Democracy takes time

Aquarter-century before the Arab Spring of 2011, there was a democratic spring in Southeast Asia: the Philippines in 1986, Burma in 1988, Thailand in 1992 and Indonesia in 1998. The Arab Spring was largely drowned in blood – Syria, Egypt, Libya – but democracy really seemed to be taking root in Southeast Asia, for a while.

But look at it now. The army is back in power in Thailand and it never really left in Burma. The Philippines still has the forms of democracy, but President Rodrigo Duterte is a homicidal clown. And we’ve seen the demolition of the facade of democracy in Cambodia. What went wrong?

In Cambodia’s case, democracy never was much more than a facade. Hun Sen, who was just ‘‘reelected’’ president with 80 per cent of the vote, has been in power for 33 years, first as the leader of a Communist puppet government put in place during the Vietnamese occupation of 1978-90, later as the ruler of an independent country where opponents sometimes disappeared and his party unaccountably always won the elections.

But there was a relatively free press and a real opposition party, so Cambodia was loosely counted as a democracy – until the opposition Cambodia National Rescue Party did surprisingly well in the 2013 election. After that, the free media were shut down one after another, and in late 2016, the rescue party was dissolved by the Supreme Court. No wonder Hun Sen won again.

Thailand went a lot further into building a real democracy. A populist party that attracted peasants and the urban poor actually got power, but the reaction was ferocious: Military-backed conservatives fought that party in the courts and in the street.

The populist party was forced to change its name and its leader several times, but it was still in business until the military coup of 2014 shut all political activity down. Each year, the generals promise a free election for the following year, but it hasn’t happened yet.

Next door in Burma, the army never lost power at all. It’s only in the past few years that the military was forced to hand some power over to civilians through free elections. But the generals struck back with a pogrom against the Muslim minority in Rakhine state, the Rohingya, which it falsely accused of being illegal immigrants.

And 700,000 Rohingyas were driven across the border into Bangladesh, Buddhist Burmese nationalists cheered the army on – and Aung San Suu Kyi, the longstanding leader and hero of the democratic movement, did not dare to condemn the crime. The army is basically back in the saddle.

And then there’s the Philippines, where the elections really are free. The trouble is that in 2016, the Filipinos elected Duterte, a self-proclaimed murderer, by a landslide. At least 3000 death-squad killings of alleged drug-dealers later, he still has the highest popularity rating of any Filipino president since 1986.

Vietnam and Laos are still communist-ruled autocracies. Only two of the eight countries in the region, Indonesia and Malaysia, are real democracies. It falls far short of the high hopes of the late 20th century, but it’s more than nothing.

Despite local scandals, Indonesian democracy works and is less corrupt than the regional norm. Malaysia has just voted out the most corrupt prime minister of its history, who is now in jail. And these two countries alone account for almost half the region’s population.

As for the rest, it’s the old game of glass half full versus glass half empty. The setbacks are clustering at the moment, creating the impression that the democratic experiment has failed in Southeast Asia, but every retrograde regime still faces far stronger democratic resistance than existed in any of these countries a generation ago.

In the century after the French revolution, there were two emperors, one ‘‘directorate’’, two monarchies and three republics, and most transitions were violent. The general direction of travel, in Southeast Asia and elsewhere, is still towards democracy, but it’s a longer journey than it looks.

If it were being founded today, there is no way anybody would expect ‘‘Victoria’’ to be included in the name. But it’s not being founded today and there is a large number of people with fond memories of their time there.

eing a Hehir is sometimes frustrating.

Every time somebody calls me for the first time that note of hesitation is always detectable. Is it said ‘‘he-her’’, ‘‘he-hire’’ or ‘‘he-hear’’?

Or they just damn the torpedoes and charge ahead with something wrong. This puts you in the awkward position of either having to correct them or let it slide. The longer you let it slide, of course, the more awkward the eventual correction will be.

For the record, it’s pronounced like ‘‘here’’, ‘‘hair’’ or ‘‘hare’’. People were often amused when I used to introduce myself on the phone with ‘‘Liam here’’. To avoid the chuckles, I’ve learned to modify this to ‘‘Liam speaking’’.

Occasionally, somebody will get it right the first time. This invariably means one of two things.

First, they’re Irish, or at least Irish enough not to be fazed by the counter-intuitive pronunciation. I’m not sure precisely how common the name is in the old country. I do know that there was a famous sports commentator by the name of O’hehir and that has probably helped.

For non-hibernians, it usually means they’ve interacted with one of my relatives before.

There are about 50 Hehirs in my family tree. That excludes aunts who changed their name on marriage and their children and grandchildren, of course.

Hehirs breed like hares.

Anyway, in a small country like New Zealand, there is a lot of secondhand familiarity. This can be a blessing and a curse, as you might expect. At school, Hehirs are always seen through the lens of their older cousins, who are not always beloved by all teachers. I also have a somewhat well-known, union-organising uncle, which is sometimes a source of suspicion or confusion depending on with whom I am dealing.

My alma mater, Victoria University of Wellington, says it is also grappling with name baggage. It is losing money hand over fist, the claim goes, because potential enrollees are confused about the ‘‘Victoria’’ bit. Does it refer to