🇹🇭 Thailand responds after 14-year-old opens fire in mall

Hello friends!

After all that excitement about running my first promo for ages, I jinxed myself and ended up so sick. I was too sick to notice this happen, even! I’m still not quite 100% but there’s been a lot and my desire to talk about it is trumping my desire to cry in bed. 

So for the next week, please enjoy 50% off for the first year for all new subscriptions:

As always, Asean and Timorese nationals under 30 are eligible for a free premium subscription. Just hit that reply and let me know a bit about yourself.

See you tomorrow for a very chunky update from the maritime states!

Erin Cook 

🇹🇭 Bangkok in shock after two killed in mall

A very nasty one out of Bangkok this week. A 14-year-old was arrested Tuesday evening after opening fire in the immensely popular Siam Paragon mall, leaving two women — a Chinese national and a Myanmar national — and five others injured. National police chief Torsak Sukvimol said the teenager had previously been treated for mental health concerns, but was not currently in treatment and had stopped taking his medication, BBC reports. He attended a school near the mall which has since told families of other students that they are working with police. 

There are still a lot of unknowns here, so I want to talk a bit macro about this hideous incident. 

This has happened almost a year to the day since the terrifying massacre in northeast Thailand by a former cop, that left dozens of young children and their teachers dead. That one followed the 2020 massacre at a mall in Korat in which a soldier killed 29 people on a spree that began at barracks. Both of these incidents led to talk about gun reform, particularly among security forces given the backgrounds of both attackers. In the nursery case, that talk was quickly dismissed with the government instead focusing on the drug angle and in the Korat case the emergence of Covid in Thailand just a few weeks later pushed the massacre out of the headlines. 

Unlike the two incidents above, this shooting is smack in the middle of Bangkok’s tourism industry. Usually, I roll my eyes when reports ham up locations as ‘tourist spots’, but in this case it is very true. While Paragon is popular with locals too, it is certainly on the tourist list. 

For Thailand, something like this couldn’t have come at a worse time. Operators and the government alike are desperate to get more tourists in — especially from China and India — and have recently introduced visa-free travel as an incentive (and hopefully to make up for all the scam compound reporting) which has been reasonably successful. Already, there are fears that a jittery response to this incident could be a hit the industry can’t afford. 

“This will impact tourism confidence and will affect our reputation. In the past, there were complaints about safety from China but this was something unthinkable,” Somsong Sachaphimukh, vice president of the Tourism Council of Thailand industry group, told Reuters. 

According to Nikkei Asia, shares in various Thai hotel groups and airlines fell in the wake of the shooting, but some watchers aren’t overly concerned for the medium term: “Although we expect the [investor] fears that security [concerns] will cut the number of foreign tourists to be a short-lived phenomenon, we can't deny that it has a certain impact on tourism-related companies and also the Thai economy, which badly needs foreign tourists to help boost spending,” a Kasikorn Research Center analyst said. 

One thing that stands out to me and the similarity in response to last year’s nursery massacre is that the clear issue is guns, but there’s a lot of talking around that. Last year, discussions around gun reform quickly morphed into discussions about drug use. I worry that we’re already seeing a repeat of that with the economic impact and the alleged killer’s background. 

Ken Mathis Lohatepanont took to the Thai Enquirer to make his plea: “There is no question: the government must take more action. Mass shootings cannot be allowed to become an annual episode. And we cannot just accept that people will have to senselessly die. This must be on the national agenda.”

So far, it’s just been a few statements from lawmakers but we’ll have an update next week (I hope!)

🇲🇲 Whose the most corrupt of all?

A fascinating longer analysis here from the Irrawaddy into corruption in the upper echelons of the military. Min Aung Hlaing last week warned the State Administrative Council members that they would face ‘heavy penalties in addition to dismissal’ if they were found to be corrupt. That warning comes as his ‘henchman’ (the Irrawaddy’s word) Moe Myint Tun and ex-minister Soe Htut were booted from the SAC and faced interrogation over corruption. 

Sure, great. But it doesn’t help his credibility that Min Aung Hlaiung’s children, son Aung Pyae Sone and daughter Khin Thiri Thet Mon, are well known to have benefited financially from dad’s power. This piece looks at the business and financial connections among the family and how far-reaching power can go. 

Guerrilla group Urban Owls has claimed responsibility for the shooting death of a businessman at a Yangon food stall Monday night. Nyan Lwing Aung was accused of working as an arms dealer for the military. Take it as “yet another warning to all business tycoons and associates” who deal with the military, the Owls said in a statement, as per the Associated Press. 

🇻🇳 Jail, jail and more jail

It feels like the more ‘amazing economy!’ stories we see out of Vietnam, the more we hear about activists/dissidents/critics rounded up by police and slapped with outrageous sentences in the courts. This has always been a feature of Vietnam news — at least while I’ve been doing this newsletter — so maybe it’s the juxtaposition that’s particularly confronting recently, but it’s certainly something I’ll be keeping an eye on.

This thought was inspired by the arrest of Ngo Thi Nhien, who has a bit of a different profile to the ‘usual’ arrests we note. Nhien heads up the Vietnam Initiative for Energy Transition, an environment think tank, where the Ministry of Public Security said she obtained ‘documents related to power grid development policies through inappropriate means,’ Bloomberg reports. Two employees are alleged to have handed over the documents which they obtained through another job.  

The arrests follow the jailing of Hoang Thi Minh Hong, a prominent environmentalist, for three years on tax charges. Prosecutors argued the 50-year-old failed to pay $275,000 in taxes for her campaign group Change. “The sentence given to Hong today was too heavy. I think it was unfair to Hong. The defence lawyer did his best but his arguments were not considered properly,” husband Hoang Vinh Nam said, as per the Guardian. 

Q3 GDP is up on the second quarter, but the expected 5.33% year-on-year will still fall short of the 6% target set by the government, Reuters Reports. Capital Economics told the wire the worst of the economic pain is behind Vietnam, but expect inflation to bite. 

Here come the chips! South Korean manufacturer Hana Micron is set to invest $1 billion into a second factory in Bac Giang province, already home to Apple suppliers and near Bac Ninh, a province that makes most of the world’s Samsung phones, writes Nikkei Asia. You can almost hear the Americans sigh in relief from here. 

🇰🇭 When dad calls

Is this the first known interference from papa Hun Sen into Prime Minister Hun Manet’s governing? I can’t think of anything earlier, but I’m happy to be corrected. Hun Manet has backpedalled on plans to raise taxes and introduce new ones in what was, obviously, an unpopular move. The people were unhappy — and so was dad.

“For the tax issue, please take a look into it. Why is it exploding? We are not taking any action yet, but the talk is causing an outcry,” Hun Sen said in a voicemail that found its way onto Facebook, as per RFA. How this ended up on the internet is not clear, but it tracks that it is more likely to be from Hun Sen’s camp, rather than Hun Manet, which is jaw-dropping to me. Still, I found this comment from Hun Sen interesting: he noted that next door in Thailand the new government was helping the people with loan moratorium and other initiatives. 

Well done, Mother Nature! The environmentalist activist group is one of this year’s winners of the Right Livelihood Award, dubbed the ‘Alternative Nobel,’ for its “fearless and engaging activism to preserve Cambodia’s natural environment in the context of a highly restricted democratic space.” As if to prove the point, the Phnom Penh Municipal Court has refused to allow three activists currently serving suspended sentences from heading to Sweden to pick up the award, reports the Associated Press. 

“This is a cruel thing for the judiciary in Cambodia to deny us as young people working on the protection of natural resources and the environment. The reason that the prosecutor gave, ‘not necessary,’ that’s a ridiculous reason because we were going to go abroad to get a global award that is not easy for any group or individual or country to get,” Thon Ratha, who was named recipient alongside Long Kunthea and Phoun Keoreaksmey, told CamboJA.