Postcards from Thailand

It’s now 2 a.m.. I can’t sleep. It’s all too tragic. A few newspaper headlines for you:

• At least 27 key locations in Bangkok such as Central World and the TV Channel 3 station have been set on fire
• The red shirt bikers in Chiang Mai ignored the curfew, coming out in force to set fires to car tyres in several places throughout Chiang Mai (a large city in the north of Thailand)
• Nine bodies were found inside the Pathumwanaram Temple (that’s bang in the centre of the current disturbances in Bangkok).
• CentralWorld on verge of collapse

And to top it all, ex-Prime Minister Thaksin is predicting (i.e. doing his very best to create) guerrilla war.

My heart bleeds for Thailand.

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It’s been a very pleasant day. I had lunch at my favorite riverside restaurant – stir-fried chicken with cashew nuts, button mushrooms, spring onions, water chestnuts, onions, and a few dried chillis. It was a bit overcast and there was a pleasant breeze. Not too hot.

Meanwhile, in Bangkok, the army was advancing on the Red Shirt protesters.

The army seemed to exercise a lot of restraint. Only a handful of people have been killed. (Only?) No doubt the press will focus upon the Italian photographer. They always do. Every death is a tragedy.

Some of the Red Shirt leaders handed themselves in to the police just after lunch. (A few others fled.) There were impassioned speeches, and many of the rank-and-file Red Shirts said they’d fight on.

In response many of the Red Shirts went on the rampage. The Stock Exchange, department stores, a TV station are on fire. Protesters have destroyed ATMs and ‘phone booths in their rage.

From 8 p.m. there’s a curfew in Bangkok. That’ll mess up business tomorrow. (If you want to buy pig intestines to make sausages you need to be at the market around 3 or 4 a.m..)

The saddest comment (for me) was from a close friend, who sent a text: “What has happened to my country?”

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Telling the time in Thai is a little … weird. Things start quite simply. Counting the hours from 1 a.m. you have:

tii 1 (1 a.m.)
tii 2 (2 a.m.)
tii 3 (3 a.m.)
etc.

(“Tii” means “strike” or “beat” and refers to the watchmen’s marking of the hours throughout the night. In my moobaan a security guard still makes the rounds every hour through the night on a bicycle striking a bell.)

When you get to 6 a.m., things go awry:

6 mohng chaaw

then:

mohng chaw (7 a.m.)
2 mohng chaw (8 a.m.)
3 mohng chaw (9 a.m.)
etc.

So 6 comes before 2. Seriously strange.

This pattern continues up to midday:

thiang (12 p.m.)

Then the pattern changes again:

baay mohng (1 p.m.)
baay 2 mohng (2 p.m.)
baay 3 mohng (3 p.m.)

And in the late afternoon, yet another pattern (just for a couple of hours):

5 mohng yen (5 p.m.)
6 mohng yen (6 p.m.)

(“Yen” is the Thai word for “cool”, reflecting the cooling as the sun gets low in the sky.)

And then another pattern:

thum 1 (7 p.m.)

but then:

2 thum (8 p.m.)
3 thum (9 p.m.)
etc.

and finally midnight:

thiang kheun (12 a.m.)

All this time-telling complexity probably explains why a certain fugitive from justice had 26 watches, including 9 Patek Philippe, 2 Audemars Piguet, a Cartier, a Chopard, a Rolex, a Breguet, and 3 Vacheron. Total value: 10 million Baht – over £200,000 at today’s exchange rate.

Unfortunately for the criminal concerned they have all been seized by the state.

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“Last night another soldier, last night another child
No one seems to worry, no one sees his mother cry”

When I was a child I used to hammer nails into pieces of wood and tell people I was making a rifle, a nuclear bomb, whatever. What I should have told them was that I was making a bomb detector. If I had, I’d have been a very rich man by now.

The GT200 bomb detector was described by Professor Hood of Bristol University as being “a piece of plastic with a car aerial sticking out of it”. It’s been known since 2002 that the devices are useless, when they were marketed under the name “MOLE”; a double blind trial at the Sandia National Laboratories showed they were totally incapable of detecting explosives. Yet Thailand has spent more than $20 million on these devices.

Soldiers in the South have long complained that the devices didn’t work and have repeatedly failed to detect bombs, leading to widespread injury and loss of life.

The device has also caused misery for hundreds who have been imprisoned for being “insurgents” based upon the device’s readings (source: Working Group on Justice for Peace).

Following a warning from the UK government earlier this year some tests were carried out on the device in Thailand. It was absolutely conclusive that the GT200 is a con, an evil fraud.

Prime Minister Abhisit banned the purchase of further devices.

[Cartoon from The Nation newspaper]

Yet, on 18 February, the Thai Army’s Chief, General Anupong Paojinda, in defiance of all evidence and logic, said that the devices were effective and that they would continue to be used.

The same day there was an explosion in Pattani from a bomb that the GT200 failed to detect. 13 people were injured.

And today two more soldiers were injured in an explosion from another bomb the GT200 didn’t detect.

“Can you hear the mocking laughter from the ones that gain by it
They’re not in line for the bullets, they’re the ones who started it “

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