2017’s Most Fascinating Stories (According to me)
Hello everyone!
I got a huge shout out in the Saturday Paper’s daily newsletter from Alex McKinnon which has sent nearly A HUNDRED new subscribers my way. Which leaves me just a couple of dozen short for my 2017 goal. If you have a friend who might be interested in signing up, send them here!
Of course, we need to start with two Reuters journalists in Myanmar who have been arrested. Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo were arrested Dec. 12 in Yangon on charges of illegally acquiring information. The Ministry of Information denies the cases have anything to do with press freedoms but this sees the count of journalists arrested in the 20 months since the NLD took government rise to 29. We’ll follow this up more next week.
We’ll also look at Marawi City, the Rohingya crisis, the jailing of Ahok and whatever other major stories I’m forgetting now, as well as look at the year ahead (so many elections!!).
But for now, let’s be a bit selfish and focus on the stories I personally got hooked on. There’s a lot that hasn’t been mentioned here, that probably could be. I was very interested in Timor Leste and Asean, low-key hoping the 50th anniversary of the bloc would be a great time to announce it could finally join. I also got REALLY into the Philippines and had to constantly edit myself down so this didn’t become a Philippines + everyone else project.
Also, just FYI this is what I published this fortnight: Vietnam Gears up to Divest State-Owned Enterprises in 2018 and The Challenge for Najib’s ‘Malay First’ Policy in Malaysia’s Next Election for the Diplomat and Indonesia shows its solidarity for the Palestinian cause for Asia Times.
Thanks,
🇵🇭 Leila de Lima 🇵🇭
The February arrest and consequent jailing of Philippine Senator Leila de Lima was one I expected to stay big news for months, but it was quickly forced off the international column spaces dedicated to the Philippines in favour of the ongoing war on drugs and Marawi City.
I’ve been really interested in de Lima since late last year, during which time I wrote about what was then happening for Lowy’s Interpreter. She has since been jailed on spurious drug charges but if Duterte thought that was going to shut her up, he was mistaken. In the last week alone she has called for an investigation into a bloody Manila raid and warned off Chinese investment in local telcos. She won’t be home for Christmas even though the Department of Justice case against her is still in the works.
Rappler has a year-end interview with her in which she muses on the last 12 months and this really struck me:
“They say my marriage didn’t work out because I prioritize my career. But now, I am closer to my family. Before, I was always in a hurry, time was the enemy. I rarely attended family events. This is a wake-up call sa mga pagkukulang ko sa kanila (to all my shortcomings to them),” De Lima said.
Just a bit of editorialising here: I really respect de Lima. I think she’s a very tough, smart woman who has dealt with a lot of shit and has kind of been abandoned by the rest of the world. Except for Papa Frankie, which is the greatest of endorsements.
🇹🇭 Thailand’s Run-Away PM 🇹🇭
The 2014 coup which saw Yingluck Shinawatra removed from power is a touch before my time, so this year was a big learning curve for me and pre-junta Thai politics. Yingluck, who led the country from 2011 to May 2014 and is younger sister to fellow-former PM Thaksin, faced corruption charges in August over a bonkers rice subsidy scheme which had led to protests against her and the eventual downfall of her government.
Fast forward to August and she was being tried for corruption. She had repeatedly told supporters — of which there are still loads and loads — she would see the case through to the end, come what may. But on the day of the verdict was to be handed down she wasn’t to be found. Rumours quickly erupted that she’d fled the country in a desperate late-night dash while local media was kept in the dark. Eventually, we learnt she had escaped to Dubai via Singapore and Cambodia before ending up in the UK where it is believed she has been issued a UK passport and may or may not have claimed political asylum.
After a load of back and forth, it looks like next year Thailand will be hitting the polls, so I hope she pops up again! I find her fascinating.
🇻🇳 Vietnam Goes Homeland 🇻🇳
Vietnam has had a quietly interesting 12 months which looked set to blow open in September with a bizarre ‘Cold War style’ kidnapping. Former oilman Trinh Xuan Thanh was allegedly kidnapped off the streets of Berlin in late July before showing up on state TV in Hanoi. He had been in Germany claiming asylum after dodging charges in Vietnam. Germany was pissed but Vietnam denied any wrongdoing, saying he returned of his own volition. Diplomatic scandal ensues. A Vietnamese man was arrested in Europe later in August on suspicions of assisting in the abduction, but that’s about the only development at this stage. Germany is still mad as hell and is not giving up on this easily, even if Vietnam doesn’t seem too interested in engaging further. I think Vietnam is going to be super interesting next year.
🇲🇾 The Assassination of Kim Jong-nam 🇲🇾
I feel like too much crazy stuff has happened this year that we collectively kind of glossed over the fact that the half-brother of Kim Jong-un was assassinated in a deeply weird way back in February at Kuala Lumpur airport. This GQ piece is by far the definitive read on the story. The trial is still underway and will continue into the new year, so expect more on this in the coming months. But I think we should have another moment to truly reflect on this absolute WTF international incident.
🇲🇲 A Quiet End for Olive Yang 🇲🇲
I had never heard of Myanmar’s Olive Yang prior to her death in July at the age of 90. Summing up her life is futile, so please read this obituary from the New York Times. One day I would like to read the words ‘HBO Asia orders 10-episode series on the life and times of Olive Yang’.
She was born to royalty in British colonial Burma, but rejected that life to become a cross-dressing warlord whose C.I.A.-supplied army established opium trade routes across the Golden Triangle. By the time of her death, last week at 90, she had led hundreds of men, endured prison and torture, generated gossip for her relationship with a film actress and, finally, helped forge a truce between ethnic rebels and the government.
🇵🇭 ‘My Family’s Slave’ 🇵🇭
According to Chartbeat, ‘My Family’s Slave’ from the Atlantic is the year’s most read story. It’s a piece from the late Alex Tizon tracing the history of ‘Lola’, a woman who he realises as a child is a slave. I don’t need to explain, Chartbeat says it had 58 MILLION minutes of eyeballs so I’m assuming if you read this you likely read that too.
I, like a lot of readers, found the piece fascinating, uncomfortable and disturbing. But what I found more interesting was the divergence in conversation it prompted depending on where the reader is from. Among my Australian Twitter friends, it was all white-hot outrage and questioning why it was published in the first place. I think that line of reasoning comes from a place of assuming publication was somehow an acceptance or endorsement of what had happened to Lola. Personally, I didn’t read it this way. To my reading, it was initially apparent that Tizon struggled with reconciling Lola’s situation and his view of himself, but grows even more complex as we learn that he continued to ‘keep her’ in a place of effective slavery. It’s a shame he passed before publication as it would’ve been exceptionally interesting to hear his responses to many of the criticisms.
This was not so much the case in Manila. The responses ran the gamut of disgust, begrudging understanding and a call to arms which said loud and clear: this is still happening in the Philippines and around the world.
This piece from Scout argues that much of this non-Pinoy outrage was misplaced, which then spun-off into another piece about how Filipinos deal with extreme inequality among workers (and slaves). So what said Lian Buan at Rappler, the story was no longer just Tizon’s, or ever just the Philippines’, and the failures of the family should be addressed. Absolutely, said Shakira Sison, also in Rappler, but who really should be throwing stones when the country’s glass houses are cleaned by domestic workers?
🇸🇬 Oxley Road and the Road Ahead 🇸🇬
Probably if we’re being honest here, I went a little too deep into the Lee family dramas this year. I had alerts set for sibling’s Facebook pages and flew to Singapore just to get my own selfie. It was out of control. But I’m not the only one. The Oxley Road saga, which Channel News Asia monitored closely, has sprung off in a few different directions since July but can be distilled to this: Are we demolishing Lee Kuan Yew’s Oxley Road home like he requested, or nah? Son and current Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong (ALLEGEDLY) said we’ll wait a moment while siblings Lee Hsien Yang and Dr Lee Wei Ling went nuclear.
It gets oddly complicated very quickly, so please see my July letter in which I was peak-obsessed for further explanations. Wall Street Journal had a great read with loads of background on the family, which is the best of what became a bloated genre. The two must-reads on the entire debacle used the situation to explore what it reveals about the political realities of contemporary Singapore, which has felt somewhat adrift in the last few years. Kirsten Han took to Foreign Policy to look at what’s up. It’d be a great read anyway, but is really elevated to gold class status with the description of her home country as ‘being the smug teacher’s pet of Southeast Asia’. Meanwhile, Joon Ian Wong looked at how the country’s elite was using Facebook to get around tough media restrictions which I LOVED and was a point not widely looked at.
The house is still standing and as of October, LHL is still not talking with his siblings.
