KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia — Former Malaysian Prime Minister Muhyiddin Yassin was charged Tuesday with sedition over a speech he made that allegedly questioned the integrity of the country’s previous king.

Muhyiddin, who led Malaysia from March 2020 until August 2021, pleaded not guilty in a court in northeast Kelantan state. According to the charge sheet, Muhyiddin made the seditious remarks last month during a by-election campaign in Kelantan.

Nine ethnic Malay state rulers take turns as Malaysia’s king for five-year terms under the country’s rotating monarchy, which began when Malaysia gained independence from Britain in 1957. The monarchy plays a largely ceremonial role, but are revered by the nation’s majority Muslims.

In his speech on Aug. 14, Muhyiddin had questioned why then-King Sultan Abdullah Sultan Ahmad Shah didn’t invite him to be prime minister following a hung Parliament in November 2022. Muhyiddin had claimed he had the backing of majority lawmakers.

Muhyiddin’s Islamic nationalistic bloc received stronger-than-expected support from Malays, who account for two-thirds of Malaysia’s 34 million people. Sultan Abdullah appointed then-opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim as prime minister after Anwar cobbled up support from rival parties to form a unity government.

Sultan Abdullah from central Pahang state, who ended his reign on Jan. 30 this year, didn’t comment on the case. But his son issued a strong rebuke to Muhyiddin, saying his remarks were dangerous and could divide the people and undermine the royal institution.

Muhyiddin was questioned by police following complaints against him. He had denied insulting the royalty, saying his remarks were factual and that he had handed in sworn oath of support by 115 lawmakers in the 222-member parliament.

Zaid Malek from Lawyers for Liberty, a human rights and law reform group, slammed the use of the colonial-era Sedition Act against Muhyiddin. He said questioning or criticizing the exercise of constitutional power by the king wasn’t seditious.

The law, introduced by the British in 1948, criminalizes speech or actions with an undefined “seditious tendency,” including that which promotes hatred against the government and monarchy or incites racial discord.

“The king is a constitutional monarch, and not a feudal ruler. His exercise of his power can thus be debated, questioned or criticized. This is the very bedrock of our system of constitutional monarchy,” Zaid said. Anwar had backtracked on his pledge to repeal the Sedition Act, which has long been used to suppress dissenting voices, he added.

Muhyiddin, 77, faces up to three years in prison or a fine or both if found guilty. He is also still battling corruption and money-laundering charges that he claims are politically motivated.

Muhyiddin was the second former leader charged with crimes after ex-Prime Minister Najib Razak, who received multiple charges after losing a 2018 general election. Najib began a 12-year prison term in 2022, with several more graft trials underway.
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NUKU’ALOFA, Tonga — Highlighting seas that are rising at an accelerating rate, especially in the far more vulnerable Pacific island nations, U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres issued yet another climate SOS to the world. This time he said those initials stand for “save our seas.”

The United Nations and the World Meteorological Organization Monday issued reports on worsening sea level rise, turbocharged by a warming Earth and melting ice sheets and glaciers. They highlight how the Southwestern Pacific is not only hurt by the rising oceans, but by other climate change effects of ocean acidification and marine heat waves.

Guterres toured Samoa and Tonga and made his climate plea from Tonga’s capital on Tuesday at a meeting of the Pacific Islands Forum, whose member countries are among those most imperiled by climate change. Next month the United Nations General Assembly holds a special session to discuss rising seas.

“This is a crazy situation,” Guterres said. “Rising seas are a crisis entirely of humanity’s making. A crisis that will soon swell to an almost unimaginable scale, with no lifeboat to take us back to safety.”

“A worldwide catastrophe is putting this Pacific paradise in peril,” he said. “The ocean is overflowing.”

A report that Guterres’ office commissioned found that sea level lapping against Tonga’s capital Nuku’alofa had risen 21 centimeters (8.3 inches) between 1990 and 2020, twice the global average of 10 centimeters (3.9 inches). Apia, Samoa, has seen 31 centimeters (1 foot) of rising seas, while Suva-B, Fiji has had 29 centimeters (11.4 inches).

“This puts Pacific island nations in grave danger,” Guterres said. About 90% of the region’s people live within 5 kilometers (3 miles) of the rising oceans, he said.

Since 1980, coastal flooding in Guam has jumped from twice a year to 22 times a year. It’s gone from five times a year to 43 times a year in the Cook Islands. In Pago Pago, American Samoa, coastal flooding went from zero to 102 times a year, according to the WMO State of the Climate in the South-West Pacific 2023 report.

“Because of sea level rise, the ocean is transforming from being a lifelong friend into a growing threat,” Celeste Saulo, secretary-general of the World Meteorological Organization, told reporters in Nuku’alofa on Tuesday.

While the western edges of the Pacific are seeing sea level rise about twice the global average, the central Pacific is closer to the global average, the WMO said.

Sea levels are rising faster in the western tropical Pacific because of where the melting ice from western Antarctica heads, warmer waters and ocean currents, UN officials said.

Guterres said he can see changes since the last time he was in the region in May 2019.

While he met in Nuku’alofa on Tuesday with Pacific nations on the environment at their leaders’ annual summit, a hundred local high school students and activists from across the Pacific marched for climate justice a few blocks away.

One of the marchers was Itinterunga Rae of the Barnaban Human Rights Defenders Network, whose people were forced generations ago to relocate to Fiji from their Kiribati island home due to environmental degradation. Rae said abandoning Pacific islands should not be seen as a solution to rising seas.

“We promote climate mobility as a solution to be safe from your island that’s been destroyed by climate change, but it’s not the safest option,” he said. Barnabans have been cut off from the source of their culture and heritage, he said.

“The alarm is justified,” said S. Jeffress Williams, a retired U.S. Geological Survey sea level scientist. He said it’s especially bad for the Pacific islands because most of the islands are at low elevations, so people are more likely to get hurt. Three outside experts said the sea level reports accurately reflect what’s happening.

The Pacific is getting hit hard despite only producing 0.2% of heat-trapping gases causing climate change and expanding oceans, the UN said. The largest chunk of the sea rise is from melting ice sheets in Antarctica and Greenland. Melting land glaciers add to that, and warmer water also expands based on the laws of physics.

Antarctic and Greenland “melting has greatly accelerated over the past three to four decades due to high rate of warming at the poles,” Williams, who was not part of the reports, said in an email.

About 90% of the heat trapped by greenhouse gases goes into the oceans, the UN said.

Globally, sea level rise has been accelerating, the UN report said, echoing peer-reviewed studies. The rate is now the fastest it has been in 3,000 years, Guterres said.

Between 1901 and 1971, the global average sea rise was 1.3 centimeters a decade, according to the UN report. Between 1971 and 2006 it jumped to 1.9 centimeters per decade, then between 2006 and 2018 it was up to 3.7 centimeters a decade. The last decade, seas have risen 4.8 centimeters (1.9 inches).

The UN report also highlighted cities in the richest 20 nations, which account for 80% of the heat-trapping gases, where rising seas are lapping at large population centers. Those cities where sea level rise in the past 30 years has been at least 50% higher than the global average include Shanghai; Perth, Australia; London; Atlantic City, New Jersey; Boston; Miami; and New Orleans.

New Orleans topped the list with 10.2 inches (26 centimeters) of sea level rise between 1990 and 2020. UN officials highlighted the flooding in New York City during 2012’s Superstorm Sandy as worsened by rising seas. A 2021 study said climate-driven sea level rise added $8 billion to the storm’s costs.

Guterres is amping up his rhetoric on what he calls “climate chaos” and urged richer nations to step up efforts to reduce carbon emissions, end fossil fuel use and help poorer nations. Yet countries’ energy plans show them producing double the amount of fossil fuels in 2030 than the amount that would limit warming to internationally agreed upon levels, a 2023 UN report found.

Guterres said he expects Pacific island nations to “speak loud and clear” in the next General Assembly, and because they contribute so little to climate change, “they have a moral authority to ask those that are creating accelerating the sea level rise to reverse these trends.”

 
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NUKU’ALOFA, Tonga — As leaders of Pacific nations were welcomed to their annual meeting in Nuku’alofa, Tonga, on Monday, they were greeted first by torrential rain and then by an earthquake.

The magnitude 6.9 quake was deep enough not to cause damage, but the long shudder and ankle-deep water served as a reminder of the natural vulnerabilities of many of the member countries of the Pacific Islands Forum, who are locked in an existential struggle for economic and environmental survival.

It also underscored the tension at the heart of an event that once barely captured the world’s notice and now draws delegations from dozens of countries across the globe — the way a fierce skirmish for geopolitical influence in the South Pacific among major powers further afield threatens to overtake local concerns, often to island leaders’ dismay.

“We don’t want them to fight in our backyard here. Take that elsewhere,” Baron Waqa, the forum’s secretary-general and a former president of Nauru, told reporters last month.

Still, there are more than 1,500 delegates from more than 40 countries at this year’s meeting of Pacific member states, all hoping to further their agendas in a region where oceans, resources and strategic power have grown increasingly contested.

Founded in 1971, the Pacific Islands Forum brings together 18 member states to discuss and coordinate responses to the issues confronting a remote and diverse region, who know that their countries — with populations as small as 1,500 people — attract more notice on the global stage when they speak with one voice. Its leaders — from Pacific Island nations, some of them among the world’s most imperiled by rising seas, as well as Australia and New Zealand — have long been at the forefront of urging action on climate change.

For the first few decades of the forum’s existence, the annual meetings of its leaders largely escaped wider notice. In recent years that has changed, regular forum-goers say: China’s campaign of aid, diplomacy and security agreements with leaders across the Pacific has prompted a rapid expansion of the size and scope of the organization and its meetings.

This week’s summit features the forum’s largest ever delegation from China and a sizeable deputation from the United States, led by Deputy Secretary of State Kurt Campbell.

Both countries are among 21 “dialogue partners” — a group of nations with interest in the region — in the forum. There is a waiting list for entry, but applications are currently closed while the forum reviews its structure. Observers said Monday that a tiered system — reflecting partners’ genuine interests and involvement in the Pacific — was a possibility.

“We’ve been mindful that our region is of great interest from a geopolitical perspective over the last few years or so,” Mark Brown, the Cook Islands prime minister and outgoing chair of the forum, told Islands Business this month. “But the security issues that are seen by our bigger development partners are not the same security issues that we consider as important.”

Where large powers might attend the forum seeking to curry influence while undermining others’ sway, the focus of the region’s leaders sits squarely where it always has been: the perils of climate change and rapidly rising seas.

Reminders are everywhere in the Tongan capital, Nuku’alofa — metal water bottles supplied as keepsakes to delegates are labeled “one less plastic bottle,” but at each meeting and meal, plastic bottles of water are distributed. Rising seas and natural disasters, as in many Pacific Island nations, have contaminated rainwater and groundwater and made them unsafe to drink.

This year, the topic has another champion — the United Nations secretary-general, António Guterres, who in a speech at Monday’s opening ceremony decried “humanity treating the sea like a sewer” and applauded Pacific leaders and young people for declaring a climate emergency and calling for action.

Some leaders tried to bring pressing issues at home to center stage: The Tongan prime minister and incoming forum chair, Siaosi Sovaleni, spoke on Monday of the health and education challenges confronting his country — and echoed throughout the Pacific.

Other topics include the legacy of nuclear horrors in the region, the cost of living and debt, and regional security — including a Pacific police training center scheduled for construction in Brisbane, Australia, that is seen as a direct challenge to China’s eagerness to equip the law enforcement agencies of some island nations.

Fiji’s prime minister, Sitiveni Rabuka, in June referred to the confluence of problems — also including transnational drug trafficking in his assessment — as a “polycrisis,” with each challenge exacerbating others.

But the Forum’s most fraught matter is likely to be the ongoing unrest in New Caledonia. Deadly violence flared in the French territory in May over a longstanding independence movement and Paris’ efforts to quash it. A failed attempt by Pacific leaders to visit the capital, Noumea, ahead of the summit has further inflamed tensions.

Longtime forum watchers say the test for major powers at the event is whether their leaders can engage in the “Pacific way,” a kind of humble consensus politics that centers on relationships and holds at its heart the idea of the so-called Blue Pacific family — island nations linked by shared culture and heritage, and distinct from the wider Indo-Pacific, whose interests are seen as more disparate and remote.

Raised eyebrows greet summit participants who are loud, pushy, or over-eager in vying for sway. “There is a way that Pacific countries do business with each other and it should be something that we’d like the rest of the world to acknowledge,” Brown, the Cook Islands leader, told Islands Business.

But the leaders are pragmatic that global interest in the Pacific is here to stay.

“It needs to be something the world pays attention to. It’s not the way it used to be,” New Zealand’s foreign minister, Winston Peters, told The Associated Press last week.

“We’ve been a lucky people and a lucky theater. We must do our utmost to secure that in the long term.”
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Tokyo — Japan scrambled fighter jets on Monday after a Chinese military aircraft “violated” Japanese airspace, the defense ministry said.   

The Chinese aircraft was “confirmed to have violated the territorial airspace off the Danjo Islands in Nagasaki Prefecture,” the ministry said in a statement, adding it had launched “fighter jets on an emergency basis.”  

China’s “Y-9 intelligence-gathering” aircraft entered Japanese airspace at 11:29 am (0229 GMT) for around two minutes, the ministry added.

There was no comment from Chinese authorities.   

Local media including public broadcaster NHK said the incident marked the first incursion by the Chinese military’s aircraft into Japan’s airspace.

The ministry said steps were taken by the SDF such as “issuing warnings” to the aircraft, but NHK reported that no weapons, such as flare guns, were used as an alert.    

In response to the incident, vice foreign minister Masataka Okano summoned China’s acting ambassador to Japan late Monday, and “lodged firm protest” with the official, as well as calling for measures against a recurrence, the foreign ministry said in a statement.  

The Chinese diplomat said in response that the matter would be reported to Beijing, according to the ministry.        

Japanese and Chinese vessels have previously been involved in tense incidents in disputed areas, in particular the Senkaku islands in the East China Sea, known by Beijing as the Diaoyus.

The remote chain of islands have fueled diplomatic tensions and been the scene of confrontations between Japanese coastguard vessels and Chinese fishing boats.  

Beijing has grown more assertive about its claim to the islands in recent years, with Tokyo reporting the presence of Chinese coast guard vessels, a naval ship and even a nuclear-powered submarine.

In the past, two non-military aircraft from China – a propeller plane and a small drone – were confirmed to have forayed into the Japanese airspace near the Senkaku islands in 2012 and 2017, according to NHK.  

Beijing claims the South China Sea – through which trillions of dollars of trade passes annually – almost in its entirety despite an international court ruling that its assertion has no legal basis.

The Danjo Islands are a group of small islets located in the East China Sea, off Japan’s southern Nagasaki region.   

Japan in recent years has strengthened security ties with the United States to counter China’s growing assertiveness in the region, boosting defense spending and moving to acquire “counter-strike” capabilities.

At the same time, it has boosted military ties with the Philippines, which has also been involved in recent territorial standoffs, as well as South Korea.
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