Old habits die hard as the East changes
By Sebastien Berger, South East Asia Correspondent
Last Updated: 2:39am BST 22/06/2007
The old man in Gucci shades stepped forward slowly, carefully
placing his four-legged cane on the ground.
"Buy some lychees for the foreigner," he ordered his daughter, at a
roadside stall in the countryside of western Cambodia. This
correspondent had never been given fresh fruit by a genocidal
geriatric before but Nuon Chea, Brother Number Two to Pol Pot and a
man with the blood of up to two million people on his hands, did
exactly that.
It felt surreal, as does the tortured progress of Cambodia's Khmer
Rouge tribunal, set up to try the likes of Nuon Chea but beset by
delays, even after the government spent years in negotiations,
seeking to avoid embarrassing the many former Khmers Rouge in its
upper ranks.
In the meantime there is no accounting for the victims, their
relatives or history, while memories fade and potential defendants
die.
It is a stark demonstration of Asian pragmatism over principle, and
one that the people have no choice but to accept - Cambodia is
ruled by Hun Sen, a strongman who has crushed dissent and co-opted
the remains of the political opposition.
advertisement
Similar states of affairs exist behind the palm-lined beaches and
growing economies of the region. Of the other countries of
south-east Asia, two - Burma and Thailand - are under military
rule, two are Communist dictatorships, two are de facto one-party
states, ruled by the same organisation since independence, and one
is an absolute Islamic monarchy.
Only three - Indonesia, the Philippines, and East Timor - hold
competitive, if sometimes flawed, elections.
Where democracy is a recent innovation, it can be inspiring. In the
tsunami-devastated Indonesian province of Aceh queues of people
lined up to elect a former separatist as governor, just along the
road from a mass grave containing 46,718 bodies.
Elsewhere, though, quiet acceptance of the status quo is the
general rule. In his book East and West, Chris Patten decried the
concept of "Asian values" - the idea that Oriental societies are
somehow different - and argued for the universality of human
rights.
It is an admirable, idealist position, but in practice reality
interferes. For the most part the nations of south-east Asia have
gone from monarchies, to colonies, to autocracies. There has been
no opportunity for a democratic tradition to develop, and deference
to authority, whether familial, social, or political, is ingrained
from birth, as it has been for centuries.
Even in Thailand, long seen as a beacon for democracy in the
region, the culture of obedience is such that when the old elite
asserted themselves over the elected prime minister in a
palace-backed military coup last year it was hugely popular.
As one Thai woman put it: "The army belongs to the king, and the
king belongs to Thailand, so it's okay."
Outside poverty-stricken basket-cases like Burma and Laos,
increasing material comforts have allowed the authorities to
establish a trade-off with political liberty, with Singapore and
Vietnam as the prime examples.
At the celebrations for the Crown Prince of Brunei's wedding, one
citizen explained: "Who needs democracy when the sultan gives us
everything?"
And with face and status all-important in many societies, such as
Thailand, the opportunity to buy international brand names matters
more to some than the nature of their government.
Instead it is left to a few brave souls to carry the torch for
greater freedoms than the right to buy a Louis Vuitton bag.
Burma's Aung San Suu Kyi is renowned as the world's only imprisoned
Nobel laureate, but there are unsung heroes too - Chee Soon
Juan, Singapore's most outspoken politician and an occasional
resident of the city-state's prison, or Thich Quang Do, a
Vietnamese Buddhist monk who lives under "pagoda arrest" in Ho Chi
Minh City for daring to defy the Communist regime.
Wearing simple brown robes, he is probably the most impressive
person I have ever met - and secret police followed me, blatantly
obviously, from his temple.
"They put me into prison, they can put me under house arrest, they
can do anything they like, but I am not afraid," he said. "You can
stifle one man for his whole life, or you can stifle a group of
people for some time, but you cannot stifle the whole people all
the time." I hope he is right.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/06/22/weast122.xml