Hun Sen meets with Malaysian ex-PM [-Meeting of the dictators?]

PHNOM PENH, Dec. 3 (Xinhua)-- Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen met with Malaysian former Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad on Thursday in Phnom Penh to talk on Muslim community in Cambodia, a spokesman for Hun Sen said.

Following the meeting, Eang Sophallet, spokesman for Hun Sen told reporters that Mahathir, who is on a two-day visit to Cambodia, had told Hun Sen that his mission this time was to help Cambodian Muslim community in his capacity as a president of the Muslim Healthcare Community in Malaysia.

Mahathir's visit was made two weeks after a Cambodian Muslim community in the northern outskirts of Phnom Penh -- suffered fire that destroyed hundreds of houses.

Muslim minority in Cambodia, known as Cham are making up some 4percent of the total country's population of 14 million people.

During the talks, Mahathir commended Hun Sen's leadership that has led the country into harmonious society with no discrimination to any races.

Also, during the talks, Hun Sen suggested Malaysia open more markets for Cambodian rice production.

Malay Blogger Fights a System He Perfected

Former Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad of Malaysia blogs in English and Malay. (Photo: Palani Mohan for The I.H.T.)

November 6, 2008
By SETH MYDANS
New York Times

KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia — In a vast office at the top of one of the world’s tallest buildings, former Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad sits at a broad, glass-topped desk, scribbling his thoughts on a pad of unlined paper.

For 22 years, Mr. Mahathir was the most powerful person in this land, and his thoughts were commands as he reshaped the country in his own image.

But he has become an irritant and a spoiler five years after stepping down, turning against his handpicked successor, Abdullah Ahmad Badawi, and falling victim to the press controls he perfected as prime minister.

“Where is the press freedom?” he asked two years ago, apparently surprised at being suddenly ignored. “Broadcast what I have to say! What I say is not even accurately published in the press!”

This May, though, he discovered the power of the Internet. Like many other inconvenient critics, he joined what seemed to be a political wave of the future, creating his own blog — www.chedet.com — where he vents in English and Malay several times a week.

Around the region bloggers are becoming a Fifth Estate, challenging the government’s monopoly on information in Singapore, evading censors in Vietnam, and influencing events in places like Thailand, Cambodia and China.

In March, political experts said, Malaysia’s bloggers helped influence elections, contributing to the biggest upset that the governing party, the United Malays National Organization, had suffered since independence in 1957. For the first time in decades, it held fewer than two-thirds of the seats in Parliament, and it lost control of 5 of the 13 states.

Among the opposition winners in the national and state governments were several bloggers, most prominently Jeff Ooi, who claimed to have prodded Mr. Mahathir into starting his own blog.

“The government doesn’t have a clue how to handle bloggers,” Mr. Ooi said in an interview. “If I were a dictator, I would be despairing. What do you do against this?”

The Internet has become the main battleground against censorship in Malaysia, where a system of self-censorship in an atmosphere of government pressure and intimidation has produced a constricted press.

Mr. Mahathir, 82, seems to be reveling now in challenging the system he once controlled, and he is as acerbic as he was during his days as prime minister.

“It is time the so-called intellectuals realize they were being duped by the Master of Spin,” he wrote on Aug. 21, referring to his bitter enemy, Anwar Ibrahim, who was his deputy prime minister and now leads the main opposition party. He also accused Mr. Anwar of being “the pious Muslim, who is also the bosom pal of Paul Wolfowitz, the neo-con Jew,” referring to the former United States deputy secretary of defense.

Blogging on Sept. 3, he offered a sort of mission statement. Many are with him as he harasses the government, he asserted. “But they are not prepared to say it openly,” he wrote. “That was why I started my blog. About six million had visited my blog site, and tens of thousands have commented and supported me.”

In case anyone doubts this, he posts comments to his blog by the dozens and hundreds, page after page, day after day. It turns out he has a lot of fans.

“Amazingly brilliant!” reads one comment. “I can’t stop laughing...you made my day Sir!”

And just to clear up any possible misunderstanding, another writes, “You, sir, are the most brilliant politician Malaysia has ever been blessed with.”

Mr. Ooi, 52, a former advertising copywriter who was one of Malaysia’s first political bloggers, started in 2003 and built a loyal following at www.jeffooi.com.

The government began an assault on Mr. Ooi that included threats of imprisonment without trial, attacks in the government-friendly press and defamation lawsuits, which are popular among leaders in Southeast Asia.

But that seemed only to make him a hero, and when he decided to run for Parliament as an opposition candidate, he already had a big head start.

“As a person that has consistently faced threats as a blogger, I had a kind of iconism and imagery that this is someone you can trust, someone the government fears, someone you need to put into Parliament,” Mr. Ooi said.

But he said it was much harder to blog from the inside. “The trade-off is that I have to write with measured words,” he said.

Earlier this year, Mr. Ooi said, he attended a public forum with Mr. Mahathir. It was there that he claimed he persuaded Mr. Mahathir to begin a blog.

“I threw him a challenge,” Mr. Ooi said. “A blogger shares a few prerequisites. One, he is strongly opinionated. Two, he could be controversial. And, thirdly, he is an agent provocateur on issues.

“I thought Mahathir fulfilled all three.”

The result, Mr. Ooi said, was “a miracle, he scored about 10 million visitors within months.”

Now, a convert to free speech, Mr. Mahathir is using his blog to champion the most recent victim of government censorship, Raja Petra Kamaruddin, the country’s most prominent blogger, who posts on www.malaysia-today.net, his Web site. The site has been blocked, but readers are redirected to another Web site, which continues to be updated.

The government has fallen back on the kind of tactics that Mr. Ooi faced. It charged Mr. Petra with sedition and jailed him for two years without trial for comments he had posted.

Mr. Mahathir sounded almost like Che Guevara when he said in his blog that the arrest showed “a degree of oppressive arrogance worthy of a totalitarian state.”

Furthermore, jailing people is futile, he said in an interview in his office. There is no way the government can arrest all the bloggers, even if it wants to.

At least, he said, “I hope so. Otherwise I’ll be in, too.”

Suharto's death ends another chapter for Asia's strongmen

In this handout photo released by President Office, Indonesia's President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, center, stands by the body of former Indonesian President Suharto at his house in Jakarta, Sunday, Jan 27, 2008. Former dictator Suharto, an army general who crushed Indonesia's communist movement and pushed aside the country's founding father to usher in 32 years of tough rule that saw up to a million political opponents killed, died Sunday. He was 86. (AP Photo/President Office, Anung, HO)

01/27/2008
By Aubrey Belford
Agence France-Presse

JAKARTA -- With the death of Indonesia's Suharto, Asia has lost another of its so-called "strongmen" -- the authoritarian and mostly pro-Western rulers who dominated for much of the late 20th century.

From his seizure of power in 1966 until his downfall in 1998, Suharto ruled Indonesia according to a model favoring market-driven economic growth ringed by repressive social control.

It was an approach common elsewhere in Asia too, justified by a notion that "you need a strong ruler to keep order and bring countries into a modern age, an industrialized age," according to Greg Fealy, an academic at the Australian National University.

The politics of the Cold War era, with the constant specter of a communist threat, also "favored strong states and strong leaders," he said, even if it came at the inevitable expense of civil rights.

Some, like Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines, ostentatiously amassed huge wealth for themselves and cronies. Others, like South Korea's Park Chung-hee, were more personally austere while their countries prospered.

Suharto's contemporaries were not cut entirely from the same cloth either.

Singapore's Lee Kuan Yew and Malaysia's Mahathir Mohamad were doubtlessly authoritarian, but not to the extent of iron-willed autocrats such as General Ne Win of Myanmar, whose isolationist rule meant that, unlike the others, he was no darling of the West.

Keeping a tough guy image was optional for such strongmen.

After a speech in 1974 by Park was interrupted by an assassination attempt that missed him but killed his wife, the South Korean leader returned to the podium and finished his speech.

Lee, by contrast, famously shed public tears over his fledgling country's forced separation from Malaysia in 1965, a counter-point to the schoolmasterly authoritarianism with which he micromanaged Singaporean life.

Some of Asia's authoritarian old school have remained close. Mahathir and Lee -- both now in their eighties -- flew to the Indonesian capital Jakarta to visit Suharto as he lay dying in hospital.

The common thread connecting Asia's autocrats was a conviction that Western liberal democracy would not work at home and would even be dangerous, Harold Crouch, an Australian Indonesia expert, told Agence France-Presse.

Their argument was that "Asian values" and the special circumstances of an emerging but fragile region necessitated "an elite to run the country," Crouch said.

But hostility to democracy did not stop Western support for many of Asia's authoritarian leaders, whose anti-communism and acceptance of foreign capital led to varying degrees of closeness.

"The Americans certainly welcomed Suharto coming to power because he killed a lot of communists in doing so," Crouch said, referring to a crackdown on the Indonesian Communist Party that killed upwards of half a million.

Still, Suharto had his own style.

While other leaders such as Mahathir adopted a stern persona, Suharto kept his ruthlessness hidden behind a personable and self-effacing exterior, said Bima Sugiarto, a lecturer at Indonesia's Paramadina University.

"He was known as a smiling general. He was very gentle, very polite but on the other hand he had an extreme skill in controlling all political scenarios behind the scenes," he said.

But while many authoritarian rulers were notorious for their corruption -- the Marcos family being an extreme example -- none matched Suharto for the way he institutionalized graft throughout government, Sugiarto added.