Tiny Brunei Known as a Problem Nation

When President Clinton arrived here Tuesday for his swan-song summit with world leaders, he stepped into a tiny, surreal kingdom where unbelievable wealth blends with rigid repression.

Brunei also represents the 21st century challenges confronting the 21 heads of state and leaders in the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation group as they push to strengthen regional economies and open up some of the world’s last closed societies.

In recent years, Brunei’s royal House of Bolkiah has squandered much of the country’s petroleum wealth. The sultan lives in a domed Art Deco palace with almost 1,800 rooms, a private residence larger than the Vatican. His younger brother spent billions of dollars from the government investment fund on personal planes, boats, a large fleet of luxury cars, ostentatious jewels and lavish hotels, including the Bel-Air Hotel in Los Angeles. The sultan finally was forced to sue his brother and seize his assets to protect the royal family’s standing.

Among Asian Pacific countries, Brunei is also one of the most politically repressive, according to a study by the New York-based monitoring group Freedom House. The small Muslim nation, which shares the island of Borneo with Malaysia and Indonesia, is an example of what human rights groups call the next generation of problem nations, successors to what the United States once called “rogue” nations.

“Traditionally, the whole idea of rogue states has been based on terrorism and security concerns that threatened the international community. But increasingly, problem and pariah states are being identified by the way they treat their own people,” said Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch, an international monitoring group based in New York.

Although they may pose a less visible threat to regional stability than such “rogue” nations as North Korea, Libya and Iraq, these countries are likely to increasingly absorb international attention over the next decade for defying the trend toward political and economic openness--and for slowing the momentum of globalization.

Some human rights groups even claim these nations are dangerous.

“Regimes that violate human rights are as destructive to human life as regimes that create weapons of mass destruction. In the end, the result is the same--human tragedy--and in real terms the toll is much higher,” said Carlos Salinas, acting director of government relations at Amnesty International.

“North Korean missiles have yet to kill anyone in Asia,” Salinas said, “while Falun Gong prisoners have been brutally beaten and other Chinese dissidents executed, Saudi Arabia engages in public floggings and beheadings, and thousands have disappeared or been tortured to death in Colombia.”

About half the size of Los Angeles County, Brunei is no doubt the smallest member of the new generation of problem nations, which may explain why it has received limited scrutiny. It has captured international attention largely for the ruling family’s exorbitant lifestyle, including a yacht whose name is a slang term for breasts, and a lawsuit filed by an American beauty queen who alleged that she and other foreign women were lured to Brunei for big bucks and then held captive in an attempt to make them “sex slaves.”

But it’s Brunei’s anachronistic political practices that outrage many observers.

Sultan Sir Hassanal Bolkiah is also prime minister, defense minister and finance minister, police superintendent and religious leader. Operating under emergency powers since 1962, Brunei’s government restricts political participation, issues laws by decree, discriminates against women, ethnic minorities and non-Muslims, and so strictly controls the media that journals and journalists critical of the regime are banned from entering the country, according to this year’s State Department human rights survey.

Holders of the nation’s only elected offices, village chiefs, are chosen for life, and candidates can have no past or current links with political parties, most of which have been banned or forced into inactivity.

“The government has not hesitated to arrest those who attempted to propagate unwelcome political views,” the State Department report says. The state also can exile anyone from the land of his or her birth.

About 75% of the labor force is employed by the government, a situation that further discourages dissent. The practice of non-Muslim religions is restricted, and books such as the Bible are banned. Children of local women married to foreigners are not allowed citizenship even if born in Brunei, resulting in more than 5,000 stateless children--a large percentage in a population of only about 325,000.

Like a number of other problem nations, notably the Persian Gulf sheikdoms, Brunei has disproportionate power--and leverage--to defy pressures to change because of its oil fields and wealth.

“The Clinton administration has a very high degree of tolerance for serious human rights abuse when the government has something significant to offer us, such as China’s markets, Saudi’s oil or Brunei’s wealth,” Roth said. “In countries where the U.S. is stronger on human rights abuses, it’s usually because they have little to offer, such as Cuba, Libya or Sudan.”

Yet under the combined pressure of Asia’s 1997-98 financial crisis, gyrating oil prices and the kind of spending that led Fortune magazine to describe the royal family as “the Muslim version of the Beverly Hillbillies,” the sultan recently launched an effort to reinvent his kingdom. An internal survey concluded that its self-indulgent spending was “unsustainable” and threatened to “undermine prosperity and stability.”

The sultan was once ranked as the world’s richest man--until Bill Gates came along. He remains among the world’s richest rulers, though his personal fortune has reportedly been halved. The fact that Microsoft’s founder now outranks the sultan tells much of the story, since Brunei’s one-track financial base has been slow to make the transition to both the new economy and information technology.

So in July, Brunei announced plans to diversify by transforming itself into a regional hub for finance, banking, securities, insurance and other business services. Its small population--which has enjoyed free health care and education, interest-free loans for homes and no taxes, not to mention one of the world’s largest amusement parks, paved with marble and granite--may also soon have to pay taxes, fees for schooling and hospital bills.

The plan conforms in some ways with the goals put forth by its allies in APEC. The sultan reportedly hopes that the two-day visit by Clinton and 19 other leaders from APEC countries will provide the stamp of legitimacy and attention needed to help him build Brunei into a regional business center.

But the transformation is unlikely to go far enough, according to human rights groups. The shortfall was reflected at the sultan’s birthday celebration in July, when he called for “changes in mind-set” and “efforts to avoid excesses” among his subjects. In the backdrop were his two wives, sitting under crystal chandeliers and wearing diamond-studded tiaras and jewels.