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.