Coup in Thailand

It seems like only a month ago that Amy and I were walking past Government House in Bangkok during our search for the zoo. Maybe because it was just over thirty days ago.

As I write this, the night of the Tuesday the 19th, tanks surround the building , according to the wire services. Thaksin, the prime minister, is in New York attending a UN meeting, and just declared a state of emergency from there. Oh, really? Thank you for that news flash, Shinawarta, the tanks were not an obvious enough clue.

Thaksin is really a crook. He was one of the richest men in Thailand before he took office, and he's making more money than ever now. Oh excuse me, what I meant to say was, he's perfectly innocent, it's just coincidence that all the businesses owned by his family members are doing so well. With all those government contracts. Well, at least we can rest assured that Halliburton, the company that is still paying Dick Cheney every month, isn't posting their best-ever, stockprice-soaring astronomical profits on their Iraq rebuilding contracts. [hesitant pause; sounds of furious last-second fact checking; awkward pause] Whoops. Anyways, back to the Corrupt Developing World:

Thaksin's despised everywhere in the country except the rural north (outside Chiang Mai) and Northwest ( the poorest, most agricultural and conservative part of the country) but even that's because he owns a lot of media access- Berlusconi junior, I guess.

The police foiled a car bomb assassination attempt in Bangkok last month- Thaksin had unwittingly changed some part of his morning routine, and it probably saved his life. Two very funny indicators after the bomb was defused: One, he's so unpopular in the city that a poll taken a few days later showed that something like half the populace thought that he had staged the bomb just to gain sympathy. Two, when the head of the military (who don't forget have ruled the country off and on four or five times in the last thirty years) was asked if he had any knowledge of who was responsible for the attempted blowing up of the prime minister, the general said he was insulted. "If we had had anything to do with it", he scoffed, "[Thaksin] would be dead."

Well, that general is having a busy evening tonight. It's just so frustrating. There was so much good news lately- Thaksin's fake elections (which the opposition justly boycotted) were thrown out of court last month, and the political appointee election commissioners who blessed the travesty were even briefly imprisoned before they agreed to participate in a parliamentary investigation. The new elections were scheduled for November... this has to mean that the military either thought that Thaksin wouldn't step down, or that they were just getting impatient with parliament altogether. Either way, they're going to be in charge, it looks.

In the past the king has given his support to the military when it moved in to replace corrupt regimes, but there was an election on the near horizon... that's the part that doesn't make sense.

Oh, and I'm fine. In Kathmandu for a few days, doing more rafting and also working on another project. I'll know in a couple weeks if it bears fruit, and if so, you'll be hearing a lot more about it.