No one knows who put a bomb on a Thai Airways jet scheduled to carry Thai Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra to Chiang Mai, but respected media outlets such as the Matichon newspaper and the Bangkok Post have hinted that the bombing may have something to do with drugs from Myanmar.
"Unfortunately it's to be expected," sighs Sunait Chutintaranond, a Burmese-speaking Thai scholar who notes that the initial U.S. media reaction to the Oklahoma City bombing also involved finger-pointing based on unfair ethnic stereotypes. Sunait, an advocate of friendship and understanding between the two nations, is worried about the tendency to blame Myanmar for everything that goes wrong in Thailand from petty crime to terrorism. Director of the Thai Studies Center at Bangkok's Chulalongkorn University, Sunait, educated at Cornell University, is the author of "On Both Sides of the Tenasserim Range" and "The Image of the Burmese Enemy in Thai Perceptions and Historical Writings."
"During the Cold War, 'communist' was the catch-all term for evil," explains Sunait. "It was a way of labeling the enemy, assigning blame and creating a pretext for a certain kind of policy. Nowadays, the buzzword is drugs. The nuance of the Thai term 'ka buan kan ya sep dit' (narco-terrorism) is important; it goes beyond illegal substances and points to an organized criminal force."