Crawling from the Wreckage

by Gwynne Dyer

  More importantly, they lack the cultural imagination to see that this process will be profoundly alienating for the Uighurs. It may sound preposterous, but most of the men who rule China simply could not come up with an answer to the question “Why don’t they want to be Chinese?” So if there are anti-Chinese riots in Xinjiang, it must be “outside agitators stirring up our Uighurs.”

  That is how Beijing explained the riots to itself and to the nation. As Xinjiang’s Communist governor, Nur Bekri, said in a televised address: exiled Uighur leader Rebiya Kadeer “had phone conversations with people in China on July 5 in order to incite [the violence].” Beijing explained the even bloodier anti-Chinese riots in Tibet in March of last year in exactly the same way, except that that time the outside agitator was the Dalai Lama.

  What’s more, most Chinese believe it. They have been taught that Xinjiang and Tibet have been an integral part of their country since time immemorial. They also believe the Uighurs and Tibetans who live in those places are (or should be) profoundly grateful for the development and prosperity that have come to their provinces as a result of their membership in the Chinese nation.

  The gulf of incomprehension is reminiscent of the gap between the Russian and non-Russian inhabitants of the former Soviet Union before it collapsed in 1991. Almost all Russians believed that the non-Russians were (or should be) grateful for all that had been done for them, and even resented the fact that they got more investment per capita than the Russians themselves. As for the non-Russians, they took their independence as soon as they could.

  The truth is that the Chinese empire first took effective control of Tibet and Xinjiang in the same period when the Russian empire was conquering the other Central Asian countries. Whatever vague claims to “suzerainty” Beijing can dredge up from the more distant past, they do not convince the Uighurs and the Tibetans themselves, who would cut loose from China instantly if they got the chance.

  It’s called decolonization, and China is the last holdout. The only way it can ensure a different final outcome to that of the other empires is to swamp the local people with Han Chinese immigrants—and that, oddly enough, is the principal result of its “development” policies. The development creates an economy that the local people are not qualified to work in, and Chinese immigrants come in to fill those jobs instead.

  The Tibetan Autonomous Region still has a large Tibetan majority, but in Xinjiang the Uighurs are already down to 45 percent of the population, while the Han Chinese are up to 40 percent. The Uighurs feel that their country is disappearing in front of their eyes, and they are right. So they attack innocent Chinese immigrants, which is shameful but all too understandable. Chinese mobs attack them back, which is equally shameful and equally understandable.

  It is already ugly, and it’s probably going to get a good deal uglier. The repression needed to hold down Xinjiang and Tibet may lead to increased repression in China in general, and it will almost certainly lead to more violence in the colonies.

  And finally … a piece about the left-right conflict.

  August 28, 2009

  LEFTIST TRIUMPH IN SAMOA

  At last the tide has turned. After centuries of huge advances by the rightists, those who drive on the left finally have a victory to celebrate. On September 7, Samoa will stop driving on the right and start driving on the left. Naturally, those who oppose the change are predicting disaster.

  “So we just wake up one morning and pull out of our driveways onto the other side of the road, do we?” says Tole’afoa Solomona Toa’iloa, who heads People Against Switching Sides. “Cars are going to crash, people are going to die, not to mention the huge expense to our small country.”

  But Prime Minister Tuila’epa Aiono Sailele Malielegaoi is not impressed: “All this talk about accidents is just stupid. The 7th and the 8th are holidays to help people get used to it, and after that they’ll be driving more carefully than ever because it will be so different.” All the nearby islands, except American Samoa, drive left, he points out, and it’s cheaper to import cars from Australia, New Zealand and Japan (which drive on the left) than from the United States.

  It’s much ado about nothing; I switch back and forth several dozen times a year. My work takes me to both sides of the road, and my family connections divide right down the middle: Canada right, Britain left, France right, South Africa left, and Argentina both (left until 1946, right since then). If the steering wheel is on the left side of the car, you drive on the right side of the road, and vice versa. A monkey could do it.

  Nevertheless, this is a big deal: the first time any country has switched sides since Burma swung right in 1970 (which made very little sense, since most of the countries around it drive on the left, but General Ne Win’s soothsayer told him to do it). And nobody has switched from right to left in living memory.

  The rightists won because the United States drives on the right, and the year of victory was 1946. That was when the U.S. embassy in Beijing threw a party to celebrate the Nationalist Chinese government’s decision that China would drive on the right. (Previously most of northern China had driven right, while southern China drove left.) In the same year, the project for a Pan-American Highway persuaded the last left-driving holdouts among the Latin American countries to switch.

  Only one-third of the world’s 6.7 billion people live in countries that still drive left. That is not likely to change much now, for once you start building high-speed, controlled-access highways, all the concrete you have poured locks you into your existing choice.

  How did we end up split like this? There is plenty of historical evidence for both sides. Deeply rutted tracks on one side of an old road from a quarry used in Roman times in England, and shallower ruts on the other side, support the hypothesis that the Romans drove on the left, for example—but the evidence from other Roman roads in Turkey suggests the opposite.

  The real answer, probably, is that there was so little long-distance road traffic that you didn’t need uniformity. Some bits of the empire drove left and other parts right, and nobody cared.

  Indeed, the same situation still pertained in nineteenth-century Europe. Both Spain and Italy, for example, had a patchwork quilt of local rules. However, most places that had been conquered by Napoleon drove right, while those that had escaped French occupation mostly drove left (Britain, Russia, Portugal, Sweden, the Austro-Hungarian Empire).

  It’s all over in Europe now. The Bolsheviks took Russia to the right after the First World War (on the roads, at least). Mussolini made all the Italians drive right, and the Spaniards and Portuguese changed over in the 1920s. Hitler forced the remnants of the Austro-Hungarian Empire (Austria, Hungary, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia) to drive right in the late 1930s, and Sweden and Iceland finally switched in the late 1960s.

  And then there’s Canada. Part of it (Quebec west to the Rockies) used to belong to the French Empire, while the rest (the Maritimes in the east and British Columbia in the west) was British more or less from the start. So the central provinces drove on the right, while the extremities drove on the left.

  The latter switched to the right in 1922–23—but my own native country, Newfoundland, only joined Canada in 1949, so it didn’t switch from left to right until 1947. There is a story about how they eased the transition there, however, that may be of assistance to those anxious Samoans.

  Newfoundlanders, in the Child’s Garden of Canadian Stereotypes, fill the same role as the Laz in Turkey, Karelians in Finland, or Tasmanians in Australia. There are hundreds of “Newfie” jokes about how stunned we are. We laugh and go along with the joke, and then later, at night, we sneak into their homes and strangle their offspring.

  The story is that the Newfoundland government was worried about how its people would handle the switch from left to right, until one minister solved the problem. “Let them get used to it a bit at a time,” he said. “The people whose names start with A to D can switch on Monday, E to K will switch on Tuesday …”

  2
7.

  SOUTHEAST ASIA

  Beginning with “People Power” in the Philippines in 1986, Southeast Asia is where the modern wave of non-violent democratic revolutions started. It’s also (with the possible exception of South Africa) the part of the newly democratic world where the gulf between the rich and poor is greatest. As such, it has become a huge, uncontrolled experiment in whether democracy can enable the poor to change their fate.

  September 22, 2004

  NEW DEMOCRACIES

  Vote for “the prettiest candidate,” said Indonesia’s President Megawati Sukarnoputri as the presidential election campaign got underway, and the voters took her at her word. On September 20, they voted overwhelmingly for her former chief security minister, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono. He’s no beauty, but neither is she—and at least he does sing very nicely. None of his campaign rallies was complete without a rendition of “Rainbow in Your Eyes” by the former four-star general and his wife, Kristiani Herrawati. The voters loved it.

  Mr. Yudhoyono is actually quite a serious man who was seen by his army colleagues as efficient and incorruptible, but even his closest adviser, Muhammad Lutfi, admitted: “This election is not about policy. This is a popularity contest so we sell [him] like a brand image.” It’s enough to give you doubts about the future of Indonesia’s new democracy.

  It’s not just Indonesia. There has been an avalanche of new democracies in the past twenty years, and there are doubts about the quality of democracy in a lot of them. At the same time, many people in these countries have become nostalgic for the sheer stability of the old regimes: in a poll conducted by the Asia Foundation last December, 53 percent of Indonesians agreed with the statement “We need a strong leader like Suharto [the former dictator, overthrown in 1998] … even if it reduces rights and freedoms.”

  The new democracies of the world are full of people who are not too sure that it was all such a good idea: East Germans who miss the threadbare economic security they had in their part of the old divided Germany; Filipinos who elected an ignorant and corrupt former movie star as president because he played heroic roles in movies; South Africans who blame the huge crime rate on their post-apartheid freedoms.

  The United Nations Development Programme has calculated that eighty-one countries moved towards democracy in the 1980s and 1990s. By 2002, 140 of the world’s almost 200 independent nations had held multi-party elections. The only really big countries where elections either don’t happen at all or have no discernible impact on who runs the place are China and Pakistan.

  It has been an astonishingly rapid transformation—which may explain why people seem so ungrateful for their liberation. The voters are inexperienced, so demagoguery works better than in the older democracies (not that it doesn’t often work in those countries, too). There is also the disillusionment that comes when people realize that changing the political system does not solve all the country’s problems. It just changes our way of dealing with them, hopefully for the better, but it’s bound to take some time for the benefits to become apparent.

  When a society opts for democracy it is betting that the collective wisdom of the majority is superior to the judgment of any single powerful individual or group. This is almost certainly true in the long run but can be quite wrong in the short run. On the other hand, the kind of individuals who rise to power in tyrannies are even more prone to catastrophic errors of judgment.

  Take Indonesia. The thirty-year Suharto dictatorship, which covered most of the country’s independent history, delivered economic growth but siphoned off most of the profits for the benefit of a narrow elite of the dictator’s cronies and collaborators. The three presidents who have governed the country in the six years since Suharto’s overthrow—chosen by a parliament where interest groups that were powerful under the old regime still had much influence—were disastrous in different ways, but all were incapable of addressing Indonesia’s problems effectively.

  By contrast, in the first election where Indonesians were allowed to vote for a president directly, they have rejected the do-nothing incumbent, Megawati Sukarnoputri, the not-very-bright daughter of independence hero Sukarno, and the man who was tipped as her successor, indicted war criminal General Wiranto, in favour of the plodding sincerity, dogged honesty and fine singing voice of Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono. The popular wisdom may not be all that sophisticated, but it probably isn’t wrong, either.

  The Indonesian voters got it more or less right. The human-rights situation in the country improved, the long separatist war in Aceh ended, corruption dropped, and the economy grew at 5 percent or better in each year of Yudhoyono’s first term. He was re-elected with almost two-thirds of the votes in 2009.

  Whereas in Burma, voting can be a life-threatening activity. Any kind of dissent is.

  October 2, 2007

  BURMESE TRAGEDY

  Empty monasteries, severed telecommunications, and a sullen, beaten silence that seems to envelop the whole country. It doesn’t just feel like a defeat for the Burmese people; it feels like the end of an era. It was an era that began at the other end of Southeast Asia two decades ago, with the non-violent overthrow of the Marcos regime in the Philippines by “people power” in 1986.

  For a while, non-violent revolutions seemed almost unstoppable: Bangladesh, South Korea, Thailand and Indonesia all followed the Filipino example, overthrowing military rule and moving to open democratic systems after decades of oppression. China itself almost managed to follow their example in the Tiananmen episode of 1989, and then the “contagion” spread to Europe.

  The Berlin Wall came down in late 1989, the Communist regimes of Eastern Europe melted away with scarcely a shot fired, and by 1991, the Soviet Union itself had gone into liquidation. It was the threat of similar non-violent action that finally brought the apartheid regime in South Africa to the negotiating table in the early 1990s. Right into the twenty-first century the trend continued, with undemocratic regimes being forced to yield power by unarmed protestors from Serbia to Georgia to Nepal. But there were always the exceptions, and exceptions are always instructive.

  The greatest exception, in the early days, was Burma itself. Entranced by the seeming ease with which their Southeast Asian neighbours were dumping their dictators and emboldened by the transfer of power from General Ne Win (who had been in power for a quarter-century) to a junta of lesser generals, Burmese civilians ventured out on the streets in 1988 to demand democracy. In Rangoon the army slaughtered three thousand of them, whisking the bodies away to be burned, and the protestors went very quiet.

  Non-violent protest is a powerful tactic, but no tactic works in every contingency. To be specific, non-violent protest does not work against a regime that is willing to commit a massacre, and can persuade its troops to carry out its orders.

  The emotion that non-violence works on is shame. Most people feel that murdering large numbers of their fellow citizens on the streets in broad daylight is a shameful action, and even if the privileged people at the top of a regime can smother that emotion, their soldiers, who have to do the actual killing, may not be able to.

  If you cannot be sure your soldiers will obey that order, then it is wise not to give it, since you present them with a dilemma that can only be resolved by turning their weapons against the regime. Better to negotiate a peaceful withdrawal from power. Non-violent revolution often succeeds, but not if the army is isolated from the public.

  The Burmese army is profoundly isolated from the civilian public. Its officers, over the decades of military rule, have become a separate, self-recruiting caste that enjoys great privileges, and its soldiers are country boys—not one in a hundred is from Rangoon or Mandalay. The regime has even moved the capital from Rangoon to the preposterous jungle “city” of Naypyidaw, a newly built place whose only business is government, in order to increase the social isolation of its soldiers and servants.

  So, after nineteen years, when the protestors came out on the streets again in the bigger Burmese cities
, led this time by monks whose prestige made many believe the army would not dare touch them, the regime simply started killing again. The death toll this time was probably no more than a tenth of that in 1988, for people got the message very quickly: nobody who defies the regime is safe. Not even monks.

  The Burmese are now pinning their hopes on foreign intervention, but that is never going to happen. It never played a decisive role in the non-violent revolutions that succeeded, either. Sooner or later, the extreme corruption of the army’s senior officers will destroy its discipline, but meanwhile it is probably more years of tyranny for Burma, with only Aung San Suu Kyi, the heroic symbol of Burmese democracy, who lives under semi-permanent house arrest, to bear witness against it.

  It is not the end of an era, however. In other places, against other repressive regimes, non-violence still has a reasonable chance of succeeding. It has just never worked in Burma.

  The litmus test for Southeast Asian democracy is Thailand because matters have gone much further there. The poor have actually mobilized politically, and the old and new elites are fighting hard to safeguard their privileges. The army has been back on the streets, and, as this book goes to press, the final outcome of the battle between the “red shirts” and the “yellow shirts” is still unclear. It may remain so for years.

  April 15, 2009

  CLASS WAR IN THAILAND

  Thailand’s Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva was humiliated last week when red-shirted protesters overran the summit of Asian leaders that he was hosting and forced him to evacuate them by helicopter, but now he is back in control. The “reds” have been driven off the streets of Bangkok by the army, and the “yellows,” who fought them last year, have not come out in force either. For the moment, peace has been restored.