Welcome to Foreign Policy’s Southeast Asia Brief.
The highlights this week: Indonesia formally requests Russia to stop its war recruitment efforts there, an ASEAN envoy visits Myanmar, and Australia and China vie for influence in Timor-Leste.
Russia’s Southeast Asian Soldiers
A Jakarta taxi driver in his 40s died in Ukraine after taking a contract to work for the Russian military, Ukraine’s Defense Intelligence said last week. Taufiq Muhammad had undergone about a week and a half of training before being deployed and then killed in battle in May.
Then, on Sunday, Indonesia formally requested Russia to stop recruiting Indonesian citizens to serve as soldiers in its war in Ukraine.
Across Southeast Asia, men are—sometimes wittingly, sometimes not—being recruited into Russia’s war machine. Indonesia may be a hot spot. The death reported last week was just the latest in a series of incidents.
Last May, a former Indonesian Marine was confirmed to have joined the Russian military. His citizenship was revoked, and he is since rumored to have died. In January, a former member of Indonesia’s elite Brimob police unit was also confirmed to be fighting for Russia; he claimed for the Wagner Group. He also lost his citizenship. In September, a 30-year-old Indonesian man was reportedly killed in a drone strike in Ukraine.
In a press conference on Monday, the Indonesian National Police said cases involving 58 Indonesian citizens were currently being investigated by national and regional police authorities.
In September, Indonesia’s ambassador in Russia, Jose Tavares, told media that he had taken dozens of calls from families who thought their relatives had been recruited into the Russian military.
In an interview with Foreign Policy, Radityo Dharmaputra, an Indonesian academic who has researched this topic, called the Indonesian government’s response this week “a necessary step, albeit ineffective.”
Radityo said Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto should now appeal personally to Russian President Vladimir Putin, whom he has met on numerous occasions, to stop the recruiting.
Indonesia should also put pressure on Russia publicly, Radityo added. Other actions he recommended included canceling cooperation if Moscow doesn’t halt its recruiting efforts, stopping migrant workers going to Russia, and generally discouraging travel there. The Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) could also establish a framework to deal with the problem, Radityo suggested.
Indeed, it is not just Indonesians who are getting pulled into Russia’s war machine. Data released by Ukraine and published by StopRussianRecruiters.org lists 44 Southeast Asians who had surrendered themselves to become prisoners of war. Of those listed, 16 are Vietnamese, 14 are Filipino, 10 are Indonesian, two are Cambodian, one is from Myanmar, and one is Malaysian.
There are also reports that three Filipinos and a Vietnamese man were killed fighting in Ukraine for Russia.
Munira Mustaffa, the executive director of Chasseur Group and a senior fellow at Verve Research, has compared Russian recruitment tactics on social media to those used by criminals in scam centers.
Some of the Southeast Asians on the front lines, like the Marine and the former police officer, seem to know what they were volunteering for. Many others were recruited by deceptive jobs ads and then pressed into the Russian military and thrown onto the battlefield with minimal training.
“Many men were enticed to Russia with promises of blue-collar work, not expecting to serve on the front line,” Munira said in an interview with me.
Munira has said Southeast Asian recruits are just a “small fraction” compared with those from South Asia, Central Asia, and Africa. She suggested that Russia is perhaps reluctant to upset ASEAN countries, with which it has stepped up diplomatic ties following its invasion of Ukraine.
However, an investigation by the German TV news program Tagesschau in July found evidence that Russia is now targeting Cambodia, Indonesia, and Malaysia for recruitment. Backlash elsewhere, including Kenya, had pushed Russia to change where it recruited.
The regional response has been muted. Outside of Indonesia, the only notable response has been from the Philippines, which in October announced an investigation into illegal recruitment activities.
Munira also called for an ASEAN-level response drawing on its experience dealing with human trafficking and scam centers.
“The deceptive and predatory practices involved, including war profiteering, could be replicated in other conflicts, both within and beyond this region, because they offer a template for exploiting migrant labor.”
ASEAN visits Myanmar. Last Thursday, Philippine Foreign Secretary Maria Theresa Lazaro, the ASEAN envoy on Myanmar, met Myanmar junta Foreign Minister Tin Maung Swe in the capital of Naypyitaw as part of a two-day trip.
Myanmar state media reported that the two discussed normalizing Myanmar’s status in ASEAN, which has excluded junta leaders from summits since the country’s 2021 coup. Lazaro’s own statements made no mention of this.
There is no indication that Lazaro met with Aung San Suu Kyi, the leader of Myanmar’s democratic opposition who has been detained since 2021—though Lazaro told Philippine media that the junta had said she was “doing well.”
Meanwhile, on Friday, Reuters broke the story that Japan was pushing for the Financial Action Task Force, a global financial crimes watchdog, to remove Myanmar from its blacklist.
As we’ve previously covered, Myanmar’s junta is making serious progress in its quest for diplomatic legitimacy.
On Saturday, shortly after Lazaro’s trip ended, the junta bombed an area held by Karen rebels on the Thai border, damaging homes and public buildings in Thailand. Thai Prime Minister Anutin Charnvirakul said on Monday that the Thai military had conveyed its concerns to Myanmar. He added: “The fighting has nothing to do with Thailand or Thai people.”
Vietnam overtakes Indonesia. Vietnam is set to become richer than Indonesia on a GDP per capita basis, according to International Monetary Fund (IMF) data released in October. The first outlet to spot this seems to have been Nikkei Asia.
According to IMF projections, Vietnam’s nominal per capita GDP will hit $5,259 this year—an annual rise of 8.9 percent and nearly double what it was a decade ago. (Indonesia’s is projected at $5,153.)
Vietnam’s breakneck growth, 9.95 percent in the last quarter alone, means it is rapidly making ground on other economies in the region. Current IMF projections suggest that it will have an economy larger than Thailand’s by 2028, though it only aims to hit Thailand’s current per capita income by 2030.
Driving this boom are strong exports and infrastructure investment, which means projected growth was revised up despite the fuel shock. A U.S. trade investigation that could result in new tariffs poses a potential challenge, however.
Another question is, is this being felt by ordinary Vietnamese? As I noted last week, despite the rapid growth, young Vietnamese, like other young Southeast Asians, are struggling to secure jobs.
Bangsamoro choses leader. A month and a half after the first-ever elections for the Bangsamoro Autonomous Region in the Philippines’s Mindanao archipelago were held—and delivered a hung parliament—the Bangsamoro Parliament chose its first chief minister, Abdulraof Macacua of the Bangsamoro Federalist Party, on Friday.
Macacua is a former chief of staff of the armed wing of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF), which signed the peace deal that led to these elections. But he broke with the leadership and formed his own party, won 31 seats, and has now secured a parliamentary majority with the support of various other parties.
Losing out is Ahod “Al-Haj Murad” Ebrahim, the chairman of the MILF and leader of the United Bangsamoro Justice Party, which won 30 seats.
Happily, Murad seems to have accepted the result. With thousands of MILF fighters still yet to be demobilized, there was a real potential for danger if he felt cheated.
In his victory speech, Macacua addressed Murad in a conciliatory way, declaring that he recognized the “sacrifices, principles, and aspirations upon which this vision was built” and considered it “both a personal commitment and a moral responsibility to carry it forward, no matter what.”
The next challenge will the demobilization of MILF fighters.
3,560. The number of deaths caused by smoke from Indonesia’s forest fires in September, according to estimates by the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air. Indonesia is facing its worst forest fires in a decade, which continued to rage through October. However, last week saw intermittent rain in some hot spots, raising hopes that the delayed wet season had finally arrived.
Cambodian women who worked in the scam industry are turning to sex work as the crackdown drives the industry abroad, according to an interesting article in Cambodia: Rain and Dust.
In the South China Morning Post, Vincent Tan spots signs of a housing bubble in key Southeast Asian markets.
Two Supreme Court rulings in the Philippines could shake up its politics and make corruption trickier, Mong Palatino writes in the Diplomat.
A security pact and a gas deal have put new focus on the tussle between Australia and China for influence in Timor-Leste.
In recent years, Australia has been moving to rapidly upgrade its relationships with Pacific islands to counter growing Chinese influence in the region. This has taken the form of alliances and security pacts, some of which explicitly block Chinese bases from being built in these nations.
Timor, Australian Defense Minister Richard Marles has declared, is the “last link in the chain.”
Can it close that link though?
In August, Chinese Defense Minister Dong Jun visited Timor and said China was “willing to work with Timor-Leste to take military-to-military relations to a new level.”
Australia’s response came when it and Timor signed a security agreement in October worth $43.5 million, with Canberra providing patrol vessels as well as help upgrading Timor’s cybersecurity and disaster response capacity. The move was widely seen as aimed at countering Chinese influence.
Still, this is well short of the strong arrangements that Australia has struck elsewhere.
China has also built economic presence and goodwill. By some estimates, 20,000 Chinese citizens since 2002 may have moved to Timor, where they now play a key role in the restaurant and retail sector.
The surprise decision last Tuesday by Australian company Woodside Energy to sell its stake in the Greater Sunrise gas field that Australia shared with Timor has no doubt prompted further anxiety in Canberra. Timor had previously threatened to turn to Chinese developers when Woodside demurred at government demands for a refinery in Timor.
It’s unclear if this threat is credible. And after Woodside’s exit, Timor’s advisors said Japanese and Middle Eastern companies—not Chinese ones—had expressed interest in stepping in. But that hasn’t stopped Australian media from worrying.
