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.”