Trump administration’s foreign aid curbs cut deep in southern Thailand

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Asmadee Bueheng knows T-shirts. It had always been a hobby, finding items emblazoned with music bands or other designs that make them rare.

In deep southern Thailand, on the border with Malaysia, he would sift through bulk shipments of used clothes – sold by weight in bundles of up to 100 kilograms − and pick out shirts he knew had value. Then he would sell them, sometimes for hundreds of dollars, to customers as far away as Japan.

It made for a fun gig, a modestly profitable side venture to his main work as a journalist at BenarNews, writing on intensely local and sometimes deeply sensitive subjects.

Then, Donald Trump returned to the White House, with a new administration that cut deeply into U.S. spending overseas, including the funds that supported BenarNews, a media outlet operating in Islamic regions of southeast Asia that published stories about Muslim society in Thailand. It was funded by the U.S. Agency for Global Media.

In Thailand, “no other news agency reported peoples’ stories in the deep south,” Mr. Bueheng says. “It was the essential platform for local stories like this to be told.”

The cuts shut down Benar in April and left Mr. Bueheng unemployed.

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Selling T-shirts is now his main work, searching through bags brought in from Pakistan and Malaysia and posting good finds for sale on Facebook Marketplace, rather than reporting on issues like a project to develop local hydro dams. That project has come at a cost to the environment and local residents that, he says, demands scrutiny.

“I want to write about this,” he says. “But nobody wants to run the story.”

The Malay Muslims of southern Thailand occupy a region that has been wracked by violence and political instability, home to a separatist movement that has attacked civilians and institutions of the central government. The conflict has killed more than 7,000 people in the past two decades.

Today, military checkpoints with armoured vehicles and defensive installations are installed across roads through the area. Soldiers with assault rifles are visible walking through local forests on patrol.

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Few foreign tourists travel here, and the Thai government has been suspicious of Western influence in the region, in particular human-rights advocacy.

“Many international organizations could not do anything here,” said Yasmin Sattar, a political scientist at Prince of Songkla University who has conducted an assessment of United States Agency for International Development spending in the Thai south over the past decades.

But the U.S., through its funding of BenarNews and money that came from USAID, found ways to deliver funds that supported local organizations and government administrators.

Among Western donors, “we could say that USAID is the biggest,” she said.

Around the world, cuts to U.S. foreign funding have been rapid and severe, with the shuttering of USAID cutting off money for critical medical supplies and life-saving food.

Mr. Trump has accused the agency of misspending billions of dollars. The cuts could result in 14 million additional deaths over the next half-decade, according to a study published last month in The Lancet.

What has happened in southern Thailand, a region little-known outside the country, underscores the immense reach of the funding changes. It also points to the ways Mr. Trump’s foreign policies risk longer-term damage to his own country, undoing years of effort to bolster the U.S. position in the Muslim world.

“It’s just a pity,” said Prof. Sattar.

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In recent years, U.S. funding in the area was largely devoted to supporting better local governance, training leaders and young people. It was an attempt to provide alternatives to extremism.

“When young people get the sense that they can engage with their own local government, at the end of the day they may not feel like they want to engage with violence,” said Prof. Sattar.

A decade ago, in the long aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks, the U.S. image was so poor in southern Thailand − as in other Muslim areas around the world − that local organizations “couldn’t even tell the community that they got funds from the U.S.,” Prof. Sattar said. But years of investment began to bring change in perceptions.

“Foreign aid can be a soft power,” she said. “But when Donald Trump returned, everything just turned back.”

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Across southern Thailand, roughly 15 small organizations have had to shutter projects because of the cuts, said Soraya Jamjuree, co-ordinator of the Network of Civic Women for Peace. Months later, “there is still no replacement for the USAID funding,” she said.

Her organization, which published a guide for women’s participation in public life, was in the past visited by the U.S. ambassador to Thailand. The front cover of the guide features the USAID logo and slogan: “From the American people.”

“A lot of religious leaders in the deep south hold very conservative ideas on women: Women should stay at home. They should not have a role in society. With this project, we are trying to conduct a dialogue with local religious leaders,” Ms. Jamjuree said. “It is not against Islamic law for women to have a greater role in society.”

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Her organization receives funds from Canada, too, as well as a raft of other international sources. But the U.S. was important because of the size of its support. Foreign cash is particularly key in an area riven by sectarian strife, she said. Community groups that receive government funding can be seen as allies with a government that some here perceive as oppressive.

The disappearance of U.S. funding has also come at a sensitive time in southern Thailand, where a long-standing peace process has been suspended since late last year. Incidents of violence rose 30 per cent last year, and are up again this year. The number of casualties was up by two-thirds.

Civil-society groups, including those that have been funded by USAID, have played a role as independent monitors of what is taking place in the Thai south, where martial law has “allowed government security forces to do whatever they want − enforcement of the law without any discretion,” said Srisompob Jitpiromsri, director of Deep South Watch, which monitors conflict in the region.

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“The issue is impunity, because government officials claim they have impunity when they violate international laws.”

For that reason, the central government has long chafed at foreign support for local organizations in the Thai south. In the wake of U.S. funding cuts, “it has seemed to me the government is a little bit more relaxed. They know that USAID has stopped giving money to the local civil society,” Mr. Jitpiromsri said.

The U.S. had always been careful not to fund projects overtly critical of the Thai military, in order to avoid pushing the country closer toward China. Nonetheless, Mr. Jitpiromsri said, “Trump’s new policy has effects on the human-rights movement.”

Among those who feel newly vulnerable is Mr. Bueheng, the journalist. He has faced criminal charges, accused of obstructing justice, underscoring the risk of his work.

“When I worked at BenarNews, at least I had some organization to support me. But after its closure, I am back to being freelance − and vulnerable to oppression by authorities.”

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