the(new)mediaslut

After a two year hiatus, normal service has been resumed. The anti-Thaksin movement is back where it started, literally and figuratively. It is as if the coup didn’t happen. Then again, the coup accomplished nothing as it put in some geriatric retirees in power to live out their fantasies of playing politician. The military were hell-bent (for lack of a more appropriate term) on reconciliation, yet the division within Thai society has deepened over the past 17 or so months.

The message the PAD are calling for is the same - a fair and unbiased trial for Thaksin and have him prove himself in court. Thaksin dissolved parliament to avoid a no-confidence debate. Today, his “puppet” PM is trying to amend the constitution to effectively get the lawsuits against Thaksin thrown out. This was after the chief investigator for the first case (Rachada land deal) was transferred to an inactive post. Same old, same old. Nothing has changed. Two years wasted.

Oh, well. The next mob is scheduled for Saturday 5th at Lumpini Park (scene of most of the mid-sized mobs last year, but not the really bigs ones just before the coup). Looks like there will be many more photo opportunities to come. Stay tuned.

Against…

And for…

Keeping the peace

It is very interesting what you say against bloggers in the past can come back to haunt you in cyberspace.

The Star wrote,

Umno Youth deputy chief Khairy Jamaluddin, who is contesting the Rembau parliamentary seat, has joined many other general election candidates in the political fray by entering cyberspace to reach out to voters.

Cool, a young Malaysian politician finally sees the value and credibility of the blog-o-sphere.

Wait a minute, wasn’t this Malaysian politician. the son-in-law of current Malaysia Prime Minster Abdullah Badawi, once described bloggers as primates?

maverickysm.blogspot.com reminds us that it was this Khairy who once described Malaysian bloggers as “monkeys”.

Monkey see, monkey do?

Smartbrain is in a concert campaigning for democracy in Burma. Sondhi Limthongkul was just on stage and said that next time, it’s Sanam Luang.

Well, to be precise, Sondhi was referring to a conversation with social critic Sor Siwalak who was also in the VIP row with Sondhi.

“Just before he left, Sor Siwalak said that next time, we should meet at Sanam Luang,” he said on stage, on mic.

Sanam Luang, in front of Thammasat University, is where most of the anti-Thaksin and later anti-military protests took place.

Photos later tonight.

A leading figure in the opposition democrat party said that it was probably Thaksin’s “highly paid media advisers” who told him to say that he will stay out of politics while explaining the background that finally led to the arrest of the former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinatwatra (a.k.a. Supreme Chancellor Palpatine) on his return to Thailand yesterday.

Speaking in an interview on ASTV on 28 February, Shadow Finance Minister Korn Chartikavanij slowly explained the chain of events that led to Thaksin’s being formally arrested and released on bail yesterday for concealment of assets for his SC Asset, the family real estate company.

Korn began with some current affairs and pointed out that while it is true that the SC Asset case is now with the Prosecutor’s office and not the Department of Special Investigations, the case has not reached the courts yet. The prosecutor may at any time ask for clarification and send the case file back to the DSI which, now that that it is under new management, could easily dismiss or intentionally weaken the case.

(The transfer of Sunai Manomai-udom, director-general of the DSI to a new department without an office or any staff by the Minister of Justice was the last straw that led to the latest round of political turmoil with many hitherto dormant anti-Thaksin activists returning to protest what they feel is this perversion of justice.)

Korn explained that there are two companies registered with the same address, the same P.O. Box, on the British Virgin Islands, Ample Rich and Winmark.

Thaksin has always admitted that Ample Rich is his company, but in 2000 he said that Winmark was a foreign investor who wanted to buy the shares for long-term investment. This was just before the Thaksin 1 government in 2001, Korn stressed.

“The strange thing is that Winmark bought shares in five companies from Thaksin, but failed to register their shareholding with the stock exchange,” he said.

In 2003, shares in SC Asset were transferred back to Thaksin’s family (his daughter) from Winmark, just one week before SC Asset was to issue its initial public offering.

“If Winmark was a bona fide foreign investor, why did they invest money for three years only give up these shares at cost one week before the IPO? The IPO price was 15 Baht while the par value was 10 Baht. This means they threw away at least 117 million. Soon after the IPO the price went up to around 30 Baht, which meant that they lost out on almost 500 million Baht,” he said.

Korn said that his party has long maintained that Winmark is in fact Thaksin and its existence was just to conceal assets and to hide his shareholding from authorities.

In the SC Asset IPO prospectus, they said that the Shinawatra family held 60 percent and two other funds held 10 percent each, though in reality, the Shinawatras probably held 80 percent.

This is significant as Thai law says that a company has absolute control of a company if one entity holds at least 75 percent of the shares.

Korn said that lying to the stock market carries both a prison sentence and a monetary fine.

The other theory is the opposition is working on that The “sale” was made so that Thaksin could launder money into the country for use just before the election.

The sale was made in 2000, just before the election that saw the TRT come to power.

“If we can prove that Winmark is Thaksin as the DSI have alleged, that means that he was able to transfer 1.5 billion Baht into the money through that sale for use in the election,” he said.

The question is then, where did that 1.5 billion come from. All ministers have to declare their assets and this 1.5 billion overseas money was never declared.

“I think we can all guess how the money was used,” Korn said.

Asked if he believed that Thaksin would not return to politics, the shadow Finance Minister agreed. “How can Thaksin return to politics as he never left politics in the first place?” he asked, rhetorically.

“Before the establishment of the cabinet, all the politicians had to fly to Hong Kong for meetings. It is clear that he has been involved all along. Some people may believe what he has said. I think it’s a sentence his highly paid media advisers told him to say, he said.

Korn said that the chain of events started when a filing with the stock exchange by UBS delared tht they had more than a five percent shareholding in SC Asset. 10 percent was from Ample Rich and 5 percent was from another account, which was later shown to be Winmark.

The shadow finance minister added that if this asset concealment case can be proven, the next step would be a case against Thaksin with the counter corruption commission as then it would mean that Thaksin (via Winmark) did indeed benefit from the policy changes that his government passed, most notably the change in telecom tax regime.

Back on the planet Tatooine (Thailand), Jabba the Hutt (Prime Minister Samak Sundaravej) has continued his criticism of the media, this time accusing media and various human rights agencies of being too concerned about the fate of drug traffickers.

“Why are you [media] so concerned about the fate of drug traffickers?” he asked the press last week, before saying that the best way not to die in the next phase of the controversial “War on Drugs” that his government is about to revive is not to get involved with drugs in the first place.

Further painting himself into a corner (as he usually does), Jabba reiterated his stand on his weekly TV show and this time blamed Media and human rights groups and other NGOs of misleading people and trying to make people misunderstand him and his government’s good policy on drugs.

Today, former senator and long time human rights activist Kraisak Choonhavan returned to the limelight to hit back at these irresponsible, if somewhat predictable (by now) remarks with some hard facts on a television talkshow, Roo Tan Pratate Thai (Thailand Watchdog) on ASTV.

The total number of people killed in the War on Drugs stands at 2,819.

An independent panel back in 2005 set up by the Senate and National Human Rights Commission to look into the War on Drugs policy that began in 2003 under the Thaksin Shinawatra (a.k.a. Senator Palpatine) found that in 837 cases involving 878 deaths, the victims had no evidence of drug dealing or involvement in drugs at all. This number includes extra-judicial killings and where it is deemed that drug dealers kill their agents to prevent a case from going to court. Extra-judicial here is generally defined as when police have to fire back when fired upon.

571 people on the blacklist were killed for “unexplained reasons”.

Kraisak noted the the committee was comprised of the Permanent Secretary and Deputy Permanent Secretary of the Ministry of Justice and the former Chief Public Prosecutor.

“He’s (Jabba) talking about the new war on drugs and another three to four thousand more deaths as if he doesn’t care about the value of life,” Kraisak said.

The former senator reminded us that along with the 108 dead in the massacre and the Krue Se mosque and 85 dead at Tak Bai, the previous Thaksin government has a pretty appalling human rights record.

Sunai Pasuk, Thailand adviser to Human Rights Watch joined Kraisak to explain how the blacklist was compiled in only two weeks. Each provincial governor was given two weeks to compile the list and they did so by cobbling together names of those with drug related backgrounds. However, when the Office of the Narcotics Control Board later examined the list, they said that it was not compiled properly with due procedure.

The government then gave each provincial governor a target of three months by which the 5, 25 and 50 percent of the names on each list had to be taken off the list. There were only three ways to be taken off that list: being arrested, being the subject of an extra-judicial killing or dying for an unknown cause.

“Dying for unknown reasons should not be a reason to call an anti-drug drug policy a success,” he said.

Sunai said that it was the Thaksin government, the Surayud Chulanont Government and also today’s Jabba government that has to be responsible to resolve each and every one of those murder cases.

He also alluded that the War on Drugs was probably the reason that Thailand did not sign up to be a founding member the International Criminal Court as if it did, then the TRT government could have been tried at that court. As things stand, joining the court at a later date does not give the court retroactive jurisdiction.

Kraisak noted that Thailand is now the third largest exporter of drugs after Afghanistan and Myanmar. He said that the Thaksin government had a number of Ministers who could not enter the US as they were on a drugs blacklist and that the economic policy at the time was very amicable to the military regime there.

“Today, why are drugs back? It means that the War on Drugs did not do anything to solve the root cause, the producers, and today Thailand is addicted to drugs,” he said.

Smartbrain is of the opinion that if anything, the media are guilty; guilty of not highlighting these atrocities enough and making people understand the big picture beyond the headline of “over 2,000 killed”.

Yes, we do care, and we should care, if half the people killed in the last War on Drugs were not really involved in drug trafficking. So should the people of Thailand. People should not be killed as part of what boils down to just a propaganda campaign.

The attack on bloggers has, predictably, began.

With Malaysian bloggers running for state and parliament in the upcoming elections, especially as the Opposition, that attack on bloggers from their opponents have started.

Wrote Jeff Ooi who is running in the elections,

My opponent has started to attack me and question the validity of bloggers in general.

On Page A14 of Guang Ming Daily (Feb 27, evening edition), my opponent whipped all bloggers in a broad sweep by stating that “bloggers hide behind computers and live in a virtual world”.

He said “people could only imagine but could never feel the sincerity (of bloggers) beyond the computer”.

Jeff countered by highlighting that it is this virtual world, called the Internet, that he managed to raise RM85,000 in 11 days to fund his campaign.

Would people who could never feel the sincerity (of bloggers) beyond the computer but can only imagine it go all out to donate such a huge amount to a blogger’s election campaign?

Strangely, Barrack Obama is also using a blog to spread his campaign messages for the US presidential elections.

The irony of this is that many still use blogs as an online dairy to update their friends and relatives on what they are doing in real life.

One young executive once told this blogger. “I started blogging so that I can let my parents in India know what I am doing in Singapore. This pacifies them as they have wild thoughts that I could be drug runner in this island state.”

Lack of sincerity or the lack of understanding of why bloggers blog?

Let the battles begin!

Thailand’s new Prime Minister Samak Sundaravej (often referred to lovingly as Jabba the Hutt) has almost from day one of his new job found himself embroiled in his role in events surrounding the 6 October 1976 student massacre.

A few weeks ago, days after taking office, he repeatedly told CNN and Al-Jazeera that only one person had died in the event and that he had nothing to do with it.

However, at the time he was not only Deputy Interior Minister but also had a radio show which fired up anti-communist sentiment.

After the massacre of “communists” (a.k.a. pro-democracy, anti-military student protesters), that saw hundreds missing, an official count of 41 or 46 dead (depending on who you ask) and of which Jabba said that only one had died. he was promoted to Interior Minister by the military government that subsequently took power.

Now, all that would have been long forgotten if it were not for the CNN interview. But more recently, on Friday, 22 Feb, Jabba, when confronted with pictures of him and the Military junta, changed his story.

“I was responding to the foreign journalist. It is within my rights, my freedom of speech, to say what I want to foreigners,” he told the press that have turned virtually every press conference into an inquisition on the October massacre since.

The question, Smartbrain asks, is that is it alright to blatantly lie to foreign journalists? That seems to be Jabba’s defense right now as the stability of the government is haunted by ghosts from the past.

This reminds Smartbrain of his first interview with Thailand’s former ICT Minister, Professor Sitthichai Pokaiudom, lovingly referred to as Dr Death as, quite apart from his collection of guns, carries with him a mask and canister of carbon monoxide so that he can commit suicide if he is ever terminally ill.

In that press conference, Dr Death spoke of the on again, off again privatisation of the two state owned telecom companies, CAT and TOT.

“As we are all Thais in this room, I will tell you that they will never be privatised,” he said. “However, a few days ago I was talking to the Farang (meaning Ang Moh or Western) journalists and I told them that privatisation would happen when the time is right.”

It begs the question then, what role foreign media has in a country’s internal affairs? Are the foreigners the unbiased, neutral observers that can objective call shots as they are? Or are they hopelessly biased, up to their nostrils in Western thinking and not seeing the reality on the ground for all their gung-ho views on elections being the be-all and end-all to everything?

Singapore has similarly announced that it is a privilege and not a right for foreign media to circulate in the island/city/state/dot.

Sadly, today successions of Thai politicians now feel it fair game to say whatever they want to foreign media and generally get away with it with little sanction, at least in the case of Dr Death, though Jabba’s fate remains to be seen.