Asia's
New political tool
From various cities, Takshin organises his forces via new-tech and shows how woefully inadequate Singapore's weak opposition is in its use. Comment. By Seah Chiang Nee.
Apr 18, 2009

In Singapore, the law stipulates that opposition candidates have only nine days to campaign for votes before a general election is held, a rare restriction in the world.

In effect, the Internet has rendered this obsolete because any politician of any party – whether in or out of a country – can campaign by using the new media right into people’s homes round the year.

In short, if the opposition parties were to set their minds to it, they can campaign anytime they want to - 24 hours a day.

It may be less effective than physical rallies or house-to-house calls, but - as proven by Anwar Ibrahim (Malaysia) and Barrack Obama - the new tech can be instrumental in winning power, provided if you have a winning message.

In contrast, none of the opposition in Singapore has shown the ability - or willingness - to make use of this channel to good use to overcome the regulations that work against them.

They do not need to wait for a Parliament session or the stipulated election campaign period (that’s for the physical campaigning) to put their messages across.

They do not require a press conference to do so. If they have a winning stance, they can sell it across the digital waves to millions of people.

Time is actually not on their side because the ruling People's Action Party has plans to begin to move into the new media.

A new era

In the present era, no politicians can afford to adopt a tortoise-like plan to use high tech. They should consider any, and all, means to get their messages to the electorate.

This is a contrast to the bad old days of press controls in Singapore more than 30 years ago.

At the time, Mr. Lee Kuan Yew used to blacklist ‘offending’ newspapers or reporters by barring them from attending government press conferences - as a form of punishment.

Punishment by banning people from reporting your messages! Can you imagine?

Today any government that ban the media – whether new or old – from covering its events is punishing itself. It will give its rivals a field day to score well.

Thaksin

The latest to successfully use the new-tech to rally supporters is ousted Thai leader, Thaksin Shinawatra, as reported by Sreeram Chaulia of Asia Times in "A tech-savvy rebellion" that run as follows (excerpts):

"Exile was once an effective ploy used by governments to deprive political opposition figures of their audience.

Banishing a politician from the homeland in the pre-information technology (IT) era was often enough to break the link between that individual and any of their supporters.

By physically kicking enemies out, governments in those days could reasonably hope to suppress unwanted personalities.

Exile therefore sat alongside arrest, detention, co-optation and assassination in the toolboxes of regimes trying to ward off threats to their survival.

But the advent of Internet technologies leaves in doubt the usefulness of political exile.

In early April, ousted former Thai prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra, whose "red shirts" recently shook the wits out of not only the incumbent government but also visiting Asean dignitaries, showed he is a perfect exponent of the new phenomenon of long-distance, tech-savvy rebellion.

Through Internet-based communications devices and video links, Thaksin - who was deposed from power in a 2006 military coup - has continued to script Thai politics from exile in London, Dubai in the United Arab Emirates and Hong Kong.

The ability of Thaksin's backers in Thailand to screen his speeches and public addresses live, via advanced net-enabled technology, has given him a platform to urge the Thai people to overthrow what he has labelled an illegitimate government.

By harnessing mass communication that can traverse continents, Thaksin has more than lived up to his pedigree as a telecommunications magnate.

The current uprising against the military-supported government by the "red shirts" may not have materialised without the provocation of Thaksin's tired but angry face rallying spirits from video screens erected on the streets of Bangkok and broadcast on satellite-based television stations.

Instead of the man in flesh and blood, his supporters took inspiration seeing him via satellite imagery.

When Thaksin thundered on the giant viewing panels that "negotiations are impossible", the assembled red shirts howled back in agreement and took to the streets after his call for a "people's revolution" against the Abhisit Vejjajiva-led government.

For followers of Thaksin, the sight of their leader appearing before their eyes in crystal clear picture and sound quality is a powerful image, perhaps more so than if he were physically present at the gatherings.

The electronic medium served as a stirring reminder to the red shirts, who feel their leader had been persecuted and should be brought back to head the country.

The video-linking not only substituted for lost political opportunities due to Thaksin's self-imposed exile - he was sentenced in October 2008 to two years in prison on conflict of interest charges - but also gave him the halo of a martyr.

Thaksin is not the first Asian politician to organise Internet-based revolts.

Altaf Hussain, the leader of Pakistan's mohajir community that migrated from India to Pakistan during and after the partition of 1947, has been in exile in London since 1992....

.. In the Middle East, Hamas' exiled leadership in Syria has also benefited from the Internet to overcome the handicap of living outside the Palestinian Occupied Territories.

The speeches and political commentaries of Khaled Mashal, Hamas' political bureau chief in Syria, are often relayed via Arab television and satellite links to Palestinians inside the Gaza Strip....

...Social networking websites like Twitter and Facebook, and video-sharing websites like YouTube, now form part of the arsenal of political movements, from Barack Obama's election campaign in the United States to the opposition Pakatan Rakyat alliance in Malaysia's polls last year.

What Thaksin, Hussain and Mashal have proved is that technological innovations can be used to influence the politics of the street...

.. Thaksin appears to have been able to inflict as much political damage to the current Thai government from his unconfirmed location in Hong Kong or Dubai.

The Thai government finally pulled the plug on the satellite broadcasts, claiming they had caused "chaos".

But the quantum leap in global communications of the past two decades is a boon for exiles and a bane for regimes caught up in obsolete methods of survival.

Look no further than Thailand for confirmation of how technology is altering political landscapes and rattling rulers."

(Sreeram Chaulia is a researcher on international affairs at the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs in Syracuse, New York.)

Report in full:
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Southeast_Asia/KD17Ae01.html