Asia's daughters put dictators on notice

September 02, 2009
By Gaffar Peang-Meth
Guest Commentary
UPI Asia Online

Washington, DC, United States, — In one respect, August was not a good month for Asia’s daughters.

It began with the death of the Philippines’ first female president, Corazon Aquino, 76, after a yearlong battle against colon cancer. Then came the Aug. 4 municipal court verdict finding Cambodian legislator Mu Sochua guilty of defaming Premier Hun Sen, because she sued him for 13 cents for defaming her in his nationally broadcast speech.

On Aug. 11th, Burma’s iconic leader Aung San Suu Kyi, 64, was sentenced to another 18 months of house arrest because American John Yettaw of Missouri swam across a lake, supposedly guarded by junta troops, and stayed two nights in her house without her permission.

In another respect, August put Asian dictators on notice.

In February 1986, inexperienced Aquino, a “plain housewife,” mother of four daughters and one son, whose husband was assassinated in 1983 for opposing Ferdinand Marcos, led the People Power Revolution that brought over 2 million Filipino civilians and political, military and religious leaders to the streets to confront with prayers and flowers Marcos’ military loyalists, backed by tanks and armored vehicles. Marcos fled to Hawaii. Aquino became Asia’s first female president.

Renowned as an advocate of democracy, peace, women’s empowerment and religious piety, Aquino replaced military rule with democracy. Her People Power inspired millions in Burma, Indonesia and Thailand. With her death Asia lost a daughter, but memories of her success put dictators on notice.

Cambodia’s Mu Sochua, a petite 55-year-old woman with three daughters, was a refugee in the San Francisco Bay Area during Pol Pot’s murderous rule that took 1.7 million lives, including her parents. With an undergraduate degree from San Francisco State University, a master’s at the University of California, Berkeley, and an honorary doctorate in law from Canada’s Guelph University, she left the United States in 1981 to work in refugee camps along the Khmer-Thai border, where she met her husband. She returned to Phnom Penh in 1989 and gave her all to advancing women’s rights.

In 2005, Sochua was one of 1,000 women proposed for the Nobel Peace Prize, and was a recipient of a Vital Voices’ Global Leadership Award for Human Rights and Anti-Human Trafficking.

In a society governed by an autocratic system that brooks no dissent from its citizens, those who challenge Samdech Decho (his title) Hun Sen must offer public apology or suffer the consequences. Sochua campaigned in opposition to the regime in power, and though civil in her discourse, was defamed by Hun Sen.

She sued him; he countersued her, claiming her suit was a form of defamation. The guilty verdict against her included an order that she pay US$2,500 in fines to the state, and $2,000 in compensation to Sen, for defaming “the long-serving premier when she tried to sue him.” Sochua expressed sorrow at the unjust outcome and said she will appeal.

At a ceremony distributing diplomas at the University of Law and Economics on Aug. 12, Sen addressed graduates, “I am the prime minister … I have an army … Let’s make clear to one another, under my order only two hours are needed to take over Phnom Penh; just try me!” In an apparent reference to Sochua, he said, “This type of woman can’t represent women.” He added, “You are not Aung San Suu Kyi.”

A day earlier Suu Kyi, who has been under house arrest for 14 of the past 20 years, was given an extended 18 months’ house arrest to prevent her participation in the 2010 elections.

In 1990, while she was under house arrest, Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy won 392 out of 485 seats in the parliamentary elections. The opposing military junta threw out the result.

Her father, Aung San, Burma’s hero, was assassinated when she was 2 years old. She said her mother taught her never to hate, not even those who killed her father. Before she married British scholar Michael Aris in 1972, she asked him, “Should my people need me, would you help me to do my duty by them?” Aris agreed.

As she returned from England to care for her sick mother in 1988, millions marched in the streets to demand free and fair elections and an end to military rule. The military rulers responded on Aug. 8, 1988, by shooting down thousands. The “Massacre of 8-8-88” became Burma’s killing field.

On Aug. 26 of that year, Suu Kyi addressed half a million people at Rangoon’s Shwedagon Pagoda, calling for a democratic government. In September, she helped form the NLD and became its secretary general.

In her words, “I could not, as my father’s daughter, remain indifferent to all that was going on.”

In July 1989 the junta put her under house arrest until July 1995, only to arrest her again and again. Behind a guarded fence Suu Kyi reads, listens to news, meditates and kept herself busy in the house.

Suu Kyi has never stopped fighting for her peoples’ civil rights, despite the junta’s vow to “crush all dangers threatening the state.” Suu Kyi once said, “Fear is very much a habit … People are conditioned to be frightened.” She recalled growing up as a child “afraid of the dark” – a coward, she said. But in April 1989 she walked in the middle of the road in the Irrawady Delta toward an army unit ordered to shoot her and her friends, when an army major intervened and spared her life.

Suu Kyi is now again under house arrest. World leaders again express anger. On Aug. 13, the Asian Human Rights Commission issued a statement: “Moral anger can serve a useful purpose where it generates meaningful resolve and leads to action to produce results, but where it is all that there is, again and again, it can have the opposite effect, sapping and demoralizing the very people whom it should bolster.”

It urged the global community to develop “some sense both of the role that the entire infrastructure of state plays in protecting the army’s hold on power, and of the role that the rest of the world needs to play in addressing that hold, rather than merely making statements of condemnation every time that the regime affronts global sensibilities and violates international law.”

Perhaps it will turn out that August was not a bad month after all. It may jolt men of conscience to action.
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(Dr. Gaffar Peang-Meth is retired from the University of Guam, where he taught political science for 13 years. He currently lives in the United States. He can be contacted at peangmeth@gmail.com. Copyright Gaffar Peang-Meth.)

Cory Aquino and the triumph of ‘People’s Power’

The Philippines during the "People Power" revolution

Friday, August 07, 2009
By Lynn Ockersz
The Island (Sri Lanka)

Late Philippine President Cory Aquino would be best remembered for being swept to power in a completely bloodless popular revolt against one of the most repressive of dictatorships in Asia. It was indeed a momentous moment in Third World political history in that the people had their say in the most decisive fashion with not ‘a shot being fired’.

It was Chinese communist icon Mao Tse Dong who famously stated that ’power comes from the barrel of a gun’ and this saying by the Chinese revolutionary had taken its place in the political ‘wisdom of the ages’, when the 1986 ‘People’s Power’ revolt in the Philippines stood the magisterial pronouncement on its head. The seemingly soundly entrenched Ferdinand Marcos dictatorship was eased out of office by the ordinary people of the Philippines who brought life to a halt for days on end in the archipelago by massing on the country’s highways in a show of phenomenal peaceful protest against their rulers, but power changed hands without a drop of blood being shed. The people wielded no violence to achieve their ends and the law enforcers largely refrained from coming down hard on the protesting public with a mailed fist. However, governance was not possible in a country which had ground to a halt and the people eventually had their say.

The ‘People’s Power’ revolt that brought Cory Aquino to the presidency was decisive proof that not all popular political revolts should be bloody in nature. Here was conclusive evidence that ‘right is might’. Until then, Asian political history, in particular, seemed to be proving just the opposite. Most states in the South-East and South Asian regions in the decade of the eighties, were home to repressive, undemocratic regimes with perhaps only India surviving as an exemplar of accountable, democratic governance.

Cambodia, for instance, at the time, was continuing to strive for political normalization following the ‘Reign of Terror’ unleashed by the despotic Pol Pot regime. ‘The Killing Fields’ of Cambodia were unsettlingly illustrative of the bloody extremes uncurbed dictatorial power could degenerate into. Hopes of positive change in Myanmar were to be soon undermined by a show of repressive force by the country’s military junta. Things came to a head in 1989, when the junta crushingly put an end to the democratic process and made Aung San Suu Kyi a veritable political prisoner.

Closer to home, Pakistan was writhing in the grip of the Zia ul-Haq military dictatorship following the ‘political assassination’ of former Premier Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. In Bangladesh too, except for some short spells of civilian rule, undemocratic administrations were the order of the day. In most of these states, ethno- populism was combining with religious chauvinism to stall democratic development.

It is against this bleak political backdrop that the epochal ‘People’s Power’ revolution bloomed rapturously in the Philippines. Here was proof that popularly-backed, value-based politics, which are peaceful in intent, could change the face of a country’s governance in the direction of democracy.

It is to the Marcos dictatorship that political analysts are indebted for phrases, such as, ‘façade democracy’ and ‘crony capitalism’. The former phrase refers to the process of ‘doctoring’ or tampering with constitutional provisions, many repressive regimes in the Third World have recourse to, for staying in power, sometimes indefinitely. Coupled with this process is the misuse or manipulation of steamroller parliamentary majorities by political executives to pass batteries of repressive laws, which are undemocratic in spirit, but have an air of legality because they bear the stamp of parliamentary approval. All this and more is done to ensure longevity of political tenures and for the exercise of undemocratic control over publics and most such bizarre distortions in governance are traceable to a degree to the Marcos regime. It is only fair that it is mentioned here, that some Sri Lankan political heavyweights have been very assiduous pupils of Marcos. In fact Sri Lanka was also referred to as a ‘façade democracy’.

The dismantling and erosion of democracy through the adoption of these political sleights of hand by ruling political elites, were geared to facilitating the increasing integration of the Philippines with the global economy. For instance, throwing the economy open to MNCs was high on Marcos’ priority list and it was with the same end in view that Sri Lanka at that time sought to replicate within its shores a free market, Singapore-style political-economy. However, it was mainly the ruling class in the Philippines and its ‘cronies’ that gained mainly from this process of economic liberalization and it is on this basis that the phrase ‘crony capitalism’ gained currency. Needless to say, ‘crony capitalism’ is not an unfamiliar phenomenon even in Sri Lanka.

However, in the Philippines the yoke of dictatorship was thrown off with the gaining of a measure of political maturity by the public. The people’s disenchantment with the Marcos regime had grown to such a degree that they were prepared to take their sense of dissatisfaction into the streets, although in a peaceful manner, when the regime disputed the result of the presidential election of 1986, which pitted Marcos against Cory Aquino.

It is the degenerate nature of the Marcos regime that helped turn public opinion decisively against Marcos and filled in the people the yearning for exemplary governance. Cory was seen as fulfilling this need and it is for this reason that she was endowed with substantial moral authority.

The Catholic Church of the Philippines, in this crisis, proved a veritable conscience of the country and was very forthright in taking the Marcos regime to task for its numerous failures. The Church, in fact, proved a catalyst in galvanizing public opinion against the regime. Thus, the Church was ‘involved’ in politics but in a very positive and constructive fashion, which is how it should be. It chose not to take the line of least resistance by saying ‘yes’ to the ‘evils’ of the day. The Church was even perhaps instrumental in nurturing non-violent, popular resistance to Marcos.

The ‘People’s Power’ Revolution of 1986, therefore, helps the South Asian political commentator to place politico-economic developments in his region in the correct perspective. Political repression, we find, could only increase with the so-called opening –up of economies. However, courageous, peaceful, popular opposition to political repression could be an agent of positive change and should be tried out and backed by all progressive sections.