Sandy, Sandy everywhere,
Sandy messes with your hair,
Sandy says she’s coming,
Sandy sends everyone flying.
Sandy crashes into the shore,
straight into Jersey Shore,
Sandy’s a storm that’s horrible,
crossing a show that’s terrible.
But what’s the price,
of an October Surprise,
when everybody expects,
what everybody expects?
Some peace is not worth it. A state that suppresses its citizens and others does not deserve peace for such peace only allows the state to continue to use its power to bully. Peace is sustainable only if rights are respected. No peace can stand with disrespect.
For other peace, it is worth the shot and it should be welcomed. One of such peace is the one almost everybody is shooting for in Mindanao. It is worth the shot because I do not think the government of Philippines is one comparable to that of Saddam Hussien of Iraq or al-Assad of Syria. Furthermore, the conflict has been going on for a long time much to the disadvantage of everybody in the Philippines, and possibly to Malaysia as well although arguably, Malaysia did benefit from the conflict given the context of the formation of Malaysia and the Filipino claim to Sabah in the early age of modern nation-states in Southeast Asia. The conflict in Mindanao essentially distracted the government of the Philippines from pursuing its claim more vigorously. Also, Malaysia, both the state and private citizens, had been naughty with respect to Mindanao in the past, just as they had with Aceh.
But that does not mean that there is no cost to Malaysia. Security in eastern Sabah had attracted attention in the past. The US government has issued travel warnings from time to time, which I think can be an unfair representation of Malaysia as a whole which is very safely relative to most neighboring countries. There have been several high-profile kidnapping cases in the past and this has caused the military to beef up its presence in that area. Whereas Malaysia could spend its resources on building up public infrastructure in Sabah, which is severely lacking compared to Peninsular Malaysia, the same resources went to security purposes. The security spending is necessary but it would have been great if it was not.
Another cost, which is bigger, has been illegal immigration into Sabah. I personally prefer assimilation for these immigrants because they have been here for such a long time. The cost of assimilation should be reasonably cheap compared to mass expulsion. I also think expulsion is an inhumane policy. I think we have a responsibility to welcome these immigrants as long as they are willing to work and become good residents. It is cruel to force them back in harm’s way.
But the politics in Sabah is murky and assimilation that a libertarian like me prefers is not a popular proposal among Sabahans. Some Sabahans hold almost racist (outright racist even?) view when it comes to the issue. So peace is one way which the problem of illegal immigration can be solved, even partially.
Peace is Mindanao may encourage some refugees to return home. Peace also may finally allow for economic development on the island and that may encourage economic migrants in Sabah to return home as well. Peace itself will encourage greater trade between Mindanao and the surrounding regions and that has to be good for Sabah and Malaysia.
But it is still to be seen if there will be peace in Mindanao despite the fanfare. A wholesome peace requires that the rebels are represented wholly and already there are fractions opposing the proposed deal. One hopes the rebelling fractions are only a minority, unpopular and unarmed. Unfortunately, it is quite clear that they are armed. Besides, how many broken peace deals were made in the past?
I also wonder though how will the effort at peace there will affect the Filipino claim to Sabah.
Cambodia has a dark modern history and I always knew that. That knowledge did not bother me much previously because I did not really relate to it. Cambodia despite being so close to Malaysia appeared farther away from me than, for example, the United States where I spent my undergraduate years.
Cambodia was some land far away from my consciousness. Farish Noor once lamented that Malaysians knew more of New York, London and Paris than Jakarta, Bangkok and Manila. I am guilty of that.
My travels to Cambodia, specifically to its capital Phnom Penh, were my effort to turn his statement untrue. I started out in Siem Reap up north trying to relearn my Southeast Asian history. It was an adventure, going through and climbing all of the famous Angkor temples and more, and then getting lost in the obscure ones, which were no less impressive than Angkor Wat or Bayon. Only the fear of landmines prevented us from being too adventurous, on top of constraints involving time and money.
Warnings of landmines are a stark reminder of Cambodia’s dark past. Too many landmines were planted across the country by participants of the Cambodian civil war. While the war has long ended, efforts at clearing up the mines are still under way and there are new landmine victims every day. The past will not just go away quietly.
Even in the capital Phnom Penh, time passed slowly. I felt as if I was still living in colonial times during my stay there. French influences are remarkably strong still. There are many French tourists and expatriates even. It was as if they refused to leave in the first place.
That is understandable. The capital, located at the meeting of Tonle Sap and the fabled Mekong rivers, is beautiful. Rows of old buildings stand along the banks, providing a lively waterfront. If it wasn’t for the devastating civil war, Phnom Penh would have been one of the great cities of Southeast Asia.
The city was emptied during the communist Khmer Rouge regime. It is hard to imagine the beautiful Phnom Penh devoid of life but it was a ghost town in the 1970s, as were other towns in Cambodia in the same period.
The communist Khmer Rouge came to power in Cambodia in 1975. They had a terrible idea of equality and wanted to create a classless society. But more than that, they did it in a hurry. Their solution was to turn everybody into a peasant overnight.
To do so, they forcefully relocated urbanites to the countryside. There were no doctors, engineers and other professionals under the Khmer Rouge. All were peasants. Peasantry, in reality, was a euphemism for forced labor. Many realized that. Those who questioned the Khmer Rouge were tortured and killed. The intelligentsia were murdered to protect the communist revolution, before Pol Pot turned on the Khmer Rouge itself in the name of power and ideological purity later in the late 1970s.
The failure of China’s disastrous Great Leap Forward, which aimed at creating a communist society quickly, was unheeded. The Khmer Rouge thought they were a better implementer of communism than their Chinese counterparts.
Well, judging by the result, maybe they were. According to the World Bank, there were more than seven million individuals in Cambodia then. By the end of the Khmer Rouge regime, between two million and three million were dead according to the United Nations. That was a significant proportion of total Cambodian population.
Yet, statistics are just cold numbers. It is always hard to humanize numbers that run to the millions. Being in Cambodia gave me the chance to understand exactly those numbers.
I visited the Tuol Sleng museum while I was in Phnom Penh. The museum was formerly a school, which the Khmer Rouge turned into a prison and a torture house. The turning of a school into a prison more than symbolized what the Khmer Rouge and, really, what communism in practice is all about.
Despite the purpose of the museum to remind us all of the past, entering that museum felt like an act of trivializing history. It cost two US dollars to enter the museum. There was something sacred about the museum that I could not explain. Yet, here, like many places in Cambodia, history had been commercialized. Past pain has been repackaged as a product of tourism. It was about making money. It felt wrong.
As I was about to condemn the commercialization as a scam, what I saw inside prevented me from protesting after all.
The first building was where the last tortured prisoners were placed in, and died. There was an empty rusty metal bed frame in each cell, with photographs of the last victims hung on the wall by the curators. The photographs were not pretty. The photographs were shot by the invading Vietnamese army as the Khmer Rouge regime fell. The Vietnamese came too late to save anybody. They found only rotting bodies bound to metal beds in the torture house.
The next two buildings had even punishingly smaller cells. It was much smaller than my bed at home. Judging by the condition of the cells, one could imagine the impossibility of life during the time of the Khmer Rouge. It was a kind of environment that if I were put inside, I would die almost immediately out of sheer despair. Out of the thousands who passed through the gates of Tuol Sleng, only a few survived it. Most were destined for the infamous Killing Field located a number of miles outside of the city, if they were not killed here.
What made the visit to the museum unbearable for me were pictures of hundreds or thousands of victims pasted on countless boards. Many prisoners were clearly scared of things that were to come. One particular face was on the verge of crying. That particular image haunted me throughout the day.
I decided I could not stand it anymore after seeing all of the photographs. I could not explore the rest of the museum to make good of the two dollars. It was then that I made an emotional connection to Cambodia.
As I sat on a bench outside in the open space, disturbed at the capability of the Khmer Rouge to do what they did, I became angry. Just before I exited the building, I spotted some writing on the wall. A visitor had penned that no God would have let this happened. I understood that person.
I came to think of the two-dollar entry cost. During the communist rule, this would have been illegal. Commerce in general would have been illegal. There was only one profession in the name of equality. The peasantry produced for the benefit of the communist state. That policy of unreasonable equality produced famine and exacerbated the genocide perpetrated by the Khmer Rouge.
Only now are Cambodians coming out of the shadow. They are eager to do commerce and improve their lot, something that was not possible under the communist Khmer Rouge.
The two-dollar entry cost is only part of the effort to come out of the hole that communism created. If the commercialization of the dark past brings about a brighter future for Cambodians, then let it be. Nobody, foreigners the very least, has the right to condemn the commercialization.
Between 1975 and 1979, Cambodia came under the communist Khmer Rouge regime. The communist rule exerted considerable cost on the Cambodian society. Just how significant?
Never forget.
Data was obtained from the World Bank.
I know I said no to foreign military intervention in Libya when its civil war erupted. I reasoned that such intervention would rob legitimacy from any success out of the rebellion against the Gaddafi administration. In retrospect, I vastly underestimated the popularity of the rebellion. Foreign intervention did not matter much in determining the perceived legitimacy of the new government. Even if foreign ground troops were deployed in Libya to aid the rebellion which did not happen, I would think these foreign soldiers would be greeted enthusiastically by most Libyans. Once I realized this, I decided to support the intervention. Besides, the Gaddafi government itself received foreign military aid, and even had foreigners fighting for him. The NATO/UN action seemed justified in a tit-for-tat logic. In the end, I am glad the situation in Libya turned out as it has panned out, with or without foreign intervention. What is happening in Libya so far has been very liberal when compared to its history and its neighbors.
Libya has to rebuild their country and it has a long way to go. The relevant point here is that the military struggle has ended.
Not for Syria though. What happened in Libya is happening in Syria. Protests erupted. The government used force against the protestors. Some protestors picked up armed and fought back in an organized manner. The Syrian rebels have not been as successful as their Libyan counterparts had before NATO/UN intervened so far. Its evolution is almost the same, except this time, the UN Security Council is divided. That makes foreign military intervention impossible, if not hard.
I am tempted to repeat the same argument about legitimacy, popularity and foreign military intervention in Syria. At the back of my mind however is the success of the Libyan model and if the UNSC had passed the resolution, it would probably pave the way toward foreign military intervention and I would support the intervention in favor of the rebels.
But the UNSC did not pass the resolution to call among other, for the Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to step down. For me, that is a barrier towards support for the intervention.
The Syrian case added a new dimension to the issue of military intervention, or rather it accentuated it. It highlights the importance of not only the organic legitimacy of the rebellion at the expense of the incumbent dictatorial government but also international legitimacy. Libya had both. Syria has only one so far. As a sidetrack, Iraq had none (nevertheless, after all that has been said and done, I think the Iraq episode is a success story and I find it hard to deride the invasion of Iraq as I had in the past. That does not mean the invasion was legitimate though).
In the statist world that we live in, we definitely do not want countries to simply conduct hostile military action in foreign soil regardless of its justification, apart from explicit self-defense. That would mean an overly chaotic world. There has to be a check-and-balance mechanism and however flawed the UNSC is, it is one that prevents the strong from bullying the weak so blatantly. That is not to say the bullying does not happen (remember Russia and Georgia in 2008?) but the system does provide some needed discouragement.
The realist in us will realize that the UNSC is all about politics and not idealism. Russia has interest in maintaining the status quo in Syria. News reports cite that Syria is Russia’s only open ally in the region amid an either an increasingly independent Arab states, or pro-US states like Saudi Arabia and other smaller Gulf states. The fall of the Assad government may benefit the US, especially when the US is siding with the rebel forces.
Regardless of the benefits the US may gain, that does not negate the liberal impetus for the intervention and that is the protection of individual liberty which is clearly being trampled over.
The point of all this is that I want a military intervention.
But the consensual approach in the UNSC does appeal to libertarian non-interventionist foreign policy. It is a bit convoluted and can be contradictory but as I have written a long time ago, it is true that pure Ron Paul’s non-interventionism ignores violation of liberty outside of the border of a liberal state. That is a problem for me but it is also a practical approach to the fact that liberal states cannot fight tyranny everywhere out of economic reality. The UNSC with it consensual approach makes non-interventionism a default position.
But in the case of Syria, it frustrates me as a libertarian. The very libertarian foreign policy comes with a trade-off with another very libertarian principle.