When people ask me about Thailand — particularly, if it is safe to visit — I tell them that the political turmoil that has plagued the country for several years has not amounted to violence.
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In Jan. 2008, the Computer Crimes Act was about six months away from taking effect in Thailand. It was part of the Internal Security Act, a complicated series of laws that were passed just before the leaders of a military coup held elections to restore democracy to the country. In Bangkok, journalists and web entrepreneurs were worried. Their main concerns were, first, the vagueness of the law, and second, the requirement that Internet Service Providers, or ISPs, log web usage. In essence, the ISPs had to be able to report who was doing what and saying what online, but exactly what information was to be logged was unclear.
Read more on Thailand news editor faces computer crimes charges…
I’ve been absent from the blogosphere for about a month to pursue projects and travel. (Lucky for me, slow blogging is in for 2009.) For most of the last few weeks, I have been in Sri Lanka, meeting people and learning about their lives. For its beautiful sunsets, delicious varieties of tea and wild elephants, there is little escaping the fact that this is an island at war. Colombo’s one-way boulevards are littered with army and police checkpoints, where heavily-armed “vigilance committees” question travelers and check ids. Sometimes the soldiers and officers are serious and to-the-point; sometimes they are conversational, like a welcoming committee with machine guns.
These are kids in Myanmar, also known as Burma. They live in a town called Tachilek, on the border of Thailand. I met them in a mosque — a very small mosque on a sidestreet in the town. There is a lot of dispute about the position and treatment of Muslims in Myanmar, a predominantly Buddhist country. I was happy to meet these boys — the one in the middle was particularly funny, meditating like a Buddhist monk but holding a slingshot in his hand. I don’t think they get many visitors.
I had planned to visit Yangon (Rangoon) with my friend Anil Kalhan in the second weekend of May, which was incidentally the weekend of the country’s constitutional referendum. Not surprisingly (though, I have to say, I was still a bit surprised) the Myanmar Embassy in Singapore closed its visa section for a few days about a month before our weekend sojourn. And then for the week after that. And the next week too, which was when Cyclone Nargis hit. When we finally got to the visa counter (on now my fourth visit to the embassy) we were told that a visa could not be ready until Monday, the Monday that we were supposed to return to Singapore.
So, our Yangon trip didn’t work out. Not to be deterred, we decided to take the back door to Burma. We went to Chiang Mai in Northern Thailand. We wandered around the city and met some people there who told us a lot about what was happening across the border in Burma. Then we went by bus to Mae Sai, the border town on the Thai side and our gateway to a country neither of us had ever seen but were very curious about.
Crossing the border by foot was a strange experience. It should have been a bigger deal than it was. You cross through Thai security, walk on a short bridge over the Sai River, are greeted by a large photo of junta leader Than Shwe, pay 500 baht (we tried to pay US$10, but they didn’t like that our bills had doggy ears), and voila! Myanmar. (Myanmar without our passports, that is. They hold on to them until you return.)
Tachilek and Mae Sai sit inside the Golden Triangle, the area where Thailand, Burma and Laos meet. It’s a place notorious for opium production, hilltribes and the spread of HIV. Not too pretty. But it’s also a place glossed over for tourists — these “dangerous” places have capitalized on their reputations in many ways. So too has Tachilek. The three-wheel taxi drivers have a little route they all follow, showing half-day tourists from Thailand Shan temples, Chinese-style temples and the beauty of the valley where Tachilek rests. Indeed, it is a beautiful country, but one that is conspicuously void of newspapers. Many buildings have satellite dishes, but the televisions we saw were tuned to WWF wrestling from across the border. One week after Cycle Nargis hit, our guide still thought only a few thousand had been killed.
So we wandered around, seeing all the things that all the curious onlookers see and trying to ask questions in between, It is certainly a strange place and one where you don’t speak too loudly, or walk past a polling booth twice, or take photos of referendum posters out in the open. Our guide made that abundantly clear to us. He also made it clear that people in Tachilek didn’t feel that their vote in the referendum was secret — so many voted “yes” to satisfy local leaders. So I took what photos I could — I’m afraid I couldn’t properly capture Tachilek, though.
Read more on ways to cross a border…
Ok — so, I couldn’t help this one.
I was sitting in a cafe in Bangkok, and, well, this is the song that came on the radio. But it was a cover that I can’t find on YouTube. It sounded almost like a love song — but maybe everything in Bangkok has that soft rock feel to it. (They also play a lot of Dido here, which I know at least one of you might appreciate.)
My week in Bangkok coincided with the week leading up to Thailand’s legislative elections, the first since a peaceful military coup in September, 2006. There has been a lot written about the elections, so I won’t spend too much time on it here,except to say that people told me that the ousted prime minister, Thaksin, maintains a lot of support, and they were right. The People’s Power Party, a reincarnation of Thaksin’s dissolved Thai Rak Thai party, took the most seats in the parliament and is looking to form a coalition and create a majority in the goverment. The results of the elections are being contested on several fronts, but it will be interesting to see how the Democrat Party and coup leaders respond, and if Thaksin returns to Thailand, though he has publicly stated that he will not return to politics.
Even if the election is seen as a referendum on the coup, and even if coup leaders and anti-Thaksin politicians lose their seats of power, they have certainly left a mark. On the Thursday night before the election, the military-appointed National Legislative Assembly quietly passed the Internal Security Act, a vague law that gives the military to take action during security crises. The bill was one of many that were being pushed through ahead of the election and activists are calling on those laws t be annulled by the newly elected parliament.
Included in the Act is the Act on Computer Crimes, which establishes many vague new authorities about content on the Internet. The provision that is making journalists and activists most nervous — though this is also a part of the law that many people are not aware exists — is one that will require Internet Service Providers and companies to keep logs on their users and employees activities (see sections 26 and 27 of the Act). They have to be able to match specific activity on the Internet to specific names of people.
Don Sambandaraksa of the Bangkok Post does a better job of explaining this than I do (reprinted here by Freedom Against Censorship Thailand). Companies, including newspapers, have to comply by keeping logs, or face heavy fines for being asked to hand over information they don’t have or aren’t willing to give up.
Internet logs or no Internet logs, Bangkok is truly a fantastic, vibrant city. Below are Muay Thai boxers and a view from the commute out of the city center on a water taxi.
(Also this week, for new music — including my own little tip, which was actually a tip from someone else — and other goodies, check out Asia Pacific Art’s Best of 2007 issue.)
Read more on One Night in Bangkok…
