POLITICS: Approaching Forty, ASEAN Seeks Image Makeover

By Marwaan Macan-Markar Reprint | | Print |

Marwaan Macan-Markar

BANGKOK, Aug 10 2006 (IPS) - Even as it tries to enhance its stature through a regional charter, to be unveiled next year, the Association of South-east Asian Nations (ASEAN) finds itself struggling to appear open and receptive to democratic currents.

This week served up two reminders of this reality for the ten-member bloc that will celebrate the 40th anniversary of its founding in August 2007. The military rulers in Burma, ASEAN’s greatest political liability, were marking a grimmer anniversary that has come to define the junta’s oppressive drive against opposition voices. Eighteen years ago on Aug. 8, Burmese troops mowed down with machine-gun and automatic-rifle fire hundreds of students who had taken to the streets for pro-democracy rallies.

On a less bloody note was the reality check that a filmmaker in Singapore had to face about the faulty state of democracy there. Martyn See was warned by the police about the offence he had committed – making a 26-minute documentary on Chee Soon Juan, secretary-general of the opposition Singapore Democratic Party. The film, called ‘Singapore Rebel’, had shots of Chee being arrested by the police and of his open calls for more political freedom in the affluent city-state.

What places the two in the same league is the principle that is a defining trait across most of the ASEAN countries – that their governments have little tolerance for opposition voices and opposition parties and have continued to suppress them through the use of bullets, prisons or repressive laws. The other eight ASEAN members are Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam.

”The governments don’t respect opposition groups and we need to expose this as efforts continue to draft the ASEAN Charter,” Teresa Kok, a parliamentarian in Malaysia’s opposition Democratic Action Party, told IPS over phone from Kuala Lumpur. ”It is a glaring contradiction at a time the governments are placing so much stress on the priority for greater democracy in the planned charter.”

ASEAN’s long-held principle of non-interference, which precludes fellow members in the region from trying to influence political change in a neighbouring country, has been an added burden for opposition voices struggling for more democratic space at home, she adds. ”They feel helpless because they know they cannot get help from democracy activists in other ASEAN countries because of the non-interference clause.”

For a former member of Thailand’s upper house, it is a silence that cannot be sustained if the ASEAN Charter, with its promise of promoting democratic institutions, human rights, transparency and good governance, is to usher in genuine change. ”Many governments are incredibly oppressive and the charter faces an uphill struggle to be realised according to its original intentions,” Kraisak Choonhavan, former chairman of the Thai senate’s foreign affairs committee, said in an interview with IPS.

”I fear it will be so watered down by governments who do not respect the right for opposition parties to function openly that it will not be worth having one,” he added. ”The only exceptions maybe Indonesia, where democracy is blooming, the Philippines and to some extent Thailand, Cambodia and Malaysia.”

Delivering a speech, this week, to mark the regional grouping’s 39th anniversary, Philippine President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo said that the country will push to ”make ASEAN a shining institution that cares for its people,” according to the ‘Manila Standard Today’, a daily. ”At the apex of our dreams in an ASEAN Charter.”

Malaysian Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi also sounded a note of hope during an ASEAN anniversary speech that called for the non-interference policy to be ”carefully refined and updated to tackle new challenges,” according to Bernama, the Malaysian state news agency.

The Malaysian premier, who singled out Burma as a factor in this call for change, did not, like other government leaders of countries with a semblance of democracy, draw attention to other ASEAN countries that have repressive political cultures, such as Vietnam and Laos.

In May, the New York-based rights lobby Human Rights Watch (HRW) drew attention to the battery of tough measures that Vietnam’s Communist government unleashed to crackdown on a ”fledgling human rights and democracy movement.” The victims included Buddhist monks, Catholic priests, former political prisoners, former Communist Party officials, academics, teachers, writers and businesspeople, according to HRW.

The history of ASEAN, which was founded during the Cold War to respond to the spread of communism in the region and to pursue economic development, is rich with evidence as to why it remains reluctant to be politically open and free even as it approaches a milestone. The founding nations – Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore and Thailand – have long records of being governed by autocratic leaders, dictators and military regimes. Those that joined the group subsequently are either ruled by communist regimes, like Vietnam and Laos, or have an absolute monarchy, like Brunei.

Currently, the one-party states in the region include Laos, Malaysia, Singapore and Vietnam, while Burma’s military regime has been in power since a 1962 military coup.

Work to draft the ASEAN Charter was given a nod of approval at a meeting of ASEAN ministers in the Laotian capital of Vientiane last August. The charter, being written by a highly respected group of citizens from the region, is expected to take the form of an ASEAN constitution, with powers that bind its members to agree and uphold common political principles.

”The Eminent Persons Groups (EPG) has started work on the ASEAN Charter’s draft and it has met three times,” Indonesian Foreign Minister Hassan Wirajuda was quoted as having told Antara, the state-run news agency. ”The EPG would submit a recommendation by the end of 2006 at the ASEAN summit in Cebu (the Philippines).”