Dear Sir and Madam:
Having watched the video of Secretary of State Hilary Clinton shaking hand with the controversial and torrorist Minister of Foreign Affairs from Thailand at http://www.state.gov/video/?videoid=20844074001, I felt betrayed by the greatest democratic nation on earth. This gesture alone may have sent a wrong signal to the citizens of the many countries fighting for a true democracy. Mr. Piromya is one of the most hated and disgusted figures in the Thai politics, for he clearly represents the royalists and the PAD that seized international airports and illegally occupied the Thai Government House as well as caused protests nationwide after he had been appointed a Foreign Minister. The parties with whom he has been associated have conspired to sabotage Thai democracy and thus brought Thailand backward from its path toward a fuller democracy and properity and constructive leadership among Asian countries.
With the intelligence that the U.S. has, how can it be possible that Mr. President and Mrs. Secretary are not correctly informed about what actually has happened in Thailand since September, 2006? I am a Fulbrighter from Thailand, so I came to the U.S. with a hope to help the world understand many great things that the world could adopt as a model for the common progress of humankind. Instead, I found that even Fulbrighters from certain parts of the world, especially those from Latin America, came to the U.S. with extreme hatred against the U.S. as a nation mainly because of the foreign policies! I am sad to report that many of them have left the U.S. unconvinced of the opposite reality that I have been blessed to experience.
As you are trying to promote a true democracy across the globe, committing to it so deeply that you even removed many leaders and killed many innocent people in hope for planting seeds of democracy, you have shown hypocrisy, as presently again illustrated in the above video.
Thai people who fight for a true democracy have been unfairly and brutally oppressed by a network of undemocratic forces comprising the monarch's privy council members, the military, the surrounding interest groups associated with the first two groups, the PAD, which was established by Sondhi Limthongkul (check his records!) so as to carry out the propaganda dictated by the orders from the other three groups. I believe it is unnecessary to provide you both with too much information that you already have on file somewhere. I have heard that the new Ambassador, briefly after his first day in office in Thailand, went to see Prem Tinnasulanondha, who as allegedly known as a mastermind of the 2006 coup. Soon after such a meeting, the military was ordered to shoot at the protesters with an aim to suppress the redshirt protesters.
If you want to promote democracy, you cannot send wrong signals and compromise with the undemocratic figures. Your association with the Abhisit administration and especially your meeting with Mr. Piromya, Mrs. Secretary, with due respect, are the worst signal that you could ever send to informed Thai citizens. Many redshirt Thais have expressed their sympathy for the terrorists in the Deep South of Thailand and the reasons why some suicide bombers do what they do because of the lack of justice, structural violence, and perpetuated oppression. You could help so much in Thailand, as Thailand would be the best material for your project to make it a most successful democratic country, given the resources, geography, educational levels of Thai citizens, established infrastructure, the willingness to cooperate, etc.
I hope this humble note will reach the bottom of your heart and trigger the best part of your brains.
Sincerely yours,
A Thai Citizen
Dear Kun "A Thai Citizen"
ReplyDeleteThank you very much to Kun "Piangdin".
I am a Thai Citizen + Australian Citizen. I have been living in Australia for 20 years. I love Australia because I can ask for the " real democracy, real equal rights, real justice, real liberty, and real belief in human rights."
I was sick of Thai politic because it has never been real democracy since I was born. There is only a small group of people who control Thailand. Thailand has the fake democracy. These are reasons that I ignored Thai politic until the coup on 19 Sept 2006. I have learnt a lot through different websites about why a lot of Thais love kun Thaksin. Every real democratic Thai people & I just understand that the future real democracy will help them to earn real equal rights, real justice, real liberty, real belief in human rights, and equal opportunities.
Then, I learned that just only one term ( 4 years ) of kun Thaksin, he had done a lot of Thailand development for all Thai people. As well as for the South East Asian region.
That why, I come to my own conclusion that it is not fair for kun Thaksin & his wife & his three kids have to be painted by bad people.
Since, 19 Sept 2006 and events between 12 - 14 April 2009 and until now, I found that Australian government & most their mass medias, USA government & most their mass medias, and UK government & most their mass medias do not show the whole world that they do really intention to help developing countries, like Thailand, to get the democracy where they always tell the world that they love all countries to have democracy.
So if Thai people do not try to help themselves for getting real democracy, do not think that any countries in the world will help us.
I wish all democratic Thai leaders, kun weera, kun jatuporn, kun morweng, kun nuttawut, kun thaksin&family, kun piandin and all Thai democratic red shirt etc. all best wishes.
A Thai & Australian Citizen
I absolutely agree with khun piangdin comment.
ReplyDeleteA small thai people.
as a woman, i've always admired hillary clinton for she is a strong woman who has put a big crack in that glass ceiling..
ReplyDeletemrs. clinton, not long ago you gave a pretty speech like "if you hear the dogs barking, keep going" now you appear to be chummy with our minister of foreign affairs who believes that "poor and rural thais are too dumb to have the right to vote"
i don't want to call you a hypocrite just yet.. one can only hope you will come to your sense and stop giving an implicit support to the current thai government who have done everything they can to send thailand back to the monarchy-military regime..
I very thank you to you to tell the truth about Thailand. This is a little bit detail. Actually it is very bad but we cannot say anything. Wehave to shut up otherwise we go in jail. Right now I hate Mrs. Clinton.She pretend to not know that Kasit is the criminal for closing Suwanaphum Airport. I saw her lauphing with that criminal it make me sick. She can tell me that America must get the big reward from Thai government. May be the oil under the sea of Thailand and Cambodia. America is behind the coup and killing red shirt I think. They help Prem to kill Thai Red Shirt.
ReplyDeleteFatal flaws that wrecked Thailand’s promise
ReplyDeleteBy David Pilling
Published: April 29 2009 19:50 | Last updated: April 29 2009 19:50
In 1995 The Economist projected that by 2020 Thailand would be the world’s eighth-largest economy. Its forecast, which now looks a tad, shall we say, optimistic, followed a 10-year run in which Thailand muscled out even China as the world’s fastest-growing economy, expanding at a blistering 8.4 per cent a year. Those were the days.
The decade after the Asian financial crisis, which began with the devaluation of the baht and ended with the 2006 coup that ousted Thaksin Shinawatra, the former prime minister, has not been so kind. Although the country bounced back from the 1997 devaluation, when it carelessly misplaced 15 per cent of gross domestic product in 18 months, the economy never recovered its former vigour. It has bumbled along at a respectable, but less than socially transformative, 4-5 per cent a year. This year its economy is likely to shrink by some 5 per cent. In that, admittedly, it is not alone.
Yet it is fair to ask why Thailand has failed to fulfil its potential. Once mentioned, at least by the excitable, in the same breath as high-tech Taiwan, it is now more likely to be grouped with the high-maintenance Philippines. Far from closing in on the world’s eighth-biggest economy – a slot currently occupied by Spain, with an output nearly six times that of Thailand – it languishes in 33rd place. In per capita terms it plods in at an even more pedestrian 78th, with an income of $3,851, far below Taiwan’s $17,000 although above the likes of Indonesia at about $2,000.
Adding to its woes – or arguably helping to explain them – Thailand is stuck in a seemingly intractable political crisis. Long a country of coup and counter-coup, for years it nevertheless managed to maintain something approaching political stability. Now it is caught in a trap in which a previously disenfranchised rural poor wants a say in a political system still dominated by the Bangkok elite not yet prepared to allow the “barbarians” through the gate. The stand-off has undermined the already shaky confidence of foreign and domestic investors.
This month, Thailand showcased its political chaos for flummoxed regional leaders attending the Association of South-east Asian Nations summit. The gathering was cancelled and the likes of Wen Jiabao, China’s premier, had to be evacuated after the conference facilities were stormed by a brightly coloured mob of Mr Thaksin’s supporters. In subsequent clashes on the streets of Bangkok at least two people were killed. A car carrying Abhisit Vejjajiva, the third prime minister since democracy nominally returned in 2007, came under attack after he declared a state of emergency. There are, Mr Abhisit said with admirable understatement in a Financial Times interview last week, “some major challenges we have to face up to”.
One of the reasons Thailand has failed to flourish as once predicted is that its growth was built on weaker foundations than supposed. What was in the 1950s an economy based on US patronage, and exports of rice and tapioca, developed into one fuelled by Japanese capital looking for a home after the revaluation of the yen in the mid-1980s. Japanese companies poured in money, building an industrial base, especially in car manufacturing, that remains central to whatever economic success the country still enjoys.
In the 1980s and early 1990s, local entrepreneurs clambered aboard, funded by a powerful local banking system and oiled by age-old connections. The political situation was always chaotic; there have been 18 coup attempts since the end of absolute monarchy in 1932, 11 of them successful. But for much of the time, according to Supavud Saicheua, an economist at Phatra Securities, the country maintained an uneasy equilibrium between monarchy, military, aristocracy and bureaucracy.
Thailand produced few truly world-class companies. It remained, by and large, a rentier economy, funded by foreign capital and driven by foreign expertise. At the time, of course, that was all the rage. In 1991, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund held their annual meetings in Thailand, a testimony to its openness and liberal reform. That went to Thailand’s head. In 1993 it went the whole hog, liberalising its capital account and setting in train the disastrous over-borrowing in foreign currency that ended with the 1997 crash.
The crisis led to what Pasuk Phongpaichit and Chris Baker call in their book Thailand’s Boom and Bust a “decapitation of Thailand’s [foreign-currency indebted] capitalist class”. The country has never recovered from the mass beheading. Today, bank lending to business languishes at two-thirds of 1990s levels. The economy has become more dependent on foreign demand, a liability in a world of frightened consumers. Trade accounts for 150 per cent of GDP, against 80 per cent before 1997.
The destruction of Thailand’s entrepreneurial class helped pave the way for Mr Thaksin, one of the few capitalist survivors of the crisis. He converted his wealth, which came courtesy of a telephone monopoly, into political capital, riding into office with the votes of a newly empowered rural poor.
Mr Thaksin’s election and subsequent conduct proved too much for a Bangkok elite that had not previously seen fit to share power. Its displeasure was finally vented in the coup of 2006, an attempt to roll the country back to a prelapsarian land of smiles. But there is no going back. Unfortunately, it is not yet clear how Thailand can move forward either.
david.pilling@ft.com
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