Razali

I am honoured to be asked to speak, and I am particularly impressed that we have so many students, young people, out there coming to listen with great interest with what we’re doing, today and tomorrow. I congratulate the organisers and I recognise their continuing commitment, their resilience, in taking this long and hilly road up to try and find a time when we can illegalise war – we come to the conclusion within our own response system that we do not want war. It will yet be a long time but nevertheless I am happy that there are compatriots in Malaysia and elsewhere that want to do this and nothing has taken them off the track of what they are trying to do.

I am not a believer in conspiracy theories as such. But in my time as a professional, in the business of being a representative of the government overseas, clearly I have seen instances when countries and groups connive to get things done; any by very subtle ways or very outrageous ways.

And we have seen many things in history in the last 2 decades where these things were done with actually impunity because there is that understanding that they can get away with it. Today we are talking about Proxy Wars. It is important that young minds, particularly, begin to realise that it is possible for people to fashion together ways to get what they want and proxy wars are efforts – subtle, sophisticated, sometimes brutal also – to try to get what they want. If we have to learn anything at all from the past, with all the victims and casualties, we must make sure that we don’t fall prey to that kind of situation where willy-nilly, in the fault of our not quite understanding the things, we become party to being part of proxy wars. But let us first talk about South East Asia. If you look at the history of South East Asia, you will see the very early positive context in relation between the countries in Europe and the countries in South East Asia.

Between major countries of Asia – India, China – and the little countries of South

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by TAN SRI RAZALI ISMAIL East Asia. There were such mutually profitable context. And I’m talking about the 17th century and early part of the 18th century where there was international commerce that traffic between, looking at the monsoon north east and the south west monsoon that commerce brought items in China to Venice and the rest of Europe and from Europe it went to China, India also. But the nexus of that was South East Asia, particularly Malaya. The Malacca Sultanate excelled in its sophistication to deal with it, taking into acceptance the movement of the monsoons and allowing for all kinds of diversity. People who lived in Malacca could trade in that area. There were Persians, Chinese, people from Africa, they came to stay as early as the 18th century.

And the curious thing was this; the native authority never had to lose power. There was no attempt to try to coerce the native authority, the Sultanate in Malaya and in some parts in Malaysia, to diminish their control with the area. It was only with the onslaught of imperialism and communism that destroyed totally that scenario. Countries like Malaya, Indonesia, Philippines became eventually colonial entities, governed by imperial power. In the case of Malaysia, the British re-fashioned Malaya, re-fashioned the very Sultanates to become, with to protocol to added – pomp and splendour and ceremonies – to become, in effect, more and more an appendage of the colonial power.

In the 50s, 60s and 70s, you have the phenomena of the imperial powers and the communism in Russia and China, trying to compete and have conflicts in South East Asia through using people to do their bidding. That was a time during the so-called democracy of the United States and the invisibility

of communism. Countries in South East Asia were made to choose sides and conduct the foreign policy in support of one or the other. In effect, by that time, they were already taking on the role of proxy states. We were taught to worry about Chinese communism, we were told that the South East Asia Treaty Organisation (SEATO) would be the protective wall, the defence against communism. Of course, one or two of us learned to play one major power against the other.

To some extent, it accrued some benefits. But mainly, many of us became very much a part of the process of dealing with proxy wars.

In the 50s, the move by Vietnam to gain independence was stalled for a very long time by the so-called “free world”. The Americans and the Allies propped up military regimes in South Vietnam to try to stop Vietnamese independence in the name of stopping Vietnamese communism. Legitimacy was added to it by referring to the effort of the so-called free world, this is to stand the invisibility of the domino theory. The Americans in Vietnam wished a dirty war. There was Agent Orange, defoliation, carpet bombings, killings and maiming of thousands, and forcing hundreds of thousands, of Vietnamese, to leave in boats later to find better homes elsewhere.

Afghanistan was the Russian version of the dirty war, where they tried to wage and subjugate the people of Afghanistan by the utilisation of lethal weapons and the most horrific of tortures that led to the total destruction of the customary and traditional structures of governance in Afghanistan, all in the name of the inevitability and invincibility of communism.

Both the US and the Soviet Union used the countries in that area as surrogate to prop up their proxy wars.

Malaya (subsequently Malaysia) was not immune to

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proxy wars. It is possible, perhaps now, to review the Malayan Emergency of the 40s, 50s and up to the 60s where many Malayans, and Malaysians, lost their lives.

This is part of a larger picture plan articulated in the 50s by the then President Eisenhower to prevent a domino effect of South East Asia falling under the sway of communism. Recently in Lahad Datu, Sabah, a faction of a Sulu group made a military incursion into Malaysia, probably coached by certain Philipino parties, possibly with some elements in the government, to promote and resurrect the Sabah claim using the trappings of some old legitimacy. This is another kind of an attempt to proxy wars – with programmes of people behind the scene to try to push whatever they want to in that speculations.

The interference and manipulation of external powers, and other powers, continue to exist to this day; and we would be fooling ourselves to think that we are entirely free of these kinds of manipulations. They come in various shapes, manifest themselves in varying degrees, and, of course, the most insidious of them all, in the application of the whole matrix of proxy war.

Proxy war is defined by many as a struggle between 2 powers through the use of substitutes in order to avoid direct confrontation. A term forged in the bitter foundaries of the Cold War, proxy wars referred to the proliferation of wars fought on behalf of these 2 major powers in that era – within those that champion so-called “liberal capitalism” of the United States, and those that defended the ideals of communism, Soviet Union.

Another way of looking at it is to think of it as what happens when a major power decides when an armed conflict works in its favour but it does not want to deal with the consequences, complications and fallout of being directly involved. Perhaps in the line of contemporary business today, this kind of expression might relate to the idea of outsourcing. Indeed, it may even follow the same logic: Why do the dirty work yourself when it is less costly to have someone else do it for you? You get what you want, your proxies get what they want, and everybody should be happy. But that is not always the case. Not everybody will be happy. And the casualties, the victims of these attempts of proxy wars, are enormous.

In 2003, the European council in Brussels acknowledged that out of the millions of people that have died in wars, 90% of them have been civilians. And the casualties for such wars did not necessarily come out as a direct result of war. Some died as a consequence of the war, but some, diseases and malnutrition, and the destruction of the economy left these people to be victims of that kind of conflict. Some died of exposure to the elements, displacement; in fact in 2013, the UNHCR have a record of 33.3 million people displaced worldwide as a result of violence and conflict. These are people who have been uprooted from their lands, forced to flee, and

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driven from their homes. These people have had to find their future in other areas. Then, of course, I point your attention to the gross violation of human dignity that often takes place during the war itself. We talk about the campaign in the past few years against the rape as a weapon of war to remind us of the suffering of women who have to go through these horrendous experience.

For example, out of 1,600 women interviewed in the aftermath of the Liberian Civil war, 92% admitted to having suffered from violence, including rape. The use of child soldiers are also a cause of great concern.

UNICEF reports over 300,000 boys and girls under 18 years of age being involved in conflicts worldwide – sometimes abducted, often forcibly recruited – these children either find themselves involved directly in violence, warping their minds forever, or have become preys and victims of the soldiers.

During the Cold War, it is estimated that 20 million people died in the Third World due to proxy wars – dying so that the United States and the Soviet Union can avoid directly coming to blows at the international stage. It is ironic perhaps make up irony that 20 million might well be seen by some of these people that connive proxy wars to be a necessary sacrifice because, at the end of the day, they were not forced to actually fight themselves, and they were not forced to use the ultimate weapon, the nuclear bomb. Proxy wars continue even today with intensity and greater sophistication, not necessarily committed only by the major powers, but by bodies and peoples and governments from other areas. Some have suggested, for example, that in the smorgasbord of armed violence happening within Syria-Iraq borders, no fewer than

8 different proxy wars are playing themselves out, including the war between the Wahhabi factions in the Middle East to the manifestation of animosity between the Sunni-Shia divide. Who are behind, really, these efforts? Libya has become a proxy for a much wider conflict. Its Islamic groups are reportedly backed by Qatar and Turkey, while the more secular forces get weapons and funding from Egypt, Saudi Arabia and UAE. There is much concern about the events that are currently taking place in Yemen. But one of the most searing questions is whether countries of that region can find legitimacy in carrying out acts that can be interpreted in terms of belligerency without having any sanctions from the United Nations.

Human history is one of division; and the breakdown of peace within tribal and religious factions can lead to serious acceleration with horrifying consequences to Yemen. The Middle East now has the poorest country.

This could be a start of a far wider war within Sunnis and Shias and supremacy to one or the other would be controlled and fashioned by influences and powers of powers behind the actual conflict. As new trends and patterns regarding armed conflict in general, and proxy wars in particular, start to emerge, we would do well to heed where our current trajectory is taking us: what needs to be done to mitigate the effect of armed conflict, especially among innocent civilians. For example, many proxy wars currently involve non-State actors, most of whom, which are part of the whole new set of dynamics, and they largely fall outside the scope of the laws of armed conflict, and some have very little qualms of not only involving civilian lives, but making civilians primary targets. It is time for a conscious effort

to emphasise the rule of law and the internalisation of mainstream moderate values, particularly by the UN, UN should take the initiative on this, not just to articulate the necessity of these values, but to emplace and build these values into the body politics and operational matrix of the UN so that we can have a clearly, a set of operating procedures that will be clear, that there are certain borders that you will not cross.

This is something that committed governments can begin to look at, and committed groups can also do, because we are supposed to be living in a civilised age.

In ASEAN South East Asia, on the cusp of establishing an ASEAN economic community and promises of a peoplecentred ASEAN and benefits for all, it is necessary to project ahead and seriously appraise what can be called, if you are not careful and attentive, a secondcoming of the politics of big countries into our area. The imperialists before, they are still back, in one guise or another, as governments or as corporate bodies. And also the emergence of possible regional powers in our area that can affect and influence how we govern our countries, and use us to push to the maximum their own national imperatives and ambitions. ASEAN has to be very clear-minded of what would constitute a clear regional ethos or regional interest, and having accepted that, as a group, ASEAN has to make sure that no attempt would be made to divide us in that fashion.

This is a very difficult process. But if we do not want to be part of what had happened to us before, enhancing, promoting proxy wars and proxy battles of the other people, it is time that ASEAN take very clear actions to ward off influences of this nature.

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