Southeast Asia in 2006: Déjà vu All Over Again

Summary

American former major league baseball player and erstwhile folk philosopher Yogi Berra once, when confronted with a supposedly new but in fact overly familiar event famously uttered the line, “it's déjà vu all over again”. While perhaps not as elegant as the Christian Bible's “what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun”, both the former New York Yankees’ catcher and the author of Ecclesiastes 1:9 convey the sense of the dominant pattern of politics, policy, and relations in Southeast Asia. The year 2006 was little different from 2005 or the earlier years of the new millennium in that persistent political, economic, and social issues at the nation-state level overshadowed efforts to enhance regionalism at the inter- state level represented by the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). While certainly not an annus horribilis, to use Queen Elizabeth II's term, it was a year of discontent.

It was not just the constancy of man-made problems and issues that characterized the human condition in Southeast Asia. Nature continued to rain Job-like trials on the people of the region only now slowly recovering from the December 2004 tsunami disaster. Earthquakes, floods, volcanic eruptions, and typhoons left hundreds of thousands of Southeast Asians homeless and destitute, sorely testing the already badly strained capabilities of domestic rescue and relief agencies. One of the more bizarre incidents was the Sidoardjo mudflow in East Java forcing thousands from their homes and disrupting the regional economy by destroying road, rail, and energy infrastructure. The hot mud, released from 1,800 metres deep by environmentally dangerous test gas-well drilling, flowed under pressure at 50,000 cubic metres a day, engulfing all it reached as it breached dams hastily thrown up to contain it. The damage has already been totalled at nearly half a billion dollars and will continue to rise as the flow from a deep underground reservoir was yet to be capped at the end of 2006. Angry victims looked to the Indonesian government, which has been vague and ambiguous about what happens if the responsible parties default.