The protesters built what looked like medieval ramparts topped with sharpened wooden stakes in the heart of Bangkok. The military was preparing to sweep them out.
As the sun was setting, I spotted Major General 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.”
Illustration: Tania Chou
Then came a loud crack, the sound of a sniper’s bullet breaking the sound barrier. 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 is still missing) and interviewing former CIA 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 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 might 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 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 the Thai prime minister.
“Unfortunately, some people died,” then-Thai prime minister Abhisit Vejjajiva said.
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, Prime Minister Prayuth Chan-ocha, is a career soldier from a modest background. Yet he declared a net worth of US$4 million, nearly half of it in cash, soon after seizing power in a coup two years ago. (In an odd remnant of the nation’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 US$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 naitions with tight controls on the news media, like Vietnam or Malaysia, there are brave journalists and armies of bloggers and Facebook commentators who try to expose wrongdoing, but the problem in 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 Vixay’s compound loaded with lizards and pangolins, an anteater-like animal that is rapidly disappearing because it is eaten for supposed medicinal qualities.
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 US Department of State offered a reward of US$1 million for information leading to the dismantling of Vixay’s business, the first such reward of its kind.
No one has come forward to claim it. 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 Vixay on a cellphone and handed it to my interpreter.
“There’s nothing there,” Vixay said. “Who told you about it?”
Laos, ruled by an authoritarian communist party, has also constructed a wall of silence over the disappearance of Sombath Somphone, a civic leader who had called for more public participation and decisionmaking in society. Security cameras showed him being stopped at a police checkpoint and led away in December 2012. Yet the Laotian government has repeatedly said it has no information on his whereabouts.
The authorities in Southeast Asia have access to many of the same tools as their counterparts in wealthier nations. What seems to be lacking is not technology, but political will to investigate powerfully connected people.
Tony Pua (潘儉偉), 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 without adequate food or fuel in May, I obtained the telephone number of someone on board and asked the telephone company to track the telephone’s location.
The telephone company balked, so I contacted a friendly Thai naval officer, Lieutenant Commander Veerapong Nakprasit, who persuaded the company to give me the telephone’s location on humanitarian grounds.
The Thai 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 assistance. I dictated a story by telephone 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, amid a supposed crackdown on trafficking by the military junta, the head of the investigation fled to Australia and applied for political asylum, saying he had been threatened by powerful people.
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 said 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 said 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 said 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.
However, 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.
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