Reporting on Life, Death and Corruption in Southeast Asia
By THOMAS FULLERFEB. 21, 2016
BANGKOK — 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 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.
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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 had probably 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 revealed their fortunes.
Even in countries with tight controls on the news media, like Vietnam orMalaysia, there are brave journalists and armies of bloggers and Facebook commenters 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 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?"
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 decision-making in society. Security cameras showed him being stopped at a police checkpoint and led away in December 2012. Yet the 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 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 without adequate food or fuel last May, I obtained the number of someone on board and asked the phone company to track the phone's location.
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.
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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 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.
我用10年，見證腐敗的東南亞
示威者用削尖的木樁，在曼谷的心臟地帶建起路障，軍方在另一頭預備攻堅。太陽西落，我（《紐時》記者）正好採訪到「叛變」到人民一邊且成為率隊者的卡提雅少將，不幸的是，下一秒轟然巨響，軍方的狙擊手就將他「嗝屁」，在我面前。他的眼睛茫然地張著，血液噴灑在迷彩服上，支持者上來將他拖走…。
在東南亞採訪10年，只能說這是塊詭異的大地。從2013年失蹤2年還找不到的馬航飛機，到前往寮國叢林採訪一位有美國中情局資歷、被政府追殺的傭兵；而當日，那位下令狙擊手殺人、並在當天屠殺58位平民的指揮官帕拉育，現在已是泰國的總理。他不需要解釋他一生作為職業軍人，是如何軍變奪權，且名下擁有4百萬美金以上的淨資產（半數是現金）。
在東南亞這個宗教、種族多元的地方，終於有一件事似乎是共通的：政治腐敗、轉型正義欠缺，罪惡政客的逍遙法外。從私盜林木的、販毒的、污公款的、殺平民的、官方勾結的。這些並非沒有媒體線索調查，即使在越南和馬來西亞這樣對新聞媒體的嚴格控制的國家，也有勇敢的媒體從業者和公民記者試圖揭露不法行為，問題是沒有任何單位採取負責的行動。
去年5月，我得知一艘來自緬甸的難民船被水手棄船，在安達曼海上載浮載沈，立即聯絡電信公司尋求信號定位，但電信公司遲疑不決、本身擁有追蹤技術的泰國海軍也一副事不干己；最後我們記者自己出力租快艇，尋座標找到了擱淺的船，船上幾百位婦女兒童看到我立即大聲呼救，後來我口述新聞給《紐時》港辦同事發佈，新聞引起全球關注。
但有件隱藏的消息後來才暴露：那晚，軍方竟把難民船拖回海上，任其自生自滅。10年來，我對東南亞有著矛盾的感覺。人民的質樸熱情、對生命中的失望和煩惱樂天地一笑置之。但讓我絕望的是精英階層的唯利是圖及腐敗。
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