🇲🇾 Najib's having a terrible week

🇹🇭 Prayuth isn't going anywhere

August 18, 2022

Hello friends!

Premium readers may recall on Monday I promised a look at the littoral ship scandal in Malaysia which is bubbling to a head in the last week and a bit. But here’s the thing: it’s deep in the weeds and my eyes are glazing over. Between the Lines is always a good investment when it comes to staying across Malaysia, but tell ya what they’ve earnt this month’s sub with their succinct coverage. Now, if you’re the kind of person who cares about defence spending in Malaysia you’re the kind of person who should be reading Between the Lines daily. And so I shall defer to the gang there. 

Thankfully (if that’s the word for it), Najib Razak has had a messy week so let’s check in on him instead. And what’s going on exactly in Thailand? And I don’t mean the reemergence of violence in the South.

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🇲🇾 Courtside drama

Tuesday wasn’t a great day for former prime minister, Najib Razak. An attempt to have his 1MDB-linked conviction overturned was laughed out of the Federal Court. Now he’s back in today for his final appeal. His legal team was eyeing a retrial, saying High Court judge Nazlan Ghazali should have recused himself. Nazlan found Najib guilty of flogging RM42 million from 1MDB subsidiary SRC International in a 2020 trial, but he shouldn’t have been there at all according to Najib. 

Nazlan had previously been the counsel for Maybank, which had previously advised 1MDB and provided a loan. That makes him “too close for comfort to be the judge trying the SRC case,” the legal team argued. The Straits Times’ Malaysia correspondent Ram Anand isn’t swayed by this: ‘They claimed they had no prior knowledge of Justice Nazlan’s role in Maybank despite it being publicly available information.’ The court wasn’t convinced either. 

I’m outta here, said lead lawyer Hisyam Teh Poh Teik this morning. “My apology is sincere and from the bottom of my heart. I am unable to act on this case…I was hopeful that the court would grant discretion in my favour because of the scope and depth of the appeal,” he told the five-member bench, according to the Edge. It follows a denied request from the team earlier in the week for a four-month adjournment. As of writing, the court is currently deliberating over Hisyam Teh Poh Teik’s shock announcement. Malaysiakini has been running a spectacular liveblog throughout all of the many court cases and I will be glued to it today!   

 

There’s still a lot of wait and see in this particularly dramatic week, but there are some other interesting aspects. If/when Najib exhausts his final appeal and the original conviction is upheld, he will be facing 12 years in jail and become ineligible to recontest the seat of Pahang, which was also held by his father, Abdul Razak Hussein. Is it time for the third generation? Ram Anand took on that question late last week, noting widespread speculation that 44-year-old Mohd Nizar Najib would step up to the plate when the time comes. He is also rumoured to be prepping for a tilt in the state election in Pahang — both his father and grandfather were also chief ministers of the state. 

🇹🇭 When did the countdown begin?

Thai politics is making my head spin again. When rules and laws are made up on the fly to favour the political elite this is what happens! Nothing makes sense! I shall leave the analysis to the experts when it comes to this bizarre scandal about how long Prayuth Chan-o-cha can remain prime minister under relatively new laws restricting prime ministers to eight years at the helm. Instead, I’m going to build a bit of a timeline so I can follow along for the ride. 

In July, the Prime Minister faced (and bested, of course) his fourth no-confidence vote since 2019. Opposition forces have tried to force him from leadership largely over economic failures — indeed, July’s Pheu Thai party motion noted that Prayuth had named himself head of the economic taskforce with no clear expertise. These have always failed handily, given the governing coalition’s enormous numbers. BUT it does very much give the impression of a government under siege which is surely a nice consolation prize for an opposition with few options. At the time, Asia Nikkei’s reporting noted it was likely that Prayuth would serve until elections are held by March next year. 

A week later, Pheu Thai had found another option. If a prime minister is bound to eight years in office, surely Prayuth’s clock started ticking during the 2014 coup. And if that’s the case, shouldn’t he be out of here by the 23rd? That is — this coming Monday. It lodged a suit at the Constitutional Court on August 2 to deliberate the matter. 

Deputy Prime Minister (and coup veteran) Prawit Wongsuwan closed ranks quickly. Media began asking if he was a successor assuming Prayuth would clear out this month. “The prime minister will stay on for two more years,” he told reporters on August 9. This is in line with the government’s view that the eight-year clock began ticking in 2017 after changes to the constitution were passed, not when the military took over and established the National Council for Peace and Order.

And then last week Kanchanee Walayasevi, the leader of the Peace-Loving Thais group, dropped some documents online. The documents purportedly came from a Constitution Drafting Committee meeting in September 2018 in which the question appears to have been resolved — the documents show the clock began in 2014, six months after the junta took power. “The statement shows that even though the premiership started before the charter came into effect, the period should be counted as a premiership term,” the meeting minutes said, according to the Thai Enquirer. 

There are loads of court cases and petitions to Parliament, but Prayuth Chan-o-cha isn’t saying a peep. If he doesn’t go Monday — and it’s seriously unlikely he would! — this is going to go on for a while yet. Buckle in! 

Reading list: 

This is because the girls were born outside the country. Malaysian women married to foreigners are unable to pass their citizenship to their children born abroad because the constitution only affords the right to Malaysian men.

“Why do fathers so easily have the right, but not mothers? My two eldest daughters who were born outside Malaysia can’t get citizenship, but my youngest born in Malaysia automatically gets citizenship. Why the difference?” Aniza asked.

Article 14(1)(b) of Malaysia’s constitution gives fathers the automatic right to confer citizenship on their children born abroad – but omits any mention of mothers.

McDowell said it was difficult to tell from the quality of the photo whether the image was of debris from the rocket, but he was confident that several parts landed near the Indonesia and Malaysian border given there had been numerous local media reports of people finding suspicious metal objects.

The discovery was made one day after people in Sarawak posted images of debris lighting up the night sky as it re-entered Earth’s atmosphere. “At first we thought it was a shooting star,” said Aizul Sidek, who captured footage with his smartphone in Kuching, Sarawak.

Another resident told local media he was caught by surprise at about 12.40am by a thunderous noise and a tremor that shook his house.

Khin, a digital safety trainer and activist from Myanmar, who requested to be identified by a shortened version of her name for security reasons, said she was “terrified” by Musk’s statement that he sees free speech as being “which matches the law,” which demonstrates a lack of understanding of the legal environment in countries like Myanmar. “If we look at Myanmar and other countries in our region… People do not agree with the law. The law just exists to oppress the people,” she said.

Ultimately, the impact of Musk’s desire to “authenticate” Twitter’s users will depend on exactly how it is implemented, and on what basis the decisions are made. 

Fast forward to 2021. A version of the Nazi book-burning orgies would emerge in the Philippines in the libraries of state universities in a purge that the country’s military said was meant to protect the youth.

The mission was to remove all books, pamphlets, research work or any reading material that has reference to communism, socialism or Philippine communist rebels who have been waging a guerrilla war for more than 50 years now.

The premise was that books with socialist or communist content poison the minds of the youth into rebelling against the government, never mind the other more substantial causes of rebellion.

While Pyae Sone remains committed to the cause of overthrowing the military dictatorship, the sacrifices he has already made may be permanent. A new generation of Myanmar’s youth is growing up against the backdrop of war, and many of those who are lucky enough to survive are left with lifelong disabilities.

“The problem now is there are a lot of young ones injured, the PDFs,” said Busaba*, a woman working for a clinic across the border in Thailand. “What is going to happen to these kids? What is their future with no limbs? Some of them still want to go back and fight.”

But an AP investigation has found that their universal use hides a dirty open secret in the industry: Their cost is environmental destruction, the theft of land from villagers and the funneling of money to brutal militias, including at least one linked to Myanmar’s secretive military government. As demand soars for rare earths along with green energy, the abuses are likely to grow.

“This rapid push to build out mining capacity is being justified in the name of climate change,” said Julie Michelle Klinger, author of the book “Rare Earths Frontiers,” who is leading a federal project to trace illicit energy minerals. “There’s still this push to find the right place to mine them, which is a place that is out of sight and out of mind.”

For Cambodia, antiquities have economic as well as cultural value. In the year before the pandemic, tourism accounted for 18.7% of the nation’s GDP growth, according to World Bank statistics, much of it spurred by visits to the historic temples.

Yet nearly all of the major temple sites have been subject to pillaging, with the most destructive wave beginning in the 1970s, during the country’s civil war and genocide, when they were ransacked by organized networks associated with military groups.

While no one knows how many artifacts were stolen during this tumult, archaeologists believe thousands passed through dealers and wound up in museums and the private collections of some of the world’s wealthiest people.

Thayer noted it was a Hanoi program meant to “empower local leaders at ward level” and promote local initiatives, and that there was no indication loudspeakers would be installed nationwide.

Thayer also cautioned that the initiative was unrelated to “regime insecurity” or the ongoing crackdown on free speech. “There is scant evidence that the legitimacy of the current regime is losing widespread public support that can be remedied by the reintroduction of loud speakers on the streets of Hanoi.”

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