"A Woman of Bangkok" is Back!

The great news is that, "A Woman of Bangkok", Jack Reynolds' classic novel published in 1956 in New York and London is at last back in print. If you scan down this blog you'll find many articles about my quest to learn more about it's author. I've now gone far down that road and so am thrilled for him that Monsoon Books in Singapore have issued both a paper version and an ebook. The blurb that you'll find at www.monsoonbooks.com.sg reads as follows. (If you go to the sample chapter, you'll also find a short bio of Jack.)********** "Set against a beautifully observed Thailand of the 1950s, this is the story of a young Englishman’s infatuation with a dance-hall hostess named Vilai, who all Bangkok knows as The White Leopard. No ordinary prostitute, Vilai is one of the most memorable in literature’s long line of brazen working girls. An unmitigated liar and brutally transparent about her desire for money, she unscrupulously milks young Reggie Joyce, the son of an Anglican vicar, with complete frankness. Reggie knows her for what she is yet there seems no folly he will not commit for her, no road to ruin he dares not take. Vilai becomes an obsession for him—an obsession that brings Reggie moments of ecstasy, months of anguish and the threat of utter disaster. Acknowledged today as one of the most memorable novels about Thailand, “A Woman of Bangkok” was first published to critical acclaim in London and New York in the 1950s and is a classic of Bangkok fiction. While the Fifties was a very different world, what is remarkable about this book is that the more the bar scene in Bangkok changes, the more it stays the same. Just as Moll Flanders and Fanny Hill stand eternal, Vilai takes a very special, dare one say seminal, place as the first and best of the many anti-heroines of the now burgeoning Bangkok novel."******** It is a fine piece of writing and well worth reading. Tell us what you think!********** Please forgive this bizarre editing. Blogspot is refusing to accept my paragraphing.

Preah Vihear Ablaze Again

The Cambodian flag flies peaceably above the first temple at Preah Vihear, known to the Thais as Khao Phra Viharn and I cannot now believe that blood is again being spilled in this futile border dispute. The conflict has no real substance but is merely the result of extreme nationalism being fanned by politicians on both sides of the border seeking to distract attention from internal problems and to impress the electorate. It is so ironic that two Asian nations are scrapping over a border that was imposed on them by French colonial Indo-China in an unequal treaty that the World Court then had to interpret.


Bullet holes from the Khmer Rouge era are clearly visible.


The biggest losers are the traders for whom the temple was a livelihood.


A sacred place, it should be enjoyed as a shared heritage.









I wrote the following article in October 2008, never thinking that the dispute would gather momentum for so long. Nothing has changed. Things have only got worse and more blood has been spilled. When will everyone come to their senses?

Thailand’s Temple of Doom?

I am so sorry that Preah Vihear, the Cambodian temple on the Thai border has once again become a political football, souring relations between the two countries.

Called Khao Phra Viharn in Thai, it is just two hours from where we live and I keep on going back as for me it is one of the most magical places in the world. I’ve been there ten times in the last few years and I want to go another ten.

Though the Khmer temples at Angkor are grander in scale, the natural setting of Khao Phra Viharn is beyond compare. It sits at the top of a cliff and as you stand there looking down at hundreds of miles of Cambodian plain and mountain spread before you, just behind you a thousand year symphony in stone, this must be one of the most remarkable places in the world.

The temple often acts as a lightning rod for tensions between Thailand and Cambodia as it is the Cambodian and not the Thai flag that flies over it. In 1962 the International Court of Justice decided a border dispute referred to it by Cambodia, ruling that the temple was within Cambodia and that the Thais must withdraw their troops. The Thais were outraged and have never forgotten this slight from the minnow to the east.

Now managed by the Cambodians in a pleasant state of sleepy under-development, little girls and old ladies wander through the ruins beseechingly selling postcards and cold drinks and whenever there are tensions between the two countries, the Cambodians assert their authority and close the temple to visitors. Whether the pretext is pollution flowing into Thailand from the stream below the temple or a Thai helicopter allegedly overflying Cambodian airspace, it always spells doom for the poor vendors who abruptly lose their livelihood.

The decision of the Court was that maps drawn up during the French colonial era and at least implicitly accepted by the Thais placed the temple in French Cambodia notwithstanding that geographically it is within Thailand. Standing on top of a gently rising escarpment and cut off from Cambodia by the cliff, it must always have been approached from the Thai plateau.

The usual presumption is that international borders follow the watershed. In this case the watershed is the cliff edge, which would put the temple within Thailand, but the Court concluded in this case that the treaty ruled otherwise. Unequal treaties by which colonial powers sought to extend their territory are nonetheless taken to be valid.

The latest saga is that Cambodia has now made an application to UNESCO for the listing of the temple as a World Heritage Site and again the Thais are outraged. The new Thai government seems prepared to co-operate but the opposition Democrats have made it a major issue in domestic politics, attempting to bring down the government. Charging that a deal had been done to allow the Cambodian application proceed in return for a casino concession for Thaksin Shinawatra, the shadowy power behind the PM, the opposition has obtained a court injunction to stop the government supporting the application for listing and has stirred up extreme nationalist fervour against Cambodia.

The whole conflict is damaging for all sides. If the Thais could only accept the reality of Cambodian sovereignty over the temple and support an application for listing, there would be benefit for all, especially for the poor vendors in the temple.

The approach to the temple from the Thai side is scheduled as a National Park so the Thai authorities already collect entry fees equivalent to those charged by the Cambodians for the temple itself. As the access and the only population centres are on the Thai side, the benefit of virtually all associated tourism primarily benefits the Thais. The Thai province of Si Saket is one of the poorest in the country and desperately needs its one significant tourist attraction to be promoted by harmonious progress to a World Heritage listing.

The current dispute could now close the temple and sour relations between the two countries for years, thus doing considerable self-inflicted damage to Thailand.

The more intransigent the Thais prove to be, the more the Cambodians will try to develop the approaches to the temple from their own side. There is talk of foreign funding for a major road through the jungle, of building a cable car up the cliff and, perish the thought, of casinos in the vicinity.

When I first visited the temple seven years ago, the view from the top was totally untouched by humanity. Though the jungle had perhaps been stripped of the best timber, there was not a road or a man-made structure in view for a hundred miles in any direction. Now already there is a dirt road with trucks crawling along it like ants and small shanty towns at the intersections. I fear what the future will bring. The great charm of the temple is that it remains under-developed and innocent, but all that soon may change.

In recent times it has been the focus of violent conflict as it was one of the last strongholds held by the Khmer Rouge long after the fall of Pol Pot, the genocidal leader of Cambodia. Indeed one of their cannons still stands high on the hill facing back towards Thailand.

Now once again the atmosphere is laden with doom and it all seems so sad. As I walk up the steep stone avenue towards the temple steadfastly refusing all offers of postcards, the little girls gaze hopefully at me. ‘Okay, mister. Not buy postcard now, but maybe later come back.’

Maybe but maybe not.

My heart usually melts for them or for the boy who in competent English tells me his life ambition is one day to go to school. My hand slips into my pocket for a few baht, always to be rewarded with a million dollar smile.

The temple and the simplicity of these people thus enriches me and all who go there, while the barrenness of racist nationalism and partisan politics that is now rearing its ugly head diminishes all of us. In this most beautiful of places the petty behaviour of politicians could not be more grotesque.

My Thai Girl's a Hunter-Gatherer

This crab wandered in and paid the price.


During the rains there's frogs and fish in the rice fields.


These tiny fish are delicious deep fried.


And this was the trap that caught them.


A spicy dish of bamboo shoot is highly prized.


But it takes much time and effort to prepare it.



Rural Thailand is changing fast, often for the better, but as always there are winners and losers. For this child, change will not come fast enough and he may have little choice but to join the cohorts of cheap labour that migrate to the cities to fuel the modern economy, thus maintaining the comfortable life-style of the middle classes. The land can no longer provide a living, except for those who own substantial farms and work hard and capably.

But it was not always that way. Once there were forests and food for free.

I’ve written before about how the Surin countryside where my wife, Cat and I now live used to be bountiful and how it abundantly yielded birds and animals to eat, roots, leaves, nuts and fruits. Her childhood was spent gathering food in the countryside and her memories of that time seem to be happy ones.

The trouble is now that every available scrap of land has been made productive and almost all the forest has gone. With increasing population, farming cannot support the population and this unlimited resource of free food for the landless is no longer there. Thus the young and fit have to move away to the cities to find low paid work, often leaving their small children with Mama Papa in the village.

I’d never before thought of Thais as hunter gatherers but rather as prosperous growers of rice, so this is a new insight for me. Farmers and pastoralists wandering the world with their cows are the wealthy ones and the hunter gatherers are all but gone. One thinks only of the pygmies in the Congo, of the Punan in Borneo and the Orang Asli or Sakai in the mountainous jungles down the spine of Malaysia.

I’ve seen people in West Africa who wore nothing but leaves but even they grew crops. I’ve stayed with Dyaks several days up the Skrang river in Sarawak, sleeping under the huge bundles of human skulls tied up with rattan. They lived off the jungle and just before we went out hunting orang utan, they showed me the paws of a bear they’d killed a few days before. They also grew a few vegetables and kept pigs that ran wild in the forest around the long houses. This was fine by me but in the absence of a WC, when I headed off into the jungle to hide behind a bush, the pigs would come running. They were so keen to get up close and personal as I squatted down that they almost knocked me flying.

The only pure hunter gatherers I’ve ever met though were the Sakai in the Taman Negara national park in Malaysia. In the vastness of the jungle we were lucky to come across them sitting in low temporary shelters of palm and leaves. They were very hospitable as they showed us how they whittled the darts for the blow pipes with which they killed monkeys and showed us the roots and the honey they’d recently collected from the jungle. They were delightful people to meet, their most precious possession being the fire that they kept glowing in one of their shelters.

I now realize to my surprise that my Thai wife too is a hunter gatherer. There’s nothing she loves doing more in the village than collecting food and despite the loss of the forests, it’s still out there if you know how to find it.

And it also comes into the house too without being asked! The garage is a cool, quiet place where we’ve caught intruding crabs and frogs, rats and even a scorpion, and all of them have gone into the pot.

Then when it rains heavily at night, the frogs cry out noisily and Cat gets up and goes out in the dark and the wet hunting them. She takes a powerful head torch and a vicious looking spear and returns with several kilos of frogs and fish in a bucket.

We’ve had heavy rain recently and the fish pond overflowed and she made a fish trap of fine netting where the water runs out. This produced quantities of beautiful small fish of the kind that are used to make plaa raa, the foul smelling fermented fish that Isaan people so love.

Then Cat takes the bamboo shoots from around the fish pond and spends ages cutting it into tiny slices and boiling it up to soften it. One dish she made recently was to mix it with rice, chopped pork, various spices and a liberal quantity of plaa raa and fiery chili to render it totally uneatable by any farang. Then it was wrapped in parcels of banana leaf to make a local delicacy that was truly a labour of love.

She also collects pak ah chet, a leaf that grows on the surface of the pond. And she gathers kee lek from behind the house which is pounded to make a bitter green paste or soup, and at a certain time of the year we go out to the rice fields and climb the sadao trees to collect the young shoots that again are cooked up to make a decent curry as bitter as bile.

Then there was the trap with a blue light that accumulates a huge quantity of insects overnight that are fried up and eaten as a snack. The rice fields are full of fish and crabs, shell fish and prawns, all there for the taking, just like at the seaside, so in some ways the countryside is still nothing less than bountiful.

Nonetheless, you have to have land as there is no longer enough to sustain the whole population of rural Isaan. And that’s why the middle generation has gone off to the towns to find menial and badly paid work.

A few days ago one of Cat’s aunties came in to show off a new grandchild that had just been left with her by her daughter who works in Bangkok. This woman had eight children of her own but with only one of them now still with her in the village, all the others having gone away to the south. She already has two small grandsons living with her, their unmarried mothers gone far away so a third is a real burden, not to mention the cost of milk formula. From time to time her family send back small sums of money her and Papa and the children but for them it’s a poor life, living in what an only be described as a shack. They have absolutely no other income.

The new child is of course a joy, but the burden for an old woman of raising yet another baby is hard. But that’s just the way it is in rural Thailand.

The comfortable middle classes in Bangkok benefit from a vast pool of cheap labour while Isaan is a totally different world.

The village is a real community, though under threat, but it’s sad if more of the benefits of the modern economy cannot be brought to the countryside. That tension is of course what the current political turmoil in Thailand has been all about.

Meanwhile Cat has her farang and a comfortable life, but I respect her passion for living off the land and for not running a mile from the toughness of her upbringing. That’s what makes living in the village more rewarding for me as Cat’s enthusiasm for country life brings me a little closer to what remains of ‘the real Thailand’.

It still leaves the question though that the countryside has been stripped bare and is no longer capable of sustaining those with little or no land. In times of trouble there is little now for them to fall back on.

Andrew Hicks The “Thai Girl” Blog December 2010

"Resilient Thailand" Again

Central World Plaza, the massive retail mall in Bangkok that was devastated during the political protests only a few months ago has opened once again. Comparing this picture to the scene of destruction that you will see if you scan down this blog is remarkable.

This is a tribute to the resilience of the established political and commercial powers in Thailand and to the ability of this society to bounce back following seismic tremors.

I admire these qualities very much but there is perhaps a negative side as well. If the elite that controls Thailand restores the shiny facade but fails to deal with the grey reality that lies behind, then greater problems are only stored up for the future.

The privilege of the moneyed Bangkokian to shop in cool, marble malls has been restored but it is still the rural migrants who do the construction and factory work and run the city for dismally low wages. There is little then to send home to Mama Papa who squat in the dust back home in the village.

Amazing Thailand, Resilient Thailand, a country that is admirable in so many ways. Nonetheless, for her sake I desperately hope that she can learn to adapt and change in the very near future as her essential problems will not just go away of their own accord.

Andrew Hicks The Thai Girl Blog October 2010

Some Sad News to Tell

'Are rural people living in Isaan truly poor' was the theme of a blog article I wrote some months ago. Rather than add more questionable generalisations to the debate, I made it a 'case study' of Cat's old auntie and uncle and I described their hard lives in detail... how that had raised seven children farming rice on a very small holding of land and eking a living digging crabs in the fields and selling noodles. (If you scan down, there are pictures of them and their home and farm.)

Now in their seventies the worst has happened. They are both fragile and as thin as sticks, but to keep body and soul together working life has to go on. They have to fend for themselves as little money seems to come in from their adult children who are far away and have many mouths to feed. The old man has continued to take his three buffaloes out to the fields every day and she to walk miles around the villages carrying heavy baskets over her shoulders with a clay barbecue to cook and sell noodles. That is how they survive from day to day.

Now he has suffered a collapse and is in hospital forty miles away in Surin. He seems to have blackouts and now is partially paralysed down one side. He has been hospitalised for several weeks and it is impossible to guess the outcome. The story that comes back to me is that as he never eats meat he doesn't have enough blood and so is very weak and they seem to be despairing of him.

She too has had a collapse, perhaps exhausted by the responsibility of managing the animals and getting into Surin to look after her husband. Now she is home but she is very much at risk.

While some of the basics of medical care are covered by the state, being ill is very expensive and I just don't know how they'll manage. In the struggle to get by, I'm sure money will be their one consuming worry.

He always has a gentle smile and is the perfect gentleman, the very best of Isaan farmers. She has enormous spirit and is the life and soul of the party but it is now terrible to see her so down.

I don't know what good luck could come their way but I only hope it does as they are among the nicest people I know.

Andrew

The Thai Girl Blog October 2010

Bangkok's World Trade Center Disaster

It is truly shocking to see a picture of Bangkok's Central World Plaza in ruins shortly after the recent disturbances in the city. Peaceful protests can so easily get hijacked and run out of control when a widespread sense of grievance is so very strong and raw.


The Plaza was a truly spectacular celebration of consumerism but for the huge majority of Thais their only place in it was as low paid constuction workers, cleaners and skivvies. A pretty girl from the countryside whose skin colour was light enough might aspire to sell burgers there but not much more.


Bangkok's world, it seems, is thus heating up in more ways than one.

How ironic it now is that before a substantial upgrading and rebranding a few years ago, this huge retail complex was called the World Trade Centre. While the Marriott Hotel did not change the name of its Tsunami restaurant, any possible association with a terrorist atrocity in Manhattan was clearly best avoided for Bangkok's biggest retail mall.

What befell though in Bangkok was entirely a domestic affair, the problems of a young country that has imperfectly integrated its distant provinces such as in the South and North East and since the revolution of 1932 has not fully modernised its essential polity.

Now the talk is of getting back to normal through reconciliation between the different factions. This sounds thoroughly appropriate, though it is meaningless if it simply amounts to demanding that the poor go back to their sweatshops and to ploughing the dirt without more. Unless the inequities in society are adequately addressed and a substantial shift occurs in the balance of political power between different interests, then the grievances will only become more bitter and the next conflict only be delayed.

History deems that Thailand's achievement in avoiding being colonised was a good thing. However, while it begs the question to say this, in essence its whole structure of power politics is in need of modernisation.

This cannot be attempted soon enough, though it is not in the interests of the power brokers to see it happen.

Meanwhile, though tourism is down, Thai manufacturing and exports are booming and the government's finances remain healthy. The means to promote change therefore exists and there is little real excuse for not so doing except self-interest.

As the pressures continue to build, what then can break the log jam?

Andrew Hicks The "Thai Girl" Blog July 2010

Cute Terrorists-Which Way Thailand Now?

A scrawled poster pasted up during the recent demonstrations in Bangkok suggests the wide popular nature of the protest. But was it, as the much criticised media coverage suggested, a genuine peoples's movement for democracy or was it in fact a power struggle by new monied interests seeking to seize power from the traditional elites? Where does the truth lie and what's next for Thailand?


The protester organisers passionately wanted to be non-violent.


Bangkok is a vibrant city that relies on armies of cheap labour.


Petty traders survive there just as they would back in the village.


Or they work on construction sites in appalling conditions.


Their salvation is finding support and community in adversity.


They are building a sleek airport rail link that they'll never use.


Getting to work means a hot bus toiling in traffic.


Or riding a smelly boat on Klong San Saeb.


Once a year at Songkhran, the Thai New Year, they have a few days off to go home to the village, fighting for a seat at Moh Chit bus station.


It strikes me that Thai politics never seems to address the key issues of the day but creates dominant personality cults and focuses solely on the politicians themselves. Which war lord is going to grab power next and what vested interests do they serve? Thus politics is not so much a contention between opposing principles and ideas but a crude struggle for power between rival patronage groupings.

Living in a village in Isaan I see this even at the local level. Elections here are always welcomed as you’ll hope to collect a few hundred baht for the promise of your vote. A candidate for a minor position in local government, orbortor or whatever, invests a considerable sum to buy his way into power but winning the post will reap a useful dividend. Nothing can ever be had without being bought.

Even a farang living in Thailand openly gets asked for bribes by officials and many times I’ve been stopped by police asking for cash before going on my way. Right up the ladder to the top, office holders use their position for their own benefit. Nobody did this better than Thaksin Shinawatra who used the government coffers to buy the favour of the ordinary voters and became unusually rich during his terms of office. As he was the first leader to make it his policy to benefit the poor farmers, his followers now do not begrudge him his questionable billions.

Every political movement or party, even a street protest, whether Yellow or Red shirted, thus needs a powerful backer dispensing patronage. Even if you are an ordinary worker sincere in your protest you cannot survive at the barricades without being paid 200 baht a day. A genuine mass movement of the rural poor can thus be hijacked and distorted by those who use it in pursuit of power.

So what of the recent disturbances in Bangkok? Were they a genuine struggle for democracy by the disenfranchised poor or something else entirely? Was it instead a power struggle in which the traditional political, bureaucratic and military elites were resisting an alliance of the newly rich and the rural poor?

Perhaps it was both, a broad populist movement which came to be bankrolled and controlled by another patronage grouping seeking power. If the Red Shirt movement was a grass roots movement of ordinary people seeking to better their lives, they soon lost control of it and it became something else entirely. Sadly, the underlying imbalances within Thai society and the sharing of political power and wealth remain unresolved.

So was it a genuine populist movement or a crude struggle between opposing interest groups? Whatever view you take, as one strips away more skins of the tear stained onion of Thai politics, there is always another layer beneath.

A Comment on my previous blog article, “Thai Rural Poverty - A Powder Keg?”, recommended an article in Newsweek as a good analysis of the current situation. (See www.newsweek.com/2010/06/04/the-end-of-brand-thailand.html) This boldly stated that of South East Asia’s modern economies, ‘only Thailand is disintegrating’ and is ‘becoming ungovernable and a failed state’.

That’s not how it feels living in Thailand though.

At the time of the troubles, if you were not in the immediate vicinity of the disturbances, life went on as normal. This does not feel anything like a failed state but is a well-managed and broadly stable society.

In the last fifty years the country has in fact made enormous strides, creating an impressive infrastructure of roads, power supply, schools and hospitals even in the remotest areas, everything managed by a clunkingly complex bureaucracy.

Through the Thaksin years and beyond, outward signs of increasing prosperity have been increasingly evident in the countryside, even if this has been partly based on inward remittances. The comprehensive powers of the police and bureaucracies and the influence of the Chinese dominated commercial sector means that the country is effectively run. Nonetheless, a deferential society such as this may allow pressures and resentment to build up if power is imposed from above and wealth is not equitably shared.

Newsweek ascribes Thailand’s relative decline to a poor education system based on rote learning and to concentrating on lower value manufacturing for foreign companies. At an early stage of its development, this approach has served Thailand well, though as Singapore realized in the eighties, lower wage economies can soon become uncompetitive and it is then necessary to gear up and go ‘hi-tech’.

Basic education that avoids critical thinking and maintaining low wages is an essential of the old approach and a cause of dissention today. Thailand’s mass labour that fuels the factories is made up of economic migrants from the countryside who passively work for poor wages, but as they become more urbanized and aware, it is they who are now protesting.

Newsweek sees a dangerous polarization between the Yellow and Red factions, though that observation states the growing problem rather than identifying solutions. In conclusion, statesmanlike leadership has been lacking, it says, and is needed to pull Thailand out of it present troubles.

Of recent prime ministers, the spatula wielding Samak, who was removed from office by the courts for hosting a TV cooking programme, was the antithesis of statesmanship. However, Thaksin himself had many leadership qualities and even occasionally talked about the rule of law. The current prime minister, Abhisit Vejajiva is a man of considerable political skill who would impress any audience for his grasp of democratic principle and who looks good on the international stage.

Yet he is in a bind that no one man could disentangle, nor would his backers want a different allocation of power and wealth. A general election is, however, due some time in 2012, so Abhisit’s task is to grimly hang onto power for as long as he can, aware that the will of the people is likely to upset the applecart and hand power back to the other side.

A further layer to the onion of Thai politics is its history. Thailand is still a young country and the democratic revolution begun in 1932 when the absolute monarchy was abolished is not yet complete. Furthermore, its far provinces are only recently integrated and then imperfectly. The northern kingdom of Lanna with its centre in Chiang Mai was substantially cut off by the mountains until recently, and the jungly scarps of the Korat plateau made Isaan, the great north east, very difficult of access from Bangkok.

Only by herculean feats of civil engineering were railways pushed through at the beginning of the twentieth century to make the nation a manageable political entity. (See “How the Trains Made Thailand”, my blog article of 31September 2010.)

On many occasions during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the peoples of Isaan have resisted rule from distant Bangkok and these rebellions have been firmly put down. A major communist movement in the north east during the Cold War era was perhaps the last of these insurrections, but the tensions have not yet gone away.

Sanitsuda Ekachai, a columnist for the Bangkok Post uses the term ‘racist nationalism’ to describe the expectation of the central Thai power elite that the minorities should conform to their brand of ‘Thainess’ and be culturally assimilated. The failure of the clod-hopping Laos of Isaan to conform to that stereotype condemns them to exclusion and ridicule and to be the eternal funny men of every comedy and farce on Thai television.

Newly developing societies often progress at two speeds but the divisions in Thai society are glaring with few opportunities for the poor and minimal social mobility. The privileged seem satisfied with the status-quo. I recently read an articulate but angry rant by a highly educated Thai against the Red Shirts. She argued that the protests were risking the economy and her long running gravy train. Why couldn’t they just go back to their buffaloes was the underlying theme. After all, if Thai farmers are poor that can only be because they’re stupid.

It strikes me that educated urban Thais often seem to know or understand little of the conditions in which rural people live; or they don’t want to know. There is also a tendency to say that some of the protesters behaved badly and so the grievances of the poor should be dismissed. However, the Red Shirts do not formally represent the interests they claim to speak for and violence on the fringes of the protest in no way devalues the complaints of the poor.

Now the Thai farmers are losing patience. Thaksin gave them a taste of what was possible for them and understandably they want more. The trouble is that conducting a peoples’ protest pure and simple is well nigh impossible in Thailand and even if they can eventually exert their power at the ballot box they will almost certainly choose the wrong leaders.

It is highly ironic who they seem to have chosen as their champion so far!

In conclusion, there are many new nations where a comprehensive corruption of power allows office holders at all levels to use their position primarily to benefit themselves, where the police can be bought and the rule of law does not operate. It is always hard to see away out.

So which way Thailand now?

There are no glib answers but the Thais do have a knack for soldiering on in adversity and slow progress towards a modern state is always possible. However, the present tensions will grumble on until the centre of gravity in Thai politics shifts quite radically against the traditional holders of power and the economy is rebalanced to allow a fairer sharing of wealth and opportunity with mass labour.

My own key idea is that a major policy of regional development should be developed to devolve factories to provincial centres, thus taking the modern economy to the rural areas. To bring jobs to the people could thus help save the essence of Thai rural society which currently is disintegrating as workers migrate to the bloated urban centres.

It won’t be easy though and it will take time.

Andrew Hicks The ‘Thai Girl’ Blog June 2010.