http://www.bangkokpost.com/301108_News/30Nov2008_news18.php
Six months ago I decided to visit the PAD protests in Bangkok. I took my 15-year-old daughter along because she showed a strong political and social interest in what was going on at the time. I thought it would be an interesting lesson for her on democracy and freedom of speech.
Scenes at the rally were friendly, safe and educated. The mob was outside _ represented in red T-shirts, clubs in their hands and drunk. The protesters in yellow (PAD) were all polite and sober.
Now my daughter asks me what happened to make the formerly peaceful PAD protests turn so disgusting and ugly. We both shake our heads in disbelief when we think of six months ago.
Now Thailand is wrecked, brought down by those who claim to love their nation and their King. My daughter has learned the lesson she had six months ago, and today we both ask the same question: When will Thailand become a peaceful country again, with 65 million smiles for every tourist and their King?
Armin Hermann
FOOD FOR THOUGHT
The PAD is damaging not only the government, economy and image of Thailand but also Thai families abroad and Thailand as a whole.
Exports of Thai vegetables and spices have been stopped to countries around the world. Thai restaurants around the world are very important to the Thai economy. Farmers, distributors and export companies benefit from the success of fine Thai food worldwide. Employees and owners at Thai restaurants around the world are often the first Thai people foreigners met, and we are the first channel to promote Thailand as a fantastic tourist destination, with great food and great tourist sights, superb Thai hotels and resorts. Now we have to tell our customers that we cannot serve Thai food with the original ingredients. Will they stay or choose another restaurant?
Protest is the right of everybody, but it should be done with common sense. Why not demonstrate around government sites? The PAD is looking for a conflict which will hurt Thai people in Thailand and all around the world for a very long time.
The tourists stranded in Bangkok will probably reconsider helping Thai people if there is another major disaster like the tsunami. In my country millions and millions of euros were collected to rebuild Thailand after the tsunami and help the survivors.
I feel really sorry for all the hard-working, nice and smiling people of Thailand, such as farmers, taxi drivers, hotel employees, waiters, shop owners, restaurant owners and many more people who make Thailand the place I love to visit. What a pity.
Sonny Buter
www.ThaiFood.nl
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THE BAD NEIGHBOUR
The mess that Thailand has brought upon itself is fundamentally a domestic problem. But the reckless and unacceptable seizure of the Suvarnabhumi airport is taking a number of neighbouring countries hostage.
Laos, Vietnam, Cambodia, Burma and the Chinese province of Yunnan all depend on Bangkok as the transport hub of the region. They all see their tourism arrivals dwindle due to a matter in which they have no part.
It is essential that Southeast Asia not depend on a single hub for all traffic, but rather spread the risk. Vietnam is an obvious potential rival; some more long-haul flights and simpler visa regulations would make it an attractive alternative to Bangkok. China should be able to connect Yunnan province to the rest of the world via its hubs. Cambodia, Vietnam and Laos can also easily be reached from KL and Singapore. Voila, the Thai monopoly is broken.
As long as the PAD is a factor in Thai politics we cannot consider Thailand a stable and reliable economic partner. The damage done is beyond repair.
Eskil Sorensen
Luang Prabang
-----
THE LAND OF HATRED
Today, an export customer cancelled orders worth in excess of 10 million baht over the next couple of months. Unfortunately this means that staff are not going to receive salaries unless we can find another customer to take over their air shipments. Does the PAD not realise they are hurting their Thai friends by not allowing the country to operate?
Vietnam is welcoming us with open arms; maybe it is time to change because the land of smiles has turned into the land of hatred and there doesn't seem any way of going back to the true values of Thailand!
Matt Christie
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LET'S RUMBLE!
Watching the Bangkok Post try to offer criticism of the increasingly criminal activities of the PAD without offending its readers, most of whom presumably support the PAD, is like watching a man trying to pluck up the courage to saw off his own leg.
Your editorial (Bangkok Post, Nov 26, ''PAD wrong to shut airport'') rightly criticises the PAD.
Unfortunately, however, the editorial stops short of calling on the government and the nation's security forces to take decisive action and restore order at the capital's two civilian airports.
The truth is that the government is unwilling to order the police to take action because it knows that this will lead to violence and that the media will then start to scream, untruthfully, that the government has lost the credibility to rule.
The result then will be that the army will then feel able to get away with another coup.
It is high time the media behaved responsibly and urge the government and the police to reclaim national property and to give it the backing to use as much force as necessary _ including the possibility of using firearms against those PAD people who could be seen on the BBC the other morning firing handguns.
The police should be made aware that the media expects access to any action they take and will be on the alert for any unwarranted violence. But they should also be aware that their primary duty is to restore order.
Dom Dunn
Sunday, November 30, 2008
THE WIND OF CHANGES-(THAILAND)
ဂ်ပန္ႏိုင္ငံ တိုက်ိဳျမိဳ့ တြင္ ေထရ၀ါဒဘုန္းေတာ္ႀကီးေက်ာင္းျဖစ္ေျမာက္ျပီ။
CREDIT-U THAN WIN
ေထရ၀ါဒ ဘုန္းေတာ္ႀကီးေက်ာင္းကို Tobu tojo Line -Naka Idabashi ဘူတာတြင္
ယန္းေသာင္းသံုးေထာင္ငါးရာနွင့္
၀ယ္ယူရာတြင္ လက္ရွိမတည္ေငြ ယန္းေသာင္းတေထာင္ငါးရာသာရွိျပီး
လိုေငြ ယန္းေသာင္းႏွစ္ေထာင္ကို ၂ လအတြင္းေငြေခ်ရန္လိုအပ္ပါေသာေႀကာင့္
ဘုရားတကာေက်ာင္းတကာျဖစ္ရန္အတြက္အျမန္ဆံုး ကုသိုလ္ ပါ
ဝင္ႀကပါရန္ေမတၱာရပ္ခံအပ္ပါသည္။ ဘုန္းေတာ္ႀကီးေက်ာင္းျဖစ္ေျမာက္ေရးေကာ္မီတီ။
ဖံုး-၀၃ ၃၉၁၆ ၁၉၅၆ .
Fingerprint screening stops 846-JAPAN
http://search.japantimes.co.jp/mail/nn20081129a1.html
Justice minister praises contentious biometric scanning regime for catching undesirables
By MINORU MATSUTANI
Staff writer
The new biometric system that fingerprints and photographs all incoming foreigners at airports and seaports prevented 846 undesirables from entering the country over the past year, the Immigration Bureau said Friday.
All were forced to leave Japan immediately, immigration official Aiko Oumi said.
The number accounts for 8.5 percent of about 10,000 foreigners whom immigration officers at airports and seaports expel every year after learning, through questioning and other measures, they had criminal records or were involved in illegal acts.
Despite complaints from foreigners who say mandatory fingerprinting, which resumed in November last year, makes them feel like they are being treated as criminals and violates their human rights, Justice Minister Eisuke Mori praised the system for helping to block illegal entries.
"As we can see, the new monitoring system can stop those with fake passports from entering," Mori said at a news conference. "I think it is very efficient."
The new system was launched on Nov. 20, 2007, after the Immigration Control and Refugee Recognition Law was revised to require all non-Japanese aged 16 and older, including those with permanent resident status, to provide biometric data upon entering the country to help keep terrorists out of Japan.
Incoming foreigners must place their index fingers on a scanner at the immigration booth, where the biometric data are checked against the Justice Ministry's list of international terrorists and foreigners with criminal records.
Of the 846, 748 were ordered to leave Japan and 98, most of whom used fake passports, were expelled from Japan and banned from entering the country for the next five years.
Of the 748, 290 were South Koreans, 137 were Filipinos and 83 were Chinese. The other 98 included 18 Filipinos, 16 Iranians, 10 Sri Lankans and 54 others.
The number of foreigners who entered Japan for the one-year period ending Nov. 19 rose 3.6 percent to 9.37 million from the previous year.
The Immigration Bureau, which is run by the Justice Ministry, also said the system reduced waiting times at airport immigration booths.
European envoy urges Myanmar opposition to contest polls - Summary
http://www.earthtimes.org/articles/show/243936,european-envoy-urges-myanmar-opposition-to-contest-polls--summary.html
Yangon- A visiting European diplomat urged the opposition National League for Democracy (NLD) to participate in the upcoming 2010 elections, political sources said Saturday. Attilio Massimo Iannucci, Asia-Pacific chief of Italy's foreign ministry, met Friday with senior NLD party members including veteran journalist Win Tin at the ambassador's residence in Yangon.
During the two-hour discussion, Iannucci urged the NLD to participate in 2010 election because there would be a chance to win again for them, Win Tin said.
"He said at present the military occupied 100 per cent of the government and after 2010, there would be only 25 per cent. It is much better than current situation," Win Tin told Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa.
The Italian diplomat also said the international community could if NLD joins election.
"We told him that 25 percent would be just a word and in practice the military would be dominating. We said the constitution must be amended before the election," Win Tin said.
But he did not say whether the NLD would join election or not.
"There are two different approaches on the election within the NLD. Some want to participate and some do not," Win Tin said.
Myanmar's ruling junta is expected to field at least two pro-military parties to contest the 2010 elections, forming them out of the Union Solidarity and Development Association (USDA).
The USDA was formed on September 15, 1993, as a popular support base for the military.
The association now claims to have 24 million members out of Myanmar's 56 million population, and has been cultivated to become the military's political arm for contesting elections.
"We will form two political parties for the 2010 elections," said a USDA member after attending their annual meeting in Naypyitaw, the military's new capital, on Friday.
The movement is an essential competent in the military's plans to introduce "democracy" to Myanmar.
Initial steps included drafting a new constitution having it approved by a national referendum in May.
Both processes were dubbed shams by many international observers because the charter-drafting process was controlled by the military, and the referendum supervised by the army resulted in an absurdly high approval rate exceeding 90 per cent.
The referendum drew intense criticism from Western democracies as it was pushed through in mid-May in the aftermath of Cyclone Nargis that devastated the Irrawaddy delta region, leaving almost 140,000 people dead or missing.
The constitution has cemented the military's dominant role in future governments by guaranteeing it a high percentage of appointed senators who can block all controversial legislation.
Myanmar has been under military rule since 1962, when army strongman General Ne Win overthrew the country's first post-independence prime minister U Nu with a coup.
Although the military bowed to international pressure to hold an election in 1990, it refused to acknowledge the outcome.
The NLD, the party of Aung San Suu Kyi, won the 1990 polls by a landslide, but the military junta blocked it from taking office by claiming that a new constitution would be needed before civilian rule could work.
The junta took 18 years to come up with a new charter, and Suu Kyi - a Nobel peace laureate - has spent 13 of those years under house arrest.
Copyright, respective author or news agency
Mumbai Terrorist Siege Over, India Says
Arko Datta/Reuters
Flames and smoke poured from the Taj hotel in Mumbai, India, on Saturday. More Photos >
Permalink
By SOMINI SENGUPTA and KEITH BRADSHER
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/30/world/asia/30mumbai.html?ref=world
A Day of Reckoning as India Toll Tops 170
Arko Datta/Reuters
By SOMINI SENGUPTA and KEITH BRADSHER
Published: November 29, 2008
MUMBAI, India — Death hung over Mumbai on Saturday.
Back Story With Keith BradsherBodies were extracted from the ruins of the Taj Mahal Palace & Tower hotel in the hours after the standoff with militants there ended on Saturday in a gunfight and fire. At the main city hospital morgue, relatives came, clutching one another in grief, to identify their dead. By midafternoon, the morgue was running out of body bags, and by evening the death toll had risen to at least 172. Funerals, among them ceremonies for two policemen and a lawyer, went on throughout the day.
As the reckoning began after the three-day siege here, troubling questions arose about the apparent failure of the Indian authorities to anticipate the attack or respond to it more swiftly.
And tensions were high, as well, between India and Pakistan, where officials insisted that their government had nothing to do with assisting the attackers and promised that they would act swiftly if any connection was found within their country.
Perhaps the most troubling question to emerge Saturday for the Indian authorities was how, if official estimates are accurate, just 10 gunmen could have caused so much carnage and repelled Indian police officers, paramilitary forces and soldiers for more than three days in three different buildings.
As the investigation continued, it was unclear whether the attackers had collaborators already in the city, or whether others in their group had escaped. All told, the gunmen struck 10 sites in bustling south Mumbai.
Amid the cleanup effort in this stricken city, the brutality of the gunmen became plain to see, as accounts from investigators and survivors portrayed a wide trail of destruction and indiscriminate killing wherever the terrorists went.
At a gas station near the Taj hotel, attackers opened fire on two waiting cars on Wednesday, critically injuring two occupants. When a married couple in their 70s went to their third-floor window to see what was happening, the terrorists blazed away with assault rifles, killing both and leaving shards of glass that still hung in the window on Saturday.
Down the road, when the gunmen seized Nariman House, the headquarters here of a Jewish religious organization, neighbors mistook the initial shots on Wednesday night for firecrackers to celebrate India’s cricket victory over England.
But when drunken revelers in a nearby alley began throwing bottles and stones, two attackers stepped onto a balcony of Nariman House and opened fire on passers-by, killing a 22-year-old call center worker who was the sole support of his widowed mother; five others were injured. A teenage boy who stepped out onto his balcony and came within firing range was swiftly shot and killed, a witness said.
“We still don’t know why they did this,” said Rony Dass, a cable television installer who lives across the street from the gas station. He lost a lifelong friend, a tailor who was locking up his store for the night on Wednesday, only to be killed by a gunman.
At the Oberoi hotel, the second luxury hotel to be assaulted, the gunmen called guests on hotel phones; some of those who picked up were then attacked, their doors smashed open and the guests shot. At the Taj, terrorists broke in room by room and shot occupants at point blank range. Some were shot in the back.
“I think their intention was to kill as many people as possible and do as much physical damage as possible,” said P.R.S. Oberoi, the chairman of the Oberoi Group, which manages the adjacent Oberoi and Trident Hotels, both of which were attacked.
Evidence unfolded that the gunmen killed their victims early on in the siege and left the bodies, apparently fooling Indian security forces into thinking that they were still holding hostages. At the Sir J.J. Hospital morgue, an official in charge of the post-mortems, not authorized to speak to the press, said that of the 87 bodies he had examined, all but a handful had been killed Wednesday night and early Thursday. By Saturday night, 239 people had been reported injured.
Contrary to earlier reports, it appeared that Westerners were not the gunmen’s main targets: they killed whoever they could. By Saturday evening, 18 of the dead were confirmed as foreigners; an additional 22 foreigners were injured, said Vilasrao Deshmukh, the chief minister of Maharashtra State, where Mumbai is located.
Page 2 of 2)
The State Department has said at least five Americans died in the attacks. Consular officials from Britain, the Netherlands and Israel went to morgues on Saturday to see if their missing citizens had turned up there.
Back Story With Keith BradsherThere were reports on the first night of the attacks that gunmen had rounded up holders of American and British passports at the Oberoi and herded them upstairs. But Rattan Keswani, the president of Trident Hotels, said he had found no basis for such reports.
“Nothing seems to suggest that,” he said, noting that a range of nationalities was represented among the 22 hotel guests who died, in addition to the 10 staff members, all Indian.
The city’s police chief, Hasan Gafoor, said nine gunmen were killed, the last of whom fell out of the terrace of the Taj hotel on Saturday morning as the siege ended. His body was charred beyond recognition when it was taken to the hospital. A 10th suspected terrorist was arrested; the police say he is a 21-year-old Pakistani, Ajmal Amir Kasab.
A senior Mumbai police inspector, Nagappa R. Mali, said the suspect and one of his collaborators, who was slain by the police, had killed three top police officials, including the head of the antiterrorist squad, Hemant Karkare.
Mr. Karkare was cremated Saturday morning in a crowded and emotional farewell.
The bodies of four other suspected terrorists were at the morgue at the Sir J.J. Hospital in Mumbai. Officials there put their ages between 20 and 25. All four were men.
Around dawn on Saturday, gunfire began to rattle inside the Taj Mahal hotel, one of about a dozen sites that the militants attacked beginning Wednesday night. They never issued any manifestoes or made any demands, and it seemed clear from their stubborn resistance at the Taj that they intended to fight to the last.
It was not long before flames were roaring through a ground-floor ballroom and the first floor of the Taj, a majestic 105-year-old hotel in the heart of southern Mumbai.
But by midmorning, after commandos had finished working their way through the 565-room hotel, the head of the elite National Security Guards, J. K. Dutt, said the siege at the Taj was over. Three terrorists, he said, had been killed inside.
By afternoon, busloads of elite commandos, fresh from the siege of the hotel, sat outside the nearby Gateway of India and shook hands with elated spectators.
“There were so many people and we wanted to avoid any civilian casualties,” one of the commandos told a private television station, CNN-IBN. He said they were firing from various parts of the hotel. By the end of the siege, he said, the gunmen had holed up in one room and barricaded the door with explosives.
The siege may have been over, but new tensions within the region were on the rise, particularly after India’s foreign minister on Friday blamed “elements” within Pakistan for the attack.
In an attempt to defuse the situation on Saturday, the Pakistani president, Asif Ali Zardari, told an Indian television channel in a live telephone interview that he supported a thorough investigation “no matter where it may lead.”
“My heard bleeds for India,” Mr. Zardari said. “As president of Pakistan, if any evidence points to anyone in my country,” Pakistan will take action, he said.
Mr. Zardari said he did not rule out the possibility of the top official of the Pakistani intelligence agency working with Indian officials on the case. But it was too early in the investigation for the top official to meet with his Indian counterpart to share information, Mr. Zardari said.
Soon after Mr. Zardari’s interview on Indian television, the Pakistani foreign minister, Shah Mehmood Qureshi, said the Pakistani government was not involved in the attack.
“Our hands are clean,” Mr. Qureshi told a news conference in Islamabad, Pakistan, after a lengthy cabinet meeting called to discuss the rising tensions between the two rival countries. “We have nothing to be ashamed of.”
Mr. Qureshi also stressed that the Indian government had not blamed the Pakistani government for the attacks.
“They are suspecting, perhaps suspecting, groups or organizations that could have a presence here,” he said. “We have said if they have evidence they should share it with us.”
[Comment] MEPs can shore up human rights at the UN-(EU)
http://euobserver.com/9/27197
RICHARD GOWAN AND FRANZISKA BRANTNER
28.11.2008 @ 18:03 CET
EUOBSERVER / COMMENT - Next week, the European Parliament's Foreign Affairs Committee votes on a report on the EU's role in the UN Human Rights Council (HRC). This comes at an embarrassing moment. The UN has been mocked for spending €18 million on a colourful ceiling for the HRC chamber in Geneva. But the European Union faces bigger problems than weird decorations.
Darfur - Sudan uses the "EU" as a pejorative tag at the HRC (Photo: wikipedia)
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Comment article
The HRC is a testing-ground for the EU's commitment to effective multi-lateralism. It was launched in 2006 with European support despite American objections that its membership rules did not exclude human rights abusers. EU members had tried to promote such rules, but their efforts were misconceived or mishandled. The US currently boycotts the HRC.
Some European diplomats wish they could stay away too. The EU and its allies on human rights are typically stuck in a minority on the 47-member Council, and lose close to two-thirds of votes in each session. China and Russia, along with hard liners like Egypt and Pakistan, enjoy considerable support and have worked hard to halt or limit UN monitoring of human rights in cases like Belarus.
It is too soon to despair. The EU still scores victories on human rights in the UN system. This week it won important votes on Iran, Burma and North Korea in the General Assembly in New York. But it remains on the defensive in the HRC.
The EU clashes with Islamic states over religious values and individual rights. African and Latin American governments that share European concerns over crises such as Darfur feel that the EU ignores their concerns on issues like poverty and migration.
Europe versus the world
"It's not the West versus the rest," says one European official of the HRC, "it's Europe versus the world." When Sudan wanted to discredit the UN's rapporteur on Darfur, a respected Afghan doctor and politician, it called her "an agent of the European Union."
But the EU is not an innocent victim at the HRC. Its members do not always seem to take the body seriously, ensuring that it doesn't probe into human rights inside Europe.
Perhaps because they are so often on the defensive, they have failed to develop a positive agenda of their own in the HRC, most obviously around the Durban Process on racism. As elsewhere in the UN system and far beyond, their diplomats spend too much in intra-EU talks and too little listening to others.
So the European Parliament is right to look into how the EU performs in Geneva. Their intervention is particularly timely for two reasons. Firstly, the financial crisis will almost certainly make the EU's job harder at the HRC: "Western values" suddenly look like very easy targets. If the EU and its allies don't start talking about how the economic crisis affects people's basic rights, Cuba and Venezuela will do so - once again leaving the Europeans on the defensive.
Secondly, the election of Barack Obama offers a challenge. European diplomats expect his administration to at least partially re-engage with the HRC. But it will not do so without preconditions. American diplomats will want some evidence that their friends have a plan to make the HRC work better. Otherwise they won't bother getting involved.
If the European Parliament can agree on a half-decent plan, therefore, it might just help persuade the US to re-connect with the UN. Fortunately, the report currently being discussed in the Parliament's Foreign Affairs Committee is a good one, with a sound analysis of the HRC's problems - and awareness of the EU's own failings.
Additionally, a number of MEPs have put forward amendments that would strengthen the report further.
Four proposals
As authors of a recent analysis of the EU's influence on human right across the UN system, we believe that four of these proposals deserve special attention.
Firstly, it is important that the European Parliament calls on the EU High Representative Javier Solana and his personal representative on human rights, Riina Kionka, to become more closely involved in the HRC.
The bulk of day-to-day diplomacy at the HRC must still be done by national diplomats. But this inevitably distracts from broader thinking about how to define the human rights agenda.
Mr Solana and Mrs Kionka - and potentially additional envoys selected for this purpose - should work on developing pioneering new HRC initiatives, visiting African, Asian and Latin American capitals to listen and consult on possible resolutions.
Solana and his staff have shown that they can articulate new ideas for the EU's members, most obviously in the creation of the 2003 Security Strategy. They can now play a similar role over the HRC.
A second important amendment involves the role played by the European Commission.
Again, the commission's office in Geneva cannot usurp the role of member-states at the HRC. But it can play a facilitating role by coordinating with its offices elsewhere on important resolutions, especially as it has better networks in the developing world than many member-states.
Unfortunately, the commission is short on staff in Geneva, and does not even have a full-time human rights staffer there. The European Parliament should push for this to be remedied, with a number of human rights specialists (possibly seconded lawyers) monitoring the HRC.
Thirdly, the European Parliament should call for greater European support to civil society worldwide to scrutinise UN affairs. The commission and member-states should find money to support NGOs in developing countries promote human rights at the UN.
That should be part of a far wider effort to ensure that Europe is part of a global debate about human rights at the HRC, rather than just talking (unhappily) to itself.
To monitor progress, we believe that the European Parliament should also request that the competent EU institutions prepare an annual report breaking down voting patterns at the HRC, and evaluating European policy there.
By definition, MEPs understand the need for public debate about international institutions. If they stimulate the discussions of the HRC, they may save it from paralysis.
Richard Gowan and Franziska Brantner are the authors of the European Council on Foreign Relations report on "A Global Force for Human Rights? An Audit of European Power at the UN" (September 2008)
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