absolutelyBangkok archive · Culture shock
Originally published Dec. 14, 2009
Lately even the pro-establishment news website TAN was calling for the sacking of the ICT minister: “Almost one year as the ICT minister, Ranongrak Suwanchawee has failed to show the public any tangible achievements but a series of failed policies.”
Her ministry’s latest coup? Web users all over Thailand report blockings by the mighty MICT as well as hazardous scripts on government sites. A reader reported absolutelyBangkok.com was blocked as were — depending on where you are and what ISP you use — CNN, Yahoo, Facebook, Flickr and others. Quite an honor to be blocked along with CNN, Facebook and such!
ThaiVisa had a first take on it — and I must say internet here where I currently am is dismissal at best since about 24 hours. Question now is if some silly MICT computer tech is tweaking something — or if, as a ThaiVisa reader speculates, the ministry is preparing for some very big news to be announced and the government wants to be in control of all the information surrounding it. A test run, dress rehearsal for the one big news.
Most probably some tweaking gone wrong. But then again, the first year in office of our dear government has come to a full circle. The discrimination of the web is a continuation of what we’ve seen so far in politics.
AFP has a bittersweet analysis questioning if our prime minister is really such a liberal as he pretends, or why is it that no other government before had used certain restrictive laws so regularly as the current one.
Here’s the better part of the analysis:
“Thailand is further divided. It is further polarized,” Thitinan Pongsudhirak, a political analyst at Bangkok’s Chulalongkorn University, told AFP.
“In his acceptance speech he said he would be a prime minister for everyone. But in fact he has not reached out to the other side.”
“The charges of double standards have been reinforced,” he said, explaining that Abhisit had “leant back” on the yellows, a group tacitly supported by Thaksin-hating, Bangkok-based elites in the palace, bureaucracy and military.
Michael Montesano, a visiting research fellow at the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies in Singapore, said that equally worrying was the increased use under Abhisit of a strict lèse majesté law. Under this law, insulting or defaming any royal family member is punishable by up to 15 years in jail.
“Those among Abhisit’s foreign admirers who have always considered him a fellow liberal need to ask themselves how, if he’s really such a liberal, he can preside over a government that so regularly uses this law,” he said.
But while this seemed to ape Thaksin’s populism, Thitinan said the Abhisit coalition had “got it wrong from the beginning” with stimulus packages that failed to address a desire for upward social mobility.
When Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen appointed Thaksin economics adviser last month, angering Bangkok, the Thai premier showed a “cheap, anti-Cambodian” approach that “made clear that Abhisit is someone that loses his cool in international affairs,” said Thitinan.
He said other members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations also found Abhisit “very difficult to work with,” and blamed a lack of success under Thailand’s chairmanship of the body this year on his domestic preoccupations.
“Abhisit has played the role he was assigned — to represent a group of interests whose politics are defined by hatred and fear of Thaksin — and he has not yet grown larger than that role,” Montesano said.
Not much to add. And don’t expect any official word about the web blocking mania.
And where you are, everything OK?
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