IN SOUTHEAST ASIA, THAI and Cambodian troops exchange gunfire while Bangkok’s TV screens mysteriously go dark. Meanwhile, in Washington, DC, an announcement is made that Barack Obama’s birth certificate has been unearthed in faraway Hawaii. In London, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown have been informed they will not be invited to Friday’s Royal Wedding. And your iPhone is stalking you. Are all these unusual events happening so closely together coincidences? Of course. But how disappointing!
By TULSATHIT TAPTIM [The Nation – Thailand] – You can choose what to believe. All I can guarantee is that while there seem to be hidden agendas everywhere else, here we don’t have any ulterior motive. You will be getting our honest assessments of the situations.
The question on everyone’s mind is, “Why now?” Why the gunfire, artillery fire and bombs rattling the Thai-Cambodian border again all of a sudden? To that, nobody has the real answer, and even Indonesian Foreign Minister Marty Natalegawa knows this much for certain: Abhisit Vejjajiva and Hun Sen had better hurry. The two leaders must talk now before it’s too late.
I’d like to add that if Abhisit and Hun Sen don’t want to do so for peace’s sake, then it should be for sanity’s sake. The latest claims emerging from the Thai yellow shirts’ camp – that the border clashes are a conspiracy to draw Thai troops to the border so they will be too pre-occupied to stage a coup – have been bettered by Noppadol Pattama’s reaction. As if it was necessary, the close aide to Thaksin Shinawatra has come out to publicly deny that his boss was in Cambodia to command Cambodian troops at the border.
That’s how far things have gone. In addition to anxiety caused by the border tension, Thais are being told that everything is not what they think it is. Last week’s satellite malfunction that resulted in blank TV screens nationwide was purportedly not a technical error, but a well-executed warning to the Thai military that if they plot a coup, they won’t have any channel to broadcast it on. We have been hearing “coup” left, right and centre.
Continued at The Nation | More Chronicle & Notices.
