New Mandala

This past week the Red Shirts protested for 3 days at Government House. There is not much I can write about other than what did not happen. There was no violence apart from the incident in which one soldier was beaten up trying to infiltrate the protest site. Just like the Red Shirts announced from [...]

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New Mandala readers in the UK will be keen to know that on Thursday 5 March 2009 former Thai Foreign Minister Dr. Tej Bunnag will be speaking in London.  All of the details for this event, organised by Samaggi Samagom, are available here.  The topic is “His Majesty the King and Development”.  And, in case [...]

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Harry Nicolaides and his case have now been discussed in all sorts of places, including on this web-board hosted by Sukhotai Thammathirat Open University.  The whole thread makes for fascinating reading.  It is all in Thai.
To give you a flavour of the exchanges, one comment (in favour of enforcing the lese majeste law) begins:
ท่าน XXX [...]

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For something a bit different, The Nation’s Bangkokian has an entertaining little report on two army conscripts who apparently attempted to penetrate the Red Shirt mob.  By these accounts it was a lively scene.

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After SOAS, Giles’s second stop of his tour of major UK campuses to deliver his critique of contemporary Thai politics brought him to Oxford, where he now lives in exile with his wife and son. Around 60 people attended his talk, which I chaired, virtually all of them Thai, some sympathisers and some hostile. Before [...]

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Over at Eureka Street there is a thought-provoking essay by Arnold Zable, the president of the Melbourne Centre of International PEN.  It picks up many of the themes that have swirled around Harry Nicolaides’ lèse-majesté case and puts them in the broader context of battles to defend writers’ rights worldwide.  It is well worth a look.

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The video that was mentioned in this post is now available at YouTube (part 1, part 2, part 3 and part 4.  Part 4 is a private video for reasons, it appears, of audience privacy).   These clips show Associate Professor Giles Ji Ungpakorn giving his recent talk at the School of Oriental and African Studies, [...]

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Harry Nicolaides is home and free.  It is, I suppose, as good a time as any to start taking stock of what happened in his particularly high profile lèse majesté case.  Of course, others remain behind bars and sadly they are not garnering the same sort of attention.  Let’s hope that changes soon.
In the meantime, [...]

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Thanks to Leedom Lefferts for this image from a traffic circle just to the south of Jinghong.

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The many readers who follow these types of conversations will be interested to know that The Irrawaddy has a short article on the Karen National Union’s Colonel Ner Dah Mya.  There are reports that he was arrested in January and has just been released on bail by Thai authorities.  Do New Mandala readers know more?

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