I will also send you an email as I probably have more recent experience of both legal and illegal travel in relation to these borders on both the China and India side than most at the moment. But, for the more general record (as Nic has it) – this may be an ‘epic trip’ but if you are seriously planning to negotiate having a Myanmar government military escort through this region ‘up to Hukawng’, perhaps you could ask them for their side of the story on the increasing numbers of sexual abuses against local women committed by their soldiers along this road. I have seen very recent documentation of this and it is something I will never forget as long as I live – and thus feel compelled to mention in this context as it is still haunting me. This road through to Hukawng is becoming netorious for these kinds of events, and much more besides. ‘Grants’ ‘sponsors’ and a replica jeep don’t necessarily mean you should project your own adventurism on this space for the thrill of it. I hope you are all preparing yourselves properly. I doubt if anything will come of it (and wish you good luck with managing the outfall if it does).
[…] From the New Mandala archive: Bangkok at night past. Face control , where only the most appropriately dressed, gratuitously wealthy or sublimely attractive can gain entry, is a real part of this other Bangkok night […]
Ah so first a Jailed rebel that attacked General Prem’s home was invited to talk about “patronage” at the FCCT and then a “conspiracy” is revealed, an ousted PM is mentioned as being involved and then everyone says no no it was some Afghan shepherd boy (pretending to be British) and as usual he cried wolf and there was no wolf
I guess everybody forgot to to tell the protesters to go home now that it was only the shepherd boy.
You bloggers crack me up so bad with your pseudo journalism”
Hmmm… interesting comment. Sort of. Someone sitting at home waiting to be cracked up has to come to this blog? There are so many mixes in your martini here that it’s difficult to see what you put in it. Logic was not one of the compounds. That the 2006 coup was said to have “originated on high” publicly by Jakrabhop and others tells tons about what is really going on here in Thailand. The coup itself and aftermath was clearly a wrestling match between two vastly different systems, that patronage one talked about and a uniquely Thai form of democratic reform that was sadly as corrupt as any system could even be imagined. So we today are witnessing the aftermath of this. I believe the saying for the common man here is, “When elephants crush the grass, stay out of the way.” Lese majeste victims remind me of these poor motorcycle drivers that police like to pull over – they are easy prey even though they may not have done anything seriously wrong.
12 June 2008
I have sent this Samaritan a letter and will post mine and his reply if it comes back with a reply. In my mind, he has overstepped his bounds.
12 June 2008
Mr. Khan has stepped beyond rhyme and reason and gotten into an area he should have thought about first. Even the king has said, “Criticize me if I am wrong.” How clear does it have to be, Mr. Khan? It’s not so strange that a guy with such close links to the police, and thus inheriting police-like mentality, would con a policeman to proceed with lese majeste charges. These guys love the past, don’t care about individual rights, and should be spending their time promoting human rights rather than undermining them.
If Khan had been Thai I might have forgiven him. But a UK citizen! Crypes!
[…] extensive tree-planting can also have negative environmental impacts. As Tim Forsyth and I wrote in our recent book on environmental management in […]
When one gets supportive of the monarchy it makes for strange bedfellows. But that’s the nature of politics in contemporary Thailand, even for crazy and less crazy foreigners.
jonfernquest: The law is the law QED. Bad laws and repressive laws are always challenged.
Your characterisation of what constitutes criticism is not what I imagined from the royal comment. If you include the bits and pieces you mention, this does not amount to direct criticism of the monarchy. (Maybe you could have mentioned Ji Ungpakorn and Thongchai).
You miss the point on J’s comments about Thai history. He is characterising the royal view of that history – no idea if he believes it himself. See Thongchai’s piece in the JCA special issue.
The slective enforcement of the law – as you yourself have blogged before – does not amount to a positive. This remains a critical problem for Thailand, especially when the courts are corrupt.
It is a strange coincidence that I came across the article
by Mr.Andrew Walker re the community rice mill, on the eve of my
efforts to set up such a mill in a very poor area in Sri Lanka
The aims & goals are the same as you had mentioned
I would be grateful if you could please advise me as to how I could
get in touch with Mr,Walker as I have many questions re the set up , running of the mill etc etc
Reg Varney: “…he was criticising … the monarchy directly and bravely. He now pays the penalty.”
Which is Lese Majeste, which is the law. QED
Most Thais would probably not agree with the “brave” part.
Reg Varney: “Can you cite examples of reasoned criticism of the king that has been made, publicised and debated?”
First of all, “well-reasoned and logical critical thought” does not mean direct “criticism.”
Critical thought begins in small significant steps such as describing events and institutions in objective terms rather than in the normal hagiographical mode, for instance in the Thai language study (MA dissertation) on the Royal Projects and the panels at the conference, and the papers on the Crown Property Bureau, or every article that criticises the crown property bureau for actually making money, or evicting tenants from locations under redevelopment, or Jit Phumisak, or any other work that argues for the socialist paradise that Pridi envisioned, that neighboring Burma actually arrived at (not).
The real test may be whether Jakrapob would ever have let loose that little rant in front of his own countrymen in his own language, or whether he was just showing off for a foreign audience, like the part about a government in exile?
Foreign news articles with a few exceptions are littered with highly partisan and trite simplifications for a highly biased audience back home. I’m thinking specifically of the BBC and Economist. Never do you get the sense of how complicated and tangled this conflict is. And part of my job is to read Thai political news in detail everyday, even though I write about economics and business. Also I’ve published a 7o page monograph on early Tai history at SOAS, and I nearly broke into laughter, when reading his TV announcer’s babble about hundreds of years of Tai history. That you or foreign journalists think that it is reasonable is quite irrelevant.
It’s a positive step that the law is now being enforced and people are being help accountable for their actions, for instance in the assets of the Ample Rich case, which is really at the heart of this current political struggle over constitutional amendment.
Hello Jing Hong, Interesting post although to say that Yunnan is a good storage place is very vague since the climate differences between the north, middle and south of the province are quite great. Saying that it is a good place to store tea is also advancing something that cannot be proved for now since nobody will know how a beeng cha will turn after 20 years or more. Pu erh tea has never been stored that long in Yunnan.
For the little info about the pu erh in the picture, if it does look like a cooked pu erh only after a few year it is because this type of pu erh is stored outside at the day light. looks good but I wouldn’t drink that thing.
Given the current situation of the Karens in Burma, San C. Po may have been on to something. I don’t recall a whole lot of Shan or Palaung Buddhists calling for a united Burma independent of Britian, and elements of the Mon community joined the Karens in rebellion against U Nu’s government, so is the issue really Christianity or ethnicity?
Jon, I think just about any comparison of the Catholics and Protestants would be interesting; what would also be interesting is comparing the ethnographic material produced by both groups. For example a comparison of Tegenfeldt’s “A Century of Growth”, which deals with the Kachin Baptist church with a comparable Catholic study.
I’ve never seen anything on the history of Catholic missions in the Eastern Shan States in Kengtung. Most of the Akhas from Kengtung seem to be Catholic. The Akha Catholic priest who used to help me with my Burmese, even told me about Akha priests who went for graduate study at the Vatican and one who did a dissertation on localising Catholicism, adapting it to local Akha beliefs. It would be interesting to study contrasts and differences in the approach taken by missionaries in the Catholic and Protestant communities of Akhas. When I lived in Yangon, got to know some Chin folk singers and it was interesting how they identified with some very specific American pastors who founded their church. Like they asked me if I knew who this rather obscure guy was, as if someone from America would know him for sure, highlighting the pastor’s importance in their mind. Living in Maesai I also met several very intelligent Burmese nationals, one from a sub-group of “Kachin,” who had studied in US bible colleges with the goal of bible translation in their dialect. (BTW There is a citation to an academic paper in Lieberman’s “Strange Parallels” that discusses hilltribe conversion to Christianity as a response to the majority Buddhism.) I taught in a very remote Karen village on the Moei River with a KNU official and a Karen-Thai headman, the population split between many Christian town Karen from inside Burma and also many hill Karen (non-Christian) from the local Thai area who didn’t seem to be connected into markets at all. There was even a sort of loyalty to Great Britain. I remember the nurse in the village saying she’d like to go visit the queen. Interesting discussion with interesting questions raised. Soon to appear in English:
PRISONERS OF A WHITE GOD
Lao People’s Democratic Republic exercises development programs which implement relocations of whole villages from mountain areas to the lowlands or along the roads. These activities are supposed to lead to abatement of swidden agriculture and opium production and also to the concentration and integration of village inhabitants into the majority of Lao society. Akhas are among the most affected.
CZ, 2008, 52 min.
Inspired by Tomas Ryska
Written and directed by Steve L. Lichtag
Music by Pavel Kotzian
IFF Envirofilm 2008 – Slovakia, Special Award http://www.lichtag.com/filmy_en.htm
John: “Akbar Khan seems to one mushroom short of a vol-au-vent.
A comment of his taken from UK Indymedia”
Let me get this straight, Akbar Khan eats contaminated snack food at Tesco and passes out due to food poisoning, and you think he’s crazy for making an issue of this?
There are probably many more unreported cases, because most people believe it is futile to report this sort of thing, I do.
Do you shop at Tesco or Carrefour?
I do everyday, and although I’ve never experienced anything this bad, their standards are surprisingly low, and they only pretend to respond to customer feedback.
Despite having every possible food item in stock in the store up above, Carrefour regularly runs out of stock with the most basic items in their food court downstairs. Despite having a posted closing time of 10pm, they actually close whenever they want, sometimes as early as 8:15, with the standard lie “mot laew” at every stall. Tesco never has ground pork on sale after 7 and you can’t even try on a pair of pants after 9. Neither big retail is exemplary in their responsiveness to customer feedback, though occasionally you see a Nielson marketing research team at Carrefour because they are trying to position themselves for a more upscale market. They have a full selection of meat til closing, so I go there.
The question Samak likes to ask: “Who is your master?” might answer why there was such a delay in bringing the case against Jakrapob. It’s unclear who Akbar Khan works for.
I personally know Mr. Ak as he is called. A backstabbing nobody slittering up some police officers by teaching them english. This man or should I say boy is untrustworthy to a high degree. He has no profession and last I knew he was transporting himself on an very old beaten down motorbike. Some people actualy believe this imposter.
FYI: This is not quite related to this topic. My apology using the space here. I just want to draw NM readers’ attention to this (I believe) important info.
Sondhi Limthongkhun explains the origins of the PAD’s “Blue Kerchief”
please see here (in Thai) my post, together with links to tape recording of Sondhi’s speeches.
Aiontay, yes that’s correct, but prior to his 1945 request to the British governor of Burma at the time for a separate Karen State, he did travel to London in 1928 to petition the British against self-rule for Burma, arguing that the country wasn’t ready.
Mr Horn: “However, having attended the panel discussion at Thammasat University on Paul Handley’s book during the Thai Studies Conference earlier this year, the consensus was that most everything Handley had written has already been written in Thai by academics. The uproar was because they were now being written in English by a farang journalist – meaning it would be spread far and wide. ”
I didn’t attend, but my understanding was that this view was seriously challenged after the event and maybe at it. This was Reynolds and Kobkua’s point and it seems off the mark. There was a thread on this site about this, so you could search that out. I remember that Reynolds cited a number of Thai works, but all were published after Handley’s book came out. I also recall that Handley responded.
On Abhisit: It seems to me that your comments are about the political statements of the Dems and their leadership. Their actions and inactions, however, betray them. Frankly, they seem to be waiting to gain the position they think they deserved to get in December and they seem very capable at stirring the coup pot with dirty tactics – lese majeste, calls to close websites (which were as much anti-Dem as anti-monarchy, etc.).
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The Stilwell Road
Dear Michael
I will also send you an email as I probably have more recent experience of both legal and illegal travel in relation to these borders on both the China and India side than most at the moment. But, for the more general record (as Nic has it) – this may be an ‘epic trip’ but if you are seriously planning to negotiate having a Myanmar government military escort through this region ‘up to Hukawng’, perhaps you could ask them for their side of the story on the increasing numbers of sexual abuses against local women committed by their soldiers along this road. I have seen very recent documentation of this and it is something I will never forget as long as I live – and thus feel compelled to mention in this context as it is still haunting me. This road through to Hukawng is becoming netorious for these kinds of events, and much more besides. ‘Grants’ ‘sponsors’ and a replica jeep don’t necessarily mean you should project your own adventurism on this space for the thrill of it. I hope you are all preparing yourselves properly. I doubt if anything will come of it (and wish you good luck with managing the outfall if it does).
Mandy
From the New Mandala archive: Bangkok at night
[…] From the New Mandala archive: Bangkok at night past. Face control , where only the most appropriately dressed, gratuitously wealthy or sublimely attractive can gain entry, is a real part of this other Bangkok night […]
The lèse majesté plot thickens
“Roger // Jun 10, 2008 at 5:51 am
Ah so first a Jailed rebel that attacked General Prem’s home was invited to talk about “patronage” at the FCCT and then a “conspiracy” is revealed, an ousted PM is mentioned as being involved and then everyone says no no it was some Afghan shepherd boy (pretending to be British) and as usual he cried wolf and there was no wolf
I guess everybody forgot to to tell the protesters to go home now that it was only the shepherd boy.
You bloggers crack me up so bad with your pseudo journalism”
Hmmm… interesting comment. Sort of. Someone sitting at home waiting to be cracked up has to come to this blog? There are so many mixes in your martini here that it’s difficult to see what you put in it. Logic was not one of the compounds. That the 2006 coup was said to have “originated on high” publicly by Jakrabhop and others tells tons about what is really going on here in Thailand. The coup itself and aftermath was clearly a wrestling match between two vastly different systems, that patronage one talked about and a uniquely Thai form of democratic reform that was sadly as corrupt as any system could even be imagined. So we today are witnessing the aftermath of this. I believe the saying for the common man here is, “When elephants crush the grass, stay out of the way.” Lese majeste victims remind me of these poor motorcycle drivers that police like to pull over – they are easy prey even though they may not have done anything seriously wrong.
The lèse majesté plot thickens
12 June 2008
I have sent this Samaritan a letter and will post mine and his reply if it comes back with a reply. In my mind, he has overstepped his bounds.
The lèse majesté plot thickens
12 June 2008
Mr. Khan has stepped beyond rhyme and reason and gotten into an area he should have thought about first. Even the king has said, “Criticize me if I am wrong.” How clear does it have to be, Mr. Khan? It’s not so strange that a guy with such close links to the police, and thus inheriting police-like mentality, would con a policeman to proceed with lese majeste charges. These guys love the past, don’t care about individual rights, and should be spending their time promoting human rights rather than undermining them.
If Khan had been Thai I might have forgiven him. But a UK citizen! Crypes!
Puer tea – store with care!
There are generally speaking 2 types of storage for Puerh tea. I have recently uploaded articles on wet and dry storage. If you are interested in reading up on both, the articles are available at http://www.puerhcha.com/Pu-erh%20Tea%20Articles/Pu-erh_Tea_Articles.htm
Varat
Forest guardians, forest destroyers
[…] extensive tree-planting can also have negative environmental impacts. As Tim Forsyth and I wrote in our recent book on environmental management in […]
The lèse majesté plot thickens
When one gets supportive of the monarchy it makes for strange bedfellows. But that’s the nature of politics in contemporary Thailand, even for crazy and less crazy foreigners.
Bangkok Post’s brave attack on the patronage system!
jonfernquest: The law is the law QED. Bad laws and repressive laws are always challenged.
Your characterisation of what constitutes criticism is not what I imagined from the royal comment. If you include the bits and pieces you mention, this does not amount to direct criticism of the monarchy. (Maybe you could have mentioned Ji Ungpakorn and Thongchai).
You miss the point on J’s comments about Thai history. He is characterising the royal view of that history – no idea if he believes it himself. See Thongchai’s piece in the JCA special issue.
The slective enforcement of the law – as you yourself have blogged before – does not amount to a positive. This remains a critical problem for Thailand, especially when the courts are corrupt.
The fragmented collective
It is a strange coincidence that I came across the article
by Mr.Andrew Walker re the community rice mill, on the eve of my
efforts to set up such a mill in a very poor area in Sri Lanka
The aims & goals are the same as you had mentioned
I would be grateful if you could please advise me as to how I could
get in touch with Mr,Walker as I have many questions re the set up , running of the mill etc etc
Bangkok Post’s brave attack on the patronage system!
Reg Varney: “…he was criticising … the monarchy directly and bravely. He now pays the penalty.”
Which is Lese Majeste, which is the law. QED
Most Thais would probably not agree with the “brave” part.
Reg Varney: “Can you cite examples of reasoned criticism of the king that has been made, publicised and debated?”
First of all, “well-reasoned and logical critical thought” does not mean direct “criticism.”
Critical thought begins in small significant steps such as describing events and institutions in objective terms rather than in the normal hagiographical mode, for instance in the Thai language study (MA dissertation) on the Royal Projects and the panels at the conference, and the papers on the Crown Property Bureau, or every article that criticises the crown property bureau for actually making money, or evicting tenants from locations under redevelopment, or Jit Phumisak, or any other work that argues for the socialist paradise that Pridi envisioned, that neighboring Burma actually arrived at (not).
The real test may be whether Jakrapob would ever have let loose that little rant in front of his own countrymen in his own language, or whether he was just showing off for a foreign audience, like the part about a government in exile?
Foreign news articles with a few exceptions are littered with highly partisan and trite simplifications for a highly biased audience back home. I’m thinking specifically of the BBC and Economist. Never do you get the sense of how complicated and tangled this conflict is. And part of my job is to read Thai political news in detail everyday, even though I write about economics and business. Also I’ve published a 7o page monograph on early Tai history at SOAS, and I nearly broke into laughter, when reading his TV announcer’s babble about hundreds of years of Tai history. That you or foreign journalists think that it is reasonable is quite irrelevant.
It’s a positive step that the law is now being enforced and people are being help accountable for their actions, for instance in the assets of the Ample Rich case, which is really at the heart of this current political struggle over constitutional amendment.
Puer tea – store with care!
Hello Jing Hong, Interesting post although to say that Yunnan is a good storage place is very vague since the climate differences between the north, middle and south of the province are quite great. Saying that it is a good place to store tea is also advancing something that cannot be proved for now since nobody will know how a beeng cha will turn after 20 years or more. Pu erh tea has never been stored that long in Yunnan.
For the little info about the pu erh in the picture, if it does look like a cooked pu erh only after a few year it is because this type of pu erh is stored outside at the day light. looks good but I wouldn’t drink that thing.
Mission to Burma, and to the Lahu, and the rest…
Given the current situation of the Karens in Burma, San C. Po may have been on to something. I don’t recall a whole lot of Shan or Palaung Buddhists calling for a united Burma independent of Britian, and elements of the Mon community joined the Karens in rebellion against U Nu’s government, so is the issue really Christianity or ethnicity?
Jon, I think just about any comparison of the Catholics and Protestants would be interesting; what would also be interesting is comparing the ethnographic material produced by both groups. For example a comparison of Tegenfeldt’s “A Century of Growth”, which deals with the Kachin Baptist church with a comparable Catholic study.
Mission to Burma, and to the Lahu, and the rest…
I’ve never seen anything on the history of Catholic missions in the Eastern Shan States in Kengtung. Most of the Akhas from Kengtung seem to be Catholic. The Akha Catholic priest who used to help me with my Burmese, even told me about Akha priests who went for graduate study at the Vatican and one who did a dissertation on localising Catholicism, adapting it to local Akha beliefs. It would be interesting to study contrasts and differences in the approach taken by missionaries in the Catholic and Protestant communities of Akhas. When I lived in Yangon, got to know some Chin folk singers and it was interesting how they identified with some very specific American pastors who founded their church. Like they asked me if I knew who this rather obscure guy was, as if someone from America would know him for sure, highlighting the pastor’s importance in their mind. Living in Maesai I also met several very intelligent Burmese nationals, one from a sub-group of “Kachin,” who had studied in US bible colleges with the goal of bible translation in their dialect. (BTW There is a citation to an academic paper in Lieberman’s “Strange Parallels” that discusses hilltribe conversion to Christianity as a response to the majority Buddhism.) I taught in a very remote Karen village on the Moei River with a KNU official and a Karen-Thai headman, the population split between many Christian town Karen from inside Burma and also many hill Karen (non-Christian) from the local Thai area who didn’t seem to be connected into markets at all. There was even a sort of loyalty to Great Britain. I remember the nurse in the village saying she’d like to go visit the queen. Interesting discussion with interesting questions raised. Soon to appear in English:
PRISONERS OF A WHITE GOD
Lao People’s Democratic Republic exercises development programs which implement relocations of whole villages from mountain areas to the lowlands or along the roads. These activities are supposed to lead to abatement of swidden agriculture and opium production and also to the concentration and integration of village inhabitants into the majority of Lao society. Akhas are among the most affected.
CZ, 2008, 52 min.
Inspired by Tomas Ryska
Written and directed by Steve L. Lichtag
Music by Pavel Kotzian
IFF Envirofilm 2008 – Slovakia, Special Award
http://www.lichtag.com/filmy_en.htm
Puer tea – store with care!
Very interesting indeed.
Will have to find some and try it.
The lèse majesté plot thickens
John: “Akbar Khan seems to one mushroom short of a vol-au-vent.
A comment of his taken from UK Indymedia”
Let me get this straight, Akbar Khan eats contaminated snack food at Tesco and passes out due to food poisoning, and you think he’s crazy for making an issue of this?
There are probably many more unreported cases, because most people believe it is futile to report this sort of thing, I do.
Do you shop at Tesco or Carrefour?
I do everyday, and although I’ve never experienced anything this bad, their standards are surprisingly low, and they only pretend to respond to customer feedback.
Despite having every possible food item in stock in the store up above, Carrefour regularly runs out of stock with the most basic items in their food court downstairs. Despite having a posted closing time of 10pm, they actually close whenever they want, sometimes as early as 8:15, with the standard lie “mot laew” at every stall. Tesco never has ground pork on sale after 7 and you can’t even try on a pair of pants after 9. Neither big retail is exemplary in their responsiveness to customer feedback, though occasionally you see a Nielson marketing research team at Carrefour because they are trying to position themselves for a more upscale market. They have a full selection of meat til closing, so I go there.
The question Samak likes to ask: “Who is your master?” might answer why there was such a delay in bringing the case against Jakrapob. It’s unclear who Akbar Khan works for.
The lèse majesté plot thickens
I personally know Mr. Ak as he is called. A backstabbing nobody slittering up some police officers by teaching them english. This man or should I say boy is untrustworthy to a high degree. He has no profession and last I knew he was transporting himself on an very old beaten down motorbike. Some people actualy believe this imposter.
Bangkok Post’s brave attack on the patronage system!
FYI: This is not quite related to this topic. My apology using the space here. I just want to draw NM readers’ attention to this (I believe) important info.
Sondhi Limthongkhun explains the origins of the PAD’s “Blue Kerchief”
please see here (in Thai) my post, together with links to tape recording of Sondhi’s speeches.
http://www.sameskybooks.org/board/index.php?showtopic=8782
or
http://www.prachatai.com/webboard/topic.php?id=690534
Mission to Burma, and to the Lahu, and the rest…
Aiontay, yes that’s correct, but prior to his 1945 request to the British governor of Burma at the time for a separate Karen State, he did travel to London in 1928 to petition the British against self-rule for Burma, arguing that the country wasn’t ready.
Bangkok Post’s brave attack on the patronage system!
Mr Horn: “However, having attended the panel discussion at Thammasat University on Paul Handley’s book during the Thai Studies Conference earlier this year, the consensus was that most everything Handley had written has already been written in Thai by academics. The uproar was because they were now being written in English by a farang journalist – meaning it would be spread far and wide. ”
I didn’t attend, but my understanding was that this view was seriously challenged after the event and maybe at it. This was Reynolds and Kobkua’s point and it seems off the mark. There was a thread on this site about this, so you could search that out. I remember that Reynolds cited a number of Thai works, but all were published after Handley’s book came out. I also recall that Handley responded.
On Abhisit: It seems to me that your comments are about the political statements of the Dems and their leadership. Their actions and inactions, however, betray them. Frankly, they seem to be waiting to gain the position they think they deserved to get in December and they seem very capable at stirring the coup pot with dirty tactics – lese majeste, calls to close websites (which were as much anti-Dem as anti-monarchy, etc.).