Aug 24, 2011
Dr. Jason Abbott
With the war in Libya reaching its conclusion, it now looks as if Colonel Gaddafi will be the next authoritarian leader in North Africa to fall as a result the remarkable events dubbed the Arab Spring or Jasmine Revolutions. As I noted back in March many both within Asia and beyond have asked whether such ‘blossoming’ of dissent and revolt could occur in the authoritarian and semi-authoritarian regimes of Northeast, Southeast and Central Asia. This week the Center for Asian Democracy at the University of Louisville will host a workshop that will explore precisely that question. Entitled “The Jasmine Revolution and the ‘Bamboo’ Firewall: The impact of the Internet and new social media on political change in East Asia.”, the workshop will host 13 scholars from prestigious academic institutions and non-profit organizations around the country to participate and explore the potential impact of technology on democracy in Asia. Next week I hope to share some of the workshop’s findings with you, but for this week I am reposting the original blog entry from March… (with a few very minor amendments).
Over the past few months the international community has witnessed unprecedented political opposition and revolutions in the Middle East. Already this so called ‘Jasmine Revolution’ or ‘Arab Spring’ has overturned two of the countries long-standing political regimes, the Ben-Ali regime in Tunisia and more surprisingly the 30 year rule of strongman Hosni Mubarak in Egypt. In Libya it resulted in the descent to near Civil War between Muammar Qaddafi and pro-democracy rebels while its demonstration effects have incited and continue to incite protest in countries from Bahrain to Oman, and from Jordan to Morocco and Syria. Much of this caught everyone by surprise, be they academics, diplomats, journalists or policy advisors. Nevertheless this outburst of popular discontent reflects a number of long-term trends, most specifically a demographic explosion in the 1970s and 1980s means that an estimated 65 per cent of the region’s population is under 30. While significant sums of money have been poured into education, both secondary and tertiary, youth unemployment is a major socio-economic problem with an estimated one in four unemployed. Such high levels of unemployment combined with pervasive levels of corruption, authoritarian political systems with extensive security surveillance and harassment, and the huge growth in the number of users of social network sites (Egypt has for example over 5 millon Facebook users of whom 58% are under 25) provided a potent combination the repercussions of which are still playing out as we speak.
Malaysian Prime Minister
This begs the question as to whether such a popular uprising could happen in that other bastion of authoritarian and quasi-democratic regimes, Southeast Asia. Could the demonstration effects spread to countries as diverse as Cambodia, Malaysia, and Vietnam, among others? Leaders in these countries are clearly worried. Inn February the Malaysian Prime Minister Najib issued a stark warning saying “Don’t think what is happening in Tunisia and Egypt will also happen in Malaysia.. We will not allow it to happen here”. Former deputy Prime Minister and opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim however had a different take remarking that the revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt should be a warning signal to other autocracies “whether in the Middle East, Pakistan or Southeast Asia”. Anwar continued noting that the demise of regimes where corruption and nepotism flourished, should remind Malaysians that governments built on the suppression of citizens are always temporary.
Cambodian Prime Minister
In Cambodia, strongman Hun Sen, who has dominated national politics since 1989 and been Prime Minister since 1998, was even starker in his warnings stating on January 20th, in response to comments on a Radio Free Asia report that a Tunisian-like protest could occur in Cambodia. Hun Sen lashed out stating “I have to send a message to people who want to inspire a riot (like) in Tunisia … I will close the door and beat the dog,” Again in contrast the embattled long-standing anti-corruption opposition figure Sam Rainsy echoed Anwar’s views stated on February 2nd, the day pro-Mubarak forces attacked anti-Mubarak supporters in Tahir square, that “I see that it is not long … that there would be such a situation in Cambodia that is the same as Egypt and Tunisia, where people have ousted leaders from power.”
In Vietnam the government have already ratcheted up a crackdown on dissidents but this has not stopped growing online calls for pro-democracy protests in the country. On February 21st one of Vietnam’s leading dissidents Dr Nguyen Dan Que, 69, launched an appeal in Ho Chi Minh City asking people to take to the streets to save the country. His appeal was taken up by a Vietnamese website urging supporters of political change to meet each Sunday in Hanoi and HCMC. Another dissident group, Bloc 8406, which issued a manifesto on democratization on April 8th 2006, issued an online statement in which it urged Vietnamese to follow the example of North Africa and demand greater democracy and human rights.
Thich Quang Duc's
Of greater concern for the Vietnamese are reports (picked up and broadcast online on CNN) that on February 17th an engineer called Pham Thanh Son set himself on fire to protest at the confiscation of his family’s property by local authorities. Although the authorities claim his death was accidental, caused by the gas tank of his motorcycle exploding, such an incident echoes the self-immolation of Mohamed Buoazizi in Tunisia, whose protest and death sparked the beginning of the unrest in Tunisia. More symbolically both acts echo the infamous self-immolation of the Buddhist monk Thich Quang Duc in Saigon in 1963 whose sacrifice led to the downfall of President Ngo Dinh Diem in South Vietnam.
Poster from Burmese
Even in the region’s most brutal and repressive regime, Burma, where a military Junta has presided over the country since 1988, a Facebook group entitled ‘Just Do It Against Military Dictatorship’ was set up at the end of February denouncing Burmese military chief Senior-General Than Shwe, and as in Egypt urging the army to join with the people. The group has prompted the distribution of anti-government materials in a number of cities across the country and while it only had 1,374 ‘friends’ when this piece was written, Facebook has become the second most popular website in Burma with over 400,000 members.
Obviously there are clear differences between these regimes and their counterparts in North Africa. In the case of Vietnam political power no longer resides in the figure of a single authoritarian leader but instead the succession problem has largely been resolved, as in China, by the retirement and promotion of successive generations of party apparatchiks. In addition in Cambodia and Vietnam government censorship and the security and intelligence forces are both more pervasive, heavy-handed and to date proven more pro-active in anticipating political unrest and acting quickly and decisively to ‘nip-it-in –the-bud’ before such unrest can appeal to wider constituencies.
High youth unemployment
Nevertheless the median age in Cambodia, Malaysia and Vietnam is like Tunisia and Egypt under 30 years old. In Malaysia unemployment levels are very low in comparison to international averages, less than 4 per cent of the total work force were unemployed as of 2008. However youth unemployment was almost three times this figure at 10.7 per cent. Similar disparities exist in Cambodia where according to International Labor Organization figures for youth unemployment are expected to rise to 14.8 per cent against a total unemployment figure of 3.5 per cent.
Likewise allegations of corruption and cronyism are widespread across the region with Transparency International rating Burma, Cambodia, Malaysia and Vietnam respectively as 176th, 154th, 56th and 116th in their 2010 Corruption Perceptions ranking (out of 178 countries). While Malaysia’s figure does not appear bad in comparison it should be noted that over the past decade Malaysia has steadily fallen down T.I.’s ranking from a high of 33 in 2002. Indeed the spread of corruption and the retrenchment in civil liberties since 2008 led the Wall Street Journal to remark, in an article today (March 4th), that Malaysia, “once regarded as one of Asia’s most promising emerging economies.. has soured”.
One of the most talked about features of the recent wave of pro-democracy demonstrations and uprisings occurring across the Arab world, has been the role played by information communication technology and social networking software. Of the latter much has been made of the fact that protests were ‘advertised’ as forthcoming events on Facebook while Twitter has become an instant source of information as it happens on the ground. Indeed in response to an anonymous posting on Twitter calling for protests in Chinese towns and cities on February 20th authorities swiftly arrested a number of online activists, deployed a heavy security presence on the date in question and began a crackdown on foreign journalists. While few anticipated or expected the demonstration effects from North Africa to have any significant effect in China clearly the events dubbed the ‘Jasmine Revolution’ reveal the deep insecurity of the regime despite its booming economic growth. And yet all this begs the question how important social networking really is as a tool for social organization and political protest. Will the revolution really be ‘tweeted’ or is the impact of ICTs greatly exaggerated?
Use of cellphones was ubiquitous in
The impact of new information communication technologies on political mobilization is not new. The use of cellphone text messaging by demonstrators to coordinate protests was first witnessed during the revolution that brought down General Suharto in Indonesia in 1999, during the ESDA II protests in The Philippines in 2001 that led to the resignation of Joseph Estrada in The Philippines and during the Tulip Revolution in Kyrgyzstan in March 2005. Similarly Facebook was used prominently during the uprising by Buddhist monks in Burma in 2007, while Twitter, a microblogging tool that limits users to 140 characters, gained prominence during the failed Green Revolution in Iran in 2009. Likewise conventional blogging has become a common feature of politics in Southeast Asia particularly in Malaysia where prominent anti-government bloggers have risen to prominence and notoriety.
Nevertheless what is new is the integration of these disparate technologies into the latest generation of cellphones (dubbed smart phones) that allow the user to take photographs, record video, access the Internet and communicate instantly via text messaging and social networking. The result is according to Philip Howard, professor of communication at the University of Washington, that “savvy opposition campaigners [have] turned social media applications like Facebook from minor pop culture fads into a major tool of political communication” (2011, p.4).
In many countries worldwide, including Southeast Asia, governments have traditionally relied on their control of the mainstream media to silence or limit opposition voices while restricting access to alternative media sources, including foreign media. Traditional media was a unidirectional structure in which the state could monopolize the production of content. The new media by contrast is fundamentally challenging this. On the one hand the nature of the new media is such that users are both consumers and producers of content. Individual users can post their own stories and become citizen journalists which in turn can be shared and evade even the harshest censorship controls and repressive regimes. In Burma in 2007 citizen journalists equipped with handheld camcorders, provided by the Norwegian based Democratic Voice of Burma, were able to record and broadcast footage of the Buddhist monk uprising and its repression (as documented in the award-winning documentary Burma VJ). Similarly during the Green revolution in Iran hundreds of videos were uploaded daily on YouTube. On the other hand these technologies now allows ordinary citizen to effectively conduct surveillance and monitor the state, documenting human rights abuses and improving the capacity of civil society.
Critics of the ‘leveling and enabling thesis’ advance a number of arguments of which the most often heard are firstly that all technology is neutral — even the new information communication technologies can be manipulated to expand the reach of the state rather than to minimize it, and that secondly the impact of the new media is exaggerated because significant digital divides continue to exist. Thus the spread and penetration of Internet access remains limited to a small largely urban middle class elite and is not a widespread social phenomenon.
Courtesy of Slate magazine, http://tinyurl.com/63ttddf
While it is certainly true that some regimes have proven to be incredibly sophisticated in controlling the Internet there remains sufficient cause to be optimistic that the decentralized, diffused and non-hierarchical character of the Internet mitigates even the strictest controls. Much is made for example of ‘The Great Firewall of China’ that enables Beijing to deny access to certain Internet IP addresses (thereby blocking access to certain websites, e.g Voice of American and BBC News) as well as the ability to scan the URL and packet transmissions for certain censored keywords (such as Tiananmen or more recently even the word Jasmine). Nevertheless for all its sophistication Beijing’s surveillance system largely relies on self-censorship, in other words the fear that a user will be caught and punished severely for accessing banned websites. Internet users and content providers have become ever more sophisticated at circumventing such controls. The use of proxy servers outside China, virtual private networks, mirror sites, and onion routing (the development of software to allow anonymous encrypted communication) means that there is constant competition between regulators and has become an ongoing cyber war. In addition countries like China limit the number of nodes that connect the ‘national’ information infrastructure to the ‘global’ worldwide web in order to enable them to operate their firewalls effectively. Ironically this can make such regimes information infrastructure vulnerable to Denial of Service attacks against the limited number of servers and ISPs that are required to operate strong filtering technologies effectively.
In terms of the diffusion of ICTs and the question of digital divides, the diffusion of mobile phones has far-outstripped the penetration of personal computers and fixed landlines in the developing world. Cambodia became the first country in the world where cellphone ownership surpassed landlines and that was as early as 1993. Consequently, it is estimated that within 5 years mobile Internet access will exceed PC Internet usage. Already 20 per cent of cellphones worldwide are 3G with sales of the iPhone and Android driving this figure ever higher. In addition as Howard notes it is largely irrelevant whether cellphone and social networking users are largely urban and middle class since these groups invariably form the social elites upon which regime legitimacy effectively rests in authoritarian countries. In addition internet penetration rates are often an inaccurate measure of the number of people who have access to the internet since it is difficult to measure the number of people who access the Net via cybercafés. In addition computers and cellphones are often shared among families.
While social networking and the diffusion of ICTs does not substitute for traditional political activism “in times of crisis banal tools for wasting time.. become the supporting infrastructure of social movements” (Howard, 2001, p. 12). While it may be true, as the detractors argue, that cellphones, Facebook and Twitter of themselves are not a substitute for traditional forms of social organization, protest and collective action; it is safe to say that it is now inconceivable that such technologies will not be a critical feature of all future collective action. As Howard concludes, “it is clear that increasingly the route to democratization is a digital one” (p. 201). The revolution in other words will be tweeted.
Reference: Howard, N. (2011) The Digital Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy, New York: Oxford University Press.
AUTHOR: Dr. Jason Abbott
URL: http://profjabbott.blogspot.com
E-MAIL: jason.abbott [at] louisville.edu
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