Author: mobius

Last week, Thai and Burmese Officials agreed at bilateral meetings to repatriate illegal Burmese migrants. The plan has some 100,000 ethnic Shan people here wondering how they might be affected. Published in The Nation (Bangkok) on Monday, January 14, 2002 Story and photos by Daniel Gawthrop One afternoon last May, at a temporary shelter for displaced persons in the Fang district of Chiang Mai province, I stood by and watched helplessly as 48 ethnic Shan…

  Posted on Dooneyscafe.com on November 24, 2001 Daniel Gawthrop scratches his head over “cultural creatives”. The language of new age, “progressive”, or “spiritual” literature can pose serious problems for people who believe in clear writing. Too much of it is steeped in sociological jargon that panders to the reader with feel-good sensibilities (“self actualization,” “essential one-ness”) that no one could possibly disagree with but which provide little, if any, useful information. Sociologists commit some…

  Posted on Dooneyscafe.com on October 1, 2001 Daniel Gawthrop explores why Thai people haven’t responded to America’s tragedy with candlelight vigils. BANGKOK—Some time late in August, as the clouds moved in and the monsoon rains began their annual sweep of the Kingdom, a new form of political protest was born. Impoverished Thai villagers, led by a man from the western border province of Kanchanaburi named Chuay Kochasit, began smearing themselves in excrement–usually swine feces…

  Posted on Dooneyscafe on August 21, 2001 Daniel Gawthrop reviews Christopher Hitchens’ indictment of Henry Kissinger. (The Trial of Henry Kissinger, by Christopher Hitchens, Verso, 2001, 160 pages Cloth, price £15/US$22/CAN$32) One afternoon in 1971, I was asked to stay behind after school when all my classmates had left. My third-grade substitute teacher had some “concerns” she said, about the short story I’d handed in the day before. No, she didn’t mind that all…

  Published in The Nation (Bangkok) on Wednesday, November 29, 2000 By Daniel Gawthrop HANOI - Last week, as US President Bill Clinton was wrapping up his historic trip to Vietnam, his Communist hosts issued an abrupt ideological broadside. Calling on the country’s citizens to embrace their socialist future and the state’s “primary role” in business matters, Party General Secretary Le Kha Phieu said: “The future of the Vietnamese nation is independence and socialism... Socialism…