Sampling forbidden fruit
Sampling forbidden fruit
In Southeast Asia, where economic growth has been so
impressive for many years, the people are distressed to hear
about unconstitutional actions on the part of the authorities. In
this region some governments seem to find it difficult to decide
what degree of political openness is appropriate. Malaysia, which
many western observers regard to be one of the most democratic
countries in the Association of the Southeast Asian Nations,
shocked the world on Sunday with the announcement of the banning
of a news magazine. For us in Indonesia the news was really
completely unexpected because we have long seen that neighbor as
quite democratic.
Malaysia has held scores of fair general elections and has
gone further than others in the region in protecting civil
liberties. It has a multi-party legislature and a free press,
even if most of the mass media are owned by the government
political party, the National Front. Its leaders, especially
Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad, have been very open with the
public.
Against this backdrop we are quite at a loss to understand
Kuala Lumpur's motivation in revoking the publishing permit of
the magazine Muslim Media International. Mahathir said that it
reviled Moslem nations and slandered the image of Moslem leaders.
The Sunday New Straits Times quoted Mahathir as saying that the
Ministry of Home Affairs had received protests from Moslem
countries concerning the magazine's editorial content.
It is not very clear what legal reasoning was employed by the
government in arriving at its decision to ban the magazine. Is
Kuala Lumpur now confused about the place of press freedom in
Malaysia's fast-growing economy? To date, Mahathir has never been
found to be on the wrong side of his country's Constitution, and
his style has been very different from that of Singapore's former
premier Lee Kuan Yew. It was Lee who said: "I do not believe that
democracy necessarily leads to development. I believe that a
country needs to develop its discipline more than democracy."
What Lee regards as discipline has been perceived by others as
a political system approaching totalitarianism. Singapore, like
some East Asian countries, apparently agreed with the thinking of
those Indian politicians who said that their country's slow
growth was the price of democracy. The idea that democracy and
economic growth are incompatible appears to be supported by the
Chinese example, in which a repressive regime has presided over
an economic miracle.
Yet Lee's philosophy has been completely rebutted by many
other examples. If so-called "discipline" or dictatorship were
the key to prosperity, several African countries would have been
economic superpowers by now. The states of Eastern Europe would
have been economic giants long before the collapse of the Soviet
Union. And people would be queuing up to enter Cuba, rather than
trying to escape.
We strongly believe that Mahathir does not need to sample the
forbidden fruit of press bans, because there has been no clash
between democracy and economic growth in Malaysia.
Mahathir's move strikes us as an unfortunate setback. In
Indonesia, by contrast, the situation appears to be more
promising, with Minister of Information Harmoko saying recently
that there would be no press bans here in 1995.
We hope that Southeast Asian leaders will agree with us that
regional stability will come, not from economic growth alone, but
through the fulfillment of the peoples' long-cherished dream: to
make their countries, not only economically successful, but also
places where ideas can be exchanged freely.