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No love lost in Southeast Asia as Kissinger carks it

December 07, 2023

Hello friends!

An unusual one today, given we kick off with a handful of pull quotes from obituaries. I think it’s important that we highlight the view from the region on Kissinger’s death, even if it the legacy is grimly familiar to many of us. 

Okay, let’s go

Erin Cook

A giant goes down

I always thought when the time came, the death of former US secretary of state Henry Kissinger would be a bang, so to speak, across the region. Instead, it’s a whimper. And I want to be explicitly clear why I think this is. There is no reckoning of Kissinger’s legacy in much of the world. He did what he did and the legacy of that vibrates down generations. It’s the Americans and their sycophants (oof, back in Canberra is hitting me hard) doing gymnastics to write pieces that can argue ‘yeah, he is responsible for mass death BUT ALSO wasn’t he good on China?’ 

There are some fantastic reads from across the region that have really helped me get a fuller picture.

Vorng Chhut, 76, had never heard the name Henry Kissinger when bombs started dropping down on his village in Svay Rieng province, near the Vietnamese border.

"Nothing was left, not even the bamboo trees. People escaped, while those who stayed in the village died," he said. "A lot of people died, I can't count all their names. The bodies were swollen and when it became quiet, people would come and bury the bodies."

A Pentagon report released in 1973 stated that "Kissinger approved each of the 3,875 Cambodia bombing raids in 1969 and 1970" as well as "the methods for keeping them out of the newspapers".

"It's an order, it's to be done. Anything that flies, on anything that moves. You got that?" Kissinger told a deputy in 1970, according to declassified transcripts of his telephone conversations.

Finally, in terms of Dr Kissinger’s connections with Southeast Asia, something has to be said of his personal relationship with Lee Kuan Yew. The relationship between the two men is well known and documented. Both not only shared a healthy respect for each other, in a sense, they were intellectual “soulmates” who shared very similar readings of and approaches to global affairs.

As Dr Kissinger wrote in his eulogy to Singapore’s founding prime minister when he passed: “Lee Kuan Yew was a great man. And he was a close personal friend, a fact that I consider one of the great blessings of my life. A world needing to distill order from incipient chaos will miss his leadership.”

“My nephew was killed — his stomach was blown out — and my older brother was wounded by an airstrike,” Oun Hean, the village chief, told me when I visited in 2010. “During the attack, they fled to the pagoda, but the Americans dropped a bomb on it.”

Compared with other Cambodian villages along the border with Vietnam, Tropeang Phlong was relatively lucky. About 15 people from the village died during the Vietnam War, according to six survivors of the conflict I interviewed there. At more than a dozen nearby villages, the survivors I met shared similar memories of attacks by American forces from 1969 to 1973.

The chief architect of their agony was Henry Kissinger, once named the most admired man in America, who died on Wednesday at the age of 100.

For many in the country, Kissinger’s impact was not abstract but visceral and continues even after his death. Land mines planted during Cambodia’s three-decade-long civil war, which was driven in part by U.S. interference, are still exploding today. In neighboring Vietnam and Laos, officials are also still undergoing the painstaking process of identifying and removing unexploded ordnance from a war that Kissinger helped to wage five decades ago.

“The sad reality is, he leaves this legacy which many, many Cambodians still pay the price for,” said Sophal Ear, a Cambodian American political scientist. “To this day, there are people who 
 lose limb and life in the process of trying to make a living in a land that has been filled with bombs.”

Kissinger and others in the White House tried to keep the campaign from the public for as long as they could, for good reason. It came as public opinion in the U.S. was turning against American involvement. The bombing campaign is also considered illegal under international law by many experts.

But to Kissinger, the ends – containing communism – seemingly justified the means, no matter the cost. And the cost to Cambodians was huge.

It resulted in the direct deaths of hundreds of thousands of Cambodians. With the U.S. government keeping the bombings secret at the time, comprehensive data and documentation are limited. But estimates on the number of deaths range from as few as 24,000 to as many as a million. Most estimates put the death toll in the hundreds of thousands.

Maybe we can leave Thai Enquirer’s Cod Satrusayang with the final word: “Henry Kissinger is finally in hell where he belongs.” 

🇰🇭 Trouble on the waters

Tonle Sap is heating up and drying out and for fishing communities that rely on the waters for income, this is a disaster. “There are days when I struggle to earn enough to afford rice or cover the cost of gasoline to return home,” fish vendor Sar Mom told Reuters, adding that his income has gone from around $25 a day to just $5. The government is alarmed, Reuters reports, and is hoping to retrain the fishing community in other methods better protected against climate change and damming. 

UN Special Rapporteur to Cambodia Vitit Muntarbhorn is in the country this week and human rights NGOs have embraced the opportunity to demand a loosening of the government’s tight grip on the sector. “The human rights situation [in Cambodia] is up and down. Currently, I can say that there is a huge decline,” Chak Sopheap, executive director at Cambodia Center for Human Rights (CCHR), said during a forum on Monday to mark Human Rights Day, as per CamboJA. 

Sreng Chenda, of the government-backed Cambodia Human Rights Committee, said things are looking “increasingly better” on the ground. “I agree that freedom of expression and press freedom are guaranteed under Article 41 of the Cambodian constitution but the article also states that the exercise of these rights should not infringe the rights of others. National security and public order must be respected. Our freedom of expression results in the violation of other people’s rights. At this point, authorities will take legal action,” he added. 

Chinese warships have popped up in the Ream naval base “in preparation for training” alongside the Cambodian navy, a spokesperson told Radio Free Asia. No one is too sure of how many ships exactly are around or how long they’ll be there for, but satellite imaging shows at least two. It’s the first publicly known instance of foreign ships at the base, RFA notes, and is the exact kind of thing that had the American wonks stressing a few years back. Wait and see! 

đŸ‡č🇭 The sweetest trip home for Hamas hostages

“You go Thailand” is what Khomkrit Chombua was told after 50 days of captivity in Gaza. Shortly after, he was one of 17 repatriated nationals flanked by family in Bangkok. “I missed my family, I was worried about them 
 I wasn’t sure if I was ever going to make it out,” Khomkrit told Al Jazeera. 

Speaking via teleconference, Prime Minister Srettha Thavisin promised the government won’t forget the other Thais still there: “I am delighted that all of you returned home safely. I and the government vow to work hard in order to bring the other Thais still held there home,” he said, as reported by Nikkei Asia. A second group of returnees arrived in Bangkok on Monday. 

Outstanding piece here from Pichayada Promchertchoo for Channel News Asia in which she reports on the talks representatives of Thailand were able to achieve in Iran, specifically between Thai Muslims and Hamas representatives. 

Lerpong Syed, who represented Thailand in Tehran, told CNA that the delegation stressed Thailand’s lack of bargaining power, compared to Western powers, and that the Thai nationals, largely migrant workers, have nothing to do with the conflict. Interestingly, speaking to Hamas directly may have been the key: “Hamas told us we are the first and only group to have a direct conversation with them,” Lerpong said. 

At least 14 people and a further 32 were injured after a double-decker tourism bus hit a tree while travelling south to Songkhla from Bangkok early Tuesday morning, Al Jazeera reports. Thailand infamously has some of the world’s most dangerous traffic and deaths are common, though this scale is particularly saddening. 

Thailand’s use of the term ‘soft power’ in its plan to boost creative economies and support the tourism industry is already winding up strict adherents of Joseph Nye, though I would argue — who cares?  The National Soft Power Strategy Committee, chaired by Pheu Thai’s new boss Paetongtarn Shinawatra, has all sorts of ideas for getting Brand Thailand up and out there. That includes extending Songkran celebrations, better known to tourists as the New Year’s water festival, from three days to a whole month. Hmm, I’ve thought about this a bit too much and maybe I’m starting to get wound up about the use of ‘soft power’ too. 

Bangkok’s school wars have only ever been briefly mentioned in these pages, largely because the whole thing is so confusing to me. Still, we have noted that over the years there have been particularly violent flare-ups in school rivalries that have left students dead and injured and local authorities perplexed about how to fix this long-running — generational! — issue. 

So when 4 Kings 2 hit screens last week, no one was taking chances reports the Nation. The film is a sequel looking at rivalries between vocational schools in Bang Kapi, Bangkok. When the first instalment was released in 2021, students flooded cinemas in their school uniforms. Now, police have been stationed in malls and will monitor the situation. 

Good work if you can get it. Former prime minister (and everything else
) Prayuth Chan-o-cha is the newest member of King Maha Vajiralongkorn’s privy council, a Royal Gazette at the end of November announced. How influential advisors are to the king is typically something we find out decades later in books that cause the writer to be banned from Thailand for life. Expect an update in 2045. 

đŸ‡»đŸ‡ł Not so Fast in North Carolina

I am very frightened by VinFast stories. The car manufacturer is one of the largest companies in Vietnam and is immensely powerful, but it’s a LOT. But I love Rest of World so the combo evens out. Lam Le and Ben Rappaport looked at VinFast’s feted opening of a $4 billion plant in North Carolina (hi, Elena!) and it’s not going as smoothly as expected. VinFast is taking advantage of US policies that offer tax credits for electric vehicles produced locally, but with enormous expenses in training American staff and ‘adapting’ to the US ways of doing things (there are too many gags here to make any at all) it’s a long road. Workers will also be unable to unionise, according to VinFast, which is so on the nose that, again, no gag can be made. 

Vietnam has a plan worth US$15.5 billion for its arm of the Just Energy Transition Partnership programme, which AFP explains as the plan for wealthier countries to fund poorer countries to get off coal. Sure, there’s money but what about the plans to continue using coal plants until they die and locking up environmentalists? That’s what close watchers in the space want to know. As always, Mike Tatarski has more on the details over at Vietnam Weekly. 

Elsewhere, with this possible visit by Chinese President Xi Jinping to Hanoi at some stage this month, a rail link between the two countries — and across Vietnam’s mineral-rich centre — is on the cards. China is especially keen, repeatedly stressing more connectivity and it appears to have been a major conversation for Foreign Minister Wang Yi’s visit to Hanoi last week, Reuters reports.

“The biggest corruption scandal in Southeast Asian history,” reports DW in this comprehensive explainer on Vietnam’s monster case of alleged corruption involving developer Truong My Lan. She is alleged to have embezzled over US$12 billion from the Saigon Commercial Bank on which she sits on the board. That’s triple Malaysia’s 1MDB, though I think still snaps at the heels of Suharto. This is a very handy piece to get our bearings since this won’t be going away any time soon. 

Well done, Vietnam! Back in July, Hanoi approved two African swine fever vaccines that will eventually be exported across the region as the disease continues to percolate in pockets. Still, more testing please, says the World Organisation for Animal Health as per Reuters. The Organisation hopes to be able to approve the vaccines next year but gotta see that data first. 

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