Features

Fresh Coup Brewing in Thailand

Published

6 months ago

2025/06/29

Thai Prime Minister Paetongtarn Shinawatra

The bottom line is that what is at stake is not merely Paetongtarn’s premiership or the fate of a few kilometres of disputed land, but the broader architecture of Thai political life. The resurgence of military assertiveness, the weaponisation of nationalism, the suppression of civil society, and the systematic dismantling of electoral legitimacy represent a retreat from the democratic aspirations of the 1997 constitution — itself long dead in spirit if not in name.

While global attention remains riveted on the recently halted conflict between Israel and Iran—ignited by President Trump’s provocative assaults on purported nuclear sites—a far more seismic and overlooked upheaval is unfolding in Southeast Asia, heralding the spectres of governmental disintegration, regional turmoil, and the re-emergence of virulent ultranationalist authoritarianism. At the heart of this crisis lies the embattled Thai Prime Minister Paetongtarn Shinawatra, caught between the unforgiving gears of royalist militarism and an inflammatory border dispute with Cambodia that has become less about territorial delineation and more a proxy war for the soul of Thai democracy.

To view the Thailand-Cambodia border standoff merely through the lens of cartographic claims over temples and ancient ruins would be to profoundly underestimate its broader implications. The border is merely the stage. The actors — the Thai military, the royalist aristocracy, the remnants of the Shinawatra political dynasty, and Cambodia’s own enduring autocracy — are embroiled in a deeper conflict over legitimacy, memory, and geopolitics.

The roots of the current impasse lie in the historical ambiguities left unresolved by the Franco-Siamese treaties of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The contentious zones surrounding the Ta Moan Thom, Ta Krabei, and the Preah Vihear temples have, for over a century, oscillated between national pride and imperial cartographic error. The 1962 International Court of Justice ruling, which awarded Preah Vihear to Cambodia, never fully settled the Thai military’s grievance — and in many ways, enshrined a mythos of loss that nationalists have continually resurrected to justify belligerent posturing.

Thailand-Cambodia border stand-off. (Image credit Bangkok Post)

Yet, what is occurring in 2025 cannot be explained merely by revisiting colonial maps. This is a crisis deliberately escalated — a choreography of confrontation designed to reinvigorate military influence within a faltering Thai polity. The fatal clash on May 28, which left a Cambodian soldier dead, may have been spontaneous in execution but was the predictable outcome of months of nationalist agitation, thinly veiled threats from mid-level Thai army commanders, and the re-militarisation of border provinces under the guise of sovereignty defence. Paetongtarn’s beleaguered premiership, marked by populist inexperience and elite antipathy, has provided the ideal vacuum for this crisis to metastasise.

It is no coincidence that her leaked 17-minute phone call with former Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen, now Senate President and once again donning military fatigues as the “Senior Logistics Officer”, has become the fulcrum of a political maelstrom. That conversation — intended as a gesture of diplomatic candour — was met not with gratitude, but with fury. Within Thailand, it was perceived by the military and conservative establishment as an unforgivable trespass on hierarchical protocol, not least because Paetongtarn appeared to denounce a regional Thai commander and supplicate before a foreign autocrat. The fact that it was leaked by a Cambodian official only highlights the performative nature of this outrage: it served as both domestic scandal and geopolitical warning.

The response from Bhumjaithai, a pivotal coalition partner, to exit the governing alliance under the pretext of defending Thai sovereignty is performative no less — a carefully calibrated manoeuvre designed to prelude a no-confidence motion and probable parliamentary collapse. Their claim that the Prime Minister’s leaked conversation compromised national security conveniently elides the fact that Thai military officers have themselves engaged in far more clandestine — and often destabilising — operations across the Cambodian border for decades, including support for anti-Vietnamese insurgents and alleged interference in Cambodian domestic affairs.

Paetongtarn’s position is now untenable. Her coalition is haemorrhaging credibility, the military has shuttered land borders under the guise of “national security,” and conservative senators have launched judicial petitions against her. The spectre of a constitutional court dismissal — Thailand’s now-traditional soft coup method — looms ever larger. Meanwhile, the military has revived its Cold War-era national security discourse, linking the border issue to broader narratives of sovereignty, moral decay, and the need for military stewardship.

But history offers chilling parallels. The October 1976 Thammasat massacre, followed by an immediate coup, was preceded by similar nationalist fervour and royalist mobilisation against student demonstrators accused of harbouring communist sympathies. The 2006 coup that deposed Thaksin Shinawatra, Paetongtarn’s father, was couched in identical rhetoric — the moral failings of a populist demagogue, the threat to the monarchy, and the need for intervention. Even the 2014 coup, conducted by then-General Prayuth Chan-ocha, was justified on the grounds of restoring order and “rebalancing” foreign relations.

Indeed, Thailand’s military has mastered the art of coup legitimation, consistently invoking border crises, alleged threats to the monarchy, or judicial irregularities to sanctify its usurpation of power. The judiciary, long infiltrated by royalist ideologues, has become a reliable accomplice, dissolving political parties and annulling elections with antiseptic legalese. Paetongtarn’s potential removal by either court or coup is not a question of “if” but “when.”

In this complex interplay of power, Cambodia plays its own part. Hun Sen’s re-entry into military affairs — symbolically announced in uniform from the frontlines — is less about logistics and more about symbolism. His historical disdain for Thai military adventurism, combined with a shrewd understanding of domestic optics, makes his posture politically advantageous. By invoking “an enemy that has invaded Cambodia,” he galvanises nationalist fervour at home while drawing Thailand deeper into a diplomatic quagmire. Cambodia’s filing of a case at The Hague over the disputed zones is not merely legal posturing but geopolitical provocation — an invitation for international adjudication that Thailand will likely reject, reinforcing Cambodia’s narrative of victimhood.

Beneath these tensions lie deeper regional anxieties. China’s increasing influence in Cambodia, through infrastructure projects and military agreements, unnerves Thai strategists who fear encirclement. Simultaneously, Thailand’s own drift from democratic norms has strained its relations with Western allies, giving Beijing further room to manoeuvre. The border crisis, thus, becomes more than a bilateral squabble — it is a proxy terrain where great power interests intersect with local authoritarianism.

The bottom line is that what is at stake is not merely Paetongtarn’s premiership or the fate of a few kilometres of disputed land, but the broader architecture of Thai political life. The resurgence of military assertiveness, the weaponisation of nationalism, the suppression of civil society, and the systematic dismantling of electoral legitimacy represent a retreat from the democratic aspirations of the 1997 constitution — itself long dead in spirit if not in name.

Thailand teeters on the precipice of yet another putsch — an outcome both banal in its predictability and tragic in its implications. And yet the international community remains inert, transfixed by conflicts elsewhere, blind to the slow strangulation of Southeast Asia’s once-promising democracy. The coming coup, whether judicial, parliamentary or military, will not just remove a prime minister. It will reaffirm the militarised state as the ultimate arbiter of power in Thailand, further ossifying a regime where ballots are tolerated only when they yield the correct result.

And as the borders close, both physically and ideologically, the spectre of armed conflict with Cambodia offers the military not only an external adversary but the ultimate alibi — the eternal justification for suspending liberty in the name of order.

by Nilantha Ilangamuwa ✍️

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Features

US’ drastic aid cut to UN poses moral challenge to world

Published

4 hours ago

2026/01/1

Thilina Walpola

An UN humanitarian mission in the Gaza. [File: Ashraf Amra/Anadolu Agency]

‘Adapt, shrink or die’ – thus runs the warning issued by the Trump administration to UN humanitarian agencies with brute insensitivity in the wake of its recent decision to drastically reduce to $2bn its humanitarian aid to the UN system. This is a substantial climb down from the $17bn the US usually provided to the UN for its humanitarian operations.

Considering that the US has hitherto been the UN’s biggest aid provider, it need hardly be said that the US decision would pose a daunting challenge to the UN’s humanitarian operations around the world. This would indeed mean that, among other things, people living in poverty and stifling material hardships, in particularly the Southern hemisphere, could dramatically increase. Coming on top of the US decision to bring to an end USAID operations, the poor of the world could be said to have been left to their devices as a consequence of these morally insensitive policy rethinks of the Trump administration.

Earlier, the UN had warned that it would be compelled to reduce its aid programs in the face of ‘the deepest funding cuts ever.’ In fact the UN is on record as requesting the world for $23bn for its 2026 aid operations.

If this UN appeal happens to go unheeded, the possibilities are that the UN would not be in a position to uphold the status it has hitherto held as the world’s foremost humanitarian aid provider. It would not be incorrect to state that a substantial part of the rationale for the UN’s existence could come in for questioning if its humanitarian identity is thus eroded.

Inherent in these developments is a challenge for those sections of the international community that wish to stand up and be counted as humanists and the ‘Conscience of the World.’ A responsibility is cast on them to not only keep the UN system going but to also ensure its increased efficiency as a humanitarian aid provider to particularly the poorest of the poor.

It is unfortunate that the US is increasingly opting for a position of international isolation. Such a policy position was adopted by it in the decades leading to World War Two and the consequences for the world as a result for this policy posture were most disquieting. For instance, it opened the door to the flourishing of dictatorial regimes in the West, such as that led by Adolph Hitler in Germany, which nearly paved the way for the subjugation of a good part of Europe by the Nazis.

If the US had not intervened militarily in the war on the side of the Allies, the West would have faced the distressing prospect of coming under the sway of the Nazis and as a result earned indefinite political and military repression. By entering World War Two the US helped to ward off these bleak outcomes and indeed helped the major democracies of Western Europe to hold their own and thrive against fascism and dictatorial rule.

Republican administrations in the US in particular have not proved the greatest defenders of democratic rule the world over, but by helping to keep the international power balance in favour of democracy and fundamental human rights they could keep under a tight leash fascism and linked anti-democratic forces even in contemporary times. Russia’s invasion and continued occupation of parts of Ukraine reminds us starkly that the democracy versus fascism battle is far from over.

Right now, the US needs to remain on the side of the rest of the West very firmly, lest fascism enjoys another unfettered lease of life through the absence of countervailing and substantial military and political power.

However, by reducing its financial support for the UN and backing away from sustaining its humanitarian programs the world over the US could be laying the ground work for an aggravation of poverty in the South in particular and its accompaniments, such as, political repression, runaway social discontent and anarchy.

What should not go unnoticed by the US is the fact that peace and social stability in the South and the flourishing of the same conditions in the global North are symbiotically linked, although not so apparent at first blush. For instance, if illegal migration from the South to the US is a major problem for the US today, it is because poor countries are not receiving development assistance from the UN system to the required degree. Such deprivation on the part of the South leads to aggravating social discontent in the latter and consequences such as illegal migratory movements from South to North.

Accordingly, it will be in the North’s best interests to ensure that the South is not deprived of sustained development assistance since the latter is an essential condition for social contentment and stable governance, which factors in turn would guard against the emergence of phenomena such as illegal migration.

Meanwhile, democratic sections of the rest of the world in particular need to consider it a matter of conscience to ensure the sustenance and flourishing of the UN system. To be sure, the UN system is considerably flawed but at present it could be called the most equitable and fair among international development organizations and the most far-flung one. Without it world poverty would have proved unmanageable along with the ills that come along with it.

Dehumanizing poverty is an indictment on humanity. It stands to reason that the world community should rally round the UN and ensure its survival lest the abomination which is poverty flourishes. In this undertaking the world needs to stand united. Ambiguities on this score could be self-defeating for the world community.

For example, all groupings of countries that could demonstrate economic muscle need to figure prominently in this initiative. One such grouping is BRICS. Inasmuch as the US and the West should shrug aside Realpolitik considerations in this enterprise, the same goes for organizations such as BRICS.

The arrival at the above international consensus would be greatly facilitated by stepped up dialogue among states on the continued importance of the UN system. Fresh efforts to speed-up UN reform would prove major catalysts in bringing about these positive changes as well. Also requiring to be shunned is the blind pursuit of narrow national interests.

Features

Egg white scene …

Published

4 hours ago

2026/01/1

Thilina Walpola

Hi! Great to be back after my Christmas break.

Thought of starting this week with egg white.

Yes, eggs are brimming with nutrients beneficial for your overall health and wellness, but did you know that eggs, especially the whites, are excellent for your complexion?

OK, if you have no idea about how to use egg whites for your face, read on.

Egg White, Lemon, Honey:

Separate the yolk from the egg white and add about a teaspoon of freshly squeezed lemon juice and about one and a half teaspoons of organic honey. Whisk all the ingredients together until they are mixed well.

Apply this mixture to your face and allow it to rest for about 15 minutes before cleansing your face with a gentle face wash.

Don’t forget to apply your favourite moisturiser, after using this face mask, to help seal in all the goodness.

Egg White, Avocado:

In a clean mixing bowl, start by mashing the avocado, until it turns into a soft, lump-free paste, and then add the whites of one egg, a teaspoon of yoghurt and mix everything together until it looks like a creamy paste.

Apply this mixture all over your face and neck area, and leave it on for about 20 to 30 minutes before washing it off with cold water and a gentle face wash.

Egg White, Cucumber, Yoghurt:

In a bowl, add one egg white, one teaspoon each of yoghurt, fresh cucumber juice and organic honey. Mix all the ingredients together until it forms a thick paste.

Apply this paste all over your face and neck area and leave it on for at least 20 minutes and then gently rinse off this face mask with lukewarm water and immediately follow it up with a gentle and nourishing moisturiser.

Egg White, Aloe Vera, Castor Oil:

To the egg white, add about a teaspoon each of aloe vera gel and castor oil and then mix all the ingredients together and apply it all over your face and neck area in a thin, even layer.

Leave it on for about 20 minutes and wash it off with a gentle face wash and some cold water. Follow it up with your favourite moisturiser.

Features

Confusion cropping up with Ne-Yo in the spotlight

Published

4 hours ago

2026/01/1

Thilina Walpola

Ne-Yo: His management should clarify the last-minute cancellation

Superlatives galore were used, especially on social media, to highlight R&B singer Ne-Yo’s trip to Sri Lanka: Global superstar Ne-Yo to perform live in Colombo this December; Ne-Yo concert puts Sri Lanka back on the global entertainment map; A global music sensation is coming to Sri Lanka … and there were lots more!

At an official press conference, held at a five-star venue, in Colombo, it was indicated that the gathering marked a defining moment for Sri Lanka’s entertainment industry as international R&B powerhouse and three-time Grammy Award winner Ne-Yo prepares to take the stage in Colombo this December.

What’s more, the occasion was graced by the presence of Sunil Kumara Gamage, Minister of Sports & Youth Affairs of Sri Lanka, and Professor Ruwan Ranasinghe, Deputy Minister of Tourism, alongside distinguished dignitaries, sponsors, and members of the media.

Shah Rukh Khan: Disappointed his fans in Sri Lanka

According to reports, the concert had received the official endorsement of the Sri Lanka Tourism Promotion Bureau, recognising it as a flagship initiative in developing the country’s concert economy by attracting fans, and media, from all over South Asia.

Nick Carter: His concert, too, was cancelled due to “Unforeseen circumstances

However, I had that strange feeling that this concert would not become a reality, keeping in mind what happened to Nick Carter’s Colombo concert – cancelled at the very last moment.

Carter issued a video message announcing he had to return to the USA due to “unforeseen circumstances” and a “family emergency”.

Though “unforeseen circumstances” was the official reason provided by Carter and the local organisers, there was speculation that low ticket sales may also have been a factor in the cancellation.

Well, “Unforeseen Circumstances” has cropped up again!

In a brief statement, via social media, the organisers of the Ne-Yo concert said the decision was taken due to “unforeseen circumstances and factors beyond their control.”

Ne-Yo, too, subsequently made an announcement, citing “Unforeseen circumstances.”

The public has a right to know what these “unforeseen circumstances” are, and who is to be blamed – the organisers or Ne-Yo!

Ne-Yo’s management certainly need to come out with the truth.

However, those who are aware of some of the happenings in the setup here put it down to poor ticket sales, mentioning that the tickets for the concert, and a meet-and-greet event, were exorbitantly high, considering that Ne-Yo is not a current mega star.

We also had a cancellation coming our way from Shah Rukh Khan, who was scheduled to visit Sri Lanka for the City of Dreams resort launch, and then this was received: “Unfortunately due to unforeseen personal reasons beyond his control, Mr. Khan is no longer able to attend.”

Referring to this kind of mess up, a leading showbiz personality said that it will only make people reluctant to buy their tickets, online.

“Tickets will go mostly at the gate and it will be very bad for the industry,” he added.