Thailand Confidential

Piss in a Cup

My thirty-year-old son was visiting from the United States. It was Friday night and we planned to leave Bangkok in the morning by train to go to the rice-growing village near the Cambodian border where I was to be married on Monday. My son, Nick, is a Mormon, so he doesn’t drink, but I had some business to do with the owner of the Q Bar, one of the city’s most popular upscale nightclubs, so that was our evening destination.

Nick drank a Coke and I had a Heineken and it was about ten o’clock when we decided to leave. I opened the door and there, to my great surprise, stood a wall of Bangkok cops. I thought that there’d been a fight or perhaps even a shooting outside that we hadn’t heard. I excused myself politely and made to walk around the boys in brown and the officer nearest to me held up his hand in a manner that made it clear I wasn’t leaving. It was then that I noticed a table had been set up nearby and that on it were some paper cups.

“Uh, Nick,” I said, “you’re about to be told to piss in a cup. It’s part of the country’s anti-drug campaign. Everybody in the bar will now be tested for drugs. The cops will take us, one at a time, into the toilet and watch us as we give them a urine sample. They will then pour it into that flask of blue liquid on the table and if it turns purple, we’re going to miss the train.”

This sort of thing had been going on for some time as a part of the new prime minister’s crusade to make Thailand drug-free, a key part of what he called his “New Social Order.” Cops had been raiding bars for several months, conducting on-the-spot tests for two of the city’s favored drugs, amphetamines—called yaa baa, or “crazy medicine”—and ecstasy. Arrests had been few, but the inconvenience to the bars and their customers had been enormous; if the place had a good crowd, as the Q Bar did on weekends, it might be dawn before the last patron was released. I was glad we were first in line.

Nick and I did as we were told and then watched a cop pour the samples one at a time into the flask and stir it around. The color didn’t change and we were told we could depart. We stood around for a few minutes to watch. The cop emptied the flask following each test, poured in more of the blue liquid without any attempt to clean the flask, added the next poor soul’s urine, and swirled it around with the same swizzle stick that he’d used in ours. What if we’d tested positive? (A reaction that was known to be caused by numerous legal pharmaceuticals, such as anti-histamines.) Would the same unwashed flask and stirrer continue to be used, and contaminate the next sample?

It wasn’t a question that I felt compelled to ask and we walked home and the next morning we made our scheduled eight-hour train ride upcountry and on Monday, the first day of January, 2003, I was married.

Exactly one month later, the prime minister got serious and took his “War on Drugs” nationwide, promising a country the size of France with a population of more than sixty million that it would be completely drug-free in three months. (Don’t laugh. The same guy once said he’d end Bangkok’s traffic problems in six months. He was serving in another prime minister’s cabinet, five years earlier.) Lists of suspected drug users and dealers were compiled in every province at the Interior Minister’s order. Provincial governors and police were told that those who failed to eliminate a prescribed percentage of the names from their blacklists would be fired. In two months, the body count surpassed two thousand and the newspapers were accusing the cops of “extra-judicial killings.”

The police denied the charge and said the dealers were killing each other in battles over territory and to eliminate people who might snitch to the cops. The Interior Minister said that he didn’t like the use of the word “killed,” asking media to say “expired.” After that, the government continued to announce figures for suspects arrested—a figure reported to be over ninety thousand—but stopped releasing the number of deaths. At the end of the ninety days, when the Prime Minister declared his mission accomplished and now reported a body count of 1,612, the actual number was thought to be more than two thousand three hundred. By year’s end, the official number of dead dropped to 1,320, only fifty-seven of them reportedly killed by police.

The U.S. State Department, Amnesty International, the United Nations, national and international NGOs criticized Thailand harshly and in the first report by Thailand’s own National Human Rights Commission, created by a progressive new constitution, lamented what it called (quoting The Nation of August 6, 2004) “the drastic deterioration of civil liberties and the ever-growing, intertwined powers of the state and groups with vested interests.” The government was accused of fomenting a “culture of authoritarianism,” saying it had “committed gross human rights violations, particularly with its brutal war on drugs, in its quest to promote state power.”

The government’s response was to blame the commission for its “disservice” to the country, saying that its report had (now quoting Kavi Chongkittavorn, The Nation’s editor, August 9) “undermined the country’s international standing.” As for all those killed in the War on Drugs, the government ordered the police to conduct an investigation, giving them a month deadline. A year later, no report had been submitted.

Drugs have played a major role in Thailand’s history and its government. For centuries, the monarchy held a monopoly on the sale of opium (along with gambling, alcohol, and a national lottery) and not until 1954 was the residue of the poppy plant and its byproduct heroin outlawed, by which time the police themselves figured prominently in the trade. As chronicled in David K. Wyatt’s authoritative Thailand: A Short History (1984) and quoting a columnist who wrote under the name Chang Noi in The Nation (Jan. 20, 2003), the Golden Triangle was developing into the world’s primary area of production when the chief of the national police, General Phao Siriyanon, used his men to “move the goods from the Triangle to the world market. Police escorts met the convoys at the Burmese border and took them to Chiang Mai or Lampang. From there the goods traveled to Bangkok by train or plane. The marine police then guarded their transfer to freighters in the Gulf.

“In 1955 the police made a record capture of twenty [metric] tons of opium, and Phao himself collected a massive reward on behalf of an informer. When asked to display the haul, Phao said it had been thrown in the sea. The public disbelief almost undid him. On another occasion, a seized cache of high-grade opium turned out to be low-grade mud.”

It wasn’t until the 1990s—with the infusion of tens of millions of dollars from the United States, police and army raids on opium farms in the north coordinated by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency, and a royally supported crop substitution program—that the plant was marginalized as a source of income for mainly hill tribe minorities who had used opium for millennia not only as a cash crop but as their primary medicine.

About the same time, amphetamines swept across Thailand like a monsoon rain, quickly becoming the national buzz of choice. Simply and cheaply produced primarily in China and Burma, it found a market in Thailand that ranged from poor truck drivers and construction workers to rich university students. This was followed by ecstacy and, to a lesser degree, cocaine and LSD and ketamine, the last one easily manufactured, with ingredients purchased at the neighborhood pharmacy, by anyone with access to a microwave oven. This is what led to Thailand’s “piss in a cup” campaign.

According to Father Joe Maier, an American Catholic priest who worked with the poor in the Bangkok slums for more than thirty years, the War on Drugs was a complete and utter failure.

All it did, he said, was make the dealers smarter and quadruple the price of yaa baa, which drove those who could no longer afford it to seek other chemical highs—among them smoking powdered Tylenol and mosquito coil. Father Joe, whose Human Development Foundation administers Bangkok’s most modern AIDS hospice, also points to the damage done by the government’s refusal to introduce a needle exchange program for intravenous drug users, many of whom end up in his and the government’s care.

Marijuana, generally known in Thailand by its Hindi term, ganja, has a more benign history, although it was from the 1960s onwards a cash crop grown by the Thai “mafia” for export largely to Europe and North America; one of the favored smokes in the U.S. at that time was a stem of sticky flowers and buds, tightly tied around a sliver of bamboo and called Thai Stick. It was also commonly grown as an herb used in household and commercial cooking, along with basil, chilis and lemongrass, especially in Thailand’s rural eastern seaboard and poor northeast. Long after its cultivation and sale were made illegal, if you were a known customer in many small restaurants, you could have it added to your curry or soup at no extra cost.

Although such open use was curtailed and traffic of all illegal drugs was driven further underground by 2004, drug use continued in much the same way it did in hundreds of countries around the world, most remarkably in the United States, the world’s largest market. With the yaa baa factories getting support from the Myanmar (Burma) government and huge profits to be made either selling the stuff in Thailand or moving it through the Land of Smiles for export elsewhere. Although millions of pills were confiscated and more alleged dealers were shot while resisting arrest, and over sixty percent of court cases involved drugs, the traffic seemed little affected.

How did the average, non-drug using Thai citizen feel about all this? Mai pen rai seemed to be the phrase of the day: never mind, the recently deceased and those incarcerated in jails—built to hold about ninety thousand (now housing over two hundred and fifty thousand)—were a scourge, and Thailand was improved by their removal from the streets or life. NGOs, academics, and some of the media continued to grumble about the damage to human rights and the justice system, but few others seemed much to care.

At the same time, with the royal family’s financial support, a five thousand-six hundred-square-meter museum called the Hall of Opium opened in Golden Triangle Park in Chiang Saen, where the Mekong River separates Thailand from Laos and Myanmar. The aim, quoting the museum brochure, was “to further educate the public at large on the serious effects narcotics pose to the national economy and society as well as to the people’s physical and mental well-being.”

What once had been considered medicinal, or recreational, and a cash crop for an ethnic minority, was now simultaneously regarded as a threat to the nation’s health and, according to the Bangkok Post, “a world-class [tourist] attraction.”

Violence

Thais are non-confrontational, they are a people of accommodation, gentleness and peace. Thailand is the Land of Smiles, a place of harmony and courtesy where showing anger is a major taboo and the cool heart ( jai yen) is sought and praised. Thailand is where no matter what happens, you say, “Mai pen rai.” Never mind. Que sera, sera. Water off my back. And get on with your life.

Buddhism says you can’t so much as kill a fly; Buddhists will not work in the abattoirs slaughtering pigs and water buffalo for the family table. Unlike other “religions,” throughout its peaceful march of two thousand five hundred years, blood has not been shed in the name of the Buddha. Ninety percent of the Thai population is Buddhist.

So why is there so much violence?

Why is there so much cruelty and savagery in Thailand’s history? In what is the country’s most popular film, Suriyothai, generally agreed to be an accurate depiction of Thailand’s early royal dynasties, numerous enemies were decapitated and a child-king was beaten to death with a sandalwood club after being placed in a cloth bag so that the executioner’s weapon would not make contact with royal flesh. Why is there this legacy of brutality?

Why, more than a dozen years after the uprising of 1992, is Thailand still puzzling over the deaths of students who were shot in street protests, still demanding the names of those responsible, and an explanation for what happened to the many still “missing”?

Why are rape and domestic violence and pedophilia and other forms of abuse of women and children so rampant at all levels of Thai society? (According to a survey by the United Nations Development Fund for Women, forty four percent of Thai women had experienced physical and sexual assaults by their spouses and, in 2003, the Thailand Research Fund said forty six percent of children were attacked verbally and physically.)

Why is the national sport, Muay Thai—kickboxing as it’s known in the west—a part of every Thai male’s military training, and as one of the world’s most brutal forms of one-on-one combat, responsible for so many fatalities? At least one a week, according to one authority.

Why do so many of the trade and technical schools have rivalries that turn into gang-like “wars” that result in students getting killed?

Why do so many young men kill themselves racing motorcycles on public streets?

Why do so many Thais enjoy chicken fights and battles between fighting kites and bulls and beetles and Siamese fish?

Why do magazines and newspapers publish so many gruesome photographs of corpses, and why is the most popular ghost in movies a woman’s head flying through dark woods, trailing intestines?

Why are so many business disagreements resolved when one party hires a gunman?

Why are so many canvassers and other political workers and community leaders killed during the run-up to an election?

Why, from 2001 and 2004, were sixteen environmental activists murdered for opposing what they considered uncaring development by prominent politicians and businessmen? (All the cases remain unresolved.)

Why are extra-judicial killings matter-of-factly accepted as a part of the Thai way of life (and death)?

In 1996, six suspected drug dealers were executed while in police custody in Suphan Buri minutes after they had surrendered in front of television cameramen and photographers. The men were then taken back into the house where they’d held some hostages (who had been freed before the six surrendered), gunshots were heard, and when the police emerged, they said the men were killed in self-defense.

This wasn’t an isolated case. According to statistics from the Ministry of the Interior, ninety cases of extra-judicial killings were reported in 1995; forty-eight in 1996; sixty-eight in 1997; and forty-seven in 1998. Three years later, in The Nation (July 25, 2001), a front page story was headlined, “Police Death Squads Run Riot.” What followed sounded like I’d gone to sleep the night before in Bangkok and awakened in the morning in Bogota or Baghdad.

“Police-backed death squads are executing suspected drug traffickers in the lower Northeast,” the story began, naming the part of Thailand where I have a house and family, “and intend to kill as many as one thousand people this year, the region’s police chief said yesterday.” The Region 4 chief, Lt. Gen. Pichai Sunthornsajjabul, was then quoted as saying, “Our target is to send one thousand traffickers to hell this year, to join some 350 before them.” Sure enough, in a program called “Shortcut to Hell,” three men suspected of dealing amphetamines were found dead a few kilometers from my house a few weeks later.

The chief explained that an anti-drug “alliance” comprising police, soldiers, government officials, civilians, and members of “private organizations” had been working as an intelligence-gathering arm of the regional police. Once the alliance’s tips were confirmed, he said, police would consider whether there was enough evidence to prosecute.

“If there’s not enough evidence to take legal action [but we are sure they are involved in the drug trade],” The Nation quoted the Lieutenant General as saying, “drastic measures will be taken by members of the alliance. We have applied legal means, political science and even Buddhism, but the [drug] problem only seems to be getting worse. Now it’s time to rely on [the]

Death Angel. Of course, it’s a legally delicate means, but it’s the path we have to take to bring peace back to society.”

There were some twenty million people under his jurisdiction, he concluded, and “if a thousand social troublemakers go missing, I don’t think it will cause anyone any problem.”

The next day, Pichai denied that summary executions were occurring under his jurisdiction, or that he condoned such a practice. He blamed the deaths on armed vigilantes. The Nation stood by its story and, soon after, the Bangkok Post quoted a commander attached to the Muang Loei district police station (in the northeast, near the Laos border) as saying his men had killed sixty six suspected drug traders who resisted arrest between January and September (2001). Another eleven were reported missing.

In 2003, the prime minister declared a nationwide “War on Drugs.” Ninety days later, an estimated two thousand five hundred suspected drug dealers and abusers were shot dead. [See “Piss in a Cup,” page 119.] A year later, in what appeared to be separatist incidents in Thailand’s southern provinces, another five hundred were killed.

Every country has its bad cop stories and incidents of ugly violence. My own country of origin, the United States, surely is one of the most brutish and homicidal in recent history (dating from the 1700s). But no one ever said America was a peace-mongering nation. The U.S. is the biggest bully on the block nowadays and it seldom lets the world forget that, sending its peace-keeping missions and unilateral war-making troops wherever it decides, even when the United Nations calls its actions illegal. It’s also the world’s number one exporter of weaponry, has the highest per capita ownership of handguns, refuses to sign the nuclear proliferation and international land mine treaties, has the world’s largest military defense budget, etc., etc., etc.

Thailand, on the other hand, is known for its social and cultural restraints on direct confrontation. And with good reason. Because it is non-threatening, most of the time. I think most people agree that Bangkok may be one of the few major cities in the world where it is reasonable to say that no matter where you are, or when, you are comparatively safe. At least from muggings and the sort of street crime so common elsewhere that it doesn’t even make the morning papers.

But there’s this high incidence of and fascination with violence in Thailand. Why?

Kanjana Spindler, assistant editor, editorial pages, wrote in her weekly Commentary in the Bangkok Post (February 19, 2003), “The question comes to mind of just how violent a society we are. After all, we claim to be a predominantly Buddhist nation and if most people claim to subscribe to Buddhism’s basic tenets then we shouldn’t tolerate violence against one another at any cost. In reality, of course, we are probably much less Buddhist than we might like to claim.”

Dr. Kriengsak Charoenwongsak, the executive director of the Institute for Future Studies for Development, a regular contributor to the Bangkok Post, believes much of the popular manifestations of violence, such as Muay Thai, “is catharsistic: it allows people to vicariously satisfy their inner drives to succeed at any cost including untempered aggression. Instead of fostering feelings of pity on those weaker than ourselves, boxing is the practice of finding satisfaction in seeing the opposition being completely crushed, something one cannot do in real life because it is against moral standards and the law. Subconsciously, people who like boxing accept the idea that hurting other people is normal.”

William J. Klausner, a former professor of law and anthropology at Thammasat and Chulalongkorn Universities and an ex-editor of the annual publication of the Buddhist Association of Thailand, agrees. In Reflections on Thai Culture, published by The Siam Society (1981), he said that to fully understand the Thai personality, “we must appreciate that the ‘cool heart’ and the ubiquitous smile are quite often merely cultural masks covering emotional concerns related to dignity, face, perceived status. There is strain and tension; and release is sought, at least initially, through indirect methods. When these techniques are no longer psychologically satisfying or effective, extreme forces of violence may well result.”

Which makes Thailand sound like just about everywhere else on earth.

The Hustlers

One of the things I enjoy most about the Lonely Planet guides to any traveler destination is the section that appears early in the book about what it calls, almost whimsically, “Dangers & Annoyances.” This is the list of warnings given in an introductory section called “Facts for the Visitor” better known for its advice about “When to Go… What to Bring… Holidays & Festivals… and Things to Buy.”

“Although Thailand is in no way a dangerous country to visit,” the section begins in a recent edition, “it’s wise to be a little cautious…” Indeed. There follow warnings about women traveling alone, guests leaving valuables in hotel safes, credit card fraud, drugs and druggings, assault, insurgent activity and the violent Malay-Muslim movement in Thailand’s south… and in the nearby pages on “Health,” there are further cautions about everything from sunburn, prickly heat, and snakes to dysentery, cholera, viral gastroenteritis, hepatitis, typhoid, worms, schistosomiasis, rabies, TB, diptheria, bilharzia, malaria, dengue fever, Japanese encephalitis, bedbugs and lice, leeches and ticks, and a supermarket of STDs and HIV/AIDS

One wonders why anyone gets on a plane.

Yet, for me, the biggest bummer are the touts and the scams. It doesn’t matter if the visitor is a backpacker staying in a five-dollar-a-night guesthouse or a businessman lodging in a five-star hotel, there are hard dollars and euros and yen to be spent and dozens of Thais lined up to take them, sometimes by any means possible. “Thais are generally so friendlly and laid-back,” Lonely Planet says, “that some visitors are lulled into a false sense of security that makes them especially vulnerable…”

“I’ve been coming to Bangkok for more than twenty-five years,” a friend who stays at one of those high-end riverside hotels told me, “and I have to say, it’s not as bad as India yet, but the way I’m bothered on the street by people who want to sell me something, for sure that that’s the way this country’s going. I bet I was approached twenty-five times today. It’s going to kill tourism, eventually.”

He’s right, of course, at least about the more aggressive hustlers, con artists and vendors. It might be mentioned that my friend’s quarter century in Asia was spent in the travel industry, so I think he knows what he’s talking about.

Whenever I travel, I miss Bangkok and I’m always glad to be “home” again, but I dread the journey’s end: getting from the airport to my flat. If I forget to give the driver my destination in Thai, chances are about fifty-fifty that he’ll try some kind of con: “forget” to turn on the meter or say it’s broken, fail to give me my change when passing through an expressway toll booth, or take the long way round to keep the meter running.

It’s worse, as my friend said, on the street. How many visitors are scammed by tuk-tuk and taxi drivers and freelancers on foot into visiting a jewelry shop owned by an “uncle” or a “cousin” who has a special sale going; others are told a new government tax will increase the price in just two days, etc. This happens with such frequency—and the gems and jewelry always turn out to be worth far less than what the sucker pays—a government office has been established to handle the complaints.

Imtiaz Muqbil, a travel columnist for the Bangkok Post, wrote (June, 2002) that tourism officials admitted that “cheating and fraud is the biggest source of complaints they get internally. Jewelry shops overcharge visitors by several times the actual amount, mostly in order to pay the hefty commissions given to guides, tour bus drivers and the owners or managers of tour operating companies.

“Shopkeepers generally know they have that one chance to squeeze visitors; a tourist is not generally considered a repeat customer. Even though they blame themselves for not having been more careful, they exact revenge by going back home and spreading the word among friends and colleagues.”

What my friend was talking about is worse. It’s not just a tired old con that includes telling the tourist over-valued gems that will kill the golden goose, but the constant hassle of walking along a shopping street, where vendors—whose stalls already occupy most of what should be pedestrian space—beckon and call and hold out their hands as if to say hello; the automatic response is to shake hands, but then try to get yours back. Making eye contact or glancing at the goods brings the vendor to your neck like a hawk.

Patpong at night may be the worst. Many visitors go there exclusively for the night market, but that doesn’t deter the touts who stand outside the sex venues. “Come inside! No cover charge! Take a look!” they cry. And if you’re a single male or in a group of males, touts hold up brochures for massage parlors or merely whisper, “Want lady? Want man? Want boy?” While others hold up signs announcing ‘PUSSY PING-PONG SHOW, PUSSY CIGARETTE SHOW, PUSSY COLA SHOW…” Numerous bars in Patpong and elsewhere also station women outside whose job it is to physically pull and push men toward the doors.

I’m not without compassion. I’ve lived in Thailand long enough to know that the touts and cabbies and street merchants are extraordinarily poor. One of my closest friends is an American Catholic priest who has lived and worked in the slums for more than thirty years and I’m down there nearly every week with him, so I know how many of these people live, and how precarious their survival may be.

I still don’t like being pestered and hustled, and I don’t think anyone else does, either. Thailand seems to be growing ravenous in its attempt to pull more and more money from its visitors, in ways that seem not just larcenous, but mean-spirited. National parks and numerous privately operated tourist attractions now have a double tier system where foreigners sometimes pay several hundred percent more to enter than someone with a Thai face. Dress codes for some of the most popular visitor destinations—the Grand Palace, for one—require foreigners to wear sandals that cover the heel—“approved” sandals are for rent in a shop nearby—while Thais may enter wearing any sort of footwear or none. (The barefoot Buddha, an Indian by birth, would have been turned away.) Until Summer 2002, a foreigner’s mobile phone wouldn’t work in Thailand, part of the fallout from the monopoly that controlled the industry, a concession held, incidentally, by the man who is now the prime minister. Many laws are enforced only for visitors, police usually accepting a small contribution, for instance, instead of the full two-thousand-baht fine for littering. When shopping on the street, a foreign face automatically doubles or triples the price.

It is as if every form of banditry is directed against foreigners, not just by the greediest of freebooters who probably think of themselves as entrepreneurs, but also by the authorities. For a time, many visitors from China—Thailand’s fastest growing source of tourists—were being taken such advantage of, the Chinese government threatened to put Thailand on a don’t-go-there list for its citizens unless the independent package tour business was cleaned up.

That put some agencies out of business, but complaints generally go nowhere. “The Thai police are usually of no help whatsoever, believing that merchants are entitled to whatever price they can get,” said Lonely Planet. “The main victimizers are a handful of shops who get protection from certain high-rankling government officials. These officials put pressure on police not to prosecute or to take as little action as possible.”

The foreigners are not totally blameless. Most shoppers buying designer gear and computer software and other counterfeit goods at flea market prices know the stuff is bogus, so they have no legitimate complaint when the forty-dollar Rolex watch stops ticking as soon as the plane takes off for home. While many gem buyers, motivated by personal greed, choose to believe the lie that the stuff will have greater resale value back home.

Still, for more than a decade, tourism has been one of Thailand’s main revenue sources and since the financial collapse of 1997, many officials have come to regard its expansion as the economy’s savior, rather than institute the reforms that might fix some of the problems that led to the crash.

Change sometimes comes to Thailand as slowly as it can come rapidly, depending on what’s to be altered and who benefits. Because they’re so rampant, and pervasive, dishonesty and fraud will not be easy to tackle. “Yet,” wrote Imtiaz Muqbil, “it could have a more devastating impact on the country’s image because it flies directly in the face of tourist propaganda which generically presents Thai people as being friendly, hospitable and good-natured.

“Having thus been lulled into a sense of complacency, visitors find themselves doubly shocked, annoyed and frustrated; they feel cheated by the incident itself as well as by the official literature which sought to convince them otherwise.”

The Bodysnatchers of Bangkok

The sounds of windscreens shattering, car parts crumpling, skulls bursting, guns banging away, screams sailing into the night are still echoing when the city’s bodysnatchers arrive. These are the Buddhist “rescue” crews who scrape up victims of violence on many of Thailand’s city streets, helping the police identify the still warm deceased, arranging and paying for final rites and cremation if no one claims the corpse. The Buddhists believe they make merit this way.

Call it instant karma.

Most modern cities elsewhere have public ambulance services. In Bangkok, and in other Thai cities, where only a few private hospitals have such modern conveyances, a number of Buddhist foundations take up the considerable slack. In Bangkok, the largest and oldest, Poh Teck Tung, is located in Chinatown. For eighty years, this outfit has kept its vehicles on the road, using pickup trucks to transport the bodies to a hospital or the morgue until they were replaced a few years ago by air conditioned vans equipped with sirens and flasher lights.

The second largest and oldest is Ruam Katanyoo, which is more Thai than Chinese in its membership and until 1995, its members competed for bodies with Poh Teck Tung, the rival teams sometimes getting into fist-fights over who got the corpses and the merit that came with the higher body count. Finally, the city government divided the metropolitan area into zones and gave the foundations schedules whereby they’d alternate coverage so no one would miss a regular turn in the most active areas.

My plan was to spend a night with Poh Teck Tung with a photographer for an English magazine. Our driver—wearing a mustard-colored jump suit covered with Thai and Chinese lettering— explained the routine. The crews worked eleven-hour shifts, six days a week, and waited for calls at assigned locations, usually petrol stations where there were convenience stores for buying coffee and snacks. There, they monitored their police radios and sped off to any crime scene or accident in their zone, often arriving before police. Victims were taken to the nearest hospital, dead or alive—the deceased to be collected at the end of the shift and transported to the city morgue. They were called “rescue” teams, but they only received five days of paramedic training and there wasn’t so much as a first aid kit in the van. Meat wagons was more like it; in Thailand, better than no wagon at all.

Some said the workers took the job not for the excitement or karma but the riches. There have been reports of money and jewelery “lost” while traveling. The foundations deny this. After all, wouldn’t that wipe out the good karma?

The first night we sat in the petrol station for eight hours without a call. We started at seven and by midnight, we were listening to a radio phone-in show for that part of the Thai population—puzzling in its size—that enjoys gore. In the absence of any real violence, we listened to other people describe their favorite accidents, those they had witnessed or their own.

At two a.m., I bought a beer, thinking that might trigger an accident in the way that stepping into the bathtub causes the phone to ring. My photographer friend, Jonathan, a Brit who spoke better Thai than English, worked his way through several bags of crisps. Our driver gave himself a pedicure. We went home at five.

The second night the photographer voiced what I’d been thinking: “Is it okay to want somebody to get hurt or die? I mean, if it’s going to happen anyway…”

“Yeah,” I said, “and why can’t it happen before midnight?”

The call came at midnight. The scene was less than a kilometer away, but when we arrived there was only an overturned Vespa and a puddle of blood. The victim had been taken to a hospital by the coppers. A near miss for us, but from the size of the puddle, maybe the last miss for the Vespa driver.

After that, nothing. Same thing the third night. By now I was overdosing on junk food, too, and drinking far too much beer, and the photographer and I were beginning to tell each other the same stories.

The next three nights we shifted gears and hung out in a press room with reporters who cover crime and accidents for the Thai newspapers, who range over the whole city. They watched television and played cards and the only action was on TV. Jonathan and I wondered if we might hire ourselves out to ward off danger. Obviously, no one got maimed or killed on our watch.

So we returned to the bodysnatchers, who told us about a legendary ten-meter stretch of highway where so many died—it’s believed the ghosts of the dead were causing the new accidents. (Where, I wanted to ask, but thought that might seem rude.) Our driver also reminisced about the time when a truck bomb killed nearly a hundred people outside the city; everyone got in on that one, he said.

We were riding with a different Poh Teck Tung unit this time and when we started out at seven o’clock, it was a Friday night and it was raining and it was the last day of the month: payday. For sure, the driver said, we’d get something smeared across the macadam tonight. He predicted at least two serious accidents.

It was nearly midnight when I tried the buy-a-beer trick and with the first mouthful, the driver called, “Let’s go!”

Ten minutes of grand prix driving followed, siren announcing our importance, me sitting in the back on the floor with the number two guy, braced as we dodged at high speed through traffic. When we arrived there were two other rescue units on site already (from small, neighborhood foundations), along with a crowd of about two hundred spectators and police, who told us two men were taken away, the driver to a hospital with serious injuries, the other, injured slightly, to the police station to explain why he and his two mates stole the car and then drove it into a concrete telephone pole. A third man was barely conscious and wedged beneath the savagely crushed car’s front end and a rescue worker was holding an IV bottle with the drip stuck into the man’s arm as others wheeled the “iron jaws” into place to pry open the mangled iron to get to him.

The press was there, too, pushing forward to capture as much blood on film as possible. The police politely moved aside for them. On the way back to the petrol station, the man sharing the floor in the back with me gave me a hearty thumbs up and a happy grin. We settled down to another wait. I bought another beer.

At twelve fifty five a.m., we were off again, this time to where a pickup truck broad-sided a sedan. All drivers and passengers were on the way to a hospital and as we returned to the petrol station there was another call, this one to pick up three corpses, all dead on arrival following the car-truck accident.

The first two bodies, a man and a woman, were laid out on the emergency room floor and were being wrapped in blotting paper to catch the leaking fluids and then were trussed up in a muslin cloth. The third was in another hospital nearby, also on the floor, apparently naked, her body covered with paper toweling, the top of her head a mess, her eyes and mouth open, expressing something between horror and surprise.

Our driver took pictures of the corpses after scrawling their names on a piece of paper and positioning it beneath their chins, like the names held under the arrested in police photographs. In this case, the final I.D. was taken lying down.

One at a time, the bodies were carried to the ambulance where they were fingerprinted and stacked in the rear. I squeezed into the front with the photographer and the number two guy hunkered down with the corpses in the back.

At three a.m., we arrived at the Wang Tong Lung police station, where our guys dragged the bodies to the rear of the vehicle one at a time and opened the top end of the muslin wrappings so a cop could take pictures with his little point-and-shoot camera. I was reminded how the Thais so love to take pictures (no matter what the occasion) and wondered if the cop showed these to his friends over drinks. One of the bodies had to be removed from the rescue unit to get at the others, causing a head wound to re-open and send blood running into the street, providing something of interest for the stray dogs in the morning, perhaps. In an apartment building opposite, a half-dozen people stood on verandahs in their pajamas and watched. This probably was a nightly occurrence for them; better than Thai TV.

Once the pictures were taken, the cop returned to watch a football game on the station house TV and after re-stacking the corpses, our guys spent half an hour filling out forms. Jonathan, who’d been here before on assignment for another magazine, told me it’s the same for homicides, the corpses scraped off the floors or lifted from beds or bathtubs, wherever murder or suicide occurs: the cops let Poh Teck Tung do all the paper work.

At four a.m., at last we were at the end of the evening’s bloody highway, where the bodies were transferred to stainless steel gurneys and wheeled into the morgue at Police General Hospital. There they became statistics and in the morning, relatives would be notified if any could be found.

It Didn’t Happen Because I Wasn’t There

Several years ago, when I was researching a story about foreign movie-making in Thailand, I was invited to visit the set of Cutthroat Island, a Hollywood-style pirate flick starring Geena Davis and Matthew Modine then being filmed in Krabi. The day before I was to leave Bangkok, my visit was cancelled and I was told that bad weather had caused the shoot to fall behind schedule, prompting the director to close the set to all visitors.

Later, I learned the truth. The film’s assistant director had jumped out of a hotel window to his death and the Hollywood film company didn’t want the story to leak out. Nor, of course, did the hotel or the Tourism Authority of Thailand.

How could an assistant director of a motion picture produced by a major American film company commit suicide in such a dramatic manner and the story not get into the press, at least locally? Easy. The police were paid to keep a lid on their reports, and if some lucky or enterprising local reporter stumbled onto the story, he was taken to lunch and given a fat envelope, too.

This sort of thing occurs all the time in Thailand. It’s a variation of the old story about a tree falling in a forest with no one present to hear it, so did it make a sound? If there’s nothing in the press or on TV, it didn’t happen. Dozens of foreign visitors die in hotels and restaurants and while shopping every year and rarely is there any news of it. In late summer of 2001, a friend returned from Koh Tao, telling me that the bodies of two foreigners washed ashore not far from where he was staying, one of them missing his feet and hands, but there was nothing in the press about it. In the eight years I’ve lived in Bangkok, I know of half a dozen foreign deaths, heart attacks and suicide being the most common cause, and they went unreported, too. Why? It might adversely affect tourism in some way. The police notify the relevant embassy and the embassy handles the case like a pussycat buries its poop.

Another, more shocking example of what I’m talking about came a few years ago when there was a serious outbreak of dysentery, causing a number of deaths and more than a hundred hospitalizations. Do you think anyone was warned away from the epidemic area? The press was told that there had been some diarrhea, that’s all. While tourism proceeded undisturbed.

A more recent case—perhaps the worst of all—surfaced in 2003 and 2004 when bird flu swept across much of Asia, resulting in the death of hundreds of millions of chickens and many humans as well. As was later learned, the first chickens died in Thailand in October, 2003. It was established as early as November that the disease was indeed bird flu, but Thailand’s first report to the World Organization for Animal Health was not submitted until January 23, 2004. By that time, over ten million birds had been slaughtered. Up to that point, the truth was covered up as government spokesmen blamed cholera and bronchitis, common diseases that wipe out chicken flocks fairly frequently.

Why? It was, as reported by Kavi Chongkittavorn, an editor of The Nation (Jan. 26, 2004) “feared that the news would cause panic among farmers and damage the national economy. Last year,” he continued, “Thailand exported poultry worth US$1.75 billion a year to Japan and the rest of world. After all, the disease’s discovery came hot on the heels of the government’s confident announcement that economic growth in 2004 would ratchet up to eight percent. Anything deemed damaging to this noble goal had to be swept under the carpet.”

It wasn’t until the truth was revealed—and numerous countries banned imports of poultry from Thailand—that the government shifted gears. In his opening address to an international conference on the bird flu on Jan. 29, Thailand’s prime minister acknowledged that “mistakes and errors” had been made in the handling of the crisis, but insisted that his administration was committed to full transparency in combating the problem.

Thus it might have come as a surprise to some when just six months later, in July, 2004, as the disease returned to Thailand’s flocks, the Livestock Development Department again failed to issue a warning. The earlier cover-up had resulted in a huge public relations disaster and one had to wonder why officials took the same tack again. Livestock chief Yukol Limlaemthong had an imaginative response and was quoted in the Bangkok Post (July 7, 2004) as saying, “We did not inform the public about the new outbreak because we assumed that Thai people no longer care about the re-emergence of bird flu, which has become an ordinary incident here.”

Had enough? Wait. There are two phrases that appear in the press, so often, in fact, they’ve become amusing cliches. Whenever there is a highway accident involving a bus or truck and there is numerically significant loss of life, as happens more frequently than people living outside Thailand might believe possible, the story in the newspapers almost always includes the sentence, “The driver fled the scene.”

I’ve seen this happen, even without loss of life involved. I was in a taxi stopped in traffic when the truck driver in front of us for some reason reversed his vehicle and backed the rear of the truck onto the hood of the cab. By the time the cabbie had reached the truck cabin, the door was swinging wide and the truck driver was long gone, as if he’d said while fleeing, “I wasn’t there, so it didn’t happen, erase, erase, erase.”

The second sentence appears in crime stories when the charges filed against a prominent person are dropped, as almost in every case they are. Why? “Insufficient evidence.”

Some more of the denial is cosmetic. When the World Bank chose Bangkok for a meeting of ten thousand delegates in 1992, the city erected a US$92-million convention center named for the Queen and then issued eviction orders to residents of an adjacent slum. When residents threatened to stage a noisy protest outside the meeting hall, a compromise allowed them to stay so long as bright murals were painted on the corrugated walls of their shacks. The government also banned all vendors from sidewalks and declared a public holiday to make it appear that the city didn’t have a traffic problem. (Thereby clearing the air somewhat, as well.) The same ploy has been used for other international gatherings.

My favorite came in 2003 when Thailand hosted the Asia Pacific Economic Council (APEC) and a special Royal Barge Procession was staged on the Chao Phrya River. Delegates were to view this impressive cultural display from the Thai Navy’s headquarters on the west side of the river. On the opposite side was a slum, so the Bangkok Metropolitan Administration, in a last-minute effort to enhance the capital’s landscape, erected what arguably was the world’s largest banner. It featured an image of the Grand Palace and welcomed the delegates to lovely Bangkok. Over half a kilometer in length and about the height of a four-story building, the slum was thus disappeared.

Thailand is not alone in donning the loose robes of denial when it feels better than the restrictive girdle of fact. Denial is a handy state of mind for people in all walks of life in all corners of the planet for every reason imaginable. Criminals routinely deny everything that seems threatening to their reputations and freedom. Parents deny that they have a drug or alcohol dependency, or a problem at home with the kids. Scapegoats are found for mistakes in business or on the sports playing field. On a larger scale, mass killings, even genocide, go unreported.

“It wasn’t me” and “It wasn’t my fault” seem to be ingrained in whatever part of the brain or moral code that has anything to do with assuming responsibility. Disavowal or refutation of any charge, no matter how large or small, seems as automatic a response as the kick that comes when a doctor taps a rubber hammer on a person’s knee.

Some call denial cowardice, but truly it is only an act of survival, a simple tactic used by the guilty for millennia. Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton and many more were caught with their pants down, either figuratively or literally, have sought similar refuge. Remember, “I am not a crook”? And, “I did not have a sexual relationship”? In those cases, the truth eventually prevailed.

Thailand, on the other hand, seems to have mastered denial in ways challenged only, perhaps, by the Japanese. (Another story for another time.) For it is here, in the Land of Smiles, where, contrary to all the tee-shirts that say otherwise, shit doesn’t happen. Or if it does, it’s not brown and it doesn’t stink.

A couple of years ago, there was a big controversy over whether or not school history books should be updated to include the pro-democracy demonstrations of May 1992 that led to soldiers shooting protestors in the street, leaving more than a hundred dead or missing. Twelve years later, the whereabouts of the missing were still not known and official reports reluctantly released to the public under a new freedom of information act were heavily censored, with the names of officers in charge of the action blacked out. The Bangkok Post described it as “hidden violence in a culture of peace.”

After much to-ing and fro-ing, with liberals and academics demanding the truth about what happened and those responsible still trying to cover their asses and save their collective face, Education Minister Panja Kesornthong held a press conference. After a long and sincere contemplation, he announced that the ministry had decided not to include anything about the incidents in the new textbooks then being prepared because, he said, with a straight face, it “wasn’t history.”

And why wasn’t it history?

Because, the minister explained, all the people involved in the tragic events weren’t dead yet.