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SPEAKING
FREELY
Asia's
hypocrisy over Australia
By Manjit
Bhatia
Now that the United States has openly
backed Australian Prime Minister John Howard and his
talk of preemptive strikes against potential terrorist
attacks on Australian interests, the region's leaders
will take this as Canberra's latest foreign- and
defense-policy doctrine. And it'll add more weight to
the theory that Australia is indeed the United States'
"deputy sheriff" in the region.
Once it was
thought that Howard had volunteered Australia to the
role by agreeing to the United Nations-mandated East
Timor political transition task. So now the opposition
Australian Labor Party - struggling to be heard or seen
by voters, and lacking a policy position that would
differentiate it from the governing Conservative
coalition - wants Howard to apologize to Southeast Asia,
on whose nose he reeks.
The scorn heaped by the
region's leaders and the media on Australia has been
relentless. There have been accusations that Australia
has an imperialistic attitude and is the United States'
lapdog. They've threatened to review their comprehensive
relationship with Australia, including cooperation and
intelligence on the "war on terror".
Then
there's the predictable Malaysian Prime Minister
Mahathir Mohamad, warning Australia that preemptive
strikes would be "an act of war". Howard's refusal to
retract his remarks, and his refusal to apologize, only
reveals his belligerence and recalcitrance, and his
anti-Asian hide.
With his popularity at a
seven-year high, even after manipulating terrorist
threats immediately after September 11, 2001, the
vicious and dishonest labeling of asylum seekers as
terrorist suspects and criminals, and the Bali massacre
last October, Howard doesn't feel the need to apologize
to anyone.
To his critics in Asia and Australia,
his message has been simple but effective: lest they
forget the evil of September 11 and October 12.
Australian voters have swallowed whole Howard's constant
jawboning.
Paul Kelly of The Australian
newspaper says this is no way for Australia to win
friends in Asia, who have long been suspicious of
Australia's place in the region. Singapore's former
prime minister (now senior minister), Lee Kuan Yew, once
called Australia the "poor white trash in Asia".
Mahathir has repeatedly said that unless
Australia's population becomes 70 percent Asian, or
shows it is "truly Asian", it will never be accepted in
the region. Michelle Grattan of The Age reminds Howard
that "words are bullets" and that he should have been
more careful before mouthing off.
But Howard
says his remarks were "low-key", "accurate" and "not
directed at any of our [Asian] friends. [And] I don't
resile from them in any way." Nor should he.
While the usual suspects - Malaysia, Indonesia
and the Philippines - wasted little time in hurling
abuse at Australia over Howard's remarks and refusal to
apologize, notably Singapore and Thailand barely uttered
a word. Thailand joined the chorus later. On December
11, Singapore joined the fray, under duress from the
usual suspects, and only in the spurious name of
Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN)
solidarity: interestingly, Singapore's criticism of
Australia's preemptive-strike theory was significantly
toned down.
But so much of the vitriol flung at
Australia by Southeast Asia's leaders is sheer
hypocrisy. Immediately after September 11, 2001, these
same leaders were queuing for an audience with US
President George W Bush, not only to show solidarity
with Washington in its war on terrorism but also to win
US material and moral support for their own struggles
against armed secessionists, political opponents, and
religious fundamentalists and extremists.
The
mostly Christian Philippines invited US Special Forces
to help it eliminate the Muslim Moros and Abu Sayyaf in
Mindanao. Singapore wants to host US warships at a
specially built naval facility - a move not criticized
by Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand or the Philippines.
Thai Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra's spiel
last week was laced with a strong denial that terrorists
could be hiding in the thick forests, small towns and
villages of southern Thailand, whose porous border with
Malaysia is so dense with jungle that even joint
Thai-Malaysian military operations struggled to weed out
armed communist insurgents during the Malayan Emergency
(1948-60). Today, bandits, narcotics and contraband
traders, and arms smugglers flout slack and corrupt
security patrols and customs officers.
After the
ruckus by Kuala Lumpur, Malaysian authorities failed to
detect a boatload of weapons destined for independence
fighters in Aceh in northern Sumatra. That's not all.
From the evidence so far, it seems al-Qaeda and Jemaah
Islamiyah operatives, including Abu Bakar Ba'asyir, had
easily moved into and out of Malaysia and Indonesia,
undetected and unsuspected. Ba'asyir had even been to
Australia several times.
Clearly, intelligence
services in these countries were caught napping, as they
were also in Europe and the US. Only Singapore's
security agencies have been vigilant enough, albeit
after September 11, in nabbing suspected terrorists.
Elsewhere, similar moves have been after-the-fact
attempts. Still, the region's leaders strongly deny
terrorists could be hiding in Southeast Asia, possibly
planning their next attacks. Hadn't Indonesian President
Megawati Sukarnoputri sat on her hands on flushing out
terrorists until after the Bali carnage?
But
Howard says no more: strike at them before they strike
at us. And what's wrong with that? Why wait if you can
stop it from happening? Prevention is better than cure:
remember that?
Besides, when the US announced
its preemptive-strike doctrine, some leaders grumbled,
warning that national sovereignty was at risk. But
overall, they knew the US was angry and nothing would
stop it from seeking revenge. And these same critics
have enjoyed and continue to enjoy material and other
benefits from the world's sole superpower, especially
when economic markets are entwined with militarization
and security. But to be sure, their criticisms were
mostly for domestic consumption.
With many Asian
economies still struggling to emerge from the economic
crisis of the late 1990s, after all the frauds heaped on
the capitalist classes through cronyism, nepotism and
corruption by the political elite, regime legitimacy
still largely rests with domestic political
constituencies, which remain cowed by authoritarian
state power, such as Mahathir wielding the
Stalinist-like Internal Security Act.
Moreover,
when Senator Robert Hill, Australia's defense minister,
first raised the prospect of preemptive strikes some
months ago on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation's
(ABC's) Lateline program, nobody in Australia or
Asia raised a heckle then, as they have for Howard,
despite neither Howard nor Foreign Minister Alexander
Downer being forewarned of Hill's plan.
Reappearing just a week ago on Lateline, Hill
reiterated his original score, this time adding that in
the war on terrorism, "this new environment requires a
more liberal definition of self-defense". Again, there
were no major protests from Southeast Asian leaders;
unusual, as anything Australia says about Asia, directly
or indirectly, gets so blown up in the region and often
invites caustic reactions. So why did Howard say what he
did? But why not?
A major accusation against
Howard is that he shouldn't have responded to a
hypothetical question posed by ABC's 7:30 Report
host, Kerry O'Brien. That's nonsense, even though Howard
had previously said he wouldn't respond to
"hypotheticals". And The Age's Grattan says:
"Speculation, however hypothetical, about the doctrine
of preemptive strikes is unhelpful." Baloney.
During Roman Empire days, battle strategies were
thought out on hypotheticals. The same during the
American Civil War, World Wars I and II, the Korean War,
the Vietnam War, the Iran-Iraq War, the Gulf War, and so
on. In just about any major military conflict, degrees
of hypothesizing threats and responses are an accepted,
conventional part of defense planning - even during
peacetime. What's more, Article 51 of the UN Charter has
consistently allowed its interpretation of self-defense
to include measures involving preemption and even
unilateral action. And each time during acts or threats
of war, the notion of sovereignty becomes watery.
Welcome to realpolitik.
But Howard did
say, if critics had chosen to listen carefully, that
Australia would first seek consultations with and
agreement from other governments for preemptive strikes,
which would probably be carried out as joint actions.
Howard shouldn't ignore the criticisms from
Asia, even if he has strong support from the US and
tacit support from Singapore and Japan, and only
measured caution from China (which should be read as
considerable support, given China's thorny relations
with Taiwan). But he needn't apologize to Southeast
Asia. He shouldn't kowtow to their bullying antics.
The hypocrisy of Southeast Asian leaders who
chose to condemn Australia, including shamelessly using
racist undertones, merely shows they are in denial about
the real threats posed by terrorists and about the
fundamentally changed world order since September 11,
2001. Just as they were also in denial about the Asian
financial crisis.
The only sane voice to emerge
from the region was that of Indonesia's Foreign Minister
Hassan Wirajuda, who said Howard's remarks were "just an
idea ... not a plan of action. That is why we do not
need to overreact in our interpretation." Besides, the
Southeast Asian leaders' hubbub finds its morality and
sanctity in the hubris propagated by the apparent
philosophical underpinnings of that bogus concept, Asian
values.
Asia's leaders use "Asian values" merely
to protect the region's ruling classes from facing ugly
realities and accountability for their actions, as a
brutal state-backed force against the rise of civil
society, and as defense against outside (Western)
criticisms. It's the old Asian story all over again - of
hypocrisy, humbug and cant.
(Manjit
Bhatia is with the School of International Business
and Asian & International Studies at Griffith
University, Australia.)
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