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Asia Buzz: Junta.com
Asia must embrace the Net, or suffer
By ERIC ELLIS
May
25, 2000
Web posted at 4:00 p.m. Hong Kong time, 4:00 a.m. EDT
As a responsible media outlet, Asia Buzz would never condone breaking the law. But there are times when the law is the proverbial ass and thus should be pointed out. And one of those times is now--in Burma.
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Irawan Sidaria isn't a household name in Asia, and isn't likely to be either, thanks to the rather troglodyte actions of the Burmese authorities. But the Indonesian national could be held as something of a beacon for information freedom in a country where simply owning a modem can put you in jail.
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Irawan has been detained by the junta for illegally operating a communications system from his room in Rangoon's Asia Plaza Hotel. Irawan's crime? To own a small satellite dish and a collection of communication devices. As the pro-government New Light of Myanmar newspaper reported this week, this satellite dish was--shock, horror!--tuned into the Inmarsat system that hovers over the Indian Ocean. It seems Sidaria's offence was simply trying to communicate with the outside world, something which the Burmese government prohibits without its permission, lest word leak out about the untoward methods it uses to maintain power, and opposition forces marshal against them.
Reading between the lines of the propaganda, it seems Irawan and his Filipino and American partners were trying to set up a business, something you'd think Burma should encourage. Maybe the Burmese cronies were cracking down because communications is a good little earner and they wanted a slice of the action for themselves.
But it's a good example of how Asia can be held back even further if it doesn't embrace the Information Age. Burma is an extreme example of the many Asian countries wrestling with the dilemma posed by the Internet--the so-called cultural and political flies it lets in to controlled regimes.
In Singapore, they worry about pornography, somewhat of a phony concern that patronizes the citizenry, suggesting that if the authorities don't block porn sites, then Singaporeans will gleefully access them with no intellectual consideration to the inherent unacceptability of such sites. Malaysia, too, frets about porn, but it frets more about criticism of the ruling authorities, as does China.
Interestingly, the reaction in China and Malaysia is that the dynamic surrounding the Internet is vastly different to the popular culture that sprung up around it in the developed world. Where in the West most Net content was seen as unreliable and a refuge for nutters and crackpots, in Beijing and KL the Net is taken pretty seriously. Local sites that comment on local affairs are more often the stuff of village chatter than the nonsense often produced in the official traditional media.
One of the interesting angles on the Filipino "Love Bug" computer virus was that its creation, in part, seemed to be a protest at the exorbitant on-line charges leveled by Filipino access providers for slow service. The protest clearly got out of hand, but at its root is perhaps a valid complaint imperfectly expressed. Offer the Internet for all at cheap prices, preferably free, and maybe cranky code writers won't create lethal viruses.
Asia is so far embracing the Internet largely to type. In Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan and Korea, it's a business and an instrument of popular culture, often one of the same thing. In India, it's frenetic and anarchic, while the Internet barely exists with any critical mass in Indonesia or Thailand. Singapore does its best to co-opt it, while Malaysia is typically unsure about how to handle it; what KL says and what KL does are often two different things.
But none of the countries mentioned are pretending it doesn't exist, because they are pragmatic enough to realize it's not going away. Regimes like Burma would do well to recognize that as well, and start arresting real criminals, not people like Irawan Sidaria.
Eric Ellis is the Southeast Asia and technology editor of web-based finance portal AsiaWise.com
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