Restless Souls

[stumonster]

BOOK REVIEW

Some heroes, many villains

Restless Souls: Rebels, Refugees, Medics and Misfits on the Thai-Burma Border by Phil Thornton

Reviewed by Bertil Lintner

Borders, Australian journalist Phil Thornton argues, mean more to people than just lines scratched in the dirt by politicians and government officials. Borders can mark the point between justice and injustice, freedom and suppression of speech, protection from and exposure to disease, persecution, torture, hunger, poverty, imprisonment and the breakup of family.

This describes the Thailand-Myanmar frontier, and Thornton arrived there in early 2000 at the request of an Australia-based Myanmar democracy activist. His assignment was to write a report about human-rights abuses by the Yangon junta, the State Peace and Development Council (SPDC). Six years later, he is still living in the Thai border town of Mae Sot covering the conflict in Myanmar, which he finds "tragic, sad, ironic, pathetic, and funny all at the same time".

While acknowledging that many NGO (non-governmental organization) workers "toil without a fuss", Thornton is critical of some foreign "consultants" and United Nations careerists, who charge up to US$1,000 per day, plus expenses, while the total cost of looking after and feeding a refugee is the equivalent of 30 cents a day. "Next to the consultants' salaries, cars, and luxury accommodation, that figure is obscene," Thornton says. The global emergency-aid business, of which the scene in Mae Sot is only a small part, "has grown into a giant unregulated industry worth billions of dollars a year".

Full book review here

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Southeast_Asia/HF03Ae01.html

Restless Souls: Rebels, Refugees, Medics and Misfits on the Thai-Burma Border by Phil Thornton. Asia Books, Bangkok, 2006. ISBN: 9748303918. Price US$11.54, 220 pages.

sounds like an interesting book if people are looking for some thai related reading.

[naka]

Sounds like the Cambodian NGO's.

Sitting in the Foreign Correspondents Club at lunchtime, tossing salted peanuts

out the window to the kids ... Loud, opinionated, scumbags who could'nt hold down

a job with a private company. which is why they don't

Gawd, how I hate those lazy civil servants worldwide, with their Arty Farty (easy to get) degrees,

and where promotion depends more on length of service than ability and hard work.

They're the only communists left in the world, other than in N.Korea.

Naka.

Edited June 4, 2006 by naka