Red-letter day for the Southeast Asian press

Red-letter day for the Southeast Asian press

Roby Alampay, Bangkok

The libel trial of Thai media advocate Supinya Klangnarong --
along with two reporters and one newspaper editor -- starts in
Bangkok on Sept. 6.

Supinya's suggestion in a published article that a company
partly owned by the family of Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra
unfairly benefited from his term in office could lead to
imprisonment and a staggering US$10 million (Bt400 million) fine.

Meanwhile, on the very same day that Supinya will be facing
multimedia giant Shin Corp. in court, Indonesian courts 2,300
kilometers away will be concluding a similar case against
staffers and editors of Tempo, one of Jakarta's leading
newsmagazine. Tempo was summoned to court for saying that
businessman Tomy Winata -- a man who has significant ties to
political leaders in Indonesia -- stood to gain from a fire that
destroyed a marketplace in Jakarta.

The confluence of dates is accidental and, indeed, the
coincidence ends there -- but the cases are similar in every
other way. The interlacing political and business interests
behind the suits, the extreme penalties that the plaintiffs are
seeking and the impact they will have on the region's media --
far from being coincidental, they are all borne of the same
troubling trend that threatens press freedom, and along with it
government transparency, in the few democracies in Southeast
Asia.

Since winning back its democracy in 1998, Indonesia has
enshrined freedom of the press, and has also put in place special
laws intended precisely to deal with transgressions and
indiscretions of the media. The Press Law sets mechanisms for,
among other things, ensuring that aggrieved parties are accorded
fair play and the right to respond. More important, they allow
for penalties and for the disciplining of irresponsible
journalists and media companies as a whole.

Curiously, however, it is not the Press Law that is hanging
over Tempo's head. Instead, the magazine is being threatened with
crippling fines and prison terms for its editor, Bambang
Harimurti, on the strength of dusted-off criminal laws originally
laid down by Dutch colonizers to suppress dissent. Tempo's story
on Tomy could provoke public unrest, the prosecution claims.

In Thailand, the application of criminal laws to a
journalistic dispute, the threat of imprisoning Supinya for an
opinion based on substantial research into a valid conflict-of-
interest question -- all these have the press troubled enough.
But $10 million in damages?

For journalists in both Jakarta and Bangkok, the issue here is
not why the press is being questioned, but rather why it is being
treated -- and being allowed to be treated -- with such lethal
intent.

The operative word is "allowed". Why the Thai courts allowed
such a disproportionate claim to be filed is telling. That
Indonesia is allowing its own Press Law to become irrelevant --
while letting its blunt antiquated laws on dissent to again be
unsheathed -- suggests that this will not be the last time those
laws will be used to taunt an already jittery media. It's
certainly not the first time. Tomy Winata filed eight other
lawsuits against Tempo magazine last year. The daily Koran Tempo
lost a legal battle with Tomy in January and was ordered to pay a
record-setting $1 million in damages.

Against this trend, the challenge by the region's newsmen to
the Thai and Indonesian governments is to ensure that the spike
in harsh litigation against journalists does not in fact signal a
larger wholesale attack on the press. More crucially, they demand
evidence that such reckless assaults on the Fourth Estate are not
in fact proxy wars waged on behalf of government itself.

Singapore's elder leader Lee Kuan Yew -- who successfully sued
mighty Western papers with lucrative bases on his home turf -- is
the region's most notorious and successful proponent of such
wars. Winning money, apologies and silence on Singaporean
politics henceforth, Lee time and again exploited the Achilles
heel of the media in capitalist societies, demonstrating -- with
the Asian Wall Street Journal no less -- that when you can
guarantee wins in your own court, the very suggestion of suing
can be enough to make journalists back off.

The Sept. 6 trial is dismaying for its suggestion that the
current leaders of Southeast Asia's democracies would take their
cue from this man -- a fellow leader, but also their supposed
ideological nemesis.

Even more dangerous, Sept. 6 could represent a more insidious
approach with regard to how the powerful and sensitive in
Southeast Asia can deal with an inconvenient and sometimes
troublesome press.

Why be the hands-on litigant when you can be the hands-off
government shaking its head from the sidelines? Or, put another
way, why be disgraced Philippine President Joseph Estrada (who
tried to do a Lee by squeezing advertisers from The Manila Times
only to end up turning the rest of the press and Manila's middle
class against him)? Indeed, why be the bully when, with nothing
more than your own nimble feet and somebody else's heavy hands,
you can have the same coopted and preempted press without the
political fallout?

When it comes to government's ability to defend or weaken the
press -- in court, against a private entity's litigation -- it is
a fine line that separates political leaders' helplessness from
indifference. Especially when such litigation is becoming
habitual on the part of the private sector, government, too,
becomes suspect because it's another thin line that separates
indifference from complicity.

In the Philippines, the third and only other democracy in
Southeast Asia, six newsmen have been killed since January. While
seeking justice for the victims, journalists there are making the
case that the rash of murders also betrays a "culture of
impunity" among enemies of the press that the government has
allowed (that word again) to fester. They point out that not a
single person has been convicted or jailed for the murder of any
of the 54 newsmen killed in the Philippines since 1986.

When it comes to killing journalists and transparency, in
other words, political and government leaders actually need not
pull the trigger. They need only stand idly by and watch media
outfits incriminate themselves, pay lip service to press freedom,
and serve their own interests by chilling the press into
submission.

The writer is executive director of the Southeast
Asian Press Alliance (SEAPA), Bangkok. He can be reached at
roby@seapabkk.org.