Myanmar

Last November, Myanmar held its first truly free national elections in twenty-five years. In the months leading up to the vote, members of the opposition National League for Democracy (NLD), foreign diplomats, and many Myanmar voters worried that, no matter who actually received the most votes, the results would somehow be invalidated. After all, Myanmar’s military had ruled the country since 1962, when it first took power in a coup, and had only given way, in the early 2010s, to a civilian government that was led by a former top general, President Thein Sein. The military-installed government had written a constitution designed to bar the NLD’s leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, from ever winning the presidency, and the military had created a political party, the Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP), that would hold power in a civilian parliament. (Myanmar’s president is not directly elected, but instead chosen by members of parliament, and the military wrote a clause in the constitution barring anyone who had a foreign spouse, like Suu Kyi, from running for president.) In the run-up to the November election, the government had used all the powers of the state---state media, state funds for local projects, arrests and detentions of opposition political activists---to help the USDP win control of parliament and the provincial parliaments across Myanmar. The USDP did not even have to win a majority of seats to keep the army in power; the constitution reserved 25 percent of the seats in the lower house for military officers, so the USDP only had to win 25.1 percent of seats for the army and its allies to have de facto control. And in some respects, the civilian regime led by Thein Sein had taken strides toward effective governance, opening the country to foreign investment, restoring closer relations with leading democracies, opening up the local media environment, and freeing hundreds of political prisoners, including many members of the NLD. Just before Election Day, Thein Sein gave a speech in which he obliquely warned that if voters did not choose the USDP, Myanmar’s reforms could easily be endangered. Surely, most USDP officials felt, the Myanmar public, appreciative of Thein Sein’s reforms and scared of voting against the military’s favored party, would support the USDP. It didn’t happen. On Election Day, the NLD dominated contests for the national legislature and the provincial parliaments. The party won 86 percent of the seats contested in the national parliament, taking a majority of seats in the lower house of parliament, even with the military still being allotted 25 percent of seats. The NLD’s majority allowed it to choose Myanmar’s new president, Htin Kyaw. The NLD also won a majority of Myanmar’s provincial bodies. Many of the USDP’s most powerful politicians, who had been sitting in the lower house since the handover to civilian rule, were ousted. And unlike the last time Myanmar held free national elections, in 1990, the military appeared ready to respect the people’s wishes. In 1990, after the NLD had won 392 of the 492 parliamentary seats contested, the army refused to recognize the result, and simply continued running the country for another two decades. But this time around, Suu Kyi quickly met with the army leadership, and army chief pledged that the military would not intervene in the transition to a NLD-led government. Top leaders of the USDP echoed the army’s call for a calm transition, with USDP acting chairman U Htay Oo telling Burmese reporters, “USDP has lost to the NLD. We will accept this result.” As the results trickled in from Myanmar’s election commission, Myanmar citizens held a raucous, nearly nonstop party in front of the NLD’s headquarters in downtown Yangon. The foreign reaction to Myanmar’s election was, in some ways, even more euphoric. Obama administration officials I met in the weeks after the Myanmar election seemed almost giddy that the Southeast Asian nations, so long a byword for thuggish army rule, could actually now be led by the NLD. Myanmar’s amazing election was even more remarkable given that, in the countries surrounding it, like Thailand, Bangladesh, and Malaysia, democracy seemed to be going into reverse. Foreign media outlets, too, celebrated the election as a massive breakthrough. The Washington Post, whose editorial board had been known for its hard-nosed view on the Myanmar military regime, touted the elections as “a triumph of hope … a triumph for those who kept the flame [of freedom] alive.” For the White House, such celebrations were not surprising. The United States had been the most forceful advocate of economic sanctions against the junta until Barack Obama’s presidency. Many who served in the Obama administration considered rapprochement with Myanmar one of the biggest successes of Obama’s presidency. Hillary Clinton, who visited Myanmar as Secretary of State in 2011, and developed a personal bond with the NLD leader, used a whole chapter of her recent memoir, Hard Choices, to highlight Myanmar’s transition, and the U.S. role in it. Myanmar’s democratization reflects “the unique role the United States can and should play in the world as a champion of dignity and democracy,” Clinton wrote. It is “America at our best.” Now, the payoff of this revamped U.S. policy apparently had come. Myanmar would become a democracy, and perhaps in the future a rewritten constitution would allow Suu Kyi to become president. A democratic Myanmar would be peaceful and stable, an example to other countries in one of the most turbulent regions in the world. A NLD-led Myanmar would surely tilt toward the United States and American friends like India and Singapore, end Myanmar’s lingering civil conflicts, crack down on the trade in illegal narcotics, gems, and wildlife, and create an economic environment ripe for U.S. companies. This rosy narrative has more than a few holes in it. For more on my assessment of the administration’s Myanmar’s policy, see my new book review in the Washington Monthly.

Htin Kyaw, who is almost surely going to be the new president of Myanmar, was so unknown to the international media that when he was nominated last week for president by the National League for Democracy (NLD), stories about him were riddled with mistakes. Some news reports suggested that he had attended Oxford University (his father actually attended Oxford, while Htin Kyaw studied at the defunct University of London Institute of Computer Science), while other reports suggested he had been Suu Kyi’s chauffeur, a rumor strenuously denied by NLD spokespeople. The Irrawaddy’s Aung Zaw offers a more thorough profile of Htin Kyaw, a longtime NLD member. Aung Zaw notes that Htin Kyaw is regarded by many associates as disciplined, capable of communicating well with both domestic and international audiences, and highly organized. Since the NLD dominates the powerful lower house of parliament, Htin Kyaw is almost sure to be confirmed as president. (Myanmar’s president is not chosen by direct election; the upper house and the military also nominated presidential candidates, but Htin Kyaw is almost certain to be selected.) Despite Htin Kyaw’s positive traits, his most important qualification for the job is his lifelong, unalloyed commitment to Aung San Suu Kyi, who is constitutionally barred from serving as president. Even before the November 2015 election, Suu Kyi made clear that, if the NLD won, she intended to govern the country by proxy, and she has not shied away from that stance. Htin Kyaw certainly has demonstrated his fealty to Suu Kyi and to the party, serving on the executive committee of the foundation named after her late mother. He has known Suu Kyi since childhood, and he is the son-in-law of U Lwin, who was a co-founder of the National League for Democracy. Larry Jagan, one of the most experienced reporters on Myanmar, offered this analysis of what the relationship between Suu Kyi and a President Htin Kyaw might look like: The iconic pro-democracy leader is set to become ‘senior minister’ in the cabinet---along the lines of Singapore’s former prime minister, Lee Kwan Yew after he officially retired from the top post, according to senior sources in the NLD. The new position will possibly be within the president’s office, where she will effectively run the government, or as head of a new ministry to oversee the transition [to democracy.] Although Suu Kyi and other party leaders appear to be assuming that Htin Kyaw will be a perfect proxy, doing whatever a small circle of other NLD elites want, such an assumption may be short-sighted. Once inaugurated, Htin Kyaw will, constitutionally, have a significant array of powers that he could wield even without Suu Kyi’s support. He will have the opportunity, if he wants, to build his own power base and team of advisors. Even if Suu Kyi stands firmly behind him, Htin Kyaw also will have to play a major role, himself, in ongoing and difficult negotiations between the government and ethnic insurgent groups over the possibility of a nationwide peace deal, and between the NLD and the military over reducing the army’s influence in politics. The new president has little experience dealing with the ethnic insurgencies or the military’s top commanders, and may leave his own imprint on both of these delicate negotiations. The country’s recent history offers more lessons that the NLD’s leadership would be wise to heed. In recent years, other powerful leaders in Myanmar also mistakenly assumed their proxies would carry out their intentions unquestioningly. When Myanmar began its transition from junta role in the early 2010s, the junta’s leaders apparently believed that Thein Sein, the man they chose to manage the change, would be a perfect servant of the military. Yet soon after assuming the presidency in 2011, Thein Sein embarked upon a wave of reforms that , in many ways, appeared more ambitious and rapid than the former junta leaders had imagined. The reforms quickly won popular support, making the transition almost impossible to reverse.

Over the past six months, the Obama White House has rapidly bolstered diplomatic and economic ties with Cuba. Last month, Washington and Havana signed a deal restoring commercial flights between the two countries for first time in over fifty years; the deal, one of many agreements recently reached, came at the same time as Washington allowed a U.S. factory to set up in Cuba. The outreach to the island is an attempt, according to deputy national security advisor Ben Rhodes, to ensure that the U.S.-Cuba rapprochement is nearly irreversible by the time that Obama leaves office. To further cement ties, Obama will visit Cuba later this month—making him the first U.S. president to do so since Calvin Coolidge. Recently, White House officials also have begun mentioning a more specific template for this bilateral rapprochement, and for how Cuba might open up its economy and its political system: Myanmar. Since the first days of Obama’s first term, administration officials placed a priority on restoring closer U.S. ties with Myanmar. Myanmar was, at the time, isolated from the United States and most other democracies by decades of junta rule, destructive economic policies, and sanctions imposed after massive rights abuses by Myanmar’s leaders. The Obama administration believed that sanctions had failed to change the course of Myanmar politics, and that America’s inattention to the Southeast Asian country was making Myanmar a virtual Chinese client state. To reverse U.S. policy toward Myanmar, over the past seven years, the White House has indeed relaxed sanctions on the country, appointed ambassadorial level representation to Myanmar (the United States had an embassy in Myanmar, but it had been led by a charge d’affaires), launched new aid programs in Myanmar, and even considered restoring military ties down the road. The Obama administration sees Myanmar as a success story, and one in which the United States played a major role in the transition. Now, it apparently sees U.S.-Myanmar relations as a model as well. As Hillary Clinton notes in her memoir Hard Choices, the administration believes that it played a central role in pushing the Myanmar generals to move toward elections, and that the rapprochement with Myanmar was an example of U.S. diplomacy and soft power at its finest. A recent Washington Post article effectively summarized administration views on U.S.-Myanmar relations and how they could be a model for relations with Cuba. “There are important similarities” between the White House’s approach to Cuba and its approach toward Myanmar, the Post reported. U.S. deputy national security advisor Ben Rhodes told the Post that in both cases the White House was breaking from years of isolating these nations, and that the administration would set the foundations for a new relationship to be built over generations. For more on how the U.S.-Myanmar relationship could---or could not---be a model for ties with Cuba, read my new article on World Politics Review.

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.

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.

Last week, Aung San Suu Kyi, whose party will control Myanmar’s next parliament, participated for the first time in the government’s ongoing peace negotiations with ethnic minority insurgencies. As the Associated Press reported, Suu Kyi declared that she would push for a complete peace accord, one that includes the insurgent groups that did not sign an initial peace framework last autumn. The National League for Democracy (NLD)’s leader’s participation in the peace negotiations has raised hopes that the government can reach a final, permanent resolution with the holdout militias. Some of the holdout insurgent groups may trust Suu Kyi and the NLD more than the previous government, which was dominated by former military men, including some who had led firefights against the ethnic armies. Suu Kyi now could take other steps to reassure ethnic minorities that their interests will be represented in an NLD-led government, and to promote peace deals with the holdout groups. The NLD swept an overwhelming majority of seats in the November general elections, leaving ethnic minority parties with few seats in parliament; most of the incoming NLD MPs, even those representing minority-dominated areas, will be ethnic Burmans (Bamars.) Suu Kyi and the NLD could assure ethnic minorities that the NLD will listen to their concerns by appointing ethnic minority politicians to positions in the incoming administration and the new Cabinet. Suu Kyi also could make clearer her vision of a future federal Myanmar. The ethnically and religiously diverse country can only be governed successfully under some form of federalism, as politicians from nearly every Myanmar party now recognize. As Kachin leader Tu Ja told The Irrawaddy last week, “We are heading toward a federal union. The president [Thein Sein] said it in his Independence Day speech recently. Daw Aung San Suu Kyi has also mentioned this. The only question is what kind of federalism this is going to be.” Suu Kyi understandably wants to focus on achieving permanent peace deals first, since the most basic job of any government is to control its territory and have a monopoly on the use of force. But as Tu Ja notes, Suu Kyi and the NLD need to simultaneously offer some clearer hints about how a federal Myanmar would operate under their government. Yet a final, comprehensive peace deal may remain elusive. Some of the challenges to a nationwide, permanent peace deal remain so intractable that it is hard to understand how even a popular, popularly elected leader could address them. The United Wa State Amy (UWSA), the most powerful holdout group, has an estimated 20,000 to 30,000 men under arms, heavy weaponry, a powerful friendship with Chinese leaders in Yunnan province, and control of a de facto autonomous mini-state in northern Myanmar. According to many reports, the primarily ethnic Wa organization also has under its control one of the biggest opium and methamphetamine operations in the world. The UWSA has basically been let alone by the Myanmar army for two decades, and it runs most of the functions of a state in Wa-controlled areas in the north. If the UWSA were to sign a permanent peace deal, it probably would eventually have to give up its total control over the functions of a state, and it likely would eventually have to wean the area off of production of drugs, by far the biggest industry in Wa country. What financial incentives could the national government, and international donors, give the UWSA to eventually hand over control of Wa regions and give up its drug business? Even a gusher of foreign aid, and the promises of investment in Wa areas, probably would not bring as much revenue into the Wa region as drugs currently do. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the United Wa State Army’s representatives did not attend the meeting with Suu Kyi.

Ashlyn Anderson, Rachel Brown, Lincoln Davidson, Ariella Rotenberg, and Gabriel Walker look at five stories from Asia this week. 1. North Korea announces its “H-bomb of justice.” Jaws dropped around the world as news of North Korea’s fourth nuclear test lit up phones, tablets, and televisions on Tuesday. Those in South Korea and China reported tremors caused by the detonation, which registered as a 5.1-magnitude earthquake--almost identical to North Korea’s last nuclear test in 2013. North Korea’s official news agency released a statement claiming a successful test of a hydrogen bomb. Although the seismic evidence is consistent with a nuclear explosion, many doubt that North Korea tested a hydrogen bomb. Still, the test has renewed the call for action, and many are looking to China to toughen its stance toward North Korea. The UN Security Council is expected to layer on the sanctions, which so far have been ineffective in curbing North Korea’s nuclear program. Despite international isolation, Pyongyang appears bent on boosting the Kim Jong-un regime’s legitimacy in the eyes of its citizens through its display of nuclear capability, and on pursuing the unattainable goal of gaining the world’s recognition as a legitimate nuclear weapons state. 2. Literary disappearances rattle Hong Kong. Over the past week, anxieties have been mounting in Hong Kong over the mysterious disappearance of publisher Lee Bo and four of his colleagues. Mr. Lee, a British citizen, is the editor of a Hong Kong–based publishing house and a major shareholder in a bookstore that specializes in reading material critical of the Chinese Communist Party. Many suspect that the mainland Chinese government was involved in the disappearances, calling into question its respect for freedom of speech in Hong Kong and its agreement with Britain to allow Hong Kong’s “one country, two systems” doctrine to persist until 2047. In early 2014, another Hong Kong publisher was arrested while crossing into the mainland, but Mr. Lee’s case, if mainland authorities were indeed involved, might signal that Chinese security forces are becoming more brazen. CFR Adjunct Senior Fellow Jerome Cohen stated that such actions reflect “not only the extending reach of Chinese law, but the extending reach of Chinese lawlessness.” 3. Myanmar sets first meeting date for new parliament. Two months after historic elections, Myanmar’s new parliament led by the National League for Democracy (NLD) will begin meeting on February 1. Though the NLD captured approximately 80 percent of votes in the election, one quarter of parliamentary seats still remain allocated to the military. Many of the incoming members of parliament lack experience in the legislature, and thus the NLD has decided to offer a series of classes to prepare incoming politicians. Among the first orders of business for the parliament will be for the upper house, lower house, and the military to each put forward a candidate for president, who will then be selected by the vote of the entire legislature. The new president will take power after March 31 when the sitting president steps down. NLD leader Aung San Suu Kyi is ineligible for the presidency due to a provision barring those with close foreign relatives from serving in the position, but she has indicated that she will serve “above” whomever is chosen as president. 4. Delhi institutes odd-even traffic control program. Starting Monday, the Delhi government instituted traffic restrictions that limit private cars on the road depending on their license plate numbers. These restrictions are aimed at curbing dangerous air pollution levels in Delhi; the city’s air was ranked the most polluted of 1600 cities studied by the World Health Organization. Monday was the start of a two-week experimental period for the odd-even rules and the city has seen noticeably reduced traffic. The city government deployed thousands of traffic personnel to enforce the restrictions. Over one hundred violators were caught and fined in the first hour of the first day.  Furthermore, an additional three thousand buses were deployed to help transport those who were on their prohibited driving day. Promisingly, unlike on a typical day when the packed buses would be stopped in traffic, the buses this week were able to complete their routes. Proponents of the plan hope that experiences like the faster bus rides will help garner support for the program. 5. Chinese court to hear same-sex marriage case. A district court in the central Chinese city of Changsha has agreed to hear a lawsuit brought by a gay man named Sun Wenlin against the district’s civil affairs bureau for refusing to register Sun and his partner for marriage. Sun argues that China’s marriage law only specifies marriage as being between a husband and wife, not between a man and a woman. This is the first time a case on same-sex marriage has been heard by a court in China, making it the latest indication that attitudes about homosexuality are changing in the country. Until the mid-90s, China criminalized homosexuality and continued to officially label it a mental illness until 2001. Last year, a college student brought a court case against the Chinese Ministry of Education challenging anti-gay bias in the country’s textbooks and gay right activists claimed victory in a fight over a documentary on mothers of gay children that was censored by video-hosting sites. Bonus: China goes to Hollywood. In a historic deal, a Chinese real estate firm has agreed to purchase a majority stake in Legendary Entertainment, the producer of popular films like Inception and The Dark Knight, valuing the movie studio between $3 and $4 billion. The Dalian Wanda Group, China’s largest property developer founded with just $80,000 of borrowed money by Wang Jianlin, now China’s richest person, will be the first Chinese company to control a Hollywood studio. The move is no surprise given Wanda’s aggressive acquisition strategy, in areas ranging from healthcare to ecommerce, and the fact that movies are a big business in China. The purchase is also part of a broader trend of increasing foreign direct investment in the U.S. by Chinese companies, which grew from just $2.5 to $57 billion over the past decade.

Having won a decisive victory in last week’s national elections, Myanmar’s National League for Democracy (NLD), which will have an absolute majority in the next parliament, now will have to set its priorities for the next few months. The next months could be an extremely turbulent time in Myanmar, as the party proposes a compromise choice for president, the current USDP ruling party comes to terms with its massive loss, the military tries to ensure that it remains the most powerful force in the country, and the NLD negotiates with various ethnic minority leaders to ensure the next government is broadly representative of Myanmar’s people. Aung San Suu Kyi and her advisors should focus on several priorities in the coming months. For one, they need to be in constant contact with senior military leaders, and they need to identify high-ranking, influential military leaders who could potentially protect a civilian government if, in the future, the armed forces tried to intervene in politics. Finding a trusted coterie of top military leaders is essential for a young civilian government to survive in a country with a history of coups. After the fall of Suharto, Indonesian President B.J. Habibie found generals willing to support his government; after the end of Francisco Franco’s rule in Spain, the Socialists running the democratically elected government had to rely on King Juan Carlos to find senior military leaders to turn back a coup attempt. Former Thai Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra thought that, in the early 2000s, he had purged the Thai army of its most politically-minded generals and surrounded himself with officers loyal to him. He was wrong: In 2006, the Thai army deposed him in a coup. The new Myanmar government also will have to choose a president acceptable to the NLD rank-and-file, ethnic minority leaders, the military, and foreign countries. I will discuss the presidential choice in a separate post. Just as important, it will have to retain many of the capable officials and advisors who worked for the previous government, particularly on ceasefire deals with the ethnic insurgencies. Many of these advisors are former Burmese exiles who returned to the country after Thein Sein launched the reform process. Their expertise on the insurgencies and on economic policy, among other areas, will be critically needed in the next Myanmar government. In addition, in the coming months the NLD-led government will have to formulate some kind of policy regarding the ethnic insurgent groups that have not signed the national peace deal. Already, conflict has intensified in Shan State between the Myanmar military and the Shan State Army-North. More important, the government will need a strategy for the United Wa State Army (UWSA), by far the largest holdout group. The UWSA’s relations with the previous government and the Myanmar military have been deteriorating for several years, and the UWSA are not a force to be taken lightly. As Southeast Asia security analyst Anthony Davis notes, the UWSA is the largest non- state military force in Asia, and it has under its command armored vehicles, heavy artillery, anti-tank missiles, and surface-to-air missiles. The UWSA does not want to give up its de facto statelet in northeastern Myanmar, which operates like a separate country. Yet Suu Kyi and the NLD cannot be seen as simply allowing the Wa to secede, since the idea of actual secession will infuriate the Myanmar military.

Rachel Brown, Lincoln Davidson, Sungtae “Jacky” Park, Ariella Rotenberg, Ayumi Teraoka, and Gabriel Walker look at the top stories in Asia this week. 1. Afghans protest beheadings. Thousands of protesters gathered outside the presidential palace in Kabul on Wednesday following the beheading of seven Afghans in the southern state of Zabul. The individuals were taken hostage in the central city of Ghazni and relocated as many as fifty-six times before being killed with razor wire. An affiliate of the Islamic State group in Afghanistan is believed to have conducted the beheadings, although it has not yet taken responsibility. The demonstrators carried with them the coffins of the slain civilians who were all Hazaras, a predominately Shia ethnic minority that makes up approximately 15 percent of the Afghan population and had previously been persecuted by the Taliban. Now the group appears to be targeted by other Sunni fundamentalists as well. While the Islamic State group in Afghanistan is only loosely affiliated with the group of the same name in Iraq and Syria, it is estimated to have between one thousand and three thousand fighters now in Afghanistan. The largely peaceful protesters criticized Afghan President Ashraf Ghani’s ability to handle the current security situation, and some called for his resignation. The president responded to the protests in a national address in which he pledged to find and punish the responsible parties. 2. Myanmar takes a step towards “democracy.” On November 8, Myanmar held the first national elections for its legislature since the country began its transition from military to civilian rule in 2011. Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy (NLD) has won approximately 80 percent of the contested seats, more or less handing her party a safe majority in parliament and the ability to choose the country’s next president. Both Myanmar’s president, Thein Sein, and army chief, Min Aung Hlaing, have endorsed the results. The military, however, still appoints 25 percent of the seats in both the upper and lower houses of Myanmar’s parliament, effectively giving the military power to block any constitutional amendment, which requires at least 75 percent of the votes. Based on the 2008 constitution, the military also controls Myanmar’s defense, home affairs, and border affairs ministries and could seize power at any moment by declaring “a state of emergency.” Meanwhile, Aung San Suu Kyi and the NLD will be left dealing with high expectations and numerous difficult problems, which include social, economic, and ethnic issues, and the question of how Myanmar should scale back its ties with China and build more constructive relations with the West. Overall, the election was a positive development for the country, but the world may find Aung San Suu Kyi far less inspiring over time as she now has to govern and not simply inspire. 3. Nepal’s border blockade results in shortages of food and medicine. Nepal is quickly running low on medicine, fuel, and other essential goods due to a blockade caused by protestors on its border with India. Nepal, a landlocked country, relies heavily on imports from India to sustain its core functions. The leadership at Nepal’s largest public medical facility in Kathmandu predicted that the current supply of medicine will run out within a week. Nepalese leadership blames India for encouraging the protests by Nepal’s ethnic minorities, the Madhesi and Tharu, in the country’s southern plains of Terai. These groups are protesting against the new Nepalese constitution, demanding they retain significant control over the regions in which they live. India denies playing an active role in the behavior of Nepal’s southern ethnic minority groups but has expressed concern over their treatment at the hands of the Nepalese government. Meanwhile, the situation threatens to become a major humanitarian disaster and has provoked commentary by human rights activists as well as United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon. 4. Democratic Party of Japan begins to dissolve. The Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ), Japan’s largest opposition party that ruled the country from 2009 to 2012, appears to be falling apart. On Wednesday, core members of the DPJ, current Policy Chief Goshi Hosono and former President Seiji Maehara held a talk with Kenji Eda, former president of the Japan Innovation Party (JIP), and agreed to work for the dissolution of the two parties by the end of 2015. The move is to form a new opposition force powerful enough to challenge the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) coalition and Komeito in next summer’s Upper House election. The DPJ has been suffering from low support ever since it lost office, and the most recent polls by Japan’s major newspapers show that while support for the LDP hovers between 34 and 40 percent, that for the DPJ only remains between 7 and 8 percent. The conservative force within DPJ has been critical of the current leadership’s pursuit to align with the Japanese Communist Party and its failure to deepen the Diet debate over security legislation bills that passed in September. 5. Congressional delegation visits Tibet. During a legislative exchange trip to China last week, seven members of the U.S. Congress, including Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, visited Tibet. In the past, Pelosi has been an outspoken critic of rights abuses by the Chinese government in the province, saying that ignoring the plight of Tibetans would mean losing “all moral authority” on human rights. The Congressional trip was significant because Tibet has been largely closed to journalists since anti-government protests in 2008 in which hundreds of Tibetans were imprisoned or shot dead by the government. Pelosi and friends weren’t the only U.S. officials in China this week: Deputy Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas was in Beijing meeting with Chinese Minister of Public Security Guo Shengkun to plan a December 1–2 meeting between officials from the two countries to discuss cybersecurity. Bonus: Former Chinese taxi driver buys $170 million painting. On Monday, billionaire Liu Yiqian won a heated auction at Christie’s in New York City for an oil painting by Amedeo Modigliani for a whopping $170.4 million—the second-highest price ever paid for a work of art at auction. Growing up in Shanghai, Liu dropped out of middle school and drove a taxi before striking it rich through stock trading, real estate, and pharmaceutical sales during the 1980s and 1990s. Now worth an estimated $1.5 billion, Liu and his wife are avid art collectors and in the past few years have opened two art museums in Shanghai filled with pieces from their collection. One art-world figure gibed Liu for just buying “the most expensive things,” and last year Liu was criticized for sipping tea from a $36 million Ming dynasty cup soon after winning it at auction. Although forgeries abound in the Chinese art market, in recent years fine art has been seen as a relatively safe investment compared to real estate or stocks.

This past Sunday, Myanmar men and women voted in their first true national elections in twenty-five years. On Election Day, the mood in many towns and cities was exuberant. The 1990 elections, the last national elections, were essentially annulled by the armed forces, which continued to govern until launching a transition to civilian rule in 2011. Unlike in 1990, this time many Myanmar people believed that the election would be upheld, leading to the country’s first democratically elected government in five decades. On the campaign trail, the National League for Democracy (NLD) and other parties drew huge rallies, and just before Election Day, opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi, head of the NLD, held a press conference that drew a massive mob of foreign and domestic reporters. On Election Day, Myanmar voters came to the polls in huge numbers. Some six thousand candidates, representing over ninety parties, ran in the election. According to one estimate by Myanmar election officials, some eighty percent of eligible voters voted on Election Day, a huge turnout given the remoteness of some areas of the country. After the polls closed, people flocked to the NLD’s headquarters in Yangon, to cheer and watch results coming in on large screens. Election Day proceeded, overall, with what appeared to be minimal irregularities and no significant episodes of violence. The NLD appears to be heading toward a large victory, one that would give it a huge majority of seats in the 664-person Parliament.  Several leading members of the government’s Union Solidarity and Development Party already have conceded, although final tallies are not due until  later this week. Now, however, the NLD and Suu Kyi still face an extremely difficult task in governing the country. For more on my analysis of Myanmar’s elections, read my latest piece in World Politics Review. 

On November 8, Myanmar held general elections, a milestone in the promised process of democratization and political reform. Early results indicate a landslide victory for the National League for Democracy (NLD), the party led by former political prisoner Aung San Suu Kyi. Read my interview with The Diplomat about what to expect from Myanmar’s new government.

Myanmar’s election last Sunday has been hailed, by the world, as a major step forward for the country’s young democracy. The excitement on the ground in Myanmar in the days leading up to the election, and on Election Day, was intense---Myanmar residents reported a kind of giddy feeling in many cities and towns, as people thrilled to the idea of voting in a real national election for the first time in twenty-five years. On the campaign trail, Aung San Suu Kyi and other National League for Democracy (NLD) leaders drew enormous and often jubilant crowds, similar to the situation before the 1990 national elections. When Suu Kyi gave a press conference at her home in Yangon, just before Election Day, reporters scrambled to get inside as if they were in a rugby scrum. But in western Myanmar, in Rakhine State, the mood was far more ominous. The situation in Rakhine State remains extremely tense; many aid workers believe that large-scale outflows of refugees from western Myanmar are about to begin again, potentially leading to another high seas crisis. Many Muslim Rohingya could not vote, since they had been removed from voter rolls months ago, in what Rohingya experts believe was a clear effort to disenfranchise Rohingya voters. (In August, the New York Times reported, “Hundreds of thousands of Rohingya who cast votes in elections five years ago have been struck from the electoral rolls, election commission officials have confirmed.”) Those who could still vote could make little impact on the election, since they were isolated in small communities, in camps for displaced persons, and in remote locations. Few political parties attempted to woo the Rohingya vote. Meanwhile, parties that tried to run Muslim candidates anywhere in Myanmar often found their candidates rejected by national election commission. As Thailand’s Khao Sod reported, “Of the more than 6,000 candidates running in the elections, the overwhelming majority of them are Buddhist, and only 28 are Muslim, representing just 0.5 percent of candidates, according to the final list of candidates released by the Union Election Commission.” What’s more, a hard-line, Buddhist, ethnic Rakhine party seemed to have little problem registering candidates, and campaigned vigorously throughout western Myanmar. The party’s rallies frequently drew large crowds, and it seemed to enjoy more support throughout western Myanmar than even the National League for Democracy did. In the run-up to Election Day, neither the ruling party nor the NLD provided much hope for the Rohingya. Apparently fearful of efforts by hard-line Buddhist monks to tar the NLD as pro-Muslim, in the days before Election Day Suu Kyi carefully distanced herself and her party from the Rohingya and other Muslims in Myanmar. (The same monks had, in September, pushed through apparently anti-Muslim legislation at the national level.) At the press conference before Election Day, Suu Kyi cautioned reporters and the world not to “exaggerate” the challenges faced by the Rohingya, even though a recent report by Yale Law School’s human rights clinic suggests a genocide against the Muslim minority group may be underway.