New Mandala

Elephants in the room: the uses and meanings of English in Thai political discourse (Part 3)

[This is the third of a three part article. Part 1 is available here. Part 2 is available here.]

Speaking in Codes

On the evening of 19 September 2006, I was watching TV at about 9 o’clock. There had been political tension for a long time, so long that I had become habituated to it just as I had become habituated to the peculiar reporting of Thai politics in general. One would often see serious newspaper reports such as “A general whose name begins with P talked to a politician whose name begins with H who took a bribe from a businessman whose name begins with T.” “Influential persons” would cause mischief through the use of “invisible hands”. General Prem was talking about jockeys, horses and owners. Prime Minister Thaksin was making oblique references to “a charismatic person outside the Constitution”. Generals were flatly denying that a coup would ever take place again saying that that era was past and Thailand was a fully democratic nation and the idea was just about unthinkable.

I believed them. So in this atmosphere, I was watching the Channel 11 show Newsline hosted by ML Nattakorn Devakula. I’d watched his show before and found him to be a bombastic and opinionated windbag but one who occasionally said something intelligent and/or interesting. On this occasion, for about ten minutes he seemed to be wittering on about nothing that I could understand. I paraphrase from memory:

The thing that we thought might be happening does seem to be happening. We hope it’s not happening but it certainly seems to be happening and nothing seems to be stopping it from happening. As we speak it’s happening right now. What’s happening seems to be definitely happening… It’s very bad that it is happening but it continues to happen.

I’d had a long day at work and had no clue what this all meant and little immediate interest in deciphering it. I woke up in the morning to the news of the coup and it immediately became crystal clear. Nattakorn had not been acting as a reporter; he had been speaking in code to those who shared the code. I may have been ignorant but many people would have understood him exactly.

I don’t blame Nattakorn. He may not have been acting in the heroic mode of the reporter who tells the truth in simple, unambiguous language. But he may have been acting quite courageously nevertheless; after all he knew that people in tanks were on their way to his TV station to replace his cryptic chatter with pronunciamentos and patriotic music and to do it with violence if they had to. However, the point this and other incidents demonstrate is that an awareness of coded language is necessary to any understanding of, or as things are constituted presently, to anything that can approach a full discussion of Thai politics. The codes I can understand (or at least identify as codes) are in English, so this area of Thai political discourse will be my focus in this paper.

[Read more →]

The context to this is simple — UMNO has two different views on how to remain in power — to become a Malay/Muslim extremist party to capture the Malay votes or to return to the middle ground — which had served it well for the past 52 years. Muhyiddin represents the first view while Najib the second. Unfortunately, due to Najib’s indecisiveness, he is considered the new “Pak Lah” (the former Prime Minister) while Muhyiddin is seen as the new “Mahathir” (read here). Despite, Najib’s policy prescription of “Malay Leadership”, it appears that UMNO is still about “Malay Supremacy” as represented by Muhyiddin.

Najib’s 1Malaysia slogan and policy agenda (read here, here and here) has been systematically rubbished by UMNO hardliners with the support of key government Ministers such as Muhyiddin and Malay/Muslim civil servants and non-governmental organisations bent on ensuring continued “Malay Supremacy” (more here, here and here).

Then there were the fire-bombings of places of worship (mostly Christian) after the “Allah” court ruling which shattered Malaysia’s facade as a peaceful nation where people of different faiths and races live harmoniously. Furthermore, a recent forum organised by JAKIM (the Islamic Development Department) blamed Christians for tensions in the country and a forum panellist threatened Christians with a repeat of May 13 (race riot organised by certain UMNO members after losing 2/3 majority in the Peninsula Malaysia in 1969) — a view which is supported by Muhyiddin but not Najib.

Several startling events point to insiders sabotaging Najib. The story of two missing jet engines which occurred during Najib’s tenure as Defence Minister surfaced after being “…solved…”. It was surprising that the scandal resurfaced under the eyes of Najib’s once trusted ally, the current Minister of Defence, Ahmad Zahid Hamidi. Since the scandal broke, two individuals, believed to be scapegoats have been charged.

The biggest set-back came a few days ago when the Prime Minister’s special aide, Nasir Safar , allegedly called ancestors of Malaysians of Indian heritage beggars and thieves and women ancestors of Malaysian Chinese  prostitutes.  This happened at, of all places, a 1Malaysia forum attended by the UMNO’s partners from the Barisan Nasional.  Nasir also threatened to revoke the citizenship of non-Malays who challenged the limit of 12 subjects that a student can take at the SPM (Malaysia’s equivalent to O-level) examinations (Muhyiddin is the current Education Minister who came up with this ruling which reduces the value of subjects such as Tamil, Mandarin and Bible Knowledge).

Several commentators have already suggested that Najib is facing unprecedented resistance to his reform agenda and is being sabotaged in the process (read here) as his middle of the road approach goes against the very being of UMNO.

Najib’s position is weak — both in UMNO and nationally. His ruling coalition is unstable with all key component parties facing leadership crises. The economy continues to falter and Malaysia’s weakening reserves suggests capital flight. Anwar’s Sodomy Trial and the “Allah” issue may drive moderates further away as fundamentalists push UMNO further to the right.  Judging by previous UMNO intrigue (e.g. May 13, 1969; Operasi Lalang, October 1987; Reformasi, September 1998), it is likely that Najib will have to resort to underhand tactics to save his position in UMNO — and as always it is innocent Malaysians — mostly likely opposition leaders and democracy that will pay the price.

With the Thai government announcing a renewed effort to “protect the king” it is probably time to examine developments in their online campaigns to generate positive feelings about the monarchy.

A long-time reader recently alerted me to a big advertisement in the Bangkok Post (above) trumpeting the creation 0f a website called www.weloveking.org.  It was launched last week by Bhum Jai Thai political leader Newin Chidchob. The launch received wide coverage in the Thai media.

This new website invites contributions of smiling photographs or videos to “give happiness to ‘father’”.  When you click across to www.weloveking.org make sure you turn up the volume so you can hear the site’s theme song.  It is also possible to download the song as a “ring tone” or “calling melody”. For uploading photos and videos, the site offers three easy methods, including Multimedia Messaging Service.

Long-time New Mandala readers know that this is not the first government-affiliated effort to define appropriate online coverage of royal matters.

All I hope is that this new site is maintained with more diligence than www.protecttheking.net which was, you might recall, designed to serve as a one-stop-shop for dobbing in lese majeste offenders. Readers may remember that the responsible official forgot to renew the domain registration.  Now when you access www.protecttheking.net you get all manner of gratuitous financial advice from “the kings of protecting your pockets”.  It isn’t, I’d wager, what the Thai authorities had in mind.

Not to be put off by that loss of valuable digital real estate, the Thai government has established another new site: www.ourking.in.th. The branding on the preliminary page indicates support from the Office of His Majesty’s Principal Private Secretary and the Office of the Royal Development Projects Board, among other agencies.

It is still in the early stages of development and they are even inviting public input on the site’s logo and template.  With a total prize of 220,000 baht at stake you could play a major role in designing this tribute to the king of Thailand.  To apply to enter the design competition you need to complete this form.  Applications close on 30 April 2010.

At some stage into the future, Burma will have a civilian Government, which will face great challenges. At some stage into the future, the regional and international community will be asked to help in the rebuilding of Burma’s economic and social structures. Australia’s view therefore is that the international community help prepare Burma for the future. Burma’s capacity cannot be allowed to completely atrophy to the ultimate disadvantage and cost of its people. The international community needs to start the rebuilding now. This is not a reward for Burma’s military, but a recognition of the immense task faced by current and future generations of Burmese.

- Extracted from Australian Foreign Minister Stephen Smith’s “Ministerial Statement on Burma”, 8 February 2010.

Update (9 February 2010): Linda Mottram from the ABC has a very useful report which provides further argument from the Foreign Minister, and also from the Shadow Foreign Minister, Julie Bishop, and Myint Cho, from the Australia-Burma Council.

New Mandala was founded in June 2006 by the Australian National University’s Andrew Walker and Nicholas Farrelly.  Its mission is to provide anecdote, analysis and new perspectives on mainland Southeast Asia. Over the years it has published more than 2,000 posts and over 18,000 comments.  The website continues to grow and its founders are constantly exploring fresh ways of providing a high-quality service to its large audience.

To help with further expansion and development, in 2010 we are seeking to appoint three country editors.  This follows the recent appointment of Greg Lopez as New Mandala Editor – Malaysia.

The new positions are New Mandala Editor – Burma, New Mandala Editor – Cambodia, and New Mandala Editor – Laos.

These voluntary positions will be filled by energetic and committed individuals. Each editor will assume responsibility for the New Mandala content concerned with their country. They will be tasked with writing, or soliciting, at least one New Mandala post per week.  These positions provide unique opportunities to contribute to the study of mainland Southeast Asia through the premier academic blog about the region.

Potential applicants are encouraged to consider the selection criteria with respect to their preferred country editorship.

For these positions applicants should:

• Demonstrate an ability to write and edit for timely publication;
• Be very comfortable with standard publishing, editing and Internet technologies, and be willing to master the tools relevant to the blogging environment;
• Possess appropriate country experience, knowledge and skills;
• Share a desire to push forward academic commentary on their country of expertise;
• Enjoy lively academic (and not-so-academic) debate;
• Appreciate the dynamic and time-critical nature of New Mandala’s mission.

Formal qualifications may prove relevant but we are just as interested in appointing editors who show a commitment to “learning on the job”.  These roles offer substantial autonomy and there is no sense in which the newly appointed editors will be expected to follow any perceived New Mandala consensus.

We are looking for critical thinkers, energetic contributors, and formidable debaters.

The New Mandala Editors for Burma, Cambodia and Laos will receive training and support, but will also need to take the initiative and immerse themselves in the blogging environment.

Applications for these positions should address the selection criteria and be accompanied by a brief CV.  All applications should be sent to nicholas.farrelly@anu.edu.au.

This Call for Applications will close on Friday 5 March 2010.

Last weekend, on the occasion of the birthday of the queen, Pro Republica wrote that the queen’s political mandate is derived entirely from the tabloids. If you have not been voted in to office, yet want to be involved at the highest political levels, you are dependent on popularity. Popularity is not measured in voting booths. It is a form rather than a function. The exotic hat instead of the head, the stiletto instead of the foot.

There are two aspects regarding function: first, the demystification of the royals, and second, their desecration. We routinely question the appearances and the apparent holiness so we can expose the shocking sight of the monarchy’s functions. Often, the royal family is nothing but a beautifully decorated balloon full of hot air. The exterior looks so dignified and seductive, that many fall for it. Like old Socrates constantly trying to prove that the Beautiful equals the Good, the royals constantly polish their own image – in the absence of function.

Where does their image actually come from? From the royalist hagiographers who concluded that the royals create “unity” for Dutch society? From the prime minister who thinks that the royal family represents Dutch identity? Does the idea that the royals have to be a visible symbol of the Netherlands come from the obsequious servants that surround them?

We’ll disabuse you right away. It’s the queen herself doing it. She creates her own image. She dictates how her subjects see her. And she does it in an underhanded way. Secretly and on the sly. It is as if statue sculpted itself by changing from artist to image and vice versa. The queen can do this because of the way our political system is organized. Within the archaic monarchy we have another medieval relic, namely the privy council. This weird institution advises the government. And if ever it would be necessary, it replaces the crown.

So how does this self sculpting statue come to be? Very simple. The queen is head of government, while the prime minister is only its leader. So the queen, as head of the privy council, can ask advice from the privy council. For example: “the relevance of the monarchy is in its contribution to its tradition” or “as the power of the state gets more diffuse in a European and global context, there is a need for someone who manifests unity and continuity”. In other words, the queen asks herself by way of the privy council what the government should think about her, and the monarchy.

So the next time your hear the prime minister say that the monarchy provides us with continuity, stability and identity, you’ll know it is because the queen told him so.

Translated from a Dutch language article, “Form and Function”, originally published at ProRepublica. In recent months the Dutch Ambassador to Thailand has made numerous public statements about lese majeste laws. More on Dutch republicanism is available here.

Asia Sentinel has a report on the death of the last surviving member of a tribe that inhabited the Andaman and Nicobar Islands in the Bay of Bengal.

Justin Thomas McDaniel, Gathering Leaves and Lifting Words: Histories of Buddhist Monastic Education in Laos and Thailand. Seattle and London, University of Washington Press, 2008. pp. xiii + 358.

Reform of Theravada Buddhism occurred in different parts of Southeast Asia in different circumstances at different times. In Burma reform started in the late eighteenth century with the enforcement of strict ordinations and the strengthening of an ecclesiastical hierarchy. The same process began in Siam in the middle of the nineteenth century and continued into the early twentieth with new curricula for the education of monks. Cambodian Buddhism experienced similar changes under French colonial rule, drawing inspiration from what was taking place in Siam. Across the region, including Ceylon, the encounter with Western travellers, diplomats and missionaries provoked a re-examination of monastic practice rather than doctrine. The impulse was fundamentalist, a return to orthodoxy and the Buddhist canon. Many indigenous Buddhist thinkers were intent on eliminating superstitious elements from the religion. They sought to proselytise a rational worldview that even today sees Buddhism as compatible with Western science.

Such is the conventional story of Theravada Buddhist modernism, but Justin McDaniel, the author of Gathering Leaves and Lifting Words: Histories of Buddhist Monastic Education in Laos and Thailand, is not having it, or at least, he is not having all of it. He finds this account of Buddhist modernism misleading in its elitism and ignorant of how Buddhism was actually taught in monasteries, especially in the villages and more remote parts of the region. After studying Pali at a village monastery on the Thai Lao border and too many years at American universities studying Buddhism and a dizzying number of European and Asian languages, including Pali and Sanskrit, all of which he uses effortlessly, McDaniel came to the conclusion that most of what Buddhists teach other Buddhists in mainland Southeast Asia is not canonical. Indeed, some monastic teachers, while they may be effective instructors, do not even know Pali.

To make his case, McDaniel begins by sketching a history of northern Siam distinct from Ayudhya and Bangkok. Speaking sometimes of only Siam and sometimes of Siam and Laos together, he tells the story in two ways, first as religious history centred on Lanna, the northern Tai kingdom, which had been a hub of Buddhist learning since the sixteenth century. The Buddha images and relics in Chiang Mai attracted charismatic teachers and students from afar. The comings and goings of so many monks through its monasteries and academies gave the city the feel of a single campus. Even today students from southern China, Burma and parts of Laos come to northern Thailand to study. The knowledge stored in the manuscript collections of northern monasteries is secular as well as religious, with medical and protective texts bound with grammars and ritual guides. Training of monk-teachers was not systematic, and the teaching materials were not standardised. The evidence points to an informal educational setting that valued individual initiative and the idiosyncratic approaches specific to each teacher.

The second strand of the history tells of the centralized government’s encroachment that detached ruling elites from their local roots. The history textbooks refer to the integration of the far-flung provinces into a centralised system, a process whose most famous monastic opponent in the north was Khruba Siwichai, but resistance was mostly passive. McDaniel calls the process ‘internal colonialism’, a ‘takeover’ by Siam of the northern kingdom of Lanna which was culturally and economically more connected to the Lao lands to the east and to the Shan country to the north and west than to the Siamese in the south. Most historians have shied away from wholly embracing the concept of internal colonialism, while agreeing that the late nineteenth-century reforms cannily made use of Western colonial practices in order to subordinate or marginalise local rulers. My own sense is that internal colonialism is not, or not yet, a critical concept used widely for dismantling the modernising dynastic narrative in Thai historical writing.

In religious affairs the Sangha Law of 1902 marked the culmination of the new arrangements by creating an ecclesiastical administration with monastic heads of monthon, provinces, districts and sub-districts, all appointed by Bangkok to parallel the civil administration. But the royal reform of Buddhist education that this administrative infrastructure was supposed to guarantee was limited in most places, and not very modern. When he looks at the examination system introduced in the early twentieth century McDaniel finds little difference from the texts used by King Rama II (r. 1809-1824), and when he studies the curriculum as a monk he does not recognise any influence of the Buddhist educational reforms of a century earlier. He bluntly sums up this revisionist view by saying that ‘these reforms were not actually implemented in any significant way’ (106). Many, if not most, monastic teachers have not taken part in the reforms imposed by the Thai monastic and secular elites. McDaniel identifies a stratum of educational activity and pedagogical practice largely untouched by national planning and educational policy. [Read more →]

The Anwar Ibrahim Sodomy II trial has been touted as Malaysia’s trial.  It started yesterday.

That could not be further from the truth – Malaysia is a basket case, plain and simple. It has been that way for some time now. It’s a country slowly waiting for its demise.

For now, let’s focus on the Anwar trial. It is all about destroying the credibility of Malaysia’s most charismatic opposition leader (and possible future Prime Minister). Anwar is currently the only individual that can hold the opposition coalition together and mount a serious challenge to UMNO. The trial is about exhausting and demoralising the opposition leader and the coalition he leads through expensive and time consuming legal battles.

The Australian Financial Review published an excellent article that put into context the sodomy trial but also analysed Anwar Ibrahim’s strategy since the 8 March, 2008 General Election where the opposition claimed a historic win (in a system where denying the ruling party 2/3 majority in Parliament is a win). The article paints a fair picture of the only man now capable of transforming Malaysia.

The Wall Street Journal  and the New York Times did pieces which considered the implications of the trial for democracy in Malaysia. Without a doubt, Anwar Ibrahim has the support of the international media and rightly so.  That the case was ever brought to trial demonstrates how far the country has regressed since Independence especially during the Mahathir era. The Lowy Institute has a nice piece that captures in summary the damage Mahathir did.

Australians have shown plenty of interest in Anwar’s new trial; although most other embassies have sent officers to observe the trial too.  Michael Danby, Federal Member for Melbourne Ports and Foreign Affairs Committee Chair, weighed in on the issue. His speech was supportive of Anwar and critical of the ruling party. However, the speech seemed a little incoherent. In the first paragraph, Mr. Danby accuses the Malaysian government of using democratic institutions for its own vested interests but concludes in the last paragraph, “…I hope that the Prime Minister, Najib and his ministers are not involved…”.

It appears that ASEAN regimes do not give up power easily – whether it is an illegal military junta in Burma, an illegal but elite, military backed government in Thailand, monarchies such as Brunei and Singapore (I’ll laugh if you tell me otherwise), banana cases in the rest of Southeast Asia with the exception of Indonesia – which is probably the only country that is heading in the right direction.

Notwithstanding Obama and Rudd’s praise – Malaysia is no different.  Malaysia’s story is similar to the “Chronicle of a Death Foretold.” The government has decided that Anwar must “die”. Will Malaysians stand-by and become willing participants to this “murder” or will Malaysians change the ending of this story.  Only time will tell.

Update 05/02/2010: Barry Wain has provided his view on the Anwar Trial via this article in The Age.

Update 07/02/2010: The influential Washington Post ran an op-ed describing how important Anwar Ibrahim’s trial is to the “West”

The legal showdown between Ms Suu Kyi and her brother comes as the SPDC is preparing to hold a controversial election later this year…Ms Suu Kyi herself, whose house arrest was extended last year after a US citizen swam across Inya Lake to her house uninvited, has given no public hint of how she regards the legal challenges mounted by her brother. It can be assumed, given all the other extaordinary privations of her life, that it is a source of great sorrow and indignation…

- Extracted from Andrew Buncombe, “Aung San Suu Kyi, a leaking roof, and the brother who won’t let her fix it”, The Independent, 4 February 2010.