Sebastian Strangio's Blog, page 2

Cambodia’s Potemkin election — what will come next?

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Despite being free from the friction of meaningful opposition, fresh challenges loom for long-ruling Hun Sen

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Cambodia’s Prime Minister Hun Sen has vowed to step down if his party does not prevail at national elections on July 29. It is not a difficult promise for the aging leader to make: Over the past year, his government has effectively removed all meaningful opposition from the field. It has arrested the opposition leader, Kem Sokha, on charges of treason; dissolved his party, the popular Cambodia National Rescue Party; rewritten the Constitution to safeguard the rule of the ruling Cambodian People’s Party; and used threats of legal action to force Cambodia’s once-vocal civil society into a self-preservational silence.

These efforts effectively ensure victory for the ruling party, and all but guarantee that Hun Sen will avoid the shock defeat that befell Prime Minister Najib Razak in Malaysia’s general election in May. With the July 29 election seemingly a foregone conclusion, attention now turns to what comes after. Hun Sen may be free from the friction of political opposition, but the recent crackdown has done little to resolve a number of challenges that will do much to determine the longer-term viability of his party’s rule.

Hun Sen’s first and most significant challenge is whether, after 33 years in power, he can keep step with the country’s rapidly changing social realities. As a character remarks in Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s novel The Leopard, set in Sicily on the eve of the Risorgimento: “If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.” The same is true for Hun Sen, whose continued rule will hinge on his ability to meet the rising demands of the Cambodian public — particularly the estimated two-thirds of the population under the age of 30.

Young voters have brought a new and unpredictable element to Cambodian politics. At the last election in 2013, they were at the forefront of the opposition CNRP, which scored 44% of the popular vote by tapping into a rising discontent about the land grabs and runaway corruption that have flourished under CPP rule. Unlike their older relatives, Cambodia’s youth have no memory of the murderous Khmer Rouge regime that ruled Cambodia from 1975 to 1979, nor of the long spell of civil war that followed. They are thus relatively immune to the CPP’s claim that it brought deliverance from a hellish past.

They have also grown up in an era of relative, though frustrated, prosperity. Cambodia’s economy has boomed under Hun Sen, growing at an average annual rate of 7.6% between 1994 and 2015. Yet the country currently ranks as the most corrupt in Southeast Asia, according to Transparency International’s 2017 Corruption Perceptions Index. Hun Sen’s rule has therefore instilled rising expectations while lacking the means to fully satisfy them.

While Hun Sen could conceivably win back support by spreading the benefits of economic growth more widely, he faces a thorny contradiction: the individuals whose support underpins his rule — from tycoons and political satraps to powerful members of the security forces — are the source of the corruption and inequality that threaten to undermine it.

This contradiction bedeviled promises of reforms after the 2013 election, and has led Hun Sen to eschew structural change in favor of a downward redistribution of political patronage. At recent rallies, foreign media have reported that he has distributed 20,000 riel ($5) cash gifts to crowds of garment workers, a strong opposition party constituency, as an inducement to vote for his party. Whether these gifts will be a sufficient balm for a disaffected electorate, and whether more substantial reforms are possible, will be crucial to the long-term sustainability of CPP rule.

Hun Sen’s second challenge is one that faces many dictators — how to prepare a viable retirement plan. In recent speeches, he has promised to remain in power for “at least 10 more years.” Hun Sen, 66 in August, is beginning to show signs of age, and questions about his health — a hardy perennial in Cambodia — are becoming more pressing. The likeliest scenario is that he will pass power to one of his sons, probably his eldest, Hun Manet, a presentable and well-spoken 40-year-old who has enjoyed a smooth rise through the ranks of the Royal Cambodian Armed Forces.

However, any power transition will be fraught with risk. While Hun Sen has presided over the longest spell of peace and economic growth in Cambodia’s modern history, he has done so in part by inhibiting the emergence of independent institutions, and making himself indispensable to the system’s continued functioning. His achievements are thus brittle. With no enduring institutions to cushion a crisis, a smooth transfer of power will require the acquiescence of the majority of the powerful interests supporting Hun Sen, something that cannot be taken for granted. As in any dictatorship, Hun Sen’s retirement or sudden removal from the scene carries considerable systemic risk.

Hun Sen’s third challenge will be to navigate the choppy international waters in which he currently finds himself. Since the abolition of the CNRP in November, Western governments — particularly the U.S. and European Union — have increased pressure on the Cambodian government to reverse its crackdown. Both have withdrawn election-related support, and promised more targeted sanctions if Kem Sokha and the CNRP are not reinstated ahead of the poll.

Hun Sen has responded with strident anti-Western rhetoric, and praise for China, which has grown to become Cambodia’s closest foreign partner, displacing the democratic governments that have bankrolled its reconstruction since the early 1990s. Between 2011 and 2015, China funneled nearly $5 billion in loans and investments to Cambodia, mostly for major infrastructure projects, while giving Hun Sen relief from Western pressures to introduce democratic reforms. In return, Cambodia has happily supported Beijing’s various interests in the region, including its controversial claims in the South China Sea — a neat convergence of interests that shows no signs of ending any time soon.

As a result of Chinese backing, Western pressure is unlikely to deflect Hun Sen from his current course. (In any case, a truly free and fair election would put the CPP’s wealth and power in jeopardy, something he will never accept). But sanctions could nonetheless give him significant headaches. Cambodia’s main vulnerability is its reliance on tariff-free access to European and American markets for its garments and footwear, which make up around 80% of the country’s exports and 37% of its gross domestic product. The E.U. is currently undertaking a review of Cambodia’s tariff exemptions, and Washington has yet to rule out a similar course of action.

While Hun Sen clearly hopes he can bluff Western governments into accepting the new status quo, tensions seem set to persist, pushing him into a deeper, and potentially unhealthy, reliance on China.

When Cambodians go to the polls this week, there is little doubt that Hun Sen will emerge victorious. But the longer-term viability of CPP rule hinges on whether it can successfully address more fundamental domestic and international challenges. How Cambodia’s aging strongman responds will do much to determine his country’s trajectory in the years to come — and whether this month’s victory will ultimately prove a Pyrrhic one.

Published in the Nikkei Asian Review, July 25, 2018

Sanctions will not resolve the Hun Sen problem

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China gives Cambodia’s strongman the option to ignore Western pressure

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What should the world do about Hun Sen? For the past year Cambodia’s bellicose leader has presided over a fierce political crackdown. His government has sharply curtailed democratic freedoms, dissolved the opposition Cambodia National Rescue Party, and arrested its leader on politically inflated charges of treason.

The clampdown not only ensures victory for Hun Sen’s Cambodian People’s Party at national elections on July 29; it also closes the parenthesis, at least for now, on the country’s 27-year experiment in multiparty democracy.

As the crackdown has unfolded, opposition leaders, human rights groups and foreign officials have issued calls for international sanctions to reverse authoritarian Cambodia’s slide. At a conference in Canberra in March, former Australian Foreign Minister Gareth Evans, a key player in the Cambodian peace process of the 1980s, condemned the global reaction to Hun Sen’s belligerence as “impossibly limp,” repeating an earlier call for the prime minister and his cronies “to be named, shamed, investigated and sanctioned by the international community.”

The administration of U.S. President Donald Trump has announced visa bans on senior officials, and Congress has suspended aid pending the release of political prisoners and the reinstatement of the CNRP. The pressure on Hun Sen is likely to increase if, as seems likely, his government fails to give ground before the election. This week the European Union announced that it will review Cambodia’s tariff-free access to the European market, which takes more than 40% of the country’s apparel exports. There have been reports that additional “targeted restrictive measures” may be considered following the election.

Superficially, international pressure seems richly deserved. Hun Sen’s crackdown has set a fearful pall over Cambodian civic life. It has effectively disenfranchised the 3 million Cambodians who voted for the CNRP in local elections last June. All the while, Cambodian state media has spewed out reports of U.S.-directed “plots” that border on hysteria.

But harsher sanctions are unlikely to advance democracy, and may be counter-productive. To start with, the potentially most damaging sanctions, such as a withdrawal of preferential access to U.S. and EU markets, would likely affect ordinary workers more than the cashed-up Cambodian leadership. Even if this were not the case, they would deepen the spiral of mutual mistrust that has existed between Hun Sen and his foreign critics since the international settlement that established Cambodia’s democratic system 27 years ago, which has gradually pushed the country into China’s embrace.

The Paris Peace Agreements, signed in October 1991, aimed to end Cambodia’s civil war and put the country on a democratic path via elections administered by the United Nations. Signed in the final months of the Cold War, the treaty turned Cambodia into a banner project for the emerging liberal world order and fostered democratic expectations that were wildly out of line with the country’s social and political realities. When U.N. peacekeepers arrived in Cambodia in 1992, the country was impoverished, war-scarred, and had virtually no history of democratic politics. Perhaps more importantly, it was ruled by an entrenched quasi-communist party — today’s CPP — which viewed the West’s democratic proclamations with skepticism.

The previous decade had been a squalid one for Western policy in Cambodia. After Vietnam’s overthrow of the communist Khmer Rouge in 1979, the U.S. and its Western allies joined China and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations in embargoing the Cambodian government installed by Hanoi. Instead, they backed a coalition of three armed factions based along the Thai border. These included what was left of the Khmer Rouge which, despite causing the death of an estimated 1.7 million Cambodians during its 1975-1979 rule, was pressed back into the fray as part of a joint Chinese-American attempt to bleed Soviet-backed Vietnam and its client in Phnom Penh.

Unsurprisingly, after 12 years on the receiving end of this sordid pact, Hun Sen, a one-time Khmer Rouge commander appointed prime minister in 1985, was inclined to see the coming of democracy not as a new dawn, but simply as a more sophisticated means of removing the CPP from power. He set out to subvert the new democratic system and bend it to his will, while continuing to harbor resentment against Western governments’ insistence on holding his government to higher standards than those it accepted or promoted elsewhere.

As self-serving as this argument is, it is hard to deny that Western threats of sanctions against Cambodia jar with the West’s engagement with dictatorships and one-party systems in Thailand, Vietnam, Laos, and Brunei, to say nothing of the human rights-abusing governments of Myanmar and the Philippines.

These sins are no alibi for Hun Sen’s recent actions. Nevertheless, singling Cambodia out for harsh treatment will deepen Cambodian resentment and harden Hun Sen’s desire to free himself from outside “interference,” real or imagined. In this respect, his government is not alone. To varying extents, Cambodia’s neighbors share its distaste for unsolicited foreign advice on what they view as “internal affairs.” This is manifested in the core ASEAN doctrine of “non-interference” which suggests that the bloc would be highly unlikely to support a campaign of Western sanctions against Cambodia.

Even if isolation were possible, sanctions would be a blunt instrument. Take the case of Myanmar. A few years ago, one could have argued that Western sanctions helped to spur economic and political reforms that began under President Thein Sein in 2011, culminating in the sweeping electoral victory of Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy four years later. It is much harder to view the sanctions as a success from the perspective of 2018. By design, the reforms left the Myanmar military’s power mostly intact, and did nothing to resolve the root cause of the country’s dysfunctional politics — its troubled ethnic relations, which exploded with a vengeance in the post-reform era.

Myanmar’s experience suggests that that while outside pressure can sometimes alter behavior it can never compel belief. Sanctions might force Cambodia’s strongman to make superficial reforms, but they can never transform him into a democrat.

It is hard for Western governments to stay silent about recent events in Cambodia. Yet, there are serious questions about the strategic wisdom of continuing to view Cambodia as a special case. Unlike in 1991, the Cambodian government has an alternative superpower patron whose political values align with its own.

Over the past decade, China has grown to become Cambodia’s closest foreign friend and ally, displacing the democratic governments that bankrolled Cambodia’s reconstruction after Paris Agreements. Between 2011 and 2015 Chinese firms funneled nearly $5 billion in loans and investment to Cambodia, mostly for major infrastructure projects, while making no demands on how Hun Sen runs the country.

Just as important, Beijing has given something Hun Sen something he feels he has never received from the West: legitimacy. As the Cambodian leader said in a speech in February, “The Chinese leaders respect me highly and treat me as an equal.”

In some ways, Cambodia’s parenthesis is also the world’s. A country that was once a symbol of the post-Cold War liberal order has now come to symbolize a world of resurgent sovereignty, in which the liberal consensus is under increasing challenge. In this context, the most prudent Western policy is to remain engaged in Cambodia, with an eye to a future beyond Hun Sen. This means adopting more realistic expectations and recognizing the limits of outside governments’ powers to compel the complex and unpredictable process of democratic change.

As the Cold War drew to an end in 1991, democratic governments could afford the luxury of treating Cambodia as a special case. In 2018, doing so will bear an increasing strategic cost.

Published in the Nikkei Asian Review, May 7, 2018

Turning east

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By most accounts, the past few years have been anni horribiles for human rights and democracy in Southeast Asia. From Thailand to Indonesia to Myanmar, liberal values appear in broad retreat, and at the start of 2018, it is becoming hard to speak of any country in the region as a healthy and functional democracy.

In general, Western media coverage have offered two broad explanations for this trend: the advance of Chinese power in the region, and the retreat of the United States under the “America First” presidency of Donald Trump.

Both explanations are valid, but only up to a point. China’s “march to the tropics” under Xi Jinping has plainly empowered authoritarian governments in the region, but it is hardly the root of the region’s political dysfunction. Similarly, Trump’s indifference to human rights has made life more difficult for Southeast Asian dissidents, but the assumption that the emergence of democratic freedoms in Yangon or Hanoi is simply a matter of sufficient American “leadership” betrays a wildly optimistic view of US power to shape developments (let alone attitudes) abroad.

These partial explanations are consoling, however, because they allow us to preserve the belief that history, for all its recent lurches, is basically still moving in the right direction. In that sense, they are good examples of what the American radical historian Charles Beard once described as the “devil theory” of politics and war. If one assumes that Western-style liberal democracy is the universal aspiration of humanity — something like the conventional wisdom in Europe and the United States — then its puzzling failure can be explained only by reference to malign forces that have arisen, within and without, to thwart the beneficent designs of history.

As Michael Vatikiotis writes in this new book, the reality in this region is a good deal more tangled. In the course of this detailed and engaging tour d’horizon, Vatikiotis seeks to account for what he describes as the “Janus-faced aspect” of modern Southeast Asia: the contrast between its “smiling mask of tropical abundance” and the repressive realities that lie beneath. “For a part of the world that has made so much social and material progress,” he asks, “why do so many countries of the region plumb the bottom of international indices measuring freedom and good government? Why does the region continue to struggle with democratic transition?”

Vatikiotis is in an ideal position to provide an informed answer. A former correspondent for the BBC and editor for the Far Eastern Economic Review, and the author of several books on Southeast Asian politics, he has lived in the region more than three decades and speaks two of its languages fluently. Most recently, he has worked as a mediator of armed conflict for the Geneva-based Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue, in which capacity he has been personally involved in trying to broker solutions to regional conflicts including the paralysing “red-yellow” conflict in Thailand and chronic Muslim separatist insurgencies both there and in the Philippines.

Blood and Silk is the product of long contemplation of the puzzling contradiction between the region’s booming economic progress, visible from Singapore to Ho Chi Minh City, and its sticky authoritarian politics. To an extent, it is also a chronicle of disillusionment. Early in the book, Vatikiotis recalls the euphoria that accompanied the “people power” movement that overthrew President Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines in 1986. At the time, he writes, “events in Manila were amplified in the media and breathlessly projected as the end of history for Asia”. When similar protests broke out in Myanmar, Indonesia and Malaysia in the late 1980s, followed soon after by the crumbling of the Soviet Union, it felt like democracy was the wave of the future. Only later did it become apparent that this post-Cold War moment, like the fall of Marcos, represented a “false dawn”, the first of many.

Drawing on the work of scholars like O.W. Wolters and Charles Keyes, Vatikiotis argues that today’s authoritarianism has deep roots in Indic-Brahmanic traditions of authority that raised kings and princes high above the worldly realm. This has shaped political cultures shot through with “vestiges of arcane princely power”, which by their nature stand in opposition to more open and transparent forms of governance. These traditions were entrenched during the era of Western colonial rule, when colonial administrations mobilised pre-modern forms of authority to maintain stability and ensure a steady supply of raw materials to Paris, London and Amsterdam. At the same time, colonial powers also “used strict lines of racial division” to control exploited populations, “thus bequeathing the region disintegrated societies at the birth of modern nationhood”.

As independence dawned in the region after Second World War, the nationalist and socialist ideals of early anti-colonial leaders like Indonesia’s Sukarno and Malaysia’s Tunku Abdul Rahman were displaced by a new generation of strongmen and their cliques, some of whom presented themselves as bulwarks against communism during the Cold War, mobilising the symbols of pre-modern tradition to prevent the emergence of effective checks on their power. Since then, Vatikiotis writes, Southeast Asian politics has continued to be dominated by zero-sum struggles in which “power is regarded as an absolute attribute … you either have it, or you don’t. And your life is worth far less if you don’t.” In historical perspective, then, Southeast Asia in 2018 is not the exception but the rule. (The two countries where this pattern may be least applicable are Vietnam, with its Sinitic cultural tradition and “Leninist-Confucian” political system, and Chinese-majority Singapore, whose antiseptic and rigidly ordered political model resembles not so much the Indic-inflected mandala kingdom as the east Asian “developmental state”.)

This is not to say that ordinary people have meekly accepted this Southeast Asian tyranny. Vatikiotis shows that very much the opposite is true, describing “the vibrant and assertive nature of civitas” in many of these countries, and the cycle of popular resistance that has characterised much of the region’s modern history. He pays frequent tribute to the activists and intellectuals he has known who have refused to allow tyranny and impunity to prevail, some of whom have sacrificed their lives in the process. But since underlying problems are rarely addressed, the region has experienced a rolling cycle of conflict, “a tragic mandala of perpetual violence” that forms the dark underside to the “sleek metropolitan glass-and-steel carapaces” of Bangkok, Jakarta and Kuala Lumpur.

Even when the mandala does finally turn, entrenched economic interests and socio-cultural attitudes ensure that old patterns repeat. In the Philippines, “people power” gave onto a new round of corruption, impunity and extreme inequality that created the eventual conditions for the election of Rodrigo Duterte on a ruthless “law and order” platform in 2016. As Vatikiotis observes, two-thirds of the Philippine Congress is drawn from some 170 political families, something that seems to remain the same regardless of who occupies the Malacañang Palace. In Indonesia, the reformasi that followed the fall of Suharto in 1998 has produced not a swift transition to democracy but a new era of ambiguous freedom in which new forms of religious exclusivism have enjoyed political blessing, while silence continues to prevail about the New Order’s founding atrocity: the anti-communist killings of 1965-66.

Worryingly, Vatikiotis describes how opposition politicians often cast their struggles in the globalised terms of freedom, justice and human rights, only to jettison these principles upon gaining office. This is evident from apparent democratic breakthroughs — the election of Joko Widodo in Indonesia in 2014 and of Aung San Suu Kyi in Myanmar in 2015 — that have since petered as both leaders revealed “a troubling insensitivity to human rights concerns and a tendency to accommodate vested interests”.

How to break this repressive cycle? After reading Blood and Silk, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that many Western discussions of democracy in the region (and indeed in general) rely on confused and shifting assumptions. It is surely a truism that people everywhere hate tyranny and want accountable and effective government. A desire not to be tortured is not a product of culture; torture, as human rights advocates rightly insist, is a universal evil. But as Vatikiotis shows, desires for freedom and justice can sit alongside a countervailing desire for security, especially in countries, like the Philippines or Cambodia, where legal protections are weak or non-existent.

Present, too, are desires for the enactment of ethnic and national myths, which can impose intense suffering on those, like the Rohingya of Myanmar, deemed to lie “outside” the ethnic or national community. No one wants to suffer, but all too many otherwise decent people are willing to sanction the suffering of others in the name of nation or religion. From my own experience in Southeast Asia, I can attest to the ease with which ethno-nationalist appeals spring from democratic tongues.

When we speak of the value of “democracy”, then, what we are really referring to is not simply elections — so easily inhabited by undemocratic power — but a complex suite of institutions and attitudes that can hold these contradictory human impulses in check. These include the rule of law, professional bureaucracies, economies able both to create wealth and to distribute it equitably, and social norms of civil engagement and respect for individual rights. The problem in Southeast Asia, as Blood and Silk makes clear, is that many of these conditions remain absent. Some nations lack even a basic consensus on the scope and shape of the national community. Malaysia and Myanmar today struggle to reconcile ethnic inequalities imposed for the convenience of British imperialism. In the Philippines, Thailand and Indonesia, the identity of the nation has been — and continues to be — fiercely contested.

In historical perspective, this is perhaps unsurprising. The rise of mass politics in eighteenth century Europe was in many countries closely associated with the rise of nationalism, sometimes of a fiercely exclusionary kind. Strong states and bureaucracies were often forged, as under Napoleon and Bismarck, by autocratic means, and political systems generally became liberal before they became democratic. The emergence of modern democracy was a halting, contingent process, often involving conflict and considerable violence.

As Pankaj Mishra argues in his Age of Anger, the onset of industrial modernity in the West was accompanied by fierce political backdraughts, as traditional societies were torn from their moorings by the forces of modernisation and urbanisation — the same process that has played out in Southeast Asia in recent decades. The result, for many, was a condition of aggrieved and chronic insecurity, from which flowed a cascade of reactions including anarchism and extreme forms of nationalism. In terms of their relationship to modernity, the pistol-toting nineteenth century anarchist — the Raskolnikov brooding in his garret — has a direct parallel in the educated Javanese Muslim, who, adrift in the urban sea of Jakarta or Surabaya, embraces jihadi doctrine and goes off to join the Caliphate. Indeed, it could well be that the duality Vatikiotis identifies in Southeast Asian societies is inherent in the process of modernisation itself: suns of progress casting shadows of dislocation.

If that is true, more turbulence is surely in store, which democratic elections alone are unlikely to resolve or contain. In 2018, Southeast Asia again finds itself at the forefront of a looming superpower confrontation. A rising China, primed with an aggrieved nationalism and driven by a desire to end its “century of humiliation” at the hands of Western powers, is extending its power assertively into the region, challenging the United States dominance of Southeast Asia and the Pacific. While China remains a “lonely power”, in the words of David Shambaugh, Vatikiotis argues that it enjoys both geographic and cultural proximity to Southeast Asia and that the region’s dysfunctional political realities will make it “much harder for the West to sustain effective influence — and much easier for China to gain sway in the long run”.

This heralds an era of new transitions in Southeast Asia. A particular question mark hangs over the future of the region’s millions of overseas Chinese. Vatikiotis sounds a warning about the possibility that Beijing, extending its strategic belts and roads via Chinese connections in Southeast Asia, and pushed on by rising domestic demands to protect “compatriots” abroad, will reawaken dormant tensions between ethnic Chinese and the region’s majority ethnic groups.

In the last chapter of Blood and Silk, Vatikiotis casts his attention forward in time, offering a sketch of what the region might look like to the year 2050. He predicts the region coming full circle, reverting back to the more decentralised patterns of power that predated the era of Western influence that began with the Portuguese seizure of Malacca in 1511. What is likely to emerge, he writes, will be something “more discernibly Asian”, with more dispersed economies oriented northwards to China, and the fragmentation of centralised power as rising demands for change continue to surge against immovable authoritarian elites. Whether this vision eventuates, or perhaps something more optimistic, it is certain that this complex region will continue to defy romantic Western expectations. Amid the rubble of democratic projects, the mandala of conflicted modernity spins on.

Published in the Mekong Review, February 2018

Malaysia Wrestles With Beijing’s One Belt One Road Bonanza

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The sales office for Forest City, one of Malaysia’s largest residential property developments, looks less like an office than an airport hangar or a museum atrium: a futuristic dome flooded with noise and light. At the entrances white-gloved guards offer a crisp salute. Nearby a band breezes through a set of pop standards. Prospective buyers–many of them from mainland China–lounge on couches sipping complimentary soft drinks while diddling on their cellphones.

Sprawling in the middle of the hall is the main attraction: a giant scale model depicting the initial phase of the $100 billion project. Large groups of Chinese and Malaysian visitors snap photos of this vast field of roads, lakes, beaches, hotels, shopping malls and illuminated towers, some with miniature “SOLD OUT” labels attached.

The eye-catching model represents just one small part of the Forest City development, which is currently sprouting from the coast of Johor State at the southernmost point of peninsular Malaysia. “The whole scale model of this is Island One. We have four islands in total,” says Yu Ting, an English-speaking sales representative from Guangdong, the home province of the project’s Chinese developer, Country Garden Holdings. When completed in 2035, Forest City’s four islands will house an estimated 700,000 people in the Johor Strait, across from Singapore.

Describing the project as a “future city” and “a magnet for global elites,” Country Garden, which has partnered with a firm controlled by the Sultan of Johor to form the Malaysia-domiciled Country Garden Pacificview, is directing its main sales pitch at overseas buyers, particularly those from mainland China. Marketing materials focus on the project’s proximity to Singapore and the fact that its units cost around a quarter of what they do on the other side of the Johor Strait. Yu Ting tells me that in the year after sales began in March 2016, Country Garden sold some 16,000 units.

However, Forest City’s selling points–its massive scale and its targeting of affluent foreigners–has made it a lightning rod for political controversies about the growing extent of Chinese influence in Malaysia. In particular, critics have charged that Forest City will eventually become an enclave for rich mainland Chinese, cut off from the rest of the country.

Carrying the furthest is the singular voice of Dr. Mahathir Mohamad, Malaysia’s nonagenarian former prime minister, who ruled the country in energetic and authoritarian style from 1981 to 2003. In a stream of public comments and posts on his popular blog, he has repeatedly assailed Country Garden Pacificview and Johor’s powerful Sultan Ibrahim Ismail, accusing them of selling off the country’s “most valuable land” to foreigners.

In an interview with this reporter, Mahathir says he sees a historical warning in the Chinese-majority city-state of Singapore, which was expelled from newly independent Malaysia in 1965. “A country is created by the population,” he says, “and if the population is overwhelmingly of one particular race or another, then we will see that the country is no longer a part of the original owners of the land.”

To attract foreign buyers, Forest City will eventually feature its own customs and immigration checkpoint, facilitating quick travel to Singapore. It will also offer buyers various tax breaks and a path to residency under the government’s Malaysia My Second Home program, which is less stringent than gaining residency in Singapore. The company offers to front the nearly $6,000 application fee and guarantees a 99% success rate for applicants.

In an emailed message, Yu Runze, the firm’s president and chief strategy officer, says that the project was initially targeted at the Chinese market. He adds that it has since broadened out to other markets. “The Forest City township was planned and designed for the international market,” he says. “In fact, the buyers for the first phase of our residential units come from 23 countries.” According to Forest City sales staff, around 60% of sales have been to Chinese buyers.

The controversy over Forest City hints at wider political questions about China’s quickly widening economic footprint in Malaysia. Under the leadership of Prime Minister Najib Razak, who took office in 2009, the relationship between Kuala Lumpur and Beijing has grown close–some say too close.

Once a bit player in Malaysia, China has been the country’s largest trading partner for eight consecutive years, with bilateral trade volume topping $57 billion in 2016. It is now the country’s main construction contractor, the largest source of foreign investment in manufacturing and, despite a downturn following the disappearance of the MH370 flight in 2014, the third-largest source of foreign tourists to Malaysia. In his farewell speech last month, Huang Huikang, China’s outgoing ambassador, said that the Sino-Malaysian relationship “should move up over the next 40 years to reach mutual dependency, like lips and teeth.”

This strategically-located country of 32 million has also emerged as a key stop on Beijing’s 21st Century Maritime Silk Road, the maritime leg of its much-vaunted One Belt, One Road (OBOR) infrastructure scheme. The OBOR initiative, unveiled by Chinese President Xi Jinping in 2013, envisages linking China with Africa and Eurasia through a complex network of ports, roads, railways and industrial parks.

Under the umbrella of OBOR, Najib’s government has signed agreements for a slew of Chinese infrastructure megaprojects. At the top of the list is the $13.1 billion East Coast Rail Link (ECRL), which will run from Port Klang, Malaysia’s main port near the capital Kuala Lumpur, to Tumpat on the border with Thailand, bisecting the peninsula’s hilly interior. In October 2016 the Malaysian government inked a deal with three Chinese state-owned companies to build and manage a deep-sea port and Maritime Industrial Park on three more reclaimed islands off the city of Melaka on the west coast, part of the $10.4 billion Melaka Gateway mega-development. In turn, this will be complemented by a Chinese-backed industrial park and port refurbishment in Kuantan, in the east coast state of Pahang.

Malaysia’s OBOR bonanza also includes the new Malaysian campus of Xiamen University on the outskirts of Kuala Lumpur, and Bandar Malaysia, a real estate project that will host terminals for a planned high-speed rail connecting Kuala Lumpur to Singapore. (Chinese companies may be in the catbird seat for that deal too.) While Forest City sits somewhat apart from this string of state-led OBOR projects, it is clearly buying into the “New Silk Road” hype. Its sales office tellingly features a floor-to-ceiling map of Eurasia and Africa pinpointing Forest City’s “strategic location” amidst Beijing’s snaking OBOR trade routes.

For China the economic and strategic benefit of these projects is not hard to glean, says Ngeow Chow Bing of the University of Malaya’s Institute of China Studies. By constructing deep-sea ports on both sides of the Malaysian peninsula and a railway–the ECRL–that runs between them, Beijing is effectively creating a means of alleviating its heavy reliance on imports through the narrow Strait of Malacca. “For the China side I think the intention is very clear: trying to create a land-bridge so they can bypass the Malacca Straits and Singapore,” Ngeow says.

But as in neighboring countries like Thailand and Indonesia, many are skeptical about whether these projects will benefit any country hosting development. Take the ECRL project. Opponents of Najib claim that it will be constructed by a Chinese state-owned firm at allegedly inflated prices, using mostly Chinese labor and building materials, and funded by soft loans from Chinese state banks. Tony Pua, a parliamentarian from the opposition Democratic Action Party, says this raises the question of whether the ECRL can accurately be described as an “investment” at all. “We do want Chinese investments,” he says, “but the type of Chinese investments that are coming to Malaysia today are either dodgy or in reality are Malaysian-paid-for investments that are not really FDI.” The glut of Beijing-backed port projects has also raised concerns that China may be eyeing them for naval purposes. Ministers in Najib’s government have dismissed claims that the price of the ECRL is inflated.

With national elections looming, the opposition Pakatan Harapan coalition has accused Najib of cozying up to China in a bid to distract attention from the international scandal surrounding the troubled state development fund 1Malaysia Development Berhad (1MDB). Again Dr. Mahathir has been in the forefront. In 2016 the now 92-year-old quit the ruling United Malays National Organization (UMNO)–the keystone of Malaysia’s ruling coalition since independence in 1957–and formed a new Malay nationalist party, which will lead the PH coalition into battle against Najib at the election, due to be held before August 2018.

With Najib under fire for the alleged mishandling of 1MDB, which has chalked up multibillion-dollar losses and is subject to investigations around the world, Mahathir has accused his former protégé of turning to the quick fix of cheap Chinese credit to the detriment of Malaysia’s long-term interests. “The present government is fond of borrowing money without thinking about repayment,” says Mahathir, who denies claims that his own long tenure was marked by cronyism and corruption. “The East Coast Railway is not necessary. … The returns will not be enough to repay the loan.” (Najib has consistently denied taking money from 1MDB or any other public funds).

Adding weight to the claims of opportunism is the fact that Chinese firms have stepped in to buy up pieces of the troubled 1MDB fund. In 2015 China General Nuclear Power acquired Edra Global Energy, a power company belonging to 1MDB. Later that year, Iskandar Waterfront Holdings and the China Railway Engineering Corp. agreed to purchase a 60% stake in the Bandar Malaysia project, another component of 1MDB. (The $1.7 billion deal fell through in May, but seven Chinese state-owned entities are reported to be among the nine firms now bidding for the project.) Last year the Financial Times also reported that China was helping Malaysia repay a $6.5 billion debt to a state-owned petroleum firm in Abu Dhabi.

The controversies over Chinese investment in Malaysia mirror the dilemma facing most of its Southeast Asian neighbors: how to reap benefits from China’s meteoric rise without being sucked into Beijing’s economic orbit. For his own part, Najib has defended his government’s dealing with China. In March he said that the ECRL would be a “game changer” that will contribute 1.5% growth annually to the three states on Malaysia’s east coast. On another occasion he asked, “What’s wrong with us fostering closer ties with China, which is expected to be the biggest economy in 2030?”

Some observers agree. Abdul Majid bin Ahmad Khan, a former ambassador to Beijing who now chairs the Malaysia-China Friendship Association, says that since relations were established with China in 1974 under Najib’s father, Abdul Razak Hussein, Malaysia has tried to maintain good relations with all countries. In the 1970s, he says, Japanese firms came and invested in Malaysia. Then came the so-called Four Tigers: Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan. “Now it’s China’s time,” he says.

Others argue that even if OBOR projects exceed Malaysia’s needs in the short-term, they could lay the basis for sustained future growth. Dr. Ngeow of the University of Malaya says that the ECRL, the Kuantan port project and many other Malaysian OBOR projects were actually conceived years ago but that only Chinese state-owned enterprises had the means and willingness to make them happen. “A lot of this is our own initiative. They come at the right time with the right conditions and the right kind of attitude,” he says. Indeed, the recent influx of Chinese FDI has underpinned a spell of healthy economic growth: Malaysia’s annual GDP growth rate has averaged 5.7% since 2010, with the World Bank predicting a similar rise in 2017.

Still, overdependence on Chinese economic patronage could make Malaysia vulnerable to a sudden economic downturn or policy shift in China. This became clear in March, when Beijing unleashed aggressive measures to clamp down on capital outflows. In Malaysia this arguably contributed to the collapse of the Bandar Malaysia buyout. It also threatened to deprive Forest City of access to its primary target market, leading some to predict that the project will become a giant white elephant.

Yu Runze of Country Garden Pacificview claims that the impact on Forest City so far has been minimal, with just 60 buyers in China–less than 0.5% of the total–asking to cancel their bookings as a result of new capital regulations. “There was some initial impact, but we have been able to balance this, and the project is going smoothly because of this focus on the global market,” he says. “We are in year one of a 20-year project and remain committed to the success of this venture.”

Judging by the crowds at the sales office on a recent Saturday, interest remains healthy. Large groups of foreign visitors trouped through the showroom, buying up souvenirs like dried durian and posing for photos on the manmade beach facing Singapore. At the far end of the beach, where the landscaping petered out amid a few scraggly palm trees and a corrugated iron fence, dredgers were at work creating what will eventually become the project’s second island.

While Forest City may have ridden out the storm this time, concerns about the wisdom of Chinese mega-investments are unlikely to go away. Abdul Majid, the former ambassador, says small countries like Malaysia will each need to learn how to ensure that the flood of OBOR capital serves them as well as it does Beijing. “It’s up to us now,” he says. “The Chinese can deliver a beautiful port, they can deliver a beautiful train–but if the recipient countries don’t take care about the contents, if they’re not prepared for it, they might have an empty port or an empty train.”

Published by Forbes Asia, December 2017

One-Party Cambodia’s Grim Message

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China-backed authoritarianism is on the rise in Cambodia as the influence of the US and other Western donor countries retreats

With the stroke of a judge’s pen, political opposition to Cambodia’s long-ruling prime minister, Hun Sen, has effectively ceased to exist. On Nov. 16, the country’s Supreme Court did what most observers expected and ordered the dissolution of the popular Cambodia National Rescue Party, two months after the arrest of its leader, Kem Sokha, on treason charges. The court also handed out five-year political bans to 118 leading CNRP members.

The ruling, which will see the CNRP stripped of its seats in the National Assembly, was the culmination of a fluctuating crackdown that escalated sharply with Sokha’s arrest in the early hours of Sept. 3. He has since been accused of conspiring with the U.S. government to overthrow Hun Sen’s Cambodian People’s Party, which has ruled Cambodia since 1979.

The elimination of the CNRP is just the latest setback for democracy in Southeast Asia and ensures that the CPP will run virtually unopposed in national elections scheduled for July 2018. Hun Sen clearly fears a repeat of the last election in 2013, when the CNRP scored significant gains. More unnerving for the 65-year-old leader, who has run Cambodia since 1985, were the mass street demonstrations that followed the election in which tens of thousands of CNRP supporters rallied in the streets to protest alleged voter fraud.

Coming on the heels of the “Arab Spring” uprisings in the Middle East, the sight of crowds of opposition supporters made the CPP highly paranoid of a possible “color revolution” aimed at ousting it from power. And indeed, the recent crackdown has been justified as a preemptive strike against a “plot” that includes the CNRP, civil society groups, labor leaders and various U.S.-funded broadcasters and nongovernment organizations.

In a broader historical context, the elimination of the CNRP marks the final blow in Hun Sen’s 25-year-long campaign to repudiate the international settlement that created Cambodia’s democratic institutions in 1991. Among other aims, the Paris Peace Agreements were intended to end the country’s civil war, which had been raging since Vietnam’s overthrow of the murderous Khmer Rouge regime in 1979, and introduce free elections. Followed by a United Nations peacekeeping mission in 1992-1993, the treaty made Cambodia an effective ward of the international community, a real-world laboratory for the transplanting of democratic institutions into the damaged tissue of a nation then emerging from decades of war and political violence.

While the U.N. intervention came wrapped in the liberal triumphalism of the early post-Cold War years, Hun Sen’s party never accepted it as legitimate. Pushed to sign the treaty by their Soviet and Vietnamese patrons, CPP leaders resented having to accept former wartime enemies as legitimate democratic opponents. They also bristled at the perceived hypocrisy of Western powers, including the U.S., which had indirectly backed the ousted remnants of the Khmer Rouge against the Vietnam-backed CPP government throughout the 1980s, and then turned around to lecture it about the importance of democracy and accountability.

The CPP saw no reason to give up power and immediately set about wrestling control of these new democratic institutions. This result was a holographic rendering of democracy, what political scientist Steve Heder has referred to as an “involuted facade state,” in which democratic forms concealed a regime based on force, predation and invisible flows of patronage.

Creeping dictatorship

For years, Hun Sen was forced to work within the system, using force and threats to maintain control, while loosening things periodically to ensure a continued flow of Western development aid. It is only recently that he has had the power to fully repudiate the system, and the main reason for this has been the increasing support of China.

Over the past 15 years, Beijing has risen to become Cambodia’s chief international friend and ally. Between 2011 and 2015, Chinese firms funneled nearly $5 billion in loans and investment to Cambodia, much of which has gone toward the construction of roads, bridges, hydropower dams and electrical transmission infrastructure. At the same time China has become Cambodia’s leading trade partner. Bilateral trade topped $5 billion in 2016, made up mostly of Chinese exports to Cambodia, while Chinese loans and grants accounted for more than a third of the $732 million that Cambodia received in bilateral aid last year. Strong backing from China, in tandem with increased domestic tax receipts, has made Hun Sen less dependent on Western support, and hence more able to finally settle his accounts with democratic forces that he has always viewed as illegitimate.

“Relief from Western diplomatic pressure is fast becoming one of China’s most popular service exports.”

In many ways, the collapse of the international democratic experiment in Cambodia encapsulates the changing regional order in Southeast Asia, offering a clue to the puzzling question of why, despite China’s overbearing attitude and bullying assertion of claims in the South China Sea, so many Southeast Asian governments seem to be embracing it.

Cambodia may be easily the region’s most China-friendly government (along with communist-run Laos), but it is far from alone. In the past few years, Thailand, the Philippines, Malaysia and Myanmar have all tilted in the direction of Beijing. The common theme in each case is that the swing has been preceded or furthered by Western, especially American, criticism about these countries’ deteriorating human rights situations.

In Thailand, democracy disappeared altogether when Gen. Prayuth Chan-ocha seized power in a 2014 coup, leading to a cooling of relations between Washington and its oldest ally in Southeast Asia. In the Philippines, another close U.S. ally, President Rodrigo Duterte has embraced Beijing as his government has come under fierce international attack over its bloody “war on drugs.”

Prime Minister Najib Razak’s government in Malaysia has also cozied up to China in the wake of the spectacular implosion of the state development fund 1Malaysia Development Berhad. As Najib’s international reputation has plunged, Chinese state companies have bought up several pieces of the doomed 1MDB fund, while Kuala Lumpur has signed a spate of Chinese infrastructure megadeals including railways, deep-sea ports and industrial parks.

Finally, there is the sad case of Myanmar, where the military launched a fierce campaign of violence and ethnic cleansing against the Rohingya minority in the west of the country, driving some 700,000 people over the border into Bangladesh since late 2016. As international condemnation has mounted, and talk has turned to the reintroduction of economic sanctions lifted after political reforms were introduced in 2011, the government has again found a willing friend in China, which has used its clout in the U.N. to safeguard Naypyitaw from international pressure.

Colonial resentments

None of this should come as a surprise. From the vantage point of 2017, it is easy to forget how profoundly Southeast Asian political cultures have been shaped by the legacies of anti-colonial nationalism, something that is true of even Thailand, which was never colonized by Western powers. Rightly or wrongly, this makes these governments highly sensitive to being told what to do by Western democracies that are themselves often inconsistent in their adherence to human rights norms.

A similar sentiment also exists among the Chinese leadership, which, even at the apogee of its power under President Xi Jinping, clings to an aggrieved nationalism that seeks to expunge China’s “century of humiliation” at the hands of Western imperial powers.

Southeast Asian nations harbor many fears and suspicions of their giant northern neighbor, but one place where their respective ruling elites find common ground, however self-interestedly, is in their desire to defend their nations’ sovereignty from perceived outside “interference.” And as these cases show, relief from Western diplomatic pressure is fast becoming one of China’s most popular service exports.

The love affairs between these governments and China are unlikely to last forever. Fear and suspicion of China are deeply ingrained across Southeast Asia, and most countries there is a strong desire for an American presence to counterbalance the Chinese rise. In a recent conversation, Bilahari Kausikan, Singapore’s outspoken ambassador-at-large, told me that Southeast Asia would always be the strategic equivalent of jelly, slipping through the hands of any outside power seeking to grasp it.

Still, recent events across the region suggest the gradual arrival of what three scholars, David P. Fidler, Sun Won Kim and Sumit Ganguly, have dubbed “Eastphalia” — an Asian order of resurgent state sovereignty, led by the growing clout of powers like China and India. For the U.S., China’s ascendance has resulted in increasing tensions between the pursuit of American interests and American values in Southeast Asia.

While defending human rights and democratic principles should be a part of any robust U.S. policy toward the region, it is becoming increasingly tricky to achieve this while also building solid relationships with prickly governments in the region.

This is a reality worth bearing in mind as American policymakers decide how to respond to Cambodia’s reversion to de facto one-party rule. With Washington now threatening to introduce visa bans and other economic sanctions on the Cambodian leadership, the U.S. would do well to heed the most likely consequence: the cementing of Hun Sen’s Chinese embrace.

Published by the Nikkei Asian Review, November 20, 2017

Cambodia Becomes the World’s Newest One-Party State

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With strong Chinese support, Prime Minister Hun Sen has effectively destroyed all opposition to his autocratic rule.

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On Thursday, the Supreme Court of Cambodia ordered the dissolution of the country’s main opposition party. For most observers, the move didn’t come as much of a surprise. For one thing, the court’s president is an old aide and associate of the long-ruling prime minister, Hun Sen. For another, the pugnacious and dictatorial Hun Sen had spent the past month “predicting” the court’s ruling, offering recently (hint, hint) that the popular Cambodia National Rescue Party (CNRP) stood a 100-to-1 chance of living to fight another election.

The decision, which will see the CNRP stripped of its parliamentary seats, is the culmination of a crackdown that intensified dramatically in September with the midnight arrest of the CNRP’s leader, Kem Sokha. The 64-year-old has since been accused of plotting with the U.S. government to overthrow Hun Sen’s Cambodian People’s Party (CPP), which has ruled Cambodia since 1979. Since then, media outlets have been shuttered and civil society activists harassed, especially those with perceived or actual links to the United States. The panel of nine judges also dished out five-year political bans for 118 leading CNRP officials.

The ruling effectively disenfranchises more than 3 million Cambodians who voted for the CNRP at local elections in June, and clears the way for the CPP to run virtually unopposed at the next general election in July 2018. In a televised address shortly after the ruling, Hun Sen said that the court’s decision was based solely on the law, and promised that Cambodia would continue to “strongly adhere to democracy at the national and sub-national level.”

Few outside the country are buying it. Amnesty International described the ruling as a “blatant act of political repression.” The International Commission of Jurists, another rights group, also attacked the decision, noting that Dith Munty, the supreme court’s president, also occupies a seat on the CPP’s highest decision-making body. “It makes a mockery of fair justice to have someone in a leadership position within one political party sit in judgment on the conduct of that party’s main opposition,” Kingsley Abbott, a senior international legal advisor at the organization, said in a statement. “There can be no starker example of an inherent conflict of interest.”

Indeed, since becoming prime minister in 1985, the 65-year-old Hun Sen has elevated conflicts of interest into an entire system of government. For more than half his life, he has ruled through a canny mix of swagger, guile, and old-style Cambodian patronage, heavily spiced with reminders of his country’s suffering under the communist Khmer Rouge in the mid-1970s.

Even then, this latest move represents an unprecedented step, spelling an effective end to a multibillion-dollar international effort to transplant democracy in Cambodia since the early 1990s. “It is very concerning for democracy in Cambodia,” said Noan Sereiboth, a blogger who leads Politikoffee, a youth political discussion group in the country. “Cambodia looks like a one-party state.”

For months, the government has justified its crackdown with far-fetched claims that the opposition was plotting to launch a “color revolution,” a reference to a series of popular uprisings that in the early 2000s ousted authoritarian leaders in countries including Ukraine, Georgia, and Kyrgyzstan. The fear took hold after last election in 2013, when the CNRP scored surprising gains, and then took to the streets for months to protest alleged voter fraud. (The demonstrations were eventually put down by force in early 2014.)

Since Kem Sokha’s arrest, the authorities have ramped up a propaganda campaign asserting that the CNRP lies at the center of an elaborate anti-government conspiracy. This allegedly includes civil society and union leaders, American democracy-promotion groups, U.S.-funded broadcasters, and various American Embassy officials. At the same time, the authorities have released videos warning of Syria-like chaos if Hun Sen’s government is removed from power. Fearful of public demonstrations ahead of Thursday’s ruling, security forces locked down the center of the capital, Phnom Penh; they also raided the offices of several nongovernmental organizations, checking to make sure protesters weren’t hiding out there.

Even then, this latest move represents an unprecedented step, spelling an effective end to a multibillion-dollar international effort to transplant democracy in Cambodia since the early 1990s.

With most of its senior leadership now in exile abroad, the CNRP has called for immediate Western action to reverse Cambodia’s slide into dictatorship. “Hun Sen is shifting the goal post, pushing the red line, because the international community has been reactive rather than preemptive,” Kem Monovithya, a party spokeswoman (who is also Kem Sokha’s daughter), said in an email.

This has been a perennial challenge for the Western donor governments that have backed Cambodia’s democratic transition since the peace settlement of 1991. For years, the promise of hundreds of millions in development assistance gave Hun Sen a strong incentive to maintain an outward appearance of democracy, even as his government used force, intimidation, and patronage to win elections. The outcome was a fluctuating cycle of political repression geared toward crippling the CPP’s political opponents, while keep Western donors engaged.

In recent years, however, this pattern has been altered by the rapid rise of Chinese influence in Cambodia. Long resentful of Western criticisms, Hun Sen has been an enthusiastic adherent to the “Xi Jinping doctrine” of large-scale Chinese infrastructure deals decoupled from demands for human rights or good governance. Over the past 15 years, Chinese cash has bankrolled bridges, highways, hydropower dams, and property developments, while Beijing has given Hun Sen political cover from U.S. and European pressure. In exchange, Cambodia has been happy to support China’s positions on a range of issues, from Taiwan and Xinjiang to disputes in the South China Sea. The two countries have even agreed to set up a joint think tank to study and prevent “color revolutions.”

With the CPP government now sweeping aside the last pretenses of democracy, the question now turns to the possible international ramifications.

Emboldened by Beijing’s support, Hun Sen has reasserted Cambodian sovereignty and pushed back strongly against Western criticism. In recent months, he unleashed a series of blistering attacks against the U.S. government, focusing on the American carpet-bombing of Cambodia in the 1960s and 1970s, and its alleged support for Hun Sen’s opponents since 1991. The one apparent exception to Hun Sen’s anti-American turn, however, seems to be none other than President Donald Trump. “You are a great man to me,” Hun Sen told Trump in a speech at an Asian summit in Manila last week, before calling on him to “remind” local embassy staff not to “interfere” in Cambodia’s affairs.

With the CPP government now sweeping aside the last pretenses of democracy, the question now turns to the possible international ramifications. In a statement on Thursday, the European Union announced that it will reassess Cambodia’s eligibility for preferential trade access under its “everything but arms” scheme. In Washington, the Senate unanimously passed a resolution calling for targeted sanctions on senior Cambodian officials.

Until now, Western countries have shown little appetite for introducing sanctions, partly out of a fear of pushing Hun Sen fully into China’s orbit, and partly because moves to restrict garment exports from Cambodia could cripple the incomes of hundreds of thousands of workers who depend on the industry. In any case, the ultimate benefit of sanctions is uncertain. In fact, the sobering lesson of Cambodia’s troubled democratic experiment is that while foreign pressure can sometimes force concessions from authoritarian rulers, it is of limited use in forcing them to adopt democratic governing principles.

The most effective pressure may end up coming from below. As Hun Sen’s party sails toward an election that he stands no chance of losing, the aging leader may find that dissolving a party is easier than resolving the rising popular demands for better government. “Even though they have abolished the opposition,” said Sereiboth, “people in the country are still eager to see change and new leadership.” In 2013, the electorate registered a strong desire for change — but Cambodia’s strongman isn’t listening.

Published by Foreign Policy, November 17, 2017

‘Allah doesn’t care if you are transgender’: the Indonesian school fighting a backlash

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An Islamic boarding school for transgender people in Yogyakarta is providing a safe haven amid a harsh crackdown on LGBT rights.

When Shinta Ratri prays, like many devout Indonesian women she dons a mukena, a long flowing gown often embroidered with colourful and intricate designs. But she finds it hard to do so in most public mosques in this small city on the Indonesian island of Java. The reason, she says, is that she began life as a man.

According to Shinta, transgender people in Indonesia find it hard to pray at ordinary mosques, where men and women are divided and they often elicit hostile reactions from other congregants.

It was for this reason that Shinta helped found the Pondok Pesantren Waria al-Fatah, the world’s only Islamic boarding school for transgender people. “In the public mosque we made people uncomfortable. We needed a safe place for trans women to pray,” she says.

Since its establishment in 2008 the boarding school, or pesantren, has become a safe haven for trans people from across Indonesia, the world’s largest Muslim-majority nation.

“In here you can be with a women’s clothes or men’s clothes, it’s up to you,” Shinta says. “It depends how comfortable you are.”

The school sits in a warren of narrow lanes in a quiet neighbourhood of Yogyakarta, housed in a 19th-century joglo, a traditional Javanese wooden house once owned by Shinta’s grandmother. Its walls are painted bright green; outside in the yard stray cats scavenge and laundry billows in the breeze.

The school has a shifting membership of around 40 mostly LGBT people. Unlike most pesantren, where students are in their teens or early 20s, the students here are generally older, and include four transwomen who live here full-time.

One of them is Yumi Sara, 50. She has lived at the boarding school since 2010, while working as an HIV/Aids advocate in Yogyakarta.

“Allah doesn’t care if you are gay or transgender or anything else,” she says, taking drags on a clove cigarette as the evening call to prayer echoes across the city from nearby mosques. “Transgender is a beautiful creature created by Allah.”

“Making a place like this is a statement,” says Mario Prajna Pratama, the chairperson of Plush, an LGBT rights organisation in Yogyakarta. “It’s like, if you do not want to give us access to pray, we will create our own.”

In Indonesian, trans people are referred to as waria, a combination of the Indonesian words for woman (wanita) and man (pria). Waria are nothing new in Javanese culture, but they nonetheless face persistent discrimination and are often pushed to the edges of society.

Refused jobs by many employers, who require that applicants describe themselves as either male or female, many find work in the arts, as traditional dancers and street performers, or in more dangerous and marginal fields such as sex work.

In addition to holding weekly prayers and Koranic readings, Shinta frequently visits university campuses to educate young people about LGBT issues. But the increasing visibility of the LGBT rights movement has prompted a backlash from political and religious conservatives. Homosexuality and transgenderism are not illegal in Indonesia, but the past year has seen a spike in anti-LGBT rhetoric and actions by the authorities.

Earlier this month police raided a sauna popular with gay men in the capital Jakarta, arresting 51 people. While most were released a short time after, five have been held for violations of Indonesia’s loosely defined anti-pornography laws. A similar raid in May netted more than 140 arrests.

The Indonesian Psychiatric Association has claimed that transgender people have mental disorders, and the country’s parliament is currently debating a law that would ban LGBT characters from national television shows.

In May two gay men were publicly caned in conservative Aceh province for violations of the region’s sharia laws, which outlaw homosexuality.

As with the fundamentalist campaign that led to the jailing of Jakarta’s former governor, Ahok, on blasphemy charges, Pratama says anti-LGBT politics have become a unifying issue for conservatives. “To make them unite, they need an issue. What can make them unite? One of the things is the LGBT,” he says.

The Pondok Pesantren Waria al-Fatah has not been immune from the backlash. In February 2016 the school was forced to close for four months after threats of violence from conservative groups, including a local vigilante group calling itself Front Jihad Islam (FJI). After the local authorities proved unresponsive to her appeals, Shinta says she agreed to close the school temporarily.

Abdurrahman, the leader of FJI, claims the boarding school is violating Islamic precepts. “In the Qur’an it is said that men should not behave like women,” he says at his home outside Yogyakarta. “It violates sharia.”

But many local residents are supportive of the pesantren and its mission. One is Arif Nuh Safri, a religious teacher, or ustadh, based at the Institute of Qur’anic Studies outside Yogyakarta, who volunteers his time to take prayer sessions and Qur’anic readings at the school.

Arif says everyone has the right to access religious truths. “When we talk about religion, we talk about humanity,” he says. “If we talk about religion but don’t respect humanity, it’s no use.”

Published by The Guardian, November 15, 2017

Reporting for this story was supported by a grant from the International Reporting Project.

The Fall of Aung San Suu Kyi, Democracy Icon

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Turning “The Lady” into a secular saint only helped Myanmar’s junta.

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First we built her up, then we tore her down. For a quarter-century, Aung San Suu Kyi of Myanmar sat alongside Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King Jr. as one of the exemplary moral figures of our age. Praised and feted around the world and the recipient of nearly every prize and recognition that the international human-rights community has to offer, she was less a person than a chiseled-in-stone idol—a totem of democratic values and principled opposition to tyranny. Now, at least in the eyes of the West, recent events in Myanmar have sent “The Lady,” as Aung San Suu Kyi is known to her admirers, toppling from her plinth.

Her dramatic fall has been prompted by the ferocious campaign of ethnic cleansing that has been directed against the Rohingya, a mostly Muslim minority in Myanmar’s west. The Nobel laureate has come under attack for saying little, and doing less, to stem a military-directed campaign of arson and violence that has driven more than 400,000 people over the border into Bangladesh in little over a month.

As Myanmar’s army torched Rohingya communities, pundits, journalists, and human-rights activists called for the 72-year-old to be stripped of her Nobel Prize and other baubles of international recognition. Her portrait has been removed from the walls of Oxford University. A onetime democratic icon is now being described, accurately, as “an apologist for genocide, ethnic cleansing, and mass rape.”

The fervor of Aung San Suu Kyi’s detractors, however, says as much about us as it does about her. Indeed, the anger seems to stem less from her actions, or lack thereof, than from her stubborn refusal to play the redemptive role assigned to her by the international community. As Gavin Jacobson wrote recently in The New Yorker, the tenor of the denunciations carries a distinct tone of personal betrayal, as if years of investments in Aung San Suu Kyi’s promise had culminated in the bankruptcy of a moral Ponzi scheme. Jacobson argued that Aung San Suu Kyi “has exposed the artlessness with which many in the West reduced a complex personality into a Rapunzel of the East.”

All of this, however, prompts the more fundamental question of why we built her up so much in the first place. Why did we—Western governments, the media, human-rights advocates—invest so much hope in a single, fallible individual?

On one level, it is easy to understand Aung San Suu Kyi’s idolization. Her life story traces a romantic arc from the vales of Oxford, to the UN headquarters in New York, to her crumbling family home on the shores of Inya Lake in Yangon, where, like a character out of Gabriel García Márquez, she lived out more than 15 years of house arrest. Revered by ordinary Burmese (though for very different reasons than overseas), Aung San Suu Kyi offered the perfect foil to the villainous Myanmar military, whose violent crackdown on the 1988 demonstrations left hundreds dead. In the subsequent years, Aung San Suu Kyi’s life took on all the qualities of a moral fable: one in which the beautiful daughter of an assassinated national hero sacrifices her own freedom to save her country from tyranny.

Yet there was more to the fashioning of Myanmar’s heroine than a good story. On a deeper level, it also seemed to be an outgrowth of the conviction, embedded in the global human-rights movement and much of the Western media and policy-making elite, that the world is moving inexorably, if sometimes haltingly, in the direction of liberal values. It is perhaps no coincidence that Aung San Suu Kyi was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991, a year that saw the collapse of the Soviet Union and the wave of liberal triumphalism that followed. This optimism was best articulated by the American political scientist Francis Fukuyama, who in his 1989 article, “The End of History?,” claimed that the West’s Cold War victory marked “the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.”

The beatification of Aung San Suu Kyi encouraged a dangerous simplification of her own country’s political realities.

Coincidence or not, Fukuyama’s mass-market Hegelianism had a loud echo in the fable that grew up around The Lady. For Myanmar’s Aung San Suu Kyi was no simple politician, but a world-historical figure who would sweep away the hated military junta and shepherd her people toward the promised land of liberal democracy and human rights. Over time, we raised Aung San Suu Kyi so high that she stood outside and above the political realities of her country.

The urge to manufacture political idols, like so much else, begins in good intentions: that is, a desire to provide recognition for those standing up against oppression and tyranny around the world. But the process always distorts. Take the case of Nelson Mandela. While Mandela’s own global idolization helped draw attention the cruelty and racism of South African apartheid, it also had the effect of effacing the radical nature of his politics, and his willingness to use violent means to achieve political aims. In the transmutation from politician to saint, a complex and revolutionary figure was reduced to a simple signifier of moral righteousness—an emblem of political change, minus the politics.

In a similar vein, the beatification of Aung San Suu Kyi encouraged a dangerous simplification of her own country’s political realities. Viewed through the lens of her personal story, Myanmar’s ethnic and political complexities were flattened into a dyadic struggle between a freedom-loving people and a coterie of evil generals, a view that recent events now show to have been reductively naive.

In truth, military rule was as much a symptom of Myanmar’s problems as their cause. From nearly the moment of its independence from Great Britain in 1948, the country has been in a state of near-constant civil war between the central government, dominated by the ethnic Burman majority, and a raft of minority peoples occupying outlying parts of the country.

After the Myanmar army, or Tatmadaw, seized power in 1962, military rule and ethnic conflict became mutually inflaming. The junta’s fierce repressions fueled the desire of minority peoples for self-determination, which, in turn, bolstered the Tatmadaw’s perennial claim that it—and it alone—could hold the country together. As the political scientist Mary Callahan has noted, praetorian rule was one answer—albeit a cruel and self-defeating one—to the centuries-old problems of state-building in outlying regions of Myanmar that had never been under effective central control.

The beatification of Aung San Suu Kyi was dangerous in another way, too. While it was effective in rallying international opposition to Myanmar’s ruling generals, it also gave the latter an easy route back to legitimacy. By 2010, Aung San Suu Kyi had so come to embody Myanmar in the eyes of Western policymakers that all the junta needed to do was to find a way to co-opt her—which is precisely what it did.

Beginning with Aung San Suu Kyi’s surprise release from house arrest on November 13, 2010, Myanmar’s opening to the world involved a conscious and canny leveraging of her global idol status. To start with, her release had the effect of legitimizing a deeply flawed national election that had been held just a week earlier, alchemizing the military “regime” into a quasi-civilian “government” stacked with ex-army men and led by a retired general, Thein Sein.

Later, Aung San Suu Kyi’s election to parliament, which took place via by-elections in April 2012, spurred the further rehabilitation of Myanmar’s international image. Western governments, euphoric at The Lady’s fairy-tale elevation, loosened and dropped sanctions; aid workers, journalists, and investors flooded into the country. There were concrete improvements at street level: Fear dissipated; people spoke openly about politics for the first time in years, and pictures of Aung San Suu Kyi, once-banned, appeared everywhere. The 2015 election saw this excitement restaged at a national level, as the NLD surged to an overwhelming victory over the military’s proxy, the Union Solidarity and Development Party.

But this apparently happy ending masked the fact that in terms of who held effective power, little had changed. Taking office in April 2016, Aung San Suu Kyi’s authority was tightly restrained by a junta-drafted Constitution that preserved a special role for the military. It reserved a quarter of parliamentary seats for military-picked candidates, giving the army an effective veto over constitutional amendments, and granted the army control of the ministries of Defense, Home Affairs, and Border Affairs. And just to be sure Aung San Suu Kyi didn’t slip her moorings, the military included a clause barring her from becoming president, by virtue of her past marriage to a foreigner (she currently serves as “state counselor”).

Aung San Suu Kyi’s global profile was crucial to this stage-managed process of reform. By luring her out of house arrest and into the halls of power, the Tatmadaw and its allies were able to shrug off Myanmar’s pariah status and secure the removal of Western sanctions, all while ceding little practical power. It was an act of audacious political sleight-of-hand—one enabled by the international community’s investment in a certain rosy narrative about Myanmar.

Aung San Suu Kyi, more hard-headed than many of her admirers abroad, appears to have entered into this bargain with no illusions. Since her release in 2010, she has repeatedly stated that she views herself not as an icon but as a politician, one willing to make the pragmatic alliances and trade-offs necessary to achieve her goals. This was likely the reasoning, however flawed, behind her party’s controversial decision to not run any Muslim candidates at the 2015 election, out of fear that it would alienate the ethnic Burmans who make up the bulk of the NLD’s support.

It also explains Aung San Suu Kyi’s silence around the plight of the Rohingya, who are widely despised by the ethnic Burman population. As Rakhine state burns, the Nobel laureate remains fixated on revising the Constitution to give her party the full power that she believes it deserves, in the service of the broader goal that eluded the old junta: the forging of a peaceful and unified Myanmar. In these political calculations, the Rohingya figure as collateral damage, ignored or hated by nearly every domestic constituency in Myanmar, including many of the pro-democracy forces that fought the junta for so many years. If anything should give us pause, it is the specter of Aung San Suu Kyi and her supporters standing side-by-side with the military that they once opposed, united in their view that the Rohingya are illegal immigrants with no place in Myanmar’s national community.

The backlash in the West against Aung San Suu Kyi reflects a disillusionment about her willingness to engage with the complex and contradictory political circumstances in which she finds herself—and, maybe, on some level, for the very process of politics itself. That is not to excuse her grievous mistakes. But her dramatic fall should remind us above all of the perils of political idolization and of enchanting ourselves into believing intractable problems can be magically overcome. The tale of The Lady suggests that it might be wiser if we resist making idols in the first place.

Published by The Nation, October 7, 2017

Cambodia’s Crumbling Democracy

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Behind the growing repression of Prime Minister Hun Sen’s government

In the early hours of September 4, the final edition of Cambodia’s oldest English-language daily rolled off the presses. The Cambodia Daily, founded in 1993, was a respected pillar of the country’s small independent media. True to its slogan—“All the News Without Fear or Favor”—the newspaper had forged a reputation for meticulous reporting and hard-hitting exposés, which belied its unassuming letter-sized format. A month earlier, the Cambodian government, under the long-ruling Prime Minister Hun Sen, had hit the paper’s publishers with a $6.3 million tax bill, ordering them to pay up or “pack up.” They had no choice but to fold.

The paper’s last day coincided with the arrest of the Cambodian opposition leader, Kem Sokha—an incident that made the front cover of the Daily’s final issue. Beneath the oversized headline, “Descent Into Outright Dictatorship,” was a picture of Kem Sokha being taken into custody by police shortly after midnight on September 2. Kem Sokha, who heads the Cambodia National Rescue Party (CNRP), has since been moved to a remote prison in eastern Cambodia. He faces 15–30 years in prison and has been charged with treason for conspiring with the United States to overthrow the Cambodian government.

As evidence, the authorities produced a video of Kem Sokha giving a talk in Australia in 2013, in which he describes meeting overseas experts “hired by the Americans in order to advise me on the strategy to change the leaders.” This, the government claimed, was proof of a conspiracy aimed at delivering a coup. It has since announced investigations of other CNRP leaders and has suggested that the party could be dissolved if it continues to back Sokha.

The closure of the Daily and the arrest of Kem Sokha represent unprecedented steps for Hun Sen, who has ruled in various guises since 1985. To be sure, periods of repression are a regular feature of Cambodian political life and have occurred periodically over the past quarter century, usually ahead of elections. But the current clampdown—now in its third year—is shaping up as both the most sustained since the early 1990s and the first to assail once untouchable Western institutions within the country.

It is also striking in that it has been accompanied by a sharp turn against the United States. Over the past year, Cambodia has pulled out of Angkor Sentinel, an annual bilateral military exercise, and kicked out a U.S. naval engineering battalion that was building school bathrooms and maternity wards in rural Cambodia. Following last month’s claims of a U.S. plot against the government, it silenced local radio stations relaying broadcasts from the U.S.-funded Voice of America and Radio Free Asia (the latter of which has since suspended its in-country operations) and ordered the closure of the National Democratic Institute (NDI), a U.S.-funded pro-democracy nongovernmental organization, which has been working in Cambodia since 1992.

According to most observers of Cambodian politics, the proximate cause of Hun Sen’s crackdown is the national elections scheduled for July 2018. The CPP is bent on avoiding a repeat of the last election in 2013, when the CNRP scored surprise gains on the back of rising public discontent related to land issues, corruption, and clotted government institutions. But there could be a more consequential shift going on, one that could alter the international settlement that created Cambodia’s democratic system at the end of the Cold War.

A superficial democracy

Cambodia became a democracy on October 23, 1991, with the signing of the Paris Peace Agreements, which ended a twelve-year civil war. The accord authorized the creation of a United Nations Transitional Authority in Cambodia (UNTAC), an 18-month peacekeeping mission tasked with disarming and demobilizing four armed Cambodian factions (including the CPP), repatriating more than half a million refugees from camps along the Thai border, and holding multiparty elections in 1993—all while assuming temporary control of the country’s civil administration.

The Paris Peace Agreements and UNTAC transformed Cambodia. After UNTAC was deployed in 1992, prompting a nearly overnight flood of foreign aid into the country and an influx of aid workers, journalists, and development experts, Phnom Penh, the decrepit capital of an impoverished socialist state, became a highly internationalized political space—a tropical outpost of what the British writer Alex de Waal has termed the “humanitarian international.” UNTAC maintained a fragile stability, allowing the CPP’s enemies from the civil war to form political parties. The new peace also provided the space needed for Cambodian media and civil society to grow.

The peace agreement, however, was not without its flaws. The treaty’s framework had been drawn up by the five permanent members of the UN Security Council, and never had much buy-in from the Cambodian factions, whose mutual antipathy remained undimmed. Moreover, Hun Sen’s CPP had good reason to be suspicious of the accord. Despite participating in Vietnam’s overthrow in January 1979 of the Khmer Rouge regime, whose pursuit of an ultra-pure vision of peasant communism had resulted in the deaths of an estimated 1.7 million Cambodians since 1975, the new government was isolated and economically embargoed by the West.

This was based on a ruthless Cold War logic. Since Phnom Penh was backed by Vietnam, which was allied with the Soviet Union, the United States and its new ally China withheld diplomatic recognition, instead bestowing legitimacy on the ousted Khmer Rouge, whose emissaries would occupy Cambodia’s seat at the UN until 1991. This long decade of isolation from 1979 to 1991 instilled in the senior ranks of the CPP a deep and abiding resentment at its treatment by the West—a factor that continues to influence Hun Sen’s behavior today.

Under Hun Sen’s rule, Cambodia fluctuated between periods of repression, usually timed to elections, and periods of relaxation, designed to placate foreign donor governments.

Despite his mistrust of Western powers, Hun Sen, a born survivor from the backwoods of rural Kampong Cham, had little choice but to sign the Paris settlement, accepting the welter of competing political factions and civil society groups that followed. But he never accepted its legitimacy, and immediately worked to gain control of the new democratic system through the use of political patronage and, when necessary, violence. Although he tolerated their presence, Hun Sen saw foreign and foreign-funded NGOs as a violation of the country’s sovereignty, and a channel through which hostile foreign powers could meddle in Cambodian affairs—just as they had in the 1980s. In one 1995 speech, he lashed out at Western criticisms of his heavy-handed actions: “Let me say this to the world: Whether or not you want to give aid to Cambodia is up to you, but do not discuss Cambodian affairs too much.” In the same speech he threatened to organize protests outside Western embassies—a threat that he also renewed last month.

Under Hun Sen’s rule, Cambodia fluctuated between periods of repression, usually timed to elections, and periods of relaxation, designed to placate foreign donor governments whose aid was often linked to improvements in good governance and human rights. Hun Sen was always careful about striking a balance. Even in July 1997, when forces loyal to Hun Sen launched a bloody strike against his royalist coalition partner, Prince Norodom Ranariddh, Hun Sen left the underlying democratic settlement intact. (After holding a new election in 1998, which the CPP easily won, the flow of foreign aid resumed.)

All this gave Cambodian democracy a curiously superficial quality. The country held competitive elections, but their result was preordained by fear, intimidation, and CPP vote-buying. NGOs and civil society organizations operated with few formal restrictions, and foreign-language newspapers like The Cambodia Daily published freely, but their activities were effectively quarantined from entrenched political interests. (The Khmer-language media, meanwhile, was effectively silenced and brought under the CPP’s control). Under Hun Sen, these freedoms existed not as a matter of right but as a temporary indulgence granted by those in power. Recent events suggest that this indulgence is now being withdrawn. Even though a relaxation of the current crackdown is likely at some point, the forced closure of the Daily and the ejection of the NDI—two respected Western mainstays of Cambodian civil society since 1992—represent a brazen assault on the legacy of UNTAC and the democratic experiment in Cambodia.

A new patron

Much of this can be put down to the rise of Chinese influence in Cambodia. Over the past 15 years, Beijing has risen to become Hun Sen’s chief foreign friend and patron. In exchange for Cambodian support for its strategic goals in Southeast Asia, including its claims in the South China Sea, China has delivered more than $2 billion in loans and investments, bankrolling the construction of highways, bridges, and hydropower dams.

No-strings Chinese loans and investments have made Cambodia less dependent on the support of Western governments and have given Hun Sen a free hand finally to jettison the last pretense of democracy and move against organizations, like the Daily, whose presence in Cambodia he has always resented. (A Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson responded to Kem Sokha’s arrest by saying that Beijing supported “the Cambodian government’s effort to uphold national security and stability.”)

Another dimension of China’s appeal is that it allows Hun Sen to satisfy his gnawing resentment that Cambodia is criticized more often than neighboring countries that are seen as more vital to U.S. interests, such as Thailand and Vietnam. This, too, is a legacy of UNTAC, which set a high standard for Cambodia and created the space for foreign journalists and human rights workers to shine a light on government failings in a way not possible in more authoritarian countries. Cambodia’s small size and marginal status have also allowed U.S. policy to be heavily influenced by a vocal anti–Hun Sen lobby in the U.S. Congress, which has spearheaded a string of resolutions seeking to revive Cambodia’s democratic experiment through the suspension of aid and, on occasion, even calls for regime change.

The result is that even as the administration of President Donald Trump warms to autocrats like General Prayuth Chan-ocha of Thailand and Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines, Hun Sen remains a pariah in Washington. From Phnom Penh’s perspective, this seems like yet another example of American double standards, and it breeds the sort of conspiratorial thinking that has led Hun Sen to believe a U.S.-backed opposition is plotting to overthrow him. One of the reasons that China has made advances in Cambodia is that it is willing to offer Hun Sen something that he has craved throughout his career: legitimacy and the status of a nominal equal.

The irony of Cambodia’s shift is that even as its democratic experiment ends, the pressure for change is building. The 2013 election was accompanied by massive public demonstrations of support for the CNRP from people who were tired of the outrageous levels of corruption and cronyism that have flourished under Hun Sen’s rule. Cambodia’s leader may have finally shrugged off the unwanted burden of Western influence, but the contradictions within his own brand of authoritarianism remain.

Published by Foreign Affairs, September 14, 2017

After Ahok: Indonesia Grapples with the Rise of Political Islam

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For decades, Indonesian society has experienced a slow process of Islamization. In 2017, the pace picked up.

JAKARTA – Five months after its closure, the doors of the Al Hidayah mosque were sealed with wooden planks and crisscrossed with yellow police tape, as if it some kind of grisly crime had taken place within. Barred from entering their house of worship by official order, four young men held their midday prayer in the heat outside, their bodies bent towards a large sign driven into the concrete by the local authorities. Its message was emblazoned in red: “Activities are banned.”

In February, police converged on this green-tiled mosque in Depok, 15 kilometers south of the Indonesian capital Jakarta, to enforce an order sealing off the building until further notice. The order followed a clamor from Islamic fundamentalists, who held protests calling for the expulsion of this small congregation of Ahmadi Muslims from the district. “We had a permit to build this mosque, so we have no idea why they sealed it,” said Abdul Gofur, 42, the caretaker of the site.

The unpretentious Al-Hidayah mosque, a box-like building lacking the otherworldly dome and minaret of many Muslim houses of worship, has a long history of run-ins with the local authorities. Gofur said the mosque had been “sealed” six times since 2011, and has survived a concerted campaign from hardline vigilante groups, including the notorious Islamic Defenders Front, or FPI, which sees Ahmadis as heretics and apostates.

On June 23, two nights before Idul Fitri (as Eid al-Fitr is known in Indonesia), the festival marking the end of the fasting month of Ramadan, Gofur said that white-robed militants pelted the building with eggs and paint, and strung up spray-painted banners calling for the expulsion of the Ahmadiyah. The 400-strong congregation has erected its own signs reading, “Love for All, Hatred for None.”

The Ahmadi minority numbers around 500,000 people scattered across this island nation of 260 million. The sect is not officially recognized in Indonesia, which acknowledges just six religions: Islam, Protestantism, Catholicism, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Confucianism. While most Ahmadiyah see themselves as Muslims, they cleave to unorthodox tenets: the sect has its own holy text, the Tadzkirah, and does not regard Muhammad as the final prophet – a belief that many Indonesians see as heresy. As a result, they have become both a subject of official discrimination, and a target for religious vigilantes.

Things got particularly bad after 2007, when a leading clerical body declared the Ahmadiyah a deviant sect; the following year, then-President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono signed a decree banning Ahmadi Muslims from disseminating their faith. Following the decree, mosques were shuttered and burned, and members of the community were subject to violent attacks. In February 2011, west of Jakarta in Banten province, three Ahmadi men were beaten to death by a mob; the perpetrators received only light sentences. According to the Jakarta-based Setara Institute for Democracy and Peace, which monitors religious freedom in Indonesia, there have been a total of 546 violent incidents against Ahmadi Muslims since 2007.

“The Ahmadiyah have become a public enemy for most of the Muslim community,” said Yendra Budiana, the spokesperson of the Ahmadiyah Muslim Community. While physical attacks have declined in the past few years, Budiana said, this has been replaced by various forms of administrative discrimination: militants have manipulated laws to force the closure of more than 20 Ahmadi mosques; a local regulation also requires that Ahmadi Muslims renounce their faith to obtain national identification cards, which are critical to accessing a range of government services.

Budiana said that militant groups seem to be treated softly by the provincial government in West Java and the regency government in Depok, both of which are currently under the control of the reactionary Islamist Prosperous Justice Party, or PKS. “We think there is some collaboration with the intolerance organizations and the local government to ban our mosques,” he said. (Idris Abdul Somad, the PKS mayor of Depok, declined a request for an interview).

Despite all the obstacles, the Ahmadiyah of Depok continue to assert their right to worship freely. “No one should ban anyone from practicing their religion,” said Rayhan Firdaus, 21, after finishing the midday prayer. “It’s mentioned in the Quran. Every Muslim including the radicals should follow that.” And sure enough, outside the Al-Hidayah mosque, facing onto a busy street, the congregants have hung a large sheet containing a translated passage from the Quran (al-Baqarah, verse 114), warning their persecutors of cosmic retribution:

And who are more unjust than those who prevent the name of Allah from being mentioned in His mosques and strive toward their destruction? It is not for them to enter them except in fear. For them in this world is disgrace, and they will have in the Hereafter a great punishment.

The ongoing persecution of Ahmadi Muslims is just one sign of the creeping rise of religious intolerance and fundamentalism in Indonesia, the world’s largest Muslim-majority country. While strict, “modernist” interpretations of Islam have been part of the religious mix in Indonesia since colonial times, the growth of fundamentalism has been particularly marked since the collapse of Suharto’s New Order regime in 1998. Many now fear that the emergence of a new Islamic identity politics poses an existential threat to the country’s reputation for diversity and relative tolerance.

This fundamentalism was encapsulated by the campaign against Basuki Tjahaja Purnama, the former governor of Jakarta, who was imprisoned for blasphemy in May. Better known by his nickname “Ahok,” the 51-year-old was both ethnic Chinese and Christian – the first such “double minority” to govern Indonesia’s capital since the 1960s.

In September 2016, his reelection campaign became the center of a sectarian storm after he referenced a passage of the Quran during a campaign speech. (In essence, Ahok was telling people to ignore political arguments that non-Muslims should not be allowed to govern Muslims).

When an edited version of the speech went viral, hardline Islamic groups like the FPI and Hizbut Tahrir rallied hundreds of thousands of protesters to gather in central Jakarta calling for Ahok to be jailed for blasphemy. Charges were leveled. After losing an April 19 runoff election to his opponent Anies Baswedan, a former Minister of Education and Culture who played the religious card adroitly, a court found Ahok guilty of the blasphemy charge and sentenced him to two years in prison.

On one level, there was nothing particularly new in the Ahok controversy. While the Jakarta election and its aftermath garnered global media attention, it was not the first time that ambitious politicians had allied with Islamic organizations in order to advance their careers. Nonetheless, for many observers, Ahok’s case represented a watershed of ethnic and sectarian intolerance. “We saw Ahok’s case as the tipping point; before it was an undercurrent,” said Alissa Wahid, the director of the Gusdurian Network Indonesia, which works to promote interfaith dialogue. “We were always afraid of this growing intolerance.”

The forces of Islamic reaction are nothing new in Indonesia, but in 2017, a chasm seemed to open between the country’s claims to represent a tolerant, pluralistic tradition – one embodied in its national motto Bhinneka Tunggal Ika (“unity in diversity”) – and the strident claims of fundamentalist Islam.

The forces that brought down Jakarta’s governor in 2017 have deep roots in Indonesian history. In some ways, the story begins as far back as the early 13th century, with the trade-born arrival of Islam in Aceh, a devout region on the western tip of Sumatra that even today is referred to as serambi Mekkah – the “balcony of Mecca.” Over the subsequent 400 years, as Islam spread gradually throughout the Malay archipelago, it melded with indigenous religious practices, as well as later imports like Buddhism and Hinduism. This was particularly the case in Java, the most populous island of the archipelago. By the 1700s there had emerged what the historian M.C. Ricklefs has described as a “mystical synthesis” of Islam and pre-Islamic Javanese traditions – a reconciliation between two differing identities and belief systems.

As Islam spread it also deepened, a process that was accelerated by the onset of globalized industrial modernity under Dutch colonial rule in the 19th century. Among many other things, this better connected Indonesian Muslims to a global body of Islamic ideas and religious scholarship. Steamships (and later, air travel) allowed more Indonesian Muslims to undertake the hajj, and for Indonesian ulama (religious scholars) to study in the famed Islamic universities of Mecca and Cairo.

In this way, modern religious currents from the Middle East, including the austere 18th century Wahhabi reform movement of the Arabian peninsula, found their way into the Malay world. And over time, the religious synthesis that existed in rural Java was transformed by a slow and contested process of Islamization that continues up to the present. “The process of Islamization in Indonesia was not a one-step project,” said Ulil Abshar-Abdallah, the co-founder of the Liberal Islam Network. “It’s still going on until today.”

In his 2010 book Understanding Islam in Indonesia: Politics and Diversity, Robert Pringle described the modern history of Indonesian Islam as one of “fluctuation and tension” between two broad currents of Islamic thought: a “traditionalist” vision, in which Islam coexists comfortably with a range of Indonesian traditions; and a more legalistic “reformist” (or “modernist”) stream, which emphasizes “the requirements of doctrine as interpreted by the latest trends in global Islam.”

Historically, these streams have been roughly represented by Indonesia’s two mainstream Islamic organizations: Muhammadiyah, founded in 1912 as a modernist organization dedicated to the purification of Indonesian Islam from syncretic tendencies; and Nahdlatul Ulama, or NU, established in 1926 as a bulwark against the rise of Wahhabism in the Arabian peninsula and the growing presence of religious purism at home. Today, both organizations have memberships reaching into the tens of millions.

This brief historical excursus is important in order to understand the dramatic changes that took place under Suharto’s dictatorship in the 1970s and 1980s. Although the New Order suppressed hardline fundamentalist groups as a possible threat to Suharto’s rule, it was also a time of booming economic growth, urbanization, and growing religious observance. These decades saw the beginning of a massive flow of Saudi petro-dollars into Indonesia, which helped instill Riyadh’s strict brand of Salafi Islam. Together, these two forces would fortify the “reformist” tendency of Indonesian Islam at the expense of the more tolerant, “traditionalist” one.

When Suharto fell from power amid mass pro-democracy protests in 1998, fundamentalist Islamic groups were among the many forces that rushed in to fill the political vacuum. Abshar-Abdallah said that local traditions and cultural practices were increasingly losing out against a kind of “Islamic globalization” – a homogenizing tendency enforced by a flood of Gulf state funding, and its world-spanning networks of Islamic preachers, scholars, websites, and publishing houses. Since the 1980s, the Saudi government has funneled billions of dollars into Indonesia, building mosques, pesantren (Islamic boarding schools), and Arabic language institutes.

A key vector of Saudi influence in Indonesia is the Institute for the Study of Islam and Arabic, or LIPIA. Founded in 1980, this exclusive – and fully Saudi-funded – university in South Jakarta counts among its alumni several generations of prominent Islamic radicals. These include Habib Rizieq, the rabid leader of the FPI, who attended LIPIA before gaining a Saudi state scholarship to continue his studies in Riyadh; and Hidayat Nur Wahid, the onetime leader of PKS. Another notable alumnus is Jafar Umar Thalib, who founded the now-disbanded extremist outfit Laskar Jihad. Meanwhile, graduates have gone on to establish satellite pesantren that further disseminate a brand of Salafism that is openly hostile to traditional Islamic practices. Abshar-Abdallah, who studied at LIPIA in the 1990s, said that the college was “instrumental in the spread of Salafism in Indonesia.”

One symptom of this change has been the dramatic increase in Islamic observance by ordinary Indonesians, particularly in the large cities, and the adoption of more austere forms of dress, including the jilbab, a head-to-toe covering worn by women. Another, Abshar-Abdallah said, has been the gradual replacement of Indonesian or Javanese words for Islamic rituals with Arabic equivalents. In recent decades, the Javanese term puasa (fasting) has increasingly given way to the Arabic sawm; instead of engaging in sembahyang (prayer), pious Indonesians now undertake salat. “People are distancing themselves from the local practices, adopting more Middle Eastern cultural practices,” Abshar-Abdallah said.

The outcome of all this is an increasing public tolerance for – if not always active support of – fundamentalist visions of Indonesian society. Vigilante groups like FPI have waged an active campaign for the passage of sharia-based by-laws and regulations, dozens of which have been successfully introduced across the archipelago. (Sharia law has also been fully introduced in the province of Aceh). They have also increased the pressure on Indonesia’s minority groups, a broad category that includes Christians, minority Muslim sects like the Ahmadiyah, progressive student groups, and the LGBT community. Since President Joko Widodo, also known as Jokowi, took office in 2014, there has been a marked increase in violent incidents against minorities. The Setara Institute recorded 270 cases of religious violence in 2016, and 236 cases in 2015 – the first two full years of Jokowi’s presidency – compared with 180 in 2014.

Alissa Wahid, the daughter of the late former president Abdurrahman Wahid, a prominent member of NU, said that while much international media coverage of Indonesian Islam focuses on attacks by violent extremists, such as last year’s attack on a Starbucks in central Jakarta that left seven dead, the creeping intolerance among the general population arguably poses a more serious threat to the country’s democracy. “This is more dangerous than terrorism,” she said. “It’s a different matter when you talk about Bangladesh, but in Indonesia, the challenge will be this social shift.”

—

On a steamy day in July, I traveled out to a musty office building in South Jakarta to meet Habib Muchsin Alatas, the chairman of the shura council of the Islamic Defenders Front (FPI), the organization’s top decision-making body. Dressed in a white Salafi robe and grey turban, with a wide face and booming voice, Alatas was a physically imposing figure, an impression that was only accentuated by his perch in the middle of a broad, glass-topped CEO desk. On his left hand he wore a deep red stone set in a silver ring.

It wasn’t long before we got to the topic of Ahok, whose prosecution for blasphemy was enthusiastically cheered on by FPI and its fundamentalist allies. Alatas described Ahok’s two-year prison sentence as “a little bit unfair”; his organization had pushed for five years, the maximum allowed under the law. “This is not about Ahok being a non-Muslim,” he said, as his various assistants proffered sealed cups of water and a plate of fried snacks and sweet rice cakes. For Alatas, Islam has been central to Indonesian nationhood since its founding; he said Ahok’s “blasphemous” comments threatened to inspire leaders elsewhere in Indonesia, precipitating a general breakdown in religious morality.

“If we are tolerant to Ahok, then other leaders will do the same. That’s why Ahok was dangerous,” he said.

There was another element at play, too: that the governor was working for the advancement of his ancestral homeland. Alatas alleged that Ahok was a “martyr for the grand designs of Chinese imperialism” in Indonesia. “And you know China is communist, anti-religion, anti-God,” he continued. “It’s like the opposite of Indonesia.”

The rise of FPI exemplifies the general growth of Islamic fundamentalism in Indonesia over the past decade. Founded in late 1998 by a coterie of army generals as a force to combat prodemocracy protesters, the group has since become notorious for its aggressive “sweeping” operations, in which swarms of white-robed thugs descend on bars and clubs, or attempt to break up “un-Islamic” public events and film-screenings. Alatas admitted that FPI sometimes took the law into its own hands when the police failed to “enforce the law,” but he said the group had been unfairly maligned by the international media, which never talked about the organization’s charity work. The reason for this, he alleged, was simple: “80 percent of the shares in television and media are owned by Chinese.”

The Islamic political firmament in Indonesia contains many diverse and overlapping constellations. These run the gamut from mainstream groups like NU and Muhammadiyah, to the street brawlers of FPI and a range of formal Islamic parties such as PKS. Alongside these groups sit myriad Islamist sects and activist groups. There are the local franchises of global Islamist groups like Hizbut Tahrir, which supports the replacement of Indonesia’s pluralist democracy with a sharia-based Islamic caliphate, and, far out on the fringes of the political galaxy, a smattering of violent extremists pledging their loyalty to al-Qaeda and the Islamic State.

Even on the puritan end of the spectrum, these groups are far from homogeneous. They hew to a wide variety of doctrinal and strategic positions, and often pursue mutually contradictory goals. But one issue most could unite behind was the campaign to bring down Jakarta’s governor.

Ahok was in many ways an ideal target. For one thing, he was ethnic Chinese, a mostly non-Muslim minority group that has long been perceived as occupying a privileged position in Indonesian society. For another, he was brash and polarizing, even before he took over as governor from his predecessor Jokowi, when the latter was elected president in 2014. Ahok’s critics blamed him for clearing thousands of urban poor from riverbanks in Jakarta, waving away the concerns of evicted residents and human rights groups. As governor, he also courted controversy with devout Muslims: last year, he prohibited Jakarta’s public schools from requiring female Muslim students to wear a headscarf, likening the Islamic head coverings to “the napkin in my kitchen.”

Charlotte Setijadi, a visiting fellow at the ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute in Singapore, said that Ahok became the end-point for a converging stream of fundamentalist tropes and ethnically-tinged economic resentments. “Having an ethnic Chinese governor with perceived ties to real estate tycoons that are also ethnic Chinese could only feed into already growing anger,” she said, “particularly when said governor allegedly insulted the Quran.”

Behind the anti-Ahok movement lay a marriage of convenience between religious fundamentalists and conservative political interests. In a recent article, Leo Suryadinata, another researcher at the ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute, argued that the swirl of Islamic rhetoric concealed an “ideological war” pitting a series of entrenched political and economic interests against reformists like Jokowi and Ahok. “The entrenched interests are using Islam (including the militant version of the religion and its adherents) to counter the reformists, as it is difficult, if not impossible, to get rid of the reformists using just secular issues,” wrote Suryadinata.

Heading this old guard is Prabowo Subianto, a Suharto-era general who lost to Jokowi in the 2014 presidential election, and gave vocal support to Anies Baswedan in his campaign against Ahok. The very embodiment of the old military-dominated order – Prabowo was also a former son-in-law of Suharto – he is widely expected to challenge Jokowi again in the 2019 national election. Already Anies is rumored as a likely running mate. Bonnie Triyana, a historian who edits the monthly magazine Historia, said that the Ahok case was “a moment when historical memories came together with political vested interests.”

While these elements in the anti-Ahok coalition don’t necessarily support the hardline agenda of FPI and its allies, the opportunistic manipulation of religious sentiment could have real-world impacts. Some activists already speak of a discernible “Ahok effect” – an illiberal turn that followed directly from the election controversies.

The Southeast Asia Freedom of Expression Network (SAFENET), has documented an alarming spike in a new form of online bullying, in which Islamic militants target Facebook users who have posted comments critical of Islam or conservative Islamic leaders. “They put their names on social media, and then the FPI will come to their office or their house,” said Damar Juniarto, SAFENET’s Jakarta-based regional coordinator. If things get that far, the target is then hauled out and frog-marched to the local police station, where militants seek to have them charged under Indonesia’s blasphemy law, or its Electronic Information and Transaction Law. (Article 28.2 of the latter forbids the transmission of any information that inflicts “hatred or dissension” against religious, ethnic, or racial groups).

These campaigns are initiated by shadowy online groups with names like the “Muslim Cyber Army” and the “Team for Hunting Religious Insults” (Team Pemburu Penista Agama). Juniarto said that these groups first identified potential targets, whose names and photos are then disseminated via social media. He showed me one video that featured a slideshow of social media profiles of people it described as “fugitives” (buronan) of Islam. To the accompaniment of canned dramatic music, the video flashed a screenshot of a Facebook profile belonging to an ethnic Chinese man accused of spreading slander against FPI leader Habib Rizieq; then there was a photo of another man accused of printing bread packaging with a Quranic verse. “Hello Mr. Police,” read the caption beneath it, “this person needs to be arrested.” The video closed with an image of a soaring eagle, a gun’s crosshairs, and a message: Insulters of religion and ulama, we will hunt you down even if you’re hidden in a rat hole.

Between January and the first week of June, SAFENET documented 88 cases in which netizens were targeted for real-world punishment by militants; the number peaked in May and June, right around the time of Ahok’s conviction. In one case documented by the organization, a 15-year-old from Bekasi, to the east of Jakarta, was confronted by vigilantes and forced to read out a letter of apology to the “Muslim community” for critical comments he made on Facebook; in a video of the incident, he reads in a shaky voice as his assailants shout and jeer. While just 12 of the 88 cases ended up in court, Juniarto said it was a worrying trend. “It’s like they have extra power after seeing Ahok sentenced,” he said.

Now that it has been proven that religion can be a successful wedge issue, Indonesian liberals fear that the coalition of Islamists and populists that brought down Ahok will now turn their fire on a bigger target: President Jokowi, who is up for re-election in 2019. For this reason, Ulil Abshar-Abdallah of the Liberal Islam Network described the Jakarta election as a “watershed” in Indonesia’s political history. “It’s created polarization in society,” he said. “For me it’s serious. Never before in the history of democratization in Indonesia have we had such polarization.”

This polarization has put particular pressure on the NU and Muhammadiyah, the two organizations that have historically occupied the broad middle-ground of Indonesian Islam. To be sure, both remain enormously influential, together claiming to represent some 75 million Indonesians, and providing a wide range of social services in far-flung corners of the country. But they seem to have been caught off guard by the sudden successes of Islamic street politics. While NU and Muhammadiyah leaders refused to endorse the mass protests against Ahok in late 2016, some of their members attended the rallies anyway, while others even went so far as to join groups like FPI leading the protests.

According to some, by trying to remain “above” active politics, NU and Muhammadiyah have unwittingly ceded terrain to groups like FPI, which have cleverly positioned themselves within Indonesia’s nationalist tradition. FPI, for instance, has expressed its opposition to the establishment of a global Islamic caliphate, something that alienates many Indonesian Muslims. Like the Donald Trump campaign in the United States, it has mixed identity politics with appeals to the economic anxieties of ordinary Indonesians, such as those evicted during the Jakarta slum clearances overseen by Ahok’s government.

Another reason for their success is messaging. In the world of wired communication that now dominates the lives of so many Indonesians, moderate voices increasingly find themselves on the margins. “If you Google a word like jihad, Google will direct you to radical websites,” said Savic Ali, a young NU member who runs the organization’s website as well as Nutizen, a new streaming video platform. He said that of the top 20 Islam-themed websites in Indonesia, there is only one “moderate” site: NU’s own website, which sits at number five. “They are more organized,” he said of the fundamentalists’ online efforts, “and they are more popular.”

Ali said that the priority for moderate organizations was to learn to tailor their messages to a generation weaned on streaming video and quick-bite social media grabs. “Young generations are more comfortable with videos – if we don’t create videos, then the young generation will learn about Islam from the Salafi media,” he said. Ali continued: “We have a problem with what we call the silent majority. Actually we believe that most Indonesian Muslims are moderate, but they are silent.”

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Despite all of these challenges, rumors of the death of Indonesian democracy may well be exaggerated. For one thing, such a prognosis overlooks just how unique – and possibly unrepeatable – were the confluence of interests and circumstances that brought about Ahok’s downfall. Writing shortly after his conviction, Aaron Connelly and Matthew Busch of Sydney’s Lowy Institute for International Affairs cast doubt on whether the coalition that brought down Ahok would be able to replicate its successes against Jokowi in 2019. In addition to enjoying the financial and political advantages of incumbency, they argued, the president is Javanese rather than Chinese, a Muslim rather than a Christian, both of which would make it more difficult to mobilize opposition against him on ethnic or religious grounds. During the 2014 election, attempts by far-right elements to tar Jokowi with a treasonous trifecta – that he was Chinese, Christian, and the offspring of communists – did little to prevent his ultimate victory.

While Ahok’s jailing was a serious setback for tolerance and liberal values in Indonesia, it’s also easy to overstate how moderate Indonesian Islam was in the first place, and how much less moderate ordinary people have become. To start with, even “moderate” Islamic organizations like NU have always included in their ranks leaders holding conservative values on issues such as women’s rights and the position of minorities. Ahok had a very high profile, but he was just one of the more than 100 case of blasphemy prosecuted since 2004. Furthermore, despite the increasing visibility of Islamic fundamentalism, support for explicitly Islamic parties remains stagnant. Since the 1999 election, the “Islamic vote” has hovered around a third of the total, often split among half a dozen or more different parties. On its own, the reactionary PKS has never gained more than 8 percent.

This suggests that while a lot of ordinary people opposed Ahok, it by no means follows that they all support the introduction of sharia or the creation of an Islamic state in Indonesia. It also suggests that over time, there is a good likelihood that Indonesian democracy will simply revert to its raucous, messy (and not necessarily liberal) mean. As Jokowi put it in an interview with Reuters in July, “Pluralism has always been part of Indonesia’s DNA” – even if liberalism hasn’t.

Indeed, more lasting threats could well come from Jokowi’s own illiberal attempts to safeguard the moderate tradition. In May, Indonesian police charged FPI supremo Habib Rizieq with violating anti-pornography laws – the same type of illiberal, sharia-inspired law that Rizieq himself has been advocating for years. (He quickly scuttled off to Saudi Arabia to avoid prosecution). Two months later, the government announced it was banning the Islamist group Hizbut Tahrir, under a controversial presidential decree giving officials the authority to disband organisations deemed to threaten “national unity.”

The New York-based advocacy group Human Rights Watch condemned the latter move, which enjoyed support from 14 moderate Islamic organizations, as “a troubling violation of universal rights to freedom of association and expression” – one that echoed a repressive ban on communism introduced at the start of Suharto’s rule in the mid-1960s. “Banning any organization strictly on ideological grounds,” it argued, “is a draconian action that undermines rights of freedom of association and expression that Indonesians have fought hard to establish since the end of the Suharto dictatorship in 1998.”

Whatever happens, Ulil Abshar-Abdallah said that the tension between Indonesian and global currents will persist. Over time, however, he expressed a quiet faith that Indonesia’s traditions, with all their complications and contradictions, would survive the pressures of globalization, both Islamic and secular, as they have already for more than a century.

“I believe that in the long run, that if Salafism exists here for 50 years or 100 years, it will be forced to adapt,” he said. “On the surface, the local tradition seems to be losing from time to time,” he added, “but they have certain ways of absorbing the great tradition.”

Published in The Diplomat, September 2017

Reporting for this story was supported by a grant from the International Reporting Project.