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Whither Democracy?
Stability was the issue that brought ASEAN ministers together in 1971 for ZOPFAN, and it remains a challenge in today's Southeast Asia. Citizens want stability, investors demand it, ruling élites thrive on it. Some nations have stability to the point of political stasis (Vietnam) or outright repression and brutality (Burma and Laos). If membership in ASEAN has pushed those countries onto a more liberal path, the road signs are pretty hard to spot. For example, Laos this year allowed UNICEF into the country for the first time to visit juveniles locked away in its dank prisons—on the condition that the agency not report what it found inside. "Asian countries are no longer under the same pressure from the U.S. on human rights," says Brad Adams, executive director for the Asia division of Human Rights Watch. "Governments now find a convenient new language to use for crackdowns: national security."
Instability has become a chronic condition in Indonesia and the Philippines, countries that ejected dictatorships with very different results. Two decades of rule by Ferdinand Marcos fertilized the Filipinos' love of irrational but always exuberant democracy—to many an investor's despair. When Suharto's dictatorship collapsed, Indonesia was left with almost no democratic institutions, and the fractious nation proceeded to unravel. Megawati—the country's third President in six years—had no choice but to rule with the support of the military. That has dented the public's faith in this nascent democracy. A recent poll by the Indonesian newspaper Kompas showed that 89% of respondents thought the nation's political parties were only busy taking care of their own interests and those of the élite—and that was before suspicions of Megawati's government rose last week about a questionable jet- and helicopter-purchase worth $197 million—an echo of a scandal that did in her predecessor Abdurrahman Wahid. "Ours is a very backward democracy," says Fachry Ali from the Jakarta-based Institute for the Study and Advancement of Business Ethics. "There is hardly any reason not to be pessimistic."
Singapore and Malaysia have the most evolved democratic institutions in Southeast Asia: Westminster-style systems with all the rough populist edges sanded away. In its 38 years of independence, Singapore has been governed by only two Prime Ministers, and the People's Action Party has never won a general election by less than a landslide—a record surpassing even that of Japan, the ultra status quo democracy.
A city-state of 4.1 million people can't be a realistic model for many larger countries, but it can certainly be an inspiration to leaders such as Thailand's Thaksin, a populist billionaire businessman. "Thaksin is a control freak," says Kraisak Choonhaven, a member of the Thai Senate's foreign-affairs committee. "He wants to see results." That he's done. To win power, Thaksin promised every village in the country $24,000 upon election, and promptly coughed up the cash after his victory. He set up a health-care system in which Thais pay 70 cents for a visit to the doctor. Clinics are jammed with happy constituents, although nearly 1,000 doctors have bailed out of the public health system. Most controversially, this February he launched his war on drugs. In the next three months, legions of suspected drug dealers and users—most of them young men—were gunned down in the streets of their towns or villages. One innocent victim was a nine-year-old boy killed when police opened fire on a car driven by his fleeing mother. According to Thaksin—who has a Ph.D. in criminology and worked as a cop before going into the telecommunications business—only "about 35 cases" involved police officers, all of whom fired their weapons in self-defense. And the other 2,000-plus killings? "It's a matter of bad guys killing bad guys," he said.
The U.N. and foreign governments expressed concern over the slaughter, but little more. Human-rights groups were appalled. "The Thais have gone from being the leader in rights to a country that seems to almost resemble its neighbors Cambodia and Burma," says Adams of Human Rights Watch. "Most Thais would be amazed to hear that, but the scale of violence is really shocking." Adams is right: most Thais were totally in favor of the campaign, leading Thaksin to announce that he was contemplating similar purges of numbers runners, flesh traders, land encroachers and bid riggers—as he puts it, "decisive action against all bad guys." Critics of the government fear that even loyal oppositionists may be hunted down like petty criminals, and no wonder: national police chief Sant Sarutanont told reporters on May 20 that "opinion makers" were among the targets of the next campaign.
Thaksin has been as busy in the corridors of power as on the streets. Through adroit mergers and coalitions with other political groups, his five-year-old Thai Rak Thai party has a lock on the current parliament. In May he said other parties "shouldn't even contemplate" trying to beat Thai Rak Thai at the polls. This is a stupendous change for Thailand, whose past governments have been run by the military or shaky political coalitions. When Thaksin completes his stint in office within the next 19 months, his will be the first civilian government to last a full parliamentary term. In April, Thaksin told members of his party that Thai Rak Thai would govern Thailand for the next 20 years—presumably with him as leader.
Cambodia's Hun Sen also recently said he would like to stay in power for a long time, and this month the country is holding its third general election since the end of the calamitous Khmer Rouge days. On the surface, that sounds like good news. But prior to the last election in 1997, Hun Sen sent tanks into the streets of Phnom Penh, and had soldiers raid the homes and headquarters of his political rivals and shell the house of his co-Prime Minister Norodom Ranariddh, who had to flee the country. This time around, the violence has lessened—although there have been several broad-daylight political assassinations. Hun Sen is so confident of victory in this month's electoral race that he isn't even bothering to campaign.