受訪者：Professor Kar-Yen Leong 梁家恩副教授

採訪者：Professor Mab Huang 黃默教授

Paraphrased by Yu-Zhe Huang 黃于哲

採訪日期：2022年5月3日

本專題採訪獲「 國家科學及技術委員會人文社會科學研究中心」 補助

I. Introduction

Doctor Leong was born and brought up in Malaysia and was educated in UK first and then returned to National University of Singapore. From that university, he was awarded a PhD. The interview started with his family background, his teaching and research projects. His encounter with the state of Malaysia, which was not a very present experience as described in his essay written for the inaugural issue of Taiwan Human Rights Journal.

Professor Leong said “I’ll start things off by talking a little bit about my own upbringing in Malaysia on the island of Penang. I grew up in a small island and I grew up in a small family, and I grew up in this island of Penang, and of course, within Penang itself, and within Malaysia in terms of its multicultural context.”

“I was exposed to different kinds of cultures, different kinds of people. And I’ve always grown up in that kind of environment where we have different languages and different people to be dealing with. I have parents who are native Cantonese speakers. But within this environment, a majority of people in Penang’s are Fujian speakers, and of course, we speak Malay as well as using English. Of course, having this kind of environment and living in a global situation as well, I’ve always felt proud and am very thankful for having grown up in that kind of in a place like Malaysia.” Profess Leong continued.

This has allowed me to then grow accustomed to different kinds of cultures as I myself moved from culture to culture. As I grew up over the years, I then began my career as an undergraduate and graduate student and doing my PhD in these different places. So that’s kind of my own personal background. It’s a typical family. We’ve got 3 kids in the family. Our parents, of course, growing up on this island, gave us exposure to these different cultures, so with that I took these experiences to the US where I studied political science. And it was in the university in the state of Vermont. It’s an extremely beautiful state, very green, very lush. Strangely enough, I chose the university that was located in a very rural environment. It’s a faraway place you would know everyone on campus.

There would be nothing to do except to just study or whatever else students would be doing on campus. It was there where one of the deepest of impression was made on me. I majored in political science, and in political science itself, I was really attracted to some of the courses offered by one professor from Iran. And he was teaching political philosophy, and I still keep in touch with him. He was responsible for most of the courses in of political theory. We had several concentrations to choose from, so that would be public administration, international relations, and political theory was something I was really attracted to. And because of the way he was teaching and the material he exposed us to, that I too developed the love for political theory. And this love for political theory or political philosophy would then go on into my graduate studies also in America.

So, it was within this kind of particular environment and through the guidance of this particular professor, and of course all the professors as well, that I thought “Okay, so this is an extremely interesting field and I would really love to go more into it. After that, I decided to do my graduate studies at Northeastern University, which is located in Boston, a city in Massachusetts. I spent two years there.

Again, one of the things I concentrated most on was political theory or political philosophy. It was a little bit more intense. I was working under Professor Gerald Bursey. These seminar courses I was exposed to let me expand my love for it and made me want to study more. It was at that point of time that two things happened: These experiences that I had in the US at the graduate level first exposed me to not only what I had to study — international relations, political theory, but it also got me to become a lot more interested in Malaysia. I think if it wasn’t for the fact that I was given the opportunity to study in the US, I wouldn’t have been exposed to a lot of things that I myself dug up on in terms of my own study in Malaysia.

Staying in Malaysia for a while made me realize that there were things that you could see, and there were things that you couldn’t see.

II. Professor Leong on His Education in UK and Singapore

“In the UK, I did my second masters after I finished my first one in the US. And that was at the Human Rights Center at the University of Wessex. And there I took many courses again. One of them was political theory, but I was exposed to international law, so I also developed an interest in studying genocide, even though my thesis at the University of Essex was on Human Rights Malaysian Commission. But what I was really more interested in was the concept of genocide at the so I kind of took that and brought it over to Singapore, which was where I applied to the Southeast Asian Studies Department at NUS. And I was granted admission where my focus was on the East Timor Truth Commission, and so in that sense, there is a connection between US and the university of Essex.” said Professor Leong.

III. Professor Leong on Southeast Asia

Professor Leong said “I inserted a description of my experience with Malaysian authorities into the article. This was due to the fact that at one point of time, I gave a presentation in Singapore. This was at a very well-known institution that works specifically on Southeast Asian studies. It does a lot of researches on Southeast Asian countries. I went there and I gave paper and I said a couple of things about how sometimes the situation in Malaysia is open to politicians in manipulating certain things.”

For instance, race, religion, so what I mentioned when I was talking about this issue was picked up by a particular person who I think was sent by the Malaysia Embassy in Singapore.. After that, when I to the university that I was teaching in Malaysia at that time, the Tunku Abdul Rahman University. I think I received a phone call saying that “Hey, are you Liang Jia En? Did you go to this conference on a particular day? Would you like to come down to the police station and have a conversation with us?” And then of course that freaked me out because this never happened to me before. But it was much later that I realized that this is actually a pattern that you can discern from the experiences other academics in Malaysia. More critical academics in Malaysia have experienced this as well.

And it brought to me this whole thinking about how, there were certain things that you can see, and there were certain things that you cannot see. And the things that you cannot see are pretty much defined by what the authorities says you cannot do, which means the authorities have that kind of power at least in Malaysia to be able to tell you these are the markers put in place, and you cannot go beyond these markers. If you do, then there will be a couple of things that you will experience like a slap on the wrist or you will be told to go to the police station. Some of us even get charged.

It was also at that time that I began thinking “Are there any certain stories that cannot be revealed? What are things that we cannot talk about? And why is it that there are certain things that we can’t talk about? So, what are the underlying reasons? What are the underlying structural reasons? What are the underlying institutions that stop us from saying certain things? So, in that sense, I also began to think, “If there are things we can’t talk about, is there also an indication by looking at the things that we can’t talk about. There are also things hidden to that extent.”

IV. Professor Leong on the Reform Movement in Indonesia

“I’ll start talking about Indonesia first and move on from there because it’s due to the fact that I’ve been working mostly in Indonesia for the past few years. The situation in Indonesia is that since 1998, there has been a change of government when the rule of this particular man, his regime has been going on for the good for 30 years. In 1998, it was the first step that Indonesians took towards democratization. From there, we see the country going by leaps and bounds. However, it is still limited because pockets continue to exist within it. Pockets of what I would call the remains of an authoritarian enclave.” said Professor Leong.

“These small pockets still exist in the government up until this point of time. One of the leftovers is the fact that there is still this inability among Indonesians to talk about what happened in 1965, which is when there was a large-scale massacre of suspected leftists and members of Communist party in Indonesia which at that point of time, was the third largest communist party in the world. This massacre basically laid the foundation for Suharto’s rule. Even when he was toppled, even when the government was democratizing, they were still unable to talk about this. I think that reform to that extent, and now is further complicated by Islamic politics. One of the biggest obstacles to democratization is the inability of state to be able to talk about how this had happened in the past.” Professor Leong continued.

“So, my work over the past few years has been trying to dig out the ways in which people had been talking about it. Despite the taboos, my research was to discover what methods people use to maintain the life of this story, even though the state and the society refuse to accept the fact that this thing had happened. To be fair, I haven’t written a lot about Malaysia for a very long time, I guess I have been avoiding writing about Malaysia.” said Professor Leong.

Professor Leong said “Correct! Singapore is very complex to me, and I find it difficult to write about Malaysia because I’m so much a part of it and I always feel that Malaysia is too bound, stuck in a kind of narrative.”

Even sometimes, its own people believe so much in it. Like this is where we are and we have things that we can talk about and we have things that we cannot approach. Especially, when it comes to race, it would usually bring all the system down. That is why I always have the feeling that Malaysia is ossified in this kind of position, but quite recently I also wrote about, it’s unpublished and not a well-written piece.

But, so far what I’ve been working on as well is actually the extension of the essay I had contributed to Taiwan Journal of Human Rights. In that book, I only look specifically at the experiences of formal political detainees that were arrested at that point of time. And through my reading of this biography of these people who are arrested under the law, 2 periods of time actually, in the mid-seventies and the late eighties.

I went through two biographies written by these political detainees and it was kind of fascinating because it reveals to me that on one hand, you have the state and a group of people who ascribed to a very racialized view world. And then on the other hand, if you go through these biographies, these were two individuals that came from two religious backgrounds and yet because of the similar kinds of experiences they had gone through while being detained in personal camps they shared a similar world view. You could discern from that, a kind of vision above and beyond religion. That was based on class, the common ideas that regardless of who you are, but despite your race and religion, the human experience was the same in terms of how the government treated these people.

V. Professor Leong on Malaysia

Professor Leong said “Yeah. Actually, Bersih in Malay means clean. It was a movement that came together in the years of 2013 and 2014 where as an organization, which was a glomeration. They got together to push for free and fair elections.”

“But actually if we look further back, this entire movement up until that point of time had actually come together in 1998 as part of the reform movement. And it was from there where we began to see the rise of different political parties, asking for changes, reforms, a cleaner government, and the end of a culture of corruption in Malaysia. It was only in 2008, the ruling government at that time, was not defeated, but a large percentage of majority was taken away from them.” Professor Leong continued.

“And it was from there that a lot of people got to realize there are actually these possibilities where people were able to get together on a platform that was multiracial. From there, these different groups began to capitalized on having free and fair elections in Malaysia. And that became the battle call for a lot of NGOs, which enables it to go above and beyond race. What we would typically find in Malaysian culture is an emphasis on religion. So fast forward to 2018, because this momentum had been going on since 1998, more than 20 years, we then see a change in terms of governance in Malaysia, so Bersih was a big part of that.” Professor Leong said.

VI. Professor Leong on Singapore

Professor Leong said “There has been comparative changes over the past few years in Singapore. It has been more reactive to what it is that people want. There was a point of time when we approach post-2008, after the subprime mortgage crisis, the financial crisis that affected most parts of the world. It was more of a backlash from people where a lot of Singaporean nationals found that there were in this kind of situation where economy wasn’t so good and when they saw so many opportunities had been given to non-Singaporeans instead.”

“So, there was a sense of anger from the people toward the government. The government then acceded more rights to its people. Over past elections, we also experienced lesser supports for PAP. It has become quite interesting that issues like LGBTQ rights and issues regarding death penalty in Singapore, these have been picking up momentum. From there, there’s sort of been a rallying call for Singaporeans.” said Professor Leong.

Professor Huang said “But there is not yet an effective opposition party yet.”

In response, Professor Leong said “No. There are a few new voices. They have been vocals, but I think what has been happening to the main party in Singapore right now is that they have been able to manage COVID pretty well. That’s why there’s a sense of confidence as far as people are concerned.”

“However, in terms of looking at human rights issues and how NGOs are, it’s pretty interesting that people can see the development of Singapore over the past few years with new groups coming up. In fact, there is a new group called Transformative Justice Collective that has been doing a lot of work advocating for the rights of prisoners, who have been found on the death roll, especially death penalty. One has just recently been sentenced to death. We have a couple of Malaysians who had been found guilty and have been sentenced to death quite recently. But this is an issue that a lot of NGOs have brought to the fore. And I think there is also a series of protests at People’s Corner on this issue, so it’s been quite interesting.” said Professor Leong.

VII. Professor Leong on Human Rights Violation

Professor Huang asked “Now if we take Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, and some other nations in South East Asia for example, can we say they are moving out of this earlier period of gross violation?”

Professor Leong said “Yes, we can. I think to the extent when we talk about human rights violation, these governments have been quite wary of possibilities of the focus on these countries if there are allegations of human rights violation, so they are quite reactive to what the international community thinks about them, but we’ve also seen a lot more activists and a lot more academics taking up a lot of issues within Southeast Asia.”

“However, I would not say they don’t continue to face harassment from the authorities, so in the context of Singapore, there have been a lot of academics that have been very vocal in investigating that period of Singapore history or in Singapore story narrative, so we’ve got the Singapore story narrative which focuses primarily on the Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew, who has been the founder of the modern Singapore state.” continued Professor Leong.

“But at the same time as well, you also have a group of people who state that the entire story was not just about Lee Kuan Yew but also a group of people who also have been a big part of Singapore becoming an independent nation. These people have contributed to Singapore story as much as Lee Kuan Yew. There has been a particular scholar Thum Ping Tjin who has been doing a lot of work looking at alternative views of Singapore. In Malaysia, I have colleagues who have done the same thing by looking at this one particular incident in Malaysia, the racial riots we had on 13 May 1969. It is a very sensitive topic in Malaysia, but I have colleagues working on it as well, and there is still much room for these academics in terms of doing the work.”

Despite the fact that they still face harassment. The same thing is in Indonesia as well, as we’ve begun seeing more and more stories and how these narratives are loosening their hold over the minds of people. And it helps that we have different methods, like books so that we’ve been able to obtain more information about incidents in Southeast Asia and we also have podcasts. We also have greater space for a certain level of political discussion about this issue.

So, it is beginning to change. It is not a revolution in that sense, but it has now become an issue of access. And this easier access will also lead to people wanting to get this access to information. That’s a pretty big threat to metanarrative a lot of these states in Southeast Asia.

VIII. Professor Leong on Duterte

Professor Huang asked “Can I ask you on a whole, very optimistic and let me again put this difficult question to you that as intellectuals, do we not tend to exaggerate our influence?

Professor Leong said “The thing is how since 2016, Duterte has been carrying out his policies, his drug wars. Now there is a case in the ICC against him, and it’s quite clear that these cases are over extrajudicial killing in the Philippines. We can quite clearly argue that these are crimes against humanity. But we also have to take into consideration other elements. I mean we have to ask questions like why is it Bongbong Marcos and the Marcos family continue to have such a powerful hold over the imagination of people? It’s because of the memories, of the dictator who continues to exert himself over Philippines politics.”

“You see that quite obviously in Indonesia as well. Depending on the elections they’ve been having at present time, the presidential level and the local level, you still see Suharto posters asking “Wasn’t it better doing it in my times?” Somehow he was trying to tell people that things were so much better back then, with stability and harmony.” Professor Leong continued.

As far as the institutions in the Philippines are concerned, I guess it still works, but the problem is that now we have groups of younger electors who mainly access information through social media. If we look at the mainstream news in the Philippines, they’re obviously against the Marcos rule in the past. But because of the fact that now we have so many younger voters depending on social media on the Internet, specifically for information, that things have become much more malleable in terms of whoever he is.

I know there is also a movement, because we look at Leni Robredo, who has also done pretty well compared to Marcos. I mean the first time when Leni Robredo went up against Bongbong Marcos (BBM) lost. To that extent that BBM has had time to prepare for the election at this point of time, so Leni Robredo had been the Vice President up until quite recently. And she has been able to build up this large group of people to come volunteer for her. She has also brought lots of issues to the fore as well, so

I think the battle is not yet done. It’s also very interesting because I know a few scholars who are also very involved and intend to maintain this resistance to the kind of narrative that Marcos has been trying to build up at this point of time and that they are constantly reminding people that the Marcos are not exactly who they present themselves to be. There are other kinds of stories which revolve around the period of Martial Law period in the Philippines having Marcos being involved in it. So there is a lot of work being done. A lot of alternatives of stories coming especially from a lot of colleagues that I know in the Philippines.

IX. Professor Leong on China

Professor Leong described “For the last few decades, at least from the seventies, China has been looked at quite suspiciously. But in these few years, with the rise of China, and given the large amount of ethnic Chinese people that we have in Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, and the Philippines, definitely. It seems like a rising but benign giant on the economic front. However, militarily speaking, it would appear be to a threat, especially when we talk about the contentious issues that we have with them, over the Spratly and over other issues, of course.”