Thailand

On the surface, Southeast Asia in 2010 appears relatively peaceful. The saber-rattling between Thailand and Cambodia over a disputed border temple appears to be dying down, and internal conflicts in Papua and southern Thailand, though hardly dormant, have at least seen the level of bloodshed decrease over the past year. Yet as highlighted in a long article Thursday in the Financial Times, many Southeast Asian nations have gone on arms-buying sprees. Vietnam last year bought new submarines and fighter jets from Russia, which has re-emerged as a major arms seller in the region. Thailand recently bought its own new stock of fighter jets, from Sweden. Burma’s junta plans to buy a new round of fighters and attack helicopters from Russia. The factor linking together these purchases, as the Financial Times notes, is China. In many ways, China’s strategy in Southeast Asia, the first region of the world where it has achieved predominance, or at least parity with the United States, has been masterful. For nearly ten years, following the Asian financial crisis, China managed to build its power in Southeast Asia without sparking the kind of backlash one might have expected, especially since many countries in the region, like Vietnam, have long and painful histories of conflict with China. To take one example, while protestors in Thailand besieged a hotel where American and Thai officials were trying to negotiate a free trade deal, which ultimately collapsed, there was little public reaction in Thailand to the Asean-China Free Trade Agreement - which came into existence early in Thailand. But China is now in some ways a victim of its past success. Because it had incessantly promised win-win diplomacy and adherence to the principle of noninterference, as China has become more aggressive – and interfering – toward countries in the region, Southeast Asian leaders begin to call out Beijing for its hypocrisy. They are right: Over the past year, China clearly has become more aggressive in Southeast Asia (as it has in other parts of the world, since the financial crisis clearly has given Beijing confidence while weakening the Western powers). Over the past year, Beijing has bolstered its claims in the South China Sea by sending significant ships into the region to show the flag, setting up the Paracel Islands as tourism destinations which probably would require a build-up of infrastructure, and more forcefully advocating its claims to offshore petroleum in the South China Sea. It has hardly listened to Thai and Vietnamese complaints about dumping from southern China. It has pushed Southeast Asian leaders to cut their informal ties to Taiwan. It has publicly criticized the Burmese government’s offensive against ethnic minority militias, some of which have close ties to China. It has mostly ignored a rising tide of public resentment in Southeast Asia over Chinese investment, which often comes along with Chinese workers shipped in from the People’s Republic. All this doesn’t mean Southeast Asian nations are gearing up for war with China. They’re not that dumb; and, there are domestic reasons (i.e. keeping the army happy) in many of these nations for the big arms-buys. But Beijing shouldn’t just ignore Southeast Asia’s new weapons purchases. They are signs, however blunt, that China’s charm offensive is fading.

Although it was buried amidst the past month’s news of the global financial crisis and Barack Obama’s struggles to maintain any political momentum, the global monitoring group Freedom House released its annual Freedom in the World outlook, which assesses the state of political and civil liberties in each country. For the fourth year in a row, global freedom declined, which Freedom House said was the longest continuous decline in the nearly forty years it has been producing the report. (Disclosure: I participated in some of the Freedom House assessments of countries in Southeast Asia.) Indeed, 2009 was one of the worst years in recent memory for human rights activists, with crackdowns on prominent figures from Liu Xiaobo to Shirin Ebadi, whose Nobel Peace Prize was seized by the Iranian government. (Talk about spite!) They were just the most noticeable crackdowns – Vietnam has reversed gains in political freedoms and gone on the offensive against democracy activists and bloggers, Thailand has stepped up its use of the lese majeste law to put a chill into online discussion, China has imposed increasingly harsh sentences on human rights lawyers and activists, and Iran’s regime is nearing all-out war against the Green movement. This decline can’t be pinned on one factor, and in some cases the reasons are unique to each country, of course. But clearly several important factors have put democrats on the back foot globally: 1. The Financial Crisis When Western leaders are spending most of their time figuring out how to keep their economies from going the way of Lehman Brothers, they don’t have nearly as much energy for focusing on global human rights. (See: Obama’s trip to China.) 2. China For several years, commentators, including myself, have warned of China’s pernicious effect on global human rights. Probably, those warnings were overstated – at the time. The past year, Beijing has become much more confident and aggressive in combating human rights advocacy, probably because it feels more secure in the wake of the global financial crisis and after the successful 2008 Olympics. (See: Chinese pressure on Cambodia to deport Uighurs, China’s pushback against Google, China’s uncompromising Xinjiang strategy.) 3. The Middle Class Used to be, the middle class was assumed to be the key to democratization. Well, not so fast. In places like Thailand, the Philippines, Bangladesh, and many others, the middle class, repulsed by elected leaders who either display autocratic behaviors and/or fail to produce economic growth, actually have pushed back against democracy, which has then resulted in a rollback of freedoms. (See: Thailand since the 2006 coup, Russia under Putin/Medvedev.) 4. No One Stepping Up to the Plate Even as major Western democracies downplay human rights to focus on the global financial crisis, no one has stepped into their stead. India, a burgeoning power and the world’s largest democracy, often acts just like China on the world stage, abetting all manner of autocratic regime. South Africa has hardly become the beacon of global human rights advocacy some hoped after the end of apartheid. Japan is in domestic crisis. Brazil still has nowhere near the global clout to make an impact on rights, even if it wanted to. (See: South Africa’s support for Burma at the UN Security Council, India’s Burma policy.)

News this week that the Thai government would begin forcibly repatriating some 4,000 Hmong back to Laos was greeted by condemnations from the UN, the United States, and various human rights organizations. With good reason: Laos has a poor record of human rights abuses against the Hmong, many of whom fought with the United States in the Vietnam War, and the Thai government admitted, even as it was forcing the Hmong back, that it feared for the safety of some in the group who were more overtly political. The current Thai government hasn’t exactly set a high standard for refugee protection – when a group of Burmese Rohingya Muslims set out to sea, fleeing harsh repression, the Thai navy allegedly intercepted their boats and cast them adrift, with little food or water. Still, the Hmong deportation rises to another level, since, as I learned from many U.S. officials and even some Thais, a solution could have been worked out that would have allowed many or all of these Hmong to be resettled in the United States. There’s a lesson here for the United States. Hard on the heels of Cambodia’s decision to send a group of Uighurs back to China, another decision condemned by many Western democracies and the UN, Thailand’s move points up the diminished power of the United States in the region, after years of neglect of Southeast Asia by Washington. During the 1970s and 1980s, a time when the United States had far more influence in Southeast Asia, Washington was able to convince the Thais, who historically have been loathe to house any refugees, to at least allow Lao, Hmong, and Cambodians fleeing war to stay in Thailand until a home could be found for them. But these days it’s simply much easier for countries in the region to thumb their noses at the United States – since China provides an alternative to American power, the United States’ own moral standing has been degraded so far that it’s debatable whether Obama can restore it, and leaders like Thai Prime Minister Abhisit no longer will sacrifice their natural impulses and domestic constituencies to win Washington’s favor. (Though I’ve never seen a scientific survey, I’m sure that if a poll were taken most Thais would support deporting the Hmong back to Laos.) Unfortunately, the region’s leaders’ natural impulses and domestic constituencies don’t exactly provide much comfort to the oppressed.

While most of the US policy-making community focuses on the AfPak theater, in southern Thailand another violent insurgency, which has attracted virtually no media attention, has proven nearly as deadly. Last week the Thai and Malaysian prime ministers made a joint visit to war-torn southern Thailand; in the days just before the visit, militants in the south killed ten people. In fact, since 2001 the battle in the Muslim-majority south, which sits inside Buddhist-majority Thailand, has raged out of control, killing over 4,000 people. These days, southern Thailand looks as much like a war zone as a place like Iraq: Checkpoints and machine guns nests dot the roads, while IEDs detonate daily and insurgents routinely attack soldiers, teachers, monks, local officials, and even random innocent laborers, shooting them, bombing them, or kidnapping and beheading them. What’s most intriguing – and difficult – about the southern Thailand insurgency is that today, eight years after it detonated, no one seems to have a clear idea of who is behind the attacks, or what they hope to gain. In the most detailed analysis of the conflict, Thailand specialist Duncan McCargo comes up with several theories: the insurgents are separatists who want to split off from the rest of the country (the South was a Muslim sultanate until the early 20th century); they are angry young people who have been cut out of politics, and its spoils, in the South; they are increasingly radical Muslims influenced by charismatic local preachers; or they are relatively moderate southerners radicalized by the intrusive presence of the security forces, which have allegedly been involved in disappearances, torture, and other severe abuses in the South. Indeed, Thai security officials I’ve spoken with seem to have no clearer idea – they didn’t know who they could negotiate with to try to bring down the level of violence. In many cases, the Thai security forces were unsure if their interlocutors, usually local Muslim leaders, actually had any sway over the fighters. In some ways, in fact, the southern Thai insurgency may represent a new type of war, one in which alienated young men (primarily men) get involved in violence for no obvious reasons – and with no obvious goals. If Bangkok wanted to offer significant political autonomy in the South, as McCargo suggests they should, would that placate the insurgency? I am not sure. Even compared to, say, insurgents in Iraq, who similarly caused chaos in 2006 and 2007, the Thai militants are leaderless, atomized, and with few real demands. Doesn’t make for real optimism about the South.

Amid political uncertainty in Bangkok, a violent insurgency continues in the country’s majority Malay Muslim provinces in the south, with no possible settlement in sight.

As Thailand heads into snap elections April 2, embattled Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra tries to fend off protests from opposition groups who charge him with autocratic governance and corrupt business dealings.