🇹🇭 Is Yingluck coming home?

Hello friends!

A long one for the Mekong today. Even with all the leaders hanging out in Melbourne, there’s plenty going on. Let’s crack in.

Also, this isn’t the purview of our Mekong section but I have a piece in Australian Foreign Affairs today about the Indonesian presidential election. It was super fun to write and probably the last one for the season!

Erin Cook

🇹🇭 Yingluck in the clear, what next?

Scraps. There are two enormous stories in Thailand at the moment, but neither has much to do with what we cover here. Still, it will be remiss to not mention the truly bizarre clash between Pinoy transgender visitors and local Thai transgender workers in Bangkok on Monday night. There’s some hideous language used to cover this and it’s tough to find decent stories, but this ThaiPBS story has the bones. Elsewhere, a Swiss fella who allegedly kicked a woman Thai doctor in Phuket is public enemy number one and will face court for assault.   

Is she coming back? Yingluck Shinawatra is in the clear for negligence charges, the Supreme Court ruled Monday, as reported by Reuters. This was the final case the self-exiled former prime minister faced from her time as leader and came just weeks after big brother Thaksin was released from whatever we call that. Detention? I want to know if she’s coming back! Her midnight dash in 2017 was one of the first big stories to happen in the region after I launched this newsletter so I feel very invested. 

‘Critical situation.’ That’s the message from the prime minister’s office over an economy that ‘requires urgent stimulus measures and a potential rate cut,’ Reuters reported Monday. Reducing rates is off the table, but eyeing off big time investment from firms like Tesla is hardly a sure — or quick — thing. 

Pheu Thai-watch. Two great pieces today in the ‘who is actually in charge here?’ genre. Termsak Chalermpalanupap writes for Fulcrum that Prime Minister Srettha Thavisin’s control of the party is much looser than it appears. Srettha has previously confessed to not knowing many of the MPs who keep him in the hot seat (not to mention the party hardly got a mandate from the people). Keep an eye on Paetongtarn Shinawatra, the daughter of Thaksin and leader of Pheu Thai. Rumours are swirling that she’s on her way to cabinet and the ‘digital wallet’ policy that Srettha bet his credibility on looks less than certain. Read this whole thing if you love Bangkok intrigue. 

Credibility might be a broader problem for the party, Ken Lohatepanont says in this report from Al Jazeera. “There is probably a sizeable core of Pheu Thai voters who remain loyal to the party and the Thaksin brand and who would stick to the party regardless of the deals it cut. But for ‘softer’ Pheu Thai voters who were on the fence between voting for Pheu Thai and Move Forward in the last election, I don’t think that they’ve done nearly enough to justify the grand compromise they have made.” 

🇰🇭 Things aren’t that bad in Angkor Wat, govt says

Homecoming. It’s been a minute since we’ve heard about the evictions of families at Angkor Wat. A report from Amnesty International back in November said thousands had been forcibly removed from the area, including people whose families date back “several generations,” as Cambodia looked to shore up the site for tourism.

In a report produced by local officials for UNESCO and released Monday, Cambodia denied the Amnesty allegations and said it was only booting out squatters, not residents of the 100 or so traditional villages around the gorgeous complex. “At the Angkor heritage site there are 112 villages where people have been living for generations, but there are squatters who have been coming in, and these squatters are the people who are being relocated, not the people living in the traditional villages,” Long Kosal, spokesperson for the Cambodian government body in charge of the Angkor Wat site, told the Associated Press.

As if, Amnesty said in response. The report is all cherry-picked details and not reflective of the situation on the ground, the organisation said. “It was never made clear to the families who those families were ... and therefore who would ultimately have to leave and who would get to stay. So fast forward to now, that confusion remains on the books,” Montse Ferrer, the head of Amnesty’s research team investigating the Angkor Wat resettlements, told the AP. 

Trafficking status report. Here’s CamboJA with a follow-up to a question a lot of us have been wondering. How effective is the government’s crackdown on scams and human trafficking after so much explosive testimony in recent years? The government has collaborated with international partners to repatriate Cambodians who have been trafficked abroad and all rescues are a win, in my book. But, warns Moeun Tola, the executive director of the Centre for Alliance of Labor and Human Rights, it remains a “worrying situation.”

Women being trafficked to China as would-be brides still allegedly occur despite massive coverage. “After the case was publicised, Chinese and Thai authorities tightened their grip on new cases involving the trafficking of Cambodian women through the Vietnamese border at the mainland for export to China. We do not know the exact facts but if the victim‘s claim is true, the authorities have conspired to help the perpetrators and are involved in trafficking and corruption,” he said. 

Am Sam Ath at Licadho says the government has done a lot of great work in this space but agrees more needs to happen. “This problem has not been resolved. It requires an in-depth study by stakeholders, strengthening of law enforcement and elimination of systemic corruption,” he told CamboJA.

A long farewell. The Phnom Penh Post is strictly online from this month, the owners announced over the weekend and reported nicely here in an AP obituary. It’s been a slow death for the paper after it was sold in 2018 to a Malaysian businessperson widely seen as a ‘proxy’ for the Cambodian People’s Party. From my experience as a thirsty reader of Cambodian news, the drop in quality was immediate and terminal. Still, it’s the end of an era. The paper was first established in 1992 as Cambodia emerged from its hideous years — and ended up covering the hideous years to come! 

🇻🇳 Big money, big charges and big sentences

The trial begins. Vietnam’s enormous embezzling case, involving some 90 defendants in a $12 billion scam, began Tuesday and is expected to run until April, Reuters reports. Real estate tycoon Truong My Lan is at the centre of the case revolving around the siphoning off of funds from the huge Saigon Joint Stock Commercial Bank. 

The whole thing is so messy and complicated, please allow me to quote a full paragraph from Bloomberg: ‘Authorities allege there were “ghost” companies, payoffs to government officials and a bank she illegally controlled that disbursed loans to herself and her allies worth about 11% of the nation’s 2022 GDP. Her personal driver secretly shuttled millions of dollars in cash across the city’s chaotic streets, police say. Twenty-four government inspectors — whose jobs are responsible for ensuring the health and safety of the banking system — are alleged to have taken Lan’s money to cover up violations.’ She faces the death penalty. 

Directives. A crackdown on civil society, including trade unions, is coming, Bangkok-based The 88 Project warns in this report from Al Jazeera. The organisation obtained Directive 24 in which ‘officials are asked to closely monitor trade unions and labour disputes, and ensure that new labour groups are not established based on ethnicity or religion.’ The directive also warns officials to keep an eye on foreign aid and investors who “hide in the shadows” and may want to take over local industries. 

“The mask is off. Vietnam’s leaders are saying that they intend to violate human rights as a matter of official policy. They are now directly implicated in abuses by the state and should be isolated, not embraced, by the international community,” Ben Swanton, co-director of The 88 Project, said in a statement, as reported by Al Jazeera. 

The outlet notes this directive, which was issued in July, is in contrast with the planned ratification of the International Labour Organization’s Convention 87 on labour rights. The ratification is due later this year after a decade of negotiations. 

Hold on, what happened to becoming the manufacturing hub of the planet? Labour crackdowns and immense growth have hardly been oil and water elsewhere in the world, but with Hanoi courting partnerships around the world the revelations should give some ostensibly liberal Western democracies pause. It probably won’t (chips, damnit, chips!). 

It’s more of the same, says Carlyle Thayer, over at UNSW. “Directive 24 does not signal a new wave of internal repression against civil society and pro-democracy activists so much as business as usual, that is, the continuing repression of these activists,” he told the BBC in this fascinating analysis of just what, exactly, is going on. The ‘combative language’ used in the directive is more for the Politburo, assuaging party hardliners that the grip on power won’t be loosening any time soon no matter how many foreign leaders are welcomed to dinner in Hanoi. 

🇱🇦 Laos confirms repatriation of Chinese nationals

Booted. Laos repatriated 268 Chinese citizens suspected of scamming, Radio Free Asia reports. This happened back in January, the Ministry of Public Security said, after they were arrested in the Golden Triangle Special Economic Zone. 

We’re getting more and more of these stories out of the Mekong lately but this report is really interesting in that it speaks to a number of unidentified Lao citizens about the view within the country. There are posters everywhere warning Lao nationals not to get sucked in by job promises that sound too good to be true. “I always hear the warnings, but I still see some people take job offers to work there. However, there are fewer people going there now and those who are already there are returning, as I observe,” one person told RFA. 

RFA also spoke with an official in Bokeo province about what they do when a complaint or query is made from concerned family members: “They file documents to us and then there is a team, consisting of officials from the department of social welfare and labour and the immigration police, who work on each case. There is also a task force unit and we will follow up the cases filed.”

Vientiane and Canberra are a world apart. We’ll save most of the Asean-Australia coverage for an end-of-the-week wrap, but I did want to highlight this piece from Ratih Indraswari in the Diplomat that I find really interesting. She compares and contrasts summit host Australia with Asean chair Laos and the deep divergence between the two, particularly in relation to China. Laos is, of course, much closer to China both geographically and socially — a connection that only deepened through the pandemic. Australia, on the other hand, is a true believer in the Quad and constantly swings back and forth on China (that is not the purview of this newsletter, but there’s plenty else to read out there!).

“...The success of Laos’ presidency in maintaining Asean’s centrality hinges on the country’s determination to counter Chinese influences,” Ratih writes, in a line that may become the defining factor of Laos’ year at the helm.