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Published on September 4, 2007

Kudos to Kavi Chongkittavorn's concise, common-sense and straightforward analysis of recent events involving censorship and the upcoming elections. As Kavi points out, Thailand escaped colonialism but in the process has become its own worst enemy.

Thailand suffers from an internal colonialism: a predatory ruling elite that, like all colonialists, long ago acquired political control of the country and has been exploiting it economically. And whenever the elite feels threatened - whether by foreign creditors in 1997 or by potential election monitors 10 years later - it uses the same shameless defence: cheap appeals to nationalism to hide the truth.

This won't stop until enough of the Thai electorate wises up and realises how it is being manipulated and exploited. Like drops of water on a stone, a vibrant free press can slowly effect change by presenting the public with insights and truth that the elite would rather we didn't know, and by holding all public officials to account for their actions.

Paul Bradley

Bangkok

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Powers-that-be spurn foreign investment

Re: "Jostling for position", Business Extra, September 3.

I read with interest Siriporn Chanjindamanee's first paragraph of her article, in which she asserted that the establishment of foreign firms at the Stock Exchange of Thailand had brought a number of negative factors to the market. However, I was surprised, on reading the rest of the article, to find that Siriporn failed to provide readers with further clarification on any of these negative factors.

My recollection of 1998, when the Securities Exchange Commission permitted foreign firms to enter the market with majority stakes, was that the Thai stock market was virtually a burned-out shell. Lax risk management at local securities companies had allowed individual firms to pile up hundreds of millions of US dollars in unhedged foreign debt to finance massive loan portfolios to retail investors and proprietary trading books that were stuffed with speculative shares. This house of cards, already teetering from three years of bear markets, was struck an almost mortal blow by the devaluation of the baht in 1997.

Foreign firms that came in brought capital to buy licences along with their technical know-how. They rescued employees from redundancy and trained them up to international standards. Many of these employees have now risen to prominent positions in the industry.

With few exceptions, the foreign brokers are only interested in servicing their global client bases of institutional investors. These clients are largely inaccessible to unaffiliated local brokers in emerging markets because they need to deal with brokers that can offer them consistent coverage over a range of different markets. It is not worth the trouble for them to open an account and take on counter-party risk to deal in just one small market like Thailand.

Hopefully, Siriporn will publish a follow-up article to substantiate her claims about the negative effects of foreign firms in the Thai stock market, or, in this climate where the government's draconian amendments to the Foreign Business Act were rejected by the National Legislative Assembly as being too soft, are readers just expected to take it as a given that all foreign investment is evil?

George Morgan

Bangkok

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EU monitors with the right attitude are welcome

Re: "Accept EU election monitors for the sake of a clean poll", Letters, September 3.

Ken Albertsen got the wrong impression of Thais being angry at the idea of European Union observers monitoring our upcoming election.

In my book, the EU should be welcome to monitor and observe our election, which should be beneficial to our country in terms of transparency and learning from others. However, it is the manner of the EU in demanding the role without due regard to our sovereignty that really disturbs our pride. While the US Embassy and the legations of other leading nations have always been active in observing our political development, they have so far remained low-profile in not appearing to interfere with our political process.

To state, by some, that we are a failed state that warrants official observers is somewhat extreme. In Wikipedia, a failed state is defined as when a monopoly on the legitimate use of physical force within a nation's borders is broken by the dominant presence of warlords, militias or terrorists. Thailand hardly falls under this category. Another definition is when a state has been rendered ineffective due to crime, extreme political corruption, an extensive informal market, impenetrable bureaucracy, judicial ineffectiveness, military interference in politics and cultural situations in which traditional leaders wield more power than the state over a certain area. Even with that definition, the critic has to be extreme to label Thailand as a failed state.

Furthermore, in the latest survey of AT Kearney on the 2007 Global Services Location Index, Thailand was ranked as the fourth most attractive country to have back-office operations following India, China and Malaysia. A failed state could never command such a ranking.

Songdej Praditsmanont

Bangkok

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Opportunity to use languages is essential

 

Re: "Teaching methods stifle creativity", Letters, September 2.

I can certainly agree that if students are aware of a "needle" in their classrooms, their interest in school, much less the subject matter, would indeed be at low ebb. Here in Thailand, as Forrest Greenwood points out, there is no practical incentive for learning English as a second language because there is little or no "geographical centre" to really use it if one has it. This is a valid point. Our neighbours to the south, Malaysia and Singapore, were both British colonies, providing a language base to easily relate to and offer an incentive to learn and use it. And of course, Mandarin and English are co-national languages of that nation.

However, given differences of teaching experiences and geographical location in acquiring those experiences, I do take exception to Greenwood's view of the teaching of English as a second language (ESL). As a retired Early Childhood teacher working in conjunction with ESL programmes in international schools in Southeast Asia, I find the objections that he cites from his experience to not ring true with mine.

The acquiring of a second language in my experience and educational background is based on the principle that you provide an environment as close as possible to the one in which the child's first language was acquired. In my schools, pupils aged four and five, where non-English speakers as well as multi-language students and English first-language students were together, this was easily done.

Similarly, older students who had little or no English and were enrolled in a total English-language curriculum school would be placed in an immersion communicative approach programme where an appropriate environment to begin was in place. They went to maths classes and gradually were mainstreamed into their other regular classes as their proficiency warranted it; facilitating that linkage of a linguistic "geographical centre" and the opportunity to transfer what they learned in one class to another, which Greenwood in his experience found was often missing.

What is acquired must be used in order to grow; if one doesn't grow in a given setting, one will not be able keep up or succeed in core subjects. Most students became quickly aware of those conditions and found it an apt incentive for further growth. Of course, some did not.

There is no one programme that fits all because both learners and teachers are unique. There will always be problems regarding all three. As far as ESL programmes go, like it or not, the communicative and nurturing mentality of the teacher's aspect is a large part of it, and to contend it does not challenge the students.

In the ESL programmes I worked with, there were no politically correct textbooks, there were no textbooks - the teachers and students, as in Early Childhood, came up with their own hand-made materials; and students most certainly were not withheld the experience of writing until the end of their high-school education.

Acquiring English as a second language will always be a problem here primarily because of the exam-based system that allows for 45-plus students in a class, the lack of trained and experienced staff and the lack of student incentive to acquire it and places to use it.

I am sure there may be many below-the-surface causes for the lack of Thai students' performance but an ESL programme definitely is not one of them. In Thai secondary schools, English is always presented through English as a foreign language base (EFL) where, as an EFL English teacher, I experienced that the opportunity for success for most was very limited. While it is true that Thai kindergartens and primary schools are beginning to apply ESL principles as regards English, complete ESL programmes at present are only to be found in a total English-language international school setting.

Mr Bill

Bangkok

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