Reasonable xenophobia
December 8th, 2002
The outrage now sweeping the Southeast Asian region over Australian Prime Minister John Howard’s remark that he would “be prepared to attack” terrorists in another country if the latter were threatening Australia reveals how deeply suspicious the region is of the country Down Under.
Thailand, Indonesia and Malaysia have officially reacted with scathing denunciations of Howard’s statement as this was reported in the media. Malaysia’s Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad—who is probably the most suspicious of Australian motives among the region’s heads of state—went as far as to say that any Australian incursion into Malaysian territory would be “an act of war” and would presumably invite a Malaysian response in kind.
Here at home, a number of Philippine officials including Blas Ople of foreign affairs, Vice President Guingona and both administration and opposition senators have also expressed their shock via statements of varying degrees of hostility.
However, President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, apparently in deference to her patron George Bush’s expression of support for Howard’s views, reacted with the usual limp statement—which of course only confirms how out of synch she and her government are with the sentiments of the region.
Howard has refused to apologize, arguing that he had nothing to apologize for. The Australian foreign minister, Alexander Downer, has “clarified” Howard’s statements by saying that he had only restated the principle that every country has the right to defend itself.
Downer also described as “absurd” the interpretation of Howard’s remarks as indicating that “Australia’s actually got some sort of new doctrine that it’s going to bomb its neighbors.” In so many words, Downer has also assured Southeast Asian governments that should it ever be necessary for Australia to launch military attacks in the territory of its neighbors, it would of course consult with the government of the country concerned.
A spokesman for Downer, however, described the outrage of the leading members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations as “nonsense.”
A number of Australian journalists have rushed to the defense of their prime minister. One of them, Paul Kelly of The Australian (a daily owned by the media mega-mogul Rupert Murdoch), described the countries of the Southeast Asian region as “xenophobic” in his December 4 column while admitting that Howard committed two errors.
The first, said Kelly, was his failure to realize that whatever he says for domestic consumption will reverberate across the region. Howard has been campaigning for changes in international law to permit countries under threat of terrorist attacks to launch preemptive strikes. His statement therefore “had the potential to be misunderstood in Southeast Asia, the primary area of terrorist concern for Australia.”
Howard’s other mistake was to answer a hypothetical question. That question, from broadcaster Laurie Oakes, was: “…you have been arguing for a new approach to preemptive defense, you want the United Nations to change its charter. Does it mean that if you knew that, say, Jama’ah Islamiyah people in another [sic] neighboring country were planning an attack on Australia, you would be prepared to attack?”
Kelly argues that Howard should not have answered the question at all. Although he did qualify his answer—he said no such situation had arisen and that military action would be a last resort—Howard did not at all mention the need to work with the concerned Southeast Asian government (an ominous omission which was one reason for the outraged reactions).
“The truth,” said Kelly, “is that if Australia were faced with evidence of an attack on its soil being mounted by terrorists within the region, then it is inconceivable that Australia would take military action without resort to the host government. It would consult.”
Kelly quotes Downer as saying that in any effort to preempt such an attack, “of course Australia would want to do that in cooperation with other nations.” Kelly then describes the reactions of Southeast Asian governments as “unprofessional” and as revealing “more about the region’s own sensitivities than it does about Howard’s mistake.”
The problem with this view is that it is no more sensitive to the tension between Southeast Asia and westernized, white-dominated Australia than Howard’s reckless but nevertheless dangerous statements. It forgets that the region has sound historical reasons to be suspicious of the West, given its long history under brutal Western colonial rule. And Australia, for all intents and purposes, is regarded in Southeast Asia as a Western country which might as well be in North America, where many of its citizens would be at home with the Ku Klux Klan.
There is in fact the White Australia policy—officially dead, but remarkably still breathing; Australians’ fear of, and disdain for, people of color (the Howard coalition that now runs the government was elected to power by, among others, playing on the average white Australian’s fears of an “invasion” by “slanty-eyed” Asian immigrants); and Australia’s talking and acting as if it were the prime power in a region in which nationalist sentiments remain strong (the Philippines is a notable exception to that rule).
White Australians are in that sense xenophobic too—which makes a lot less sense because it was their forefathers, the first white settlers, who were the foreigners in a country where people of color (the Aborigines they slaughtered by the thousands and whom they treat as worse than second-class citizens today) had been living for centuries. The countries of the region have a right to their xenophobia (an “undue fear of what is foreign” is the dictionary definition), considering their past and present experiences with the West—with which Australia never fails to identify, thus making it a persistent and noisy reminder.
It sounds reassuring that Australia would “consult” those countries where terrorist groups plotting against it are based before launching any military action—except that the presence of foreign troops in much of the Asean countries would be intolerably violative of both those countries’ sense of independence as well as their laws.
Again, the Philippines under the pallid, though mercenary governance of Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo would be an exception, despite a constitutional ban on foreign troops in its territory (offer it a few million dollars quick and you can have the run of the place). But Malaysia would certainly brook no foreign troops in its territory and neither would Thailand. Certainly Indonesia, which has the biggest and toughest armed forces in the region, would deny Australian military forces access to its territory as well.
If worse comes to worst, and Australia does see the need for military action in other countries—and if, as expected, after consultation with, say, the government of Indonesia, it is denied military access to its neighbor’s territory, would it then meekly abandon that option?
Every indication says it won’t. Australia after all wants international law and the UN Charter changed to permit “preemptive strikes” à la the US—that’s how serious it is about acting as the regional policeman.
US President Bush’s expression of support for Howard also says as much, if not more. The world will have to change, said Bush Press Secretary Ari Fleischer, and by implication he meant that it will have to accept unilateral preemptive strikes as a fact of 21st century, post-September 11, 2001, life, primarily because the US (and now Australia) says so.
The “clarifications” by the Australian government are in this context hardly reassuring. The Southeast Asian countries (again, except Arroyo’s Philippines) do have a right to—and are far more reasonable in—their xenophobia.
(Today/abs-cbnNEWS.com, December 7, 2002)