From Gaza to Southeast Asia: how does ASEAN score on ethnic cleansing and genocide?

Amid Southeast Asia's growing support for Palestinians in Gaza, treatment of minority groups at home is brought into the spotlight.

Photo credit: Prachatai/Flickr.

X, or the pipeline from Gaza to Southeast Asia

It all started with a seemingly innocuous post on X, formerly known as Twitter, as most discourse does nowadays.

When X user burnerphoneuser posted an image listing the member-states of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) with the humorous caption “the flags of bad bitch central,” they likely weren’t expecting the post to go viral.

Screenshot of the X post as at June 13, 2024.

Replies to the post initially agreed with the poster’s caption, while many people also took ‘friendly’ jabs at Singapore for standing out against the rest of the association’s countries, highlighting a “lack of culture” when compared to its neighbours.

In a matter of hours, the conversation turned to address the island-state’s support for the Israel, its military and its ongoing aggression over Gaza and the occupied Palestinian territories. As many users started singling out Singapore in that regard, others came forward to remind that other countries, notoriously Myanmar, equally support the Zionist entity, and have also similarly failed to recognize the State of Palestine.

As the question of Singapore’s political alignment, and to a lesser extent Myanmar’s, on the international scene took the forefront of the discourse, South China Morning Post (SCMP) reported that Malaysia had evicted and burned down the homes of over 500 Bajau Laut, a seafaring nomadic community native to the state of Sabah on the Malaysian side of the island of Borneo.

Shortly after the news broke out, many in Malaysia took to social media to call out the hypocrisy of their government, who has expressed unwavering support for the plight of Palestinians and the establishment of an independent Palestinian state, while seemingly employing similar tactics against native groups on its own territory.

These parallel developments bring to light the often contradicting positions adopted by ASEAN states with regards to supporting indigenous communities elsewhere while perpetrating ethnic cleansing and genocidal practices at home.