Gaza Rocket Attack Into Israel Kills a Thai Worker

The foreign agricultural worker, Manee Singueanphon, 30, from Thailand, was the first fatality from Gaza rocket fire since the end of a three-week Israeli military offensive into Gaza in January 2009. Israel said the primary purpose of its military campaign was to halt years of rocket fire from Gaza into southern Israel.

What a Thai migrant worker was doing in Israel won’t mean mean much to most readers of the New York Times. The same cannot be said for ComingAnarchy readers! Many of you may have read that headline and exclaimed, “Ahha! This is all because of the Blue Diamond Incident that Curzon explained a few months back!” At that time, I noted:

Saudi Arabia and Thailand may not have seemed like major players in the late 1980s, but hundreds of thousands of Thai workers were in Saudi Arabia at the time, and Riyadh had millions in investments in Thailand, both of which were abruptly halted. As it happens, Thailand went on to export most of its migrant workers in the Middle East to Israel.

In one of the bloodiest protests I’ve ever heard about, anti-government “Red Shirt” protesters in Thailand donated blood for their protest to spill at the Thai government headquarters. Their protest was for a new election to be called. They collected enough blood to fill 1,000 standard soft drink bottles. This is definitely one of those things that belongs in the “finger-chopping whacky” category.

The Red Cross has denounced the protest as wasteful and unhygienic because diseases such as hepatitis and HIV can be spread if needles are reused.

A number of Buddhist monks, who are forbidden by law from taking part in political activities, were among the first to give blood.

Previously: Ethiopia – Poland – Armenia – Persia – Russia I – Russia II – Russia III – India – Britannia – Sweden – Saudi Arabia

Thailand and Saudi Arabia share a lot in common, as two native monarchies that survived the European colonialism of the 19th century and the Cold War upheaval of the 20th century. However, due to a string of incidents in the late 1980s involving theft and murder, the two countries barely have official relations.

The story begins in 1989, when a Thai gardener by the name of Kriangkrai Techamong was working in Saudi Arabia at the palace of the Crown Prince and took the opportunity to steal US$20 million in jewelry, including a unique blue diamond, shipping them to Thailand hidden in a crate of apples. He returned to Thailand shortly thereafter, picked up the jewelry and stashed them in his home in northern Thailand with the intent to sell them. The Saudis discovered the theft after his departure and Thai police, acting on their information, caught him. They promised to return the items and the case was closed.

Or so it should have been. The Saudis quickly discovered that as many as three-quarters of the returned pieces were fakes, some very crude. The blue diamond was among the fakes, and the Saudis were outraged at the deception and demanded immediat restitution. When nothing was forthcoming, Riyadh dispatched Al-Maliki, a Saudi businessman with close ties to the royal family who had experience doing business in Asia, to Bangkok to investigate in November 1989. Less than two months later he was shot outside his home in Bangkok (or disappeared without a trace—the English language sources on the event are inconsistent). Next month, three Saudi diplomats were assasinated in Bangkok, and the Saudis, suspecting police responsibility for the crimes, downgraded diplomatic relations with Thailand and dispatched a pistol-wielding hardliner as chief diplomat to Bangkok. When he concluded that the Thai police were behind the incidents, Saudi Arabia responded by cancelling the work permits of approximately 250,000 Thai labourers in Saudi Arabia, banning all Thai nationals from traveling to the country, and prohibiting Saudi nationals from visiting Thailand.

Saudi Arabia and Thailand may not have seemed like major players in the late 1980s, but hundreds of thousands of Thai workers were in Saudi Arabia at the time, and Riyadh had millions in investments in Thailand, both of which were abruptly halted. As it happens, Thailand went on to export most of its migrant workers in the Middle East to Israel. And the situation continued to deteriorate. In 1994, the wife and young son of the principal witness in the case, a Bangkok jeweler, were found killed, and a senior police officer was indicted, tried, and sentenced to death in the killing, although the sentence was never carried out. Things can’t have been helped by the fact that the victim of the Blue Diamond theft became the ipso facto ruler of Saudi Arabia in 1996 and King in 2005.

The two countries maintain diplomatic ties and embassies. Since at least 2004, various articles published in Arab news sources have trumpeted Thailand’s promise to solve the cases and a consequent restoration of ties, and only now does there finally appear to be movement in that direction. The Saudis have long insisted that the original blue diamond be returned and the perpetrators brought to justice in order for normalized relations to be restored. As of the end of 2009, they are finally changing their tune to a more conciliatory tone, issuing public statements that they trust any decision made by the Thai authorities regarding the cases. What has changed? First, I understand that the statute of limitations expired on 1 January 2010, and anything not issued by the end of 2009 is invalid. Second, Riyadh has the economic and geopolitical incentive to normalize relations now that Iran, Saudi Arabia’s key rival in the Persian Gulf, appears to be benefiting from growing influence in Thailand.

In The Travels Marco Polo makes it to a land he calls “Tebet”, which includes modern-day Tibet as well as parts of Szechuan and Yunnan provinces. Here in this land “terribly devastated” by Mongu Khan, Polo describes almost breathlessly the marriage customs of the locals. Apparently “no man on any account would ever take a virgin to wife.” Consequently, women of experience are considered desirable wives, and advertise their experience by displaying the tokens she received from her various liaisons.

Without naming any names, Polo describes the experience of travellers thus (the following quote is from page 172-3 and the emphasis is my own):

When it happens that men from a foreign land are passing through this country and have pitched their tents and made a camp, the matrons from neighboring villages and hamlets bring their daughters to these camps, to the number of twenty or forty, and beg the travellers to take them and lie with them. … When the men have worked their will and are ready to be gone, then it is the custom for every man to give the woman who he has lain some trinket or token so that she can show, when she comes to marry, that she has had a lover. … Obviously the country is a fine one to visit for a lad from sixteen to twenty-four.

Obviously.

Interesting sidenote: The real Sir Francis Younghusband found both “free love” and his second wife in the mountains of Tibet.

Why did Angkor fall? According to the annals of Siam, we understand that the Kingdom of Angkor fell because of the relentless Burmese or Siam invaders. Recently, scientists have come to believe that it was the collapse of the city’s waterworks that resulted in its demise. For those unfamiliar with the topic, you can read my previous post here for more information, but in brief, Angkor’s temple complexes had a network of hundreds of kilometers of canals and massive reservoirs that appear to have been used both for irrigation, religious ceremonies, plumbing, and sewage. In one of the great mystery’s of human history, it was abandoned by the 16th century and its history forgotten. I witnessed these abandoned waterworks when I visited Cambodia in 2003.

Recently, more evidence has emerged that suggest that a “megadrought” preceded the abandoning of the city. Looking at the tree rings of centuries-old conifers that survived the Angkor era, Professor Brendan Buckley of Columbia University reveals a sharp weakening of Asia’s summer monsoon from 1362 to 1392 A.D., and and again from 1415 to 1440 A.D. This occurred just as the “Little Ice Age” that drastically affected Europe was setting in, suggesting a greater global link to climate change. This was shortly before the Khmer kingdom was approaching its fall and collapse.

But there were also warning signs before the two droubts. Archaeological and pollen findings indicate that Angkor’s great reservoirs and storage ponds began operating at sharply reduced capacity several decades before the back-to-back droughts. So it wasn’t just droubt, but climate instability in general, along with an inflexible plumbing and sewage system, that brought about the collapse and abandonment of the city.

All this information comes from a recent article in Science, published on February 20, 2009. And it ends with this warning:

Thailand’s prime minister, Somchai Wongsawat, will resign today after a constitutional court banned him from office and found his party and two others guilty of electoral fraud. Hopefully international flights will now be able to reach Bangkok—see previous post for background here.

I have some friends who either live in Bangkok or are traveling Thailand. Considering the current situation what with protestors occupying airports, sporadic violence, and threats of another coup, I queried them both on the reality on the ground. Here are the e-mails I received.

First from a friend who lives in Bangkok:

I’m doing fine. In fact, believe it or not, although these protests have been going on for the last few months, I’ve seen very little of them in the Bangkok city center. Daily life is pretty much the same as its been, except you have to be selective about what color you decide to wear (red and yellow represent the two sides). Wearing one color probably won’t result in you being attacked, but it could result in people picking verbal fights with you to defend the position of that particular protest group. That being said, either color is likely to excite the ire of those on the streets of Bangkok—public support for either side is pretty scarce, especially after the protestors closed the airports.

The situation goes back to former PM Thaksin Shinawatra, who was the first elected leader to really pay attention to the poor masses and improve their standard of living, but he was also corrupt, abusing power, benefiting financially from his government connections, and abusing human rights abuses including extrajudicial killings. He was ousted in 2006 and convicted this year of corruption, although he was a fugitive in Britain.

So, the red shirts love Thaksim, while the yellow shirts hate him, and most people are stuck in between not knowing what to do. Apparently many troops were moved to Bangkok at the end of last week, so a coup was widely expected, but fortunately nothing happened. Anyway, I’ve stayed clear of the protest sites, as there has been sporadic violence, so I can’t tell you what it’s like there, and I really only know what gets reported.

Then from a friend traveling Thailand:

I’m in Pattaya, Thailand, and everything is peachy. The airports outside of Bangkok are working just fine, including international flights, so the country isn’t exactly cut off from the rest of the globe.

Chiang Mai flies not just internationally but also intercontinentally, although I’m avoiding Chiang Mai since the Prime Minister is there and security is tight with the protests going ape.

My next stop from Pattaya is Angkor Wat in Cambodia and I fly out tonight from Utapao. Utapao is actually a military airfield about 140 km from Bangkok, but due to the closure of the international airports it has opened up for some commercial traffic. All part of the adventure!

Unrelated to today’s court order is the fact that Bangkok’s Suvarnabhumi international airport has reopened to cargo flights despite an ongoing siege of the facility by protestors. The first cargo flights were authorized to land at the airport as of 9 a.m. Tuesday and the first flights arrived during the afternoon.

Both Younghusband and I have traveled to Cambodia on separate trips in 2003 and traveled the country. We visited Angkor Wat, saw landmine museums, played chess with German ex-pats, and shot AK-47s at the cost of a few dollars. Prostitution was advertised regularly and I was told that drugs were readily available for purchase. There was not a hint of high-rises or skyscrapers in the city of a quarter of a million, with the tallest building being perhaps 8 stories high. In talks with my very learned, bilingual and friendly hotel proprietor, he revealed that he used to be a bureaucrat for the Ministry of Economy, but left when the government couldn’t afford to pay his salary for six months. Compared to nearby Thailand, Malaysia, and even Vietnam and Laos, Cambodia was still poor and chaotic.

But things are changing. The Wall Street Journal recently published an article on Phnom Penh that said it is “tamed and transformed.”

Today, Phnom Penh still has plenty of rough edges and crime. At certain places, visitors can still order “happy pizza,” or pizza with marijuana topping. But in other ways, it’s a different city entirely. But the government has destroyed 200,000 or more firearms through a program in which citizens voluntarily lay down their guns. It has also shut down the military-hardware market and closed some of the most infamous brothels. Foreign cash is pouring in, with some investors calling Phnom Penh “The New Ho Chi Minh City” after the city that’s Vietnam’s emerging center of consumption. Property values have soared and Phnom Penh is getting its first skyscrapers. One Cambodian developer even wants to dredge the Mekong River all the way to Vietnam, some 60 or so miles south, to create a deepwater megaport, and other financiers are planning a satellite city with offices and malls.

All that activity has brought more well-heeled visitors and more hotels. The Quay Hotel along the riverfront, opened earlier this year, which calls itself Phnom Penh’s first “carbon-friendly” hotel (it measures carbon emissions and then buys “offsets” through carbon-reduction programs) and features minimalist décor of the “2001: A Space Odyssey” variety, spaces “infused with aromatherapy” and a rooftop wine bar. Other new hotels include the Pavilion, an elegant boutique property in a colonial mansion hidden behind the Royal Palace.

Some have complaints. Many of the hardened expats who have turned Cambodia into their adopted home are upset at the gentrification. Tuk-tuks, the ramshackle taxis used for short trips around town, now sometimes cost $2 instead of $1. Rents have soared and the average Cambodian hasn’t yet seen the benefits, and their incomes remain the lowest in the region. But it’s a start on what should be positive changes.

Kaplan explains how we could invade Burma and how it would work. (Thanks Eddie!)

The New York Times
May 14, 2008
Aid at the Point of a Gun
By ROBERT D. KAPLAN

Mae Sot, Thailand: MORE than 60,000 people may have died as a result of Cyclone Nargis in Myanmar, and at least 1.5 million are homeless or otherwise in desperate need of assistance. The Burmese military junta, one of the most morally repulsive in the world, has allowed in only a trickle of aid supplies. The handful of United States Air Force C-130 flights from Utapao Air Base here in Thailand is little more than symbolic, given the extent of the need.

France’s foreign minister, Bernard Kouchner, has spoken of the possibility of an armed humanitarian intervention, and there is an increasing degree of chatter about the possibility of an American-led invasion of the Irrawaddy River Delta.

As it happens, American armed forces are now gathered in large numbers in Thailand for the annual multinational military exercise known as Cobra Gold. This means that Navy warships could pass from the Gulf of Thailand through the Strait of Malacca and north up the Bay of Bengal to the Irrawaddy Delta. It was a similar circumstance that had allowed for Navy intervention after the Indian Ocean tsunami of December 2004.

Because oceans are vast and even warships travel comparatively slowly, one should not underestimate the advantage that fate has once again handed us. For example, a carrier strike group, or even a smaller Marine-dominated expeditionary strike group headed by an amphibious ship, could get close to shore and ferry troops and supplies to the most devastated areas on land.

The magic of this is that an enormous amount of assistance can be provided while maintaining a small footprint on shore, greatly reducing the chances of a clash with the Burmese armed forces while nevertheless dealing a hard political blow to the junta. Concomitantly, drops can be made from directly overhead by the Air Force without the need to militarily occupy any Burmese airports.

In other words, this is militarily doable. The challenge is the politics, both internationally and inside Myanmar. Because one can never assume an operation will go smoothly, it is vital that the United States carry out such a mission only as part of a coalition including France, Australia and other Western powers. Of course, the approval of the United Nations Security Council would be best, but China — the junta’s best friend — would likely veto it.

And yet China — along with India, Thailand and, to a lesser extent, Singapore — has been put in a very uncomfortable diplomatic situation. China and India are invested in port enlargement and energy deals with Myanmar. Thailand’s democratic government has moved closer to the junta for the sake of logging and other business ventures. Singapore, a city-state that must get along with everybody in the region, is suspected of acting as a banker for the Burmese generals. All these countries quietly resent the ineffectual moral absolutes with which the United States, a half a world away, approaches Myanmar. Nonetheless, the disaster represents an opportunity for Washington. By just threatening intervention, the United States puts pressure on Beijing, New Delhi and Bangkok to, in turn, pressure the Burmese generals to open their country to a full-fledged foreign relief effort. We could do a lot of good merely by holding out the possibility of an invasion.

The other challenge we face lies within Myanmar. Because a humanitarian invasion could ultimately lead to the regime’s collapse, we would have to accept significant responsibility for the aftermath. And just as the collapse of the Berlin Wall was not supposed to lead to ethnic cleansing in Yugoslavia, and the liberation of Iraq from Saddam Hussein was not supposed to lead to civil war, the fall of the junta would not be meant to lead to the collapse of the Burmese state. But it might.

About a third of Myanmar’s 47 million people are ethnic minorities, who have a troubled historical relationship with the dominant group, the Burmans. Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, the heroine of the democracy movement, is an ethnic Burman just like the generals, and her supporters are largely focused on the Burman homeland. Meanwhile, the Chins, Kachins, Karennis, Karens, Shans and other hill tribes have been fighting against the government. The real issue in Myanmar, should the regime fall, would be less about forging democracy than a compromise between the Burmans and the other ethnic groups.

Of course, Myanmar is not the Balkans or Iraq, where ethnic and sectarian rivalries were smothered under a carapace of authoritarianism, only to erupt later on. Myanmar has suffered insurgencies for 60 years now, and may be ripe for a compromise under a civilian government. But neither can we be naïve. Just because Myanmar is not Yugoslavia doesn’t mean it isn’t like Russia; it is a mini-empire ruled by the ethnic-Burman military that could crumble into its constituent mountainous parts, especially as the democracy advocates have demonstrated little ability to run a country. Here in Mae Sot, a center for non-Burman ethnic dissident groups, complaints over the disorganization of Mrs. Aung San Suu Kyi’s movement are rife.

It seems like a simple moral decision: help the survivors of the cyclone. But liberating Iraq from an Arab Stalin also seemed simple and moral. (And it might have been, had we planned for the aftermath.) Sending in marines and sailors is the easy part; but make no mistake, the very act of our invasion could land us with the responsibility for fixing Burma afterward.

Robert D. Kaplan is a national correspondent for The Atlantic and a fellow at the Center for a New American Security in Washington.

Both Malaysia and Japan are democratic states. Yet both have seen a majority party in control of all branches of government for many decades. In Japan, it’s the Liberal Democratic Party, while in Malaysia, it’s the Barisan Nasional (National Front). Elections a few years ago in both countries rewarded both – Japan’s LDP won a crushing 2/3rds majority in the lower house in 2005, and the Barisan Nasional won a whopping 90 percent of parliamentary seats in 2004.

However, these historic wins were short-lived. Just as Japan’s opposition Democratic Party won a majority in the upper house for the first time in history in 2007, Malaysia’s opposition party won key states in this weekend’s general election, and Barisan Nasional has lost its two-thirds majority for the first time since 1969 (read local blogger accounts here, here, here and here). The situation in Japan and Malaysia is now the same—after a few short years, the majority remains in control, but substantially weaker.

For decades both parties managed the economy and the general civic welfare of the nation, which voters recognized and rewarded accordingly. But scandals in recent years for both parties have undermined public support. The question in both Malaysia and Japan is whether the opposition will be able to deliver the final blow and wrest control of the executive branch. Whether or not that will succeed remains to be seen.