Word: thais
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...British academic Duncan McCargo counters such heartless defeatism with Tearing Apart the Land, an introduction to a scandalously underreported conflict. Most of the 1.8 million people in Thailand's three southernmost provinces are Malay-speaking Muslims, but they make up only 2% of a largely Thai-speaking Buddhist country. For a century, attempts at assimilation have been met with resentment and rebellion. The current hostilities erupted under former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, whose hard-line response to what he dismissed as banditry turned sporadic militant attacks into a full-blown insurgency...
...Like Britain, Thailand has embarked upon a rocky legislative road, hoping that new laws will fix an old problem. While Brits debated minimum pricing, Thais were arguing the merits of prohibiting alcohol sales during Songkran, or Thai New Year, which runs April 13-15 and is the country's most important annual holiday. This is a bit like Sir Liam banning booze at Christmas. Better known among tourists as the Water Festival, Songkran is famous for mass water-pistol fights and - with millions of Thais visiting their families - insanely busy highways. During last year's festival, 360 people died...
...Thailand is a largely Buddhist country, and one of the Five Precepts of Buddhism forbids intoxication. Yet excessive drinking is deeply rooted in the culture. "Thais are fun-loving people," said a recent editorial in the newspaper Thai Rath. "We all know that a party is not complete without drinks." This perhaps explains the ban's lukewarm reception from British-educated Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva's government. The Tourism Minister claimed it would drive away foreign visitors and further damage a vital industry already reeling from global recession and the shutdown of Bangkok's two airports by antigovernment protesters last...
...Britain, PM Gordon Brown rejected minimum pricing as unfair to the "responsible, sensible, majority of moderate drinkers." He also knows that, in the midst of a recession and with his poor ratings, making booze more expensive is political suicide. Brown's Thai counterpart Abhisit enjoys greater popularity among his people, but still cannot afford to anger them - not when his country's unemployment rate has (like Britain's) spiked sharply. But Abhisit needn't have worried. With Songkran fast approaching, the ban was scrapped - not because it was unfair to the responsible majority of Thai drinkers but because, like minimum...
...Thailand has an increasingly vocal antialcohol movement. Last November Thai Beverage PLC, the country's largest producer of alcoholic drinks, indefinitely postponed its stock listing after Buddhist monks led a blockade of the Stock Exchange of Thailand building in Bangkok. Thais in favor of prohibition also cheered the passing of an alcohol-control act that took effect in February last year. It raised the legal drinking age from 18 to 20, banned alcohol-related advertising, and - at a time when Britain was liberalizing its licensing laws to allow for round-the-clock drinking - restricted the sale of alcohol to only...