India saw what Myanmar did

A late read from Cambodia's darkest days

December 19, 2019

Hello friends!

This will be the last long reads of the year. If you’re looking for much longer (they’re called books) reads to dodge family over the holidays I’m reading This Is What Inequality Looks Like and A Great Place to Have a War both of which I super recommend. 

Christmas discounts are still available for one-year premium subs, so get 25 percent off here:

This is a day early so we can have a look at the Maguindanao verdict which is coming out right now.

Next Monday, I won’t be doing the regular blast rather tying up some loose ends so we can begin again! The relentless march continues!

Please forward this on to any interested friends.Erin Cook

I’ve spent a lot of this week out of my regular reading, trying to get across India and the CAB. This column from the FT looking at how this sort of citizenship law has roots in Myanmar is very handy if not horrifying. 

The context for the Indian bill has also raised alarms. The government — which claims India is being swamped by illegal Muslim migrants from Bangladesh — is gearing up for a massive national exercise to assess which of India’s 1.3bn residents is eligible for citizenship.

Echoing demands once made on Rohingya, Indians are expected to have to prove their ancestors were resident in India in the first years after independence — or face the prospect of being declared illegal migrants, liable to detention and deportation.

Educators were among the targeted groups during the Khmer Rouge, a policy which has left a huge mark on contemporary Cambodia after generations missed out on formal education. But there are efforts to bridge that gap.

The regime’s deliberate attack on education was designed to be irreversible, destroying an estimated 90 per cent of schools. After the fall of the Khmer Rouge, every aspect of society had to be rebuilt, especially education. Today, in Cambodia, the poor population are still largely uneducated. An entire generation of children during or in the years following the regime missed out on school. 

When parents haven’t been to school themselves and can’t afford to feed their child, the chances of the child attending school are slim. This lack of household funds to cover school supplies, like books and uniforms, and informal school fees, contributes to the high number of out-of–school children in Cambodia at primary level of education, estimated by Unesco to be over 186,000 in 2018.

I already love anything that goes up on the Lowy Institute’s Interpreter, but this column idea is great. Writers, academics, thinkers etc. take a look at how they felt at the time and how they feel now about truly historic events. And here’s Milton freaking Osborne on the Khmer Rouge tribunal — how lucky are we!

In this discussion I should note that both when I wrote in 2009, and indeed still today, I am not a disinterested observer of developments in Cambodia. I approach my analysis of the country still very much aware that a number of close personal friends whom I came to know between 1959 and 1971 died at the hands of the Khmer Rouge, either through execution or physical neglect, and this fact has undoubtedly affected my judgment – I wrote about three of them in some detail in my book Before Kampuchea (1979 and 1986).

Yes, yes, YES! I’ll always go in to bat for Singapore and I’ll be adding this piece from VICE to my arsenal. Keep your annoying bars where you have to guess the password before going through a secret door and paying $25 for a whisky sour, give me the Kopitiam and a couple of longies (distinctly different to a longyi, FYI). 

Apart from the cheap beer and the vendors’ endearing quirks, I also like Kopitiams because they’re so unpretentious. No “craft beers” or “artisanal cocktails,” the Kopitiam is purpose-built with practicality in mind, not personality. That’s not to say they lack character. On the contrary, they’re overflowing with it.

The personality comes from the customers who look to its tiled, off-white walls for sanctuary. With some Kopitiams open until the next morning, you meet all kinds of people stopping by for refreshments. There are the leery-eyed old-timers playing poker, shuffling decks late into the night. In another table are food delivery riders slouched in clouds of cigarette smoke, eager to make their next buck. Perhaps most interesting of all are the growing groups of young adults, mostly university students, who choose to come here for a drink, giving the newest concept bars a miss.

The coast of Pinut-an has been a destination for those seeking riches for centuries. The area has loads of quartz and within that some gold deposits. Since the 1970s locals in the area thought, sod this let’s get it straight out of the sea and dive sans-equipment. The photos here are something else.

Gaylo heats a small piece of amalgamated gold over the kitchen stove, shielding his nose and mouth with an old T-shirt to avoid inhaling mercury vapors. Many miners, he says, don’t even take that basic precaution. Gaylo, who earlier worked as a surveyor for multiple mining firms, says gold mining offers “monetary opportunities” and helps him support the community and even workers from other regions with jobs. Each gram of gold fetches 1,300 pesos — more than $25 — in the market.

Cambodia’s been beefin’ with the European Union for a year now, but relations with the US are always patchy. The latest flare-up between Hun Sen and Trump (Christ, what a duo) has been quelled somewhat, especially with Phnom Penh needing to shore up exports and Washington worried about Beijing swooping in. So what does this look like, and where to next?

U.S. ambassador to Cambodia, W. Patrick Murphy, handed Prime Minister Hun Sen a letter from President Donald J. Trump on November 21. The letter, aside from diplomatic small talk, made an assurance that the U.S. would not seek regime change in Cambodia – clearly an attempt to dispel paranoia among the political elite in Phnom Penh.

Hun Sen quickly wrote back welcoming Trump’s assurances and that his government wanted to “restore trust and confidence” with the U.S. He also thanked the Trump administration for “understanding” his government’s course of democratization.

There are two Singapores (there’s more than that, but for the purpose of this there’s two). The Singapore that has nationals bragging about the most powerful passport and foreigners flocking to pay way too much for a Singapore Sling at Raffles. Then there’s the Singapore where people struggle to make ends meet and would never dream of wasting money on a frankly overrated cocktail. 

During the single-night count where volunteers came across 921 homeless people, 191 were still awake and 88 agreed to be interviewed.

Among them, just under four in 10 had housing registered in their names, while a similar proportion said they could have stayed with family, friends or at their workplaces. But they chose to sleep outside because of family conflict, not wanting to inconvenience friends, problems getting along with co-tenants, or wanting to be near the workplace.

About half of the interviewees said they had been sleeping outside for between one and five years, with a third having done so for more than six. Just under two in 10 had been outside for less than a year.

I love this one! We so often hear about the drug trade in Myanmar, watching this video from Al Jazeera on how one rebel army is treating addicts is illuminating. The rehab methods seem fairly wild, there’s footage of a woman treating an injury to a man’s skull. 

Things change a lot in Vietnam but two things are constant — the food rules are women are the keepers. It’s a very interesting read about how women thrived in the micro businesses which popped up post-Doi Moi. Why did I watch this when I’m stuck on a train for hours with nothing but a sad Lawson’s lunch box?

For young people and children born and raised in Myanmar’s more restive states, life is much more difficult. Lwe Naw’s father was recruited to an armed force before he was killed, living her and her family to fend for themselves. Now she’s better known as Pyinnyasari, the name she took after becoming a nun. 

She says she sorely misses her mother and younger brother but still considers herself fortunate to have been educated in a place far from armed conflict. “A lot of my friends [from home] wanted to come here. They said I was lucky,” she said. While she was happy being nun, she said she hoped to soon leave the Sangha, as the Buddhist monastic community is called, and become a teacher in the state school system.

Pyinnyasari’s teacher at Kalaywa Tawya is Wunnasari. She, too, is a Ta’ang who fled conflict in the northern Shan hills, arriving at the monastery 20 years ago. It has become a permanent home, where she oversees the education of younger nuns.

This from Friend of the Letter Sophie Raynor is beautifully written and the illustrations by Stephani Soejono elevate it to one of the best pieces this month. Domestic violence in Timor-Leste is, like much of the region, rife and seen as a private household matter. Civil society and community groups are now plugging that gap.

“When the husband beats the wife, she wants to go to the family to solve it,” Amaral says. “The family says, ‘oh, we haven’t spoken with his [elders] yet.’ They don’t want to be responsible. And then if a woman doesn’t find justice in the family, she wants to go to her church. But the priest can’t receive her; ‘you’re not married in the church, it’s not my responsibility.’ So, culture can’t grant justice, church can’t grant justice, civil law can’t grant justice.”

🇰🇭 Lost in Cambodia (The Guardian)

This is an old one, reshared in a ‘Twitter Tankies backing Beijing over Uighur and Hong Kong will not be remembered well’ fashion. Malcolm Caldwell was an academic who, despite increasing evidence to the contrary, continued to support Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge mission. He went to Cambodia and he never came back. This is a fascinating read, but also a vital lesson. It is a decade old so while it does touch briefly on Hun Sen and the CPP it doesn’t get into it, just a heads up. 

But why would he seek international support by killing one of his few remaining friends from abroad? It makes no sense. "Don't apply rational thinking to the situation," Becker cautions. "It was crazy. Crazy. Malcolm's murder was no less rational than the tens of thousands of other murders." The journalist Wilfred Burchett claimed to have seen a Cambodian report not long after Caldwell's death, which stated that he "was murdered by members of the National Security Force personnel on the instructions of the Pol Pot government". Burchett theorised that Caldwell had changed his mind about the regime, but all the available evidence indicates otherwise. In the end, Becker's conclusion seems to be the most satisfactory: "Malcolm Caldwell's death was caused by the madness of the regime he openly admired."

Reply

or to participate.