Party was returned with an increased majority.
With a four-year term and a working majority Roh
is in a position to push through promised reforms
but so far has lacked the determination and steadi-
ness to achieve much. For South Korea the night-
mare remains – the militarised North which the
South has tried to placate with aid. Possibly even in
the North in 2004 tiny shoots of change have
begun to sprout to bring the country out of its iso-
lation. North Korea’s nuclear plans create the most
uncertainty and tension in the region.
Philippine democracy is in a parlous state. The
people’s choice of president has, in the past,
proved unfortunate. President Gloria Arroyo’s
qualifications as a sound economist seem less
important than the handsome media image of the
best known B-film actor, a Mr Poe, totally inex-
perienced in politics. Memories of the impeached
predecessor of President Arroyo were enough,
however, for the majority to vote for her. The
better news in 2004 is that a peace deal might be
done with the Muslim separatists on the island of
Minndanao and their assurance that their links
with al-Qaeda will be severed.
Voting for changes of government in elections,
however imperfect the process, has become the
norm in Asia except in China and North Korea
and in Pakistan, which has more a tradition of mil-
itary rulers than democratic elected ones, as well as
in Myanmar. Indonesia went to the polls in April
2004 with President Megawati Sukarnoputri, the
daughter of the nation’s founding father, hoping
to maintain her position. The Bali bombing in
2002 demonstrated that Islamic terrorists are
active. Despite the economic recovery bringing
Indonesia back from the brink, she is blamed for a
lack of determination to stamp out corruption.
Elections in 2004 voted her out of office.
In Malaysia there have been no great changes
since Mahathir’s retirement. The once-popular
deputy premier Anwar Ibrahim remains in prison.
Here there are more elections and calls for an end
of corruption, inevitable when one party and one
leader holds power for two decades as Mahathir
did. With the rest of Asia, Malaysia’s economy too
has recovered.
The two most important countries of southern
Asia, India and Pakistan are moving toward
peaceful coexistence, working for a compromise
on Kashmir after coming close to war at the close
of the twentieth century. The declaration in 2004
of the President of Pakistan, General Pervez
Musharraf, that he would not permit any territory
of Pakistan to become a home for terrorism broke
the stalemate. The danger of a conflict escalating
to a nuclear exchange drew the political leader-
ships on both sides back from the brink. Nuclear
weapons cast a black shadow over the world but
the hope must be that Alfred Nobel’s dream that
the destructive capacity of mankind would be so
great that there would be no alternative to peace
will be realised. Dynamite and the weapons of
two world wars were not sufficient to deter, but
no two countries possessing nuclear weapons have
ever fought each other.
Alliances and friendships internationally are
based less on what countries have in common
than in identifying common enemies. When the
president General Musharraf seized power in
1999 he first backed the Taliban regime in
Afghanistan but then changed sides two years
later and became America’s ally. This earned him
the enmity of Muslim radicals of the Pushtun
minority he had earlier supported. But he struck
a deal with moderate Islamists that would enable
him to remain president until 2007. With the
backing of the army and adroit politics, which
enabled him to persuade parliament to allow a
military-dominated National Security Council to
be created, he will remain in power unless assas-
sinated by an extremist. Internationally, with its
successful nuclear weapons programme and the
secret spread of nuclear technology to Libya, Iran,
Malaysia and to North Korea in return for North
Korean missile technology, Pakistan should have
been branded a ‘rogue state’. But as an essential
US ally in the ‘war against terrorism’, hunting bin
Laden, no sanctions will be inflicted, nor will the
human-rights records be challenged by the West.
Common enemies make for strange bedfellows.
India began its marathon elections in the
spring of 2004. The Congress Party, which pre-
viously ruled India, has made a comeback with a
young Ghandi generation set to revive its for-
tunes. Hindu extremism has marred the otherwise
successful coalition government led by the Hindu
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