Asean Focus on mainland Southeast Asia

The July edition of Asean Focus Group’s Asian Analysis has two short articles that will be of considerable interest to New Mandala readers.

• Hazel Lang, formerly at the Australian National University and now based at Griffith University, writes about refugees along the Thai-Burma border. She concludes that:

…whilst resettlement provides people with hope for a new life abroad it does not contribute to enduring solutions in the form of a permanent resolution of the underlying causes of displacement across in Burma’s eastern borderlands, where an estimated further 500,000 people are internally displaced. Every month hundreds of new arrivals cross the Thai border seeking refuge. Thus in approaching truly sustainable solutions, we cannot isolate the refugees in the Thai border camps from the wider context continuing to cause displacement of communities.

• Bertil Lintner, journalist and author, has a short piece titled “Thailand and Post-Thaksin Politics“. He argues:

…the Thaksin era in Thai politics seems to be over, and new actors are emerging on the scene. In the final analysis, the Thais seem to be tired of decades of corruption, which many feel only got worse under Thaksin’s administration, and now are looking for a cleaner, more modern government that can lead the country once the military has stepped aside. But, given what happened to Thaksin on September 19 last year, it is also clear that the military is not going to become an apolitical player any time soon.