Should APEC leaders gather in Kuala Lumpur?

Should APEC leaders gather in Kuala Lumpur?

Indonesia, Thailand and the Philippines have expressed
disquiet over current developments within Malaysia. The Jakarta
Post's Asia correspondent, Harvey Stockwin, who has been
following Malaysian developments since Malaya became independent
in 1957, suggests that there are good reasons why APEC leaders
should at least consider taking the ASEAN criticism of Malaysia
one step further. Following is the first of two installments.

HONG KONG (JP): South Korean President Kim Dae-jung, Chinese
President Jiang Zemin, Australian Prime Minister John Howard,
Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chretien, New Zealand Prime Minister
Jenny Shipley, Mexican President Ernesto Zedillo, and U.S.
President Bill Clinton all have a very important decision to
make. It could be critical to the future of Southeast Asia. There
is scarcely any outward sign that they are even considering it.

The decision is this: Should they use their precious time, and
misuse the potentially promising Asia Pacific Economic
Cooperation grouping (APEC) to endorse the fast-developing
dictatorship of Malaysian Prime Minister Dr. Mahathir bin
Mohamad? So should they proceed with the APEC summit in Kuala
Lumpur next month?

Two heads of government are omitted from those non-ASEAN APEC
leaders who should immediately confront this grave issue. One is
Chilean President Eduardo Frei who has to worry more about a past
rather than a present dictatorship. Frei is now battling to keep
the Chilean right and the Chilean left from further dividing the
country over contrary memories of a bitter past. The risk of such
division -- which might vitiate the further growth of Chilean
democracy -- has arisen as a result of the extraordinary arrest
of former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet in London on October
17.

The threat to Chilean democracy arises because, in an Asian
perspective, Pinochet -- unlike former Philippine dictator
Ferdinand Marcos, unlike former Indonesian dictator Soeharto, and
almost certainly unlike would-be dictator Mahathir -- abandoned
his dictatorship in favor of a return to a meaningful Chilean
democracy, in return for which he sought and received immunity
from prosecution within Chile itself.

The initial British High Court ruling sustains Pinochet's
immunity as a former head of state and so does not undo this
essential Chilean compromise. But the whole episode relates to
the decision now confronting APEC: it reminds that, as in the
case of Marcos, as in the case of Soeharto, and now in the case
of Pinochet, Western nations are very good at opposing dictators
only after Filipinos, Indonesians or Chileans have done the hard
and bruising work of getting rid of their dictatorships. In the
case of Malaysia, there is a chance to set a better precedent:
Western and East Asian nations aligning their human rights
convictions more immediately with their actions.

APEC is confronted with the need for a decision because of
what is happening to Malaysia, not merely what is happening to
former Deputy Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim.

There is a deplorable tendency in modern media -- print or TV,
Eastern or Western -- to excessively personalize issues, great or
small. In an era of globalization, of the Internet, of the ever
swifter movement of everything from money to people, it seems
more imperative than ever that the print media especially
demonstrate a greater ability to see the world in more impersonal
terms.

Yet the clash of personalities is still, too often, paramount.
It is a form of simplification, at the expense of greater
understanding of the underlying forces at work.

So the complex unresolved issue of China's reunification is
misleadingly simplified into Jiang Zemin versus Lee Teng-hui. So
the enormous complexities of U.S.-Japan relations are reduced to
whether the Japanese prime minister and the U.S. president call
each other by their given names.

So Mahathir is allowed to get away with making Malaysia's
deep-seated economic crisis into a Mahathir versus George Soros
mismatch.

And so Malaysia's overall crisis has been allowed to become
merely Mahathir versus Anwar Ibrahim, when it is altogether far
more serious than that.

Anwar's dismissal, arrest and prison mistreatment are, of
course, symptoms of what ails Malaysia. But Anwar has also been a
key element in the disease that now afflicts the country. For far
too long, he made his peace, and sought to benefit from
Mahathir's dictatorial ways.

Anwar belatedly adopted the slogan Reformasi only when
Mahathir moved against him, thus leaving himself open to the
charge of opportunism.

But the need for Malaysian reform, especially political
reform, has long been obvious and has, indeed, become urgent.
Anwar was so much himself part of the Mahathir system that he did
not espouse it much earlier, perhaps because he did not see it,
but more likely because he hoped that there would be time enough
to rectify matters when an orderly succession eventually made him
Prime Minister.

If the Malaysian situation is to be personalized, then it
should be done in terms of Mahathir versus the older generation
of Malaysian leaders. Former Prime Ministers Tunku Abdul Rahman,
Tun Abdul Razak, and Tun Hussein Onn, former deputy Prime
Minister Tun Dr. Ismail and former Finance Minister Tun Tan Siew
Sin together handed over a Malaysia which was significantly more
tolerant a society than Singapore, a modestly free society, an
open economy, with a less controlled media than Singapore's,
unpretentious politics and -- a rarity in the post- colonial
Afro-Asian world -- a polity wherein political succession was
agreed in advance of any such change becoming necessary.

Mahathir, had he been a true modernizer, could have taken all
these trends and improved upon them. In reality, given his
dictatorial bent, he has made all of them worse. Far from
abandoning the Internal Security Act, Mahathir has used it more
often against his political foes than his predecessors ever did.
Far from expanding freedom of expression and freedom of the
press, he has diminished both to vanishing point. Mahathir's
excessive political dominance and press control increasingly make
elections meaningless.

This is one crucial reason why APEC heads of government should
seriously consider staying away from Kuala Lumpur.

The older generation of Malaysian leaders (now, sadly, all
passed away) feared the direction in which Malaysia would be
headed under Mahathir. Hussein Onn (Mahathir's predecessor as
prime minister) never ceased to wonder if he had done the right
thing in appointing Mahathir as his deputy. At the time he saw
greater danger in abandoning the unwritten rules of succession
which had been followed since independence.

If the older leaders were apprehensive, the younger generation
of politicians -- particularly in the ruling United Malays
National Organization (UMNO) -- appear to be seduced by the fast
development of money politics, as well as of the economy, and
have been much less clear-sighted. The net result is that
Mahathir's burgeoning dictatorship could turn out to be much more
firmly rooted than its Asian predecessors.

Thus Filipinos initially did a lamentably good job of trying
to forget their democratic habits when Marcos imposed martial
law. Yet even at the height of his authoritarian powers, Marcos
could never impose the political and mental uniformity which
Mahathir is apparently now able to command.

Thus Indonesians reached great and sustained levels of
sycophancy in their ever more questionable efforts to keep
Soeharto in power over the last 32 years. Yet, even at the height
of his authoritarian powers, Soeharto could never expect the
Indonesian press to be as completely docile as the Malaysian
press has now become.