🇹🇭 PM Srettha gets a move on with debt moratorium

Hello friends!

Bit of a bleak one today, I’m afraid. A terrible story here on a young man who died over the weekend in Yangon’s Insein Prison and the renewed defanging of Move Forward across the border in Thailand. There’s a lot, so let’s get into it. 

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See you tomorrow for the maritime region.

Erin Cook

🇹🇭 Srettha puts public money where his mouth is

Prime Minister Srettha Thavisin is going ahead with his debt moratorium plan that is slated to help millions of farmers, Bloomberg reports. The plan, which was approved by the cabinet yesterday, will allocate 12 billion baht to cover interest on loans held by around 2.7 million farmers. The moratorium will take place for three years, beginning next week, and will cost the government around 30 billion baht, Deputy Finance Minister Julapun Amornvivat said, as per Bloomberg. 

Similar programmes have been tried with muddled success, but this really stood out to me: “More than 90% of Thai farmer households are indebted at an average of 450,000 baht, and the vicious cycle of debt and reliance on credit to overcome the burden pushes them into a trap, according to a study by the Puey Ungphakorn Institute of Economic Research.” 

Move Forward has named Chaithawat Tulathon the new leader, after Pita Limjaroenrat was forced to step down. Chaithawat has long served as the party’s secretary general and had been floated as a likely replacement. Still, he calls it a mere “temporary restructuring” as Pita’s cases work their way through the courts, as per Nikkei Asia. 

It comes just days after former Move Forward MP Pannika Wanich was banned from politics for life on Thursday. It stems back to an online post made 13 years ago that was found to be disrespectful to the monarchy, that resurfaced recently. You can stop her from running, but you can’t shut her up, she vowed in a post to Twitter/X: “So everything remains exactly the same. My political mission on behalf of the Party continues, including being a campaign assistant in future elections. We’ve come this far. We will not stop halfway until we reach the finish line,” she wrote, as per Bangkok Post. 

Don’t get too comfortable, Thaksin Shinawatra. The former prime minister-former exile could be out of jail by February, Bangkok Post reports. 

🇲🇲 Rest in peace to Min Hein Khant

Terrible news from inside the notorious Insein Prison, where 21-year-old political prisoner Min Hein Khant died of a heart attack on Sunday. According to the Political Prisoners Network he had been hospitalised for a heart condition — which he developed only after incarceration — for about a week.

“He didn’t receive adequate medical treatment in the prison. He died because treatment was delayed due to the drawn-out reporting process that is required in order to receive emergency treatment in prison,” a spokesperson for the organisation, a former political prisoner, told the Irrawaddy. Min Hein Khant had been sentenced to 27 years imprisonment for his role in defending the country against the military. 

Beautiful piece here from Emily Fishbein for Al Jazeera on how the coup and conflict have changed perceptions among the Myanmar diaspora. This story is full of great quotes, but I especially loved this one from an unidentified Myanmar national living in the US on financially supporting the National Unity Government: “I think I am responsible for the revolution as a Myanmar citizen. Therefore, I am paying my tax to the government.”

A little update on last week’s report in which Tom Andrews, the UN Special Rapporteur for Myanmar, yelled at a US Congress committee to do more on supporting the Rohingya community. An additional $116 million has been allocated for aid for the Rohingya in Myanmar, Bangladesh and elsewhere in the region, according to Reuters. 

🇰🇭 Hun Manet works the room

Jakarta, Beijing and now New York! Freshly installed Prime Minister Hun Manet addressed the United Nations General Assembly on Friday. Those elections were “free and fair,” thanks, he told world leaders. “Cambodia will continue on its present path of independence and neutral foreign policy based on the rule of law, equal mutual respect and adherence to the principle of the UN Charter,” he said during the address, as per Nikkei Asia. If anyone was willing to give him the benefit of the doubt, that may have been undermined somewhat by recent crackdowns on Candlelight members, but Hun Manet doesn’t appear too concerned.  

Voice of Democracy is down, but it’s certainly not out. The independent news outlet shutdown by the government in February has risen again in Washington state in the US. According to Voice of America’s report here, the outlet will relaunch next week with content for Facebook, YouTube and TikTok. It’s exciting, but there are still challenges: “Although we now have advances in technology, social media, online communication, we cannot guarantee that local people can communicate or use all of them,” Nop Vy, executive director of the Cambodian Journalists Alliance, or CamboJA, told VOA. 

Fascinating read here from the BBC on the Dara Sakor Seashore Resort, a Chinese-backed tourism site that should be sitting across from Sihanoukville. It’s the first in a series looking at some of the highly publicised projects announced a decade ago for the Belt and Road Initiative (10 years in and I still can’t spell ‘initiative’ correctly on the first go, bring back OBOR).

It’s grim reading. The BBC talks with villagers displaced for the project who have struggled in the years since, as well as environmental experts who warn the degradation is dramatic. And for what! There’s no resort there, instead more questions about corruption and dodgy business dealings. This is a longer piece but if this is anything to go by, the whole series will be excellent. 

🇻🇳 History is too weird sometimes to make a quippy headline

Ooh, is this the other shoe-dropping? In an exclusive, Reuters reported the US and Vietnam are discussing an arms deal in the wake of US President Joe Biden’s visit to Hanoi and an upgrade in relations. ‘The deal is still in its early stages, with exact terms yet to be worked out, and may not come together. But it was a key topic of Vietnamese-US official talks in Hanoi, New York and Washington over the past month,’ Reuters reports. Probably don’t need to do the explicit ‘this will, if it comes to fruition, wind Beijing right up’ line, do we? 

Music lecturer Dang Dang Phuoc lost a challenge in the High People’s Court, Dak Lak province, this week, according to Radio Free Asia. He was convicted in June of “making, storing, spreading or propagating information, documents and items aimed at opposing the State of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam,” the latest in a long string of judicial crackdowns on dissenting voices.