OPINION

Alarming parallel

Re: "Thai superiority complex harms Karen", (Commentary, March 22). There are disturbing similarities between the Thai government's treatment of the forest-dwelling Karen and the treatment of the Rohingya in Myanmar.

I am not suggesting that the Thai government's treatment of the Karen is as criminal and so totally inhuman as the fate of the Rohingya, but the comparisons are nevertheless worrying.

The Rohingya are an Indo-Aryan ethnic minority of some 1.4 million people who claim to have lived in what is now western Myanmar for centuries. The previous military junta denied this claim and stripped the Rohingya of their citizenship in 1982, restricted their right to free movement and limited education opportunities for their children, among many other debasements. The more recent history of the Tatmadaw's atrocious treatment of the Rohingya is a matter of public record that is best defined as genocide, murder, rape and infanticide.

As Paritta Wangkiat points out in her commentary, the Karen have lived in upper Bang Kloi for centuries, long before it was declared a national park in 1981. She says: "But park officials nevertheless criminalised them for encroaching on the forest. The eviction ... was completed in 2011, in what is known as the Tanao Sri operation in which their huts and rice barns were reduced to ashes."

How resonant is this with the Tatmadaw not only forcing some 750,000 Rohingya out of Myanmar and into neighbouring Bangladesh, but burning their huts, their crops and appropriating their fields for use by ethnic Burmese?

Most alarming, as Paritta reports, is Prime Minister Prayat Chan-o-cha's response to reporter questions which was to say he did not blame the indigenous community for demanding land rights, but condemned "the people behind them", supposedly influencing the Karens as part of a malicious effort to stir up conflict in the country.

He went on to say: "Thai people are not happy with Karen living in the forest ... because it is against the government's forest conservation policy."

This reveals two major flaws in the thinking of the man who is meant to be the leader of a united Thailand. Firstly, it suggests that Karen are not Thai. Secondly, it puts forward a spurious and unsupported argument that "the people are not happy" with this. How the hell does he know? Has he bothered to ask them?

Shame Prayut. Shame!

Re: "It's all in the maths", (PostBag, March 15).

I certainly hope that the above was just being tongue-in-cheek when suggesting that Scrooge should be made a guest speaker at Thailand's Institute for the Promotion of Teaching Science and Technology, and at the Regional Centre of Science and Mathematics.

Yes, Scrooge made a good point when he showed that seedless grapes bought in bulk actually cost more than they do individually. Nonetheless, he was not an exception in doing so. I have routinely met with foreigners from Western countries who have been perplexed over the fact that many products bought in the kingdom cost more in bulk than they do individually. It is a common practice for stores in the Occident to charge less for products bought in bulk but this does not seem to be a common practice here. So most Thais do not even question why products bought in bulk are not cheaper than are others.

If anyone deserves an award, it is perhaps the above-mentioned individual.