Human Rights Watch World Report 1997 - Asia overview

Human Rights Developments

In terms of human rights, Asia in 1996 was marked by major setbacks, minor progress and much unfinished business. On the one hand, there was an obvious deterioration of the human rights situation in Burma, Cambodia, China, and Indonesia. In addition to the arrest of over 1,000 supporters of the democracy movement in Burma during the year, forced labor and forced relocations in Burma's eastern provinces led to a massive exodus of refugees and migrants to Thailand. China's particularly harsh treatment of democracy advocates like Wei Jingsheng, serving a fourteen-year prison sentence, and Wang Dan, a former student leader who "disappeared" in 1995 only to surface in custody and be formally tried and sentenced to eleven years in prison on subversion charges in October 1996, were part of a more systematic effort to crush the political opposition. At the same time, China's arrests of busiess and banking executives during the year demonstrated that arbitrary detention was not restricted to political activists. The utter disregard for the rule of law by Chinese authorities, even as some legal reforms were undertaken, did not bode well for Hong Kong and its transition to Chinese rule in 1997. Many activists in Hong Kong were already concerned by Chinese government statements and actions that signaled strict controls of the press and of political participation after the transition. In Indonesia, dozens of student activists under the age of thirty faced trial and certain conviction on political charges for taking part a nonviolent leftist political organization that the Soeharto government, with no evidence, charged with masterminding serious riots in Jakarta, the capital, in July. If the level of state repression was high during the year, the demand from Asian citizens for basic civil liberties was greater than ever. If 1988 was the year of the pro-democracy movement for Burma, 1989 for China, 1990 for Nepal, 1992 for Thailand, 1993 for Cambodia, and 1995 for Hong Kong, 1996 was a banner year for Taiwan and Indonesia. The elections in Taiwan in March, in which 14,000,000 Taiwanese voters for the first time chose their president by direct and secret ballot after an open and lively campaign, was a stunning refutation of the "Asian values" argument that Asians care more about strong, efficient government than about popular participation. The elections also demonstrated that there was nothing inherently incompatible about Confucian cultural traditions and respect for civil liberties. The Indonesian democracy movement developed a new cohesion with the formation of an independent election monitoring group in March and the demand for accountable leadership that led to mass support for Megawati Soekarnoputri, daughter of Indonesia's first president, as an alternative to President Soeharto. Major human rights problems remained unresolved in the region. In Kashmir, despite the holding of elections in May and September and a reduction in the frequency of confrontation between the military and various groups of armed insurgents, the level of summary executions of suspected militants by Indian security forces remained high. In Sri Lanka, initial optimism that the government of Chandrika Kumartunga, which was largely supportive of human rights, would be able to prevent violations of humanitarian law as its army waged war against the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), was waning at the end of the year. The LTTE, whose violations of a cease-fire in April 1995 led to the resumption of the war, was responsible for serious violations of humanitarian law in the territory it controlled. In Bangladesh, all political parties were responsible for widespread violence and civil strife prior to elections in February and June. Religion frequently intersected with human rights in Asia, often with negative consequences. The Chinese government saw Tibetan Buddhism, Christianity, Islam, and millenarian sects, for different reasons, as serious threats to the legitimacy of the Communist Party and intensified efforts to regulate all. Clashes between Muslims and Christians, originating in unsolved political conflict and unprosecuted human rights abuses, erupted in East Timor in June as they had in 1995. A rash of church-burnings in Java in June, September and October, that the government failed to prevent, and the efforts, with clear communal overtones, of the Indonesian army in August to whip up anti-communist sentiment among Muslim groups following the arrest of members of a student leftist party, all suggested that the much-vaunted reputation of the Indonesian government for religious tolerance needed to be reconsidered. The taking of Kabul by the Muslim militia calling themselves Taliban or "students" signaled a period of grave discrimination against women; the group's seizure of former Prime Minister Najibullah from a U.N. compound and the subsequent torture and execution of Najibullah and his aides boded ill for human rights in Afghanistan. In Burma, the ruling State Law and Order Restoration Council persisted in a pattern of discrimination and abuse against the Muslim Rohingya minority in Arakan, in the north of the country. At the same time, the fact that Bishop Carlos Ximenes Belo of East Timor received the Nobel Peace Prize was recognition of the critically important role religious figures can play as protectors of human rights. And there was some progress toward prosecuting communal violence in India, with the reinstatement of a commission looking into the role of the police in Hindu-Muslim riots in Bombay in 1993. In September, one Hindu man was prosecuted and convicted for killing two Sikhs in the course of a massacre of over 3,000 Sikhs in Delhi in 1984 in which police and ruling party officials took an active role; it was the first such conviction in relation to that massacre. Several regional issues came to international attention during the year. The problems of migrant workers in Malaysia – Bangladeshis, Indonesians and Filipinas in particular – were highlighted with the trial beginning in June of Irene Fernandez, a Malaysian human rights activist charged with "false reporting" for her efforts to document abuses of migrants in Malaysian immigration detention centers. If her trial represented the efforts of one part of the Malaysian government to silence public criticism of the problem, other parts of the government took constructive steps during the year to curb abusive practices of labor recruiters. Thailand's cabinet, in part because of pressure from a labor-starved business community, adopted a resolution in July giving temporary legal status, and therefore protection of some Thai labor laws, to almost 900,000 illegal migrant workers, mostly from Burma, Laos and Cambodia. But that welcome development was offset by the failure of the Thai government to crack down on illegal recruiters sending Thais, many of them women, to Japan and other countries. Of all the human rights issues in Southeast Asia, migration was one of the few on which systematic talks at an intergovernmental were taking place, both among national human rights commissions, within the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and at a bilateral level between foreign and labor ministers of sending and receiving countries. In the Human Resources Development Working Group of the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation forum (APEC), on the other hand, there was strong resistance to addressing the problem of migrant laborers, despite attempts by the Philippines government to get it on the agenda. Bonded labor continued to be a major issue in South Asia. Both India and Pakistan failed to enforce laws prohibiting bonded labor, but in both countries, local nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) had produced a range of recommendations for governments and donor agencies for the identification and rehabilitation of bonded laborers, particularly children, and there was some prospect of greater international scrutiny of government enforcement procedures. Another regional human rights issue, that of the Vietnamese boat people spread among camps in Malaysia, Hong Kong, the Philippines and Indonesia, came to a violent close at the end of the year with the formal end of the Comprehensive Plan of Action, the multilateral plan for repatriation and resettlement of Vietnamese asylum seekers, on June 30. As first-asylum countries rushed to close down their camps, their security forces often used disproportionate force against Vietnamese resisting forced return, although the resistance itself was often violent. Incidents of excessive force occurred throughout the first-asylum countries, including the January shooting death of one Vietnamese in Sungai Besi, Malaysia and the beatings of Vietnamese in Palawan, Philippines in February. Detention conditions for Vietnamese in Hong Kong continued to be a major concern, where some of the camps were expected to remain open in 1997 despite stepped-up efforts to repatriate those remaining. In a humanitarian move that could have been a model for other first-asylum countries, the Philippines in August permitted the remaining 1,000 Vietnamese to integrate locally. Domestic and international advocacy efforts forced the issue of trafficking of Asian women and children for prostitution onto the agenda of governments in the region. In August, for example, Thailand announced a ten-year plan, the "National Policy and Plan of Action for the Prevention and Eradication of the Commercial Sexual Exploitation of Children," distributed at a world conference on the subject in Stockholm. While welcome, the plan focused only on those under eighteen, leaving the problems of older victims unaddressed, and it was not clear how implementation would proceed. The plan, however, gave too little attention to the prosecution of traffickers and promoters of commercial sex. Thailand has been a center of trafficking for prostitution, with Burmese and Chinese women trafficked into the country, and Thai women trafficked out. One other development in the region was worth noting. Increased access by human rights organizations and pro-democracy activists to the Internet facilitated international advocacy campaigns on everything from Burma to bonded labor, but Asian governments for the most part treated the Internet with great suspicion. In January, the State Council in China issued a draft set of rules to regulate use of the Internet; subscribers were ordered to provide a written guarantee that they would not use the Internet for purposes "harmful to the state." In September, Chinese authorities deployed sophisticated technology to block subscriber access to as many as one hundred English and Chinese sites on the World Wide Web. In June, the South Korean government warned that the draconian National Security Law could be applied to attempts to circulate material about North Korea on personal computers; the warning came after a local newspaper carried an article on a Canadian Web page with a picture of Kim Jong Il, the North Korean leader. In July, Singapore announced a new licensing system designed to regulate the Internet and censor any material that might "undermine public morals, political stability and religious harmony." On September 4, the ASEAN countries announced an agreement to collectively regulate communication on the Internet. In the same month, Burma issued a new law which entailed a fifteen-year sentence for anyone importing, purchasing or using modems or fax machines without governmental permission. No known restrictions were placed on the use of the Internet in South Asia.

The Right to Monitor

Human rights organizations continued to be effectively banned in – and international human rights organizations banned from – North Korea, Burma, Vietnam, Brunei, Bhutan, andChina/Tibet. In China, however, university-based legal aid organizations took on some functions of rights protection. Singapore had no human rights organizations operating freely in the country, but access to the country by international organizations was not a problem. Human rights monitoring continued to be a dangerous profession during the year, with two monitors killed in India: Kashmiri human rights lawyer Jalil Andrabi was abducted by Indian security forces and murdered in March, while Parag Kumar Das, an editor and activist from Assam, was killed in May. Fernando Reyes, a human rights lawyer, was killed in Zamboanga del Sur, the Philippines, and Kalpana Chakma, secretary of a women's organization in the Chittagong Hill Tracts, Bangladesh, was abducted by army gunmen in June and not seen thereafter. In Burma, twenty-one political prisoners who had attempted to send information about prison conditions to the U.N.'s special rapporteur on the country were beaten and given additional sentences of five and twelve years. In Indonesia, Cambodia, Malaysia, Pakistan and Nepal, human rights monitors faced various degrees of persecution and harassment. National human rights commissions in the Philippines, India, and Indonesia continued to play an important role despite restrictions in their mandates, particularly in the case of the latter two. India's commission focused national attention on the problem of custodial violence; it was far less successful in raising concerns about abuses by security forces in Kashmir or the northeast. The Indonesian commission helped bring about prosecutions of soldiers in several key incidents during the year and issued a brief but stinging report on the government-backed storming of opposition party headquarters that led to the Jakarta riots in July The year saw increasing joint action of NGOs across national boundaries, especially on Burma. From May 1 to 17, the Bangkok-based NGO coalition, Asian Forum for Human Rights and Development, sent a delegation of two Thais and two Filipinas to Burma to investigate human rights abuses. In a report issued from Manila in July, the group called on ASEAN countries to ban aid and investment and ban Burma from membership in ASEAN. At the trial of Irene Fernandez in Malaysia, international observers from Indonesia and Bangladesh as well as the United States were in attendance. In February and March, NGOs in Nepal hosted a series of meetings which brought together hundreds of Asian activists to coordinate advocacy on wide range of human rights concerns, from labor rights, the environment, health, and development, to protection of civil society and conflict resolution. November saw one of the largest gatherings of Asian human rights organizations for a regional meeting since the 1993 Asian preparatory conference for the Vienna World Conference on Human Rights, as hundreds of groups convened in Manila in conjunction with the APEC summit. Labor rights issues were high on the agenda.

The Role of the International Community

Security and commercial concerns dominated the international agenda in Asia throughout 1996, and most governments saw pressure on human rights concerns as jeopardizing those interests. The European Union held its first E.U.-Asia summit meeting in Bangkok in early March, at which the phrase "human rights" was barely mentioned. The U.S. maintained its low profile on human rights concerns in South Asia, with the exception of the child labor issue. Ensuring continued access to Asian markets and maintaining existing investments there were far more important to the industrialized countries than challenging Beijing, sanctioning Rangoon, conditioning Korea's entry into the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) on labor rights improvements, or protesting crackdowns on the political opposition in Indonesia. As the World Trade Organization (WTO) prepared to hold its first ministerial meeting inDecember in Singapore, Asian NGOs debated the pros and cons of trying to include in the WTO Charter a "social clause" – a way of linking trade benefits to adherence to basic labor rights standards. Asian governments were virtually united in their opposition to an effort led by the U.S. and France to set up a working group on labor and environmental standards at the Singapore meeting that would address many of the concerns raised by social clause proponents. The issue was also expected to be debated in the margins of the APEC summit in Manila in late November.

United Nations

The United Nations was much more visible as a human rights presence in Asia than in previous years. The Geneva-based U.N. Human Rights Centre continued to maintain an office in Cambodia, and its term was extended for another two years in an agreement between the center and the Cambodian government. Justice Michael Kirby stepped down as the special representative for human rights in Cambodia and was replaced by Thomas Hammarberg, former secretary-general of Amnesty International. In July, Louis Joinet, head of the Working Group on Arbitrary Detention, visited China to begin discussions about the possibility of a more in-depth visit by the working group in 1997. Special Rapporteur on Torture Nigel Rodley visited Pakistan in February, but his effort to obtain permission from Indonesia to investigate torture in East Timor was unsuccessful. In Burma, a new special rapporteur was appointed by the Commission on Human Rights to replace Prof. Yozo Yokota, but as of November, State Law and Order Restoration Council (SLORC) had not permitted the new appointee, Rajsoomer Lallah from Mauritius, to visit. No new ratifications of major U.N. conventions on human rights took place during the year, but a campaign was underway in Indonesia among NGOs and the government-appointed National Human Rights Commission for ratification of the Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment. The hearings in Geneva of the U.N. Committee on the Rights of the Child drew international attention to abuses against children in China and Burma, and in October, the hearing of the Human Rights Committee on the compliance of the United Kingdom with its obligations under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, particularly with respect to Hong Kong, was a useful means of raising international concern about China's determination to avoid such reporting once Hong Kong returns to Chinese control in 1997. China also submitted a report to the U.N. Committee Against Torture on the steps it had taken to prevent torture. The report was used by NGOs to focus on the steps China had not taken and on the ongoing problem of torture in Chinese prisons. The U.N. Human Rights Commission in Geneva suffered a severe blow to its credibility and effectiveness when, during its April 1996 session, the Chinese government used commercial threats and blandishments to block any discussion or vote on a resolution expressing concern about human rights abuses in China and Tibet.

Association of South East Asian Nations

The ASEAN ministerial conference in Jakarta in July, and the expanded ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF) – a forum for discussion of security issues, which included India, China, and Burma (as an observer) – resulted in a standoff on strategy toward Burma. ASEAN reaffirmed its commitment to "constructive engagement" despite pressure from mostly western countries to use its influence to bring more pressure to bear on SLORC to improve its human rights practices. Later in the year, however, as conditions in Burma further deteriorated, a growing split emerged within ASEAN over how to deal with Burma and how soon to grant it membership.

European Union

Human rights proved a particularly thorny issue in European-Asian relations. In March, as noted, Bangkok hosted the first E.U.-Asia summit, widely seen as an attempt by European leaders to use the APEC model to involve Europe more closely in the economic dynamism of East and Southeast Asia. The meeting involved twenty-five heads of state, and the only human rights issue that surfaced was East Timor, when the Portugese prime minister and Indonesian President Soeharto held bilateral talks. Some key E.U. countries, including France and Germany, apparently used the meeting to find a formula for avoiding sponsorship of a resolution criticizing China's human rights reccord at the U.N. human rights commission. When foreign ministers of many of the same European countries met their ASEAN counterparts in July in Jakarta, they were roundly criticized for focusing too much on human rights issues, particularly on Burma and East Timor.

Japan

Japan continued to play a cautious role on human rights in the region, using the leverage of granting, suspending or resuming Official Development Assistance (ODA) to advance human rights concerns only in the case of Burma, while security issues were the clear priority in its bilateral relations with China. This was also the case in South Asia, where Japanese authorities engaged India on nuclear discussions but refrained from directly addressing specific human rights problems such as Kashmir. Tokyo asserted its role as the world's leading aid donor by hosting, together with the World Bank, two international donor consortiums in 1996, on Cambodia and India.

Donors and Investors

The World Bank and the Asian Development Bank made little demonstrable progress in 1996 toward implementing their respective "good governance" policies, although the World Bank did show some interest in addressing the bonded child labor issue, especially in India. Demands for increased corporate responsibility in Asia in terms of protecting human rights increased both domestically and internationally. The demands on footwear manufacturers, such as Nike, and mining companies, such as Freeport-McMoRan, both of which have operations in Indonesia, were particularly public. Light export-oriented industries, such as the manufacture of textiles, garments, and toys, and other industries such carpet-weaving, became more sensitized to the issues of child labor and worker rights abuses. In Burma, international investment became the target of selective purchasing legislation in several U.S. cities and states and of consumer boycott campaigns in other western countries, leading to the withdrawal of several companies from Burma. Apple Computers and Heineken were among those that pulled out. In some cases, companies responded with either cosmetic gestures or more serious efforts to monitor their own operations, but few were willing to work with local or international NGOs to assist in carrying out social audits or monitoring of internal guidelines, and the lack of transparency and accountability by the private sector remained a key obstacle to enhanced corporate responsibility. An important emerging issue for the business community was the upcoming transfer of Hong Kong in July 1997, and how foreign investors would respond to human rights developments after the transfer. As the year ended, some U.S. business interests were already playing a positive role by sending clear signals to Beijing on the importance of maintaining the rule of law, protecting free expression, and stopping the spread of corruption from the mainland to Hong Kong.

The Work of Human Rights Watch/Asia

The year was marked by new initiatives on both research and advocacy, while Human Rights Watch/Asia continued to follow up on past work. On countries with strong NGOs, we worked with local groups to set priorities: bonded labor and migrant labor in South and Southeast Asia became research priorities in this way. But even in countries with no human rights organizations, such as China and Burma, the scope of our work widened beyond the traditional and ongoing concerns of arbitrary detention, torture and violations of freedom of expression and association. A major study of abuses in China's orphanages during the year sparked international outrage and provided new insights into how the impact of a repressive state apparatus can reach beyond political and religious dissidents to touch the country's most vulnerable citizens – abandoned, orphaned and handicapped children – in a way that violated the most fundamental human rights. With regard to Burma, a report released in September on the human rights violations suffered by the Rohingya Muslim minority served as a follow-up to two earlier reports on that issue, but in focusing as much on repatriation and protection of returned refugees as on abuses inside Burma per se, it provided a new way of examining the problem. It also provided new opportunities to seek accountability from the Burmese government, including through international humanitarian and development agencies. We continued to respond swiftly to particularly grave cases of abuse, issuing press statements and briefing materials, appealing to U.N. bodies, or meeting with officials of donor governments as the case warranted. The massive arrests in Burma in May and September, the crackdown on student and labor activists in Indonesia in August and September, and the formal indictment and trial of Chinese dissident Wang Dan in October were all occasions for emergency interventions. Likewise, whenever Asian human rights monitors abroad were attacked, we responded immediately, as in our protests over the killing of Kashmiri lawyer Jalil Andrabi in March and our decision to send a series of observers to the trial of Malaysian activist Irene Fernandez in Kuala Lumpur. Hong Kong received particular attention during the year, as the transition to Chinese sovereignty approached in 1997. Our office in Hong Kong continued its emphasis on China, but staff also worked with local monitoring groups to generate more international attention to the steps taken by China that had or were expected to have deleterious effects on civil liberties. While our research output was considerable in 1996 – ten short reports, four book-length reports, two of them in collaboration with the Human Rights Watch Children's Rights Project (CRP) – we devoted an equal amount of staff time and resources to advocacy efforts. An example was the campaign on bonded child labor in India, based on the report The Small Hands of Slavery, issued in September. The report itself involved three months of intensive research. When it was ready for publication, we undertook a process of detailed consultation with our Indian colleagues on the policy recommendations and on plans for follow-up. We then sent letters summarizing the recommendations to the key donor governments and agencies attending the annual meeting on development assistance chaired by the World Bank, which convened in Tokyo in September. We also discussed the issue with Japanese Foreign Ministry officials in advance of the meeting. Responses from several agencies including the World Bank suggested that some of the recommendations could be incorporated when projects to support industries known to employ bonded child labor, such as sericulture, came up for renewal. The report was used as evidence by local NGOs in Tamil Nadu in a case before the Supreme Court to abolish bonded labor in that state. A joint campaign of local, regional and international NGOs to eradicate the practice of bonded labor was expected to continue well into 1997. Asia was a major focus of work at the U.N. during the year. We joined with other NGOs in lobbying for a resolution criticizing Burma's human rights record at the U.N. Commission on Human Rights, which ultimately succeeded. Despite the best efforts of our New York, Washington, Brussels and Hong Kong offices, however, and those of many activists worldwide, a resolution on China failed to come to a vote. In the course of intensive press work and discussions with European Union members on the China resolution, however, the Brussels office managed to secure a resolution from the European Parliament that helped force the E.U. countries at the commission to take a stronger position than they would have otherwise; that action provided a useful basis for further European lobbying on China. We raised several Asian issues in written submissions at the U.N. Human Rights Commission meeting in Geneva in April, including abuses in Chinese orphanages, concerns about trafficking of women from Burma to Thailand, and concerns about migrant workers in Asia. Staff submitted evidence on Burma at the hearing on the Committee on the Rights of the Child. In July, as in previous years, we submitted a petition on human rights abuses in East Timor to the U.N. Committee on Decolonization, noting that any discussion of East Timor's political status must be informed by an understanding of the pattern of human rights violations there. The Washington, London and Brussels offices played key advocacy roles during the year. Human Rights Watch gave evidence on forced labor in Burma before the European Commission in Brussels and testified before the U.S. Congress four times on China and once each on Hong Kong, Indonesia/East Timor, and Pakistan. We also testified before the U.S. government's Presidential Commission on U.S.-Pacific Trade and Investment Policy. Through our Washington office, we maintained close and regular contact with embassies of Asian countries as well as with the World Bank, U.S. government agencies and the U.S. Congress. In July, a staff member traveled to Tokyo to meet with government officials, members of parliament, NGOs, journalists and others to continue a dialogue on human rights issues in the region and Japan's official human rights policy. We also published op-eds in Japanese newspapers during the year, as well as providing information about human rights concerns through other articles in the regional press. In sum, the year in Asia was marked by increasing cooperation of local, regional and international NGOs, especially on issues such as labor rights and women's rights. Arbitrary detention and punishment of peaceful dissent continued to be major problems in countries where NGOs were not allowed to function, but condemnation of these practices from NGOs and governments in other Asian countries was increasingly common. The political manipulation of religion by governments and opposition groups in many Asian countries raised the spectre of communal conflict in the years to come. Among donor countries and trading partners of Asian countries, business concerns continued to overshadow human rights, and the fear of losing contracts became a powerful incentive for many countries to avoid criticism of human rights abuses.