Victor Mallet - The Trouble With Tigers - The Rise and Fall of South-East Asia

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, critical of the West, written by Kishore Mahbubani of the Singapore foreign ministry. Without mentioning any particular country, Lingle said some Asian governments relied on a ‘compliant judiciary to bankrupt opposition politicians’. The prosecutor in Singapore asserted that this must be a reference to Singapore, where Lee Kuan Yew and his PAP colleagues indeed had a record of suing opposition politicians for defamation. Lingle (who had fled the country), and the editor, publisher, printer and distributor of the newspaper (which has one of its printing sites in Singapore) were ordered to pay enormous fines and costs for contempt of the Singapore judiciary. The offence was not to say that the government bankrupted its opponents, but to call the courts ‘compliant’. Lingle vividly described the unusual experience – for a mild-mannered university professor – of suddenly finding himself being interrogated by the police for expressing unremarkable opinions. He ran away – fearful until his plane was airborne that he would be arrested – leaving behind his job and most of his possessions. He has since become one of the most cogent critics of Singapore, comparing it unfavourably to South Africa in the apartheid era, when he says he openly denounced the regime without fear of repression. Subsequently, Singapore’s leaders continued to sue their opponents – notably Tang and Jeyaretnam in 1997. 28 The fact that both men are lawyers is a reflection of the traditions of independence that the judiciary once boasted of: the law was one of the few professions where people felt far enough removed from government patronage and influence to practise opposition politics. That no longer seems to be so. Tang, like other opposition figures before him, fled overseas.

Singapore’s ministers are adamant that they must defend the reputation of the country and its leaders. They deny that they have become absurdly litigious (a habit which Asians frequently mock as an American disease) and believe that courts in the West are too liberal in allowing apparently defamatory attacks on important people. ‘I don’t think Singapore can exist if ministers and national leaders are placed on the same level as second-hand-car dealers,’ says George Yeo. ‘It would be a disaster. How can we run the place like that?’ Some Singaporeans insist that whereas westerners – out of respect for individual rights – say it would be better for a guilty person to go free than to convict an innocent one, Asians prefer the innocent person to be convicted if that will help the common good. 29 But there is an unresolved contradiction in the attitudes of south-east Asian authoritarians. They defend their right to have a different, non-liberal, non-western system of justice, but at the same time governments can insist – on pain of legal action – that they have not in any way undermined the independence of their judiciaries.

Some authoritarian governments in south-east Asia deploy soldiers to break up demonstrations. They sometimes suppress labour movements and sometimes manipulate the courts. For the region’s more sophisticated authoritarians, however, coercion alone is not a satisfactory method either of developing the country or of keeping power indefinitely. The repeated use of force alienates the population, antagonizes foreign governments and makes overseas investors uneasy; it is, in short, politically destabilizing. A much more effective solution is to co-opt the government’s potential opponents, leaving coercion as a last resort to bring into line the few intransigents who refuse to be brought into the fold. Why crudely censor the media, for example, when you can persuade editors and journalists to censor themselves? Singapore’s Lee Hsien Loong, deputy prime minister and son of Lee Kuan Yew, acknowledges the role played by co-option in south-east Asian politics. For him and his government colleagues, it is essential that the government should be allowed to govern while planning and legislating for the future without being pulled this way and that by various pressure groups. ‘If people continually make such suggestions which make sense we will soon have him in our system, rather than keep him outside and throwing stones at us or criticizing us, because if he’s making sense we will bring him in and use him,’ says Lee. ‘We don’t believe that it is a good thing to encourage lots of little pressure groups, each one pushing its own direction and the outcome being a kind of Ouija board result rather than a considered national approach.’ 30

South-east Asian governments devote much time and effort to this task of co-opting their citizens and forging a sense of national purpose – a purpose for which only the government or the ruling party, it is understood, are qualified to succeed. It is not only the region’s communist states that run Orwellian propaganda campaigns. The Burmese authorities organize crude pro-government rallies which usually end, according to the official media, with ‘tumultuous chanting of slogans’. 31 Suharto’s Indonesia practised a form of guided democracy based on the vague ideology of ‘pancasila’, the five principles of belief in one God; humanism; nationalism; popular sovereignty; and social justice. Suharto was called the ‘Father of Development’. Singapore is famous for its government campaigns. An agency once called the ‘psychological defence unit’ of the information ministry and now renamed the ‘publicity department’ has promoted patriotism through singing, starting with the early hit song ‘Stand up for Singapore’ in the mid-1980s. Other campaigns have urged Singaporeans to have more or fewer babies, depending on the population growth rate and demand for labour; to defend their country; to flush the toilet; to turn up at weddings on time; and not to be too greedy at hotel buffet lunches. Richard Tan Kok Tong, a former head of the Psychological Defence Unit – and one of those Singaporeans who met his wife through the official match-making service of the Social Development Unit – says people respond to such campaigns partly because they feel vulnerable in a small, multiracial city state surrounded by the large Moslem populations of Indonesia and Malaysia. ‘We have a background where the people are told you’re here as migrants and we either pull together or we get hanged together,’ he said. ‘It’s against this sort of precondition that people can accept this sort of propaganda.’ 32

Such propaganda, however, is not enough to ensure the support of the more sophisticated members of society. In most of south-east Asia, patronage – the conferring of favours in exchange for loyalty – is also an essential part of the political system. It is of course true that neither political patronage nor corruption are confined to Asia, or to authoritarian governments. In Thailand, Banharn became a member of parliament and then prime minister largely because he was adept at directing the government’s budget to the projects he favoured. His constituency of Suphanburi became famous for its excellent roads and facilities – and was nicknamed ‘Banharn-buri’. In the Philippines, senators and members of the House of Representatives are expected to dispense largesse by sponsoring weddings, buying trophies for village athletics competitions and writing letters of recommendation to possible employers for people they have never met. Such patronage is typical of old-fashioned political systems in which personal loyalties are prized and institutions are weak; it can also be risky for both sides, because shifting political alliances and regular elections mean that those who are powerful today will not necessarily have influence tomorrow.