Crawling from the Wreckage (43 page)

The latter switched to the right in 1922–23—but my own native country, Newfoundland, only joined Canada in 1949, so it didn’t switch from left
to right until 1947. There is a story about how they eased the transition there, however, that may be of assistance to those anxious Samoans.

Newfoundlanders, in the Child’s Garden of Canadian Stereotypes, fill the same role as the Laz in Turkey, Karelians in Finland, or Tasmanians in Australia. There are hundreds of “Newfie” jokes about how stunned we are. We laugh and go along with the joke, and then later, at night, we sneak into their homes and strangle their offspring.

The story is that the Newfoundland government was worried about how its people would handle the switch from left to right, until one minister solved the problem. “Let them get used to it a bit at a time,” he said. “The people whose names start with A to D can switch on Monday, E to K will switch on Tuesday …”

Beginning with “People Power” in the Philippines in 1986, Southeast Asia is where the modern wave of non-violent democratic revolutions started. It’s also (with the possible exception of South Africa) the part of the newly democratic world where the gulf between the rich and poor is greatest. As such, it has become a huge, uncontrolled experiment in whether democracy can enable the poor to change their fate
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Vote for “the prettiest candidate,” said Indonesia’s President Megawati Sukarnoputri as the presidential election campaign got underway, and the voters took her at her word. On September 20, they voted overwhelmingly for her former chief security minister, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono.
He’s no beauty, but neither is she—and at least he does sing very nicely. None of his campaign rallies was complete without a rendition of “Rainbow in Your Eyes” by the former four-star general and his wife, Kristiani Herrawati. The voters loved it.

Mr. Yudhoyono is actually quite a serious man who was seen by his army colleagues as efficient and incorruptible, but even his closest adviser, Muhammad Lutfi, admitted: “This election is not about policy. This is a popularity contest so we sell [him] like a brand image.” It’s enough to give you doubts about the future of Indonesia’s new democracy.

It’s not just Indonesia. There has been an avalanche of new democracies in the past twenty years, and there are doubts about the quality of democracy in a lot of them. At the same time, many people in these countries have become nostalgic for the sheer stability of the old regimes: in a poll conducted by the Asia Foundation last December, 53 percent of Indonesians agreed with the statement “We need a strong leader like Suharto [the former dictator, overthrown in 1998] … even if it reduces rights and freedoms.”

The new democracies of the world are full of people who are not too sure that it was all such a good idea: East Germans who miss the threadbare economic security they had in their part of the old divided Germany; Filipinos who elected an ignorant and corrupt former movie star as president because he played heroic roles in movies; South Africans who blame the huge crime rate on their post-apartheid freedoms.

The United Nations Development Programme has calculated that eighty-one countries moved towards democracy in the 1980s and 1990s. By 2002, 140 of the world’s almost 200 independent nations had held multi-party elections. The only really big countries where elections either don’t happen at all or have no discernible impact on who runs the place are China and Pakistan.

It has been an astonishingly rapid transformation—which may explain why people seem so ungrateful for their liberation. The voters are inexperienced, so demagoguery works better than in the older democracies (not that it doesn’t often work in those countries, too). There is also the disillusionment that comes when people realize that changing the political system does not solve all the country’s problems. It just changes our way of dealing with them, hopefully for the better, but it’s bound to take some time for the benefits to become apparent.

When a society opts for democracy it is betting that the collective
wisdom of the majority is superior to the judgment of any single powerful individual or group. This is almost certainly true in the long run but can be quite wrong in the short run. On the other hand, the kind of individuals who rise to power in tyrannies are even more prone to catastrophic errors of judgment.

Take Indonesia. The thirty-year Suharto dictatorship, which covered most of the country’s independent history, delivered economic growth but siphoned off most of the profits for the benefit of a narrow elite of the dictator’s cronies and collaborators. The three presidents who have governed the country in the six years since Suharto’s overthrow—chosen by a parliament where interest groups that were powerful under the old regime still had much influence—were disastrous in different ways, but all were incapable of addressing Indonesia’s problems effectively.

By contrast, in the first election where Indonesians were allowed to vote for a president directly, they have rejected the do-nothing incumbent, Megawati Sukarnoputri, the not-very-bright daughter of independence hero Sukarno, and the man who was tipped as her successor, indicted war criminal General Wiranto, in favour of the plodding sincerity, dogged honesty and fine singing voice of Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono. The popular wisdom may not be all that sophisticated, but it probably isn’t wrong, either.

The Indonesian voters got it more or less right. The human-rights situation in the country improved, the long separatist war in Aceh ended, corruption dropped, and the economy grew at 5 percent or better in each year of Yudhoyono’s first term. He was re-elected with almost two-thirds of the votes in 2009
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Whereas in Burma, voting can be a life-threatening activity. Any kind of dissent is
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Empty monasteries, severed telecommunications, and a sullen, beaten silence that seems to envelop the whole country. It doesn’t just feel like a defeat for the Burmese people; it feels like the end of an era. It was an era that began at the other end of Southeast Asia two decades ago, with
the non-violent overthrow of the Marcos regime in the Philippines by “people power” in 1986.

For a while, non-violent revolutions seemed almost unstoppable: Bangladesh, South Korea, Thailand and Indonesia all followed the Filipino example, overthrowing military rule and moving to open democratic systems after decades of oppression. China itself almost managed to follow their example in the Tiananmen episode of 1989, and then the “contagion” spread to Europe.

The Berlin Wall came down in late 1989, the Communist regimes of Eastern Europe melted away with scarcely a shot fired, and by 1991, the Soviet Union itself had gone into liquidation. It was the threat of similar non-violent action that finally brought the apartheid regime in South Africa to the negotiating table in the early 1990s. Right into the twenty-first century the trend continued, with undemocratic regimes being forced to yield power by unarmed protestors from Serbia to Georgia to Nepal. But there were always the exceptions, and exceptions are always instructive.

The greatest exception, in the early days, was Burma itself. Entranced by the seeming ease with which their Southeast Asian neighbours were dumping their dictators and emboldened by the transfer of power from General Ne Win (who had been in power for a quarter-century) to a junta of lesser generals, Burmese civilians ventured out on the streets in 1988 to demand democracy. In Rangoon the army slaughtered three thousand of them, whisking the bodies away to be burned, and the protestors went very quiet.

Non-violent protest is a powerful tactic, but no tactic works in every contingency. To be specific, non-violent protest does not work against a regime that is willing to commit a massacre, and can persuade its troops to carry out its orders.

The emotion that non-violence works on is shame. Most people feel that murdering large numbers of their fellow citizens on the streets in broad daylight is a shameful action, and even if the privileged people at the top of a regime can smother that emotion, their soldiers, who have to do the actual killing, may not be able to.

If you cannot be sure your soldiers will obey that order, then it is wise not to give it, since you present them with a dilemma that can only be resolved by turning their weapons against the regime. Better to negotiate a peaceful withdrawal from power. Non-violent revolution often succeeds, but not if the army is isolated from the public.

The Burmese army is profoundly isolated from the civilian public. Its officers, over the decades of military rule, have become a separate, self-recruiting caste that enjoys great privileges, and its soldiers are country boys—not one in a hundred is from Rangoon or Mandalay. The regime has even moved the capital from Rangoon to the preposterous jungle “city” of Naypyidaw, a newly built place whose only business is government, in order to increase the social isolation of its soldiers and servants.

So, after nineteen years, when the protestors came out on the streets again in the bigger Burmese cities, led this time by monks whose prestige made many believe the army would not dare touch them, the regime simply started killing again. The death toll this time was probably no more than a tenth of that in 1988, for people got the message very quickly: nobody who defies the regime is safe. Not even monks.

The Burmese are now pinning their hopes on foreign intervention, but that is never going to happen. It never played a decisive role in the non-violent revolutions that succeeded, either. Sooner or later, the extreme corruption of the army’s senior officers will destroy its discipline, but meanwhile it is probably more years of tyranny for Burma, with only Aung San Suu Kyi, the heroic symbol of Burmese democracy, who lives under semi-permanent house arrest, to bear witness against it.

It is not the end of an era, however. In other places, against other repressive regimes, non-violence still has a reasonable chance of succeeding. It has just never worked in Burma.

The litmus test for Southeast Asian democracy is Thailand because matters have gone much further there. The poor have actually mobilized politically, and the old and new elites are fighting hard to safeguard their privileges. The army has been back on the streets, and, as this book goes to press, the final outcome of the battle between the “red shirts” and the “yellow shirts” is still unclear. It may remain so for years
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Thailand’s Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva was humiliated last week when red-shirted protesters overran the summit of Asian leaders that he
was hosting and forced him to evacuate them by helicopter, but now he is back in control. The “reds” have been driven off the streets of Bangkok by the army, and the “yellows,” who fought them last year, have not come out in force either. For the moment, peace has been restored.

The whole situation seems as arcane as the street battles of the blues and greens in Byzantium fifteen centuries ago. It certainly doesn’t sound like modern politics, and indeed, it is not like politics in mature democratic countries like France or India. But it is (apart from the coloured T-shirts) a great deal like nineteenth-century European politics.

Thailand’s democracy is less than twenty years old, and it was the growing Thai middle class that made it happen—just as it was the middle class in European countries that made the revolutions happen there in the 1800s. In both cases, they were doing it for themselves, not for the poor.

As the history of a hundred ancient empires demonstrates, the poor and the downtrodden never launched a democratic revolution. It didn’t occur to them to demand their democratic rights, because they lacked the education and the perspective even to think in those terms. Democracy only got onto the political agenda when a large and literate middle class appeared.

The European middle class mainly wanted political equality, as they were already doing quite nicely economically. But, no sooner had they won it than they discovered to their horror that the poor were also infected by this idea of equality. At that point, the newly empowered middle class faced a stark choice: either make a political deal that brought the poor into the system economically, or live forever in fear of the day when angry mobs broke into their homes. In Europe, it took most of the nineteenth century and a good deal of the twentieth to come up with a deal that worked, but in the end, various versions of the welfare state did the trick.

Most of the former colonial countries inherited the democratic system. They didn’t all make it work but at least they knew the rules, including how to get the poor to accept the system. Whereas Thailand, almost uniquely in southern Asia, was never colonized.

In 1992, middle-class Thais, overwhelmingly Bangkok-based, drove the army from power in a non-violent revolution that brought genuine democracy to the country for the first time. It was an exhilarating and long overdue event, but the Thai middle class really didn’t anticipate what was going to come next.

Give a country a democratic system, and pretty soon the poor will figure out how to use it for their own purposes. Their leader and voice in Thailand was Thaksin Shinawatra, an ex-cop from humble origins who became a telecommunications billionaire. He was a demagogue who cut as many corners in politics as he did in business, but he genuinely represented the poor, both urban and rural, and they voted for him in the millions.

Thaksin won power in 2001, and began pushing through measures to give the poor access to cheap loans, medical care and other things that the middle class took for granted. The poor loved him for it, but the urban middle class was appalled: they had lost control of politics, and their money was being spent on ignorant peasants.

Thaksin was overthrown by the army in 2006 and his party was banned. Then, as soon as democracy was restored, the poor voted for his allies and the new party they had formed. So the new government also had to be overthrown, a task that was accomplished last year by the yellow-shirted supporters of the People’s Alliance for Democracy.