Human Rights and State Security: Indonesia and the Philippines

1. Human Rights and State Security in International Relations

1 Human Rights and State Security in International Relations Why do governments routinely violate human rights, and what makes them decide to change that practice? Do international human rights norms, in fact, influence state behavior? If so, can non-governmental human rights organizations influence a state’s human rights practice in a positive way, and under what conditions? Why is the mobilization of external actors different, even when they are responding to similar types of violations? And under what conditions can governments evade public pressures to change their practices? In addition to those general questions, what happens when we focus on specific nations—in this case, Indonesia and the Philippines? Do international norms have any significant impact on these nations’ human rights practices, and under what conditions? And what about the activities of international human rights organizations like Amnesty International, the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights or Human Rights Watch? How do the public discourses that routinely develop between governments and these organizations influence the governments’ decisions on human rights policies? And how does the impact of a mobilization vary with the type of regime? That is, does it make a difference that the Philippines and Indonesia were authoritarian at one point and in a transition to democracy at another point when they were targeted by human rights campaigns? Finally, have human rights campaigns helped these two states to continually improve their human rights practices? In addressing these questions, I attempt to establish three major claims. First, I show that international human rights organizations, like Amnesty 2 Chapter 1 International, exert a much greater influence on the human rights practices of these two countries than analysts of their behavior usually assume. These organizations pursued international campaigns on the Philippines and Indonesia that influenced their state policies in human rights even during the Cold War, when both nations were key military allies of the United States in Southeast Asia. In both countries, they mobilized public opinion about human rights practices; they also influenced other nations to change their foreign policies toward these governments. These campaigns shaped the decisions of Indonesia’s Suharto government, and the Philippines’ Marcos government, in areas such as mass releases of political prisoners that these governments saw as threats to their state’s national security. But they did more than that. In the Philippines in , human rights organizations affected Marcos’s choice to liberalize the authoritarian political system. In Indonesia, they influenced Suharto’s decision to grant human rights monitors access to East Timor in ; it had been annexed by Indonesia in , and the monitors suspected gross and systematic human rights violations . This action would open the floodgates for a more systematic criticism of the Indonesian military. In both countries, these campaigns influenced governments to relax the enforcement of laws that effectively restrained people ’s right to associate freely and to express political opinions; the campaigns also got them to denounce the practice of torture. In Indonesia in , a controversial state security agency was dissolved because its practice of arbitrary detentions was criticized by human rights organizations. In both cases, human rights concerns contributed to the unraveling of the authoritarian Marcos and Suharto governments, in  and  respectively. These influences occurred with some regularity and were not just isolated incidents. But at the same time that we observe these organizations having a surprising amount of influence on these two governments, we also observe that their influence varied considerably over time and place. In the s Amnesty had conducted similar campaigns on political prisoners in both Indonesia and the Philippines. But while these campaigns initially achieved similar results—both governments released great numbers of political prisoners— the political reforms went much further in the Philippines than in Indonesia. Why? The Philippines were strategically more important to the US government because they hosted the two largest military installations outside US territory (Kessler ). And objectively, Indonesia was a greater violator of norms because it annexed East Timor in . Both these observations make the political reforms counterintuitive. In any case, in  the international Human Rights and State Security 3 mobilization in Indonesia ended suddenly: apparently the Indonesian government could deflect human rights pressures, but the Philippine government was unable to do so. And why were the same groups that proved so instrumental in bringing down the Marcos government in  not able to provide more effective constraints on gross and systematic human rights violations in the Philippines under a democratic government...