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.