The Perantau

Southeast Asia and Military Dominance:

A Love Affair with Human Rights

Protests, military and coups. Crisis, chaos and death. Some fight, some hide as Myanmar is put under the international spotlight. Condemnations are thrown around but the world stands idly by. Loved ones gasping for air at the hands of the men in uniform. As bad as it is, it’s not something new. Southeast Asians are all too familiar with the situation.

The Philippines in 1986. Cambodia in 1970 and 1997. Thailand had its 12th military coup in 2014. Until its downfall in 1998, Indonesia’s authoritarian regime was blessed by the military’s iron fist, where it all started with the overthrow of the country’s first president. But why does it keep happening?

“The short answer to that is that militaries are still fairly powerful within the region,” says Andrew Rosser, Professor of Southeast Asian Studies at the University of Melbourne.

“[I]n a place like Indonesia where the political system is formally democratic and the military have no sort of formally privileged position in the polity in contrast to the past, it’s still a powerful actor.

“Thailand’s political history has been one of chopping and changing between periods of democratic and military rule. So the current sort of period of military rule is entirely in keeping with that country’s history.”

Myanmar has a similar past. Although the country is characterized by much more consistent military rule, there were periods where it took significant steps towards democracy in the late 1980s.

“It held elections that Aung San Suu Kyi’s party won and her victory here tend to have been a trigger towards some sort of clamp down [by the military],” Andrew continues.

“History is repeating itself now,” he says, “where Aung San Suu Kyi’s party had a series of electoral victories. The military don’t seem to have really captured the hearts and minds of the people of Myanmar. It hasn’t been able to prevail in elections.

“So maybe what we’re seeing here is a reaction against their inability to make more inward inroads through democratic processes. I think that might be a sort of wider element actually in Southeast Asia.”

Southeast Asia’s military loves to be in power, often under the banner of claiming legitimacy as head of state. Violence becomes the language that people understand, where a silver tongue may be your only saving grace.

“Some journalists and reporters were threatened if they continued criticising the government,” recounts Harjoko Trisnadi, a retired Indonesian journalist and a co-founder at Tempo, of the constant dangers he and his co-workers faced during Indonesia’s authoritarian military regime.

“When riots broke out,” he says, “we would receive phone calls from the Ministry of Information saying ‘don’t publicise these incidents.’ These riots were usually confrontations with the military, and since the ministry was under the control of the army, that was probably why.

“We had to manually black out some pages since we would have already printed out the news ready for distribution. Now, this created a stir. People saw what we did. We played with fire, so we had no idea what could have happened.”

Southeast Asia was, and still is, notorious for silencing the press. The International Federation of Journalists dubbed the Philippines as the deadliest country for journalists and the Freedom House labelled Laos and Vietnam as ‘not free’ for press freedom.

Civilians lack a platform to voice their pains. The power that the military holds in the region means it creates a safe haven for them to infringe on human rights.

Government officials and pro-democracy activists detained, digital communication cut off, and highly repressive legislation bills have been imposed in Myanmar.

Right now, a number of civil society organisations across Southeast Asia wrote a joint open letter to ASEAN urging strong action against the ongoing military violence in Myanmar and to stop the infringement of fundamental human rights.

Professor Andrew Rosser frames this very nicely. “What you’ve had there is formerly authoritarian military-backed regimes taking steps towards democracy,” he says.

“If elites have been able to operate effectively within the context of those democratic systems then democracies endure, to some extent. But where they haven’t, where issues have come up for them, challenges have come up for them, then they’ve been in a position to reassert their authority.”

The world of academia has proven that this holds true.

A study published in The Pacific Review investigated the relationship between low-quality democracy and varied authoritarianism with reference to elites and regimes in present-day Southeast Asia. Although civil society organizations and social movements in Southeast Asia has strengthened, it has been undermined by military generals and corrupt bereaucrats that try to re-impose authoritarian features.

An article in the Asian Security journal echoes this stance, although slightly more optimistic. Seeing that Myanmar in the past has, though reluctantly, accepted foreign aid in dealing with the aftermath of Cyclone Nargis, the study argued that there was potential for ASEAN to reconcile humanitarianism and sovereignty.

Unlike other international organisations like the United Nations, ASEAN in the ASEAN Human Rights Declaration explicitly mentions in article 7 that although human rights are fundamental, “the realisation of human rights must be considered in the regional and national context bearing in mind different political, economic, legal, social, cultural, historical and religious backgrounds.” This means that human rights are whatever you want it to be.

ASEAN member states have also made a commitment of mutual cooperation “to the promotion and protection of human rights and fundamental freedoms … in accordance with the ASEAN Charter,” as outlined in article 39 of the declaration.

Have other countries done anything to try to stop the Myanmar situation? No.

Sovereignty is something highly regarded by the ASEAN member states. The organisation was built on the back of the Cold War, but more importantly, on the back of Southeast Asia’s colonial past. The premise of ASEAN was for economic cooperation on getting the region level with the rest of the world, and they are careful not to tell each other what to do.

“[M]embers of ASEAN seem to abide pretty religiously by the principle of non interference in the affairs of other countries,” Rosser explains.

This means that in the context of Myanmar, international intervention, if any, will not be from neighbouring countries. Western countries are also unlikely to intervene; not only will it be costly, but it may also cause political damage.

“So what does that leave us with? [Political] figures in Western governments verbally condemning what’s happened in Myanmar.”

As far as human rights is concerned, military governments are far from great. However, we should also be aware of the fact that civilian governments also have their fair share of human rights issues.

There is a wider problem of governance in relation to human rights in Southeast Asia. Ultimately, it extends beyond the question of whether or not militaries are in power.

Perhaps a re-evaluation of what ASEAN stands for is necessary. Maybe only then could we see a difference.

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Originally submitted as coursework for the Bachelor of Arts, University of Melbourne