Welcome to Foreign Policy’s Southeast Asia Brief.
The highlights this week: Protests turn ugly in Indonesia as pro-presidential thugs emerge, Thailand cracks down on badly-behaved foreigners, and an unhealthy haze engulfs the region.
Thugs come out as government popularity slips
Indonesia’s gangsters have a long history of acting as arms of the state in a crisis. Last week, we saw one of the most blatant examples of this since the country’s democratization in 1998.
The sequence of events was as follows. On Thursday, there was a protest in Jakarta focused on issues including corruption. While there were fears of a repeat of last year’s riots, the protest, which was held outside the parliament complex, proceeded peacefully at first.
