[Tlc] T-politics

[justinm at ucr.edu]

Forwarded from Dr. Charnvit Kasetsiri.
Thanks,
justin


http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/fullcomment/archive/2008/10/20/joshua-kurlantzick-going-backwards-in-bangkok.aspx
 
Joshua Kurlantzick: Going backwards in Bangkok
Posted: October 20, 2008, 1:20 PM by Marni Soupcoff
Joshua Kurlantzick
As Thailand disintegrates into scenes at the prime minister’s offices more reminiscent of Animal House than Government House, average Thais could be forgiven for not being able to follow every other news story. But this month, one story about the news has received virtually no coverage. In the last week of August, after nearly two decades, the Sunday Perspective section of the Bangkok Post, the leading English newspaper, closed down forever, to virtually no notice. 
It shouldn’t have. In a society where the elites — the military, the bureaucracy, the rich — long went unquestioned, Perspective, a tough investigative reporting section, provided Thais with a service people in other countries take for granted: questioning the powerful. It also happened to be my first job — I was a cub reporter at Perspective just one year out of university more than a decade ago. Sharing fresh mango with a grizzled reporter, I realized for the first time how hard many of these men and women, through their reporting, had fought for Thailand’s democracy — an inspiration that convinced me journalism would become my career path. Today, contacting an old friend from the section, I realized a sadder truth: While the growth of Perspective showed how Thailand itself was building a democracy, its demise reveals how that democracy has collapsed.
Arriving at Perspective, I was puzzled at how the section worked. As a cub reporter, it was more than foreign to me: Rather than a room of people banging away furiously at computers, as I’d expected, many reporters rarely came to the office, which was a warren of desks. I’d see them in a nearby dive restaurant, huddled in a smoky corner with someone I didn’t recognize, and I quickly learned not to intrude. 
I soon saw that these methods made sense. In a country where retribution against writers could come in the form of a gun, rather than an angry denial the next day, sources feared even talking to Perspective reporters, and writers spent months cultivating key contacts. One Perspective reporter, Supara Janchitfah, became a one-woman crusade, constantly travelling to cover ever injustice against the Thai poor. 
On trips to southern Thailand and other parts of the country, reporters frequently were harassed. When I travelled to the Thai-Burmese border, just a few weeks after I started work, to interview a rebel general, I had no idea what I was in for. I volunteered for the trip with Ralph, a hard-drinking older reporter. We drove for hours into the rural northwest of the country, finally meeting our contact at a dive hotel in a small town. Ralph stared around nervously, pointing out men in the hotel coffee shop he believed were Burmese spies — which they well might have been. Finally, an older Burmese refugee met us, and we piled into another truck, to be driven in a crazy, circuitous route to the border, and a small house guarded by heavily armed men. Inside, the rebel leader, Bo Mya, looked like a Southeast Asian version of Jabba the Hut — a corpulent older man with a small court around him, dispensing angry threats against the Burmese government, and then stopping to pick at a row of snacks in front of him. 
Back in Bangkok, several days later, I remember thinking, “I can’t believe this is my first job.”
Beginning in the mid-1990s, just as Thailand began to build a democracy, those methods still worked. Perspective reporters showed the Bangkok Post’s readers a country beneath the false harmony and smiles: the environmental disasters covered up by industry, the simmering separatist movement in the south, the massive graft of the Thai political class and much more.
The payback came anyway. Reporters were constantly threatened. In the south, Bankgok Post journalists were constantly on the move, fearing an attack at any time from militants who knew they were in the area. Still, the section’s middle-class readership, who’d fought like the reporters for democracy in the 1990s, protected the staff, in a way. As long as Perspective remained required reading among Bangkokians, it remained hard for the powerful to damage the staff, and at the section we took this kind of unique protection for granted. 
In the streets of Bangkok today, those same middle-class people storm Government House, wrap themselves in royal colours and protest in the streets, claiming they are once again taking the country back for democracy — even though, just as often, they are actually instigating fights with police, which have left several dead on the streets of Bangkok in recent weeks.
They’re not fighting for democracy, either. Thailand’s one-time democrats, the people who once delved into Perspective each Sunday, have totally lost their way. Since the first election of Thaksin Shinawatra as prime minister in 2001, Thailand’s urban middle-class has forgotten the principles it stood for. Though Thaksin was far from an angel — an autocratic egomaniac who disdained the rule of law — he won two elections, using populist policies and corralling the mass of rural voters who’d, until then, played little role in Thailand’s new democracy. 
Rather than responding to tough politics with tough, but effective, democratic politics of their own, Bangkokians have fallen back on tired, anti-democratic tactics. Instead of trying to help educate rural voters so they, like Bangkokians, value clean politics and progressive platforms, too many city-dwellers just disdain the rural masses, not realizing that these elections were the democratic result of the blood they spilled before on Bangkok’s streets.
Instead of trying to take the fight into parliament, Bangkokians storm the streets and, in 2006, threw flowers on coup-makers, after Thailand’s army launched a coup promising to return order and democracy to the country — the coup was really initiated to take power away from Thaksin and return it to the elites. Instead of fighting for Thai institutions, rival paper The Nation welcomed the 2006 coup and then became little more than a Pravda for the post-coup government.
A city that returns to entrenched ways of the past is a city that no longer needs Perspective, since it is a city that no longer cares for reform — and a sign of how a once-promising democracy has come unraveled. In recent years, friends at Perspective told me, readership of the section had declined. Top editors no longer really cared whether the paper invested time and money pursuing long investigative pieces, because they knew few readers really paid attention. And in truth, facing these pressures, the section hemorrhaged staff and sometimes produced less impressive work, like printing inspirational pieces about local business leaders. 
Perspective’s writers will still find their bylines in the paper, but now they’ll be jotting down news briefs, or covering the stocks. Readers can still find tough stories, but they will have to look harder, perhaps to online sites with less penchant for facts. And cub reporters might still arrive at the Bangkok Post, which now looks like any newsroom with banks of gleaming computer screens. They’ll learn to take quick notes, edit copy in the newspaper style and work with page layout. But nothing more.
—  Joshua Kurlantzick is a special correspondent for The New Republic and a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace’s China Program. 

______________
Dr. Justin McDaniel
Dept. of Religious Studies
3046 INTN
University of California, Riverside
Riverside, CA 92521
951-827-4530
justinm at ucr.edu