THE BIG ISSUE: SEARCHING FOR SANITY
>> It now is pretty much confirmed by all available sources that the world is nuts. Last week was just more proof piling up.
A bomber or bombers or gang got angry that their piffling PVC pipe bombs were being treated with disrespect all over. The Bangkok police chief said a bomb didn’t even exist. So they set one off where no one couldn’t notice — in an army-run hospital waiting room named after ex-army commander and current phuyai in charge of all security, Gen Prawit Wongsuwon. It wounded 25 mostly elderly patients.
On the other side of the world, brothers in arms with equally missing morals outdid that.
Manchester Arena was sold out. Inside there were 20,099 people full of love, empty of hate and united in the single goal of watching an excellent performer, the US Nickelodeon starlet and Beauty
and the Beast singer Ariana Grande. There was also one other guy who didn’t believe any of that.
He was (emphasising “was”) Salman Abedi, former Libyan “freedom fighter” and it took him one hundredth of a second to cut through all that stuff about hashtag love by cutting down more than 100 mostly teenage Grande fans, killing 22 as they flocked out of the show, ready to head home.
He was wearing a quite sophisticated bomb from a talented bombmaker, and he had instructions from an expert on just where to go and stand to find and kill the most young people he could.
What Manchester and the Phramongkutklao Hospital bombings were not is what the UK Labour Party’s rising star Yvette Cooper and the Royal Thai Army commander Chalermchai Sitthisart called them: “A first”. It is untrue that, as the Liv
erpool Echo editorialised, “the architects of terror have hit a new low”. Terrorists never have shown much ... no strike that ... never have shown any care about killing babies and children.
Terrorists kill children. In Thailand, it has been considered by decades of government until today as impolite and a violation of unwritten censorship rules to point that out — the T-word and the baby-killing part.
A few days after the Barisan Revolusi Nasional (BRN) tried to murder mothers and children with a car bomb at the Big C Supercenter in Pattani, army chief Gen Chalermchai said it was a first. The BRN never had tried to kill civilians before, let alone babies. If only.
Last September, a few days before Gen Chalermchai took command of the Royal Thai Army, BRN agents (the group admits/brags about this) detonated a bomb at the entrance to Narathiwat’s Ban Taba School. It killed five-year-old Mitra Wohbah as well as her father, who was dropping her off, and a food vendor. Mitra’s murder galvanised and revolted this nation.
The BRN has never shrunk from targeting children and often murders innocent, bystanding civilians. Its new chief Doonloh Wae-mano has long been its “military” (English translation: Guerrilla terrorism) leader. He planned the 2012 day of bombing that culminated in two double-tap, car-bomb attacks in Yala and at the Lee Garden Hotel in Hat Yai. They were meant to slaughter, and did kill, 15 people and wounded 526 including women, children and foreign tourists.
Had the Big C Pattani attack been wholly successful, Mr Doonloh would have spilt the blood of far more innocents than Salman Abedi of Manchester.
Gen Chalermchai and the general prime minister, like all previous prime ministers, don’t want to internationalise the conflict in the deep South. Officially calling the BRN “terrorists” would do that. Unofficially, between you, me and the gatepost, they are still terrorists.
Who says so? Well, here in Thailand we own the marvellous Anand Panyarachun, who was either the best prime minister under a military dictator or simply the best prime minister. The United Nations asked him to write a panoptic definition of “terrorism”, and here it is, from the official UN report issued 13 years ago:
Terrorism is any action “that is intended to cause death or serious bodily harm to civilians or non-combatants, when the purpose of such act is to intimidate a population, or to compel a government or an international organisation to do or to abstain from doing any act”.
The Twitter campaigns for #[NameOfCity]Strong and #Coexistence have no effect. The Abedi family, the soldiers or whoever bombed the hospital waiting room, the mindset that it’s just a darned shame if a five-year-old interferes with a school bombing and gets killed — they are far beyond #unitylove.
The terrorism in Bangkok, the deep South and around the world will be stopped by reasonable people. That will be after they push aside, one way or the other, the insane terrorists.