🇹🇭 Thaksin backs the House

Hello friends!

I had to delay last week’s Mekong update on account of an enormously exciting presentation on Friday, which was a very big professional deal to me and a great tone to set for the year. It was all about Prabowo Subianto and how he’s shaping up Indonesia and while it was a closed session, this piece I did for Lowy covers a lot of what’s been catching my eye three months in.

But too much has happened! So, today an update on two key stories in Thailand and then I’ll be back Wednesday to discuss the recent Cambodia-Thailand assassination and how this all fits into a larger, very worrying uptick in transborder political violence in the Mekong states.

See you then!

Erin Cook

Cabinet passes controversial casino draft

After years of umming and ahhing, we have Cabinet approval on drafting a bill to legalise casinos in Thailand. The decision, made at a Cabinet meeting last Monday, is as unsurprising is it is unwelcome to public health experts and others concerned with the impact of gambling on communities. But for Prime Minister Paetongtarn Shinawatra, it’s all about reigniting the tourism industry. It’s fairly transparently targeting mainland Chinese visitors and details remain slim. “It will benefit society as a whole in the future. This is part of the government’s policy to support sustainable tourism, or man-made destinations, which was addressed in Parliament,” Paetongtarn said, as reported by the Associated Press. 

Thailand’s First Father, Thaksin Shinawatra, is very, very keen on this one. He backed the plan at an event last Monday shortly after the cabinet talks were revealed, Reuters reports. The wire also notes the various Shinawatra governments and those backed by his Pheu Thai have all pushed for legalisation. “Online gambling has two to four million Thai users with savings of 300 billion baht and gains and losses of about 500 billion per year. If we can tax 20% ... we would get more than 100 billion per year,” Thaksin said.

Sure, the taxation is grand but what about everything else? People’s Party MP Rangsiman Rome, who also chairs the House Committee on national security, border affairs, and strategy, is rightly worried about what this sort of reform could do to problem gambling and the potential for regulated gambling to be used for money laundering, the Nation reports. Interestingly, he linked it directly to the Chinese crime syndicates using Thailand as a base or transit point to other spots in Southeast Asia, a problem Thailand is increasingly assertive in confronting. 

This feels very culturally complex — even the most clueless visitor to Thailand asks what the lotto street vendors are up to — and I’m really looking forward to reading coverage from Thai writers about that. But for the time being: I am very alarmed at how deeply involved Thaksin is in this, even by his own standards. I think that alone, for such a lucrative industry, should keep everyone healthily cynical about this. 

Vigilance as reported Uyghur deportation deadline approaches

Last week, the AP reported it had received a letter from 43 Uyghur men who said they’d been detained in Bangkok for a decade and that Thai authorities had told them that their deportation to China was imminent. 

“We could be imprisoned, and we might even lose our lives. We urgently appeal to all international organizations and countries concerned with human rights to intervene immediately to save us from this tragic fate before it is too late,” the letter said. 

Thailand has form here. Around 300 Uyghurs were arrested by immigration authorities in 2014 near the Malaysia border, AP reports. Thailand deported 109 Uyghurs to China in 2015 and sent another 179, primarily women and children, to Turkey. That left 53 in immigration detention, although five, including children, have since died. The way Thailand has dealt with this — and refused to deal with it, in some cases — has seriously undermined its international reputation and is often deployed as evidence of Bangkok kowtowing to Beijing. 

So this letter, understandably, created a furore. 

Do not do this, pleaded rights group Justice for All. “This decision would endanger these individuals’ lives and contravenes international human rights standards,” the group said in a statement, as per Benar. “Verbal threats of deportation back to China by officials in the immigration centre have increased, despite their asylum applications being accepted by the United Nations. This development greatly heightens the urgency and distress of the situation,” it added. 

Here comes Marco Rubio. The arch China hawk set to be Trump’s Secretary of State swooped in when asked about the brewing trouble during Senate confirmation hearings this week. Would he get involved and put a stop this? “Yes, and the good news is that Thailand is actually a very strong US partner — strong historical ally as well — so that is an area where I think diplomacy could really achieve results because of how important that relationship is and how close it is," he said, as reported by Radio Free Asia. 

“This is not some obscure issue. These are people who are basically being rounded up because of their ethnicity and religion and they are being put into camps,” he added. Broken clocks etc. 

Whoa, relax, Defence Minister Phumtham Wechayachai said on Friday (in not so many words). He denied that there were any immediate plans to deport any Uyghur in Thailand at all. 

Today is the day and I imagine the Bangkok press pack will be very vigilant today, so will report back later in the week.