Walls close in on Thailand’s poorest; virus hits economy
BANGKOK: Shuffling around their tiny slum home which is too small to stand up in, Thanapat Noidee and his wife Papassorn share donated noodles with their sons and worry about bills, as the coronavirus pushes Thailand’s poor deeper into penury. The wood and breeze-block hut which is their home stands in the heart of a Bangkok commercial district festooned with five-star hotels and upmarket restaurants.
They share the small space in the shadow of the nearby high-rise developments with their children Woraphat and Kittipat, aged six and seven respectively. Under the 1.2-metre-high (four feet) ceiling, the adults have to kneel to move around the single room which is the bedroom, living room and dining area.
Downstairs, a tap provides a shower and a flat concrete surface serves as a kitchen area, a space shared with rats which clamber over their washed dishes. Papassorn lost her job as a messenger as Thailand locked down to control the coronavirus in late March. “I have to borrow money for the electricity from my father and grandfather,” she says. “The school term opens again soon (July 1) and I have to find money for those expenses as well.”
Thailand’s parliament is due Sunday to vote on whether to approve a near-$60 billion stimulus to revive an economy battered by the pandemic. If agreed, it will be the biggest state cash injection in Thai history. Thailand has long paraded low unemployment as a symbol of its economic success. But millions like the Noidee family rely on informal work or day wages for survival, jobs imperiled by a feared 6-7 percent contraction in the economy. Two months after the lockdown and with the outbreak under control, Bangkok is gradually creeping back to life.
But Papassorn’s work has not returned while her husband has seen the roughly 1,000 baht ($31) he earns each day as a motorcycle taxi driver more than halved because of a fall in customers. The family have depended on the nearby Holy Redeemer Church for daily food handouts—a charity service which is being closed down as the city reopens. “Without food donations, I’ll have to fight harder for my family to survive,” said Thanapat as he moved on his knees inside his lodgings, occasionally knocking his head on the ceiling.— AFP
Fragility and humility
At the UN, there is a sense of a dangerous drift into new and dysfunctional territory. “In the past, when you had disagreements among members of the Council, it was compartmentalized,” said a UN official, speaking on grounds of anonymity. “So your adversary one day on a particular issue was your best ally the next day on another issue. What we see now is everything spilling over.
“So there are camps, or there are disagreements which just spill over from one issue to another,” the official said, clearly alluding to the situation in Hong Kong, where tough new Chinese security legislation has pitted the two leading permanent members of the UN against each other. “The tensions between the US and China are really problematic” for the world body, meaning the Security Council is “not able to move forward on a range of things,” the official added.
Several ambassadors shared that view. “There is a huge fracture in the global multilateral architecture right now. And it’s very serious,” said Olof Skoog, the European Union ambassador to the UN. “We are witnessing a polarization in the Security Council,” said Ambassador Christoph Heusgen of Germany, currently a non-permanent member of the council, alluding to an ever more bitter volley of tweets being exchanged by the US and Chinese missions. At a press conference Thursday, Guterres expressed his regret that the pandemic had not evoked a greater sense of humility from the big powers.
“If the present crisis shows something, it is our fragility. Collective fragility. When we are fragile, we should be humble. When we are humble, we should be united and in solidarity,” he said, in remarks directed to members of the Security Council. He then made it abundantly clear that he had in mind the United States and China—which as permanent Security Council members enjoy the veto power that greatly magnifies their influence. “I have never seen the Council’s work being paralyzed by (non-permanent) members,” he said. — AFP