Quake jitters in Bangkok, another crisis for Myanmar and the Duterte-ICC issue in hyper-political Philippines
When friends ask about last week’s earthquake, I say that it was strong and loooong enough to make a Filipino like me - far from unfamiliar with temblors - to run down and out of my condo building here in Bangkok.
I was having lunch past 1 pm when the earth moved on 28 March. Was I getting dizzy? Somehow I recall that the swaying was side to side, not front to back. Pausing to let more awareness seep into me, I realised it was an earthquake, waited for a wee bit – and when it still didn’t stop, stood up to run down. Pulling my door shut, with phone in hand, I caught sight of my hanging lamp swaying like mad, almost touching the ceiling - even if I was just on the third floor.
I reached the ground floor to see water sloshing out of the swimming pool, which was looking like a messily stirred bowl. We residents stood across the street, amid the din of wailing fire alarms (triggered by the quake) that were later joined by ambulance sirens. (A guy who had been in the pool when the quake struck stood with us, his swimming trunks dripping wet.)
Four days after that quake, many of us Bangkok folks remain jittery, feeling somewhat ungrounded. As worrisome as aftershocks, or maybe more than those, is the uncertainty of what could happen - or not knowing what else can happen - after this quake. Skyscrapers are drawing not-so-comfortable glances. Government buildings have emerged as particular subjects of worry, not least with photos of some buildings with major cracks being circulated online. (In malls, though, many seem to be going on with shopping.)
On the day of the quake, a friend who lives on the 17th floor of a 32-floor condo tower in Bangkok returned from work to find major horizontal cracks snaking across the lobby’s walls. Trudging up the stairs to her unit, she found fallen bathroom tiles strewn across the floor. Another friend tripped and fell several times as he rushed down from the 45th floor of his 55-floor condo building.
Sleep didn’t quite come for many, including me, that night. ‘Displaced’ and staying with me, my friend from the 32-floor tower said she dreamt that there was another temblor in the night, and that we both went running down.
But all in all - despite the collapse of that unfinished tower near Chatuchak Park (more than 1,000 km from Mandalay) and many initial reports of buildings with cracks - Bangkok did extremely well.
We find huge relief in that, even if shaken and rattled – and reminded of how tiny humans are in this universe, and how little we really control. No bad news about the city’s tallest towers is extremely good news. King Power MahaNakhon is 314 metres high with 77 floors and a 78th-floor observation deck, Baiyoke Tower II in Pratunam is 304 metres high (88 floors). Banyan Tree hotel, site of the vertical marathons I used to join, has 61 floors.
Myanmar: Civil war and another disaster = a deadly mix
But across the border, Myanmar - the quake epicentre was in northern Mandalay - did not need another disaster on top of its polycrisis of political and armed conflict, economic collapse and humanitarian emergency. This 7.7 magnitude quake overloads a country already struggling with festering wounds and held back by its pre-existing weak capacity for disaster management. Myanmar was a place where state functions had virtually stopped functioning, poverty had risen to its highest levels in decades and 20 million of the country’s 57 million people were in need of humanitarian assistance.
Even before the Mandalay quake, Myanmar was already sixth among the 10 countries most vulnerable to disasters in the World Risk Index 2024. It also ranked second in ACLED’s conflict index in 2024, and remains on the conflict watchlist in 2025.
Cyclone Nargis, which killed over 138,000 people in 2008, was among the 20 deadliest extreme weather events in the world from 2004 to 2024, according to World Weather Attribution. WWA released this list after analysing data from past events for “fingerprints of climate change” using the tools - not around in the past - of attribution science. (Previous newsletter here.)
Indeed, the definition of a disaster has changed in the climate crisis. In the World Risk Index, risk is defined as exposure and vulnerability. The combination of these two is what turns a hazard - like typhoons or quakes - into humanitarian disasters. Perhaps we see some of the difference that capacity makes when we look at the extent of the damage in Myanmar compared to Thailand - and one could surmise that the same quake in a place like Japan would bring significantly less damage and casualties.
In this 2022 interview with Reporting ASEAN, Myanmar environmental advocate Win Myo Thu had said he feared that in the context of conflict and one where “social capital and natural capital are rapidly diminishing”, the country may not be able to recover after major disasters.
This quake is just the latest in a series of disasters that have occurred during the country’s armed conflict, raging since the February 2021 coup by the military:
Typhoon Yagi in September 2024 (around 360 dead)
heat waves in the summer of 2023 and 2024 (with deaths reported, though reliable figures are hard to get)
Cyclone Mocha in May 2023, with 145 official deaths reported but which are believed to be over 400, and huge parts of Rakhine State wrecked
A must-read to understand the earthquake is below. “It usually takes some time — hours, days, weeks — to assess the impact of such a large earthquake. That is especially true when the event occurs in an area where communication with the outside world is limited,” write independent quake scientists Judith A Hubbard and Kyle Bradley.
Before the quake, I was going to write a bit about the March arrest on the charge of crime of humanity of former Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte - which continues to roil domestic politics even if has dropped out of global headlines.
I was editor in a daily newspaper being published during weeks of negotiations to set up the International Criminal Court (ICC) in Rome in 1998 (that paper was done by Inter Press Service, the international news agency I was with at the time). The issue of national sovereignty was a major one, naturally, but the consensus was that these crimes were so heinous - and whose perpetrators could escape accountability - that they needed to be addressed by the world community as a single unit, so to speak. This includes giving individual citizens an avenue to seek justice in this community, going beyond national borders that can easily obstruct this process.
It’s far from a finished story, especially in the hyper-political space that is Filipino politics in election season.
Lost in the still-spinning narrative that Philippine courts should have handled the Duterte case is the fact that this is not a competition of courts. There are the other elements too, including whether, and how far, local courts have credibly investigated the issue at hand - in this case, the extrajudicial killings in Duterte’s drug war (the principle of complementarity). (We also heard discussion of this principle when the ICC arrest warrants against Israeli leaders were announced.) Only a handful of Filipino policemen have been convicted for killing a few people, says the Coalition for the ICC.
Below is a visual showing which Southeast Asian countries are parties to the Rome Statute, a story on the torrent of disinformation unleashed by the Duterte arrest, and reflections on doing journalism in our times.
Johanna - founder/editor of the Reporting ASEAN series
1 DATA BOX
2 #mediaonmedia
In A Fractured World, Journalism Can’t Just Be One Version of A Story
By JOHANNA SON
Some months ago, I asked a good friend of mine who is also a journalist, ‘Could you ask your mom if the world felt like this before the Second World War’? Her mother replied that she couldn’t recall as she was too young at the time.
Have you had similar thoughts about the state of our world today?
Philippines: Duterte arrest sparks disinformation surge – in his favour
By YVONNE T CHUA
The stunning arrest of former Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte by Interpol on 11 March has unleashed a torrent of disinformation across social media. Fabricated claims and misleading narratives widely cast him as a victim of injustice in an effort to garner public support.