HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH /ASIA OVERVIEW Human Rights Developments In terms of human rights, Asia in 1996 was marked by major setbacks, minor progress and much unfinished business. On the one hand, there was an obvious deterioration of the human rights situation in Burma, Cambodia, China, and Indonesia. In addition to the arrest of over 1,000 supporters of the democracy movement in Burma during the year, forced labor and forced relocations in Burma=s eastern provinces led to a massive exodus of refugees and migrants to Thailand. China=s particularly harsh treatment of democracy advocates like Wei Jingsheng, serving a fourteen-year prison sentence, and Wang Dan, a former student leader who Adisappeared@ in 1995 only to surface in custody and be formally tried and sentenced to eleven years in prison on subversion charges in October 1996, were part of a more systematic effort to crush the political opposition. At the same time, China=s arrests of business and banking executives during the year demonstrated that arbitrary detention was not restricted to political activists. The utter disregard for the rule of law by Chinese authorities, even as some legal reforms were undertaken, did not bode well for Hong Kong and its transition to Chinese rule in 1997. Many activists in Hong Kong were already concerned by Chinese government statements and actions that signaled strict controls of the press and of political participation after the transition. In Indonesia, dozens of student activists under the age of thirty faced trial and certain conviction on political charges for taking part a nonviolent leftist political organization that the Soeharto government, with no evidence, charged with masterminding serious riots in Jakarta, the capital, in July. If the level of state repression was high during the year, the demand from Asian citizens for basic civil liberties was greater than ever. If 1988 was the year of the pro-democracy movement for Burma, 1989 for China, 1990 for Nepal, 1992 for Thailand, 1993 for Cambodia, and 1995 for Hong Kong, 1996 was a banner year for Taiwan and Indonesia. The elections in Taiwan in March, in which 14,000,000 Taiwanese voters for the first time chose their president by direct and secret ballot after an open and lively campaign, were a stunning refutation of the AAsian values@ argument that Asians care more about strong, efficient government than about popular participation. The elections also demonstrated that there was nothing inherently incompatible about Confucian cultural traditions and respect for civil liberties. The Indonesian democracy movement developed a new cohesion with the formation of an independent election monitoring group in March and the demand for accountable leadership that led to mass support for Megawati Soekarnoputri, daughter of Indonesia=s first president, as an alternative to President Soeharto. Major human rights problems remained unresolved in the region. In Kashmir, despite the holding of elections in May and September and a reduction in the frequency of confrontation between the military and various groups of armed insurgents, the level of summary executions of suspected militants by Indian security forces remained high. In Sri Lanka, initial optimism that the government of Chandrika Kumartunga, which was largely supportive of human rights, would be able to prevent violations of humanitarian law as its army waged war against the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), was waning at the end of the year. The LTTE, whose violations of a cease-fire in April 1995 led to the resumption of the war, was responsible for serious violations of humanitarian law in the territory it controlled. In Bangladesh, all political parties were responsible for widespread violence and civil strife prior to elections in February and June. Religion frequently intersected with human rights in Asia, often with negative consequences. The Chinese government saw Tibetan Buddhism, Christianity, Islam, and millenarian sects, for different reasons, as serious threats to the legitimacy of the Communist Party and intensified efforts to regulate all. Clashes between Muslims and Christians, originating in unsolved political conflict and unprosecuted human rights abuses, erupted in East Timor in June as they had in 1995. A rash of church-burnings in Java in June, September and October, that the government failed to prevent, and the efforts, with clear communal overtones, of the Indonesian army in August to whip up anti-communist sentiment among Muslim groups following the arrest of members of a student leftist party, all suggested that the much-vaunted reputation of the Indonesian government for religious tolerance needed to be reconsidered. The taking of Kabul by the Muslim militia calling themselves Taliban or Astudents@ signaled a period of grave discrimination against women; the group=s seizure of former Prime Minister Najibullah from a U.N. compound and the subsequent torture and execution of Najibullah and his aides boded ill for human rights in Afghanistan. In Burma, the ruling State Law and Order Restoration Council persisted in a pattern of discrimination and abuse against the Muslim Rohingya minority in Arakan, in the north of the country. At the same time, the fact that Bishop Carlos Ximenes Belo of East Timor received the Nobel Peace Prize was recognition of the critically important role religious figures can play as protectors of human rights. And there was some progress toward prosecuting communal violence in India, with the reinstatement of a commission looking into the role of the police in Hindu- Muslim riots in Bombay in 1993. In September, one Hindu man was prosecuted and convicted for killing two Sikhs in the course of a massacre of over 3,000 Sikhs in Delhi in 1984 in which police and ruling party officials took an active role; it was the first such conviction in relation to that massacre. Several regional issues came to international attention during the year. The problems of migrant workers in MalaysiaCBangladeshis, Indonesians and Filipinas in particularCwere highlighted with the trial beginning in June of Irene Fernandez, a Malaysian human rights activist charged with Afalse reporting@ for her efforts to document abuses of migrants in Malaysian immigration detention centers. If her trial represented the efforts of one part of the Malaysian government to silence public criticism of the problem, other parts of the government took constructive steps during the year to curb abusive practices of labor recruiters.Thailand=s cabinet, in part because of pressure from a labor-starved business community, adopted a resolution in July giving temporary legal status, and therefore protection of some Thai labor laws, to almost 900,000 illegal migrant workers, mostly from Burma, Laos and Cambodia. But that welcome development was offset by the failure of the Thai government to crack down on illegal recruiters sending Thais, many of them women, to Japan and other countries. Of all the human rights issues in Southeast Asia, migration was one of the few on which systematic talks at an intergovernmental were taking place, both among national human rights commissions, within the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and at a bilateral level between foreign and labor ministers of sending and receiving countries. In the Human Resources Development Working Group of the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation forum (APEC), on the other hand, there was strong resistance to addressing the problem of migrant laborers, despite attempts by the Philippines government to get it on the agenda. Bonded labor continued to be a major issue in South Asia. Both India and Pakistan failed to enforce laws prohibiting bonded labor, but in both countries, local nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) had produced a range of recommendations for governments and donor agencies for the identification and rehabilitation of bonded laborers, particularly children, and there was some prospect of greater international scrutiny of government enforcement procedures. Another regional human rights issue, that of the Vietnamese boat people spread among camps in Malaysia, Hong Kong, the Philippines and Indonesia, came to a violent close at the end of the year with the formal end of the Comprehensive Plan of Action, the multilateral plan for repatriation and resettlement of Vietnamese asylum-seekers, on June 30. As first-asylum countries rushed to close down their camps, their security forces often used disproportionate force against Vietnamese resisting forced return, although the resistance itself was often violent. Incidents of excessive force occurred throughout the first-asylum countries, including the January shooting death of one Vietnamese in Sungai Besi, Malaysia and the beatings of Vietnamese in Palawan, Philippines in February. Detention conditions for Vietnamese in Hong Kong continued to be a major concern, where some of the camps were expected to remain open in 1997 despite stepped-up efforts to repatriate those remaining. In a humanitarian move that could have been a model for other first-asylum countries, the Philippines in August permitted the remaining 1,000 Vietnamese to integrate locally. Domestic and international advocacy efforts forced the issue of trafficking of Asian women and children for prostitution onto the agenda of governments in the region. In August, for example, Thailand announced a ten-year plan, the "National Policy and Plan of Action for the Prevention and Eradication of the Commercial Sexual Exploitation of Children,"