COMMENT The plight of the Rohingya refugees, fleeing in the thousands from untold agonies visited upon them by a brutal military and their willing accomplices - in a macabre twist here - among civilian Burmese, demonstrates in a graphic way the failure of the Asean policy of non-interference in the domestic affairs of their members.

Searing images of the refugees’ suffering, relayed globally by satellite TV, will mar an otherwise wholly justified satisfaction felt by members of Asean’s 50th anniversary celebration this year.

The self-congratulation is not complacent because this grouping of 500 million from disparate ethnicities, adhering, if truth be faced, to conflicting religions, has shown what can be achieved when nations decide that the clashing differences among them need not require a resort to arms to settle them.

Regional groupings in the rest of the world have not had a comparable record of internal amity as Asean has had.

But before the peace imperative took hold of the region, conflict within its confines was latent as well as overt: the states of Indochina were a cockpit of clashing nationalisms and interests between Cold War powers.

Only a few years prior to Asean’s inception in 1965, confrontation between Sukarnoist Indonesia and fledgling Malaysia threatened the peace in the region, and an old Philippine claim to parts of the eastern periphery of Malaysia (Sabah) had the potential to ignite.

That these flash points did not conflagrate into wider and recurrent conflict, as in sub-Saharan Africa, were due to the cultural distaste of South-East Asians for the bluff and bluster of war and a growing conviction among its peoples that a free market for investment and entrepreneurship held greater promise of poverty reduction than the economic nostrums peddled by the communists.

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As the benefits and appeal of foreign direct investment in reducing poverty among Asean’s constituent states became increasingly evident from the mid-1980s, the economic liberalisations that this trend required threw up the question of whether it needed to be accompanied by political liberalisation.

Generally, the response of Asean was that this political liberalisation in member states was a decision for its individual members to make without interference from others.

Asean, from its inception in 1965, has sedulously stuck to its policy of non-interference in the domestic affairs of its member nations.

This was justified in the first 20 years of the group’s existence as member nations sought to consolidate their national independence and provide for their peoples’ economic growth and security.

But from the 1980s, the economic liberalisation brought on by foreign direct investment, greater international trade and capital flows, inevitably threw up the question of whether political liberalisation was its concomitant.

Political authoritarianism

As a notion this entwining of economic and political liberalisation was resisted in Asean.

It was generally felt by the grouping’s leaders that economic growth was better and more rapidly achieved when accompanied by political authoritarianism.

The example of a formerly chaotic (under Sukarno) Indonesia making impressive economic strides under autocratic successor Suharto and the steady and, ultimately, stupendous ascent of Singapore under the quasi-authoritarian Lee Kuan Yew were powerful testimony that the twain of economic liberalisation and a loosening of political controls need not meet.

        

This caused Asean to cast a blind eye on the Myanmar military despotism which from General Ne Win, who led a coup in 1962, to General Than Shwe, who relinquished power in 1911, combined cruel repression of minorities and political dissidents with some degree of economic openness.

This dysfunctional combination has now issued in the grimly ironic reality that even when political change in Myanmar began in some earnestness in 2011, under the promptings of a reformist like General Thein Sein, aided by democracy campaigner Aung San Suu Kyi, it is not anywhere near both leaders’ radar that a fair deal be sought for the long oppressed Muslim minority in a predominantly Buddhist nation, the Rohingyas.

The plight of this people is the 21st century’s replication of the Soviet gulag.

That even a Nobel Peace laureate like Suu Kyi cannot find it in her to decry the unspeakable conditions of this persecuted minority retrospectively underscores the blindness of the policy of Asean in looking the other way when Myanmar’s ghoulish generals held sway in their resource-rich but hapless nation.

Now several thousand Rohingya have become human flotsam in the seas around the South-East Asian peninsula, their piteous condition growing, as Lee Kuan Yew once put it about Vietnam’s boat people,  “calluses in the heart” of Thai, Malaysian and Indonesian authorities who elect to play maritime ping pong with them.

TERENCE NETTO has been a journalist for more than four decades. A sobering discovery has been that those who protest the loudest tend to replicate the faults they revile in others.