[Even in countries with tight controls on the
news media, like Vietnam Southeast Asia seems not so much exposing the truth as
doing anything about it.]
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Thai soldiers facing
rival groups of antigovernment and pro-government protesters in
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As the sun was setting, I spotted Maj. Gen.
Khattiya Sawatdiphol, a renegade who had defected to the protesters, and asked
him what he would do next.
His
“people’s army” would not back down, he said. “The military cannot get in
here.”
Then
came a loud crack, the sound of a sniper’s bullet breaking the sound barrier.
General Khattiya collapsed at my feet.
One
blink earlier he was answering my questions. Now he was slumped on the ground,
his vacant eyes still open, as blood spilled onto his camouflage uniform. The
world around me went into slow motion as I watched the general being dragged
away by his supporters.
I
have covered life and death in Southeast Asia for the past decade, a job that
has entailed puzzling over a missing Malaysian plane one day (two years later,
it’s still missing) and interviewing former C.I.A. mercenaries who were being
hunted by the government in the jungles of Laos another. I seemed to spend almost as
much time dodging the authorities as interviewing them.
The bullet that felled
General Khattiya in 2010 missed my head by inches.
It
is hard to speak collectively about a region of so many different languages,
ethnicities, religions and political traditions. But as I start a new
assignment in a part of the world that may as well be a different cosmos — Northern California — I have been trying to make sense of what I
have seen in Southeast
Asia .
I
come back to one theme again and again: impunity.
In
the killing of General Khattiya, who never regained consciousness and died
several days later, a report by an independent body concluded that the assassin
most likely fired from a building controlled by the military.
Yet
no one has ever been charged. The general who helped lead the deadly military
crackdown that ensued, killing 58 civilians, is now Thailand’s
prime minister.
“Unfortunately, some people died,” said the
prime minister at the time, Abhisit Vejjajiva. A murder case against him was
dismissed.
It
is often no secret who is committing abuses in Southeast Asia , whether they are illegally cutting down
forests, trafficking drugs, skimming a percentage from government transactions
or shooting protesters.
Unusual
wealth, the euphemism for suspected graft, is everywhere.
The general now running Thailand,
Prayuth Chan-ocha, is a career soldier from a modest background. Yet he declared a net worth of $4 million, nearly
half of it in cash, soon after seizing power in a coup two years ago. (In an
odd remnant of the country’s democratic past, the members of the junta were
required to declare their assets.)
He has never explained how he amassed this
tidy sum on his annual army salary of $40,000. “Do not judge people based on
your perceptions,” he said in a television address after he and other
top-ranking army officers and police officers had revealed their fortunes.
Even in
countries with tight controls on the news media, like Vietnam Southeast Asia seems not so much exposing the truth as
doing anything about it.
Watching
the rise of Asia during my time here, I have wondered whether
there can be continued prosperity without justice. Can societies so thoroughly
riddled with corruption carry through with the remarkable economic advances
made over recent decades?
To
see wrongdoing here, sometimes all you have to do is knock. Across the Mekong
River, in Laos,
at the edge of a forest, I found the walled compound of Vixay Keosavang, a
Laotian businessman who has been described as the Pablo Escobar of wildlife
trafficking.
After
I banged on the compound’s heavy metal gate, a security guard rolled it open.
Yes, the guard said, there were live tigers, bears and many other endangered
species inside. Neighbors said trucks regularly left Mr. Vixay’s compound
loaded with lizards and pangolins, an anteater-like animal that is rapidly
disappearing because it is eaten for supposed medicinal qualities.
Mr.
Vixay had been so nonchalant in his trafficking business that he used
commercial courier services to send rhino horns and ivory tusks directly to his
company’s office in Laos
Prompted
by my article, the United States State Department
offered a reward of $1 million for information leading to the dismantling of
Mr. Vixay’s business, the first such reward of its kind.
No one has come forward to
claim it. Mr. Vixay has never been charged. The Laotian authorities say they
have no evidence against him.
After
telling me about the animals inside, the guard called Mr. Vixay on a cellphone
and handed it to my interpreter.
“There’s
nothing there,” Mr. Vixay said. “Who told you about it?”
The authorities in Southeast Asia have access to many of the same tools as
their counterparts in wealthier countries. What seems to be lacking is not
technology but political will to investigate powerfully connected people. Tony
Pua, an opposition leader in Malaysia,
calls it a culture of “forget it and move on.”
When a boat filled with refugees from Myanmar was abandoned by its crew, adrift in
the Andaman Sea
The
phone company balked, so I contacted a friendly naval officer, Lt. Cmdr.
Veerapong Nakprasit, who persuaded the company to give me the phone’s location
on humanitarian grounds. The navy, aware that the refugees could die without
help, presumably could have made the request and found the boat on its own.
We rented a
speedboat and followed the coordinates until we found the stranded boat. Upon seeing us,
several hundred rail-thin refugees, many of them women and children, called out
for help. I dictated a story by phone to the newsroom in Hong Kong , and soon readers around the world were
aware of the refugees’ plight. We had brought bottles of water, and we tossed
them to the grateful passengers.
That evening, out of sight
of journalists, the Thai Navy pushed the boat back out into the open sea.
The
refugee crisis in Southeast
Asia last year
spiraled into a regional embarrassment that forced governments to admit that
their own officials were complicit in trafficking desperate migrants from Myanmar.
Yet in Thailand Australia
The
Thai junta has not set a firm timetable for leaving power, but its members are
taking no chances.
Soon
after the May 2014 coup, they issued a decree that put them above the law for
“all acts,” including the seizure of power and any “punishments” they meted
out.
The
last words of the Constitution they wrote for themselves call for blanket
immunity. The junta members are “entirely discharged” for their acts.
Lawyers
representing the victims of the crackdown in 2010 say they see little hope for
justice now that the military is in power.
One
of the key witnesses in the crackdown, Nattatida Meewangpla, is a paramedic who
says she saw six people shot by soldiers.
For
the past year, she has been held in detention on the orders of a military
court, charged with participating in a social media chat group that opposed the
military takeover. Her lawyers say the military is trying to silence her.
“People
were chased and killed,” she wrote to me from prison last month. “I am the only
witness still breathing.”
My
decade here has been a time of intense ambivalence. I was enchanted by people’s
warmth, congeniality and politeness. When I interviewed protesters on torrid
summer days, they would often fan my face as we spoke. I learned from my Thai
friends how to laugh away life’s disappointments and annoyances. I relished the
food and marveled at the hospitality.
But I despaired at the venality of the elites
and the corruption that engulfed the lives of so many people I interviewed. I
came to see Southeast
Asia as a land of
great people and bad governments, of remarkable graciousness but distressing
levels of impunity.
Thomas
Fuller was the Southeast Asia correspondent for The
International Herald Tribune and The New York Times from 2006 until this month.
He has taken a new posting as the San Francisco
bureau chief.
