Before the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, American officials might have reacted angrily to this apparent abuse of civil liberties. This time they didn’t say a word. The world has changed, and Washington has a new agenda for Southeast Asia, the place it considers the second front in the war on terror. The old U.S. priorities–democratic reform, human rights, free trade–have not disappeared. They’ve simply been overshadowed by Washington’s fixation on terrorism. Last month’s horrific bomb blasts in Bali, Indonesia, which killed nearly 200, only heightened the sense of urgency. But now, as the governments of Southeast Asia rush to draft antiterror strategies, the questions arise: How much will these new measures curtail civil rights, especially among the region’s vast Muslim population? And how will these fragmented, multiethnic nations balance the demands of fighting terrorism with the dangers of social upheaval and democratic backsliding?
There are no clear answers yet. So far, the urgent U.S. push to strengthen the war on terror has affected only the few hundred people being detained across the region. Some may be innocent, but the public outcry has been muted. In Malaysia and Singapore, where governments have long used arbitrary powers to detain criminals or political opponents, the biggest change is that Washington no longer pesters them about human-rights abuses. In cacophonous young democracies like Indonesia and the Philippines, the dangers are more palpable. The flurry of new antiterror measures remind reformers and Muslim groups too much of old strong-arm tactics; they are afraid of losing relatively recent democratic gains. “Now the yardstick by which America measures the quality of its allies is by their commitment to antiterrorism,” says Indonesian writer Wimar Witoelar, a former aide to ex-president Abdurrahman Wahid. “We sorely miss the people who used to champion human rights and democracy here.”
The stakes are highest in Indonesia, a fragile and splintered nation that has the largest Muslim population in the world. When U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell visited Jakarta in August, he made clear that Washington continues to hold human rights and democratic reform as foreign-policy priorities in Indonesia. But the main purpose of his visit was to strengthen the weak link in the war on terrorism. The Bush administration was especially disappointed with President Megawati Sukarnoputri’s reluctance to arrest Muslim cleric Abu Bakar Bashir, the alleged leader of Jemaah Islamiyah, a Southeast Asia-based terrorist group with links to Al Qaeda. Washington provided no clear evidence on Bashir, Indonesian officials say, so Megawati–indecisive in the best of times–was left with an excruciating choice. Refusing to arrest Bashir ran the risk of international isolation, but wrongly imprisoning a Muslim leader could threaten the country’s delicate social stability.
The bomb blasts in Bali tipped the balance. In the days after the tragedy, Megawati moved quickly to appease Western nations angered by her inaction. The president put an ailing Bashir under arrest. She signed two emergency decrees that vastly expand the power of security forces. And, in the most symbolic move, she appointed a former Suharto henchman, retired three-star Gen. A. M. Hendropriyono, to oversee Indonesia’s splintered spy network. The U.S. ambassador to Indonesia, Ralph Boyce, applauded Megawati’s moves. Intelligence officials in Washington are particularly satisfied with the promotion of Hendropriyono, whom they see as the person in Indonesia most deeply committed to fighting Al Qaeda.
Washington may be pleased, but some Islamic groups and reform-minded Indonesians are worried about a return to the days of Suharto. Officials’ announcement last week that a top suspect had confessed to the Bali bombings raised eyebrows and concerns. “We are suspicious of this latest Bali confession not because we’re Islamic radicals but because we remember that for decades the military would produce terrorists, extract false confessions and lock them up–all to maintain control,” says one Indonesian intellectual recalling Suharto’s 32-year rule. Hendropriyono himself led a 1989 military operation against a fundamentalist Islamic sect in Lampung district that left scores dead, earning him the moniker, among Muslims, as the “Butcher of Lampung.” Now, four years after Suharto’s fall, Megawati is turning back to the military and Hendropriyono. Indonesian legislators are drafting an antiterror law that incorporates Megawati’s new decrees. “We just got rid of our Internal Security Act and now they are starting with a new one,” says Jusuf Wanandi, director of the Centre for Strategic and International Studies in Jakarta.
A key question in Southeast Asia is whether antiterror measures should work like the movie “Minority Report,” in which cops caught criminals before they committed their misdeeds. “Pre-crime,” as the movie called it, already exists to some extent in Singapore and Malaysia. Before 9-11, American officials roundly criticized how both countries used internal-security acts to do their dirty work: detaining opposition activists or potential criminals indefinitely without charges or trials. Now that those countries are using the same laws to round up terrorist suspects–and U.S. authorities are using similar tactics at home–Washington is looking the other way. In the upcoming State Department human-rights report for 2002, Malaysia’s Anwar is still labeled a political prisoner, as are the opposition activists detained in early 2001. But the United States does not question the cases of 72 others (68 of whom are still in detention) who have been held under Malaysia’s ISA since the summer of 2001. Nor does it criticize the 31 people detained in Singapore over the same months.
The locals aren’t griping much, either. Before 9-11, long-suffering citizens throughout Southeast Asia voiced deep concern about security forces acting with impunity and infringing on hard-won civil liberties. But with the attacks on America–and now the bombings in Bali and the southern Philippine island of Mindanao–the public mood has changed. Today people seem more willing to give their governments more leeway, even if it means curtailing the same freedoms that are threatened by the terrorists. “I’m right behind the government’s detaining these terrorists before they get up to any mischief,” says Malaysian accountant Vincent Lim, echoing a common view throughout the region. “It’s people like that who can destroy everything we’ve built up.” Such suspension of disbelief may end up reinforcing governments’ authoritarian tendencies. Chandra Muzaffar, a former Malaysian opposition-party leader and now head of a social-issues think tank, says: “I think the government will be able to continue [with its detentions] with little more than a whimper of protest.”
Even in the Philippines, the usually raucous press and public have been largely silent on the more controversial elements of antiterror proposals. One of the leading bills in Congress would outlaw “acts preparatory to terrorism”: planning and training; gathering information on potential targets; providing transport, communications, weapons and so on. National-security adviser Roilo Golez says such pre-emptive moves are necessary. “I’m more worried about lives and human bodies lacerated than human rights violated,” he told NEWSWEEK. “Of course, these preparations have to be overt. But we don’t have to wait for the smoking gun because if we do–that’s the one that has been fired already.”
One of the most fervent opponents of these pre-crime provisions is none other than Imee Marcos, the daughter of the former dictator. “That’s scary stuff,” says Marcos, who has proposed a bill that is careful not to trample on human rights. “Antiterror law must not ultimately come to terrorize the people it seeks to protect.” Many of the ideas being hatched in the Philippines, though, seem reminiscent of her father’s regime. The National Security Council has resurrected a plan to have a national computerized identification system, a proposal that was shot down by the Supreme Court in 1996. There are plans to arm civilian guards in Manila and revive the “secret marshals” used by Marcos during the 1970s and 1980s. “These measures, coming one after another, pose more harm and long-term danger than the threat of bombings,” says Dani Beltran, secretary-general of the human-rights group Ecumenical Movement for Justice and Peace.
The desire to please Washington has put some Asian governments in awkward positions. Megawati has placed Bashir under house arrest, but her government–fearing the social consequences of putting him on trial or handing him over to the Americans–doesn’t know what to do next with the cleric. Malaysia transferred alleged Qaeda suspect Ahmed Ibrahim Bilal to U.S. authorities when they canceled his passport in early October, circumventing its own extradition rules in the process. In the Philippines, President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo proudly presented the nation a cell of alleged terrorists arrested in May in the northern provinces of Tarlac and Pangasinan. The TV cameras panned from the eight members of the group to a cache of firearms and grenades. But after further investigation, only two of the six included in the complaint were actually charged for illegal possession of firearms. Charges against the rest were dropped.
Washington’s obsession with terrorism has roots that are horrifically real. But it also has implications that are potentially dangerous for Southeast Asian democracies that have only recently emerged from a darker, authoritarian past. The region, like Eastern Europe after the fall of communism, is still run by leaders and militaries weaned on power: even Arroyo and Megawati, two democratically elected presidents, are both daughters of autocratic leaders. Critics warn they may take advantage of the war on terror to consolidate their power, isolate their opposition and forget about democratic reforms. The region can’t afford to slip back into chaos or dictatorship. “If [the United States] would like us to be at the forefront of this fight, the main problem for us is how to stay democratic in the future,” says Wanandi. Like its partners in the region, Washington must also find a balance between its old and new agendas–or else neither one will be fulfilled.
