use them to an extreme extent. The authoritarian policy of permitting limited dissent – while forbidding opposition parties to become too strong, let alone win – is rarely admitted in explicit terms, but is no secret. Asked why south-east Asian leaders bothered with the trappings of democracy when they believed so fervently in the importance of strong government, Juwono Sudarsono of Indonesia’s National Defence Institute, one of Indonesia’s foremost political analysts and a minister in the dying days of Suharto’s rule, accepts that there is a level of ‘tolerable dissent’. ‘You devise systems which allow some degree of dissent,’ he says. ‘All south-east Asian countries do that, simply because it’s practical.’ Opposition parties and other groups critical of the government are seen as sparring partners. ‘Sparring partners are not supposed to win.’19
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,