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Human Rights Defender |
The East is East, West is West, and never the twain shall meet, the saying goes. This Rudyard Kipling fallacy, was indirectly brought up at the Asia-Europe Meeting (Asem) in March 1996 by certain Asian regimes keen to keep the discussion of human rights violations off the agenda of the leaders summit.
The European nations were told in rather explicit terms by countries like Indonesia,
Malaysia and Singapore not to foist their values indiscriminately on societies in which it will not work - an implication that Western style democracy is not applicable to East Asia.
Indonesian Foreign Minister Ali Alatas had a blistering message for the Europeans in early February after the Asian Ministers meeting in Phuket. For the first dialogue to be successful, controversial and non-relevant issues should not be brought up. I can think of at least 10 issues that can seriously embarrass the Europeans, but were not raising them, he lashed back with after being asked to comment about East Timor.
Malaysias Permanent Secretary for Foreign Affairs, Tan Sri Ahmad Kamil Jaafar, joined in the fray and cited Bosnia, Chechnya and Northern Ireland: When we talk about human rights violations, look at Bosnia, look at Chechnya. Thousands are being killed in Bosnia, hundreds in Chechnya. What are the Europeans doing about Chechnya? Are they doing enough in terms of telling the Russians not to move against Chechnya? Look at Northern Ireland - isnt that something to do with violation of human rights?
While Ali Alatas and Kamil Jaafar had an axe to grind against the West, an indisputable fact remained. Democracy in Europe had at least assured public knowledge of the atrocities in Bosnia, Chechnya and Northern Ireland. The same cannot be said of East Asia, where regimes, through tight control of the media, have hidden the repression in East Timor, Irian Jaya, Aceh, Burma and Tibet.
The Asian side agreed to discuss human rights at the leaders summit, only if they were talked about in general terms, with the differences in the socio-cultural backgrounds of the two continents taken into account. And in the run-up to the Asem, the government-controlled Singapore press began to pose questions like: Does development come before human rights? Should certain civil and political liberties be put on hold while collective economic and social interests are advanced? Do you give a starving man a loaf of bread or a milk crate to vent his spleen on the passing world?
So can there be a single set of Asian values, if by that we mean to ascribe a single set of beliefs to some 3.4 billion people spread across dozens of countries, believing in different if not contradictory religions and speaking in different tongues? Do also a single set of Western values hold for supposedly a billion or so diverse humans in Europe, the United States and other places settled by Europeans?
Too often in this debate, one gets bowled over by a polar opposite that there is only one universal mode of moral conduct to which all 5.6 billion human beings adhere that entirely transcends all national or cultural differences, argues Prof Donald Emmerson, a Southeast Asian studies expert at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.
The extreme understanding of Asian values as a unique set of preferences found only in Asia is untenable. But Asians do have some values, and certain Asians are characteristically Asian. These observations imply a strategy for shifting constructively from the extremes of the Asian values debate toward the centre by trying to determine what values Asians do hold and ascribe to one another, he adds.
But Emmerson points out that many decision-makers in Asia may themselves be practicing double standards: Thoroughly Westernised themselves after spending a lot of time in Europe these Asian leaders may sincerely fear the consequences for social stability should their own more liberal or Western values pervade the larger population. Implicit in this reasoning may be the idea that while we the elite can handle personal freedoms, they the masses cannot. Thus, there is a tendency for elites in Asia to underestimate the people.
But is it a Western cultural bias to protest when personal and political freedoms are at the mercy of government security forces? Are Asian governments interpreting human rights in self-serving ways - to promote their own domestic and international interests while undermining the interests of adversaries, whether ideological foes abroad or ethnic minorities at home?
The so-called Asian values are used by East Asian governments to establish authoritarian systems. In East Timor, Irian Jaya and Burma, Asian values are being used to violently suppress community values, says Carmel Budiardjo of Tapol, a human rights group based in Britain.
Even Singapores former Foreign Minister Wong Kan Seng has admitted: Diversity cannot justify gross violations of human rights. Murder is murder, whether it is perpetrated in America, Europe, Asia or Africa. No one claims torture as part of his cultural heritage.
In East Asia, the strong developmental state combines high-speed economic growth with delayed democracy. Civil liberties and individual freedoms are poorly developed in law and the political culture. As Singapores Lee Kuan Yew advised the Philippines government, the key to his countrys development is order and discipline, not just a free market - code words for the authoritarian one-party state he headed for over a quarter of a century. Incomes and business have flourished in Singapore, but not human rights. And Lee rejects Westernisation while embracing modernisation and its attendant changes in lifestyle.
So is democracy and respect for human rights really achievable in Asia - leaving aside the Asian values argument used by the authoritarian regimes?
According to Kim Dae-jung, the prominent South Korean human rights activist, it is. Writing in the December 1994 edition of Foreign Affairs, Kim says: The Asian economies are moving from a capital and labour intensive industrial phase into an information and technology intensive one. Many experts have acknowledged that this new economic world order requires guaranteed freedom of information and creativity. These things are possible only in a democratic society. Thus Asia has no practical alternative to democracy; it is a matter of survival in an age of intensifying global economic competition. The world economys changes have already meant a greater and easier flow of information, which has helped Asias democratisation process.
Asia should lose no time in firmly establishing democracy and strengthening human rights. The biggest obstacle is not its cultural heritage but the resistance of authoritarian rulers and their apologists, he adds.
Perhaps the best conclusion is given by Burmas pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi, while still under house arrest, in her November 1994 address to the World Commission on Culture and Development in Manila, delivered in absentia by former Philippine president Corazon Aquino: Many of the authoritarian governments wish to appear in the forefront of modern progress but are reluctant to institute genuine change. Such governments tend to claim that they are taking a uniquely national or indigenous path toward a political system in keeping with the times. It is often in the name of cultural integrity as well as social stability that democratic forms based on human rights are resisted by authoritarian governments.
Sonny Inbaraj is the Editor of the Editorial Page of The Nation newspaper, published in Bangkok, Thailand. This article was first published in The Nation on 26 February 1996.