🇰🇭🇹🇭🇮🇩🇵🇭 Borders, bombs and deadly typhoons

Not a slow week for Southeast Asia

Hello friends!

A bit of a horror week so far, so no quips from me.

Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto has just popped up in Sydney today. I cover the Australian-Indonesian relationship over at Flat White, Kopi Susu and will certainly have some opinions there shortly if you’re keen to join us.

I’ll be back on Friday with a look at the scam centre developments of recent weeks.

See you then!
Erin Cook

🇵🇭 Horror typhoon season for the Philippines

President Bongbong Marcos visits Cebu last week after declaring yet another state of emergency (c/o his Facebook)

Typhoon Fung-wong has made its way across the northwest of the country, Al Jazeera reports. It has since moved on towards Taiwan, but not before leaving at least 18 dead due to landslides and flooding, as per the Associated Press.

The Philippines has barely had a moment to breathe. Fung-wong, known locally as Super Typhoon Uwan, came just days after Typhoon Kalmaegi battered the centre of the country last week before hitting Vietnam. The death toll across five provinces has reached at least 232.

🇹🇭🇰🇭 Peace agreement? We hardly knew her!

Haters, you were right. The Trump-backed peace agreement signed at last month’s Asean summit between Cambodia and Thailand has been shelved by Bangkok. Thai Prime Minister Anutin Charnvirakul had already been quite open in his views that this agreement was simply the first step, not the final product.

That he has withdrawn because two soldiers patrolling the border have been injured, with one losing a foot, does not surprise.

“Everything must be stopped … What happened (at the border) did not help reduce the adversary situation, and if it did not help reduce the conflict, we can’t do anything, and everything had to stop,” he told reporters Monday, as per Nikkei Asia.

“The Thai military is halting all agreements until Cambodia can show clear sincerity that they will not be hostile,” Thai Supreme Commander General Ukris Boontanondha said as per Armed Forces social media posts via the Guardian.

The incident took place near the Preah Vihear Temple and prompted Thailand to allege fresh land mines had been laid by Cambodia. Cambodia has vehemently denied this, saying any land mines still about in the area were certainly laid in the 1970s and 1980s and are not new. Phnom Penh remains ‘committed’ to the peace process, the Foreign Affairs Ministry said in a statement Monday.

The old question lingers: Does either side really want peace? William Roth, a law lecturer at Thammasat University, digs in for the Bangkok Post. Both sides have used this conflict for their own gain many times over the decades, Roth writes, but the case to be made by Thailand to the International Court of Justice might not be so dire:

Thailand’s overall chances right now before the ICJ are much better than conventional thinking would have it. Cambodia has set the public relations stage by saying that it wants certain boundary issues to be decided by the ICJ, undoubtedly believing that Thailand would never, ever agree. But what if Thailand, surprisingly, called Cambodia’s ICJ bluff and challenged it to accept ICJ jurisdiction for all of their unsettled boundary areas? Not only would Thailand now look like the “good guy” country to the world, but the court’s eventual decision would, at long last, end this otherwise intractable dispute.

A judicial AND a PR win for Thailand? That would be the time to set notifications for Hun Sen’s Facebook page.

🇮🇩 Jakarta school bombing leaves students hospitalised, a city on edge

An awful story from the Jakarta suburb of Kelapa Gading Friday afternoon, where 50 people were injured in a bomb inside a mosque during prayers. The mosque is located inside of a school, with most of the injured students. A 17-year-old student is believed to be behind the attack and was hospitalised with injuries.

Police confirmed 32 people were still being treated in hospital as of Monday, Antara reports. “We are treating not only physical injuries but also their psychological trauma,” Jakarta Police official Budi Hermanto said.

Investigations are continuing, police chief Listyo Sigit Prabowo told reporters.

Jakarta is no stranger to bombings in this century, but this one is certainly different. Religiously-motivated terrorism has fallen off a cliff in recent years and this may indicate something freshly worrying: online radicalisation inspired by white supremacy and neo-Nazi ideologies. This young Indonesian boy — who, it goes without saying, would be hated on sight by those pushing these views — is not believed to have fallen into those beliefs exactly, but rather was inspired by the massacres and violence it results in. Burn the computers.

Mayndra Eka Wardhana of Jakarta’s counter-terror police unit told Reuters that the young man was allegedly motivated by “vengeance and loneliness.”

I’ve been a little fixated on this case. I’ve never seen anything like it in Indonesia; this sort of violence is not common and is very shocking. And there are links to other stories in the region that kind of raise my heart rate a little. We’ve spoken briefly about Malaysia’s devastating bullying issue in recent months, and while this is still being investigated, that may be a factor here. Similarly, the American influence of it reminds me of the 2023 shooting in Siam Paragon, where the young perpetrator there took clear influence from mass killings in the US, most obviously the Columbine High School massacre.

Maybe, hopefully, these are just extremely high-profile aberrations and there’s no real cause for concern for young people of the region. I hope so! But beyond a tragedy for the good communities of Kelapa Gading, this seems to me to be an alarm bell for the rest of us.