Behind the smile

From the late 1980s to 1995, before coming to Hong Kong, I taught at a university in Mobile, Alabama. Among my students were young women who had once been boat people from South Vietnam, those who escaped in rickety, overcrowded boats when the communists took over their country. I liked these students because they were diligent and hardworking. They sometimes related horrifying stories of their escape from Vietnam (they were small children at that time), especially how their mothers and aunts had been raped by Thai fisherman, who often flung the adult males from the boats into the sea. After being raped, some women had been taken ashore to be sold for prostitution. The boats, often short of water and food and with engines breaking-down, had the misfortune to drift into the Gulf of Thailand.




A rickety boat crowded with Vietnamese boat people

To me, being from a Buddhist country (Sri Lanka), the behavior of these pirates from another Buddhist country, Thailand, was shocking and incomprehensible. Buddhism preaches compassion and non-violence and unlike in the case of Christianity and Islam, did not convert people of other faiths by the sword. Much has happened in recent years to sully the reputations of other Buddhist countries such as Sri Lanka, Burma, and Cambodia, and I'll dwell on this phenomenon later.

What made me write this entry is the recent persecution of another wave of boat people by the Thais. Again, these refugees were the wretched of the earth, fleeing Burma and Bangladesh in search of a better life. According to yesterday's Sunday Morning Post, boat people who landed on Thai beaches had been beaten, forcibly put on boats and pushed out into the sea. More than 500 are dead or missing. Some had been shot or thrown overboard.

Thailand likes to be known as the "Land of Smiles". The picture of a smiling Thai hostess, with palms folded in the traditional Buddhist sign of greeting, adorns the advertisements of Thai Airways. Thousands of Buddhist temples dot Bangkok, the capital, and the countryside. But Thailand has been a curse to its neighbors. Those smiles hide a recent history bathed in blood.

I think it all started when Thailand became a Rest & Recreation (R & R) center for thousands of American GIs during the Vietnam War. Traumatized by the fighting, they came looking for sex and drugs, and the rot began. Till recently, 9 out of 10 visitors to Thailand were men travelling alone, looking for sex and drugs. Any male visitor to Thailand, even one who has his wife or girlfriend with him, is pestered with offers of women virtually from the time he gets off he plane. When these offers are turned down, the touts, assuming one is gay, begin to offer boys for sex.

Of course, Thailand soon ran out of women to supply the insatiable demand of Bangkok brothels, so the smuggling of women from Burma and China began. According to recent reports, between thirty to forty thousand Burmese women and girls, sometimes as young as twelve years old, have been trafficked to Thailand, with thousands of new arrivals each year. Over sixty percent are under the age of 18. These young women come from minority groups such as the Shan, the Mon, and Tai, fair skinned and therefore drawing better prices in Bangkok brothels. Oppressed by the murderous Military Junta in Burma, people from these groups have no option but to go abroad, and are trafficked with promises of better jobs. many of them become infected with AIDS and then return to the pathetic lives in their own countries. Chinese girls from minority tribes in Yunnan are similarly trafficked to Bangkok brothels.

The smuggling of women isn't the only way in which Thailand exploits its neighbors. The Khmer Rouge of Cambodia, who are estimated to have killed more than a million of their own people, were supplied weapons by Thais, often by those in the Thai military, in return for teak wood and gemstone (especially emeralds) found in Cambodia. During their last days, Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge were cornered on the Thai-Cambodian border and managed to fight on for years only because they had the support of corrupt Thai military officers.

Teak wood is one of the most valuable commodities in South-East Asia and the teak forests in Thailand have been exploited till hardly any trees are left. So, in addition to razing the teak forests of Cambodia, the Thais have also been leasing Burmese teak forests with the connivance of the murderous military Junta in Burma.

A few months ago, I saw a documentary on Al Jazeera television on the murder of Burmese fisherman on Thai trawlers. Apparently, poor Burmese are recruited to work on these boats and a treated like slaves. At the first sign of dissent, these fisherman are knifed or brutally beaten to death. Many Burmese fisherman who escaped from these boats are stranded on an Indonesian island thousands of miles from their homeland.

As I mentioned earlier, Thailand, like Burma, Cambodia, and Sri Lanka, are Buddhist countries. Buddha preached non-violence and compassion, but all these countries are mired in blood. How could this be explained? I used to visit Thailand to attend conferences but stopped going ten years ago. I will not spend money in a country which rapaciously exploits human beings.

For the story of one Vietnamese refugee, go to
http://www.vietka.com/Vietnamese_Boat_People/ThaiPirates.htm