BBC still naive and unrepentant

Even after its disastrous coverage of the Ratchprasong riots last year - in which huge, idealistic banners in English over the stage were allowed to cover up the strident messages that were being shouted upon it; in which Thai speeches were mis-translated to assert just the opposite of what they actually meant; in which a well-known red-shirt leader who speaks English very well was interviewed as if he were a simple peasant with democratic longings; in which the legitimate prime minister was dismissed as an illegally installed, undemocratic stooge - yes, even after all those blunders, the BBC still doesn't get it!

You're out of your depth, BBC, even with Chris Patton at your helm. You think this is about a simple struggle between a people longing for freedom and a traditional elite who are jealous and won't let them in. It's also about big business, investment, cornering the market, stripping a whole country and counting the bucks in the billions!

Pick your reporters up and shake them, Chris Patton, they do such a disservice to what's really happening in Thailand. Tell them about Southeast Asian spin, how leaders hire Western lobbyists and international lawyers to fine-tune their message with the specific intention of getting the BBC to say just what it did. Tell them about how elections are really organised here; how the least-informed members of the electorate, the ones with no access to education or news and with no political experience, are manipulated by power brokers; how 75 per cent of the votes in Thailand are bought; how the more mature voices of experience and reason, the voices of lawyers and journalists, of engineers, activists and health workers, indeed of the most important native voices in this or any other developing society, are literally drowned out by village loudspeakers every morning before breakfast.

"Traditional elite?" Of course there is one, and of course it's opposed to the takeover of Thailand Corp by a rival conglomerate. But that "traditional elite", the old aristocratic families, is tiny, and just one interest among many in Thailand, like the Army, for example. The police are red through and through, and don't forget that at Ratchprasong they refused to do law enforcement at all, which is one of the reasons blood was shed in the end.

What the BBC has no sense of is the whole class of Thai people who do have some education and don't want their country made into a business. They're only 15 per cent of the population, but it's a minority with a huge responsibility in any developing country, and an "elite" simply because so few Thais have any political awareness at all.

I'm a dyed-in-the-wool socialist, dedicated to the betterment of society and the advancement of the people. Yes, I'm a red shirt in my dreams, make no mistake, but I don't want to wake up and find it's Joseph Stalin yet again in my parlour, or Ferdinand Marcos with my hat on his head.

Lung Kip

Chiang Mai