More of the same?
BURMA, THE bad boy of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, is supposedly easing restrictions on, among others, the press and the political opposition, and the Western funding agencies are rushing into the democratization breach.
They’re armed not only with the dollars and euros that like magic potions are supposed to transform benighted societies into modern democracies. They also have in tow those learned consultants on press freedom, governance, politics etc., whose expertise no mere Asian country can do without. Critics— and they include some of the very same people who have themselves been doing consultancies, assessments, and training in various fields including journalism–call the culture of the international community of foundations, “non-profits,” “partner organizations,” non-governmental organizations, NGOism. NGOism basically consists of throwing money and consultants at selected countries, which in far too many instances seem to be those the countries where the partner organizations are based have various interests including strategic, political, or economic ones, to help them “democratize.”
If it works, the country that’s been the recipient of all that supposedly non-partisan, non-political aid ends up with institutions that are veritable mirror images of the donor country’s institutions, which itself is a kind of failure in that sooner or later they collide with such realities as local culture, not to mention the interests of the very politicians who were supposed to steer the country to democracy and modernity.
When it fails, it fails big-time. In Timor Leste, which for an entire decade since its independence in 2002 had been the recipient of private as well as governmental international assistance, a veritable tsunami of funding and foreign expertise has failed to even put together a journalists’ code of ethics acceptable to Timorese practitioners—or even to Western analysts. A UN team did put one together, but what they came up with was so contrary to the imperatives of press freedom and independence it very quickly passed into oblivion. (Nowadays observers simply refer to that Code as “stupid. ”)
Today, say Timor Leste media practitioners, veritably the same problems remain in the fledgling press and media, among them journalists’ having to defend their independence from government, and low skills levels and indifferent ethical awareness. Most of the international NGOs have pulled out supposedly because Timor Leste democracy was already a reality, and press freedom in place.
And yet both are never really completed, are they? For example, in the three countries where the institutions of democracy have been restored since 1986—the Philippines (1986), Thailand (1992), and Indonesia (1998)—democracy and press freedom are still works in progress that have had to be defended from their opponents, the enhancement of which has required the most tenacious and laborious effort.
One wonders if, assuming the liberalization of Burma continues, and the international NGO community repeats what it’s done in countries like Timor Leste (and to some degree, the Philippines) by fashioning their institutions into their own image, and later withdrawing once they think their work is done, that country will end up like Timor Leste, where the promises of democratization and modernity have yet to be realized, despite—or is it because of?– the money and expertise that’s been thrown at it since 2002.