Southeast Asia Thread

Man, been seeing on the news that Lee Hsien Yang is already considering to run for president in Singapore after the SPF is investigating him involving the estate of LKY.

Nothing like having your brother sic law enforcement on you and the rest of your family just because you're trying to carry out Ah Pa's will, eh.

Needs to be a soap opera.

Election shenanigans in Indonesia: it looks like the Central Jakarta Court ordered the General Elections Commission (KPU) to postpone the 2024 election by two years.

The decision stemmed from a civil suit (tfw continental law) launched against the commission by a minor political party, which failed to pass the party registration process and accused the commission of unfair treatment. The court ruled that the KPU's failure to register the plaintiffs constituted a dereliction of standards, and ordered it to postpone the election as a penalty. Everyone else in the country seems to be protesting the ruling as an absurd breach of the separation of powers, so it's not clear what exactly the judges expected to happen.

Reuters: Malaysia's ex-PM Muhyiddin to be charged with corruption.

Anwar has previously accused Muhyiddin of mismanaging billions of dollars' worth of COVID relief funds during his time in office, which naturally drew the former the BERSATU chief to fire back against what he called a politically-motivated prosecution (something that Anwar is well acquainted with on both ends). The plot thickens.

Malaysia Now: A rights group criticised the Malaysian government's hypocrisy in its praise for Michelle Yeoh's Oscar win. After all, the LGBT themes in Everything Everywhere All at Once would've been met with censorship and state harassment had it been made in Malaysia.

The activists specifically cited the belated moral panic over 2021 indie film Mentega Terbang, which follows a Muslim schoolgirl who learns about what other faiths and schools of thought have to say about life after death. Conservative Muslims accused the filmmakers of trying coax Muslims into leaving their religion, and some of the actors have been brought in for police questioning.

And a couple weeks late, but: The Diplomat: Vietnam’s Parliament Selects Vo Van Thuong as New President. Thuong, who is replacing disgraced former president Nguyen Xuan Phuc after the COVID repatriation funds scandal that wiped out the upper echelons of the previous government, is also the youngest member of the Politburo at 52.

Worth clarifying that the president's office isn't the top seat in the Vietnamese system: it's the General Secretary of the Communist Party, an office currently occupied by the elder statesman Nguyen Phu Trong. Some observers have painted Trong as a Xi-like figure who seeks to dismantle the institutional separation of powers and install a personalist regime in its place.

Trong is also known to be close to the Ministry of Public Security. Its powerful minister, To Lam, was previously seen as a clear favourite for the presidency; some analysts are speculating that his candidacy was withdrawn due to protests from other top officials who were wary of the Ministry's growing power, especially since the recent felling of Phuc and other top executives looks an awful lot like an internal coup carried by the MPS with Trong's blessing.

Lam is perhaps best known internationally for a little 2021 incident where he was spotted being hand-fed a $2,000 gold-covered steak by Salt Bae after attending the COP26 summit in Glasgow. That's both a perk and a catch of holding power in a patrimonial autocracy: everyone is stealing something, which means that anyone can be targeted once the top dog decides to stop looking the other way.

CNA: Myanmar junta dissolves Aung San Suu Kyi's NLD party, ostensibly for "failing to re-register" under its new electoral law. As of this week, only 50 out of 90 parties have re-registered to the rolls. The junta had set August as the date for the next election, but its lack of control over wide swathes of the country's territory makes that a questionable proposition.

New York Times: FIFA stripped Indonesia of this year’s U-20 World Cup after government officials and protesters called for the exclusion of Israel’s team. Wonder if any other country attracts FIFA shenanigans at a rate so disproportionate to its stature in international soccer, to be honest.

Edited by eagleoftheninth on Mar 29th 2023 at 2:27:16 AM

So, Myanmar is basically back to square one…?

Do you mean Israel or Indonesia?

It never left square one, and it won't until every officer in the Burmese military is purged. Which will happen roughly a day after hell freezes over.

It already happened with the 2021 coup, more or less. This is just the junta throwing on a legal façade to legitimise its annihilation of remaining democratic processes.

Indonesia. Wikipedia has a nifty summary — and frankly, I'm surprised that FIFA didn't suspend or strip its host status after the stadium disaster that killed over 100 people last year.

ABC interviewed former Jakarta governor and likely 2024 Indonesian presidential candidate, Anies Baswedan. A former Minister of Education under Jokowi (before getting reshuffled), he is a mirror image of the outgoing president in some ways: he was a university rector who entered national politics by selling himself as a progressive-minded outsider, before eventually striking an alliance of convenience with a faction of the Indonesian right wing.

Anies ran for the governorship of Jakarta in 2017 against Jokowi's ethnic Chinese Christian former vice-governor Basuki Tjahja Purnama (aka "Ahok"), in an election marred by particularly nasty expressions of identity politics. Conservative Muslim organisations (both mainstream and hardline) accused the incumbent Ahok of blaspheming the Qur'an in a campaign speech and staged a series of massive rallies that were vocally supported by Anies, as well as pressuring Jokowi to distance himself from his former colleague.

In this ABC interview, Anies took up a defensive stance on his record, arguing that the divisive nature of the election was out of his control and that he spent his subsequent governorship reaching out and winning back the trust of minority communities. Of course, it might take a bit more than that to win votes in the upcoming election — and trumping the margins might just require striking yet another alliance with the theocrat-adjacent types that buoyed him to power last time around.

Somehow got in my news feed that Charles Yeo Yao Hui, formerly of the Singaporean Reform Party, is seeking asylum in the UK as of 2022.

https://www.todayonline.com/singapore/lawyer-charles-yeo-political-asylum-uk-reform-party-1957966?cid=internal_inarticlelinks_web_30032023_tdy

Al Jazeera: How Chiang Mai became the world’s most polluted city. Basically, agribusiness giants would prey on local smallholding farmers, getting them to sign contracts for seeds and fertilisers in exchange for their harvest, and those farmers, pressured to maximise their output, end up resorting to destructive slash-and-burn practices to clear out lands quickly, blanketing northern Thailand in a toxic haze. It's more or less the same story as the palm oil burnings in Indonesia and Malaysia.

Human Rights Watch: Malaysia Repeals Mandatory Death Penalty. The death penalty is still technically available at judges' discretion, but nonetheless, it's a rather welcome step to full abolition in a region where people are so frequently executed for drug offences.

Anwar is in a panel that's studying about the possibility that Najib could have a pardon.

GMA: The Chinese ambassador to the Philippines "advised" the country to oppose Taiwanese independence instead of offering the US access to its military facilities if it cared about the 150,000 overseas Filipino workers in Taiwan. Normal diplomatic talk, cool cool.

Al Jazeera: ASEAN ‘strongly condemns’ deadly Myanmar air attack, which killed an estimated 165 people in a NUG-held village in the Sagaing region. A marked escalation over the routine "concerns" and "thoughts and prayers"; if that dastardly Min Aung Hlaing refuses to come to his senses, they might even step it up with an unprecedented response like "unequivocally condemn" sooner than later.

Oh, and a belated happy Songkran to all the Thais out there, I guess. *squirts water blaster*

Edited by eagleoftheninth on Apr 15th 2023 at 9:18:39 AM

Shame If Something Happened...to the people who would be in greater danger if China was dumb enough to attack, which the bases make less likely?

I don't get it. Is Xi really this stupid to go around making empty threats like that? You can't even say a move like this is for domestic consumption because the Filipinos are going to tell them to fuck off. Hell, if I were the Filipinos, I'd strongly consider offering a deal to the US for expanded basing rights right after that, since US military bases in general are a pretty good deal (unless you're Cuba, or otherwise have rights that we seized by force and can pay uninflated 1903 prices for).

DND is not taking too kindly on the Chinese ambassador's statement and a lot of Filipinos are calling for him to be PNG.

Yes. Xi really is that stupid.

Yeah, I happen to be visiting the Philippines and people here are pissed at Beijing.

There is legit fear from progressives and conservatives alike if China would ever attack since besides this, there's also Island disputes.

So def not a good diplomatic move. Then again, current President IS no friend to America.

Edited by RedHunter543 on Apr 16th 2023 at 2:55:19 AM

Does the Philippines have any serious rebel issue in the Mindanao island for China to bring it up?

Yeah, all sorts of terrorist attacks down there.

But I'll defer to others who have a better understanding of the situation.

Edited by RedHunter543 on Apr 16th 2023 at 2:56:27 AM

The Moro people of Mindanao (Muslim majority with close historical ties to the Malay cultural sphere) have long asserted an independent national identity. Moro groups rose up in armed rebellion in the late '60s, when the Marcos regime started settling armed Christian migrants from the Visayas in Mindanao, as well as launching an ill-fated plan to lodge itself in the ongoing Indonesia-Malaysia confrontation by using Moro soldiers to infiltrate North Borneo (a stretch of land historically claimed by the Sulu Sultanate; look up the 2013 Lahad Datu standoff for a more recent flare-up of this particular conflict).

A vanguard rebel group called the Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF) waged war against the central government for decades, alongside a splinter group called the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF). The MNLF reached a ceasefire deal with the government in 1996, followed by the MILF in 2014 (although the movement is still around as an armed political party, with its own militias). In the meantime, though, the conflict had turned the sea region between Mindanao and North Borneo into a bit of a security black hole, with countless cases of high seas piracy, kidnapping and drug trade (occasionally abetted by corrupt elements of the Philippine and Indonesian security forces).

By the turn of the millennium, an Al-Qaeda franchise called the Abu Sayyaf Group^* Named after, but not affiliated to, Afghan mujahideen commander Abdul Rasul Sayyaf. had set up shop in the Sulu Archipelago off Mindanao, it was soon followed by Jemaah Islamiyah, another AQ franchise. Pan-Islamic militant jihadism replaced Moro nationalism as the main security issue, with Islamic militants coming from far and wide to join training camps in the region.

In 2014, Abu Sayyaf and a few smaller affiliates declared allegiance to the Islamic State, renaming themselves as the Islamic State — East Asia Province. The IS success in Iraq and Syria attracted material support and recruits to its overseas branches, including the aforementioned East Asia Province, until it decided to launch its bid for an Actually Existing Islamic State by trying to take over the city of Marawi in 2017 — which, ah, didn't quite work out for them (among other things, their unrestrained brutality pushed the MNLF/MILF to join forces with the central government against them).

What little was left of IS after the fighting is still limping around in the jungles, occasionally launching bomb attacks and bank robberies but otherwise not really achieving anything big. In 2019, a referendum officially established the Bangsamoro Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao, an autonomous territory covering parts of southwestern Mindanao and the Sulu Archipelago. So, the plans for this autonomous region was actually agreed on in a 1976 peace talk (brokered by Muammar Ghaddafi, of all people), which lapsed until the later ceasefire deals allowed negotiations to resume between Manila and Moro nationalist groups. For now, it's something of a test bed for a greater degree of federalism in the Philippines, featuring a parliamentary system in a country with a unitary presidential government.

But the ambassador's statement on comparing Mindanao and Taiwan are way different. The former doesn't have its own government like what Taipei has. The former is also running things under an autonomy-type arrangement.

It feels like a false equivalence situation since that is a standard tactic of Beijing, trying to compare Mindano to Taiwan.

To show how “magnanimous” Beijing is by not interfering there while demanding the Philippines not support Taiwan by implicitly threatening the lives of Filipinos in Taiwan.

Edited by RedHunter543 on Apr 16th 2023 at 5:42:01 PM

It's consistent with their rhetoric. The CCP considers Taiwan to be a breakaway province, thus 'intervening' with it is no different from someone supporting the Philippines' own secessionists

It's not a position that respects self-determination but it's not particularly hypocritical.

Edited by Fourthspartan56 on Apr 16th 2023 at 12:45:20 PM

Those guys (Filipinos) may disagree TBH, depending on who you talk to.