1967. The appearance of democracy remains valuable in the 1990s to satisfy domestic public opinion and to defuse any international criticism.
But there is no question of the opposition being allowed to win power in a national election. Witness the violent events in Indonesia surrounding Megawati’s challenge to Suharto and Goh’s threats to voters in Singapore. (‘Do you think we could have done even half of what was achieved in the last thirty years if we had a multiparty system and a revolving-door government?’ Goh once asked. ‘Do you think we could have done just as well if we had a government that was constantly being held in check by ten to twenty opposition members?’16) Then there have been Mahathir’s furious campaigns in Malaysia to bring errant states to heel – including the withholding of federal financial support – when they elect opposition parties. Just before the 1990 elections in Malaysia, Joseph Pairin Kitingan, chief minister of the somewhat disaffected state of Sabah in Borneo, withdrew his PBS party from the Barisan Nasional, the ruling national coalition led by Mahathir’s Umno (the United Malays National Organization), and went on to win in Sabah. As the writer Rehman Rashid recounts, those who were with Mahathir at the time of the PBS pullout had never seen the prime minister so angry: ‘The squeeze began,’ writes Rashid. ‘Sabah’s timber export quota was lowered, decimating the state’s principal source of revenue. Tourism was tacitly discouraged; domestic air fares were raised. (For [neighbouring] Sarawak, however, there were affordable package deals.) Domestic investment was redirected; foreign investment put on hold. (Sabah was “politically unstable”.) The borders grew even more porous to illegal immigration from the Philippines and Indonesia. The local television station was abandoned. Sabah was denied permission to have on its territory a branch of a Malaysian university, as Sarawak did. Pairin was charged with three counts of corruption. Kota Kinabalu became a funereal town.’17 The point about immigration was that most of the newcomers were Moslems, rather than the Christian Kadazans who formed the bedrock of PBS support, and they could therefore be drawn into Umno. The central government demonstrated it would do almost anything to bring Sabah into the fold again. In 1994 the state was back in central government hands after four years of opposition.
For years, people have struggled to define and analyse these kinds of authoritarian governments and explain their success. On the face of it, they are not one-party states, so the term ‘dominant party politics’ has come to be used. One of the best definitions to describe the combination of elections and unchallenged rule by a government party is Samuel Huntington’s ‘democracy without turnover’. Another analyst notes that the democratic system and the law are regarded by such governments as resources to exploit rather than restrictive frameworks within which they must operate; it is the people who are accountable to the government – in the sense that they must lose investments or bus routes or housing upgrades if they vote for the opposition – rather than the government which is accountable to the people.18
Yet neither Singapore, nor Malaysia, nor Indonesia can comfortably be labelled totalitarian. They are not usually brutal in governing their own people (Indonesia’s war of conquest in East Timor in the mid-1970s is the obvious exception), which is why they have come to be known as ‘soft’ authoritarians. They allow their opponents to speak and to organize, albeit within certain limits. Although they use the security provisions inherited from their former colonial masters to detain or otherwise restrict opponents without trial, they do not normally 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
