.png.3b3332cc2256ad0edbc2fe9404feeef0.png)
jamesbrock
-
Posts
2,240 -
Joined
-
Last visited
Content Type
Profiles
Forums
Downloads
Posts posted by jamesbrock
-
-
Good. Throw him away.
-
8 hours ago, ddavidovsky said:
For those with a serious interest, this paper also contains some useful sociological insights into the situation:
http://www.apu.ac.jp/rcaps/uploads/fckeditor/publications/journal/RJAPS_V27_Otto.pdf
I said Thailand needs to increase development and give greater autonomy to the south. Perhaps even more important is for Bangkok to show more respect for their culture.
Good one. A very good paper, well worth reading.
-
39 minutes ago, abrahamzvi said:
Quite rightly so! Try and enter any western country as a tourist and set up legal or illegal businesses,and see what happens!
My wife entered Australia as a tourist, set up a partnership (with me) while she was on a Bridging Visa, and then a Pty Ltd Company (as corporate trustee for a family trust) with her as the sole director. She's been legal every step of the way, even registering for GST when legally required, and is employing up to 5 staff and paying all required taxes. She has never, ever, been questioned by the authorities, and is certainly not considered a threat to national security.
-
A monumental tourist attraction that will be an object of pride for the nation with a plagiarised centrepiece... Sounds about right.
-
Of course they'd say that...
-
███ me, this sort of ███ really █████ me off. I mean, these █████ ███ scumbags should ████ be ████████ and █████ a ███. I, for one, wouldn't weep.
-
So, let me get this straight, foreigners financing their Thai spouses and supporting the Thai economy is a matter of "national importance and national security" deserving of a taskforce, but locals and tourists on business or visiting area casinos were paying between 50 and 500 baht to cross the border with "no documents of any kind" required is fine??
-
27 minutes ago, outsider said:
Basically more chaos.
Yep, 21 distinct precincts with jurisdiction over their own territory? Commanded by barely competent cops with zero experience in traffic management?
How could this possibly fail??
-
14 minutes ago, mtls2005 said:
Please note that the appointment of Chalermchai Sittisart to the top Army spot, and all of the other appointments/promotions including 115 newly-minted generals, have been royally endorsed by His Majesty the King and the list announcing the closely watched annual military reshuffle was published in the Royal Gazette on Friday.
To suggest anything other than "suitability" could be misinterpreted.
Wait, isn't <nevermind>
-
Just now, Oxx said:
This is very much an over-simplification, and Jawi is only one of the languages of the area.
In the south it was the same, with Thai and Malay people living in separate communities.
The ongoing terrorism has led to a massive exodus of peoples from the south. However, given that the Buddhist communities were typically wealthier than the Moslem ones, more (Thai) Buddhists have left than (Malay) Moslem ones, leading to a now higher proportion of Moslems in the four southern provinces.
Wrong on so many counts.
There has been a great deal of academic research undertaken on the Southern Insurgency - by Thai and international academics and security experts - most of which routinely ignored by the Thai authorities (and people who only want to see a religious reason).
This paper, The Root Cause and Aggravating Factors Behind the Violence in Patani, presented to the Conflict in Thailand Seminar in Lund, Sweden, on August 31st 2013, aggregates a large number of studies, and is a very interesting read:
For those who don't have the time to read, or the desire to understand, I'll include the conclusions:
QuoteConclusions
The paper has attempted to illuminate the reasons behind the surge in violent attacks which has made Patani one of the most unstable regions in the world. It argues that while the literature has suggested numerous drivers behind the violence, it is important to distinguish between the root cause of the conflict and aggravating factors which are fuelling the violence. The paper will end with concluding remarks concerning addressing the root cause of the instability which is necessary for resolving the conflict. However, since addressing the root cause is unlikely to be sufficient in resolving the conflict without confronting the aggravating factors, important points on the latter are now raised.
The major aggravating factors extracted from the literature and reported in this paper include; 1) the militarisation of the region including the use of civilian militia and public spaces, such as Buddhist temples, 2) an excess of illegitimate state institutions which lack professionalism and undermine one another, 3) national political rivalries whose competition channels through the local state institutions and manifests into poor collaboration in areas such as counter-insurgency, and 4) economic marginalisation felt by the Malay community. Ironically, all four of these factors are a direct result of the government’s policies towards resolving the conflict. The solution to alleviating these destabilising policies is, as Barter (2011) argues, for the government to do less, not more, which I would add, includes the military especially. Sarosi and Sombatpoonsiri’s (2011) call for disbanding civilian militias and restricting gun ownership along with what one would naturally infer from Jerryson (2009), which would be for security forces to stop using Buddhist temples as military spaces, would be the most positive form of action for de-militarising the region.
An effective way to reduce the excessive number of inefficient institutions would be to follow Barter’s (2011) recommendation of getting rid of overlapping administrative bodies and intelligence agencies. This links in with confronting the destabilising effect of competition between different political forces, which undermines counter-insurgency operations. Conglomerating these different political factions into one institution would force the different groups to collaborate as resources and intelligence would have to be shared and these parties would not be able to function separately. Currently, the balance of power and control of resources is too much to the advantage of the military which adds to tensions within the security forces.
Finally, the military or any other security force should not be involved in development projects in the region, let alone conducting them themselves without participation from the local community. Resources for development should be in the hands of local community organisations which are made up of the Patani inhabitants. If the government is truly concerned about the poor state of education and health in Patani then improving the access of Patani Malays to working in these sectors as well as providing a better service in these areas for Patani Malays can be facilitated in allowing the local language, Yawi, to be used in these public sectors.
There are many options available to the government in attempting to resolve the conflict in Patani. However, for any real chance of resolving the conflict, the government has to be seriously committed to tackling the root cause of the conflict. Without this political will, any other peace initiatives will have been made in vain. The Thai state has to officially recognise the existence of the Patani Malay identity, to give it an equal status to the Thai national identity within the Patani region, and to stop trying to assimilate the Patani Malays into Thais. This may seem trivial to outsiders but it has serious symbolic meaning to Patani Malays and especially to those involved in the Patani insurgency movement.
Likewise, this recognition is anything but trivial for the Thai state as it means a complete revision of the government’s attitude to its ethnic minorities since the beginning of the Thai nationalist project over a hundred years ago. This brings us back to the argument held by many state officials that giving such concessions to the Patani Malays will attract demands from other ethnic groups within Thailand for the same recognition. The simple answer to this is yes, and of course it should if the country is to live up to its self-proclaimed status as the land of the free.
In reality, however, many ethnic minorities may show no interest in forming a distinct identity to the Thai identity. For instance, the ethnic Malays in Patani’s neighboring province of Satun have never showed any interest in differentiating themselves from Thais, apart from stating that they are Muslim. Likewise, the 9.4 million ethnic Chinese who make up 14 per cent of Thailand’s population (The CIA Factbook) are also unlikely to show much interest in adopting another identity other than Thai or Thai-Chinese. The point is that all citizens of Thailand should have the choice to decide their own identities, whether it be simply Thai or another ethnic identity, such as Malay, Lao or Northern Khmer, for example.
Sooner or later, Thailand will have to address its attitude towards its ethnic minorities whether it decides to seriously commit itself to resolving the conflict in Patani or not. Although there is no longer a strong resistance to Thai hegemony amongst the Isan (meaning northeasterners in Thai), the majority still refer to themselves as Lao privately, use their own language, which is distinct from Thai and the Lao language which is spoken in neighbouring Laos, and have a strong feeling of being treated as second-class citizens in Thailand (McCargo and Hongladarom, 2004). On the other hand, according to Vail (2007), the northern Khmer, of which there are over one million speakers in Thailand, do not show any interest in conserving a distinct identity from Thai. However, they still face major social stigmatism and choose to hide their Khmer roots through fear of denigration from the Thai populace.
The treatment of ethnic minorities as inferior to ethnic Thais is problematic as they make up a substantial proportion of the country’s population. The Lao, from the Isan region represent over 20 million of all Thai citizens (McCargo and Hongladarom, 2004) which means they are an important source of political support for anyone who aims to lead the country. Unlike the Thai- Chinese, it was the Thai state which came to the Malays, Lao, Northern Khmer and other ethnic groups and not the other way around. Thailand fails to officially recognise and respect this, and the ethnic minorities should not forget this either.
-
10 minutes ago, Srikcir said:
Although of the major regional languages of Thailand, Southern Thai is most similar in lexicon and grammar to Central Thai, the varieties are sufficiently different that mutual intelligibility between the two can be problematic. Southern Thai presents a diglossic situation wherein registers range from the most formal (Standard Central Thai spoken with Southern Thai tones and accent) to the common vernacular (which utilises more local vocabulary and incorporates more words from Patani Malay). The Thai language was introduced with Siamese incursions into the Malay Peninsula possibly starting as early as the Sukhothai Kingdom. During this and successive kingdoms, the area in which Southern Thai is spoken was a frontier zone between Thai polities and the Malay Sultanates. Malay vocabulary is an integral part of the lexicon, as Malay was formerly spoken throughout the region and many speakers of the language still speak the Patani dialect of Malay.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_Thai_language#Differences_from_Standard_Thai
Apparently there is sufficient difference between Southern Thai and Central Thai that the Kingdom mandated upon annexation that the official language will be Central Thai for interaction with government organizations and public education.
As replied to ddavidovsky, the local language of the ethnic Malay population of Patani is Yawi, or Kelantan-Pattani Malay. It is is a highly divergent dialect of Malay.
From the introduction of the Wiki article you quoted,
QuoteSouthern Thai ... is spoken by roughly five million people, and as a second language by the 1.5 million speakers of Kelantan-Pattani Malay and other ethnic groups...
-
7 hours ago, ddavidovsky said:
If anything, they will just reinforce the border adjacent to populated areas, though I suggest they spend the money instead on developing the southern provinces and giving them greater autonomy, which is really what they want - I don't believe even the insurgents think that a separate state is viable.
One of the problems is the Thai Government are spending - just not in the right way to make any meaningful change.
Between 2004 and 2012 the government spent 161 billion Baht on resolving the conflict in Patani. Approximately 70 per cent of this (110 billion Baht) was spent on counter-insurgency operations.
7 hours ago, ddavidovsky said:Statehood is like species differentiation. It takes an aeon of nurturing a distinct heritage. The place is just not different enough. If they had their own language they would have more of a case - I'm not sure having their own dialect is enough.
Except that the local language, Yawi, or Kelantan-Pattani Malay, is a Malayan language - not a dialect of Thai - proving that the Patani are ethnic Malay, not ethnic Thai.
7 hours ago, ddavidovsky said:As to the economics of it, it takes more than a bit of agriculture. Tourism potential is only moderate and it's a smallish area - limited room for development but still would require sufficient GDP to keep it running.
According to the 2009 Thailand Human Development Report, published by United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), the combined size of the Pattani, Yala and Narathiwat’s economy in 2007 was just over 120,000 million Baht.
7 hours ago, ddavidovsky said:I can't see it working and I doubt that was ever their real goal, though the idea of independence has crept up recently in order to sustain the struggle. Thailand can solve this problem by throwing money down there and giving them enough autonomy. No other solution is needed - and there really is no other solution.
Agreed. With the caveat that the money spent down there actually goes to the region. According to the above UNDP report,
"During fiscal years 2004-2008, 109,000 million baht was allocated to security and development activities in five provinces in the deep South. For fiscal years 2009-2012, 63 billion baht was earmarked under the Development Plan for the Special Area – Five Southern Border Provinces. It is the largest programme budget for the area, and the first that development activities are allocated more budget than security activities. A key issue is the implementation; to ensure that the local population truly benefit from the allocation. There also remains an issue of people’s participation in shaping their own destiny which invites an effective response."
The government placed ISOC in charge of the disbursement of most of the above mentioned 63 billion Baht funds allocated for development programs, and, in many instances, it was the military themselves who perform the development activities. UNICEF also reported how government development projects are seen as disregarding local input and how much of the benefits of these projects go to business interests outside of the region.
-
1 hour ago, dbrenn said:
He should start by making the Army corruption free.
He should start by restoring democracy with an effective democratically elected government, reforming the military and making it accountable to the democratically elected government (not the other way around), removing military personnel from all government positions and board/management positions in all state enterprises, and establishing government-appointed independent oversight bodies for both the military and RTP, and making their budgets transparent... Oh, sorry, I went off on a tangent there!
-
Just now, Saradoc1972 said:
Dear oh dear! I bet their grand-grand-grandfathers had it bad, and then their grand-grandfathers (not like they really noticed any of this in those overgrown backwaters).
Now I totally get them. It's all totally in line with the ongoing humiliation of Islam since the 8th century and when they lost Spain.
Grievances and resentments normally die down after a generation or two. The Polish, French and Italians don't hate the Germans, the Hereros don't remember a thing, the Germans don't hate the Americans, neither do the Spanish, there is no narrative of revenge in Vietnam, it's only Muslims who seek some explanation why they must be after anybody else, probably it must be down to unfair play that Islam does not rule the world, if it was not it would have to be them being bad Muslims or something.
Oh, right, an Islamophobe.
The issue has nothing to do with the fact that the southern Thai Malays were the original settlers there with their own culture, their own religion, their own language and their own kingdom.
It's got nothing to do with the fact that their history can be traced back to the old and ancient Malay Kingdom of Langkasuka in the second century, that evolved over the years to become the Pattani Sultanate of the 19th century.
Nothing to do with the British-Siam Treaty of 1902 dividing the Sultanate between Thai and the British colonisers.
Nothing to do with the total cultural colonisation was imposed on them to the extent that they had to change their own Malay-Muslim names to Thai ones, they were not allowed to practice their own culture freely, their language, Malay, was suppressed and they were forced to adopt Thai culture and language which is totally alien to them.
Absolutely nothing to do with the complete and systematic Thai cultural domination perpetrated by a Thai colonisation agenda to permanently erase their Malay-Muslim origins that they should have gotten over by now.
They're Muslims, so that explains everything.
Apologies for engaging you.
-
5 minutes ago, Saradoc1972 said:
There can be no "peace talks" with Muslims, especially not with this bunch. This bunch doesn't talk, they go into schools and kill the teachers so the kids don't learn Thainess.
They don't even have a catalogue of demands, apart from <snip>
...apart from what was taken from them against their will—i.e. self determination—when the Sultanate of Pattani was divided between London and Bangkok under the the Anglo-Siamese Treaty of 1909, and their own ethnic identity which was forcefully erased when, in 1934, Marshall Plaek Phibunsongkhram set in motion of the process of Thaification which had as its objective the cultural assimilation of the Pattani people, among other ethnic groups in Thailand.
I am not in any way defending their methods, but I can see they have (had?) legitimate grievances.
-
3 minutes ago, Upnotover said:
......they are coming for instant curries?
Only the favorable ones...
-
If one needed proof that—in the eyes of the elite—Bangkok is Thailand.
-
58 minutes ago, recom273 said:
I felt a little sad there looking at the driver.
He looks like someone's Dad, trying to Get by .. He deserves a fair trial to explain the lack of active policing and lawlessness is the need to carry a BB gun, rather than the instant punishment by a pack of animals.
Im not trying to condone his actions because we don't know the full story - but the absence of a real police force could be part of the blame.
I've said it before, the absence of a real police force is partly to blame for a lot of Thailand's ills. (Which is why the elite are in no real hurry to reform them...)
-
19 minutes ago, webfact said:
Prime Minister Gen Prayut Chan-o-cha said the government will not intervene in the Thai justice system,
19 minutes ago, webfact said:the premier said that corruption is the cause of social unrest and prevents the country from growing and developing in a sustainable way.
Some of us have been arguing that for years...
20 minutes ago, webfact said:Gen Prayut also expressed confidence that Thailand will be free of graft in 20 years,
I wish you all the best, but I really can't see it happening.
-
8 minutes ago, rkidlad said:
I can tell you the answer that question; corruption. Also, incompetence at every level and zero empathy.
Yep, any sincere probe would definitely be looking into the bank accounts of the officers involved/responsible.
That being said, couldn't Prayuth Article 44 away the Statute of Limitation on this case if he wanted to?
-
I'm not convinced that mob justice is better than no justice, but it's certainly more regular and consistent.
-
1 hour ago, webfact said:
motorcycle taxi guys outside just looked at her casually when she emerged in terror.
Why is this not surprising?
-
50 minutes ago, Bluespunk said:
'''The United States and Mexico have fortified much of the 3,141 km (1,951 miles) between them to discourage illegal northbound immigration.'''
Have they?
Depends on one's definition of "much"...
"The US and Mexico share a common border of about 2,000-miles (3,200-km). As of February 10, 2012, the Department of Homeland Security had completed 651 miles of fencing out of nearly 652 miles mandated by Congress, including 299 miles of vehicle barriers and 352 miles of pedestrian fence."
Source: http://www.globalsecurity.org/security/systems/mexico-wall.htm
-
8 hours ago, NongKhaiKid said:
And often the worst offenders are ... wait for it, the BIB.
You don't mean this?
7 hours ago, ChrisY1 said:I may be wrong....but as far as I know, and unless there has been a change of law, it's legal to ride on the footpaths....
This is subject that has had frequent visits....
According to the story published in The Nation (http://www.nationmultimedia.com/national/Motorcycle-taxi-drivers-meet-police-over-assault-v-30295038.html), "The 1992 Act on Maintaining the Country's Cleanliness And Tidiness states motorists are prohibited from parking or driving on footpaths unless at the entrance of a building. Offenders can be hit with a fine of up to Bt5,000."
It (hilariously) continues, "The same law states that people who witness such an offence should report it to police and split the fine with the officer who issues the fine."
PM Prayut wants space at Wat Phra Kaew for Thais to conduct religious activities
in Thailand News
Posted · Edited by jamesbrock
Illegal Chinese tour guides face extended "stay" in Thailand - could be five years - http://www.thaivisa.com/forum/topic/942302-illegal-chinese-tour-guides-face-extended-stay-in-thailand-could-be-five-years/
It's a bit late to "express concern" don't you think?
Perhaps one should have asked the Ministry of Sports and Tourism to find out whether the seizing of 13.2 billion baht is assets and imprisoning tour guides for 5 years would possibly impact tourism promotion plan as a whole before actually doing it?