Word: thai
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...speaking to the colonel who is selling him the guns. The colonel glares at me. I know he doesn't believe that I'm a friend of Joe's from across the border in Malaysia who needs a gun for protection. He starts to shout in Thai. Joe nods politely, putting to one side the 10 weapons he has selected. Smiling all the time, carefully avoiding eye contact with the colonel, Joe reaches into a waist pack and counts out a thick wad of Malaysian currency. "I won't bring her again, I promise. Here, this is 11,000 ringgit...
...latent menace, what happened at that army camp on the Thai-Malaysian border is mundanely commonplace. In Thailand and Cambodia scores of illicit arms exchanges happen every day, some of them for as little as one or two pistols, others for crates holding several thousand Chinese-manufactured AK-47s, still encased in a thick layer of protective green grease. The two countries are the spring from which a flood tide of weapons - pistols, automatic rifles, rocket launchers, mortars, even the occasional light artillery piece - flows to every corner of Southeast Asia. The weapons are the lifeblood of the region...
...regional security specialist, one-third of the arms flowing into the region is left over from Cambodia's decades of war. Another third consists of new weapons smuggled into Cambodia - and sometimes into Thailand through neighboring Laos - from China. The last third is from illegal sales by the Thai army, like the one I saw with...
...administered by a dizzyingly complex system of middlemen like Joe. When the police do crack down, those at the top, the brains running the muscle, are never touched. Take a man like Samnang. A 45-year-old arms trader, his daytime job is as a border guard on the Thai side of the border with Cambodia. "I am an ex-Khmer Rouge soldier," he says, smiling easily. We are talking outside his office at the bustling gateway, and Samnang is dressed for work - blue shirt and pants and a walkie-talkie. "Even when we were in power, I started selling...
...buyers like Samnang are the brokers who collect large orders from buyers and arrange for the gun shipments. Chay, a broker in his early 30s, seems nervous when we meet just after dawn in the urine-redolent upper room of a bar 15 minutes outside Bangkok. A heavily built Thai, Chay fidgets a lot, looking down at his hands. His discomfort may be caused by his boss who is sitting at another table, an obese, balding man in his 50s who scowls behind thick, gold-rimmed glasses and cigar smoke...