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Where is Somchai? A brave wife s 17-year quest for the truth
The unresolved case of Somchai Neelaphaijit is in stark contrast to Thailand s beautiful image as the Land of the Free
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Posters of missing Thai activists are pasted on a wall in Bangkok in June 2020. (Photo: Mladen Antonov/AFP)
I was taking a train in Manila in March 2004 when I received a call from Munir Said Thalib, then chairperson of my former organization, the Asian Federation Against Involuntary Disappearances. Munir requested me to issue a statement on the enforced disappearance of Thai lawyer Somchai Neelaphaijit on March 12, 2004. It has been exactly 17 years since Somchai involuntarily disappeared.
The Carpenter-President: On Ben Bland’s “Man of Contradictions: Joko Widodo and the Struggle to Remake Indonesia”
Benjamin Bland
WHO IS JOKO WIDODO, the enigmatic president of Indonesia? The scholar Ben Bland has spent two decades studying the political culture of my country, as well as the working-class background of the furniture-maker known to his citizens as “Jokowi,” and has tried his best to wrap the answer in a book aptly titled
Man of Contradictions.
Bland begins his narrative with a personal account of chasing down and interviewing Jokowi when he ran as Jakarta governor candidate in 2012. But he doesn’t let the readers fall into Jokowi’s persona much longer in favor of the broad political canvas of new-order authoritarianism still entangled in Indonesian bureaucracy. What’s his plan? Everyone is still trying to figure it out.