Hello friends!
Here’s your weekly update on the Mekong region. We’re sans Thailand again, with a final pre-election round-up this Friday. You can catch up on last week’s here.
It’s staying hot, hot, hot in the region. Laos and Vietnam have joined Thailand in breaking previous high-temperature records, although this weather analysis from the Guardian suggests respite could be coming soon.
See you later!
Erin Cook
🇱🇦 A whodunnit in Vientiane
Blogger Anousa “Jack” Luangsuphom, just 25, is a legend. Last Wednesday it was reported he’d been shot and killed while in a cafe in Vientiane. It’s since come out that his family had said he’d died to prevent anyone from trying again. He’s now recuperating in hospital after sustaining shots to the chest and the face!
“Friends and family basically told people he was dead because they were worried if the gunman knew that they had not succeeded in killing him, they would return to finish the job,” Human Rights Watch’s Phil Robertson told the BBC. Robertson also said there are concerns about a slow response from authorities seemingly uninterested in investigating the shooting.
According to the BBC, he runs the Kub Kluen Duay Keyboard (Driven By Keyboard) Facebook page which is a hub for dissidents and critics of the government. The page posted this photo on the weekend:
In a comprehensive piece this week for the Diplomat, Australian academic Kearrin Sims places the attempted murder in a context of violence and asks the question: is Laos a criminal state? “Laos has long been an authoritarian state with no tolerance for public criticism. Increasingly, however, it appears to be also becoming a criminal state, where corrupt elites have enmeshed themselves within the state apparatus for the purpose of accumulating wealth,” Sims writes, listing off murders that have gone without investigation in recent years and largely linked to the political elite.
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