Gwynne Dyer: Strongmen beat down democracy in Asia

Cambodia: Hun Sen, his opponents disappear. Photo / AP

Aquarter-century before the Arab Spring of 2011, there was a democratic spring in southeast Asia: the Philippines in 1986, Burma in 1988, Thailand in 1992 and Indonesia in 1998.

The Arab Spring was largely drowned in blood (Syria, Egypt, Libya), but democracy really seemed to be taking root in southeast Asia.

But look at it now. The army is back in power in Thailand, and it never really left in Burma. The Philippines still has the forms of democracy but President Rodrigo Duterte is a homicidal clown. And last week saw the demolition of the facade of democracy in Cambodia.

In Cambodia's case democracy never was much more than a facade.

Hun Sen, who was just "re-elected" president with 80 per cent of the vote, has been in power for 33 years - first as the leader of a Communist puppet government during the Vietnamese occupation of 1978-90, later as the ruler of an independent country where rivals sometimes disappeared and his party unaccountably always won the elections.

But there was a relatively free press and a real opposition party, so Cambodia was loosely counted as a democracy - until the opposition Cambodia National Rescue Party did surprisingly well in the 2013 election.

After that the free media were shut down and in late 2016 the CNRP was dissolved by the supreme court. No wonder Hun Sen won again.

"Whatever Mr Hun Sen wants, he gets. People are so fearful," said deputy CNRP leader Mu Sochua, who fled to Germany last month. (The CNRP leader, Kem Sokha, is in jail on treason charges.)

Thailand went a lot further in building a real democracy. A populist party that attracted peasants and urban poor actually got power and started moving resources their way. Military-backed conservatives, including much of the urban middle class, fought that party in the courts and in the street.

The populist party was forced to change its name and its leader several times, but it was still in business until the military coup of 2014 shut all political activity down. Each year the generals promise a free election for the following year, but it hasn't happened yet.

Next door in Burma, the attempted non-violent revolution of 1988 was thwarted by a massacre of students worse than the one carried out by the Chinese Communist Party on Tienanmen Square the next year.

It's only in the past few years that the military were forced to hand some power to civilians through free elections. But the generals struck back with a pogrom against the Muslim minority in Rakhine state, the Rohingya, whom they falsely accused of being illegal immigrants.

So 700,000 Rohingyas were driven into Bangladesh, Buddhist Burmese nationalists cheered the army on - and Aung San Suu Kyi, long-standing leader of the democratic movement, did not dare to condemn the crime.

And there's the Philippines, where the elections really are free. The trouble is that in 2016 the Filipinos elected Rodrigo Duterte, a self-proclaimed murderer, by a landslide.

At least 3000 death-squad killings of alleged drug-dealers later, he still has the highest popularity rating of any Filipino president since the "people power" revolution of 1986.

Vietnam and Laos are still Communist-ruled autocracies, and only two of the eight countries in the region, Indonesia and Malaysia, are real democracies. It falls far short of the late 20th century's high hopes - but it's a good deal more than nothing.

* Gwynne Dyer's new book is 'Growing Pains: The Future of Democracy (and Work)'.