A U.S. $5 billion dollar loan for construction of a rail link across southern Laos between Thailand and Vietnam has reportedly been approved. The loan is worth more than half of Laos’ total Gross Domestic Product.

New Zealand group Rich Banco Berhad has apparently approved the loan to Malaysian-based Giant Consolidated, which will build the 220-kilometer track linking the two borders. However, details surrounding the deal, the bank and its relationship with the Malaysian group are sketchy at best.

The project, along with other massive infrastructure projects planned by Vientiane, has raised eyebrows among economists who doubt the country’s ability to repay its potentially enormous debts.

According to the World Bank, Laos GDP was just U.S. $8.3 billion in 2011. Laos has sole ownership of the project and will be responsible to repay the debt after a Chinese group withdrew amid concerns over its profitability.

However, Chinese companies remain active elsewhere in the country and are prominent on big ticket infrastructure projects, including the U.S. $7.2 billion high-speed train running north to south and linking the Chinese border with Vientiane.

The Asian Development Bank has described that project as “unaffordable.” Yet, the EXIM Bank of China intends to fund the project, which the Lao transport minister says is almost ready to go ahead once the final details are thrashed out.

Other projects on the books include dams, roads and airports.

Many of the projects have proven controversial, particularly the Xayaburi Dam. The contentious project will be the first dam built on the mainstream of the lower Mekong River, home to more than 60 million people who depend on the river for their livelihoods. Vientiane has launched an extensive public relations campaign to try and convince sceptics of the dam’s value for the Mekong, its inhabitants and neighboring countries.  

The publicity push has been contradicted by independent reports that detail the potential damage to ecosystems and fish catches, which prompted calls for a moratorium by Vietnam, Cambodia and Western countries that fund the Mekong River Commission. Vientiane publicly agreed but secretly carried on construction.

Any criticism of these projects from the outside is met with indignation by officials who accuse the Western media of lying, while Laotians who question the merits of such massive developments are often ridiculed as unpatriotic.

In recent days, the Lao government has also faced intense international pressure over the disappearance of Sombath Somphone, a U.S.-educated Laotian activist prominent in community development. His plight was raised by United States Secretary of State John Kerry last month when he urged Laotian authorities to step up their investigation into his disappearance without delay.

Amid these ongoing controversies, Laos is taking on the added burden of constructing the east-west rail link, which is expected to take four years. Only time will tell if the government is up to the task.

Allegations of dirty tricks have emerged in the campaigns for the May 5 Malaysian elections after a number of websites were hacked and broadcasts by radio stations were apparently jammed.

Websites belonging to Radio Free Malaysia, Radio Free Sarawak and the news portal Sarawak Report, among others, were subjected to DDOS (distributed denial of service) attacks, which editors blamed on the Malaysian government.

Typically, DDOS involves saturating a website with information and requests that slow its response to the point of being inoperable. The attacks have been traced to Russia and Eastern Europe.

One site apparently received 64 million hits.

“This is not a proper expenditure of taxpayers’ money and it only goes to prove how vulnerable this 50 year old regime feels to the truth,” said Clare Rewcastle Brown, editor of Sarawak Report and founder of Radio Free Sarawak and Radio Free Malaysia.

Sabah and Sarawak, the two Malaysian states in the country’s east on the island of Borneo could cost Prime Minister Najib Razak and his United National Malays Organization (UMNO) its first election since independence from colonial Britain in 1957.

The leadership in both states have faced widespread allegations of corruption that include government kickbacks and illegal logging and have been pivotal in delivering the UMNO the required votes in previous national elections.

Details of the attacks have been restricted in cyberspace with the web operators relying on social networking sites like Facebook and bloggers like Din Merican to get information on the attacks out to the Malaysian public.

“BN (Barisan Nasional) controls every single newspaper and broadcast outlet in Malaysia, which are all forced to pour out propaganda favoring their party and to attack opposition leaders without allowing them their right of reply,” Brown said. “And yet BN are nevertheless clearly terrified by even the most modest platforms providing independent news or alternative information.” 

Similar allegations of hacking were made during the recent Sabah crisis, when at least 200 militia members from the Southern Philippines crossed the maritime border and launched a bloody insurgency in the name of the self-anointed sultan. The action cost more than 70 lives.

The Malaysian government was roundly criticized for its inability to control its eastern borders and deal with the rebels effectively and this was expected to cost the UMNO votes at the upcoming poll.

Prior to the insurgency in early March, the UMNO was widely expected to win the upcoming election. But opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim has gained an unlikely political advantage from the violence in Sabah. Given his unprecedented gains in the 2008 elections, victory for his Pakatan Rakyat coalition is no longer totally out of the question.

Thai human rights lawyer Somchai Neelapaijit went missing on March 12, 2004. Filipino activist Jonas Burgos was last seen on April 28, 2007. Lao development economist and educator Sombath Somphone disappeared on December 15, 2012.

The search for these missing activists has become a campaign for human rights promotion, not only in their respective countries but across Southeast Asia. Their names have become synonymous with the fight against enforced disappearances, kidnapping, torture, and other human rights atrocities, often carried out with apparent impunity.

At the time of his disappearance, then 53-year-old Somchai was handling cases in southern Thailand, a region ravaged by infighting between government troops and Muslim separatist rebels. Somchai was pursuing a case against police officers accused of torture when he mysteriously disappeared in Bangkok.

Jonas, the son of Philippine press freedom fighter Joe Burgos, was connected with a left-leaning peasant group when he was abducted by suspected state agents in a Quezon City shopping mall. There were witnesses who testified in the court that Jonas shouted ‘Aktibista ako!’ (I’m an activist!) while he was being dragged out of the mall.

Sombath is a popular NGO leader whose work with the Participatory Development Training Centre in Laos earned him the 2005 Ramon Magsaysay Award, known as Asia’s Nobel Prize, for community leadership. Sombath’s disappearance was captured on CCTV footage, which shows Sombath being stopped by police and then abducted by unidentified men. Sombath’s abduction is believed to be related to his advocacy for the protection of land rights for ordinary villagers.

All three cases highlight the inability of their respective governments to protect the human rights of their citizens, especially activists and civil society members who criticize politicians and public authorities. In particular, they expose the perpetration of kidnapping and abduction by state forces as unofficial policies or instruments used to silence dissidents, despite the fact that all governments in the region have embraced the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Angkhana Neelapaijit, Somchai’s wife, has expressed disappointment that Thailand’s Department of Special Investigation has not made any progress at all with the case almost a decade after her husband was abducted. Meanwhile, Sombath’s wife Ng Shui Meng called the Association of Southeast Asian Nations a “toothless” agency for its failure to enforce regional agreements on human rights and democratic governance. Like Angkhana and Shui Meng, Edita Burgos, the mother of Jonas, was also discouraged by her government’s apparently insincere pledge to help find her missing son when a ranking military officer suspected of involvement in the abduction was promoted to a higher rank last December.

Perhaps the families and supporters of Somchai, Jonas, and Sombath are motivated by the support they continue to receive from people around the world. In March, even United States Secretary of State John Kerry asked the Laos government to release more information about Sombath’s case. Further, Edita Burgos asked the Philippine Supreme Court to reopen her son’s case after she received new documentary evidence identifying the abductors of Jonas as an intelligence unit of the 7th Infantry Division of the Philippine Army and the 56th Infantry Battalion.

The continuing search for Somchai, Jonas, and Sombath is also an ongoing campaign for greater human rights protection in Thailand, the Philippines, and Laos. The campaign has created public awareness that human rights legislation must be backed with political will and commitment in order to effectively prevent more human rights abuses.

In the case of the Philippines, this means that the signing of the landmark Anti-Enforced or Involuntary Disappearance Act of 2012 last December must be followed up with substantial action and procedural reform. Only by taking these concrete steps can the new administration prove that human rights violations are no longer tolerated.  

Hundreds of people across Southeast Asia – often children or impoverished villagers looking for scrap metal –continue to be maimed or killed every year by land mines and unexploded bombs, despite a concerted effort by governments to rid the region of the scourge.

It’s a point not lost on the Vietnamese, who are pushing the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) to take the lead on this issue and establish an expert panel to help resolve it.

The initiative was put forward by Vietnam’s Deputy Defense Minister Lt. Gen. Nguyen Chi Vinh during a meeting of regional defense officials in Brunei recently, where he said such a move would also help maintain peace, stability and development within Southeast Asia.

Land mines and other types of explosives have been left by an array of insurgent groups over the last half century, at times backed by the Soviet Union, China or the United States, as the vied for regional influence during the Cold War and after. The devices are still being used in some parts of Southeast Asia today.

The reality for today’s generation is that land mines and UXO (unexploded ordnance) are an enormous problem in ASEAN countries. Of the 10 members of ASEAN, UXO remain a major issue for Burma, Thailand, Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam and the Philippines. 

More than 20 percent of Vietnamese land remains contaminated with mines, which have killed or injured more than 100,000 people over the years. The push for a region-wide panel came as Philippine authorities published the results of a survey that found 113 people have been killed and another 262 wounded over the last decade by mines planted by the Communist New People’s Army (NPA) in the country’s south.

The NPA has run a communist-inspired insurgency on the island of Mindanao for almost 45 years and is just one of several outfits waging a rebellion in the troubled south. Authorities fear that a shortage of guns and ammunition is prompting the NPA to increase the use of mines and cheap improvised explosive devices (IEDs).

Cambodia has long been the region’s unfortunate poster child for this tragic issue. Despite international efforts to ban land mines and other munitions like cluster bombs, however, Cambodia’s recent border conflict with Thailand at Preah Vihear proved such treaties were difficult to enforce.

Journalist Hurley Scroggins and human rights groups found overwhelming evidence that Thailand had used cluster bombs as recently as early 2011, only further complicating efforts to clear Cambodia of UXOs.

Divisions within ASEAN, ranging from different types of government to religious and ethnic differences, have cast serious doubts over ASEAN’s ability to act as a cohesive political bloc on the world stage. Perhaps Vietnam’s push for a regional initiative to resolve the land mine issue can change this picture by enhancing regional ties at a much wider level.

Impunity and the ability of the well connected to flout laws and do as they like is a subject that Southeast Asian governments wish would just go away. It undermines democracy and that old chestnut the separation of powers, a foundation of democratic principles.

Governments spend fortunes on public relations trying to convince people that the problem is merely a figment of critics’ imagination, parlayed by a media that simply doesn’t understand the true values and characteristics that are the making of their grand societies.

Then along comes Kopassus, an Indonesia special forces group. Its members have long been suspected of leading a dirty tricks department and doing as they please. But the idea that its agents can enter a prison at will and carry out revenge killings of four detainees, before all but issuing a press release stating such thugs deserved to die, beggars belief.

Not only were they able to carry this off, but the police findings from the initial investigation into the killings will be handed over to an army investigation team – basically allowing Kopassus to investigate itself.

Indonesia has pushed long and hard to be seen as a kind of Southeast Asian superpower. With a population of more than 242 million people, it is by far the biggest country in the region, but numbers do not always count when it comes to wielding influence and leading by example.

The four killings were carried out by 11 Kopussus commandos, who raided the Cebongan Penitentiary in Yogyakarta in retaliation for the apparent brutal and sadistic murder of former Kopassus soldier First Sgt. Heru Santoso. The soldiers said they had been angered further by an earlier street attack on another Kopassus commando, First Sgt. Sriyono.

Predictably, the government has tried to clarify the situation while maintaining that its moral beacon had not been compromised by its own security forces acting out of anger and revenge, without orders, embarrassing a nation that desperately wants to be taken seriously.

President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono – a former general and brother-in-law of the current army chief – rebuked the commandos for their vigilante acts. Nevertheless his faith in the military justice system remains unshakeable and the trial will go ahead.

Kopassus Commandant Maj. Gen. Agus Sutomo told local media, “Everyone will be able to gain access to the court. The open trial is our answer to those who question whether the military can be impartial when trying its own soldiers.”

No doubt such a military tribunal will carry all the pomp and circumstance required to convince a skeptical public that it means business. Whether it actually administers justice, though, is another story.