Word: thais
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...nearly 6 million vehicles and frequent antigovernment protests, Bangkok can be an overwhelming place. For the perfect respite, head to Agalico, tel: (66-2) 662 5857, an all-white teahouse set in a sequestered garden in the middle of Thailand's capital. It's the period fantasy of a Thai aristocrat who was educated in England and lives in a traditional Thai house next door. Homemade scones, quiches and cakes are served in the main teahouse, which, with its wicker furniture and fanciful birdcages, could serve as the location for a Jane Austen courtship scene. You can also dine...
...militant movement remains secretive and nebulous. Most attacks are carried out by small cells of youths - "self-managed violence franchises," McCargo calls them - enraged by a history of Thai oppression and modern-day abuses by soldiers and police. Their pitiless creed is summed up by a note left for the authorities beside a decapitated victim. "You caught someone who was innocent," it read. "We killed someone who was innocent...
...Ranged against this ruthless foe are the bumbling and sometimes brutal Thai security forces. McCargo is scathing about them. The army subcontracts much of the fighting to ill-disciplined paramilitaries, he writes, keeping its best-trained troops close to Bangkok to stymie or stage coups d'état. The police, McCargo says, are "vicious and incompetent." His unsparing criticism is supported by groups like Human Rights Watch, which, in a 2007 report, attributed 21 "disappearances" to the security forces, including that of campaigning Muslim lawyer Somchai Neelaphaichit...
...extended an emergency decree that makes it hard for rights-abusing soldiers and police to be prosecuted, and his vow to boost the halal-food industry and other local projects does not address the conflict's complex roots. By blankly rejecting Amnesty International's recent claims that the Thai military was systematically torturing Malay Muslims, Abhisit also struck a yoga position familiar in Thai politics: saving face by burying your head in the sand...
...McCargo, the only long-term solution combines firm action against the perpetrators of violence and "substantive autonomy" for the three southernmost provinces. The problem is that, for the rest of this intensely nationalistic country, autonomy is regarded as a back door for separatism, a word whose closest Thai equivalent translates emotively as "tearing apart the land." Such sensitivities make public discussion of bold solutions impossible, laments McCargo. As his book suggests, putting the land back together isn't impossible. Tragically, it isn't imminent either...