Page 134 - Conflict, Terrorism, and the Media In Asia

Conclusion 123
Nevertheless, media reporting had positive and negative impacts for groups
engaged in conflict with government. In the Philippines for instance, the identifi-
cation of the MILF and the CPP-NPA as rebel or revolutionary groups, and their
differentiation from JI and the ASG, is important in maintaining public support for
the government’s political approach to dealing with the MILF and the CPP-NPA.
The Malaysian and Filipino media have also had a major role in de-legitimising the
KMM and ASG respectively, by denying the theological justification for their
actions.
In contrast, the campaigns by the mainstream media in Indonesia and China to
de-legitimize the GAM and the Xinjiang separatist movement respectively, have
not had any appreciable impact in undermining support for these causes within
the Acehnese and Uyghur communities. Again, this illustrates the limitations of
the media in being able to shape opinion in communities which are not receptive
to particular messages.
The internet has the potential to act as an agent of change in the region, and as
a facilitator for protest movements, but that potential remains unfulfilled in these
conflicts. Minority communities and militant groups across Asia are using the
internet as a means of by-passing the media gatekeepers, and governments are
finding it increasingly difficult to police the net. It has been suggested that the
new media allows those on the periphery to develop and consolidate power, and
ultimately to challenge the authority of the centre (Majod 1999: 81), and as
regimes toppled in Thailand and Indonesia in the 1990s, the global communica-
tion media was increasingly identified as an important cause of regional political
upheaval in Southeast Asia (Atkins 1999: 420).
Yet the impact of the internet should not be overstated. In the instances where it
has facilitated political change, there was already widespread popular discontent
with those governments, centreing around the issues of democracy and anti-corruption.
In the Philippines, limited internet penetration suggests that it was not the internet
which generated the mass popular discontent with the Estrada administration,
whilst in Indonesia the fall of Suharto was as much a consequence of the main-
stream media broadcasting images of protests over the 1997 economic collapse as
it was the mobilisation of mass opinion through the internet. The parallels between
these incidents and the conflicts covered by this book are limited, because the
groups and communities engaged in violence with their governments do not have
mass popular support, and neither have the root causes of those conflicts generated
mass popular support sufficient to enable the media to facilitate change. By itself,
the internet has not proven that it is capable of generating a mass movement capa-
ble of forcing political change. Its limitations are reflected in the fact that despite
hosting a large number of websites publicising militant Islamist ideologies and
causes, and militants being active in chat rooms and on message boards, significant
numbers of people in the states covered by this book have not been infected with
those militant ideologies. It is also illustrated by the inability of Xinjiang émigré
groups to effectively use the internet to gather and disseminate information.
It must not be forgotten that people are not passive receptors for messages on
minority causes and militant ideologies, and the internet is a melting pot for a