🇹🇭 Thailand mourns horror weekend

Hello friends,

We have a lot (a lot! My phone almost melted down) of new readers today thanks to Jon Russell’s excellent Asia Tech Review newsletter. This looks at tech around the wider region and is an outstanding resource for keeping up to date with what’s up in that world. Repay him for me by smashing his inbox here.

I haven’t done an intro for myself here in months (years?) and it feels a bit naff to do it now. We’ll get into who I am on Friday! I just wish it was a nicer read to introduce you all with.

I’m not going to go too much into how Thailand’s largest-ever mass shooting went down. This was the biggest story in the world while it was unfolding and I’m pleased (though that doesn’t feel the right term) that for once the world paid proper, real attention to the region when it needed it. For a timeline, please see here with the Bangkok Post.

The base facts are this. A disgruntled 32-year-old army soldier unleashed hell in Nakhon Ratchasima, also known as Korat, in Thailand’s northeast. The attack began at his army base before moving to the popular Terminal 21 shopping mall which he kept under siege for 17 hours. He was eventually killed by law enforcement, but not before killing at least 28 people and leaving nearly 60 people injured.  

I’m not too interested in the details of the shooter and his life, but if you are AFP has some background here.

I expect the fall-out will continue for a while yet. I’m very interested in coverage on Thailand’s gun culture, land disputes and any think pieces on masculinity in Thailand. If you come across any please send my way. 

There are some critical questions about media in this case, but I do just want to quickly note that as someone very far away who cares about Thailand I’ve been amazed at the calibre and speed of reporting. When it’s done ethically, it serves the community brilliantly. 

Let’s get started,Erin Cook

A crime of this calibre is practically unheard of in the region and Thailand has reacted with shock and mourning. The mall became a memorial site on Sunday and Monday, with mourners stopping by to pay respects. A Buddhist monk led around 1,000 people in a candlelit vigil nearby. Loved ones of the dead were among those in attendance. 

High school student Nachote Chotiklang said he was in his mother’s car as she passed the gunman’s vehicle.

The assailant “got out of the car and fired into the window. At that, I ducked down and didn’t do anything until I felt that car hit something. It hit a tree.”

When the teenager was asked what happened to his mother, Nachote shook his head. Another man explained that she had died.

Local hospitals have been stressed to their limits by the tragedy, with the one forensic doctor able to perform only six autopsies a day. This has left some families unable to take their loved ones remains home until Tuesday. 

One witness told BBC that the soldier was very precise in his shooting, aiming directly for the heads’ of his victims. Chanathip Somsakul was one witness who hid in a bathroom at the mall with dozens of others but they ran into difficulty in monitoring the situation via social media and couldn’t tell what was and wasn’t trustworthy news. 

They weren’t the only ones. The gunman reportedly checked media reports to find out law enforcement movements, while also posting to his social media. "No one can escape death," he said in one of three posts. His profile has since been deleted by Facebook. 

The hideous nature of social media was on full display, as the Thai Enquirer lays out. Beyond giving the shooter his platform, social media was used to circulate uncensored snaps of the dead and dying. It’s painful to think that some family members could well have learnt their loved one hadn’t made it out via a Tweet.

But today, we are also seeing a failure of humanity. Content appears on the newsfeed – there is still a remarkable amount of agency that goes into clicking the “share” button. But videos of the victims’ dead bodies, screenshots of the shooter’s cavalier statements, live streams of the situation inside Terminal 21 and the authorities stationed outside the mall have been shared by media outlets and concerned citizens alike.

As Thailand watches events unfold in fear, it is a race to see who can know more and who is closer to the news source. Social media has provided the tools: some come equipped with screenshots from Facebook posts made by the shooter’s classmates, remarking on his ‘quiet’ qualities, others with screenshots of prior text messages shared with the shooter. This is the emotive content that moves us and has transformed the massacre into a macabre content carnival.

As the Enquirer notes, it wasn’t just social media getting in on the action. The police have since accused mainstream media of ‘undermining’ response efforts with coverage including airing live footage during the spree. The National Broadcasting and Telecommunication Commission plans to reprimand some of the stations, says the Commission’s secretary-general Takorn Tantasith:

“I had to call these channels’ executives to ask them to be cooperative because these live broadcasts compromised the security of officers involved in the operation. Even after being asked they didn’t completely tone down their coverage.”

Prime Minister Prayuth Chan-o-cha has also been accused of not taking it seriously enough after being seen high-fiving by-standers during an official visit to the city. “I intended to offer my moral support … my expression may have been misunderstood or made many people uncomfortable,” he later said, as reported by the Guardian.

The army itself, of course, has some questions to answer. Speaking on why the soldier did it, army chief Gen. Apirat Kongsompong confirmed the initial ‘land dispute’ story. The gunman’s superior officer, Col. Anantarote Krasae, and his mother-in-law were the first two victims in the spree. The gunman reportedly felt wronged in a land deal orchestrated by the pair. The New York Times has more on that here.

Still, how he managed to leave the army compound with an arsenal of weapons confuses. Apirat says the soldier had ‘used his rank’ to convince others and while procedures are in place, they will be reviewed. The AP spoke with the formerly-Bangkok based Michael Picard, research director at GunPolicy.org:

“It is alarming if that’s all it took — that one guy was tasked with guarding/monitoring a well-stocked armory,” Picard wrote in an email interview. “It’s possible that the assailant used his rank and knowledge of the base to bypass existent controls, but this still shows that the level of control over this base’s armory was woefully insufficient in terms of manpower and access restriction.”

The Bangkok Post has a nasty update Tuesday. Two ‘online pranksters’ (a petition to get ‘dickheads’ into the style guide when appropriate) have been arrested after allegedly posting threats of copycat massacres. Both face charges under the Computer Crimes Act but say it was all a laugh.