Land Of Smiles: Annals Of Corruption

[george]

LAND OF SMILES: Annals of corruption

By Bradley Martin

VIENTIANE, Laos - At the Thai visa office here in the Laotian capital, officials require three working days to process a visa application. There's no explanation of why it takes so long even though Thai visa offices elsewhere, in Tokyo for example, let you apply one day and get your Thai visa the next.

But help is near in case you had already seen everything you wanted to see in Vientiane and environs and were counting on a quick departure. As the applicant walks grumbling out onto the front porch of the office, he or she is quickly approached by a man who offers to get the visa in two days, for 1,600 baht (about $42). Wave him off and go over to a nearby coffee vendor's tent to plot your next move and, lo and behold, an attractive woman who's sitting there overhears your story and sympathizes. She can get the visa for you in just one day, for only 700 baht, she soon advises.

Somehow I didn't care for the idea of entrusting my passport to a stranger who claimed to have connections with the authorities. For all I knew, either the man or the woman might have sold it to a ring supplying altered passports to would-be immigrants to my home country. And what would I have told the authorities? That I had paid a bribe to circumvent Thai immigration laws? This sort of situation may explain a lot of the cases of people showing up at their own countries' embassies with tales of having ''lost'' their passports.

Of course there really are plenty of people in Bangkok who, for a fee, can in fact expedite matters with the immigration authorities, as friends have told me. Those expediters even advertise their services in print, and they have been in business long enough that it's reasonable to assume they don't routinely steal their customers' passports. So why shouldn't there be such people hanging around the Thai visa office in Vientiane?

But even if I had been pretty sure that the Vientiane expediters had the connections to follow through and get me a quick visa, paying them off so they could pay off Thai officials would have made me feel like a hypocrite. That's because in my youth, more than 30 years ago, I was a teacher at a Thai graduate school of public administration, leading my English conversation students in discussions on how to modernize Thailand. And more often than not the topic of the lesson turned to rooting out the country's number one public administration problem: corruption. I preached enough on the subject then that I'd feel like a jerk even now to be buying off officials.

My students in those long-ago days were government officials or future officials who joined into those discussions with more or less zeal depending on where they sat on the scale between idealistic and jaded. One of the most zealous anti-corruption speakers was a 26-year-old Interior Ministry official who was preparing to become a nai amphur or district officer. Oh, how he excoriated corrupt officials.

One day I arrived at my office to find that student waiting for me, wearing a long face. When I asked him what was wrong he replied: ''Acharn [teacher], I have a confession to make. You know how enthusiastic I've been on the subject of corruption.''

''Oh, yes,'' I replied. ''You've definitely been a leader in those discussions.''

''Well,'' he said. ''I've thought it over and I feel I just have to tell you: I've decided to become a corrupt official.'' And then the fellow, who was a bit on the chubby side, became animated and even drooled a little in anticipation as he began listing the many benefits of being a corrupt official.

It was disappointing to hear him say he had changed his mind, of course. But there was something comical in the situation as well, and I confess that it was all I could do to keep from bursting out laughing. After all, official corruption had been a way of life for a long time. Even with grants from the Ford Foundation, which we were spending at the institution where I taught, we were not going to change Thai people overnight.

I haven't seen that student-official since he graduated. Now he would be around 60, perhaps retired already with his ill-gotten gains - including a mistress or two, as the wherewithal to be polygamous had been one of the benefits for crooked officials that he listed in our discussion.

Back then, in the 1960s, if a great many of the district officers and other government officials, both civilian and military, were cynical types such as my student became, the image of the village headman or phuyai baan - who was not a civil servant but an elected local - was rather that of a well-meaning simpleton.

That image owed much to the wildly popular Thai country ballad of Phuyai Lee. Lee was the mythical headman of an upcountry village whose people were just coming into contact with modernization programs funded with foreign aid.

There are many, many verses of the song, all of them showing Phuyai Lee as a rube, a clueless hick. In the most famous verse, central government authorities tell Phuyai Lee to instruct his villagers to raise pigs. But the word the Bangkok-educated officials use for pigs is not the everyday word but a very fancy word. In English we can substitute ''shoat''. Phuyai Lee doesn't know the word's meaning but he issues the instruction anyhow: ''You should all raise shoats!''

The villagers shout: ''What's a shoat?''

''Just an ordinary little dog,'' replies Phuyai Lee, and that line - ''little dog, ordinary little dog'' - is repeated as the chorus after each succeeding verse.

Well, I'm here to tell you that those days are gone. Nowadays you could probably find just as much criminal intent and connivance among elected village headmen as among district officers and higher officials.

I learned of this trend from a Northeastern Thai woman who is struggling to establish a laundry business in Bangkok, putting in 12- and 14-hour days, seven days a week, but never quite making ends meet.

The other day her mother-in-law showed up and asked the woman for a very large sum of money. It seemed the laundress's brother-in-law, the spoiled and useless elder brother of her husband, had decided to run for election as village headman. His mother had urged him on, knowing that headman had become quite a lucrative position because of the growing opportunities for corruption. Here was a poor farm family's chance to strike it rich.

So the mother had mortgaged the family farm to provide her favorite son the funds he needed to buy the votes of his fellow villagers. He had won the election, but right afterward the mortgage was called. The fellow hadn't had time to steal enough from the public trough to pay off the debt or even to keep up the 10 percent a month interest payments.

The laundress frankly and honestly pleaded poverty. She simply didn't have the money, and there was no one she could borrow it from. Her mother in law, not believing her, sat in the laundry from morning until night with a put-upon look until the laundress collapsed from stress and had to be hospitalized. The mother-in-law then packed up and went home to her village. It now appears she'll have to sell the farm to pay off the mortgage. Never mind. The headman will get it back eventually.

-- Asia Times 2004-09-14

[kenkannif]

3 days for a Visa? I don't think so! Always next day (same day for a couple that managed to blag it!) for all the people I've sent there! Although fussy about papework!

[Darth Bangkok]

yeah, you can pick it up the next afternoon.

but the paperwork is different for everyone. it depends on the school or company that is sponsoring you and how the officer values it.