Word: thailander
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...THIS FOR A SIGN OF political maturity: blood runs in the streets as soldiers repeatedly fire into crowds of protesting citizens intent on forcing government changes. In most countries those events would be interpreted as a sign of catastrophic breakdown. But in Thailand they signal that the country no longer consists of a mass of illiterate peasants who meekly submit to military rule. That may have been true for most of the past six decades, but now a five-year economic boom has created an urban, affluent, well-educated middle class that is demanding a voice in politics...
...made in Asia. According to Sandhu, by the year 2000, Asia's gross national product is expected to match Europe's; this year Hong Kong's gnp per capita will pass New Zealand's. Nine out of the 10 fastest-growing economies last year, including South Korea, Malaysia and Thailand, were Asian. Taiwan now has foreign currency reserves equal to more than two-thirds of Australia's $145 billion foreign debt...
Last week the first 527 refugees from camps in Thailand moved back to Cambodia to start a new life -- the first step in the repatriation of some 375,000 people driven from their country by a 13-year civil war. But the homecoming cannot go much further until U.N. peacekeeping troops, who will soon number 16,000, are able to defuse a battle in Kompong Thom province between ^ government forces and heavily armed Khmer Rouge units...
Intelligence experts fear that many terrorists have been able to replace Soviet financing with money from Iran, which is said to be backing undercover extremists from Algeria to Thailand -- while simultaneously bidding for better official relations with the West. A rising fear is that Tehran may seek to capitalize on the chaos engendered by the collapse of the U.S.S.R. by inspiring Islamic fundamentalist terrorists in the mostly Muslim Central Asian republics once ruled from Moscow. Worldwide, "Iran's attempts to export the Islamic revolution have largely replaced the former Soviet Union's communist revolutionary zeal" as a source...
...Then, as Thailand discovered last week, the result can be embarrassment and uncertainty. The designee is Narong Wongwan, 66, a lumber and tobacco millionaire whose pro-military Justice and Unity Party won the most seats in Thailand's first parliamentary elections since a bloodless coup 13 months ago. Soon after Narong was named to head a five-party coalition government, Washington officials disclosed that he had been denied a visa to enter the U.S. last July because of alleged links to Thailand's opium and heroin trade...