Season of Fleeing

Monsoon rain has turned the mountain area lush green again. Seoson of rain can be very romantic time when you are under shelter and have nothing to worry about.

Watching pouring rains over the city, I recall those rainy times in border jungle. Also shower rains, over bamboo town of the refuge. Under that cloud, yet gave hipnotic atmostphere, the maladies were in the air.

Early this moth, while the people of Tha Song Yang District, Tak Province were starting their farming season, over three thousands Karen villagers from the other side of the border could not, but displaced by armed operation of the Burmese army against the Karen National Union.

Forests are the same green, the rains don't discriminate, but the humans do. Not by nature, the season of fear started.

While Thai army maintains to wait for figthing to stop and that refugees can return home, the rain keeps hitting the area, so does the shootings on the opposite sites.

I at odds feel the cold of a child's skin, whose eyes are same innocent with all those victims of changing season.

The curse of plastic nationhood

Literature review provides picture of the current state of particular field/topic of studies a researcher is working on. This process may give different loads of work in different subject but however indispensible for preventing another redundant or naive discovery. It somehow looks to be a never ending task, which could be used as justification to prolong this preliminary step. Procrastination! Myself.

It is often interesting to start a book with the Acknowledgment pages where authors elaborate their motives, inspiration and dedication of the work. Some pieces are as simple as to dedicate to their parents, family of their own, friends and beloved ones, or just a list of people of assistances, while somes boast its academic or ideological significances. Notwithstanding its argument or contribution, a book always has a purpose ! Agenda?

Pavin's book (A Plastic Nation: The Curse of Thainess in Thai-Burmese Relations) employed both historical studies and analysis of recent accounts on Thailand's contemporary foreign policy toward Burma.It highlights critical roles of Thailand's nationalism and cultural otherness toward its western neighbors policy. Invention of Burmese Image and and Artfacts of Thainess is argued to be political apparatus for Thai elites in achieving their interest. The celebration of selecting Thai norms and the contestation to international norms by Thai leaders of different periods are scrutinised through three controvercy issues in contemporary relations between Thailand and Burma; Ethnic Insugencies, Drug Trade, and Burma's Admission into ASEAN. Realities the media continues to cover every day.

They say you are what you read. It is hard to deny, perhaps. Pavin's acknowledgement to Thongchai for his influencing deconstruction of Thai nationhood reminds me one personal purpose of taking cause of study, to liberate oneself. Liberty ! Upon finishing A Plastic Nation, I started to assume meaning of the traffic board on his book's cover photo. It suggests readers for a direction, Stop !

"I am grateful to have learned from him [Thongchai Winichakul] that the sense of Thainess imbued in me is in fact mouldable and, in my own terms, rather plastic. And that, a long-established negative attitude toward the Burmese as historical adversary should be elimintaed, and Thai leaders must from now on discontinue to draw the face of a foreign enemy, such as Burma had served for centuries, in order to guarantee their legitimacy. If there were enemies of the Thai state, they were our own Thai leaders with their insatiable greed for private interest."

In search of 'cosmopolitanism' in Thai civil soceity

Burmese refugees have lived in camps, often for decades, being forced to depend on external aid, with restricted freedom of movement and limited livelihood that cause psychosocial effects, chronic family and community conflicts, while resettlement to the third country as the durable solution had not been permitted until very recently.

In spite of its debatable capacity to be more generous country of asylum, endured protection gaps and protracted refugees situation in Thailand concerned by humanitarian aid agencies worldwide demonstrates dilemma in the country’s ambition to play active role in international community.

Despite that the state has maintained strict policy of ‘temporary assistance’ to Burmese refugees and denial of rights to local integration, there prevails refugee support sentiment from the Thai civil society in their course of promoting social justice and good governance.

From this point I plan to examine existing discourse within the Thai civil society regarding Burmese refugees, political conflicts in Burma and concerning public policy. My preliminary question is that ‘whether there are adequate shared ideas, what kind of the shared ideas and how the shared ideas were constructed within the civil society, as in articulating support for their agenda of refugee hospitality?’

Considering that academic discourse can play an important role in norm making or introducing new ideas to the society for positive social change, my research is aimed to understand the evolution of the existing ideas and trends of social discourse to be adopted by the Thai civil society in engagement with the state regarding refugee issue, and how it will shape the country’s response to refugee problems.