seemed to have struck more deeply here than else-
where in the region. With the Alliance Party in dis-
array, Mahathir Mohamad, prime minister since
1981, claimed that the communist and Chinese
threat in the early 1990s required increasing
vigilance. In 1987 he invoked a security act to
imprison many opponents. More ominously, he
harassed and weakened the judiciary and so placed
a question mark over Malaysia’s democratic consti-
tutional future. By 1993 repression had not
resulted in a serious Chinese backlash; but, even if
there were one, the great majority of Chinese
Malays would not support the Chinese or
Vietnamese communists in the north. Dr Mahathir
retained control throughout the crisis of 1997 and
1998, blaming it on the West instead of on the
imprudent spending of Malayan business. But the
West was, in part, to blame for recklessly supplying
loans for unproductive development. As time went
on, Dr Mahathir become more authoritarian, his
last years were marred by the abuses of the judicial
process as he sought to imprison those who
opposed him or fell out with him over policy. The
most notorious case was the conviction of the most
likely successor to Mahathir, Anwar Ibrahim, con-
victed in 1999 of corruption and sodomy and sen-
tenced to six and nine years in prison. His wife now
leads an opposition movement. After twenty-two
years in power, Mahathir announced with tears in
his eyes his intentions to retire and did so in
October 2003. There are elections but democracy
is flawed when emergency legislation can be
invoked to detain active politicians in opposition.
In many ways Malaysia is a remarkable country;
Muslim and secular, tolerant of all religions and,
during the last two decades, successfully over-
coming the dangers of ethnic conflict between the
wealthier Chinese community and the Malays,
unlike what occurred in Indonesia in 1998. The
Malays make up just over half of the 23 million
population, the Chinese about a quarter and
Indians less than ten per cent. Positive discrimina-
tion has raised the educational level and standard
of living of the Malays. The cloud over the
future is the spread of more militant Islam which
Dr Mahathir with some concessions succeeded in
containing. Malaysia is not yet a fully developed
nation, the majority of its people are still only on
the path to becoming the ‘fully developed coun-
try’ in Mahathir’s ‘Vision 2020’ that he set out
as a goal in 1992. Mahathir’s chosen successor,
Abdullah Badawi, his deputy prime minister, lacks
his authority and style. In facing Malaysia’s future,
Mahathir’s premiership will be a hard act to follow
despite all its shortcomings.Siam, renamed Thailand in 1949, is one of the
five relatively prosperous states of south-east Asia,
the others being Singapore, Malaysia, the
Philippines and Sri Lanka. With a population of
over 50 million in the 1980s, Thailand possesses
rich resources, principally tin, wolfram, rubber
and rice. In the capital, Bangkok, a downtown
commercial centre and some factories stand cheek
by jowl along its hundreds of canals with shanty
dwellings lacking sanitation. In the West and in
Japan, Thailand achieved notoriety for encourag-
ing tourists attracted by the unrestricted nature of
its prostitution, which catered for all varieties of
Western and Eastern tastes. AIDS is now rampant
in the sex bazaars, threatening the lucrative
tourism and, worse, the country’s population.
Every new ruler and government promised to
clean up Thailand, referring not to this specialised
tourism, but to widespread administrative cor-
ruption. Thailand is a monarchy, but power is
exercised by a group of generals who periodically
engage in coups against each other. By 1993
there had been six such successful coups since
1945 and numerous unsuccessful attempts. On
three occasions the military handed the govern-
ment back to civilian control, but never for very
long. Consequently, parliamentary democracy
had little opportunity to develop.
Thailand and Japan were the only Asian coun-
tries to escape colonisation by one of the
European powers, but Thailand lost some of its
territory in the nineteenth century to Laos and
Cambodia, then French Indo-China. Thailand’s
geographical position poses particular problems
for its foreign policy, for it cannot afford too many
enemies simultaneously. It has borders with
five countries. To the north and west lies Burma,
with which it cultivates good relations. To the
south-west is Malaysia, with which it shares anti-
communist interests and a desire to avoid being
drawn into war. Thailand’s problems emerge on
its north-eastern borders with Laos and its south-