Democracy's perilous fight

 

Democracy protestor in Myanmar - France 24

 

Editorial by Manekseka Sangkum

 

Planet earth as a whole is a frightening, unjust and brutal place for the vast majority of its inhabitants. In most of the still under-developed nations of 'the South' - and East - ruling power is almost exclusively in the hands of corrupt and brutal military dictators. Even in the more established democracies and industrialised North, there are differentials in socio-economic trends to be found in terms of unequal distribution of wealth and social economic status. But at least the states there tend to look out for their more vulnerable and marginalised groups within their population.

While democracy is still relatively new to the peoples of South East Asia, it is almost becoming an ineluctable phase in their awakening and development which is being made all the more acute and urgent in these societies by growing socio-economic gaps between the haves and have-nots as well as the flagrant abuse of power on the part of the small minority perched at the top of the pyramid and supported by their monopoly over the means of organised violence.

Whether you live under Communist ruled Vietnam or China or under the dictatorship of military junta as in Cambodia, Thailand and Myanmar, the thirst or desire for change where the people could decide and affect their own destiny through elective representation rather than being dictated to by that unelected minority with the guns is the same and equally as unquenchable; internally at least. The Chinese students and their professors had staged their brave fight for that change in China in 1989 mass protests but only to be brutally crushed. Even the soldiers deployed to quell their peaceful gatherings at Tiananmen Square were those with the most recent experience of combat and brutality: they had served in the brief but violent Sino-Vietnam war in 1979.      

 

We are today witnessing a similair event in Myanmar where the change is being called for by ordinary citizens armed with no more threatening weapons at their disposal than their pots and pans and placards. Cambodian people had also staged their protests against state repression intermittently since the 1980s – especially, in the urban capital city of Phnom Penh - and they had also been brutally put down by the same man who clings to power to this very day. 

How ironic and sad that the rest of the ‘civilised world’ and its democratically elected governments could only watch on and issue strongly-worded statements in condemnation every time a people in a distant corner of the world stand up courageously to dictatorship and live bullets, yet are being propelled to do so by the very same core values treasured and upheld by their own populations at home.