Shine Zaw-Aung, a Burmese graduate of Stanford University and a fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation, relocated to Myanmar in 2013 and founded First Rangoon, a consultancy advising local companies. The following essay, edited for length and clarity, appeared on his blog on August 15 and was his last post before departing for business school at the University of Chicago.
When I moved back to Asia in 2013, I brought with me Southeast Asia on a shoestring, Lonely Planet’s much loved travel guide, then celebrating its 16th edition. Here are the lands, the book proclaims, of blue seas and gilded temples, of exotic sands and happy smiles, and to a certain extent, it is right. No disease, pestilence, war or humanitarian disaster stalks the land — at least not to the extent that required advocacy nor intervention of African proportions.
But all is not well.
Look beyond the sun-toned surfers, cocktail-swirling socialites and besuited tai-pans. Clouds are lengthening. Parliamentary democracies in Asia have turned into facades for majoritarianism, where the dominant ethnic group exploits and marginalizes the periphery.
In Indonesia, the political center in Java dominates other islands even after a decade of political decentralization; it extracts natural resources from Irian Jaya without delivering infrastructure improvements.
On the eastern side of that tension-haunted island, Papua New Guinea’s government treats its marginalized Pacific Islanders on the island of Bougainville likewise: by one measure the central government in Port Moresby received 20% of profits from a copper mine in Bougainville, while the natives only received less than 1%. No wonder separatism haunts both Irian Jaya and Bougainville.
Elsewhere, minorities are often political scapegoats.
In recent years, governments of Myanmar, Thailand, the Philippines, and China have marginalized and prosecuted Muslim minorities. In the ever-darkening climate of the global war on terror and a triumphant Daesh state in the Levant, Muslim minorities are cast as fifth columnists, prone to political conspiracy, secession and ready to declare their wicked allegiance to a transnational and post-nation-state caliphate. Democracies and autocracies alike are using such rhetoric to pander to the nationalists and thus consolidate the ruling clique’s political capital.
Meanwhile, thuggish illiberalism is rife.
In 2014, Thailand’s military seized power against a populist government which had widespread support in rural areas. The Philippines has elected Rodrigo Duterte, who rails against Christian missionaries and journalists while the country sinks ever deeper into lawless vigilantism. Both Duterte and Thai junta leader Prayuth Chan-ocha have made unfortunate comments about rape and sexual assault.
Brunei (“A Kingdom of Unexpected Treasures,” its tourism brochures proclaim) is introducing sharia law. Although it vociferously protested the beheading of two of its own citizens for murder in Saudi Arabia, Indonesia was defended its execution of several drug traffickers, reversing a previous government’s moratorium on capital punishment.
To the West, India has turned increasingly nationalistic; a brand of Hindu nationalism has been cultivated by India’s new leader Narendra Modi, whose tenure in Gujarat coincided with persecution of Muslims. Hindu nationalist outfits, such as doctrinaire Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, frequently rage against activities and even charities undertaken by other religions. In Bangladesh, many journalists and bloggers who have spoken out against Islam, and its views on gender equality and atheism, have been killed in a series of extrajudicial killings to which the government there has turned a blind eye.
Several weeks ago, Malaysia passed a series of authoritarian laws to help the Malay-dominated government, which hangs on to power thanks to gerrymandering despite losing the popular vote. The Malaysian government is pushing through an Islamic penal code that includes amputations and stoning.
In this country with large ethnic-Chinese and ethnic-Indian populations, a discredited prime minister is trying hard to appeal to the Islamists. Under a recently reintroduced Sedition Act, opponents of Islamic law and corporal and capital punishments has been imprisoned. Harsher punishments beckon for blasphemers and apostates, and the leader of the opposition has been jailed on charges of sodomy.
Increasingly, Asian leaders realize that ethno-nationalism and pandering to the dominant ethnic group can win votes.
During the last Indonesian election, Prabowon Subianto, the opposition candidate — a former general who was a former son-in-law of a former dictator — accused the eventual winner, Joko Widodo, of being a Chinese Christian. The Cambodian strongman Hun Sen’s bitter rival, Sam Rainsy, stokes an intense dislike for poor ethnic Vietnamese living in Cambodia, with going so far as to call them ‘youn’, a derogatory term with unfortunate historical implications.
Here in Myanmar, Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi is the de facto leader of the government after her party of dissidents came to power earlier this year. But Suu Kyi, who is widely respected domestically and internationally, is quiet against Buddhist extremism and the plight of Muslim minorities.
Malign influences of departing colonial powers are often blamed, but current ruling establishments from Dhaka to Dili proved themselves to be equally imperious — by relying on colonial era laws and by exporting their own brand of majoritarianism. As dominant ethnic groups in Southeast Asia internally migrate, they carried their religious or nationalistic beliefs with them, fuelling conflicts. The export of the Thai language into the Patani south, Javanese migration to Ambon and Kalimantan, and the Philippine zeal in changing Mindanese names to Roman Catholic ones, have left deep societal divides. Myanmar has recently enacted four race and religion laws that targeted religious and indigenous minorities.
These internal squabbles bode ill for the region as it juggles the rise of India and China, America’s pivot to the region, and territorial squabbles in the South China Sea. In this deeply religious land, moral authorities are all too happy to demonize other races and religions. This has justified a bitter scotched war with Tamils in the ‘happy’ island of Sri Lanka, and fueled the insurgencies in the Philippines, Myanmar and Thailand. Breakdown of law and order has created immigration problems, human trafficking, and general trade in human misery.
All religions are handy accomplices in this. Hindus in India, Buddhists in Sri Lanka, Thailand, and Myanmar; Catholics in the Philippines, Muslims in Bangladesh, Malaysia and Indonesia all view other religions as the Terrifying Others. Hypocrisies are rife: while they bemoan persecution of their coreligionists abroad, they are all too willing to persecute their neighbors and countrymen.
All this resembles Europe of last century — a continent of multi-ethnic states, whose periphery increasingly frays over debates of nationalist rights and privileges. Exactly a century ago, millions perished at Verdun and Somme; another great war and coercive measures (redrawing of national borders after the first world war; forced relocation of peoples to create single ethnic polities after the second) followed. Asia teeters dangerously close to the same route.
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