Saturday, January 17, 2009

Not so great Human Rights

How does Thailand do it? It's oversea's image is at best laughable and its domestic problems are nearly as bad as the UK.


This week it turn's out that a dodgy goverment agency which is outside the laws of the land as been turning away Bangladeshi Muslim refugee's. That isn't the worst of it, not only did they detain over 800 of them at the end of the year for several days without food and water, they also had a good go at kicking shit out of them. Just when things couldn't get worse the military put them on old boats tied up, towed them out to sea and then cut them adrift with only two day food and water and no engine.

A couple of weeks later they began to turn up on the Andaman Islands in these knackered boats, its not accurate how many died, but it runs into hundred's. Not good!

This comes on top of a report earlier in the week from Amnesty International regarding the systematic torture of Muslims in the south of the country. Whilst Amnesty can sometimes report a very one sided view, they do concede that the Thai authorities in the south face an enemy that is equally barbaric and vicious, this doesn't compensate for the tactics the Thai's are using.

In any case these reports wont put the tourists off coming or business investing in Thailand so will be of little importance in the grand scheme of things, I doubt most Thai's will hear about them anyway, most of the TV is controlled by the Army.

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