It has been an unusually active week in Asian news, to put it mildly. Pakistan has allowed the Taliban to enact Sharia in the Swat Valley in an “Illiberalism for peace” deal. North Korea last week launched a rocket, and then yesterday announced that is was booting nuclear inspectors out of the country.
And then, of course, there is Thailand. While the protests by the red-shirted United Front for Democracy against Dictatorship (UDD) supp
orters seemed to have faded for now, Thailand watchers say that the Thai government, under Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva, has turned Bangkok into a veritable prison.
Just in time for the conflagration, the Council of Asian Liberals and Democrats held their 15th anniversary conference 27-30 March 2009 in Bangkok at Chulalongkorn, Thailand ’s oldest university. The conference was organized in part by our friends at the Friedrich Naumann Foundation, who have offices in Bangkok and around the world.
The theme of the conference was “Liberal Responses to the Global Financial Crisis”, but sadly the growing disquiet no doubt muffled the good work that the Naumann Foundation had done that week.
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