LTO Cambodia: May 2010

Sunday, May 23, 2010

Twitter Bangkok

From its inception until about a month ago I considered twitter an all but useless frivolity, good only for bored housewives and self-obsessed kids. Bangkok has changed my mind.

During the unfortunate events of the last week in Bangkok, twitter proved itself an absolutely amazing, invaluable tool for everybody involved - the people on the ground, the government, the protesters, the journalists and even for casual observers such as myself.

During our little war here in Cambodia of July 97 we were, for the most part, pinned down in our houses with little information about what was going on. I was lucky at the time. I had a cell, a shortwave, an Icom (military) and a television. And still, information was very sparse, narrow and always way late. Military chatter, two day old (incorrect) news on CNN, the occasional phone call from one of the few other people in town with a cell, usually looking for, rather than offering information. And it took four different bulky tools to get that limited information.

But during the Bangkok event, through Twitter, I had access to dozens of sources of information, right there on the ground, on all sides of the event, being reported in real time, in an easily monitored format - more than 3 dozen people in the heart of the action twittering what was happening before their eyes from several perspectives at that very second, and so did lots of people there in Bangkok, from their handphone alone. Except for analysis and summaries, it made traditional news sources all but superfluous - whether web, cable or broadcast.

From an information gathering point of view, it was even more powerful than actually being there on the ground, because you could be in 40 places at the same time, experiencing it from 40 different perspectives - the mad red shirt, the terrified tourist, the resolute governor, the crazy expats giving the blow-by-blow from the streets, the journalists making cynical observations or trapped in a pagoda under fire, people reporting troop and protester movements and confrontations, calling for help for the wounded, reporting fires and bombs, even Thaksin's lawyer trying to spin the whole thing from Europe. It was a mass of information, all as it was happening.

This was another landmark event for twitter, and a transformational event for me & twitter. I am sold.

Cambodia

Cambodia is Srok Khmer, the 'Land of the Khmer,' the primary ethnic group in the area since at least the Neolithic and an Indian influenced civilization with origins near 2000 years old. Centered on the lower Mekong and tributaries the Khmer people have dominated the region for millennia. From 2nd century AD Khmer kingdoms rose and fell, culminating in unification and the 500 year reign of the Angkorian Empire, the builders of the temples of Angkor near Siem Reap. The Empire stretched from Burma to the ocean. But by the 1400s Cambodia fell to centuries of change and decline squeezed between the expanding Siam and Vietnam. Colonized and by the French in the 1860s, independence 90 years later in 1954, a brief post-colonial 'golden period' under Sihanouk, coup in 70, civil war, fall to the communist Khmer Rouge in 75, 3 years 8 months 20 days of madness, Vietnamese rescue in 1979, occupation, low level war and international sanctions in the 80s, the UN, ostensive democracy and an adventure party destination in the 90s and now mainstreaming, tourism, rapid development, rapacious capitalism and NGOs, missionaries and other international busybodies aplenty.

Southeast Asia

As the term implies, Southeast Asia encompasses the southeastern corner of the Asian continent, loosely speaking, the area between India, China and Australia. It is made up of two distinct regions: the mainland zone, a bulbous peninsula jutting into the Pacific Ocean, bounded by China to the north and India to the west; and the insular (island) zone in the Pacific Ocean. The name 'Southeast Asia' is a comparatively recent invention, first coming into use into the 20th century and still a bit indefinite in definition. Mainland Southeast Asia is generally considered to include Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam, Thailand, Burma (Myanmar) and peninsular Malaysia. The mainland is sometimes referred to as Indo-China though Indochina (Indochine) also designates the 19th/20th century French colonial conglomerate of Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam. Sitting south of the Tropic of Cancer, most of mainland Southeast Asia lies in the hot, humid tropics and sub-tropics with a climate dominated by a monsoon cycle which divides the year into two distinct seasons: a dry season and an extremely wet monsoon season. Much of the mainland is mountainous and thickly jungled, with large river systems and wide, low-lying, flood-prone plains, much of which is, in modern times, deforested and blanketed with geometrical rice paddies. Several major river valleys including the Mekong River, the Red, Ma and Ka rivers and the group of rivers draining to the Chao Praya Delta played host to the rise of early civilization in the area. The Mekong River is one of the world's greatest rivers, the seventh largest on the planet, and since pre-history has been closely associated with the land of the Khmer.