October 21, 2003

Daughters of privilege

By Eric Ellis

Has Asia, home to the world’s most dynamic economies, a region which provided the world’s first modern female leader, suddenly become enlightened?

AT SOME point in the next day or so, the somewhat curious image of George W. Bush in Thai national dress will embed itself into the global consciousness.

The self-styled leader of the free world is in Bangkok for the annual summit of the Asia-Pacific Economic Co-Operation (Apec) group of 21 Pacific rim, mostly Asian, nations. Apec's national dress photocall has become a ritual after the forum's decade of summiteering and schmoozing, and GWB, as its de facto leader, will endeavour to look as comfortable as a determined Texan can be in delicate silks woven of impossibly gorgeous colours.

They don't dress up at Euro-summits. But there is something else about Apec that is rare in meetings of Europe's leaders, certainly since the days of Thatcher and Edith Cresson of France. Women are invited.

That is the paradox of Asia, a region that seems to throw up so many famous female leaders -the Bhuttos, Sukarnoputris, Gandhis, Aquinos, Arroyos and Bandaranaikes -but where women are infamously maltreated, as witnessed by any Patpong fleshpot in the Thai capital itself, with its teen prostitutes, or the region's ignoble tradition of much-abused domestic slaves.

So has Asia, home to the world's most dynamic economies, the presumed engine of the world's future for so many people, a region which provided the world's first modern female leader, Sirimavo Bandaranaike of Sri Lanka in 1959, suddenly become enlightened?

Yes and no. True, three women will be represented among Apec's 21 leaders; President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo of the Philippines, Indonesia's President Megawati Sukarnoputri and Prime Minister Helen Clark of New Zealand.

But those very same names -the Bhuttos, Gandhis and Aquinos that are so emblematic of female leadership for most of us elsewhere in the world - are also the names of famous men who have been killed in, or attempting to gain, office, their deaths sweeping their sometimes reluctant wives and daughters to precisely the same crucial position in a dynastic creaking of the region's preordained political machinery.

Indeed, of the three powerful women chatting with Messrs Bush, Hu of China and Chretien of Canada in Bangkok this week, the only woman there who was elected leader is 53-year-old Clark, hailing from a country that was the world's first to give women the vote -in 1893 -and which is, strictly speaking, more Pacific than Asian.

More common in Asia is the experience of Indonesia's Megawati Sukarnoputri, whose very name means daughter of Sukarno, the charismatic first president of the world's most populous Muslim nation.

For most of her 56 years, Megawati was happy as a housewife, unwilling and her critics say -intellectually unable to assume or even to recognise her political birthright. But in 1998 General Suharto, who had engineered a brutal mid-1960s rout of the left-leaning but much-loved Sukarno, was ousted in a popular uprising after 31 years as dictator.

A year later, nudged along by her ambitious husband Taufik Kiemas, Megawati was elected Indonesian Vice-President, outmanoeuvred by the blind cleric Abdurrahman Wahid. Two years later, Taufik's hand as the effective leader of Megawati's populist Indonesian Democratic Party was evident when Wahid was ousted in a parliamentary power-play.

Today, with his distant wife ensconced in the Istana in Jakarta, Taufik is an increasingly wealthy businessman and backroom politico plotting his wife's election next year.

Arroyo, 57, was elected Vice-President of the Philippines in 1999, becoming deputy to the charismatic former B-movie star Joseph Estrada. Two years later she emerged, blinking, as President when Estrada was toppled in a wave of middle class protest against his corruption and cronyism. She, too, will face the people next year.

Both Megawati and Arroyo should be symbols for the impoverished women of their nations, two of the world's biggest exporters of cheap female labour, mostly to clean the world's kitchens and hotel rooms. But in two years of unremarkable presidencies, neither, their critics say, has done much to advance women's rights in her country.

The reason, these critics claim, is that the two women, both privileged daughters of presidents (Arroyo's father, Diosdado Macapagal, was Filipino leader from 1961-65), are products of the ruling elite and thus distant from the daily tribulations of their people.

Female politicians not carrying family baggage are rare in Asia. Japan's recently resigned Foreign Minister, Makiko Tanaka, is the daughter of Kakuei Tanaka, one of Japan's most revered postwar leaders, and also its most scandalised. The father of Japan's notorious money-politics political culture, Tanaka pere was arrested and forced to resign in 1974 for accepting more than $2 million in bribes from the US defence giant Lockheed.

China, of course, had its Madame Mao, Jiang Qing, and in India, the Italian born Sonia Gandhi helms the Congress Party once led by her assassinated husband Rajiv, his assassinated mother Indira and her father, India's first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru. Elsewhere in the sub-continent, Benazir Bhutto failed twice as Prime Minister of a Pakistan once led by her father Ali Bhutto, who was killed in office by his political opponents. In Sri Lanka, the current President Chandrika Kumaratunga is the daughter of Sirimavo, while in Bangladesh, the Prime Minister, Khaleda Zia, is the widow of former President Ziaur Rahman, who was assassinated in a coup attempt in 1981. Even the region's most prominent political dissident, Burma's Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, is of blue political blood. Her father Aung San is seen as the father of Burmese independence, even by the junta that detains his daughter.

Indeed, it is rare to find a female political leader in Asia who is not part of a dynasty. The fearsome Madame Wu Yi is the only woman in China's communist politburo, while in Taiwan, Vice-President Annette Lu, a Harvard-trained lawyer, said in a recent interview: "I am perhaps the only (woman) in Asia who has achieved so much on my own merits, coming from a very average family."

In Asian politics, for a woman, that speaks volumes.