Thailand floods: Some residents defy warnings and stay to help evacuees – Christian Science Monitor
October 27th, 2011
Don Mueang airport runway on Thursday afternoon (Photo: Simon Roughneen)
In a corner of the upstairs departure terminal at Bangkok’s now-closed Don Muang airport, Chutimas Suksai and six friends are taping empty water bottles together to attach as bouyancy support to a set of improvised bamboo rafts they were making.
Ms. Chutimas, an anthropology student from Thammasat Univerisity, has spent most of the past two weeks volunteering her time to help some of the hundreds of thousands of Thais affected by three months of rain and flooding, which has killed more than 360 people, with an estimated 1 million of Bangkok’s estimated 12 million residents already evacuated.
When Thailand Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra announced that the capital should brace for four to six weeks of flooding, citizens who stayed in Bangkok, such as Chutimas and her friends, started looking for ways to help people ride out what could be a long-lasting deluge. (more…)
Bangkok faces possible deluge – The Irrawaddy
October 27th, 2011
Thanadoldolwat Pornkhienthong, owner of the Supatra River House Restaurant, watches water rush in to his yard (Photo: Simon Roughneen)
http://www.irrawaddy./article.php?art_id=22334
BANGKOK – “I asked the BMA (Bangkok Metropolitan Authority) and the Army for help with sandbags, but no response”, said Thanadoldolwat Pornkhienthong, owner of the Supatra River HouseRestaurant on the west bank of the Chao Praya river.
The waterways winds it way through Bangkok, and from Mr Thanadoldolwat’s balcony, offers splendid views of the river – to the spectacular Khmer-style Temple of Dawn on the right and the Grand Palace across the way.
However, the upstairs promenade dining area is littered in drying clothes and furniture lifted up the 10 feet of stairs, after downstairs on Wednesday evening, water gushed in, covering the yard and sidestreet entrance to the restaurant in 2½ feet of water.
“I have to try protect myself”, said Thanadoldolwat, who despite living right on the often swollen river, says “I have never seen anything like this in the twenty years after I open this business”.
On Wednesday evening, after floods closed the Bangkok’s second airport and site of the country’s temporary flood management agency known as the Flood Relief Operations Centre (FROC), high waters on the Chao Praya ran down as far as the Grand Palace on the river’s east bank.
Asked on Wednesday whether all areas of Bangkok would be flooded, Thailand’s Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra said that it would depend on how dykes and barriers in the east, north and west of the city hold up. If walls in all three areas fell, the city would flood, she said, with different areas experiencing water levels between 10 centimetres to more than a metre. (more…)
Thailand floods: Water seeps into heart of Bangkok, barriers may not hold – Christian Science Monitor
October 26th, 2011
BANGKOK – As the most severe flooding to hit Thailand in decades began to enter the heart of Bangkok’s temple-dotted tourist-magnet riverside districts today, Thailand’s authorities conceded that there is a high possibility that most of the city’s sprawling 12 million population could be inundated.
Overflow from the Chao Praya in front of Bangkok's Grand Palace on Wednesday evening (Photo: Simon Roughneen)
Overflow from the Chao Praya river, which snakes through the city, washed into neighborhoods on both sides on Wednesday, threatening the hospital grounds on the west bank of the river where 84-year-old King Bhumibol Adulyadej is currently staying across, almost directly across from where the famous Grand Palace and Emerald Buddha are facing rising waters. (more…)
Exiles Want More Change Before Burma Given ASEAN Chair – The Irrawaddy
October 26th, 2011
http://www.irrawaddy.org/article.php?art_id=22326
BANGKOK — Recent reforms by the Burmese government are not enough to warrant the country’s taking the chair of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Asean) in 2014, say long-time opposition exiles.
The Burmese government is pressing to head the ten-state regional bloc, after being refused its turn to hold the rotating Asean chair in 2006. Incumbent Indonesia is sending Foreign Minister Marty Natalegawa to Burma to discuss the matter, prior to an upcoming Asean summit in Bali scheduled for Nov 17.
In the most recent of a series of high-profile moves aiming to demonstrate its reformist credentials, on October 13 the Burmese government permitted the release of 237 political prisoners—according to numbers given by the Thailand-based Assistance Association for Political Prisoners-Burma (AAPP). (more…)
Amid mixed messages, floods threaten Thailand’s economy – Christian Science Monitor
October 24th, 2011
Putting a flood barrier up at an entrance to Bangkok's Chatuchak market on Monday afternoon (Photo: Simon Roughneen)
http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Global-News/2011/1024/Bangkok-floodwaters-threaten-Thailand-s-economy
BANGKOK - Standing over the clanging hammers and ripping saws, Tinnakorn Rujinarong watched workmen bang together a yard-high barrier meant to keep looming floodwaters – which have killed over 350 people and swamped an area the size of Northern Ireland – out of one of the world’s biggest flea-markets and one of Thailand’s best-known attractions.
Most weekends, around 200,000 people sweat and haggle their way through the sauna-like narrow alleys running between Chatuchak Market’s 10,000 shops. “Around 100 million baht is spent here every weekend”, says Mr Tinnakorn, who is the market’s Deputy Director.
Across the city – which satellite images show to be a virtual island surrounded by floods to the north and the Gulf of Thailand to the south – shops are running out of drinking water and non-perishable food, with various chains saying that they are having difficulty in replenishing barren shelves as 10 million residents stock-up amid fears of a citywide deluge.
Barclays Capital estimates that the floods will shave almost 1% off Thailand’s economic growth for 2011, and whether Chatuchak opens next weekend is anyone’s guess. Walls were stood up at the market perimeter on Monday afternoon, after Bangkok city governor Sukhumbhand Paribatra told TV viewers last night that six additional city districts, including Chatuchak, should get ready to evacuate. (more…)
Finding Cannibals: filling the North Korea news gap – PBS Mediashift
October 22nd, 2011
http://www.pbs.org/mediashift/2011/10/filling-the-news-gap-in-north-korea294.html
Byoung-Keun (middle) at work at the DailyNK office in Seoul. Photo by Simon Roughneen.
SEOUL, South Korea — “I am always worried about security for those who report information to us from inside,” said Byoung-Keun, a North Korean working in Seoul as a journalist for The DailyNK, a news website focused on telling the world what is happening in possibly the world’s most closed-off society.
Byoung-Keun is a pseudonym, because the former North Korean state official cannot divulge his real name to PBS MediaShift. Doing so could lead to reprisals for family and former colleagues living in North Korea, or even an assassination attempt on him in Seoul, if other recent reports about defectors being targeted by Pyongyang are true.
In North Korea, Internet and cell phone use are restricted to senior government officials and foreigners — and then closely monitored. (more…)
Logs on the railroad – Asia Times
October 21st, 2011
North Korean soldiers keeps watch at checkpoint inside the demilitarised zone along the border with South Korea (Photo: Simon Roughneen)
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Korea/MJ26Dg02.html
After China detains activists helping would-be North Korean defectors, concerns grow that escape routes for those fleeing from North Korea might be shut down, with estimates suggesting the country’s gulag’s holds some 200,000 political prisoners.
SEOUL – “I was smuggled over the Yalu River into China”, recalls *So Yeon, a woman from Chongjin, a city in the now-decrepit industrial zone of northern North Korea,
A night-time crossing, over the Yalu or Tumen rivers that mark the North Korea-China frontier, is the usual means by which North Koreans flee their country, to what they hope will be a better life elsewhere.
Most hope to make it South Korea, by a roundabout, dangerous odyssey that usually involves a trek through China to either Mongolia or to Southeast Asia, without official papers and under constant fear of arrest and possible deportation back to North Korea (more…)
Myanmar to free more than 6,300 prisoners – Los Angeles Times
October 12th, 2011
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-myanmar-prisoners-20111012,0,7704676.story
By Mark Magnier and Simon Roughneen,
Reporting from Imphal, India, and Bangkok, Thailand— Myanmar announced plans Tuesday to release more than 6,300 prisoners in the latest of several modest reform steps taken by the long-isolated nation, although it wasn’t immediately clear how many of those to be freed are political detainees.
Human rights groups, dissident organizations and analysts welcomed the move, but said they remained skeptical that a fundamental change was underway. The military regime in Myanmar, also known as Burma, has ruled the country with an iron fist for decades.
“We’re basically dealing with the same creature, with slightly more enlightened posturing,” said Zarni, founder of the London-based Free Burma Coalition, an activist group, who uses one name. “We shouldn’t fool ourselves that the regime is driven by reformers.” (more…)
Thailand wades through worst flooding in decades – Christian Science Monitor
October 12th, 2011
Thailand’s floodwaters have already killed 269 people and submerged some 3.4 million acres of farmland to the north. And Bangkok’s estimated 12 million residents are bracing for another storm.
- Women fill sandbags along canal in Rangsit, Bangkok (Photo: Simon Roughneen)
Bangkok, Thailand. Shoveling sand into canvas bags, Thawatchai Siithundoin wipes the sweat from his brow and looks up at the darkening late afternoon sky.
“If it rains again, that canal will fill my house,” he says, pointing to the water lapping the roadside about four yards behind him in the northern Bangkok suburb of Rangsit. (more…)
Burma in the crosshairs as US, China & India Jostle for Asian Influence – The Irrawaddy
October 11th, 2011
Kurt Campbell speaks at Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok on Monday (Photo: Simon Roughneen)
http://www.irrawaddy.org/article.php?art_id=22236
BANGKOK—Discussing what he described as early stages of change in Burma, a senior US diplomat on Monday promised his country “will match their steps with comparable steps,” as expectations grow that Burma will release some of the country’s almost-2,000 political prisoners in the coming days.
Burma’s new National Human Rights Commission published an open letter on Tuesday, in which it “humbly requests the President, as a reflection of his magnanimity, to grant amnesty to those prisoners and release them from the prison.”
If the release happens, the US is likely to relax or end some of the economic sanctions levied against senior Burmese officials and business cronies.
Commenting on Burma’s recent decision to suspend operations at the US $3.6 billion Chinese-built Myitsone Dam in war-wracked Kachin State, Assistant Secretary of State Kurt Campbell said this development is one of several that “demand closer attention,” confirming that the US is “looking forward in the course of the next several weeks to continuing a dialogue that has really stepped up in recent months.”
Campbell termed the recent discussions between Burmese President Thein Sein and opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi as “very consequential,” and described the president as “a serious interlocutor.” (more…)
