The high global demand for mineral resources in the past decade has led to a rapid expansion of mining exploration in the Philippines. Suddenly, mining became a major economic priority for the government because of its huge potential in generating jobs and tax revenues. But public opinion towards mining turned negative due to the associated environmental disasters, displacement of local villagers, and the militarization of communities where mining operations exist. 

Even local officials, many of whom are part owners of some of the mining concessions, have to publicly criticize the destructive impact of mining. In fact, 14 of the country’s 85 provinces have passed local ordinances imposing a moratorium on mining activities. 

Recognizing the need to reform the mining law which is seen by many as pro-foreign; and in response to the growing grassroots opposition against mining, President Benigno Simeon Aquino III formed a study group last year which was tasked with formulating a new mining policy. 

After several months of consulting various stakeholders in the mining sector, but most especially the mining companies, the committee submitted its recommendations to the president who later on signed Executive Order No.79. According to the government, the new mining policy seeks to harmonize the conflicting interests between big business and local communities in order to maximize the proper use of mineral resources for national development.

What are the key points of the measure? First, the government expanded the areas closed to mining operations by including tourism development areas and prime agricultural lands in the designated “no mining” zones. The government also declared a moratorium on new mining agreements until a revised law on revenue sharing scheme is passed. Furthermore, the granting of mining rights will be subject to competitive public bidding. 

To develop downstream industries for strategic metallic ores, a national industrialization plan will be drafted in the next six months. To facilitate dialogue between all stakeholders and to oversee the implementation of government directives, a Mining Industry Coordinating Council will be established. 

A controversial provision in the new mining policy is the explicit prohibition for local provincial and municipal councils to pass anti-mining laws. 

Green groups immediately denounced the new mining policy, which they claim is still biased in favor of mining liberalization and foreign plunder of the country’s finite mineral resources. They pointed out that despite the purported expansion of “no mining” areas, the new policy would still allow the government to honor existing mining agreements. They also belittled the mining moratorium provision since the government can still give mining exploration permits. 

The Catholic Church, which has long been a vocal critic of the mining sector, was also not impressed with the “token reforms” in the new mining order. They insisted that the policy framework of the government with regard to mining is still contrary to the principle of rational “stewardship” of natural resources.  

Meanwhile, small scale miners are complaining that the government is unduly favoring foreign large scale miners despite the fact that the latter are mostly responsible for the huge mining disasters in the recent past. Local government officials are frustrated as well because the national government is trying to curtail the right of communities to express opposition to mining activities. 

Curiously, the Chamber of Mines instantly praised the new mining law which they think would encourage more mining investments in the country. They also affirmed their commitment to promote responsible mining and contribute to the country’s economic growth. 

The debate over the new mining policy is expected to intensify given the negative response of many groups and institutions. The support expressed by the business sector can’t easily erase the negative public perception towards mining activities. If the intent of the government is to ease the simmering tension between miners and villagers, then it has clearly failed for now. In fact, there’s already a clamor for the passage of an alternative mining legislation that would address the specific demands of communities affected by mining operations.

In sum, the government has squandered the opportunity to enact a mining policy that would unite all sectors in support of a sustainable and pro-people mining industry. Instead, it drafted a document that seemed acceptable to only one sector. Because of this, the option of resorting to ‘resource nationalism’ has become more popular today.

After months of political wrangling and a constitutional crisis dating back a year, Papua New Guinea finally has a new Prime Minister. Peter O’Neill was sworn in by the country’s Governor-General Sir Michael Ogio after he was elected on the floor of the Parliament with 94 votes to 12.

A final bid by O’Neill’s chief nemesis -- his former deputy prime minister and probable opposition leader Belden Namah – failed despite his insistence that he and not O’Neill would form a government.

It’s a political battle royale that has been watched closely by the 10-nation Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN), a political and trading bloc which PNG and East Timor would like to join. PNG wants to become the 11th member.

The financial and political benefits of being a part of a trading bloc of 500 million people with plans to become a fully integrated economic zone by 2015 are tantalizing but ASEAN is not totally enamored by the idea and the politics and shenanigans in PNG over the past 12 months have not helped.

Bloody riots had, at times, accompanied the political brinkmanship that at one point had left the country with two prime ministers, resulting in travel advisories from the United States and Australia.

Nevertheless a deal struck with the help of former prime minister Sir Julius Chan resulted in a coalition that included Sir Michael Somare who was ousted in August last year, sparking a crisis which culminated in a military mutiny in January.

Elections opened on June 23 and eventually had O’Neill’s People’s National Congress (NPC) securing more seats than his rivals, opening the way for talks on a coalition.

The inclusion of Somare, 76, went a long way towards ending the stalemate. Somare is the country’s longest serving leader. He became the country’s first prime minister in 1975, serving until 1980 and stood again in 2002.

“Sir Michael's participation in the new parliament and new coalition is a welcome signal of political reconciliation after the tensions of recent months,” Australian acting Prime Minister Wayne Swan and Foreign Minister Bob Carr said in a joint statement.

“The government looks forward to working with Prime Minister O’Neill and his ministerial team to further strengthen the close partnership between Australia and PNG.”

There were early signs that Narmah had accepted the result and had patched up his differences with O’Neill.

However, most observers – chief among them ASEAN – will take some convincing that PNG has finally found stability and any membership to the club of Southeast Asian nations remains some time off.

According to the 2011 United Nations Human Development Index, PNG sits at 153, several spots below Burma and behind Cambodia and Laos, all ASEAN members.

Lost in the slow news of summer, the Olympics, and the conflict over the South China Sea, last week Indonesia released a report that was truly groundbreaking for Southeast Asia, in its willingness to examine serious past human rights abuses. In Thailand, the killings of 2010, in the streets of Bangkok, have not been properly examined, in a way that clearly assigns blame and ends controversy. In Burma, despite the promising political reforms, there has of yet been no real effort to analyze the vast abuses committed over the past fifty years by the military and the ethnic armies. In Cambodia, the Hun Sen government has for years stalled serious investigation of past crimes by the Khmer Rouge (KR). Cambodia under Hun Sen also has not included the KR period in most textbooks for Cambodian schools.

But last week the Indonesian National Commission on Human Rights (Komnas HAM) released a more than 800-page report that analyzes the mass killings of hundreds of thousands of Indonesians that took place in the mid-1960s, during the time that Suharto and the army took over the country and pushed out Sukarno and the communist PKI. Luke Hunt has a fine overview of the new report.

For four decades, even after Suharto’s regime fell in the late 1990s, the mid-1960s bloodletting, which tore apart society and led to neighbor-against-neighbor and family-against-family killings, the Indonesian government essentially buried any discussion of the era, the famed “Years of Living Dangerously.” But now this is a dramatic reversal. The report has been heavily covered in the Indonesians media, and should open up a more thorough discussion of the period, as well as a more accurate assessment of Suharto’s time – polls taken last year showed that many Indonesians have a more positive view of the Suharto era than they do of the post-1990s democratic era. In addition, the government of current president Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, to its credit, has vowed to push forward with analysis and potential prosecutions based on the report. However, many Indonesian legislators have responded by saying that the country should just forgive and forget the past.

Joshua Kurlantzick is a fellow for Southeast Asia at the Council on Foreign Relations. He blogs at Asia Unbound, where this piece originally appeared. You can follow him on Twitter: @JoshKurlantzick

Comprehending the political reforms in Burma over the past year can be overwhelming. Most observers have welcomed the opening-up of the country by President Thein Sein while others are warning it would be more prudent to wait before dispatching the accolades.

The realities are that if an election was held tomorrow the opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi would win with a landslide while punters would be hard pressed to find anyone who believes Burma’s military, which is unfairly mandated with 25 percent of the seats in parliament, would simply handover power.

The release of political prisoners, who should never have been locked-up in the first place, hardly justifies salivating businessmen eying the country’s potential riches and there are sound reasons behind maintaining sanctions, at least for the time being.

Hardly any mention has been made of trying those responsible for past atrocities, like the 2007 crackdown on the Buddhist clergy. The government’s treatment of the Muslim Rohingya minority is verging on cultural genocide.

Nevertheless, Thein Sein has taken his country into unprecedented territory and in an interview with Anasuya Sanyal of Channel News Asia aired earlier this week, he re-iterated his time as leader will be limited and confirmed he had health issues.

Asked about his legacy and his previous remarks that he will be a one term leader, he said: “My reason for stating that I will only serve one term is because of my age and health condition. I would like to see the next generation take the country to greater political stability and economic prosperity.”

In May, those around him attempted to play down reports that he was ill. He reportedly has a heart condition and has spent time in Singapore where he received a new pacemaker.

This has obvious ramifications for the entire reform agenda within his country.

Thein Sein’s greatest achievement to date has been in legitimizing Aung San Suu Kyi and her political role in Burma, whether opposing factions within the military like it or not. She will have him to thank after the next elections, if the poll and its results go smoothly.

But with elections not due until 2015 and no obvious successor for the current presidency, those eying the potential spoils of a free Burma -- whether the pro-business cheer leaders or supporters of genuine democratic reforms -- would probably be better off by adopting a more cautious approach.

Before Indonesia’s former President Suharto was forced to stand down in 1998, many Western and local media described him as his country’s first democratically elected leader. This was done simply because most journalists were scared of him and his nepotistic regime.

Once gone, and no longer a threat, correspondents immediately changed their tune and referred to the nation’s accepted face of democracy as the “former dictator Suharto” or “the strongman”.

It was an inglorious flip-flop but one that recognized the realities of his 32-year rule.

Fourteen years since his forced retirement, a landmark investigation has determined just how mean Suharto could be, finding he had committed a “gross violation of human rights” when conducting the communist purges of the mid-1960s.

It’s the stuff made famous by Mel Gibson in The Year of Living Dangerously, an 840-page report into the massacres of hundreds of thousands of people after an alleged failed coup by the outlawed Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) against then President Sukarno.

The plot to overthrow was never fully proven.

Nevertheless, Suharto, a major-general at the time, led a military response that wiped-out perhaps half a million PKI and others with suspected links to the communists, including family, sympathizers and people simply caught on the sidelines of a paranoid and nasty regime.

Murder, rape, torture and slavery, were among the rights abuses.

Suharto replaced Sukarno with his role in the pogroms hushed-up and quietly ignored until after his death in 2008.

A draft bill for a Truth and Reconciliation Commission was attempted but failed in 2006. Legal action brought by survivors has also failed while a personal apology by former President Abdurrahman Wahid was considered by many as inadequate.

Authors of the latest report by Indonesia's National Commission on Human Rights (Komnas HAM) are recommending that Jakarta embark on a national reconciliation process including compensation for the survivors and legal action against those responsible for the killings.

“Komnas HAM is a serious outfit and their work is solid,” said Greg Barton, the Herb Feith Research Professor for the Study of Indonesia at Monash University in Australia. “Their reports represent some of the most significant critiques of the Suharto regime to be published in the post-Suharto era.”

President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono has told Indonesia’s Attorney General to follow up on the report which maintains that military officers from that period should stand trial.

However, finding justice for crimes committed almost 50 years ago will prove difficult if only for the logistics required to build a case for the prosecution. Previous governments have also been accused of going slow on follow-up investigations into findings of previous cases made by the commission.

“I don't have any strong expectations that we will see either prosecutions or payment of compensation. Nothing over the past 14 years gives us reason to hope that we will see concrete outcomes,” Barton said.

“Nevertheless, if this process results in profound and serious public reflection then whatever the legal outcome something substantial will have been achieved.”

That said, victims of a much less known incident might have better luck. Komnas HAM has also conducted a separate inquiry into the deaths of hundreds, maybe thousands, in what became known as the petrus killings of the early 1980s.

Petrus is an Indonesian abbreviation meaning mysterious shootings.

They died in another Suharto crackdown, this time on known criminals between 1982 and 1985. Suharto has admitted to the unilateral killings, designed to remove thugs and lower an escalating crime rate. People were singled out by security forces and killed, some simply because they had a tattoo.

The commission found that people who had not committed any crimes also died.

“Based on our analysis, there was evidence of attacks committed by a group of people who were actually part of law enforcement,” Komnas HAM Commissioner, Yoseph Adi Prasetyo told journalists at a recent press conference.

“There were also cases of wrong targets, where the victims were never involved in any crimes but became victims because they happened to have the same names,” he said.

Komnas HAM said corpses related to the petrus killings were found across the country’s main islands of Java and Sumatra while related incidents were reported from Bandung, Makassar, Pontianak, Banyuwangi and Bali.

Suharto was forced to stand down in May, 1998, after anti-government riots left 1,000 people dead, many more injured and thousands of buildings destroyed. Attempts to try him for corruption and genocide failed amid a lack of support and claims that ill-health meant he was not fit to stand trial.

Another Indonesian analyst, who declined to be named, added the recent re-emergence of Maj. Gen. Prabowo Subianto, the son-in-law of Suharto, onto Indonesia’s political landscape could prove a further hurdle in finding justice for victims of past crimes.

“Over the last 14 years Prabowo has traded in his military greens for tailored suits and re-invented himself as a businessman-cum-politician and is expected to contest elections in 2014,” he said.

Prabowo used his troops to organize gangs of thugs during the 1998 riots that attacked and razed scores of Chinese businesses in Jakarta while publicly urging Indonesians to help him in confronting "traitors to the nation."

As leader of the Great Indonesian Movement Party (Gerindra), Prabowo’s chances of victory at the next poll remain a distinct possibility, and that in itself will cause investigators hoping to find some closure for Suharto’s victims much concern.

Such concerns will no doubt be shared among Indonesia’s local and foreign press corps who would prefer not to recycle old cliché’s dating back to Prabowo’s in-laws.