May 10, 2022 | DFF, Opinion Articles
By Mu Sochua.
According to a story widely circulated on Philippine social media, Ferdinand Marcos Sr, the late dictator who imposed a brutal regime of martial law on the country between 1972 and 1986, owed his immense fortune to the payment of 192,000 tons of gold by the Tallano royal family of the Maharlika Kingdom for his legal services.
There is a problem with this account; there is not a shred of truth in it. The Maharlika Kingdom and the Tallano family never existed. Marcos’ fortune is better explained by rampant corruption and the plundering of the state coffers during his years in power, as several court cases in the country and abroad have demonstrated.
This is one of the stories that makes a huge campaign of disinformation aimed at whitewashing the Marcos regime, ahead of the Philippines’ upcoming general elections on May 9, in which Marcos Sr.’s son, Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr, is running for the presidency. The campaign portrays the Marcos dictatorship as a “golden age” for the Philippines and makes other fantastical claims, such as that the country was then the third richest economy in the world.
The strategy seems to be working. Bongbong Marcos heads all the opinion polls in the run-up to the elections, and the Marcos Dynasty seems to be poised to return to Malacañang, the Presidential Palace in Manila.
As elsewhere, social media is a powerful political tool in the Philippines. Sixty-eight percent of the country’s population have regular access to the Internet, and there are over 92 million recorded social media users, albeit this number does not necessarily represent individual ones. Filipinos are more active on social media than their counterparts in any other Southeast Asian country, averaging 255 minutes per day. All of this makes the country fertile ground for online campaigns of disinformation.
One month before the polls, Facebook’s parent company Meta announced that it had taken down up to 400 accounts from the Philippines that were engaging in “malicious activities” ahead of the May election. This is not new. Three years ago, Facebook announced the removal of at least 200 pages of coordinated “inauthentic behavior” linked to a network organized by the social media manager of President Rodrigo Duterte’s electoral campaign. His daughter, Sara Duterte, is now the running mate of Marcos, and commands a similarly large lead in the race for the vice presidency.
There are indications that these disinformation campaigns are part of a long-term plan to bring the Marcoses back to power. The creation of new pro-Marcos pages, many coming from troll farms and fake accounts, began to increase in 2014. Around the same time, the flamboyant Imelda Marcos, widow of the late dictator and mother of Bongbong Marcos, announced at her 85th birthday dinner party that she wanted her son to run for president.
More recently, authentic and fake accounts have been used on a massive scale to spread misleading or fake information regarding the presidential candidates, the issues at stake in the elections, or the electoral process itself. An instance of the latter is the false claim that it is necessary to pass a negative RT-PCR test to be able to vote, something that it clearly aimed at discouraging people from casting their ballots. This is creating an environment in which it is increasingly difficult for many voters to know what is true and what is not, making it all the more difficult to make an informed decision at the polling station.
And not all disinformation campaigns are as relatively innocuous as the story of the mythical “Maharlika Kingdom.” Disinformation campaigns in which the victims are accused of having links with the communist insurgency of the New People’s Army, a tactic known as “red-tagging” in the Philippines, have risen alarmingly, as the regional organization ASEAN Parliamentarians for Human Rights (APHR) has documented.
The consequences of these kinds of campaigns are often dire. Not only are they bound to have a significant impact on the elections, but they have resulted in harassment, attacks, disappearances, and even murders, according to a 2020 United Nations report on the Philippines.
The spread of disinformation online for political purposes is not a phenomenon exclusive to the Philippines, of course. Conspiracy theories like QAnon have helped poison the public debate in the United States; in Myanmar, Facebook was turned into a propaganda tool by ultra-nationalists to voice anti-Muslim rhetoric, contributing to extreme violence against the Rohingya minority; it has helped the far-right to make inroads in several European countries; and, more recently, it has been used by the Russian government to justify its brutal invasion of Ukraine in the eyes of its population.
At the core of this problem is the social media giants’ business model, whose content curation algorithms are designed for clicks and attention, so that users’ data can be sold to advertisers for enormous profits. Yet, too often what grabs our attention is sensationalism and outrage rather than fact-based information, thus allowing disinformation, extremism, and division to be massively amplified.
In order to face the challenge that these campaigns pose to democracy, it is necessary that social media giants like Facebook, TikTok, Twitter are made bound to a new set of rules and standards that prevent them from profiting off public harm and instead protect the public interest. Policymakers and lawmakers must start with establishing new data rights protections, requiring transparency in political advertising on these platforms, and adopting measures to combat hate speech.
This should be done in parallel with education programs to empower internet users to verify facts, identify false information and stop it from spreading, and support public service journalism so we can all operate and debate on the same set of accurate facts.
As challenging as it may seem, the phenomenon of disinformation campaigns should be addressed thoroughly in order for democracy to survive, in the Philippines as elsewhere. In the words of the Philippine journalist Maria Ressa, co-founder and CEO of Rappler and recipient of last year’s Nobel Peace Prize, “you cannot have integrity of elections if you don’t have integrity of facts. If they make the facts debatable they are essentially dooming our nation.”
Mu Sochua is a Board Member of ASEAN Parliamentarians for Human Rights (APHR) and a former Member of Parliament in Cambodia.
This article first appeared in The Diplomat.
Mar 14, 2022 | DFF, Opinion Articles
By Kasit Piromya
A region that’s long been accustomed to natural disasters is now suffering from seismic activity of the diplomatic kind – one that threatens to break up the regional architecture of Southeast Asia.
The tectonic rift at the foundation of ASEAN continues to worsen, with the interests of the more democratic-leaning founding members on one hand and those of more recent authoritarian member states on the other. The question before us is: If ASEAN continues to pull itself apart and sinks into irrelevance, what will take its place?
Few may have noticed this shift in political ground. ASEAN has little relevance in the daily lives of most people in Southeast Asia, so despite the critical issues it deals with, it trudges along with many unaware of its weaknesses.
It takes a catastrophe, like the one that has exploded and smoldered in Myanmar for the past year, for it to become clear that if it is going to meaningfully address crucial issues that threaten regional security, economic stability and diplomatic relations, then ASEAN must shape itself accordingly.
With ASEAN front and center, despite all the diplomatic shuttling and rhetoric, the international community has failed to make any progress on the crisis; if anything, it’s made matters worse. The split within ASEAN, over the fundamental point of whether or not it was a matter of concern for the bloc, was evident within days of the attempted coup.
Cambodia and Thailand’s political leadership described it as an internal matter, while Singapore, Indonesia and Malaysia expressed concern, calling for restraint and a peaceful resolution. The Philippines, the oldest democracy in the region, seemingly changed its view from one day to the next, eventually stating that it viewed the takeover with “grave” and “deep” concern. Vietnam, Brunei and Laos took their time before eventually issuing formal statements on the matter.
Over the past year, the inability of the ASEAN member states to jointly recognize the importance of the Myanmar crisis and agree on collective action has enabled the generals to unleash a devastating firestorm of violence and suffering on the people, one that has potentially cost upward of 10,000 lives.
ASEAN’s inaction has directly contributed to the region now hosting its own version of Syria’s protracted conflict. Other international actors are not blameless either, and the inability of the world to effectively respond has worsened an already appalling human rights and humanitarian tragedy.
Since Cambodia became the ASEAN chair in December, the split within the bloc has widened, notably when Prime Minister Hun Sen unilaterally broke the consensus on a five-point action plan to deal with the crisis, warmly shaking hands with coup leader Min Aung Hlaing on a visit to the Myanmar capital and issuing a joint statement with him.
The pair’s friendliness is perhaps “a natural fellowship of dictators”, as Thai academic Thitinan Pongsudirak put it in a recent discussion hosted by the ASEAN Parliamentarians for Human Rights. Within hours of Hun Sen leaving Myanmar, having announced a new joint plan apparently aimed at supplanting ASEAN consensus, the military reneged even on this agreement, reportedly launching air strikes in civilian areas.
The Myanmar people were outraged by the trip, a sentiment summarized by activist Khin Ohmar, who told Hun Sen bluntly, “you are not welcome”, saying that his trip risked lending legitimacy to the junta, making him “complicit in their crimes against humanity and war crimes against our people”.
The pushback against Hun Sen’s trip from the leaders of Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia and the Philippines signaled their awareness that Cambodia was attempting to hijack the ASEAN agenda. A planned retreat of ASEAN’s foreign ministers hosted by Cambodia was called off in an implicit rebuke of Hun Sen’s rogue diplomacy.
It’s now time the other eight ASEAN leaders were explicit. If they allow Cambodia to continue toying with the ASEAN agenda, they will be colluding with Hun Sen, furthering the destruction of the bloc’s unity, integrity and credibility. It is clear that ASEAN’s response to this crisis is about more than Myanmar.
As Prof. Thitinan pointed out, the damage being done to ASEAN by Hun Sen’s approach “might be irreparable”. “It might be finished – ASEAN as we know it,” he said.
For now, Hun Sen appears to have taken stock of the pushback. After initially suggesting the junta be included in ASEAN meetings, he has apparently reverted to the bloc’s agreed position of only allowing military representatives to attend if progress is made on the Five-Point Consensus. We will soon find out what that really means at the rescheduled ASEAN Foreign Ministers Retreat in Siem Reap on Feb. 17.
The responsibility now rests with the prime ministers of Malaysia, Singapore and Thailand, the presidents of the Philippines and Indonesia, the sultan of Brunei and the leaders of Vietnam and Laos. They must now unite to send a clear message to Hun Sen to adhere to the collective ASEAN framework and hold Min Aung Hlaing accountable to the consensus that he himself agreed to.
ASEAN’s focus must now shift to doing whatever it takes to alleviate the suffering of Myanmar’s people, who have clearly chosen the future they want: without military involvement in politics. Now, the choice for the rest of the world is whether to support or abandon them.
For Southeast Asia, the implications are profound and ASEAN leaders must ask themselves if they are willing to take the necessary actions to be a region where a people’s longing for peace, justice and freedom can be fulfilled.
As Myanmar’s Spring Revolution enters its second year, ASEAN’s failure to effectively respond risks eroding the very glue that holds the organization together. ASEAN’s future is at stake, and it’s time for tough words from Myanmar’s neighbors.
Another anniversary was marked this past week: It’s been 49 years since the United States and Vietnam signed the peace treaty to end a war that cast a huge shadow on the region and further afield, and contributed to the formation of ASEAN itself.
“One generation’s experience of brutal war is the next generation’s history,” as Jonathan Cohen, executive director of Conciliation Resources, put it.
This is the task before us all today: To ensure that, for future generations in Myanmar, this conflict is a distant memory that marks a decisive moment on the path towards justice, peace and democracy.
This article first appeared in the Jakarta Post
Feb 15, 2022 | FoRB, Opinion Articles
By Eva Sundari
After almost 100 years in operation, last month Nahdlatul Ulama (NU), Indonesia’s most prominent Islamic organization, made history, electing its first women leaders.
Under the leadership of reform-minded scholar Yahya Cholil Staquf, 11 women were named on NU’s board for the first time, among them former first lady Sinta Nuriyah Wahid, her daughter and prominent activist Alissa Wahid, and Khofifah Indar Parawansa, the governor of East Java.
Although a long way from gender parity, the move was a breakthrough for the organization, and is at least a step toward addressing some of the challenges faced by women in Indonesia today, which includes, among other things, the use of genital mutilation in some parts of the country, restrictive laws on women’s rights, as well as the continued practice of polygamy and child marriage. The women elected to NU’s board all have established records of meaningful contributions to society in their own right, and their inclusion on the board must be the opportunity for them to have substantial influence within the organization when it comes to addressing issues such as these.
As well as being an important political vehicle, since at least the Reform years of the 1990s, NU has played a vital role in advocating for social inclusion and standing up for ethnic and religious minorities, including Papuans and Chinese-Indonesians. As just one example, Abdurrahman “Gus Dur” Wahid, the former Indonesian president and NU leader, has been dubbed the “father of Chinese-Indonesians” because of his role in revoking an instruction leftover from the Soeharto era that prohibited the development of Chinese culture and religion.
NU and its membership have also played a role in advancing women’s rights. In 2017, female NU members initiated the Indonesian Women’s Ulema Congress (KUPI), which gathered together more than 1,000 female global clerics to discuss issues such as the history of female religious authority, sexual and domestic health, and declared several fatwas that support women’s empowerment.
Indonesia’s more hard-line Islamist groups, with their conservative interpretation of the religion, may have attracted the bulk of the media attention in recent years, but it should not be forgotten that women in Indonesia have long pushed back against this vision of Islam. NU and its members have played an important role in that resistance, and the appointment of women to its board is the latest in a series of progressive ideas the organization has initiated.
It has strongly criticized polygamy, and advanced women’s reproductive health access, awareness, and education. Female NU members have also played important roles in advancing women’s issues around the archipelago. Some entered politics, pushing for pro-women legislation such as the Anti Sexual Violence Bill (TPKS) and the Protection of Household Workers Bill (PPRT), as well as the Health Bill passed in 2009, which permits abortions in cases of rape or related health concerns.
Currently, freedom of religion or belief (FoRB) in Indonesia is experiencing many challenges, and that extends to women’s rights. In its most recent annual report on civil and political rights in the country, Freedom House ranked Indonesia as “partially fair”. One of its lowest rankings came in the area of freedom of belief (scoring 1 out of 4), with issues ranging from official discrimination against religious minorities, such as restricted access to documentation, to “violence and intimidation” against Ahmadi and Shia communities.
The research group SETARA Institute recorded 180 incidents of FoRB violations in 2020, 12 of which were against women and children, while the National Commission on Violence Against Women has documented hundreds of discriminatory local regulations that specifically limit the fundamental rights of women in the name of religion.
As a prominent Islamic organization claiming about 90 million members, NU has a crucial role to play in addressing issues such as these. The election of women to its board should be celebrated as the important step that it is, but it also must result in meaningful representation, whereby these elected women in leadership roles can deliver substantive impact on the issues of FoRB and women’s rights.
Challenges remain for NU in addressing the more conservative mindsets within its internal bodies, but the election of women to its board is a welcome move in the right direction, toward ensuring a range of perspectives are heard, including those of women, and the organization promoting a moderate and progressive version of Islam to be followed by adherents in Indonesia, and further afield.
Eva Sundari is a board member of ASEAN Parliamentarians for Human Rights (APHR), a former Indonesian Member of Parliament (MP)
This article first appeared in The Jakarta Post.
Jan 5, 2022 | DFF, Opinion Articles
By Charles Santiago
As a first gambit as the incoming chair for ASEAN in 2022 – and in its 50th year no less – Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen’s “offer” to visit the junta in Myanmar next month is breathtakingly audacious in all the wrong ways.
Let’s be very clear about what’s happening in Myanmar. Senior General Min Aung Hlaing’s coup has plunged the entire country into a multi-dimensional catastrophe and given rise to the most unified and viable alternative to military rule Myanmar has ever seen.
Opposition to the junta has risen in every corner and every sector of the country, and the people are leading a “spring revolution,” complete with a parallel government structure in areas where the military doesn’t have control.
The Myanmar military’s policy of all-out terror has brought death, destruction, and disruption upon the people. There have been 1,633 reported incidents of violence against civilians there since the coup on Feb. 1 (compare that to 377 such incidents in Yemen), according to the independent Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (ACLED).
Those reported incidents are overwhelmingly due to extreme violence used by the state to repress protests against the military takeover. ACLED data for all such incidents in the 10 ASEAN member nations since Feb. 1, if used in an infographic, would illustrate the black hole the military is burning in the heart of mainland Southeast Asia.
People are being forced to the brink of starvation because of the repeated offensives. The Special Advisory Council-Myanmar (SAC-M), a group of independent experts, has accused the junta of crimes against humanity, including intentionally depriving people of food, by destroying food supplies, killing livestock, and cutting off roads used to transport food and medicine. Military offensives in the country’s north-west and east have prevented farmers from harvesting their crops, SAC-M says. Since the coup, two million more people need life-saving assistance.
Just this week, in its Asia Power Index, Australian think-tank Lowy Institute adjusted 2030 gross domestic product forecasts for Asian countries post-pandemic, predicting Myanmar’s would need to adjust by a whopping 39.5 percent (second lowest was fellow ASEAN member, Laos, by 18.9 percent).
It’s not as if military rule has ever been successful. The Tatmadaw, as the military is known, has ruled since the 1960s. The challenges it faces today underscore a fundamental failure for which the military must take full responsibility. The Tatmadaw would have the world believe that the military is the guardian of the Union of Myanmar and lasting peace. The reality is entirely different.
For as long as the military has ruled, the people of Myanmar have hoped to emerge from under the jackboot. Every uprising the country has seen has been met with force. Far from being stable, Myanmar under military rule is home to some of the world’s longest civil conflicts, in large part due to the Tatmadaw’s belligerence.
Myanmar today is a country at war. Reports from the ground sound like something out of a nightmare, not the dream fantasy of a “discipline-flourishing democracy” hawked by the junta.
Responding to the coup in April, ASEAN agreed on the need for “political stability” in all member states, and the much-discussed but unheeded five-point consensus, which includes the cessation of violence, dialogue among “all parties concerned” and the provision of humanitarian assistance, as well as the establishment of a special envoy.
This approach has been supported by the international community, including the UN Security Council, as well as the governments of the United States, United Kingdom, and South Korea, among others.
Even China – no fan of international accountability on human rights – remarkably accepted ASEAN’s lead on the crisis at the 30th anniversary summit of China-ASEAN Dialogue relations. Beijing ultimately agreed with ASEAN that there should be no representative for Myanmar present at the summit.
The junta has made almost no progress on the five-point consensus, the very reason ASEAN excluded Min Aung Hlaing from the 38th and 39th summits in November. The military has not only refused to cooperate with ASEAN, but appears determined to intensify conflicts and commit further atrocities against its people, to crush the uprising that has emerged nationwide against it. It has even come up with its own five-point roadmap, which it plasters across its official mouthpiece.
There is an international united front to back ASEAN’s position to refuse high-level political representation to the junta – at least there was until Hun Sen stepped in. By welcoming the junta’s foreign minister to visit Phnom Penh this week, the Cambodian prime minister not only granted the generals the legitimization they crave (and which has been denied by the people), but also undermined ASEAN.
Cambodia takes the ASEAN chair on Dec. 29. Any incentive for the junta to accommodate the five-point consensus, so carefully negotiated by the bloc, risks being unilaterally dismantled by Hun Sen.
“We think we are the doctors. We are the disease,” is the saying that comes to mind considering the foolhardy and deluded determination with which Hun Sen and his Myanmar counterpart, Min Aung Hlaing, are pursuing their criminal agenda.
There are eight other members of ASEAN, as the government in Phnom Penh well knows. The last time it chaired the regional bloc and ignored the other members in 2012, ASEAN failed to reach an agreement on a final statement at the summit for the first time, ostensibly choosing to back China’s interest in the South China Sea dispute over ASEAN member interests.
A decade later, Hun Sen is yet again single-handedly undermining ASEAN’s efforts threatening to diminish regional credibility and intensify instability, even before his country officially takes the chairmanship.
This article first appeared in The Jakarta Post.
Nov 25, 2021 | Internet Freedoms, Opinion Articles
By Mu Sochua
Over the past two years, Thailand has not just suffered repeated Covid-19 waves, but it has also faced growing discontent and criticism. Widespread protests have taken place calling for major reform of the political establishment.
Many aspects of these protests have been innovative, not only because they challenged usually taboo subjects such as monarchy reform and the army in politics. The protests took place both on the streets as well as the internet.
The internet has become an increasingly important space in Thailand’s pro-democracy movement, with digital-savvy netizens using the web to spread their messages and make their voices heard in the form of videos, memes, popular hashtags, and social media posts.
The authorities’ attempts to quash the protest movement and the control measures — with political cyberspace campaigns, are repressive laws to restrict internet use and have their online access and activities limited and monitored by state surveillance.
In its 2021 Freedom on the Net report, which analyses internet freedoms globally, Washington DC-based Freedom House, a non-profit group on democracy rated Thailand “not free”, giving it a grade of just 36 out of 100. “The internet is severely restricted in Thailand,” the report said.
Among the weapons in the government’s arsenal to control the internet are the Cybersecurity Act 2019, which allows the government to monitor and access digital data it deems “cyber threats” to the country, and the Computer Crime Act (CCA)2017.
The CCA, first introduced in 2007 and amended in 2017, is draconian in nature. It grants broad powers to the government to conduct surveillance, censor free speech and opinion, and target activists and political opponents. It allows the government to prosecute those it deems to be spreading “false” or “distorted information”.
The act has repeatedly been used to arrest activists in order to restrict freedom of expression. At the height of the pro-democracy protests in 2020, authorities targeted protesters and warned them against using online platforms to mobilise people to join the demonstrations. According to the Thai Lawyers for Human Rights (TLHR), between July 2020 and September 2021, 90 people in 103 cases were charged under the CCA.
The government did not stop there. In August, the Ministry of Digital Economy and Society introduced a new ministerial notification to update rules on retaining computer traffic data of service providers, pursuant to the CCA. This new notification adds requirements for a range of digital service providers, including internet providers, social media platforms, and messaging applications, to collect data to identify individuals and hand it over to authorities upon request. This data is admissible in court. Even public venues providing internet access are required to install surveillance cameras to aid authorities in identifying internet users.
Ultimately, these new rules are here to assist authorities in tracking down individuals whose online activities they deem to have violated the CCA. Given how the authorities have used the broadly worded CCA against those calling for change in Thailand, there are legitimate concerns the new ministerial notification was made not to fight cybercrime, but instead to grant authorities added arbitrary powers to crack down on free speech in the digital sphere.
The new ministerial notification took into account the increased popularity of social media and messaging platforms such as Facebook, Line, Telegram, YouTube, and Instagram, among others, and has now added them as the subject of increased state surveillance, outside of any accountability for the government. Since these surveillance activities are justified by the authorities in the interests of “national security”, users are not able to invoke their right to privacy under the Personal Data Protection Act 2021.
Despite the government’s efforts to control cyberspace, Thai youths and various pro-democracy groups are still displaying extreme courage, continuing their street protests and using social media to express opinions, raise awareness, and mobilise their campaigns. Yet, for them and all people in Thailand, keeping themselves safe from the government’s prying eyes is becoming increasingly challenging.
Internet service providers and parliamentarians should be at the forefront of fighting back against digital dictatorship, and urging the government to repeal laws and regulations that curtail internet freedom.
Mu Sochua is a board member of Asean Parliamentarians for Human Rights (APHR) and a former Cambodian member of parliament.
This article first appeared in the Bangkok Post
Nov 15, 2021 | CCHR, Opinion Articles
By Kasit Piromya
At the recent COP26 climate conference in the Scottish city of Glasgow, Indonesia was one of more than 40 countries that pledged to transition away from “unabated coal power generation” in the next few decades.
Although Indonesia endorsed just three of the pledge’s four clauses – excluding Clause 3, related to issuing new permits for coal-fired projects – it was a step in the right direction from the world’s biggest coal exporter, and one of the biggest emitters of greenhouse gases globally, for which coal comprises a significant amount. In its pledge, Indonesia promised to reach net zero by 2060, or sooner with international assistance, and said it would “consider accelerating coal phase out” into the 2040s, on the condition that it receives international financial and technical assistance.
The caveat is in many ways a reasonable one. After all, wealthier countries have been the main cause of global emissions, while developing nations have felt the bulk of their impacts.
While Indonesia deserves support in these efforts, it also deserves considerable scrutiny. After all, within days of signing onto a pledge to end deforestation by 2030, the first major announcement at COP26, Indonesia appeared to renege on its commitments, with Environment and Forestry Minister Siti Nurbaya Bakar reportedly calling the pledge “clearly inappropriate and unfair”. Yet, between 2001 and 2019, Indonesia lost more than 26 million hectares of forest, a 17 percent decrease in tree cover since the turn of the century, and one of the main drivers of greenhouse gas emissions in Southeast Asia in recent decades.
On top of halting deforestation and ending its reliance on coal, there are many other areas where Indonesia can step up its response to the climate crisis. In late September, ASEAN Parliamentarians for Human Rights (APHR) published a report, Building Back Better: Southeast Asia’s transition to a green economy after COVID-19, which evaluated whether the recovery measures taken in response to the COVID-19 pandemic in the region, including Indonesia, promoted a transition to a green economy.
Indonesia’s performance in almost all areas of the report was deeply disappointing. Of the 11 “green policies” identified as those that can accelerate a green economic transition, Indonesia had adopted just three. This included a US$240 million capital injection into PT Kereta Api Indonesia, the state-owned rail company, supporting clean transport infrastructure, and reducing traffic congestion as part of its National Economic Recovery Program. It also took measures to accelerate solar energy production.
In contrast, however, Indonesia had the dubious distinction among the countries of the region of adopting all four negative policies identified as contributing to global emissions. These included providing subsidies for environmentally harmful industries and products such as oil exploitation, deregulating environmental standards, and supporting polluting businesses such as airlines, while providing them with no incentives to adopt more climate-friendly practices. Also in 2020, Indonesia’s House of Representatives passed the Mining Law, which allows automatic mining permit extensions of up to 20 years. Mining activities are likely to increase greenhouse gas emissions from land use, which already accounts for almost half of the country’s total emissions.
There’s much that can be done. The measures adopted as part of the COVID-19 economic recovery, and pledges made during COP26, present a unique opportunity to ensure Indonesia moves away from the current destructive economic model, and instead builds back better.
Some progress has been made at COP26. On the sidelines of the event, Indonesia, as well as the Philippines, signed an agreement with the Asian Development Bank (ADB) to establish an Energy Transition Mechanism (ETM), an “ambitious plan that will upgrade Indonesia’s energy infrastructure and accelerate the clean energy transition,” according to Finance Minister Sri Mulyani Indrawati. This builds upon the IEA-Indonesia Energy Transition, which was agreed in March.
These are welcome steps that require careful scrutiny, while other steps are also required. This includes encouraging dialogue between constituents and policy makers on the impacts of climate change on their communities, as well as the harms caused by laws such as the Mining Law. The government must also put in place green conditions for supporting large businesses, including state-owned enterprises, as well as promote policies that provide job training in sectors that are positive to the green economy, including renewable energy and energy efficiency.
Finally, the Indonesian government must be part of this unprecedented moment in history, and drastically shift away from its reliance on coal, which has done so much to destroy our planet. This means removing fossil fuel subsidies, phasing out coal by 2040, and creating an environment that enables the growth of renewable energy investment.
Lawmakers lie at the heart of fulfilling these climate change commitments and after our global leaders met in Scotland, now is the time for us to hold them accountable and ensure they move beyond vague platitudes made in the corridors of power, and toward real policies that improve people’s lives, and protect our planet.
The article originally appeared in the Jakarta Post
