absolutelyBangkok archive · Culture shock
Originally published Nov. 13, 2009
Don’t accuse me of not trying. I tried very hard to uncover some positive international news reporting about Thailand. A task that’s doomed. There’s not only an irreconcilable division within Thailand. Thailand herself seems more and more misunderstood and isolated by the international media and community. Following the current spat between the two neighboring kingdoms Thailand and Cambodia, even news agencies seem at a loss of how to report Bangkok’s verbal and diplomatic saber rattling and its application of seemingly archaic laws without slightly sarcastic undertones.
A whole different picture in Thailand herself. Former prime minister Thaksin’s Cambodia gambit “is going down badly in Thailand, where many of Mr. Thaksin’s critics accuse him of selling out his country’s interests to help an ancient enemy instead,” reports the WSJ. “If Mr. Thaksin persists with this alliance with Cambodia, the nationalist backlash in Thailand will pick up, even among his own supporters,” says Thitinan Pongsudhirak, a political science professor at Bangkok’s Chulalongkorn University.
Writes the blog
Thai Intelligent News in “Thailand Isolated Globally”: the Thai government has the Thai press on its side and “approval to go to war with Cambodia.” But as the post’s title says, this approval is a uniquely Thai thing. Written in the blog’s peculiar very own English the author lays down a long list of news wires, magazines and, yes, countries that turned negative on Thailand, intensely puzzled about Thai antics and the application of laws: Reuters, AFP, the Economist, Washington Post, New York Times, not to mention businessmen and diplomats. Has Thailand become an international embarrassment? And if so, is it a perception or rather a communication problem?
That the Thai government openly sides with a planned mass rally against Thaksin by ordering local officials to tell local people that the nationalistic royalist PAD had the constitutional right of assembly, that surely doesn’t speak of the Abhisit-government’s impartiality.
Government-sponsonsored mobilization of the masses has only a few parallels in today’s world, namely in North Korea, Venezuela, et al. You don’t wanna compare Abhisit to Kim or Hugo, do you.
The outside world just doesn’t seem to get that we have a potentially brilliant prime minister with great intentions who’s well read in political science and philosophy and impresses with that coy English accent. The outside world doesn’t fully understand why Thailand’s revered institution, the world’s richest, needs extra protection.
And as long as the outside world doesn’t understand, why bother about ignorance.
I still think Abhisit shouldn’t have accepted the premiership back in December. A better timing, a better PM. Under the government’s given shape and form he’ll never be allowed to be his own man. Even a perfect Thai smile can only hide so much.
I wonder though if he had a choice.
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