In Asia: Weekly Insight and Features from Asia

The current visit of Afghan President Karzai to Washington, D.C., accompanied by many of his ministers and high-level officials, is being greeted on both sides as an opportunity – indeed a necessity – to open a new page in the relations of two strategic partners in need of each other’s support and trust. There is bitterness on both sides even while there is an overwhelming hope to move forward and cease accusations and counter-accusations that have taken place ever since then-U.S. presidential candidate Obama visited Afghanistan in October 2008, and called upon President Karzai to get out of his bunker and face reality.

Negative feelings now overshadow all aspects of relations between the two governments. The relationship was darkly clouded by Afghanistan’s recent presidential elections and the harsh words, pressuring, and legal and political maneuvering that have accumulated through the actions (and inactions) of many individuals and institutions since then.

Read more »

The fact that an In Asia blog piece was scheduled to appear just two days after polls closed for the May 10 general elections in the Philippines was enough to cause anxiety for this writer. In the past, it was literally weeks before results of manual counting of handwritten ballots would produce results. This time, though, two days is enough to analyze results and winners – to everybody’s surprise.

Campaign banners fill the streets on election day.

Election day headlines reflected reports about problems in the automation, adding “glitches” to the alliterative litany of Philippine election problems:  guns, goons, and gold. However, in the end, less than 500 of the more than 76,000 Precinct Count Optical Scan (PCOS) machines failed – to be quickly replaced from the stock of substitutes. Electronic transmission of results at the end of the day could also be slow in some places – at Tetuan Elementary School in Zamboanga City, it took 90 minutes for the first precinct to transmit its results (though subsequent transmissions went more quickly). But suddenly, by 3 a.m., national networks were announcing that several local races had already been declared.

Read more »

Last week, Indonesia was stunned by the World Bank’s announcement that Indonesia’s Finance Minister, Sri Mulyani, has been appointed to one of the Bank’s most senior positions. Of immediate concern for investors in Indonesia is how the country will manage to retain the hard-won progress in economic reforms made under Mulyani’s leadership. More broadly, her departure has left civil society uneasy that Indonesia’s rough-and-tumble politics could seemingly squeeze out such an accomplished civil servant. At the same time, many Indonesians are filled with pride that the reformer has been recognized so visibly on the world stage.

Sri Mulyani is credited for the solid macro-economic policies that have enabled Indonesia to outperform its neighbors. Public domain photo, Wikimedia Commons.

Read more »

On election day in the Philippines, The Commission on Elections declared a poll failure in several towns in Lanao del Sur, among them the municipality of Bayang, where a peace covenant signing among local candidates took place in February 2010 to pledge support for the conduct of honest and peaceful elections in the area. While the peace convention provided some protocols for local candidates to refrain from any acts of violence during elections, the breakdown of the precinct count optical scan (PCOS) machines in some polling precincts caused disorder among political supporters of the local candidates.

Read more »

Among the most prominent rido (clan conflict) reconciliations facilitated by The Asia Foundation’s partners in the Philippines is the celebrated resolution to the feud between the Imam and the Macapeges clans. In the small municipality of Matanog in the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (ARMM), the former mayor (Macapeges) and his political rival and successor (Imam) had been embroiled in a seemingly endless conflict over disputed 2001 election results. For over six years, the families of Kahir Macapeges and Nasser Imam had been engaged in a notoriously bloody war that left nine relatives and two bystanders dead and 13 wounded. This dispute wrought devastating emotional losses, destruction to property, and, because security resources were sometimes focused on protecting the two political figures, often disrupted day-to-day municipal governance.

Kahir Macapeges (left) and Nasser Imam (right) swear on the Koran in a reconciliation ceremony in Davao City on Jan. 30, 2008.

Read more »

48 hours before the polls open on Monday, May 10, the Philippines is taking a deep breath before the big plunge. On Friday afternoon the Supreme Court held a special session and dismissed 11th-hour petitions to halt the elections due to concerns over the need to replace faulty memory cards in the 80,000 voting machines. Now, the candidates are all holding their final rallies (known as miting de avance) at which festivities overshadow any concerns over real issues.

The Noynoy Aquino camp remains tense, despite his wide lead in all the polls (at 42 percent, according to Social Weather Station’s final poll). One worry is for their Vice Presidential candidate, Mar Roxas, who is now tied in the polls with Makati Mayor Binay. A number of advertisements have come out for “NoyBi” (votes are separately cast for president and vice president), so the Aquino campaign has had to reiterate that “NoyMar” is their official slate, not least because Noynoy wants to give Mar a significant partnership role (Roxas was in the cabinet as Secretary of Trade in Industry on two occasions, so he has significant executive experience). Roxas points out that the surveys showing the two tied came out before the influential Iglesia ni Cristo (INC) endorsed him along with Noynoy. Some dispute the effect of such endorsements by religious groups, but the INC endorsement probably will add hundreds of thousands of votes.

However, a lead of only a few percentage points may cause problems, given doubts about the new Precinct Count Optical Scan (PCOS) technology. A serious bug was detected in final testing on Monday, May 3 – quickly diagnosed by computer technicians, 76,000 compact flash cards were re-programmed by Friday but the challenge getting them back to the machines in precincts throughout the archipelago by Monday looms large. The Commission on Elections (COMELEC) claims 98 percent readiness, but there have reportedly been some delays. Threats such as attacks by the communist New People’s Army and incidents of a local candidate putting spikes on a road have been reported. “Netizens” are ready to use the Internet to map problems in the elections.

In the face of all this, turnout is expected to be high (75 to 80 percent), and unlike in the United Kingdom, voters in long queues will be allowed to vote even after the scheduled close of polling. Overseas voting turnout is running ahead of the last election and the large community of American Filipinos is following events closely. Check back here on Wednesday, May 12, for an update on election results, 48 hours after voters head to the polls.

Steven Rood is The Asia Foundation’s Country Representative for the Philippines and Pacific Island Nations. He can be reached at srood@asiafound.org.

In the past, Philippine elections have frequently been marred by allegations of widespread cheating and other electoral malpractice. The most famous (or perhaps infamous) method of cheating is called dagdag/bawas (add-subtract), when votes are subtracted from the opposition candidate and added to a favored candidate, and vice versa.

Concerns over election credibility have been exacerbated by the typically long period between voting and the official announcement of results. Delays were caused in part by an antiquated polling procedure that required voters to remember candidate names and write them on a ballot paper, leaving polling officials to decipher the handwriting of all voters, including some less than fully literate, all the while dealing with complaints from watchful party officials who were “certain” that the illegible scrawl was a vote for their candidate.

A local woman examines a mock ballot during a voter education seminar on the new automated technology.

Increasing public frustration prompted the Philippine government to propose in the mid-1990s that the polling process be automated to decrease cheating and simplify polling and vote-counting. Some supported this because they believed automation would serve as an effective check on cheating, while others saw modernization as a means to finally do away with the infamous write-in ballot process.

After several false starts, automated elections were finally tested in the 2008 Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (ARMM) elections.

Read more »

As the Philippines enters the final stretch before elections on Monday, May 10, competing survey results continue to deluge the public. The Philippines is well-endowed with respected, technically sound public opinion pollsters (as well as long-standing market researchers). So much so, that many suggest a “poll of polls” approach is necessary to make sense of it all.

Actually, with respect to the president and vice presidential races (who are actually elected separately, though they run as a team), recent results are easy to interpret – all reveal clear front-runners. A Social Weather Stations (SWS) survey from April 16-19 has the Liberal Party’s Noynoy Aquino (Ninoy and Corazon Aquino’s son) leading the Nacionalista Party’s Manny Villar by 12 points, 38 to 26. The same poll puts the Liberal Vice Presidential candidate Mar Roxas ahead of the Nacionalista’s Loren Legarda by 39 to 24 (with Makati Mayor Jojemar Binay at 25 percent – he is running in tandem with former President Estrada who ranked third as a presidential candidate in this year’s race, at 17 percent).

Read more »

• Looking Back as May 2010 Philippine General Elections Approach
• Examining the Arroyo Legacy
• Election Campaign Starts; Entertainment Industry Threatened
• Clan Conflict (Rido): A Threat to Stability in Southern Philippines
• Power Players Unveil Recommendations for New Administration
• As Elections Near, Bayang’s Leaders, Candidates Sign Peace Covenant
• Corruption Most Cited Concern Among Business Leaders in Choosing Next President

On Nov. 23 2009, the incident now widely known as the “Maguindanao Massacre,” left 57 unarmed civilians dead. The enormous media attention to this gruesome incident and the resulting local and international public outrage ensured swift action from authorities to arrest and put to trial the suspects in the killing. Amid fears of a looming rido (clan feud) between two political clans, the victimized Mangudadatu family stated categorically, in public, that they would not retaliate against the alleged perpetrators, the Ampatuans.

While the details of the grisly murder unfolded to an outraged public, a similar incident had taken place nearly a month before, away from media’s gaze (and with fewer casualties), in southwestern Philippines on Pata Island, Sulu province. On Oct. 30, 2009, a man named Majid Adjail, his wife and his sister-in-law, left Barangay Daungdong and travelled to Poblacion Saimbangon to register as voters for the May 2010 election.

Read more »