Southeast Asia Thread

Specifically, policies pushed by Islamic fundamentalists.

It's a little more complicated than that. The Jokowi government, and the ex-New Order strongmen (like Luhut Pandjaitan) whom it increasingly co-opted after 2016, are bitter nemeses with many hardline Islamist groups — most of all the widely feared Islamic Defenders Front (FPI), which it finally managed to shutter under the COVID lockdown in 2020. The main Islamist party in the parliament, the PKS, was also just about the only bloc that seriously opposed the new criminal code, knowing full well that the new statutes against "alternative state ideologies" can be easily used to muzzle their ilk in the future.

But the fundamentalist Muslim crowd is a powerful bloc, despite their underrepresentation in formal party politics. Many of their vanguard groups have robust funding from certain political/security forces factions that employ them as hired street muscle; in fact, some of them are direct descendants of the right-wing nationalist militias that played the same role during the Suharto era. The 2016-2017 Jakarta election protests cemented the legitimacy of their identity grievances and pushed many parties to court their support through various means; even Jokowi eventually picked a conservative cleric (albeit not from a typically fundamentalist organisation) as his 2019 running mate.

Which brings us to the big problem come the time of the 'roni. The current government is a jumbo-sized coalition of many factions and demands many political appointments to remain stable. The health minister in charge when COVID hit was a former high-ranking Army doctor who represented the military faction in the cabinet. He also turned out to be a crank of colossal proportions, playing down the situation, aggressively resisting calls for a lockdown and pushing numerous pseudoscientific treatments until he was replaced at the end of 2020.

From some of the headlines we saw shared in the COVID thread around that time, there was also pushback from religious groups who protested the restrictions on communal Friday and Eid prayers in the mosques (tying neatly to that crowd's existing vitriol towards the current government). The end-of-Eid holiday season posed another major problem: just like Spring Festival season in China, it's a homecoming season where millions of people would travel to their hometowns and meet up with their families. It's a pretty significant occasion for most people with family in the country, not just the conservative/fundamentalist crowd.

Despite all else the government fumbled throughout 2020, the Jokowi admin did actually manage to ban homecoming travels for the season. The enforcement was hardly airtight, though, and by that point the pandemic was already ripping through the major cities, where many informal economy workers simply didn't have the option to stay home.

https://www.mindef.gov.sg/web/portal/mindef/news-and-events/latest-releases/article-detail/2022/December/13dec22_nr

LHL is in Europe to give his speech after overseeing the launch of the Type 218SG submarines.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-63983803

HRH Princess Bajrakitiyabha is being treated due to a heart condition after she collapsed while training her dog.

She’s treated as the potential successor to King Vajiralongkorn.

She also did diplomatic work in Austria, working there as the ambassador.

CNA: Royal Thai Navy corvette Sukhothai sank in the Gulf of Thailand with 105 people aboard; most have been rescued, with 5 found dead and 20 still missing.

VnExpress: Foreign ministry's leaders should be punished for repatriation scandal: investigators. Seems that the Vietnamese government is purging its Foreign Ministry after it came to light that many diplomats and staffers exploited the mass repatriation program at the beginning of the pandemic to charge extortionate fees from Vietnamese nationals returning from other countries.

Aaand the dominoes keep on falling. VnExpress: Deputy PM Pham Binh Minh loses Politburo membership. The Vietnamese government has four Deputy PM seats; Minh was the most senior DPM prior to this episode and was in charge of foreign affairs, as befits his background as a diplomat and putting the ultimate responsibility for the COVID repatriation scandal on him. The National Assembly has scheduled a special session on 5th-9th January to discuss urgent matters regarding high-ranking personnel, so it looks like there's more reshuffling to come.

There are some religion-related hulabaloo in Indonesia lately. Basically, a politician want to build a mosque, not just a normal mosque, but an extravagant mosque that need lots of money (more or less 1 trillion Rupiah) which draw criticisms because, you know, he could just use that money on something more important like fixing local infrastructures and transportation system.

Said politician then go on a tangent and said that the money is assigned based on necessity and list some religious buildings that receive government money in recent years. One of the buildings listed there is Besakih Temple in Bali, a historical and important religious site for the Hindu, that received funding for renovation.

This um... pissed off the Hindu not only because that politician equate the renovation of a historical religious building to the construction of what is basically his own vanity project, but also because he is dragging down the Hindu to justify his own shit. This isn't good and lead to a discussion among the Hindu about how much the Islam-dominated government treat them. There are a lot of long-held resentment surfacing there.

I think that this is quite an interesting development since religious turf war conflict here is usually between the Muslim and the Catholics/Christians due to overlapping territories. The Hindu are usually content staying in Bali and being territorial, and the Muslim know better than to poke the bee's nest.

https://mothership.sg/2023/01/42-national-servicemen-deaths-past-20-years/

Mothership has a mention that 42 Singaporeans conscripted for national service died while doing their work over 20 years.

5 were from the SAF, four from SPF and three from SCDF. (SCDF is basically government-run firefighters/ambulance service in one, although there are private ambulances.)

Note that Singapore is trying its darnest to have a 0 death rate.

Singaporean government does provide compensation to the families of Singaporeans/permanent residents who died. One of the highest compensations is at 1.5 million (SGD).

I spoke to a Filipino-Chinese expat lady who my mom know. There's a guy who died while in conscription as a firefighter with the SCDF. Guy also happens to have Filipino roots too.

Everyone please kindly put on your best surprised face

Reuters: Myanmar junta chief family assets found in Thai drug raid. Thai authorities raided a Bangkok apartment belonging to property and energy tycoon Tun Min Latt, a close ally of Min Aung Hlaing, on drug trafficking and money laundering charges, and apparently found bank books and title deeds belonging to the junta leader's children.

Edited by eagleoftheninth on Jan 12th 2023 at 10:08:21 AM

Piiiiika!

Oldie but goodie: This SCMP article from 2017 traces the origins of the ubiquitous prawn cracker.

The Irrawaddy: Indonesia and ASEAN set up new Office to Deal With Myanmar Crisis.

VnExpress: Vietnamese president Nguyen Xuan Phuc is resigning from the Politburo over the COVID repatriation bribery case that occurred under his watch. The scandal has already felled two Deputy PMs (Vu Duc Dam and Pham Binh Minh, article previously linked) as well as numerous high-ranking officials in the Ministries of Foreign Affairs and Health. Probably the biggest post-war shake-up in Vietnamese politics to date.

Saw on NHK that Indonesia's having protests over the koran burning in Sweden.

https://www.channelnewsasia.com/singapore/ns-defaulter-8-years-study-canada-work-jail

Meanwhile Ryan Foong Xue Fei was arrested for not doing NS since he lived/worked in Canada for seven years. He's the 21st person in Singapore to be charged with defaulting NS.

What's NS in this context?

National Service, aka mandatory military service. Which Singapore insists on maintaining despite no conceivable military threat to them in the near or far future, zero risk of invasion by Malaysia, and having excellent, warm relations with China to boot.

Edited by TheWildWestPyro on Feb 3rd 2023 at 9:55:38 AM

Not only military (Forgot to expand on the NS abbreviation), but one can also do conscription time in the police or in the civil defense force (combo of firefighting/paramedic services handled by government).

Actually, Singapore has doubled down on NS over time, mostly due to Malaysian stupidity in conducting joint exercises close by (one time during National Day in the 1990s that any NS man who can mobilized ASAP was called up). There's one training video done by Malaysian MOD that featured the use of English despite having Malaysian/Indonesian troops presence throughout and they could have used Malaysian. There's also some intrusion by choppers (mostly by police) and the rhetoric coming out from "certain" politicians like (a bit surprising) Anwar and Mahathir.

Another is the Russia-Ukrainian War. That, coupled with non-state actors using cyberattacks have raised concerns that the Singaporean military made a fourth branch called DIS.

Edited by Ominae on Feb 4th 2023 at 4:54:44 AM

Have to sappork the fishball auntie-industrial complex on Tekong hor. Beach Road also.

Anyway, speaking of that: the Special Advisory Council for Myanmar, an independent fact-finding group headed by former high-ranking UN experts, published a report on the foreign companies that have helped build Myanmar's military industry over the years. Some are state-owned, some are private; some still work with the regime while others have disavowed it. Myanmar's international partners comprise a wide and varied cast:

• China: Basically everything, from raw material processing to drone manufacture.

• Singapore and Israel: Small arms sales and manufacturing support (ST Kinetics, IMI).

• Russia: Small arms optics (they sell a lot of front-end military hardware to the Tatmadaw, just not much on the manufacturing side).

• India: Small arms optics and explosive fuzes (Ordnance Factory Board and private companies).

• Ukraine: Armoured vehicle sales and manufacturing support (Ukroboronprom, Ukrspecexport), plus transfer of aviation parts (Motor Sich).

• South Korea: Manufacturing support for various kinds of guided and unguided munitions (POSCO, formerly Daewoo).

• Germany, Japan, Taiwan, Austria: Various kinds of industrial machine tools.

• France: Engineering CAD and simulation software developed by Dassault (could've been pirated, tbf)

Edited by eagleoftheninth on Feb 4th 2023 at 11:49:38 AM

I support the aunties too...

https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/politics/raeesah-khan-saga-police-probe-into-conduct-of-wp-s-pritam-singh-faisal-manap-ongoing

I'm wrong to assume that Raeesh Khan's problem are far from over since K. Shanmugam (Home Affairs/Law Minister) said that the case is ongoing for lying under oath.

Edited by Ominae on Feb 7th 2023 at 11:48:15 AM

BBC reported a while ago that Cambodia closed the Voice of Democracy.

It made news there after they published a report that Hun Sen’s son signed off of financial donations to Turkey. Local law says Hun Sen should do it.

Report from BBC mentioned that he refused to accept any apologies from VOD reps. Think I also heard that Hun Sen is insulted by the report.

Vietnam+: Consensus reached for return of Nguyen Dynasty’s imperial seal. The seal was made in the early 19th century under the dynasty's founding emperor Minh Mang (who conquered modern-day south Vietnam from the Cham Muslims, Khmers and various highland tribes) and was last owned by Emperor Bao Dai, who lived in exile in Paris after his ousting in the 1955 referendum.

The emperor's French widow, Monique Baudot, died in 2021, passing the possession of the seal to the French auction house Millon. In November last year, the Vietnamese Ministry of Culture reached a legal agreement with the auction house for the transfer of the seal to Vietnamese soil, which included its formal purchase for €6.1 million by private collector Nguyen The Hong, acting as a middleman. The seal is due for its homecoming in April.

Also a little TIL: Tibetan Buddhism is apparently catching on in Vietnam. No statistics on the number of adherents yet, but there's apparently enough that they're building the world's largest prayer wheel on the new Samten Hills tourist site near Da Lat.

Edited by eagleoftheninth on Feb 15th 2023 at 5:48:55 AM

CNA: 11-year-old girl in Cambodia dies from bird flu.

New York Times: Thai Hunger Strikers Calling for Changes to Monarchy Are at Risk of Dying. Two young women, Tantawan “Tawan” Tuatulanon, 21, and Orawan “Bam” Phuphong, 23, were taken to the hospital on their 44th day of hunger strike, which they staged as part of wider protests calling for judiciary reform and a repeal of strict lèse-majesté laws — which have been extensively abused by the Prayuth government to prosecute not only insults against the ruling monarch, but criticisms of the government as a whole. The two women were previously detained last year for conducting a poll asking for people's opinion on royal motorcades.

Edited by eagleoftheninth on Mar 4th 2023 at 1:43:47 AM