Southeast Asia in 2006: Déjà vu All Over Again

Southeast Asian Affairs 2007 SOUTHEAST ASIA IN 2006 Déjà vu All Over Again Donald E. Weatherbee American former major league baseball player and erstwhile folk philosopher Yogi Berra once, when confronted with a supposedly new but in fact overly familiar event famously uttered the line, "it's déjà vu all over again". While perhaps not as elegant as the Christian Bible's "what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun", both the former New York Yankees' catcher and the author of Ecclesiastes 1:9 convey the sense of the dominant pattern of politics, policy, and relations in SoutheastAsia. The year 2006 was little different from 2005 or the earlier years of the new millennium in that persistent political, economic, and social issues at the nation-state level overshadowed efforts to enhance regionalism at the interstate level represented by the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). While certainly not an annus horribilis, to use Queen Elizabeth II's term, it was a year of discontent. It was not just the constancy of man-made problems and issues that characterized the human condition in Southeast Asia. Nature continued to rain Job-like trials on the people of the region only now slowly recovering from the December 2004 tsunami disaster. Earthquakes, floods, volcanic eruptions, and typhoons left hundreds of thousands of Southeast Asians homeless and destitute, sorely testing the already badly strained capabilities of domestic rescue and relief agencies. One of the more bizarre incidents was the Sidoardjo mudflow in East Java forcing thousands from their homes and disrupting the regional economy by destroying road, rail, and energy infrastructure. The hot mud, released from 1,800 metres deep by environmentally dangerous test gas-well drilling, flowed under pressure at 50,000 cubic metres a day, engulfing all it reached as it breached dams hastily thrown up to contain it. The damage has already been totalled at Donald E. Weatherbee is Donald S. Russell Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the University of South Carolina, USA. 4 Donald E. Weatherbee nearly half a billion dollars and will continue to rise as the flow from a deep underground reservoir was yet to be capped at the end of 2006. Angry victims looked to the Indonesian government, which has been vague and ambiguous about what happens if the responsible parties default. The political dimension is complicated by the fact that the company sinking the well is held by the family of the cabinet minister entrusted with social welfare. In addition to recurring natural disasters, pandemic disease remains rife in Southeast Asia. The incidence of HIV/AIDS (human immunodeficiency virus/ acquired immunodeficiency syndrome) is growing. The World Health Organization reported that 7.8 million Southeast Asians are HIV-infected, of whom 2 million are women. This is the second highest regional number of HIV-infected persons after Sub-Saharan Africa.1 After coping with the economic and human consequences of SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) in 2003, the region now faces a re-emergence of avian influenza in the most recent and destructive H5N1 strain of the virus. So far, it has occurred in Indonesia, Myanmar, Thailand, and Vietnam. Indonesia has had the highest mortality rate (77 per cent) where there has been transmission to humans.2 Where it has been detected, there has been a natural resistance of livestock owners to forced culling of their flocks in the absence of prompt and adequate compensation. The Sidoardjo mudflow was a local environmental disaster affecting thousands of Indonesians. Also originating in Indonesia was the annual reprise of another environmental disaster — the haze — the ASEAN euphemism for the smoke from uncontrolled forest fires blanketing the Straits regions and impacting the health and quality of life of millions of Thais, Malaysians, and Singaporeans. The haze in 2006 was the worst since 1997 when, leaving aside the human costs, the economic costs to the region ran up to US$10 billion. It is frustrating for Indonesia's neighbours that after a decade the same problems of uncontrolled legal and illegal burning and clearing recur, partly because of weak enforcement of existing laws and corruption. There were some unusually blunt, even harsh, words levelled by...