Letter From the Editors

Welcome to the July 2023 issue of The Diplomat Magazine.

For this month, we split our focus between present and past: examining both the lingering impact of history and probing history-in-the-making. Anniversaries in Solomon Islands and the Korean Peninsula provide an opportunity to examine how the past has shaped the present. For the Uyghur diaspora and Bangladesh’s democracy, today’s developments will set the tone for the future – potentially a very dark one.

Our cover story details the plight of Idris Hasan, a Uyghur refugee who fled from China only to wind up in indefinite detention in Morocco. His case is a prime example of China’s transnational repression, which has put Uyghur exiles under increasing pressure even in once-safe havens. Through interviews with Hasan’s family and friends, journalist Nicholas Muller details both the specifics of his case and the broader ramifications for desperate Uyghurs – as well as the foreign governments that claim to support them.

Twenty years ago, in July 2003, the Regional Assistance Mission to Solomon Islands (RAMSI) began. Years of civil conflict in the country had so alarmed its leaders that they invited in an Australia-led international intervention. The intervention, which ended in 2017, is often herald as a success. But, as researcher Anouk Ride explores in her article, while RAMSI’s initial quelling of violence and disarmament was an unequivocal success, the following effort at state-building was far more controversial. It’s important, Ride argues, to ask where narratives about RAMSI’s successes come from, and whose stories those narratives miss.

July 2023 marks another anniversary: 70 years since the Korean Armistice Agreement was signed. Se Young Jang, an assistant professor of Korean Studies at Leiden University in the Netherlands, explains how the war became frozen under what was supposed to a temporary truce. First, a civil war between Korea’s two halves morphed into an international conflict, pitting the United States and its allies against China. As that happened, South Korea – under President Syngman Rhee – increasingly lost control over the war, with Rhee’s insistence on final unification marginalized and ultimately ignored. As Jang writes, Seoul was relegated to “a secondary party to the original armistice system” – and seven decades have done little to change that.

Over the course of the last 14 years Bangladesh’s democracy has been under siege. The ruling Awami League – led by Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina – has cemented itself in power, scrapping the previous system of allowing a neutral caretaker government to oversee elections. Despite growing public frustration with rising inequality and corruption, the government focused its energy on cracking down on its political opponents. Dhaka-based journalist Zarif Faiaz writes that the ruling party’s “revenge-fuelled politics, oligarchy-leaning policies, and growing authoritarian tendencies” make it difficult to expect a free and fair election when the next vote comes in early 2024.

We hope you enjoy these stories and the many more in the following pages.