Proceedings of the Standing Senate Committee on
Foreign Affairs and International Trade
Issue 9 - Evidence - Meeting of April 9, 2014
OTTAWA, Wednesday, April 9, 2014
The Standing Senate Committee on Foreign Affairs and International Trade met this day at 4:15 p.m. to study security conditions and economic developments in the Asia-Pacific region, the implications for Canadian policy and interests in the region, and other related matters.
Senator A. Raynell Andreychuk (Chair) in the chair.
[English]
The Chair: Honourable senators, this is the Standing Senate Committee on Foreign Affairs and International Trade. We are here to study security conditions and economic developments in the Asia-Pacific region, the implications for Canadian policy and interests in the region, and other related matters.
We have by video conference from the University of British Columbia, the Department of History, Mr. John Roosa. We have one hour, as the bells will start to ring at 5:15 p.m. for a vote at 5:30. If we start on time with opening remarks from you, we can go to questions with the senators and efficiently end by 5:15.
Welcome to the committee. If you have an opening statement, we'd like to hear from you and then turn to questions.
John Roosa, Department of History, University of British Columbia, as an individual: I'll keep my opening statement brief, about five or six minutes.
Thank you for inviting me to speak with you today and for welcoming me. I'm an historian on Southeast Asia whose current research is centred on the events of 1965-66 in Indonesia when hundreds of thousands of people were detained without charge, tortured and summarily executed. It was a time when state power was at its most secretive, arbitrary and violent.
Indonesia has changed much since then. It has especially changed since 1998, when President Suharto resigned after 32 years of dictatorial rule. I have witnessed these changes first-hand, living in Indonesia for 7 of the last 20 years. The post-1998 political reforms have been impressive. Not since the early years of independence in the 1950s have Indonesians been engaged in such a profound and wide-ranging effort to build a state based upon the principle of the rule of law.
Today, I would like to focus my brief opening comments on the rule of law in Indonesia and three other Southeast Asian countries that I'm told are of particular interest to the committee: Myanmar, or Burma, the Philippines and Singapore.
The rule of law is one of the most urgent issues in Southeast Asia today. I would not have said that 20 years ago. Then I would have said that the urgent issues were peace, democracy and human rights, but there has been a lot of progress. Internal armed conflicts are far fewer; authoritarian regimes are largely things of the past, except for Vietnam and Laos; all Southeast Asian countries are electoral democracies of one sort or another, although Myanmar is still at an early stage; the discourse of human rights is widely accepted; and one does not find the adamant assertions of Asian exceptionalism so prominent in the 1980s and 1990s.
Today, one outstanding problem, especially in Indonesia, Myanmar and the Philippines, is the rule of law. An important component of this idea of the rule of law is the ability of the state to ensure that its officials follow the laws. State officials in these three countries have a tendency to use their positions for personal gain, rent-seeking is common, and revenue that should go into the state's treasury often winds up in the bank accounts of individuals or political parties. Revenue that should be available for expenditure for public goods, like health and education, is squandered.
What little money is spent on health and education is reduced further by embezzlement. Transparency International's Corruption Perception Index rankings provide some sense of the problem. Most of the states in Southeast Asia rank in the lower half and some at the very bottom, among the most corrupt states in the world. For Southeast Asia, only Singapore, Malaysia and Brunei rank in the upper half, with Singapore near the very top.
In the World Bank statistics on regulatory environment, government effectiveness, ease of doing business and the rule of law, one finds the same kind of rankings.
Corruption in these cases results in what social scientists call low-state capacity or low infrastructural power. The state has little capacity to collect taxes and spend the tax money on public goods. This low-state capacity has deleterious consequences for the environment, the society and the economy.
Indonesia is a textbook example of what happens when rapid economic growth is coupled with low-state capacity. Some observers thought President Suharto's dictatorship from 1966 to 1998 was a strong state that would provide the conditions needed for economic growth. They said the same about the supposedly strong state of President Marcos, who put the Philippines under a martial law regime from 1972 to 1986. Strong powers of coercion, however, do not always strengthen the rule of law.
Once the Suharto regime fell in 1998, Indonesia had to start from scratch, writing new laws, amending the constitution, reforming the judiciary, cracking down on corruption, overhauling the tax system and so on, and still much remains to be done.
Suharto's legacy is a state that has trouble enforcing its own laws, such as the laws against burning the forest and peatland. Every year now, Malaysia, Singapore and parts of Indonesia are blanketed with smoke from the forest clearances on the Island of Sumatra, much of it carried out by oil palm plantations.
If authoritarian regimes do not necessarily improve state capacity, democracies do not either. Post-1998 Indonesia and post-1986 Philippines show that electoral democracy does not necessarily lead to the rule of law, though it certainly can help.
Progress on the rule of law largely depends on political struggles within the countries of Southeast Asia, but the Canadian government and civil society can play a role in helping it. Researchers at Canadian universities have been engaged with Southeast Asia for many years and have had many positive contributions in collaboration with people there.
The Canadian International Development Agency funded a good portion of the research on Southeast Asia. I hope that the recent reorganization of CIDA does not result in a decline of funding for this kind of research. It is precisely now that the Canadian government should be expanding its funding for projects that bring Canadians and Southeast Asians together for more than just business deals. As Canada expands its trade and investment in Southeast Asia, it should think about what role it can play in helping improve the rule of law.
Those are my comments.
The Chair: Thank you. You talked about CIDA. Could you expand on why you're hesitant about the change of putting together the issues of foreign policy, trade and development under one rubric, which is what the U.K. and Australia have done? You seem to be hesitant that Canada is doing it. Could you explain?
Mr. Roosa: I'm only hesitant given that I don't know exactly what will happen in the future. In principle, I'm not objecting to it. I just see that there's a reorganization. I'm somewhat familiar — not intimately — with CIDA's past performance, but now that I see a reorganization, I don't know whether it's going to continue in the same way, because the change occurred so recently. It was June last year.
The Chair: You were talking about the rule of law and that the problem is lack of implementation of those laws, which leads to corruption, which leads to depletion of resources, et cetera. Is it because the institutions aren't strong enough, or that the political will of the government is not yet there?
Mr. Roosa: I think both. That is, the institutions are not strong and the political will is not there. But there are some positive signs.
Indonesia today is going to the polls. Indonesia is the fourth largest country, so this is a large logistical exercise in voting by close to 200 million eligible voters. The party that is likely to win a plurality is a party that has a very strong anti-corruption agenda. In all elections, corruption is really the leading issue in Indonesia. It's only now, though, with the current character of the leading political party, PDI-P, and also its presidential candidate, who is leading in the polls and will be voted in — probably quite handily — in July, for the presidential election. This party and their presidential candidate, Joko Widodo, have a strong political will now to tackle corruption and they have some very intelligent ideas and some very good programs in order to deal with it.
If the political will is there, yes, then the institutions can change.
Senator Ataullahjan: You already brought up that Indonesians are going to the polls today to elect regional and national representatives, and the party that wins the most seats in the House of Representatives will be able to support candidates for the presidential election in July. Jokowi stands as the overwhelmingly popular candidate, particularly as a champion of social reform. If he wins, what do you think the impact will be on Indonesia domestically, especially with regards to human rights?
Mr. Roosa: Jokowi will probably win in the July elections, unless something unforeseen happens. He has a proven track record against corruption, and doing precisely what I just outlined in my comments about raising the revenue that's in the hands of the state, preventing it from leaking out to private individuals and other institutions, and then using it to improve health and education.
In Indonesia, the Philippines and Myanmar, government spending on health and education is at abysmal levels. Jokowi understands that and has very good ideas on how to deal with that. There will be a lot of impact, but I think one problem is going to be, what happens to the big industries? Jokowi so far has only been mayor of two cities and governor of Jakarta. What happens when he has to determine policy for the oil industry? The Indonesian oil industry is very corrupt. Or the mining industries? I don't know.
In terms of human rights, he faces the military, too. While the military's powers have been substantially reduced since 1998, they remain at times a law to themselves. Jokowi will have to be very careful in reforming the military. The last president who tried to — Abdurrahman Wahid — was sabotaged severely and forced out of office, partly because of his agenda for military reform.
I would expect some improvement because Jokowi, in the way he has dealt with security problems within Jakarta and Solo, has opted more for a clever legal route than outright repression.
Senator Ataullahjan: One of our previous witnesses, talking about Burma, said it has 55 million people and huge resources, which have become a curse due to ethnic fighting, and the mistake that Burma has made is that it neglected its human resources, which were the best in that region after World War II. Would you agree with that statement?
Mr. Roosa: Yes, with some qualification. That is, the downfall of democracy in Burma and the downfall of its engagement with the world and with the international economy was not wholly due to problems that the Burmese created themselves. There are a lot of international factors involved, to the point where the Burmese military decided, in 1962, that it might be best to cut Burma off from the rest of the world. Chinese nationalist troops were occupying a large part of eastern Burma and helping those ethnic conflicts, encouraging ethnic conflict. It was a bad decision, of course, but still there were reasons for it.
Yes, the very formulation of Burmese nationalism prior to independence was based upon an ethnic identity of the lowland Burmans, and they had great difficulty integrating the upland ethnic groups. Once the military came to power, the military tried to resolve these conflicts with or by force.
Since the 1990s, there has been a lot of change in that equation between the central military and the upland ethnic groups, such that many of the conflicts are not as intense as they were before and don't claim as many casualties. There are smaller scale conflicts. It's not entirely ethnic anymore, either, even if some of the armies are going under an ethnic name. It has become overlaid with a lot of gangs, drug lords and so forth, so that it's not just ethnic conflict itself representing some kind of traditional conflict, but it's actually new forms of conflict.
Senator Ataullahjan: Yet we see the massacre of the Rohingya Muslims, with no one speaking on their behalf, and the horrific pictures that have come out of Burma of their being burnt alive.
Mr. Roosa: Yes, I wouldn't categorize it as an internal armed conflict. That is, the Rohingya are not armed. They are just civilians who are being attacked. Again, the government is not enforcing its own laws. It doesn't have any laws that say this is valid, but they've decided this is an acceptable kind of violence.
Very few people are speaking up in favour of them, but human rights groups are, and there are many academics who are also speaking up against this inexcusable kind of victimization.
Senator Robichaud: You mentioned that one of the candidates in the Indonesian election, who is most likely to win, has a track record of fighting corruption. I just want you to elaborate a bit. You also said that in the oil and mining industry, corruption is rampant. Do you have any idea as to who the players are in those sectors?
Mr. Roosa: By players, do you mean within Indonesia?
Senator Robichaud: Within Indonesia, and without.
Mr. Roosa: Yes. Jokowi's track record, first, is as the mayor of Solo, a large city in central Java, for about 10 years. For the past two years he has been governor of Jakarta and has accomplished a remarkable amount. This is someone who breaks the mould, who sets up a new paradigm, and this is why he's so wildly popular. There haven't been politicians like this after 1998 that have come up with this kind of principled and intelligent agenda.
For corruption, one of the things he did was scare the bureaucrats. He dismissed many of the bureaucrats who were clearly part of the old corruption, and he put the ones that he retained under very close watch. He has his vice governor go around to the offices and check closely on what they're doing. That's one thing.
The other thing he started to do was deal with gangs. Not too far from the presidential palace in Jakarta is a large market called Tanah Abang. It was entirely unregulated. It was a source of traffic jams. There were a lot of vendors on the street selling, and they were paying protection money to a local gangster. Jokowi dealt with this problem by building a new building and moving the street vendors into the building, depriving the gangsters of revenue and improving the traffic flow in the streets. It was a kind of win-win-win situation.
He's dealing with a bureaucracy and looking into the accounts of the civil servants within the Jakarta administration. That kind of pressure from the top is encouraging pressure from below to monitor as well. So there's a different spirit in Jakarta now, too. People are expecting things from the state, they expect better performance from the civil servants and they don't accept being fleeced so easily anymore.
That was the answer to the first question.
On the oil and mining: The state-owned oil company is called Pertamina. It's a very large company with very large revenues, in the tens of billions of dollars every year, but its profit is very small. You can get an idea of how important the rule of law is by comparing Pertamina's operations with a state-owned company in Malaysia, which is the twelfth most profitable company in the world according to one survey. It has tens of billions of dollars ready to invest in British Columbia, where I'm sitting, in natural gas. Pertamina is nowhere near that level, even though it has larger reserves and is an older company. So much of the revenue over the years has been wasted and hasn't gone into the state coffers and been used for productive purposes or saved for investment. They're having a terrible time trying to reorganize it.
The current president, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, reorganized one part of the oil industry and created a new office, but just last year the Corruption Eradication Commission, which was set up 2002 as part of the reforms, arrested the head of that new agency that was supposed to solve the problem of corruption — red-handed with hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash in his office and home and so forth. So the reorganization intended to stop corruption actually resulted in a different re-channelling of the resources.
In both oil and mining, one of the problems with corruption in Indonesia is just that it's so varied, that it's at every level. There's the district-level officials, provincial and national-level officials. The mismatch between the different laws and some of the confusion over who has authority to do what among the three levels produces headaches for everyone concerned, ordinary citizens as well as multinational corporations. I hope that went some way to answer that question.
Senator Demers: Thank you very much, sir.
According to the Asian Development Bank, a large segment of the population has not benefited from the recent fast pace of economic growth and, in some cases, socio-economic inequalities have been widened. To what extent has economic growth and the reduction of poverty translated into other socio-economic improvements, such as better access to health services, education, clean water and sanitation service in the Asia-Pacific region?
Mr. Roosa: All the things you just mentioned about education, health, clean water and sanitation are all things that depend greatly on government action. Private investment doesn't do it. Indonesia, Myanmar and the Philippines are facing tremendous crises in all those areas, precisely because the economic growth isn't being managed by the state well enough so that the state can use the money that is available.
One of the reasons Jokowi, a presidential candidate, is a good paradigm is because he keeps telling Indonesians, "The money is there. If we just follow the tax laws that we have now, we can do a lot more."
Of course, the tax laws could be reformed greatly, too, but there's a lot of money there. Gone are the days when development thought that countries like Canada should build schools and clinics in third-world countries. A lot of the third-world countries have the money now because of economic growth.
However, without any coordination, the fruits of economic growth will go to foreign companies or to private individuals, and one can see that the inequalities in Southeast Asia are very stark. Even the wealthy wind up getting their houses flooded because of the mismanagement of the sewage systems. They have to live with rivers that are clogged with pollution, and it affects everyone's health. Yet, without that kind of coordination, without that institutional building and without state power to regulate it — social scientists call it the "governance gap" — the economic growth is expanding but the government isn't able to cope with it.
Greater private investment or greater economic growth by itself is not going to solve the problem. That would be the upshot.
The Chair: I just have a few other questions. Are you able to answer any questions on security and smuggling issues with respect to Indonesia, per se, where I believe you said you lived seven years?
Mr. Roosa: I can give it a shot.
The Chair: Please do.
What I wanted to know is what type of difficulties on security do we have? We have heard things like piracy being an issue. We think of security as destabilization in the region and internal conflict with some of the ethnic groups. Is that a question of security, or is it more of a criminal element that you are aware of? What are the concerns?
I'm looking at it from the perspective of Canadians wishing to go there for purposes of investment, as well as for their own safety when they're there.
Mr. Roosa: I will mention a few things about smuggling in general and try to answer the question about the effect for Canadians.
There's a lot of smuggling right now in illegal timber. The government has laws to prevent the export of timber that has been felled without permit, yet it is widespread. Government officials in the outer islands are paid off, and large boats are loaded with illegal timber and then sold in other markets in Asia. There may be a role for Canada to play in helping Indonesia enforce its own laws, especially as to identifying where the illegal timber is going.
There is also a lot of smuggling of some of the oil products. One can learn a great deal about the nature of smuggling by looking at the statements of the Corruption Eradication Commission. They have done a great service for public education about how the corruption works in Indonesia with all the prosecutions they've had since 2002.
Officials like to send their money outside of Indonesia, and Singapore seems to be the favourite place. There's an ongoing tiff between Indonesia and Singapore about rules for dealing with these funds obtained through illegal means.
Smuggling is actually not as bad as it was, let's say, in the 1950s, when a lot of the economy was based on smuggling, because the state really had very little power and it was hard to tell the difference between legitimate trade and smuggling.
A lot of smuggling is abetted by the security agencies — by the military; they allow it to take place. I don't know statistics on how bad it is.
How does security affect Canadians living in Indonesia? It doesn't affect it much. Canadian mining companies face problems with illegal mining or other miners who come in and are allowed to do so, again, because of the military, but I can't say it's all that widespread. I wouldn't think it is all that important for Canadian businesses, but maybe somebody from Canadian business would say it was. I don't know well enough.
The Chair: I won't ask the supplementary, which is whether it is a good place to do business. It is not your area.
One other area, though —
Mr. Roosa: Actually, I could say something in general about whether it is a good place to do business.
The Chair: Okay.
Mr. Roosa: Just right now, Canadian investment is very low in Indonesia, as well as the Philippines and Myanmar/ Burma. It could be much greater with better institutions. There are a lot of businesses — not Canadian ones — who find it easy to do work in Indonesia, or easy enough to get by, so they do it. But it is a difficult environment to work in.
Again, Canada could do something to help improve the public institutions in Southeast Asia so that investment could be easier.
Senator Robichaud: My supplementary is on Senator Andreychuk's question and answer. You said Canadians could do more to make the climate better for Canadians to go invest there. What could we do?
Mr. Roosa: There's a whole range of issues. I don't know how effective these are going to be, or whether one could even measure them.
There's a range of issues involving Canadian universities. McGill already brings many Indonesians here with CIDA money to Montreal to study Islam, but there's no reason why other Indonesians and other Southeast Asians couldn't be brought to Canada for training in other matters such as law.
Judges in Southeast Asia tend to be trained within their countries, and greater exposure to other legal systems and legal training would be valuable.
Other legal scholars would be helpful. There are not a lot of legal scholars who are doing top-notch work in Southeast Asia on legal theory or on how to design laws.
In terms of education and doing more to fund NGOs, Canada already does some in that regard. Throughout Southeast Asia, it does good work funding human rights NGOs and other kinds of NGOs.
We can also think about ways to close this governance gap to make up for the deficiencies of governments in Southeast Asia and to deal with some powerful economic actors, such as helping them enforce the laws on illegal timber. A lot of the forest fires have been set by palm oil plantations that have licences from the government, but the industry itself is trying to develop standards for sustainable oil palm production. Efforts in that direction would be helpful so that we can target the sort of consumer side to put pressure on the production side. Some moves have already been made against some of the big timber and paper companies in Indonesia which has helped them reform their behaviour.
Concerning the Canadian Corruption of Foreign Public Officials Act, as far as I know the first prosecution was last year, showing that Canada is quite serious about corruption. That is, putting pressure on the countries where corruption is rampant to say that foreign companies won't tolerate that.
Senator Wallace: Mr. Roosa, you began by saying the move to acceptance of the rule of law is one of the most critical issues you see facing Indonesia. You have touched on some of that in your comments.
I am trying to understand what you are getting to when you refer to the rule of law. It could be the substantive issues of law that relate to civil law, contract law, administrative law or criminal law. Are you thinking of all of those in terms of substance? There are inadequacies in the actual substance of laws in all of those areas.
When we're thinking of where Canada may be able to help, it would be in creating laws within all of those legal areas. Would it also include establishing institutions in Indonesia that are capable of enforcing and interpreting the laws, courts, tribunals, and so on?
Then there is enforcement. Are there issues around enforcement to create a strong rule of law in Indonesia?
That covers a lot of territory. When you refer to the rule of law, what in that menu are you referring to and to what extent would you see the greatest deficiencies in those areas?
Mr. Roosa: For the purposes of my brief opening comments, I was just using the term "rule of law" as a cover-all for something very specific, which was the ability of a state to get its officials to follow its own laws.
I was focusing on that because I do think that, while there is much to be done in terms of legal reform in terms of rewriting the laws, writing new laws and improving the laws, at this point it would be nice to see greater enforcement of the laws. That is tied with the institutions. If you look at Indonesia post-1998, they created a new institution called the Constitutional Court of Indonesia and there are already these kinds of institutions which are really helping build up a rule of law.
I should mention — given that I'm an academic in Canada — that I was involved in a case before the Constitutional Court. The Attorney General's office banned my book that was published in Indonesia in 2008. They banned it in 2009 and the publisher brought the case before the Constitutional Court to have the court declare the law that allowed the Attorney General's office to unilaterally ban books to be unconstitutional. I was involved in helping prepare that petition and we won. The Constitutional Court declared that law unconstitutional, which meant that an academic in Canada now has an association with an important decision for expanding freedom of speech in Indonesia.
A lot can be done within the existing institutions. The problem is the enforcement — not just from the police, but from the state officials, the bureaucrats themselves.
I still think there's a lot of room for Canadians to be involved in helping draft laws. Some Canadian academics have been involved in the past, as far back as the 1980s, maybe earlier, in helping write the environmental laws.
For all the areas of law that you listed — criminal law, civil law and administrative law — the laws are there, the law books are there, and the courts are there. It is still at an inchoate stage because the rule of law was held in suspension for 32 years during the Suharto dictatorship. Laws were allowed to be decided arbitrarily by the state officials themselves, who didn't have to follow laws. Now Indonesia has to play catch-up.
There is still some room for rewriting the laws, changing the laws and rethinking the nature of the legal codes. A lot of them are sort of cobbled together and they're somewhat inconsistent. That is, cobbled together from all colonial-era laws, laws before the Suharto dictatorship and so on. The key area now is really in this area of enforcement. That's why I was emphasizing that in the opening comments.
Senator Wallace: Thank you very much. I was going to come back to that, but you have answered it.
Basically, in terms of officials, corruption and how all that applies to the rule of law, your main point would be there are laws there. Laws can always be improved, the wording and so on, but it is an issue of enforcement. If there are ways that, from our Canadian experience, we could provide some thoughts to the system to better enforcement, I take it that would be your suggestion?
Mr. Roosa: Yes. Enforcement and the other areas, too, are important, especially in the courts. The judiciary in Indonesia is very poor. You mentioned the enforcement of contracts and property law. The whole land title system in Indonesia is very messy and people can take a long time just to get title to the land. I happen to know because I live in a neighbourhood where people have been struggling to get titles to land that they have been living on for a long time. One has to know somebody to get connections to people in the office. On that score I don't exactly know what Canada can do, but that general area of property rights is going through a lot of reforms now and I'm sure Canada could be involved in some way.
The Chair: You note in the years that Indonesia was inward-looking, it was a dictatorship, but it has moved into a different phase. Is Indonesia significant in the region? Does it play an assertive role? Is it seen by its neighbours as equal to its size and population or is it very much inward?
Mr. Roosa: Other countries in Southeast Asia understand Indonesia to be the most important country in Southeast Asia just given its size.
I wouldn't say it is inward-looking anymore. Actually, one of the big changes after 1998 was the increasing self-confidence of Indonesian officials. During the time of the dictatorship, they were always a bit worried about their position. The motto was to just make sure that the big boss was pleased. There was inhibition about what they could do and how they could express themselves.
Now they're much more confident and outspoken. They have to face a lot of debates about what to do, and they can't just rely on following orders. There has been a big change. Yes, you're right that under the dictatorship, even though it is such a large country, it seemed to be invisible. On the international stage today, it still has some level of invisibility. Certainly, it's taking a lead role in the ASEAN forum, so I don't think that's a concern anymore.
Senator Ataullahjan: If I understand correctly, you are saying they have moved beyond Suharto's legacy of human rights violations with regard to East Timor, political prisoners and others. You feel that Indonesia has moved beyond that?
Mr. Roosa: Yes and no. After Suharto, they were able to do something different with regard to East Timor. Even then, in allowing the referendum, the military exacted revenge on East Timor and made sure that East Timor's independence came at a very high price.
On Aceh, too, the post-1998 Indonesian government has shown greater wisdom and was able to sign a peace accord with the guerrillas to end that internal conflict. Indonesia has a human rights commission that was set up during the Suharto dictatorship. The former justice ministry has renamed itself the Ministry of Law and Human Rights. In principle, there's a lot of respect accorded our human rights, but in practice the continuing existence of arbitrary military power at the local level is such that part of the Indonesian military is stationed inside the country. They have a somewhat superfluous role now. It is just a legacy that goes back even to the 1950s.
Some reformers have proposed reducing it, at least, but it hasn't been reduced, even though it is superfluous. The problem is that these soldiers are stationed as a kind of supplemental police who played a role in domestic politics and law enforcement and not just national defence. There's constant conflict with the police over jurisdiction and with gangs. The different gangs will try to get backing from the local military. That produces a lot of conflict.
It was just last year that soldiers of one unit raided a prison in Central Java and brazenly executed four prisoners that the police were trying to hide from them. It was a case of revenge. It isn't that calm in terms of that level of brazenness and bloodshed. There still needs to be some reforms in the military to move it over to national defence, purely.
The other problem is with West Papua. It's an ongoing and serious problem whereby the Papuans' rights are not being respected. This is apart from whether one is pro- or anti-independence for Papua. It is a humanitarian and human rights issue; and that is something the international community should still be monitoring and expressing concern over.
Senator Robichaud: What is the relationship between the government and the military? The military seems to be a force on its own, operating the way they think they should operate.
Mr. Roosa: It is a complicated relationship that's changing as we speak. It has changed a lot just since 1998. The military no longer has representatives within the legislature, and the central government has shown greater initiative in appointing the top generals.
There was a moment in the early 2000s when the government was attempting to intervene more deeply into the military to audit its businesses, for instance. After 2003, the military was able to come back and prevent that kind of reform. Since 2003, as far as I can see, military reform hasn't progressed very much. The military realizes that it has to change as its role is increasingly becoming superfluous as the wars in Atatu and East Timor have ended. The police are responsible for a lot more of the day-to-day law enforcement.
The military are trying to figure out what their role is. So far we haven't seen from the executive branch during the tenure of Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono a strong effort to continue the military reforms that were begun earlier. Part of the problem with the military is that it collects money from businesses as protection, so it has its own budget. Until the central government is able to fully control, the military budget is not going to be able to control the military — the appointments, policies and so forth.
Having first gone to live in Indonesia during the time of the Suharto dictatorship, I see it is a very different environment now. The military are not as front and centre as they were before. There is room for some optimism about further progress.
The Chair: We're looking at Burma, as well as Indonesia. The military was firmly in control and permeated virtually everything, including the economic situation. They have been moved to the margins, although they're still in control. Do you see a curve of development in Burma that would replicate what happened in Indonesia? It is not dismantling the military, but there is a slow gradual nudging away of them to try to build a society, while they don't destabilize it by those who could.
Mr. Roosa: The Burmese military is still facing the problem that it faced back in the 1980s, which was that it could no longer manage economic growth. It could no longer provide for better living standards for Burmese people. It attempted elections in 1998, just as it attempted elections in 2010, as a way of sort of legitimizing its power. Once it realized it was losing control in 1988, it resorted to a clampdown on the popular mobilizations and re-imposed direct military rule and abandoned the electoral system.
The military in Burma knows it is in trouble. They know that they have to be responsible for improving the living standards of Burmese. The Burmese are increasingly feeling like they expect better living standards. It is putting the military in a bind.
The recent reforms reflect the effectiveness of international pressure. The fact that Burma made these substantial reforms, the fact that the Burmese military conceded so much, I think was due to the sanctions. This is true actually for many other countries in Southeast Asia who are very wary of China now and the rising power of China, especially the countries that border it, like Burma. Burma needed the bargaining power with China so that they would not have to accept all the conditions that China imposed on its investments and so it wouldn't become just sort of a colony of China.
It had to open up to the West. To open up to the West, it had to get rid of the sanctions. To get rid of the sanctions, it had to have these political reforms. I think that's a trend. It may well be that the Burmese military will step back further as it sees that it needs to step back so that the Burmese can experience better living standards.
The Chair: Thank you. Your testimony today has been extremely helpful to us. You have a historic perspective and on-the-ground experience, and it has been helpful in our study, particularly as we look to the differences in these countries and particularly the testimony on Indonesia. It has been fleshed out for us. Thank you for being here.
Senators, we're on time for our vote, so I'm going to adjourn this meeting.
(The committee adjourned.)