Postcards from Thailand

Earlier this year a 19 year old Dutch tourist was brutally raped by a Thai tour guide in the popular seaside resort of Ao Nang, Krabi. Her attacker was arrested and then promptly freed on bail. Letting a violent rapist who had already fled once to avoid arrest out on bail may seem a little odd, but then, Thailand is a foreign country: they do things differently there. In fact, even convicted murderers can be let out on bail here before serving their sentences.

Recently five policemen were found guilty of murdering a teenage boy, with three of them being sentenced to death, one to life imprisonment, and one to seven years inside. His body had been dragged along the ground by handcuffs, causing deep cuts to his wrists. His body was covered with cuts and bruises. And – perhaps most shockingly – his testicles had been crushed. Finally he was strangled and hanged. And the court, in a decision that defies belief, granted them bail pending an appeal.

What makes the bail decision even more shocking is that there are more than twenty other murders linked to these policemen, and that they have a track record of extreme witness intimidation. And just to top things off, witness protection was withdrawn from the three key witnesses just because the trial was over and the policemen had been found guilty.

The father of the Dutch rape victim was aggrieved by the decision to grant bail to the rapist and made a music video which he uploaded to Youtube. It goes by the name Evil Man from Krabi (link below).

This video has, as they say, “gone viral”, and as a consequence there have been a lot of cancellations of tourist bookings in the Krabi area. This has brought reaction from the Tourism and Sports Ministry.

The Tourism Minister Chumphol Silpa-archa (younger brother of former Prime Minister Banharn Silpa-archa – nice how politics is a family-run business in Thailand) said that the incident could not be considered rape because the victim had had dinner with her attacker previously. Funny that. I hadn’t realised that brutally beating your partner so that she is in fear for her very life was a normal part of foreplay in Thailand. As I say, they do things differently here.

A Permanent Secretary’s response to the video was to consult with the Information and Communications Technology Minister about blocking the music video from being viewed from within Thailand.

It seems that a key requirement for being a government official here is the ability to disengage the brain before speaking.

Whilst the government is blaming the fall in foreign tourist numbers to Krabi upon the rape and video, another incident might also have a bearing. Last month a British couple were reportedly attacked by a group of youths on motorcycles, also in Ao Nang, in what appears to have been a sexually-motivated assault. The man was later treated for stab wounds to his face, arms, chest and legs. One local businessman subsequently posted on a webboard:

“In Ao Nang, I fear that another tourist death is imminent. Gangs of teenage kids armed with knives and machetes roam the roads like something out of a Hollywood horror movie.”

Similar incidents, both in Krabi and at other top tourist destinations, are far from uncommon, so rather than trying to deny the rape and block the video, shouldn’t the Ministry be doing something to make Thailand’s top resorts safer for their visiting guests?

Links

Human Rights Watch report on murder of teenage boy: http://www.hrw.org/news/2012/08/24/thailand-ending-kalasins-police-reign-terror

Report on rape of Dutch girl: http://www.andrew-drummond.com/2012/09/model-raped-on-her-19th-birthday-we.html

“Evil Man From Krabi” music video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GRErWjo809g

Pack sex attack report: http://www.andrew-drummond.com/2012/10/briton-stabbed-defending-girlfriend-in.html

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According to today’s newspapers a large hole has opened up under the Rangsit-Pathum Thani Road just to the north of Bangkok.

Police are looking into it.

(Photo from the Bangkok Post, 4th October 2012.)

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Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra promised there’d be no severe flooding in Thailand this year. Well, the rains have barely started to fall, and already six areas in Ayutthaya province are flooded, and this is the centre of the city of Sukhothai yesterday.

Image from Bangkok Post.

Plans to test the water drainage capacity in Bangkok were due to be held last week – water was to be released from dams upstream and passed through the city’s network of khlongs (canals). The test was called off because there was widespread flooding following a night of heavy rain.

This year was supposed to be different. Following last year’s devastating floods the government was supposed to have been focussed on flood prevention, and virtually unimaginable sums of taxpayer money have been forked out to that end.

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In a totally unrelated story, Police Colonel Dusadee Arayawuthi, is being transferred from the Public Accounts Anti-Corruption Commission, just as he was about to spill the beans on massive corruption in flood defence projects. The only reason given was that some unnamed phuyai (bigwig) wanted him transferred. He was also going to reveal large scale tax evasion in the grey market import of luxury foreign cars and widespread encroachment on national parks in two provinces by “influential figures and local politicians”. (The encroachers even had the gall to use illegal loans from a state bank to fund their acquisition of the parkland and then defaulted on the loans.)

In fact, he ordered his staff to investigate 595 flood prevention projects in the north east; checks revealed “irregularities” in every single project looked into.

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In another unrelated story, a recent study by the University of the Thai Chamber of Commerce has revealed that “tea money” accounts for the disappearance of 30-35% of all government land, building and equipment expenditure. Some reports, however, put the figure much higher.

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Yet another unrelated story, a survey earlier this month by Assumption University revealed that 66% of Thai people think that corruption is acceptable. (With people under 20 that figure is 78%, which bodes well for the future.) Even just under 60% of civil servants thought corruption acceptable if it helped them with job promotion, transfer to a better job location or personal profit.

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And a final unrelated story: of the flood defences for the seven industrial estates in Ayutthaya and Pathum Thani provinces which were severely flooded last year, not a single set of defences has yet been completed.

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According to the newspapers this morning, a Thai senator has “accidentally” killed his secretary. It seems that the two of them were having dinner in a restaurant. Whilst they were waiting for food the senator’s 9 mm Uzi submachine gun capable of firing 600 rounds per minute “accidentally” went off, shooting his secretary in the stomach. She died shortly afterwards.

What sort of person takes a loaded submachine gun to a restaurant? For that matter, what sort of private individual even owns a submachine gun?

Fortunately for the senator, he has parliamentary privilege, so won’t be arrested for his “accident”.

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For more than 50 years Thailand has been the world’s largest rice exporter. Now, thanks to the populist policies of Thaksin’s puppet government, it’s lost that position. That title now belongs to India, and by year end Vietnam’s rice exports will almost certainly have surpassed Thailand’s too.

It’s not difficult to understand why this has happened. Thai rice, thanks to the government’s rice mortgage scheme – a scheme designed to enrich the middlemen in the trade, not the farmers – costs as much as $170/tonne more than rice from competitor countries. Consequently exports have fallen almost 50% since last year, and the government now has 12 million tonnes of mortgaged rice in storage, progressively losing its taste, texture and value. The cost of this follow so far: 260 billion Baht (that’s 8.2 billion Yankee Dollars, or 5.3 billion Great British Pounds).

So, this is the cost of populist politics and politicians.

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In Thailand there are plenty of policemen who share a rather-too-close relationship with those they should be locking up. Indeed, there are plenty of policemen who should be locked up themselves for their manifold crimes, ranging from taking bribes to let motorists off for minor traffic law infringements (which is rampant in Thailand) to running brothels and casinos (both of which are apparently illegal in Thailand). The situation rather reminds me of the final line of Animal Farm:

“The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.”

It was a bit of a shocker, though, to learn that the National Police Chief, Priewpan Damapong, recently made a trip to Hong Kong to have a chin-wag with Thailand’s most famous convicted criminal and fugitive from justice, Thaksin Shinawatra, who just happens to be his brother-in-law (or rather, ex-brother-in-law because Thaksin and his wife technically divorced to prevent her assets being seized for his criminality).

Rent-a-mouth deputy Prime Minister Chalerm couldn’t see anything with the country’s top policeman hobnobbing with a convicted felon, replying “Why was it inappropriate?” when questioned by reporters.

However, for the rest of us, the only question that remains is whether Priewpan’s actions broke the law, or were simply an ethical breach of staggering proportions?

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