Southeast Asia

Despite Myanmar’s recent transition to civilian leadership, the military has retained significant power and is most to blame for the sectarian violence against the Rohingya.

The current year has been one of significant backsliding for democracy in Southeast Asia, a continuation of a regional trend that has been in the works for more than a decade. This year, Cambodia’s long-ruling leader, Hun Sen, has taken the country back to the repression of the late 1990s, cracking down hard on the leading opposition party. Currently, co-opposition leader Sam Rainsy is in exile, after fleeing facing defamation charges. Co-opposition leader Kem Sokha is in jail on treason charges, supposedly being held in a remote prison. The government is shuttering NGOs, and essentially forced the prominent independent news outlet, the Cambodia Daily, to close its doors in September. Hun Sen has launched a series of broadsides against the United States, though he also has approvingly cited the White House’s treatment of the press corps. Meanwhile, in Malaysia repression on the opposition continues, while in the Philippines the brutal drug war and other abuses of the rule of law show no sign of abating. In Myanmar, it remains unclear whether the elected civilian government has any real control over the military, which is perpetuating a massive catastrophe in Rakhine State that has been called ethnic cleansing. In Thailand, the ruling junta remains in charge, the chief opposition leader has fled the country, and a crackdown continues on academics, journalists, and civil society. Next year is going to be a pivotal year for Southeast Asian democracy—and it could get much worse than it is today. Cambodia will hold national elections. Many Cambodia analysts, including opposition politicians, believe Hun Sen will stop at nothing to ensure that his party, the CPP, remains in power after the 2018 elections, even though the opposition made gains in the 2013 election, and also in this year’s local, or commune, elections. Hun Sen could, before the 2018 election, increase his crackdown—banning the CNRP, putting more CNRP members in jail, and clamping down harder on independent media. This year, besides the closure of the Cambodia Daily, the government in Phnom Penh ordered shut roughly fifteen local radio outlets, many of which aired independent programming. Radio Free Asia pulled its bureau in Cambodia out of the country as well. Meanwhile, Malaysia and Thailand may have elections in 2018 as well. Malaysia will surely have an election before the end of August. The opposition remains fragmented, and the ruling coalition is highly likely to win. Prime Minister Najib tun Razak, who recently returned from a visit to Washington, has been able to skillfully crack down on civil society while also avoiding having ongoing corruption allegations impact his domestic political maneuvering. He has continued to squeeze the opposition. As John Sifton of Human Rights Watch notes, the Malaysian government “has arrested dozens of opposition politicians and activists, charging them with sedition and other criminal offenses for criticizing the government or Najib on social media. Newspapers publishing reports critical of the government have been shuttered, and participants in peaceful protests have been arrested and charged with violating Malaysia’s restrictive Peaceful Assembly Law.” In Thailand, even the possibility of an election remains unsure, although there will likely be a vote in 2017. As I noted in a recent World Politics Review article, simply because former Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra has fled the country does not mean the opposition Puea Thai party has lost popularity. But, the junta may use every tool possible, if an election is held, to ensure Puea Thai does not win an outright majority in the lower house. And then there is Myanmar. The next year will be pivotal, to see whether the government can establish control over the security forces—or even wants to. This dynamic will shape the near-term future of Myanmar politics, and the direction of the ongoing crisis in Rakhine State.

Throughout this past summer, Thai politicians, journalists, and other opinion leaders waited anxiously for the conclusion of the trial of former Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra, who was removed by a military coup in May 2014. Yingluck had been brought up on charges that she mismanaged a rice subsidy scheme that wound up losing some $8 billion; the junta government claimed that her mismanagement also had allowed vast corruption in the subsidy program. The charges were somewhat unusual, since she was not personally accused of corruption in the program. In some ways, she was being charged with making bad decisions in government, which is not normally considered a crime. But, a central objective of the junta government has been to eradicate the influence of the Shinawatra family in Thai politics, and to break the bond between the Shinawatras and their mass of mostly rural supporters. The charges appeared, in part, like one way to crush Yingluck and her allies. Yingluck ultimately did not show up to hear her verdict on August 25, disappointing crowds of backers at the court, and she is believed to have fled Thailand. Will her flight destroy the Shinawatra family’s power, and further entrench the junta and its favored politicians? For more on the Yingluck case and Thai politics, see my new World Politics Review column.

In recent months, considerable ink and pixels have been spilled chronicling the growing humanitarian crisis in western Myanmar, and castigating the government led by Aung San Suu Kyi and the Myanmar security forces for their scorched earth policy toward Rakhine State in the west. But less has been written about possible actions that Naypyidaw, and outside actors, can take. In my new piece for Aspenia, I outline some potential immediate steps that could help stem the crisis. The piece can be read here.

Part Two Read Part One here.  Could the situation for democracy in Southeast Asia, which had seemed on the verge of having multiple consolidated democracies in the 2000s, get worse these days? Well, actually … In recent weeks, authoritarian rulers have demonstrated even more willingness to crack down in Cambodia and Thailand. And, Myanmar is descending into the kind of civil strife that could easily undermine the democratic transition—or even make some army leaders think they need to seize control of the country again. Likely worried about the opposition’s gains in 2013 national elections and in 2017 local elections—and perhaps emboldened by the election of a U.S. government that has demonized reporters and downgraded rights promotion as a component of U.S. foreign policy—long-serving Cambodian prime minister Hun Sen has gone on the attack against his opponents in the past six months. Hun Sen also probably is seizing this chance to defang the opposition before national elections next year. Hun Sen has now taken his crack down to a level not seen in decades. Last week, opposition leader Kem Sokha was arrested on treason charges. He was just one of many people who have been caught up in Hun Sen’s crackdown. In recent weeks the government also has forced the National Democratic Institute to remove its foreign staff from the country and end its programs in Cambodia. The Hun Sen government also has gone after the Cambodia Daily, one of the foundations of Cambodia’s independent press. The Cambodia Daily, which had been an important voice for independent reporting in the country, published its last issue yesterday. Hun Sen also is threatening Voice of America and Radio Free Asia’s Cambodia outlets, among other media outlets and civil society organizations. There are legitimate fears that Hun Sen may try to simply shut down the CNRP opposition party. Democracy in Thailand is not doing much better, although Thailand’s main opposition party, like the opposition CNRP in Cambodia, still probably enjoys significant public support. Former Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra apparently has fled the country instead of facing her court date on August 25, on charges related to her administration’s rice subsidy scheme. (Her verdict has been postponed until late September.) On the same day two weeks ago that Yingluck did not appear in court, her former commerce minister from the period of Yingluck/Puea Thai rule was given a forty-two year jail sentence in a case related to Yingluck’s charges. Some of these charges on the rice subsidy scheme are controversial, since those accused are standing trial essentially for government incompetence. Other Puea Thai leaders face serious charges. The military may indeed hold an election in 2018—or it might not—but in any case it has already tried to destroy the opposition, and to make sure that the armed forces have control of politics for many years to come. Then there is Myanmar. Since Aung San Suu Kyi’s government took power last year, it has concentrated on the economy and on the peace process with a number of ethnic minority groups. Indeed, Suu Kyi’s spokesperson has made clear that rights and democracy come behind economic issues and the peace process on the NLD’s priority list. So, Suu Kyi has said little as security forces have gone on a scorched earth campaign in Rakhine State since last autumn, and in recent weeks the security forces and an increasingly powerful Rohingya militant group have laid waste to Rakhine again. The Washington Post noted last week that “witnesses said Myanmar soldiers [have] torched villages and sent thousands of Rohingya fleeing across the Naf River to neighboring Bangladesh, which is already home to about 400,000 Rohingya refugees who have fled Burma in recent years,” yet Suu Kyi has not commented on the army’s tactics. The fighting in Myanmar shows no sign of ending. Human Rights Watch has documented massive burning of villages, and the United Nations reported this week that some 120,000 Rohingya have fled Myanmar in just the past two weeks, adding to the number of Rohingya as refugees or internally displaced people. Under Suu Kyi, Myanmar reporters also have been increasingly threatened, whether through defamation cases or simply by harassment from the security forces. There seem to be few signs of a better future for Southeast Asian democrats, at least in the near term. Indeed, if the past five years have been terrible for democracy in Southeast Asia, the next five look even more uncertain.

Part One Over the past five years, as I have documented in a number of books, articles, and policy papers, Southeast Asia, once seen as a potential model of democratic transition, has regressed badly. Ten years ago, Cambodia, Malaysia, Thailand, the Philippines, and Indonesia all were young democracies—or, at least, hybrid regimes that seemed to be making progress toward full democracy. By the early 2010s, Myanmar had joined the list of possible success stories. The Myanmar generals gave way to a civilian regime that, in 2015, allowed free elections that then brought a NLD-dominated government to power in Naypyidaw. But recent years have been brutally unkind to Southeast Asian democrats. Thailand suffered a coup in May 2014, and now Thais live under the harshest junta rule the kingdom has seen in decades. Thai civil society has been battered. Malaysia’s government has jailed opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim and other prominent opponents, and the ruling coalition seems likely to dominate the next elections; the last election was held amidst claims of massive gerrymandering and state funds being widely used in political ways. The most authoritarian states in the region, Laos and Vietnam, reversed any mild hints of political change they had made in the 2000s. In recent years, both countries have aggressively cracked down on online dissent and other forms of free expression. The Philippines is regressing as well. In his one-plus year in office, which has included his drug war, dubious extrajudicial killings of critics, and arrests of other critics, Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte has managed to undermine the rule of law. He has also harmed many of the institutions that had made the Philippines one of the most stable democracies in the region. And in Indonesia, some political observers worry that, even in the country enshrined as the greatest democratic success story in Southeast Asia, the roots of democracy are weakening. Hardline Islamist groups are gaining power in national and provincial-level politics, and played a central role in the defeat of former Jakarta governor Ahok earlier this year. Meanwhile, even President Joko Widodo is being accused of amassing undemocratic powers. New Mandala notes that, with his controversial new law that could allow his government to ban vast numbers of NGOs and other organizations, “Jokowi has placed the legal existence of every NGO and civic organization in Indonesia at the mercy of a unilateral executive decision.” Read Part Two here. 

On Friday, former Thai Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra will hear the verdict in her trial over allegedly neglecting management of a massive rice subsidy plan. She oversaw the rice subsidy during her government, which was deposed by the Thai military in 2014. The verdict could trigger new unrest in Thailand, which has been relatively calm for the past year. Yingluck, the younger sister of former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, is the most visible symbol of the Thaksinite Puea Thai party who still remains in Thailand. (Thaksin lives in exile, and no other Puea Thai leader has the name recognition of Yingluck.) Since the 2014 coup, Yingluck has been living a very curtailed life, but she has managed to remain in the public eye. She has done so by welcoming supporters at her house for nonpolitical gatherings that were then shared on social media, continuing to speak to the public via social media and her trial statements, and generally serving as a rallying point for Puea Thai supporters in the midst of three-plus years of military rule. Over the past year, the military has continued its campaign to crush dissent, but at the same time a veneer of calm has descended over Thailand—and not only because of the harsh repression. To be sure, the junta continues to severely restrict freedoms, going far beyond the actions of Thai military leaders in recent decades. Most recently, the authorities this month announced charges against a group of participants in a major academic conference in Chiang Mai, claiming that they violated a prohibition on public assembly. Their crime? New Mandala reported that it consisted of: “put[ting] up signs reading ‘This is an academic forum, not a military camp’ on the wall of a seminar room of the Chiang Mai International Exhibition and Convention Center during the Thai Studies conference, and [taking] photos with the signs.” Yet at the same time, the death of King Bhumibhol last year, the period of post-Bhumibhol mourning, the passage of a new constitution in 2016, and the expectations of elections in 2018 have combined to tamp down antigovernment sentiment. Opponents of the junta may hope that the military will finally give way in 2018, although the timeline for an actual election remains uncertain. Still, some Puea Thai figures may believe that encouraging large-scale protest is not wise at this time, given that the party seems poised to win any upcoming election. As Shawn Crispin has noted in Asia Times, the government’s own internal polls have shown that Puea Thai would likely win the most seats in the lower house of Parliament, though the new constitution is designed to make it very difficult for any party, including Puea Thai, to win a majority. Still, it is not out of the question that Puea Thai could perform so well, even in the new system created by the 2016 constitution, that it could win an absolute majority. A verdict that sends Yingluck to jail—rather than a not guilty verdict or a guilty verdict with some kind of suspended sentence—could actually help push Puea Thai toward that majority. A guilty verdict with jail time could lead to renewed public protests in Bangkok and the north and northeast, the heartland of Puea Thai backers. Even in the current climate of intense repression, the party’s core supporters have been active. Puea Thai backers have organized outside the Yingluck courthouse, and the junta has taken extensive preparations for larger unrest after the court’s decision. The junta has even threatened anyone who drives Yingluck supporters to the court. It also has reportedly mobilized thousands of police men and women to stand guard outside the trial venue. Indeed, a guilty verdict and jail time, issued in a country under military rule and for a charge that seems like a political prosecution to many Puea Thai supporters, would probably make Yingluck an even more sympathetic public figure. A not guilty verdict, meanwhile, would anger core junta backers and perhaps the top generals themselves; in the minds of the junta’s pro-military/royalist supporters, a not guilty verdict might make the junta look weak. As The Nation reported, the junta seems to understand the possibility of Yingluck looking like a martyr, noting that the military hoped that the former prime minister would flee the country rather than face the verdict. The junta’s desire not to see Yingluck made into a martyr may result in the court choosing a middle ground verdict, like finding Yingluck guilty but suspending her sentence. Such a middle path might keep the uneasy peace in Thailand that has existed since the king’s death last year, but the peace cannot hold indefinitely. The junta cannot postpone an election forever, and its favored parties will have difficulty defending the army’s record during its three-plus years running Thailand. The country’s economy has continued to stagnate, and decisions on infrastructure, the education system, and other important issues have remained deadlocked. The Yingluck trial has not proven a rally point for the junta, which is why the military may have wanted the former prime minister to simply leave the country.

Following the Association of Southeast Asian Nations’ (ASEAN) foreign ministers meeting earlier this month in Manila, China and Southeast Asian nations announced that they had agreed on a framework for negotiating a code of conduct in the South China Sea. In theory, a code of conduct would set guidelines on activities allowed in the Sea, including militarization and land reclamation. Both Philippine and Chinese leaders touted the adoption of a framework as a serious step toward reducing tensions in the South China Sea. Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi also announced that Beijing would be willing to launch negotiations about a code in November. Yet although the two sides have agreed on a framework, it will be almost impossible for Beijing to get ASEAN nations to agree to an actual code of conduct. For more on why a code is unlikely any time soon, see my new article for World Politics Review.

This week: cyber in ASEAN, quantum computing in China, cybersecurity regulations in the United Kingdom, and election hacking allegations in Kenya.

Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte, who blasted the United States repeatedly in 2016, and has reportedly had a lifetime of grievances against Washington, may be recognizing he needs to take a different approach to U.S.-Philippines ties. Duterte repeatedly slammed former president Barack Obama in 2016, and bristled at U.S. criticism of his brutal war on drugs. As the Wall Street Journal reported, this anger seemingly ran deep. Duterte grew up in the Philippine south, a hotbed of anti-American sentiment. According to the article, he had been infuriated by U.S. actions in Mindanao during his time as governor of Davao—and also by the United States’ reported refusal to grant Duterte a visa to visit. After Donald Trump was elected president, Duterte’s rhetoric toward the United States warmed somewhat. In part, Duterte simply seemed to like Trump’s style. The Philippine leader also surely realized that the Trump administration would not push him hard on rights abuses in his war on drugs—a realization that came true this week, when Secretary of State Rex Tillerson avoided mentioning Duterte’s rights abuses in his public appearance. As CBS reported: “Tillerson did not use the moment [of meeting Duterte] to take a stand for human rights. As Duterte and Tillerson stood and shook hands in the presidential palace, each donning a wide grin, Tillerson ignored a CBS News reporter's questions about the agenda of the meeting. Another reporter blurted out a question about human rights—which was hard to hear above the loud, incessant camera clicks in the room—but Tillerson didn't say anything … Tillerson never publicly addressed the brutal anti-drug tactics while he was in the country. When Tillerson met one on one with Duterte, two Filipino government officials say that Tillerson didn't mention the U.S. government's human rights concerns with regard to the anti-narcotics tactics.” But despite his warm words for Trump, noticeable in a call he held with the U.S. president earlier this year, Duterte still seemed determined to pursue a foreign policy that shifted the Philippines away from the United States and toward warmer ties with China, Russia, and other powers. He also appeared wary of seeming too conciliatory with Washington, even with Trump as president. After being invited to Washington by Trump, Duterte publicly declared that he did not know if he had the time to visit. But in the past three months, the major deficiencies of the Philippine armed forces, already known to defense experts in the Philippines, the region, and the United States, have become even more obvious to all. As regional powers like China and Vietnam spar over the South China Sea, backed by their military modernization efforts, the Philippines is left behind. As Islamic State–linked groups continue to battle the Philippine military in Mindanao, predictions of a rapid victory by Philippine government forces have proven hollow. The military has lost troops to friendly fire incidents, used conventional bombs that killed civilians, and still has not taken all of Marawi city back from the militants. As the military struggles in Mindanao, Duterte reportedly has asked Philippine congresspeople to increase funding to expand the armed forces. Duterte’s administration seems to increasingly realize it needs help. During the Tillerson visit, the Philippine president told the Secretary of State that he was a “humble friend” of the United States. According to NBC, the Philippines now may allow U.S. forces—probably drones—to launch airstrikes against militants in the southern Philippines. This would be a dramatic shift from Duterte’s former claims, earlier in his presidency, that he wanted to actually evict all U.S. forces out of the southern Philippines. Yet as the struggle for Marawi drags on, Duterte already had shifted, even before the NBC report. He had been allowing U.S. advisors and U.S. surveillance flights over Mindanao, as well as new shipments of U.S. small arms. As the battle against Islamic State–linked groups in Southeast Asia expands, the Philippine armed forces likely will need much more help—from the United States and other regional powers.    

Although the Islamic State group has been recruiting Southeast Asians for years, and Southeast Asians who fought with the Islamic State have steadily been trickling back to the region, only in the past six months have Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines, Singapore, and other countries in Southeast Asia and the Pacific dramatically bolstered their anti–Islamic State cooperation. The threat was there before, even though the numbers of Southeast Asians who traveled to Islamic State territory was relatively small—by some estimates, 800 to 1,000 Southeast Asians traveled to Islamic State–controlled territory, a low figure compared to the numbers who traveled from Tunisia and other North African nations to fight with the Islamic State. But now, with the siege of Marawi in the southern Philippines, a spate of recent violence in Indonesia such as the May 2017 attack, a new flood of Islamic State propaganda encouraging Southeast Asians to adopt Islamic State tactics and wage war at home, and the revelations that core Islamic State leaders in Syria had been funding the Marawi militants (according to a report by the Institute for Policy Analysis of Conflict), Southeast Asian nations are getting more serious about the Islamic State threat. Even before the past six months, the danger was there. The fact was that the Islamic State allowed an entire brigade in Syria and Iraq to be filled with Malaysians and Indonesians, and Islamic State–linked attackers launched a terrorist attack in downtown Jakarta in January 2016. Leading Southeast Asia terrorism analysts, such as Jakarta-based Sidney Jones of the Institute for Policy Analysis of Conflict, long have been warning that Southeast Asians returning to the region from joining the Islamic State in the Middle East could win recruits in Indonesian prisons, where radicalism has thrived. Many terrorism experts warned that Islamic State–linked radicals could take advantage of lawless parts of Southeast Asia, like the Sulu Sea and the southern Philippines, to attract young Southeast Asian militants looking for somewhere to fight, but unable to battle the Malaysian or Singaporean governments at home, since Malaysia and Singapore have much stronger rules of law than the Philippine south. But as I noted in a recent Expert Brief, the administration of Rodrigo Duterte did not, until recently, focus enough attention on the growing threat of Islamic State–linked radicals in the southern Philippines. Manila mostly ignored what appeared to be Islamic State–linked groups’ warm-up attempts for the Marawi siege, like seizing another, smaller town in Mindanao prior to the Marawi siege. Duterte, for most of his first year in office, used his bully pulpit to lead his brutal “war on drugs,” and also did little to push forward the peace process in the southern Philippines that he had inherited from his predecessor, Benigno Aquino III. With the exception of Singapore, Australia, and to a lesser extent Malaysia, other Southeast Asian nations also did not adequately prepare for what appears to be a ramped up Islamic State interest in Southeast Asia. The Philippines, Indonesia, and Malaysia moved slowly on their plans to launch joint patrols in the Sulu Sea, taking more than a year from announcing the patrols to actually putting them into practice. Some Southeast Asian nations appeared hesitant to join the U.S.-led global anti–Islamic State coalition, or to participate in joint anti–Islamic State propaganda programs based in Malaysia. Now, Southeast Asian nations have started to take the regional Islamic State threat much more seriously. Besides the Marawi siege, the Islamic State has used its propaganda to encourage fighters to travel to Southeast Asia. What’s more, Islamic State leaders may see Southeast Asia now not only as a location to spread their message of radicalism but also as a place where core Islamic State fighters could eventually flee to—and then possibly coordinate global propaganda efforts out of if the Islamic State is completely pushed out of its territory in the Middle East. As Bilveer Singh notes in The Diplomat, “In place of the ISIS that was centered in Syria and Iraq, new bases of operation are likely to emerge. The export of the ISIS model is already evident in Libya and Yemen, and probably in parts of the Asia-Pacific.” Worried Southeast Asian and Pacific nations are now taking encouraging steps toward much closer cooperation in fighting the Islamic State. Late last month, officials from the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, Brunei, New Zealand and Australia met in Indonesia and announced plans to dramatically improve information sharing on Islamic State threats in the region and to cooperate on border control issues. Meanwhile, the United States has apparently joined the patrols in the lawless Sulu Sea, an important step forward in Manila-Washington cooperation in battling the Islamic State, and a sign of support for the regional Sulu Sea patrols. Singapore may also join the Sulu Sea patrols, a positive step, given Singapore’s highly advanced forces. Meanwhile, as Prashanth Parameswaran of The Diplomat notes, Australia has stepped up and is funding multiple efforts at regional collaboration in battling the Islamic State. It seems that, since the Marawi siege, the region’s worries about the Islamic State are producing real action.

Although General Prayuth Chan-ocha’s meeting with President Trump, which was supposed to take place this week, has been postponed, Thailand’s relations with the United States still appear warmer now than at any time since the country’s 2014 coup. Back then, in May 2014, Prayuth and other officers ousted an elected government, headed by Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra, which had been buffeted by street protests in Bangkok for months. This past April, the Trump administration issued an invite to General Prayuth for a White House visit. This was a break with the Obama administration, which had not hosted the coup leader in Washington, and which had kept some broader distance from Bangkok, reducing the size of joint military exercises, and taking other steps to curtail ties to the Thai junta. (Relations had been coming out of the post-coup freeze at the end of the Obama years, however.) In addition, even though Prayuth’s visit was delayed, Thai and U.S. officials, from the Department of State and the Thai Ministry of Foreign Affairs, held a session of their strategic dialogue last week. Yet the reasons for a recent warming of U.S.-Thailand relations do not demonstrate that much has really changed in Thailand’s stagnant politics, or in the slow-growing Thai economy. For more of why the warming means little about actual events in Thailand, see my new article for Aspenia Online.

In six months in office, President Donald Trump has reordered the foundations of U.S. foreign policy, alienated many traditional U.S. allies, remade the Republican Party, and generally dominated U.S. public discourse with his wild pronouncements and seemingly endless scandals. However, in the Asia-Pacific Trump’s impact, though substantial, has been more marginal than in North America or Europe, where Trump has created a massive divide between the U.S. government and governments of major partners like France, Germany, and Mexico. Overall, policymakers in Washington and Asia have come away from Trump’s first six months in office somewhat reassured that he has not totally upended most aspects of U.S. Asia policy. For more on my analysis of the first six months of Trump’s Asia policy, see my new piece for World Politics Review.

The National League for Democracy (NLD)-led government in Myanmar has now been in office for more than a year, with Aung San Suu Kyi as de facto head of government. Suu Kyi certainly wields sizable influence. In fact, Suu Kyi has often been criticized, by commentators and members of her own party, for keeping too tight-fisted control of actions by the government, so much so that NLD members of parliament seemingly have little to do. To be sure, on some policy areas, Suu Kyi does not have the level of control that leaders of other, more established democracies enjoy. The military remains an extraordinarily powerful actor in Myanmar, and one apparently capable of operating, in outlying areas at least, without even clearing policy through the Cabinet. The military retains its percentage of seats in parliament, essential control over its budget, and its strong resistance to any constitutional change. Proponents of constitutional change that might reduce the formal powers of the armed forces, like former NLD lawyer U Ko Ni, have been murdered. Nonetheless, there are areas of policy over which Suu Kyi should enjoy significant influence, and freedom of the press is one of them. Suu Kyi was a longtime opposition leader, at a time (mostly) when Myanmar’s media was tightly controlled, the security forces regularly detained reporters, and state media outlets used their pages to mock and condemn her. She could use her bully pulpit to promote independent media, greater freedoms for journalists working throughout Myanmar, and an end to media monopolies. She could step in strongly if journalists were detained, and call for greater transparency in government— transparency that might actually work in her favor, since a more vibrant Myanmar press could well expose abuses by the armed forces and, indirectly, apply pressure for constitutional change. But Suu Kyi has not taken this approach. Instead, over the past year, press freedom in Myanmar seems to have regressed. In some respects, press freedom in Myanmar now seems more restrictive than it was in the final years of the former Thein Sein government. The Suu Kyi government has not tried to change existing laws that are major barriers to a free press. The Committee to Protect Journalists’ Shawn Crispin notes: “Chief among those laws is section 66(d) of the Telecommunications Law, a broad provision that carries potential three-year prison terms for cases of defamation over communications networks. While the law was used only occasionally against journalists under military rule, politicians, military officials, and even Buddhist monks are increasingly using it now to stifle online and social media criticism.” The Myanmar chapter of the PEN press freedom group has estimated that over 55 cases have been filed, under this law, just in the year since Suu Kyi’s government came into office. Meanwhile, late last month three journalists were arrested in Shan State, under a different Unlawful Association law. These reporters included one from The Irrawaddy; they had been covering one of the country’s ethnic insurgencies as well as allegations of abuses by the state security forces. “The return of a climate of fear is very disturbing,” wrote The Irrawaddy’s editor-in-chief, Aung Zaw, after the publication’s reporter was arrested. As with the rising toll of defamation cases, Suu Kyi has said nothing about the arrests in Shan State. A spokesperson for her party told the New York Times, “For media personnel, press freedom is a key need … For us, peace, national development and economic development are the priority, and then democracy and human rights, including press freedom.” Meanwhile, Suu Kyi’s government has enacted other restrictions on press access.  It has made it nearly impossible for journalists to cover parts of Rakhine State in the west. The Suu Kyi government also recently refused to provide visas to UN investigators tasked with analyzing the situation in Rakhine State and allegations of abuse by Myanmar security forces in Rakhine State. In some ways, the Suu Kyi government is looking more and more like its predecessors.