Monthly Archives: March 2018

Fake news, Facebook and fanning emotions

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March 30, 2018

Fake news, Facebook and fanning emotions

by Nathaniel Tan@www.malaysiakini.com

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COMMENT | Not so long ago, food trucks were a craze here in Kuala Lumpur. I enjoyed their novelty as much as the next guy. But at some point, it occurred to me… these aren’t new. We’ve had food trucks here almost as long as we’ve had trucks – lok lok, sugar cane, rojak and/or cendol, to name but a few.

Fake news is a little bit like that. It’s entered out lexicon in a way that suggests it was invented when Donald Trump was elected President of the United States. The truth is, that stuff goes back way further.

Image result for Tengku Razaeigh Hamzah in Christian Head gear

One 28-year-old example of fake news comes from when Tengku Razaleigh Hamzah was accused by UMNO of having Christian leanings, simply because a young woman in Sabah put traditional Kadazan headgear on his head that apparently had a cross somewhere in its design. Some say it cost him the 1990 general election.

Existing laws sufficient

One criticism of these new fake news bills, both here and in Singapore, is that there already exist plenty of laws to deal with the spreading of misinformation or lies.

This is entirely true. There is no way a country like Singapore would not already have plenty of ways to slap you six ways to Sunday for publishing something even remotely untrue.

The manner in which all these countries are now jumping on the fake news bandwagon and enacting unnecessary new legislation suggests that this action is not borne out of any genuine commitment to truth and responsible journalism, but merely a “fashionable” excuse to ramp up repression.

In Malaysia at least, the new laws are horribly worded and give an insane amount of power to the state to literally define what is true and what is not.

Giving this power to institutions that do not have the best reputation with regard to integrity and impartiality, to say the least, seems little more than an extension of the crackdown on legitimate dissent and satire.

The echo chamber

While fake news isn’t new, social media is – or relatively so, anyway. This basically means that now, like the AirAsia motto goes, everyone can publish fake news.

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Apparently, nobody understands this new power better than Russian trolls – the people some say played a pivotal role in Trump’s election. Cambridge Analytica has also apparently taken credit for that particular victory, citing its success in using data harvested from Facebook to guide micro-targeted political advertisements.

Amid these claims, I think what we should be most wary of regarding Facebook and other social media networks is the echo chamber effect.

I speculate that the success of the alleged Russian voter influence machine was predicated largely on the willingness of individuals to share material that appealed to them, and which they did not care to verify.

As our social media network often consists of people with similar views to us, what happens is that a lot of material gets bounced around similar networks – material that is often created and shaped with the explicit purpose of generating certain types of sentiment.

Over time, people often prefer platforms like Facebook, which essentially provides them with more of what they want to hear – either from like-minded people, or from microtargeted ads based on “psychographic” profiling.

Thus, a chamber where the same types of sentiment echo continuously back and forth.

What’s in a forwarded WhatsApp message?

One of the more interesting, ironic things about the “fake news” craze is that it’s used by every side.

In America, fake news probably helped get Trump elected. Simultaneously, “fake news” is also Trump’s favourite battle cry against his critics – saying for example, that the reports of Russians meddling in the American elections is, in fact, fake news.

As the circle goes round and round, it’s important not to think that it is only things we don’t like that are “fake news,” and that all other information that concurs with our pre-existing sentiment and views is genuine.

I likely share a number of demographic traits with your average Malaysiakini reader, and I speculate that many of you have received or forwarded material that is, essentially, fake news.

The examples I keep coming back to are material with an anti-Malay or anti-Muslim bent.

There are a couple of “favourites” that keep showing up again and again over the years. I think there’s one talking about how great Japan is because they don’t have any Muslims there.

Then, in the wake of the Robert Kuok controversy recently, there was another round of pro-Chinese, anti-Malay content circulating around again.

It’s a little bit of an uphill struggle, dealing with older generations in particular perhaps, but we should all do our part to encourage moderation and to make it harder for those trying to play on old prejudices and manipulate our various echo chambers for less than sanguine reasons.

The importance of objectivity

Objectivity is not a particularly common trait among humans – not consistently anyway.It’s not easy to expect people to self-police, and be aware of when they are becoming the target of manipulation, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try.

Perhaps, just as we were expecting the impending demise of traditional journalism as a result of technological evolution, we are seeing that same evolution recreate a need for professional, objective and neutral, fact-based journalism.

If news organisations can, over time, develop a solid reputation for integrity and commitment to ethical journalism, I do hope and believe that over time, society will eventually self-correct and gravitate towards more reliable sources of information.

Of course, no change happens without sufficient pushing by people who care sufficiently. Let’s hope enough of us will answer that call.

 

BOOK REVIEW: End of an Era

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March 30, 2018

BOOK REVIEW: End  of an Era

by John Berthelsen

http://www.asiasentinel.com

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Carl Minzner, a law professor at Fordham Law School in New York, has displayed absolutely stunning timing, coming out with a book saying China faces the prospect of slipping into decline because of authoritarianism at almost exactly the time that Xi Jinping appears to have bulldozed the National People’s Congress into in effect declaring him president for life by vaporizing the limitation on presidential service to two terms.

“This is not to say that regime collapse is imminent or even likely,” writes Minzner, who prior to joining Fordham as an expert on Chinese law and politics served as Senior Counsel for the Congressional-Executive Commission on China, as an International Affairs Fellow for the Council on Foreign Relations, and as Yale-China Legal Education Fellow at the Xibei Institute of Politics and Law in Xi’an. “The Qing dynasty continued on for decades after its peak, even as problems of elite governance and social unrest steadily worsened,” he notes.

But, he says, the relative, if halting progress towards some form of democracy under Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao has obviously been halted and reversed, and what is important is that the DNA for building a civic society has never made it out of the Petri dish. Lawyers, journalists and human rights activists are being thrown in jail in increasing numbers under Xi.

“There is almost no chance of a stable, liberal democracy emerging in such a situation. All institutions outside the Party itself are weak, underdeveloped and lack legitimacy. No alternative social forces or political movements or any size are waiting in the wings to pick up the pieces if the existing system should shatter.”

Much of the book is a valuable, clear-eyed tabulation of how, since Xi came to power in 2013, his grip has tightened. And, he says, China is different from the Soviet Union, which shattered and came apart. It won’t. “China’s reform era has produced what the Soviet Union lacked: a broad coalition of “winners “ – urban residents, homeowners, SOE employees, whose comfortable lifestyles are intimately intertwined wit the existing political system.”

Image result for carl minzner end of an era

Indeed. As we know, from the time of Deng Xiaoping’s Opening Up in the 1970s to the present, China uplifted 800 million people out of dire poverty – by far the most astonishing economic transformation in history. Today it is China and not the United States that is driving the global dialogue, not just on trade but on investment, infrastructure development and, given the vacuum that has opened in the west, in diplomacy. It was Xi Jinping at Davos, not anybody from the Trump administration, who starred.

But it was Tiananmen in 1979 that put paid to liberalization – that and Glasnost in Russia and the end of the Soviet Union. The tentative moves for village elections, any kind of accountability, is over.

“Look behind the shiny nameplates and imposing government buildings,” Minzner writes. “For all of China’s surface stability, there is a deep absence of institutionalized norms.”  That lack of institutionalized norms extends all the way from parents’ inability to deal with recalcitrant children to the most important foundations of government.

“Building real institutions is not a question of a party secretary (or parent) pounding his desk to mandate better systems of control. Nor is it a matter of issuing more bombastic exhortations of belief,” he says. “It requires agency – a regular back-and-forth between ruled and ruler alike through organized channels of governance that build popular faith in them as channels to resolve grievances and manage social tensions. The golden era was China’s golden opportunity to slowly construct such institutions. It failed to do so. Gradualist reforms that Chinese officials and citizens themselves had pursued…were slowly choked by an increasingly toxic atmosphere.”

Any hope that Hong Kong and Taiwan would point the way to reform for the motherland has been dashed. Hong Kong is being strangled. Taiwan, with perhaps the most vibrant democracy in Asia, is under deep threat.

Xi’s corruption campaign, which has jailed 1.3 million officials from lowly clerks to such tigers as the former security chief Zhou Yongkang, former Chongqing boss Bo Xilai, ex-presidential aide Ling Jihua and general Guo Boxiong, is as much a vehicle to rid the country of Xi’s competition, Minzner writes.

Taken together, this lack of ambition to institutionalize workable government norms and a long list of other missing foundations – at a time when China is about to join the rest of the world’s major nations with vastly slowing growth – means the era is over, Minzner theorizes.

But is it. Look at Singapore, where only a façade of democracy exists, and where free expression has been strangled since Lee Kuan Yew came to power in 1959. Admittedly Singapore is a much more manageable 5.6 million people. But even today, the People’s Action Party, headed by Kuan Yew’s son Hsien Loong, is contemplating new legislation that would strangle dissent even more.

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When the Asian Wall Street Journal was kicked out of Singapore in 1988, the newspaper’s editors, in a blistering editorial, said the lack of freedom of the press would come back to haunt the island republic and that basically it was never going to count for much. Today Singapore’s per-capita GDP ranks fourth in the world and second in Asia after Macau on a PPP basis. Sadly both China and Singapore are demonstrating that economic well-being has decoupled from the practice of democracy. One wishes Minzner were right. But doubts are growing.

 

A ‘Malay Malaysia’, but in what sense Islamic?

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March 30, 2018

A ‘Malay Malaysia’, but in what sense Islamic?

by Anthony Milner

A ‘Malay Malaysia’, but in what sense Islamic?

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The Najib government needs to win new legitimacy at GE-14 if it’s to juggle Malay, Islamic, and royal claims, amid a restive East Malaysia.

The government’s determination to focus on the Malay community is shrewd politics, but it also plays into a major transformation taking place in Malaysia, the consolidation of a specifically Malay Malaysia.

What exactly this Malaysia will look like is not certain, but there is a demand for a stronger Islamic role. The Malayisation process has been underway for decades, and is partly a matter of demographic change. At the time of independence (1957), Malays were only about half of the country’s population; today they are a clear majority in Peninsular Malaysia, and together with other indigenous peoples (the bumiputra, “sons of the soil”) make up over 68 per cent of the Malaysian total. Building a Malay Malaysia will entail reconsideration of the nation’s founding document.

The (Najib) government’s determination to focus on the Malay community is shrewd politics, but it also plays into a major transformation taking place in Malaysia, the consolidation of a specifically Malay Malaysia.–Milner

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The Future of an inclusive, secular and liberal Malaysian Malaysia is bleak.

At a glance, the constitution of 1957 displays the strong influence of the English-speaking world, with its Westminster parliamentary system and Australian/United States federal structure, and has been said to imply a “liberal-democratic order”. But the constitution also includes local formulations that over time have influenced Malaysia’s identity as a nation, and they all bear on the process of building a more Malay nation.

First, the “sovereignty, prerogatives, powers and jurisdiction” of the nine monarchs of Malaysia are stressed, and in a manner conveying (in the words of one prominent legal scholar) that the role of the monarch “far exceeds” specific “constitutional provisions” [fn1]. Second, “the Malays” are declared to have a “special position” in the country, and are assured a particular share of appointments in public service and educational opportunities. Moreover, the constitution names Malay as the “national language”. Third, although the constitution is sometimes seen as inaugurating a secular polity, and declares itself to be “the supreme law of the Federation”, it contains the potent but confusing statement that Islam is “the religion of the Federation”. Multiple monarchy, Malay pre-eminence, and Islamic priority: these features together help make Malaysia internationally distinctive. The meaning and significance of each element, however, continue to be debated.

Image result for Jamal Yunos and The Red ShirtsUMNO’s Jamal Yunos and his Red Shirts are endorsed by Prime Minister  Najib Razak

 

 

Following race riots between non-Malay (Chinese and Indian) and Malay Malaysians in 1969, the Malay character of the country was sharpened, with a greater stress on the Malay language and culture, as well as promoting Malay economic opportunities. In the 1980s the concept of “ketuanan Melayu”, often translated as “Malay dominance”, was enunciated. Besides UMNO, other organisations such as Perkasa (formed in 2008) and more recently the Red Shirts have played an activist role in promoting Malay rights. With respect to religious identity, Pas has long urged a greater role for Islamic doctrine in the legal system and Malay society generally. Particularly during the Mahathir administration (1981–2003), the government itself instituted policies to enhance the role of Islam, for instance through the creation of an Islamic bank and an Islamic university, and the strengthening of the role of Islamic courts.

Alongside the Najib administration’s emphasis on moderation internationally, something welcomed especially in Western countries, the domestic focus on gaining Malay support has encouraged less-moderate initiatives. In August a minister in the Prime Minister’s Department said atheists should be “hunted down” and returned “to their faith”. The government also appeared to assist the attempt by Pas to strengthen the Islamic criminal code (hudud) by empowering shariah courts to impose heavier punishments. A further move was the change in leadership of PM Najib’s Global Movement of Moderates, established to further the government’s moderation objectives. The new CEO (appointed in 2015), Nasharudin Mat Isa, formerly a PAS Deputy President, soon focused on how best to implement and explain hudud law in the country. “Malaysia being a Muslim state,” he said, “we can be a model of how that kind of law is implemented in a modern society.” Consistent with this appointment, the Prime Minister explained that moderation would now be pursued on the basis of shariah principles and insisted that “humanism and secularism as well as liberalism” were a “threat to Islam”.

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The July 2017 banning of the book Breaking the Silence: Voices of Moderation, produced by a group of prominent moderate Muslims called the G25, also illustrated the changing religious climate. In Malaysia’s “constitutional democracy,” the book insists, the federal constitution is the “supreme law of the country,” and “any law enacted, including Islamic laws,” must not “violate the Constitution,” with its stress on such “fundamental liberties” as the “rights to freedom of expression and worship”. Among those opposing the ban, the Human Rights Commission of Malaysia (Suhakam) argued that the book’s contents were in line with PM Najib’s advocacy of moderation (wasatiyyah) in Islam.

There have been protests from the non-Malay partners in the ruling coalition about the government’s support for religious conservatism. “Malaysia is a secular country,” an officer of the Malaysian Chinese Association declared in March 2017, insisting that the federal constitution requires “defending all religions.” Faced with such views, in March the government backed away from actually sponsoring the hudud bill introduced by PAS. Despite such reversals, however, the momentum toward Islamisation is strong. In 2017, for instance, public whipping was introduced in Kelantan state; and Pahang state adopted the Islamic concept of diyat, which allows a victim’s family to influence sentencing involving the death penalty. Considering these initiatives, it is important to take note of polling that suggests strong support in the Malay community for religious conservatism. Furthermore, in the view of some Islamic activists, current religious initiatives merely follow a long history of burgeoning Islamisation, reaching back before British intervention in the 19th century.

The Constitution’s reference to Islam as “the religion of the Federation” is also increasingly highlighted—placed above the claim that the Constitution itself is “the supreme law”—and seen as a basis for arguing (as a former chief justice did this year) that “anything which is in contradiction to Islam is unconstitutional”. One matter clear in the Constitution is that the nine rulers are “the Head of the religion of Islam” in their respective states. The Conference of Rulers—which in late 2015, in the context of the 1MDB investigation, had questioned the “government’s credibility and integrity in administrating the country”—took an assertive stand on religious matters in October 2017. The Johor sultan had condemned a launderette for adopting a Muslim-only policy. Johor, he said, “belongs to all races and faiths” and is “not a Taliban state.” In response, a religious teacher who supported the ban on non-Muslims insisted that “we are a Muslim country,” and that in taking a stand he was “carrying out my responsibility to spread Islamic teachings.” The Conference of Rulers then stated its concern to protect “the harmony that currently exists within our multi-religious and multi-ethnic society.”

Related

 

GE14: the polls, the money, the stakes

Ibrahim Suffian, Terence Gomez, Fadiah Nadwa Fikri and Amrita Malhi talk with Kean Wong about what’s at stake in Malaysia’s 2018 elections.New Mandala 20 March, 2018

 

 

The Rulers were conveying that, despite being “heads” of Islam, and despite the King’s constitutional duty to “safeguard the special position of the Malays,” they consider themselves to be reigning over all their subjects, irrespective of ethnicity. The Constitution, in fact, refers to “rulers,” not “Malay rulers,” and there is a long record of Malaysian rulers speaking in an ethnically inclusive manner. Just what role the rulers might play in shaping a Malay Malaysia, however, will depend not only on their ability to attract non-Malay support but also on their skill in handling the increase in both Islamic and Malay nationalist demands.

If the Najib government fails to achieve a comfortable victory in the coming election, the task of accommodating and juggling Malay, Islamic, and royal claims—and also the growing demand of the East Malaysian states for greater autonomy—will be all the more formidable.–Milner

Malaysia is a society in transition. Malay ethnic demands, far-reaching Islamic aspirations, and royal assertiveness—each in its particular way challenges the liberal, secular structure that many saw being ushered in with the 1957 constitution. These concepts are all, however, embedded in that document—waiting, as it were, for future opportunity. If the Najib government fails to achieve a comfortable victory in the coming election, the task of accommodating and juggling Malay, Islamic, and royal claims—and also the growing demand of the East Malaysian states for greater autonomy—will be all the more formidable.

[1] Raja Azlan Shah, ‘‘The Role of Constitutional Rulers in Malaysia,’’ in F. A. Trindade and H. P. Lee (eds.), The Constitution of Malaysia: Further Perspectives and Developments (Singapore: Oxford University Press, 1986): 89.

[2] Arfa Yunus, ‘‘Laws in Contradiction to Islamic Laws are Void, Says Former Chief Justice,’’ New Straits Times, March 25, 2017

This excerpt is from ‘Malaysia in 2017: Clever Politics, Deeper Transformation’, Asian Survey, Vol. 58, Number 1.

Misunderstanding ASEAN

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March 29, 2018

Misunderstanding ASEAN

by Bunn Nagara@www.thestar.com.my

“SO when is China going to join ASEAN?” a foreign news editor asked me in the early 1990s by way of introduction at a luncheon meeting in Tokyo.

He had asked when, not if, seeming to assume it was just a matter of time. There was no talk or even rumour of such a prospect at the time, so he must have just dreamt it up.

It was so ludicrous as to seem like a trick question.

Shouldn’t a foreign news editor be better informed about ASEAN and China than to even think of asking such a question? And yet so much about ASEAN remains unknown even among some of its national leaders.

Image result for Duterte and ASEAN
Turkey in ASEAN?– You must be joking, Mr. President
Last year Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte advocated ASEAN membership for Turkey and Mongolia. The Philippines at the time held the rotating chairmanship of ASEAN, and Duterte must have thought he could do as he pleased.
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Jokowi wants Australian Prime Minister, Malcolm Turnbull, to keep him company in ASEAN. What a ridiculous idea.

This year it was the turn of Indonesian President Joko Widodo to dabble in the ridiculous. On a recent trip to Australia he told the media that Australia should join ASEAN.

Nobody else in ASEAN took either remark seriously, even if those statements made the news throughout the region. In case of lingering delusions resulting from these statements, some history may help.

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South-East Asia has had more than its share of regional organisations through the decades.

During the Cold War, the US and its allies fashioned the South-East Asia Treaty Organisation (SEATO) as a bulwark against international communism. It was basically a military grouping to turn the region into a Cold War zone. SEATO was a misnomer from the start, with six of its eight members from outside South-East Asia. Even the two members from this region, Thailand and the Philippines, were allies of the US in a Western-directed Cold War scheme.

Indonesia and Malaya (later Malaysia), which wanted no part of the Cold War, stayed out. So did most other countries in the region including Cambodia.

The Association of South-East Asia (ASA) was another attempt at regional identity politics. But with only three members Thailand, Malaya and the Philippines, it lacked credibility and purpose.

MAPHILINDO comprising Malaya, Philippines and Indonesia was yet another attempt by South-East Asian countries to create an organisation of the countries of the region themselves. MAPHILINDO came on the eve of Malaysia’s formation, with the undeclared purpose by Macapagal’s Philippines and Sukarno’s Indonesia to thwart the creation of Malaysia. Indonesia had its confrontation (konfrontasi) policy against Malaysia, while the Philippines pursued its claim to Sabah. Thus MAPHILINDO was diplomatically worded to favour Malaya over the others.

Still that did not work. With MAPHILINDO’s hidden purpose known to Malaya, it suffered from neglect and died an early death.

Soon after that Malaysia was born (September 16, 1963) with Sabah, Sarawak, Singapore and Malaya coming together to form a new federation.

Meanwhile, historic change was underway in Indonesia. Rebellion erupted against Sukarno’s rule, he was stripped of his life presidency, and konfrontasi against Malaysia ended when General Suharto assumed power in 1965.

Malaysian officials and their Indonesian counterparts had worked feverishly behind the scenes to manage an emerging situation with a fledgling new Indonesia. Within months, ASEAN was born in 1967.

Thus began a slow but steady process of regional institution building to ensure peace, stability and prosperity through fraternity. Since then, ASEAN has been at the heart of this process.

The other three co-founding members of ASEAN were Thailand, the Philippines and Singapore. With ASEAN, the dormant Philippine claim to Sabah stayed dormant between governments.

Since Indonesia, the Philippines and Malaysia had been locked in disputes over territory and Sukarno’s aggression, ASEAN had to come by way of a neutral partner country: Thailand.

So the Bangkok Declaration of August 8, 1967 saw the formation of ASEAN, following much spadework by Thai officials to ensure agreement. Malaysia acknowledged the hard work put in by Thai Foreign Minister Thanat Khoman, awarding him the title of “Tun” for his efforts.

However, right from the start, disparities existed among ASEAN member countries. There was a hulking Indonesia next to Singapore, while differences in economic development made for more variations.

For ASEAN to work, all members had to agree to certain basics: all members were equal regardless of size or wealth, decisions would be made by consensus, ASEAN chairmanship would be by rotation, none shall interfere in another’s internal affairs, and disputes had to be resolved peacefully.

Even as Thailand and the Philippines continued to host US military bases, these would only be temporary and never to be used against another member country. The ASEAN region would equate peace with freedom and neutrality, while rejecting all manner of nuclear weapons.

The spirit and essence of ASEAN is non-alignment. Today all 10 ASEAN members are in the Non-Aligned Movement, with Thailand, the Philippines and Brunei the latest to join in 1993.

When Duterte championed Turkey and Mongolia for ASEAN membership, many in the region were taken aback. Aung San Suu Kyi asked if he had considered geography and he said he had, showing instead how he had failed to grasp the subject and the question.

Neither Turkey nor Mongolia is in South-East Asia. Besides, Turkey is a member of NATO and is hoping to join the EU.

When Jokowi advocated Australia’s membership of ASEAN, he seemed to have lacked the luxury of thinking before speaking. To be fair he was probably prodded into a rash answer, or something must have been lost in translation.

His apparent enthusiasm has not been supported by his colleagues in government, among Indonesia’s elites or anyone else in ASEAN.

Australia is not in Asia, much less in South-East Asia. When Paul Keating was Prime Minister he insisted Australia was in Asia, but when he moved to a solemn academic post he admitted it wasn’t. Neither is Australia a non-aligned country, nor likely ever to be one. It is comfortably set in the US strategic alliance. Yet some senior Australian figures and establishments like the Asia Society Policy Institute recommend Australia joining ASEAN in 2024 together with New Zealand. Clearly, it is not just a deficiency in geography that is at issue.

One or even a few ASEAN leaders do not make decisions for a grouping that operates by consensus. When ASEAN was being formed in 1967, Malaysian Prime Minister Tunku Abdul Rahman reportedly favoured Sri Lanka’s membership.

Singapore opposed it, while the other three members were not particularly motivated either way. A decade later Papua New Guinea applied to join and ASEAN has kept it waiting ever since.

Some reports suggest even Pakistan and Bangladesh had been keen to join. Again, a better sense of geography and geopolitics would help to keep things in perspective. In 2011 Timor Leste applied to join ASEAN with the official support of Indonesia and Cambodia. Unlike the other hopefuls, the territory and people of Timor Leste had been in ASEAN before independence as part of Indonesia and as Indonesians.

No country joins ASEAN without a formal invitation, with that invitation resulting only from a consensus among all member countries. However, consensus is more accessible than unanimity.

Bunn Nagara is a Senior Fellow at the Institute of Strategic and International Studies (ISIS) Malaysia.

Hun Sen: No one negotiates better than me

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March 29, 2018

Hun Sen: No one negotiates better than me

by Ben Sokhean and Quinn Libson

https://www.phnompenhpost.com/national/hun-sen-no-one-negotiates-better-me-history-world-leaders

Ben Sokhean, Quinn Libson and Political Analyst Meas Nee would be well advised to read Astrid Noren-Nilsson’s Cambodia’s Second Kingdom: Nation, Imagination and Democracy for a proper understanding of H.E.Cambodian Prime Minister  Samdech Techo Hun Sen’s political philosophy, his trials and tribulations, his achievements since he took control of the country in 1998, and Cambodia’s contested history since Independence in 1953. Samdech Techo Hun Sen puts democracy building in an explicitly developmental context. For the Cambodian Premier, it is peace, stability and development first. –Din Merican

Prime Minister prepares to speak at a gathering of garment workers in the capital on Wednesday. Facebook

In a boast reminiscent of US President Donald Trump, Prime Minister Hun Sen went on a tangent on Wednesday before thousands of garment workers in Por Sen Chey district extolling his negotiating prowess, calling himself one of the top negotiators in the “history of world leaders”, while reiterating that he would not actually be engaging in any such negotiations with the opposition.

The premier emphasised the role he played in negotiating with former members of the Khmer Rouge, saying “Hun Sen’s presence [at negotiations] helped to solve the problems with the soldiers”. He also posited that the job of negotiator, in some ways, is even harder than the role of a soldier on a battlefield, explaining that in battle, the lower-ranked soldiers are the ones in the line of fire, while in negotiation, it’s the high-ranking combatants – like Hun Sen – who are the ones who see the action.

“There is no one using negotiation opportunities better than me in the history of world leaders,” the prime minister told the workers, adding that he had also been carrying out negotiations for longer than any other current leaders.

Political analyst Meas Nee, however, challenged the validity of Hun Sen’s boasts, saying such talks should not just result in a “winner and loser”.

“The negotiator is a person who enables the involved parties to work with one another and solve the problem,” Nee said. “If we look at the current political crisis in Cambodia, if the leader is good, the political crisis would not be stuck in the deadlock it is today, and I think that it would be solved already.”

Image result for Hun Sen and Samy Rainsy

Despite Hun Sen’s claim that his negotiation skills rival all others, the premier is maintaining his position that he will not entertain the possibility of talks with former members of the forcibly dissolved Cambodia National Rescue Party, which had previously been the only legitimate challenger to Hun Sen’s Cambodian People’s Party in this July’s national elections. On Monday, Hun Sen insisted that there would be no pardons for jailed opposition figures or talks with the CNRP.

CPP spokesman Sok Eysan pinned the blame for the lack of compromise on former opposition leader Sam Rainsy, maintaining that Hun Sen is trying to “build a culture of dialogue” with the result that “all Cambodian people are happy and welcome”. Rainsy has been out of the country since 2015, fleeing a host of politically tinged convictions against him, including some in cases levelled by the premier himself.

“The convict Sam Rainsy is the one trying to destroy the culture of dialogue until it’s dead,” Eysan said.

Responding to Wednesday’s speech, Rainsy had a message for the Premier: “[B]eing really effective in negotiations aimed at peacefully resolving national issues requires at least two fundamental skills: intelligence, which he seems to demonstrate, and courage, which he has yet to show.”

“Hun Sen seems to be only guided by fear in his continuous refusal to engage in any negotiation with the CNRP, the only credible opposition party.”

 

This article previously said Prime Minister Hun Sen’s speech was given on Tuesday March 27. In fact it was given on Wednesday March 28. This has  been amended.