While the East Asian economic miracle and transitions
from authoritarian regimes to democratic forms of government in Taiwan, South
Korea, and Thailand attract well-deserved attention, the region also contains
all but two of the communist one-party states left in the world. North Korea,
China, Vietnam, Laos, and Burma stand out as regimes that continue to repress
their own people and to pose threats to regional and world stability. The
Endowment provides support to prodemocracy activists working under severe
conditions of repression in the three largest of these countries.
In other parts of the region, the Endowment is able to
help democrats in a variety of circumstances, whether the task is democratic
consolidation following the fall of a previous regime, as in Cambodia and
Mongolia, or attempting to spur the genuine political transformation of the
"soft authoritarian" regimes in Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore.
In Burma, China,
and Vietnam, NED supported programs
provide information, material assistance, and a lifeline to the outside world
to prodemocracy individuals and groups working under severely repressive
conditions. The diversity and vigor
of the Burmese and Chinese
prodemocracy movements allowed for relatively large allocations of funds for
these countries. In Burma, the Endowment provided vital support for the
democracy movement led by the National League for Democracy and Nobel Laureate
Daw Aung San Suu Kyi. Through its discretionary program, NED enabled the
Burmese in exile and living in the border areas of the country to overcome the
censorship and crude propaganda of the State Law and Order Restoration Council
(SLORC) regime through a variety of information-related initiatives. In 1996,
NED supported a twice-daily radio program taped in Thailand and the border
areas of Burma, an international newsletter, and a highly popular
Burmese-language underground newspaper whose circulation has risen from 3,000
copies per issue to 8,000 copies per issue in less than three years. The
Endowment has also made possible pioneering coalition-building efforts among
the democratic opposition and the long-aggrieved ethnic groups. This was the
first successful effort to arrange face-to-face talks among groups demoralized
and divided by 40 years of civil war since massive slorc military offenses
against the ethnic groups on the eastern border began in 1993. Because all four
core institutes are now active in support of efforts to restore democracy in
Burma, the Endowment has been able to contribute more than ever before to a
comprehensive and effective set of initiatives by the Burmese living in
Thailand and India to continue supporting the beleaguered National League for
Democracy members and other democracy movement supporters inside the country.
In China, the Endowment
is able to support both various prodemocracy networks comprising dissidents and
human rights supporters who must operate under severe constraints and programs
that take advantage of opportunities created by official economic, legal, and
municipal reform policies. To enable dissidents to freely circulate information
and opinion in spite of increasingly harsh government efforts to crush
independent voices, NED programs supported several Chinese-language
prodemocracy periodicals, Internet publications, and a newspaper. NED also
supported a variety of democratic information dissemination projects for
Tibetan audiences in Tibet, India, and the United States. To provide some
international protection for victims of government harassment inside the
country, NED grantee Human Rights in China (HRIC) maintained around-the-clock
human rights monitoring and reporting, via faxed press releases, during
government crackdowns and trials of key dissidents such as Wang Dan and Wei
Jingsheng. Issuing more than 35 press releases, in addition to a quarterly
bilingual magazine and several in-depth reports, HRIC achieved widespread
coverage of their information in the wire services and major newspapers not
only in the United States, but in Hong Kong, Taiwan, other parts of Asia, and
Europe as well. In addition, the Free Trade Union Institute continued to
support a network of labor rights researchers, advocates, and educators.
The Endowment also supported efforts of liberal
democrats and scholars inside China to advance significant reforms. In addition
to several discretionary programs concentrated on policy research and analysis,
the International Republican Institute (IRI) continued its legislative
development program. IRI worked to institutionalize and improve local election procedures
and initiated training in local governance for elected, village-level
officials. The Center for International Private Enterprise supported a
symposium series on public affairs in Beijing, China's first international
conference on the role of the private sector, and a program to educate business
management teachers and entrepreneurs in business ethics and the role of
business in civil society.
The pace of
democratic institutionalization in Mongolia has stepped up dramatically
following the spectacular victory in the June 1996 parliamentary elections of
the democratic opposition coalition, which has benefited from IRI training and
consultation over the past four years. The peaceful handover from the ruling
former-communist party, which had been in power continuously for 75 years, to a
liberal-democratic majority in parliament creates an opening for Mongolia to
begin making progress in the consolidation of democracy. Toward this goal, the
Endowment also supported the League of Democratic Mongolian Women (LEOS), a
woman's ngo that provides democracy and human rights education for the nation's
widely dispersed population and conducts activities to encourage greater
popular participation in government and policy making.
"We, the Third World people in Asia,
Africa, and Latin America, still have a life-and-death struggle for democracy,
freedom, and justice against ruthless dictatorships. The NED's support for our
struggles, in the face of severely limited resources, is of great importance
and could make a difference between total victory and defeat for the democratic
forces."
Dr. Sein Win
Prime Minister
National
Coalition Government of the Union of Burma
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