US Aid freeze sends shivers across region

Hello friends!

Happy Lunar New Year to all who celebrate! This is one of those sad years where I’m not in Southeast Asia to enjoy the vibes (and food), but Canberra’s tiny, one-street-but-lovely Chinatown in Dickson will be hosting celebrations on Saturday afternoon. Delayed, but not forgotten!

Before we crack in, an enormous asterisk. I have no idea what the Trump administration is doing. Not just in an ideological way but in a day-to-day way. I keep hearing there are court challenges and waivers and all sorts of things on the US Aid funding freeze, but the pace of news is so overwhelming I truly do not know where that’s at. 

Instead, here’s how it looks for Southeast Asia where the impact means different things across the region.

Let’s see what the weekend brings us,
Erin Cook

Like many people who read this newsletter, I’ve been slackjawed learning about the US Aid funding freeze all week. This below doesn’t get into the nuts and bolts of the policy (if it has such a thing and isn’t better typified as a ballon of hot air) but I have a nice gift link here from Wall Street Journal that does a great job laying it all out. 

I’m not loving that it’s being framed as ‘leaving space for China to fill a void,’ because I don’t think that’s the main priority. Although it surely is true, if my own Australia’s recent experiences are instructive. Rather, it’s just an evil thing to do. The scale and the range of organisations across the planet affected is staggering and the world will surely be a worse place for it. Which is quietly a challenge to my usual US-cynicism, much to think about. 

Around the region

This story has ignited a rage in me. Those brilliant organisations across the Mekong states — but especially in Cambodia, Vietnam and Laos — who work tirelessly to remove unexploded ordinance, that is, land mines, and clean up remnants of Agent Orange from the countryside, have had their funding frozen. 

“There is a good chance people are going to die … Somebody is going to walk into a minefield that should have been cleared this week, boom,” Cambodian Self Help Demining and the Landmine Relief Fund co-founder Bill Morse told the New York Times this week. 

Too true. But what is especially egregious, what is beyond criminal to me, is that the bloody American government put them there in the first place. Other programs around the world should have the funding returned because it is the right thing to do, but in this specific instance it’s hardly ‘aid,’ it’s justice. It’s paying your bill. 

“The US government and the American people bear responsibility for addressing the consequences of the war,” Tran Phu Cuong, a government director managing international aid, told the paper. This is so disturbing that it has me agreeing with a Cambodia People’s Party spokesman. “Who created the wars which left these countries with land mines? Everyone knows,” Sok Eysan said.

In Malaysia, Justice for Wildlife Malaysia (JWMYS), an NGO that ‘monitors wildlife court cases and provides training for rangers’ is facing financial ruin, the SCMP reports. “We have always relied on grants for our work. It is not sustainable nor ideal, but work such as ours is – while crucial – sadly not sexy. I understand this,” co-founder Arlina Ghani said in a statement on social media Monday night. 

An unidentified source within Malaysia’s civil society sector said the impact is widespread, but few organisations are willing to be as upfront as JWMYS in its effect. Many of these organisations include those working on democracy safeguarding, SCMP notes. 

Over the way in the Philippines, the freeze could have frightening effects on the country’s defence relationship. Under Biden and his secretary of defence, Lloyd Austin, the Philippines and the US mended it’s relationship after a tumultuous period of Rodrigo Duterte and now it looks set for another rocky few years. 

Department of Foreign Affairs Undersecretary Eduardo de Vega has tried to calm the boat, telling media earlier in the week that “we’re still talking to the Americans about that.” He also noted the Philippines has funding from other allies. This is true, sure, but none like that special relationship with DC. A tense moment for the government but a PR win for the many vocal groups that oppose American military installations in the archipelago.   

Disaster for Myanmar

It’s in Myanmar that the scale truly becomes devastating. International Rescue Committee health clinics supporting displaced people from Myanmar in Thailand has announced it’s clinics will close by today. Reuters reports that a waiver for humanitarian reasons was flagged by the US but it’s not clear, exactly, how that will play out for organisations like the IRC. 

‘Bweh Say, a member of the refugee committee at Mae La camp, in Tha Song Yang district, and a local schoolteacher said on Wednesday the IRC had already discharged patients and stopped people including pregnant women and people with breathing difficulties dependent on oxygen tanks from using their equipment and medicine,’ the wire reports.

It brings to mind those horrible reports in the early days of the coup when healthcare ground to a halt inside of Myanmar amid successive waves of Covid. 

“A lot might depend on Marco Rubio as secretary of state,” the always insightful former US diplomat Scot Marciel told the Irrawaddy in this excellent Q&A. Marciel, who served as the US’s ambassador to Myanmar from 2016 to 2020, is very frank in this and it’s super illuminating. Must be noted this chat took place before the freeze directive. 

Worry less about Trump because he doesn’t know (or care) a thing about Myanmar. Trump 1.0 was marked by total disinterest in Southeast Asia and that won’t change, but Myanmar does have friends in high places: “there are still a lot of people in Congress and the Senate who care a lot about Myanmar, and who will, I think, push for more continuity and support for the people.”

This may leave the Burma Act in limbo. “I think implementation of the Burma Act will depend a little more on the secretary of state or who the USAID director is. There’s now more of an ‘America first’ mentality, questioning why we are helping other countries when we have problems of our own,” Marciel told the outlet. 

Still, “the amount of money involved in a place like Myanmar in terms of US humanitarian assistance and so on is not big enough to provoke a major policy debate. Hopefully it’s big enough to be helpful but not big enough to become a big political issue in Washington. So if I had to guess, I would guess more continuity on that front.” 

Here’s hoping that prevails.

East-West Centre analyst Miemie Winn Byrd earlier in the month flagged senior (in all regards) Senator Mitch McConnell’s previous comments criticising the slow implementation of the Act under the previous Biden administration. With both chambers controlled by Republicans, “they should be able to speed up the full implementation of the Burma Act.” 

Just before I sent this DVB published a brand new Q&A with Miemie Winn Byrd on the shaking out of the freeze in Myanmar. When it comes to the resistance movement, she says, it won’t make a difference since it’s all organic and US financial support is relatively low compared to conflicts elsewhere in the world. 

“I just wanted to say that you must do what you have to do. If you rely on other countries, you’ll be at their mercy. This resistance [to the 2021 military coup] is self-made, compared to Ukraine and Gaza, it won’t be affected by this funding freeze much. Despite some inconveniences, it’ll keep going on,” she told DVB.

Hpone Myat, a columnist for the Irrawaddy, has an interesting overview here of the historical relationship between Myanmar and the US and the various ebbs and flows in support. “During the Biden administration, Myanmar saw no significant support for its democracy struggle from Washington. And given Trump’s US-centered MAGA mantra and his expected centring of foreign policy on the advancement of US interests, Myanmar people are less than hopeful that the change in administration will bring any breakthroughs in US policy toward their country,” Hpone Myat concludes. 

Elsewhere, a big thank you from Dhaka, where interim leader Muhammad Yunus has welcomed an exemption to the freeze in funding for food support for the Rohingya refugee camps in Bangladesh. 

Who else can give a hand (and some money)?

Mizzima, a news outlet funded in part by a grant from Internews, an arm of US Aid supporting independent media around the world, has had its funding suspended. India’s hard-swinging outlet Scroll put it better than anyone else could so let me quote them in whole:

‘Despite the ban by the junta, the threat of arrest, torture and indefinite detention, Mizzima’s journalists continued to work from hideouts in the country and outside, living in exile – most of them illegally. The salary from Mizzima was their only means of survival. The journalists risk their lives every day — in fact, several times a day — to send out reports on one of the most brutal and violent conflicts in the world today.’ 

Scroll writes that beyond the devastating news that journalists working for the outlet’s online and broadcast teams won’t be getting paid, it also means the world will find it even harder to know what, exactly, is happening across Myanmar. 

Mizzina has always been a great supporter of Indian film and business, Scroll notes, could a donation to the neighbours be a stop-gap measure? 

Independent researcher Htet Hlaing Win took to the East Asia Forum earlier in the month to call on the European Union to step up. The writing was on the wall already, he notes, with policies such as scholarship programs for students from Myanmar deemed ‘wasteful’ by the then-incoming Trump administration. He also writes that while Rubio is certainly not afraid of a sanction, these have so far had little effect on weakening the junta and instead hurting the people. 

‘The only actor capable of taking the United States’ place, by intensifying existing programs or initiating new ones, is the EU,’ says Htet Hlaing Win. Last October’s sanctions, alongside the UK and Canada, targeted aviation fuel and were hoped to be a major step towards ending the aerial assaults (results are still mixed). Still, with the US retreating, conflict heating up in Rakhine State and elsewhere while the humanitarian crisis enters its fourth year Europe needs to lean in.