While military in Thailand are increasingly restricting freedom of speech in the country in the name of “safety”, they meanwhile started to relax restrictions in place since the Military Coup of last week. The curfew has been eased by three hours, bringing Bangkok and provinces back –almost- to normalcy.
BANGKOK – It seems that professionals of tourism have been heard. After five days of a rather strictly enforced curfew from 10 pm to 5 am, the National Council for Peace and Order (NCPO) decided on Wednesday morning to relax curfew hours to midnight until 4 am. A move which will bring some life back in Bangkok streets in the evening as well as helping many people with a job starting in the first hours of the evening, from food stall owners to night market shopkeepers, not to name bars and cinemas.
The wish has been expressed by the travel industry to provide a kind of normalcy back to travellers to the Kingdom. The military government of General Prayuth Chan-ocha even mulls out the idea of freeing totally from the curfew restrictions certain tourist areas in the country (such as Pattaya, Phuket or Hua Hin).
The relaxing of the curfew rules is also easing travels within the country as inter-regional busses and public transport such as BTS, MRT and Airport Express in Bangkok now finish their services at 11.00 pm compared to midnight prior to the Coup. Most stores are back to normal opening hours as well, particularly shopping malls.
While a kind of normal way of life comes back to the Kingdom, the most worrying sign in the current situation is a government’s clamp down on freedom of expression in media and in public social media. CNN and BBC television channels have been taken off air since the coup. On Thursday, Facebook was disconnected for 45 minutes. It seems that the move was enforced at the demand of the military government who wanted to track some accounts judged permissive.
A few Thai journalists also have been summoned to “report accurately and more positively” according to the Bangkok Post.
The same newspaper indicates that the NCPO is looking at drafting a new order which would tight controls over media and social media… While it is probably necessary for military to clean the political mess that Thailand endured over the last year, accompanying measures to restrict freedom of speech are unlikely to generate empathy neither from locals, nor from the international community.
Luc Citrinot a French national is a freelance journalist and consultant in tourism and air transport with over 20 years experience. Based in Paris and Bangkok, he works for various travel and air transport trade publications in Europe and Asia.
