BY MATTHEW DIMMOCK
BANGKOK — Authorities are striving to make this city look its best for the October 20-21 Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit. The race is on to "sanitise" Bangkok's streets, or at least the ones that foreign delegates will travel along. Bangkok's poor and homeless are the major targets in the government's cosmetic campaign.
Floral garland sellers, predominantly children struggling to survive, are symbolic of Bangkok's congested intersections; they have now been banned from doing business along the 39 routes to be used by APEC delegates. The ban will be lifted once delegates return home.
Police have warned street people to "get lost" or face arrest. These people "may commit crimes or fall prey to criminals", explained deputy metropolitan police commissioner Wirote Jantarangsi.
Bangkok governor Samak Sundaravej told the September 17 Bangkok Post that "homeless drifters are a nuisance and should be treated like stray dogs". He was referring to the city's policy of rounding up stray dogs and transporting them to shelters in a nearby province.
"There are no excuses for being a vagabond", Samak said. "If we help them by feeding them and providing shelter more will only leave their homes, come to the city and drift around. In doing so, they take advantage of society. We should send them home."
Such is the urgency of hiding the human evidence of disastrous neoliberal economic policies. World Trade Organisation delegates in Cancun in September were presented with the false impression of prosperity while poor communities encircling the resort town were hidden from view.
The same is intended for the APEC summit, where delegates will be able to continue to implement ruinous economic policies without having to witness the human victims, such as the forlorn faces of garland sellers who desperately want to go to school.
Thai farmers and poor people made a powerful show of force during the Cancun ministerial with demonstrations at the EU Commission and US embassy in Bangkok on September 9, where they demanded the removal of food and agriculture policies from the control of the WTO and a thorough review of the environmental and social impact of existing trade rules and agreements.
Such rules and agreements, along with the exorbitant subsidies which rich-country governments grant their farmers, have forced many Thai farmers and their families out of business. They have little choice but to travel to Bangkok in search of labouring or factory work. They often end up in slum communities or living on the street.
APEC promotes the same policies and objectives, including trade liberalisation and privatisation, as the WTO and other global institutions of the "new world order". Since the collapse of the Cancun negotiations on September 14, the US has decided to pursue bilateral free-trade agreements with renewed vigour, and it is the US-Thai FTA that will dominate talks between US President George Bush and Thailand's Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra at the APEC talks.
"For Thailand, the biggest threat now is the bilateral agreement with the US, which we called 'WTO plus', as it would demand more than what the WTO demands, including prohibiting states from issuing laws that will protect the environment and local labour", environmentalist Kannikar Kijtiwatchakul told the September 18 Bangkok Nation. Such demands are designed to favour big business.
Bamrung Kayotha from the Assembly of the Poor, one of the groups that took part in the September 9 anti-WTO protest, said: "Before I was a small pig farmer, but I cannot compete with the big corporations which monopolise the chain of production of every commodity. Small-scale farmers can never compete with the corporations under the free trade agreement, which is why we have to fight to stop it."
However, Shinawatra, the self-proclaimed "people's man", has vowed to blacklist any local NGO that organises demonstrations and seminars during the APEC summit. He has also threatened to ban members of foreign NGOs from entering the country during the summit. "It won't hurt if you think about your motherland and the image of your country for just a week", Shinawatra told local activists.
Shinawatra has also threatened to withhold aid money from village organisations involved in protests. He has accused foreign NGOs of being motivated by a "hidden agenda" and insists that protests are foreign-run, not the product of the problems and injustices facing Thailand's poor.
"These people merely need to show they are working to please their overseas sources of funding. Everybody knows that [Thai] NGOs are funded by foreigners", he told the Nation.
The prime minister's comments have sparked much criticism. The stifling of free speech and lawful dissent comes at a time when Thailand is preparing to commemorate the October 1973 student uprising that overthrew military rule, an event considered to be the birth of Thai democracy.
[Matthew Dimmock is a freelance journalist currently based in Thailand.]
From Green Left Weekly, October 15, 2003.
Visit the Green Left Weekly home page.