Torn and frayed in Manila

No regrets from Thaksin after army kills scores of protestors

It is depressing but not surprising that Thailand’s Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra should express no remorse for the outrageous mass murder of Muslim demonstrators on Monday. "We have no choice but to use force against them," he said. Just to remind you, over 80 Thai-Muslim protesters were shot, kicked or suffocated to death when they were transported in crowded trucks from a protest site in Narathiwat’s Tak Bai district to an Army camp in Pattani.

Here is the Bangkok Nation’s account of the incident:

A photograph obtained by The Nation clearly shows a soldier lying on the ground firing his rifle horizontally, refuting the prime minister’s claim that security forces only fired into the air and not directly at protestors.

The incident happened after more than 3,000 Muslims, the majority of whom were youths, gathered early on Monday morning outside a police station in Narathiwat’s Tak Bai district calling for the immediate release of six village defence volunteers detained by the army for allegedly giving state-issued pistols to Islamic militants.

Citing fears that the situation could get out of control, the military decided to end the six-hour confrontation at about 3pm by firing water canon and tear gas at protestors, causing the stand-off to descend into chaos. The sound of gunfire was heard for about 10 minutes, said Nation photographer Charoon Thongnual, who covered the incident.

“Soldiers fired at below knee-level, targeting protestors hiding under a car,” Muhammad Ayuf Pathan, a reporter on the scene, told on-line Prachatham new agency. “They were killed and thrown onto army trucks. There were at least 14 dead bodies, that I could count,”

Another reporter said: “I saw at least three protestors kicked to death with my own eyes.”
Tak Bai resident Tuwaebosu found the body of his 30-year-old son lying dead under a car parked near the demonstration site. At least one Muslim woman was reportedly among the dead.
…

A photograph published in the Thai-language newspaper Matichon showed protestors were herded like animals as they were packed onto an army truck in layers. The authorities refused to reveal how many people were put into each truck.

A relative of Gifli Mama, 25, who doctors said died of suffocation, said that Gifli’s neck was broken and his face and body bruised, suggesting that he could have died before being put on the truck.

Another relative gave an account of an injured protestor, who is now hospitalised, that soldiers tied his hands together and threw him onto a truck. Two to three layers of prisoners were piled on top of him. Those at the bottom needed to push their foreheads against the ground to take in air.

When the truck reached the military base, the prisoners limbs numbed and unmoving, soldiers dragged them from the truck and kicked them, he said.

At least nine people are being treated at Pattani hospital for gunshot wounds, a hospital source said.

Anwar and Habibie

Michael Vakitiotis has an interesting take on the Anwar release in the current Far Eastern Economic Review. The way he (and Anwar) see it, Anwar and former Indonesian president Habibie represent a pan-South-East-Asian movement towards a more tolerant and pluralistic Islam. I'm sure many Malaysians might say that Anwar's Umno Youth days didn't reveal a particularly tolearant attitude, but still, I think it is an interesting argument. Whether Habibie and Anwar end up on the scrap-heap of busted 1990s leaders or do manage to lead their countries away from confrontation with the West remains to be seen. Anyway, here is the gist of the argument: "

Habibie's influence over Anwar isn't easily dismissed. The diminutive former president founded a reformist Islamic movement in Indonesia in 1990. Habibie worked closely with Anwar in the mid-1990s to promote a tolerant and constructive brand of Islam which they hoped would influence the religion worldwide and head off what they saw as a dangerous trend towards intolerance and confrontation with the West.

Together they gave speeches and formed think-tanks in which young Muslim scholars synthesized the best of Western social science and philosophy with Islamic thinking. They were both leaders in waiting, and they attracted young and ambitious thinkers who saw in them the way to an end to decades of religious conflict and authoritarianism.

What a difference a decade makes. The harsh realities of politics interrupted their intellectual discourse. Anwar was sacked as deputy prime minister in 1998 and soon after went to jail, while Habibie lost Indonesia's 1999 presidential election. Their push for Islamic pluralism crumbled along with the so-called Asian economic miracle. In its place an intolerant and radical brand of Islamic thinking took root in the Islamic schools that Anwar and Habibie had wanted to influence.

Now that Anwar is free, Habibie and other scholars and thinkers around the region are hoping the former Muslim radical will resume his quest for a tolerant, progressive Islam to counter the fundamentalism blamed for a surge in terrorism.

What Anwar’s release says about judicial independence in Malaysia

I have a lot of respect for the Malaysian Bar Council, which under Param Coomaraswamy and Tommy Thomas bravely and consistently provided one of the only restraints to former Prime Minister Mahathir’s increasingly authoritarian and arbitrary premiership. Still, I can’t agree with the Council’s comment on Anwar’s release.

The Bar Council, which represents some 8,000 Malaysian lawyers, said the Federal Court's decision on Thursday to uphold Anwar's last-chance appeal against his sodomy conviction showed that "Malaysian justice can be independent of politics."

It does? I think it shows the opposite: while the Prime Minister was gunning for Anwar the judiciary toed the line, under his more emollient successor the judges are still doing what they are told.

In 1988 Mahathir first flexed his muscles against the judiciary by removing Lord President Lord President Tun Salleh Abas and replacing him with the more pliant Chief Justice Hamid Omar. I was Managing Editor of the Malayan Law Journal at the time and thought that the doom and gloom of my lawyer friends was rather overdone. Not for the first time, I was proved completely wrong as over the next 15 years the Malaysian judiciary’s independence crumbled slowly and painfully before our eyes. A nice summary of the executive v judiciary battle in Malaysia can be found here.

Given that the large Barisan majorities in the 1990s allowed Mahathir virtually to ignore the legislature (in his last few years as Prime Minister he almost gave up attending debates in the Parliament) Malaysia became a sort of elective dictatorship. Nothing demonstrated this more than the arrest of Deputy Prime Minister Anwar on trumped-up sodomy charges in 1998. It will be interesting to see whether his release heralds a more balanced distribution of power within the Malaysian political system, or whether Abdullah is merely tidying up some of the loose ends left by his predecessor.

Discipline and football in Thailand

You'll never walk alone?
Singapore may be allowing table dancing, Malaysia may finally be catching up with corrupt politicians and the Philippines may be flirting with disaster, but the really interesting social experiment taking place in South-east Asia has to be in Thailand. For better or worse (and probably for better and worse) the current administration of Thaksin Shinawatra is trying to change the social life of Thailand forever. From a campaign that is literally a “war on drugs” (over 1,000 people killed and counting) to the current “social order” campaign (well covered in a recent New York Times article), Thaksin has shown that he has a vision of the future and is going to be ruthless about achieving it, whatever the cost.

Bizarrely, the only thing that may derail him is his insane plan to buy Liverpool football club. Someone ought to tell Thaksin that reversing the decaying fortunes of England’s former champions is going to prove a lot more difficult than getting Thai teenagers into bed by 10pm, that’s for sure.

[Thanks to Butch for the NY Times link.]

Why isn’t there more outrage ...

… about Aung Sang Suu Kyi’s continued detention? It now appears that the operation she just underwent was not minor at all, but major gynaecological surgery. She should be released immediately. The international community, and the spineless ASEAN member states in particular, should put much more pressure on the Burmese generals to address the major human rights abuses in Burma.

These crimes were highlighted yesterday at an “ASEAN People's Assembly”:

After the May 30 attack on Mrs Suu Kyi and her followers that left scores dead, more than 250 people have been rounded up, bringing the total number of political prisoners to over 1,350 including 41 MPs elected in the overturned elections of 1990. Some two million people may be hiding along the border as internally displaced persons

The really interesting player is China, which has become an increasingly reluctant supporter of the junta. At the People’s Assembly, Debbie Stothard, coordinator of the Alternative Asean Network on Burma, said she was confident that Beijing eventually will let go of Rangoon.

China is already paying a heavy price for its support of Burma, said Ms Stothard. The growing rate of drug addiction in China has alarmed leaders there.

During the 1990s when Burmese drug production rose, it was matched by a dramatic increase in heroin and ATS abuse in China. By 2002, it was estimated that China's HIV/Aids population was between 800,000 to 1.5 million, and projected to rise to 10 million by 2010.

I hope she's right, but I have my doubts. Burma may be a pretty iffy card in the geopolitical game of poker, but such concerns have never stopped the Americans from sponsoring unsavoury regimes. My guess is that, so long as the regime can prove it is in control of the country, it can count on Chinese support. Big powers seem to have almost unlimited tolerance of evil in strategically located countries, but don’t like to look stupid by backing a loser.

American support for the Marcos regime is a good example. While the dictator was imprisoning and assassinating his enemies, senior American figures such as father of the current half-witted president were quite happy to tell him "we love your adherence to democratic principles". However, as soon it looked as though the declining Marcos was going to leave the Americans with egg on their faces, he was advised by Senator Laxalt to “cut and cut clean”. Let’s hope someone in Beijing places a call like that to Rangoon very soon.