Burmese authorities, including President Thein Sein, are living with their collective heads in the clouds. The idea that a government can single out one ethnic minority and restrict their breeding to two children is as obscene as it is illegal, a form of ethnic cleansing that should warrant the attention of prosecutors at the international Criminal Court (ICC).

More so, given the government’s desire to see Burma normalize relations with the rest of the world, which would mean being subjected to the numerous resolutions and agreements struck by the United Nations over the last 60 years or more, when Rangoon was opting to model itself on the likes of North Korea in a bizarre form of military socialism that enriched the leaders and left the overall population destitute.

Even opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi, if only briefly, stopped toeing the government line and spoke out against the reinforcement of the two-child policy, first initiated in 1994, for Muslim Rohingyas. However, her comments again seemed to lack the moral backbone that once made her famous.

“If true, this is against the law,” she said.

Much of the violence against Muslims over the past 12-months was launched in the state of Rakhine, where almost 200 people were killed during the bloodiest period in the second half of last year. It is also where a government commission claimed it “found“ that population growth among the Rohingyas was behind the sectarian violence.

Rakhine state spokesman Win Myaing left no doubts about the intentions of the policy, saying that it would be mandatory for all Rohingya, although the government was still determining how to enforce it.

Given the level of well-documented violence in the past year, including rape, torture, beatings and detention, perhaps the idea of Myaing and his cohorts sitting back and mulling over ways to enforce a population control program for people it does not like should not come as a surprise. What’s it to be? Sterilization? Forced abortion?

"This is the best way to control the population explosion which is a threat to our national identity. If no measure is taken to control the population, there is a danger of losing our own identity," said the National Affairs Minister for the Yangon Region Zaw Aye Maung.

He also suggested that the government would be doing the Muslims a favor because the two-child policy would reduce the costs of raising a family.

Much of the ethnic violence in Burma has been blamed on the country’s Buddhist monks, who have broken every conceivable notion of Buddhism as a purely peaceful religion and hold fast to government propaganda that Burmese Muslims are just Bengalis who fled across the border sometime back.

One Buddhist monk from Maungdaw township was, according to Agence-France-Presse, enthusiastic.

"It's a good idea. If the government can really control the Bengali population in the area, the other communities will feel more secure and there will be less violence like what happened in the past," said the monk named Manithara.

Thein Sein has showed himself to be a clever politician, bringing his country in from the cold while allowing the generals, who ruled with an iron fist for than half a century, to don business suits and reinvent themselves as politicians. He might soon be able to add ethnic cleansing and genocide to his list of accomplishments.

Massive blackouts have hit several Southeast Asian countries in the past month, causing widespread panic, business losses, and even political controversy. 

On May 8, a sudden outage in five power plants in the Philippines plunged 40 percent of Luzon Island into darkness, including Metropolitan Manila. Meanwhile, on May 21, mysterious lightning allegedly affected power transmission in Thailand, triggering the kingdom’s “biggest blackout ever” in its 14 southern provinces.

The following day, a crane error knocked out a major transmission line in Vietnam, immediately causing a ten-hour blackout across 22 provinces in the nation’s south. Affected cities included Vietnam’s southern commercial hub, Ho Chi Minh City, and Phnom Penh in neighboring Cambodia. 

Three weeks after the Luzon blackout, Philippine energy officials admitted that they are still clueless as to what caused the power plants to malfunction. But at least they clarified that a total of 14 plants conked out during the unforgettable day of darkness. 

Meanwhile, the Thai blackout inconvenienced eight million residents and was the country’s worst power interruption in 30 years. According to the Federation of Thai Industries, the resultant economic damage could reach 10 billion baht.

In Vietnam, the blackout affected a third of the country and was said to be the first large-scale power breakdown in 100 years. Cambodia suffered, too, because its power supply is partly provided by Vietnam. 

Even if these blackouts were not connected to each other, they remind us that in the age of tablets and smartphones, governments that fail to deliver an uninterrupted power supply will quickly find themselves bombarded by angry comments from even the most apolitical of citizens – especially netizens. Further, politicians must answer not only persistent questions about the causes of blackouts; they must also debunk conspiracy theories – especially those that seem credible. 

In the case of the Philippines, the power went off just a few days before the scheduled midterm polls, which led some to suspect that that unusual blackout could be a rehearsal to stage systematic electoral fraud. Indeed, power interruptions were reported on election day, but they seem to have been isolated cases. 

Meanwhile, in Thailand, the blackout was concentrated in the south where Muslim rebels have been waging an armed insurgency since 2004. This fact prompted many residents to fear that the power outage could have been a prelude to an intense military attack. Soldiers were dispatched to assuage the public’s fear.

Some academics have taken another view, asserting that the blackout was a ploy by the government meant to influence public opinion in favor of building coal power plants in areas where there is strong community resistance to such projects. In the aftermath of the blackout, public opinion favors the resignation of the energy minister.

The blackouts, accidental or not, were too big to ignore and these should force Southeast Asian governments to review their power infrastructure. It is interesting that during the Luzon blackout, the proposal to use the Philippines’ mothballed nuclear plant was revived, triggering a lively debate about the advantages of harnessing the country’s renewable energy potential.

Finally, Cambodia must brainstorm other ways to generate power since it was already experiencing severe power cuts in recent months. The government needs to think of a fast solution before “powerless” citizens take to the streets and demand reliable electricity.

Officials in Phnom Penh – and the whole region for that matter – should learn from the experience of Burma, where protests arose in its major cities during a power shortage crisis exactly a year ago.

Earlier this month a popular satellite television provider in Vietnam took the drastic step of dropping 21 foreign channels, including BBC and CNN. The reason cited was Decision 20, a guiding document for the law that sets out controversial new translation and editing rules.

The legislation, which Hanoi says will make foreign channels more accessible to Vietnamese audiences, has roused staunch objections over cost, censorship and vague wording since it was passed in 2011, and implementation has already been postponed once.

However, a call to the Ministry of Information and Communication for clarification didn’t turn out exactly as planned.  A senior official said the decision had not, in fact, been implemented. Shortly afterwards foreign channels also disappeared from state-run giant Vietnam Television. Reporters were left scratching their heads.

One particular bone of contention among critics was a requirement that news channels pay a Vietnamese agent for a 100 per cent “summary” translation. However, no one could figure out what “summary” meant, and translating a round-the-clock news channel was deemed prohibitively expensive. 

Aside from the obvious commercial aspect, many in the television industry were puzzled by the thinking behind the decision. 

"If something’s sensitive why do they want to translate it in the first place? It defies logic,” one employee at a Vietnamese television company said.

It then emerged that the ministry had quietly removed these impediments for news channels in an amendment to the regulations, known as Decision 18A, which was signed off by Deputy Prime Minister Nguyen Thien Nhan in March.

To give people time to adjust, the amended Decision 20 was in force but not being enforced.

That didn’t stop some providers from erring on the side of caution and removing channels that did not comply with the requirements that remained, namely getting an editing licence. The licence forces all foreign channels to pay an authorized Vietnamese agent to edit content before it is distributed publicly on Vietnamese cable and satellite platforms.

Rather obviously, the system raises concerns about censorship. News channels working in Asia are used to governments censoring content for moral and political reasons, but signing a contract to enable the process is another matter.

“The particular problem caused by Vietnam’s rather unclear situation is that it seems that the news channels would be asked to sign off on their own censorship,” said John Medeiros, chief policy officer at pay-tv industry body CASBAA.

By the time Decision 20 came into effect only 16 foreign channels had editing licences. Since then, the ministry has handed out around a dozen more. Despite the fact most still do not have one, after a week of meetings, all foreign channels are now back on air. How long they will stay there remains to be seen.

"BBC World News is committed to delivering high quality impartial news to audiences across Vietnam and we are in continued discussions with Vietnamese authorities on the matter,” a BBC spokeswoman said.

With some officials involved in negotiations pushing for the government to scrap the legislation altogether, it could be a while before any more “decisions” are made.

Chelsea Clinton, daughter of former U.S. President Bill Clinton and former First Lady and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, traveled to Burma on Monday to personally oversee the U.S.-based company Procter and Gamble (P&G) deliver its six billionth liter of clean water as part of an initiative the firm began in 2010.

Clinton traveled to Gway Tauk Chaung village in Pathein, Burma, at the invitation of the director of P&G’s Children’s Safe Drinking Water (CSDW) program, Dr. Greg Allgood.

The CSDW program is an initiative P&G has undertaken with the help of the Clinton Global Initiative, an NGO run by former President Clinton, which aims to deliver two billion liters of water each year across the world through 2020. With the ultimate goal of saving one life every hour between 2010 and 2020, the company estimates that the clean water it has already delivered “has saved 32,000 lives and prevented 250 Million days of diarrheal illnesses across 71 countries.”

The CSDW program has been especially active in Burma where natural disasters frequently cause clean water shortages. For three years after Cyclone Nargis left many Burmese without adequate drinking water in 2008, P&G provided the country with over 31 million liters of clean water. Since 2011, the company has also distributed over one million satchels of its water purification powder, with each satchel capable of transforming up to 10 liters of dirty water into water that is safe for consumption.

According to the World Health Organization, lack of clean drinking water is one of the leading causes of Diarrheal disease, which is the second most common cause of death in children under the age of five, killing some 760,000 children around the world each year. The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) estimates that 4,000 children die each day around the world from a lack of drinking water or basic sanitation, with improper hygiene being another leading cause of the disease.

In a speech she gave at an event in Yangon during her recent trip, Clinton, who is a board member of her father's initiative, noted that 40,000 children die of Diarrhea annually in Burma alone. Discussing the disease, she added:

"It’s unconscionable not only for scores of people to die from a disease that is   completely preventable, but also to stand on the sidelines when we have the   knowledge and the means to really do something about it. Any of us with the opportunity and tools to make a difference in the lives of others have an imperative to do so."

During the visit, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and P&G also signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU), pledging to develop a new program aimed at improving health conditions for women and children in Burma. In a joint statement announcing the MOU, USAID and P&G said:

"Will seek to develop a multi-year, multiprogram Global Development Alliance, which will make initial investments of at least $2 million on health projects aimed at providing clean drinking water, promoting better hygiene behaviors, and building capability linked to improvements in delivery of Maternal and Child Health (MCH) services."

As part of the new MOU, P&G has agreed to provide Myanmar with at least 200 million liters of water over the next two years.

Zachary Keck is assistant editor of The Diplomat.

Signs of progress have been slow to appear in Thailand’s troubled south three months after Bangkok first publicly agreed to help Malaysia negotiate a resolution. Killings have also escalated, indicating the limits of Kuala Lumpur’s influence over Muslim separatists.

Among the dead are five paramilitary rangers who were killed during an ambush last week when suspected rebels detonated a bomb buried under a road. The rangers were en-route to a meeting with Muslim leaders in Pattani amid talks about the conflict that erupted on a broader scale in 2004 and has since claimed more than 5,500 lives.

By enlisting Malaysia as a “facilitator” in negotiations, Thailand had raised hopes that perhaps some kind of agreement might be reached with the shadowy outfits demanding a homeland in Thailand’s three southernmost provinces, which were annexed by Bangkok more than a century ago. Some have also expressed hope that the killings might abate while talks are ongoing.

However, Malaysia’s negotiating skills have proven questionable.

Kuala Lumpur played an active role in securing a peace deal last year between the Philippine government and Muslim rebels who were demanding autonomy in the Philippines’ south.

But Philippines-based rebels employed by the self-anointed Sultan of Sulu, Jamalul Karim, later turned on Malaysia, launching an insurgency in the eastern state of Sabah in March that cost more than 70 lives.

In Thailand, the Patani Freedom Fighters, or Pejuang Kemerdekaan Patani, and the National Revolutionary Front-Coordinate (BRN-C), with its roots dating back to the 1960s, are the most prominent of several groups linked to the fighting. The local word for the insurgents is juwae.

The latest deaths in Southern Thailand came shortly after a shootout in Narathiwat where another ranger and a suspected militant were killed during a raid on a suspected hideout. A warning was made by rebels earlier this month through a leaflet drop that women and children would not be spared by the insurgents.

Malaysia’s involvement with the Philippine peace talks date back decades and its initial support for the Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF), which later splintered into the current Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF), gave it an inside edge during negotiations between Manila and the MILF.

There were also territorial complications as the Philippines does not recognize Malaysian sovereignty over Sabah, much to the annoyance of leaders in the capital. They became involved with the peace process if only out of self-interest and an understandable desire to see their interests in Sabah protected.

However, apart from a shared border and a religious affiliation with Muslims in the South, Malaysia does not seem to have any real influence in Thailand. Its attempts to broker talks with the rebels amid a rising death toll could prove more of an unwanted distraction than a real help.