Tag: thailand
Bomb In Thai Capital Kills 16, Wounds 81 In Bid ‘To Destroy Economy’

Bomb In Thai Capital Kills 16, Wounds 81 In Bid ‘To Destroy Economy’

By Amy Sawitta Lefevre and Andrew R.C. Marshall

BANGKOK (Reuters) – A bomb planted at one of the Thai capital’s most renowned shrines on Monday killed 16 people, including three foreign tourists, and wounded scores in an attack the government called a bid to destroy the economy.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the blast at the Erawan shrine at a major city-center intersection. Thai forces are fighting a low-level Muslim insurgency in the predominantly Buddhist country’s south, but those rebels have rarely launched attacks outside their heartland.

“The perpetrators intended to destroy the economy and tourism, because the incident occurred in the heart of the tourism district,” Defense Minister Prawit Wongsuwan told Reuters.

Several media outlets had earlier reported that 27 people were killed but national police chief Somyot Poompanmuang told reporters the death toll was 16 in an attack he said was unprecedented in Thailand.

“It was a pipe bomb,” Somyot said. “It was placed inside the Erawan shrine.”

The shrine, on a busy corner near top hotels, shopping centers, offices and a hospital, is a major attraction, especially for visitors from East Asia, including China. Many ordinary Thais also worship there.

The government would set up a “war room” to coordinate the response to the blast, the Nation television channel quoted Prime Minister Prayuth Chan-ocha as saying.

Two people from China and one from the Philippines were among the dead, a tourist police officer said. A rescue agency said 81 people were wounded and media said most of them were from China and Taiwan.

“It was like a meat market,” said Marko Cunningham, a New Zealand paramedic working with a Bangkok ambulance service, who said the blast had left a two-meter-wide (6-foot-) crater.

“There were bodies everywhere. Some were shredded. There were legs where heads were supposed to be. It was horrific,” Cunningham said, adding that people several hundred meters away had been injured.

POLITICAL TENSION

At the scene lay burned out motorcycles, with rubble from the shrine’s wall and pools of blood on the street.

Earlier, authorities had ordered onlookers back, saying they were checking for a second bomb but police later said no other explosive devices were found.

Authorities stepped up security checks at some major city intersections and in tourist areas. The city’s elevated railway, which passes over the scene, was operating normally.

While initial suspicion might fall on Muslim separatists in the south, Thailand has been riven for a decade by an intense and sometimes violent struggle for power between political factions in Bangkok.

Occasional small blasts have been blamed on one side or the other. Two pipe bombs exploded outside a luxury shopping mall in the same area in February, but caused little damage.

Police said that attack was aimed at raising tension when the city was under martial law.

The army has ruled Thailand since May 2014, when it ousted an elected government after months of at times violent anti-government protests.

The shrine intersection was the site of months of anti-government protests in 2010 by supporters of ousted former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra. Dozens were killed in a military crackdown and a shopping center was set ablaze.

(Reporting by Amy Sawitta Lefevre and Andrew R.C. Marshall; Additional reporting by Khettiya Jittapong, Martin Petty and Panarat Thepgumpanat; Writing by Robert Birsel; Editing by Clarence Fernandez)

Photo: People pray at the famous San Phra Phrom shrine, known as the Erawan shrine in English, of the Hindu god Brahma, in Bangkok’s shopping district, in this March 30, 2013 file picture. REUTERS/Damir Sagolj/Files 

Indonesia And Malaysia To Allow Stranded Migrants To Come Ashore

Indonesia And Malaysia To Allow Stranded Migrants To Come Ashore

By Jonathan Kaiman and Shashank Bengali, Los Angeles Times (TNS)

BANGKOK, Thailand — Indonesia and Malaysia agreed Wednesday to allow thousands of migrants stranded at sea to come ashore, while the United Nations said it would repatriate Bangladeshis detained in three countries for entering illegally.

The announcements following a meeting of three Southeast Asian nations in Malaysia appeared to signal that a weekslong migrant crisis was easing after fishing boats packed with refugees from Myanmar and job-seekers from Bangladesh were abandoned by their captains and blocked from reaching land by governments unwilling to take them in.

Bowing to international pressure, Indonesia and Malaysia, which along with Thailand had said for weeks that the migrants were not welcome, reversed course and said they would be allowed in temporarily to receive humanitarian aid.

But the countries called on the international community to provide financial assistance to help shelter and care for the migrants, many of whom are suffering from severe hunger and dehydration after days or weeks at sea, and to repatriate or resettle them in a third country within one year.

“We commend the governments of Malaysia and Indonesia, in particular, for committing to continue to provide humanitarian assistance to the some 7,000 irregular migrants still at sea,” William Lacy Swing, director general of the United Nations’ International Organization for Migration, said in Geneva.

The foreign affairs ministers of Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia said in a joint statement “that necessary measures have been taken by the three countries on humanitarian grounds, beyond their international obligations, in addressing the current influx of irregular migrants and further underlined that the issue cannot be addressed solely by the three countries.”

Thailand’s foreign minister skipped a joint news conference following the meeting in Malaysia. Malaysian Foreign Minister Anifah Aman said Thailand had agreed to provide humanitarian aid but would not shelter refugees.

The Thai government has previously said it cannot take in any more migrants since it already hosts tens of thousands of refugees from Myanmar.

The IOM said it would bring back between 2,000 and 3,000 Bangladeshi citizens who are believed to be jailed in Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia for migrating illegally to those countries.

Asif Munir, IOM spokesman in Dhaka, the Bangladeshi capital, said the organization had set up a $1 million emergency fund to resettle the detainees.

“This is one of the recognized ways to bring back illegal migrants from the landing country to their motherland,” Munir said.

The fates of thousands of Rohingya Muslim refugees from Myanmar, who are fleeing persecution in their home country, remained unclear. Bangladesh’s Foreign Ministry officials said their nation would not take in the Rohingya, who are denied citizenship in Myanmar and face state-sponsored discrimination.

While many Rohingya refugees fled from Myanmar, others left on boats from southern Bangladesh, where some 500,000 are registered as refugees.

Bangladesh had faced intense criticism at home for failing to rescue its own citizens who were stranded at sea in recent weeks, after a crackdown by Thailand and Malaysia resulted in many of the boats being abandoned by their captains and left adrift in the Andaman Sea and Straits of Malacca.

Late Tuesday and early Wednesday, more than 370 migrants landed in Indonesia after floating for months on overcrowded boats, Indonesian officials said.

More than 3,000 migrants have reached land in Southeast Asia in recent weeks, about half of them in Indonesia’s Aceh province. Many have spoken of abysmal conditions on the boats. Some say smugglers beat and tortured them then fled off the coast of Thailand, leaving them adrift without food or water. Many have died, leading experts to warn of an epidemic of “floating coffins.”

The Thai government is planning a conference of Southeast Asian nations on May 29 to discuss the issue. Thailand’s deputy foreign minister said Wednesday that Myanmar, which had previously said it would not participate, had accepted an invitation to the meeting, according to The Associated Press.

(Los Angeles Times staff writers Kaiman reported from Bangkok and Bengali from Mumbai, India. Special correspondent Mohiuddin Kader in Dhaka contributed to this report.)

Photo: Jonathan Kaiman/Los Angeles Times/TNS

Thailand’s Military Rulers Accused Of Human Rights Abuses

Thailand’s Military Rulers Accused Of Human Rights Abuses

By Shashank Bengali, Los Angeles Times

MUMBAI, India — Thailand’s military rulers detained hundreds of people without charges, tortured some prisoners and systematically stifled dissent since seizing power in a May coup, a leading human rights watchdog reported Thursday.

Amnesty International said that although most prisoners were released within a week, they remain at risk of prosecution in military courts.

The crackdown has created a climate of fear in the Southeast Asian kingdom that shows no signs of easing as the Thai army has said it would keep power at least until the end of next year, the group said.

“The Thai authorities should end this disturbing pattern of repression, end human rights violations, respect its international human rights obligations and allow open debate and discussion — all of which are vital to the country’s future,” Richard Bennett, the group’s Asia-Pacific director, said in a statement.

The 68-page report offered one of the more detailed pictures of the political situation in Thailand to emerge since the military deposed an elected government and parliament, suspended the constitution and formed a rubber-stamp legislative assembly made up primarily of ex-members of the security services.

Gen. Prayuth Chan-ocha, the army’s commander-in-chief, who wields near-absolute power, ordered at least 571 people arrested in the days following the May 20 coup, the report found. Nearly 400 were affiliated with the political party of ousted Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra, but 141 were academics, writers, journalists and activists, the report said, while another 78 people were arrested at peaceful demonstrations.

The junta has also charged civilians with breaking military laws, the group said, adding that at least 60 people face imminent trials before military courts where they would have no right to appeal.

The army has also sharply restricted free speech by blocking websites, establishing censorship panels to monitor media reports and threatening imprisonment for anyone posting information thought to be critical of the military online.

Gatherings of more than five people are banned, and Bennett said the junta has cracked down “on the smallest form of dissent” — including eating sandwiches in public, a form of silent protest against the military that activists organized on social media.

The report details the case of one political activist, Kritsuda Khunasen, who accused soldiers of beating her, blindfolding her for a week and suffocating her with a plastic bag during her detention beginning in late May.

When activists raised questions about her whereabouts, authorities announced that she was being held in order to “adjust (her) understanding” and later aired footage of her saying she was being well treated — a statement that the activist, who was later released, said was coerced.

Photo via Wikimedia Commons

Thai Military Coup Leader Bestowed Role Of Civilian Prime Minister

Thai Military Coup Leader Bestowed Role Of Civilian Prime Minister

By Carol J. Williams, Los Angeles Times

The general who led a military coup in Thailand three months ago took on the civilian mantle of prime minister Thursday when the legislators he appointed nominated him as sole candidate and voted overwhelmingly to make him government chief.

Gen. Prayuth Chan-ocha had said after the May 22 military coup that the junta’s objective was to restore civilian democratic rule as soon as feasible, suggesting that new elections might be possible as soon as next year.

But by handing the reins of executive authority to Prayuth, his fellow officers in the National Assembly appeared to be signaling a longer phase of military rule even with the new prime minister’s declared intent to retire from the army next month.

All but three of the assembly’s 194 members voted to give Prayuth control of the government and the right to appoint a 35-member Cabinet. The appointment is contingent on approval of King Bhumibol Adulyadej, but as the coup was applauded by royalists and the Bangkok elite, the king’s endorsement was a foregone conclusion.

A BBC report from Bangkok, the capital, called the vote to cast a cloak of legitimacy over Prayuth’s leadership “the kind of rushed acclamation favored by dictatorships and communist parties of old.”

Prayuth, 60, said in brief remarks to the Bangkok Post that he hadn’t sought the role of head of government but accepted it because “I only want the country to move forward.”

The deeply conservative general now has virtually absolute power, with command of the powerful military and the authority to impose curfews, stifle political opposition and cut funding for the populist programs undertaken by former Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra and her billionaire brother, Thaksin Shinawatra, before her.

Thailand has been wracked by political turmoil since a 2006 coup deposed Thaksin and charged him with corruption, prompting him to flee to exile in the United Arab Emirates.

Yingluck was elected to succeed him when democracy was purportedly restored with a 2011 election, but she was confronted with constant opposition by politicians aligned with the Bangkok business elite. Massive protests in Bangkok for much of the year preceding the coup ignited occasional violence and disrupted transportation and government services.

Prayuth cast the coup as necessary to restore order and security in a country dependent on international trade and tourism, but the overthrow of elected leadership — the 12th since Thailand’s absolute monarchy ended in 1932 — was encouraged by the conservative political opposition that saw Yingluck’s subsidies to farmers in the impoverished north as pandering to secure votes.

The Tourism Authority of Thailand states on its website that the country relies on tourism for only 7 percent of its $200 billion gross domestic product. But foreign visits have dropped by at least 20 percent since the coup, threatening an important source of stability and employment.

AFP Photo/Pornchai Kittiwongsakul

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