The Trouble With Tigers: The Rise and Fall of South-East Asia

Coercion – sometimes outright force – remains a vital part of government tactics throughout south-east Asia. In its crudest manifestations, this means arresting and torturing government opponents; more subtly, it can mean that opposition leaders will mysteriously find it impossible to get work in government institutions (if they are teachers or doctors, for example) or to win government contracts (if they are in business). Even before Hun Sen overtly seized control of Cambodia in his 1997 coup d’état, members of parliament were all too aware of the dangers of speaking freely about the rampant corruption in their government. ‘We are limited in our activities,’ said Ahmed Yahya, an MP for the royalist Funcinpec party and a member of Cambodia’s Cham Moslem minority. ‘If I dare to speak up, I will feel lonely and a lot of people will hate me and I will get a bullet in my chest or my head or my hand, so I have to keep quiet.’20 Shortly after he said this, fifteen people were killed when grenades were thrown at opposition leader Sam Rainsy, a pro-democracy campaigner and former finance minister. Hun Sen’s followers were strongly suspected of being the perpetrators. Both Rainsy and Yahya subsequently went into temporary exile overseas.

There are other, less obviously violent methods by which governments maintain control. One is to restrict the rights of industrial workers and to ban free trade unions. (Sam Rainsy was particularly unpopular with the government and Asian investors because he championed the rights of Cambodian textile factory workers being paid as little as US$30 a month.) Vigorous and independent trade unions are the exception rather than the norm in south-east Asia, in spite of the universal tendency of workers to organize themselves as a country industrializes. In Malaysia, trade unions have been banned in the electronics industry, which is vital to Malaysian export growth. In Indonesia, the Suharto government harassed and arrested leaders of the free trade union SBSI and promoted a pro-government union called the SPSI. In Singapore and Vietnam, unions are closely linked to the government. Even in democratic Thailand, unions are weak and face various legal restrictions, some harking back to the struggle between the authorities and their communist opponents in the 1960s and 1970s. However, such restrictions are not always as controversial in south-east Asia itself as they appear to international labour rights campaigners. Many factories and workshops do have grim health and safety records and industrial employees do work long hours with fewer benefits than in the West. There are frequent worker protests at factories in the poorer countries such as Vietnam and Indonesia. But conditions in modern factories, particularly those owned by foreign multinationals with international images to maintain, are usually nothing like as appalling as they were in the textile mills of the English industrial revolution. Wages have been rising sharply, too. One of the biggest headaches for employers in the Malaysian electronics sector is not worker activism but job-hopping for higher pay. In Thailand, it was notable that when a left-wing British magazine sought to expose conditions in the troubled textile industry in Bangkok, it illustrated the article with a photograph of a happily smiling Thai seamstress. Wages were low and hours long, the article said. But it added: ‘The most surprising feature of Bangkok is the absence of conflict between workers and owners. There is nothing of the smouldering hatreds of Jakarta, or the concealment of Dhaka. Neither side appears to see the relationship as exploitative.’21 In the more developed southeast Asian economies, the combination of globalization, fast-growing economies and rising wages has helped to defuse the employer-worker conflict that has hitherto been an inevitable part of industrial revolution.

But the suppression of trade unions is only one aspect of authoritarianism in practice in south-east Asia. Much more sinister are the decline of the rule of law, the erosion of the independence of the judiciary and the increasingly explicit role of the police and security forces as agents of those in power rather than defenders of law and order. Some countries – Burma and Cambodia, for example – have been under authoritarian rule for so long that the young have no experience at all of a justice system in which courts and judges function independently of the regime’s wishes. In other countries, there has been a gradual decline in the professionalism of the legal system and an increase in government interference since independence. Courts in most of south-east Asia routinely support the government in political cases, labour disputes and environmental challenges to government-backed projects; when they do not, both sides in the case are usually surprised – and such decisions are overturned on appeal. The issue of the rule of law, vital for honest business executives and humble peasants alike, comes up again and again in interviews across the region. People usually regard the right to be treated fairly as more important even than the right to vote. The concept and practice of the rule of law existed long before the European Enlightenment and continue to exist in non-western societies.22 Even if one can label liberal democracy as a ‘western’ demand, the same is not true of the rule of law.

For the Malaysian journalist Rehman Rashid, the government’s decapitation of the Supreme Court in the 1980s was the last straw that drove him into voluntary exile. Mahathir had sharply criticized the judiciary after a number of cases in which judges had upheld freedom of speech and challenged a controversial government road contract. After the Lord President of the Supreme Court had protested about the government interference, he and two other Supreme Court judges were dismissed. ‘Malaysia’s judiciary was decimated,’ wrote Rashid. ‘Great gaping holes had been blown on the highest bench, and they would be filled by the premature promotions of the definitively inexperienced. Moreover, these jurists would know they owed their elevation to political forces, and their consciences would never command the respect of Malaysia’s legal fraternity. To peer over the bench and see nothing but contempt at the Bar – how would that impact upon the discharge of their duties? The Malaysian judiciary would be a beleaguered and fearful shadow of what it had been.’23 At first the concern was focused on political matters. But by the 1990s there were fears that large, well-connected Malaysian companies were using the courts for purely commercial advantage. ‘Complaints are rife that certain highly placed personalities in Malaysia, including those in the business and corporate sectors, are manipulating the Malaysian system of justice,’ said Mr Param Curaswamy, a lawyer and special rapporteur on the independence of judges and lawyers for the UN Commission on Human Rights.24

Other countries have similar problems. In Indonesia, the independence of the judiciary was undermined by the fact that most senior posts in the Justice Ministry and the High Court were filled by graduates of the military law academy.25 Thailand’s justice system is affected by bribes paid to prosecutors, judges and the police.26 Philippine courts are subject to corruption too. By one estimate, only about seven in every fifty judges were honest. ‘Certainly the crooked judges live lives way beyond the means of their income,’ said Senator Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, who went on to become vice-president.27

It has become increasingly difficult to discuss such matters openly in south-east Asia. Critics fear they will be found in contempt of court by the very courts they are criticizing. This is what happened to Lingle, the American professor working at the National University of Singapore. In 1994, he wrote an article in the International Herald Tribune responding to an earlier commentary, critical of the West, written by Kishore Mahbubani of the Singapore foreign ministry. Without mentioning any particular country, Lingle said some Asian governments relied on a ‘compliant judiciary to bankrupt opposition politicians’. The prosecutor in Singapore asserted that this must be a reference to Singapore, where Lee Kuan Yew and his PAP colleagues indeed had a record of suing opposition politicians for defamation. Lingle (who had fled the country), and the editor, publisher, printer and distributor of the newspaper (which has one of its printing sites in Singapore) were ordered to pay enormous fines and costs for contempt of the Singapore judiciary. The offence was not to say that the government bankrupted its opponents, but to call the courts ‘compliant’. Lingle vividly described the unusual experience – for a mild-mannered university professor – of suddenly finding himself being interrogated by the police for expressing unremarkable opinions. He ran away – fearful until his plane was airborne that he would be arrested – leaving behind his job and most of his possessions. He has since become one of the most cogent critics of Singapore, comparing it unfavourably to South Africa in the apartheid era, when he says he openly denounced the regime without fear of repression. Subsequently, Singapore’s leaders continued to sue their opponents – notably Tang and Jeyaretnam in 1997.28 The fact that both men are lawyers is a reflection of the traditions of independence that the judiciary once boasted of: the law was one of the few professions where people felt far enough removed from government patronage and influence to practise opposition politics. That no longer seems to be so. Tang, like other opposition figures before him, fled overseas.

Singapore’s ministers are adamant that they must defend the reputation of the country and its leaders. They deny that they have become absurdly litigious (a habit which Asians frequently mock as an American disease) and believe that courts in the West are too liberal in allowing apparently defamatory attacks on important people. ‘I don’t think Singapore can exist if ministers and national leaders are placed on the same level as second-hand-car dealers,’ says George Yeo. ‘It would be a disaster. How can we run the place like that?’ Some Singaporeans insist that whereas westerners – out of respect for individual rights – say it would be better for a guilty person to go free than to convict an innocent one, Asians prefer the innocent person to be convicted if that will help the common good.29 But there is an unresolved contradiction in the attitudes of south-east Asian authoritarians. They defend their right to have a different, non-liberal, non-western system of justice, but at the same time governments can insist – on pain of legal action – that they have not in any way undermined the independence of their judiciaries.

Some authoritarian governments in south-east Asia deploy soldiers to break up demonstrations. They sometimes suppress labour movements and sometimes manipulate the courts. For the region’s more sophisticated authoritarians, however, coercion alone is not a satisfactory method either of developing the country or of keeping power indefinitely. The repeated use of force alienates the population, antagonizes foreign governments and makes overseas investors uneasy; it is, in short, politically destabilizing. A much more effective solution is to co-opt the government’s potential opponents, leaving coercion as a last resort to bring into line the few intransigents who refuse to be brought into the fold. Why crudely censor the media, for example, when you can persuade editors and journalists to censor themselves? Singapore’s Lee Hsien Loong, deputy prime minister and son of Lee Kuan Yew, acknowledges the role played by co-option in south-east Asian politics. For him and his government colleagues, it is essential that the government should be allowed to govern while planning and legislating for the future without being pulled this way and that by various pressure groups. ‘If people continually make such suggestions which make sense we will soon have him in our system, rather than keep him outside and throwing stones at us or criticizing us, because if he’s making sense we will bring him in and use him,’ says Lee. ‘We don’t believe that it is a good thing to encourage lots of little pressure groups, each one pushing its own direction and the outcome being a kind of Ouija board result rather than a considered national approach.’30

South-east Asian governments devote much time and effort to this task of co-opting their citizens and forging a sense of national purpose – a purpose for which only the government or the ruling party, it is understood, are qualified to succeed. It is not only the region’s communist states that run Orwellian propaganda campaigns. The Burmese authorities organize crude pro-government rallies which usually end, according to the official media, with ‘tumultuous chanting of slogans’.31 Suharto’s Indonesia practised a form of guided democracy based on the vague ideology of ‘pancasila’, the five principles of belief in one God; humanism; nationalism; popular sovereignty; and social justice. Suharto was called the ‘Father of Development’. Singapore is famous for its government campaigns. An agency once called the ‘psychological defence unit’ of the information ministry and now renamed the ‘publicity department’ has promoted patriotism through singing, starting with the early hit song ‘Stand up for Singapore’ in the mid-1980s. Other campaigns have urged Singaporeans to have more or fewer babies, depending on the population growth rate and demand for labour; to defend their country; to flush the toilet; to turn up at weddings on time; and not to be too greedy at hotel buffet lunches. Richard Tan Kok Tong, a former head of the Psychological Defence Unit – and one of those Singaporeans who met his wife through the official match-making service of the Social Development Unit – says people respond to such campaigns partly because they feel vulnerable in a small, multiracial city state surrounded by the large Moslem populations of Indonesia and Malaysia. ‘We have a background where the people are told you’re here as migrants and we either pull together or we get hanged together,’ he said. ‘It’s against this sort of precondition that people can accept this sort of propaganda.’32

Such propaganda, however, is not enough to ensure the support of the more sophisticated members of society. In most of south-east Asia, patronage – the conferring of favours in exchange for loyalty – is also an essential part of the political system. It is of course true that neither political patronage nor corruption are confined to Asia, or to authoritarian governments. In Thailand, Banharn became a member of parliament and then prime minister largely because he was adept at directing the government’s budget to the projects he favoured. His constituency of Suphanburi became famous for its excellent roads and facilities – and was nicknamed ‘Banharn-buri’. In the Philippines, senators and members of the House of Representatives are expected to dispense largesse by sponsoring weddings, buying trophies for village athletics competitions and writing letters of recommendation to possible employers for people they have never met. Such patronage is typical of old-fashioned political systems in which personal loyalties are prized and institutions are weak; it can also be risky for both sides, because shifting political alliances and regular elections mean that those who are powerful today will not necessarily have influence tomorrow.

But in an authoritarian state, the existing government is the only reliable source of patronage; and it usually intends to remain so. The result in countries such as Indonesia and Malaysia has been an exceptionally close relationship between government and big business. Selected companies benefit from large infrastructure projects initiated or funded by the state – roads, power stations and so on – and from government licences to exploit natural resources such as timber. In return, businesses are expected to be politically loyal and to provide financial support – sometimes for government purposes and sometimes for individuals. In Indonesia, the involvement of President Suharto’s children and a handful of his longstanding ethnic Chinese associates in big industrial and infrastructural projects and in trading monopolies was notorious. In Malaysia, where the government has had an explicit policy of favouring Malays over the Chinese who previously dominated business, the web of connections between corporations and the ruling Umno party has been extensively documented.33

In Cambodia, there has been an open exchange of favours and cash between Hun Sen’s government and the coarse but powerful businessman Theng Bunma. One of the more bizarre manifestations of Cambodian patronage has been the building of hundreds of ‘Hun Sen schools’ around the country; the businessmen pay and Hun Sen supposedly wins the admiration of an education-starved populace. Meanwhile the education ministry can barely pay its teachers, let alone build schools, because it is starved of funds by the Hun Sen government – which neglects the collection of formal taxes from big businesses. One senior member of Hun Sen’s Cambodian People’s Party explained the country’s patronage system by saying that if a businessman wanting a concession offered money to Hun Sen in the ‘Asian way’, Hun Sen would say, ‘Build me a school’; if offered flowers, he would say, ‘I don’t want flowers. Give me food and fish and noodles for the army.’34 In few countries are the ties between politicians and businessmen as unsubtle as in Cambodia, but the symbiosis of the two is common throughout the region. The extent to which companies rely on governments for their profits has obvious economic and commercial implications which are discussed in chapter 4. Politically, it simply means that big businessmen tend to identify closely with governments and publicly support their aims.

In the 1980s and early 1990s, the south-east Asian model of authoritarian politics seemed remarkably successful. Economies grew at 6 per cent, 8 per cent, 9 per cent, even 12 per cent a year. Businesses were expanding at breakneck speed. The poor got less poor. The rich got richer. Ethnic differences were apparently buried. Governments and their business allies began to boast of the success of ‘Asian values’ and to formulate theories that justified their authoritarianism and rejected ‘western’ democracy. There was little sign that the newly enriched elites wanted to rock the boat by opposing their governments just when they were starting to lead comfortable, even luxurious, lives. They enjoyed working for banks, stockbrokers or industrial conglomerates in Jakarta or Bangkok, shopping for brand-name clothes and travelling overseas just like their counterparts in London or New York. Privately, they mocked the simplistic slogans of their governments, but few took part in any serious opposition movements. As Malaysian businessman David Chew puts it: ‘More and more people now are stakeholders in the country; and if you’re stakeholders you’ll want to preserve what you have … Maybe this is the better brand of democracy. Of course, it’s a little bit more autocratic.’35

As confidence grew, so too did talk of exporting successful authoritarian political models to newly developing countries in south-east Asia. Indonesia was regarded as a particularly useful model for Burma and Vietnam because it had developed a quasi-democratic system of government in which the armed forces are given explicit political privileges (by being allocated seats in the national assembly, for example), and in which they play an even more influential role behind the scenes. In all three countries the soldiers believe they have a right to a role in national politics because of their involvement in the struggle for independence from foreign powers, and – in the cases of Indonesia and Burma – in maintaining order and keeping fractious ethnic minorities in the national fold after independence. The idea of exporting this model – known in Indonesia as dwifungsi (dual function) because it grants the armed forces a sort of guardian role in politics and society in addition to their normal security function – is not without difficulties. Indonesia’s generals are anxious not to be associated too openly with Burma’s military junta for fear of discrediting the whole dwifungsi concept. They fear that Burmese soldiers might again commit some internationally-condemned atrocity against their own people, and they are uneasy about the seeming inability of the Burmese generals to relinquish control and retire elegantly behind the scenes. Whereas in Indonesia the management of the economy was successfully delegated to the western-educated economists known as the Berkeley mafia, the generals in Burma tried to run the economy themselves – with predictably disastrous results.

Another difficulty for authoritarians is that the legitimacy that a government or an army earns from an independence war or a fight to restore domestic order is soon diminished by generational change; most Vietnamese today were born after the end of the Vietnam war in 1975. ‘In our time of rising popular expectations,’ said José Almonte, who was national security adviser to former Philippine president Fidel Ramos, ‘authoritarian governments are essentially fragile – no matter how commanding they may appear to be. Because they rule without popular consent, their claim to legitimacy depends on their ability to restore stability and to develop the economy. And, once civil order is restored, authoritarian governments in developing countries are undermined by both their economic failure and their economic success.’ Economic failure obviously makes them unpopular, while ‘economic growth unavoidably generates social change that multiplies people’s demands for political participation and respect from their rulers.’36

Aristides Katoppo, a senior Indonesian journalist and head of the Sinar Harapan publishing company, predicted before Suharto was forced to resign that a more demanding electorate would eventually oblige the Indonesian government to modify its authoritarian stance. ‘I think they [the people] don’t mind a strong executive government, but it must be more just and less arrogant. Rule of law is the issue.’ He acknowledged that the reduction of military influence in government and the erosion of the power of the authorities would take time, but he had no doubt about the way things were going. ‘The direction,’ he said, ‘is very clear.’37 South-east Asian liberals are beginning to make their voices heard. They affirm the need for justice, whatever a country’s political system. They reject the idea that democracy is ‘un-Asian’, pointing to various democratic – or at least consultative – village traditions. And they have begun to pick holes in some of the favourite arguments of the authoritarians.

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