Thailand Confidential

by Jerry Hopkins

  Call it instant karma.

  Most modern cities elsewhere have public ambulance services. In Bangkok, and in other Thai cities, where only a few private hospitals have such modern conveyances, a number of Buddhist foundations take up the considerable slack. In Bangkok, the largest and oldest, Poh Teck Tung, is located in Chinatown. For eighty years, this outfit has kept its vehicles on the road, using pickup trucks to transport the bodies to a hospital or the morgue until they were replaced a few years ago by air conditioned vans equipped with sirens and flasher lights.

  The second largest and oldest is Ruam Katanyoo, which is more Thai than Chinese in its membership and until 1995, its members competed for bodies with Poh Teck Tung, the rival teams sometimes getting into fist-fights over who got the corpses and the merit that came with the higher body count. Finally, the city government divided the metropolitan area into zones and gave the foundations schedules whereby they’d alternate coverage so no one would miss a regular turn in the most active areas.

  My plan was to spend a night with Poh Teck Tung with a photographer for an English magazine. Our driver—wearing a mustard-colored jump suit covered with Thai and Chinese lettering— explained the routine. The crews worked eleven-hour shifts, six days a week, and waited for calls at assigned locations, usually petrol stations where there were convenience stores for buying coffee and snacks. There, they monitored their police radios and sped off to any crime scene or accident in their zone, often arriving before police. Victims were taken to the nearest hospital, dead or alive—the deceased to be collected at the end of the shift and transported to the city morgue. They were called “rescue” teams, but they only received five days of paramedic training and there wasn’t so much as a first aid kit in the van. Meat wagons was more like it; in Thailand, better than no wagon at all.

  Some said the workers took the job not for the excitement or karma but the riches. There have been reports of money and jewelery “lost” while traveling. The foundations deny this. After all, wouldn’t that wipe out the good karma?

  The first night we sat in the petrol station for eight hours without a call. We started at seven and by midnight, we were listening to a radio phone-in show for that part of the Thai population—puzzling in its size—that enjoys gore. In the absence of any real violence, we listened to other people describe their favorite accidents, those they had witnessed or their own.

  At two a.m., I bought a beer, thinking that might trigger an accident in the way that stepping into the bathtub causes the phone to ring. My photographer friend, Jonathan, a Brit who spoke better Thai than English, worked his way through several bags of crisps. Our driver gave himself a pedicure. We went home at five.

  The second night the photographer voiced what I’d been thinking: “Is it okay to want somebody to get hurt or die? I mean, if it’s going to happen anyway...”

  “Yeah,” I said, “and why can’t it happen before midnight?”

  The call came at midnight. The scene was less than a kilometer away, but when we arrived there was only an overturned Vespa and a puddle of blood. The victim had been taken to a hospital by the coppers. A near miss for us, but from the size of the puddle, maybe the last miss for the Vespa driver.

  After that, nothing. Same thing the third night. By now I was overdosing on junk food, too, and drinking far too much beer, and the photographer and I were beginning to tell each other the same stories.

  The next three nights we shifted gears and hung out in a press room with reporters who cover crime and accidents for the Thai newspapers, who range over the whole city. They watched television and played cards and the only action was on TV. Jonathan and I wondered if we might hire ourselves out to ward off danger. Obviously, no one got maimed or killed on our watch.

  So we returned to the bodysnatchers, who told us about a legendary ten-meter stretch of highway where so many died—it’s believed the ghosts of the dead were causing the new accidents. (Where, I wanted to ask, but thought that might seem rude.) Our driver also reminisced about the time when a truck bomb killed nearly a hundred people outside the city; everyone got in on that one, he said.

  We were riding with a different Poh Teck Tung unit this time and when we started out at seven o’clock, it was a Friday night and it was raining and it was the last day of the month: payday. For sure, the driver said, we’d get something smeared across the macadam tonight. He predicted at least two serious accidents.

  It was nearly midnight when I tried the buy-a-beer trick and with the first mouthful, the driver called, “Let’s go!”

  Ten minutes of grand prix driving followed, siren announcing our importance, me sitting in the back on the floor with the number two guy, braced as we dodged at high speed through traffic. When we arrived there were two other rescue units on site already (from small, neighborhood foundations), along with a crowd of about two hundred spectators and police, who told us two men were taken away, the driver to a hospital with serious injuries, the other, injured slightly, to the police station to explain why he and his two mates stole the car and then drove it into a concrete telephone pole. A third man was barely conscious and wedged beneath the savagely crushed car’s front end and a rescue worker was holding an IV bottle with the drip stuck into the man’s arm as others wheeled the “iron jaws” into place to pry open the mangled iron to get to him.

  The press was there, too, pushing forward to capture as much blood on film as possible. The police politely moved aside for them. On the way back to the petrol station, the man sharing the floor in the back with me gave me a hearty thumbs up and a happy grin. We settled down to another wait. I bought another beer.

  At twelve fifty five a.m., we were off again, this time to where a pickup truck broad-sided a sedan. All drivers and passengers were on the way to a hospital and as we returned to the petrol station there was another call, this one to pick up three corpses, all dead on arrival following the car-truck accident.

  The first two bodies, a man and a woman, were laid out on the emergency room floor and were being wrapped in blotting paper to catch the leaking fluids and then were trussed up in a muslin cloth. The third was in another hospital nearby, also on the floor, apparently naked, her body covered with paper toweling, the top of her head a mess, her eyes and mouth open, expressing something between horror and surprise.

  Our driver took pictures of the corpses after scrawling their names on a piece of paper and positioning it beneath their chins, like the names held under the arrested in police photographs. In this case, the final I.D. was taken lying down.

  One at a time, the bodies were carried to the ambulance where they were fingerprinted and stacked in the rear. I squeezed into the front with the photographer and the number two guy hunkered down with the corpses in the back.

  At three a.m., we arrived at the Wang Tong Lung police station, where our guys dragged the bodies to the rear of the vehicle one at a time and opened the top end of the muslin wrappings so a cop could take pictures with his little point-and-shoot camera. I was reminded how the Thais so love to take pictures (no matter what the occasion) and wondered if the cop showed these to his friends over drinks. One of the bodies had to be removed from the rescue unit to get at the others, causing a head wound to re-open and send blood running into the street, providing something of interest for the stray dogs in the morning, perhaps. In an apartment building opposite, a half-dozen people stood on verandahs in their pajamas and watched. This probably was a nightly occurrence for them; better than Thai TV.

  Once the pictures were taken, the cop returned to watch a football game on the station house TV and after re-stacking the corpses, our guys spent half an hour filling out forms. Jonathan, who’d been here before on assignment for another magazine, told me it’s the same for homicides, the corpses scraped off the floors or lifted from beds or bathtubs, wherever murder or suicide occurs: the cops let Poh Teck Tung do all the paper work.

  At four a.m., at last we were at the end of the evening’s bloody highway, where
the bodies were transferred to stainless steel gurneys and wheeled into the morgue at Police General Hospital. There they became statistics and in the morning, relatives would be notified if any could be found.

  It Didn’t Happen Because I Wasn’t There

  Several years ago, when I was researching a story about foreign movie-making in Thailand, I was invited to visit the set of Cutthroat Island, a Hollywood-style pirate flick starring Geena Davis and Matthew Modine then being filmed in Krabi. The day before I was to leave Bangkok, my visit was cancelled and I was told that bad weather had caused the shoot to fall behind schedule, prompting the director to close the set to all visitors.

  Later, I learned the truth. The film’s assistant director had jumped out of a hotel window to his death and the Hollywood film company didn’t want the story to leak out. Nor, of course, did the hotel or the Tourism Authority of Thailand.

  How could an assistant director of a motion picture produced by a major American film company commit suicide in such a dramatic manner and the story not get into the press, at least locally? Easy. The police were paid to keep a lid on their reports, and if some lucky or enterprising local reporter stumbled onto the story, he was taken to lunch and given a fat envelope, too.

  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.”

  After much to-ing and fro-ing, with liberals and academics demanding the truth about what happened and those responsible still trying to cover their asses and save their collective face, Education Minister Panja Kesornthong held a press conference. After a long and sincere contemplation, he announced that the ministry had decided not to include anything about the incidents in the new textbooks then being prepared because, he said, with a straight face, it “wasn’t history.”

  And why wasn’t it history?

  Because, the minister explained, all the people involved in the tragic events weren’t dead yet.

  Wild Thailand

  The Ugly Truth About Elephants

  You can forget all that Babar/Dumbo nonsense.