Immediate Release
20 December 2024
Nearly five years ago, with the videotaped keynote address on the history of democratic struggle by Professor Noam Chomsky and the official blessings of the then two-time Prime Minister of Malaysia, Tun Dr. Mahathir Mohamad, we inaugurated FORSEA in Kuala Lumpur as a truly grassroots platform and network aimed at taking the message of democracy directly to the region’s communities struggling to shake off authoritarian rule in their respective ASEAN nations.
In December this year, our small team of FORSEA board directors – all volunteers – broadened our scope of concern, expanding from our original focus on Southeast Asia to a global perspective. Accordingly, we also expanded the makeup of our board of directors.
See the full board of directors here: FORSEA BOARD MEMBERS – FORSEA
Among our new colleagues are: Northern Irish Nobel Peace Laureate Mairead Maguire of the Peace People in Belfast; retired Dean of Macquarie University Law School in Sydney, Gill Boehringer; noted genocide scholar Penny Green, Professor of Law and Globalization and Director of the International State Crime Initiative at Queen Mary University of London; Hishamuddin Rais (aka Isham), the famed comedian, film director, columnist, and dissident from Malaysia who is a founding member of FORSEA; Bradley Simpson, Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies at the Department of History, University of Connecticut, USA, and famed student leader with the Free Burma Coalition at Northwestern University in the 1990s; Sunita Viswanath, Co-Founder of Hindus for Human Rights and a board member with Amnesty International/USA; and Azeezah Kanji, a legal academic and writer and Director of Programming at Noor Cultural Centre, Canada.
In her acceptance email to the Burmese rights campaigner Dr Maung Zarni, Mairead Maguire wrote, (I am) “happy to join the board” of FORSEA “for its inspiring work.” In a recently held public panel on making “ecocide” the 4th crime under the Rome Statute, hosted at the International Criminal Court (ICC), the panel reportedly cited Israeli Ecocide Brings Renewed Interest in the Crime – FORSEA, a FORSEA’s publication by Professor Gill Boehringer.
In light of Isreal’s ongoing genocide in Gaza, the Occupied Palestine, and the Jewish Supremacist State’s blatant pre-emptive destruction of Syrian and “eternal annexation of Syria’s Golan Height, our new, broadened concerns now encompass such troubling developments as the sharp rise of US militarism in the Far East Asia and over South China Sea, the US-Israel joint genocide in Gaza and their destabilizing project of “regime change” across the Middle East, where one government after another is violently attacked or toppled by the United States through CIA-funded covert operations or “colour revolutions,” as the Western propaganda industry of CNN, BBC, DW and other outlets spin them.
To reflect our concerns, FORSEA has also expanded its loose-knit team of board directors to include some of the world’s leading scholars of colonialism, genocide, legal studies, and non-violence advocates. A few of us who are most active as frontline activists and engaged scholars with internationalist perspectives will now benefit from our new colleagues, who will bring extraordinary expertise, experience, and wisdom, not simply analyses, culled from their decades of engagement in international activism and affairs.
Although the founding members of FORSEA have always embraced internationalist and humanist perspectives and values, we had initially thought we would focus on the state of the region, which has witnessed multiple genocides, the Cold War-era wars and civil wars.
Southeast Asia has been the site of a long series of state violence or “the crimes of the powerful,” as our new colleague Professor Penny Green of Queen Mary University of London put it.
Among them are Indonesia’s unacknowledged, but CIA-backed genocidal killings in 1965 of Indonesians of Chinese ancestry, as well as radical democrats and communists of Indonesia; Washington’s undeclared invasion and war in the formerly French Indochina (Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam) and the resultant Khmer Rouge genocide in the 1970s; the strife-torn Myanmar and its Rohingya genocide; Thailand’s internal democratic struggle and Islamophobic violence in the predominantly Malay and Muslim Southern Thailand; and the nascent reformist movement in Malaysia.
Our current world order is inextricably interconnected, and is no longer divided by Capitalist vs Communist, with the non-aligned movement – then called “Third World.” The new battle lines are drawn between the oligarchs-billionaires and corporate interests who backseat-drive political states, particularly in the so-called Global North (former genocidal Western powers), and the Global South, which houses the world’s majority of human.
Evidently, the United Nations-clustered post-World War II order of nation-states is coming apart at its seam. Its most powerful actors blatantly dismantling the guardrails of international law and normative standards of state conduct.
Against this sordid re-emergence of the “law of the jungle,” where the strong prey on and eat the weak, FORSEA adopts the view that communities of activists and concerned scholars must break out of our colonially constructed silos of area-focused work, either in scholarship or activism. We welcome our new members who have dedicated their lives to making our troubled world a more humane place for the vast majority of earth’s citizens.
In its 5-years’ history, FORSEA has organized multiple public events, both online and in-person, and disseminated first-rate analyses and commentaries by leading rights campaigners and scholars working on different causes as diverse as anti-caste and anti-Hindutva, the re-emergence of European and American Fascisms, Myanmar’s persistent genocidal racism and violence against Rohingya, India’s egregious violations of human rights in the wholly India-annexed Kashmir, gender discrimination inside Myanmar’s armed resistance organizations, Thailand’s geopolitical trap, its authoritarian complex and the popular opposition, Myanmar junta’s war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide at home and the genocide in Palestine.
FORSEA
