Harun Rashid touches on the correlation between corruption and developments in Asean and East Asia ([#1]AMF amid Asean[/#], Nov 13). One of the most hyped-about benefits of democracy for developing countries is its supposed capability to ward off corruption. Nothing is further from the truth.

From Nigeria in Africa to India in Asia (to quote but just two big developing-country democracies), corruption is as entrenched as ever and inefficiency and near-total inaction laid at the door of democracy's 'peculiar' workings.

In place of tangible results are largely endless platitudes about listening to the 'voice' of the people and much idealistic noises to assuage the consciences of the minuscule upper and middle strata of these so-called democratic polities.

People with clear vested interests would have us believe that corruption and the so-called Asian way of doing things were the root causes of the most recent Asian economic crisis, forgetting that it perhaps was nothing but a more virulent outbreak of a normal boom-and-bust economic cycle that more recently attacked Mexico.

Events since have shown that while corruption did not prevent Asian countries from achieving fantastic economic gains, it certainly cannot have been responsible for the subsequent slide although the lack of general transparency might have aided the slide once it began.

Largely overlooked was the fact that the West needed the fig-leaf of corruption's spectre to attempt a massive socio-political and economic re-engineering of Asian societies in the wake of the economic crisis through the relatively "cost-free" instrument of the International Monetary Fund.

The end-results are what we are witnessing today; most dramatically in Indonesia where a perhaps mortally weakened country will likely remain the bane of neighbours near and far for many years into the foreseeable future.

In Indonesia's case, the West's unprecedented interventions might have already driven a strategic stalemate into the bargain - the West cannot afford not to continue feeding Indonesia's dependence on foreign bailout loans while Jakarta's loosening grip on authority within the country makes its promises of reforms that much harder to keep.

Which is the better alternative?

A seething mass of poverty-stricken Indonesians dependent on financial bailouts by foreigners into the foreseeable future or an Indonesia that more or less works, corrupt unquestionably but yet seemingly prosperous, with more and more Indonesians gaining an increasing stake in a future with at least some hope?

The lesson in all this? The foolhardy not to realise that corruption is like sin to us religious beings, to be contained and suppressed as much as possible but banished totally? We must start trusting the snake-oil man first!

John Teo