d” word (dynasty) in relation to Lee Hsien Loong while they were in dispute with their brother over their father’s will. In the same breath, they also spoke of Lee Hsien Loong engaging in “abuse of power.” Only a Lee could get away with this kind of remark, and if Lee Hsien Yang stands for parliament he will have the platform for repeat performances.

Who can tell how deep the ramifications might go, especially with the current leadership seemingly past its prime? No wonder the government is looking a little tired. And wary. •

The post Succession time in Singapore? appeared first on Inside Story.

Then, his claims of unfairness came only after the Electoral Commission had announced the official result. This time, his team have floated accusations of dodgy voter lists and plans to rig the vote count weeks before polling day.

All reputable opinion polls suggest the electoral outlook for Prabowo and his running mate Sandiaga Uno is grim. Incumbent Joko “Jokowi” Widodo and his running mate Ma’ruf Amin have maintained a double-digit lead in even the closest of polls, consistently polling in the low to mid 50s. At the same time, a March Indikator poll showed each of Prabowo’s coalition partners at or below their 2014 vote count, with the National Mandate Party polling well below the electoral threshold of 4 per cent.

Predictably, Prabowo has questioned the reliability of these polls, asking attendees at his massive Jakarta rally on 6 April, “Do you want to be continually cheated? Do you believe the surveys?” Further muddying the waters, his camp has claimed that their own internal polling shows the former general ahead by 62 to 38 per cent. Dubious pollsters such as Puskaptis, an organisation that falsely claimed in 2014 that Prabowo had won the election, have also released results showing him in front.

More prominent, though, in Prabowo’s recent campaign rhetoric have been efforts to discredit the work of the electoral commission ahead of polling day. Such efforts fall into two categories: allegations floated directly by members of Prabowo’s campaign team and social media hoaxes.

His campaign team has claimed, for example, that the voter list contains 17.5 million dubious voters sharing just a few different birthdays, and that Jokowi will be installed as president even though Prabowo will win the popular vote. Prominent Prabowo supporters such as his brother Hashim Djojohadikusumo and former National Mandate Party chair Amien Rais have also sought to intimidate Indonesia’s election commission by threatening mass protests, a legal challenge at the Constitutional Court and even a complaint to the United Nations.

Meanwhile, social media hoaxes have claimed that seven containers of pre-filled ballot papers favouring Jokowi were stacked at Jakarta’s port and that Electoral Commission servers had been preset for a Jokowi victory. In another online campaign, social media influencers supporting the Prabowo camp sent out an SOS to international observers to supervise the 2019 election in order to guarantee its integrity.

Indonesia’s election campaign has certainly not been entirely free of irregularities or controversies. Recently, reports about stray ballots marked in favour of Jokowi emerged from Malaysia — where around 600,000 registered voters live — but the ballots’ authenticity remained unclear at the time of writing. The National Mandate Party had already admitted problems with the voter list prior to this, but denies the allegations of systematic fraud. Rather, it has pledged to work continuously on updating the voter list until election day. The Election Supervisory Board (Bawaslu) has backed the party and made it clear that while minor irregularities have indeed occurred in the preparation of the voter list, there is no evidence for systematic fraud on Jokowi’s behalf.

The polls available have also shown little sign that voters believe the claims of unfairness. Recent surveys by Saiful Mujani Research and Consulting and Indikator — albeit conducted prior to reports of the Malaysia case — revealed an overwhelming majority of voters have confidence in the Electoral Commission’s ability to conduct the election professionally. Disaggregated results from the Indikator poll demonstrate strong confidence in the Commission and Bawaslu even among Prabowo voters.

So what are the main goals of the Prabowo camp in raising these allegations? There are at least three potential reasons for the strategy.

First, Prabowo might hope to sway undecided voters by building an overall narrative that the Jokowi administration is dishonest and will do anything to be re-elected. This narrative is tied to earlier accusations that the government was unfairly targeting and prosecuting opposition figures, mobilising village heads and bureaucrats for the campaign, and using misleading statistics to make its performance in government look more impressive.

Second, the spread of fabricated polls could lay the groundwork for a potential legal challenge after the election, either from Prabowo himself — in case the final result in the presidential election is narrower than most polls are currently predicting — or from one of the parties in Prabowo’s coalition that are at risk of failing to clear the 4 per cent threshold.

Third, Prabowo might be hoping to build up his threat potential in order to pressure Jokowi into protecting his interests if he loses the election by a margin so large that a legal challenge is futile. Despite the polarising effects of the campaign, Indonesia’s long tradition of promiscuous powersharing makes it entirely possible that the two men will seek to collaborate after the election if Jokowi wins a second term. For Prabowo, such collaboration is likely to be more appealing if he can negotiate from a position of relative strength — hence his provocative actions towards the end of the campaign.

Whether Prabowo’s efforts will have the desired effect remains to be seen. What is certain, though, is that after an initially subdued campaign, the last few weeks once again revealed Prabowo’s true colours. Election day therefore shapes up as another important fork in the road for Indonesian democracy. •

This article first appeared in East Asia Forum.

The post Old strategy with a new twist appeared first on Inside Story.

On the other hand, many Indonesians describe the political climate as deeply polarised. Subianto’s running-mate Sandiaga Uno recently declared that “we need to unite the country” and expressed a hope that a “great disconnect” will be “amended” after the election. The General Elections Commission, or KPU, said it would form a “peace committee” for the third televised debate. And when one university invited me to give a guest lecture I was asked not to talk about the election because it was a “sensitive topic.” A lecturer there told me that the current discourse of politics, in which students “cannot agree to disagree,” is “bad for Indonesia and cannot be controlled,” and a student asked my advice about how political “peace” could be achieved.

What drives this disconnect between a largely tame election campaign and the way many people feel about it? One way to answer this is to think about how online lives are distorting offline realities. Rather than Indonesia experiencing a “polarising” election campaign, perhaps social media discourse is making Indonesians perceive that polarisation is greater than it really is — and perhaps politicians are encouraging that perception.

Of course, the previous two high-profile elections — the last presidential election and Jakarta’s mayoral election — could be defined as highly polarising, and in both cases the division was driven by social media. In 2014 Jokowi (as Widodo is usually known) and Prabowo led a highly charged presidential campaign in which the two were often portrayed as starkly different in campaign material and in the media. Jokowi followers changed their Facebook page to “I stand on the right side,” the “right side” being a corruption-free meritocratic leadership. They contrasted Jokowi, who had worked his way from local mayor to governor of Jakarta to presidential candidate, with Prabowo, a former military general and New Order figure who spoke of family ties as key to his leadership credentials. The campaign caused serious friction in many families.

One example of how the 2014 election was defined was a Jakarta Post editorial that endorsed Jokowi because “there is no such thing as being neutral when the stakes are so high… Rarely in an election has the choice been so definitive.” The Post argued that Jokowi was “determined to reject the collusion of power and business” while Prabowo was “embedded in a New Order-style of transactional politics that betrays the spirit of reformasi.” Many human rights activists saw Jokowi’s defeat of Prabowo as a victory for democracy over authoritarianism. Jokowi may have disappointed these activists (and many others) in his first term, but the polarising campaign messages were clear in the lead-up to his win.

Then came the undoubtedly polarising Jakarta election of 2017. Official and unofficial campaign material promoted Islam as its focal point, and the term pribumi, which distinguishes Indonesians whose ancestral roots lie mainly in the archipelago from more recent arrivals, was rejuvenated. Digital media had become an increasingly important space for Indonesians to debate and discuss these issues, both in private WhatsApp conversations and more publicly on Facebook and Twitter. As the media scholar Merlyna Lim described it, the social media election discourse in 2017 was characterised by the “freedom to hate.” Add to that the rise of hoax news, “black” campaigning, and paid trolls, or “buzzers,” and Indonesian politicians, parties and supporters helped create a highly aggressive discourse. Middle-class Indonesians recall incredulously how if someone disagreed with someone else in family or work WhatsApp groups they left the group! Others explained about how it was unwise to talk openly about whom you would vote for because it would lead to segregation in religious communities.

Not surprisingly, having survived two polarising elections, many Indonesians were both wary and weary of elections. As Prabowo once said, “democracy makes us tired.” So, is Indonesian democracy having a power nap before the campaign begins in earnest, or is it sleepwalking into something completely different?

Both Prabowo and Jokowi have clearly had buzzer teams working to shape online discourse, as well as to counter, and even create, “black campaign” material. The language of war is often used to describe the digital sphere, with a “weaponisation” of “online armies” and “cyber warriors” seen to be taking place. Perhaps it is no surprise, then, that some Indonesians describe the situation as a “hoax emergency.” As Jokowi observed about this Russian-style propaganda, “They don’t care whether it would cause divisiveness in society, whether it would disturb peace, whether it would worry the public.” It was, he added, a systematic drive to “produce non-stop slander, lies and hoaxes that confuse the people.”

Citing some extraordinary cases, local experts have warned that social media can easily cause conflict because of Indonesia’s low literacy levels. In the words of academic Adi Prayitno, “many Indonesians are still irrational and tend to be emotional when it comes to different opinions in politics,” leading them to think politics is a “one-way-to-heaven issue or a fight between good and evil.” The social media discourse in Indonesia colloquially describes Jokowi’s online supporters as cebong (tadpoles) and Prabowo’s online followers as kampret (bats).

At the heart of the idea of social media polarisation is the example of the United States. Former presidential candidate Agus Yudhoyono, for example, argued in a recent speech that Indonesia’s political divisions were caused by rampant misinformation and hoaxes on social media. “If this situation continues,” he said, “it will put an end to the country’s multiparty system and will lead the country to a two-party system like in the United States.” A dual-party system was not suitable for Indonesia’s history and diverse society, he added.

National Police deputy chief Ari Dono Sukmanto agrees, saying recently that perhaps the disruption that occurred in the United States “could happen to us, too.” One political campaigner on the Jokowi side told me the US election was crucial to their response to “black campaign” material: “Michelle Obama said, ‘When they go low, we go high.’ But it didn’t work. Trump won. So here, when they go low, we go lower.”

Despite all the concerns about division, disinformation and hoax news, though, the polls haven’t changed. Jokowi still leads on around 57 per cent to Prabowo’s 32 per cent. Rather than creating a “hoax emergency,” the two online armies seem largely to be fighting each other, while younger Indonesians increasingly move away from the tense political discourse on Twitter and Facebook towards the more apolitical Instagram. “The Nurhadi-Aldo golput phenomenon isn’t because people want a better candidate,” my Indonesian colleague tells me. “It’s because people don’t want a contest. They’d rather joke about politics on social media than get into serious debates about it.”

This slide from Ismail Fahmi’s social media analytics company, Drone Emprit, shows the “polarisation” of supporters that occurred on Twitter during the second televised debate. The “01” cluster represents Jokowi’s supporters and the “02” Prabowo’s. I would interpret this data as showing that the polarised online discourse is created largely by partisan buzzer teams.

But rather than acknowledging this, Indonesian politicians are more likely to argue that these partisan discussions online are the result of the election itself and the way Indonesians are engaging with politics.

The atmosphere of disinformation and division is having an effect, however, on how Indonesian elites and ordinary citizens feel about democracy. Direct and open contestation, a key feature of any democracy, is clearly a problem for many Indonesian politicians and even some members of the public.

Yet despite the re-match of presidential candidates from five years ago, there is no clear ideological contestation in the 2019 election. The 2014 contestation of Jokowi as democrat versus Prabowo as New Order figure no longer fits. Jokowi is no longer the face of a reformist democrat, as Tom Power has argued in New Mandala. Furthermore, Jokowi has built consensus and is increasingly strict about opposing voices. He has managed to get the majority of political parties on his side, has the support of most mainstream media companies (including those who were critical of him in 2014), and has pursued a more aggressive crackdown on opposition figures through the Electronic Transactions Law.

Is religion still a polarising factor, as it was in the 2017 Jakarta election? Vedi Hadiz sensibly argued in the aftermath of Jakarta’s 2017 election that Indonesia was seeing the emergence of two contestations among conservative forces: the conservative Islam adopted by Prabowo and his Islamist party allies, and the nationalist conservatism pushed by Jokowi and the military.

But I’m not sure it’s possible to distinguish Prabowo and Jokowi even on these conservatisms anymore. As Jokowi has shown by appointing the Islamic scholar Ma’ruf Amin as his running mate (and in many other facets of his politics), incorporating opposition forces is preferred to making a stand against them. Ridwan Kamil, who made a similar choice for vice-governor in the West Java election, described this process to me in this way: “In Indonesia, perception about politics is always divided in Islamic image and nationalist image. So if the combination comes from both, people consider it as a balance. People consider me more as nationalist, which means I have to find a vice-candidate that has an image which is more from Islam.”

Those from Prabowo’s Gerindra party, meanwhile, privately tell me that everyone would be invited to join their coalition should they win. Their most popular social media hashtag so far — simply #gantipresiden (“change the president”) — encapsulates the ideological drought of the opposing camp.

So social media is creating an artificial atmosphere of polarisation, which in turn gives politicians the excuse to avoid having a serious policy or ideological contest in the name of avoiding fuelling that supposed polarisation. Perhaps scarred by the elections of 2014 and 2017, many politicians and Indonesian citizens are quite happy to see a stable — even boring — election at which the incumbent president is re-elected easily. But if the political contest is confined to social media, things aren’t so great either.

Of course, there is still a month to go. But so far this campaign is missing something essential to a democracy — presidential candidates pitching clear ideological and policy differences. The emergence of social media disinformation and hoax news seems to have meant that many Indonesian politicians and citizens see a highly contested election campaign, ironically, as the biggest threat to Indonesian democracy. •

An earlier version of this article appeared in New Mandala.

The post Indonesia’s polarisation paradox appeared first on Inside Story.

From the moment Singapore gained independence from Malaysia in August 1965, its stability and prosperity have rested on a number of constants. So many of these seemingly immutable features of Singaporean politics are now in doubt that the government faces existential risks not just in the medium term but conceivably even in the short term.

The first constant is the supremacy of the family of Lee Kuan Yew, who led the colony to self-government in 1959 and independence in 1965. At every point since 1959, at least one Lee (and, for a long twenty-one years, two Lees, father and son) dominated cabinet and politics. When Lee Kuan Yew died in 2015, his son, Lee Hsien Loong, had already been prime minister for eleven years. The next prime minister won’t be a Lee, but Lee Hsien Loong is certain to emulate his father’s example and remain in cabinet, and in charge, for years to come. It also seems likely that his son, Li Hongyi, will enter parliament in the next election as part of a generational succession.

Yet since Lee Kuan Yew’s death the Lee family brand has become tarnished and fractured. Even leaving aside the many disappointments of PM Lee Hsien Loong’s period in government, and his manifest political shortcomings, the mystique has been smashed by family squabbles over his father’s legacy and will, and accusations that Lee Hsien Loong and his wife, Ho Ching, are trying to build a dynasty. Since the feud became public in 2016, Lee Hsien Loong has displayed a disconcerting willingness to use the full force of government in his personal campaign against his brother, nephew and sister-in-law, who are variously living in de facto exile and/or facing charges or official investigations. His brother, Lee Hsien Yang, has retaliated by making a substantial donation to the legal fighting fund of a blogger being sued by Hsien Loong.

The second constant has been the internal coherence of the national elite, which has always operated, free of checks and balances, through cabinet, the security services and most arms of government. The raw power of cabinet and government is undiminished, but there are telltale signs that cabinet unity is under strain. Loose talk among Singaporeans suggests that factions now exist inside cabinet; without firm evidence such rumours should be treated with extreme caution, but it is nevertheless clear that cabinet has become a much bigger tent than it used to be. Mild social reformers like deputy prime minister Tharman Shanmugaratnam are following very different instincts from cabinet members who come from a security or defence background, like deputy prime minister Teo Chee Hean.

Moving outside the confines of cabinet, however, signs of disaffection and “almost factions” on the periphery of the national elite are becoming too commonplace to be ignored. In retrospect, it is clear that divisions over the two final candidates for prime minister were unusually acrimonious and serious at the most recent meeting of the 1500 handpicked “cadre” members of the ruling People’s Action Party, or PAP.

Added to that is the fact that the litany of criticism and the divergent visions of former and even current key personnel outside cabinet have now been going on long enough to have become a pattern. The list begins with a former head of the civil service, Ngiam Tong Dow, and now includes a former head of the National Wages Council, Lim Chong Yah, a former chief economist with the Government of Singapore Investment Corporation, Yeoh Lam Keong, and a former director of fiscal policy at the finance ministry, Donald Low, to name just some of the more prominent former insiders. The pattern of carefully worded critiques mixed with robust (and even fearless) criticism is now too well established to be dismissed.

Not so many years ago the government cautiously welcomed such appraisals provided they were worded with sufficient respect and restraint, and many were even published in an elite civil service journal called Ethos. Today, however, the government more frequently resorts to familiar tools of repression: critics get warned off, their employment contracts fail to be renewed, and they are scolded, intimidated and humiliated in public. This says much about cabinet’s growing sense of insecurity, but more salient to the current analysis is the fact that these critiques are not just emanating from political opponents but also from people who either have been at the edge of the elite or, in the case of Ngiam Tong Dow, have spent a career working in the innermost circles of the elite.

These stresses are certainly not the stuff of revolutions, but they do show that divisions and disagreements are festering in the inner circles of the national elite, even if mostly out of public sight and under tight control. Worryingly for the government, many of the criticisms and alternative perspectives surfacing in public impinge on core elements of the national consensus on which the government itself tries to claim the moral high ground: national productivity, administrative leadership and competence, equality of educational and career opportunity, distributive justice for those outside the elite, and intergenerational social planning.

The third threatened constant derives directly from the former point: the national elite has hitherto been entirely successful in co-opting the country’s professional class into its political project. For decades, tertiary-educated professionals kept their distance from opposition political parties and civil society. How the scene has changed. Opposition parties now boast members and candidates with elite CVs: senior civil servants; university professors and associate professors; business leaders; professionals working for multinational companies. And there are more lawyers willing to do pro bono work for civil-society activists than ever before.

The breakdown of the PAP’s monopoly on the loyalty of professionals has been apparent since the beginning of the decade, but it is now a new normal — and one that confirms the degeneration of the core appeal and purpose of both the PAP and the ruling elite. The professional class is the PAP’s most important constituency for the purposes of regeneration and functionality, and it has become indifferent to the needs and aspirations of its erstwhile political patron.

It is no coincidence that the fracturing of the elite’s functional support base has been accompanied by an unmistakable deterioration in the administrative and political competence of the elite over the past decade and a half, with an escalating series of political and administrative crises in areas such as immigration, housing, health and transport.

There can be little doubt that the government faces major challenges in the medium term, but even in the short term it won’t be plain sailing. The PAP is being challenged by a new political party being pulled together by one of its own: Tan Cheng Bock, a former PAP MP who in 2011 came within a few thousand votes of being elected president of Singapore against the government’s own candidate. Tellingly, Tan’s new political venture has been endorsed by Lee Hsien Loong’s brother.

With all this ferment in the background, one might have expected Lee Hsien Loong to have chosen a successor with particularly strong leadership and political skills. One such candidate was indeed available — deputy prime minister Shanmugaratnam — but he was not considered for the simple reason that he is not Chinese. Of the six Chinese men who were shortlisted for the job, Lee chose finance minister Heng Swee Keat, whose main political asset seems to be that he was a favourite of Lee Hsien Loong’s father. And they wonder why they are having trouble holding their base together. •

The post Singapore’s ruling elite is fraying at the edges — and at the centre appeared first on Inside Story.

Quoting Menzies at a Liberal government is always a good tactic, so here’s more from the founding father, from April 1939:

I have become convinced that, in the Pacific, Australia must regard herself as a principal, providing herself with her own information and maintaining her own diplomatic contacts with foreign powers… It is true that we are not a numerous people, but we have our vigour, intelligence and resource, and I see no reason why we should not play not only an adult, but an effective part in the affairs of the Pacific.

Menzies offers an enduring truth while stating the bleeding obvious. Over the decades since then, though, Australia has ceased using media power to play an intelligent and effective part in the affairs of our region. As one former senior ABC staffer puts it, our programming for regional audiences is simply “risible.”

To be clear, “broadcasting” is a catch-all covering a lot of ground: analogue to digital to satellite, Facebook to FM. Content converges: radio and TV become video and audio and text. Broadcasting is publishing. TV and radio are reborn online. The digital age both unites and atomises.

When the Abbott government axed the ABC’s ten-year $220 million contract to run Asia-Pacific TV in 2014, just a year after it began, a communications minister named Malcolm Turnbull argued that there was no need for the Oz voice in a crowded regional arena. If people wanted international stuff, Turnbull said, they could go to the BBC or CNN.

The ghost of Menzies would have raised both eyebrows, because Menzies said the purpose of getting close to great and powerful friends was to bolster our interests, not hand ’em over — insurance policy, not giving away the store. During his three years as prime minister, the same Malcolm Turnbull came round to the “speak for ourselves” viewpoint.

In a key foreign policy speech last year, he reflected on the digital revolution:

Technology has connected local aspirations and grievances with global movements.

Hyper-connectivity has amplified the reach and power of non-state actors, forcing us to reassess how we, as nation states, assert and defend our sovereign interest…

Now, in this brave new world we cannot rely on great powers to safeguard our interests. We have to take responsibility for our own security and prosperity while recognising we are stronger when sharing the burden of collective leadership with trusted partners and friends.

The gathering clouds of uncertainty and instability are signals for all of us to play more active roles in protecting and shaping the future of this region.

Take responsibility. Don’t expect the great powers to safeguard our interests. Act to shape the future of the region. Menzies would nod at this description of the value of a powerful Australian voice — and the need to speak for ourselves.

And yet, these are the worst of days for Australian international TV, which is twenty-five years old this year. And they are the hardest days for Radio Australia, which reaches its eightieth birthday next year. They are gasping, limping shadows. The cash drips slowly; much life has departed.

In 2010, the ABC spent $36 million on international services (about $42 million in today’s dollars). These days, a guesstimate of the international broadcasting spend is $11 million. The ABC is vague about the exact figure; perhaps it’s an embarrassed reticence. Yet tough international times demand independent journalism, just as they require steady political attention, economic engagement of every kind, smart diplomacy, good aid, effective intelligence and a strong defence strategy.

To remake Australia’s international media thinking, the government and the ABC will have to separate domestic bickering from foreign policy. The government can overturn poor decisions that have damaged our international voice if it wants to, and the ABC has the capacity to recover its role as an international broadcaster, a core charter responsibility that Aunty has been shedding.

Surveying international broadcasting’s decline means picking through the ruins of past decisions by government and the ABC. The debris still remains from the Abbott government’s decision to axe the ABC’s ten-year $220 million contract to run Asia-Pacific TV just a year after it began. That was a sad example of Australia’s international interests being trampled by domestic argy-bargy driven by deeply entrenched hang-ups about the ABC. The Liberal Party’s fear of the ABC was succinctly expressed long ago by John Howard’s consigliore Graham Morris: “The ABC is our enemy talking to our friends.”

The enemy–friends tension is a backhanded tribute to the ABC’s influence across Australian society. For many decades, ABC power also reached beyond our borders; domestic political arguments have obscured the ABC’s traditional role as a major media voice in our neighbourhood. It discarded its South Pacific audience by reducing electricity to its shortwave broadcast towers, degrading the signal and cutting off listeners, and then announced there was no longer a shortwave audience. The broadcaster decided what it was prepared to give, not what the South Pacific required.

A broadcasting recovery involves listening to what the Islands say they need, rather than telling them what they’ll get. Reviving South Pacific shortwave should be part of a bigger project: to restore the ABC as an international broadcaster and create a twenty-first-century Australian voice across the Asia-Pacific.

For its part, Canberra stopped thinking about what good journalism could do for the region, and for Australia’s vital interests. The fashionable chatter was all about new technology and soft power, losing sight of deep truths about the role of journalism. Soft power trumped hard news.

Discarding our journalistic heritage in our region is poor history, lousy policy and appalling judgement — and it meant that lots of old media agendas became fresh headaches for Australia. Propaganda and polluted facts are back, rebadged as fake news. Canberra laments challenges to the rules-based system in a tone tinged with a bewildered sense that things shouldn’t be like this. A media rethink can start with putting in the journalistic vision so lacking in last year’s foreign policy white paper.

The paper was happy to talk about “media” (fourteen instances) but didn’t once mention “journalism” or “broadcasting.” This was strange, given that the final chapter, “Partnerships and Soft Power,” stressed the “vital” need for persuasive Australian soft power to influence the behaviour or thinking of others. The closest reference to journos was a domestic tick for Australia’s “robust independent media.”

“Global governance is becoming harder,” the white paper judged, and the international order is contested by “measures short of war,” including “economic coercion, cyber attacks, misinformation and media manipulation.” The paper fretted that Australia must be ready to “dispel misconceptions and ensure our voice is heard when new and traditional media are used to sow misinformation or misrepresent Australian policies.”

The “ensure our voice is heard” line was where I expected to find journalism. Instead, the answer to the “voice” conundrum was lots of soft power and digital engagement — a reasonable start, not a full answer. Australia needs to rediscover the power of hard news as the sharp edge of our soft power.

For twenty-five years, Australia’s international TV voice has been a political plaything and a broadcasting afterthought, constantly facing chops and changes. This history of chop, change and political spasm is evident in the eight changes of identity and ownership over that quarter-decade:

1. First came Australia Television, or ATV, in 1993, when the Keating Labor government gave the ABC start-up funding. Unlike the rest of the ABC, though, ATV carried commercials. Canberra wanted it, but didn’t want to pay for it.

2. Channel 7 was given control in 1998 (twice — once with news, then as a pure shopping channel). The commercial network made a hash of it, didn’t make any money and lost interest. So…

3. In 2001, it went back to the ABC as ABC Television International.

4. A year later, it was rebranded as ABC Asia Pacific.

5. Then, in 2006, came another name change: the Australia Network.

6. In the 2014 budget, the Coalition cut all funding to the Australia Network. It closed, to be replaced by a drastically cutdown operation.

7. The Australia Network’s replacement, Australia Plus, started in September 2014.

8. From 1 July 2018, the network has been renamed ABC Australia.

Neither side of politics emerges with much credit from this zigzag. Canberra’s level of interest has been as changeable as the name.

The moment of creation under Labor illustrates recurring themes of limited attention, political crosscurrents, and plenty of vision but little money. Launching ATV to broadcast to the Asia-Pacific, the Keating government boasted of its significance for regional engagement and interests, ranging from media and education to business and foreign policy. Confident talk wasn’t matched by cash or commitment.

The ABC sought to establish an international version of its domestic service, but couldn’t devote proper resources to ATV, not least because the government didn’t want to pay for what Australia needed. Programming suffered because the ABC had domestic copyright to broadcast programs but didn’t own international rights. The Keating government knew ATV was worthwhile, but wouldn’t give anything more than start-up funding for the satellite service. Once established, it would have to pay its own way with advertising.

The refusal to launch ATV as a fully funded public broadcasting service (like the rest of the ABC) was telling. A hybrid design — part ABC, part commercial — was the half-arsed response of a half-hearted government. That half-in, half-out problem continued.

Domestic politics too often derails discussion of international TV. The Keating cabinet’s debates about establishing ATV veered off into rant-and-rave sessions about how ABC domestic reporting was hurting the government. Much bile was directed at ABC managing director David Hill, who’d fought budget cuts with a famous campaign proclaiming the ABC cost each Australian only “eight cents a day.”

A couple of times when ATV was on the cabinet agenda, Hill came to Canberra to support the idea. Having the ebullient ABC head in the cabinet anteroom was a disastrous provocation. After navigating past Hill, ministers would have another ABC hate session, then defer decision.

Themes from the creation story recur over the twenty-five years:

Politics overturns policy: Each change of federal government — Keating to Howard to Rudd to Abbott — has been a chop-change moment for international TV. The Liberal–Labor foreign policy consensus has never translated into agreement on the worth of our broadcasting service to the regions. (Southeast Asia and the South Pacific are different regions with different audiences.) Thus…

The gap between big interests and little cash: The high rhetoric of Asia-Pacific engagement is negated by low commitment of dollars.

The ABC as problem and solution: All federal governments come to fear/distrust/hate ABC reporting on them; that perennial rant-and-rave problem obscures a clear understanding of what public broadcasting can do for Australia in the Asia-Pacific. The problem has a funny dimension: politicians know the power of the ABC, but they’re not willing to use that power to serve our international interests.

International ABC can’t be domestic ABC: The ABC’s domestic programming is vital to the international service, but that’s the start, not the finish. Reaching and holding audiences in Asia and the South Pacific is about talking with, not just talking to. Diverse audiences have different needs. Programming has to be for them, not just rebroadcast from Oz.

Chop and change hurts: International broadcasting is expensive and complex because a lot of power is in play. Australia’s constant and growing interests in the Asia-Pacific demand a constant and growing broadcast conversation, using all converging media.

A strong, consistent voice in our region serves Australian foreign policy. Get the zigzag pattern off the screen and adjust the international TV picture.

The wrack and roil afflicting the international system matches the digital disruption of news media. The rules and norms of the foreign policy game and media world shake, shift and suffer.

Australia frets about threats to the rules-based system as the tectonic plates of geopolitics and geoeconomics crunch. Not least of those truths is the one to be found at the heart of seven Australian defence white papers over forty years: geography matters.

Traditionally, Australia wanted a strong international broadcasting voice in what defence-speak calls our region of primary strategic interest: Southeast Asia, the South Pacific and the eastern Indian Ocean. That broadcasting tradition is looking very modern. Geography is back. Or, more accurately, the demands of geography never went away — we’re just feeling the weight with fresh force.

In the foreign policy game, the word “influence” stands besides “interests” at the calculating, cerebral end of the field. But influence and interests must always be within shouting distance of values and beliefs, which tend to reside in the heart and hearth part of the arena.

The qualities of good journalism — “reliable,” “independent,” “factual” — are exactly the same as are needed in the foreign policy of a country seeking to persuade others, protect interests, project influence and promote values.

Amid all the disruption, there’s a perfect media instrument ready to serve as Australia’s voice in the Asia-Pacific, to do journalism that’ll serve our interests and values. Well-tested by history, with a proud heritage of great journalism and a prescient charter, that instrument is the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. Simple as ABC, really.

Or it should be. To illustrate the ABC problem, come into my anecdotage while I recall a previous life as an ABC correspondent. Two decades ago, a sardonic line rattled around ABC executive ranks: “A peasant in Longreach is more important than a peasant in Lombok.” The bitter point of the comparison — central Queensland versus an Indonesian island — was that the ABC must devote scarce cash to its domestic users, not its potential international audience. Axing South Pacific shortwave last year affirmed that old corporate view.

But power politics zoom back, the digital revolution rages and Australia’s foreign policy dilemmas demand that the ABC get back into the international journalism game, bigger and better.

Three distinct decision strands must combine for the back-bigger-and-better conclusion to be realised. Strands one and two reside in Canberra: first, political and policy consensus; second, the shift from agreement to action.

Canberra’s troubled consensus: In international affairs, tectonic plates are crunching and lava is melting the rules-based system. Canberra’s agreement on how nasty things are looking is expressed in the 2016 defence white paper, the 2017 intelligence review and the 2017 foreign policy white paper.

The defence white paper frets about fraying international rules: the word “rules” is used sixty-four times — forty-eight of these in the formulation “rules-based global order.” The stress on rules expresses the fear of what’s failing. “Rules-based global order” is a big phrase to cover such disparate forces as jihadism and China’s rise. Mostly, though, it’s about China.

The intelligence review identified three big trends: fundamental changes in the international system, extremism with global reach, and accelerating technological change. And the foreign policy paper got a lot into one stark sentence: “Today, China is challenging America’s position.”

The Canberra consensus fuels the substantial Liberal–Labor unity ticket on foreign policy. The ticket is tacit but important. As always, argument rages about whether the government or opposition will do a better job on China or the US alliance or in the South Pacific. What’s not disputed is the trouble in the trends. Beneath the usual politics, there’s a shared sense of foreboding.

From description to prescription: It’s always tough moving from anxiety to action. What can/should/must we do?

A strong broadcast voice in the Asia-Pacific, based on the ABC, is part of the answer to regional challenges. Australia must move from the agreed description of problems in strand one to a new Canberra consensus on the use of the ABC to support our interests, influence and values in the South Pacific, Southeast Asia and beyond.

We must rebuild a powerful and consistent broadcasting voice so we can rejoin regional conversations and contests. Tough international times demand independent journalism, just as they require steady political attention, economic engagement of every kind, smart diplomacy, good aid, effective intelligence and a strong defence strategy.

Canberra has to agree on the prescription, set the policy response and do the budget numbers for a sustained media commitment.

ABC changes: Recent decades show that the ABC will always choose Longreach. ABC priorities are domestic, not international. The institutional response is logical, yet it fails to serve Australia beyond our shores. We need a future ABC that can do what Australia needs for Lombok and Lautoka and Lae.

The domestic–international tensions inherent in the ABC charter must be resolved. The international responsibility must be more than a declining division of the ABC — it must become a new planet in the Australian policy universe. That planet must be created by the ABC and draw on its values and resources.

To serve Australia’s interests, influence and values in the Asia-Pacific, we need an Australian International Broadcasting Corporation, or AIBC. The AIBC would resolve the domestic–international tensions in the ABC charter, giving proper expression to the charter’s international dimension.

The charter is at the heart of the 1983 Act that remade the ABC from a Commission to a Corporation. In the charter’s foundational clause, the law gives equal weight to the ABC’s domestic and international responsibilities.

Domestically, the ABC must produce innovative and comprehensive broadcasting services of a high standard — programs that contribute to a sense of national identity and inform and entertain, and reflect the cultural diversity of the Australian community, with a specific mention of “programs of an educational nature.”

Internationally, it must transmit news, current affairs, entertainment and cultural programs that will “encourage awareness of Australia and an international understanding of Australian attitudes on world affairs; and enable Australian citizens living or travelling outside Australia to obtain information about Australian affairs and Australian attitudes on world affairs.”

The habit of rebroadcasting domestic fare has been maintained in the relaunch of the Asia-Pacific TV service, rebranded as ABC Australia. The ABC says the service “will deliver distinctive content to culturally and linguistically diverse international audiences and to Australian expatriates, encouraging international awareness and understanding of Australia and Australian attitudes.” Fine words, but the ABC’s reach falls short of its grasp.

The programming offers rebroadcasts of ABC news programs, “slice of home” shows and Australian Rules football. For an expat, an excellent menu. But for forty countries of the Asia-Pacific — those “culturally and linguistically diverse international audiences” — this is lots of Oz attitudes, about Oz for Oz.

Australian content is necessary but not sufficient for an Asia-Pacific service. Australian content needs to be the start, whereas at the moment it’s the finish.

To do more will need cash and commitment from Canberra — and the AIBC to deliver the focus. The aim is to talk with neighbours, not merely broadcast to neighbours; that supposes media conversation of many types, not just an oration from Oz.

Atop the excellent foundation of good ABC shows, the AIBC must offer reporting that matters in the lives of Lombok or Lautoka or Lae. The new organisation should be born of the ABC, reflect ABC traditions and standards, and draw on ABC resources — but it must have its own corporate identity as an expression of its distinct, international purpose.

The AIBC would have its own chair and board and its own separate budget. The deputy chair of the ABC and the ABC managing director should be on the board of the AIBC, but so should the head of the Special Broadcasting Corporation.

Replicating the successful ABC model, the board should have a staff-elected member, and then gather board members with international experience from business, diplomacy, aid and one of the major generators of Oz soft power in the years ahead, the universities.

Under its Act, the ABC can establish subsidiary companies, so in theory no new legislation is required. But in line with my argument that Canberra must pay for what Canberra wants, the AIBC must have its own budget allocation. Don’t leave it to the ABC. Aunty can’t pay for what Australian foreign policy demands.

The AIBC must have a separate identity so the international effort doesn’t get drawn into the domestic fights that are a natural part of the ABC’s existence. Like the ABC, it must be a fully funded, independent public broadcaster — not a state broadcaster.

Give the AIBC the right to seek partners where it sees a natural fit in such realms as development aid, philanthropy and universities. Its core, though, is as a public broadcaster.

Don’t fall into the trap of thinking Australia can have an important foreign policy instrument on the cheap. If the AIBC is going to have heft, it must be richly funded by Canberra; the ABC doesn’t have a lazy $30 million to redirect to Oz foreign policy, much less $50 million or $75 million.

Canberra has to see the need and fund the instrument. Australian interests, influence and values demand an Australian voice in the Asia-Pacific. •

The post The sharp edge of soft power appeared first on Inside Story.

When you add this democratic transition to Indonesia’s longstanding tradition of religious tolerance — in the world’s largest Muslim country — and a solid pace of economic growth that has doubled real incomes in twenty years, it has been a remarkable success among developing democracies, even if few Australians seem to grasp that.

But now clouds are gathering, and its future is uncertain. Last Friday a conference of Indonesia experts at the Australian National University heard that under the man who seemed to epitomise its democratic transition, president Joko Widodo (Jokowi), Indonesia is lurching towards a more authoritarian style of government. Conservative Islam is growing increasingly powerful, the army and police are being used for politically partisan ends, and dissidents and those seen by Muslim clerics as deviants are experiencing rising repression.

Jokowi was a successful furniture manufacturer before entering politics, and his main policy priorities as president had been to build infrastructure, cut red tape, and run a sound economic and fiscal policy. That has been a stunning success. Jakarta today is a city of infrastructure projects under construction everywhere you look — a metro railway, tramlines, exclusive bus routes — and every part of this country has its own projects under way.

But those priorities have changed in the wake of the defining event of his presidency: the dramatic fall from power last year of his former deputy and successor as mayor of Jakarta, Basuki Tjahaja Purnama, a clever, some say arrogant, Chinese Christian known as Ahok, who is now in jail for blasphemy after accusing his enemies of distorting the Qur’an.

With Ahok behind bars, some of his enemies turned their sights on Jokowi. Yes, he is a Javanese Muslim, which puts him in a very different category. (Some Muslims do not accept the idea that non-Muslims should be able to rule over them.) But enemies have questioned even that, or alleged that he is not a real Muslim. The local elections in June went badly for his party, the PDI-P, headed by former president Megawati Sukarnoputri, which won just three of the sixteen posts contested for provincial governors (premiers).

Jokowi has never lost an election, and he is bending over backwards to make sure he doesn’t lose this one.

Next Sunday sees the official start of Indonesia’s 2019 presidential election campaign, even though election day is not until 17 April. Restrictive rules have ensured that there are only two candidates, making it a rematch between Jokowi and the man he defeated in 2014, the Trumpish retired general Prabowo Subianto. The polls show Jokowi well ahead of his rival by a two-to-one majority. But then, the polls were similar at this stage in 2014, and that ended up as a very close race.

As Tom Power of the ANU explained at the conference, Jokowi’s strategy is to head off the risk that the Muslim campaign that brought down Ahok will be used against him. And hence, with vice-president Jusuf Kalla ineligible to seek another term, he has chosen as his running mate Ma’ruf Amin, the seventy-five-year-old conservative chairman of Indonesia’s clerical body, the Indonesian Ulama Council, or MUI, and president of the mass Muslim organisation Nahdlatul Ulama, or NU.

It was a stunning embrace of the enemy. Amin played a crucial part in the campaign against Ahok, issuing a “religious opinion” in November 2016 that Ahok’s comments amounted to blasphemy. That ruling triggered the massive street protests that shook Jakarta in the following month, followed by Ahok’s defeat at the polls and his sentence to eighteen months in jail.

In what Dr Power calls “the post-Ahok landscape,” Jokowi chose to seek accommodation with Amin. “NU has become a target of patronage,” Power said, quoting an official of the group as saying: “Whatever Kyai Ma’ruf asked, Jokowi gave him. This way, Kyai Ma’ruf is comfortable, and Jokowi is comfortable. They have become closer and closer, and now NU is always at the side of the government.”

The choice of Ma’ruf may have neutralised the threat of an organised Muslim campaign against Jokowi, but it could have a cost. Jokowi had already chosen the progressive chief justice of the Constitutional Court, Mahfud MD, as his running mate, which would have been a more plausible pairing. But that choice ran into opposition from the parties in his alliance, who feared that it would make Mahfud the heir apparent, and from the NU, which wanted one of its own. So the president gave way.

“Jokowi was made to look weak and beholden to party bosses,” Power concluded. “He disappointed many of his own non-religious supporters, who remembered [Ma’ruf’s] role in the Ahok case.

“The question is, to what extent will he [Ma’ruf] exert influence? Will he sway Jokowi’s administration to be less tolerant? If he said (as he has in the past) that homosexuals should be in prison, what would Jokowi do? It could be very damaging.”

The conference focused on the rights of minorities in Indonesia, including LGBTI communities, religious minorities seen by the MUI as deviant (such as Shi’ite and Ahmadiyya Muslims) and ethnic minorities such as the Chinese. While there have been some steps forward for human rights in the courts — and for the disabled, in the legislature — many of those decisions remain unimplemented. The steps backwards are far more visible.

Take the case of Meiliana, a forty-four-year-old Chinese Buddhist living in North Sumatra. In 2016 she complained about the excessive noise from the loudspeakers of the mosque close to her home. The faithful were outraged. Someone quickly organised a mob of Islamic extremists, which ransacked and set fire to fourteen Buddhist temples. The courts then acted: not against the arsonists, but against Meiliana. Like Ahok, she was sentenced to eighteen months’ jail on a charge of blasphemy — just for making a complaint.

This is not the Indonesia of old. Historian Robert Cribb, also of the ANU, interpreted it as the “pious Muslims” taking back the social dominance they lost when Indonesia was set up under a constitution enshrining Sukarno’s philosophy of Pancasila (five principles). Pancasila prescribed religious tolerance, recognised five religions (now six), and gave the Buddhist, Hindu, Catholic, Protestant and now Confucian minorities equal rights with the Muslim majority.

“They want it to be clear who is in control,” Professor Cribb said. “It is as if they are saying collectively, ‘We will decide the meaning of Islamic law in this country, and the terms in which it is introduced.’ Tolerance has been seriously eroded. It worries me that something very special about Indonesia is under threat.”

It is not just under threat in Indonesia. Professor Cribb drew parallels with the fatwa issued by the Murdoch press here against Yassmin Abdel-Magied for “civic blasphemy” in suggesting that Anzac Day should also be a time for remembering the injustices committed by Australians — and the excoriation of senator Fraser Anning by some because he used the phrase “final solution” in a speech, unaware that uttering those words is a form of blasphemy to some.

It is not only diminishing tolerance that worries Tom Power and Murdoch University’s Jacqui Baker. Baker cited Jokowi’s regular calls for police and army officers to promote his goåvernment’s achievements in their villages and kampungs, and the growing number of Duterte-style extrajudicial killings of drug sellers and petty criminals. “It sounds the alarm for further democratic backsliding,” she said.

Power noted that the conservative Islam embodied by Ma’ruf and the MUI has little in common with the radical Islam of the terrorists. Indeed, during this period Jokowi has given the green light to increasing repression of “anti-Pancasila” groups, such as the Hizb ut-Tahrir, a global movement to establish a single Islamic caliphate to rule the world.

Indonesia has adopted an electoral system that restricts the number of candidates for high office by requiring presidential candidates, for example, to be supported by parties holding at least 20 per cent of the seats in parliament. Increasingly, Power pointed out, this is coming to mean no election at all, as there is little ideological difference between most of Indonesia’s parties, and everyone wants to be on the winning side.

In this year’s regional elections, he said, more than 10 per cent of the mayors and bupatis (heads of regions) standing faced no competition, either because no one else nominated or because courts ruled out rival candidates. Voters could vote either for the single candidate or for the empty column where a challenger was meant to be.

In Makassar, a city the size of Brisbane, the courts blocked the mayor from standing again after the parties decided to unite behind one of their own, Munafri Arifuddin. Faced with the choice of Munafri or the empty column, the city’s voters elected the empty column, creating a new first in Indonesia’s unusual democracy.

It nearly happened in the election for president. At one time even Prabowo faced trouble getting enough party support to be on the ballot. As Power recounted, Prabowo then went to Luhut Pandjaitan, one of Jokowi’s key ministers, and asked if Jokowi would allow him to join the ticket as his running mate — removing any need for an election. Negotiations began, but failed, Power said: “the stumbling block was reportedly disagreement over the distribution of cabinet spoils.”

Indonesian democracy is still standing. But, Power concluded, its quality is in decline.

Some commentators say Jokowi has focused on the wrong threat. As a Javanese Muslim, he is a much less vulnerable target for Islamists than Ahok was. Rather, the main threat to his re-election could come from economic problems.

That might seem extraordinary, given Indonesia’s record. Susan Olivia of the University of Waikato told the conference it has achieved consistent economic growth of 5 per cent or more. The budget is in relatively healthy shape — a deficit of 2.5 per cent of GDP, including all that infrastructure spending — and net debt is just 25 per cent of GDP, the second-lowest of the world’s ten biggest economies.

Jokowi’s infrastructure program has been widely popular. On Transparency International’s measure, corruption is no longer as bad as it was, partly because the online revolution promotes payment systems that cut out the middleman. And his award-winning finance minister, Sri Mulyani Indrawati, has spearheaded a program of serious deregulation to cut red tape and make Indonesia more business-friendly.

But what is happening in the United States is creating waves through the developing world. The ANU’s Ross McLeod pointed out that rising US interest rates mean Indonesia too has to raise its interest rates to maintain the capital inflow that finances much of its investment. The Fed’s rate rises have led the dollar to appreciate in value, and the rupiah to depreciate. And with a big trade in exporting components for Chinese factories to assemble into finished goods, Indonesia too is vulnerable to Donald Trump’s expanding tariff hikes on Chinese exports.

Australia faces similar issues. But we have political bipartisanship in these areas, so they can be handled sensibly. The Reserve Bank has not only allowed the Australian dollar to decline, it has welcomed it, because that makes Australian exports more competitive. (We have also been lucky so far with mineral prices rising to offset the dollar’s fall.)

That is not the case in Indonesia. Prabowo keeps attacking Jokowi in what we treat as no-go areas, and policy-making is suffering as a result. The rupiah this year has fallen by 8 to 9 per cent against the US dollar, in line with the Australian dollar’s falls. But Prabowo argues that this is making Indonesians poorer, and the government should intervene to maintain its value.

And intervene it has. McLeod pointed out with regret that, to prop up the rupiah and keep capital inflow coming, Bank Indonesia has sold off US$4 billion of its reserves, and lifted its interest rates by 1.25 per cent — equivalent to five Australian rate rises. To try to hold down the increase in the current account deficit, the government has hiked tariffs on imported vacuum cleaners and other goods.

And as Prabowo is also banging on about rising oil prices, Jokowi has increased the petrol subsidies he had earlier cut, and slowed infrastructure spending to pay for them. All of this will slow Indonesia’s growth, McLeod argued, compared to an Australian-style policy response that lets nature take its course and relies on the automatic stabilisers to keep the economy upright.

Indonesia’s previous president, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, had two terms in office. The first saw an impressive five years of reform combined with reassurance; he was comfortably re-elected. In his second term, however, SBY dropped the oars and stopped rowing; he no longer wanted to make hard decisions, he just wanted to stay popular. Indonesia drifted off course. Islamist groups and economic nationalists became more assertive, infrastructure was left to become even more backward, and the crisis of Indonesia’s low education standards grew even worse.

For all his faults, Jokowi’s first term has been a successful one. Like SBY, he will probably be re-elected, and comfortably. But what will his second term deliver to Indonesians? Will it continue the progress of his first term, or see it regress into a less tolerant, more backward country? Will the president keep rowing — or will he too drop the oars, avoid the hard decisions, and gradually let his country drift off course? •

The post Indonesian democracy’s gathering clouds appeared first on Inside Story.

“I came here to vote because I have no choice,” Sreymao tells us. At last year’s local elections — widely seen as a litmus test for the national poll — she voted for the opposition Cambodia National Rescue Party, or CNRP. Now, she says, she’s lost hope. “We want change, but we cannot make it. So I just go with the flow, let it be.”

Hun Sen has ruled Cambodia with an increasingly heavy hand for thirty-three years, and no one in Cambodia expected his supremacy to come to an end at yesterday’s election. Victory for the ruling Cambodian People’s Party, or CPP, had been a forgone conclusion ever since a compliant court dissolved its only legitimate challenger, the CNRP. Opposition leader Kem Sokha had already been arrested on charges of treason, and has been incarcerated for almost a year in a remote prison near the Vietnamese border.

With most of the minor parties receiving tiny shares of the vote — they are often called “fireflies,” because they flicker briefly (and suspiciously) just before an important vote — the CPP will make a clean sweep of Cambodia’s parliament. Its super majority will cement the growing perception of Cambodia as a de facto one-party state.

For CPP spokesman Sok Eysan, the result is “extraordinary… as we expected before.” For former CNRP president Sam Rainsy, who is living in exile, this “sham” election was “conducted in a climate of fear” and is “a betrayal of the popular will.” Despite Donald Trump’s history of courting authoritarian leaders, the US administration leans towards Rainsy’s view, expressing itself “profoundly disappointed by the government’s choice to disenfranchise millions of voters.” And Australia took the view that jailing the opposition leader and dissolving his party has “reversed more than twenty-five years of progress towards democracy in Cambodia.”

The lead-up to Sunday’s election had seen a noticeable change in the country’s social media landscape. Thousands of Cambodians found themselves added to a string of WhatsApp groups with the potential to spread information, or misinformation, rapidly. On the night before the election, fake news — including a letter from the CNRP’s jailed leader urging people to vote — circulated on Facebook. On election day, thousands of bots began spouting pro-CPP propaganda on Twitter.

The government had also banned a range of independent media websites in the forty-eight hours before the vote in an attempt to suppress credible alternative information. Cambodia’s press freedom rankings had already plunged ten places to 142nd worldwide in the past year, with news outlets shuttered, journalists jailed and social media users under heightened scrutiny.

With this level of coercion and misinformation, the European Union and countries including Australia, the United States and Japan had refused to formally observe the election process. Instead, it was monitored by a handful of dubious observers, including delegations from China and Myanmar and individuals from the likes of the UK Independence Party and Italy’s far right.

With the ruling party’s victory assured, the opposition’s call for a boycott increased the pressure on the government to achieve a high voter participation rate. Pressure to participate was especially fierce at the local level, where surveillance is pervasive. Villagers were told they could lose their jobs, be denied essential services or be fined large sums of money if they failed to cast a ballot. For Sreymao, the fact that a police station sits not far from her home played a key role in her decision.

Once voting got under way, businesses connected to Hun Sen’s daughter-in-law offered discounts on bubble tea and free popcorn for those sporting an ink-stained finger. Hundreds of thousands of garment workers — plied with gifts of 20,000 riel (A$6.60) from Hun Sen — had been given three days off and 50 per cent of their salary early. Un-inked fingers would undoubtedly result in salaries being docked.

Cambodia’s National Election Committee said yesterday that voter turnout was more than 82 per cent. That figure is below the 90 per cent record at last year’s local elections, but was still greeted with scepticism by the opposition’s deputy leader in exile, Mu Sochua. “The NEC can manipulate results, but they cannot say 80 per cent [voted],” she said in Jakarta on Monday. “We can see with our own eyes the polling stations [in former opposition strongholds] were almost empty.”

An analysis of the preliminary results shows a sharp increase in the number of spoiled votes — ballot papers left blank, crossed out, with all boxes ticked, or emblazoned with a rising sun, the symbol of the outlawed CNRP. In a majority of constituencies, according to the analysis, the number of invalid votes was higher than those of the second-ranked party.

But turning out isn’t necessarily the same thing as casting a valid vote. At Chak Angre Leu temple, where the CNRP’s Kem Sokha lodged his ballot last year, a local man, Sun Heng, stood watching a small trickle of voters. “I got 50,000 riel (A$16.60) from a CPP team leader a few months ago, on the promise I would vote for the CPP,” he told us. “I just made the paper invalid. I just folded it and dropped it in. It’s more safe than not voting at all.”

Next door to the CNRP’s former headquarters — now blocked off by metal fencing — a former refugee and monk-turned-translator, Chin Channa, was drinking tea with fellow opposition supporters. Their fingers were ink-free.

Chin Channa had been “so excited” by the huge CNRP gains in 2013, he said. For him, yesterday’s only saving grace was that voter turnout appeared low. “I do not want this regime to continue like this. When we vote, we expect change.”

Much of Hun Sen’s legitimacy stems from his role in the Vietnamese-backed force ousting the murderous Khmer Rouge regime in 1979. A former Khmer Rouge cadre himself, he maintains that a loss of power by the ruling party would ensure a return to civil war.

Several CPP supporters we spoke to dutifully repeated the government’s claims about the opposition and the threat of foreign interference. But some have a more nuanced view. Among them was Prak Sokphan, who lost her father and three siblings during the Pol Pot years and was subjected to almost four years of forced labour and starvation.

“For me, I need to be grateful,” she said, eyes welling with tears. “They rescued me. My life was very hard under Pol Pot.” Despite her gratitude, she felt that the loss of the opposition voice in Cambodian politics was a step backwards. “I am old,” she told us. “I do not have modern thinking, but I want to have an opposition voice to develop and complete the country.” ●

The post “When we vote, we expect change” appeared first on Inside Story.

It was like how we felt two and a half years ago when Burma’s military junta finally allowed the people to elect Aung San Suu Kyi as their ruler.

What’s happened in Burma since reminds us that euphoria doesn’t last. Running a successful campaign from opposition doesn’t mean you can run a successful government.

The challenges facing Dr Mahathir on his return as prime minister are different from those faced by Aung San Suu Kyi, but they will be just as tough. And the same goes for Anwar Ibrahim, assuming Mahathir keeps his word and hands over to him as prime minister.

To an outsider — and not having been to Malaysia for more than a decade, I am one — this election surely marks the end of the kind of government Malaysia has experienced for half a century: one based above all on racial division, authoritarian controls and social conservatism, with economic liberalism and wage suppression added to attract foreign investment.

What will replace it remains to be seen. US President Franklin Roosevelt’s quip — “There are many ways of going forward, but only one of standing still” — was never more relevant.

The new government is a coalition of Malay supremacists, Chinese who want to push back, modern Westernised reformers, conservative Muslims, and Borneo tribals with their own agenda. Its 150-page election manifesto and its earlier alternative budget reflect this dissonance.

But overall, the main stream of its manifesto is a social democratic reform agenda — a free media, an independent judiciary, higher wages, lower taxes, more spending — albeit with nods to continued Malay supremacy. Their model is an Asian version of Sweden. Yet their leader is a man whose twenty-two-year rule as prime minister exemplified the authoritarian abuses he is now promising to overthrow.

It is an extraordinary paradox. Nothing exemplifies this better than the fact that two of the three senior ministers Mahathir appointed on Saturday  — party leaders Lim Guan Eng of the (Chinese) Democratic Action Party  and Mat Sabu of the (Muslim) Amanah — first became friends in jail in the 1980s as political prisoners sent there by Mahathir.

No one should underestimate this remarkable ninety-two-year-old. He was a formidable prime minister in every way, a highly competent leader and, for all his faults, he left Malaysia a better and much more advanced country than the one he took over in 1981. There was corruption, but it was minor compared to what happened after he handed over. (In 2003, Transparency International ranked Malaysia as the thirty-seventh cleanest country in the world; by 2017, it had slid to sixty-second.)

In fifteen years out of office, and unable to influence his successors, he has clearly experienced a very different side of politics. It is fair to assume that in returning to power as the head of a coalition of his former enemies, he has not only embraced them but also embraced a good number of their policies.

Yet as soon as he was sworn in as prime minister, the old lion has shown his power in familiar ways. While the alliance won a crushing victory (and his own party has just thirteen of its 113 seats) he probably believes that it was his decision to offer himself as its leader that made the difference between victory and defeat — and he may well be right.

He is certainly acting as if he rules. He decided that he, not the parties or their leaders, will choose who represents them in cabinet. And his promise that after leading the coalition to power, he will hand over to the former deputy PM he put in jail, Anwar Ibrahim, has now become a promise to hand over the leadership “after a year or two.”

The Anwar camp has taken this sagely. His wife Wan Azizah Wan Ismail, the eye surgeon who is now in her husband’s old job as deputy prime minister, said on Tuesday it is more important to get the reforms implemented than to have Anwar take over swiftly as prime minister. Mahathir had already made up with his former deputy; he wasted no time in visiting Anwar in his prison hospital after being sworn in. Anwar was released today.

An early, unambiguous agreement between the two leaders on the timing of the succession will be essential to the success of their government. Anwar has been quoted as saying he is prepared to wait a year or so for it to happen. Anything short of a clear transition plan will raise questions about Mahathir’s real intentions.

It is apt that his coalition is called the Pakatan Harapan (the Alliance of Hope). But the hope will be fulfilled only as effectively as the alliance can stay unified and satisfy the expectations it has raised. And the divisions that will threaten that unity in government are deep.

An out-and-out autocrat has taken charge of a coalition of democrats whose key platform is to wipe out the autocratic state.

A coalition of Malay and Chinese parties will have to negotiate a watering down of the long-running New Economic Policy set up in the 1970s by the father of vanquished prime minister Najib Razak, Tun Abdul Razak. The policy was developed in response to demands by Mahathir — then a young firebrand within the ruling party — that Malays be given preferment in various ways to transfer economic power from the Chinese.

Its election manifesto, despite trimming earlier promises, remains fiscally irresponsible. With Malaysia already in deficit, the new government has promised to remove the goods and services tax, cut taxes on petrol and cars, abolish road tolls (gradually), and ease student loan repayments, while increasing the minimum wage by 50 per cent, providing government funding to political parties, and increasing spending on health services, science and technology, renewable energy, police and military pensions, investment in the five poorest states, and subsidies to farmers and low-income families.

That will be challenging.

Let’s just remind ourselves of the nature of Malaysia. Compared to most other countries — especially other Islamic countries — it has been a standout economic success. In real terms (adjusted for price differences between countries), it is now one of the thirty largest economies in the world. Its real output per head is now three and a half times what it was when Dr Mahathir first became prime minister in 1981.

Government debt is rising but manageable, and the country sells more to the world than it buys. Its 32.5 million people now have a per-capita GDP roughly 60 per cent of Australia’s, compared to 30 per cent when Mahathir began his long reign. Malaysia will not meet his old goal of joining the club of rich nations by 2020, but it is getting closer. And its economy is still growing by 5 per cent a year, with unemployment just 3 per cent.

Yet in terms of its people’s aspirations, and its potential, Malaysia is an underachiever. Its rich neighbour Singapore is a constant reminder of that. Malaysia relies on global investment rather than its own innovation — and the investment is there because its workers remain relatively low-paid.

In Australia, wage earners’ share of national income has now shrunk below 50 per cent, but in Malaysia, it is just 34 per cent. In parts of Kuala Lumpur and Georgetown you could think you’re in the first world, but most of the country belongs in the third.

And it is a nation divided on racial faultlines. Every Malaysian is defined by his or her race. On the Malay Peninsula, about two-thirds of the people are ethnic Malays, but economic activity is dominated by the quarter who are Chinese. Malay-run governments discriminate against the Chinese in a range of ways — such as university entry, which is one reason why so many Chinese Malaysians study in Australia. In Borneo, there are similar conflicts between Chinese and the locals.

Malaysia is also an Islamic state, and many Muslims, especially in its poorer states, want it to become more so. Since 1990 the east-coast state of Kelantan has been ruled by the Parti Islam Se-Malaysia (PAS, or the Malaysian Islamic Party), which abolished cinemas and required men and women to use separate supermarket queues and park benches, and which was prevented only by Dr Mahathir’s intervention from imposing sharia law punishments such as stoning adulterers and cutting off the hands of thieves.

How do you rule such a divided country? The government of the Barisan Nasional (National Front), which effectively governed Malaysia from its independence in 1957 until last week, did it by suppressing freedom. The front was dominated by the traditional Malay party, the United Malays National Organisation, or UMNO, but it roped in the minorities through its coalition partners, the Malaysian Chinese Association, the Malaysian Indian Congress, the largely Chinese party Gerakan, and local parties on Borneo.

Newspapers and television were forced to become government propaganda outlets. With rare exceptions, the courts did what they were told. People had few means to fight injustices or change attitudes. There were free and fair elections, and opposition parties were allowed to win state elections. But at federal level, elections were conducted on rigged boundaries — so that in 2013 the government was returned easily, even though most people voted for the opposition.

This is the country that Dr Mahathir has returned to govern with his former enemies. It is a country they want to change — but in different ways.

Malaysia’s new rulers form an extraordinarily diverse coalition. It comprises four parties inside the alliance, and a fifth outside it. They are:

The Parti Keadilan Rakyat (PKR, People’s Justice Party), with forty-seven seats. This is the party of the jailed leader-in-waiting Anwar Ibrahim and his supporters. It represents a multi-ethnic, liberal, forward-looking Malaysia that rejects the race-based, authoritarian, conservative policies of the outgoing government — as well as ordinary voters who just felt the government of outgoing prime minister Najib Razak went a bit far in introducing a goods and services tax and pinching government money. (Malaysians are used to a bit of corruption, but the siphoning of almost A$1 billion of government funds into Najib’s personal bank account was something else.)

The Democratic Action Party, or DAP, with forty-two seats. This is the party of Chinese Malaysians. Significantly wealthier than the Malays, they face discrimination in other ways. They want that discrimination ended — and many want a Malaysia where people are no longer defined by their race.

The Parti Pribumi Bersatu Malaysia (the Malaysian United Indigenous Party, in which pribumi, or “of the land,” is defined as Malays and tribal people), with thirteen seats. This is the party founded in 2016 by Dr Mahathir and former deputy prime minister Muhyiddin Yasmin in protest against the apparent corruption of Najib.

Amanah (National Trust), with eleven seats. This comprises the former moderate wing of the Islamic party, PAS, which was expelled in 2015 when the ulamas took control. The moderates took over an old minor party, renamed it Amanah and joined Anwar’s coalition. They have a multi-racial outlook, but they are essentially conservative Muslims.

The Parti Warisan Sabah (Sabah Heritage Party), with eight seats. Based in tribal North Borneo, it too was formed by a senior minister who broke ranks over Najib’s corruption. Shafie Apdal had been vice-president of the dominant UMNO. But this time he allied with Mahathir’s coalition, and throughout Sabah they supported each other’s candidates and stood just one in each seat.

Given Najib’s reluctance to concede defeat, it was fortunate that the result gave him no choice. The ruling coalition lost 40 per cent of its seats, and its vote slumped from 47 per cent in 2013 to just 34 per cent. With federal and state elections held on the same day, it also lost most of its state governments. Najib could not pretend to have been re-elected. It was an unambiguous rout.

Of the 222 seats, the four members of the Alliance of Hope won 113, while ten other seats went to Warisan and two independents supported by the alliance. Another eighteen went to the Muslims of PAS, who also retained government in east-coast Kelantan, and won next-door Terengganu.

The Barisan Nasional was left with just seventy-nine seats — and thirty of them are in Borneo, where the anti-government mood was less intense. It would have won far fewer seats were it not for the gerrymander, which meant that seats ranged from 20,000 voters in pro-government areas on Sarawak to 150,000 in urban areas dominated by the Chinese. (The alliance’s manifesto promises to reduce but not eliminate this disparity.)

On the mainland, in Mahathir’s home state of Kedah, the ruling coalition slumped from ten seats to two, and in Johor state, from twenty-one seats to eight. In Kuala Lumpur, it was completely wiped out. Given that much of its strength traditionally has depended on its ability to provide favours in return for finance, it will face a hard time rebuilding from opposition.

But to emphasise what a mosaic of views Malaysians still hold, the election results were very different from one part of the country to another:

The reform coalition won a landslide victory in Malaysia’s industrial heartland along the west coast: Penang, Kuala Lumpur and the surrounding state of Selangor, and south to Johor. This is the richest and most developed part of Malaysia, and home to most of its Chinese and Indians. They gave Mahathir’s team a massive victory, by sixty-nine seats to eighteen. This is where the alliance has most of its seats, and its MPs will force Mahathir to move further than he might like.

In the two states on the northeast coast, by contrast, which are overwhelmingly Malay, the alliance won no seats at all, and just 12.8 per cent of the votes. While that might reflect tactical voting by some of its supporters, the election was essentially a contest between the Barisan Nasional and the PAS, with the Islamic party the clear winner.

In the four northern states, it was more of a three-party contest. The alliance won twenty-nine seats to the Barisan Nasional’s twenty-four, while the PAS won 23.6 per cent of the votes but only three seats. Mahathir’s party won Perak and his home state of Kedah, while the old government retained its dominance in inland Pahang and distant Perlis.

And on Borneo, the reformers won the highest vote, but the old guard won most of the seats. Mahathir’s coalition won in Sabah, but Najib’s largely held on in Sarawak, which is grossly overprovided with seats in parliament.

One electoral footnote. With the Chinese voting overwhelmingly for the Anwar–Mahathir–DAP coalition, the election virtually wiped out the minority parties of the old ruling coalition:

From thirty-one seats in 2004, the Malaysian Chinese Association now has just one, which it won by just 303 votes. Gerakan was wiped out completely, and the Malaysian Indian Congress was left with just two seats, both won by about 600 votes. The old guard now consists essentially of UMNO and its Borneo partners.

All told, only the west-coast states gave the new government its majority. Its dominance of Malaysia’s most advanced and richest region will provide the engine for reform, but Mahathir — and even Anwar — will instinctively weigh up the reaction in the conservative northeast and on Borneo in deciding how far and fast to proceed. There will be constant tensions within the coalition.

Yet that may prove an advantage. The closest parallel in Australia was the election of the Whitlam government in 1972; it likewise had a utopian manifesto full of new spending promises, but it lacked anyone with previous ministerial experience. With Mahathir, Anwar, Lim Guan Eng (a Monash University economics graduate and chief minister of Penang for a decade), and former deputy prime minister Muhyiddin Yassin, this team has plenty of experience in government.

But it will be trying to govern in a very different way from the past. It has promised a free media, an independent judiciary, an independent anti-corruption commission, a gutting of the powerful Prime Minister’s Department, the abolition of the raft of security laws used against political opponents — as well as higher wages, lower taxes and more spending.

Mahathir is ninety-two. He looked tired when I interviewed him in 2002, and he is a lot older now. Even Anwar is seventy.

At least they appear to be off to a good start. But every day will rephrase the core question: what sort of country do these five very different parties want Malaysia to become? ●

The post What sort of country will Malaysia become? appeared first on Inside Story.

Earlier this month, Australian businessperson Bill Clough sold the Post to a Malaysian investor, Sivakumar S. Ganapathy, the head of a PR firm that has had dealings with Hun Sen’s government. When Post reporters exposed these links, the new owner demanded the removal of the “damaging” article from the Post’s website and the immediate sacking of its authors and the paper’s editor-in-chief.

In protest, all foreign editors and news journalists left the Post. The exodus sent a message: interfering with the masthead’s ethos of intelligent, in-depth and independent reporting inevitably has consequences.

But the bleeding has been staunched, and many Cambodian reporters have stayed diligently at their desks. With the backbone of the Post still firmly in place, hopes remain for critical journalism going into the upcoming election, however inevitable Hun Sen’s victory might be.

The Post’s sale and greater curbs on the press came amid a renewed political crackdown in which the government has jailed the opposition leader — Hun Sen’s only legitimate challenger — and dissolved his party ahead of July’s election. Independent outlets have been shuttered and journalists jailed, sending Cambodia another ten notches down the global press freedom rankings to 142nd place.

After an exorbitant tax bill forced the independently minded Cambodia Daily to close last September, many speculated that the Post would be next. Others believed that the government would keep the Post around as a fig leaf to disguise the full extent of the media crackdown.

The sale of the Post is more than a business transaction; it has far-reaching implications for press freedom and for the public. “The swift end to independent journalism in Cambodia will hurt citizens most,” Australian academic Lee Morgenbesser told Post journalists for their final article. His comments were later stripped from the piece by the new editor-in-chief.

“Absent the Phnom Penh Post, the corruption and repression that so perfectly defines the Cambodian government will go unreported and, thus, unchecked,” Morgenbesser said. “The end of the fourth estate in Cambodia, which follows the eradication of competitive elections and dilution of civil society, will produce a more entrenched and less accountable form of authoritarian rule.”

Those of us who resigned from the Post are left grappling with a number of questions. Is this what Hun Sen wants, a hamstrung press? Does resigning play into his hands?

Like the Cambodia Daily, the Post had been slapped with a multimillion-dollar tax bill, but it disappeared around the time of the paper’s sale. As the Post’s previous editor-in-chief, Chad Williams, points out, the tax threat may have been used to coerce the sale.

For Ed Legaspi of the Southeast Asian Press Alliance, more information about the sale is crucial. “They must come clean on the role of the government, otherwise there will be that cloud of a doubt about the sale, which is not good for the Post or press freedom,” he says, adding that the language used to describe the tax bill settlement “implies the hand of the government to sweeten the deal.”

In purely business terms, the purchase makes little sense, says Legaspi. “Newspapers nowadays are losing money, so it is also doubtful that Mr Sivakumar wanted the Post for its profitability, and with a tax burden at that. But whether Hun Sen has a hand in it or not, it does contribute to the government agenda of crippling independent media in Cambodia.”

Would it be better to stay and fight, even within a flawed system? Does making a compromise necessarily mean becoming compromised? Is it worth overlooking one censored article in the hope of continuing to investigate corruption and hold the Cambodian elite to account?

For Sebastian Strangio, author of Hun Sen’s Cambodia and a former reporter at the Post, these are complicated questions that come down to absolute versus relative freedoms. “Cambodia became an international project [in the 1990s] and, for a time, a country in which observers, especially foreigners, had the luxury of adopting absolute standards,” he says. “Since the recent crackdown this is suddenly much harder to sustain.”

Strangio suspects the current batch are “the last generation of foreign journalists in Cambodia to enjoy the privilege of being able to take an absolute stand on press freedom issues. For Cambodian journalists, of course, these have always been much more complicated questions.”

When he worked at the Post, Strangio was struck by the implausibility of an authoritarian government in a developing country allowing the Daily and the Post to publish. “It all felt a bit unreal,” he says. “This was one of the themes of my book: the canny way in which the government preserved some pastures of freedom while effectively controlling the system as a whole,” he said.

The Phnom Penh Post, established in 1992 by Kathleen O’Keefe and Michael Hayes, reported on the country’s first post-atrocity elections. It covered the final thrashing years of the Khmer Rouge’s guerilla war. It reported the cementing of prime minister Hun Sen’s power through a coup and the murder of human rights activists.

The Post investigated the illegal logging that has decimated the country’s forests and corruption in the ranks of Cambodia’s elite. It never shied away from shining light on the grim realities faced by Cambodia’s impoverished while the wealthy lined their pockets.

For the Post’s foreign reporters, something crucial was broken this month and couldn’t — or wouldn’t — be undone. The removal of the article set a dangerous precedent for future censorship. Many found untenable the idea of working for a man who described a straight news report as malicious internal sabotage. It’s too soon to say what comes next for those reporters who resigned, but with the recent media crackdown, jobs are scarce. Some foreigners who resigned are heading home to seek out new journalism opportunities, while others are planning to stay and freelance ahead of the July election.

The doublespeak has begun — acting CEO Ly Tayseng, representing the new owner, has told news outlets that the article itself undermined editorial independence. On social media, photos circulate showing the newsroom at work, designed to counter a slew of articles heralding the death of press freedom. Some Cambodian journalists have vowed to keep quality reporting a priority under the new leadership; others have expressed great disappointment at the departure of their foreign colleagues at a time when they need support, not abandonment. Others will wait and see.

The past week’s editions have included mispelled bylines, an article partly copied from a press release, and pieces lacking in vital context and balance. But our colleagues have continued to publish important journalism about highly politicised trials. The true test of the quality and integrity of the paper will only become clear over time, rather than in a week of upheaval.

Tayseng asked those last to depart if they knew the “consequences” of walking out: “You are killing the Post,” he said. That weighed on reporters heavily, but many stood by their convictions. What the new management failed to see was that their actions — removing a transparent news piece and demanding those responsible be sacked — undermined the Post and what it stands for. Censorship will do more to kill the Post than the walkout of journalists who believe that this paper, and this country, deserve so much more. ●

The post Cambodia’s media conundrum appeared first on Inside Story.

I sensed his confidence was genuine, and it was vindicated on Wednesday this week when a surge of public support for Harapan, the opposition coalition, overwhelmed all the obstacles built into Malaysia’s electoral system — a system that has tipped the scales in the government’s favour in contests with successive opposition coalitions over the past six decades. The result will also deliver another important first for Malaysian society, a woman deputy prime minister, Wan Azizah. (Azizah’s husband, Anwar Ibrahim, is still in prison and was unable to run.)

Despite stating repeatedly that he will not be seeking revenge against vanquished prime minister Najib Razak and his allies, Malaysia’s new leader, Mahathir Mohamad, had to wait for most of Thursday to get an audience with the King. Only then was he sworn in and able to form a new government. The ceremony finally took place at 9.30 last night in Kuala Lumpur. Najib tweeted his congratulations and an assurance that he would assist in a smooth transfer of power.

Last night’s developments came after a remarkable press conference earlier in the day at which Najib told the Malaysian public, in Malay and English, that he would accept the people’s verdict. The election had left his Barisan Nasional coalition with only seventy-nine seats. This wasn’t a concession speech: rather than wishing the new government well, Najib was seeking to buy time. He pointedly referred to his willingness to accept whomever the King chose to appoint as prime minister. And he stressed that no single party — Harapan candidates contested as part of an alliance of parties — had won a simple majority of Malaysia’s 222 federal parliamentary seats.

Shortly before Mahathir’s swearing-in took place, the palace issued a press release denying that it was the cause of the delay. Mahathir had dressed himself up and gone to the palace after issuing a 5pm deadline, and photos of him and his wife waiting for an audience, after a long day and night spent on polling and counting, elicited an outpouring of sympathy on social media. Mahathir is elderly, and the delay was beginning to look like cruelty.

The Wall Street Journal quoted an insider’s report that Najib, bewildered by his defeat, had spent much of the day trying to formulate a plan B to avoid a transfer of power. But the numbers were against him. Together, the Harapan parties had won 113 seats, leaving only thirty new MPs not formally allied with either major grouping. Of the thirty, eight were said to be leaning towards Mahathir even before the election. But even if Najib could convince all thirty to join him, he would still have had only 109 seats, short of a majority. Perhaps his aim was to pull one of the parties out of the Harapan alliance and into Barisan — that was certainly the strong hint in yesterday’s speech.

The opposition was never going to take that risk. “We would be prepared to put everyone in a hotel for a few days, with their phones taken away, to prevent our elected candidates from jumping,” the Harapan candidate told me in February. All indications are that arrangements were indeed in place to prevent the direct negotiations that could lead individuals or whole parties to jump.

When the 5pm deadline Mahathir had set for the King passed, Malaysians began to consider whether they would have to go to bed without a government, despite such a strong expression of electoral will — if they could find a way to fall asleep, that is.

Many wouldn’t have slept the previous night. The official results weren’t announced until Thursday morning, despite unofficial figures having appeared much earlier on media websites. Opposition supporters accused the Barisan-aligned Election Commission of Malaysia, or SPR, of delaying the Harapan victory it had worked to prevent, pointing to an apparent unwillingness by some officials to certify counts. At one polling place, according to social media reports, voters locked both the ballot boxes and the electoral officials in a school until the relevant forms were signed.

Public mistrust in the electoral system is the norm in Malaysia, and it seemed that the palace media office had been observing the strong public condemnation of the SPR on Wednesday night. After rumours had begun circulating that the SPR was delaying announcing the results in order to rig them, its chair, Hashim Abdullah, had eventually fronted a late-night press conference to defend the commission, and the results were released soon afterwards.

Late on Wednesday night, Barisan representative Khairy Jamaluddin announced that the defeated government would “respect the result.” As Mahathir waited in the palace, though, fears grew that the result Barisan would respect might yet be a different one from what voters intended. Rumours that MPs had been offered millions of ringgit to change sides prompted Mahathir to announce that he had already done all the deals, achieving a total of 135 seats by winning pledges of loyalty from another twenty-two elected representatives.

Najib’s press conference also involved a lengthy defence of the democratic character of the election. This was the wise choice — Malaysia relies on its five-yearly elections, despite their usually predictable results, to gain entry into polite international society. Despite having the power to do so, Najib declined to declare a state of emergency, as a previous Malaysian government did after a strong opposition showing in 1969, a move that would have exploded his defence of the Malaysian electoral system.

Najib remains the target of several international investigations aimed at unravelling the 1MDB scandal. If he steps down, he might be prosecuted, either overseas or by a new set of authorities in Malaysia. Mahathir says he is not seeking revenge, but Najib’s attempt to buy time eventually ran out. •

The post Malaysia’s day on edge appeared first on Inside Story.

As it does at every election, the government has shaped the contest to minimise competition from the opposition parties, this time grouped in a coalition called the Pakatan Harapan, or Alliance of Hope. The short campaign and the weekday vote is designed to keep turnout low; revised electoral boundaries carry on Malaysia’s rich tradition of malapportionment and gerrymandering; and a new “fake news” law is clearly intended to constrain political discussion by Malaysians on social media and in the foreign press.

Not surprisingly, Najib himself has predicted an increased majority, not least in a recent interview with Bloomberg, his first with a foreign media outlet for more than three years. The PM’s boycott of foreign media began when the 1MDB scandal first erupted in 2015 with allegations that a state investment fund led by Najib had lost billions of dollars and racked up billions more in debt. The fund is still being probed in the United States, but similar investigations in Malaysia have found Najib innocent of all wrongdoing, and his UMNO party, which dominates Barisan Nasional, has closed ranks around him. Electorally and institutionally speaking, Najib appears to have his bases covered, at least within the country he leads.

The mood, meanwhile, wavers somewhere between indifference and insolence. When I asked political observers and insiders in Kuala Lumpur about the election recently, they responded with sighs and eyerolls before sharing their views. Beyond the capital, seasoned observers are reporting unusually silent audiences at the usually lively opposition campaign rallies known as ceramah, their faces unreadable. But this subdued reaction hasn’t stopped Pakatan’s campaign from circulating images of well-attended events accompanied by images of empty chairs at Barisan ceramah.

At one of Barisan’s events, to which taxi drivers were coaxed with a promise of free fuel cards to the value of 800 ringgit (a bit less than half the average monthly wage), the crowd declined to be stage-managed by officials, kicking over barriers and heading for the counter. Nobody seems to be performing as expected, except when they lament the spiralling cost of living. Food prices have soared, and the price of the widely eaten kembong — Indian mackerel, now seen as a cost-of-living bellwether — has more than doubled since 2015.

Reading the mood on the street mightn’t be easy, but it’s a different matter on Facebook and the encrypted carrier Whatsapp. Here, the fracturing of Malaysia’s biggest and once-stable voting bloc — the nation’s majority Malay Muslims — is evident in debates raging in text and video about who is to blame for cost-of-living pressures: China or the Chinese?

“Big China has begun the process of colonising Malaysia,” reads one message circulating on social media, with a link to a video from one James J. Tsidkenu’s Christian Sixth Seal News Network breathlessly outlining China’s Belt and Road plans. “Rise, all the races of Malaysia: Malays, Chinese, Indians, Iban, Kadazandusun and others, Malaysian citizens,” the blurb says:

Please listen and watch this video and act IMMEDIATELY BEFORE it’s too late. CHINA is targeting LEADERS who are corrupt and kleptocratic for ONGOING bribery, and finally MALAYSIA will be mortgaged… The SIGNS are CLEAR and EVIDENT. Look around us… CHINESE projects are everywhere. This is an early ATTACK of THEIRS against Malaysia.

The use of the term “kleptocrat” — increasingly common in opposition messaging — is clearly intended to remind voters about the 1MDB scandal, which indicated that enormous amounts of money were channelled through Najib’s bank account. (He countered that they formed a Saudi donation for countering violent extremism.) Add to that the fact that some of 1MDB’s debt has been bailed out by China, and that Chinese projects are altering the Malaysian landscape, and you have all the ingredients of a conspiracy against ordinary Malaysians.

Videos like this are part of a narrative in which 1MDB’s missing billions, which could have been spent on more effective social insurance, have helped bankrupt Malaysia. According to this line of argument, the resulting debt has acted as an invitation to China to finance expensive projects — including an east-coast rail link and a vastly upgraded South China Sea port using Chinese labour and serving China’s Belt and Road interests — that Najib can use as electoral inducements.

The narrative doesn’t stop there. When Malaysia fails to repay its Chinese debts, China will take over the country. As evidence, opposition leader (and former prime minister) Mahathir Mohamad has repeatedly pointed to Sri Lanka’s leasing of its Hambantota Port to China for ninety-nine years in return for debt relief. “We don’t want to sell chunks of this country,” he told Singapore’s Straits Times earlier this month, promising to subject Chinese investments to greater scrutiny should he come to power.

Other opposition material uses images of the Malay Peninsula dotted with Chinese projects. One, circulated on Whatsapp by opposition micro-targeting outfit Invoke Malaysia, points out that Chinese projects are exempt from the goods and services tax, another cost-of-living pressure point for Malaysians. This high-contrast, high-impact imagery (below) juxtaposes Chinese president Xi Jinping with an elderly Malay Muslim “uncle” of seemingly modest means. “Quiz: Between these two uncles, which one gets a GST exemption?” asks the text.

External threat: election advertisement developed by Invoke Malaysia circulating on Whatsapp.

The coming election is “the ONLY and final chance that WE HAVE,” the Whatsapp message continues. “CHINA is now USING kleptocratic leaders to achieve its colonial aims over Malaysia… like in other countries that HAVE been mortgaged like Pakistan, Myanmar, Sri Lanka, African nations, etc.” To make sure its audience understands which Chinese are at fault, it finishes with these words: “This is a threat that is REAL, EVIDENT and TRUE that comes from BIG CHINA. Not Malaysian Chinese BUT communist CHINA from BIG CHINA.”

The opposition’s China campaign contrasts strongly with the government’s allusions to the Chinese threat within the nation. Its target is the Pakatan coalition, which includes the Democratic Action Party, whose membership is largely ethnic Chinese. The government’s argument is that the opposition represents a potential Chinese takeover of sovereignty from within, and it is precisely this message that Pakatan arguments are working to flip by shifting the source of the Chinese threat to Big China while burnishing its own credentials as a multiracial coalition that will protect local Chinese.

Malaysian Islamist organisations, which often take the initiative in developing Islamist justifications for Barisan rule, have been working to blur the boundary between Big China and Malaysian Chinese. One of them, ISMA, hosted a forum in March to promote the idea that the entire Chinese diaspora, no matter its physical or generational distance from the People’s Republic, will fall into line with Beijing as China begins to “Sinicise” Malaysia.

This line of argument dovetails with Barisan’s repeated assertions that the opposition is “led” by the Democratic Action Party, which a state mufti described in 2015 as kafir harbi, or infidels in a state of war against Islam and Muslims. Malaysia’s previous election result, in which the government lost the popular vote partly because Chinese voters deserted it, was racialised on the following day by the front-page headline of the UMNO paper Utusan Malaysia, “What More Do the Chinese Want?”

Which Chinese, the opposition might well ask. Pakatan Harapan is counting on two things: that Malaysian Chinese will support it at least as strongly as they did last time; and that its effort to neutralise the “Chinese threat” by pointing to Big China might further fracture the Malay Muslim voter bloc. Even the Merdeka Centre is predicting an 8 per cent Malay Muslim swing away from the government. The next eleven days will show whether the “Chinese threat” can be countered by the “China threat” to deny Najib the increased majority he seeks. ●

The post One Malaysia, two Chinas appeared first on Inside Story.

At 10.41am on 21 March the president’s office posted a two-paragraph statement on its Facebook account. President U Htin Kyaw was resigning, effective immediately, to “take a rest.” I was in a meeting with my publisher at the time, and ran upstairs to the newsroom to help put out the first reports of his departure.

The announcement was both surprising and widely anticipated. Rumours about Htin Kyaw’s plans had been circulating for a year. He had twice been abroad for medical treatment. In fact, he had almost disappeared from public view. In the wake of his resignation, his wife — a law-maker with the governing National League for Democracy, or NLD — denied he is seriously ill and insisted he had never planned to serve a full five-year term.

But many Facebook users were quick to compare recent photos with shots from around the time he took office in March 2016. The latest images show a gaunt man, seemingly drained of energy.

Regardless of his reasons for resigning, his departure is a sad marker of the government’s first two years in office. Htin Kyaw is widely respected and has always carried himself with dignity. But he was effectively a puppet of Aung San Suu Kyi, who created the role of state counsellor to get around the constitutional ban on her becoming president. With so much power concentrated in her office, Htin Kyaw was never given the opportunity to perform to his potential.

His replacement is Win Myint, who resigned as lower-house speaker almost immediately after the president’s announcement. While Htin Kyaw typically worked behind the scenes, the new president is a more widely recognised politician. The fact that he was handed the speaker’s job back in February 2016 was a major expression of faith by the party hierarchy.

In Myanmar, as in the United States, the speakers of the two law-making chambers are key players; they decide when the legislature will meet, the order of business it will follow, and what can and cannot be said. They create committees and summon government officials to address law-makers. The position has been likened to that of ship’s captain — it couldn’t be further from the president’s ribbon-cutting duties.

As an Aung San Suu Kyi loyalist, Win Myint would be likely to settle for the ceremonial role she created for the president. But there are hopes that she will revise the relationship between president and state counsellor to better reflect Win Myint’s political skills and experience.

A stronger, more effective president — albeit one who is loyal to Aung San Suu Kyi and doesn’t create a competing centre of power — would deal with one of the key criticisms of the NLD administration: that too much control is centralised in the state counsellor’s office, creating a decision-making bottleneck. It’s unlikely, but not impossible. The centralisation of power is not Aung San Suu Kyi’s fault alone; her status is such that many ministers defer to her as a matter of course, routinely seeking her approval before acting.

While the manoeuvring around the presidency understandably grabbed the headlines, the more interesting development was Win Myint’s replacement as speaker. It underlines many of the compromises the NLD has made to gain and maintain power.

Aung San Suu Kyi had two obvious choices to fill the job: the incumbent deputy speaker or the head of the bill committee, which vets all legislation before it is tabled. The deputy speaker would seem the natural pick; but in this case it meant elevating a controversial figure, T Khun Myat, over a party stalwart, Tun Tun Hein.

T Khun Myat’s biography makes for interesting reading. An ethnic Kachin Christian, he is descended from hereditary rulers known as Duwa. He studied law and worked in the government law office until 1988. When that year’s upheaval ended the socialist regime but brought a military junta to power, T Khun Myat found a new, higher calling: from 1990 to 2010, he was concurrently head of the army-allied Kutkai militia in northern Shan State and a senior official in the attorney-general’s office. He also found time to serve on the committee that drafted the 2008 constitution.

In 2010 he won election to the lower house as representative of the military-linked Union Solidarity and Development Party, or USDP. A trusted ally of the speaker, former general Shwe Mann, he was appointed to head the bill committee and by all accounts acquitted himself well. He was a key player in Shwe Mann’s efforts to assert the parliament’s independence from the government.

By the time T Khun Myat was re-elected in November 2015, Shwe Mann had been purged from the party leadership. Shortly after parliament convened in January 2016, T Khun Myat left the USDP to sit as an independent. Whether he resigned or was expelled is unclear.

Not surprisingly, his years leading the Kutkai militia have attracted the most scrutiny. The militia has played a crucial role in maintaining government control over the main highway to China. In return, T Khun Myat was granted business concessions — standard practice in Myanmar, where business and conflict are often intertwined, and loyalty to the military is rewarded financially. This is where things get particularly thorny, though, because it has been alleged that he was embroiled, as leader of the Kutkai militia, in the illicit drug production and trafficking that are rife in conflict-hit Shan State.

For many NLD law-makers — veterans of decades of junta persecution — T Khun Myat represents all that the party fought against. So when they arrived at parliament on 22 March and discovered the party expected them to elect him speaker, they acquiesced only with a sense of deep resentment. Some reportedly took to Facebook to air their concerns.

The decision also reopens a festering wound over Shwe Mann’s influence on the NLD government, and Aung San Suu Kyi in particular. Shwe Mann’s story, like T Khun Myat’s, is complicated. He was appointed speaker after being overlooked for the presidency in favour of another former general, the USDP’s Thein Sein. To recover from this setback, he built up parliament as his own power base, bringing him into regular conflict with the government.

Because the constitution bans members of government from party activities, Shwe Mann was acting leader of the USDP for most of the time Thein Sein was in office. Despite his bloody past crushing armed ethnic groups and his family’s business empire, he was cast as a reformer and tipped as a potential president after Thein Sein. He also created new alliances, notably with Aung San Suu Kyi — ostensibly his rival — after she entered parliament following a by-election in April 2012.

In June 2015 he crossed a line, though, by pushing for constitutional reform against the wishes of Thein Sein and the military commander-in-chief, Min Aung Hlaing. Two months later, during a USDP conference, Thein Sein sent police into the party’s headquarters and Shwe Mann was purged from the party leadership.

Once the NLD won power, Shwe Mann and many of his allies — most of whom are also former generals — were appointed to key roles. Some became ministers; T Khun Myat got the deputy speaker’s job. Shwe Mann was given the task of leading a powerful parliamentary body, the Legal Affairs and Special Cases Assessment Commission. Few people really know what the commission does on a day-to-day basis; its remit is broad, enabling it to review legislation, “assess special issues whenever they arise” and report to the speaker, “accomplish duties assigned by the speaker,” and tender opinions on request.

In this role he has become a confidante of Aung San Suu Kyi, providing advice on ministerial picks, how to handle the military — and, it seems, who should be the next speaker.

Many, though, don’t share Aung San Suu Kyi’s faith in Shwe Mann. He is despised — even considered a traitor — by the military for not following the script while he was speaker, and he is mistrusted by most within the NLD.

Over the past six months, many have drawn attention to Aung San Suu Kyi’s unwillingness to speak out about the human rights violations taking place in Rakhine State. But the continued influence of figures like T Khun Myat and Shwe Mann is a reminder that she has been making compromises since her release from house arrest in November 2010.

Myanmar’s transition was constructed by the generals, but it was strengthened by the grand bargain they engineered with Aung San Suu Kyi in 2011. She accepted their constitution and agreed to play by their rules. As time goes on, it looks increasingly like a Faustian pact.

The first two years of NLD rule have been disappointing for many in Myanmar. Aung San Suu Kyi’s political goals, particularly on the peace process, have been thwarted by the military. The crisis in Rakhine State has damaged — perhaps irrevocably — Myanmar’s relationships with the West, to the advantage of countries like China. The government has struggled to bend the bureaucracy to its will; if anything, the NLD has been co-opted by them, too.

But this shouldn’t be surprising. A transition built on compromises was always going to be messy, complicated and unsettling, particularly after the binary politics of military rule, when “good” and “bad” seemed so easy to define.

That doesn’t mean the government should be let off the hook; there is massive room for improvement. But nor should everything be viewed through the prism of Rakhine State. It is a symptom, not the cause, of the challenges that Myanmar faces.

The appointment of a new president presents the opportunity to reset and deal with the mistakes of the past two years. Progress on Myanmar’s key challenges is likely to be slow and the stain of Rakhine State cannot be erased. But the NLD under president Win Myint has the opportunity to deliver tangible change that benefits millions of people. ●

The post In Myanmar, politics makes a comeback appeared first on Inside Story.

Australia has always thought ASEAN a good thing. The hard question, always, is what good Australia can do with ASEAN. The answers offered by prime minister Malcolm Turnbull played back to ASEAN its own rhetoric by embracing the grouping as the region’s strategic convenor:

Today is a historic day, as the leaders of ASEAN and Australia come together for the first time in Australia, working together here determining our commitment to the centrality of ASEAN and our commitment — commitment of Australia to ASEAN at the very heart of the stability, prosperity, security of our region. The meeting comes at a critical time for the region. The pace and scale of change is without any precedent in human history. Our vision is optimistic and born of ambition — it’s for a neighbourhood that is defined by open markets and the free flow of goods, services, capital and ideas. Over the past fifty years, ASEAN has used its influence to defuse tension, build peace, encourage economic cooperation and support to maintain the rule of law. And we are fully committed to backing ASEAN as the strategic convenor of our region.

As with any summit communiqué, the Sydney declaration serves as both a paper vision and a wallpaper covering, showing what can be agreed and gliding over the differences. The declaration of “a new era in the increasingly close ASEAN–Australia relationship” is summit-speak with a basis in fact.

That closeness — what I’d call a growing “big fact” of Oz diplomacy — is the ASEAN flavour of much of Oz foreign policy. As an example, our policy on Myanmar over recent decades has been the ASEAN recipe with added Oz rhetorical sauce. No surprise, then, that the strongest public statement in Sydney on the Rohingya crisis was from Malaysia.

The rhyming and chiming of ASEAN–Oz policy reflects the reality of the many headaches we share. The times are getting tougher and the region’s most important middle-power grouping has much to discuss with its fellow middle power, Australia. The areas of vigorous agreement range across terrorism, trade and the problems of the times.

The signing of a memorandum on combating terrorism and violent extremism was the showpiece headline. The leaders also expressed a strong shared commitment to free and open markets, underlining “the critical importance of the rules-based multilateral trading system.” In the time of Donald Trump, this is suddenly more than a motherhood statement. As Turnbull noted, there are “no protectionists around the ASEAN table.”

Australia and four of the ASEAN states this month signed the “minus version” of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP minus the United States). Now Australia, the ASEAN 10, plus China, India, Japan, South Korea and New Zealand want to complete another deal this year: the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership.

About the South China Sea, Australia happily embraces and talks up ASEAN’s effort to get a code of conduct with China (oh, that we all live long enough to see it). Australia can also do sharper talk on the South China Sea, as it does in the trilateral strategic dialogue with Japan and the United States.

When it comes to walking the walk, though, Australia tends to do the ASEAN shuffle. In the words of foreign minister Julie Bishop, Australia rejects “any unilateral action that would create tensions and we want to ensure that freedom of over-flight and freedom of navigation in accordance with international law is maintained and the ASEANs all back that same position.”

In the way the runes are read in Canberra, the foreign minister’s abhorrence of any unilateral-tension-creating action extends to any suggestion that the Australian navy should sail closer than twelves miles to China’s terra-formed sandcastles in the South China Sea.

An ironic area of agreement is that the times ain’t right for Australia to join ASEAN — yet. The discussion, however, has begun. A summit surprise was Indonesian president Joko Widodo, in a Fairfax interview, endorsing the idea of Australian membership of ASEAN “because our region will be better, [for] stability, economic stability and also political stability. Sure, it will be better.” An ASEAN-flavoured Oz foreign policy makes this idea thinkable and doable.

The big beasts of Asia, the United States and China, were naturally absent from the Sydney declaration. But their breath, as well as their tracks and their appetites, were a constant presence.

An ASEAN obsession now embraced by Oz foreign policy is the quest never to have to choose between the two beasts. Not so long ago, there was a significant chasm between ASEAN neutrality and Australia’s alliance addiction: we’re the nation proud to stand with our great and powerful friends. Today, as the chasm shrinks or is defined away entirely, Australia, like ASEAN, doesn’t want to have to choose. We share much — including what we dread. •

The post ASEAN and Australia peer down from the summit appeared first on Inside Story.

According to the grand rise-of-Asia narrative, we are seeing the end of the era that began when Vasco da Gama set out from Europe in 1497 in search of new trade routes to Asia, and launched the 500-year epoch in which the West both ruled and created the rules. Against this broad sweep, Donald Trump’s arrival is a mere symptom, not a cause, but he will accelerate the trend in unpredictable ways.

Asia’s rise is the new normal, a defining element of our times, and certainly of the twenty-first century. Australia has been living amid its expansion for so long that the response can be a blasé “ho-hum, what’s new?” Yet almost everything alters when epochs change. New truths emerge and old verities collapse. New rulers strain against old rules.

One of the elemental changes is the erosion of the West’s power to dominate global politics. Gideon Rachman’s statement of this is a conventional rendering of the new normal, but beneath that “normal” the ground shifts and roars. “For more than five hundred years, ever since the dawn of the European colonial age,” he writes, “the fates of countries and peoples in Asia, Africa, and the Americas have been shaped by developments and decisions made in Europe — and, later, the United States.” He goes on:

But the West’s centuries-long domination of world affairs is now coming to a close. The root cause of this change is Asia’s extraordinary economic development over the last fifty years. Western political power was founded on technological, military, and economic dominance, but these advantages are fast eroding. And the consequences are now defining global politics.

Rachman, the chief foreign affairs commentator of London’s Financial Times, is an Atlanticist marvelling at the power shift to the Pacific. His new book (published in the United States with the title Easternization: Asia’s Rise and America’s Decline) is built around the themes of Asia up, America down and Europe out.

Asia’s resurgence, he writes, is “correcting a global political imbalance of political power that has its origins in Western imperialism. In that sense, the rise of Asian powers is an important step towards a more equal world.” But his account of US decline is counterpointed by a “largely positive view of the role of American power in the world.” America’s policing of the rules, he argues, offers the best chance for a just world:

The idea of a multipolar world, without dominant powers and guided solely by the rule of law, is theoretically attractive. In practice, however, I fear that just such a multipolar world is already emerging and proving to be unstable and dangerous: The “rules” are very hard to enforce without a dominant power in the background.

Asia rises, but is divided. Rachman points to two significant obstacles to the Asian century. The first, corruption, eats at the ability of the coming powers, China and India, to create trustworthy institutions for a globalised system: “Popular rage about corruption is a common theme that links democratic India and undemocratic China.” The second, and more serious, is the divisions and rivalries within Asia: “For the foreseeable future, there will be no Eastern alliance to supplant the Western alliance.”

Asia’s rise will be even quicker if it’s accompanied by an American retreat, real or perceived. Image can swiftly shape reality in international affairs, and Rachman worries the notion that America is losing its grip on world affairs is “in danger of becoming conventional wisdom — from Beijing to Berlin to Brasilia.” In power politics, vacuums are always filled, but there’s much jostling, misjudgement and mishap along the way, especially if the occupant of that supposed vacuum vehemently denies that it’s shifting.

Rachman thinks that if the United States has the will then it has the resources to stay near the top of the global rules game. But while America grapples with relative decline, he says, Europe is slipping and slinking out of the contest. Turning his eyes to his own turf, this Atlanticist frets that Europe, which wrote the manual for the world’s system of states, is losing its right to sit at the top table: “The European powers are in precipitous decline as global political players.”

Much changes in the shift from the Enlightenment to Easternisation. Britain has decided to go solo, leaving a smaller Europe led by a Germany that’s determined to stay out of fights. Britain’s “self-isolation,” Rachman writes, is “a potentially shattering blow to European self-confidence.”

The military dimension of Europe’s retreat is what Rachman calls a “breathtaking” reduction in French and British military might over the past forty years. Europe, he says, is gambling with its own security:

The cumulative effect of America’s growing reticence, Germany’s semipacifism, and defence cuts in Britain and France is that the NATO alliance — the bedrock of Western security since the end of the Second World War — is in disrepair. The sense that NATO’s decade-long mission in Afghanistan has effectively failed has further sapped the West’s interest in acting collectively around the globe.

A key feature of our rapidly shifting era is China’s expanding view of its power and prerogatives in relation to the United States. At the end of the twentieth century, China was still following Deng’s admonition to hide and bide — hide its power and bide its time. At the start of this century, it was still easy to sketch the comfortable view that the deep intertwining of the American and Chinese economies and their mutual interest in the global system would define the relationship.

By the time of the global financial crisis in 2008, as America crashed into recession, China had decided it would rise on its terms, not abide by American understandings. The power contest has quickly become intense and sharp, as Rachman illustrates:

Over the course of the Obama administration’s eight years in power, America came increasingly to see China as more a rival than a partner. Quite how far the balance had tipped was brought home to me in the spring of 2014, when a senior White House official told me that he regarded the relationship as now “80 per cent competition and 20 per cent cooperation.” I was so surprised that I got him to repeat the formulation, in case I had misheard — “80 per cent competition,” he said again.

If it took Obama’s team two terms to arrive at that view of China as 80 per cent rival, that perspective is one of the few settled elements of the Trump worldview.

The national security strategy Trump issued in December attacked China as a revisionist power, challenging “American power, influence, and interests, attempting to erode American security and prosperity,” seeking “to displace the US in the Indo-Pacific region.” The companion national defence strategy issued in January states that “inter-state strategic competition, not terrorism, is now the primary concern in US national security.” America ranks a clash with China ahead of the threat from jihadists. As the Economist headlined, the next war looms as great-power conflict.

Australian official language is more restrained than America’s, but Canberra is just as vexed about what sort of ruler China aims to be. Australia’s 2016 defence white paper fretted constantly about the need for international rules, using the word “rules” sixty-four times, forty-eight of them in the formulation “rules-based global order.”

To see US–China rivalry only in bilateral terms, though, is to miss much that is shaping Asia’s future. Widening the frame beyond the world’s top two economies to include the third-biggest economy, Japan, is what Richard McGregor offers in his new book on Asia’s reckoning and the struggle for global dominance.

McGregor’s focus is on the “cold peace” between Japan and China — the tangled emotions and complex psychology of the Sino-Japanese relationship. “The story of Japan and China,” he writes, “is one of stunning economic success and dangerous political failure.” China harbours “a sense of revenge, of unfinished business” about Japan. The two countries seldom find equilibrium, he says, and rarely manage to treat each other as equals.

Pondering Asia’s future, McGregor is uncertain about what course the US will take: perhaps it will turn its back on the world under an isolationist president, or maybe Pax Americana can survive, with a resilient American economy and refreshed alliances robust enough to hold off an indebted and internally focused China. “The spectre of a renewed Sinocentric order in Asia, though, is upending the regional status quo for good, whatever path the US might take,” McGregor writes:

Geopolitically, the three countries have increasingly become two, with Japan aligning itself more tightly with the US than at any time in the seven decades-plus since the war… As its power has grown, China has begun building a new regional order, with Beijing at the centre in place of Washington. The battle lines are clear.

China’s rise and Japan’s relative decline have fed a poisonous cycle. McGregor quotes a Chinese saying — “two tigers cannot live on one mountain” — to illustrate the view of many Chinese that their competition with Japan to be Asia’s dominant indigenous power is a zero-sum game: “What once seemed impossible and then merely unlikely is no longer unimaginable: that China and Japan could, within coming decades, go to war.”

McGregor is one of the outstanding Asia hands of this generation of Australian journalists. He started as an ABC correspondent in Tokyo, moved to newspapers, and eventually served as chief of the Shanghai, Beijing and Washington bureaus of the Financial Times. His previous book, on the Chinese Communist Party, The Party, was a revelation, built on a framework of fine reporting. Asia’s Reckoning has the same strengths; this is history that draws vivid force from the notebooks of a journalist who did daily duty as the past few decades unfolded.

McGregor describes how, after Japan established diplomatic relations with China, the two enjoyed a high point of “seemingly amicable relations from the late 1970s until the 1980s” as China’s leaders reached out to Japan for investment, technology and aid. Zhou Enlai’s line was that the two countries had enjoyed 2000 years of friendship and fifty years of misfortune. That playing down of history did not become the prevailing view.

Sino-Japanese rapprochement was commercial and diplomatic, but issues of war and history were merely covered over like land mines left just under the surface. As the conflict over history built, McGregor writes, “a corrosive mutual antipathy has gradually become imbedded within their ruling parties and large sections of the public.”

The Chinese government has played the history card — demonisation of Japan — in a desperate effort to maintain its own legitimacy. After the bloody crackdown on the Tiananmen Square demonstrations in 1989, McGregor writes, Japan became “collateral damage” to Beijing’s most pressing priority: to rebuild the party’s standing after having unleashed the military on its own people. Beijing “opened a vast new political front to ensure that such protests never got off the ground again.”

Popular anger must be directed at Japan, not the party. Beijing has stoked rage with “the decades-long party campaign to burnish its patriotic lustre with an unrelenting diet of anti-Japanese history and news.” Beijing’s first use of the now regular criticism of foreigners “hurting the feelings of the Chinese people” was directed at Japan. McGregor quotes the view that the party has raised young Chinese on a diet of “wolf’s milk.”

McGregor offers a masterful account of the complex fifty-year dance between China, Japan and the United States, describing “a profound interdependence alongside strategic rivalries, profound distrust and historical resentment.” His book stays true to one of the central maxims of news journalism: report what you see, don’t be a seer. So McGregor offers little about what might come next: about whether China, Japan and the US are heading to a smash, a muddle through or a major realignment. Granted, publishing at the dawn of Trump throws even more variables into the choices and changes confronting the world’s three biggest economies. Spare a moment’s compassion for the author of a narrative who has to finish his work with the arrival of The Donald. Flux all around and the fog of the future abounds.

The history McGregor offers has plenty of evidence the reader can use to construct two vastly different futures for Japan. I’d call these opposed visions Strong Japan and Comfortable Japan. Marking the 150th anniversary of the Meiji Restoration/Revolution this year is a reminder of how Japan has twice during that period shown the ability to make huge shifts in its governance and society in order to respond to external challenges.

Strong Japan foresees a Tokyo that refuses to bend to Beijing. Japan reclaims its rights as a “normal nation,” building its military strength as America’s key Asian ally and leading Asia in both balancing against and engaging with China. This is prime minister Shinzo Abe’s vision of Japan, reaffirmed by his victory in the October general election. Strong Japan is expressed in the unusual role Abe has taken in leading Asia’s response to Trump: saving the Trans-Pacific Partnership after Trump dumped the trade treaty, reshaping the Japanese constitution, and making a fresh effort to create a “quadrilateral” alliance of democracies linking Japan, the United States, India and Australia.

McGregor’s version of Strong Japan includes his belief that Japan will not be fighting on its own if it does go to war with China in coming decades. He offers a significant judgement about the resilience of the Japanese and Chinese systems in contemplating conflict — and calculating the impact of a defeat: “In Tokyo, a military loss would be disastrous, and the government would certainly fall. But that would be nothing compared to the hammer blow to China’s national psyche should Japan prevail.” He cites the view that such a loss would be terminal for the Chinese Communist Party, marking the moment for regime change.

Comfortable Japan, by contrast, sees Abe as a political outlier who won’t be emulated by future prime ministers. In this version, Japan matches the decline of its population and economy by declining gently to middle-power status. This Japan embraces the peace of its pacifist strain, no longer wanting to serve as America’s unsinkable aircraft carrier. The US–Japan alliance fades away, dismissed as the strange joining of two nations with vastly different histories and values. Putting aside its old nightmares about being betrayed or abandoned by a US turn to China, Japan would drift out of Washington’s orbit. Tokyo could quietly decide that the cost of resisting Beijing is too high.

Comfortable Japan would accommodate China as the new ruler. For the Japanese, this would be portrayed as Japan’s turning back to Asia. In China, the Community Party would proclaim victory in the history war and start to turn down the heat.

If Richard McGregor won’t make any bets on the future in his book, Hugh White puts all his money on red. White thinks China is going to win and America is going to leave. His prediction is that Comfortable Japan will beat Strong Japan because of tensions in the alliance with the United States:

Japan is the key to East Asia’s emerging order as China’s power grows and America’s wanes. Japan’s alliance with America has been the keystone of America’s strategic position in Asia. While the alliance lasts America will remain a major regional power, and when it ends America’s role in Asia will end with it. So we can best understand how America’s position in Asia might collapse by considering the future of the alliance.

The alliance might look robust, but China’s growing wealth and influence has changed the equation:

For America, the costs of the alliance are growing, while the benefits are not. China’s rise makes it both a more valuable economic partner and a more formidable military adversary, and so the costs to America of protecting Japan against China go up both economically and strategically… By the same token, the benefits of the alliance to Japan are falling, as US support in a crisis becomes less certain. This worries Japan more and more as both China and North Korea look more and more threatening. There will come a point when Tokyo reluctantly concludes that America simply cannot be relied upon any longer.

White dismisses the Strong Japan option as too hard. Japan has all it needs to break the nuclear taboo and get nuclear weapons; the difficult part would be explaining the nukes to its own people and getting acceptance from Asia.

A Strong Japan would have to create a coalition of like-minded countries, including Australia, to balance China’s power and prevent Beijing from dominating the region. White judges that the other countries won’t join — all have their own interests with China and all would be reluctant to accept Japan’s direction and serve Japan’s interests — and so middle-power status is more or less inevitable.

In Canberra, Hugh White is always one of the smartest men in the room — and these days one of the most controversial. His customary cheeriness prevails, despite the storms he’s stirred with his writings on Australia’s choice between China and the US. One of the bravura habits of Hugh is his ability to walk into a conference room or lecture hall armed with only a takeaway coffee (muffin optional) and a single sheet of blank paper; the paper is folded down the middle and, before the coffee has cooled, he jots down a series of notes on both sides of the fold. Then he delivers a flawless speech which is both to time and on topic. It’s the performance of a formidable and disciplined intellect, well attuned to the rhythms of Canberra.

After university in Melbourne and Oxford, Hugh White arrived in the national capital in the late 1970s to work as an intelligence analyst in the Office of National Assessments. He jumped to journalism in the parliamentary press gallery (and sharpened his prose style) as defence writer for the Sydney Morning Herald before joining the office of defence minister Kim Beazley and then becoming international adviser to prime minister Bob Hawke. As the defence department’s deputy secretary for strategy and intelligence, he wrote the Howard government’s 2000 defence white paper. He was the inaugural director of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute and is now professor of strategic studies at the Australian National University.

White’s seer service was displayed in his previous Quarterly Essay, Power Shift: Australia’s Future Between Washington and Beijing, published in 2010. This new Quarterly Essay proclaims that the issue of choice is fading and the result is looming.

The onrush of China has been so central to this decade that it’s difficult to summon up the hysterical response eight years ago to Hugh White’s heresy: the proposition that America should cede some power to negotiate a new regional order, retaining a lesser but still substantial American strategic role in Asia to balance China’s power. As an example of the convulsive response to this proposition, here’s Greg Sheridan in the Australian in September 2010, attacking White’s “astonishing,” “ridiculous” and “weird, weird” essay:

Professor Hugh White of the Australian National University has done something remarkable. He has written the single stupidest strategic document ever prepared in Australian history by someone who once held a position of some responsibility… His central thesis is that the growing strategic competition between the US and China is almost certain to produce deadly and convulsive conflict unless the Americans can be persuaded to give up their primacy in Asia and share power with China as an equal.

Back then, I told White to send Sheridan a big Christmas card of thanks: the gnashing gusher about astonishing weirdness ensured Hugh’s essay had to be read by everyone who mattered in Canberra, and many in Washington. Today we’d be blessed if we’d achieved the comfort of the Washington–Beijing power-sharing agreement that White advocated in 2010. Now he thinks the chance is gone.

White’s new essay judges that the rivalry may proceed peacefully or violently, quickly or slowly, but the most likely outcome is becoming clear:

America will lose, and China will win. America will cease to play a major strategic role in Asia, and China will take its place as the dominant power. War remains possible, especially with someone like Donald Trump in the Oval Office. But the risk of war recedes as it becomes clearer that the odds are against America, and as people in Washington come to understand that their nation cannot defend its leadership in Asia by fighting an unwinnable war with China. The probability therefore grows that America will peacefully, and perhaps even willingly, withdraw.

It’s happening already, says White. And although it is “not what anyone expected,” the process can’t be reversed.

What does Australia face in Rachman’s era of Easternisation and what Hugh White describes as a new regional order delivered by a profound shift in Asia’s distribution of power?

Rachman thinks Australia “faces an acute strategic dilemma,” even as it greets “the rise of Asia with exuberant enthusiasm, treating it as an unparalleled opportunity to secure Australia’s prosperity long into the future.” The dilemma facing Australia and New Zealand deepens if Southeast Asia becomes a Chinese sphere of influence. “Australasia,” says Rachman, “risks becoming an isolated Western outpost, cut off from its political and cultural hinterland. As a result, the vision of China asserting its influence across the South China Sea and in Southeast Asia set off alarm bells in the Australian elite.”

The fear of a coercive China bending Southeast Asia to its will has driven Australia to change its definition of the region from the Asia-Pacific to the Indo-Pacific. “The notion of the Indo-Pacific emphasises India’s importance and challenges the idea of a region that inevitably revolves around China,” says Rachman.

It also stresses the central importance of the Indian Ocean, as well as the South China Sea. And it makes the Australians feel less lonely. Rather than being stuck out on the edges of the Asia-Pacific region, Australia could style itself as at the centre of a vast Indo-Pacific region framed by the two democracies of the United States and India.

Hugh White’s account is of an Australia little prepared for what it faces, especially a US retreat from Asia which, under Trump, “is probably becoming irreversible.” Canberra didn’t see this coming because Washington didn’t expect it, and we have got into the habit of seeing the world through Washington’s eyes. Australia’s misjudgement, White writes, was to depend more and more on America as its position became weaker:

America has no real reason to fight China for primacy in Asia, shows little real interest in doing so and has no chance of succeeding if it tries. Until our leaders realise that, they will not address the reality that we are, most probably, soon going to find ourselves in an Asia dominated by China, where America plays little or no strategic role at all.

White has cemented his unpopularity in official Canberra because his vision of America vacating the region is completely at odds with the views of the Turnbull government. Its November 2017 foreign policy white paper does describe a new, contested world of great-power rivalry where America’s long dominance of the international order is challenged, but its conclusion is that the US will keep winning:

Even as China’s power grows and it competes more directly with the United States regionally and globally, the United States will, for the foreseeable future, retain its significant global lead in military and soft power. The United States will continue to be the wealthiest country in the world (measured in net asset terms), the world’s leader in technology and innovation, and home to the world’s deepest financial markets. The Australian Government judges that the United States’ long-term interests will anchor its economic and security engagement in the Indo-Pacific. Its major Pacific alliances with Japan, the Republic of Korea and Australia will remain strong.

The structure and conclusion offered by the Australian government can encompass the competition described by Richard McGregor and stretch to take in Gideon Rachman’s Easternisation. But Hugh White describes another world.

We are unlikely to face a single sliding-door moment — a big, one-time choice. We will make constant choices because that is what diplomacy and the world of states is all about. We can no longer chant John Howard’s reassuring mantra that we will not have to choose between our history and our geography.

Our geography presses. China, the United States and Japan — along with India and Southeast Asia — will all be integral to the way we weigh our options and make selections. The constant effort will be to maximise flexibility and minimise zero-sum calls. And Australia isn’t alone in experiencing this angst about our Asian future: it is shared by the other middle powers that will gather at the ASEAN summit in Sydney next month.

China and the United States will push and woo Australia. “We will be able to defy Chinese pressure if we choose,” writes White, “but China will be able to inflict heavy costs on us if we do. It will not be able to dictate to us, but it will be able to shape our choices very powerfully.” A foretaste of how this will go is the Turnbull government’s pushback against China over cyber espionage and perceived interference in our political system, and China’s angry response. This foreign policy quandary has deep domestic roots: in Australia’s census, 1.2 million people declared themselves of Chinese heritage and about 600,000 were born in China.

China’s geopolitical aim is to turn Australia into a neutral, to detach America’s oldest and closest ally in Asia. America fears that Australia will be “Finlandised,” slowly slipping into China’s orbit. White quotes a senior official in the Obama administration venting his frustration about Australia: “We hate it when you guys keep saying, ‘We don’t have to choose between America and China’! Dammit, you do have to choose, and it is time you chose us!”

For his part, Donald Trump threatens to bring a frightening clarity to one of the essentials of the Asian security system: the US military guarantee to Asia, which is of such importance that any future peacetime threat to the formal and informal alliance system will most likely come from the United States itself. Short of war, only major new US demands — or US failures to deliver — could imperil the value of its multi-tiered alliance system in Asia.

A superpower always has the potential to underdeliver or over-demand. Washington will underdeliver if it doesn’t have the means to fulfil its security guarantees to its Asian allies, followers and even free-riders. That underperformance will show first in US political will or regional commitment rather than in the sinews of US military power.

The other end of the same equation is a United States that demands too much from its allies, causing them to baulk. Trump is forcing Asia to ponder both problems, especially the nightmare of an America that could underdeliver by departing.

Even if China were still hiding and biding and America wasn’t being roiled by its president, Australia would confront tougher decisions because of the relative power and wealth we bring to Asia’s table. The key word is “relative”: our long-term relative decline as a power and an economy in Asia continues as it has for decades. That doesn’t signify Australian decline or failure — merely that we are growing at a slower rate than a lot of others in the pack. An ever more prosperous neighbourhood is obviously better for us as well as them, but regional success challenges our power and our choices.

The times will require an independent foreign policy because the times will be tougher. We will fashion our own suit, not ride the coat-tails of others. Australia must be clear about what it sees, and precise in describing it. Our pride in the Australian tradition of straight talking must be matched by even straighter thinking.

An independent foreign policy will demand a capability for independent thinking. For a long time, when Australia talked about China it was actually talking about the United States; that American lens was why we didn’t give diplomatic recognition to China until 1972. Over the past decade, there’s been a flip. Now when we talk about the United States, often we’re really looking at China.

No longer can we afford to allow either Washington or Beijing to frame the other in our thinking. Nor can we see Japan’s strategic options solely through the fifteen-year-old trilateral strategic dialogue of the United States, Japan and Australia — any more than we’re going to deal with India only through the resurrected quadrilateral of the US, Japan, Australia and India.

Australia must see others in the region as their own agents with their own agendas. Lots of independent players will inevitably mean many surprises. Depending on your temperament, it’s an exciting new era or terrifying in its uncertainty. Foundations shift and structures shake.

As a great joiner, Australia wants to be in every conversation and club; but that is just the starting point. Then it’s a matter of how the various clubs and cohorts and Australia itself can contribute to Asia’s future. Independence is more easily declared than displayed; it’s not one of our strongest habits. Just as our geography is going to force us to confront choices, the times will demand independent thought and sometimes independent action. It’s no contradiction to say that an Australia best able to define and declare its independent interests will be better placed to be an ally of the United States, a partner to China, a friend to Japan and a fellow middle power to ASEAN nations.

Australia confronts a rapidly changing Asian system, beset by rivalry and great-power contest. “In this dynamic environment,” says Australia’s foreign policy white paper, “competition is intensifying, over both power and the principles and values on which the regional order should be based.” Power. Principles. Values. We have a core interest in the rules of this game and how the region is ruled, but Australia’s future in Asia doesn’t look much like what we knew during the bipolar stand-off of the cold war or America’s two-decade unipolar moment after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Time to run the ruler over what’s left and start to work for the rules we want. ●

The post Asia’s rise: the rules and the rulers appeared first on Inside Story.

Mahathir, who rose through UMNO’s ranks to become prime minister in 1981, is ninety-two years old. His decision to stand this year has raised questions about the state of politics in a nation where the median age is only twenty-eight. Malaysian and international media outlets alike have reflected the view that Mahathir’s selection to lead the coalition is “laughable.”

For answers to this apparent paradox, though, look not to the nation’s age profile but to the calculus of building electoral coalitions in a diverse nation that still bears the scars of the political battles of the past two decades. Look also to Mahathir’s singular success in building coalitions over even more decades, using a combination of Malay nationalism, an Islamist ethic favouring entrepreneurship and capitalist development, and selective minority representation. In combination with favours for allies and civil and judicial pressure on opponents, his use of these themes has been masterful.

During his twenty-two years at the top, Mahathir transformed the nation — for better or for worse, depending on which constituency you consult. He resigned in 2003, having sacked Anwar, his deputy and finance minister, in 1998. Anwar had quickly become his most formidable opponent, and went on to lead several iterations of the opposition “pact” or alliance that Mahathir now heads. Anwar’s wife, Wan Azizah, is Mahathir’s deputy.

Anwar himself has almost completed a second prison term — the first instigated by Mahathir, the second by Najib — and is due for release in June, at which point he is likely to seek the royal pardon needed for him to re-enter political life. His convictions resulted from charges of corruption and sodomy — a criminal offence in Malaysia — both of which he has strenuously denied. Without a pardon, he won’t be able to participate in politics for another five years after his release. One way or another, the opposition parties’ aim is for Anwar to replace either Mahathir himself or Wan Azizah — though both sides of politics know that there’s a risk Mahathir and his family might permanently capture the opposition machine.

At the last election, in 2013, the Anwar-led opposition parties won the national popular vote but didn’t gain sufficient seats to replace Barisan in government. Anwar has invested years in perfecting a form of political code-switching that allows him to argue for democratic reforms using both Islamic and secular liberal principles, a skill many voters, Muslim and non-Muslim, consider impressive. But his coalition failed to win important rural seats whose largely Malay Muslim voters hold disproportionate power in this largely urban nation. Many voters in these seats view their economic and political interests as tied up in development schemes, subsidies and loans — hallmarks of the Barisan government — that have propelled many Malay Muslims into better jobs and more secure livelihoods in a modernising economy.

Appointing Mahathir as opposition figurehead is a bid to secure the one missing ingredient in the opposition parties’ 2013 bid for power. It is for precisely this reason that the “nonagenarian,” as Najib calls him, is suddenly running again. He is a critical component of an opposition pitch to these voters that voting against the government will not turn their lives or the polity upside down, as many fear it will.

The nature of these fears are no mystery — they reflect frequent public comments by government ministers and by other figures linked to UMNO and its affiliated non-government organisations. They include the assertion that the opposition is un-Islamic because it takes in the Democratic Action Party, whose membership is largely Chinese. Allowing the opposition to come to power, the argument goes, would give it the chance to dismantle the web of state schemes that protects ordinary Malay Muslims not only from poverty but also from the country’s other “races.” It would also lead to an ethnic Chinese bid for power that would displace Malay Muslims in their own nation — from which they ejected their last group of colonisers only in 1957.

Mahathir’s participation signals that the opposition understands it must make clear to these voters — and their political patrons — that there will be no sudden dismantling of Malay Muslim privileges if the government falls. Nor, as Mahathir signalled earlier this week, will there be a public reckoning for members and officials of UMNO. Instead, voting for the opposition will rewind and reset the nation at the point it had reached twenty years ago, when Mahathir and Anwar were last leading the nation together, indeed as the leaders of the very same Barisan that these voters continue to support.

Mahathir also aims to reassure two other important constituencies, even while they express dismay at a potential return to “Mahathirism” and seek to limit his power. These are non-Muslim Chinese, Indian and “Other” minorities, and “liberal” Malay Muslims, a term generally given to urban professionals comfortable with interracial and mixed-gender interactions in private and public life. Many of these voters are already familiar with the opposition, and may fear not only Barisan but also what appears to be the government’s new ally, the Islamist Pan-Malaysian Islamic Party, or PAS.

PAS has left the opposition alliance and is now working in coordination with Barisan, ostensibly lured away by UMNO on the basis that PAS might join a unity government that upholds Malay Muslim political supremacy for all time. It commands a large following, although it has lost some to a breakaway party, Amanah, which has remained in the opposition.

If the opposition fails and Barisan wins decisively with PAS by its side, minorities and liberals will not like the price PAS is likely to extract from the re-elected government. Many fear that this would include hudud laws and a wholesale Islamisation of the state and public life. Such a transformation would be risky for Malaysia, though, and would destroy its cultivated reputation as a safe and diverse nation in which “moderate” Islam prevails. Malaysian government departments and linked foundations currently participate in a number of international programs aimed at countering violent extremism and promoting religious moderation.

Through the 1990s, Mahathir presented himself to minorities as a bulwark against PAS, a party he has sometimes likened to the Taliban. A strong argument along these lines might well disrupt Barisan’s strategy of coordinating its campaign with PAS, and potentially deliver Barisan a weak win that opposition parties would portray as illegitimate. Najib has instigated a new battery of national security laws that he might consider using if political disaffection continues after such a result — but again, using them will be risky if Malaysia wants to continue projecting itself as a democracy. Using such laws would evoke the Malayan Emergency from 1948 to 1960.

As for the likelihood of an outright opposition win — this would take a surge of energy that hasn’t so far been forthcoming from supporters demoralised by the seeming impossibility of dislodging UMNO. Even the multibillion-dollar 1MDB scandal, which broke in 2015 and remains the subject of a US Department of Justice investigation, seems not to have weakened its position.

In a move some critics interpreted as a signal to his opponents that the investigation could not shake him, Najib visited the United States last year. The essentially symbolic nature of the visit was evident in the only recorded interaction between Najib and US President Donald Trump, an extract from a meeting uploaded to Najib’s Facebook page by his own staff, in which he mentioned a set of “value propositions” for the United States. Najib also delivered a speech at Washington’s Center for Strategic and International Studies, this time with no audio recording circulated at all. Its transcript promoted a close US–Malaysia defence relationship, suggesting another government weak spot at which Mahathir might aim — Malaysia’s increasingly close relationship with China.

Since the 1MDB scandal, China has helped settle a proportion of Malaysia’s 1MDB debt and invested heavily in high-speed rail projects linked to its One Belt One Road initiative. Mahathir and other opposition leaders have already targeted the government for “selling” the nation to China in order to bail out Barisan. In Johor state, meanwhile, Chinese developers are constructing an enormous housing project called Forest City, which aims to attract 700,000 investors including overseas Chinese buyers. Mahathir has been critical of this project too.

Adding to these concerns was the publication by Malaysian Insight, around a month before Najib’s trip to the US, of a claim that China had offered advanced rocket launchers and a new radar system to the Malaysian armed forces. These would also be located in Johor, which faces Singapore. Alarmed, the Singapore authorities immediately sought clarification. The Malaysian government denied the claim.

China’s rise offers Mahathir an opportunity to externalise the potent political theme of the Chinese threat, pointing to Big China as the real menace rather than Malaysia’s ethnic Chinese minority. The opposition parties used race in a similar way in 2013, in that case via the “phantom Bangladeshi voter.” In the days before the election, rumours circulated that 40,000 foreign workers — images of whom suffused the opposition’s get-out-the-vote campaign — would be mobilised with false IDs to vote for the government. This time, discussing Big China property investments, infrastructure loans, debt bailouts and other interventions could allow Small China — Malaysian Chinese — to re-enter the political boundaries drawn around the Malaysian people.

This tactic has the potential to shore up the opposition’s positioning as the voice of the “real,” multiracial Malaysia — just what the old Barisan, led by Mahathir and Anwar, purportedly used to represent. Many Malaysians are nostalgic for this notion of the Malaysian people and its ruling government — a version the new Barisan seems to have abandoned to cultivate PAS, but that the opposition parties are deliberately channelling.

All these scenarios aside, it’s important to remember that no opposition has ever won government in the postcolonial nation’s sixty-year history. Such a win isn’t inconceivable, though — assuming Mahathir can capture the minority of voters who will determine the future government. Indications are that the opposition parties are working to unearth further scandals that might touch these voters more closely than 1MDB, including in the workings of the rural development agency FELDA. FELDA settlers already complain of excessive debt burdens and insufficient yields.

The opposition might well respond with a plan for reducing the settlers’ dependency on government, which would allow them to consider changing their votes. For this plan to succeed, however, the opposition’s ageing leadership will need to avoid losing Malaysia’s youth. Like the prospect of future infighting between the opposition parties, this is an opposition weak point and the government knows it.

Whatever happens next, the campaign has begun in all but formal terms. Mahathir and Najib will have plenty of other weapons hidden up their sleeves. ●

The post The battle for the “real” Malaysia appeared first on Inside Story.

The political stand-off emerged on 19 October when three opposition parties — the CNRT, the PLP and KHUNTO, together controlling thirty-five of parliament’s sixty-five seats — rejected the government’s program. Fretilin had narrowly won the most seats, twenty-three to the CNRT’s twenty-two, in the parliamentary elections last July. While a Fretilin-led coalition with smaller parties seemed likely after the CNRT resolved to sit on the opposition benches, Fretilin’s negotiations with the PLP (eight seats) and KHUNTO (five) eventually faltered, though not before a short-lived alliance with the Democratic Party (seven seats) and KHUNTO saw Fretilin’s Aniceto Guterres elected president (or speaker) of parliament.

Ultimately, Fretilin formed a thirty-seat minority coalition with the Democratic Party, or PD. On 16 September, with no alternative majority coalition being proposed, president Francisco “Lú-Olo” Guterres, also from Fretilin, appointed the first minority government in Timor-Leste’s short constitutional history. The executive was bolstered by some well-regarded independents, including José Ramos-Horta, and a scattering of ministers affiliated with other parties.

The AMP didn’t announce its opposition alliance until four weeks later. But it soon demonstrated its control of parliament by rejecting the government’s program, and it has firmed up further since then. The AMP hasn’t questioned the constitutionality of the president’s actions, but it has referred to them as “imprudent,” pointing to the political unsustainability of the minority government and offering the AMP as an alternative if the government falls. The lack of parliamentary support for the government’s program is now the central political fact of the stand-off. The AMP parties are likely to establish a formal coalition if an early election is called, and it will clearly be a formidable force.

Relatively little of substance has changed since October, apart from the thwarting of the government’s budget rectification bill and a decision by the parliamentary president to delay opposition motions that would threaten the government and refer a motion for his own removal to the courts. Parliament also failed to hold certain plenary sessions in December, in apparent breach of its own regulations. These tactics seemed designed to delay the second rejection of the government program until a time closer to 22 January, the earliest day on which the president can dissolve parliament and call early elections.

The stand-off has also revealed some grey constitutional areas. It’s unclear, for instance, how long a government can delay re-presenting its program, though some commentators argue that the thirty-day limit for the first presentation is implied for the second. For its part, the opposition has boycotted sittings of the parliamentary committee on budget and finances, effectively preventing its operation, on the basis that a government that is not fully invested by parliament can’t pass such measures. Inflammatory rhetoric has also increased, with prime minister Mari Alkatiri claiming that the rejection of the government program represented an attempted golpe, or coup, and the opposition calling for the prime minister to step down. These developments highlight the apparent return of “belligerent democracy” after the informal power-sharing government of CNRT and Fretilin from 2015 to 2017.

To an extent, the current stand-off is a clash of emerging conventions in Timor-Leste’s democracy. Similar political systems tend to have a default presumption that the most-voted party will lead a coalition government. In Portugal, for example, that convention stayed in place for thirty-nine years after the restoration of democracy in 1976.

This view — which Fretilin has articulated consistently, in victory and defeat, at previous elections — remains central to the government’s case, though certain caveats ought to be noted. First, while minority governments are perfectly constitutional, majority support in parliament is still required to pass the program. Indeed, Portugal’s thirty-nine-year run ended in 2015 in similar circumstances. Second, the convention might best be seen as first right to attempt to form government, which Fretilin was given last year. Most importantly, though, Timor-Leste is entitled to develop its own political conventions, which are likely to emerge, within the bounds of the constitution, through presidential practice. It could be argued that this occurred when the CNRT-led coalition was installed in 2007, suggesting a new path for the convention, though it is also true that a majority alliance was evident far earlier when president Ramos-Horta was in the process of forming government in 2007.

Throughout this period, Fretilin has pointed to its parliamentary support for the budgets put forward by the CNRT-led government in 2013 and 2014, and its cooperation with the 2015–17 government, which relied on informal power-sharing. It also argues that its program should be held accountable by parliament, rather than simply rejected. Critics have countered that the 2015–17 CNRT-led government saw a younger Fretilin figure, Rui de Araújo, installed as PM — a vital concession to securing cross-party unity. While talk of “deals” around generational handover overstates the formality of the 2015–17 arrangements, and it is normal for the leader of the most-voted party to assume the PM’s role, post-election negotiations may have proceeded more smoothly if Mari Alkatiri had replicated Xanana Gusmão’s move to a position of backroom power. The generational debate is largely one of form rather than content, as both men will remain powerful figures in any resolution.

Gusmão’s lengthy absence from Timor-Leste, now referred to jokingly by Fretilin as a peregrinação, or pilgrimage, was largely necessitated by the intense maritime boundary negotiations with Australia and commercial joint-venture partners. But while his decision not to return during various breaks in the talks is portrayed by supporters as “leaving it to a younger generation,” it has tended to highlight how central he remains to any political resolution.

Some see a personality contest between Alkatiri and Gusmão, but many East Timorese see a deeper clash between modes of governance and inclusion. While Fretilin’s attempt at forming government was unquestionably inclusive — it involved a coalition with the PD, with whom it previously had fractious relations, and included Ramos-Horta and other important independent figures — Gusmão is still seen as the superior proponent of “big tent” politics.

The current impasse has also brought to the fore lingering divisions between those ex-resistance figures who were active on the external diplomatic front during the Indonesian occupation and those who were involved in military resistance within the country. Some newspapers have used this potentially divisive theme openly in headlines. The AMP reunites the key military resistance figures of Gusmão and Ruak, who were at loggerheads earlier last year. The fact that Fretilin and the PLP’s platforms have, at face value, more in common than either have with the CNRT highlights the importance of resistance-era alignments.

Developments in the party system are also significant. The strong possibility of a formal AMP coalition if parliament is dissolved is an acknowledgement that finishing first matters, though perhaps more as a pragmatic accommodation of the current president’s view rather than as an enduring statement of principle. Another important development is the recent emergence of the National Democratic Forum, or FDN — a group of smaller parties that were unable to clear the 4 per cent hurdle in 2017 — with the stated aim of supporting the AMP. Latest reports suggest at least five parties intend to register as a coalition, including sub-threshold parties that did relatively well in 2017, such as PUDD, the UDT and Frenti-Mudança. Together, they would have a good chance of exceeding 4 per cent; if that’s the case, their alliance would make it more difficult for the major parties to increase their seat share. This would particularly disadvantage Fretilin in the event of an early election. Balancing this, Catholic Church commentary on the minority government has been relatively positive, a major shift from the 2005–07 era.

With the drama approaching its end, President Guterres will soon be called on to resolve the impasse. He has three paths. He could dissolve parliament and seek fresh elections. This is the path favoured by Fretilin, and remains the more likely, though not inevitable, outcome. (Intriguingly, this option may require positive parliamentary approval of election expenditure.) He can seek a solution within the current parliament, inviting the second-largest party to lead an AMP coalition government in a period of cohabitation with a Fretilin president. This is the path favoured by the AMP. A third way forward is a renegotiated government of national inclusion reflecting the power distribution in parliament, a possibility that faces the obvious hurdle that Mari Alkatiri would probably have to step down as PM.

Despite the political ructions, East Timorese society remains largely calm. Leaving aside the return of a more belligerent form of democracy and the accusations of an institutional coup, this political stand-off demonstrates that the checks and balances in the constitutional system are operating, with strong executive accountability to parliament. Elections in other democratic nations — and not just those with proportional voting systems — have failed to produce sustainable governments. This does not, of itself, constitute a political crisis.

The PLP has argued throughout that Fretilin’s possession of the three sovereign posts of president, prime minister and president of parliament is unreasonable given its 30 per cent vote share. While this position is a compelling one, it should also be recalled that the president received the active support of CNRT in his campaign, a final legacy of the power-sharing era of 2015–17. As with the president of parliament, therefore, current arrangements reflect a time when opposition positions were still in flux: a fact that ought to cool political tempers on both sides as the next phase approaches. ●

The post Timor-Leste’s parliamentary endgame appeared first on Inside Story.

Unlike Europe, though, Southeast Asia created a region without a shared religion or roughly common culture. The ASEAN that celebrated its fiftieth birthday in August rests on the shifting foundations of deep differences.

In making the case that ASEAN is “a living and breathing modern miracle,” Kishore Mahbubani and Jeffery Sng argue that Southeast Asia is, in civilisational terms, the most diverse corner of planet Earth: “No other region in the world can match its cultural, religious, linguistic and ethnic diversity. In a relatively small geographical space, we find 240 million Muslims, 130 million Christians, 140 million Buddhists and seven million Hindus.”

The Muslim monarchy of Brunei sits beside the American-model razzmatazz of the Catholic Philippines. More than a Chinese island amid the Malay sea, Singapore has become the Confucian state with a multiracial method, gazing across the strait at its giant neighbour Indonesia and linked by the causeway to Malaysia.

The birthday cake is iced with the peace and plenty, but what’s striking about ASEAN’s peace dividend is the limited amount of power that has passed to the people. This is a government-created project run by elites, reflecting the way elites hold power in member states: whether in communist Vietnam and Laos, the one-party democracies of Singapore and Malaysia, or the newly born democracies of Indonesia and Myanmar.

In one of his novels on the vibrant yet vicious life of modern Southeast Asia, Timothy Mo offers an acid line on how it works: “In the East, the placid poor lived in terror of the violent rich. In the West, the rich lived in terror of the criminal poor.”

Or behold the Janus-face of modern Southeast Asia that Michael Vatikiotis has been gazing at for forty years: “One face projects astonishing social and material progress… the other, facing inwards, is one of stern, uncaring authoritarianism with no concern for the suffering of those left behind in the chaotic scramble to get rich and be glorious.”

Vatikiotis’s viewpoint is that of a journalist who rose to be editor of the Far Eastern Economic Review and then a conflict negotiator for the Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue. His book grapples with the “grim realities — and paradoxical limitations — of unconstrained power.” Why, he ponders, does democracy have such weak institutional roots in a region that proclaims its success and growing riches? He describes how political elites constantly bargain for better position and more power: “Often, the higher up the social and political hierarchy you go, the more backward the thinking. Across the region, people in power seem to view progressive political change as a threat.”

Blood and Silk is a fine reporter’s book as well as an analysis of what ails Southeast Asia. Vatikiotis’s experiences as a reporter in Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand and Hong Kong weave through the work. Arriving as a correspondent in Jakarta in 1987, he found a place of “unfathomable intrigue and bureaucratic obfuscation.” Indonesia, under Suharto, had an undercurrent of “muted fear and apprehension.” Vatikiotis writes that words like “authoritarian” and “repressive” sound like “technical terms; dry, remote and distant, they convey neither the physical pain nor mental suffering that the victims of autocratic government suffer.”

Modern Southeast Asia is plagued by a state of demi-democracy, says Vatikiotis. Profound inequalities of wealth and welfare fuel unrest and conflict, amid politics both volatile and unprogressive. “The stability of Southeast Asia therefore remains questionable,” he writes, “its politics unpredictable, its societies in flux.”

The counter argument sees Southeast Asia as flush, not in flux, offering the chance for hope and happiness based on the many disasters that have been avoided. This is the picture painted by two ASEAN cosmopolitans, Mahbubani and Sng, who got to know each other as children in a poor Singapore neighbourhood. Mahbubani became Secretary of Singapore’s Foreign Ministry and is now dean of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, while Sng has lived in Thailand since the 1980s.

Their version of ASEAN’s miracle is history delivered as a passionate pep talk. The book is published by the National University of Singapore, and a grant from the Lee Foundation has had it translated into Bahasa Malay, Bahasa Indonesia, Burmese, Khmer, Lao, Tagalog, Thai and Vietnamese.

“One weakness of ASEAN,” the two authors write, “is that the 600 million people who live in Southeast Asia do not feel a sense of ownership of ASEAN. Indeed, they know little about the organisation.” The yin and yang of the Association, Mahbubani and Sng argue, is that it draws influence from its limited power:

ASEAN’s strength can be found in its weakness. The reason ASEAN has emerged as the indispensable platform for great-power engagement in the Asia-Pacific region is that it is too weak to be a threat to anyone. So all the great powers instinctively trust it.

They describe an organisation “born to fail” at a time of great turbulence in Southeast Asia, but surviving to create an “ecosystem of peace.”

As the Vietnam war agony built, the original five members of ASEAN came together in 1967 to reassure each other and seek collective strength. ASEAN has always understood a brutal truth: hang together or hang separately. “The fear factor is important,” Mahbubani and Sng write. “It was the critical glue that held the five countries together.” The document of creation, the ASEAN Declaration, hints at the fears by defining the goals: economic growth, regional stability, equality and partnership.

ASEAN has built a region with a set of agreed purposes, expressing a regional imagining that today unites Indochina and maritime Southeast Asia, giving common cause to communists and capitalists.

Mahbubani and Sng describe Vietnam’s decision to join ASEAN in 1995 as “one of the biggest ironies of history.” Just as the uncertainties of the Vietnam war “first generated ASEAN’S cohesion and solidarity,” so ASEAN built its international profile and diplomatic muscle by opposing Vietnam for a decade over its 1978 invasion of Cambodia. Here is the pragmatism of a practical region: Vietnam joining the group created to resist it, as ASEAN embraces the fear that formed it.

ASEAN’s greatest achievement is internal: the set of mutual guarantees that have become important strategic and diplomatic norms for its members. Just as the European Community makes another war between France and Germany unthinkable, so ASEAN’s drive is to create a sense of region so strong that Southeast Asia will not war with itself. The end of the cold war meant the 1990s was the moment of expansion and inclusion, as Vietnam, Laos, Myanmar and Cambodia joined the Association.

The ASEAN Miracle nominates the peace dividend as one of three major achievements to justify the term miracle: “Apart from the EU, no other regional organisation comes close to matching ASEAN’s record in delivering five decades without any major conflicts. In many ways, the ASEAN project is synonymous with peace.”

The second achievement Mahbubani and Sng offer is the lift in livelihoods across Southeast Asia, with ASEAN providing the hidden X-factor to drive national economic development.

The third is the courtship of ASEAN by great powers “bearing gifts” (the United States, China, Japan and India, the European Union and Russia): “No other regional organisation has been as assiduously courted as ASEAN by the great powers.”

As China’s power grows and US attention wavers, ASEAN faces serious stress tests. The Association’s response is to restate the old lessons about hanging together. The internal guarantees between the ten members are as important as ever, and ASEAN has to work harder to maintain the place it claims for itself “in the driver’s seat” of Asian regionalism. My list of ASEAN ambitions in the years ahead (based on the decades past) is this:

• Deliver peace and prosperity in Southeast Asia by protecting state sovereignty and maximising influence.

• Use the collective influence of the ten states to give ASEAN members a central role in developing Asia’s strategic system.

• Influence the way strategic competition is conducted, aspiring to the creation of regional norms.

• Use ASEAN to manage the big powers.

• Create maximum diplomatic and security space. Avoid ever having to choose between the US and China.

The ASEAN project stepped into a new era in 2015 with the announcement of the ASEAN Community — a three-legged creation of a Political–Security Community, an Economic Community and a Socio-Cultural Community. It’s a typical ASEAN act of creation. Announce the thing exists, then set to work via hundreds of meetings to create a reality to match.

The Community aspiration confronts the old problem of making ASEAN more than just an elite endeavour, driven by government. ASEAN may have delivered for its people, but it’s yet to get the people to love ASEAN. Mahbubani and Sng make this what they call their most obvious recommendation for the future: “If ASEAN is going to survive and succeed over the long term, ownership of the organisation must shift from government to the people.”

ASEAN, they write, offers positive responses to Western pessimism about the clash of civilisations:

As the world moves away from two centuries of dominance by Western civilisations and towards a multi-civilisational world, ASEAN provides a valuable model for how very different civilisations can live and work together in close proximity. No other region can act as a living laboratory of cultural diversity, so the whole world has a stake in the success of ASEAN.

Michael Vatikiotis looks at the same landscape and sees a darker future: “Frankly, Southeast Asians have good reasons to worry.” The region fails chronically to deliver on the promise of popular sovereignty: “The one constant I have experienced over the last forty years is the perpetual selfishness of Southeast Asian elites and their wilful subjugation of the rights of citizens to their own considerations of wealth and power.”

The bonds of tolerance and inclusion underpinning social stability in Southeast Asia have loosened:

Identity politics is on the rise. Following a global trend, growth in religious orthodoxy has hardened the boundaries between different religious communities and generated high degrees of intolerance and exclusivity that increasingly fuel violent conflict.

This observation is given bloody emphasis by the Marawi conflict in the southern Philippines and the Rohingya crisis in Myanmar.

Vatikiotis describes outside pressures tearing at the region:

The spread of conservative Islamic dogma and extremist ideology fuelled by the contest between Saudi Arabia and Iran and the rise of China as an economic and military power are two of the most significant developments Southeast Asia has experienced since the Pacific War and the end of the colonial era.

He predicts that China will trump the United States, helped along by Trump. He doubts that India or Japan can provide sufficient strategic ballast against China. “Based on these stark realities,” he writes, “quite possibly by 2050 Southeast Asia will have lost the minimal benefits of trade and security afforded by ASEAN membership. The ten member states will have become more aligned on the basis of geography and economic dependency — mostly with China.”

Australia will be deeply involved and subject to the same pressures and promises. That’s why next March, with Sydney Harbour as the glittering setting, the prime minister will host the first Australia–ASEAN summit to be held on Australian soil. Malcolm Turnbull says he’ll be talking to the ASEAN leaders about what he calls “our region.”

Australia wants closer strategic alignment with ASEAN and ever greater economic integration. With the ten-nation grouping now representing about 15 per cent of our total trade, ASEAN is our third-largest trading partner after China and the European Union.

Australia, a middle-power player in Asia, is a natural partner of this middle-power grouping. Our Asian dreams will be shaped by ASEAN’s success or failure. If the ASEAN Community project is a success — in its social, political and strategic dimensions — Australia will want to be deeply involved. Equally, Australia’s interests would be deeply compromised if ASEAN stalls or fails.

ASEAN’s future as miracle or misery will say much about Australia’s own future. •

The post ASEAN as a bloody miracle appeared first on Inside Story.

As we now know, that mention was to be his downfall. Last year, he recalled it as a murmured or garbled off-the-cuff response to a question. When the tape emerged it showed what he had really said: “The role that Australia should be playing as a friend is to know that we see several thousand years of history, thousands of years of history, where it is and isn’t our place to be involved.” What was he thinking?

On the face of things, it seems bizarre that a politician should voice approval of the policy of a foreign country on grounds not only satisfactory to the country concerned, but actually supplied by that country – in this case the “thousands of years of history” that China commonly advances  as justification for its actions in the South China Sea, and many other places as well.  But invoking those “thousands of years” has become common in the age of China’s rise. Dastyari may have picked up the habit from his sometime mentor, former foreign minister Bob Carr, who has urged that “the China story needs to be told and given credit for all that it has achieved… It has a culture and civilisation that goes back five millennia.” Carr may in turn have been influenced by, and has certainly quoted, Henry Kissinger on the importance of paying attention to “five thousand years of history.” On this point, all three men are in lock step with Xi Jinping.

It is difficult to understand what is meant by “five thousand years of Chinese history.” None of the commonly mentioned linchpins of Chinese culture were secured that long ago. The earliest forms of writing in East Asia have been dated to around 1200 BCE, or 1400 at a stretch. Confucius was not alive till the sixth century BCE. A unitary state — the Chinese empire, that is — was not founded till 221 BCE, and since then, a succession of states have existed in what we now recognise as Chinese territory. Through centuries and even millennia during those five thousand years, vast areas of this territory were occupied by non-Sinic peoples.

Probably the period is best viewed as something like the four thousand years of biblical chronology: a sacred period attached to a belief system. This would explain why the line between history and mythology is blurred. “China has a full rich history of over five thousand years,” writes Kang Ouyang. “From ancient times when the three emperors and five sovereigns started the Chinese civilisation, national wisdom began to sprout…” Ouyang is director of the Institute of Philosophy at Huazhong University of Science and Technology and is known for his work on the “national spirit.”  He otherwise writes on Marxism, but in this account, a recently published book on The Chinese National Spirit, the true believer trumps the Marxist. The “five thousand years” is advanced at several points in the book, most fascinatingly as a label for the period within which China has been engaged in international relations.

What is the logic of the connection between the “five thousand years” policy positions on either China’s part or anyone else’s? In another recently published book, History and Nationalist Legitimacy in Contemporary China: A Double-Edged Sword, Robert Weatherly and Qian Zhang chart the ruling Communist Party’s purposeful use of history and historical memory as a legitimising strategy, to replace the foundations formerly supplied by commitment to revolution and Marxism. The point they make is not a new one, but it is worth reiterating until it permeates general knowledge about contemporary China. Every country has its national myths, most of which are grounded in or derived from history; but in China, history alone is the bedrock. The People’s Republic doesn’t have a religion, and it doesn’t have a constitution — or at least, not one that counts. It no longer even has a revolutionary ideology. It just has history, lots of it.

Needless to say, such “history” cannot be freely researched and openly debated. It is more akin to a religious doctrine. Its central tenets can be recited, as if from a catechism. What is the history of the Chinese Communist Party? “It is a history of leading the peoples of the whole country under the guidance of Marxism–Leninism–Mao Zedong Thought to undertake a socialist revolution and the establishment of socialism, with tremendous achievements…” What is the Chinese Dream? “It came out of the great experience of the thirty years or reform and opening up, out of more than sixty years of persistent searching since the establishment of the PRC, out of the profound conclusion of 170 or more years of development of the Chinese people, out of the enduring legacy of the Chinese people’s 5000-year old culture.”

When Dastyari first heard mention of “thousands of years” uttered in relationship to the People’s Republic of China, his instincts should have told him that it was a mantra routinely uttered in the service of a particular belief system, with no self-evident relationship to the South China Sea. As things stand, it is hard to understand why he would have chosen to recite it, other than that he might have been talking too much to Bob Carr, whose position on the South China Sea he echoed. The rather muddled sentence quoted above, in which he actually rephrases the term, suggests that he might have been somewhat confused as to what he was saying. As a citizen of a country with sixty-five thousand years of human settlement, and as a parliamentary representative in a complex society with a different sort of history — difficult, intensively researched and much debated — he was in a position to bring quite a different perspective to bear on regional disputes. That might have required greater sensitivity to Australia’s history, as well as a better understanding of China’s. •

The post Sam Dastyari and the thousands of years of Chinese history appeared first on Inside Story.

It is the Bataan nuclear power plant, an expensive and contentious US$2.3 billion investment by the energy-hungry Philippines. Begun more than four decades ago, it was finally paid off in 2007, having for many years drained funds from the national budget of a country whose per capita income is just US$9400. Yet, although the country’s power prices are among the highest in the region and act as a major disincentive for much-needed foreign investment, the plant has never generated a single commercial watt of electricity. Speculation continues about a possible activation of what has become a textbook, analogue-era white elephant.

Now, the plant has taken on new symbolic significance with the growing drive to rehabilitate Ferdinand Marcos’s reputation. The late dictator’s declaration of martial law in 1972 plunged the Philippines into an era of murderous repression, massive civil rights violation and unbridled corruption, as the kleptocratic president and his circle bled the country dry. Marcos supporters claim the plant is a tribute to his farsightedness; his detractors portray it as a folly of the highest order that has left the people with nothing but debt.

The Bataan nuclear plant was initiated by the Marcos administration in response to the 1973 oil crisis, and was designed to reduce the Philippines’s dependence on imported oil. Construction of the 620-megawatt nuclear plant commenced in 1975 and was completed in 1984, at an inflated cost of US$2.3 billion, more than four times the initial bid of US$500 million. A brief test run on 28 May 1984 — the only time the plant has operated — generated 5 megawatts of power for a few minutes.

After Marcos was driven from power in February 1986, and in the wake of the Soviet Union’s Chernobyl nuclear accident two months later, the administration of Corazon Aquino decided not to bring the plant into operation, on safety grounds. Earlier, in 1979, construction work had briefly been suspended following the Three Mile Island nuclear accident in Pennsylvania, and a subsequent survey had highlighted numerous defects in the Bataan plant, along with concerns about its earthquake-prone location.

After Aquino pledged to honour the debts incurred by the Marcos regime, successive governments struggled to pay off the plant. Payments peaked at 4.36 per cent of total government spending in 1988, and the debt was only retired in 2007. On average, from 1987 to 2007, the Philippine government paid US$246,000 a day for the project. Sporadic attempts to upgrade the plant, or to convert it to a gas-fired operation, were eventually abandoned. The current word in Manila is that there is Russian interest in activating the project.

Marcos supporters claim the plant sits idle simply because it is identified with the late dictator. The most fervent advocate for the plant’s reopening, former Congress member Marcos “Mark” Cojuangco, told me this was a ridiculous situation. “Look, you don’t avoid using roads that Marcos built, nor do you boycott his hospitals, so why is this sitting unused when we have the most expensive electricity in the region?”

Cojuangco, a member of one of the wealthiest families in the Philippines, was educated at Sydney’s exclusive Saint Ignatius’ College Riverview. He turned up unannounced at the plant when I was visiting with a large group of graduate students enrolled in my anti-corruption course. His slick sales pitch — which he insisted was driven only by his passion — extolled the virtues of nuclear power, the quality of the workmanship in the plant and, of course, the vision of Ferdinand Marcos. He also showed a video in which he swam in the cooling pond of a Swiss nuclear reactor to demonstrate how safe it was.

Bataan is tainted not just by the Marcos name, but also by the dubious contract awarded to the giant US corporation Westinghouse over the only other contender, General Electric. Negotiations were handled by a golfing partner of Marcos, Herminio Disini, whose wife was a first cousin of First Lady Imelda Marcos.

General Electric submitted a proposal containing detailed specifications and a cost estimate of US$700 million. Westinghouse submitted a lower cost estimate, US$500 million, but without any detail or specification. A presidential committee tasked to oversee the project preferred General Electric’s proposal, but was overruled in June 1974 by Marcos, who signed a letter of intent awarding the project to Westinghouse. It was later revealed that the company had paid Disini a US$60 million bribe. He was also awarded the contract to build the plant, even though he had no prior business experience in such projects.

By March 1975, with little explanation, Westinghouse’s cost estimate had ballooned to US$1.2 billion. It later emerged that Westinghouse sold similar technology to other countries for only a fraction of the amount it billed the Philippines. Westinghouse claimed, however, that the increase in cost reflected project risks (volcanic and seismic activity, for instance) and the cost of facilities to house the plant’s workers — but it didn’t disclose that it had no doubt factored the Disini bribe into its calculations.

With the debt burden mounting in 1988, the Aquino administration launched legal action against Westinghouse, alleging it had paid bribes to Marcos, who had since fled the Philippines. Charges of corruption were also laid against Disini, but were dismissed by the ombudsman. Disini fled to Liechtenstein, where he lived a regal existence, purchasing both a castle and a noble title. A settlement was finally reached with Westinghouse in 1995, involving a package of US$40 million in cash and the construction of two 160-megawatt turbines valued at US$60 million.

Disini quietly returned to the Philippines in 2001, and criminal charges were filed against him. In 2012, the Sandiganbayan (a special court with jurisdiction over cases of graft and corruption) ordered that he return more than US$50 million in commissions from the Bataan deal. It dismissed charges against Marcos, who had died in 1989, ruling that while a close relationship was established between the two, “there is insufficient evidence to prove that [Marcos] actually obtained part of the commission.” Disini died in 2014 without having paid over the money.

Three years later, in Rodrigo Duterte’s Philippines, the pro-Marcos drumbeat is getting louder by the day. (A prominent cheerleader is the former dictator’s son, Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr., who is also an advocate for Bataan.) The hulking monolith sits idle, an attraction for tourists and the merely curious, its obsolete technology looking like a museum piece — but still costing the government an annual US$1 million to maintain.

Apart from its association with Marcos, its legacy is a deep-seated public aversion to debt. The Duterte administration, trumpeting its “Build, Build, Build” policy, could have a hard time convincing a sceptical public of the need to “Borrow, Borrow, Borrow” to make the necessary investments in the future of this country. ●

The post No power, but plenty of symbolism appeared first on Inside Story.

Everything, it seems, is contestable in this political free market. But recent developments suggest that the checks and balances vital to democracy are under threat on multiple fronts, just as the country faces a range of security problems, especially a rising terrorist menace and an unprecedented wave of extrajudicial killings by both police and vigilante gangs in the war on drugs and crime.

The latest attack comes from a familiar source, Rodrigo Duterte. The Philippine president is moving for the impeachment of two of the country’s most powerful independent voices, the chief justice and the ombudsman, in what is being seen as a sustained attack on the country’s institutions of accountability. While opinion polls show that Duterte, elected to the presidency last year, continues to enjoy significant public support, he has become increasingly impatient with criticism and constraints on his power and, Trump-like, furious at attempts to investigate his own affairs.

It doesn’t help that both the chief justice, Maria Lourdes Sereno, and the ombudsman, Conchita Carpio Morales, are women. The president’s difficulties in dealing with women in positions of authority are well-known and deep-seated.

In the Philippines, it is the president who appoints the chief justice from a list of three nominees provided by the Judicial and Bar Council. Importantly, one of the chief justice’s duties is to preside over the Senate in the case of impeachment proceedings against the president. All other impeachment cases are presided over by the Senate president.

Chief Justice Sereno came to the position amid controversy. She was appointed by former president Benigno “Noynoy” Aquino to replace the late Renato Corona, who was removed from office in May 2012 because of his failure to disclose his statement of assets, liabilities and net worth to the public. Corona had been appointed in what Aquino called “a secret midnight swearing-in” a month before outgoing president Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo’s term was due to expire, and just two days after Aquino had won the presidency.

The case against Chief Justice Sereno was originally brought by a lawyer, Lorenzo Gadon, who has said that he wants to avenge slights against former president Arroyo, now a member of the House of Representatives, and the disgraced Justice Corona. Lurking in the background while all this manoeuvring takes place is the family of the late dictator Ferdinand Marcos, whose widow, Imelda, now eighty-eight, and son Ferdinand Jr (known as Bongbong) are still very active in politics.

According to the executive director of the Institute for Political and Electoral Reform, Ramon Casiple, the move by Gadon, a close associate of Arroyo, is nothing more than a ploy to position Bongbong for the vice-presidency and, by implication, the presidency should Duterte be impeached. The younger Marcos, who ran unsuccessfully for the vice-presidency last year, has an electoral protest against vice-president Leni Robredo currently before the Presidential Electoral Tribunal, which just happens to be chaired by Chief Justice Sereno.

Despite a lack of evidence, the house committee on justice, packed with Duterte supporters, voted 25–2 on 5 October to impeach Sereno, even without discussing point-by-point Gadon’s allegations, which have since been answered in detail by the chief justice.

It was surprising to many that Duterte quickly endorsed the action against Sereno, even calling on her to resign rather than damage the court in any impeachment process. Duterte has also sought to discredit her by publicising the fees she earned as a lawyer, her supposed lavish lifestyle and alleged but unspecified corruption.

Hailed as a human rights champion and fearless defender of the judiciary, Sereno continues to attend to her duties and maintain a hectic public-speaking schedule. After she presented the closing address to the Philippine Economic Society a few days ago in Manila, she was mobbed, especially by younger attendees jostling to take selfies with her.

For her part, ombudsman Conchita Carpio Morales’s crime seems to be her resolve to investigate the president. Duterte has accused her of conspiracy and using falsified documents relating to alleged undeclared assets, and says that the grounds for her impeachment would be what he calls selective justice. He promised to present his real bank records at any impeachment trial against Morales to prove that her office held falsified documents. He also initiated an investigation of the ombudsman’s office.

Undeterred, Morales said she would continue her investigation. “The office has already stated its position — to abide by its constitutional duty. No need to add more,” she said when asked to respond to Duterte’s latest statements.

Despite the storms swirling around Duterte — and his ominous references to the need for “revolutionary government,” which horrify the business community — he remains highly popular with men and women alike, according to the latest quarterly survey by Manila-based pollster Social Weather Stations. The survey, conducted 23–27 September, found 67 per cent of adult Filipinos satisfied, 14 per cent undecided, and 19 per cent dissatisfied with the president’s performance, with overall satisfaction having fallen by 11 points from 78 per cent.

How Duterte compares: thirty years of findings from Social Weather Stations

Duterte’s popularity among women is especially surprising, given his well-known problems dealing with them. His sister, Jocellyn, described him as a “chauvinist” in a recent interview — “When he sees a woman who fights him, it really gets his ire” — and recited a list of female critics that included his own vice-president, a senator who is now in jail, and the chief justice. All three crossed swords with Duterte after denouncing his brutal war on drugs, which has killed thousands of people since he took office in June 2016.

While campaigning last year, he joked about the gang rape of an Australian missionary who was killed in a prison riot. Speaking to Philippine troops in May, he said he would take responsibility for any rapes they might commit. But women’s rights advocates also praise him for distributing free contraceptives in his hometown, Davao City, where he was mayor for twenty-two years, and for championing a reproductive health bill opposed by the country’s influential Catholic Church.

In what is playing out in some respects as a Southeast Asian version of the daily crisis that is Washington under Donald Trump, Philippine democracy is once again being sorely tested not just by a president who resents and resists accountability, but also by the ceaseless, self-serving dynastic power struggles that have characterised Philippines politics for decades.

It is still in many respects a working democracy, with an admirably robust media, but its crucial institutions are looking increasingly fragile under the populist assault waged by Duterte. Just where all this will go is anybody’s guess, but the immediate future is, to put it mildly, very uncertain. ⦁

The post Duterte opens up a new front appeared first on Inside Story.

This nightmare has arrived hot on the heels of what was already a global forced migration crisis, with the numbers of people displaced globally reaching 65.6 million in 2016, of which around one third were refugees.

It’s not surprising there have been calls for Australia to create a special resettlement program for the Rohingya, much as it did for people displaced by conflicts in Iraq and Syria in 2015, or when it offered “safe haven” visas to Kosovans and East Timorese in 1999. But jumping straight to resettlement runs the risk of legitimising the brutal efforts to force the Rohingya out of Myanmar. And nor is it clear that this is what the Rohingya want: initial assessments suggest that more than nine out of every ten want either to stay in Bangladesh or to return to Myanmar.

Last week Australia announced more support for communities affected by the violence in Rakhine State and for frontline agencies providing relief to refugee camps in Bangladesh. It was confirmed in Senate Estimates that the Bali Process on People Smuggling, Trafficking in Persons and Related Transnational Crime, which Australia co-chairs with Indonesia, is attempting to broker a more coordinated response to the displacement crisis. Senior officials from key Bali Process countries, including Myanmar and Bangladesh, met in Jakarta in mid-October. They meet again in Kuala Lumpur this week. Australian officials visited Northern Rakhine on 2 October, and Chief of Army, General Angus Campbell, raised human rights concerns with Myanmar’s military in September.

Much more than a refugee crisis

Forced migrants – not only those from Myanmar but also from around the world – may or may not be refugees as defined in the 1951 Refugee Convention and its 1967 Protocol. They could be asylum seekers, stateless or trafficked people, or people uprooted by conflict, natural disasters and the effects of climate change. What these people share is a vulnerability that forces them to move, internally or internationally. As the past few years have shown, their movement raises complex challenges for governments and within national and international communities.

Consider, for example, Tropical Cyclone Mora, which displaced 851,000 people across Bangladesh, Myanmar and India in May and June this year. That’s more than three-quarters of a million people on top of the Rohingya crisis. In the Philippines, meanwhile, the first half of 2017 saw 563,000 people displaced by thunderstorms and flooding; at least another 350,000 had to move because of the conflict in Marawi City.

When the World Economic Forum, or WEF, released its 2017 Global Risks Report, large-scale involuntary migration was ranked second for likelihood and sixth for impact. The WEF was late to the party: between 2007 and 2015, forced migration hadn’t made either of the WEF’s “top five” lists, ranked by likelihood and impact.

By 2016, of course, the risk of large-scale forced migration was a reality. Crises the previous year in Syria, Yemen, and the Andaman Sea (where thousands were stranded after fleeing Myanmar and Bangladesh by boat) had broken decades-old displacement records, with the numbers topping sixty million for the first time since the second world war.

But what is especially telling, and somewhat misleading, is that the WEF still rates forced migration higher for likelihood than for impact. Yet four of the top five risks for impact in 2017 — extreme weather events, water crises, natural disasters, and the failure of climate-change mitigation and adaption — have impact partly because they result in forced migration.

Although the WEF has devoted much attention to freedom of movement as part of its mission to “improve the state of the world,” this has mainly been about the movement of goods and capital, not of people. The same has been true, at least until recently, of international organisations and agreements. Put simply, there is very little global governance of migration. Smaller, localised efforts deal with parts of the challenge, such as labour migration and human trafficking, but these don’t add up to an effective international arrangement. This gap contrasts with the long-established international rules for the protection of refugees, especially the 1951 Convention and its 1967 Protocol, of which the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees is guardian.

It was only last year that the International Organization for Migration finally became part of the formal machinery of the United Nations as the UN Migration Agency. At the same time, countries agreed to negotiate a global compact on safe, orderly and regular migration, alongside a global compact on refugees. They also recognised the intricate relationship between migration and the UN’s 2030 Sustainable Development Goals.

Starting with the region

These global developments are promising, but the reality is that the best prospects for progress on migration, including forced migration, are at the regional level. Here in Asia and the Pacific, we can either respond reactively, by scrambling to address each new crisis as it arises, or we can proactively build a coherent framework to provide consistent, well-formulated responses based on regional cooperation, shared responsibility and distributed capability.

Calls for a coherent regional response have been central to critiques of Australia’s tough border protection and refugee policies. The argument runs like this: if Australia devoted the same level of resources to regional cooperation that it spends on offshore processing, then we could find a way to “stop the boats” by providing asylum seekers and refugees with options that don’t involve paying thousands of dollars to people smugglers and risking dangerous journeys at sea.

That might seem utopian, but regional cooperation is the best and most decent hope we have for making progress in that direction. This is why the Centre for Policy Development joined forces with policy institutes in Indonesia, Thailand and Malaysia in 2015 to establish the Asia Dialogue on Forced Migration. The Dialogue brings together government and non-government officials from key countries in the region with one goal: creating more effective, dignified and lasting regional responses to forced migration. It seeks to foster collaboration, facilitate a deeper understanding of regional perspectives, build trust between critical influencers, and cultivate a long-term policy framework to support the movement of vulnerable people.

The Dialogue’s organising principle is that that more effective regional governance of forced migration in Asia and the Pacific is both essential and possible. After five meetings, including last month in Manila, we are seeing real signs of progress.

But building a regional cooperation framework is slow, grinding work. It means forging common ground between competing national interests; it involves working with existing institutions, like the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, or ASEAN, which have other priorities; and it requires broadening the focus of current arrangements — like the Bali Process — to improve humanitarian outcomes.

Until recently, effective responses to forced migration have not been a priority of governments in the region. Nor has collective action. International rules governing the treatment of forced migrants have had few followers in this region. Of ASEAN’s members, only Cambodia and the Philippines have ratified the Refugee Convention and the UN Conventions on Statelessness.

A notable exception to the tendency to act unilaterally was the 1989 Comprehensive Plan of Action, which enabled the resettlement of a wave of refugees from post-conflict Indochina. But the CPA, despite its strengths, is an inadequate guide for our current challenges. It worked in a different time and a very different context.

The region’s inability to learn from the past and improve collective responses was painfully (and fatally) evident in May 2015 when thousands of Rohingya and Bengalis were stranded in the Andaman Sea. Speaking in Bangkok less than a year later, Hassan Wirajuda, Indonesian foreign minister from 2001 to 2009 and co-founder of the Bali Process, conceded this wasn’t the first time regional responses had been found wanting.

“We must admit that the region then — some twenty-five years ago — was not well prepared and equipped to handle that large-scale influx of migrants following the wars in Vietnam and Cambodia,” he told an Asia Dialogue on Forced Migration meeting early in 2016. “Ironically, neither were we ready to cope with a much smaller flow of Rohingya migrants last year.”

It wasn’t just that the region wasn’t ready to cope with the 2015 Andaman Sea Crisis. The key regional institutions — ASEAN and the Bali Process — didn’t respond at all. The silence and inaction prompted Wirajuda to tell the Australian and Indonesian ministerial co-chairs to “step up or step aside.”

Glimmers of hope

But there are signs the tide is turning.

Late last year, Indonesian President Joko Widodo issued a decree to protect refugees. In March this year, ASEAN’s Convention Against Trafficking in Persons, Especially Women and Children entered into force, followed swiftly by a 2017–20 plan for its implementation.

The Sixth Ministerial Conference of the Bali Process in March 2016 established a new emergency response mechanism and authorised a review of the region’s response to the Andaman Sea crisis. Its recommendations — which included the creation of an operational task force on planning and preparedness, and a commitment to greater collaboration with ASEAN — were adopted in Sri Lanka last November.

And, in August, the first Bali Process Government and Business Forum was held in Perth, featuring ministers and business leaders from forty-five Bali Process countries. A comprehensive work plan to tackle human trafficking, forced labour and related exploitation was released.

It’s easy to dismiss these developments as too little and too late. But they are a necessary start, and they share a recognition that unilateralism and quick fixes will not do. Governments acting on their own tend to produce problems of the type we are seeing on Manus and Nauru, along with the human suffering and trauma that goes with it. Copying strategies from other regions won’t do either. So much is clear from the relative failure of the European response to the Syrian refugee crisis. Each region, especially ours, has specific needs that require tailored responses.

Achieving the necessary reforms involves patience and resolve. CPD and our partners in the region are developing ideas and creating the conditions in which reforms can be advanced within a fractious and fraught political environment. The process is never fast enough, but there are no shortcuts.

The elements of a better regional approach have long been argued for and have often advanced. Sadly, however, there are no silver bullets; no elegant regional “solutions.” Partly, this reflects the deficit of trust, information and capability between policy-makers in the region, which has created a dangerous vacuum as the number of people on the move has risen.

In the absence of regular and frank dialogue, it’s impossible to know where priorities and perspectives diverge and where common interest might be found. You can’t plan and develop capability for foreseeable or unexpected crises. There is no line of sight for what might be possible within and between countries. You are left to nut it out on the hop.

Deliberations about mass displacement are inevitably sensitive and complex. Consider, for example, the crisis in Myanmar and Bangladesh right now. A frank discussion should cover the prognosis for ongoing conflict in Rakhine State, Myanmar’s commitment to allow those displaced to return, and how those returns can occur safely. Alongside this is the further assistance required by Bangladesh authorities, international agencies, and vulnerable populations now in temporary camps. Victim identification and registration of those who have moved is essential. So too is an assessment of the risk of onward movements, including by sea, and the potential exploitation by people smuggling and human trafficking networks. Equally important is the possibility of integrating new arrivals within Bangladesh, and the availability of resettlement options for those permanently displaced. It’s no easy task given the sheer scale of movement, and is best advanced with the involvement of Myanmar and Bangladesh both at the table.

Waiting for rest of the world?

Hassan Wirajuda’s successor as Indonesian foreign minister, Marty Natalegawa, has stressed the importance of building regional consensus and not waiting for the rest of the world to step in. Speaking before the current Rohingya crisis broke out, he said the region had to break out of its 20^th century “straightjacket”. Natalegawa said change wouldn’t come “by adopting declarations, statements of intents or treaties. It requires doing things and establishing practices”.

At this stage, there is limited public information on what actions ASEAN and the Bali Process have taken, or new practices they have followed. But there is enough to suggest that this time might be different.

The ASEAN chair released a public statement on behalf of ASEAN foreign ministers. Although it was later criticised by Malaysia, and ASEAN continues to attract strong criticism for its inaction, the statement was an advance on ASEAN’s more muted approach during the Andaman Sea crisis. Individual ASEAN members, including Indonesia, have been particularly proactive. Indonesia’s foreign minister, Retno Marsudi, was the first foreign official to visit Myanmar and Bangladesh after the crisis started. Specific actions, including assistance from ASEAN’s Coordinating Centre for Humanitarian Assistance of Disaster Management, were recommended by ASEAN, and accepted by Myanmar. Aid from the Centre started to arrive in Rakhine State in mid-October. The big test for ASEAN will be at its leaders’ summit in a fortnight.

The Bali Process, which uniquely has Myanmar and Bangladesh among its core members, was advised in September to use its new authority to broker a frank discussion among interested and affected governments and institutions. Senior officials met in Jakarta in mid-October for this purpose, with representatives of Myanmar and Bangladesh participating. This is a big step forward for the region and for the Australian and Indonesian co‑chairs, given the heavy criticism of their efforts in 2015. Senior officials will gather again for an Ad Hoc Group meeting in Kuala Lumpur this week.

Patiently impatient

These are baby steps, of course, and they only relate to this crisis, which is part of the much larger global displacement that has been going on for several years. It’s a crisis certain to intensify as environmental migration becomes more pronounced, and one that can’t be solved entirely by the Bali Process or ASEAN. The hard work has barely begun.

Indonesia’s Hassan Wirajuda has said that the absence of an effective global governance system for migration means that our region will depend solely on its ability to create its own regional order. He has called for a regional institution focused on international migrants. Non-government and unofficial talks will continue to play an essential role.

In fact, regional and “mini-multilateral” arrangements are emerging as a key to the success of the global compact on migration, which is to be finalised in New York next year. Regional consultations on the compact will take place in Bangkok next week. This reality is dawning on ministers, senior officials, international organisations and civil society groups. Waiting for the rest of the world to step in and respond to migration crises takes too long, and can be counterproductive.

As part of the region with the largest number of forced migrants in the world, countries in Asia and the Pacific must take responsibility for brokering responses to forced migration. As they are beginning to acknowledge, the most predictable, effective and legitimate responses will be homegrown. ●

The post Patient policy-making for a region on the move appeared first on Inside Story.

Underscoring this trend is the 2017 World Press Freedom Index, which highlights the situations in Thailand, where the media industry is increasingly muzzled by a military government, and in Cambodia, where defamation laws have been criminalised to silence dissent.

According to Reporters Without Borders, which compiles the index, “The bad news is that media freedom is in the worst state we have ever seen.” Media freedom “has retreated wherever the authoritarian strongman model has triumphed,” says the organisation. “As we have reached the age of post-truth, propaganda, and suppression of freedoms, this 2017 World Press Freedom Index highlights the danger of a tipping point in the state of media freedom.”

Analysts also say that countries like the Philippines and Indonesia, where press freedom had taken root, have also fallen foul of press watchdogs, alongside Myanmar, where an end to more than fifty years of military rule has not resulted in an end to the persecution of journalists. “There are few, if any, press freedom bright spots in Southeast Asia these days,” says Shawn Crispin, senior Southeast Asia representative for the Committee to Protect Journalists.

Some analysts also argue that China’s rise and its sometimes brutal suppression of the media has set an example that is being embraced by its southern neighbours whether democratically elected or not.

“Hopes that the democratic transition in Myanmar would lead to more press freedom have been largely dashed as the elected government and still autonomous military use outdated laws to threaten and jail journalists,” Crispin says.

“It’s not what we expected under an Aung San Suu Kyi–led government and frankly she has been immensely disappointing considering her previous credentials as a pro-democracy icon. The jailing of journalists under Suu Kyi’s watch will leave an indelible stain on her legacy as a democratic reformer.”

He says there are rising concerns that the media curbs that Thailand’s ruling junta initially put in place to secure their coup have been fully consolidated and would be hard to remove even if the country eventually moves back towards elected governance.

“Journalists who have stuck their heads up and criticised military rule have been consistently stomped down, particularly in the broadcast media,” Crispin adds. “It’s a shame considering how far press freedom had progressed in Thailand to see it so easily and quickly reversed.”

According to Keith Loveard, a Jakarta-based analyst with Concord Consulting, reporters in the region too often face life-threatening challenges in exposing wrongdoing and abuse of power, arguably the most important roles of the journalist in any country.

Indonesia improved on the 2017 World Press Freedom Index, up six places from 2016 to 124 out of 180 countries, the best performance for a Southeast Asian country, followed by the Philippines, Myanmar, Cambodia and Thailand rounding out the top five, all far ahead of China, which is ranked a lowly 176. But the index noted growing concerns about the harassment of journalists by the security forces.

Indonesia’s Alliance of Independent Journalists recorded at least seventy-eight cases of violence against journalists in 2016, compared with forty-two in 2015 and forty in 2014.

Loveard says most of these cases go unpunished and, most of the time, are not even seriously investigated. “Despite the honourable protections offered by the Press Law, in reality reporting on Indonesia remains a potentially dangerous business. These attacks are just a part of the pressure on the freedom of the media that is often far more subtle.”

He says much of the Indonesian media is guilty of being entrapped by deeply embedded patronage systems across Southeast Asian societies. “Envelope journalism” is rife and too many reporters use their jobs for access to powerful figures and the opportunity to create side deals that are far more lucrative than their official roles.

“There remains a strong culture of immunity for the military and the police in particular and many other powerful figures assume that they are immune from investigation,” he says, “so it requires considerable nerve to probe into the darker regions of Indonesian life.”

Elsewhere in the region, communist-governed Vietnam and Laos remain journalistic backwaters. Each was classified a Black Spot by Reporters Without Borders, while Brunei has raised concerns with the institution of Sharia law. Singapore is still stymied by its inability to cope with any form of criticism, highlighted by prime minister Lee Hsien Loong’s recent threat to sue his own siblings for defamation amid a family squabble.

In Malaysia, the scandal-plagued government of prime minister Najib Razak has faced only muted criticism, benefiting enormously from a press establishment that rarely deviates from the wishes of the long-ruling United Malays National Organisation.

Long-time correspondent and former Foreign Correspondents’ Club, Hong Kong, president Karl Wilson has focused on the Philippines for decades and says corruption there is now endemic at all levels and more journalists have been killed in direct relation to their work there than anywhere apart from Iraq and Syria.

“The election of President Rodrigo Duterte and his anti-drug policy has made the job of journalists more difficult,” he says. “The outspoken former mayor of Davao does not like journalists and has made that fact clear on a number of occasions.”

Wilson says international media organisations like to say that 90 per cent of cases in which journalists have been murdered since the fall of Marcos have been solved. Still, that is hardly comforting and heavily mitigated by the 2009 Maguindanao Massacre, when fifty-eight people, almost half of them provincial journalists, were murdered, allegedly by the Ampatuan family.

“Since then there have been three presidents who have promised swift action but in the end nothing. Witnesses have been murdered and the case against the Ampatuans has hardly moved,” Wilson says. “It shows a judicial system that is in paralysis and the power of families over the political and judicial system. The whole episode has been virtually forgotten, even by us. The whole episode is a disgrace and a blight on our profession.

“It would have been a totally different story if this had happened in Australia, US or Britain. Why should our colleagues in the Philippines be any different?”

Foreign correspondents are also complaining that they are more often being subjected to the same scrutiny and pressures as local reporters. Foreign journalists have rarely been subjected to those restrictions because they have had little impact on local readers and voters, thus remaining off the radar of the authorities.

But this is changing for journalists who report in English. With its overarching influence across the internet, that language is increasingly responsible for shaping public opinion and influencing political thought.

Loveard says responsibility for dealing with these circumstances lies as much with media proprietors as it does with reporters in the field, regardless of the language and market they serve. “There are, of course, many exceptions but there is still a long way to go, not least in the area of training. What is more constraining is the domination of the media industry by powerful business interests who have zero understanding that ownership does not necessarily mean total control of editorial policies and biases.” ●

This article first appeared in the Correspondent, the magazine of the Foreign Correspondents’ Club, Hong Kong.

The post Few bright spots for press freedom in Southeast Asia appeared first on Inside Story.

The stakes were high. Some had called it the most important speech of her political career. The government had promised she would break her silence and explain to the world what was really happening in Rakhine State, from where an estimated 420,000 Muslim Rohingya have fled for the safety of Bangladesh.

In the end, though, the Nobel laureate offered neither a resounding defence of her government’s actions nor a stirring pledge to uphold the values she espoused for so long in opposition.

Essentially, she tried to occupy the safe middle ground of one of the country’s most fraught issues. She framed the conflict as just one of many challenges that Myanmar is facing. More time was needed, she said, noting that her government had not yet been in office for eighteen months.

For Aung San Suu Kyi the politician, this was a sensible line to take. The polarisation is such that she can’t please both international and domestic audiences at once. For the most part, she was forced to sacrifice her international appeal on the altar of domestic politics.

Political realities at home largely explain her handling of Rakhine. While the 19 September speech has generated negative media coverage internationally — headlines like “Aung San Suu Kyi, a Much-Changed Icon, Evades Rohingya Accusations” in the New York Times — the response here has been overwhelmingly positive.

In downtown Yangon, thousands turned out to watch the speech on a giant screen. A Burmese colleague who was behind the wheel when Aung San Suu Kyi came on the radio said that other drivers pulled over to the side of the road, apparently to listen. Millions are likely to have watched on state media, and all the major news outlets broadcast the speech on Facebook Live. In a literal way, it was a moment that stopped the nation.

This is not surprising. In the wake of 25 August attacks on police and military posts by the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army, anti-Rohingya sentiment has brought Myanmar together like no other issue in recent memory. Democracy and human rights activists, ethnic and religious minorities — even non-Rohingya Muslims — have fallen in behind the government and unequivocally backed the military’s brutal response.

This sentiment is not new. But the ferocity has intensified to frankly frightening levels. The government’s declaration of ARSA as a terrorist group has opened the floodgates. Those fleeing — women and children included — are now routinely being labelled terrorist collaborators, with government officials fanning the flames. All Rohingya are to be punished for the sins of ARSA. “If people are innocent, innocent villagers, they have no reason to flee away from their villages,” the Myanmar ambassador to the United States, Aung Lynn, told Voice of America on 14 September.

It’s not surprising, then, that the flight of the Rohingya is widely seen as the solution to a problem, rather than the creation of one.

This anger and hostility is dangerous for Aung San Suu Kyi and her National League for Democracy, and their political opponents sense it. Nine days before the speech, the military-backed Union Solidarity and Development Party, which won the 2010 election after the NLD boycotted, held a forum on the crisis. Speakers took aim at the government’s strategy, particularly its decision in August 2016 to appoint a commission led by former UN secretary-general Kofi Annan to examine the causes of the conflict and recommend solutions. That commission released its final report just hours before ARSA launched its attacks.

Despite this setback, the government has pledged to implement the report’s recommendations. But this is where the military and government diverge. While they’re in lockstep on the security response in Rakhine — to the dismay of many international observers — potential conflict looms over the long-term steps to resolve the crisis. The military and the Union Solidarity and Development Party object especially to the Annan report’s recommendation that the discriminatory 1982 Citizenship Law be brought into line with international standards. They are seeking to fashion a coalition of like-minded allies and to paint the NLD as soft on the protection of ethnic and national identity. In recent weeks, the military commander-in-chief, senior general Min Aung Hlaing, has repeatedly highlighted the importance of the citizenship law in his public speeches. At a ceremony to in northern Rakhine State on 20 September to honour the soldiers who fought off an ARSA attack on a regimental headquarters, he repeated the immigration ministry motto, “Race cannot be swallowed by the ground but only by another race.”

The real game here is the 2020 election. It’s only with the benefit of hindsight that the NLD’s landslide victory in 2015 seemed inevitable. Prior to the vote, most expected Aung San Suu Kyi would have to build some sort of a coalition with ethnic parties to secure the presidency for her party.

The problem for the NLD is that the military holds 25 per cent of seats in parliament. If its proxies can scrounge one-third of the remaining, elected seats, for 50 per cent overall, they can ensure the military’s presidential nominee gets over the line. The popular support that the NLD enjoyed two years ago was never likely to be repeated, particularly in ethnic minority areas, and there will inevitably be a drop in support. It wouldn’t take much to move the needle that bit further, and hand control to the military.

The NLD will face another potential hurdle, too: repatriation of those who have fled. Aung San Suu Kyi said her government was ready to “start the verification process at any time” based on principles agreed with Bangladesh in 1993, after a similar exodus two years earlier.

Repatriation will not be as simple as Aung San Suu Kyi suggested. Most Rohingya are stateless; providing proof of citizenship will be impossible. Yet the only effective way for the government to combat allegations of ethnic cleansing will be to accept back those who have left, allow them to return to their villages and assist them to rebuild. This will be a huge challenge — and is likely to face significant opposition.

The NLD government does not have the coercive powers that the military regime enjoyed in the mid 1990s, when it repatriated an estimated 230,000 Rohingya. Instead, they will be returning to a highly charged environment. In an indication of the present tensions, on 21 September a 300-strong mob pelted a boat carrying Red Cross aid with rocks and Molotov cocktails because they believed it was destined for Rohingya communities. The shipment was only allowed to leave after the intervention of locals monks and police, who fired into the air.

For all the realpolitik at play on Rakhine, Aung San Suu Kyi’s speech was still deeply discomfiting. Delivered in English to diplomats, it was less an explanation of events in Rakhine than a lecture on how the world had failed to grasp the complexity of both this specific crisis and the country more generally. At times the NLD leader hit the right notes, including a request for international assistance to resolve the conflict, and promises to begin repatriation and citizenship verification.

But she also made a worrying number of questionable or simply incorrect claims — that all people in Rakhine State have equal access to education and health, for example, or that the violence essentially ended on 5 September. These left many scratching their heads.

Perhaps the most bizarre moment came when Aung San Suu Kyi said, “We want to find out why this exodus is happening.” Surely the answer is self-evident: their villages are gone, burned to the ground. The government’s claim that such destruction was entirely self-inflicted — that hundreds of thousands of Rohingya have destroyed their own homes before fleeing, to tarnish the military’s image or gain international sympathy and aid — is simply implausible.

Is this just spin, or does she actually believe what she is saying?

Many have suggested Aung San Suu Kyi may be fearful of defying the military, of even suggesting a version of events that implicates Myanmar’s most powerful institution in violence targeting the Rohingya. Her tone suggested neither fear nor acquiescence, just resigned frustration and an icy coolness. There was no sense of urgency, despite the humanitarian crisis unfolding along the country’s border with Bangladesh. What seemed to be lacking most of all, though, was compassion. ●

The post Does Aung San Suu Kyi believe what she’s saying? appeared first on Inside Story.

The English-language edition of the Global Times didn’t carry this editorial, and the intended audience was clearly a domestic one. But the vocabulary is a reminder of what and whom Australia is dealing with in these globalised times. An Asialink blog post by Anthony Milner and Jennifer Fang, quoted by Needham in the same report, suggests the importance for Australia of joining with its neighbours in full acknowledgement of China’s leadership. But the Global Times, likely to be happy with Milner and Fang’s argument that Australia is out of step with the region on this issue, doesn’t make such a concession easy. Its editorial projects the image not of an established leader, but of an easily angered hegemon that hasn’t yet worked out how to make all its clients fall into line.

If they are well-read in their own history (and Xi Jinping certainly is), Chinese leaders will recognise the problem as an old one. When China’s first emperor was yet just one king among many, he granted an audience to the strategist Wei Liao. Wei flattered him, saying, “Qin’s might is such that the rulers of other states are like mere heads of a province or a district beside it.” The problem for such a strong state, Wei went on to say, was that these lesser states might join in league against it. He had a plan: “I hope Your Majesty will not be sparing of goods and money but will hand out bribes to their leading ministers so as to disrupt their schemes. By laying out no more than 300,000 in gold, you can completely undo the other feudal rulers.”

And so it came to pass. Qin followed Wei’s advice, and the surrounding states fell like flies into the trap. More than two millennia later, Beijing is following the same script. Rodrigo Duterte’s rapid transformation from a Churchill to a Chamberlain of the South China Sea is an outstanding example of how successful the strategy can be.

Most states in the region are still working out how to manage this big new power. Do they subscribe to China’s invocation of ancient historical relationships that were sundered by Western gunboats and are now, properly, being restored? Or do they stand on their dignity as modern nation-states with sovereign rights, as deserving of respect as any great power? For Australia, the question is a bit different, since it has no ancient relationship with China. Admiral Zheng did not land on these shores early in the fifteenth century, and Australians did not make their way to the capital to pay tribute any time thereafter.

Nonetheless, as is the case elsewhere, the “300,000 in gold” counts for a lot in Australia. When Milner and Fang argue that “Australia has become disconnected from its own region,” they imply that this reflects a dated attachment to the US alliance. In fact, the rise and rise of China has captured the attention of politicians, investors and educators in this country to an extraordinary degree. Influential Australian commentators here, as in Southeast Asia, have not only acknowledged China’s leadership but have been hard at work getting the rest of the country to do so as well. Bob Carr and James Laurenceson at the Australia–China Relations Institute and Hugh White at the ANU are only the most obvious advocates. Dazzled by China, Australians have lost sight of Southeast Asia in important respects. The fall-off in engagement is particularly evident in a decline of Southeast Asian expertise in our universities.

It is one thing to urge reconnection, as Milner and Fang do, and another to subscribe to an imagined regional consensus on the status of China’s leadership. Whatever Asialink knows about the attitudes of commentators in the rest of the region, it is at least clear that there is not at present a consensus on China’s leadership. Vietnam is resistant to Chinese hegemony; Indonesia is watchful; Singapore “remains a great believer in a strong US presence in the region.” Japan, which may not have entered into Milner and Fang’s analysis, seems in no present danger of being led by China. South Korea, a country that China should have been able to cultivate more effectively than has been the case, has put in place an American missile shield in face of China’s objections and threats of economic retaliation. Chinese enrolments in South Korean universities, accounting for up to half of some student bodies, have dropped precipitately in the current academic year.

China does have significant acolytes in the region, but must wish they were less flaky. The Philippines has a populist and erratic leader whose tenure is uncertain, Thailand is run by a military junta, and Malaysia’s prime minister is embroiled in ongoing financial scandal. These shortcomings in political culture at the leadership level do not mean that their cosying up to China is unimportant, or that Australia should not be engaging with the countries concerned. (In fact, this country’s current engagement with the Philippines is much in the news.) But it is open to question whether a democratic country with an anti-corruption commission and a free press should be lining up with them to pay tribute to China on the basis of regional consistency.

In an ironic historical shift, these three countries were aligned with the West during the cold war, and looked to the United States as protector, while Jakarta and Hanoi formed an “axis” with Beijing — at least until the military coup in Indonesia in 1965. Current relations are more complex. In July, Indonesia enraged China by bestowing a new name, North Natuna Sea, on the maritime zone in the northern outreaches of the Indonesia archipelago, crossing China’s sacrosanct “nine-dash line.” At the ASEAN meeting in early August, Vietnam in its turn provoked China by pressing for tougher wording in the South China Sea code of conduct.

Jakarta and Hanoi are now showing signs of wanting to strengthen bilateral ties. Two weeks ago, Nguyen Phu Trong, secretary-general of the Communist Party of Vietnam and head of the Politburo, paid a visit to Jakarta. This was the first visit from Vietnam at this level since Ho Chi Minh attended the Bandung Conference in 1955. Trong’s main presentation was delivered at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies in Jakarta, and focused on the need for unity in ASEAN and for resisting great power interference. He did not name the “great power,” but with the renaming of the North Natuna Sea still fresh in their minds, the audience would have understood it to be China.

Trong’s visit coincided with the fourth annual meeting of the International Conference on Chinese Indonesian Studies, held at the country’s top university, Universitas Indonesia, and attended by scholars from Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia, Japan, China and (in a tiny minority of two) Australia. The theme of the conference was China’s Impact on Southeast Asia and Its Diasporic Communities. Papers by Chinese presenters in the plenary sessions, including one on Sino-Indonesian relations in the 1950s and another on China and ASEAN, provoked critical and even angry responses from the floor, expressed mainly but not only by Indonesians in the audience.

A matter of particular irritation for the audience was the supposition that China should be able to build bridges with mainstream societies (notably Indonesia and Malaysia) through its contacts with the diaspora communities. Such a strategy, defended by the speaker on grounds that it was “normal” and “understandable,” was viewed from the floor as divisive, and likely to have a negative impact on the Chinese ethnic communities in Southeast Asian countries.

It is not easy being a scholar in China. In international contexts in particular, there is a strong expectation that the interests of the country (in other words of the party-state) be defended in any academic presentation. In 2014, Xi Jinping embarked on a soft-power strategy of “telling the China story well.” Since then, academics in Chinese universities have been undertaking training (“brain-washing,” in their own words) in how to tell the China story. Not surprisingly, the senior academic in the Chinese delegation at the conference segued in his presentation from history to policy, urging the importance of ASEAN unity. Needless to say, the premise for this piece of advice differs from Nguyen Phu Trong’s.

China is demonstrating an ability to divide and rule ASEAN, particularly through its relations with Malaysia and Singapore. But Beijing is used to dealing with orderly hierarchies and prefers not to be in the position of herding cats; what it would ultimately like is its own Monroe doctrine in the Asia-Pacific region. Australia is far from being the only country in the region resisting this prospect. For this among other reasons, stronger connections with its neighbours seem desirable. The mere promise of military aid in times of crisis (as currently with the Philippines) is woefully inadequate. But these is no obvious reason why closer relations should entail capitulation to an authoritarian regime in the interests of regional conformity. Diversity, too, can be a source of strength that needs recognising and protecting. •

The post Herding (paper) cats appeared first on Inside Story.

By some intangible but unmistakeable change in the air, I sensed that today was a public holiday. I briefly contemplated my ignorance and its implications: look at me, passing through foreign countries, engaging superficially, talking a cosmopolitan talk yet (evidently) utterly removed from everyday fundamentals of life.

Still, I was simultaneously struck by how much Changi Road’s collective vibe this morning — happy, languid — seeped into me, a mere visitor, by some process of neighbourhood osmosis, changing my mood. People lifted spoonfuls of coral-orange laksa to their mouths while reading newspapers. A very old man, the top buttons of his shirt undone, sat on a bench near the canal: a kingfisher flashed in front of him. Men in blue robes and white taqiyah caps and women in multicoloured hijabs talked with wide, white smiles on the mosque’s grassy lawn. I now felt a sudden urge not to hurry off to the subway and instead get some laksa, stroll the canal, chat on the grass.

The threads that link us all these days are increasingly thin, but I’ve been noticing here the way my emotions, my attitudes, even my actions are subtly connected to those of people living around me in this neighbourhood; small but meaningful encounters, often wordless, typically unspectacular, prompt me to incorporate, to assimilate, to adjust, to comprehend, building up a tentative but tangible civility between myself and disparate others who live here.

Travellers often call Singapore lifeless and antiseptic. That’s certainly true in swathes of its downtown: all bank headquarters, expo halls and enormous malls. But this neighbourhood brims with colour and life. There’s a park down the street; last night, Chinese families gathered there with firecrackers and painted paper lanterns. The canal in the evenings takes on the air of a Mediterranean promenade. International influences are palpable. Seng Kee is a Cantonese restaurant with servers from various parts of mainland China; they say xie-xie when I’m done. Recent arrivals from Bangladesh and Sri Lanka often work in curry houses. Maladies have also crossed borders to be here: posters warn of both dengue and zika.

Travellers often call Singapore boring. I find it far from boring. Here a history of war, social trauma and acute racial tension, notably race riots in the 1960s, has been overlaid by an economic growth that has achieved a preciously held stability. But community tensions and political dysfunctions have remained — indeed, are arguably growing. I find Singapore fascinating as a place to think about what the world has achieved; whether what has been achieved is enough; how much of what has been achieved is precarious, and if that might yet go into reverse.

I decided on a walk. A man and his young daughter crossed the street. The daughter carried a Cirque du Soleil carry bag that featured a cartoon of a starry night and silhouettes of magical beings; halfway across the street she broke, without warning, into an exuberant skip. A couple swam and splashed in a condo pool, pink-blossomed bushes on its sides, the water a rich aquamarine blue pockmarked with white bubbles like phosphorescence. A bespectacled Chinese man walked past wearing a John Lennon “Imagine” t-shirt.

This island endured a brutal Japanese occupation, and decades of radicalism and unrest prompted by the shadows of imperialism and communism. Someone else walked by wearing a Che Guevara t-shirt and holding a laptop carry bag. Violent insurrection reduced to garb, worn while commuting to some co-working space. Rather than boring, I find it mesmerising to observe the life of a place that is, after an extended era of turmoil, living with the space and the scope afforded by peace and prosperity.

I got my roti from a hawker centre in Little India. Bollywood music boomed from a stereo and I found myself tapping my foot to it — another small example of osmosis, another modest, barely conscious act of assimilation to my milieu and to the people I had placed myself among. I now ace the pronunciation of teh tarik, Indian milk tea, the simple consequence of hearing it said here so often. These vendors know me. I like this fact, although our conversations never get beyond pleasantries.

“How are you my friend?” He is Tamil — thick moustache, bushy hair, black sandals on brown feet.

“Pretty well, and you?”

“Yes, fine.”

Indians are treated badly in Singapore, often discriminated against. I finished my roti and paid the man. He gave me a brief nod, then we both turned our backs, and went back to our own business.

Everywhere, shopping: Little India brims with clothes, electronics, miscellaneous kitsch. So many bargains, testaments to what globalisation can do, good and ill. People exult in sixty-cent bottles of water and two-dollar adapter plugs. The costs are not so obvious. The other day a friend was passing through and I visited him in his Little India hostel. His dorm was full of single South Asian men; at 8 pm, they were all in their bunks and on their phones, the phones plugged into the wall via adapters, the room full of the sound of them chatting to faint voices in Bangalore, Tamil Nadu, Kerala. Were they talking to their families, or to business colleagues? I saw a rucksack filled with computer games. Two pairs of shoes, one black, one brown, sat under a bunk; singlets and dress shirts hung from coathangers on the bunk’s railing, forming a thin, incomplete curtain of semi-privacy. The cheap labour of this caste of lonely transients gives us our cheap goods. On leaving, I had looked back at the badly signposted hostel and saw that it was, from the street, barely noticeable.

Walking on from the hawker centre, I saw a preschool on the ground floor of a gleaming condo. Its adverts promised “mathematics,” “English,” “science” and even “Latin dance,” but also “calligraphy,” “Chinese painting” and “tea appreciation.” Tradition and modernity wrestled on the same set of posters: the excitement of a new world — one poster showed a young Chinese girl before a blackboard filled with dense chalk equations — was juxtaposed against the pull of an old, vanishing one, a nostalgia the power of which we have been consistently underestimating.

A young man strode past wearing army fatigues and enormous black boots: Singapore still has compulsory military service. He looked thoroughly blasé, though, as if the army was just another commuting destination. I caught a cab. Soon, I looked out its window and saw dozens of goods-laden ships moored off the coast. Indonesia is close by out there, in the form of small islands. I asked the driver what he thought of the recent fracas over a resort on one of those islands having been accidentally shaded the same colour as Singapore, and not Indonesia, on an internet map — an action that prompted Indonesia’s president to send the military to plant a flag on the place. “They did what?” he said. He hadn’t heard — and when I told him about it, he shrugged.

In the 1960s, Singapore frenziedly launched its economic development amid relations with its neighbours — populous, majority-Muslim Indonesia and Malaysia — that were considerably more tense. My cabbie seemed to veritably exult in the fact that he hadn’t known and didn’t care, that Indonesian army movements were no longer cause for concern. His window was down, and a warm breeze fluttered the longish grey hair on the sides of his head. He changed the subject to recipes for Hainanese chicken rice.

But how much scar tissue remains? How limited and fragile are the reconciliations that have taken place between Singapore and neighbouring countries, and among Singapore’s own ethnic groups? Fighter jets often train along the island’s east coast, making sharp turns high in the sky; the Straits Times reported the other day overwhelming majorities of Singaporeans telling pollsters they have personally encountered racism.

I arrived at the library, sat at a large communal table. Two teenage girls in hijabs procrastinated by doodling notes in Malay to each other and laughing, their Arabic textbooks unread in front of them. A young man studied law. A middle-aged Chinese woman sat with a stack of Lonely Planet guides. Here war has ended, chaos has ended, and so large numbers of people can visit a library, sit down and think: what now? The library displayed a photographic history of the city prominently on a shelf. I briefly got up and flicked through it, saw skyscrapers rising from slums, literally: it left no doubt as to the scale of achievement.

Simultaneously at the table, I saw an existence of tribe and a transcending of tribe. A woman was reading a Chinese-language newspaper and taking notes in English. A man was reading a Tamil-language newspaper, absorbed in an article about Barack and Michelle Obama. A teenager sat down next to me, opened his computer: his desktop wallpaper was this planet, seen from space. A young woman — a student teacher? — typed what looked like a lesson plan for a psychology class, which included “Give a brief account of the eugenics movement.” A small child took from a shelf a picture book on Jesse Owens.

Yet conflicts simmer. There aren’t enough power points at this library. As more people arrived, resentment built. New arrivals noted green lights indicating full charge on MacBooks, and saw no reason their owners couldn’t share power. Those who’d got here early, often specifically because of this issue, thought otherwise. A guy sat opposite me with a laptop out of juice. Seeing my plug in place, he gave me, and me alone, the closest thing to a death stare that one can perform while one is inside a public library and flanked by a bookshelf of Terry Pratchett titles. My laptop cord had an obvious white adapter, starkly confirming my foreignness. I felt him questioning my belonging, my entitlement to resources. Singapore has a large immigrant population of Westerners who take high-paying jobs, something that is increasingly resented. But I disputed his premise, and didn’t budge.

Chicken tikka for lunch, skin ochre-red and charcoal-stained but the meat white, still succulent. A passing man, Indian, visibly appraised my meal, spoke in Tamil to the vendor, then sat down; a minute later he was eating the same thing. Two Chinese people sat down and also ordered the same. Another small act of osmosis, this time other people seeing me, assimilating to and incorporating elements of my template today. I enjoyed the thought of chicken tikka’s deliciousness being a fundamental thing that swathes of the world have in common, hard evidence that people are not so different.

Then the Indian guy wanted to talk. I was Australian? What did I think of the cricket? But I don’t follow cricket. I racked my brain for something to say pertaining to cricket post–Steve Waugh, drew a total blank. I brainstormed what other topics the two of us might talk about, couldn’t think of a single one. Our dialogue stalled into silence; our thin connection snapped.

A movie I wanted to see was playing downtown. It was a documentary about a group of Singaporeans whom the Singapore government detained without trial and brutally interrogated in 1987. Somebody in the audience kept laughing. Whether it actually indicated maliciousness and lack of empathy, or whether it was a laugh to muffle a sense of sadness or anger, I didn’t know; but it discombobulated me, nonetheless. One victim, interviewed, said he once went to the toilet and even his guard had been shocked by the amount of blood — and laughter rang out jarringly. Another man described the Orwellian illogic the security police had used to establish guilt. The laughter rang out again, seemingly in total contradiction of every value I not so long ago had assumed the twenty-first century would be about.

One of the former detainees attended the screening, and when the film finished he was feted by a crowd of mostly young Singaporeans, men with glistening black hair and women in cocktail dresses and pretty shoes, everybody holding glasses of champagne or craft beer. In the scene I saw a quandary that is especially stark in affluent-but-undemocratic Singapore, but that also has a wider relevance. Here we were, surrounded by art-house-theatre chic, enjoying a deeply imperfect but almost unimaginably hard-won stability, able to eat, able to work and study, able to go to movies in the afternoons, and we were chatting, with sympathy, to somebody who had been tortured by people who went unpunished, as did their political masters.

Questions bubbled in my mind like the bubbles in the champagne. How much should we sacrifice, and when? In this steadily crystallising new age, where is the line between tolerable and intolerable?

Back to my neighbourhood. Al-Salaam was now open. I sat down, ordered a teh tarik, opened a book. It was by William Finnegan, about teaching at a “coloured” school in apartheid South Africa. I was just reflecting on it when I heard, “Sir! Sir! How are you crossing the line, sir?” I blinked. It was an old man, face deeply crevassed, wearing a striped shirt, beefy sandals and very thick black-rimmed glasses.

“Sir, your book! Your book! Crossing the line! So how do you cross the line, sir? What line do you cross?”

Then I got it. Finnegan’s book is called Crossing the Line, referring to the apartheid line.

“Oh… right.”

“A-ha ha ha!” He was all but dancing in front of me. His enthusiasm to talk and to engage was overflowing; I wondered about its source. He started to babble. “I am seventy-six, sir. I worked for sixty years! Now my daughters look after me.” He asked me my age, job, marriage status; then he said, randomly, “My first job interview, sir, they asked me, ‘Do you speak Chinese?’ Because I am Malay. Because I am Malay.” It wasn’t clear whether he’d got the job, whether he was exulting in his cross-cultural prowess or lamenting an ethnic insularity that had stalled his career. It could easily have been either.

By way of parting, he said, “Crossing the line, crossing the line. All we can hope for is peace, sir. All we can hope for is peace.”

And what line, or lines, were we about to cross? I’d taken an outside table at Al-Salaam, so I was watching the sun disappear from Changi Road. I reached for my teh tarik. I’m becoming obsessed with teh tarik. The sunset meant it was definitely beer o’clock by Anglo-Saxon Time, but Al-Salaam doesn’t have it and, in any case, I’ve actually given beer up in Singapore. Admittedly, I’ve done so partly because alcohol’s so bloody expensive in this city. But I’ve also done it because, sitting at Al-Salaam one evening, I realised I now genuinely preferred to have tea here. I’d realised the pleasure of drinking something hot rather than cold at this time of day.

I’d also realised that I simply enjoyed the atmosphere of Al-Salaam. I liked the fact that, while it’s typically filled with lively conversations, it’s never loud. Tonight, a young Indian couple spoke softly to each other. An ancient, spectacled mufti arrived and greeted the staff with a nod. I liked the fact that while food and drink here give me great pleasure — I soon ate an immaculate mutton curry — I never feel I’ve consumed to excess like I sometimes feel at Western bar-and-burger-type places. Al-Salaam’s staff and patrons I found respectful, modest, refined — by more osmosis, assimilation, incorporation, I felt myself imbibing a little of those traits by the act of immersing myself here.

Tables were now filling up. Some people were walking over from the mosque next door, after prayers; others were coming from elsewhere. Malays, Indians, Arabs and some Chinese, too, sat eating nasi goreng or curries. But I noticed, tonight, that though everybody was under the same roof, they were, without exception, sitting among their own ethnicity. I sipped my teh tarik. Two tables over, the mufti did too, slowly, to savour it, and turned the pages of his newspaper. I saw a brief flash of garish orange — the world news section, coverage of the US presidential race. Abruptly, I was conscious of my skin; abruptly, I was self-conscious about sitting here.

I vaguely wanted to say something to the mufti. But what? I didn’t know. I chose to be silent. So he and I simply sat, and gazed out at the street — in the same basic direction but inescapably separately, observing, through different eyes, a sudden, somehow unexpected twilight. •

This essay first appeared in Griffith Review 57: Perils of Populism, edited by Julianne Schultz.

The post Crossing lines in multiracial Singapore appeared first on Inside Story.

This time, Mahathir is chairing Pakatan Harapan, or Alliance of Hope, a new grouping of opposition parties that aims to oust prime minister Najib Razak, the current UMNO leader, at the next Malaysian election, due before the end of August 2018. It was Mahathir who elevated Najib into his position in 2009 — “I thought Mr Clean would be a good prime minister,” he told me — having briefly left UMNO to pressure his own successor, Abdullah Badawi, to resign.

Mahathir has resigned from UMNO before, but never to mount a project like this one. Famously confrontational, he is Malaysia’s longest-serving prime minister, in office from 1981 to 2003, during which time he attracted heavy criticism for restricting civil liberties using Malaysia’s Internal Security Act. Many of the activists he targeted in those days — people like Lim Kit Siang from the Democratic Action Party — are now alongside him in Pakatan Harapan.

Mahathir is working through his new party, the Parti Pribumi Bersatu Malaysia, or the United Malaysian Indigenous Party (the word “indigenous” being a contested term in Malaysia). If he succeeds in removing Najib, he says, he will aim to limit the damage Malaysian prime ministers can inflict. Last week, at a discussion of future directions in Malay Muslim politics organised by Parti Amanah Negara, another Pakatan ally, he announced that the opposition would seek to limit future prime ministers to two consecutive terms.

Even so, Mahathir continues to alienate long-time democracy activists like Kua Kia Soong, adviser to civil rights organisation Suaram. But the former PM’s supporters in Pakatan will have calculated that his critics will trade off those reservations against the chance of ousting Najib. Mahathir’s statements are nevertheless crafted to neutralise these activists’ criticisms as much as possible, and to calm the nerves of voters who sense that, even at ninety-two, Mahathir is still powerful enough to capture Pakatan Harapan.

Mahathir is in an awkward position for another reason. He can only afford to partially distance himself from a legacy he otherwise views with pride. Today’s Malaysian adults — including those who distrust Mahathir — witnessed their nation grow rich during the long economic boom he led with his deputy and finance minister, Anwar Ibrahim. When the two men disagreed about how to deal with the Asian financial crisis in the late 1990s, Mahathir sacked Anwar and introduced stimulus measures and currency controls.

Internal UMNO opposition to Mahathir coalesced around Anwar. Mahathir responded with the corruption and sodomy charges that led to his former deputy’s imprisonment between 1999 and 2004. Pakatan Harapan is the latest in a series of opposition alliances that formed against Mahathir in subsequent years. In 2013, Anwar led a previous iteration, Pakatan Rakyat, to a dramatic win in the popular vote (though not in numbers of seats). Fuelled by a historically high voter turnout and a backlash in Malaysia’s cities, that near-loss stripped the Barisan Nasional of much of its legitimacy.

Now Anwar is in prison again after a second round of sodomy charges. Although he can’t lead Pakatan into the next election, he is still present in its leadership line-up, resuming the old alliance between himself and Mahathir.

Najib himself is under investigation by the US justice department in the largest kleptocracy case it has ever undertaken. The case revolves around the Malaysian state development fund, 1Malaysia Development Berhad, or 1MDB, which transferred around US$1 billion (A$1.25 billion) into Najib’s personal bank accounts before the scandal broke in 2015. At the time, many commentators declared that Najib’s end was near, but they continue to wait for their prediction to come true.

Najib can still win Malaysia’s next election, even though the US justice department and the FBI have found that his stepson Riza Aziz and associate Jho Low used 1MDB funds to finance a lavish, jetsetting lifestyle. The justice department has seized assets purchased by these two men, including jewels, film rights and luxurious real estate holdings, and is holding them in trust.

The prime minister has built a cache of bureaucratic weapons to help keep himself in power, including new national security laws that give Malaysia’s security agencies unprecedented powers to search and arrest, declare special security zones, seize property, impose curfews and detain without trial. Staying in power might well help Najib avoid indictment in the United States, as “Malaysian Official #1” — a moniker assigned to him by the justice department. Riza and Low may not be so lucky: last week, former US ambassador to Malaysia John Malott warned of their imminent criminal indictment. In an open letter published on a Facebook page run by Malaysian cartoonist and government critic Zunar, Malott called Najib an international pariah.

Najib is working hard to deflect these criticisms onto Mahathir. Last week, he sought to draw back international investors who fled Malaysia after the 1MDB scandal broke. (Between 2014 and 2016, with the 1MDB scandal pointing to the entrenched corruption in Malaysia, capital outflows from the country’s equity market totalled nearly RM20 billion, or A$5.8 billion.) Speaking at the Malaysian stock exchange’s Invest Malaysia 2017 forum, Najib admitted that there had been “lapses in governance” at 1MDB, but argued that his response had been superior to Mahathir’s conduct during his own twenty-two-year rule. To add weight to this point, he announced that he would establish an Integrity and Governance Unit in all government-linked business entities, which together dominate the Malaysian economy.

Meanwhile, 1MDB has been bailed out by Chinese firms. The Malaysian ringgit has begun to recover from the scandal’s impact and the World Bank is forecasting a lift in national GDP. Najib recently delivered a new light-rail line for Kuala Lumpur and Klang Valley commuters, and has announced high-speed intercity rail projects funded by Chinese investments.

Najib is, however, patently shaken by Mahathir’s entry into opposition politics. He used the Invest Malaysia forum to urge international investors to avoid the opposition, which he described as resembling a “return-to-work program for old age political pensioners.” The number one pensioner, of course, is Mahathir, under whose leadership, Najib argued, “the Malaysian people had to pay a very high price so that a few of his friends benefited.”

For Najib, one big danger lies in Mahathir’s vast web of contacts. Even more than the rest of the opposition leadership, the former PM has high-level access in international political and business circles. Collectively, the opposition leadership has internationalised the 1MDB scandal by arguing to Malaysia’s friends and allies that they would be better off without Najib. Mahathir has been doing his share, courting the international media, travelling extensively, and granting interviews to academic researchers he would never have agreed to meet as prime minister.

As for his reception at home, he is broadly admired, whether his activist critics can stomach his popularity or not. Last weekend’s social media chatter, for example, focused on an online opinion poll conducted by liberal-leaning online media outlet Malaysiakini. The problems of selection bias and multiple voting are pronounced in polls like this one, yet Mahathir’s critics and opponents will notice the numbers: 75 per cent of those reading in Malay, and 69 per cent of those reading in English indicated that they “trust” him.

Yet Najib’s attacks on Mahathir are not limited to the corruption theme; he is also ramping up the racial and religious rhetoric. He has ferociously attacked Mahathir’s present collaboration, via Pakatan Harapan, with Malaysia’s Democratic Action Party. Najib is pointing to the DAP’s overwhelmingly ethnic Chinese membership as proof that Pakatan is a front for a Chinese takeover of Malaysia.

In contrast, Najib’s communications and multimedia minister Salleh Said Keruak asserted last week that only a government led by UMNO can protect the rights of Malaysia’s Malay Muslims — including guaranteeing the constitutional provisions that enshrine Malaysia’s monarchies and entrench Islam as the nation’s official religion. Most importantly, Salleh claimed, only UMNO can defend the “special rights” of Malay Muslims, including their access to a range of social assistance provisions.

But some of these special rights are emerging as weak points for Najib, and another scandal is affecting precisely the constituency he needs most — rural Malay Muslim voters who hold disproportionate electoral power thanks to a system marked by gerrymandering and malapportionment. This scandal is centred on FELDA, the Federal Land Development Authority, which was founded in the 1950s to address rural poverty and landlessness using market mechanisms.

Since independence in 1957, FELDA has funded the resettlement of selected rural families in smallholder plots, where they produce rubber, oil palm and other cash crops. Like so many other Malaysian government agencies, FELDA also manages corporate entities, including FELDA Global Ventures. Today, FELDA is performing poorly, with low yields and depressed commodity prices leaving many of its settlers in serious debt. They are obliged to repay to FELDA regardless, while shares in FELDA Global Ventures, which many settlers have purchased with more loans, are declining in value.

The problems don’t end there. Malaysia’s anti-corruption commission found that another FELDA company, FELDA Investment Corporation, purchased a London hotel at an inflated price. Last week, the commission raided the office of consultancy firm Deloitte Malaysia in connection with this purchase. Meanwhile, FELDA Global Ventures chair, Isa Samad, was moved on earlier this year over questionable deals of his own. Last year, Mahathir told me that “most of the electorate” might not be “able to understand what 1MDB is about,” but FELDA is a scandal they certainly can.

Importantly for both sides of politics, FELDA settlers dominate fifty-four electorates that Najib’s Barisan Nasional relies on to form government. Opposition parties have seized on the FELDA revelations, arguing that UMNO’s own corruption is precisely what is undermining settlers’ special rights. According to media reports, several people are likely to be charged over FELDA’s financial dealings in the near future.

Last week, Najib announced that nearly 100,000 FELDA settlers will soon each receive RM5000 in relief payments, an amount settlers have already denounced as insufficient to resolve their debt problems. Meanwhile, FELDA pressure groups are openly bargaining with Najib, telling him that if settlers are not delivered further assistance, then the opposition might make “inroads” in FELDA-dominated electorates.

Mahathir’s aim is to cut through Najib’s racial and religious rhetoric to convert rural voters’ own mini-1MDB scandal into votes for the opposition. Assuming he achieves this, he will be in a stronger position to persuade Malaysia’s royal, bureaucratic and military elites that they should accept the result and decline to support Najib if he tries to use his new national security laws. Should Najib use his emergency powers to avoid an election altogether, Mahathir’s role will be to emphasise Najib’s weakness.

This is why Najib’s racial and religious attacks on Mahathir are so important — they are designed to prevent this Malay Muslim constituency from even thinking of voting for Mahathir. For his part, Mahathir will aim to show that he has an answer to his charges.

Since the 2013 election, Najib has been courting Islamist party PAS with suggestions that he might agree to introduce draconian hudud penalties for Malay Muslims. The representation of his allied Chinese and Indian parties in the Barisan Nasional, meanwhile, has almost been wiped out by non-Muslim voters’ flight to the opposition.

Mahathir, on the other hand, is now running a multiracial coalition that nevertheless purports to protect Malay Muslim rights — which sounds very much like the Barisan Nasional in the days when Mahathir and Anwar were running it. Their alliance was also characterised by a strong Islamisation of public life that nevertheless gave no quarter to PAS’s desire for hudud. Many Malaysians’ nostalgia for that period has grown only more palpable since Najib and PAS began to publicly float the idea collaborating more closely to further Islamise Malaysia’s legal system.

The opposition is also subtly signalling an economic transition that will free FELDA settlers and other rural Malaysians from the unsustainable lifestyles that lock them into voting for Najib and the Barisan. Its youth wing is promising to create a million new jobs, build more affordable housing, raise the minimum wage and get rid of foreign workers — a formula designed to signal its willingness to end Barisan’s symbiotic relationship with rural dependency once and for all.

As Mahathir told me last year, “I have always said that in this country there must be a kongsi — a sharing — between the Malays, the Chinese and the Indians. That is the only way.” If there’s one thing Malaysians of all ethnic and religious backgrounds can build a kongsi around, it’s their distaste for foreign workers, many of whom come from Bangladesh, Burma, Indonesia and Nepal.

Mahathir’s formula is not guaranteed to work. But reports indicate that thousands of people, most of them aged thirty-five or younger, are turning up at his new party’s meetings. Despite his age, he seems not to have lost his capacity to speak to Malaysians, no matter how much frustration this might cause his critics. ●

The post Dr Mahathir’s formula appeared first on Inside Story.

The current government was formed in extraordinary circumstances in early 2015, when former independence movement leader and prime minister Xanana Gusmão handed the prime ministership to an opposition Fretilin figure, Rui Araújo. Best seen as a power-sharing executive rather than a formal government of national unity, this de facto “grand coalition” between Timor-Leste’s two largest parties – the National Congress for Timorese Reconstruction, or CNRT, and Fretilin – was a remarkable development. As recently as 2012, bitter tensions had existed between the two parties.

Power-sharing executives are not uncommon in the Pacific region, and generally award ministries to any parties winning a significant number of seats. They tend to facilitate political stability, but they can also reduce the accountability of government to parliament by incorporating all significant parties into the executive government. The fact that the smaller Partido Democrático, or PD, kept its ministries when its formal alliance with CNRT ended in 2015 suggests that this is an emerging informal feature of the East Timorese political system. Its dynamics are likely to influence the result of this month’s election.

Members will be elected under Timor-Leste’s proportional system, with voters selecting a party rather than individual candidates. Each party registers a list of sixty-five candidates in order of election, giving party leaders substantial power over candidates anxious to appear high on the list. But the system also allows for progressive features, like the requirement that every third candidate be a woman, which has given Timor-Leste one of the highest percentages of female MPs in Asia, at 38 per cent.

The system isn’t strictly proportional. To get any of its candidates into parliament, a party needs at least 4 per cent of the vote, up from 3 per cent in 2012, which effectively awards a bonus to parties that clear the hurdle. The 4 per cent might be a substantial barrier, but the large number of parties participating in the election attests to the relative ease of party registration and political participation. This feature reflects Timor-Leste’s relatively open society and pluralist culture, which saw it ranked as the most democratic country in Southeast Asia in the Economist’s 2016 Democracy Index.

The March election to the presidency of Fretilin’s Francisco “Lú-Olo” Guterres appeared to solidify the de facto accord between the major parties, with Gusmão’s endorsement helping Guterres draw some 60 per cent of the national vote. The figure suggests that voters like the power-sharing arrangement between CNRT and Fretilin, which could continue beyond this election, though not necessarily in the same form.

Seeking to challenge the major parties, immediate past president Taur Matan Ruak and his new Partidu Libertasaun Popular (Popular Liberation Party, or PLP) have focused on basic health and education spending rather than the megaproject-led development favoured by the government. The PLP vocally opposes the unpopular life pensions for politicians, and has also raised allegations of patrimonialism and the growth of “money politics” in awarding government contracts.

While these issues have the clear potential to resonate in the electorate, the present government’s success in maintaining political stability and reducing political conflict within Timor-Leste’s political elite remains a major electoral asset. In a country with a long history of conflict and memories of the 2006–07 political crisis, this factor alone undoubtedly means that CNRT and Fretilin will remain highly competitive. Irrespective of which major party comes first, their ability to coexist will remain central to political stability in Timor-Leste.

Nevertheless, the PLP and other smaller parties will take encouragement from recent polls suggesting that far fewer people are happy with the direction of the country than three years ago, including just 50 per cent of those under twenty-five, down from 80 per cent in 2014. While anti-corruption campaigns have rarely swayed votes in the way spending programs can, alternative development visions focused on basic development indicators may resonate in communities where infrastructure spending programs have provided few benefits to date.

The parties’ electoral campaigns have played to their respective strengths. Xanana Gusmão’s personal legitimacy and popularity as the former resistance commander remains the cornerstone of the CNRT’s appeal. Though the party also includes extremely competent and senior ministers, including minister of state Agio Pereira, the CNRT has been criticised for being little more than a political vehicle for Gusmão and entirely reliant on his charismatic legitimacy – a perception reinforced when a new PM was not chosen from within the party, and again when the party decided not to field a presidential candidate.

In fact, posters featuring the wider CNRT team of ministers were dropped in the early weeks of the parliamentary campaign in favour of images of Gusmão alone. The current party slogan, “Vote for our future,” suggests continuity with earlier CNRT campaigns focused on rapid modernisation through government-led infrastructure spending, in line with Gusmão’s Strategic Development Plan.

For its part, Fretilin’s parliamentary campaign seems the most modern and professional, reflecting its status as the most disciplined and well-established of the East Timorese parties. With the slogan “For a more developed Timor-Leste,” Fretilin’s campaign materials promise improved outcomes in education and health using images of East Timorese making a “plus” sign with crossed fingers. Because resistance credentials remain central to political fortunes in Timor-Leste, the loss of the party’s most senior Falintil veteran, Lú-Olo, who can’t campaign actively as president, has been notable.

Fretilin’s social media campaign has been at pains to counter suggestions that the current government represents a coalition with CNRT, reiterating their view that prime minister Araújo and other ministers participate in the current government as individuals. The party says that it remains committed to working with Gusmão after the election in the interests of stability, but that formalised cooperation with the CNRT more broadly is a different proposition. It is by no means clear that Fretilin would again accept ministries if it finished in second place, though it acknowledges that tough decisions may need to be made in the interests of national stability.

For the PLP, the focus on Taur Matan Ruak as leader draws on two sources of symbolic strength: his legacy as the final commander of Falintil during the resistance era, and his more immediate presidential legacy as the closest thing to a national opposition leader from 2015. Ruak attacked the government in parliament over accountability issues in early 2016, and vetoed the initial version of its budget; his relationship with Gusmão has yet to recover from this episode.

Supported by a host of younger Western-educated East Timorese from Dili’s intelligentsia, the PLP campaign represents a transitional point between an older mode of resistance legitimacy and generational change. Campaign rallies have focused on opposing discrimination, criticising the vast expenditure on “megaprojects,” and urging the greater focus on basic health, education and agriculture spending frequently recommended by Dili’s civil society organisations. Reflecting its position at twelfth place on the national ballot, the PLP has talked of using “Vitamin 12” to combat corruption. More controversially, it backs obligatory military service, though it argues this is best seen as a nation-building program of public works projects and employment creation.

Unlike the large setpiece rallies of CNRT and Fretilin, which see supporters (known as “militants”) trucked in from elsewhere in the district, the PLP has focused on smaller rallies at the posto, or subdistrict, level. The smaller scale reflects its smaller budget, and the idea that it is running a grassroots campaign. At rallies, the party points out that millions have been spent on the south-coast Tasi Mane petroleum project while the locals still have poor educational and health outcomes, and that – despite the brand new south-coast highway – the more important road from the southern town of Suai to Dili remains poor. The PLP also campaigns against the new “unelected leaders” of the exclave of Oecusse – a clear dig at Fretilin’s leadership of the Special Social Market Economy Zone project in the Oecusse district, known as ZEESM.

Ruak has been joined onstage at rallies by some important characters, including well-known Falintil veteran “L4” and one of Fretilin’s early leaders, Abílio Araújo, who was later expelled from the party. PLP sources privately estimate winning between ten and twenty seats, though local political commentators assess the likely range more modestly at between five and fifteen. Either way, these low and high estimates have very different implications. At the low end, the PLP would at least represent a welcome reinvigoration of parliamentary opposition. At the upper end, it would become a potential coalition partner.

Many have written off the PD, the CNRT’s former alliance partner, but what little polling exists in Timor suggests its support is alive and well – if somewhat diminished by the untimely death of leader Fernando “Lasama” De Araújo in 2015, and by the rise of the PLP, which draws on some of the same clandestine youth resistance networks and associated imagery. The PD’s profile was boosted by the surprisingly sound performance of António da Conceição in the presidential campaign in March, in which he received the backing of the PLP. By contrast, the fourth party in the current parliament, Frente Mudansa, appears to be in considerable trouble after one of its key figures, Jorge Teme from the exclave of Oecusse, threw his lot in with the PLP.

With an outright majority for any one party unlikely, and in the absence of reliable polling, local commentators have been looking for reasons why the major-party vote shares from 2012 (CNRT 36 per cent, Fretilin 30 per cent) might change in 2017. Some point to growing popular dissatisfaction with the direction of the country, arguing that it opens space for the PLP to gain seats. But it is also possible that new entrants like the PLP will take votes from smaller parties, which together received 20 per cent in 2012, and were excluded by the hurdle requirements. Others argue that the political value of stability will prevail, and that there is a real chance of a “business as usual” result. Reinforcing this sense, the election campaign has been very sedate, and even dull, with the most interesting question being how well the PLP can perform.

For Fretilin, positive comments by José Ramos-Horta about the role of Mari Alkatiri and Lú-Olo in stabilising East Timorese democracy in recent years have been welcomed by the party and highlighted in social media. More recently, Ramos-Horta has made the same comments about Gusmão, and has also encouraged Ruak to reconcile with him. At the district level, the impact of Fretilin’s stewardship of the ZEESM project will be interesting to watch in Oecusse, as will the CNRT vote in the district of Covalima, where the massive Tasi Mane project is closely associated with Gusmão’s party.

It is too early to say whether the “build it and they will come” approach to attracting private investment has been successful. Certainly, the rapid development of new infrastructure has resulted in some high-quality bridges and roads, but it has also created resentment and displacement in local communities governed by older customary land use practices. These two district votes will therefore offer an interesting mini-analysis of the local reception of ambitious development plans.

Overall, the key question for 22 July is whether the CNRT and Fretilin can withstand the challenge from the former president’s PLP, and what sort of reconstituted cross-party government would follow. While the March presidential poll suggested a welcome reinvigoration of parliamentary opposition, it also raised the real possibility of a “business as usual” outcome in the parliamentary elections, at least in terms of seats. The nature of any arrangement between the major parties may, however, change considerably. Meanwhile, the PLP and other parties have had another four months to campaign widely and expand their national vote. Sources inside the PLP expect to do well in Ruak’s home district of Baucau, where the personal vote is strong, in the populous Western town of Maliana, and in Oecusse.

With a new Fretilin president already installed, a key question will be the identity of a new prime minister in the event that CNRT and Fretilin return to some form of power-sharing arrangement. While it seems likely that a new PM would come from CNRT, no one in Dili seems sure who this might be. Obvious candidates include Agio Pereira and state administration and justice minister Dionísio Babo-Soares. Certainly, it seems clear that Gusmão himself no longer desires the role, happy to direct the government from the Ministry of Planning and Strategic Development.

For its part – assuming it is unable to form government – the PLP will need to decide if it will accept ministries if they are on offer, and thus effectively join a power-sharing executive. Or will it act as an unfettered parliamentary opposition? The poor relations between Gusmão and Ruak suggest that ministries are not likely to be on offer immediately, though this might be somewhat more likely in the event that the biggest party is Fretilin, where relations are more cordial. Either way, given the capacity of the East Timorese leadership to “hug it out” over apparently insoluble grievances, this issue may confront the PLP sometime in the life of the next government.

For East Timorese society in general, the 2017 elections represent an important transitional moment, with a full fifth of the electoral roll voting for the first time. These new voters don’t remember the Indonesian era, nor necessarily the political crisis of 2006–07. The election has also seen the welcome rise of domestic political commentary for an international audience, written by an increasingly confident and well-informed East Timorese commentariat.

Despite these shifts, a generational transition of power from the “1975 generation” of leaders seems further away than five years ago. The last two years have seen a stronger reassertion from the older generation of leaders, including Gusmão and Alkatiri, of the need for patience among younger political leaders – a notable change in tone from the “transitional” rhetoric of 2012. The promised transition to younger leaders at the Fretilin party congress didn’t occur, and Gusmão himself has remained firmly in control despite moving from centre stage. While the key roles of prime minister and chief justice are indeed filled by the younger generation, as the major parties point out, the 1975 generation remains the key power-holder behind the scenes.

For Australia, there appears to be little prospect of a change in direction in the foreign policy positions that unite the major East Timorese parties, including the determination to demarcate maritime boundaries between the neighbouring states. Both parties to the current Timor Sea conciliation process in The Hague privately report substantial progress in recent negotiations, though numerous difficult issues remain to be addressed. On balance, the likelihood that Canberra will face a substantially different government in Dili after 22 July seems low. •

The post In Timor-Leste, the election campaign enters its final week appeared first on Inside Story.

The global asbestos industry’s stratagem to conceal the reality of Siti’s situation – and obscure the fact that asbestos causes disease – was on show as the meeting in Geneva unfolded. Once a hazardous material is listed under the Rotterdam Convention, a member country must grant formal consent before the material is imported into its territory. Listing asbestos would be a small but significant step in reducing the harm it causes, but would stop well short of bringing the deadly global industry to a halt. And yet a small rump of countries succeeded in resisting even this moderate measure.

Exploiting the fact that unanimity is required for changes under the convention, three asbestos-mining countries – Russia, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan – stubbornly held out. As if to emphasise the nature of their opposition, they were joined this year by the government of Syria. It is hard to find any reasonable basis for their stance. Attempts to foster doubt about whether chrysotile, or white asbestos, is as dangerous as other types were dealt with categorically by a World Health Organization expert, who testified that “all forms of asbestos, including chrysotile, are carcinogenic to humans, and cause mesothelioma and cancer of the lung, larynx and ovary. The evidence that chrysotile is carcinogenic is conclusive and overwhelming, and it has continued to strengthen over time.” Even an effort by a group of African countries to remove the asbestos-mining countries’ veto over the listing process was deferred until the next biennial conference of parties.

“Failure to list chrysotile asbestos on Annex III once again is an absolute disgrace,” said Andrew Dettmer, national president of the Australian Manufacturing Workers’ Union and an NGO delegate at the Geneva conference. His emotional response was surely apt in the circumstances. “While they dither, hundreds of thousands of people will die from asbestos-related diseases.” And yet, as correct as Dettmer is, the outcome in Geneva didn’t occur in isolation. It reflects the fact that the extraction, manufacture and consumption of asbestos continues to be commonplace throughout the Global South.

I met Siti Kristina not far from the asbestos textile factory in southern Jakarta where she worked for more than two decades. Production of asbestos-containing products occurs on a massive scale in Indonesia. Each year, the country imports over 100,000 tons of raw asbestos from mines in Russia, Brazil and China, without placing so much as a tariff in the way. Factories dotted throughout Java and Sumatra use the carcinogenic fibres in wall and ceiling boards, insulation, rope, gaskets, brakes and clutches. But mostly, Indonesia uses asbestos in cement roofing.

As her grandson climbed over her and we ate fried rice, Bu Siti described her job. Her employer, Jeil Fajar, had moved from Japan to South Korea in the eighties in pursuit of lower wages and lighter regulation; in the nineties it left Korea for China and Indonesia, where Bu Siti joined the company in 1991. In the factory, sacks of raw asbestos would be mixed with polyester to create asbestos thread, which was twisted and woven into cloth for industrial insulation. At each stage of the process, deadly asbestos fibres permeated the room, and found their way into each breath of air Siti and her co-workers inhaled.

After a decade working in the Jeil Fajar factory, Siti started to experience the dry, heavy coughing fits known so well by asbestos victims. Usually these episodes would last around a week. Medication prescribed by doctors sometimes helped her recover temporarily but a few days later the coughing would start again. Siti told me how she experienced a bout of dry coughing that endured for more than a month. She lost her appetite entirely and her weight dropped dramatically.

In 2008, a joint research team from Japan, South Korea and Indonesia came to the Jeil Fajar factory to conduct medical examinations on the workers. Siti – disconcerted by her deteriorating health – volunteered to take part. When the result of the CT scan eventually came back, she discovered she had been diagnosed with early onset asbestosis. Asbestosis results from fibres inserting themselves into the lining of the lungs, causing inflammation and scarring that retards our capacity to breathe. Sufferers of asbestosis are at increased risk of developing multiple forms of cancer. 

The local doctors – who happened to be associated with Jeil Fajar – disagreed. They told her she was just experiencing minor irregularities, gave her pills and sent her away. She was suffering from asbestosis according to doctors in Japan and Korea, but not according to her local medics. Dr Anna Suraya is the head of the Scientific Development Unit of the Occupational Doctors Association of Indonesia. “Mostly doctors here, if they see a lung problem, their focus is on tuberculosis,” she told me. “The first thing they look for is tuberculosis.” The resulting tendency, in Suraya’s view, is for doctors to wonder why cases of tuberculosis have an unusual appearance in scans and turn out to be drug-resistant, when in fact they’re dealing with asbestosis. 

Reorientation needed: Anna Suraya from the Occupational Doctors Association. Tom Greenwell

This is the nub of the problem. Officially, Indonesia has never had a case of asbestos-related disease. Accordingly, there has been no successful claim for workers’ compensation that acknowledges the link between asbestos-related disease and occupational exposure to asbestos.

Wira Ginting heads up an NGO, the Local Initiative for Occupational Health and Safety Network, or LION, that supports asbestos workers and victims in Indonesia. LION is part of a network of organisations campaigning for a ban on asbestos in Indonesia, and supported Siti Kristina’s travel to Geneva. For Ginting and his colleagues, Indonesia’s relationship to asbestos is a bit like the addict’s to his habit: the problem needs to be acknowledged before it can be solved. Ginting told me that the absence of any diagnosis of asbestos-related disease in Indonesia is “the gap” in dealing with the problem. “There is huge, massive consumption of asbestos,” he says. “But on the ground, there is no case of asbestos-related disease. For some people, it provides proof in support of the asbestos lobby’s position.” Asbestos is strong, flexible, heat-resistant and, above all, cheap. Why tighten regulation – let alone consider a ban – if nobody is getting sick? 

Ginting took me to meet Subono in Karawang, seventy kilometres east of Jakarta, where the factories making everything from semiconductors to sanitary items meet the rice paddies of subsistence agriculture. Subono worked with asbestos for fifteen years before he found out it could kill him. At a factory that made fibro roof sheets, he operated a machine that ground scrap material into powder, pumping out plumes of dust containing long, curly asbestos fibres. With little in the way of protective equipment and no ventilation, he was constantly exposed. Even on breaks, he would join other workers in a room near the factory floor, where they ate, drank coffee and napped as asbestos fibres floated through the air. He would take his uniform home to wash it, carrying the poisonous particles with him. 

That factory is owned by a company called Siam-Indo. The Siam half of the operation, back in Thailand, has already replaced asbestos with substitute materials. They might be more expensive, but only very marginally, and certainly less than the value of a human life. It’s hard to argue with Subono when he says, “It’s a double standard for the company. Why do they stop using asbestos in their home country but not here? It’s clear it’s possible.”Like Siti Kristina, Subono started experiencing acute coughing fits after years of working with asbestos. It was the same kind of cough, one that never really went away. When he lay down to sleep, he experienced tightness around his chest. And then his skin started to itch intensely. Subono told me that many of his friends experienced similar problems. But they lacked access to a medical explanation that connected their symptoms with asbestos.

Double standard: former asbestos worker Subono (right) with colleagues at the manufacturing union SERBUK. Tom Greenwell

Subono first learnt about asbestos-related disease when LION extended its work into Karawang in 2013. At a meeting organised for workers in his factory, it was explained that the hazard from asbestos occurs when the fibres are dispersed into the air and breathed in. They stick in the lining of the lung, and our bodies are unable to remove them. Sustained exposure to intense concentrations of asbestos dust places a person at acute risk. For Subono, who had been handling, drilling and grinding the material his whole working life, his symptoms suddenly made sense – and his blood began to boil. When he first confronted his manager, he was given the standard industry lines about how asbestos can be used safely. Then he was told that “chicken shit” isn’t pleasant either; that’s why chicken farmers don’t hold it up to their nose. In a follow-up to LION’s information seminar, Subono undertook a medical assessment. He was diagnosed with lung abnormalities.

Then his sister-in-law, who lived close to the factory like many residents of Karawang, died of lung disease. Reeling from the death and his own diagnosis, Subono felt distressed every time he walked through the factory gates. One day he pointed out all the asbestos dust lying around to his manager. The retort came back that there was nothing to worry about. Furious, Subono swept up fistfuls of the stuff from the floor and shook them in his boss’s face, demanding to know if he really believed it was harmless. As his boss backed away, Subono saw clearly that the manager knew the dangers Subono and his co-workers were being exposed to.

Not long after, Subono resigned.

Over coffee in the two-century-old Bogor botanical gardens, Wira Ginting stepped me through the strategy to establish, in official terms, that Indonesians are suffering from asbestosis, mesothelioma and lung cancer as a direct consequence of the country’s asbestos industry. As we talked, president Joko Widodo’s convoy left the adjacent presidential palace and passed by. It was election day in Jakarta and Ahok, Widodo’s successor as governor of Jakarta, would lose a contest mired in religious and ethnic tension.

Ginting described to me how LION had organised an independent medical examination of twenty workers in asbestos factories in 2015. “This time,” he said, “Indonesian doctors were the ones who did the diagnosis.” Anna Suraya, the occupational diseases specialist, supervised the project, ensuring that the doctors and hospitals involved would place the study’s results beyond question. Nine of the twenty workers tested were found to have asbestos-related disease.

The next step was to submit a workers’ compensation claim to the state social security agency, BPJS Employment. Ginting explains that “the BPJS decision will determine their position on asbestos-related disease. If they grant compensation, whatever the value actually, it will recognise asbestos-related disease and then it will become the responsibility of the workers’ compensation system to cover victims.” Its value as a test case is not just the precedent for other workers’ compensation claims. A successful claim would constitute an official recognition of the danger of asbestos, which would in turn form the basis for pushing for comprehensive and vigorously enforced regulation – and, ultimately, a ban. Prior to the state social security agency’s assessment of the compensation claim, it had to be endorsed by the Ministry of Manpower. That endorsement was granted in March.

In 2014, Subono left the factory where he had worked his whole life. At first, he tried his hand selling birds in Jakarta. But he was soon lured back to Karawang to work for SERBUK, the local union representing workers in the manufacturing sector, including his old comrades at the Siam-Indo factory. He told me about the improvements the union has won: warning signs, quarantined areas and a rest room outside the factory proper. The company provides proper masks, although only for workers in high-risk areas. It says it’s too expensive to provide masks for all employees.

Before I Ieft Karawang, Subono showed me a photo of himself and seven friends from the factory in 1999. They are on a holiday and the photo is taken in front of a waterfall. Subono would have been eighteen at the time. A guitar sits in his lap. He points to three men in the photo, standing behind him. Like him, they have been diagnosed with lung disease. Then he gestures to the man sitting beside him. He died last year. 

Siti Kristina ended up losing her job at Jeil Fajar. As an export-oriented company, its asbestos products increasingly fell out of favour and Siti and her friends were laid off. She opened a small store selling fried snacks but now faces the medical legacy of working with asbestos, combined with a lower income. Yet she continues to speak out about what she and others are going through. As she told the delegates in Geneva, “In Indonesia, many people still do not know about the dangers of asbestos. There are many of my friends that do not have the opportunity to participate in a medical examination. It is very possible that they have asbestos-related disease too.”

After I left Jakarta, Anna Suraya emailed me. News had come through that BJPS Employment had approved the workers’ compensation claim that followed from the 2015 study. It is a huge breakthrough, an official recognition of the reality of asbestos-related disease. It will be difficult to disown and will likely lead to a further reckoning with the true costs of asbestos in Indonesia. I sent a message to Wira Ginting, who has been working towards this moment for years. His matter-of-fact reply reflects his sober determination, a resolve at least equal to those who succeeded in blocking progress in Geneva: “Yup, one step at a time.” •

The post Battling asbestos, one step at a time appeared first on Inside Story.

While it’s not unusual for members of ethnic and religious minorities to win local elections in Indonesia, Ahok’s campaign is testing the limits of Indonesian tolerance. He is a member of the ethnic Chinese community, a group that has been subject to a long history of formal and informal discrimination. And he is also a Christian in a city that is 85 per cent Muslim, and it is in this respect that he is most vulnerable.

Islamist activists and grassroots preachers campaigned against Ahok by appealing to a Qur’anic verse that, they say, prohibits rule by non-believers over the faithful. In response, Ahok told an audience last September that voters were being “fooled” using the verse. His comments were recorded and quickly went viral online. His opponents accused him of insulting the Qur’an, and massive street protests followed. Islamist organisations like the Islamic Defenders Front showed that they have phenomenal mobilising power.

The protests and associated outcry placed enormous pressure on the national government, and Ahok was charged with blasphemy. His trial is continuing. Predictably, his approval rating plunged. Although he eked out a first-round victory in February, he has consistently lagged in the polls leading to this week’s second round. This is despite the fact that – having taken over as Jakarta’s governor when Joko Widodo, his then superior, was elected as Indonesia’s president in 2014 – he was previously favoured to win. He is widely admired in Jakarta for various government policies, especially improvements in healthcare, education, transportation, infrastructure and welfare programs. He is also admired for his tongue-lashing of bureaucrats and legislators he accuses of corruption or incompetence.

Yet numerous surveys have shown that religious solidarity is trumping government performance in this election. A poll conducted last month found that 66 per cent of respondents were satisfied or very satisfied with Ahok’s performance as governor. Yet only 41 per cent said they would vote for him, with 49 per cent favouring his opponent. For 21.6 per cent of respondents, religion was the main factor determining their choice of candidate, whereas only 16.3 per cent cited a record of achievement. The obvious conclusion is that a significant proportion of the city’s Muslim voters, despite being satisfied with the work of their governor, will not vote for him for religious reasons.

When Indonesian electoral candidates make ethnic or religious appeals, they mostly adopt a benign approach: they emphasise their membership of a particular ethnic or religious group without denigrating others. By contrast, the campaign against Ahok has been relentlessly negative.

At the grassroots, a legion of preachers and activists have striven to convince Muslim voters not only that Ahok insulted their religion, but also that it is forbidden to vote for a kafir – an unbeliever. Friday sermons at the city’s mosques have become important campaign arenas. Fevered rumours about floods of Chinese nationals illegally planning to vote for Ahok have swept through social media, fanned by Anies Baswedan’s backers. There has been a resurgence of racist denigration of ethnic Chinese of a sort not seen for years.

Though Anies – a Muslim intellectual who previously had cultivated a reputation as a pluralist – has not personally engaged in crude attacks on Ahok, he has instead run a dog-whistle campaign signalling his Muslim credentials and reaching out to extremist groups like the Islamic Defenders Front. An army of proxies is mobilising religious and ethnic opinion against Ahok on his behalf.

This tide of ethnic and religious mobilisation will likely push Ahok from power. The unanswered question is the extent to which the election represents a marker of broader social and political transformation. On the one hand, the election is an unusual test case for Indonesian pluralism, given Ahok’s double-minority status and the blasphemy case’s contribution to his vulnerability. On the other hand, observers have long noted growing pietism in Indonesia’s Muslim population as well as increasing assertiveness in those espousing intolerant religious ideas.

Jakarta sets the pace for national politics, and politicians may see this election as a toolkit that can be used in other contests, including the 2019 presidential race. If ethnic and religious sectarian politics push Ahok’s opponent over the line, it would bode poorly for the future of Indonesia’s pluralistic democracy. •

The post Testing Indonesia’s tolerance appeared first on Inside Story.

The reports are reminiscent of an era when the military government used the state media to burnish its nation-building credentials. Few were convinced then and few are likely to be convinced now. In fact, reading the state-run papers it’s hard not to conclude the opposite of the intended message: that little has changed over the twelve months since the NLD was sworn in on 30 March 2016.

There’s a growing consensus that the new government has failed to deliver on the promise of change that swept it to power in a landslide. Expectations were impossibly high in the aftermath of its election victory, of course, but even those who recognised the challenges faced by the fledgling government have been disappointed.

To some extent, the blame rests with forces beyond the government’s control. Its honeymoon period lasted barely six months – until the early hours of 9 October, to be precise. Shortly after midnight, hundreds of Rohingya Muslim insurgents armed with sticks and swords staged surprise attacks on border outposts in northern Rakhine State, killing nine police officers and seizing a cache of weapons.

The worst fear of many – that decades of oppression and hopelessness would foment an insurgent movement – had come to pass. In an instant, the incremental progress that the NLD was making in Rakhine State had been undone. The military was sent in on “clearance operations,” reports of horrific abuses followed, and more than 70,000 Rohingya fled over the border into Bangladesh.

But more was to come. In the following months, a coalition of armed ethnic groups launched surprise attacks on military positions in northern Shan State. The government briefly lost control of a town on the Chinese border, with more than 100 people thought to have been killed.

In late January, a key legal adviser to the NLD, Ko Ni, was shot at point-blank range at Yangon International Airport. The military-controlled police force soon arrested four suspects, including several former officers from the Tatmadaw – the Myanmar military – whom they accused of having been motivated by a personal grudge against the Muslim adviser. But many suspect that the military – or at least more senior officials – were involved, and that Ko Ni died because of his renewed push to amend the country’s constitution. We will almost certainly never know the truth.

With the killing of Ko Ni, Myanmar’s transition lost whatever remained of its innocence. Those behind the attack had sent a powerful message: politics remains a dangerous game in Myanmar, and proximity to Aung San Suu Kyi doesn’t guarantee anybody’s safety.

Internationally, Myanmar is seen increasingly through the prism of the tragic events in northern Rakhine State, where the Tatmadaw has been accused of serious human rights abuses against the Muslim population. Because the military operates autonomously under Myanmar’s constitution, the government has little ability to influence or respond to recent events in northern Rakhine State.

More concerning is the government’s performance in those areas it does have control over: managing the economy, improving service delivery, leading the peace process, reforming the civil service and fighting corruption. Clear policies or initiatives have been rare, and many of the main achievements – such as the introduction of a new investment law – were the continuation of processes started by the former government.

Some close to the government insist that concrete policies are being formulated behind the scenes and will bring results in time. Most of the relatively straightforward reforms, low-hanging fruit like releasing political prisoners or floating the currency, were picked off early by the previous government. Those that are left – the big structural reforms, like increasing tax revenue or healing ethnic tensions – will take years, if not decades.

But the criticism of the NLD is less about the lack of results than about its approach to governing, including poor communication, centralised and authoritarian decision-making, and a lack of proper prioritisation of reforms. These are common complaints among the elites in Yangon and the capital, Naypyitaw – the diplomats, civil society leaders, politicians, law-makers, journalists, advisers, consultants and analysts.

Take a recent example. In early March, the government announced plans to reduce the annual water festival holiday, held in mid April, from ten to five days, because the length of the break was damaging to the economy. Unsurprisingly, this snap decision prompted much public anger, and the government began issuing confused statements that suggested it was rethinking the plan. It is sticking by the five-day schedule – at least for now – despite some sizeable protests from workers in industrial zones.

Quite why the NLD felt that now was a good time to pursue such an unpopular and largely unnecessary change is unclear. But incoherent decisions like this – and there have been several of late – are undermining trust and confidence in the NLD administration. There is also a fear that Aung San Suu Kyi is squandering her political capital.

Aung San Suu Kyi bears a significant amount of responsibility for the government’s failings. As state counsellor ­– a position created by Ko Ni to work around her ineligibility for the presidency – all power is essentially concentrated in her office, slowing down decision-making on even the most mundane matters.

The poor communication stems largely from Aung San Suu Kyi’s personal aversion to the media and journalists. Since her election victory, she has held only a handful of press conferences inside Myanmar, typically alongside visiting dignitaries. She appears an isolated figure, cut off from much of the country and surrounded by a small cabal of trusted advisers.

Perhaps the best that can be said is that the country has not imploded. The government has a workable, if sometimes strained, relationship with the military. It has maintained fiscal stability amid some powerful economic headwinds. Its cautious budget for the 2017–18 financial year, which begins 1 April, has at least kept the likes of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank happy.

Despite all this, it’s unclear how the people of Myanmar – two-thirds rural, one-third ethnic minority, mostly Buddhist and conservative – feel about their government. Virtually no opinion polling is conducted, so we have to go on gut feeling, anecdotal reports and what we read on Facebook.

We might soon get a glimpse of the national mood, albeit an imperfect one. On 1 April, up to 1.7 million voters in nineteen constituencies will vote in by-elections, mostly for seats in Yangon, the largest city and commercial capital, and Shan State. The constituencies to watch include Hlaing Tharyar, an impoverished industrial area of western Yangon that NLD won by a huge margin in 2015; Ann, in Rakhine State, where the leader of the powerful Arakan National Party is seeking a return to parliament after his shock loss in the last election; and Chaungson, in Mon State, where thousands of residents recently protested over the naming of a bridge after Aung San Suu Kyi’s father, independence hero Aung San.

There are reasons not to take the results too seriously. As a member of the government, Aung San Suu Kyi is barred from campaigning. This has diminished interest in NLD campaign events; rallies in Yangon have attracted just a few hundred supporters. Little is at stake because the party has such a large majority already. Most of the seats in Shan State were not contested in 2015 as a result of security concerns, so we have little data with which to compare.

But if the NLD vote drops even moderately compared to 2015, it will pile more pressure on a government that is struggling for momentum. A cabinet reshuffle sometime after the vote seems inevitable; several ministers have proven incapable of fulfilling their roles.

The future of the government rests largely on the decisions made by Aung San Suu Kyi and her senior advisers. If they recognise and acknowledge that some of the current strategies are not working, there is time to get back on track. After all, we are only one year into a five-year term.

But if the first twelve months are any guide, Myanmar is in for a turbulent few years. •

The post Myanmar’s turbulent year of civilian rule appeared first on Inside Story.

The election of a wealthy media celebrity on the promise of making America great again confirms Beijing’s view that the United States is in terminal decline. And if, as promised, Trump abandons the alliance system and the liberal order that Washington has maintained through decades of investment in diplomacy and regional security in the Asia-Pacific, then it’s game over for Pax Americana and win-win-win for China.

As far as Beijing is concerned, Trump can breach protocols on the status of Taiwan, throw up trade walls, call out currency manipulators, and do any number of deals intended to make life difficult for Beijing, but so long as his transactional approach to world affairs undermines the rules-based order and throws alliance partners into a spin, it’s a welcome trade-off. The Chinese leadership is confident that if it comes down to a knuckles-bared fistfight over trade, territory and regional influence, China will win in a knock-out.

Unless Canberra moves adroitly, Australia could be knocked out too. Moving adroitly doesn’t mean siding with Beijing in any dispute with Washington, as some have suggested. Rather, it means calling out China as readily as we do the US when its behaviour threatens the values and principles that underpin our security and wellbeing as a nation.

China’s leaders have long complained that the principles, rules and alliance networks associated with the postwar order – an order imposed by the US – limit their country’s room to manoeuvre. Today, they argue, Washington’s writ should no longer apply in Asia. In a recent policy statement on Asia-Pacific security, Chinese authorities declared that “ and regional rules should be discussed, formulated and observed by all countries concerned, rather than being dictated by any particular country. Rules of individual countries should not automatically become ‘ rules.’”

China is not the only state constrained by “ rules.” All states in the Asia-Pacific region are effectively constricted by a regional security regime designed after the war to inhibit arbitrary or aggressive behaviour by one state towards another. Japan’s margin for movement, for instance, is far narrower than China’s. Until recently, Japanese nationalists have been kept on a tight rein by a postwar constitution, drafted under the supervision of American occupation forces, instituting a liberal-democratic form of government and formally renouncing the sovereign right to wage war. Following China’s aggressive posturing, however, Japan’s prime minister Shinzo Abe has hinted that the restrictions imposed by the postwar order no longer apply to his country either. In anticipation of a visit to Hawaii in December 2016, he is reported to have told colleagues that “if I go to Pearl Harbor, the ‘postwar era’ will come to a complete end for Japan and the United States.” If China takes off the gloves, it can expect other states to do the same.

China’s chaffing at its place in the postwar order differs from Japan’s chiefly in its lack of any tangible foundation. Beijing alleges from time to time that America’s alliance network is an existential threat to China, that open global markets primarily serve American interests, that concern for human rights is merely an excuse for meddling in domestic affairs, that currency movements are manipulated by devious American markets, and that the freedoms enjoyed by the liberal media and academy in the West mask underlying anti-Chinese sentiment. All these claims are contestable. What cannot be denied is that China has adopted its own Leninist party-state constitution, that it does as it pleases around the globe, and that it points its nuclear-tipped missiles towards every point on the compass. Nobody is stopping it from doing so.

Americans also point out that China has been the primary beneficiary of the regional stability underpinned by US security guarantees. American journalist John Pomfret, author of a major recent study on US–China relations, The Beautiful Country and the Middle Kingdom,notes that, apart from a short spell during the cold war, “the United States has been, if anything, the prime foreign enabler of China’s rise. America’s open wallets, open society and open universities have been key factors in China’s ascent from a Third World backwater to a global economic power.” Early American generosity built China’s finest hospitals and universities, American power ended Japan’s horrific occupation of China, American diplomacy secured the region in the postwar era, and America’s commitment to open trade underpinned China’s rapid economic development.From an American perspective, China’s Communist Party would sooner undermine the path that carried China to prosperity than acknowledge that China’s accomplishments were not the Party’s alone.

Australians may not care one way or the other about Chinese revanchists or aggrieved Americans. If they pointed to evidence of American hypocrisy in violating the rules and principles the US lays down for others, they would not be alone. Still, it’s worth asking what the end of a liberal rules-based system, however imperfect, could mean for Australia.

China’s alternative to Pax Americana is not the absence of order, but a new kind of order, one grounded in values that are not universal and rules that are anything but liberal. Unlike America, China will never be accused of hypocrisy: it has no intention of breaching the hierarchical authoritarian principles that underpin the Communist party-state. The Chinese Communist Party is already using local media and other avenues to extend these values into Australia and other countries in violation of the universal rights and values championed by countries working in the liberal tradition.

Put simply, China’s government promotes obedience to authority ahead of freedom, champions hierarchy over equality, and demands submission of individual and community interests to those of an authoritarian state. It could be argued that some of these priorities have merit in the abstract, but there is nothing abstract about them when the authority to be obeyed is the Communist Party of China.

Christopher Ford of the Hudson Institute has spelled out what extending Chinese Communist Party values under a new regional order could mean for states in the region. Beijing aspires to refashion the regional political order after its own hierarchical, authoritarian and deferential style of government. The new order it envisages would see political authority operating “along a vertical axis of hierarchical deference to a lead actor, rather than along a horizontal axis of pluralist interaction.” All states falling under the shadow of this new order would need to accept their place within a framework of authority centred in Beijing, and abide by norms and rules set in Beijing. What this would mean for business and civil society abroad is unclear but, as a mark of deference, governments in the region would be expected to eschew conduct or commentary that might possibly offend the government or people of China. Under Chinese rules, respect for particular national values cannot be separated from ritual displays of respect for the regime in Beijing that sets and polices them.

An idea of how this might work in practice can be gauged from China’s territorial expansion in the South China Sea and the historical arguments mounted on its behalf. Chinese officials frequently point out to Australian business leaders and diplomats that Australia has no skin in the game and hence no business inserting itself in the process of claims settlement in the South China Sea. Nothing could be further from the truth. Australia’s future security and territorial sovereignty require concerted defence of the principles underpinning the existing rules-based system for resolving disputes over land and maritime sovereignty in the region.

Beijing’s maritime claims are based not on commonly understood general rules governing maritime sovereignty but on historical claims unique to China – on Chinese rules, as it were. If Beijing were truly committed to norms, it would have defended its position on maritime sovereignty by contesting specific findings of the arbitral tribunal’s decision on the Philippines’ South China Sea case in July 2016 while respecting its overall jurisdiction in the case. Instead, Beijing chose to ignore the tribunal’s jurisdiction. Its claims to disputed maritime territories are based not on commonly accepted rules and norms, but on particular historical claims to seas and territories over which no tribunal outside China is permitted to exercise jurisdiction.

In laying claim to disputed territories, Beijing reaches back centuries to establish historical ownership over land and maritime territories that can then be forcefully “reclaimed” as its own. A country can never invade itself, and so China’s leaders believe that by claiming to be recovering “lost” territories they can never be accused of invading anyone.

Beijing’s elliptical style of historical thinking seems to inform the judgement of retired state and federal political leaders in Australia who insist, from time to time, that China is a peace-loving nation that never has and never will extend its authority by force. Former prime minister Malcolm Fraser presented this argument most starkly in his book Dangerous Allies (2014).The claim fails to explain how China grew from a modest state in the lower reaches of the Yellow and Yangtze Rivers into a vast continental power stretching from the deserts of central Asia to the peaks of the Himalayas, and north to Siberia, without apparently conquering the territories it incorporated. The propensity of Australian leaders to repeat China’s claims can be explained by reference to classical Chinese military strategy, most clearly set out in Sun Zi’s Art of War, in which artful deception of the leaders of rival states is a key tactic in any successful conquest.

When this kind of history rules, anything goes. What kinds of historical claims could Australia find itself open to if it were to concede China’s historical claims to the South China Sea? In the absence of contestable principles of governance, could China claim Australian territory without, in its own terms, “invading” Australia?

On 25 November 2016, the Chinese naval training vessel Zheng He, named after a famous fifteenth-century Chinese admiral, docked in Sydney Harbour. According to the local Chinese-language press, China’s consul-general, Gu Xiaojie, welcomed the vessel in Chinese with these words:

The Chinese nation is a peace-loving nation. Adhering to the road of peaceful development is the serious choice and solemn commitment of the government and people of China. Six centuries ago Zheng He’s fleet, vast as it was, did not occupy an inch of territory belonging to other governments. Today the development of China’s naval forces has one aim only, to preserve peace, and is not aiming at expansion or regional hegemony. The Zheng He comes in peace and is certain to return home laden with friendship.

The consul-general’s claims bear little relation to history. It is not true to say that China has never expanded by force or occupied territory belonging to other states. Nor were Admiral Zheng He’s voyages peaceful argosies. History aside, at this moment the People’s Navy is advancing China’s territorial expansion at the expense of the Philippines, Vietnam and other neighbouring states. While spinning stories of historical ownership and peaceful intent, China is seizing territory and building military bases in the South China Sea from which it can project hard power into adjacent territories, including US bases in the region and ultimately Australian territorial waters. It has done so peacefully only in the sense that it has advanced in incremental steps, as Ross Babbage has put it, “below the threshold that would trigger a forceful Western response.”

So it has always been. China has historically expanded through incremental conquest and periodically contracted after defeats. Sometimes the conquests have involved Chinese forces invading neighbouring territories and folding them into China, as with Yunnan and Tibet in the south. At other times, neighbouring forces have invaded China and brought their conquered territories with them. When the Manchus conquered China in 1644, they brought the vast lands of Manchuria into China where they became known as the Northeastern Provinces. In the 1750s, China invaded the immense territories to the west, incorporating those into the country as Xinjiang.

These were not peaceful conquests. In the western conquests of the 1750s, for example, the Qing emperor ordered the massacre of the dominant Dzungar Mongol community in what is known as the Dzungar Genocide. An estimated 500,000 Dzungar Mongols were killed and the remainder were taken into slavery. The history is little known because once Xinjiang was incorporated into China the Dzungar were no longer around to recount their own genocide.

Three centuries earlier, at the time of Zheng He’s voyages, the Ming emperor was mounting massive invasions into continental Southeast Asia and across the northeastern reaches of the lower Himalayas. Part of the invaded territory was incorporated into China as Yunnan Province. Another part fell within what we know as Vietnam; it was subsequently wrested back by locals and is now considered Vietnamese territory. Zheng He’s voyages were historically associated with these fifteenth-century Ming conquests.

There was little that was peaceful about Zheng He’s own ascent to the position of admiral. He was a Muslim of Persian descent whose family is thought to have been associated with the Mongol rulers of China before the founders of the Ming Dynasty drove them out. As a boy, he was captured and castrated by Chinese forces during the Ming invasions of Yunnan. He ascended the Ming military hierarchy through association with an able member of the Ming imperial family, Zhu Di, who seized power in a military coup from his nephew, the reigning emperor, before executing thousands of the nephew’s loyal followers.

Zheng He’s fabled naval expeditions were not especially peaceful either. His well-armed troops engaged in fighting and kidnapping en route and set up maritime defence posts on far-flung alien territories. His fleets established military bases in Malacca and Samudera to control maritime passage through the Straits of Malacca. At one point they returned to China with the captured ruler of a Sri Lankan kingdom.

In a rules-based order, these troubled histories and the disputes they generate would be of interest to few but historians. But in a regional order based on contested national stories, China’s claims to historical precedents begin to matter at the highest levels of government.

In a formal presentation to the joint houses of the Australian parliament on 24 October 2003, China’s president, Hu Jintao, laid the foundations for the recent visit by the training ship Zheng He when he told parliament:

Back in the 1420s, the expeditionary fleets of China’s Ming Dynasty reached Australian shores. For centuries, the Chinese sailed across vast seas and settled down in what they called Southern Land, or today’s Australia. They brought Chinese culture to this land and lived harmoniously with the local people, contributing their proud share to Australia’s economy, society and its thriving pluralistic culture.

At the time President Hu was speaking, China was still largely playing by the rules. His reference to Zheng He’s fabled expeditionary fleets reaching Australian shores raised a few eyebrows among historians, but his remarks were allowed to pass in the belief that they were merely ceremonial. Can we now be so sure?

If we concede that China’s primary test of maritime sovereignty is a historical claim to seas once traversed by its own fleets, then it would be prudent to ask whether President Hu’s speech to the Australian parliament could one day support a historical claim to sovereignty over Australian territory. Could there come a time when Beijing will claim Australian territorial waters as it now claims the South China Sea?

In this light, China’s actions in the South China Sea should concern all Australians. President Hu’s historical claim to continuous Chinese contact with the Australian continent over a period of six centuries, initiated by the Chinese state and carrying prior naming rights to what we now call Australia, is all but identical to the historical claim that Beijing is mounting in support of its territorial and military expansion in the South China Sea. In each case, the claim asserts that state expeditionary forces sailed a particular sea long before anyone else, made contact with local peoples, named their lands, and maintained continuous contact for centuries thereafter, presumably until European colonial powers intervened to “contain” China. In an order where historical claims trump commonly agreed norms and rules, failure to challenge President Hu’s claims at the bench of history could place Australian territorial sovereignty at risk.

President Hu’s assertion that the expeditionary fleets of China’s Ming Dynasty reached Australian shores is based not on historical documentation but on generations of myth-making by popular historians in China. These myths gained currency beyond China a decade ago when an Englishman, Gavin Menzies, published a book entitled 1421: The Year China Discovered the World, which claimed that Zheng He discovered America, New Zealand, Australia and other places besides. Menzies’s facile arguments were exposed over a number of years by Australian historian Geoff Wade, most memorably in an ABC Four Corners documentary in 2006. Nor is there any evidence to support popular Chinese claims of the “discovery” of Australia. And yet Hu Jintao’s words have neither been challenged nor denied in parliament, and stand as a matter of record.

President Hu’s words also invite Australians to reconsider the historical arguments underpinning Beijing’s claims to the South China Sea. Chinese state expeditions and merchant junks sailed through the seas and straits, but they did so alongside ships of numerous other states and principalities, including Southeast Asian and South Asia polities, and even distant Persia. Zheng He’s voyages retraced routes mapped out by earlier Islamic navigators and traders. If history rules, then China’s exclusive claim to the South China Sea is a weak one.

These historical details counted for little when China appeared content to operate within the liberal order. In a new order based on unique historical claims, territorial disputes are presumably arbitrated through critical evidence-based historical inquiry. And yet, under Communist Party rule, no historian in China is permitted to challenge any of the government’s historical claims, and the views of foreign historians who challenge them are categorically denied and suppressed. In 2004, for example, sixteen scholars who jointly published a book on the history of Xinjiang covering the Chinese conquest and the Dzungar massacres were denied visas to enter China for telling that history. The book has been banned in China ever since.

Historical claims made by Chinese leaders on Australian soil can still be challenged, however. If the gloves are off, Australia’s political representatives in federal parliament should ensure that the historical record is corrected by formally refuting President Hu’s speech to parliament.

Alternatively, to avoid embarrassment to premier Li Keqiang ahead of his mooted visit to Australia this new year, Beijing could reaffirm its respect for the “ rules” cavalierly dismissed in its recent policy statement on Asia-Pacific security. Together, Beijing and Canberra should acknowledge that these rules underpin the prosperity and security of China, Australia and the Asia-Pacific region. •

The post Handing the initiative to China appeared first on Inside Story.

Findings from the Pew Research Center’s recent global survey of internet uptake and use underline these information inequalities, pointing to low levels of uptake in South Asia, especially in Pakistan, where 15 per cent of adults use the internet, with an entirely different situation in wealthy Pacific nations such as South Korea (94 per cent) and Australia (93 per cent). In China, rates of internet use are now at 65 per cent, according to Pew, very close to the global median of 67 per cent.

For the surging mobile internet, it’s a similar story, although a fast-moving one. China and India are the two largest smartphone markets in the world, dwarfing all others. Rates of smartphone ownership correlate closely with GDP, but we’re seeing very steep increases in ownership across all emerging economies. According to Pew’s figures, ownership in China increased by 21 per cent between 2013 and 2015; in Malaysia, the growth rate over the same period was 34 per cent. South Korea has the highest smartphone ownership rate of any country globally, with 88 per cent of respondents owning one.

These developments are prompting much new thinking about digital inequality and inclusion. While the digital divide is plainly not disappearing with the emergence of mobile, it is changing dramatically. Connecting with the work of other researchers and practitioners, Jonathan Donner’s 2015 book After Access raises a series of critical questions about the social ramifications of the shift towards mobile devices and connections. He argues that we need to work from an understanding of mobile services as and where they are – and while mobiles have great advantages over other technologies in affordability and accessibility, in the global South the services they offer are often far more limited than the mobile and fixed-line broadband services of the developed world. Cost considerations are vital: because of their historical links with phone services, mobile data is priced very differently from fixed-line internet, and metering bears directly on how the mobile internet is used and what it may be used for.

Survey data such as the Pew reports provide a necessary aggregate picture of a rapidly transforming global scene, but they shouldn’t obscure the social and geographical differences embedded in mobile networks, or be read as evidence of a trajectory that can be taken for granted. Access to the internet is essential, but it is what people can actually do with their access that determines any social or economic benefit.

In such a fluid environment, the research seems to point in several directions. The mobile internet, at least in its current form, is certainly improving lives in many ways, but it is also fragmenting and stratifying. We can’t blandly assume that it will offer the same possibilities for everyone; or that the trend lines mapped by Pew are all leading to the same point. Internet experiences and practices are increasingly diverse, and there are also likely to be great differences in their transformative potential, depending on who and where you are. Other kinds of socio-economic metrics may be needed to grasp the differences.

The problems that Donner alerts us to are not merely those of emerging economies and the developing world: the dynamic of mobility, rapid growth and stratification is at work everywhere, although how it plays out will vary dramatically in different national contexts. Australia is a good example. A country with high levels of internet use, it appears near the top of Pew’s country rankings for smartphone uptake, but nevertheless exhibits signs of the stratifying impact of mobile. I’ve recently worked with a group of researchers on preparing a new index of digital inclusion that aims to provide a useful, up-to-date measure of uptake and use in the light of the rapid growth of mobile, and its particular cost structures, constraints and possibilities. This project has underlined for me the new problems presented by mobile’s social dynamic, and the need to provide tools that can assist research and practical interventions.

We used data from interviews conducted with 50,000 households across the country since 2013 in order to capture regional variations, and to track changes over time. We took “digital inclusion” to mean not only access, but also the skills, attitudes and capabilities of users, and the affordability of the service.

Our work shows some clear trends we expected to see, and one we didn’t. The story about access is positive, with our measures of where and how often people access the internet, the range of devices they use, and the amount of data they have available all rising steadily over the last three years. All these indicators show that Australians right across the country are spending more time online and using more devices for more purposes. That reflects, above all, the smartphone’s growing ubiquity in everyday life – a worldwide trend. It also reflects the changing content of online media and the increasing importance of video, not only for entertainment, but also for information, education, and many other everyday purposes. “Digital ability” – skills, confidence and activity online – is also growing, although unevenly across different regions and different social groups.

When we look at affordability, however, our measure of inclusion has declined in Australia over the last three years. Although we know that the price of data has fallen steadily and significantly, people are using much more of it. So internet use has become relatively more expensive as a proportion of household incomes. This is the result of how we pay for mobile data, not only in Australia but also in most markets. The mobile internet bears the legacy of mobile telephony, including its metered pricing model; there are many variations, but the general principle is that instead of paying a flat access fee, we pay for the amount of data we use.

So increasing mobile data charges are the other side of the explosive internet growth story. Spending more on the net may not be a major problem for people with middle-class incomes, and it doesn’t mean the internet is necessarily unaffordable. But the trend does have serious implications for low-income internet users. The issue for them is that the internet is increasingly embedded not only in everyday social life but also in government and community services, education and labour-market services.

No exactly comparable data exist for other Asia-Pacific countries. But other measures of affordability and digital capability suggest that these are major obstacles, subject to a high level of regional variability. A 2016 report by GSMA, a mobile industry group, highlights the scale of the overall problem: even with optimistic projections of mobile take-up rates, GSMA estimates that more than 35 per cent of the population of the Asia-Pacific region will still lack internet access by the end of the decade. Affordability and the lack of digital skills were identified as two of the three most significant barriers to mobile internet use (the other was a lack of local, relevant content).

In Indonesia, 46 per cent of respondents identified affordability as a barrier; in Vietnam and India the figures were 23 per cent and 24 per cent respectively. In China, only 11 per cent of non–internet users identified affordability as a barrier, but 89 per cent cited a lack of digital literacy and skills. In India, the lack of locally relevant content was a much more significant barrier, with this reason cited by 80 per cent of non-users, compared with 30 per cent in China.

All this points to the scale of the future challenge for digital inclusion. Twenty years ago, the costs of not being connected to the internet were small. They are now substantial. As crucial services and knowledge resources increasingly move online, the risk of a stratifying internet is that the benefits of connection are concentrated among those who are already well-placed. Digital exclusion then becomes an increasingly serious problem for those who depend on support and services most. •

The post The stratifying internet appeared first on Inside Story.

The Bali Process is the key diplomatic forum in which Australia and forty-three other countries in the region discuss the challenges posed by forced migration from countries in the region and beyond. Members themselves describe the Bali Process as “a voluntary, inclusive, non-binding forum for policy dialogue, information sharing and capacity building.” Established in 2002, its full title is the Bali Process on People Smuggling, Trafficking in Persons and Related Transnational Crime. The UN High Commissioner for Refugees, the International Organization for Migration, and the UN Office on Drugs and Crime are also members, and other countries and agencies participate when appropriate.

Although ministerial meetings are usually held every two years, this March’s meeting was almost a year late. It was perhaps no coincidence that relations between the Bali Process co-chairs, Indonesia and Australia, had been strained during that time by Australia’s incursions into Indonesian waters during boat turnback operations, and Indonesia’s execution of Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran for drug offences.

The region had also faced a refugee crisis that left up to 8000 Bangladeshi and Rohingya people stranded on boats in the Bay of Bengal and the Andaman Sea. Abandoned by people-smuggler crews who feared Thai government law enforcement, these thousands waited, many perishing, without basic food, water and medical attention, while surrounding countries delayed humanitarian assistance and asylum.

Not surprisingly, those tragic events were among the matters discussed at this year’s meeting, which commissioned a review to “share lessons” and “work to implement necessary improvements.” Led by Australia and Indonesia, the review will consider “options for improving national, regional and subregional contingency planning and preparedness for potential large influxes of irregular migrants in the future.” Its timing is still unclear.

The ministers also acknowledged the “unprecedented levels of displacement and mobility seen globally since the last ministerial conference,” and adopted a declaration reinforcing member countries’ commitment to tackling “complex challenges.” Many of the meeting’s recommendations focused on preventing future maritime crises (and associated loss of life) and tackling the underlying causes of forced migration.

Ministers directed member governments to consider their responses to people arriving by boat, giving priority to coordinating procedures for rescue at sea, identifying predictable places for disembarkation, improving reception and screening systems, and engaging civil society in delivery of post-disembarkation emergency assistance. They also recommended research into temporary protection and local-stay arrangements.

Significantly, the meeting agreed on a special mechanism to enable the Bali Process co-chairs to consult, and where necessary convene future meetings, to consider “urgent irregular migration issues with affected and interested countries in response to current regional issues or future emergency situations.” According to Peter Hughes, a former deputy secretary of Australia’s immigration department and now a fellow of the Centre for Policy Development, this mechanism “provides a vital avenue for the Bali Process to make a difference in responding to mass displacement.” The fact that countries agreed to this special mechanism corresponds to their acknowledgement at the meeting of the need for more “agile, timely responses.” Attendance at meetings called by the co-chairs will be voluntary, and the impact of this mechanism remains to be seen.

Ministers recognised the importance of “providing basic protection for migrants, refugees and asylum seekers” and of “inclusive socioeconomic development, full respect for human rights and measures to reduce statelessness.” Underlying ministers’ statements is the view that unless humanitarian and protection needs are met, “people will continue risking their lives on smugglers’ boats.” Their decision to extend the focus of policies to migrant protection is significant; in the past, Bali meetings have been preoccupied with legal responses to people smuggling and human trafficking (and especially their criminalisation).

The meeting welcomed long-term solutions for refugees in the form of the “provision of resettlement places” and “appropriate local solutions.” A toolkit to improve systems for registering births, deaths and marriages is also being developed and countries were encouraged to participate in order to “enhance the capacity of states to identify and provide protection to at-risk populations.” Regional information campaigns are being developed to highlight the dangers of irregular boat journeys.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, ministers recognised the need to expand “safe, legal and affordable migration pathways” as an alternative to journeys facilitated by people smugglers. Member governments were encouraged “to consider how labour migration opportunities can be opened up to persons with international protection needs.” Family reunification programs are another possibility. The declaration also referred to “exploring viable temporary migration schemes.” An Australian Human Rights Commission report released in September this year also advanced options to “expand opportunities for safe entry to Australia.”

While the trend of the March meeting is positive, the devil will be in the implementation – if it occurs at all. Recent history tells us that the Bali Process has not resulted in significant protection-focused policy initiatives among its members. A 2011 Regional Cooperation Framework, agreed to by all Bali Process members, expressed the clear need for “practical cooperative solutions that also address humanitarian and protection needs,” but even five years later the framework has not been translated into national policy in Australia or other member countries.

Australia’s processing and detention arrangements with Nauru and Papua New Guinea are inconsistent with the protection-centred approach to which it is committed under the Bali Process. In their recent book Refugees, Regionalism and Responsibility, Penelope Mathew and Tristan Harley explore this policy contradiction, pointing out that “Australia has inverted the moral responsibility for resettling refugees by sending asylum seekers to developing countries in order to evade the hard legal obligations of allowing unauthorised boat arrivals to seek asylum in Australia.” Further evidence that governments in the region may not truly be committed to protection sentiments expressed in Bali Process meetings can be seen in the lack of effective, immediate response to last year’s crisis in the Bay of Bengal and the Andaman Sea.

In mid 2015, the Refugee Council of Australia, the peak body for organisations representing refugees in Australia, argued that “large multilateral forums like the Bali Process are unlikely to provide any significant impetus for change in the region.” Will things be any different after governments have had the opportunity to implement the commitments they signed up for at this year’s ministerial meeting? Recent history suggests not – though one key difference this time around is that Australia’s Pacific Solution is unravelling. With Canberra forced to look for alternative policies, it’s not unthinkable that one day soon the Bali Process may be taken seriously as a means towards an alternative policy. •

The post As the Pacific Solution unravels, Bali provides a lead appeared first on Inside Story.

In this part of Sarawak, not connected to the national electricity grid, small-scale solar electricity is proving successful where larger projects have failed. For Ajan, the experiment is certainly paying off. “I only bought this a few months ago, but the cost was not that high. For one panel, including the battery, I pay around 300 ringgit. The smaller ones are only 250. This whole setup cost no more than 1000 ringgit.” At this price, two large panels with batteries and an inverter can pay for themselves within a month or two, depending on usage. This means that solar installations have become affordable even here, where most people have little income other than from cash crops and their children’s remittances.

Downriver, the community of Long San is also looking to small-scale solar, after years of failed projects by the Malaysian government and non-government organisations to bring electricity to the area. At present, Long San’s clinic, airport, and primary and secondary schools (which serve the whole region) all rely on diesel or petrol generators. Fuel has to be hauled in from the coast via logging roads, a drive of at least four hours in good weather.

Villages in this part of Sarawak are only accessible via logging road, like this one near Long Julan, Baram. Christine Horn

In 2009, the Malaysian government agreed to fund a mini-hydroelectric project in Long San, to provide electricity for the whole community. Cables were installed across the village and switches fitted in each house. But after a reported RM2.4 million (A$760,000) had been spent, the project was abruptly abandoned. It was part of a pattern of failure with mini- and micro-hydroelectric projects – sometimes including solar installations – in Sarawak’s rural communities.

Then, as part of the Sarawak state government’s project to build twelve hydroelectric “mega dams,” a dam on the Baram river was proposed, which would have seen Long San under one hundred metres of water by 2020 because of its location within the reservoir area. But after months of protests and blockades, the dam project was finally put on hold this year. People in Long San and the surrounding villages point out that the hydroelectric dam would not, in any case, have provided the area with electricity. The Bakun dam, a hydroelectric project in Sarawak completed in 2011, caused the resettlement of thousands of indigenous people, but in their new resettlement site people still rely on generators, with the electricity transmission lines from the dam looming overhead.

Over the past two years, Long San has begun to develop solar power options. At first, small solar-powered devices, like radios and LED lanterns, appeared around people’s houses. Then, people started using solar panels just larger than an A3 sheet of paper and connected to a battery with an integrated inverter smaller than a shoebox. These can power several LED light bulbs for a whole night. More recently, larger panels have become available, which can power other electrical devices as well.

What has made solar panels available at this price, and how has the technology become accessible to people in this remote region?

The answer lies a couple of kilometres south of Long San, in a place locally known as Kilometre Ten, or Kilo Ten, otherwise known as the Samling Baram Central Base Camp. It is the local headquarters of the biggest logging company operating in the area, Samling Timber Sdn Bhd. Kilo Ten is a village of its own, with accommodation for workers and their families, shops, canteens and several restaurants, a church, a nearby veneer factory, a helicopter pad, various mechanics workshops, and the company’s local offices. The size of the camp suggests the scope of Samling’s operations in the area. During the day, logging trucks laden with the relatively scrawny leftovers of decades of timber extraction make their way past the camp to the central log pond. Samling has been a feature of people’s lives here for years.

According to one estimate, 30 per cent of households in rural Sarawak have no access to grid electricity, and must run their own generators, like this one at Long Moh, Baram. Christine Horn

The source of the blossoming solar electrification in the area, however, is only loosely affiliated with the camp itself, and has in fact recently been banished from its previous location near the workshops. In a small cluster of shops, now in a shack outside the camp gates, a team of four or five Chinese shopkeepers display their stock for company employees and others passing through on the main logging road adjacent to the camp. These shops and their products have provided solar technology to the area for over two years.

The shops offer all the electrical goods that people in rural communities need, and more: from tinted headlamps for hunters to karaoke machines; from rechargeable fans to remote-controlled drones; and, yes, solar panels. The panels come in different sizes and are sold together with all the necessary parts, including the inverter, battery, cables, and four LED light bulbs with fittings. Several USB ports for charging phones are integrated in the battery case. One shopkeeper helpfully points out the technical details, and shows customers images on her smartphone of the products in use. She comes from a small town in China and goes back every Chinese New Year to see her children. Her husband also works in Kilo Ten, but she does not say how both of them came to be here. Every day, she and her colleagues sell solar equipment to the people passing by on their way to the villages.

Battery and inverter tucked away in a kitchen in Long Selaan, Baram. Christine Horn

The success of the solar technology sold at Kilo Ten can be attributed to the fact that it is cheap, easily installed and readily replaced if broken. Peter, a local from Long Mekaba, a village some way upriver from Long San, put it this way: “I bought the panel and the battery for my house, but I didn’t expect it to last long. The quality does not seem to be that good. But it has already lasted for two years. And even if the battery breaks, for example, I can just get a new one at the shop.” As for the cost, Peter said that it was not a big problem. “They are really cheap. If you buy this kind of thing in Marudi [a bigger town nearby] or in Miri [the main city in the area], you will pay at least twice what you pay at Kilo Ten.”

The supply strategies of the Kilo Ten shops probably leave a bit to be desired, which may well account for the competitive prices. In any case, these shops have been the key to the rapid uptake of solar technology in the region. They have made the technology available at a price people can afford, in a central location that is easy to access because the main road passes by the camp. The low prices allow local people to take the risk of investing in a new technology, even if they don’t know whether it will pay off. The different options available allow each family to buy a system that is tailored to their needs and budget.

Although these children in Long Loyang are watching a TV powered by a generator, the spread of solar could one day provide cheaper, more secure power. Christine Horn

The story of rural electrification in Long San and the surrounding area suggests that the technology is already a viable alternative for local people. For governments in developing countries, as well as non-government organisations and researchers in the field, this may mean that it is time to look beyond community-based options – which can suffer from a range of problems, such as misappropriation of funds, faulty planning and tricky maintenance – and instead focus on promoting cheap and readily available solar devices to encourage individual solutions. In this way, individuals are empowered to control each step, including investment, installation, maintenance and repair.

For Ajan, the investment in solar energy is going to pay off soon, but not everyone has caught on yet. Most people in rural Sarawak still use generators, but things could be changing. •

The post An electrifying story of low-tech power appeared first on Inside Story.

Xi Jinping is widely seen as a new-style example of this caste. In the light of Archie Brown’s analysis, the fact that figures from US president Barack Obama down have remarked at how Xi has stamped himself on China’s body politic, presenting a more assertive image of his country and its foreign policies, is probably as much a warning as an accolade.

Xi’s problem is that the key point about the myth of strong leadership is that myths are only real if enough people believe in them. Once the belief ebbs away, so does the strength. And as elite politicians – including former British prime minister David Cameron – can find out quickly, power is a fickle thing. Its coming is hard, its departure very easy. And so, for all the ubiquity of Xi in policy-making and Communist Party entities within China, there remains the very real question of just how secure his power is, and what threats it faces. Heading up so many leading groups and consolidating so many visible expressions of power could be as much a sign of weakness as of strength.

Added to this is the issue of how greatly politicians expose themselves when they take such a prominent position. Policy-making and implementation in a country as vast and complex as China is a high-risk business. So much can go wrong. Placing yourself in the centre of all these decisions means that eventually it is you, and you alone, who takes the blame. Deng Xiaoping, paramount leader in the 1980s and into the 1990s, showed his background as a military tactician when he made sure he always had a layer of political protection around him, with figures like Hu Yaobang and Zhao Ziyang taking the rap when things went wrong.

Last month’s judgement on the South China Sea by the International Court of Arbitration raises questions about the limits not just of China’s power, but also of the Xi leadership. Brought by the Philippines in 2013, the action yielded a final adjudication that was largely negative for China. This is problematic for Xi, not so much because of the judgement’s ramifications, which are serious enough, but because of the risks it poses domestically. Even with tighter censorship of news and information, the limits of Xi’s power will be filtering through to the domestic audience, many of whom had started to believe their president could enforce China’s will and prosecute China’s claims without resistance.

Falling economic growth has tempted the Party leadership into seeking a new pillar of legitimacy by appealing to nationalist sentiment. Xi sits at the heart of this, presenting himself as a global leader absorbing global respect for a country at the centre of affairs like never before. The problem with this posture is that many people outside China are wary or distrustful of its intentions, and either resist this new assertiveness or regard it with ambivalence. There is dissonance between the strong image of the country’s newfound status promoted within China, and the more complex reality outside.

China needs deep economic, intellectual and diplomatic engagement with the world as it seeks to continue transforming itself into a middle-income country. Ratcheting up nationalistic messages that could lead to things getting out of hand, and perhaps even to military clashes, is not in China’s interests, nor anyone else’s for that matter.

Xi’s Communist Party is trying to manage a huge but delicate balancing act. On the one hand, challenging economic conditions mean that it needs partnerships with countries around it like never before. This is evident in the leadership’s promotion of the Silk Road initiative, which seeks to create a vast region with benign commercial trade and investment links to China. On the other hand, delivering the “China dream” means that the Party must preside over a country that is respected, taken seriously, and restored to a position of regional dominance. For Japan, Malaysia, Vietnam and particularly the United States, that is not so palatable.

Until the arbitration ruling, the Xi leadership had managed to calibrate its messages, swinging from soothing language about the peace-loving rise of China and the potential for win–win outcomes, to harder-edged assertions of its rights in the South and East China Sea. On the latter, Xi has staked a lot of personal political capital. He sits at the head of a system that has aggressively asserted that the islands within the nine-dash line are sovereign Chinese territory by historical right and natural justice.

The Hague ruling has turned up a host of problems, and so far the Chinese government has failed to respond particularly coherently. Despite stating that it didn’t recognise the judgement of the court, it has expended considerable effort in trying to denounce the final outcome. This suggests that it cares deeply about what has happened. The reaction has also exposed a contradictory attitude towards law, with China embracing it when it suits and dismissing it as a tool of American hegemony when it doesn’t. And its reaction has also created real suspicion and diplomatic bad blood among neighbouring countries with which it needs to have stable and secure relations.

When the system looked looser and less centralised, China’s response to an issue like this could be seen not so much as the view of the central government, but as the sectional concerns of other figures promoting their own interests. This happened during the Hu era, when there was less evidence of Beijing’s role in policy and more leeway for controversial responses to be put down to sectoral interests. Under Xi, there seems to be no such luxury. Presumably, the concerted campaign by Chinese officials and others to denounce the ruling from The Hague, and the attempts to discredit and attack the court and the process, were all mandated and coordinated from Beijing.

Under the most optimistic scenario, tempers will now calm down and the parties will all go back to the patient business of trying to work out a pragmatic compromise. In that case, the International Court of Arbitration’s ruling, rather than having ratcheted up tensions, will have at least injected some urgency into the job of devising solutions. We would then be able to conclude that Xi has inherited the pragmatism and flexibility of other leadership periods since Mao’s.

If China doesn’t step back or show signs of a willingness to compromise, though, it runs the very real risk of becoming diplomatically isolated. The rhetoric of win–win and China’s peaceful rise will be treated as empty words. Xi will then be faced with the problem of trying to forge good-quality relations in the economic realm with a world that trusts it even less, politically, than it has in the past. Like it or not, if Xi can’t resolve this, then his power will prove to be severely limited. And at a time when China’s role is so crucial in so many global issues, that would be a huge pity, and a huge cost to pay for the relatively limited issue of control over the South China Sea. •

The post A strong leader encounters stormy waters appeared first on Inside Story.

Largely on the back of the Nobel laureate’s personal popularity, the NLD was always expected to do well. But with the military holding 25 per cent of seats in all national and regional parliaments, attention had focused on whether the party could secure 67 per cent of seats, giving it a “supermajority” – more than 50 per cent even after military MPs are factored in. This would enable it to select and appoint the president without the need to negotiate with other political stakeholders.

The NLD has blown that target out of the water. With a handful of constituencies left to announce, it has already won more than 80 per cent of seats – a figure eerily similar to its win in 1990, a result the generals never honoured. The scale of the victory has been devastating for many of Myanmar’s ninety-two registered parties, not least the military-backed Union Solidarity and Development Party, or USDP, which campaigned on the record of President Thein Sein, the reformist president it put in place in 2011. The USDP parliamentary caucus has been wiped out, and almost all government ministers who contested have lost heavily.

Full voting results have not been announced; the Union Election Commission has so far given only the name and party of the winning candidate, and the number of votes they received. Yet unofficial figures from local electoral commission branches and the parties, which had members at each polling station to monitor the vote and count, reveal huge wins for the NLD. In Hlaing Tharyar, on the outskirts of Yangon, its candidates received more than five times the number of votes as their USDP rivals. Other races have been closer, yet the USDP has won just a handful of seats in areas dominated by the ethnic Bamar, its supposed conservative heartland. According to a (possibly apocryphal) report from northern Myanmar, one USDP candidate received just two votes at his local polling station – despite having six family members eligible to vote there.

In some cases the outcome has been simply embarrassing. In Naypyitaw, the capital the generals built from scratch barely a decade ago, the former defence minister, who resigned to contest the election, lost by 176 votes to a poet, Maung Tin Thit, standing for the NLD. To make matters worse, it’s the constituency of the former head of the military junta, Than Shwe, and his deputy, Maung Aye. In the end, the USDP won only one of ten national parliament seats in Naypyitaw, despite its being home to almost 100,000 civil servants and military personnel, as well as their families.

Given such strong results, why was the outcome ever in doubt? Democratic elections are so new to Myanmar that opinion polls and data on voting intentions are virtually non-existent. The few surveys conducted in recent years – by the International Republican Institute, Asia Foundation and Asian Barometer Survey – highlighted strong approval for the government and the president but also continued enthusiasm for Aung San Suu Kyi and the NLD. The results also showed a respect for hierarchy and tradition, and the strong influence of religious leaders. And 53 per cent of respondents in the Asian Barometer Survey listed the economy as their top priority, above issues such as governance and social services.

These factors were all thought to play in favour of the USDP. The party had the backing of conservative Buddhist leaders and the military, either explicitly or implicitly, and during the campaign its candidates emphasised the positive changes of the past five years. Yet, in the end, the election became a referendum on authoritarianism. Voters were unwilling to consider the past five years as distinct from everything that the military had done in the fifty-three years since it seized power from a democratically elected government and introduced a socialist autarky. The historical legitimacy of the NLD, the party that won in 1990 but was denied power, was certainly affirmed. But the antipathy towards the ruling military elite was palpable; one photograph widely shared on social media shows an invalid vote cast in Shan State, with eight candidates listed. Every box has been stamped except for the USDP. (In Myanmar’s first-past-the-post system, voters need only stamp one box.)

Despite the complexities of the issues identified as important to the election – religion, the economy and ethnic affiliation, for instance – the people voted for a simple idea: change. That’s not to say they were unconcerned about the NLD’s perceived support for Muslims, or questions over the party’s ability to govern. These fears, stoked by the government and the USDP, were simply trumped by the hope for a better future and belief in Aung San Suu Kyi to deliver. In that sense, it was a hugely positive result.

The NLD campaign was extremely effective, despite criticism from observers over its message to vote for the party and ignore the candidate. “Don’t worry about the candidates,” Aung San Suu Kyi said at her rallies. “If they’re bad, we’ll pull them into line.” High-profile individuals who may have been reluctant to toe the party line – or, rather, Aung San Suu Kyi’s line – had been blocked from running for the NLD. The country’s democracy icon then reinforced the message on a punishing national tour that even took her to remote ethnic minority areas, such as conflict-hit Kayah State, on the border with Thailand. Thousands turned out at each stop. No one can agree on how many attended her last rally in Yangon, on 1 November, but the sea of red appeared close to 100,000.

Anecdotal reports suggest that some voters – perhaps a significant number – may have decided to support the NLD only at the last minute, when they were swept up in the euphoria of the moment. With no exit polling, it is impossible to know. Certainly, the result surprised the USDP, which had expected the government’s construction of roads, bridges and schools, and its offering of low-interest loans, to resonate with hip-pocket voters. The Ayeyarwady delta, the country’s rice bowl and home to Thein Sein and many other senior government officials, was thought to be one such area. As it turned out, many said they would vote USDP when the candidates visited their villages but once they got in the booth they ignored the party’s lion emblem and stamped beside the NLD’s logo, a golden peacock on a red flag. In part, they had humoured the USDP candidates out of Myanmar politeness.

This tallies with some of the findings of the Asian Barometer Survey, which comprised more than 1600 interviews conducted between May 2014 and March 2015. The response rate – those willing to undertake the survey – was 87 per cent, the highest in East Asia. But one legacy of decades of military rule is that many, particularly in rural areas, are still reluctant to discuss party politics: around half of the respondents refused to answer questions about voting intentions. Many voters obviously preferred to keep their cards close to their chest, or were still unsure how they would vote. But when asked general questions for the survey, they tended to answer. And just 4 per cent – the lowest of any Asian nation – expressed support for authoritarian government.

The NLD has also done far better in ethnic minority areas than even the most optimistic observers anticipated. Administratively, Myanmar is divided into seven regions, dominated by the ethnic Bamar majority, and seven states, one for each of the seven main ethnic groups: Kachin, Kayah, Kayin, Chin, Mon, Rakhine and Shan. Only in the latter two did the NLD not win the majority of seats.

Prior to the vote, ethnic leaders had expressed concern about the impact of vote-splitting among the large number of ethnic parties. Under Myanmar’s first-past-the-post voting system, they would take votes away from each other and possibly enable the USDP or NLD to win despite local sentiment. While this was indeed a factor in some areas, preliminary figures suggest the NLD would have won in many constituencies even if there had been just a single ethnic minority party. The full voting results will no doubt give a clearer picture.

With preliminary results mostly in, the question is: what now for Myanmar? The scale of the NLD’s win and the speed with which it became evident has quickly shifted attention to the transition to a new government. On 10 November, Aung San Suu Kyi wrote to president Thein Sein, senior general Min Aung Hlaing and parliamentary speaker Shwe Mann proposing talks aimed at “national reconciliation” this coming week. They quickly accepted her offer, with the president and military commander-in-chief also congratulating her on the NLD’s victory.

These talks are important for a number of reasons. Myanmar’s constitution sets out a novel process for selecting the president, together with an unusually long transition period. Newly elected MPs will not meet until late January. One of their first orders of business will be to choose the president from among three candidates. Elected representatives in the upper and lower houses will nominate one each (the NLD, thanks to its overwhelming victory, will get to choose both). A third will be chosen by the commander-in-chief through the military’s parliamentary bloc. All representatives, elected and military, will then gather to choose the president from among these three candidates, with the two losers becoming vice-presidents. The NLD-backed president will then appoint a cabinet, but will not assume office until the end of March – four-and-a-half months from now.

In the meantime, the current parliament – whose members were mostly wiped out in the election – will meet on 16 November. Its agenda has been kept largely under wraps. Aung San Suu Kyi has instructed as many as possible of her MPs-elect to get to the capital to observe the session and learn about the parliamentary process.

Myanmar’s peace process is also moving forward, following the signing of a nationwide ceasefire accord on 15 October after two years of negotiations. The agreement was nationwide in name only – eight groups signed on but around another dozen, mostly those strung out along the border with China, refused. Their decision was driven in part by a desire not to give the government and USDP a boost in its re-election campaign. Political negotiations with the eight signatories are scheduled to start by 15 January, with a framework for political talks to be agreed a month before they begin. At the same time, Myanmar’s military is engaged in heavy fighting with one of the non-signatories, the Shan State Army–North, exacerbating tensions further.

But the question of the presidency is central. As many have already noted, the constitution bars Aung San Suu Kyi from the position because her sons hold foreign passports. In June and July of this year, the military used its parliamentary veto to block sweeping changes to the constitution proposed by parliament. An amendment to the “Aung San Suu Kyi clause” – section 59(f) – was not even put to a vote. The military has made clear that the constitution is not set in stone, but section 59(f) is one of several red lines it will not cross.

Aung San Suu Kyi has responded in recent weeks by pledging to install a puppet leader, and declared she would be “above the president” – dangerous rhetoric, and a position that some of her opponents have already declared unconstitutional. It remains unclear whom she will choose; most likely, she has not yet made a decision. There would be no sense in committing so early, and there are no obvious candidates. Managing such an unusual arrangement, with a president granted wide-ranging powers by the constitution essentially subservient to an elected MP, will require deft footwork from the NLD leader.

In such a potentially volatile environment, negotiations as to how to manage the next four months are essential. The speed with which Aung San Suu Kyi’s offer for talks was accepted is heartening. It is important that all four leaders who gather in Naypyitaw this week maintain a constructive relationship, particularly Aung San Suu Kyi and Min Aung Hlaing, who will retain their status beyond March 2016.

Despite the NLD’s election win, the military still holds many keys to the kingdom. These are enshrined in the constitution that it painstakingly drafted over the course of fifteen years and had approved in 2008 at a sham referendum. The military’s 25 per cent of seats in parliament gives it the power to block constitutional reform, and it also controls three key government ministries. The ability to choose one vice-president also gives it a majority on the powerful National Defence and Security Council, which effectively sits above cabinet.

A poor relationship with the military will hamper Aung San Suu Kyi’s ability to govern the country. Already, the scale of the challenge she and her party face is daunting. Expectations are sky-high, with “an almost religious belief that instantly life will be better,” as one journalist put it to me. With their parliamentary presence largely gone, ethnic minority political leaders – not to mention ethnic armed groups – will no doubt fear a continuation of the strict centralism that characterised military rule and eased only slightly under Thein Sein.

In recent years the government’s reforms have been slowed by the low capacity of the civil service, with a small number of qualified people bearing an impossibly heavy burden. This challenge will not disappear overnight. There is also simply not yet enough money in government coffers to do much that the NLD, and the people, would like, particularly in health and education. Reducing corruption and convincing businesses, in particular, to pay more tax will be absolutely essential, yet far from easy.

But there is much to be optimistic about. The graciousness with which the USDP conceded defeat and congratulated the NLD on its victory – effectively drawing a curtain on five decades of military-backed rule – has surprised many. While the military strongly supported the USDP, constitutional safeguards mean there is little incentive to stage a coup. It will also be confident that, in five years’ time, some voters will defect back to conservative or ethnic political forces. But the NLD should be carried along on a tide of public goodwill for some time yet, including in the civil service. It will also begin in a much stronger position than Thein Sein’s five years ago, thanks to his government’s reforms, particularly on the economic front.

Finally, there was one other winner on 8 November: the Union Election Commission. For years, the distrust between the opposition and the commission has been palpable, largely because its outspoken chair, Tin Aye, is a former general and USDP member. Even shortly after the vote, senior NLD officials were warning that the slow release of official results might reflect commission efforts to amend the result. There were, of course, some isolated problems on election day, particularly with eligible voters not being on the electoral roll, and the commission’s public messaging could certainly have been better. But the many doubts expressed about the commission’s impartiality and its ability to manage the election have largely been proven wrong. That such a high-stakes vote could be held with little violence or attempts to manipulate the outcome is an incredible feat.

From a position of mutual distrust, the commission was able to draft enduring codes of conduct for political parties and electoral observers, together with dramatically improved voter rolls. In addition to voting, thousands of people also gained experience of the political process, acting as formal or informal election observers in polling stations during the day. The election, therefore, has bequeathed Myanmar an incipient trust in its electoral system and those who run it. This will be essential for future elections.

The people of Myanmar have spoken, and done so decisively. Now all eyes are on Aung San Suu Kyi, president Thein Sein and senior general Min Aung Hlaing and their moves this week. •

The post The next steps on Myanmar’s road to democracy appeared first on Inside Story.

The renewed unrest began on 16 September when a group of more than 800 protesters tried to push through a police barrier blocking the entrance to Petaling Street, a bustling market not far from Jalan Alor. Dressed in red, the protesters chanted “Long Live Islam!” and “Long Live Malays!” Even though the market’s traders had stayed away that day, the protesters were determined to pass through the colourful archway that helps code Petaling Street – like Jalan Alor – as a “Chinese” place in Malaysia’s capital city.

This was only a small part of a much larger crowd of protesters brought together by the slogan, “Malay dignity.” Now described as “redshirts” – a label borrowed from neighbouring Thailand – around 45,000 of these protesters had been gathering all morning in Padang Merbok, a large, open reserve off Parliament Street, about half an hour’s walk away. Groups of redshirts had poured into the city from around the peninsula on 2000 buses commissioned for the occasion, including one bearing the branding of Taylor’s University, a private institution in Subang Jaya. Taylor’s later sacked its shuttle bus contractor Wawasan Sutera for its unauthorised use of the vehicle.

The problem for Taylors’s – and the Petaling Street traders – was the atmosphere of racial and religious intimidation created by the rally. The redshirts were pulling every lever they could to demonstrate their mastery of Malay Muslim symbolism. They had gathered at a number of central locations associated exclusively with Malayness and Islam, including the National Mosque, the Federal Territories Mosque and the Putra World Trade Centre, where UMNO, the governing United Malays National Organisation, has its headquarters. Another group of protesters had gathered outside Kraftangan, the Malaysia Handicraft Development Corporation – a hot and tiring sixty-minute march away from Padang Merbok. This group of around 5000 redshirts was led by rally organisers through the streets of Bukit Bintang, despite a police ban on protesters entering the area.

Even with the ban, up to 300 redshirts were already inside this area, gathered on a shopping and nightclub strip in the heart of Bukit Bintang. They were standing right in front of Sungai Wang Plaza, a mall that now seems old-fashioned compared with new favourites like Pavilion, guarded that afternoon by a row of armed police. The fact that redshirts had gathered there was no coincidence. Sungai Wang stands directly in front of the high-tech gadget emporium Plaza Low Yat, which itself was the scene of an ugly racial brawl in July.

Low Yat is also strongly coded as a “Chinese” place, and the July brawl began there when a Malay Muslim youth apparently stole a smartphone after arguing with a Chinese trader he accused of scamming him with a counterfeit model from China. Later, a larger group returned to vandalise the shop, and on the next night a crowd gathered by Malay Muslim organisations returned to chant “Allahu Akbar!”, along with “Smash it!” while vandalising property.

The main entrance to Low Yat and around half its shops were closed on 16 September as a second group, now 7000-strong, marched through Bukit Bintang. Meanwhile, the group at the entrance to Petaling Street had apparently become agitated. Police – visors down and shields up – sounded their warning siren twice and warned the crowd to disperse. After starting up a chant of “We’re coming in!” the crowd began a four-hour push to enter the market. Police were pelted with bottles and other rubbish, to which they responded by firing water cannons.

UMNO-linked rally leaders speaking at Padang Merbok quickly denounced the fracas, and the Petaling Street crowd finally began to disperse after rally leader and UMNO division chief Jamal Yunos intervened. Questioned later, he demanded that the authorities act against counterfeit goods – a phenomenon also racially coded as “Chinese,” especially after the Low Yat incidents.

Jamal has since warned of a “99 per cent” possibility that another rally – “and maybe a riot” – will take place on Petaling Street on 25 September if authorities don’t compel traders to divide their incomes with Malay Muslims, who in return will share with them the nation “they” liberated from Britain.

The redshirts have emerged from the politically charged interaction between three key organising principles in Malaysian public life: race, religion and a sixty-year-old government in crisis. They reflect a confluence of forces unleashed by the critically important election result in 2013, and the subsequent litany of national and scandals centred on embattled prime minister Najib Razak. The redshirts’ charged political rhetoric is raising concern that the threat of violent retribution against Malaysia’s Chinese is building to a point where it might not be contained.

The redshirts were drawn from around the Malay Peninsula – especially rural settlements established by Malaysia’s Federated Land Development Authority – and from UMNO divisions led by Najib’s supporters. Najib, currently in New York ahead of a planned address to the UN General Assembly, is facing money-laundering investigations in the United States over financial transactions by the indebted national strategic development fund One Malaysia Development Berhad, or 1MDB. The US Justice Department is also looking into luxury New York property purchases by companies linked to Najib’s stepson Riza Aziz – producer of The Wolf of Wall Street (banned in Malaysia) – and former 1MDB staff members.

Malaysian publication The Sarawak Report, which claims to have funnelled information about 1MDB to the FBI, was also recently banned by Najib as he moved to shut down a Malaysian investigation into 1MDB. The 1MDB taskforce established by the Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission was quickly disbanded, and its offices were later raided by police. Najib co-opted four of its members to his own cabinet, and sacked the attorney-general, followed soon afterwards by his deputy prime minister Muhyiddin Yassin.

Muhyiddin had not himself been serving on the taskforce, which was tracking the US$700 million apparently channelled by 1MDB into Najib’s personal accounts. Instead, he criticised Najib directly by pointing out that the scandal was causing UMNO to lose so much credibility that it would surely lose the next election, scheduled for 2018. Indeed, the last election resulted in such a strongly contested victory for UMNO that it could only be described as humiliating for Malaysia’s seemingly permanent ruling party.

Having won with a popular vote of only 47 per cent, UMNO was returned to power by the system of elaborate gerrymandering and malapportionment that creates many more rural seats – where Malay Muslim support for UMNO remains relatively strong – than urban ones. Indeed, since the 1MDB scandal broke, some of Malaysia’s irreverent political blogs have speculated that the funds channelled through Najib’s accounts were spent on fighting the election.

In fact, UMNO has resisted adapting to the competitive state of Malaysian politics since the 2008 and 2013 elections. Malay Muslim voters can no longer be portrayed as a unitary electoral bloc, and they are no longer content to treat UMNO as the only legitimate channel through which to advance their interests. Yet leading Malay-language newspaper Utusan Malaysia responded to the 2013 election result with the racially charged question “What more do the Chinese want?”. UMNO’s argument is that Malay Muslims are under threat by increasingly assertive Chinese, and Najib has recently called for his supporters to rise against the “insult” delivered to their leader.

Malaysia’s elections attract frequent criticism from Human Rights Watch and other organisations, and from local NGOs including the Bersih coalition, which has agitated since 2007 for “clean” elections. Around a month ago, Bersih organised a rally, Bersih 4.0, in which around 100,000 people, mostly dressed in yellow, filled the streets of Kuala Lumpur to demand free and fair elections, transparent government and the right to demonstrate.

The rally stretched over two days, ending before an official state-led parade celebrating Malaya’s independence from Britain. Aerial photographs showed that the rally was larger than the Merdeka (Independence) Day parade organised by the government the following day. Yet the Islamist party PAS had refused to mobilise its members for the rally and government agencies had barred all civil servants from attending. As both of those constituencies largely consist of Malay Muslims, the rally appeared disproportionately “Chinese.”

Debates about Bersih’s Chineseness ignited immediately. The government-linked media denounced the rally as an assertion of Chinese power in a nation that belongs to Malay Muslims. Opposition Twitter feeds pointed out that the rally’s racial makeup reflected voting patterns: Malaysia’s Chinese appear to have largely turned against the nation’s government, and the Malay Muslim constituency it purports to represent is now irreparably fractured. With the number of Malay Muslim participants being strongly played down by UMNO and its supporters, Bersih’s social media channels began circulating images of racial harmony at the rally. Among them were photos of Chinese protesters sharing bottled water with Malay Muslims washing for prayer, and footage of Chinese encouraging each other to quieten down and make space for the prayers to proceed.

Organisers also released a Facebook video showing aerial photographs of the enormous rally, interspersed with close-ups of protesters belting out Malaysia’s national anthem. “Happy Merdeka Day,” the video said. The message was unmistakeable: Bersih was claiming to represent this diverse nation better than the government could, and its participants no longer needed UMNO to manage relationships between Malaysia’s Muslims and its non-Muslims. The plural society model favoured by UMNO could easily be replaced by something more organic, something verging on intercultural cooperation in the service of a larger, truly national, cause.

The day before Bersih 4.0, a group of men dressed in red shirts misleadingly labelled “Bersih 4 Security” gathered outside the Sogo department store on Jalan Tuanku Abdul Rahman. Smashing roof tiles and planks on their backs and heads, they performed sequences of silat – a martial art steeped in Malay Muslim mysticism. Silat’s “cultural accretions” are not always approved of by religious purists, but it has been a symbol of cultural nationalism throughout Malaysia’s history, and its clubs have long been involved in political activity. Opting not to rally on the same day as Bersih, the group’s spokesperson, the same Jamal Yunos, promised instead to organise a Malay Muslim “self-defence” rally on 16 September.

The date was important. This is Malaysia Day, commemorating the day in 1963 when the Federation of Malaysia was formed from Malaya, Singapore and the Borneo states of Sabah and Sarawak. The rally, later renamed the “People’s United Assembly,” was organised by Pesaka, the National Silat Federation, led by Muhammad Ali Rustam, a former UMNO chief minister for Malacca. He shared this effort with Jamal Yunos, working in his capacity as head of the Malaysian Confederation of NGOs, a group of at least 250 organisations brought together around Malay Muslim identity. Jamal had also organised a public protest pouring red paint over an effigy of Bersih leader Maria Chin Abdullah, a Chinese woman who is also Muslim. Described by Singapore’s Straits Times as “a kindly auntie,” Maria has been a civil rights activist since the 1980s. Her late husband Yunus Ali, who was a PLO commando while in exile in Palestine and Lebanon, was also a life-long political activist.

Yunus went into exile as a result of his involvement in Malaysia’s increasingly radicalised student movement around the time of the 1969 election – the last time an UMNO-led government was delivered such a heavy electoral blow. One other important activist at the University of Malaya during this period was Anwar Ibrahim, now leader of the opposition coalition, the People’s Alliance, which won the popular vote in the 2013 election. After he claimed victory in a “stolen” election, Anwar – who was UMNO’s deputy prime minister in the 1990s – was sentenced to a second prison term for sodomy in February. Anwar’s daughter, opposition politician Nurul Izzah, recently returned from a US lobbying trip. There, she pointed out that the racial and religious threats unleashed by Malaysia’s decomposing political system may no longer be containable by the authorities.

Since Anwar was jailed, the People’s Alliance has disintegrated amid discussions of a Malay Muslim “unity” government that might implement hudud punishments as part of a wide-ranging Islamisation of the Malaysian state. This realignment later stalled, but one of the People’s Alliance parties, PAS (the main Islamist supporter of hudud) has refused to cooperate with the multiracial coalition since reconstituted as Pakatan Harapan, the “Alliance of Hope.” But the new coalition has enlisted a group of former PAS leaders, who have since established Amanah (Trust), a new party that argues Islamists can and should join in political alliances with non-Muslims.

In light of the system’s convulsions, yesterday’s terror alert is potentially incendiary, depending on what transpires in the days and weeks to come. Nevertheless, such moments have passed before, and Malaysians’ sanguine understanding of their nation’s politics has seen them through almost every crisis with their capacity for tolerance largely intact.

Former prime minister Mahathir Mohamad was a master of the art of threatening racial and religious violence, but then dialling back the threat just as it began to frighten the public. Mahathir has often called for Najib to step down, citing a desire to protect UMNO’s legitimacy as his reason for intervening. Installed after a sudden electoral surge by Anwar’s People’s Alliance in 2008, prime minister Najib’s moment came when his predecessor Abdullah Badawi was blamed by Mahathir for UMNO’s poor performance. Mahathir’s faction has not been able to depose Najib in the same way it acted against Abdullah, prompting Mahathir himself to attend Bersih 4.0. There, he issued a brief statement about people’s power, the political force he had always worked to contain. He also remains involved in internal UMNO intrigue. 

Last weekend, a former UMNO division chief connected with Mahathir was arrested before he left for the United States to share 1MDB information with the FBI. He has been detained without trial under Malaysia’s Security Offences (Special Measures) Act, which replaced its notorious Internal Security Act in 2012. The new Act contains enhanced measures for dealing with terrorism as well as a wide range of actual and purported threats to public order. This year, the Malaysian parliament passed an additional Prevention of Terrorism Act, which now allows for detention without trial to continue for up to two years. Public concern is growing that Najib will use these legislative instruments to stifle investigations into 1MDB, especially if enabled by a climate of fear around terrorism.

Najib himself is determined to ride out the crisis. Indeed, it seems to appear that nothing will move him. Meanwhile, senior UMNO figures are growing increasingly critical of the racial and religious rhetoric. One such leader, Saifuddin Abdullah, CEO of the Global Movement of Moderates Foundation established by Najib in 2010, has begun to call for new forms of politics to protect social cohesion. Now seen as too friendly with the opposition, Saifuddin is under investigation by UMNO for having attended the launch of Anwar’s Alliance of Hope.

In Johor state, meanwhile, the royal family has issued a series of statements obliquely criticising Najib for corruption and racism. Among their outlets are the social media accounts managed by the Crown Prince, who is also president of the Johor Football Association and its team, the Southern Tigers. Followed by more than a million people, the team’s Facebook page is an important platform for the prince, who attracted a rally of 2000 Malaysians outside his palace after the government criticised his statements earlier this year. It seems that Malaysians are increasingly mobilising through whatever associations they can join, more of which are becoming politicised as citizens tire of the heightened tension.

Meanwhile, investors, already worried by UMNO’s contradictory statements about the disappearance of Flight MH370, have started taking their capital out of the country. Foreign funds have sold nearly US$4 billion in Malaysian shares this year alone, and the ringgit has fallen sharply against the US dollar, increasing inflation and diminishing Malaysians’ purchasing power. Commodity prices are in decline, as is economic growth in a nation which exports crude and palm oil. As the scandals drag on and Najib digs in, a former activist from Wanita UMNO (UMNO Women) has filed applications for his assets to be frozen after accusing him of having “pissed” on the rest of the party.

As recently as last week, Malaysia’s poet laureate Samad Said stated that the current national climate of street mobilisations and a collapse of public trust contained all the triggers for a declaration of emergency. Samad himself has recently joined the Democratic Action Party, or DAP, one more component of the new coalition campaigning for Anwar to become prime minister. The DAP is also strongly associated with the “Chinese,” and has pushed its Malay Muslim activists forward to counter this perception. In 1969, it was the DAP’s strong electoral showing that triggered anti-Chinese pogroms around Kuala Lumpur, after which Malaysia’s King declared a nationwide emergency. In the following election, in 1974, the Islamist party PAS ran alongside UMNO to help re-establish the familiar system of racial and religious bloc politics.

Malaysia has a long history of emergency declarations that suspend civil liberties and clamp down on public opposition. This is especially the case if that opposition breaks out of the racial and religious boundaries created by the state. Tomorrow’s threatened redshirt riot in Petaling Street is an attempt to restore the boundaries breached by Bersih 4.0. In the midst of all this turmoil, last night’s terror warnings could exacerbate the climate of foreboding, with any false political move ultimately proving the poet Samad right.

For Australia, the time to engage Malaysia with smart new forms of public and private diplomacy – not only focused on terror and foreign fighters but on social cohesion across the region – has now arrived. •

Postscript: Kuala Lumpur has been brought back from the brink of racial and religious violence over the weekend, in a sequence of developments following the decision of the United States to issue a terror alert for Jalan Alor.

Media sources say that the alert was linked to reports of increased Islamic State activity in Malaysia. On Friday night, Malaysia’s counterterrorism unit detained three men, about whom little information has been released. The men – Malaysian, Indonesian and Syrian – can be held without trial for up to two years under Malaysia’s Prevention of Terrorism Act.

Police also arrested redshirt leader Jamal Yunos, who they detained for twenty-four hours to ensure he could not organise a rally – and “possibly a riot” – directed against Chinese traders in nearby Petaling Street. Jamal has since been released, and is threatening to sue the “pro-opposition” media for portraying him as a threat. Large numbers of police were also deployed in the area on Saturday, and no redshirt rally took place.

Former prime minister Mahathir Mohamad is accusing prime minister Najib Razak of manufacturing the redshirt crisis, and opposition spokespeople are arguing that the redshirt spectacle is designed to distract from the 1MDB scandal and the nation’s economic woes.

This weekend’s developments have also introduced China as a new actor on the Malaysian stage. Chinese ambassador Huang Huikang visited Petaling Street on Saturday bearing mooncakes for its traders while stating that China opposes terrorism. His public statements referenced Jalan Alor, Chinese nationals, regional economic development and China–Malaysia trade. Yet his visit was to Petaling Street, whose Chinese traders are likely all Malaysians, who may have little or no specific connection to China or its interests.

The Malaysian Ministry of Foreign Affairs has since summoned the ambassador to explain his actions, and Malay Muslim nationalist organisations have begun to issue statements decrying external interference in Malaysia’s sovereign politics. Such statements are usually directed at the United States, yet now the question of Malaysian social cohesion is an arena for Chinese power. As a result, Chinese Malaysians may have reason to wonder if they might attract yet more public denunciations.

The US terror alert has provided cover for Malaysia to step back from its flashpoint. Nevertheless, the stage is set for the next instalment in its slowly-unfolding – and ever more dangerous – political crisis. And each time the crisis heats up and cools down again, levels of public trust decline even further.

The post Malaysia’s flashpoint appeared first on Inside Story.

The strong backing for the government came despite the rise of the internet, and of social media in particular, and after the opposition had recorded a string of electoral successes by capitalising on policy and administrative failures in housing, transport, immigration and the cost of living. It also came at the first election under the “new normal” paradigm created by the opposition’s strong performance at the 2011 general election. The PAP’s leaders, no longer able to assume that the party held the moral, intellectual and electoral high ground, knew that they now had to win support much like politicians do in Western democracies.

The opposition was naturally disappointed with its showing this time, and the PAP’s leaders were naturally pleased. In the case of cabinet ministers, though, a more telling reaction was evident in their faces, speeches and body language: they were amazed. Only two nights earlier, prime minister Lee Hsien Loong had addressed a PAP rally and, by all conventional measures, delivered one of his worst speeches ever. He was fumbling, flustered, defensive and pleading. He highlighted all the issues on which his government was vulnerable – “housing, transport, immigration and healthcare” – on the rather weak basis that the government was working hard to fix them. To make it worse, the small crowd missed the cues to cheer or laugh and contributed a series of awkward silences. No one is going to convince me that Lee didn’t walk onto that platform in a state of near panic, and didn’t walk off thinking he was a loser.

But it wasn’t to be – far from it, in fact. Something drastic had happened in the four years since the 2011 election, or possibly as recently as the week of the 2015 election campaign itself.

Learning politics

I’d suggest, first, that the PAP leadership has used the four years since the last election to learn how to do politics. Recognising the reality and implications of the “new normal,” cabinet had set about winning back lost support, moderating and correcting unpopular policies, deflecting criticism, and being seen to listen to the people. New programs of welfare-style handouts and healthcare and housing reforms were targeted at hitherto neglected segments of the constituency: unmarrieds, the aged and the poor. (Admittedly, some of these reforms were already in train in more modest ways before 2011.) Uncharacteristically, the government also engaged in slick, expensive and very effective public relations campaigns to reach out to the beneficiaries of these campaigns so that they were fully aware of what was available – and whom they had to thank for it.

Lee’s ministers also denigrated selected members of the opposition, took a series of steps to silence and frighten critics, and brought social media more fully into the ambit of the government’s regulation. All the while, it used the Ministry of National Development to engage in a major campaign targeting the opposition’s managerial competence on the basis of the Workers’ Party’s management of the only town council run by an opposition party. The PAP turned the problems at that town council into a meme that suggested an opposition victory (which was technically a possibility, since all seats were contested) would bring Singapore crashing down.

Except perhaps for the heightened levels of direct repression, such measures are the very grist of ordinary political engagement in most functioning democracies. But until 2011 they were outside the experience of Lee and his ministers, most of whom come from privileged backgrounds and all of whom were parachuted into politics after being plucked from their chosen careers. They had not had to fight to get their positions and had little notion of how to relate to ordinary people.

The problem was longstanding. From the 1980s on, PAP leaders slipped into lazy habits when it came to winning elections: bullying opposition candidates (by libel and other legal actions); harassing opposition parties and civil society organisations (by restricting and closely managing their capacity to organise and speak); managing the media and later on trying to manage the internet; bullying constituencies (by threatening to deprive them of housing upgrades if they voted for the opposition); and manipulating electoral boundaries just a few weeks out from each election. Receiving feedback and finessing policies with an eye to popular opinion was part of this mix from the 1990s on, but it was not a high priority. And so they were blindsided in 2011 when the opposition found itself able, even under such repressive conditions, to build a base of popular support sufficient to propel its candidates into parliament in a serious way.

Popular support

The second major factor in the PAP’s victory is even more basic. The overwhelming majority of Singaporeans – including, it seems, the internet generation – have accepted, and even welcome, the PAP as their security blanket. As much as they might grumble about the government and enjoy poking fun at it, even young, educated and well-travelled Singaporeans could not endure the thought that Singapore might have to manage without the PAP and the managerial approach it represents. Perhaps the decisive moment was that final night of rallies, when they saw the video coverage of Lee Hsien Loong in a state of near panic, his personal vulnerabilities on display for all to see; but the message had probably firmed up much earlier. In this framework, the main task of the government’s political messaging was simply to provide a trigger to activate this fear.

If this analysis is sound, then the likelihood of fundamental political change in Singapore is bleak indeed. For the foreseeable future, a safe harbour will always trump concerns about the performance of the government. Singaporeans are now willing to accept that they live in an ordinary country in which trains break down regularly, the government routinely makes mistakes and then apologises, and the ruling party deals with criticism by silencing its critics. Such shortcomings have always been a feature of post-independence Singapore, but they are now public, acknowledged – and, it seems, acceptable to the vast majority of voters. •

The post Singapore’s flight to safety appeared first on Inside Story.

It was another sixteen years before the PAP lost a seat in a parliamentary election. In 1981 a single opposition member won a by-election and entered parliament alongside seventy-seven government MPs, initiating a period of modest progress among the several active opposition parties. A decade later, four opposition MPs were sitting in a house of eighty-three elected MPs. This turned out to be a high point – until 2011, that is, when a landslide swing against the government took the opposition’s elected representation in parliament from two to six. Two years later, six became seven when the government lost another by-election.

No one thinks the opposition parties will transform their base of seven seats (all of which are held by the Workers’ Party) into a majority of forty-five, but that certainly doesn’t mean this month’s election is unimportant. It is important for the opposition, the government and the country, though for different reasons in each case.

Building on loyalty

For the multi-party opposition, the most serious risk is a move backwards. Five of its seven elected seats are held by one party, the Workers’ Party, in a single multi-seat constituency, the Aljunied Group Representation Constituency, and under Singapore’s winner-takes-all electoral system, a loss there could take them back to where they started. Their team in Aljunied is under tremendous pressure for its alleged mismanagement of the local town council. (Singaporean MPs double as municipal administrators.) Since 2011 the government has been hammering the example of Aljunied to create the impression that the opposition is a bunch of amateurs – or worse – who can’t be trusted with drains and walkways let alone running the country.

The campaign against the Workers’ Party team reached a new high after the elections were called and has the potential to do serious damage, but in the absence of published opinion polls it is difficult to know how much. Constituencies that elect opposition MPs tend to develop very strong loyalties to their contrarian representatives, and tend to resent rather than believe the government’s smears and attacks. The government’s critique of the Workers’ Party’s town council smacks of a hunting pack, and it would be surprising if it had more than a marginal effect on the outcome – but time will tell.

To balance the scales somewhat, the Workers’ Party is fielding the same experienced team that won the constituency in 2011, whereas four of the five PAP candidates are unknowns. (The PAP usually fields a couple of cabinet ministers in these multi-member constituencies but after losing two in 2011 it has obviously decided not to risk any more ministers in Aljunied.)

Leaving aside the risk of going backwards, this election offers the opposition a once-in-a-generation opportunity to consolidate its record-level holdings, or even to take its score of elected members into double digits. The eastern end of the island in particular has a number of single-seat and multi-seat constituencies in which the PAP might be vulnerable – and the opposition has no shortage of issues on which to fight for them. According to a semi-official 2014 survey of satisfaction with the government, the PAP’s most vulnerable issues are the cost of living, the cost of cars and housing, immigration, and the cost and reliability of public transport. Significantly for the opposition and for external critics of the Singapore government, the survey shows a high level of public satisfaction on the issue of “civil rights/liberties/free speech,” despite the government’s increasingly frequent and high-handed prosecution and persecution of people who dare to question it.

Also at stake for the opposition will be the shape of opposition politics itself. Eight opposition parties are contesting this election, and even though the Workers’ Party is the only one with elected MPs in the current parliament, two other parties (the Singapore Democratic Party and the Singapore People’s Party) have won seats in the past and the National Solidarity Party has come close. Even new parties contesting their first election are led by seasoned campaigners who used to belong to – or even lead – other parties. If the non-PAP parties hope to become an alternative government, they need to move beyond this very fluid landscape. And if the Workers’ Party remains the main opposition party after the election, the other parties should perhaps give some thought to recognising it as such and find a way to accommodate this as a fixed reality.

The incumbency advantage

For its part, the PAP is looking down the proverbial barrel. The government has so much stacked in its favour that if it does well it will only be “as expected,” but if it does badly it will be a disaster. Not that the PAP will lose government, but any slippage from the already-bad 2011 result will probably destroy prime minister Lee Hsien Loong’s stature and authority inside cabinet. Even a failure to significantly improve the PAP’s showing will be enough for Lee to be judged harshly by his colleagues. The imperatives in Singapore’s political culture might make a spill motion against Lee extremely unlikely, but if the result is disappointing he risks becoming a lame-duck leader.

Lee followed the announcement of the election date with hyperbolic statements about the election ushering in the next generation of leaders and the next prime minister. This wasn’t just a contrived effort to appear statesmanlike: it was also an attempt to disguise his desperation in the face of the high stakes for which he is playing. There are other indicators of his desperation as well. Calling an election eighteen months early is a clear sign of nervousness, and his new pattern of asking to be judged more by his father’s record (since 1965) than by his own (since 2004) is an implicit admission that his eleven years as prime minister have been less than wonderful.

Yet it is too soon to be writing him off. Lee Hsien Loong emerged from the 2006 election with his authority seriously wounded by, among other things, the weakness of the party’s vote in his own constituency. This put his long-term hold on the prime ministership at risk, but he reversed the trend in his own constituency in 2011 (partly by tweaking the boundaries) and successfully turned his personal fortunes around, even as neighbouring Aljunied slipped away from the government.

This time, the PAP faces many challenges, but it still holds most of the cards. The institutional advantages it enjoys in any election have been supplemented by the fact that the election takes place immediately after the spectacular but jingoistic celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of Singapore’s independence, which in turn followed the dam-bursting wave of emotion after Lee Kuan Yew’s death in March. This confluence of forces is tailor-made for Lee’s chosen tactic of framing “his” government’s record over the fifty years since independence rather than the decade and a bit since he became prime minister.

The ideas deficit

For Singapore as a whole, the future looks more certain, if not more comforting. The most worrying feature of this election is how bereft the government is of new ideas – or at least that is how it seems at the time of writing.

Government ministers used the period before the formal campaign began to make preliminary statements. One of these was buried in an interview given on 27 August by manpower minister Lim Swee Say, who said, “The way we grew our economy over the last ten years or so, I think we all recognise that is no longer sustainable.” He was referring to the most explosive of all the policy failures that led to the surge in support for the opposition in 2011: the government’s effort to boost production levels through the simple expedient of drastically increasing immigration to boost the number of working bodies – a policy initiated personally by the prime minister ten years ago. This primitive strategy was itself a throwback to the economic model of the 1960s and 1970s, when Singapore was launching itself as a manufacturing and export centre. It worked in the 1970s, but there should have been no place for it in twenty-first-century Singapore.

When I read Lim Swee Say’s statement I assumed he had been given the task of foreshadowing a major revision in the direction of government, and I was puzzled to find it buried in a news report. After all, it is widely acknowledged that Singapore, as a country and as an economy faces new and unprecedented challenges that require novel responses. This has been the standard orthodoxy in the upper levels of the civil service for more than a decade, so surely, I thought, this must be the opening gambit in pushing in a new direction.

A few days later I watched Lee Hsien Loong launch his party’s election manifesto and then downloaded and read the manifesto itself. Only at that point did it become clear that Lim’s admission was not part of any plan. I was struck by the timid, backward-looking nature of both Lee’s speech and the PAP manifesto. No new ideas; no hint of reflection; no revision; nothing very much that looks forward at all. This is not just bad news for the PAP; it is bad news for Singapore, since new ideas are desperately needed. Lee still has time to announce new ideas, but time is running out and I am beginning to wonder whether there is a single new idea in cabinet – or whether there has been for some time.

This would never have happened under Lee Kuan Yew. His mind churned with probing questions, new ideas and unorthodox solutions. He had a courageous approach to leadership and he was never afraid to ask hard questions or challenge orthodoxies. The downside of his leadership was that there were basically no barriers between the formation of an idea in his head and the implementation of his idea on a national scale – and this led to many embarrassing mistakes and policy foibles. The upside was that at least he had ideas and could recognise good ideas that other people put to him. And he had the political and administrative skills to implement them.

The bottom line is that Lee Hsien Loong is no Lee Kuan Yew. As he draws attention to “his” government’s fifty-year record of achievement, he had better hope that people do not interrogate the comparison between himself and his father too closely. No doubt, such thoughts have already struck many of his colleagues in cabinet. •

The post Singapore looks forward to the past fifty years appeared first on Inside Story.

To be sure, Najib’s fingerprints are all over the current mess. The proximate source of the crisis has been the collapse of Najib’s pet sovereign-investment company, 1Malaysia Development Berhad, or 1MDB, which has caused Malaysia’s stock market and currency, the ringgit, to plummet. All this has transpired amid credible allegations that the prime minister siphoned an eye-popping US$700 million into his personal bank account.

But this road towards ruin commenced with Mahathir, not Najib. It is vital to recognise that Mahathir rose to power in blessed circumstances. Malaysia’s economy had been growing healthily for decades, thanks to the prudent economic management of a highly capable bureaucracy. Governance and tax collection were effective, and debts were few. Natural resources wealth, including oil, was professionally stewarded. A decade of muscular redistribution to the country’s ethnic Malay majority had restored social stability after the race riots of 1969. Incoming foreign investment was copious and about to mushroom even further. Mahathir found himself in command of one of the most cohesive ruling parties (the United Malays National Organisation, or UMNO) and coalitions (the Barisan Nasional, or BN) in the world. The regime was authoritarian, but not intensely repressive or disliked in comparative terms. In short, Mahathir was holding a winning hand when he became prime minister in 1981.

Then came the debt. Obsessed with following in the footsteps of Asia’s technological leaders, Mahathir began borrowing heavily to fund Look East, his government-led heavy-industrialisation program. Privatisation was part of his growth package, but the beneficiaries were business figures with more loyalty than talent. When the global economy went into recession in the mid 1980s, patronage started drying up. UMNO split, largely in reaction to Mahathir’s strong-arm style of rule. Mahathir’s two most talented rivals, Tengku Razaleigh and Musa Hitam, bolted from UMNO despite their deep personal ties to the party, mostly to get away from Mahathir himself. Mahathir responded by launching a police operation under the pretext of racial tensions, imprisoning and intimidating political rivals and cementing his autocratic control.

By the late 1980s, all of the defining features of Malaysia’s current crisis were evident. The regime was increasingly repressive. The office of prime minister was becoming a haven of autocracy. Ethnic tensions had been reopened to political manipulation. The economy was worrisomely indebted. And UMNO was shedding some of its most capable leaders. This was the beginning of Malaysia’s sad national decline, and it happened under Mahathir’s watch and by his own hand.

Fast-forward a decade and all of these syndromes recurred in even nastier forms. The Asian Financial Crisis of 1997–98 punished Malaysia for the unsustainable dollar-denominated debts it had accumulated under Mahathir’s single-minded push for breakneck growth. Mahathir blamed everybody but himself for the crash. He sacked and imprisoned his popular and gifted deputy, Anwar Ibrahim, largely for his temerity in suggesting that Malaysia needed deeper reforms to regain economic health.

Mahathir didn’t pull Malaysia out of its crisis with economic reform or adjustment, but with more and more borrowing and spending. This was possible because Malaysia was still sitting on the fiscal reserves it had been amassing for the half century since the British colonial period. Mahathir grandiosely claimed that his imposition of capital controls had saved the economy, but capital flight had basically run its course by the time controls were implemented. Mahathir imposed the controls to facilitate political repression as much as economic recovery. The spectre of anti-Chinese riots in neighbouring Indonesia was then callously manipulated to keep ethnic Chinese voters in the BN fold in the 1999 elections.

And so, even before the turn of the millennium, Malaysia was hurtling down the very trajectory of decline we are witnessing in the current crisis. Like Mahathir, Najib assumed autocratic control over the economy and embarked on irresponsible borrowing and investment schemes, especially 1MDB. Like Mahathir, Najib unleashed a torrent of repression under antiquated security laws to protect his own position amid rising criticism from civil society and from within UMNO. Like Mahathir, Najib has recklessly played the ethnic and religious cards as his position has weakened. And in consummate Mahathir style, Najib has now even sacked his deputy, Muhyiddin Yassin, for questioning his repression of the media in response to the 1MDB scandal. In sum, Mahathir has nobody to blame more than himself as he watches Najib drive Malaysia even further into the ground.

Neither Najib nor any of his likely replacements appears capable of reversing Malaysia’s decades-long decline. And herein lies perhaps Mahathir’s worst legacy of all. By forcing the three most capable politicians beside himself out of UMNO during their prime, Mahathir ensured that only relative lightweights would command leading positions in Malaysia’s most powerful political institution. If Malaysia is to exit this crisis on a path to restored health rather than steeper decline, the political and economic reforms first demanded in the reformasi movement of the late 1990s will finally need to be put in place: either by a new generation of leadership within UMNO, or by Malaysia’s repressed but resilient political opposition. •

The post Malaysia’s mess is Mahathir-made appeared first on Inside Story.

Yet the majority Rakhine Buddhists – often cast as the villains – also have legitimate grievances, in their case against the ethnic Burmese, or Bamar, central government. They see themselves as the meat in the grinder between the numerical might of Bangladesh and the political, military and financial power of the Myanmar government far off in Naypyitaw. Perhaps a more apt metaphor would be ground chilli in a mortar and pestle: hot to touch, ready to explode. “We are now in danger of being overrun by these Bangladeshis,” Rakhine politician Zaw Aye Maung told a briefing for diplomats in Yangon on 4 June – a comment that provoked an angry response from Bangladesh’s ambassador.

The violence in Rakhine State has been the major blot on the reform copybook of Myanmar’s quasi-civilian government, which came to office in 2011 in a highly choreographed transition. Much to the government’s chagrin, the issue has been taken up energetically by much of the international community – governments, the United Nations, NGOs and the media – and that has drawn attention away from Myanmar’s recent achievements. Yet the fierce domestic opposition to any concessions to the Rohingya limits how the government believes it can respond. It too feels hemmed in.

In recent weeks the Rohingya plight has again been thrust into the spotlight. The world has watched as the lives of up to 10,000 people – a mixture of economic migrants, asylum seekers and trafficking victims from Bangladesh and Rakhine State – have hung in the balance, their vessels floating on the Andaman Sea and in the Bay of Bengal with little food or water and nowhere to berth. In what the International Organization for Migration called “maritime ping-pong,” stricken vessels were towed back out to sea by the navies of Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia as they approached territorial waters.

Under growing international and domestic pressure, nations in the region finally abandoned their much-cherished principle of non-interference in the domestic affairs of their neighbours and began to act. On 20 May, Indonesia and Malaysia agreed to allow the boats to land as long as the international community helps repatriate or resettle their human cargo within a year. Then, on 29 May, representatives from seventeen countries, including Myanmar, met in Thailand to discuss irregular migration in the Indian Ocean. Much discussion again focused on the “root causes” of the migration – a thinly veiled reference to the discrimination against the Rohingya in Rakhine State.

There is a predictability about how the Myanmar government responds to the recurrent crises on its western flank. It enters siege mode, insisting that the issue is strictly domestic and should be settled by domestic laws. It declares the problem one of illegal immigration and poverty – legacies of colonial rule, geography and ethnic conflict – rather than a result of discrimination or a failure to enforce human rights. It resists attempts to characterise Rakhine State’s cycle of poverty and violence as anything more sinister. It responds indignantly when accusations of genocide or crimes against humanity are levelled.

The government also fiercely disputes the legitimacy of the Rohingya designation, an identity it believes was confected in the mid twentieth century to further the political aims of Rakhine’s Muslims. Instead, it insists on calling them Bengalis. And that is often where the debate starts and stops. The inability of the government and its critics to either ignore or temporarily overlook the question of ethnic designation results in a series of historical back-and-forths that never ends. No middle ground is found, and areas where progress can potentially be made go unexplored.

Some believe the government has confected the crisis in Rakhine State for political purposes, to distract the attention of its people – particularly the impoverished Rakhine – from issues of political and economic equality. According to this line of thinking, it is also a useful wedge against Nobel laureate and opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi, who has been notably quiet on the issue. (Questioned by reporters in parliament on 19 May, she said it was the government’s responsibility to resolve the crisis.) Cue international condemnation of the human rights icon who has failed to stand up for human rights.

For similar reasons, though, the confected crisis theory seems implausible. The Rakhine conflict has drawn domestic and international attention away from the other challenges that Myanmar faces, making the reform effort that much harder. Ethnic Rakhine distaste for Naypyitaw has only increased, and is likely to be felt at the ballot box in a general election later this year. Tens of millions of dollars of state and donor funds are being spent supporting displaced families. The conditions in Rakhine State have also been a major factor in Washington’s decision to maintain some economic sanctions, complicating Myanmar’s program of economic liberalisation. The European Union continues to sponsor two annual resolutions on Myanmar’s human rights situation at the United Nations, largely for the same reason.

But while the current crisis hasn’t been manufactured in Naypyitaw, in other ways it reflects longer-term official policy. In the 1950s and 60s, the Burmese government quietly encouraged the development of Rohingya identity to counter a mujahedeen movement that had emerged after the second world war. In the early 1990s, though, it cancelled the identity documents held by many Rohingya and refused to replace them, instead doling out temporary registration cards, which became known as “white cards.” Formal applications from Rohingya for citizenship were ignored. It is this lack of citizenship that has fuelled many abuses in recent decades. Without identification, Rohingya can’t even travel to the next township without permission from a local government official. Economic opportunities are extremely limited.

Criticising the government is a national pastime in Myanmar, particularly in an era when social media gives people an instantaneous and public voice. But Naypyitaw’s position on this question is strongly supported. The Rohingya are neither accepted nor pitied, and public attitudes can be fierce. In my role editing the Myanmar Times, the country’s only privately owned English-language daily, this has been the thorniest issue to cover during Myanmar’s transition. Our paper’s support for human rights – including the right to self-identify – for all in Myanmar is deeply unpopular; we have been variously labelled “The Rohingya Times” and “The Bengali Times” for daring to use the word “Rohingya” and putting photos of Rohingya on our front page. Comments on our Facebook page – 652,000 “likes” and counting – are an intemperate testament to the depth of feeling the issue arouses.

At a time of relative political liberalisation – an incredibly free press, the right to protest, political representation for minorities – these forces and feelings have proven hard to control, limiting how the government feels it can respond. The few steps it has taken to address human rights issues in Rakhine State, including a flawed citizenship verification process for Rohingya, have prompted protests in Rakhine State and major cities elsewhere around the country. A proposal to maintain voting rights for white-card holders, most of whom are Rohingya, met with similarly fierce opposition.

Unable to resort to the tactics used during military rule to quell dissent, the government also lacks the ability to craft a convincing narrative to explain its actions and vision to domestic audiences, partly because it is unwilling to repudiate or even acknowledge past mistakes. In perhaps the most eloquent defence to date, senior government minister Soe Thane spoke recently of the need to “balance interests, pace change, and connect our aspirations to political realities on the ground” in order to ensure the reforms do not fail. “We ask though that our friends outside add not fuel but bring water to the fires that we have to put out as we open up our country and our society after so many years of authoritarian rule,” he wrote in Nikkei Asian Review.

Western governments are aware of these pressures and have made few public statements berating Myanmar, a task left instead to NGOs. The UN country team has been almost totally silent, with criticism instead emanating from Bangkok, Geneva and New York. At the same time, quiet but intense talks have been launched in an effort to push Myanmar to address those root causes. The importance of the intervention of Southeast Asian nations – ASEAN, previously unwilling to touch the issue, has been a bulwark against Western criticism – cannot be overstated. The regional nature of the boat crisis has prompted a slight recalibration of thinking in Naypyitaw, which senses that failure to engage will leave it on the outer. Publicly it remains belligerent, but there is an understanding that the situation in Rakhine State needs to change for the better, for all.

The question now is how best to encourage that change. Some steps that could be taken immediately – the granting of full citizenship to the Rohingya, for example, or their recognition as an official ethnic group – are clearly off the table. Compromises and quiet diplomacy are the order of the day, but the Myanmar government cannot be allowed to use domestic politics as an excuse for inaction. Negotiating this fine balance will require tact and coordination from the international community, and strength from Myanmar’s collective political leadership. Even if that occurs, change will not come fast enough for some. It is likely to be decades, possibly generations, before the deep-seated resentment and fear driving the persecution of the Rohingya can be fully mitigated. •

The post Myanmar and the Rohingya: the case for quiet diplomacy appeared first on Inside Story.