Malaysia

International Investigations Take Over as Domestic Malaysian Justice Fails New evidence shows that transfers from troubled state investment fund 1MDB into Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak’s personal bank accounts may top $1 billion—$300 million higher than previously thought. Yet Malaysian authorities continue to clear him of wrongdoing. The attorney general’s office ended its case, saying it found no evidence of graft, and Parliament is delaying a long-awaited investigatory report on the fund. The government has also shut down a Malaysian news site reporting on corruption and threatened harsh punishments for journalists who leak “official secrets”—a thinly-veiled warning to would-be whistleblowers. Less politically malleable are international authorities who continue to probe the cross-border case. Singapore recently seized a “large number” of related bank accounts. Criminal proceedings in Switzerland allege misappropriation of up to $4 billion in state money. And in the United States, the Department of Justice opened an inquiry into Najib’s U.S. real estate holdings and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) into the 1MDB case itself. Najib maintains the money was a political donation from an unnamed Saudi royal, a claim that conflicts with the growing financial paper trail. How to Get Rid of Ghost Workers The Nigerian government cut nearly 24,000 non-existent, or “ghost workers” from its payroll, a move that saved $11.5 million last month alone. A Finance Ministry audit showed that workers’ names and bank accounts did not match, and some accounts were paid several times. Ghost workers cost many nations: Iraq paid at least $380 million per year to 50,000 soldiers who never reported for duty, Kenya found over 12,000 retired or fictitious civil servants on its payroll, and Cameroonian officials estimate that almost a quarter of the government’s 220,000 employees could be ghost workers, running up a $12 million monthly tab. Technology—in particular biometric screenings and bank ID verification systems—is helping reformers uncover these costly shams. Lax Bribery Laws in the OECD The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) called out member nations Finland, Slovenia, and Belgium for weak anticorruption measures. Though all three countries rank favorably on Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index, recent evaluations by the OECD Working Group on Bribery highlight their failures to prosecute companies and people that pay bribes elsewhere. Finland lags on adopting adequate whistleblower protections, Slovenia’s anticorruption commission is politicized, and Belgium has yet to convict a single national for foreign bribery. Though the OECD Anti-Bribery Convention is not legally-binding (unlike the United Nations Convention against Corruption), it distinctively and importantly takes on corruption’s supply side—going after those who pay, rather than demand bribes.

On Saturday, as the Diplomat reported, Malaysia’s former deputy prime minister, Muhyiddin Yassin, released a statement on Facebook warning that the country was slipping into dictatorship. Yassin lashed out against Prime Minister Najib tun Razak for overseeing this reversal from democracy. “In the face of public outrage at his leadership, Najib is using all the power that he has to suppress the voice of the opposition and silence his critics,” warned Yassin. “We are really witnessing the collapse of democratic institutions and the emergence of a new dictatorship.” This was not new criticism by Yassin, but it was probably his harshest attack on the prime minister to date. Najib sacked Muhyiddin Yassin last year, after earlier revelations in the 1MDB scandal reportedly prompted Yassin to call for Najib to step down. Yassin’s political career has been on a downward spiral ever since. Last week, already stripped of his Cabinet position, Yassin was also suspended as the deputy president of UMNO, the main party in the governing coalition. Yassin’s statement echoed a similar one released by former prime minister Mahathir Mohamad last week. Mahathir, who has been harshly criticizing Najib for more than a year over allegations of widespread graft by Najib and his family members, last week blasted Najib’s leadership once more. Mahathir, like Yassin, claimed that the prime minister was leading Malaysia into a dictatorship, toward becoming a country little different from Asia’s most authoritarian regimes. Over the past year, Mahathir, who has never seemed able to stomach any of his successors, and the current prime minister have battled publicly, and through proxies. Najib reportedly arranged for an intraparty putsch that ousted Mahathir’s son as chief minister of Kedah state in early February. Some Malaysian reports suggest that the Malaysian authorities are also probing members of Mahathir’s family’s business dealings, and Malaysian police are investigating Mahathir for allegations of slander related to some of his blog postings. Although it still seems unlikely that police will pursue a case that could wind up with the ninety-year-old Mahathir in jail, the investigation serves as a further warning of Najib’s desire to maintain total control over his party. Earlier this week, facing pressure on so many fronts, Mahathir resigned from the ruling party. Certainly, neither Mahathir nor Yassin is an ideal messenger to warn of threats to Malaysian freedom. Mahathir memorably sacked his then-deputy, Anwar Ibrahim, in 1998 after Anwar clashed with the prime minister over monetary policy and over the need for greater freedoms within the ruling party and in Malaysia in general. Mahathir then continued to dominate government as the authorities pursued a highly dubious case against Anwar for sodomy. (The governments of Najib and predecessor Abdullah Badawi would pursue a second, equally dubious case against Anwar a decade later.) But the criticisms delivered by Mahathir and Yassin hit home. Over the past two years, Malaysia under Najib has shifted from a hybrid regime in which a relatively vibrant civil society coexisted with a moderately repressive government toward outright authoritarianism. Within the governing coalition, Najib and his allies have virtually eliminated dissenters. The government also has undercut the independence of vital institutions ranging from the office of the Attorney General to the central bank. Legislation making it easier to criminalize dissent, and Anwar’s jailing in the second sodomy case, has decimated the opposition coalition, a disparate group of parties that needed Anwar’s experience and magnetism to hold the alliance together. The government has tried to suspend or block access to independent Malaysian media outlets, and Malaysian courts have even upheld the government’s ban on T-shirts worn by the Bersih civil society group; the government claims that the shirts are a threat to national security. With Mahathir leaving the party, and likely to launch more attacks on Najib, the country’s backsliding could get worse---quickly.

Last month, Malaysia cut its 2016 growth forecast and slashed spending plans as the economy continues to suffer from falling oil prices. Oil and commodities are very important to Malaysia’s economy, with palm oil, in particular, being one of its foundations. Gas and rubber are also important sectors. So falling global commodity prices have hurt Malaysia badly. According to an article in the Straits Times, the Malaysian government has said that “each $1 drop in oil prices slashes RM 300 million [roughly $72 million] from its annual revenue.” As a result, the government has tried to plug the hole in the state budget through a new 6 percent value-added tax, known as the Goods and Services Tax (GST). Introduced last year, the tax is not very popular and in fact has sparked significant protests in Malaysia. For more on my assessment of Malaysia’s current economic prospects, and the impact of Malaysia’s economic challenges on Malaysian politics, read my interview with World Politics Review.

The U.S.-ASEAN summit earlier this week, held at Sunnylands estate in California, was overshadowed by the death of Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia, and the political debate over his possible replacement. Many Southeast Asian leaders, who had looked forward to the summit as a sign of the Obama administration’s interest in the region, as well as a kind of blessing for hardline rulers like Cambodia’s Hun Sen and Thailand’s Prayuth Chan-ocha, were probably disappointed by how little attention the summit got from the U.S. media and from many U.S. politicians and opinion leaders. Still, the summit offered several glimpses into the current and future challenges facing U.S.-ASEAN relations. For one, as several media outlets have noted, the joint statement released after the summit, while noting a need for “mutual respect for the sovereignty, territorial integrity, equality and political independence of all nations ... and a shared commitment to peaceful resolution of disputes” in the South China Sea, did not mention China or China’s role in creating an environment ripe for armed conflict in the Sea. (Less than a week after the summit, Fox and other news outlets reported that China has placed surface-to-air missiles on an island in the disputed Paracels chain in the South China Sea). The lack of any mention of China in the joint statement, despite the fact that before the summit U.S. officials clearly intended any joint statement to reference China’s actions in the Sea, testifies to the continuing divisions within ASEAN over how to handle China’s growing power in the region. This fissure between countries, like Vietnam, that are terrified of China’s rising power, and those, like Cambodia and Thailand, that are much less concerned, has repeatedly divided ASEAN in the past five years. These divisions are undermining the organization’s famed consensus. On several occasions now, ASEAN leaders or defense ministers have been unable to agree upon a joint statement summarizing ASEAN’s position toward China’s actions in the South China Sea. Second, selling more Southeast Asian nations on joining the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) will not be easy. Four Southeast Asian nations---Singapore, Brunei, Malaysia, and Vietnam---already have committed to joining the TPP. Vietnam in particular stands to make major economic gains from joining, and the recent Party Congress, which essentially ended Vietnamese Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung’s political career, will not change Hanoi’s commitment to the TPP. But though President Obama used the Sunnylands summit to press other ASEAN members to join the TPP, public and elite opinion in several Southeast Asian countries is largely against TPP accession. In particular, in Thailand, where a potential U.S.-Thailand free trade agreement was scotched by public protests and a lack of popular support a decade ago, there is now little will in the Thai government or among Thai opinion leaders to join the TPP. In Indonesia, public support for joining TPP is also tepid, despite President Joko Widodo’s pledge that the country will sign up. The fact that the U.S. Congress, which gave President Obama fast track authority, now appears to have put discussions about ratifying TPP on ice until after the November elections, cannot be helping President Obama persuade ASEAN members to sign up for the deal. Third, the White House clearly understands the importance of symbolism in ASEAN. Many previous U.S. administrations, going back at least two decades, have disdained ASEAN as a talk shop that rarely produces tangible outcomes, and have bristled at the organization’s seeming love of symbolism---showy photos of leaders clasping hands, working groups that deliver lengthy and jargon-filled plans for future integration, hundreds of ASEAN-related meetings of top officials every year. But ASEAN moves slowly and cautiously, even more so now than the organization did in the 2000s, when it was led by dynamic former Thai foreign minister Surin Pitsuwan. Regional powers that invest in ASEAN, accepting its symbolic gestures as part of doing business, are often rewarded with opportunities to improve bilateral ties with individual ASEAN nations. The Obama White House clearly has understood this bargain---join in the symbolism, and (sometimes) reap the reward of closer bilateral relations with ASEAN members and a better image among Southeast Asian publics. From signing ASEAN’s Treaty of Amity and Cooperation in 2009, to this week’s Sunnylands summit, the White House has embraced ASEAN’s symbolism-before-substance style with fervor.

Read Part 1 here and Part 2 here.  Part 3 Southeast Asia’s decade of democratic regression, which I examined in the previous blog post, reflects a worrying global retrenchment. Freedom House’s annual Freedom in the World report, which measures the spread or retrenchment of freedom globally, has reported ten straight years of declining global political freedom. In Freedom House’s 2016 edition of Freedom in the World, more than seventy countries registered declines in political freedom as compared to the prior year. The implications of this democratic regression are broad and significant. On a human level, the regression of democracy means that, compared to a decade ago, more of the world’s people are living today under governments that restrict economic, social, and political rights. People living under authoritarian rule are more likely to have shorter and less healthy lives, as shown by indicators of human development; over time, democracies have proven more effective in fostering key aspects of development including life expectancy and reduced child mortality. The global democratic regression may lead to more interstate conflict. In addition, political retrenchment may foster extremism, creating favorable conditions for groups inspired by the self-proclaimed Islamic State or for other types of extremists, such as Buddhist nationalist extremist groups in Myanmar or hardline royalist groups in Thailand. Already, outside Southeast Asia groups linked to the Islamic State have made headway in states where political freedom has regressed, or never fully emerged, and where people feel they cannot create political change by working within the system. In Egypt, for example, where a military government has thrown leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood in jail, and also crushed more liberal political groups, Islamists have increasingly turned to violence, attacking police, military, and government targets in the Sinai and other parts of the country. In Libya, where the collapse of the Qaddafi dictatorship led to a chaotic political environment, the Islamic State has established a large foothold, and have reportedly started heading south to recruit fighters from sub-Saharan African states. Overall, notes Edward Delman of The Atlantic in a study of the Islamic State’s international recruiting, “the countries that send the largest numbers of foreign fighters to Syria and Iraq, either in absolute terms or on a per-capita basis, tend to be either politically repressive (Saudi Arabia, 2,500 fighters), politically unstable (Tunisia, 6,000 fighters), discriminatory toward a Muslim minority (Russia, 2,400 fighters), or a combination of the above.” Notably, Southeast Asian nations are not on the list of countries that send the most foreign fighters to Syria and Iraq. Yet Southeast Asian nations that do not embrace political reform could face a greater threat from Islamic State-linked extremists. To combat the spread of Islamic State-influenced groups in Southeast Asia, the region’s leaders need, most importantly, to reverse Southeast Asia’s democratic regression. The region’s leaders should not overreact to the actual threat of terrorist attacks, but rather should more effectively address the root causes of popular alienation from normal politics. After all, even if 1,500 or even 2,500 Southeast Asians have traveled to Islamic State-controlled territory and returned to the region, this figure is a miniscule fraction of the total population in Southeast Asia. And as Delman notes, countries in the Middle East and Europe have contributed a far higher number of fighters to the Islamic State than Southeast Asian nations. Yet if Southeast Asian nations respond to the militant threat by subverting the rule of law, and promulgating legislation that gives the security forces excessive powers, they risk further alienating populations and actually pushing more people into joining extremist groups. Instead, Southeast Asia’s leaders should battle militants within legal frameworks. In Indonesia, the Jokowi government had not, before this month, sought legislation that would allow security forces to detain suspects for extended periods of time without charge, as is possible in some other countries in the region. Potential changes to counterterrorism laws in Indonesia currently being debated still would not give security forces the sweeping powers they enjoy in other Southeast Asian nations. Still, Indonesia is going to probably get tougher. The country is about to potentially pass preventative detention laws that could allow the authorities to hold terrorism suspects for up to six months, a significant shift that could undermine the rule of law in the archipelago. Adhering to the rule of law bolsters popular support for antimilitancy efforts and does not run the risk that regional governments can use detention for broad roundups of political opponents. Jokowi’s government also has sent a signal that it will not tolerate extrajudicial killings by the police and other security forces. Although Indonesia’s security forces hardly enjoy a clean reputation, Jokowi has suggested that an independent, nonpartisan investigating body will analyze suspected rights abuses by the security forces, such as in places like Papua. Other governments in Southeast Asia should copy this approach, relying on legal, humane strategies to investigate and arrest militants, and fostering more effective oversight of security forces. In addition, countries in Southeast Asia need to strengthen institutions that can resolve political conflicts, so that they do not have to rely on undemocratic, archaic institutions to resolve disputes. In Thailand and Myanmar, political conflicts too often are resolved by the military; in Cambodia and Malaysia disputes are often resolved in backroom negotiations involving a small handful of business and political elites. These weak institutions foster cycles of political conflict, and make it easier for militants to claim that democracy is failing to create peace and security.

Next week, at a summit in California, President Obama will meet the ten leaders of countries in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), the most important regional group in Asia. The event, the first-ever US-ASEAN summit on American soil, is being touted by the White House as a sign of the importance of Southeast Asia. After all, the Obama administration has made relations with Southeast Asia a centerpiece of “the pivot,” or “rebalance to Asia,” a national security strategy that entails shifting American military, economic, and diplomatic resources to the Pacific Rim. There are indeed important reasons for holding the U.S.-ASEAN summit. Tensions are rising between several Southeast Asian nations and China, in part because of Beijing’s increasingly assertive actions in Asian seas. China’s recent decision to move an oil rig into waters claimed by Vietnam could precipitate another showdown in the South China Sea, as happened in 2014. Two years ago, tensions over China’s decision to move the same rig into disputed waters led to deadly anti-China riots in Vietnam. Not only Vietnam but also other Southeast Asian nations are increasingly frightened of China, led now by the most autocratic Chinese leader since Deng Xiaoping. Malaysia, Singapore, Vietnam, and the Philippines are all desperately trying to upgrade their navies and coast guards. Two decades after essentially tossing U.S. forces out of bases in the Philippines, Manila has welcomed back American troops, as part of a new military cooperation deal. Even some of the region’s poorest nations, which are heavily dependent on Chinese aid and trade, are concerned. In Laos, where China is the biggest aid donor and largest trading partner, the ruling communist party last month elected a new leadership reportedly devoid of any pro-China politicians, a drastic shift from Laos’ last government. In Myanmar, where China is probably the biggest trading partner and most important donor, the Myanmar military’s concern about becoming a kind of Chinese satellite was a major reason why the country’s junta ceded power to civilians in the early 2010s. In addition, trade ties between the United States and Southeast Asia are increasingly important to the U.S. economy. Together, the ten ASEAN nations comprise the fourth-largest trading partner of the United States. Some evidence also suggests that the new ASEAN Economic Community, a nascent regional free trade plan, is helping Southeast Asian nations weather an increasingly rocky global economic environment. But President Obama’s summit with Southeast Asian leaders comes at an awkward time in one very important respect. Since the pivot was launched, Southeast Asia’s political systems have, on the whole, regressed badly. For more on my analysis of Southeast Asia’s democratic regression, read my new Project Syndicate piece.

Read Part 1 here.  Part 2 After Jakarta’s initial successes against militants such as those from Jemaah Islamiah, a new generation of Islamists began to emerge in Southeast Asia in the late 2000s and early 2010s. Some had been students in schools set up, in the 1990s and 2000s, by earlier generations of radicals, while others had taken part in plots and attacks in the 1990s and 2000s and had survived the region-wide crackdown on Jemaah Islamiah and other militants. As Indonesian militancy expert Sidney Jones notes, many of these survivors lacked the discipline and organizing principles that had been characteristic of Jemaah Islamiah in the late 1990s and 2000s. Jones notes that the Indonesian authorities were saved in January 2016 primarily by the militants “incompetence,” but if radical groups continue to grow and train in Syria, they may eventually perfect more deadly bombing and shooting plots in Southeast Asia. The rise of the self-proclaimed Islamic State has provided new inspiration for the younger radicals and, for some willing to travel to Syria and Iraq, a new place for young Southeast Asian militants to train and meet fellow militants from around the world. In some ways, for Southeast Asian radicals the Islamic State’s wars in Syria and Iraq were a kind of modern version of the Afghanistan of the 1980s, a place for foreigners to come, learn how to fight, and mingle with other radicals. However, it was far easier for Southeast Asians to make the journey to Islamic State territory than it had been to join the mujahedeen in Afghanistan during the 1980s. Social media, for one, made it far easier for young Southeast Asians to learn about life in Islamic State territory and plan trips to Islamic State-controlled regions than it had been for radicals who wanted to fight in Afghanistan in the 1980s. In addition, the Islamic State’s theatrical brutality, tailored to social media, seemed designed to inspire radicals in other countries to adopt more brutal tactics. Some Islamic State leaders apparently see the value in recruiting and training Southeast Asians. After all, Indonesia has the largest Muslim population in the world, and Indonesia and Malaysia are two of the most prominent moderate Muslim-majority states in the world, countries with close relations with the United States, France, China, and other countries either involved in the battle against Islamic State or targeted for attacks by Islamic State leaders. In the past four years, the Islamic State has not only created a brigade of its fighters for Indonesians and Malaysians, who speak a common language, but also released video messages, shared on social media, targeted at Southeast Asian recruits and including efforts to Southeast Asian women to travel to Islamic State territory and potentially marry fighters. Jones’s Institute for Policy Analysis of Conflict estimates that as many as forty percent of Indonesians who have traveled to join the Islamic State are women and children. At the same time as the Islamic State is spreading its message into the region, Southeast Asian states are struggling with other factors that could spark radicalism. These factors include: The expansion of social media and Internet access, and the growing use of apps like WhatsApp and Zello that are harder for the authorities to track; the growth in foreign-funded religious schools in Southeast Asia; and, incompetent Southeast Asian prison systems, which tend to group Islamists together and often brutalize them; and, some Southeast Asian leaders’ response to the growth of the Islamic State, a response that has too often morphed into outright Islamophobia. In Myanmar, Thailand, Malaysia, Cambodia, and other countries in the region, a lack of political freedom has been probably the biggest driver of militancy. Once touted as a democratic beacon for other developing regions, since the late 2000s, much of Southeast Asia has witnessed a democratic retrenchment. In its report on global freedom in 2009, Freedom House ranked the Philippines, Thailand, Singapore, Malaysia, and Timor-Leste as “partly free” nations, and ranked Indonesia as “free.” Twenty years earlier, only the Philippines ranked as “partly free” in the region; the rest of these countries were graded “not free,” while Timor-Leste did not even exist as an independent nation. In Thailand, for instance, throughout the 1990s and much of the 2000s, Thailand appeared to have left its era of military interventions behind; Thai army commanders insisted the era of coups had passed and that the armed forces would become a normal military, run by elected civilian ministers. Thailand passed a progressive constitution in 1997, and in the 1990s and 2000s the country held multiple free elections. Malaysia, meanwhile, seemed poised to develop a competitive two-party system in the 2000s and early 2010s. In Cambodia, unexpected gains by the opposition coalition in 2014 national elections led to a brief period of compromise between opposition politicians and longtime prime minister Hun Sen. Today, few people are touting democracy in Southeast Asia as an example of political freedoms. Since the 2000s, Thailand has suffered more than a decade of political turmoil capped by a military coup in May 2014, the second coup in the kingdom in less than a decade. The country is still ruled by a junta, and even if elections are held in 2017, Thailand’s new constitution, written under junta rule, will dramatically restrict democratic freedoms and undermine democratic institutions. In 2015 Hun Sen’s government ended the rapprochement with the opposition. The Cambodian government pursued criminal charges against opposition leader Sam Rainsy, forcing him into exile, and Cambodian police did nothing as a mob of people, potentially organized by the ruling party, attacked opposition lawmakers just outside the parliament building. In Malaysia, the story is similar. After the 2013 general election, which the ruling coalition narrowly won, relying on gerrymandering and alleged vote fraud, the government jailed opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim, and used a new law to crack down on other opposition politicians and civil society activists. In Myanmar, since the end of junta rule in 2010-11, Muslims have been the targets of brutal violence. Gangs and paramilitary organizations, apparently tolerated by the state, have launched waves of attacks on Muslim communities in western Myanmar and other parts of the country; over 130,000 Muslim Rohingya, an ethnic minority, fled their homes, and often wound up in camps for the internally displaced that seemed more like internment camps than centers designed to aid refugees. In southern Thailand, meanwhile, increasingly autocratic rule has added to popular alienation from the Thai state and made it easier for militant cells to recruit, according to a study of recruiting by Don Pathan, an expert on the southern Thai conflict who writes for The Nation newspaper. The government of former Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra, the last popularly elected leader before the May 2014 coup, had attempted to launch peace negotiations with the southern militants. But after the coup the Thai army essentially jettisoned the talks. In late 2015 and early 2016, several representatives of the southern insurgents held informal meetings with army negotiators in an attempt to restart the talks, but these informal meetings have yet to produce any tangible results. In Malaysia, the government’s increasing repressiveness and desire to burnish its Islamic credentials have combined to fuel radicalism. Malaysia’s government has not only passed legislation that could suppress opposition voices, but also used its powers to entrench economic and political preferences for ethnic Malays, disempowering ethnic Indians and ethnic Chinese. Malaysian leaders also have used speeches to increasingly try to portray Malaysia a state for Malay Muslims, and tarred opposition leaders by portraying them as stooges of non-Muslim ethnic minorities. As a result, although Malaysian Prime Minister Najib tun Razak has been vocal, on the international stage, about the need for moderate Muslim voices to combat militancy, his government has allowed Malay Muslim nationalist voices to dominate the governing coalition and to wield extensive power over public discourse. At the same time, the government’s crackdown on public protests, nonprofits’ operations, and independent media have limited the means by which Malaysians, including Islamists, could participate peacefully in public discourse. Religion has become central to Malaysians’ identities, as economic and social policies entrench the linkage of faith and identity. “More and more Malays identify themselves first and foremost as Muslims. In a poll carried out [in 2015], Merdeka Center found that 60 per cent of Malays consider themselves as Muslims first, 27 per cent as Malaysians first, and only a peculiarly low 6 per cent saw themselves as Malays first,” writes Penang Institute analyst Kok-Hin Ooi in an analysis for New Mandala. Of course, the extremism that has bloomed in Southeast Asia from failed democratization does not only entail Islamism. Southeast Asia’s failed democratization has sparked many forms of extremist groups, all of which pay little heed to legal, constitutional means of resolving political conflicts. In Thailand, the stalled democratization has fostered a rise in militant Buddhist organizations, some of which have pushed to make Buddhism the state religion. It also has sparked the growth of hardline, conservative, royalist street demonstrations. These royalist street demonstrators, some of whom also belong to militant Buddhist groups, paralyzed Bangkok with protests in late 2013 and early 2014, disrupted planned parliamentary elections, and ultimately set the stage for the May 2014 coup. (During the 2013 and 2014 protests, many of these royalist groups openly called for an end to the franchise for poor Thais and/or a restoration of the absolute monarchy.) In Myanmar, incomplete democratization, and the vacuum of political power left by the end of authoritarian rule, has also allowed radical Buddhist nationalist groups to gain power. Some of the new Buddhist nationalist groups have alleged links to hardline, anti-Muslim political parties; others allegedly are linked to the gangs and paramilitaries that have terrorized the Rohingya and other Myanmar Muslims. These empowered extremist groups are not necessarily fueled primarily by economic grievances. The three provinces of southern Thailand are not the poorest in the country, and are far from the poorest areas of Southeast Asia. In fact, the southernmost provinces are far richer than some areas of Thailand’s rural, drought-hit northeast. The extremist royalist groups that helped topple the Yingluck government and pave the way for the coup were led by middle class and upper class Thais, including some of the richest people in the kingdom. In Malaysia, meanwhile, the most hardline Malay Muslim groups, and the militant Islamist cells that have been uncovered, do not usually attract the poorest in Malaysian society, but rather middle-class and lower-middle class Malays, especially those who apparently fear that urbanization and more open politics might mean a dilution of state privileges for Malays. Indonesia, by contrast, has not regressed politically over the past decade, and its continued democratic transition has blunted the appeal of radicalism. Along with the Philippines, it is the only Southeast Asian nation to be consistently ranked among the freest nations in the developing world by Freedom House. In his first two years in office, President Joko Widodo has helped further entrench democratic culture and institutions, even if he has been less aggressive in pushing on long-term political and economic reforms than some of his supporters had hoped. (In particular, Jokowi has tended to fall back into statist, economic nationalist policy prescriptions.) Still, as President Jokowi has maintained the system of regional and local elections, installed prominent anticorruption activists at the center of his cabinet, and transformed the style and image of the presidency from that of a remote, almost monarchical figure to that of a public servant listening to public concerns. Meanwhile, by the middle of the 2010s, Indonesia’s massive decentralization of legislative authority and government budgets had greatly empowered local politicians and local populaces. Decentralization allowed for a degree of differentiation in how localities handled issues like the selling of alcohol, the regulation of gambling, and other issues that Islamic parties and Islamist militant groups tended to emphasize. (Occasionally, these local laws catered to devout Christians, such as in predominantly Christian areas of Papua, rather than to Muslims.) And decentralization and democratic consolidation have greatly helped Indonesia’s battle against a new generation of militants. Decentralization, for one, helps reduce the appeal of Islamic parties and militant groups on the national level. Devout voters can obtain many of their demands through local legislation, reducing the appeal of national Islamic parties---or of militant groups who pledge to force change through violence. Freedom of expression means that Indonesians can openly advocate for the imposition of harsher Islamic laws or other goals of militant groups; the state does not stifle their voices. Confidence in Indonesia’s political system, and the impact of Indonesian presidents’ public speeches against militants, has clearly had an impact on the Indonesian population. In a poll released in November 2015 by the Pew Research Center, nearly 80 percent of Indonesians had an unfavorable view of the Islamic State, a much higher unfavorable figure than in Malaysia, Turkey, and Pakistan, among other countries. In Malaysia, for instance, only about sixty percent of the population in the same poll, had an unfavorable view of the Islamic State. It helps that the largest Indonesian religious organizations have added their weight to the countermilitancy campaign. Nahdlatul Ulama, an Indonesian religious movement with some 50 million members, has developed a sophisticated public campaign promoting a tolerant version of Islam. The campaign also emphasizes to Indonesians how alien the Islamic State’s form of Islam is to Indonesia’s Islamic traditions. These national campaigns have helped the Indonesian security forces, who rely on tips from the populace. Although militants were able to strike in Jakarta in January, in December 2015 Indonesian security forces made a string of arrests in five cities of people allegedly linked to Islamic State and planning a larger attack. To be sure, Indonesia has not eradicated militant groups. Terrorist attacks are always a possibility in Indonesia, even if the government has shifted public opinion against Islamists and destroyed many militant cells. The archipelago’s porous borders, notoriously corrupt immigration checkpoints, and open society all allow militant groups to come and go with impunity. Yet Indonesia’s open society has helped inoculate the country against the possibility that militant groups inspired by the Islamic State will gain large numbers of followers.

Read Part 2 here and Part 3 here.  Part 1 On January 14, militants struck in one of Jakarta’s busiest shopping and office districts. At around 11 am, one attacker blew up a suicide bomb at a Starbucks. Then, a group of attackers grabbed foreigners from the area, started firing wildly into the street, and drove a motorcycle toward a nearby police station and attacked that. The surviving militants then engaged in a running gun and bomb battle with Indonesian police, leaving a total of eight people dead, including five of the attackers. After the attacks, it quickly emerged that the purported ringleader, an Indonesian man named Bahrun Naim, had been living in the Islamic State’s “capital,” Raqqa, where he had reportedly organized the Jakarta violence. Although the brazenness of the attack shocked some Indonesians, the fact that militants inspired by ISIS committed violence in Jakarta was not particularly surprising. Since the previous autumn, Indonesian police and intelligence had been receiving reports of ISIS-linked militant cells organizing on Java and other islands; a month before the attack, Indonesian police had made a string of arrests, across the archipelago, of militants allegedly linked to the Islamic State. One of Indonesia’s leading specialists on militant groups, Sidney Jones of the Institute for Policy Analysis of Conflict, had warned that ISIS has “transformed the terrorism threat [in Indonesia] after years of mostly foiled [terrorism] plots” in the archipelago. And the Indonesian government had estimated that hundreds Indonesians had traveled to Islamic State-held territory in Syria and Iraq and then returned home. So many Indonesians and Malaysians had traveled to Islamic State territory that IS had started a brigade of fighters just for visiting Indonesians and Malaysians. Indonesia was not alone in facing the threat of militants linked to or inspired by the Islamic State. Some Southeast Asian intelligence organizations place the total number of Southeast Asians who have made the trip to ISIS territory as between 1,200 and 1,800. Even in Singapore, a city-state with an extremely effective intelligence service, radicals inspired in part by the Islamic State have returned to the island, according to public speeches by Singapore’s prime minister. In addition, several veteran militant groups in Southeast Asia whose existence predated the rise of the Islamic State, such as those fighting in the southern Philippines, have publicly pledged their allegiance to IS in 2014 and 2015. Whether these pledges are designed to bring more notoriety to the veteran groups, or actually constitute real linkages with IS, remains unclear, but their impact is to strengthen Islamic State’s image as a group with real global appeal. Yet of all the Southeast Asian nations facing rising militancy---the Philippines, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Cambodia, Myanmar, Brunei, and Indonesia---Indonesia is actually the best equipped to combat the challenge of radicalism. The Indonesian government confronted an earlier rise of militancy, in the late 1990s and early 2000s, a time when many Indonesian militants were inspired by al-Qaeda; Indonesian security forces effectively penetrated the earlier militants’ cells and broke up many terrorism plots, without comprising Indonesia’s democratic transition. To be sure, as Jones notes, that earlier decade of militant activities left some radical networks in place, networks that IS sympathizers now may try to activate in the archipelago. The Islamic State’s powerful social media messaging may help militants regroup in Indonesia. But these militants will have a difficult time seriously threatening Indonesia’s social fabric, or upsetting the political gains Indonesia has made since the end of the Suharto dictatorship. Indeed, while much of Southeast Asia backslides into authoritarian or semi-authoritarian politics, highlighted most notably by Thailand’s harsh military rule, Indonesia’s political system has continued to mature, becoming a consolidated and essentially federal democracy. This maturation, and the maturation of Indonesia’s religious establishment, has created many ways to co-opt radicals through the political process, undermining the appeal of militant groups to the broader public---and making it easier for police to identify and arrest the small number of extremists planning violent attacks. I will examine why democratic regression facilitates militancy in other Southeast Asian nations in my next post.

Rachel Brown, Lincoln Davidson, Gabriel Walker, and James West look at five stories from Asia this week. 1. Malaysian prime minister evades corruption charges. Malaysia’s attorney general announced Tuesday that Prime Minister Najib Razak did not commit a crime in accepting a $680 million donation from the Saudi royal family in 2013. Najib has been under investigation for corruption since July, when investigative journalists unearthed documents alleging the prime minister had taken $680 million from a state development fund he had created. The attorney general, who was appointed by the prime minister when his predecessor was fired weeks after the scandal broke, said that Najib returned $620 million of the donated funds. It is not clear how the $60 million that was not returned was used. Najib applauded the end of the investigation, which he called an “unnecessary distraction,” but Malaysian corruption authorities have called for a review of the attorney general’s decision. Even if ultimately cleared of the charges, Najib’s public image may be irrevocably tarnished by the allegations, as well as his government’s attempts to increase Internet censorship and arrest opposition critics. 2. Taliban attacks power grid as China urges peace talks. On Tuesday, after Afghan security forces launched an expanded operation in northern Baghlan province, the Taliban sabotaged a major power line in an attack that destroyed one electricity transmission tower and damaged two others, briefly cutting off a portion of electricity supplied from Uzbekistan to Kabul. Afghanistan imports nearly three-quarters of its electricity, with the majority of power to Kabul coming from Uzbekistan; the national power company was able to provide seventy-five megawatts of backup electricity as security forces worked to de-mine the area so the towers could be repaired. Also on Tuesday, the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs released a statement urging both governments in Afghanistan and Pakistan to restart peace talks with the Taliban, affirming their commitment to facilitating talks that were derailed last summer. China has joined Afghanistan, Pakistan, and the United States in attempting to formalize a process through which the Afghan government can enter negotiations with the Taliban; the newly formed Quadrilateral Coordination Group will meet for a third time in early February in Islamabad. Finally, on Wednesday the Pentagon nominated Army Lt. Gen. John Nicholson to replace Gen. John Campbell as the top U.S. and allied commander in Afghanistan. At a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing, Gen. Nicholson urged caution against withdrawing troops too soon amid the deteriorating security situation across the country. 3. China indicts Canadian charged with espionage. Kevin Garratt, a Canadian citizen who formerly operated a coffee shop in the Sino-Korean border city of Dandong, Liaoning province, has been indicted on charges of spying and stealing state secrets after a year and a half in prison. Garratt and his wife, Julia Garratt, were first detained in August 2014 and were barred access to lawyers for months. While Julia Garratt was released in February 2015, authorities have prohibited her from leaving China. Another foreigner, Swedish human rights activist Peter Dahlin, was expelled from China this week after making a confession on state television that he had “caused harm to the Chinese government [and] hurt the feelings of the Chinese people.” 4. Japanese minister resigns after bribery accusation. Akira Amari, a top economics minister in the Shinzo Abe administration, stepped down after a Japanese magazine alleged that he and his staff had accepted bribes of at least $100,000 from a construction company. Although Mr. Amari denied pocketing the money, and claimed it was a legitimate political donation, he still resigned in order to take responsibility for his staff and to avoid a politically destabilizing scandal. Mr. Amari was in charge of carrying out Prime Minister Abe’s domestic economic revitalization plan and was also Japan’s lead negotiator on the Trans-Pacific Partnership, so there is some question over who will defend the legislation in parliament, since it has not been approved yet, now that he is gone. In addition to Mr. Amari, three other ministers have previously resigned from the Abe administration because of political funding scandals. A former environment minister, Nobuteru Ishihara, has already been chosen to fill Mr. Amari’s empty post, and Mr. Amari plans to continue serving as a member in the lower house of parliament. 5. China deepens footprint in Iran. Chinese President Xi Jinping, as part of a tour of the Middle East last week, was the first foreign leader to visit Iran after sanctions were lifted. While the region remained tense following the rupture in diplomatic relations between Iran and Saudi Araba, the focus of Xi’s trip was largely economic. Xi and Iranian leaders committed to deepening economic cooperation over the next twenty-five years, aiming to expand the value of their countries’ trade to $600 billion. China has been Iran’s largest trading partner over the past six years, and the two nations did over $50 billion in trade in 2014. China’s economic clout in Iran grew significantly while Western sanctions were in place, and China plays a role in a number of major construction projects including Tehran’s metro system and the Niyash Tunnel. The two nations also agreed to a military and security strategic partnership, which includes more collaboration to address terrorism and the expansion of military exchanges. Additionally, China backs Iran’s application to join the Shanghai Cooperation Organization as a full member. Xi also visited Iran’s regional rival, Saudi Arabia, and the Chinese government emphasizes a balanced foreign policy in the region. China has recently become more actively engaged in the Middle East as demonstrated by a new Arab Policy Paper published in mid-January. The state-run media service Xinhua has emphasized the contributions that China could make to the Middle East, including that “the wisdom of China, which is trusted by Middle Eastern countries as a non-interfering country, could serve as an effective remedy for problems and herald a brighter future for the region.” Bonus: People’s Daily declares war on George Soros’s purported war declaration. The Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) top newspaper took major offense at remarks about the Chinese economy the investor made at the World Economic Forum last week. Soros said that a hard landing was “practically unavoidable” for the Chinese economy; state media fired back that Soros “would inevitably pay a heavy price” for shorting China. On January 26, an article featured on the front page of the international edition of People’s Daily, titled “Declaring war on Chinese currency? Haha,” said that Soros had “openly ‘declared war’ on China” at Davos, but “there can be no doubt that his challenge to the RMB and HKD will fail.” The daily doth protest too much, methinks.

Over the past three weeks, several events have dramatically highlighted the growing appeal of the Islamic State based in Southeast Asia. First, on January 14, a group of militants reportedly run by an Indonesian man who had traveled to Syria carried out an attack in a busy neighborhood in Jakarta, leading to at least seven deaths. Several weeks before the attack, the Indonesian police had made a string of arrests of other Indonesian cells linked to the Islamic State. Then, last week, Singaporean authorities made a major announcement. The city-state announced that it was using its Internal Security Act, which allows for detention without charge, to hold 27 Bangladeshis who it claimed had become radicalized, and were considering launching terrorist attacks. It was the Singaporean authorities’ broadest use of the Internal Security Act in three decades. According to several news reports, the Singapore police claimed that some of the Bangladeshis were planning to return to Bangladesh to carry out terrorist attacks. Most of the Bangladeshi laborers were quickly deported from Singapore. Do these events add up to a serious threat from the Islamic State to Southeast Asia , either by Islamic State recruiting and funding of Southeast Asian militant cells or simply by Islamic State inspiration for Southeast Asians? As I mentioned in a previous post, IS created a brigade in Syria for visiting Southeast Asians, including Indonesian fighters. IS also may be providing a small amount of seed money to some militant groups in Southeast Asia, and the Islamic State clearly hopes to spread its ideology more widely. Its propaganda arm has produced videos, shared online, in Indonesian/Malay and targeted at Indonesian and Malay youths. Indonesian, Malaysian, Philippine, and Thai authorities believe between 600 and 1,200 Southeast Asians have traveled to Syria and Iraq in recent years to fight with the Islamic State and then have returned to Southeast Asia. In addition, several existing militant groups in Southeast Asia have taken public oaths of loyalty to the Islamic State in the past two years, probably both because they share beliefs with the Islamic State and because the loyalty oaths bring them greater media attention. What’s more, as Zachary Abuza of the National War College has noted, the growing influence of Islamic State in Southeast Asia may be leading to a kind of competition among Southeast Asian militant groups to see who can carry out the most brutal attacks, following in Islamic State’s use of extremely brutal, well-publicized tactics. Such brutal tactics, Abuza notes, are easily spread through social media. But overall, the level of threat to Southeast Asian nations varies widely. It is true that Indonesians have traveled to Syria to fight, and even taken part in their own brigade, but Indonesia also is one of the most open societies in the region, with a government and a religious establishment that has a record of effectiveness at combating militancy. Indonesia’s biggest religious organizations have launched campaigns to combat the influence of IS and other groups. Indonesia’s decentralized, free politics filter Islamists through the political process. In the Philippines, the Aquino government is close to completing a landmark peace agreement that could end much of the fighting that has plagued Mindanao for decades. Although there are holdouts unwilling to accept the deal, the completion of the peace process, combined with a flow of investment and aid to Mindanao, could dramatically undercut any public support for militants in the southern Philippines. In contrast, Thailand, Malaysia, and Myanmar have political environments that could be conducive to growing militancy. All three are either outright authoritarian regimes or are currently somewhere between democracy and autocracy; the lack of political freedom means there are few legitimate avenues for Islamists to engage in politics. In Thailand, harsh army rule in the three southern provinces has added to southerners’ anger, made it harder to gain cooperation with army units hunting for militant cells, and potentially has fostered radicalization of young men and women. In Myanmar, there has been little violent reaction so far from Muslim populations that have been terrorized for four years now, particularly in Arakan State; many Muslims are so battered that they are focusing all their energy on survival. Still, it is not hard to imagine that years of attacks on Myanmar Muslims might eventually lead to the emergence of militant Myanmar Muslim groups, perhaps with inspiration or even training from Islamic State. And in Malaysia, the environment is perhaps even more favorable for militants inspired by the Islamic State. Since the 2013 Malaysian general election, the Malaysian government has “been competing...to show the Malay heartland” its Islamic credentials, according to Murray Hunter, a business consultant with thirty years of experience in Southeast Asia. Hunter notes that the ruling coalition also has been publicly burnishing its Islamic credentials in an attempt to tar the opposition as dominated by ethnic Chinese. Such strategies are fostering religious and ethnic divisions in Malaysia. “This is a perfect environment for Islamic State dogma…to breed,” Hunter notes.

It’s that time again---time for resolutions that last a couple weeks into the new year and bold predictions that (surely) will turn out right this year. Right? 1. Najib tun Razak will be Malaysia’s Prime Minister at the End of 2016 For most of 2015, many Malaysian politicians, observers, and activists wrote Najib off, sure that the in-fighting within the governing coalition, the scandals around the 1MDB state fund, and the torrent of criticism of Najib by former prime minister Mahathir would ultimately force Najib out of office. They were wrong. In fact, after surviving UMNO’s December general meeting unscathed, Najib passed legislation that will entrench his power. Just before the end of parliament’s sessions for the year, Najib presided over the passage of new legislation that will potentially give the government unprecedented powers to detain critics on national security-related charges. Expect Najib to still be in control in Malaysia as this year ends as well. 2. Thailand’s Elections will be Pushed Back Farther The Thai junta, which took power in a coup in May 2014, has pushed back the date for elections and a handover of power several times, after a draft new charter collapsed. Prime Minister and junta chief Prayuth Chan-ocha has now promised elections in 2017, but Prayuth also shows signs that he is consolidating his rule. This past year, the military has been busy purging members of its ranks not aligned with Prayuth’s army faction, and launching an even more intensive crackdown on dissent than it did in the months after May 2014. With the Thai king still alive but apparently quite ill, expect Prayuth and the other generals to push elections off even farther, possibly into 2018 or beyond. 3. Jokowi Will Have a Better Year 2015 was a difficult year for Indonesian President Joko Widodo. Struggling to make the transition in his first full year on the job from city mayor to leader of one of the most powerful nations in the world, at times he seemed to zigzag on foreign and economic policies from day to day. His personalized style of decision-making, in which he relied on few close advisors and often made decisions by his gut, proved unworkable in governing such a large and diverse country. Saddled with ministers and other officials who had proven themselves at PDI-P loyalists but did not embody Jokowi’s brand of clean politics, the president also found his reputation as a different type of politician tarnished. It got worse. In the fall, haze enveloped parts of Indonesia and spread throughout the region; Jokowi went home after one day of a planned multi-day trip to the United States to help lead the fight against the haze. By leaving so soon, he may have alienated some of the major corporate leaders he had planned to meet and woo later in the trip on the U.S. West Coast. Given his troubled 2015, 2016 could hardly go worse for Jokowi. And, in all likelihood, the Indonesian president will have a better year. He already has shed himself of several ministers and advisors who had damaged his reputation for fighting graft, and his public image also has benefited from the recent scandal surrounding the speaker of the lower house of parliament, who allegedly tried to extort money from Freeport McMoran. The fact that Jokowi’s energy minister actually reported the allegations against the speaker to the parliamentary ethics committee is, to many Indonesians, a sign that Jokowi’s administration is taking graft seriously. In addition, Jokowi has slowly and steadily begun to push back against economic nationalists within his administration and in parliament. Although the president is unlikely to deliver the massive regulatory reforms he promised in late 2015, the president has set an ambitious economic reform agenda. If he can even push through half of the reforms he has promised for 2016, both local and foreign investors will cheer, and the Indonesian economy will benefit. 4. Laos will not be an Effective Asean Chair In 2015, the Association of Southeast Asian nations was chaired by Malaysia, a country with a wealth of skilled and English-speaking diplomats and officials, and the capacity to capably hold hundreds of meetings annually. Although the Malaysian government was distracted by the 1MDB scandal and in-fighting within UMNO, it still managed an effective chairmanship. Laos will have serious trouble doing the same. Of all the members of Asean, Laos is by far the least prepared to chair the organization; its diplomatic and bureaucratic corps is small, and it has no leaders who could take charge at an Asean meeting and help bridge gaps on divisive issues. Laos is the most authoritarian nation in Southeast Asia, and Laotian leaders already have shown that they are uncomfortable with the nongovernmental aspects of Southeast Asian integration, declining to let Asean civil society groups hold a meeting next year in Laos. 5. China Will Show Southeast Asia both the Stick and the Carrot As I noted in CFR.org’s roundup on Chinese policy in 2016, Beijing this year probably will continue its dual approach to Southeast Asia. Expect China to continue upgrading atolls in the South China Sea and preparing them for use as military bases, while also using ever-tougher tactics to threaten Vietnamese and Philippine ships traveling in disputed waters---tactics like openly displaying guns pointed at Vietnamese and Philippine vessels. But in dealing with mainland Southeast Asian nations like Thailand, Myanmar, and Laos, which chairs Asean in 2016, China will turn on the charm. In particular, Chinese officials and leaders will be eager to win over the new Myanmar government led by the National League for Democracy. Read Part 2 here. 

This past summer, as Malaysian Prime Minister Najib tun Razak faced an explosion of news articles about alleged irregularities in the 1MDB state fund and about the appearance of over $600 million in Najib’s personal bank account, many Malaysian politicians believed that Najib would not survive as prime minister through the end of the year. Former Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad, still one of the most influential figures in Malaysia, had unleashed a steady stream of online invective at Najib, repeatedly calling on him to resign. U.S., Swiss, Singaporean, and Hong Kong investigators reportedly were looking into 1MDB and/or the transfer of funds to Najib’s account. Malaysia’s own central bank and attorney general reportedly were investigating Najib as well, and other powerful people within the United Malays National Organisation (UMNO), the main component of the ruling coalition, seemed to be gearing up for an effort to unseat Najib. Meanwhile, the opposition alliance was planning a no-confidence vote in Malaysia’s parliament. At street rallies, opposition activists called on Najib to come clean about 1MDB and the funds in his account and to resign. Yet now it is December, time for UMNO’s general meeting, and whatever his international image, Najib’s hold on his party is much stronger than anyone would have imagined six months ago. In all likelihood, no one will emerge at the general meeting as a serious challenger to the prime minister’s position as president of UMNO. Indeed, Najib has consolidated his power within the party in the months before the general meeting; Manjit Bhatia at New Mandala estimates that the anti-Najib faction of UMNO members attending the general meeting accounts for less than 1 percent of the total number of branches of the party. Najib has neutralized opposition in several ways. He has wooed voters. The prime minister has overseen an expansive, populist budget in October that increased state handouts to a range of influential groups. He and his allies have used pro-Malay language to shore up his image with conservative Malays---and to portray some of the opposition to him as led by ethnic minorities. Najib also has mostly neutralized his most influential critics within UMNO, including Mahathir and former Deputy Prime Minister Muhyiddin Yassin. Yassin was sacked as deputy prime minister earlier this year, and Najib has moved to isolate the former deputy’s allies within UMNO. The former deputy prime minister has continued to criticize Najib, but it is unclear whether this criticism has changed the minds of any UMNO cadres, who apparently don’t see any other viable candidates for prime minister or party president. (The actual intra-party elections have been pushed back eighteen months, although a party president could step down even though elections were not imminent.) And the longer Najib remains as prime minister, the more time he has to allegedly utilize the patronage networks that flow downward through UMNO, and that ensure the loyalty of party cadres. To be sure, Najib will be questioned at the UMNO general meeting about 1MDB, how it was managed in the past, and its management today. He may be questioned about his explanations of how the huge sums appeared in his personal accounts, and critics like Mahathir may circulate at the general meeting. But Najib’s fiercest critics may be unable to address the entire general meeting, and UMNO’s internal disciplinary board may even punish party members who criticize Najib. Already, the disciplinary board has removed from office at least two local leaders who criticized Najib and praised Mahathir, according to Channel News Asia. Meanwhile, Najib has much less to worry about from the political opposition than he did six months ago---or surely than he did two years ago, when the opposition nearly won the general election. To be sure, the opposition faces high barriers. Human Rights Watch’s recent report on Malaysia’s climate of free expression notes that the government has used detentions, legislation, and other tactics to criminalize opposition to Najib and reduce the space for political gatherings. But the opposition also has imploded in the past year, after the jailing of coalition leader Anwar Ibrahim and the breakdown of peace between the Islamic opposition party PAS and the mostly ethnic Chinese DAP. No one opposition leader has been able to fill Anwar’s shoes. The reconfigured, new opposition coalition, which contains a splinter group of MPs that broke off from PAS, controls fewer seats in Malaysia’s parliament than the united opposition did after the 2013 elections.

Since July, when the Wall Street Journal and other publications broke stories alleging that hundreds of millions of dollars, possibly from a Malaysian state fund, had been deposited into Prime Minister Najib tun Razak’s personal accounts, the prime minister has been struggling to hold onto his job, and to keep more scandals from erupting. The FBI, Hong Kong authorities, and Swiss authorities reportedly are investigating the troubled 1MDB state fund and the deposits into Najib’s accounts. Since July, Najib has sacked the country’s attorney general, attempted to shut down a leading Malaysian financial publication that had run more stories alleging improprieties in the state fund, removed a deputy prime minister who had become critical of his leadership, and overseen the arrest of protestors holding large rallies demanding cleaner government. Allies of Najib’s have insinuated that the large demonstrations in Kuala Lumpur are a plot by ethnic Chinese and other minorities to undermine ethnic Malays. But even as he pushes back, Najib faces more and more challenges to his survival as prime minister---challenges that also suggest that some of Malaysia’s institutions are more independent that many Malaysians had previously imagined. And with Parliament back in session this week, the focus will be on Najib even more. Despite reports of intense pressure on the central bank to end its own investigation of the state fund, the head of the Malaysia’s central bank earlier this month announced that it would continue investigating 1MDB. In early October, Malaysia’s sultans, traditional rulers from each of the country’s constituent states, released an unprecedented joint statement saying that a lack of clear answers about 1MDB and the money in Najib’s accounts has led to a “crisis of confidence” in Malaysia. The sultans, who normally do not intervene in politics, also called for a rapid and transparent investigation into where Najib’s money came from, and what it was used for. Perhaps unsurprisingly, a recent survey of the Malaysian population by the Merdeka Center found that only 31 percent of Malays now trust in the government. Malaysia’s opposition will try now to fatally weaken Najib through a no-confidence motion filed this week, but this strategy is probably not going to succeed. The opposition is hoping that some critics of Najib within the governing coalition will either support the no-confidence motion or abstain, giving the motion enough abstentions to pass. Although critics of Najib within the governing coalition, like former deputy prime minister Muhyiddin Yassin, have harshly condemned the prime minister, they are unlikely to join the no-confidence vote, since they do not want to be responsible for aiding the opposition in any way. Without picking off a few members of the governing coalition, the opposition will be at least twenty-five votes short of carrying the no-confidence motion. But as a profile of the prime minister by Reuters notes, Najib faces other problematic votes in the coming months. He could find himself without enough votes from his coalition to pass the next fiscal year’s budget or to approve Malaysia’s participation in the Trans Pacific Partnership, since the TPP is not popular with many members of the governing coalition. “Losing either of those votes [on Najib’s proposed budget or the TPP] would significantly weaken the prime minister’s [political] position,” Reuters notes. A loss on the budget or TPP vote also would create challenges for Najib at December’s general assembly of UMNO, the dominant party in the ruling coalition. An even weaker Najib could prompt challengers to emerge at the general assembly.

After a decade, in the 2000s, in which China aggressively pursued warmer relations with many Southeast Asian nations, using a combination of diplomacy, aid, and soft power to woo its neighbors, the past five years have seen a significant chill in China-Southeast Asia relations. First, Beijing’s more aggressive pursuit of its claims in the South China Sea led to heightened tensions between China and other claimants---most notably Vietnam and the Philippines, but also increasingly Indonesia, where the armed forces are trying to rapidly modernize Jakarta’s naval capacity in part out of fear of China’s actions in the South China Sea. However, even as China alienated countries like Vietnam and the Philippines, it had until recently maintained relatively warm relations with several of the other leading Southeast Asian states, including Thailand, Myanmar, and Malaysia. These countries were either not involved in the South China Sea dispute or, like Malaysia, they had less at stake in the dispute than the Philippines or Vietnam. Thailand and Malaysia also historically have maintained close links to China for decades. In Myanmar, China’s investment and aid had become so important that, even as Naypyidaw attempted to boost relations with leading democracies, Myanmar leaders rarely offered public criticism of Beijing. After the May 2014 coup, Thailand’s military leaders apparently came to see the kingdom’s relationship with Beijing as even more important than in the past. Unlike democracies that withheld aid or publicly criticized the Thai junta, Chinese officials offered rhetorical support for the junta government and continued several high-profile joint infrastructure projects. But even in these countries, leaders and officials have become more willing to openly criticize Chinese foreign policy, as shown by events in Malaysia and Myanmar over the past week. In Myanmar, where talks over a permanent peace deal between the government and numerous ethnic insurgencies only resulted in a deal involving about half the insurgent armies, government officials this week openly blamed Beijing for meddling in the peace process. According to Reuters, one of the Myanmar government’s top peace negotiators announced that Chinese officials had tried to persuade several of the most powerful insurgent armies, including the Kachin Independence Organization and United Wa State Army (UWSA), not to sign the peace deal. Why exactly Beijing would try to get the groups not to sign remains unclear, but Beijing’s relationships with the UWSA and other groups give China a degree of influence over its border region, and perhaps Chinese leaders fear that a peace deal might undermine that influence. (A permanent peace agreement might stabilize the border and reduce the possibility of refugees fleeing into China, to be sure.) Meanwhile, in Malaysia some senior government officials have lashed out at what they perceive as an inappropriate intervention into domestic politics by China’s ambassador to Kuala Lumpur. As weeks of protests and counterprotests in Kuala Lumpur have taken on a racial tinge, China’s ambassador, Huang Huiking, visited the heart of Kuala Lumpur’s Chinatown and warned that China would oppose any efforts by protestors to target any racial or ethnic groups. ‘We will not sit by idly” if demonstrators target ethnic Chinese, the ambassador said in a statement.“We sincerely hope that Malaysia will maintain its social stability.” Although the ambassador’s sentiments were certainly understandable---protests at times had involved ugly anti-Chinese incidents---some nationalist Malay politicians reacted to Huang’s statement with anger. Malaysia’s deputy prime minister, a fierce nationalist, called on Huang to offer an official explanation, or apology, for his statement. The ambassador must “lay to rest claims that the Chinese envoy had intended to interfere in local affairs,” said deputy prime minister Ahmad Zahid Hamidi. Will Chinese leaders now respond in ways that ameliorate concerns about Beijing’s forceful regional diplomacy? China can ill afford to alienate Southeast Asian nations like Malaysia, who have served as effective mediators in the past and often sided with China’s interests within ASEAN.

CFR’s Civil Society, Markets, and Democracy (CSMD) Program highlights noteworthy events and articles each Friday in “This Week in Markets and Democracy.”  Sri Lanka and Tunisia Struggle with Accountability Recent events in both Sri Lanka and Tunisia show how complicated the balance between accountability for past wrongs and political stability in new democracies can be. This week the United Nations Human Rights Council released a long-delayed report detailing the abuses committed during Sri Lanka’s brutal, twenty six-year civil war (that ended in 2009), and called for the formation of a domestic-international hybrid court to investigate alleged war crimes. The newly-elected government under Sri Lankan President Maithripala Sirisena proposes instead an independent truth and reconciliation commission—similar to the post-apartheid South African body—to investigate crimes and compensate victims. In a process already beset with political maneuvering, critics worry that without international judges, prosecutors, and lawyers’ autonomy and leverage, alleged perpetrators—including former and current government and military officials—will remain free. In Tunisia, citizens are protesting a proposed economic reconciliation law that would enable corrupt officials from the former Ben Ali regime to avoid jail if they reveal their assets and pay fines. Many fear that if enacted, it would undermine the work of the Tunisian Truth and Dignity Commission’s transitional justice efforts, and democratic progress more generally by protecting the nation’s political and economic old guard. Malaysian Corruption Investigation Crosses Borders The globalization of finance includes illicit transactions. An ongoing Malaysian corruption scandal has moved into the international realm, after the government hindered domestic investigations into allegations that Prime Minister Najib Razak received nearly $700 million from the failing state-owned investment fund, 1Malaysia Development Berhad (or 1MDB). The money came to his private accounts from a British Virgin Islands-registered company and via Singapore branches of Swiss banks. So far, the Swiss Attorney General’s office has frozen tens of millions in 1MDB assets, and the United Arab Emirates is following the trail of over $1 billion dollars in missing state investment funds linked to 1MDB. If Malaysian civil society, multiple foreign authorities, and private banks can successfully come together to uncover the truth, it could prove a useful model to achieve the anti-corruption goals within the United Nations’ post-2015 development agenda being finalized next week in New York. Democracy Day: Where We Are in 2015 The United Nations’ International Day of Democracy (#DemocracyDay) celebrated the year’s advances and setbacks. The positive side counts recent citizen-led calls for government accountability. In Guatemala, citizen protests combined with sophisticated corruption investigations brought down President Otto Pérez Molina on charges of fraud, conspiracy, and bribery. In Lebanon and Iraq, citizens and civil society groups are demanding better public services and an end to corruption and political patronage. Yet more sobering trends multiplied as well—in particular government efforts to silence those who question public officials. In Azerbaijan, lauded investigative reporter Khadija Ismayilova was sentenced to nearly a decade in jail on trumped-up charges after criticizing President Ilham Aliyev and exposing pervasive corruption. Ahead of 2016 elections, Uganda’s parliament is debating a bill that would allow the government to shutter NGOs that threaten the vaguely-defined “public interest.” Similar legislation is under consideration in China and already in effect in Cambodia, Russia, and Egypt. Scholar Larry Diamond goes as far as calling the lack of progress a “democratic recession”—his timeline of democratic transitions petering out with the euphoria of the “Arab Spring.” Still, while regime change may have stalled, the clamor for better governance within existing democracies seems to be growing.