dbrenn

With all the difficulties in visas, I'm wondering about the positives and negatives of getting Thai citizenship.

Can a person do this and have dual US/Thai citizenship?

A US citizen can acquire Thai citizenship and retain both nationalities. There are of course many advantages to having Thai citizenship - you can do everything that the locals can do, own things, work where you like with no work permit, never have to think about visas, travel on a Thai passport to neighbouring countries like Laos and Vietnam visa free, and so on. You still keep your US passport for travel elsewhere, so you have the best of both worlds.

If you are eligible for something, apply for it. the rules only get harder and one day you could find yourself on the wrong side of a regulation.

Assuming that you are male, you need PR first.

Well, reasonable request. For long term stay. Get a visa.

Right. Just like everywhere else, Thailand expects that people get visas that reflect the true purpose of their intended stay. Nothing unusual about that.

As usual they are completely ignoring the real problem.

For many people there are no real alternative or very poor alternatives to visa runs. I am one of the lucky ones that got my investment visa in place before they were terminated, but if you are below 50 and wish to stay in Thailand your options are limited.

'Give us your money and get the hel_l out!!', seems to be all they really want.

Most other countries don't alllow 'resident tourists' either. If people want to stay, they have to satisfy often stringent criteria regarding occupation, health, criminal history, family ties, etc.

Thailand is actually a lot slacker than most other places. Why should westerners aassume that they have a right to stay on without a visa, simply by lying and ticking 'tourist' on the landing card every 15 days for years on end?

I am shortly returning to Australia. I will be applying for the age pension and most likely will have to stay in Aus for 2 years before I can come back to Thailand. I will have 800,000+ in my Siam Bank account.

Should I leave the money there ready for me to return as a retiree? What happens if my circumstances change and I need the money in Australia or aren't able to return to Thailand at all?

Not sure how long a bank account can remain dormant in Thailand before it is closed, and what the implications of that would be regards accessing your wedge.

A few years back, it was two years. You might want to check it out.

Exchange rates are a lottery at the moment - you might win, you might lose. Thailand's economy is likely to fare worse than Aussie though.

Looking through this thread, it's apparent that nobody knows what really happened, and knowing Thailand it will be hard to prove anything

1 - A memo was produced by Sonthi. He is the guy who took power after the coup. No vested interest there, we can be sure ...

2 - Inquiries in Thailand usually end up drawing blanks. Blame will be laid along political lines

Thinking back to the time of this drug war, it had wide public support. Methamphetamine (Yaba) use in particular had grown to epidemic proportions, and was considered the most pressing social problem at the time. Since the production of opium had been controlled, yaba had taken its place and was available everywhere - college kids were taking it while studying for exams. Taxi drivers and truck drivers were taking it to work longer hours. Someone I knew got hooked on it and nearly died - it really is a terrible thing, a scourge that was everywhere.

Now I'm not saying that extrajudicial killings are something that should be allowed to happen, and I personally oppose the idea. The question at the time was how else could and should this have been done? The problem in enforcing drug laws had always been that most of the more senior and welathy drug dealers in Thaiand pay off the cops and the judiciary to get themselves off the hook. Only the small time guys get busted and sent to jail. The public saw the war on drugs as a lesser of two evils at the time, a way to get to the more senior dealers, and so the war on drugs was supported it because it did significantly reduce the availability and increase the price of meth on the street.

So all this moralising about extra judicial killings is all well and good. We should also try to add some balance to the discussion about the horror that is yaba, and how to control it in a country like Thailand where the police and judiciary are so renowned for corruption and the bad guys get off the hook.

Thaksin is not the root of all evil and the more that silliness keeps getting airplay as some sort of means of downplaying people that oppose him for very specific reasons, the more boringly repetitive it becomes.

Could not have put it better myself.

Hang on - just like most yellow propaganda, that argument works in two directions.

Is this the same Rixalix who continually downplays anyone who supports Thaksin's lot for very specific reasons, like the fact that he was elected, pointing to a court judgment and TV rules as a means of silencing his opposition?

Do you continually deliberately miss the point? Or is this a sad attempt at irony?

Miss what point? Is there one?

Talks by Thaksin of a Shinawatra dynasty... a "TRT-ruled Thailand for 20 years" (conveniently never mentioning who is exactly is going to exceed term limits and be at the top)... Shades of Marcos and the many parallels between the two began appearing more evident (Marcos also won a popular vote... and upon nearing the expiration of his term limit, declared martial law and subsequently ruled with tyranny for over 20 years resulting in the near annihilation of his country). This is certainly what peaked my interest in the matter. I had already lived under the Marcos tyranny... and finding myself now living in Thailand, I saw a repeat of it for my newer SE Asian home.

Any means, including an intervening coup, to take this man down before he created the atrocities that Marcos career did... such as a 100,000 disappeared and presumed dead Filipinos during his long stretch of terror as well as an empty National Treasury...

is justified IMO.

It's anybody's guess as to what level of exaggeration that statement merits.

Claims that Thaksin might have turned out like Marcos are pure conjecture. Nothing more, nothing less. The fact is that there was a democratic mechanism in place to unseat Thaksin, i.e. the ballot box. Quite unlike the corrupt PAD/CDR/army clique that replaced the democratically elected government. While Thaksin was arrogant and unpleasant. there was nothing that he did while in power to change the constitution or dismantle the democratic process that got him in power, and coulod have removed him from power.

What was the first thing that the CDR did? Tear up the constitution.

Dbrenn, do you need to be a fortune teller to predict that in the middle of April next year, hundreds of people will die on Thai roads in traffic related accidents?

Thaksin had done enough damage already - the pattern was well established.

Traffic accidents? Is Thaksin now responsible for deaths on the roads? That's so silly. You are reduced to trying to use road accident statistics as a way of judging what a Thai politician might or might not have done? Pull the other one!

Hold an election and see what the people think. Why is that such a difficult concept for you? Ahh, I know - the Dems would lose an election - they can only cling to power by sucking up to the CDR corrupt army generals, and mafia like Newin

.. the damage that he would have done in the time it took to get him out. He would have remained in power for many more terms, have no doubt ....

And you 'understand the damage that would have been done'? What are you, a fortune teller? Did your crystal ball give inside knowledge, first hand, on what Thaksin's plans were, what he would have, might have, done? All you have is what you read in the papers, and many of them spout just the kind of propaganda that you insist only people who disagree with you fall for.

Again, you are second guessing what might have been, what might have happened but hadn't happened yet, and using it to justify a military coup, economic ruin, risk of civil war and unending chaos. The time to kick Thaksin out with the army would have been if he refused to leave office after getting voted out in a general election, which was not on the cards. To preemptively send tanks on to the streets on a whole load of 'what might have been' hunches caused a whole lot of mahhem and civil unrest, sparked of a class strucggle, and destroyed faith in democratic values at home and abroad. All for no clear purpose.

Thaksin was not elected fairly and squarely.

Well a lot of people don't agree with that, as we can see from all the protests and chaos. Thaksin's lot was elected with a parliamentary majority, twice. And the present government can't brush that glaring fact under the carpet, nor can it come clean and put its democratic credentials to the test in an election, which says a lot. Election results, it seems, can only be believed if Rixalex's preferred side gets in. That's the scary part of the PAD doctrine - they know what's best for all of us, so democracy can take a back seat. No need for elections with them around, right?

You will be telling us that the moon is made of green cheese next.

Kuhn Thaksin came to power with the help of the army.

You are forgetting a couple of minor details there -- a general election, followed a full term in office, followed by another general election. Thaksin was not installed by the army in the way that Abhisit was, and to claim otherwise in unrealistic.

At the time when Thaksin was elected, the army was relatively quiet politically. They had been sidelined from politics since they were discredited in the 1992 military crackdown on the Black May protesters. The yellows gave them the excuse to reemerge from their barracks and start meddling in politics again.

Elections are not perfect, but they are the best choice out of a bad lot.

and it's good news that one is projected within a reasonable time frame.

When it happens, yes, and let's hope that it is fair. The problem is that the yellow people can't seem to accept the results of elections, pols from one side are banned, and the Dems boycott elections that they think they will lose.

Given their penchant for deceit and rejigging, I have no confidence that that the Reds would respect the results of an election even if one was called sooner than what is to be projected as within the year.

*sigh* you may have a point. But sending tanks rolling down the street, to topple an elected civilian government so that a bunch of corrupt generals could have their turn at filling their pockets. That isn't respecting the results of an election either.

What's a voter to do? They are all as bad as each other. Was it worth risking civil war for?

Elections are not perfect, but they are the best choice out of a bad lot.

Where did you get the idea that BEFORE the coup those same generals

were NOT "filling their pockets"? Of course they were.

So they need not have taken out Thaksin for that reason.

And they WERE getting their budgets and they were running their little scams.

They never got touched in the War on Drugs, and just started back up again.

Thaksin was getting quite unstable and that was obvious to any unbiased observer at the time.

I was UNBIASED against him till his ACTIONS and WORDS changed that position.

The generals didn't need to remove him to add their snouts to the trough,

they have their own whole end all to themselves already.

Thaksin was getting unstable? So he should have been voted out of office in a general election.

My comment about not having to support either side was very much directed at you and your friends on this forum. You continue to huff and puff and get your knickers in a twist at the suggestion that you support Thaksin, but continue to come out with comments that start like this:

There doesn't have to be just two sides to this dicussion. This is not a football match - one side against the other with colour coded shirts for easy recognition.

I'm for democracy. Now if that means Thaksin is the PM, or if it means that Abhisit is the PM, all well and good if the people have chosen their PM is a free and fair election. All my posts here have supported that view, and haven't deviated from it.

The only reason that I despise Abhisit is that his rule is illegitimate - he was put there by military and mafia handlers. He preaches democracy, when he himself is not democratically elected.

Imagine that the situation was reversed, that Thaksin was in opposition to a democratically elected Abhisit government. Supposing Thaksin had resorted to using the army to topple a democratically elected Abhisit government, instead of winning the hearts and minds of the people to get elected fairly and squarely. If that were the case, I would still be supporting the side that was democratically elected.

My revulsion of using military force to unseat a government, and the utter hypocrisy of the present government when it claims to represent democratic values, is the overriding factor for me, and dwarfs any party political considerations. I really couldn't care less about the individual personalities of Thaksin or Abhisit against the much more serious backdrop of civil unrest and chaos that Thailand is up against. It's who the citizens choose that counts. The people chose Thaksin, not Abhisit. The people are angry that their choice has been disregarded.

Now you will probably resort to your usual tactics of telling me that I support a criminal, then implying that I am in contempt of court in an effort to shut me up by using the TV rule book, like you always do when you run out of things to say. Wasn't Thaksin supposed to be the one who was at fault for using tactics like that? That's what the PAD were saying when they started their ralles at Suan Lum.

There is nothing that justifies or outweighs the bad things that Thaksin did to this country.

Nothing??? Wow! Brave words!

If you think that dividing Thai society and risking civil is was doesn't outweigh Thaksin's unspecified 'bad things', then that's your opinion. I hope that you will never have first hand experience of a civil war, but the ones on the television look a lot worse than anything that Thaksin was doing. Civil wars start when a country becomes idealogically divided, then people start fighting each other, then they start killing each other. Without a democratic process that gives the masses the choice that they have already had a taste of, the very process that was arrogantly crushed by the yellows, the smouldering problem could reignite exposively at any time.

You can vote out Thaksin, but you can't vote away a civil war.

Given their penchant for deceit and rejigging, I have no confidence that that the Reds would respect the results of an election even if one was called sooner than what is to be projected as within the year.

*sigh* you may have a point. But sending tanks rolling down the street, to topple an elected civilian government so that a bunch of corrupt generals could have their turn at filling their pockets. That isn't respecting the results of an election either.

What's a voter to do? They are all as bad as each other. Was it worth risking civil war for?

Elections are not perfect, but they are the best choice out of a bad lot.

What was is it like for you the first time ever you stepped foot in LOS?

I'd never been to an asian country before.My older brother(by 3yrs)and his best mate came out here in 1999. I came out the following year with his best mate.

The heat hit me first.Wow,sweat straight away.All these asian faces looking at us both.I must have looked like a scared little boy(I think I was).Taxi Limo to Pattaya(typical I know).Then came the traffic,"what the hel_l is going on,were gonna die". Stopped on the way for some water and the toilet.I had to shout my mate to ask what the hel_l was going on but at the same time laughing my arse off.No bog roll.What a great holiday it ended up being.More to follow of course.......

You must have some good stories!!!!!

The distinctive smell of the place, the friendly and polite people, the heat.

What is your point exactly? The Democrats are as bad as the TRT/PPP? So condemn them both then.

Don't support either. Nobody forces you to choose a side.

Oh wow! That is such a tremendous improvement Rix. Until recently, anyone who disagreed with you had to be a criminal and rabid supporter of Thaksin the Damned. Either on one side, or the other, with nothing in between.

Glad you have seen the light.

Koo, there are millions of people who have exactly opposite reactions to all three choices. You do realise they exist?

I only know that majority of Thais love the 3rd man. This explained why he and his parties won elections.

Right - the Dems dare not hold an election, for obvious reasons. And they still have the audacity to go by the name "Democrat" Party.

and yet barely 10% of what the Leaders were confident of bringing out...

A 10% turnout to any function is still quite good in Thailand SJ, unless there is free food

100,000 is still a lot of people, and undescores that the government cannot sweep the red movement under the carpet. They can only suppress the reds temporaily, using tanks and guns.

Why don't the Dems suppress the reds permanently by holding an election? Oops, forgot - they might lose, again.

Are you complaining that not more TRT/PPP MPs got banned?

If they did, they couldn't have voted for any democrats...but as they wasn't, they are still legit in the eyes of the law.

So those who voted for Abhisit are legit because they didn't buy votes?

Many banned TRT/PPP did not buy votes. But they were banned. Are they not legit in your word?

That's what people here ignore Koo. There are two definitions to the word 'banned':

1 - (Criminal) banned - people who support Thaksin

2 - (Forgiven) banned - people who support Abhisit and lend him 22 MPs

So, you see, the word banned in yellow political speak actually has two meanings

If so, she is a British subject at that time, a tourist.

I don't beleive that true. As soon as she steps on Thai soil she is a Thai and not longer has protection as a UK citizen.

I don't have a UK passport but mine has a little warning about holding dual nationality that says my country can't help if you are in the country that is your other nationality.

That's right, see the UK rules on dual nationality here:

http://www.ukba.homeoffice.gov.uk/sitecont...ity?view=Binary

Article 4 of the Hague Convention on Certain Questions relating to the Conflict of Nationality Laws, 1930 provides that "a State may not afford diplomatic protection to one of its nationals against a state whose nationality such person also possesses". This means that the UK cannot protect a dual UK/Thai national from the Thai authorities.

Travelling to Thailand on a UK passport won't make any difference and won't ensure that the OP's niece will have to leave Thailand, ever. As a Thai national, she can never be deported, even if she overstays the entry stamp on the UK passport that she used to enter Thailand. The fine of up to 20,000 Baht would still be incurred for overstaying the British passport entry stamp, however.

As Ubonjoe says, it depends on the girl's age as to whether her mother would be abe to prevent her from leaving of her own free will. Given that the couple are separated with presumably no custody arrangements, if the mother did decide to prevent her child from leaving, then the case would have to go to court. Mothers usually win custody battles.

Thaksin and his proto redshirts did their best while he was still in office to

'Submerge that Emerging Democracy you mentioned.

And they are still at it at these S.L. protest sites and in general.

You can overlay some valid arguments on top of a ceaspit of bile

and it's still bile under it all.

Devotion in an almost relgious ferver is not over typical political things,

but over ATYPICAL political personalities. Good ideas debased by grafting onto

cults of personality; which most often spin out of control eventually.

Well I agree with your likening Thai politics to a cesspit of bile. But that bunch of corrupt and incompetent CDR army generals running the country, filling their pockets while advocating the dilution of the popular vote for the 'uneducated'? What kind of democracy is that?

For all Thaksin's misbehaviour, at least the TRT could have been voted out of office, by the general public, by way of a peaceful popular vote. A bunch of corrupt generals Kicking the TRT/PPP out for alleged corruption, then helping themselves, in a country where corruption is pandemic, is hypocrisy of the highest order. People resent being treated like idiots and they obviously don't like it at all when the party that they chose to govern them is forced out of office and replaced with the Dem oppostion, under whose governance they derived no benefit whatsoever for years on end. They are all corrupt, so describing just one side as a cesspit of bile makes no sense at all.

Look at the mess the generals have made. Was it really worth it?

My guess is it's a war you wage on behalf of others - could be your wife, or perhaps your in-laws, or maybe even your neighbours.

And there you go second guessing again! Just like you second guess anyone who doesn't agree with you and assume that they must be a Thaksin supporter. You are totally obsessed with the man.

defending Thaksin is a job your heart's not really in. You do it well but lack the devotion of a Koo82. My guess is it's a war you wage on behalf of others ....

Eh? You are at it again! When are you going to stop relating everything people say here back to Thaksin? I think Journalist was spot on when he said that you do it to try to hide behind TV rules that forbid criticism of court judgement.

And if you think that my heart is not in this, because I don't have hours on end to spend all day constructing elaborate responses on an anonymous internet forum, then that's up to you. The fact is, there isn't much to say to people like you who dodge the various issues I and others have put forward regards democratic values, alignment of the yellows with ccorrupt handlers, hypocritical viewpoints, and so on. All you do is accuse everyone who doesn't agree with you of having criminal associations and leading the discussion towards ctiticism of a court judgement. That is such a cowardly way to behave. You hide behind Thaksin because your weak arguments don't stand any scrutiny.

For us or against us. You are like George Bush.

There you go again banging on about Thaksin. You seem to have an obsession with the man

Simple count of occurences of "Thaksin" in that post, including all the quotes, gives dbrenn - 4, rixalex replies - 5.

I can't be bothered checking Plus, and it doesn't matter anyway - you make things up as you go along as has been observed by other posters here. You don't have a point of view that is consistent with facts that are reported from yellow and red alike. The last sensible conversation that I had with you ended up with you denying that the CDR had any agenda against foreign rights, in spite of evidence to the contrary that was all too obvious at the time to the expat and business community living in Thailand, in the months following the coup. There is no point talking to you if you keep inventing things to make whatever point it is that you are trying to make.

Do you work for the Democrat party, or are you just a troll having a laugh?