Dancing to nationalism’s outdated tune

Why should we let the Uighur migrants stay here and “breed litters of children”? says PM Prayut Chan-o-cha in his customary UNHCR-is-not-my-father tone. “Litters of children” — the unit term usually used to describe dogs and other animals, was employed without a blink here. In the original Thai, the PM used the word krok, a rougher, throatier and much more derogatory term than the English equivalent. Krok gives the image of animal lust. It signifies a large number of puppies crawling from the belly of a bitch. It’s not the term any mother would want to be heard describing their children.

Should the Uighurs stay here — or be sent to Turkey, or packed off to China, or pushed back to the desert from where they came — is one problem. The way we handle the press about this matter is another. And yet the most worrying problem is why our PM couldn’t negotiate the hot water of international migration with a more measured and mature attitude. His “krok of children” is not a gaffe, though it would give us consolation to think so. From the way he uttered it, forcefully and spontaneously, it didn’t seem like a conscious choice of words; it flowed out of him, it was subconscious, which is worse, because it points to something deeper, something symptomatic of the military doctrine that has become a mainstream agenda: Racebased nationalism, which validates us to treat others — it doesn’t matter if they’re illegal immigrants — as beneath us.

First it was the Rohingyas, now it’s the Uighurs. The brown-skinned boat people and the fair-skinned wanderers. Thailand is not the modern Silk Road but a limbo of porous borders — a transit point to uncertainty led not by Marco Polo but by pirates and soldiers. The Eid al-Fitr holiday is coming up next week, and these Muslims aren’t going to have a very joyful celebration to mark the end of Ramadan, either in Myanmar, or in China, or here.

Thailand insists that the decision to ship some 109 Uighurs back to China was done according to international practices after the migrants went through nationality checks — a claim that didn’t stick with the Turkish government, the UN and several rights groups, which issued rebukes and warned about persecution against the Muslim minority after their deportation. Historically, the Chinese government has subjected the Uighurs to campaigns of institutional assimilation (just like Thailand did to the southernmost provinces) as well as cultural and religious suppression, and many of them fled their homeland, while some undertook violent resistance. Nationalism in China, too, is race-based, and the Muslim ethnic group with a Turkish connection sees itself as second-class citizens in the Han-majority nation that has little tolerance for non-conformists. The cycle of suppression, resistance, migration and deportation is familiar.

But what does nationalism mean in the age of internationalism? Very little, it seems. China, with its geopolitical clout and money, perhaps can afford to shut its ears to human rights criticism. But Thailand has already been put on the spot with the slavery and Rohingya scandals, not to mention our awkward position as a 99% democracy (a proud invention). And now, our handling of the Uighur case seems clumsy. That’s not because the Foreign Affairs Ministry was wrong in saying it followed the right procedures, but because we’re so unaware that we’re dancing out of tune. In this age of deep connectedness, more and more issues that our government faces are no longer national — not even bilateral — but international. You can’t just shake hands with China over the Uighurs when other players also see this as their problem, from Turkey to the US, from the UN to the Islamic countries, and now everyone is at our throats because we didn’t acknowledge their stakes in the matter.

This has been the reality before the PM’s “litters of children” — the instant classic krok — quote, before the display of crude nationalism that was so out of touch with the rest of the world. It’s not asking too much of a leader that he think twice before saying things that resonate globally (isn’t that why we despise the Shinawatras so much, the brother’s arrogant boasts and the sister’s jumbled, Sydney-is-a-country blooper?). The PM spoke ill of the Uighurs in Thai, of course, but here is what his team should tell him right away: it doesn’t matter if he speaks in Thai or English or Tibetan, because this is a world where what you say in one language in one country means you’ve said it in every language everywhere.

Nationalism is useful in sports, but not on the international podium. This is the way the world works now, and those who’re stuck in the past only have themselves to blame.

Kong Rithdee is Deputy Life Editor, Bangkok Post.