I truly loved Southeast Asia, but I couldn't live there again. (Especially after this article.) Not enough diversity in the news.
by Richard in Japan
(conservative)
Tuesday, August 13, 2013
Before there was a Richard in Japan, I was just Richard, but in Thailand. I spent three years in that tropical paradise, first as a Peace Corps volunteer, then staying to teach English at a college. It was a pleasant experience, but not very lucrative: thanks to the low cost of living my meager salary could support an opulent lifestyle, but I had accumulated a mere $2000 savings in all that time. Fifteen years ago I moved to Japan, and you probably know the rest.
Then as now, I paid close attention to the news, and of course the news chiefly concerned itself with the internal affairs of Thailand and its immediate neighbors including Burma to the west, Cambodia to the east, and Malaysia to the south.
(Incidentally, there is a consensus among news organizations to refer to Burma using a different name, starting with the letter M. You won't find that here. That name is the creation of the military junta enforcing their wishes on an unwilling population with heavy-handed oppression. It's also not "formerly known as Burma", or "also known as Burma". The freedom-loving people who live there call it BURMA.)
I find it remarkable that, whenever I see those same countries in the news today, fifteen years later, I recognize all the names. Somehow, the exact same newsmakers then are still making news today. It's as if no one else in those countries is capable of making headlines. Not only that, they are still fighting the same battles, no closer to resolution than when I lived there. It would be as if, all these years later, Bill Clinton was still president, and Ken Starr was still trying to put a stop to that.
Actually, Thailand and Burma have seen some changes. When I left, the shining star of Thai politics was a telecom billionaire named Thaksin. Now fifteen years later he has been elected prime minister, deposed by the military, and is currently in exile. His younger sister, Yingluck, is the current prime minister. Meanwhile, Burmese independence leader and Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi, who has spent most of the past twenty years in detention, was recently released and elected to a seat in Burma's parliament. So yes, the cast of characters hasn't changed, but at least the story isn't the same as before.
That simply cannot be said of Cambodia. That country has been in the iron grip of one man since 1979, when a coup backed by the Vietnamese replaced the Pol Pot regime with a former Khmer Rouge member named Hun Sen. Many sources charitably refer to him as "one of the world's longest-serving prime ministers", making him out to be democratically elected. In fact, he's a tyrannical dictator, who routinely jails and even kills his political opponents if he thinks they have even a snowball's chance of winning. Nobody knows this better than Sam Rainsy, sort of the male version of Aung San Suu Kyi. Fifteen years ago he was the one best chance for Cambodia to achieve true democracy, so of course Hun Sen brought out the big guns and aimed them at Sam Rainsy. Since then he's been tried (in absentia, since he had the foresight to leave the country) and sentenced to ten years in prison. Recently Hun Sen "magnanimously" announced that he had secured a royal pardon for Sam Rainsy, who was free to come back to Cambodia in time for another so-called "election". Just one catch: the deadline had already passed for registration, so Rainsy would not be allowed either to run in this "election" or even vote.
This story is almost a carbon copy of the political turmoil in Malaysia, but add a soap opera's worth of steamy sex allegations. What I said earlier about Ken Starr? Mahathir vs. Anwar was the Monica Lewinsky scandal on steroids.
Long story short: Mahathir was the prime minister and undisputed strongman of Malaysia; Anwar was his second in command and anointed successor. When it came time for Mahathir to leave the stage, he grew offended with and picked a fight with Anwar (through proxies, so his own hands would stay clean). In this case, it involved circulating a book with accusations that Anwar was a homosexual which, in Islamic Malaysia, is a crime. Among other things, it charged that Anwar had sex with his former speechwriter and HIS OWN ADOPTED BROTHER. Both of them denied it, but it didn't seem to make much difference to the courts controlled by Mahathir.
Remember Monica Lewinsky's blue dress? That's nothing compared to the DNA-stained mattress they used at this trial. Anwar was arrested, beaten, subjected to a kangaroo court, and sentenced to nine years in prison. To its credit, the high court overturned his conviction in 2004, and Anwar attempted a political comeback.
Then in 2008, almost exactly ten years after the original charges of sodomy, Anwar was put on trial for homosexual sex again. This time, instead of gossip printed in a book, they found someone to accuse Anwar first-hand. His former assistant testified to the police that he had had sex with Anwar several times. Think for a minute about that: in Malaysia, sex with a man, even if consensual, is a crime. By reporting to the police, this aide was risking a twenty-year jail sentence. Who would voluntarily subject himself to that? This case was a frame-up from the word go, and this time even the courts didn't buy it. For once justice was served, and Anwar is again a free man. At age 65, he is trying yet again for the electoral prizes that have been denied him all these years.
And Mahathir? He's long-since retired in favor of yet another chosen successor, but he's still trying to make the case that the original charges were not some kind of vendetta.
I truly loved the Southeast Asian peninsula, but I couldn't go back there. (Especially after writing this article.) I need to live in a place that shows a little more diversity in the news.
(c) Kublai Khan Unlimited 2013.
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Published: Tuesday, August 13, 2013
Last modified: Tuesday, August 13, 2013
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Source: http://www.news.myanmaronlinecentre.com/2013/08/14/the-more-things-change-in-southeast-asia/
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