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Democracy Recession in South-east Asia

WASHINGTON, Jun 13 (IPS) - The coup in Thailand, extrajudicial killings in the Philippines, limitations on religious freedom in Malaysia -- South-east Asian democracies are not exactly flourishing these days.

Nor has the wave of democratisation and people power that swept through the region in the 1980s had much effect on the governments of Burma or Laos. The number of democracies worldwide now outnumbers the number of non-democracies. But in Southeast Asia, democracy seems to be experiencing a recession.

"These are clearly fragile democracies," argued Anwar Ibrahim last week at an Asian Voices seminar sponsored by the Sasakawa Peace Foundation. Ibrahim is the former deputy prime minister of Malaysia and an outspoken advocate for human rights.

"We cannot limit our understanding of democracy solely by the occurrence of elections. Elections are clearly problematic processes. We have to consider the presence of phantom voters -- a phenomenon which is not unknown even in the United States, for instance in Florida in 2000. We must grapple with the fact that there is often no access to a free media and that the judiciary is blatantly compromised."

In particular, Ibrahim questioned the democratic trajectory of Malaysia, now led by Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi and the National Front secular coalition. The political situation, he allowed, has improved somewhat since the days of Prime Minister Mahathir, who presided over his imprisonment. "In this system, the personalities change but there's no change with the judiciary, with the media," Anwar said.

"Corruption has grown worse. Yes, we are doing better than many nations in the developing world, but how do you assess success? Compared to Somalia or Zimbabwe, we're doing well. But in the early 1980s, we compared ourselves to Singapore, Taiwan, and South Korea. In 2007, these countries have long since surpassed us, some in terms of economic growth and others with respect to political change and reform."

Perhaps the most dramatic blow to regional hopes for democracy came last September with the military coup in Thailand. But as Thitinan Pongsudhirak, director of the Institute of Security and International Studies in Bangkok, explained at the same seminar, the challenge to Thai democracy began before 2006.

"The 1997 constitution was supposed to put a stop to the patronage system, to money politics. It was a people's constitution," Pongsudhirak recounted. The constitution "promoted the transparency and accountability of the political system. It augmented the stability and effectiveness of government. It promoted bigger parties and a more stable party system. It gave more authority to the executive branch. It established a party list system in which experts can enter Thai politics without participating in money politics."

The new Thai constitution also made it possible to go after corrupt politicians. In 2000, the national anti-corruption commission found prospective prime minister Thaksin guilty of assets concealment. When Thaksin assumed power in 2001, however, the corruption trial went to the Constitutional Court, which acquitted the prime minister by a narrow margin.

"After that, the constitution went downhill, leading to the coup and the constitution's abolition," argued Pongsudhirak. "The 1997 constitution was supposed to usher Thailand into a promised land but we have wasted a decade."

Despite corruption charges, Thaksin was and continues to be quite popular within Thailand. "He had his populist platform," Pongsudhirak said. "He became a threat to the established order. Things get done in a certain way in Thailand. The coup restored the primacy of the holy trinity: the alliance between the bureaucracy, the military, and the monarchy. Thaksin threatened this holy trinity. He won the peoples' hearts and minds in four or five years. He would win an election if it were held tomorrow by United Nations."

In the Philippines, meanwhile, democracy also seems to have taken a step backward. Corruption and scandal dogged the administration of Joseph Estrada, leading to a second people's power movement in 2001. In the 2004 elections, observed Filipino lawyer and civic activist Jose Luis Gascon, "there were issues of cheating and intimidation on a widespread scale."

Gascon acknowledged that Filipinos enjoy democratic institutions and, in 2004, could watch for the first time as an incumbent president ran again for office. But democracy in the Philippines remains tenuous.

"Ultimately, interventions must be done to strengthen civil society, to protect human rights, to ensure transparent parties, to strengthen the judiciary to ensure its independence, to guarantee free and fair elections in 2010, and to deal with the major cases of extrajudicial killings," Gascon said. "The Philippines should present a viable model in the region so that the Lee Kuan Yews and the Mahathirs of the world will not say that democracy is bad for South-east Asia."

The democratic deficit in South-east Asia is not simply within countries but between them as well. Anwar Ibrahim reserved some of his sharpest words for the ten-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and its policy toward the military junta in Burma.

ASEAN includes Malaysia, Thailand, Burma, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, the Philippines, Brunei, Indonesia and Singapore.

"In the case of Burma we can see the utter abdication of responsibility and the failure of governments in ASEAN to undertake positive, effective measures and the failure to give any meaningful influence except for this obsolete notion of constructive engagement," Answar said. "The only thing happening in Burma is construction undertaken by these countries, not constructive engagement: construction projects profiting from cozy relations with the corrupt military junta."

What should the ASEAN members do about Burma? "I'm not suggesting that the Thais and the Malaysians go to war with Burma. But ASEAN should take a strong position that a military regime cannot treat its citizens as slaves. If not for EU insistence, you can imagine the military junta leading the discussions at ASEAN conferences. We must be more principled. If you want to attend our meetings, some basic rules have to be accepted," Anwar concluded.

Source: 
<p>http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=38158</p>

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