Ethnic Conflict, Ethnic Accommodation,, and Nation-Building in Southeast Asia Carl H. Iand Four types of ethnic conflict are found in the ten states of post-colonial Southeast Asia. Within these types, cases of peaceful accommodation, as well as forceful attempts to suppress rebellious minorities, are examined. Explanations for diverse governmental responses are found in geography, history, including colonial policies of divide and rule, and the nature of post-colonial governments. Some of the region's governments have shown great skill in devising peaceful methods of accommodation. But several military governments, unsuccessful at nation-building, have seen the forceful suppression of ethnic rebellions as their only option. r ~ . o u g h not as well-reported as the "troubles" in Ulster, "ethnic cleansing" in 11 the former Yugoslavia, or the Rwandan genocide, Southeast Asia too suffers from ethnic conflicts. In part, these are legacies of colonial rule, which defined the borders and changed the ethnic composition of most of the region's successor states. In such divided states, the antipathies and rival claims of culturally dissimilar ethnic groups now test the skills of national leaders. Some have solved these conflicts peacefully. Others have embroiled their peoples in long and bloody internal wars that, even when they seemed militarily successful, left dominant ethnic majorities facing embittered minorities in their midst or on their borders. Such conflicts then have been used to justify the continuance of authoritarian governments. Southeast Asia's multi-ethnic states fall into four groups, characterized by different types of ethnic division, that require different remedies. In one group, the main conflict is between lowland and highland peoples. A second group is composed of neighboring states whose political borders do not coincide with the cultural boundaries that define their peoples. A third group is composed of large and culturally diverse archipelagic states beset by regional demands for autonomy or separation. A fourth group is made up of states that are divided by the competing interests of their long-settled native inhabitants and more recent immigrant populations. These four types of division are not mutually exclusive; some countries suffer from more than one of them. But each type of division is most common in a particular sub-region of Southeast Asia, and will be illustrated by examining several countries in that sub-region. Within these groups, some have resolved their conflicts peacefully, while others have not. Carl H. Land6 is a professor of political science and East Asian studies at the University o f Kansas. His primary country of specialization is the Philippines.

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Uplands versus Lowlands

The first group of countries, divided by conflicts between lowland and highland peoples, are found mainly though not exclusively in northern, or continental Southeast Asia. Most seriously divided is Burma (Myanmar); other such countries include Laos and Thailand. Lowland-highland divisions are especially prominent in Southeast Asia's Northernmost countries because of the distinctive topography of that sub-region, and of the population movements and patterns of settlement that were shaped by them. The lands that lie directly south of China are sub-divided by six mountain ranges or plateaus, extending in a north-south direction from the high mountain ranges of Southern China towards the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea. These ranges are separated by Southward-flowing rivers and by their surrounding plains. Since pre-historic times, speakers of diverse languages have migrated southward along these ridges and valleys. Some ended their migrations in the fertile alluvial lowland plains. Their descendants created great kingdoms and sophisticated civilizations, through the wealth produced by the cultivation of irrigated "wet" rice by large, settled populations. Other southward-migrating peoples remained in the highlands, where they subsisted mainly by planting "dry" rice and other non-irrigated crops by method called "swidden," "shifting," or "slash and burn" farming. This type of farming, which still flourishes in the highlands, did not permit the growth of large, densely settled populations or the accumulation of great wealth. It produced no powerful states, comparable to those of the lowlands. The largest political units in the highlands have been small chiefdoms. Until recently, most highland peoples were non-literate, their technologies remained simple, and their religions were narrowly local beliefs of the sort we call "'pagan" Viewed from the lowlands, the highlanders did not produce enough extractable wealth to justify the cost of bringing them under a lowland king's rule. His main concern was to maintain and expand his control over the lowlands so as to be able to extract produce and labor from their inhabitants. Even this was not an easy task, Therefore, lowland rulers in both Thailand and Burma tattooed their subjects to impede their flight to locations away from the king's reach. As a result, lowland and highland societies remained largely independent of each other. Contacts between them were minimal, violent encounters were confined to capture of slaves and to occasional punitive expedition sent into the hills by a lowland ruler against highlanders who had raided his lowland villages. James C. Scott has pointed out that the early mainland Southeast Asian kingdoms lacked the clear territorial boundaries of the modern states which claim to be their successors. With ample land available, but with manpower in short supply, the measure of a kingdom's greatness was not the expanse of its territory but the size of its population. As Scott put it, "The key to successful statecraft was typically the ability to attract and hold a substantial, productive population within a reasonable radius of the court" (Scott 1998, 185). Edmund Leach described the traditional Burmese kingdom as being composed of the lowest of several "horizontal slices through the topography," that patchwork of valleys which contained its wet-rice growing population (Leach 1954, 18-28).

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Thus, it did not include the shifting cultivators who lived at elevations roughly above five hundred feet. European colonial intrusion brought an end to the isolation and independence of the highland peoples. Having first conquered the lowlands, Europeans drew the boundaries of their new acquisitions at the top of the adjacent mountain ranges, and then sent expeditions to explore the highlands that lay on their sides of the borders. That was followed by the extension of colonial administration into the highlands, the building of roads, the influx of lowlanders, including Chinese traders, and the entry of Catholic and Protestant missionaries. These came to the highlands because their pagan peoples were more open to conversion than were the Buddhists and Muslim inhabitants of the plains. Highlanders on the whole were not unhappy with the new European presence. It brought them mission schools, medical care, and an appealing world religion, while involving little if any foreign economic exploitation. That was reserved for the richer and more exploitable lowlands. Colonial administration, by suppressing highland feuding and warfare, and thereby easing travel between different highland settlements along the new networks of roads, as well as by introducing a common European language, lessened the separation of neighboring tribes. By the end of the colonial period, there had developed in each mountain range a nascent sense of highland nationalism that was directed less against the Europeans than against the historically threatening lowlanders. When independence came after the end of World War II, highlanders viewed their impending incorporation into a new lowlander-dominated state with apprehension. Among their fears were the prospect of harsher rule by lowland officials and the anticipated influx of lowland settlers who might appropriate their lands. Also feared by the now Christian highland and other tribal peoples, especially in the Muslim countries of insular Southeast Asia, was the prospect of forcible conversion to the religions of their new lowland rulers. Such fears led to demands for the creation of separate highland states, or at least for some measure of autonomy for the highlands within the new post-colonial states (see Wijeyewardene 1990). At the heart of the highlanders' fears was their knowledge that few lowlanders understood or valued their upland way of life. Such fears were confirmed after 1975 by the Communist government of Laos, a land-locked, largely mountainous country. Like most other Southeast Asian governments, the lowlander-dominated Laotian government has shown scant understanding of the highland economy. Thus it has tried to force its hill-people to give up their accustomed swidden farming and adopt the sedentary wet rice-growing methods of the lowlands. To this end, the Laotian government forcibly resettled large numbers of highlanders in lowland locations suitable for irrigated farming. A professed aim was to preserve upland forests so as to promote the export of logs, a major source of government revenue throughout Southeast Asia. An unstated aim may have been to punish and bring to heel the upland Hmong, many of whom during the Indochina War fought in the CIA-funded anti-communist "Secret Army." Whatever its intent, the forced resettlement of highland peoples in the malariainfested lowlands has been devastating to their way of life and to their health as well. A recent United Nations study estimated that some villages suffered up to 30 percent mortality in their first three years following resettlement (see Ireson 1991).

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The u n w i l l i n g n e s s of h i g h l a n d p e o p l e s to be i n c o r p o r a t e d into a lowlander-dominated state led to years of warfare in neighboring Burma, a country surrounded on all sides, except its southwestern coast, by a great horseshoe of mountain ranges. The seeds for the present conflict were sown by earlier British colonial policies of divide and rule. During the nineteenth century, Great Britain, expanding her Indian empire eastward from across the Bay of Bengal, occupied first the lower and then the upper parts of Burma. That included its highland regions, whose non-Burman minority peoples account for roughly a third of modern Burma's inhabitants and occupy some forty percent of its land. In the years that followed, while Burma's lowlands progressed by stages from direct British rule to elective semi-self government, different arrangements were made for the Northern Shan, Kachin, and Chin highlands. These "scheduled areas" were ruled indirectly through their traditional leaders. At the same time, the Karens, the largest non-Burman .minority whose members live in Burma's southeastern region alongside but culturally distinct from the Burman majority, were given "reserved seats" in the colonial legislature. While Buddhism was becoming a central element of Burman nationalism, Baptist missionaries were converting Karens and other minorities to Christianity. A further apple of future discord was the British colonial practice of recruiting ethnically-based military units exclusively from the country's minorities, the highland tribes, and from immigrant Indians, an immigrant minority to be discussed below. Favored treatment for tribal peoples could not but prepare the way for demands for continued favored status, or for secession, by these minorities once the British were gone and leaders of the Burman majority took full control of the state. Even before Burmese independence came in January 1948, parts of the highlands were in rebellion, with several ethnic rebel armies in tactical alliances with two factions of the insurgent Communist Party of Burma. By 1949, as the Karen National Union began its struggle for an independent Karen state, Karen defectors from the new Burmese army were on the outskirts of Rangoon, and the army's control over the lowland countryside was in doubt. In the years that followed, rebellion would spread to other minorities in Burma's northern, northeastern and northwestern highlands (see Smith 1991). To satisfy its secession-minded minorities, Burma's 1947 constitution provided for a decentralized form of government. Some minority regions, the Shan and Karenni states, were granted partial autonomy, with the right to secede. Others, though granted some autonomy, would not be given this option. But despite these concessions, the fears of the hill tribes were fanned by Prime Minister U Nu's 1961 amendment of the new constitution, making Buddhism the state religion. Attempts to placate the highlanders came to an end in 1962 after the seizure of power by a military junta, which remains in power today. While the new government proclaimed the right of all citizens to practice their own religions, quasi-federal arrangements were abandoned, and a strong centralized authoritarian state was created instead. There followed three decades of highland rebellion. At its high point, twenty-five armed groups, including several communist ones, were in revolt, and had formed a Democratic Alliance of Burma. In 1988 they were joined by students from the lowlands, who had fled to the hills after the bloody suppres-

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sion of their demands for reform. In 1990 they in turn were joined by recently elected members of Parliament when the military annulled the results of that year's parliamentary elections. To all such challenges the junta responded with military force. As the 1990s drew to a close, the campaign to suppress the Communist and highland rebellions had all but succeeded. Some resistance was reported to be continuing among the Shun, Chin, and Kachin, but fifteen rebel forces had concluded cease fire agreements with the national government, as had the Chinese opium warlord, Kuhn Sa. The rebel Karen National Union, among the last of hold-outs, is under pressure to do the same. About 100,000 refugees from Burma remain in camps across the Thai border. Some refugees have been forcibly returned to Burma. Many more Burmese have entered Thailand in search of employment. But the Burmese army's military success has come at a high cost. Many lives have been lost by both the rebels and the government forces. Costly resources have been spent on military campaigns by the 300,000-man army. In 1995, more than 45 percent of the state's budget was devoted to defense, while Burma remains one of the least developed and poorest counties of the region, with a per capita income of less that US$300. Because of its policies of repression in the lowlands and highlands alike, Burma, in much of the West, had become a pariah state. By 1990, all of Burma's former donor countries except China had stopped providing aid. Thailand, which also has substantial highland areas inhabited by some 400,000 minority peoples, has managed to avoid clashes between highlanders and lowlanders on the Burmese scale. When there have been conflicts, the government has responded with conciliatory changes in policy, When in 1967 the "Red Meo" Hmong of Northern Thailand (so named because of the color of women's dress) resisted attempts by the Thai Border Police to extract unofficial levies on their previously legal opium harvest, the military bombed their villages, leading large numbers of Hmong to flee into more remote forested areas. Others were forcibly resettled to refugee camps in the lowlands. The crisis abated by 1971, in part because of the intervention of Thailand's king, who publicly criticized the military's highland campaign. The government responded by ending forced resettlement and introduced development projects in the highlands designed to replace opium growing with other crops. The king has sought to bring the uplands into the national community by promoting Buddhism through a Monk and Novice Training Center at a temple constructed in the foothills (Wongsprasert 1988, 126-137). Other royal projects, funded initially by the king, but later included in the national budget have, reportedly, had a significant impact in the upland areas. Thailand's avoidance of highland secession movements like those besetting its neighbor may be explained in a number of ways. Its highland population is smaller than that of Burma, and is found mainly in the country's northwestern region. More important, perhaps, is the fact that Thailand escaped Western colonial rule. Thus existing relations between Thailand's kings and the highland peoples were not interrupted, as they were in Burma, by a period of separate and preferential, colonial highland administration. When Thailand's system of government was reformed under its late nineteenth century modernizing monarchs, the uplands came

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to be administered as regular parts of the Kingdom. Finally, although Christian missionaries have made some converts in the highlands, most of Thailand's hill peoples are either pagan or Theravada Buddhists, like their lowland countrymen. Hence, Thailand's highlanders have neither sought nor been offered autonomy. In the Philippines, the Kalinga people of the Cordillera in Northern Luzon, led by Kalinga Catholic priest Fr. Conrado Balweg, rose up in arms when the government of Ferdinand Marcos began to construct a dam that, while providing hydroelectric power for the lowlands, would have flooded the highland rice terraces on which their livelihood depends. For this interior highland tribe, separation from the Philippines was never an achievable goal. The Kalingas put down their arms when the government of Corazon Aquino abandoned the construction of the projected dam. The same types of conflicts have involved upland minorities in various parts of Indonesia. In Irian Jaya, large numbers of mountain-dwelling Papuans have been forced to relocate in malaria-infested lowlands in the interest of "development," but also perhaps for easier control by a security-conscious government. Similar resettlement of highlanders has taken place in Sulaswesi and Kalimantan, where these slash and burn cultivators have been unfairly blamed for causing forest fires. In North Sumatra, the Bataks of the Lake Toba region have recently mounted a massive protest over a pulp and plywood factory located near their lake, in which a local environmental NGO is providing leadership. Political versus Cultural Boundaries

Not as peaceful as in Thailand's hills have been conditions in that kingdom's four southernmost provinces. This can be explained by a different type of ethnic conflict which can appear when the political boundaries between neighboring states do not coincide with the cultural boundaries between their dominant populations. That can lead to demands for the rectification of what are perceived to be unreasonable and unjust inter-state frontiers. Europeans are all too familiar with such irredentist demands on their own continent. It was Europe that gave us the word "irredentism," as in "Italia irredenta" (Italy unredeemed), the rallying cry of late nineteenth century Italian nationalists who hoped to annex to their newly united nation-state the Italian-speaking parts of neighboring countries. Similar demands are heard in Central Europe to the present day. Irredentism affects Thailand because 1.5 million inhabitants of its four Southern Patani provinces, amounting to 3 percent of Thailand's population, are Malay-speaking Muslims, whose language, culture, and religion bind them more closely to the peoples of peninsular Malaysia than to the Thai-speaking Buddhists of lowland Thailand. Until the end of the nineteenth century, the Malay Rajas of Patani regularly gave tribute to the king of Siam. Apart from this, they ruled their own subjects in traditional Islamic fashion. At the turn of the century, as Great Britain was extending control over the main portion of Peninsular Malaya, Thailand's modernizing King Chulalongkon (1868-1910) transformed his Malay tributary states into ordinary provinces and imposed Thai law. Their rulers resisted this imposition, were deposed for their defiance, and found themselves replaced by Buddhist Siamese officials.

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There followed attempts to assimilate the kingdom's Malay subjects culturally by requiring their children to attend Thai schools, with Thai as the language of instruction. Malay resistance increased thereafter. A serious Malay uprising occurred in 1922. Subsequent government policies of attraction resulted in the election of several Muslims to the Thai parliament. But an intensification of forced assimilation under the ultra-nationalist Thai premier General Phibunsongkhram during the 1940s led to a renewal of Malay resistance, with religious leaders supplanting Malay aristocrats in its leadership, and integration of Patani with Malaya became their goal. More recent Thai governments have been more conciliatory, placing less emphasis on cultural assimilation, though still insisting on Thai education for Thailand's Malay subjects. Four underground Malay resistance fronts remain active today (see Che Man 1990). Their resort to violence reached a high point during the early 1970s. Thai military operations against them have met with limited success, but the insurgents have been weakened by factional divisions within their ranks. Though they receive financial assistance from some Arab states, they have been hampered by a lack of official support, first from Britain and later from Malaysia, which under a long-standing agreement for joint control of the border, has received Thailand's help in suppressing a mainly Chinese-Malaysian communist insurgency based in the same border region. Recently Malaysia's Prime Minister Mahathir, speaking at a commemoration of that border agreement, reminded Thailand's Malays that his own country is a multi-racial one and that they too should be able to live in a multi-racial state. At the same time, Malaysia relies on its good relations with its neighbor to discourage Thailand from harsh measures of suppression against the Patani Malays. Malay dissatisfaction continues to simmer. Many Patani Malays have moved to Malaysia and other Muslim countries for refuge or to study in Islamic schools. The Thai government for its part attempts to win Malay support by spending heavily on the economic and educational development of the Patani provinces, and recruiting Malays into the government service. Thus, the current Thai Foreign Minister, Surin Pitsuan, is a Muslim. Eastward beyond the Gulf of Thailand, however, the military operations of two mutually hostile communist governments have inflamed conflict in an ethnically-contested frontier region, the borderland between Vietnam and Cambodia. The present conflict is a legacy of the millennium-long Southward migration of Vietnamese from their Red River Delta homeland into the formerly Khmer-controlled plains and Mekong River Delta of what is now South Vietnam. That slow but relentless migration, combined with attacks against Cambodia from its eastem neighbor Thailand, helped to destroy the successor kingdom of what from the eighth to the thirteenth century had been a great Khmer empire, and made the Vietnamese the dominant people of the Mekong Delta. This transformation was ratified in the nineteenth century by the region's new French colonial rulers. But in both South Vietnam and Cambodia, a mixture of long-resident Khmer inhabitants and more recent Vietnamese settlers has preserved a volatile ethnic mixture. With the withdrawal of France and later the United States, and the coming to power of the Khmer Rouge, Cambodian nationalism took an aggressive turn. The Khmer Rouge began to massacre or expel Vietnamese from Cambodian territory

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and made some armed incursions into Vietnam itself. Vietnam responded in 1978 with a massive invasion that drove the Khmer Rouge to the Thai border, and then installed a break-away Khmer Rouge faction in it place. But a resurgence of main-force Khmer Rouge resistance, combined with diplomatic pressure from both the Association of Southeast Asian Nations and China, forced Vietnam to withdraw its occupation force in 1989, leaving in place its client, former Khmer Rouge commander Hun Sen. How long the latter will remain amenable to Vietnamese guidance remains to be seen. But it is safe to predict that the long-standing antipathies between Khmer and Vietnamese will make that relationship an uneasy one at best.

Archipelagic States The southernmost, archipelagic region of Southeast Asia, inhabited mainly by Malayo-Polynesian speaking peoples, now includes two large states, each composed of numerous scattered islands. The largest of these states is Indonesia. Smaller but similar in geographic, racial, and linguistic composition is the Republic of the Philippines. Although the indigenous peoples of each of these two states were fairly similar in their languages and cultures, their archipelagic geography served in the past to impede large scale population movements between different islands. That led to the survival of many distinct regional languages within the larger Malayo-Polynesian language family. The insular geography of the region, explained by the volcanic origins of its islands, also has been an impediment to political unification. In pre-colonial times, the larger southernmost archipelago that now comprises Indonesia had seen the rise and fall of many island kingdoms. Two of these, Buddhist Shrivijaya on Sumatra in the seventh century and Buddhist and Hindu Majapahit on Java in the fourteenth century, brought many other smaller island kingdoms under their actual or nominal control. These two empires were long gone, and Islam had swept the archipelago to become its dominant religion, when Portugal, and later the Netherlands East India Company, established fortified trading stations at strategic locations in the then politically fragmented archipelago. Early in the nineteenth century, the Dutch government took over the acquisitions of the Netherlands East India Company on Java, and later expanded its control over other islands, where local rulers were pressed into accepting Dutch supervision. Only the ruler of Aceh in Northern Sumatra waged an extended war of resistance against the Dutch. A century and a half later, the staunchly Islamic province of Aceh was once again in rebellion against the Indonesian state. Between 1990 and 1992, Indonesia's armed forces carried on a major military campaign against the Aceh-Sumatra National Liberation Front. Its guerrilla struggle for independence flared up again in 1999. Indonesian nationalism had its center on Java, the archipelago's most densely populated island. It was there that the Indonesian Republic was proclaimed on August 17, 1945. Since independence, Java's largest city, Jakarta, has served as the country's capital. Jakarta's dominance, including its extraction of resources from other parts of the archipelago, led to several rebellions in the outer island during the county's early years. In West Java, a Darul Islam rebellion was in full flower soon after independence. Other rebellions took place, during the 1950s in West Sumatra, Sulawesi, the Moluccas, and Lesser Sundas.

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Much criticized internationaUy has been Indonesia's forcible absorption of parts of two islands whose people did not wish to join the new Indonesian Republic. In both cases, the army met unexpectedly determined resistance from the local inhabitants. The first of these two ventures involved the western portion of the large mountainous but thinly-populated island of New Guinea, which Indonesia has renamed Irian Jaya. During the colonial era, New Guinea, whose Papuan highland population is unrelated racially, culturally and linguistically to the Southern Mongoloid, Malayo Polynesian-speaking Indonesian majority, had been divided between two colonial powers. Eastern New Guinea, including some adjoining islands, was under Australian rule; Western New Guinea was governed by the Dutch. When Indonesia won its independence from the Netherlands in 1949, President Sukarno claimed the right to incorporate into the Republic all parts of the former Netherlands East Indies, including Western New Guinea. At first the Dutch rejected this demand, pointing to New Guinea's distinctive ethnic composition. But under American and United Nations pressure, including reportedly threats of exclusion from the Marshall Plan, the Netherlands agreed to cede West New Guinea to Indonesia in I963, on the condition that the transfer be ratified retroactively through the free choice of the inhabitants. Once in control of its new acquisition, in 1969 Indonesia engineered an ostensible "act of free choice" by a number of New Guinean tribal leaders brought together for that purlrose, instead of by a vote of the whole population. That was unacceptable to other Papuans, who chose to resist. Since then, a Free Papua Movement has carried on a small-scale but persistent guerrilla war against the Indonesian occupation. Their struggle is fed by resentment against the government-promoted transmigration and settlement in Irian Jaya of almost 200,000 Javanese. Indonesia's policies in Irian Jaya have produced occasional border incidents with the formerly Australian controlled but now independent state of Papua New Guinea on the Eastern half of the island, where sympathy for their Western kinsmen runs deep. Indonesia's policies also have brought sharp criticism from both the government and human rights organizations in Australia, PNG's former colonial ruler and post-colonial protector. Sukarno also attempted to extend the territory of the Republic by claiming the Northern half of the island of Borneo. In colonial times, Borneo had been divided between the Dutch and the British. The Southern or Dutch part, Kalimantan, had joined Indonesia early on. But two Northern parts of this large island, consisting of the states of Sarawak and Sabah, joined other former British colonies in forming the new Federation of Malaysia. Sukarno tried to prevent this merger by sending Indonesian armed volunteers into the North, but his plans came to naught, when Malaysian and British troops, including Nepalese Ghurkas, successfully resisted Sukamo "Confrontasi" Indonesia ended its confrontation against Malaysia in 1967, after the downfall of Sukarno. Another festering guerrilla war, and an object of wider criticism abroad, resuited from Indonesia's other forced incorporation some years later of the Eastern half of the small island of Timor. This half-island's predominantly Catholic, Melanesian people also differ in their language and culture from Indonesia's Muslim majority. East Timor had long been a Portuguese colony, the last remnant of

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what once were extensive Portuguese possessions in Southeast Asia (see Schwartz 1994, ch. 8. East Timor: The Little Pebble That Could). This colonial relationship came to an end in 1974, when a military revolt in Portugal overthrew the dictatorship of Marcelo Caetano. Many of the officers who seized power in Lisbon had fought in Africa against an ultimately successful independence struggle in Portuguese Angola and Mozambique. There some had been converted to the socialist beliefs of their African opponents. On coming to power in Lisbon, they resolved to grant independence to their former enemies by dissolving what remained of Portugal's overseas empire, including far-off East Timor. That rang alarm bells in Indonesia. Like their African fellow colonials, some of East Timor's new leaders were Marxists. Indonesia's new military government, which a decade earlier had crushed an Indonesian Communist Party that seemed to be on the way to taking power, saw an independent but radical East Timor as a potential safe-haven and breeding ground for a revival of the Indonesian communist movement, and as a staging ground for Communist China. It also saw East Timor as a missing piece in Indonesia's goal of bringing all peoples of the archipelago under a common rule. But as in New Guinea, that was more easily said than done. In December 1975, with what New York Times columnist Anthony Lewis reported was American foreknowledge and tacit approval, Indonesia's armed forces invaded East Timor. After a group of Timorese leaders were pressured or persuaded to call for unification with Indonesia, that country annexed East Timor as its twenty-seventh province. The military occupation however met armed resistance led by Fretilin, the Revolutionary Front for an Independent East Timor. The struggle continued for some years, in spite of harsh Indonesian measures of suppression, including the large scale forced relocation of civilians. Since 1975, East Timor's Bishop Belo estimates some 250,000 lives have been lost, out of a pre-invasion population of 650,000. Meanwhile, as in Irian Jaya, 150,000 trans-migrants from other parts of Indonesia have settled in East Timor. Not surprisingly, they support its incorporation into Indonesia. While large scale armed resistance by native East Timorese has ended, guerrilla warfare has continued, and there has been an urban campaign of non-violent resistance. To the north of Indonesia, another archipelagic state, the Republic of the Philippines, provides another example of how ethnic demands and conflicts can be managed by making concessions to disaffected minorities. The Philippines, in their present form, were first brought together in the sixteenth century by Spain. No ancient empires or other large political units comparable to those of pre-modem Indonesia had existed there. Spain was most successful in imposing her rule in the northern and central islands, where a mostly pagan population was converted to Catholicism by Spanish priests, and a partly-Hispanized native and Mestizo elite came into being. In some parts of the large southern island of Mindanao, and the adjacent Sulu island chain, Islam, spreading northward from what is now Indonesia, had gained a foothold, and provided religious cement for the formation of a number of small Muslim sultanates. These were able to resist Spanish attempts to bring them under effective control and to convert their Muslim subjects to the Spanish faith. It was not until after 1898, when the United States replaced Spain as the colonizing power,

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that superior American arms and prudent policies of attraction brought the Muslim region under the effective administration of the new colonial government. The Americans, like the British in Burma, at first maintained a separate system of administration in the Muslim South. In the Christian regions, elected provincial governments, as well as an elected legislature, were established during the first years of American rule. In what was then called Mort Province, there was an appointed American governor and, after 1916, appointed congressmen. Only in 1935 did the Muslim provinces begin to elect their own governors and members of Congress. But for the remainder of the American period, Christians and Muslims, each in their various provinces, managed their own local affairs, and had little contact with each other. The isolation of the Muslims came to a gradual end when the Philippines became independent after World War II. The population had been growing rapidly in the northern and central islands, in part due to public health measures introduced by the colonial authorities. As this growing population placed increasing pressure on available land in the northern and central islands. Mindanao, then still thinly populated, was seen as a frontier region, beckoning Christians to migrate and settle there. In the 1950s, the Ramon Magsaysay administration offered homesteads in the interior parts of Mindanao to former communist-led rebels from Luzon who had surrendered their arms. Many other Filipinos settled in Mindanao as well. That brought the new arrivals into sometimes violent conflict with the Muslims, who saw their ancestral lands occupied or sold to Christian settlers. By the mid-1960s, Muslims who made up only 3 million out of a total Philippine population of 65 million, found that they were in the majority in only four of the country's once predominantly Muslim Southern provinces. That led to the formation in 1969 of the Mort National Liberation Front (MNLF), dedicated to winning independence and a separate state in the old Muslim region. The spark that set off armed rebellion came in 1972, when President Ferdinand Marcos imposed martial law throughout the Philippines. One of his first martial law measures was to order the surrender of all privately held firearms. In the Christian provinces, many welcomed this attempt to put an end to what had been endemic private violence and to impose law and order. Muslims, however, saw the collection of their weapons as a scheme to disarm them in the face of their Christian enemies. If Muslims were to survive as a people, it seemed, they must win their freedom quickly by force of arms. That led, in the following years to an increasing level of warfare between the Philippine armed forces and the MNLF, as well as a number of then smaller Muslim rebel groups (see Che Man 1990). Unlike the military rulers of Burma and Indonesia, Marcos, an experienced politician before he became a dictator, eventually chose to combine armed force with serious efforts at reconciliation. For help he turned to Libya's Muammar Qadhafi, who in 1976 brokered what became known as the Tripoli Agreement between First Lady Imelda Marcos and MNLF leader Nur Misuari. That agreement provided for political autonomy but not independence for thirteen traditionally Muslim provinces. The agreement was not implemented in Marcos' time, however, due to mutual charges of bad faith. Thus, the war continued. After Marcos' fall in 1986, President Corazon Aquino resumed negotiations with the MNLF, this time with the good offices of the Indonesian government. In 1989, a plebiscite was held in the thirteen Southern

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provinces as specified in the 1976 Tripoli Agreement. Because of the growing number of Christians in the South, only four of the thirteen provinces voted for regional autonomy, and these then became the Autonomous Region of Muslim Mindanao. This outcome, which fell far short of the much larger entity it had hoped to win for the Muslims, failed to satisfy the MNLE But it found more acceptable an initiative by Aquino's successor, Fidel Ramos. In a move designed to involve both Muslims and Christians in the economic development of a long-neglected southern region, the Philippine government created a Special Zone for Peace and Development, embracing what had become fourteen provinces specified under the Tripoli Agreement. There a Southern Philippines Council for Peace and Development is to oversee an ambitious program of economic development as well as to promote peace and order. MNLF leader Misuari was appointed Chairman of the Council with broad authority to spend governmental funds under a recently adopted new decentralizing Local Government Code. At the same time, Misuari was elected governor of the four-province Autonomous Region. The former guerrilla leader now exercises economic influence in a region considerably larger than he could have hoped to rule through continued resistance, while governing the four predominantly-Muslim provinces as well. Investments are to be sought from countries in ASEAN and the Organization of Islamic States. The United States has provided funds for the construction of a southern sea and airport in General Santos City. This convergence of statesmanship on the part of both the Philippine government and the Muslim leader has ended the MNLF rebellion. There remains in the field a another Muslim rebel force, the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF), which did not take part in the government-MNLF negotiations, and continues to wage its own guerrilla war. It has been strengthened by defectors from the MNLF, and has the support of Islamic groups abroad. It now is engaged in its own negotiations with the government. These negotiations with rebellious minority leaders, conducted by three successive Philippine administrations, are illustrative of a culture of compromise and reconciliation that, several times during this century, has helped to breach bitter political divisions. It also reflects the logic of democratic politics, expressed in the well-remembered dictum of the late Senate President Eulogio Rodriguez, that "Politics is addition."

The Legacies of Large Scale In-migration A fourth group of multi-ethnic states show most clearly the effects of Western colonialism. Their ethnic composition is the result of large-scale population movements that occurred in response to the colonial rulers' efforts to exploit the natural resources of their new possessions. Even before colonial rule in Southeast Asia, Chinese had come to work in the tin mines of the Malay Peninsula. But such in-migration swelled during Europe's industrial revolution, especially after the opening of the Suez Canal in 1868, when the Southeast Asian tropics became major producers of agricultural commodities and minerals needed by the manufacturers of the colonial metropoles. Production of these commodities on a commercial scale required the employment of many

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willing laborers. These were not available in sufficient numbers in the then still thinly-populated Southeast Asian colonies. But there were other more densely populated countries, not far from Southeast Asia, containing many men who were eager to improve their lives by working abroad. That was the case, especially, in Britain's Asian empire, where her free trade policy made possible the easy movement of people from one colony to another. It was the case also in China where, during a time of growing European encroachment, the Imperial government could no longer enforce old restrictions against the travel of Chinese abroad. Thus Southeast Asia, during the nineteenth century, saw a heavy in-migration of Indians and Chinese. Indians went mainly to nearby Burma and Malaya. Ethnic Chinese, of whom over 20 million now reside in Southeast Asia, migrated mainly to Malaya, the Netherlands East Indies, Thailand, and in smaller numbers to Singapore, French Indochina, and the Spanish Philippines. Most Indians and Chinese arrived in Southeast Asia as indentured mine or plantation workers. But many soon left these menial occupations and became merchants, money lenders, and landowners. At first most immigrants were men, who intended to return to their homelands. But after the 1930s, Indian and Chinese women began to arrive in substantial numbers, and what had initially been temporary workers became permanent settlers. That created what British historian J.S. Fumivall called "plural societies," made up of several ethnic communities, each in its own occupational niche, who "live side by side yet without mingling in one political unit," with little in common except their interactions in the market place (Furnivall 1944, ch. XIII, "Plural Economy"). In these colonial-era plural societies, the potential for open conflict between different communities was limited by the overarching power of their European colonial rulers, who kept each ethnic group in its place. With the end of colonial rule, peace between different ethnic communities became uncertain. The danger of open conflict was greatest in countries where the largest, and now politically most powerful community, had occupied the lowest rung on the colonial-era's occupational ladder. Now they were in a position to use their new political power to right what they saw as old wrongs and to improve their own condition, at the expense of what had become newly vulnerable aliens. As might have been expected, the treatment and position of alien minorities became a central issue in the internal politics of these states, and has been resolved in diverse ways. The harshest resolution occurred in Indonesia. There, policy towards the ethnic Chinese has varied over time depending on the state of relations between Indonesia and China. In 1955, under Sukarno, who sought close ties with China and at home came to rely increasingly on Indonesian communist support, Jakarta and Beijing signed a dual nationality treaty under which the Indonesian government promised to protect the rights and interests of Chinese nationals (Suryadinata 1985, 35). By the end of the decade, the growing power of the anti-communist Indonesian army led to the adoption of regulations excluding alien Chinese from retail trade in the rural areas, and to the repatriation of many Chinese nationals. The conditions of ethnic Chinese reached a low point in 1965 and 1966. After a failed Communist plot to take control of the state, large numbers of suspected communists, most of them Javanese, were massacred with the apparent encouragement of

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the army. Also killed were many Chinese; that was especially the case in North Sumatra, where communist-led unions had succeeded in attracting many ethnic Chinese members to the forefront of the labor movement. Elsewhere, too, in small towns and villages, Chinese, who had been resented for their roles as petty shopkeepers and now were accused of being communist supporters, suffered in the popular fury. How many of these lost their lives at that time remains a matter of dispute. There may have been fewer in number than was initially assumed. As many Chinese had been forced out of the countryside and into the cities by a Sukamo decree excluding Chinese from rural trading, they may have become less vulnerable to a mainly rural killing spree. Later, after accusing the Peoples Republic of China of having secretly shipped weapons to arm pro-communist peasants, the new Suharto government launched a fierce anti-Chinese campaign (see Heryanto 1998). The PRC embassy was attacked, Chinese language newspapers, schools, and shop signs were prohibited, as was the public celebration of the Chinese New Year. Most significantly, Benedict Anderson observed in 1983, "in the entire fourteen years that Suharto has been president, there has never been a 'Chinese' cabinet minister though such ministers were regular features of the revolutionary, parliamentary and 'guided democracy' years. Nor will one find any generals or senior civil servants of obvious Chinese ancestry" (Anderson 1983, 491). In response to such signals from the government, many Chinese have taken Indonesian names, and most young ethnic Chinese now speak Bahasa Indonesia and Javanese, instead of their ancestral Chinese dialects. At the same time, Suharto made use of Chinese business skills for the benefit of both the country and his family. Comprising only 3 to 4 percent of Indonesia's 200 million inhabitants, ethnic Chinese, according to an often-repeated estimate, now control as much as 70 percent of the country's private economic activity. Chinese businessmen were partners in various conglomerates belonging to the former president's children, to their mutual advantage (see Schwartz 1994, ch. 5, The Race that Counts). Anderson finds a fine logic in this dual policy towards the Chinese: "From the point of view of the state...it makes excellent sense, for it increases the economic resources available to the state, without any cession of political power. The more pariah the Chinese become, the more dependent they become" (Anderson 1983, 491). For the state, one might well substitute the word "Suharto." But Suharto's ties with wealthy Chinese businessmen provided scant protection for their less well-connected fellows. At several times during recent decades, anti-Chinese rioting had taken place in the Sumatran city of Medan. In the late 1990s as the Indonesia's economy began its fall into deep recession, and as the political opposition became more outspoken, Indonesia's ethnic Chinese became convenient scapegoats for the failures of the Suharto government. In May 1998, as student demonstrations against Suharto swelled, poor Indonesians in Jakarta and elsewhere looted and burned Chinese business establishments and raped Chinese women, while the military stood by without intervening. The riots resulted in the loss of nearly 1,200 lives, both ethnic Chinese and ethnic Indonesian, and induced the flight of many Chinese and their capital abroad. After the resignation of Suharto on May 20, the successor government was investigating, though without much vigor, reports that the anti-Chinese spree in May had been precipitated by Suharto's son-in-law General Prabowo to justify a crackdown on all of his father-in-law's critics and opponents.

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Less bloody but more lasting has been the fate of Burma's South Asian minority, which before World War II numbered between 300,00 and 400,000 individuals (see Chakravarti 1971). Immigrants from the Indian sub-continent began to come to Burma during the nineteenth century, when Burma was a province of Britain's Indian Empire. Like some native minorities, Indians in 1922 were given separate seats in Burma's colonial elected assembly. Many Indians served in the civil service; others worked as common laborers. South Indian Chettyars, an old Tamil trading and banking community, became the country's main shop keepers and money lenders. Under British law, they could take title to the land mortgaged by Burmese peasants if these could not pay their debts. Thus the Chettyars became an alien land-owning class, with Burmese peasants as their tenants. During the 1930s depression, many landless Burmese drifted to the cities in search of employment, where competition with Indian laborers led to bloody rioting. When Burma became independent in 1948, its new government adopted numerous legislative measures designed to nationalize and socialize the economy, including prohibitions against the ownership of land by non-agriculturists, strict ceilings on rents, the cancellation of old debts, and the waiving of interest on new debts. Such measures were welcomed by Burmese peasants, but wiped out the investments of the Chettyars. At the same time, the Burmanization of the public service led to the dismissal of large numbers of Indian public employees. Later, in the 1960s, all trades and professions were closed to foreigners. Dispossessed or deprived of employment, most of the South Asian middle class sought repatriation to India or Pakistan. Only a small number of Burmanized Indians remain. Burma's harsh treatment of her Indian community led to years of cool relations between the Indian and Burmese governments, and may have helped to bring on Burma's present close relationship with India's powerful enemy, China. Later, in the late 1970s, an insurgency by Muslims, many of them long-time residents of Burma, was followed by the expulsion of 40,000 Muslims into neighboring Bangladesh. More were expelled in the early 1990s. Substantial numbers of Indians and Chinese settled in France's three Indochinese colonies during the colonial years. There, as in Burma, they set up small businesses, or worked in service occupations. Communist victories in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos deprived many of these immigrants of their occupations, and led to their flight, encouraged by govemmental methods most harsh in Cambodia and least harsh in Laos. Vietnam's invasion of Cambodia in 1978 and China's retaliatory attack against Vietnam, led to the departure of many of the remaining ethnic Chinese from Vietnam. More hospitable to immigrant Asians, at least today, have been the Philippines and Thailand. Both countries have substantial Chinese communities. In the years before Chinese women began to arrive in these countries, many Chinese men married local women, and inter-marriage continues today. There now exist in both countries a significant group of families of mixed native and Chinese descent. In the Philippines, "Chinese Mestizos" (persons of mixed Chinese and native descent) have long been an integral part of the economic, intellectual, and political elite. Among them were the national hero Jose Rizal, executed during the last years of Spanish colonial rule, as well as former Presidents Sergio Osmena, Elpidio Quirino, and Corazon Cojuangco Aquino. Most of the great plantation owners of the Western Visayan sugar-growing region are Chinese Mestizos.

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Pure Chinese have played a leading part in Philippine commerce. Briefly excluded from their traditional dominance of retail trade during a time of intense nationalism in the early postwar years, they found it possible to escape from that disability as a result of the easing of requirements for citizenship in 1974 during presidency of Ferdinand Marcos, who having recognized Communist China, wanted to ensure the loyalty of the Philippines' Chinese. Some 400,000 of the country's 600,000 ethnic Chinese now are Philippine citizens. Chinese capital played a major part in the Philippines' post-Marcos recovery. Today, six ethnic Chinese "taipans" own two airlines, one brewery, one tobacco company, a bank, and a chain of shopping malls. One of them is reputed to exercise extraordinary influence upon the legislative process as a result of his heavy campaign contributions to members of Congress. In Thailand, where they have been present since considerably before the nineteenth century, ethnic Chinese now constitute over 10 percent of the population. In that country assimilation has been relatively easy as well. But there too, governmental attitudes towards Thailand's Chinese residents has varied over time. King Chulalongkon (1968-1910) encouraged the in-migration of large numbers of Chinese to provide unskilled labor for the country's development. His successor, King Wachirawut (1910-1925) reversed course by attacking the Chinese in his pamphlets Jews of the Orient and Clogs on Our Wheels in an effort to promote nationalism among the Thai (see Anderson 1983, 94). In the late 1930s and 1940s, Field Marshal Phibunsongkhram made similar use of anti-Chinese rhetoric. Recent governments, fearful of communist influence among the Chinese in Thailand, have encouraged their cultural assimilation. Thus, children of Chinese parents born in Thailand are Thai subjects. At the same time, Thailand's governments have attempted to limit new Chinese immigration. As in the Philippines, many Chinese have intermarried with native Thai or have taken Thai names. If they speak un-accented Thai they are generally accepted as Thai. Similar policies of assimilation have been directed towards members of the Ethnic Lao minority who are linguistically and culturally related to the Thai, and whose ancestors were forcibly resettled in Northeastern Thailand when Thai rulers conquered Laos in the early nineteenth century. Easy Chinese assimilation into Thai society may be explained in part by the proximity and ethno-linguistic connections between lowland Thai and the Chinese "Tai" peoples of Southern China. As in Indonesia, pure ethnic Chinese have been useful business partners for influential members of the military, and thus gained both governmental access and political protection, although this is less needed by them today than it was in the past. In the Philippines and Thailand, the assimilation of Chinese immigrants has been eased also by their ready acceptance of the religion of the country's majorities. Most Philippine Chinese have become Catholics. Most of Thailand's Chinese are Buddhists, though of the East Asian Mahayana, not the Southeast Asian Theravada branch of that faith. Chinese find it more difficult to accept or be accepted into the more demanding Muslim faith, which calls for a way of life alien to most Chinese. As Philippine-Chinese businessman Washington Cy-Cip explained, "we Chinese are too fond of eating pork." The religious impediment to Chinese assimilation has been especially strong in Malaysia, where Islamic law forbids marriage between Muslim Malay women and

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non-Muslim men. There, a large Chinese minority, which represents more than a quarter of the population, have been subjected to deliberate legalized discrimination by a government that represents a Malay majority, whose identity is embedded in their Muslim faith no less than in their race and language. Since attaining independence in 1957, the Federation of Malaya, and after 1963 the expanded Federation of Malaysia, have been governed by a coalition of ethnic political parties first called the Alliance and, later re-named the National Front. The members of that multi-party coalition are not equal. The United Malays National Organization (UMNO) has held a dominant place in the coalition and has provided all of the country's prime ministers. Clearly subsidiary positions in the coalition have been occupied by the Malaysian Chinese Association and the Malaysian Indian Congress. Their main task has been to mobilize the votes of their ethnic communities. In return, they are given some ministerial posts. UMNO justifies its dominant place in the coalition not only on the basis of the numerical majority of its Malay constituents but also by the claim that Malays are the Bumiputera, the indigenous "sons of the soil." That, they assert, gives them the right to set the conditions under which other communities will share in benefits of citizenships. These conditions were embedded in a "Bargain," concluded among the Alliance parties during the country's early years. Under that bargain, the Bumiputera were to be dominant in the governmental sphere, while the Chinese and South Asian immigrant communities would be free to pursue their economic interests. At first, this meant that Chinese and Indians would continue to play the dominant role in the modern economy, while a still largely peasant Malay population would be helped by the government to narrow the occupational gap between them and the other "races" by means of a wide-ranging program of educational and occupational ethnic preferences and quotas. In theory, Bumiputera also include the indigenous, non-Malay tribal peoples of Eastern Malaysia, but in practice, as elsewhere in the developing world, their interests are often shunted aside in the course of the exploitation of their forest habitat for the purpose of national development (see Winzeler 1997). In 1969, the bargain became unstuck when the outcome of parliamentary elections seemed to threaten continued pre-eminence of the Alliance parties. That led to several days of inter ethnic rioting in the national capital of Kuala Lumpur, and to the loss of a reported 169 lives. Order was restored by predominantly Malay army units, including the Sarawak Rangers. Then UMNO imposed new rules of play. Its own dominance of a broadened coalition, now named the National Front, was reconfirmed. More important, the government launched a New Economic Policy (NEP) designed to increase dramatically the Bumiputera's place in the modern, urban sectors of the economy. Any open questioning of these policies, or of the revised "Bargain," has been prevented by far-reaching restrictions against any public, including parliamentary, discussion of the institutionalized inequalities upon which the system rests. Finally, although Chinese Malaysians are not expected to become Muslims, they must, while in school, learn Malay, the country's official language. How long this system of ethnic preferences will be maintained is not clear. Malaysia's leaders have suggested that at some time in the future, when the Bumiputeras have

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attained educational and economic parity with other communities, these preferences can end. But that is not likely to happen soon. The continued imposition of a system of unequal citizenship, while advantageous to the Bumiputeras, has embittered Malayasia's ethnic Chinese and Indians. Most young Chinese, finding it hard gain access to a tertiary education in Malaysia under the limited Chinese quotas, study at universities abroad. A predictable if unintended result has been that Malaysia's young Chinese have an educational advantage over the Bumiputera who received their higher education in Malaysia. An indication of the inter-ethnic hostilities that remain could be observed at my own University. When a "Malaysian festival" was held there some years ago, all of the participants, including the costumed "Malay princess," were Malaysian Chinese. The few Malay students then at the University chose to attend the Indonesian festival instead. In Nearby Singapore, which joined Malaysia in 1963 but then was expelled from that federation in 1965 by its Malay prime minister, very different ethnic policies prevail. Unlike Malaysia, Singapore's population is over 75 percent Chinese. The remainder are members of Malay, South Asian, and Eurasian minorities. But because Singapore was an almost un-populated island before it became a thriving commercial city during its years of British rule, it has few people who can claim to be "sons of the soil." Almost all Singaporeans are immigrants or descendants of immigrants. For this and other reasons, one of which may be to avoid being regarded as "another China" like Taiwan, Singapore's ruling Peoples Action Party (PAP) has made a point of portraying Singapore as a "multi-racial" state (see Chua Beng Huat 1998; Purushotam 1998). While it has been led mainly by ethnic Chinese, the PAP seeks the votes of all Singaporeans, and includes members of all "races" in its leadership and in the government and bureaucracy. As Singapore's lingua franca, the government has chosen not Mandarin or a Southern Chinese dialect, but English. That choice has the advantages both of being a neutral language and of furthering the government's plan to make the city state a world-class commercial center, a magnet for foreign investment, and the region's communications hub. To narrow the social distance between the races that led to riots during Singapore's early post-war years, the government razed the old ethnically-separate kampongs and replaced then with government high rise housing. Each apartment building constructed through the government's HDB program must have among its tenants members of all ethnic groups. To prevent an erosion of this deliberately multi-ethnic housing system through voluntary re-segregation, those who sell their flats must find buyers from among their own race. While promoting national unity, Singapore's government also celebrates the diverse origins of its citizens. Although it gives primacy to the unifying English language, it requires all pupils in the public schools to take some courses devoted to their ancestral languages and cultures. At the same time, members of all ethnic communities are encouraged to attend each other's cultural events: Chinese New Year, the Malay Hari Raya, and the Indian Festival of Lights. In contrast to Malaysia's Malay-dominated government, which openly discriminates in favor of the Bumiputera, Singapore's Chinese-dominated government follows an opposite course. Recognizing that most of Singapore's Malay citizens

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have not yet attained the educational levels or developed the business skills of the Chinese majority, the government has adopted a variety of measures designed to favor Malays: Malay students are exempted from paying fees at the National University, and Malays appear to have easier access to certain types of government jobs. In practice, this has meant that, while private business continues to be dominated by ethnic Chinese and multinational corporations, a large proportion of post office clerks and similar lower and middle-level government employees are Malays or Indians. At Singapore's National University, the cleaning women are Malays, but Malay professors and students are relatively few in number. Malay students tend to eat at separate tables, perhaps for Muslim dietary reasons. Thus, despite the government's admirable intent, the leisure time of most Singaporeans is spent largely in the company of members of their own communities. Finally, the bottom rung of the employment ladder, notably construction work, is left to temporary workers from abroad. The mainly South Asian male construction workers live in temporary plywood barracks on their construction sites. The women, mostly Filipina and Indonesian house maids, live in the homes of their employers. But neither construction workers nor house maids can expect to become Singaporeans. An indication that Singapore's Malays are not wholly convinced of their equal status appeared a few years ago at a soccer match held in the city-state between Singaporean and Indonesian teams. As the Straights Times noted, the Malays in the audience reserved their cheers for the Indonesian team) The journalists who reported the incident were reprimanded privately by a habitually hyper-sensitive government. Singapore's leaders are determined to prevent unauthorized assertions of ethnicity. During a recent election campaign, when a Chinese opposition candidate complained that the government was dominated by "Christian Chinese," he was attacked as a "Chinese chauvinist" and later sued for calling his critics "liars." Like the United States, Singapore remains less than a multi-ethnic utopia. But the government's determination to instill in its citizens a shared sense of Singaporean nationality, while also celebrating the city state's cultural pluralism, combined with its effort to enable all Singaporeans the benefit from the country's dramatic economic growth, have been impressive. That places Singapore in happy contrast to several neighboring states. Brunei Darussalam, a small seemingly displaced oil-rich Persian Gulf emirate in the northern part of Borneo, need little discussion here. Its sultan, an absolute monarch, runs the government with the assistance of his family and relatives, and permits no political participation to either his Malay subjects, or to a small community of Chinese businessmen, Indian government and oil field workers, and other expatriates. The remaining foreigners, Nepalese members of the Ghurka Reserve Unit, have protected the Sultan against all challenges to his rule, including President Sukarno's "Confrontasi."

Explanations This article began with a typology of ethnic divisions found in the ten states of Southeast Asia. It has described various peaceful and violent ways by which governments of the region have sought to deal with such divisions.

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With only ten cases, and a large number of variables, it would be difficult to show causal relationships without greatly narrowing the scope of this study. One may, however, draw some tentative conclusions about what appear to have been successful methods for the management of ethnic conflict devised by governments in the region. Throughout post-colonial Southeast Asia, governments have chosen a single regional language and made it the language of instruction so as to promote communication among a linguistically disparate people. Singapore chose English, a language native to none of its main ethnic groups, as its lingua franca. In learning a national language, no one must renounce his parental tongue. Not so with religion, which can be deeply divisive. Religion's threat to national unity may be reduced if not eliminated by creating a determinedly secular state. That has been the policy of Indonesia and the Philippines. Still, Christian Indonesians and Muslim Filipinos feel threatened by the dominant religious communities. Burma, by imposing Buddhism as the state religion, increased the alienation of its Christian hill peoples. Several Southeast Asian countries have immigrant minorities whose distinctive appearance, languages and cultures set them apart. In such countries, some assimilation can be achieved over time through intermarriage. In the Philippines, Thailand, and Indonesia, the marriages of immigrant men to local women have created bridge groups that have helped to soften, though not eliminate, inter-ethnic tension. Why have some Southeast Asian governments relied on force to suppress ethnic communities that dared to challenge central authority, while others have been willing to offer political concessions? Not surprisingly, force has tended to be the first choice of military-dominated governments, while negotiation and accommodation has been preferred by the region's democracies. But there are deeper explanation for the choices made between force and accommodation. These explanations, which also shed light on broader roles of the military in government, lie in the past experiences of each country before and during Western colonial rule, and especially the time and manner by which independence was gained.

Nation-Building: The Northern 1ier Throughout Southeast Asia, native leaders, after the end of World War II, have been faced with the challenge of transforming former colonies into viable nation-states. Because of both geography and history, that task has not been alike in all parts of Southeast Asia. In his posthumously published book Nationalism, Czech historian Ernest Gellner identified four separate zones of Europe that, over different periods of time and with different degrees of difficulty, gave birth to the modern nation state, an entity that is both a "nation" whose people think of themselves as a community with a common language and culture, and a politically organized state (Gellner 1997). The first or oldest European zone consists of countries located near the Atlantic Coast: England, France, Portugal, and Spain. In these countries, organized states in the form of hereditary kingdoms and nationalities speaking a common or related languages, developed together and were well-established before the appearance of modern nationalism. There, state and nation are in harmony.

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In the second zone, composed of the German and Italian speaking regions, culturally distinctive nations emerged before their peoples were brought together into unified states. Erasing political borders to achieve this was the goal of nineteenth century German and Italian nationalists. Once this was accomplished, nationalists could be content. In the third zone, Eastern Europe excluding the former Soviet Union, there has existed a multiplicity of cultures and states, few of which had identical borders. This remains today a zone of conflict among nations struggling to create states. Gellner's fourth zone, the former Soviet Union, remains "a work in progress"; it is unclear what form nationalism will take. The five countries of Northern Southeast Asia-- Burma, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam---come closest, in Southeast Asia, to resembling the European states of Gellner's first zone. In this region, which came under European colonial rule only during the nineteenth century, the colonial powers conquered existing kingdoms with large settled populations which shared, in each case, a common religion and spoke the same or related regional languages. To these, the colonial powers then added the adjacent highlands. Their-post colonial successors would create nation states based on these core lowland populations, while retaining and attempting to assimilate the highlands as well. 2 This colonial era demarcation of state boundaries also affected Thailand which, though never colonized, had its borders defined in effect by what the Western powers chose not to claim. Only Laos was divided into three kingdoms at the time of its colonial subjugation, as a result of intra-familial quarrels in its ruling houses, which made the parts of a once-unified kingdom vulnerable to encroachment from both its eastern and western neighbors. While within these Northern tier states there remained marked inter-regional cultural differences and accompanying regional loyalties, none has produced among its lowland population, a serious movement for secession. Thus, the leaders of each of the present northern states could find strong support in popularly remembered history in their efforts to rally their lowland peoples, first for their anti-colonial struggles, and then for maintenance of national unity. 3 The main ethnic conflicts in the Northern tier states stem from the attempts of their governments to enforce a previously tenuous claim to control the lands inhabited by the hill tribes of their border regions, in the face of the highlanders' efforts to maintain or regain their ancient freedom from lowland control. Most of the governments have relied mainly on policies of attraction to give their upland peoples a sense of participation in a lowlander-dominated state. Not so the military rulers of Burma, who have been as ready to use force against their non-Burman highland minorities as against the lowland opponents of this habitually repressive regime. That choice can be explained by their professional inclination as soldiers, by the extraordinary geographic and numerical scale of the tribal challenge to the Burmese state, and by the legacy of Great Britain's colonial system of divide and rule or, to put it more kindly, of separate and different administrations for different peoples. British policies in Burma had fostered both minority demands and majority resentments. It is hardly surprising that after achieving independence, Burma began to fragment so quickly. As U Nu's parliamentary government seemed unable

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cope with the threats of tribal secession, the military stepped in and proceeded to put down secessionist rebellions in its own way. The tragic results are evident today.

Nation-Building: The Peninsular States South of this northern tier of pre-colonial kingdoms turned post-colonial nation states, beginning with the Malayan Peninsula and extending across the South China Sea, lie four nation states-in-the-making: Indonesia, the Philippines, Malaysia, and Singapore. These resemble Gellner's third or fourth European zones. All but the last of the four are inhabited mainly by Malayo-Polynesian speaking peoples. None, in anything approaching its present dimensions, was an established kingdom when it began to come under European rule. Majapahit, the last great empire in the Indonesian archipelago, had fallen apart in the early sixteenth century and had been replaced by numerous smaller Muslim states, when first Portugal and then the Dutch began their gradual penetration of the region. The present Philippines, another nearby cluster of islands, contained some small Muslim sultanates in the far South when Spain began its colonization of this archipelago in the course of the sixteenth century, but most of the northern and central islands had no large supra-local political units. In both Indonesia and the Philippines, nationalism grew out shared memories of a lengthy colonial experience, from which emerged a new nation state. Indonesia and the Philippines still call themselves by names derived from those given them by their colonial rulers. Singapore, the most recent creation, still uses the language of the colonial power as it lingua franca. Malaysia and Singapore inherit from their colonial past internal ethnic divisions left by the heavy recent in-migration of non-natives. All of these peninsular states now face, in varying forms, the challenge of creating a new sense of nationhood among their previously separated peoples. Nationhood came least easily for Indonesia, the largest and most populous of the Southern states. That can be attributed not only to the sheer geographic expanse and cultural diversity of the former Netherlands Indies, but also, as in Burma, to the colonial rulers' policies of divide and rule. Over several centuries, while extending their control over the many islands that today comprise Indonesia, the Dutch governed their possessions indirectly, with the help of many traditional local rulers. Each of these claimed the loyalty of his own subjects. As in Burma, that impeded the growth of a broader sense of Indonesian nationhood. The Dutch strategy of divide and rule was employed once again, then quite deliberately, during the four-year struggle for Indonesian independence. Hoping to retain some influence over parts of their pre-war empire, the Dutch promoted the formation of fifteen mini-states as a rivals to the Java and Sumatra-based Indonesian Republic. But when the Dutch were defeated in 1949, these mini-states quickly joined the new Republic. Evidently, during their common experience under Dutch rule, their subjects had developed a sense of archipelago-wide nationhood that had not existed before. Benedict Anderson has suggested how this occurred. In eighteenth century Europe and Spanish America, print-capitalism, the rapid commercial spread of a common language used by an educated middle class and by a centralized bureaucracy, had made possible the emergence of nationalism and of nation-states (Anderson 1983, ch. 40).

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In a similar fashion, in the late colonial Dutch East Indies, an old interinsular trade language had become an administrative lingua franca used by native members of a centrally-directed colonial bureaucracy. That language would help to unite future Indonesians in a struggle against the Dutch attempt to regain its East Indies empire and then, as bahasa Indonesia, would become the national language of the new Republic (Anderson 1983 110-113, 120-121). By contrast, in French Indochina, Anderson observed, separate scripts in Vietnamese, Khmer, and Lao, invented by the French for the education of their Vietnamese, Khmer and Laotian subjects, and the emergence of what became in effect separate bodies of subordinate native administrators in Cambodia and Laos, helped to create separate nationalisms in the two western parts of the French Indochinese empire (Anderson 1983 113-120). That, together with Khmer memories of Vietnamese conquests of parts of what had once been a much larger Khmer domain, helps to explain why, at the end of the Japanese occupation, the Indochinese Communist Party, created by Ho Chi Minh, split into three national parts, and why there is no united Indochina today. But the sense of common nationhood, stemming from many years of administration by native officials speaking a common language, which united most of Indonesia, did not extend to the inhabitants of Dutch New Guinea, whose highland peoples had only recently been discovered, nor to Portuguese-administered East 11mor. In both of these new Indonesian provinces, independence movements persist. As for various other of the easternmost Melanesian and largely Christian islands, among them North Sulawesi and some the Malukus, whose native peoples continue to chafe under the central government's rule, both race and religion account for their dissatisfaction. To give the non-Muslim peoples a sense of inclusion, the country's official ideology, since Sukarno's time, has been not Islam but Pancasila, which includes a non-sectarian belief in one supreme God. But that has not been sufficient to prevent the most recent sectarian riots and killing in Ambon, the capital of the Malukus. In the absence of a historic pan-Indonesian state, which could define the borders of a new Indonesia, it was perhaps not surprising that President Sukarno conceived of an ambitious scheme for his new country's expansion into areas that had not been parts of the Netherlands East Indies, i n c l u d i n g the f o r m e r l y British-controlled northern portion of Borneo. Only British military support for Malaysia, and finally the overthrow of Sukarno, brought that venture to an end. Still, Sukarno's successor added new territory to Indonesia when he annexed formerly Portuguese East Timor. Without the battle field successes of the then fledgling Indonesian army, independence could not have been won. Nor could the new state's borders have been extended, or its unity maintained. Repeatedly during the following decades, Indonesia's armed forces (ABRI) were called upon to suppress attempts by rebellious regional commanders to seize power and form rival governments. Then in 1965, the army again played a decisive role in meeting another threat, the near-seizure of power by the Indonesian Communist Party. The past contributions of the armed forces, to both the creation and preservation of the Indonesian state has entitled them, in their view, to exercise dual functions (Dwi Fungsi) involving both the defense and the governance of the state. While Dwi Fungsi now is being questioned by some post-Suharto reformers, it does not

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seem likely that the military will easily give up either of its two functions in this still fragile nation state. Less fragile has been both the nationhood and statehood of the predominantly Christian Philippines. Three centuries of shared centrally directed rule by Spain, had nourished by the latter years of the nineteenth century a nationalist movement strong enough to produce in 1898, half a century earlier than in Indonesia, a nearly successful anti-colonial revolution. It also had forged a strong sense of unity. None of the country's many Christian islands or language groups ever sought separation from the rest. Only a small Muslim population in the far south did not share this sense of Philippine nationhood. Later, under American rule, an extended period of partial self-government enabled Filipino leaders to debate and resolve national issues peacefully in the full view of an increasingly literate electorate. When independence came in 1946, it did so peacefully, under civilian leadership, and not by force of arms. That explains why the Philippine military, even during the Martial Law years, accepted the supremacy of a civilian president, and did not claim the equivalent of the Indonesian army's "Dwi Fungsi." When a group of disaffected field-grade officers, by repeated attempted coups, sought to seize power from President Aquino, they were defeated by loyal armed forces.

Nation-Building: The Plural Societies Malaysia in its present form was neither a state nor did it attempt to become a nation until 1963. Indeed, until shortly before that date, few could have imagined Malaysia's existence. It was created on short notice out of diverse components, all of which happened to have been under various forms of British rule. During its early years, Malaysia appeared so fragile to its neighbors that like Sukarno, with his confrontasi, two Philippine presidents laid claim to the East Malaysian state of Sabah, on the basis of a dynastic inheritance of the former Sultan of Sulu. Ferdinand Marcos went so far as to train Filipino Muslim soldiers to infiltrate Sabah until the trainees mutinied, were shot, and that ill-considered scheme came to public--and Malaysian--attention. In developing their country, Malaysia's ethnic Malay leaders have not tried to meld together all of the country's diverse peoples into a nation. Malsaysia's privileged core population, the source of the county's official language and religion, are the Bumiputera. Malaysia's ethnic Chinese and South Asian inhabitants remain second class citizens. After the inter-racial rioting of 1969, it was made clear once again to non-Bumiputera that they will remain outsiders, tolerated because of their economic skills and resources, but not truly welcomed as members of the national community. In making that point, a predominantly Bumiputera army played a very visible role. Of all of the states of the region, Malaysia's nationhood seems most problematical. The Republic of Singapore is unique in the region in having had no large pre-colonial native population. Governing the descendants of diverse immigrant groups, Singapore's leaders have dealt with the possibility of ethnic conflict by attempting to create a new nation state with a distinctive multi-ethnic identity that, while respecting the ancestral cultures of all ethnic groups has chosen a neutral,

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colonial language as its lingua franca to help promote a sense of shared nationhood. While a new, multi-ethnic but united nation state is still some way from being achieved, the intent of the policy deserves admiration. Its success will depend upon the continued growth of Singapore's impressive economy. A serious and prolonged economic down-turn could open serious fissures in the island state.

Remedies From the point of view of feasible remedies for ethnic conflict, the states of Southeast Asia fall into two groups. The first of these consists of states whose ethnic minorities are separated by geography from the majority populations. In such states, inter-ethnic peace might seem to be quite easy to achieve. All that the dissatisfied minority asks is that it be let go. But no government finds it easy to give up a part of its land, though if it might not mourn the loss of its inhabitants, as we have seen in Kosovo. And even if a government were willing, to surrender a part of its territory, that would open it to attack by more nationalistic opponents. A more feasible course for such a government is to cede to a geographically isolated minority a substantial degree of autonomy without actually granting independence. Decentralized states with large degrees of regional or provincial self-government can do this most easily, as has the Philippines. Centralized Indonesia has found the prospect of granting autonomy, let alone independence, to East Timor or Irian Jaya more painful. The Burmese junta evidently regards even the granting of autonomy to its upland areas as unthinkable. Ethnic demands for the revision of interstate boundaries where these do not coincide with the cultural boundaries between peoples, exemplified in Southeast Asia by the case of the Patani Muslims of Southern Thailand, can be promoted or discouraged by the actions of the two neighboring govemments. In Sub Saharan Africa, where such anomalous borders are common, the post colonial states have by a consensus, generally if not universally observed, refrained from making or supporting irridentist claims against the territories of their neighbors. Malaysia, by adopting a similar stance, and Thailand through its efforts to include its Muslim minority in the national fold, have largely if not wholly defused Patani Muslim irridentism. In "plural societies," where natives and immigrants communities are inter-mingled spatially, but where their diverse histories have left one group at a disadvantage, as in the cases of Malaysia and Singapore, inter-ethnic conflict may be lessened by preferential policies designed to reduce these inequalities. Such measures are most acceptable if they are not seen to be punitive in intent or effect. Singapore's Chinese-dominated government has created affirmative action programs for the benefit of its Malay minority, which appear to have been accepted by ordinary Chinese. In Malaysia, on the other hand, a Malay-controlled government has imposed such preferences for the benefit of its own Malay constituents. Malaysia's Chinese and Indians have had no real say in the matter. They appear to have accepted them because preferences for Malays have not involved punitive deprivation for the Chinese and Indians, who continue to prosper. Whether such preferences will continue to be acceptable to future generations of non-Bumiputera will depend upon whether preferences will be phased out when the Bumiputera have reached a certain level of economic development, or whether Bumiputera ethnic preferences become permanent

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entitlements. Thus, in Singapore, ethnic preferences, to be acceptable, require from the majority a spirit of generosity. In Malaysia they require majority self-restraint. Addendum: The Destruction of East Ttmor

While this article was being edited, disaster struck East Timor. In January, Indonesia's new President B.J. Habibie, perhaps persuaded by a suggestion from Australia's Prime Minister, but without consulting his own foreign minister, cabinet, or military, announced an autonomy plan for the province which its people could either accept or reject in a referendum to be administered by the United Nations. Rejection would imply a preference for full independence, which the national parliament meeting in November could then grant to East Timor. In the meantime, Indonesia's military would maintain order in the province. On August 30, East Timorese, in a massive turnout, chose independence by an overwhelming 78.5 percent of their votes. But the military and pro-integration militias, as well as some in the government, who had expected autonomy to be accepted, were determined to block independence. Even before the election, these irregular "militias." composed of pro-autonomy East and West Timorese, began to terrorize the civilian population, threatening greater violence if autonomy were rejected. They were armed and in some cases led by members of the military, including the special forces and locally-recruited territorial battalions. Although election day was peaceful, it was followed by a rapid escalation of violence by the militias, leading to the flight of East Timorese, United Nations election monitors, foreign journalists, and even Indonesian policemen. It took the country's top military commander General Wiranto six days to fly to the province. But he was unable, or unwilling, to control his local commanders. By this time East Timor's capital city Dili was emptied of its population and in flames. Over two hundred thousand East Timorese had been driven or forcibly transported from their homes, some to militia-controlled camps in West Timor, or had sought the protection of independence fighters in the mountains. An unknown number were dead. Pro-independence leaders, Catholic clergy, students and other educated Timorese had been the special targets of the killing spree. "There is no question that General Wiranto could have turned off the violence much sooner," said a senior American military official, "But he and the rest of the government were waiting to see if their plan to get something less than full independence for East Timor would work" (New York Times, Sept 14, 1999). This havoc, in defiance of the pledges made to and by the United Nations, led that body to demand that Indonesia stop the violence or permit an international force to do so. After at first rejecting foreign military intervention, President Habibie consented. His decision, and that of General Wiranto, came after threats to the general, relayed in private by high American military and naval officers, that non-compliance would result in the blocking of IMF loans to Indonesia. As the Australian-led multi-national intervention force took control of the capital city of Dill, Foreign Minister Ali Atalas told the U.N. General Assembly: "Twenty-four years ago, it was our responsibility to accept the territory...in order to stop an ongoing fratricidal carnage after a disastrously bungled decolonization process." Now, his country would depart from the territory "honorably, peacefully,

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and amicably." But when the bulk of Indonesia' forces left the island after burning their barracks, reconnaissance flights found that the province appeared to be almost deserted, with up to 75 percent of its buildings and homes demolished. Some 200,000 forced evacuees were being held in West Timor, inaccessible to the international peace keepers. Additional Timorese had been shipped to neighboring islands. Days later, the violence continued. "They've burned the cities and the towns, reported a relief worker. Now they're taking care of the villages." Fifty Indonesian officers--mostly in uniform, reported UN spokesman Fred Eckhard--were seen helping set another village ablaze, and four children who had come down from hiding in the hills "were caught by militia and executed" (Associated Press, Sept. 17, 1990). There followed new and now public warnings to Indonesia, by the American Secretaries of State and Defense, that its responsibilities included the security of East Timorese outside of that province, and their safe retum to East Timor. It was not sufficient for the military to simply quit that province. Else, foreign loans and economic aid could cease and Indonesia would risk international isolation. Soon thereafter, Indonesia agreed to allow refugees to be returned to East Timor under United Nations protection. President Habibie at first had explained the behavior of the military as a psychological aberration, a case of soldiers run amok. But that was hard to believe. "Running amok" in Malay societies is a brief spasm of homicidal fury by a person provoked beyond endurance, which usually ends in the killing of the amok-runner by the endangered bystanders. It seemed more likely that Indonesia's savaging of the province was the result of a centrally-directed military plan, known to General Wiranto, to keep East Timor in Indonesia by ridding it of most of its native population, and resettling the province with Indonesians and pro-Indonesian Timorese. Save for the forceful foreign intervention, made possible by Indonesia's current vulnerability to economic pressure, such a plan might have succeeded. The East Timor army commander's defiance of the nation's civilian leadership, if not of his own higher command, as well as the use of non-uniformed thugs to massacre civilians, had precedents in recent Indonesian history. By its doctrine of dwifungsi, a military proud of its role in creating Indonesia has long claimed the right to join with civilians in making domestic and foreign policy. In a country where army divisions are regionally based and loyalties to regional commanders are strong, revolts during the 1950s by various army divisions against the Cabinet and army chief, instigated by then President Sukarno himself, as well as revolts by anti-Sukarno officers in other regions, offered precedents for local military insubordination, if such it now was, towards Jakarta. The massacre of half a million suspected communist in 1965, the subsequent student riots against President Sukarno, and the 1998 killing and raping of ethnic Chinese, all carried out by civilian mobs with the army's encouragement, served as models for the similar use of "militias" in East Timor. While reflecting the fragility of a young nation with an expansive and over-extended state, the military's response to this case of minority dissatisfaction does not auger well for the future of democracy in Indonesia. Will a military that has shown contempt for the electoral process in East Timor, allow independence or autonomy movements to continue to boil in Aceh, Kalimantan, and West Irian

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in order to j u s t i f y its b u d g e t s ? Is its v e n g e f u l d e s t r u c t i o n o f E a s t T i m o r the last thrashing o f a military that expects to lose political p o w e r to civilian authority, or a prelude to a new military dictatorship, or s o m e t h i n g in b e t w e e n ? Notable, finally, has b e e n the role o f E a s t T i m o r e s e m e m b e r s o f the militias and territorial forces in the destruction o f their o w n country. T h e i r leaders include m e n w h o have profited h a n d s o m e l y u n d e r Indonesia, and w h o fear for their lives if independence comes. T h e y have v o w e d to r e c o n q u e r the province. T h a t p o s e s troubling questions about the prospects for reconciliation in an independent East Timor. Internationally, the intervention o f a concert o f d e m o c r a t i c regional states twice during the last y e a r o f the m i l l e n n i u m , first in K o s o v o and then in East Timor, m a r k s a b r e a k with the principle o f state sovereignty. It offers new hope for at least s o m e other minorities faced with ethnocide, a n d serves as a w a r n i n g to their oppressors. Notes

1. 2.

3.

This brings to mind a recent soccer match in Los Angeles, at which Mexican-American spectators cheered the Mexican team and booed the American one. Although the pre-colonial kingdoms of northern Southeast Asia had at times broken apart, and different ruling dynasties had replaced one another, Burma, Thailand, Vietnam, and Cambodia had again become unified kingdoms when Great Britain and France began their conquests in northern Southeast Asia less than two centuries ago. In Vietnam, armed opposition to the French, led by high-ranking mandarins and members of the imperial family seeking to restore the former ruling dynasty, continued until 1916. An exception to this generalization is that of the Malay-speaking Muslims of Southern Thailand who, although they too inhabit the lowlands, differ from their majority Thai neighbors in both their language and religion. But their desire to become a part of Malaysia has not been encouraged or welcomed by that federation. Another exception is that of Vietnam which from 1954 until 1975 consisted of two separate states. But here the motivation for separate statehood lay in ideology, not regional differences or ethnicity. The separation was supported for a time by foreign intervention, but ended in 1975 with reunification.

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