SIEM REP, Cambodia — Twelve-year-old Van Nak remembers like it was yesterday the force of the blast that took his right arm and his father. “It hit me here,” he says tapping his chest with his only hand, “and knocked me over.” Van was just 6 years old when he accidentally triggered a landmine near the Thai-Cambodian border while planting rice with his now deceased dad, one of the tens of thousands of victims of subterranean explosives that litter the countryside. According to the government-run Cambodian Mine Action Center, anywhere between four and six million mines and pieces of unexploded [...]
BANGKOK, Thailand — Astrology and superstitious belief are part of everyday life in impoverished Burma, where hope for every family hangs on some fortune-teller’s prophesy. But there is one prediction no one in the country is prepared to make — who will succeed ailing leader Than Shwe. Rumor is rife in Rangoon that the hardhearted general who cherishes his family life is seriously ill with intestinal cancer. His death or withdrawal from a position of influence is seen by some Burma-watchers as a small chance for a break in the long-running deadlock between the hard-line military regime and the suppressed [...]
BANGKOK, Thailand — While a jittery Thai capital has been warned to brace for more bomb attacks from unidentified terrorists, the country’s military-installed government is sowing fear among Thailand’s foreign business community. New laws promulgated by the unelected interim regime following the September army takeover seem to have less to do with the coup’s professed aim of putting the country back on the road to national unity than with blatant nationalism. Foreign companies in Thailand are seething in the wake of a law that tightens restrictions on foreign business ownership. This follows a clumsy diktat in late December on foreign [...]
