Democracy budding in Asia

NEW DELHI, India -- In India, more than 380 million people turned out. So did tens of millions in Sri Lanka, Taiwan, the Philippines and South Korea.\nIn staggering numbers, Asia has taken to voting this year. And if casting ballots doesn't equal quality governance, the spree of elections does highlight a dramatic change on the continent over the last 20 years: the spread of democracy.\nTaiwan, the Philippines, Thailand, South Korea and Indonesia all have shed dictatorship and embraced the ballot box.\nBut democracy is by its nature unpredictable. Guided only by the often-whimsical views of the electorate, democratic countries are saddled with their election-winners -- whether brilliant statesmen or inept leaders who buy voters. It's a system where corruption can thrive and demagogues often have broad appeal.\nWitness the crime lords running for parliament from Indian prisons, or the Indonesian general-turned-presidential candidate who's under indictment for human rights abuses, or the fist fights that occasionally break out in legislatures in the otherwise full-fledged democracies of Taiwan and South Korea.\nSome countries -- India, Indonesia, the Philippines -- are so big and under-computerized that just tallying the vote can take as long as the 2000 Florida recount.\n"We all understand that building a democracy definitely won't be easy," Taiwanese President Chen Shui-bian said recently. "Since Taiwan walked away from authoritarianism and strode toward democracy, the road has been extremely hard."\nChen, the first opposition candidate to be elected Taiwan's president, would know. He won re-election in March by just 0.2 percent, his opponent claimed fraud and trickery, and protesters staged huge, sometimes-violent demonstrations.\nComplicating the situation was a bizarre election-eve shooting that lightly wounded the president and his running mate.\n"We still need to walk carefully," Chen said.\nUp to the mid-1980s dictatorships were the Asian norm, ranging from Beijing's ironclad rule to the kleptocracy of Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines. India and Japan were among the few functioning democracies in the region.\nThese days, democratic governments are taking their turn, with plenty of surprises: the near-tie in Taiwan, this month's defeat of the Indian government, the impeachment of South Korean President Roh Moo-hyun in March for a minor election law violation, followed by public outcry and his reinstatement by the Constitutional Court.\nCertainly there are exceptions. China remains the elephant in the living room, its communist autocracy shielded from much criticism by its immense profit potential. Myanmar, formerly Burma, has become an international outcast under its military regime. Cambodia elects its prime minister; communist Vietnam doesn't.\nThe Himalayan nation of Nepal has seen nascent democratic rule reversed, with power returning to the king and riots shaking its streets. In Hong Kong, democratic hopes were killed -- for now -- after Beijing ruled the territory can't directly elect its next leader.\nNorth Korea remains one of the most secretive dictatorships on Earth.\nStill, with even China holding vaguely democratic local elections, the ballot box is clearly gaining ground.\n"There's reason for what the diplomats call 'cautious optimism,'" said David Steinberg, an Asia scholar at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. "There has been progress in Asia, and, yes, we can expect more progress over time. But we can also expect backsliding."\nTake the Philippines, where former longtime ruler Marcos was forced out in a peaceful 1986 "people power" revolt. It was a turning point in Asia, with popular sentiment chasing a dictator from power and ushering in rapid democratic expansion.\nBut a tiny oligarchy still wields enormous influence, and traditional political clans dominate most elections.\nPresident Gloria Macapagal Arroyo is in power because a second people-power revolt ousted former movie star Joseph Estrada from office. A May 10 election pitted her against Fernando Poe Jr., also a movie star and Estrada's best friend. More than a week later, with less than half the votes counted, Arroyo held a growing lead and Poe's party was claiming widespread election fraud.\nThen there's the nearby archipelago of Indonesia, dogged by corruption, military brutality and the still-powerful shadow of ousted dictator Mohamed Suharto, whose former party won the most seats in April parliamentary elections.\nSince Suharto was forced out in 1998, Indonesia has had a largely independent media and relatively free elections. But the ruling establishment -- the political, military and business elites -- has barely changed.\nWhere real change has come, it is in many ways a repudiation of the philosophy advanced by Chinese leaders, as well as Singapore's founding father Lee Kuan Yew and longtime Malaysian ruler Mahathir Mohamad, that Western liberal values lead to chaos and social decay. To them, only so-called "Asian values" -- or, politically speaking, strong authoritarian governments -- could create stable, developed nations.\nIt was a philosophy with plenty of opponents, among them Jose Ramos-Horta, the foreign minister of East Timor, once ruled by Indonesia, now by its own freely elected government.\n"The thousands of Asians who died in the streets of Manila, Bangkok, Jakarta, Rangoon, Beijing did not die for so-called 'Asian values'," he said recently.