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RI has vital role restoring democracy across ASEAN
Democratic watchdogs: Celebrating 17 years of the Tifa Foundation by opening a forum entitled “Our Race to the Bottom: Civic Space, Human Rights and the Trajectory of Democracy in ASEAN Countries” at the JS Luwansa Hotel and Convention Center in South Jakarta on Thursday are (from left) Rosalia Maria Emanuele Sciortino of Thailand’s Mahidol University, Arina Khoo Ying Hooi of Malaysia’s University of Malaya, Debra Yatim of the Tifa Foundation board, Rosalinn Zahau of the Open Society of Myanmar and Ross Tapsell of the Australian National University
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span class="inline inline-center">Democratic watchdogs: Celebrating 17 years of the Tifa Foundation by opening a forum entitled “Our Race to the Bottom: Civic Space, Human Rights and the Trajectory of Democracy in ASEAN Countries” at the JS Luwansa Hotel and Convention Center in South Jakarta on Thursday are (from left) Rosalia Maria Emanuele Sciortino of Thailand’s Mahidol University, Arina Khoo Ying Hooi of Malaysia’s University of Malaya, Debra Yatim of the Tifa Foundation board, Rosalinn Zahau of the Open Society of Myanmar and Ross Tapsell of the Australian National University.(JP/Ben Latuihamallo)
Indonesia, as the largest and most stable democracy in Southeast Asia, should play a bigger role to drive the region in a positive direction amid signs that democracy is becoming tangled in all 10 ASEAN member countries, scholars and activists are suggesting.
Calling Indonesia Southeast Asia’s democratic behemoth, Nicholas Farrely, the associate dean at the Australian National University (ANU) College of Asia and the Pacific, said in a discussion on Friday that the amount of progress the region achieved in terms of democratic fulfillment depended, to some degree, on the role that Indonesia played.
“We need to be thinking of how a democratic identity is going to be formed and introduced in the way Indonesia interacts with its neighbors,” Farrely said in the seminar held by the Tifa Foundation. Farrely acknowledged that one thing hindering democratization in the region was ASEAN’s long-time non-intervention policy, by which no ASEAN members normally meddle in what is going on in their neighbors’ yards.
Over the past decades, most countries in Southeast Asia, a region with more than 600 million people, had been showing positive progress toward democratization, but more recently these nations have experienced huge setbacks toward fully adopting democracy, with scholars questioning whether the region is now racing to the bottom rather than climbing upwards. For example, Thailand, a country that historically has a politically strong military, had its armed forces go back to barracks several times, but the military returned to politics with a coup d’état in May 2014. In the Philippines, President Rodrigo Duterte has been criticized for the extrajudicial killing of people accused of trafficking drugs.
“Southeast Asia does not give us much reason to be optimistic,” Farrely said.
Meanwhile, in Cambodia, the opposition has been repressed and in September opposition leader Kem So Kha was jailed for treason as Prime Minister Hun Sen seeks another decade in office. Mu Sochua, a board member of ASEAN Parliamentarians for Human Rights and a member of the National Assembly of Cambodia, said the ruling party in his country had been using the propaganda that those who opposed to the government were “US servants” and therefore should go to jail. Sochua said Indonesia could also play a role in restoring stability in Cambodia by, among other things, gathering together the countries that took part in the 1991 Paris Peace Accord, an agreement signed by 19 governments, including Indonesia and France, which ended decades of conflict and bloodshed in Cambodia.
“Indonesia plays a big role for solutions. We ask Indonesia, the co-founder of Paris Peace Accord, to engage France, Australia, Japan and other countries to guarantee a free and fair election in Cambodia,” Sochua said. “We cannot just say that non-intervention is the norm [in ASEAN].”
However, Indonesia also has some problems internally, with a recent rise of sectarianism and religious intolerance marring democratic reform. Sectarianism influenced the outcome of the Jakarta election in February. Analysts said what happened in Jakarta would likely be replicated in other parts of the country when 171 regions hold elections next year. Such problems in Indonesia had emerged because politicians had exploited religious populism for their own interests, said Usman Hamid, the director of Amnesty International Indonesia.
Usman saw Indonesia’s path to democracy positively, saying that such problems happened everywhere else. He said all Indonesia should do was to strengthen its civil society
“Nineteen years of democratization in Indonesia has been running without interruption. It is a work in progress,” Usman said, adding that despite all its problems Indonesia had not experienced a military coup, which was undoubtedly a good sign.
Usman said that in order to improve democracy in Indonesia, the country should strengthen its civil society and “win the middle class.” He pointed out how democratic culture has enabled women farmers in Kendang, Central Java, to organize their own movement to protest against a cement factory that would destroy their lands.
