Welcome to the Mekong Review Weekly, our weekly musing on politics, arts, culture and anything else to have caught our attention in the previous seven days. We welcome submissions and ideas and look forward to sparking lively discussions.

Thoughts, tips and comments welcome. Reach out to us on email: weekly@mekongreview.com or Twitter: @MekongReview

To sign up for the newsletter, click here

c

Thai perseverance

In spite of an increasingly violent police response, anti-government protests in Thailand show scant sign of slowing. Rallies calling for the resignation of Prime Minister Prayut Chan-ocha have ebbed and flowed since last July, but the poor vaccine rollout and surging spread of Covid-19 in recent weeks has renewed public fury.

Ever since the former general first took office in a coup in 2014, Prayut has faced countless large protests. These demonstrations, however, look different ‘Gone are the familiar images of the youth and middle class-led democracy uprising of last year, with its iconic three-finger salute, calling for Prime Minister Gen. Prayut Chan-ocha to step down and a new democratic constitution with reforms to the monarchy,’ notes Sunai Phasuk, senior researcher at the Asia Division of Human Rights Watch. ‘Now, frontline protesters are largely underprivileged, urban poor who have been hit hardest by the pandemic. They see their suffering as caused by the authoritarian rule, cronyism, corruption, and inefficiency of the Prayut government.’

The demographic expansion in the protest movement, coupled with the perseverance of the demonstrators represents the biggest public challenge to the government in years. The extent of the corruption and mismanagement has become plain as day. Tear gas, rubber bullets and mass arrests have done little to dissuade demonstrators, many of whom may feel they have nothing left to lose. As the highly contagious Delta variant continues to spread, wreaking havoc on the country’s most vulnerable, more are likely to join their ranks.

From the archives

Don’t forget us

Erfan Dana

My name is Shams but I am also known as Erfan. I’m a Hazara refugee from Afghanistan, currently living in an International Organisation for Immigration (IOM) shelter in Indonesia. Most people are just finding out about life in lockdown but I’ve been living it for years. Not surprisingly, my fellow refugees and I have found it causes severe psychological and physical distress. All this has just got worse with the pandemic.

Before the outbreak of Covid-19, I filled my days studying, exercising and swimming at a nearby beach. But under the lockdown we are all confined to an overcrowded shelter with no facilities. Social distancing is not possible when you live in an IOM shelter. The 230 people here live eight to a room designed for four, and we all share the same bathroom, the same kitchen, the same stairways, the same space. There is no hand sanitiser and there are no masks.

Thankfully, nobody has tested positive here so far, but the risk of catching the virus is high. There are many elderly refugees with chronic health conditions. We can only access medical treatment for life-threatening conditions. The IOM, the United Nations-linked organisation that deals with issues of migration, claims they cannot provide medical treatment for sick refugees because they don’t have enough funding. So we are waiting to see who gets sick. We are experts at waiting.

I’ve been waiting in one way or another for six years now, since I fled my home in Ghazni in eastern Afghanistan. Hazaras are a mostly Shia ethnic group from the centre of the country. We’ve been persecuted for decades and this got much worse when the Taliban came to power in 1996. It is getting worse again. On 12 May gunmen attacked a maternity ward in a Kabul hospital mostly used by Hazaras. They killed sixteen women, some of them while they were giving birth, as well as two children and seven others.

I was sixteen when I left my homeland. I was working as an English teacher and someone reported me for teaching boys and girls in the same classroom. Teaching both sexes together was forbidden. Worse, the Taliban considered those teaching English to Muslims to be infidels promoting Western culture. As well as teaching, I had another job: collecting educational supplies for the school from Kabul, which involved travelling along dangerous roads. Inevitably, I was reported to the Taliban, and from that moment I was in constant danger of being kidnapped and killed. Eventually my situation became so precarious that my only option was to flee.

Read more here

Check it out:

We’re consistently impressed with Asia Undercovered, a weekly newsletter that delivers exactly what its name promises. Each week, journalist Nithin Coca digs up and disseminates the stories not making it to mainstream media. With a focus on quality, local journalism, the newsletter is a must read for anyone looking to expand their knowledge of the region. Read past issues and subscribe here.

• Tags: Newsletter