Episode #236: Debbie Stothard
“Most people expect some white woman when they meet Debbie Stothard. It's a very Anglo, white bread name.” So begins Debbie’s self-introduction that relates the story of her Scottish great-grandfather who went to Malaya to work on, and eventually own, a portion of the huge rubber company Guthrie’s vast plantations. “I'm a product of colonial capitalism!” Debbie exclaims. He settled down in Penang with a woman who was most likely Thai, but when he got older, returned to Scotland. So Debbie, a Malaysian citizen, is clearly not just the “Anglo, white bread” person her name might imply.
Debbie's journey as a catalyst for change began to take shape during her high school years, ignited by her first foray into journalism, when she wrote a compelling article addressing a pressing issue within her school community. The principal pulled her aside and scolded her, saying, “‘That's not the way to solve things!’ But it did solve things,” she recalls, “so I was convinced that I wanted to be a journalist.” In college, she became a stringer for a local paper, then got a full-time job as a crime reporter—the only female on the beat. “I was drunk with power and access,” she acknowledges. “Look, I’m a Malaysian school girl, living in a very sheltered-type situation, and then you unleashed me into a world where you're chasing the police with stories, where politicians entertain you and show some respect because you’re media.”
Against her parents’ wishes, Debbie refused to return to university, and continued to spend time with colleagues she characterizes as “alcoholic, very jaded, old men,” chasing stories that put her closer to the reins of power. Increasingly drawn into that world, she became less interested in peers her own age; this concerned her parents, who decided to offer to support her to study in Australia, and after a couple of years, she realized she “didn’t have a life.” So she attended Sydney’s University of Technology, where she joined what was then known as a “Third World Solidarity” movement, which engaged in anti-racism advocacy with other Southeast Asian students. Expanding their influence to other campuses, they were energized by the events of the day, which included the People’s Power movement in the Philippines, Suharto’s overthrow in Indonesia, Tiananmen Square in China, the 1993 Thai coup, as well as ongoing oppression in Sri Lanka and Bangladesh. “Governments were colluding with each other to violate human rights, and to surveil and persecute human rights activists, at the very least, they were protecting each other from international pressure for human rights violations,” she says.
But nothing captured the group’s imagination like the 1988 democracy movement in the Golden Land. “These were students rising up against a military dictatorship in a country, Burma, which was really mysterious but also fascinating to me,” she recalls. They tried contacting student groups in Burma, but had no luck, then tried to find Burmese students attending Australian universities, but couldn’t locate a single Burmese student anywhere in the country. Debbie was also growing increasingly worried when the Malaysian Prime Minister, Mahathir, pushed for Burma’s inclusion in ASEAN, as she feared it would normalize the latter’s ongoing human rights violations. This is when an idea came to her that would focus the direction of her future action: “Hey, why don't we have an alternative ASEAN meeting on Burma?” she proposed to a friend, “because we don't agree with the anti-human rights positions of our governments.”
Debbie’s vague idea didn’t have any clear objectives, budget, or plan, but it somehow took on a life of its own; she and her friends began to organize a conference to host this “alternative ASEAN” concept (from which came the name of her organization, ALTSEAN), and bring together a host of academics, activists, politicians, journalists, and others from the region that shared their concerns. And Burma was at the center of their effort, as Debbie describes: “We wanted to make Burma an ASEAN issue, because ASEAN governments kept dismissing it as a Western concern.”
At the time, Debbie planned on committing two years of her life to that effort, and then return to her studies, although she now views this plan like the misadventure at the heart of the Gilligan’s Island sitcom, where a ‘three-hour tour’ turned into a seven-year odyssey. From the start, Debbie turned ASEAN’s norms upside down. First, she and her colleagues believed it was important for the conference to democratize and decentralize the meeting space, so there were no gatekeepers. This allowed personal networking to flourish. Second, they found it ironic that in spite of a movement that coalesced around a female icon, Aung San Suu Kyi, most of the leading activists and democratic leaders in the Burmese resistance were men. So wanting to empower more women, her newfound group began to foster the formation and support of various women’s organizations throughout Bamar as well as ethnic communities, which they then trained through sponsored internships. “We focused on making sure that they had the confidence and the ability to do advocacy,” she recalls. “But actually, what we ended up doing was contributing to a generation of women leaders who worked across ethnic lines.” This culminated in the formation of the Women’s League of Burma (WLB), which has now been a force for generations. In fact, Debbie describes how many longtime democracy advocates “turned their backs” on the Rohingya crisis as it developed, but not those women groups, particularly the Karen organization. “They've been innovative and creative and courageous kickass feminists who actually have done more than I could ever do individually,” she says.
Debbie recounts a time in history when Burmese women held a distinguished status, a complex subject expertly explored by the academic Marlar in a recent podcast. However, Debbie believes that the twin forces of colonization and militarization significantly diminished women's roles. It is this loss of stature and influence that they are now diligently striving to reclaim. More recently, she notes that Burmese women have been so terrified of the brute force of the military, as well as their use of sexual violence, that many have clung to silence as a means of self-protection. So scared are some families of the possibility of rape that Debbie has found daughters become married off at an early age, as they hope that a husband can better ward off this grim possibility. What is more, Debbie notes how women were often made to feel somewhat responsible when a rape occurred, and so some of the female leaders created advocacy around the fact that “the way to stop rape is to actually get men not to rape! It seems so obvious, but nobody had taken that role,” she says. “And trying to make men into anti-rape allies, and encourage men to publicly oppose rate, because rape is not a women's issue.” Still, this was such a sensitive subject in traditional Burmese society that it was difficult to make people feel safe when addressing it, and so they took the novel approach of creating a series of jokes that brought in the issue home in a light way. “Who says that feminists don't have a sense of humor!?” Debbie quips.
Debbie continued her work promoting gender equality, and several years ago, she was approached to work on a “feminist economic policy” that could provide better opportunities to Burmese women. Although the coup interrupted any hope of implementation, she is optimistic that their effort will set the groundwork for a better, democratic future once the military is defeated. She contrasts her group’s work to the NLD, which employed a top-down approach that failed to effect the kind of lasting change that many had hoped for. “If we're thinking about the future while we are fighting this junta with everything that we've got, whether it's nonviolent means or with arms, the thing is that we need to be thinking about how the next generation is going to live. We can't afford a rerun of 2011 to 2021.”
Like many past podcast guests, Debbie was disappointed that the transition years did not deliver on their promise, citing such frustrations as the flawed 2008 Constitution that allowed the military retain its ultimate grip on the levers of power, and the NLD’s inability to safeguard human rights in the face of vast land grabs and unchecked development projects. Echoing the words of Bobo from a past podcast episode, who remarked that “governments are always acting like a government, and activists are acting like activists,” Debbie recognizes the role for change-makers like herself and her colleagues. “We have to actually speak truth to power, as sometimes people get so complacent and they don't get that sense of urgency, because we're being diplomatic and polite and respectful. Sometimes we just have to yell, and we have to use some strong words, so they wake up from their complacent sleep.”
Debbie has equally strong words for Western academics. She explains that in the past, unfortunately, they have too often been relied upon by Western policymakers at the expense of more knowledgeable, local voices, pompously and arrogantly asserting “realities” that are one-sided or distorted, or just plain wrong. This tendency by Western policymakers to rely on prestige and educational attainment over the authentic voices of stakeholders from non-Western backgrounds often cuts off critical discussions and curtails the possibilities for positive change. She quotes one who said the following some years ago: “We are just going to have to live with the military, whether we like it or not, and we have to think about it incremental change. The revolution is not going to be possible at all. See how they killed off those people in ’88.” Others believed that “people in Burma are too weak and too complacent and too easily intimidated. They're not going to oppose the military. And then there was the Saffron Revolution!” And she notes that the same chorus of naysayers has come back on the scene after the 2021 coup, intoning their wisdom, as Debbie recalls, saying: “Burmese people are so racist, they're never going to have any solidarity for the Rohingya, they're never going to have any solidarity for the ethnics! It's over… this is going to be a few weeks of protests, and then it's dead, and people will learn how to live under the junta.” While what transpired after the coup may have surprised many people, it did not surprise Debbie. From the open-hearted apologies to the Rohingya, to women leaders out in front, to the creative and innovative protests across the country, to the unprecedented ethnic solidarity, this was the reality that she and others had been building towards for decades.
Another big change that she recounts is the many activists who made the painful decision to transition from decades of non-violent advocacy to supporting the armed rebellion. “Fundamentally, this junta has been targeting unarmed civilians,” she says. “At some stage, it is your human right to defend your life and to defend the lives of people you love… I don't know that I would choose to do that, but I have to respect people's decisions for doing that.” But though acknowledging that she is not in a position to make choices for those facing dire circumstances firsthand, Debbie hopes that the country's future reconstruction shifts back towards peaceful resolutions. “The stakes are so high in Burma, not just for people in Burma, but the stakes are very high for this region, and internationally. Because we want to be able to see transitional justice, and a solution that makes the community resilient and makes the political and economic situation resilient against the recurrence of conflict of armed conflict, and the recurrence of a military dictatorship.”
Debbie has also been active in the Milk Tea Alliance, a loose network which links activists across Southeast Asian countries and their respective struggles. Indeed, she calls herself a “Milk Tea Auntie,” and in some ways this collective is a continuation of the student organizing she did early on in Australia. She describes how the Milk Tea Alliance began: the girlfriend of a Thai actor referred to Taiwan as a country, which led to a backlash from Chinese netizens. In her defense, activists from various countries rallied in support, leading to a broader movement of resistance against cyberbullying. “How much of our human rights perspectives are colonized?” she asks rhetorically, in describing one of the purposes of the activist collective. “We can't assume that the solution will come from some Western human rights organization. There has to be a little bit more respect and understanding that the people who are directly affected by human rights violations should also be the source of the recommendations, and the solutions.”
Similarly, Debbie challenges Western notions about ALTSEAN. “We're not [like] multinational corporations, so we shouldn't be taking that colonialist, capitalistic view or approach. Bigger is not necessarily better! And [sustaining our organization’s] longevity should not necessarily be one of our goals.” This adaptability is the reason why ALTSEAN has successfully evolved to fulfill various roles over time; it wasn't rigidly fixed to one mission, but responding to the immediate needs of the changing times. “If we are a big organization with huge amounts of resources, then it makes us less agile,” she says. “Let's see how can we innovate and how we can adjust ourselves to what the movement needs. This makes things much more interesting, less boring, because we're constantly renew constantly renewing ourselves.”
One area that ALTSEAN has waded into quite a bit recently is the idea of ethical business in Myanmar. Debbie feels there has been a misuse of the ESG (Environmental, Sustainability, and Governance) rating system by corporations, and criticizes the top rating agencies for awarding high ESG scores to companies that have supplied weapons or equipment to the military junta in Burma, arguing that such ratings are ethically compromised. Debbie is particularly critical of the businesses that have continued to operate in Myanmar since the coup. She is angered by their claims of being a "civilizing influence," while actually their support of the regime only makes the situation worse. She condemns those that refuse to place their revenue in escrow accounts — a strategy suggested by Burmese activists to prevent funds from reaching the junta — as well as those who irresponsibly exited the country after the coup, and endangered lives by handing over sensitive data. Debbie also shines a light on the unethical behavior of companies that exploited the conflict; for example, those that took the opportunity to actually lower wages or deny payments to striking workers. Finally, she slams the ongoing exploitation by international and local businesses that have continued mining and operating in conflict areas, which neglect the well-being of their workers and contribute financially to the junta. She foresees a "day of reckoning" for these companies, emphasizing the moral and ethical choices they failed to make in favor of human rights and ethical business practices.
It has certainly been a long journey for Debbie Stoddard from a being a stringer on the crime beat to a Milk Tea auntie. “It wasn't like I woke up one morning and said, ‘I want to be a champion for human rights, and this ideal is noble ideal,’” she says. “Basically, I became a human rights activist because I was trying to solve a problem. We do need to have a more pragmatic and understanding that, yes, human rights principles are absolutely important. But we have to remember that at the center of this are human beings, we have to be human-centered in our human rights approach.”