Thailand (Lonely Planet, 13th Edition) - China Williams [39]
Modern matches are held within a marked circle, beginning with a wâi kroo ceremony and accompanied throughout by a musical ensemble. Thai-boxing techniques and judo-like throws are employed in conjunction with weapons techniques. Although sharpened weapons are used, the contestants refrain from striking their opponents – the winner is decided on the basis of stamina and the technical skill displayed.
Ðà·grôr
Sometimes called Siamese football in old English texts, à·grôr involves kicking a woven rattan ball (about 12cm in diameter) between opponents.
The traditional way to play is for players to stand in a circle (the size depends on the number of players) and simply try to keep the ball airborne by kicking it soccer-style. Points are scored for style, difficulty and variety of kicking manoeuvres. This form of the game is often played by friends and office colleagues wherever there’s a little room: a vacant lot, school playground and sandy beaches.
A popular variation on à·grôr – and the one used in intramural or international competitions – is played like volleyball, with a net, but with only the feet and head permitted to touch the ball. It’s amazing to see the players perform aerial pirouettes, spiking the ball over the net with their feet. Another variation has players kicking the ball into a hoop 4.5m above the ground – basketball with feet, and no backboard!
Popular in several neighbouring countries, à·grôr was introduced to the Southeast Asian Games by Thailand, and international championships tend to alternate between the Thais and Malaysians.
MEDIA
Southeast Asian governments are not typically fond of uncensored media outlets but Thailand often bucked this trend throughout the 1990s, even ensuring press freedoms in its 1997 constitution, albeit with fairly broad loopholes. That era came to end with the ascension of Thaksin Shinawatra, a telecommunications tycoon, and his Thai Rak Thai (TRT) party at the beginning of the new millennium. Just before the decisive 2001 general election, Thaksin’s company, Shin Corp, bought a controlling interest in iTV, Thailand’s only independent TV station. Shortly thereafter the new board sacked 23 iTV journalists who complained that the station was presenting biased coverage of the election to favour Thaksin and TRT. Almost overnight, the station was transformed from an independent, in-depth news channel to a pro-Thaksin mouthpiece.
With Thaksin winning the prime minister position and his party holding a controlling majority, the press encountered the kind of censorship and legal intimidation not seen since the 1970s era of military dictatorships. In 2002, two Western journalists, Shawn W Crispin and Rodney Tasker working for the Far Eastern Economic Review, were threatened with expulsion after the Thai authorities deemed a 10 January 2002 article to be offensive to the country. In 2004, Veera Prateepchaikul, editor-in-chief of the Bangkok Post, was removed from his job due to direct pressure from board members with allegiances to TRT, after Prateepchaikul’s critical remarks of Thaksin’s handling of the 2003–04 bird flu crisis. The TRT government also filed a litany of defamation lawsuits against critical individuals, publications and media groups who printed embarrassing revelations about his regime.
After the 2006 ousting of Thaksin, the media managed to retain its guarantees of press freedoms in the newly drafted constitution but this was a ‘paper promise’ that did little to rescue the press from intimidation, lawsuits and physical attacks. The military junta and its interim government took great liberties in silencing any pro-Thaksin reports. For example, the military blocked Thai cable and the internet from transmitting a 2007 CNN interview Thaksin gave months after the coup. The pro-Thaksin iTV channel was seized by the military and re-established as Thai PBS, a commercial-free public station. The post-coup election restored power to Thaksin’s former party,