Parting Shots

by Matthew Parris

  A number of little vignettes of my service in Mongolia will always be engrained on my memory. The first was the security precautions taken for the arrival of Mr Brezhnev in November 1974 … [I]t seemed strange to me that security dictated that an armed policeman should be stationed on the steppe by the roadside every 100 yards or so from the airport to the city when no humans were visible (they had all been herded into the city for a ‘spontaneous’ welcome). The only potentially dangerous creatures were some very cold cows.

  Approximately once a year all Ambassadors attend a session of the Great People’s Khural when the elected representatives of the people gather together to listen to long, boring speeches telling them what has already been decided upon by the Central Committee of the MPRP.2 Whether or not one can understand a word of what has been said is beside the point, and of no consequence. It has all been said before. What is really intriguing is the absence of any attention to the two hour monologue. The members of the Great People’s Khural, apart from a tiny minority of assiduous note takers, seem singularly disinterested. I observed one lady attending to the coiffe of her neighbour in front. Snuff was passed and snuff-bottles admired. Sweets and even nose-drops were passed around. Some gave up the unequal struggle to keep awake and either slept on their hands or sitting upright. I actually saw one of the latter, no doubt in the middle of some Mongol dream, rear up and crash into the aisle. No one took the slightest notice. He was heaved back into his seat and the proceedings continued.

  There is a curious feeling of timelessness about the country. Not so much of time standing still, but time not really being of importance. Mongolair’s internal service is a typical example. The so-called scheduled flight planners give detailed ETDs and ETAs, but the pilots scarcely heed them. Aircraft – and cars/trucks are treated like horses: fuel them, flog them, start and stop them. (The Mongolians have devised a unique system for getting up an icy slope. It is simply to engage gear, rev up the engine and let the back wheels spin until the heated rubber melts the ice. Proceed a few feet and repeat the process until the summit is successfully reached.) …

  The Mongolians are almost pathologically concerned about their progressive image, and strangely anxious to show a Western Ambassador (or his wife) only those examples of their activities which they believe will make a good impression. It was only after involving the wishes of Mme Tsedenbal-Filatova3 herself that my wife was permitted to visit a school and the music and ballet academy. Requests to visit the children’s hospital initially met with no success. There was vague talk of an apparently permanent flu epidemic. It was only after I had twisted the Minister of Health’s arm after presenting him with a large quantity of drugs donated by Beechams that permission was forthcoming. In the event it was a pretty harrowing experience and the wives returned thoroughly shaken. The so-called intensive care unit contained rows of very sick premature babies, several dead and some clearly dying.

  And yet … and yet. Despite all the difficulties, the frustrations and the rag-bag of absurd and petty annoyances, there is something very engaging about many (certainly not all) of the Mongolians that I have met. The children – those that survive – are particularly attractive. (The one that threw a stone accurately at my wife, mistaking her for a Russian, grinned wickedly as he fled.)

  One will remember the people for their extraordinary cheerfulness and their sometimes overwhelming hospitality, for their infinite capacity for making promises they know they cannot keep and for their tendency to say nothing: unable to say yes and unwilling to say no …

  The ground here is cold and stony: the row fairly hard to hoe.

  I am sending copies of this despatch to Her Majesty’s Ambassadors at Moscow, Peking and Washington.

  I have the honour to be

  Sir,

  Your obedient servant,

  Myles Ponsonby

  1. MFA: Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

  2. MPRP: Mongolian People’s Revolutionary Party.

  3. Mme Tsedenbal-Filatova: Anastasia Filatova, the formidable Russian wife of Mongolia’s Communist leader Yumjaagiin Tsedenbal.

  Thailand

  ‘Licentiousness is the main pleasure of them all’

  SIR ANTHONY RUMBOLD, HM AMBASSADOR TO THAILAND, JULY 1967

  Sir Anthony’s valedictory from Thailand caused quite a stir. Not for the opinions within it, which are, to put it mildly, rather old-fashioned, but because it reached a far wider audience than was ever intended. Not least because it questions the sanity of the Thai Foreign Minister, the despatch, though selected for printing, was supposed to go to a narrow ‘Q’ distribution. But the clerk’s handwriting was indistinct, and when it reached the printers the despatch was mistakenly given the much wider ‘A’ distribution. The Foreign Services of more than fifty countries across the Commonwealth received a copy, including Malaysia and Singapore. Whitehall realized its mistake only after the amused staff of the New Zealand Embassy in Washington – so far had word of the notorious telegram spread – asked their counterparts at the British Embassy there for a copy.

  Perhaps this despatch is jinxed, for when in 2009 the editors of this book included it in their BBC Radio Four series, Parting Shots, the current British Ambassador in Bangkok found himself obliged to issue a press release distancing himself from his predecessor’s opinions.

  It’s hard to fault Anthony Rumbold’s style (his final Austria telegram, on p. 21, is another masterful put-down sketch). But his powers of prophecy have proved imperfect. He predicted elsewhere in this (abridged) despatch that Thanom and Prapass, the two military leaders then ruling Thailand, would stay the course, avowing that ‘the days of the coup d’état are probably over for good’. But by the time Arthur de la Mare, Rumbold’s successor-but-one in Bangkok, came to write his valedictory, there had been a popular uprising (in 1973) when the two dictators were to be found ‘fleeing the country like thieves at dead of night, on their way to ignominious exile’. And far from being ‘over for good’, Thailand saw its most recent military coup in 2006.

  GOODBYE TO THAILAND

  Sir Anthony Rumbold to Mr. Brown (Received 18 July)

  (No. 19. CONFIDENTIAL) Bangkok,

  13 July, 1967.

  Sir,

  I am on the point of leaving Bangkok after a stay of two and a half years and have the honour to set down some thoughts about Thailand … There is a theory that the Thais are rather easier for Europeans to understand than are other oriental people. I do not believe this theory. It seems to me that Sino/Indian/Malay/Thai ways of thought are so alien to ours that analogies between events in South-East Asia and events in Europe are nearly always misleading, that forecasts based on such analogies are bound to be wrong, that the motives of Asians are impossible for us to estimate with any exactness, and that Thailand and the Thais offer no exception to these precepts. The general level of intelligence of the Thais is rather low, a good deal lower than ours and much lower than that of the Chinese. But there are a few very intelligent and articulate ones and I have often tried to get some of these … to come clean with me and to describe their national characteristics as they see them themselves … [but] [s]omething always seems to be held back …

  … The traveller Henri Mouhot described the whole of Siamese society in the mid-19th century as being ‘in a state of permanent prostration, every inferior receiving his orders from his superior with signs of abject submission and respect’ … But I would go so far as to make the unfashionable assertion that the most steadying feature in the body politic of Thailand, irritating and even repulsive though it may be, is precisely this sense of his place in society possessed and accepted by each and every individual. The god-like position of the King is questioned by nobody … Below the King, very far below him, the individuals who control the nation are ranged in their respective places, each one knowing exactly how he or she stands in relation to each other. These relationships are perfectly clear to the Thais themselves …

  Since the revolution of 1932 which put an end to
the absolute monarchy, though scarcely affecting the veneration owed to the monarch, proximity to the source of military power has been the most important factor in assuring influence and position … Money is another important factor. All Thais love money and the possession of it is regarded as a sign of virtue or merit. They call it vitamin M. The amount of it and the use made of it is of more significance in their eyes than the method by which it has been acquired. Family connections are very important. Even good birth is still a factor to be reckoned with …

  The more important Thai leaders are worth considering individually. The one with whom I have had most to do has been the Foreign Minister, Colonel Thanat Khoman … [H]e is vain, touchy and disputatious. Most of his colleagues in the Government dislike him for his intellectual arrogance and because he lets everybody including themselves know that he despises them. He keeps everything to himself and is beastly to his subordinates … His obsessions about ‘liberals’, about the French and about Cambodia sometimes make one wonder whether he is altogether sane. But he is not entirely repulsive. He quite likes the British, indeed he worked with us in the war, but he regrets our present weakness and our tendency to appeasement as he sees it …

  I have very much enjoyed living for a while in Thailand. One would have to be very insensitive or puritanical to take the view that the Thais had nothing to offer. It is true that they have no literature, no painting and only a very odd kind of music, that their sculpture, their ceramics and their dancing are borrowed from others and that their architecture is monotonous and their interior decoration hideous. Nobody can deny that gambling and golf are the chief pleasures of the rich and that licentiousness is the main pleasure of them all. But it does a faded European good to spend some time among such a jolly, extrovert and anti-intellectual people. And if anybody wants to know what their culture consists of the answer is that it consists of themselves, their excellent manners, their fastidious habits, their graceful gestures and their elegant persons. If we are elephants and oxen they are gazelles and butterflies …

  I have, &c.

  A. RUMBOLD.

  ‘Latter-day version of Sodom and Gomorrah’

  SIR ARTHUR DE LA MARE, HM AMBASSADOR TO THAILAND, NOVEMBER 1973

  In the National Archives and after declassification, sections of despatches are occasionally blanked out; in their place a red stamp informs the reader that the full document remains closed until some specified future date. The redacted material may threaten to damage Britain’s relations with foreign countries even after thirty years have passed. Sir Arthur de la Mare’s valedictory, declassified in 2004, is rare however, in that it is the opening paragraph, where the ambassador typically sets the scene, which has been obscured. Doubtless it contains more caustic comment on the Thais. The full document will be declassified in 2014. For now we can only speculate: it is possible that the redacted section contains a negative reference to the King. Even today, anyone making an offhand reference to the Thai Royal Family can expect to cause offence, or face a minimum of three years in jail if they are unwise enough to do so in Thailand, where strict lèse-majesté laws apply.

  FAREWELL TO THAILAND, TO EAST ASIA AND TO THE DIPLOMATIC SERVICE

  Her Majesty’s Ambassador at Bangkok to the Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs

  (CONFIDENTIAL) Bangkok,

  15 November, 1973

  Sir,

  It does. Decayed garbage left for months on the side of the roads; stagnant canals that serve both as cesspools and as the dumping ground for dead dogs; buses and lorries that belch uncontrolled clouds of diesel fumes; scarcely a pavement without potholes and open manholes to break the legs of the unwary; bag-snatchers in every block; assault and violence a way of life; prostitution and every form of natural and unnatural vice on a scale astonishing even in Asia; a city of 4 million with only one park, and that littered with refuse and infested by thieves; unplanned hideous ribbon development; no proper drainage, so that in the rainy season large areas of the city remain flooded for weeks on end; and the whole set in a flat mournful plain without even a hillock in sight for a 100 miles in any direction: this is Bangkok, the vaunted Venice of the East. A small section, the old city with its palaces and temples, retains some of its oriental charm, but it is but a poor compensation for those who have to live in this ‘improved’ latter-day version of Sodom and Gomorrah.

  But why do I begin this farewell despatch from a post which in spite of its many frustrations I have greatly enjoyed with so uncomplimentary a description of its capital city? I have often had occasion to remind London that Bangkok is not Thailand, nor Thailand Bangkok. That is true, but most Thais do not realise it. Bangkok to them is not only all that counts in their country, it is all that counts in the world.

  There are reasons for this. There are here no Manchesters, Birminghams or Liverpools to share the industrial and commercial loads with the capital. The two Thai towns next largest to Bangkok, Chiang Mai in the North and Haad Yai in the South, though both growing rapidly are country villages by comparison. If it was ever true that a man who is tired of London is tired of life it is equally true that a Thai who given the choice prefers to live outside Bangkok is looked upon as an eccentric. I have often asked Thai friends why when they retire they do not go to live in more pleasant and salubrious areas such as Chiang Mai or Songkhla. The question astonishes them: ‘But we couldn’t live anywhere but in Bangkok!’ Civil servants or business officials sent to man posts in the provinces regard it as demotion and as loss of face …

  … [L]ike other people including ourselves the Thais tend to gauge their status by the past rather than by the present. Inordinately vain and race conscious by nature they look upon themselves as the elite of South East Asia. After 37 years’ acquaintance with them and the last three in their own front yard I cannot say that I find their pretensions entirely justified. Except for those who have Chinese blood they are indolent and feckless. Their charm is proverbial, but it is often no more than a polite pose and I am quite sure that of all the Asians of various nationalities whom my wife and I have known and whom we call friends it is the Thais who will most quickly forget us. Trying to determine whether a Thai really means what he says is one of the most difficult tasks I have encountered in my diplomatic life. And, charming and friendly as they are, to do business with them is a constant frustration. They cannot make up their mind; everything has to be referred to a higher authority; and even the highest authority of all, the King, is so shackled by protocol and precedent that though he will speak his mind with refreshing directness he will seldom intervene even in situations which only he can resolve …

  … Some two years ago I bethought myself that I would address you on the subject of the Thai way, and got as far as setting pen to paper. But after wrestling for some weeks with a draft I abandoned the project, deeming it prudent not to give you further cause to doubt my sanity. But since it is now immaterial whether my superiors consider me better fitted for a lunatic asylum than for a diplomatic post I shall try to describe the Thai way as it has been vouchsafed and revealed to me.

  First the idiom. If I were a Thai official in the presence of my superior I would stand at deferential attention while he spoke, then when he had finished would bend low and hiss in his ear the one word: ‘Crap!’ For in Thai this basic four-letter word is not only the appropriate but the mandatory expression of total submission. And, on another plane, what can one make of a language where the word for dentist is ‘more fun’ or where, at least to the foreign ear, the words for ‘near’ and ‘far’ are exactly the same?

  But why not? Distance and proximity are matters of the mind, and so is time. Shortly after my arrival here I paid a courtesy call on a senior Minister. I was advised that it should take only 15–20 minutes to get to his office but that as traffic was unpredictable I should allow 30. I did, and arrived at the Ministry flustered and embarrassed 35 minutes late. The Minister heard my apologies with blank astonishment. ‘But my dear Ambassador, it�
��s true that in principle our appointment was for four o’clock but it is only four thirty-five and I didn’t expect you until about now.’ And then as he remembered my British provenance his eyes twinkled and he added: ‘If I may offer a word of advice to you as a newcomer don’t worry about punctuality. It is a British fetish but we Thais don’t suffer from it.’

  So here is there and near is far and a watch merely an ornamental bauble. There are indeed separate and distinct expressions for ‘yes’ and ‘no’ but since it is impolite to use the latter the former is used for both. It is then up to the person addressed to decide whether yes is to be interpreted as a flat no or as a no which he may convert into a yes by putting his request in another form or to a higher authority. But usually it means that his request will receive favourable consideration, which in turn means that no action will be taken upon it. If you invite a Thai to dinner and he accepts you must not deduce therefrom that he will be there, for by accepting he has done you a courtesy; he has thus transferred the obligation from himself to you and is therefore under no necessity to turn up. If you know him well enough to remonstrate he will be taken aback: ‘But I accepted, didn’t I?’ It is then no good replying: ‘Yes, mate, so you did, and that’s why I expected you’, for he will go away confirmed in his assurance that the thought-processes of the farang (Westerner) are quite beyond comprehension.