Free migration across SE Asia

Farish A. Noor, Berlin

Despite the improvement in government-to-government relations between Malaysia and Indonesia, it would appear as if our societies are further apart than ever before. Prejudice, misapprehension and the tendency to resort to caricatural stereotypes have clouded our vision of a common shared humanity and collective destiny, for the peoples of ASEAN as a whole.

In Malaysia the punishment for illegal migrants include not only fines and detention, but also whipping -- a mode of punishment that can only be described as medieval, brutal and dehumanising.

Malaysians also forget that if there are any "unwanted Indonesians" in Malaysia, there is also a certain "unwanted Malaysian" in Indonesia today: The fanatical bomber Azahari, whose role in the numerous bombing campaigns in Indonesia has done so much damage to the image and well-being of the Indonesian people. Have Malaysians considered apologising for this unwanted visitor lurking in Indonesia?

The most appalling aspect of the present media-orchestrated scare about illegal migrants in Malaysia is the unstated prejudice that at times accompanies the campaign. Never mind the fact that Malaysia actually needs these foreign workers; or the fact that in many cases their illegal entry was facilitated by corrupt Malaysian companies and businessmen themselves.

It is astounding, to say the least, that the citizens of present-day Malaysia and Indonesia seem to demonstrate no knowledge of history whatsoever. The official narrative of postcolonial Malaysia and Indonesia is a modern myth that presents the state as a fait accompli, regardless of the fact that Malaysia and Indonesia -- like all the other states of the ASEAN region -- are artificial modern constructs whose borders were set not by the peoples of ASEAN themselves but rather by our former colonial masters.

Today Malaysians and Indonesians view each other through the narrow perspective of the modern nation-state, whose boundaries (be they political, cultural or historic) seem eternally fixed. Yet this begs the obvious question that is invariably asked by the scholar: What about the centuries of cross-cultural contact, migration and fluid inter-penetration?

Lest we forget, the most important and renown Malay kingdom -- Malacca -- was founded by Paramesvara (later Sultan Megat Iskandar Shah), who was himself from Palembang, Sumatra. In the postcolonial era the memory of Malacca has been used time and again by countless Malaysian politicians and ideologues as proof of the greatness of the people of Malaysia -- except we often forget that Malacca would never have existed had it not been for the labours of a prince from Sumatra!

The same is true for many of the other great kingdoms and empires of Southeast Asia, from Angkor to Ayudhaya, Majapahit to Mataram, Aceh to Patani: They were all created by the collective efforts of Southeast Asians who migrated from one part of the region to another.

This was the era before the arrival of the modern idea of the nation-state, on e that was not configured by the dislocating and disruptive effects of colonial intervention.

Sadly today this sense of a common, abstract, collective identity has passed. It is a supreme irony that Malaysians today regard Indonesians as "foreigners", and vice-versa; when the reality is that for hundreds of years the two nations (in reality a multiplicity of nations) have been in constant contact with each other. It is also ironic that the Malays of Malaysia regard their Indonesian counterparts as being as "foreign" as any tourist from Europe or Japan, considering the obvious links of language, culture and religion they share together. (One could go further and make the claim that many, if not most, Malays in Malaysia today have some common blood-ties to Indonesia, as in the case of this writer as well.)

The "othering" of our Indonesian brethren as "outsiders" and "foreigners" would not have happened has it not been for the vicissitudes of politics.

Prior to the creation of a separate Malaysia and Indonesia, scores of Malaysians were directly involved in the independence struggle of the Indonesian nation, which they regarded as an extension of their own habitus. The early Malay nationalists of Burhanuddin al-Helmy and Ibrahim Yaakob's generation took active part in the formation of Sukarno's nationalist movement, and during the anti-colonial war against the Dutch a number of Malaysians crossed the Straits of Malacca to lend a hand in the fighting that took place in Sumatra and Java.

It was, however, the Konfrontasi (confrontation) between Indonesia and Malaysia in the early 1960s that led to the fatal rupture that effectively sealed the fate of both countries. Hundreds of Malaysian Muslim students who were studying in the traditional madrasahs and pesantren of Indonesia were recalled by the Malaysian government and then redirected to more conservative institutions in the Arab states. (An ironic twist indeed, for it also foreclosed for the Malaysians the possibility of developing of a more tolerant, pluralist and dynamic Islamist intellectualism as we find in Indonesia today.)

As Malaysians and Indonesians were taught to think of each other as different and alien, the sense of common identity and the sharing of a common past became impossible. Centuries of cross-cultural borrowing and migration had been summarily brought to an untimely end by the most unnatural of political developments.

That is why we, the people of ASEAN, desperately need a collective subaltern history of ASEAN written from the perspective of the people, rather than the governments, of the region.

Should this condition continue unchallenged, we might as well forget the dream of creating a ASEAN for and by the people of ASEAN themselves. The solipsistic logic of the modern nation- state does not sit comfortably with non-governable elements and phenomena such as the transcultural transfer of ideas, values and peoples: Yet it is precisely this fluid dynamics of interaction and exchange that holds the key to the development of dynamic civilisations and cultures.

Recognition of this historical legacy would require the effort of overcoming the "otherness" of our neighbours. This is the truth that we, the nations of ASEAN, need to remind ourselves time and again: We are not "strangers" to each other!

Farish A. Noor is a Malaysian political scientist and human rights activist and can be reached at farishactivist@yahoo.co.uk