davidw, thank you for the link to the Streckfuss book to be published and that not-standing-up-in-a-movie-theatre case, scary because the **lese majeste apparently provided an excuse for violence** which police action supported, which does seems rather micch─Бdiс╣нс╣нhi = fallacy (f.), heathism (f.), infidelity (f.) (Pali), Pol Lt-Col Kalyanamit not living up to his name. Wouldn’t it have been better if they just kicked them both out of the movie theatre?
To some people talking about lese majeste in a critical fashion might actually constitute an act of lese majeste. This sort of logical conflation seems to be fairly common nowadays. Like being critical of the drug war is considered to be aiding and abetting drug dealers, rather than an honest concern about the integrity of legal truth finding and procedure.
Forgot to add that I was also crisiticized at NM for not being strong enough regarding the monarchy’s human rights record. So I guess I was way too careful for some.
I concur with Chris Baker. I don’t recall anything. But that may not be the point for this seemingly eccentric and protector of the monarchy. This probably fits the category: “you are warned.” I believe Mr. Head was warned about reporting the coup and king connection right after the coup, by the Foreign Ministry.
I don’t recall being particularly “open” in my initial comments, but was more outspoken in the Q&A perhaps. I was still being careful, realizing that this topic is potentially dangerous to all involved, especially Thai and Thailand-based colleagues.
I was at the FCC panel and, like Chris Baker, cannot remember any insulting remarks by Head regarding the monarchy (in fact, I’ve just checked the notes I took on that evening and Head’s introduction was apparently quite harmless and not very specific since I didn’t write much of what he said down). Compared to the openness of Kevin Hewison on that evening, Head truly limited himself to his role as host and moderator. It seems, Head is made the scapegoat for the whole evening. Craig Reynolds is proven right when he says with regards to Handley:
“Handley is a farang journalist. That’s what the fuss is about… The Thai government tends to worry more about foreign journalists than about academics in sensitive cultural matters, and Handley is a farang journalist – an outsider.” (see recent post at New Mandala).
But is this worry because opinions of journalists have a wider reach as compared to academics, or because the Thai government regards journalists more as outsiders in comparison with academics, which makes them less entitled to critisize?
I’m still here Ngarn. Have been very busy lately so haven’t had the chance/time to read NM on a daily basis as I would like to. Once this busy spell is over I will drive my cab again.
It is apparently not only foreigners who are recently the subject of lese majeste charges.
*****
Thai couple faces lèse majesté charges for not standing for royal anthem in cinema
Prachatai
09 April 2008
News
A Thai man and his female friend have been charged by police with lèse majesté for not standing for the royal anthem at a movie theatre in Bangkok late last year.
On April 5, 2008, Pathumwan District Police called to Chotisak Onsung, 26, and his friend, asking them to visit the police station to hear the charge for the offence alleged by Navamintr Witthayakul, 40, who was among the cinema audience.
The lawyer for Chotisak and his friend, Songkran Pongbunjan, said that on Saturday, April 5, he met the police investigator to request a postponement to April 22 at 1.30pm because it was too soon for his clients to see the police that day.
Songkran said that according to the police investigator all witnesses had already been questioned, and a police committee had taken opinions from individuals and academics and decided to proceed the case. However, a panel under the National Police Committee will make the final decision on whether to pursue the case or not.
According to Songkran, Chotisak and his friend are likely to seek help from the Lawyers’ Council’s human rights committee.
On September 20, 2007, Chotisak and his friend went to a cinema in Central World shopping complex in downtown Bangkok. They were urged by Navamintr to stand up for the royal anthem which precedes every movie shown in Thailand’s cinemas, and they had a heated argument with the man. They claimed that they were physically abused. Afterwards they filed complaints at Pathumwan police station against Navamintr for verbal and physical abuse, damage to personal property and coercion, while Navamintr filed a lèse majesté complaint against them.
Article 112 of the Thai Criminal Code stipulates the penalty for a lèse majesté offence as 3-15 years’ imprisonment.
For those interested, David Streckfuss’s work on lese majeste is supposedly due out in monograph form in the future from Routledge. Hard to tell how it will have been revised from the dissertation. Also, since it is Routledge, the price will be appallingly high unfortunately.
A taste of poverty for the rich: Thai hotel stirs controversy over lavish feast for charity (4/7/08)
By Jocelyn Gecker, Associated Press Writer
BANGKOK, Thailand (AP, 4/7/08) – A Bangkok luxury hotel treated its top clientele to a tour of a poverty-stricken Thai village on Saturday before dazzling them with a lavish feast, ignoring outrage over the event that prompted a boycott by elite chefs around the world.
Controversy has surrounded the event, which critics characterize as a tasteless publicity stunt and organizers call a novel approach to helping the needy.
The posh hotel hosting the event, the lebua, is offering a 10-course meal – for free. The catch was that the guests – 35 bankers and corporate executives from the U.S., Europe and Asia – were required to spend the afternoon visiting a village in one of the poorest parts of Thailand.
“Who better to give poor people what they need than rich businessmen?” said Deepak Ohri, the hotel’s chief executive, who puts the hotel’s cost for the dinner and trip at $300,000.
Early Saturday, the hotel jetted its well-heeled group to Ban Tatit village, a ramshackle community of wooden shacks in northeastern Thailand that is home to 600 residents. The village once raised hundreds of elephants but there are now only five of the giant gray beasts, villagers said.
Organizers said they hoped the visit would inspire their wealthy customers to act charitably.
Participants disputed the controversy surrounding the event as misguided.
“How would I ever have known these people needed help?” said Javed Malik, an airline executive based in Hong Kong. “I might not help the elephants but I’d like to help those children,” he said, pointing to a group of smiling girls in dirty T-shirts.
The controversy appears to have delighted organizers, who credit the resulting publicity with drawing nearly $50,000 in advance donations. Contributions will be managed by a foundation the hotel is creating with its own donation of $96,000 to bring clean drinking water and other basic infrastructure to the village, Ohri said.
The executives toured the village’s broken water filtration system, its dilapidated schoolhouse and parched farm land, which is too dry to grow crops for themselves or the elephants.
The sights of poverty did not appear to dent anybody’s appetite.
“Would they have gotten everyone here together if it hadn’t been for the 10-course dinner afterward?” said Shanghai-based businessman Peter Foster.
The 10-course meal awaiting the group back in Bangkok included a seafood risotto, scallops with truffles, roasted rack of lamb, neck of Iberico pig – each to be washed down with a different fine Burgundy or Bordeaux.
An outcry in the French media prompted three of France’s top chefs to bow out of the feast last month after initially agreeing to cook it.
“You can’t see people living in misery and then go back to Bangkok to eat foie gras and truffles,” said Paris chef Alain Soliveres, one of the three who opted out.
The bad publicity spooked 20 other top-ranked chefs in France, Germany and Japan, who feared that taking part in the event would harm their reputations, Ohri said.
Despite the boycott, four chefs from top-rated restaurants in Europe agreed to cook the meal.
Three of them will walk away with $8,000 each for the night’s work: Christian Lohse from Fishers Fritz in Berlin, Henk Savelberg of the Restaurant Hotel Savelberg in The Netherlands and Atul Kochhar of London’s Benares.
Belgian chef Yves Mattagne, whose Sea Grill in Brussels has two coveted Michelin stars, said he was donating his earnings to the village of Ban Tatit.
“This is to help people,” Mattagne said, while chopping chives for a red tuna with ginger entree. “For me, the most important thing is the charity.”
From serving the king to serving the coup to serving the king…
HM the King appoints former PM Surayud as privy councillor
HM the King has appointed Ex-Prime Minister Surayud Chulanont as privy councillor.
Surayud was a privy councillor before resigning to take the premiership of the government installed after the coup d’etat.
The other two figures appointed as privy councillors were former Justice Minister and ex-Supreme Court Judge Charnchai Likitjitta and former Supreme Court Judge Supachai Phungam.
The appointment took effect on Tuesday.
The Nation, 9 April 2008
The sky will not fall in if we talk freely and frankly about the king’s role in contemporary Thai politics
Yes, it will.
Like talk about the Pope’s role in communicating God’s will in the middle age. Start definining dimension and roles, and there will be consequences.
This case is just a signal that full academic freedom in Thailand is not allow, some words are beyond contestation. Thai are democratic, but there are just something you cannot say about our great teacher and Dear Leader.
Thanks. Aligning the Burmese with the English translation would provide quite a nice language learning aid for Burmese learning English and for learning the Burmese language.
A parallel corpus would be a nice supplement to the monolingual corpus at Doug Cooper’s SEA-LANG.
Assuming Head is tried and convicted will they even publish what he said?
Seems to be the norm in lese majeste cases to never describe what they actually did or said. Like that Mae Chi who was convicted up north a year or two ago. The article did not even say what she had done or said.
Seems like the police have a lot of leeway in which cases they take seriously or not. Any citizen can personally file a complaint, but are there a lot of complaints filed? There aren’t many that go to trial it seems, at least based on the complaints filed against Thaksin.
There doesn’t seem to be much transparency or information on this subject, Like Streckfuss’s dissertation, still haven’t been able to obtain a copy to read. The one copy at Thammasat has disappeared from the shelves. Seems like the police are the mysterious hidden, unquestioned because unquestionable information-wise, fount of power on this particular issue.
I found it interesting that the last time I was in Bangkok on a Monday.. only 2 weeks ago, there was a noticeable absence of the ghastly yellow shirts. The rate had dropped from about 80% of ‘Bangkokians’ to about 20%.
I was fortunate enough to attend a Harry Connick concert which one of the minor royals also attended. During the coup days, attendance of a Royal incurred the anthem and endless standing while they came in, and sat down. Again at the end the hapless audience is expected to stand (I find this painful, as despite my UK passport I never stood for the British Queen) as they all depart.
The Connick concert was interesting as only the two rows adjacent to the ‘royal row’ stood. As Connick played a dance number for his encore, the princesse’s row was engulfed by happily dancing Hi Sos’s. So much so, that the security team could not get in to let her out, She simply had to sit it out while everyone else took their leave. Sign of the times?
I think you are in touch with my partner Sean.. he may have maps in the office. Mike Callahan has an extensive library of maps and GIS data. Have you contacted him?
Ref the resettlement debate I am concious of the fact that farmers grow to know their land. I think planners assume that one parcel of land is as good as another but as non farmers they may not be cognisent of the time it takes for a framer to familiarise themselves with drainage patterns, sunlight, slope, local bugs, weather patterns etc.
There has been evidence of malnutrition in the new THPC site due to this. The health adviser is concerned about the extent of malnutrition. The same is true I gather of the NT2. where the people say they are happy with health centers and schools but not happy about being dependent on rice handouts. It’s worth mentioning that the Aheu (sp??) people I have been told by Monsieur Alton had a very important ancestral spiritual site located exactly where the dam wall is situated. Attempts to resettle in some approximation to the site to maintain some links with the ancestors have been refused. No one is prepared to say who made this decision. The proposed NT1 site will also submerge a few ancient caves and ancestral sites. Women in some minority groups are concerned that the placentas of their children which are usually buried around the houses may be abandoned with dire risk to the children. Ceremonies have to compensate.. so its all very complex as several writers have pointed out.
I have seen both films in Vientiane and I was fortunate enough to meet the film makers and the kids who starred in Bomb Harvest.
The Vientiane showing was held at the newly opened public information center at COPE situated near the Green Park hotel on Rue Khouvieng. The makers told me that the night before it had been shown at the US Embassy and the Americans insisted that 20 minutes be cut from the middle. I gather that the censored part included the bit where the US spokesperson admits to the illegal nature of the incursions and to the suspension of rules of engagement and including all the footage taken from the earlier film ‘Bombis’.
I think what the US embassy set saw which included I gather a whole lot of aid policy makers was roughly what ABC viewers witnessed.
I recommend anyone coming to Vientiane to drop in at the Information Center. It’s a moving tribute to the Lao and the dedication to all who are working in clearing and rehabilitation of victims and I use that word advisedly.
To purchase a copy try: [email protected]
I was pleased I did not have to pay for a ticket to see Rescue Dawn. Luckily DVD piracy is alive and well so 10,000 kip bought me a copy. While I appreciate Christian Bales talent for starving for arts sake (he did the same Weight Wachers trip for The Machinist) the film is so non-reflective and questioning to be somewhat farcical. it could have been set in Angola. It did not pause to think that the fly boy’s jailers might be a bit pissed off at having their homes and crops bombed,.. rather making the Lao/Vietnaese to be screaming, grunting Asian sadists ..It was simply awful. In this time of Clooney and Sean Penn made films, which peer into the American myth, there was little excuse for this self congratulatory crap.
In Matichon, Wattanasak says ‘there is nothing political about this. I am doing this entirely on my personal account.’
The CSD police officer accepting the complaint, Pol Lt-Col Bunloet Kalyanamit (interesting surname…), said the next step was to check the translation from English to Thai, and consult academic experts on language whether the remarks are truly offensive.
At the moment, nobody knows what the offensive remarks were. I was there and I can’t remember Head saying anything risky. Does anyone else?
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Lèse majesté and the BBC
davidw, thank you for the link to the Streckfuss book to be published and that not-standing-up-in-a-movie-theatre case, scary because the **lese majeste apparently provided an excuse for violence** which police action supported, which does seems rather micch─Бdiс╣нс╣нhi = fallacy (f.), heathism (f.), infidelity (f.) (Pali), Pol Lt-Col Kalyanamit not living up to his name. Wouldn’t it have been better if they just kicked them both out of the movie theatre?
To some people talking about lese majeste in a critical fashion might actually constitute an act of lese majeste. This sort of logical conflation seems to be fairly common nowadays. Like being critical of the drug war is considered to be aiding and abetting drug dealers, rather than an honest concern about the integrity of legal truth finding and procedure.
Lèse majesté and the BBC
Forgot to add that I was also crisiticized at NM for not being strong enough regarding the monarchy’s human rights record. So I guess I was way too careful for some.
Lèse majesté and the BBC
I concur with Chris Baker. I don’t recall anything. But that may not be the point for this seemingly eccentric and protector of the monarchy. This probably fits the category: “you are warned.” I believe Mr. Head was warned about reporting the coup and king connection right after the coup, by the Foreign Ministry.
I don’t recall being particularly “open” in my initial comments, but was more outspoken in the Q&A perhaps. I was still being careful, realizing that this topic is potentially dangerous to all involved, especially Thai and Thailand-based colleagues.
Lèse majesté and the BBC
I was at the FCC panel and, like Chris Baker, cannot remember any insulting remarks by Head regarding the monarchy (in fact, I’ve just checked the notes I took on that evening and Head’s introduction was apparently quite harmless and not very specific since I didn’t write much of what he said down). Compared to the openness of Kevin Hewison on that evening, Head truly limited himself to his role as host and moderator. It seems, Head is made the scapegoat for the whole evening. Craig Reynolds is proven right when he says with regards to Handley:
“Handley is a farang journalist. That’s what the fuss is about… The Thai government tends to worry more about foreign journalists than about academics in sensitive cultural matters, and Handley is a farang journalist – an outsider.” (see recent post at New Mandala).
But is this worry because opinions of journalists have a wider reach as compared to academics, or because the Thai government regards journalists more as outsiders in comparison with academics, which makes them less entitled to critisize?
Whatever happened to Colonel Jeru?
I’m still here Ngarn. Have been very busy lately so haven’t had the chance/time to read NM on a daily basis as I would like to. Once this busy spell is over I will drive my cab again.
Lèse majesté and the BBC
It is apparently not only foreigners who are recently the subject of lese majeste charges.
*****
Thai couple faces lèse majesté charges for not standing for royal anthem in cinema
Prachatai
09 April 2008
News
A Thai man and his female friend have been charged by police with lèse majesté for not standing for the royal anthem at a movie theatre in Bangkok late last year.
On April 5, 2008, Pathumwan District Police called to Chotisak Onsung, 26, and his friend, asking them to visit the police station to hear the charge for the offence alleged by Navamintr Witthayakul, 40, who was among the cinema audience.
The lawyer for Chotisak and his friend, Songkran Pongbunjan, said that on Saturday, April 5, he met the police investigator to request a postponement to April 22 at 1.30pm because it was too soon for his clients to see the police that day.
Songkran said that according to the police investigator all witnesses had already been questioned, and a police committee had taken opinions from individuals and academics and decided to proceed the case. However, a panel under the National Police Committee will make the final decision on whether to pursue the case or not.
According to Songkran, Chotisak and his friend are likely to seek help from the Lawyers’ Council’s human rights committee.
On September 20, 2007, Chotisak and his friend went to a cinema in Central World shopping complex in downtown Bangkok. They were urged by Navamintr to stand up for the royal anthem which precedes every movie shown in Thailand’s cinemas, and they had a heated argument with the man. They claimed that they were physically abused. Afterwards they filed complaints at Pathumwan police station against Navamintr for verbal and physical abuse, damage to personal property and coercion, while Navamintr filed a lèse majesté complaint against them.
Article 112 of the Thai Criminal Code stipulates the penalty for a lèse majesté offence as 3-15 years’ imprisonment.
Translated by Ponglert Pongwanan
Lèse majesté and the BBC
For those interested, David Streckfuss’s work on lese majeste is supposedly due out in monograph form in the future from Routledge. Hard to tell how it will have been revised from the dissertation. Also, since it is Routledge, the price will be appallingly high unfortunately.
http://www.amazon.com/Defamation-Social-Thailand-Rethinking-Southeast/dp/0415414253/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1207738489&sr=1-1
Emotional tourism
This seems a little more fair than the AFP story:
A taste of poverty for the rich: Thai hotel stirs controversy over lavish feast for charity (4/7/08)
By Jocelyn Gecker, Associated Press Writer
BANGKOK, Thailand (AP, 4/7/08) – A Bangkok luxury hotel treated its top clientele to a tour of a poverty-stricken Thai village on Saturday before dazzling them with a lavish feast, ignoring outrage over the event that prompted a boycott by elite chefs around the world.
Controversy has surrounded the event, which critics characterize as a tasteless publicity stunt and organizers call a novel approach to helping the needy.
The posh hotel hosting the event, the lebua, is offering a 10-course meal – for free. The catch was that the guests – 35 bankers and corporate executives from the U.S., Europe and Asia – were required to spend the afternoon visiting a village in one of the poorest parts of Thailand.
“Who better to give poor people what they need than rich businessmen?” said Deepak Ohri, the hotel’s chief executive, who puts the hotel’s cost for the dinner and trip at $300,000.
Early Saturday, the hotel jetted its well-heeled group to Ban Tatit village, a ramshackle community of wooden shacks in northeastern Thailand that is home to 600 residents. The village once raised hundreds of elephants but there are now only five of the giant gray beasts, villagers said.
Organizers said they hoped the visit would inspire their wealthy customers to act charitably.
Participants disputed the controversy surrounding the event as misguided.
“How would I ever have known these people needed help?” said Javed Malik, an airline executive based in Hong Kong. “I might not help the elephants but I’d like to help those children,” he said, pointing to a group of smiling girls in dirty T-shirts.
The controversy appears to have delighted organizers, who credit the resulting publicity with drawing nearly $50,000 in advance donations. Contributions will be managed by a foundation the hotel is creating with its own donation of $96,000 to bring clean drinking water and other basic infrastructure to the village, Ohri said.
The executives toured the village’s broken water filtration system, its dilapidated schoolhouse and parched farm land, which is too dry to grow crops for themselves or the elephants.
The sights of poverty did not appear to dent anybody’s appetite.
“Would they have gotten everyone here together if it hadn’t been for the 10-course dinner afterward?” said Shanghai-based businessman Peter Foster.
The 10-course meal awaiting the group back in Bangkok included a seafood risotto, scallops with truffles, roasted rack of lamb, neck of Iberico pig – each to be washed down with a different fine Burgundy or Bordeaux.
An outcry in the French media prompted three of France’s top chefs to bow out of the feast last month after initially agreeing to cook it.
“You can’t see people living in misery and then go back to Bangkok to eat foie gras and truffles,” said Paris chef Alain Soliveres, one of the three who opted out.
The bad publicity spooked 20 other top-ranked chefs in France, Germany and Japan, who feared that taking part in the event would harm their reputations, Ohri said.
Despite the boycott, four chefs from top-rated restaurants in Europe agreed to cook the meal.
Three of them will walk away with $8,000 each for the night’s work: Christian Lohse from Fishers Fritz in Berlin, Henk Savelberg of the Restaurant Hotel Savelberg in The Netherlands and Atul Kochhar of London’s Benares.
Belgian chef Yves Mattagne, whose Sea Grill in Brussels has two coveted Michelin stars, said he was donating his earnings to the village of Ban Tatit.
“This is to help people,” Mattagne said, while chopping chives for a red tuna with ginger entree. “For me, the most important thing is the charity.”
Lèse majesté and the BBC
From serving the king to serving the coup to serving the king…
HM the King appoints former PM Surayud as privy councillor
HM the King has appointed Ex-Prime Minister Surayud Chulanont as privy councillor.
Surayud was a privy councillor before resigning to take the premiership of the government installed after the coup d’etat.
The other two figures appointed as privy councillors were former Justice Minister and ex-Supreme Court Judge Charnchai Likitjitta and former Supreme Court Judge Supachai Phungam.
The appointment took effect on Tuesday.
The Nation, 9 April 2008
Lèse majesté and the BBC
The sky will not fall in if we talk freely and frankly about the king’s role in contemporary Thai politics
Yes, it will.
Like talk about the Pope’s role in communicating God’s will in the middle age. Start definining dimension and roles, and there will be consequences.
This case is just a signal that full academic freedom in Thailand is not allow, some words are beyond contestation. Thai are democratic, but there are just something you cannot say about our great teacher and Dear Leader.
Burma’s draft 2008 constitution
Thanks. Aligning the Burmese with the English translation would provide quite a nice language learning aid for Burmese learning English and for learning the Burmese language.
A parallel corpus would be a nice supplement to the monolingual corpus at Doug Cooper’s SEA-LANG.
http://sealang.net/burmese/corpus.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_text
Does anyone know what font the Burmese part uses?
When is Burmese going to be included in the unicode engine that browsers use?
Lèse majesté and the BBC
Assuming Head is tried and convicted will they even publish what he said?
Seems to be the norm in lese majeste cases to never describe what they actually did or said. Like that Mae Chi who was convicted up north a year or two ago. The article did not even say what she had done or said.
Seems like the police have a lot of leeway in which cases they take seriously or not. Any citizen can personally file a complaint, but are there a lot of complaints filed? There aren’t many that go to trial it seems, at least based on the complaints filed against Thaksin.
There doesn’t seem to be much transparency or information on this subject, Like Streckfuss’s dissertation, still haven’t been able to obtain a copy to read. The one copy at Thammasat has disappeared from the shelves. Seems like the police are the mysterious hidden, unquestioned because unquestionable information-wise, fount of power on this particular issue.
Lèse majesté and the BBC
Andrew,
I found it interesting that the last time I was in Bangkok on a Monday.. only 2 weeks ago, there was a noticeable absence of the ghastly yellow shirts. The rate had dropped from about 80% of ‘Bangkokians’ to about 20%.
I was fortunate enough to attend a Harry Connick concert which one of the minor royals also attended. During the coup days, attendance of a Royal incurred the anthem and endless standing while they came in, and sat down. Again at the end the hapless audience is expected to stand (I find this painful, as despite my UK passport I never stood for the British Queen) as they all depart.
The Connick concert was interesting as only the two rows adjacent to the ‘royal row’ stood. As Connick played a dance number for his encore, the princesse’s row was engulfed by happily dancing Hi Sos’s. So much so, that the security team could not get in to let her out, She simply had to sit it out while everyone else took their leave. Sign of the times?
The Lao resettlement controversy
Keith,
I think you are in touch with my partner Sean.. he may have maps in the office. Mike Callahan has an extensive library of maps and GIS data. Have you contacted him?
Ref the resettlement debate I am concious of the fact that farmers grow to know their land. I think planners assume that one parcel of land is as good as another but as non farmers they may not be cognisent of the time it takes for a framer to familiarise themselves with drainage patterns, sunlight, slope, local bugs, weather patterns etc.
There has been evidence of malnutrition in the new THPC site due to this. The health adviser is concerned about the extent of malnutrition. The same is true I gather of the NT2. where the people say they are happy with health centers and schools but not happy about being dependent on rice handouts. It’s worth mentioning that the Aheu (sp??) people I have been told by Monsieur Alton had a very important ancestral spiritual site located exactly where the dam wall is situated. Attempts to resettle in some approximation to the site to maintain some links with the ancestors have been refused. No one is prepared to say who made this decision. The proposed NT1 site will also submerge a few ancient caves and ancestral sites. Women in some minority groups are concerned that the placentas of their children which are usually buried around the houses may be abandoned with dire risk to the children. Ceremonies have to compensate.. so its all very complex as several writers have pointed out.
Slow rescue from Laos’ lethal harvest
I have seen both films in Vientiane and I was fortunate enough to meet the film makers and the kids who starred in Bomb Harvest.
The Vientiane showing was held at the newly opened public information center at COPE situated near the Green Park hotel on Rue Khouvieng. The makers told me that the night before it had been shown at the US Embassy and the Americans insisted that 20 minutes be cut from the middle. I gather that the censored part included the bit where the US spokesperson admits to the illegal nature of the incursions and to the suspension of rules of engagement and including all the footage taken from the earlier film ‘Bombis’.
I think what the US embassy set saw which included I gather a whole lot of aid policy makers was roughly what ABC viewers witnessed.
I recommend anyone coming to Vientiane to drop in at the Information Center. It’s a moving tribute to the Lao and the dedication to all who are working in clearing and rehabilitation of victims and I use that word advisedly.
To purchase a copy try: [email protected]
I was pleased I did not have to pay for a ticket to see Rescue Dawn. Luckily DVD piracy is alive and well so 10,000 kip bought me a copy. While I appreciate Christian Bales talent for starving for arts sake (he did the same Weight Wachers trip for The Machinist) the film is so non-reflective and questioning to be somewhat farcical. it could have been set in Angola. It did not pause to think that the fly boy’s jailers might be a bit pissed off at having their homes and crops bombed,.. rather making the Lao/Vietnaese to be screaming, grunting Asian sadists ..It was simply awful. In this time of Clooney and Sean Penn made films, which peer into the American myth, there was little excuse for this self congratulatory crap.
Emotional tourism
Great idea great hotel.
Why are there no articles about what actually happened and how lebua plans to help these people?
Lèse majesté and the BBC
In Matichon, Wattanasak says ‘there is nothing political about this. I am doing this entirely on my personal account.’
The CSD police officer accepting the complaint, Pol Lt-Col Bunloet Kalyanamit (interesting surname…), said the next step was to check the translation from English to Thai, and consult academic experts on language whether the remarks are truly offensive.
At the moment, nobody knows what the offensive remarks were. I was there and I can’t remember Head saying anything risky. Does anyone else?
Lèse majesté and the BBC
Anyone know anything about Lt. Col. Wattanasak Mungkandee?
Lèse majesté and the BBC
This was my favorite part:
Now haven’t I heard that last name somewhere before?
Emotional tourism
I agree Kelly, I hope many more such initiatives are planned by lebua. Good work……:)