Acilius

UPDATED: Harry Nicolaides was freed on 21 February 2009 by the will of the King of Thailand.

In the 29 July, 2009 edition of Eureka Street, Australian writer Harry Nicolaides reported on a market at Tachilek in eastern Burma where child pornography is openly sold.  The authorities in Burma and Thailand must know about this market; Mr Nicolaides certainly had no difficulty finding it.  Yet, Mr Nicolaides writes, “unless you are a saffron-robed monk, you will not be searched on the way back across the border into Thailand.”  Nicolaides’ report was reprinted in the December January issue of Chronicles (which I noted here.)

The Thai police have still done nothing about the trafficking of child pornography from Tachilek through their country.  But let it not be said that they have simply been idle.  No indeed.  In August, four weeks after the publication of the report, they arrested the reporter.  Monday, he was sentenced to three years in prison.  The court did not of course say that Mr Nicolaides was being punished for exposing the Thai government’s complicity in brutal crimes against children the world over.  Instead, the authorities cited a brief passage in an extremely obscure (sold only seven copies) novel Nicolaides self-published almost four years ago, claiming that the fictional character of a Crown Prince described there reflected badly on Thailand’s actual Crown Prince and thus violated the country’s strict laws against lese-majeste. 

Here is an online petition asking for the release of Harry Nicolaides. 

More information about the case, including links to several sites offering downloads of the novel which the Thai authorities cited as the cause of their action against Mr Nicolaides, can be found here. 

On 24 September 2008, a friend of Harry Nicolaides posted a piece about Mr Nicolaides’ arrest.  On 20 January 2009, the same friend posted about Mr Nicolaides’ plea and sentence; I commented on this latter post, bringing up Mr Nicolaides’ investigation into the child pornography industry and asking his friend whether he thought the prosecution might be the Thai government’s way of hushing that issue up.

Big news organizations occasionally do stories about sex tourists in southeast Asia. I’ve never made an effort to follow such stories, but as far as I can tell Harry Nicolaides’ report was the first one to name Tachilek and to identify it as a hub of the international trade in child pornography.

The reason I think that Harry Nicolaides’ fate matters so much is that there are only a few big news organizations and they can only cover so many stories at a time. If in addition to CBS News sending a unit to Thailand once every three or four years we also have a great many freelance reporters like Harry Nicolaides who are at liberty to roam about the region, we will be far more likely to find out the truth about what is going on there. Leave Nicolaides in prison, and there go the freelancers. All the bad guys will have to do to stay out of public view is get advance notice every time one of the media elephants comes stomping into town.

A matter like the Nicolaides case and the underlying problem of the international trade in child pornography could be viewed as a ”human rights” issue, or as a question of national sovereignty.  The human rights perspective is already rather familiar, so I’ll include a few words about how it could be seen as a question of national sovereignty.

If children are assaulted in the USA, then the USA and its citizens have an obligation to take some kind of action in response.  If Nicolaides is telling the truth in his article about the market at Tachilek, then we must assume there is an international child pornography industry that exists as an institution, that the market at Tachilek is key part of this institution, and that as a result of the operations of this institution children in the USA have been and will likely continue to be subjected to binding, rape, and torture.  If the governments of Burma and Thailand know about the market at Tachilek and choose to do nothing about it, therefore, they are complicit in acts of violence committed against American citizens on American soil and the government of the USA has an obligation to take steps to discourage them from continuing in this complicity.    
 
I suspect the reason why Harry Nicolaides and his supporters have not raised the issue of Tachilek publicly is that doing so would make it harder for the Thais to back down.  The court might have been at liberty to rule that the novel didn’t really defame the Crown Prince, the king might be able to grant a pardon on condition that Harry Nicolaides leave the country.  The court could hardly have issued a public ruling that Thai officials are trying to silence a man who had exposed their complicity in gruesome crimes against children around the world, nor can the king proclaim that his government is tainted by involvement in such horrors.  
 
What action do I wish would be taken?  First, Mr Nicolaides must be released.  As long as the Thais have to justify holding him in prison,  they will not have latitude to act in any meaningful way to put a stop to the market at Tachilek and related abuses elsewhere.   How can his release be obtained?  I suspect that a word from a highly placed US government official to the king of Thailand might suffice to persuade the king to grant a pardon in April.  How can such an official be persuaded to put such a word in the ear of the king?  I have written letters to my elected representatives in Washington, asking them to raise the matter the next time they talk with the Thai ambassador; I doubt that such letters will increase by very much the probability that they will do as I request, but I can say that if no one told them about the case there would be zero probability that they would raise the matter.  Some public campaigning, in the form of petitions, letters to the editor, public rallies, and so on, might be useful as a way of making American officials aware of the case.  Of course, such activities inside Thailand would be counterproductive.  Nothing can be gained by embarrassing the Thai regime.

Second, Thai and Burmese officials must work jointly to shut down the market at Tachilek and to prevent another such market emerging elsewhere in their territories.  Both of these regimes react defensively to embarrassment.  Therefore, it seems unlikely that an approach involving massive public campaigning and formal international institions would have much success in promoting such an effort.  Rather, the USA and its allies must sit down with Thailand, and perhaps other ASEAN states as well, and work out an overall approach to detente with Burma/ Myanmar.  In fine, they should approach the Burmese regime with an offer to back down from the “human rights” campaign against them in exchange for certain concessions, none of which would need to be public.  First on this list of concessions would be a joint effort with Thailand to crack down on Tachilek.  This approach to the burmese would of course have to be made behind closed doors.  Such an approach would not be likely to happen as long as the USA and China see Burma as contested territory in their geopolitical maneuverings.  Certainly Mr Nicolaides’ imprisonment is not the only obstacle to cleaning up the mess at Tachilek.  It is an obstacle, however, and it can and should be cleared.