Yingluck Shinawatra’s victory at the Thai elections has generated reactions from local feminists. Contrary to many Thai women, they are reluctant to consider it a successful step on the way to equality.
"How can we be proud? Everyone knows it’s down to Thaksin”, declared Sutada Mekrungruengkul, director of the Gender and Development Research Institute of Thailand, to the AFP news agency.
Indeed, Yingluck’s success is largely due to her being the younger sister of Thaksin Shinawatra, the former prime minister overthrown after a military coup in 2006, and as adored by the poor as he was hated by the elite.
Yingluck’s success has, however, gone beyond all expectations, which is a sign that she managed to convince not only her brother’s followers but also many undecided voters. Without counting that, if she won because of being Thaksin’s sister, she could easily have lost for the very same reason. Yingluck may go from little sis to the Big Sister.
But Sutada’s declaration, shared by all the political adversaries of Thaksin’s Pheu Thai party, doesn’t stop there. It falls into the ridiculous with a comparison to Aung San Suu Kyi, who, they say, «has fought for twenty years and is still not prime minister of Myanmar». That can’t be said to be Yingluck’s fault. It shows that, despite many limits, there is democracy in Thailand, unlike in Burma. The comparison also ignores the fact that Aung San Suu Kyi succeeded in becoming leader of the opposition because she was the daughter of general Aung San, the founder of independent Burma. Another powerful female Asian politician, Indira Gandhi, owed her success to her family. Not Gandhi’s (her husband, no relation to Mahatma Gandhi), but her father Nehru’s, the Indian Prime Minister between 1947 and 1964.
The problem may lie less with gender and more with dynasties, which in Asia often result in a chiefly female line.
Using Yingluck for the umpteenth feminist controversy could also be seen as a symptom of hysteria. Not because hysteria is to be considered as a solely female condition (the term derives from the Greek hystera meaning womb). But because, as many psychologists maintain, it is the manifestation of a crisis that a person expresses in a coded representation that he/she knows.
Yingluck’s victory could positively be interpreted as the recognition of female qualities, such as moderation and reconciliation, on which she based her election campaign.
But in the coded representations of extreme feminism, that could not happen. So there must be another reason.
You have to wonder: would the feminists have been quite so critical if she had been ugly? But then, male honesty demands: would she have won in that case?
What is important for Thailand right now is that Yingluck really manages to unite all the different factions. Under the same sky.

“What bloody country could I have become editor in with such a small investment? Sure the government backed me. I said to them: hey, your international image is not that great. Maybe I can help you”. So says Ross Dunkley, the Australian director and editor of The Myanmar Times, the only Burmese newspaper targeting the outside world.
On 10th February, Ross was arrested in Rangoon on immigration charges. He is also reported as having been charged with consorting with prostitutes and marijuana possession. Ross is being held at Insein prison, a place where political adversaries are detained and tortured. His hearing is set for 24th February. If found guilty, he risks up to five years in jail.
Up to last Thursday this big, bald-headed Australian could call himself a lucky man. He had always managed to get on in a country where the worst nightmares can come true in a rude awakening.
In fact, Ross had made a deal with the devil. His Mephistopheles was Khyn Nyunt. In 2000, when Ross launched The Myanmar Times, the operation was approved by the then first secretary of the military junta and military intelligence commander. That’s why, when I asked Ross how he was coping with the censorship (I’m still amazed by how ingenuous the question was), he replied: “I said: I could be more useful to you if the newspaper weren’t subject to the standard censorship, Military Intelligence control would be more appropriate”.
At the time of our meeting, General Nyunt was prime minister and Ross had the benefit of full protection: he was the man presenting the human face of the junta to the West. A few months later, though, the General was removed from office “for health reasons”, then arrested for corruption and sentenced to 44 years in jail at Insein. Some say that he was later placed under house arrest, but no one really knows where he has ended up.
A few years later I met Ross again. He was still fighting fit and busier than ever. In the meantime he had made other deals with other devils. The first with “Sonny” Myant Swe, the son of General Thein Swe, who in 2005 was head of the department of international relations at the Military Secret Service. Then the Swe family also fell out of favour and ended up in jail. Ross then made a deal with doctor Tin Tun Oo, a local tycoon who had links with the junta.
The problem is that Dr. Oo has not been disgraced. On the contrary, he has become a member of the Union Solidarity and Development Party, the “democratic” side of the junta. So when discussions began over the running of The Myanmar Times editing company (which in the meantime had started other publications in South East Asia), it was time for Ross to suffer for his past deals. This is the view taken by many local observers and by his partner and fellow countryman David Armstrong.
Maybe Ross wound up in jail because he thought times really had changed and that in Burma there was room for discussion (which insults his intelligence). More probably, his bosses in the authorities thought they didn’t need him, or his help improving the country’s image, anymore. They seem to be convinced of having initiated a country on its way to a new era, a new system and a new political platform towards democracy. “Discipline-flourishing”, as General Than Shwe, the real Lucifer of Burma, puts it, but still democracy.
Some western newspapers will have you believe that the Burmese and Than Shwe have achieved their goal. This deprives many people of strong outside support and puts them at risk. Not Ross though. He will probably, and hopefully, be alright. But what of the over 2000 political prisoners held at Insein jail and at other detection centres across Myanmar? They have been there for years and will probably remain there. Forgotten.
Once again, it’s the world that’s making a deal with the devil. So how can we condemn Ross? Let’s not, however, turn him into a martyr.

Aung San Suu Kyi is finally free. The hard work starts now. All scenarios are possible. Perhaps the military junta really has started on the road to democracy after all. It’s a hope we can’t help but have, for ethical if not political reasons. But it’s a hope that soon fades. You only have to read the clear, concise analysis of Bertil Lintner, one of the most acute observers of Burmese affairs, published in the New York Times.
For now the Burmese government seems to have reached an important objective on the road to legitimation. Another important target is to be able to play on different tables. Not only with China, Russia, India and Asean, but also with the United States and the European Union. It’s also an excellent result for the multinationals that do business with the Burmese military. Now they look a little less tainted.
Much depends on the lady herself. She now has to put her political and diplomatic skills to the test. Some are already bringing them into doubt. As though the courage, dignity and moral strength she has shown in the last twenty years were no longer sufficient. The symbol remains such only if under house arrest.
Let’s give her the time she needs. And hope the generals do the same. And this can only be done if international politics is committed to this situation and recognises her as their interlocutor.
These analyses have to be done calmly and clinically. Otherwise the opportunity may turn into a limitation. The risk being the “Tibetization” of Burma. Or rather its opposition. Which could be want the generals are aiming for. “This is not an ordinary military dictatorship we are talking about,” said Bertil Lintner. “This is a military that has become expert at staying in power.” The risk is that Aung San Suu Kyi ends up being just another “icon” used on T-shirts or in rock songs, a mere marketing tool. A female Che Guevara, peaceful and wearing flowers in her hair. A sort of layman’s saint comparable to Mandela, Gandhi or the Dalai Lama, with no analysis of the differences in context, history, strategy and geopolitics.
The risk is that Burma will be remembered only when peace protests or mega-concerts are held.

He was known as Sergeant Smack. The term smack originated in the 60s as slang for heroin (perhaps because it also means ‘taste’ or ‘flavour’). Sergeant Smack’s real name is Leslie “Ike” Atkinson. During the Vietnam War, between the late 60s and the early 70s, he was the brains and the operator of a smuggling ring dealing in the purest heroin from the Golden Triangle, where the Mekong River pushes into Thailand, defining the border with Laos on the east and Burma on the west. The opium poppy grows easily in the alkaline soil on that stretch of the river and it is this flower that helped transform this region of Southeast Asia into a hotbed of heroin production.
Moving between here and the Bangkok bars where the American soldiers spent their R&R, Sergeant Smack peddled the heroin that would quickly become an epidemic among soldiers and back in the United States. According to the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), turnover quickly rose to 400 million dollars. To counter the smuggling a special unit was set up by the DEA, code-named Centac 9, which conducted a 3-year investigation spanning three continents.
Smack was arrested in 1975 at his home in Goldsboro, North Carolina, and later sentenced to 31 years in prison. He was eventually released in 2007. It is said that he never carried a weapon and the officers that framed him called him “a gentleman”.

His story is told in Sergeant Smack: The Legendary Lives and Times of Ike Atkinson, Kingpin, and his Band of Brothers. The book was written by Ron Chepesiuk, who analyses and describes the players, associates and crime scenes with the precision of an investigative journalist and the narrative style of a screen writer.
The book reveals the intrigues and dealings of the African-American gangs that operated between the United States and Southeast Asia like so many fish in the murky waters that were American-Thai relations at that time. It tells of a business that involved foreign embassies in Bangkok, senior military, police, government and some of “the most respected Thai families”.
One of the many mysteries that Chepesiuk sheds light on concerns one of the most worrying and macabre legends of the Vietnam War: the so-called Cadaver Connection, according to which heroin was smuggled to the USA inside the coffins of soldiers killed in Vietnam. According to Chepesiuk, this legend was fed by one of the men working for Sergeant Smack, Frank Lucas, who has always boasted that Cadaver Connection was his idea.
Smack is quoted in the book as saying, “When Lucas dies, his epitaph should read: ‘He fooled the world into believing the cadaver connection’”. He did it so well that the legend was even used in the film American Gangster starring Denzel Washington as Lucas.


American Ganster: the trailer

Click here to read an extract from the book

Yet another car accident turns to tragedy. Two vehicles are involved in a minor crash. The occupants, two youngsters and two men, have a heated argument on the street. Later, when the youngsters think the episode is behind them and are chatting at a bar, they are shot execution style by the two men and several of their comrades.
This sounds like the kind of news story you hear quite often.
But this one happened in Pegu, a city 50 km north of Rangoon in Burma. According to the state-run media the incident was caused by two young drunks.
According to Burma Partnership, the organisation representing exiled Burmese, the two youngsters, named as Aung Thu Hein, 22, and Soe Paing Zaw, 18, were travelling on a trishaw (a cycle rickshaw) when it collided with a motorbike ridden by two army officers. After the argument, the two officers and some of their associates went looking for the youngsters. They eventually found them and killed them.
In a bid to minimise the consequences of these killings and placate the resentment of friends of the victims, the local authorities offered their families one million kyat (just less than 800 Euros) in exchange for their silence. Perhaps it was due to the fact that they did not accept the pay-out and even protested that the bodies of the two young men were immediately cremated without allowing parents and relatives to say their last goodbyes.
Unfortunately this kind of news story does happen often. In Burma.

A funeral notice for Aung Thu Hein appears in a local newspaper with his picture at top. Authorities denied his family basic rights over the funeral arrangements and officials kept everyone away from the coffins during the proceedings. Photo: Mizzima

The Thai censorship board has banned the broadcasting of a video clip entitled “We’re Sorry Thailand”. According to the board, the clip, which includes scenes from last May’s uprising, may trigger further protests and clashes among factions.
Thai Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva has asked for the ban to be removed, judging the video for what it actually appears to be: a declaration of shared responsibility. By doing so he is sending a strong signal, which seems to demonstrate a serious will to move towards national reconciliation, and above all towards implementing profound change in the culture and society.
Unfortunately, censorship appears to be sending an even stronger signal, one inspired by the desire to continue presenting the country as the “Land of Smiles”.
If this line prevails, perhaps even more apologies will have to be made to Thailand.

The banned cip

The government-owned daily newspaper “New Light of Myanmar” has announced that a rare white elephant, a 38-year-old female standing over two metres tall, has been captured in Maungtaw, in the state of Rakhine. Analysts have underlined the fact that for some Myanmar people the white elephant is a symbol of political change, thus connecting it with the upcoming elections set to take place in October.
For others, better acquainted with the superstitions of the ruling junta, the news has a more worrying meaning.
A report by the Democratic Voice of Burma has alleged that the Myanmar government is developing a secret programme to create nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles: a “Great White Elephant”, a magical symbol of power. It's to be hoped that the project remains just a symbol. But it may turn out to be one of the worst monsters populating the Asian imagination thanks to the government’s cooperation with North Korea.
The real mystery of this latest act of lunacy by the military junta is not if they can make weapons of mass destruction, but why. For a dissident exile in Bangkok, this is proof that the generals are nothing more than a bunch of psychopaths living in fear of invasion. Others see it as a move controlled by the Koreans. Yet others see it as a much more complex strategy to gain control over the region. In the meantime, the new planes made for the top junta chiefs have also been named “White Elephant”.



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