Global News Journal

Can export bans be challenged at the WTO?

Russia’s ban on grain exports as a heat wave parches crops in the world’s third biggest wheat exporter has raised questions whether such export curbs break World Trade Organization rules. Russia is not a member of the WTO, and it remains to be seen how its new grain policy will affect its 17-year-old bid to join. But other grain exporters, such as Ukraine, which is also considering export curbs, are part of the global trade referee.

WTO rules are quite clear that members cannot interfere with imports and exports in a way that disrupts trade or discriminates against other members. But in practice most WTO rules aim to stop countries blocking imports – shutting out competitor’s goods to give their own domestic producers an unfair advantage.

In line of fire at Bangkok protests

It was 2 a.m. on a Friday morning and we were stuck in the Reuters office on the 35th floor of the U Chu Liang Building. Thai anti-government protesters had begun rioting after their military strategist, a flamboyant major-general known as  “Commander Red” was shot in the head as he was being interviewed by the New York Times at the “red shirt” protest encampment that occupies a huge chunk of expensive real estate in the Thai capital.

The protesters had swarmed into our parking lot, troops hot on their heels. One red shirt was shot dead, taking a bullet through his eye, outside our office.  Our managers  had ordered us to evacuate, but we had to wait until the violence died down outside.  I strapped on a 10 kg flak jacket and helmet emblazoned with “press stickers”, took a ride down the cargo elevator in a building under emergency power, and stepped carefully into the parking lot, looking around to see if it was safe for the remaining people in the newsroom to leave. It was quiet, as I crept around the parking lot, dodging from car to car, feeling slightly ridiculous. A taxi was parked just outside. I was beginning to understand what gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson meant when he said in his book Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas:  ”When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.”

I was about to enter the taxi,  when BOOM! The sound of a grenade maybe 50 metres away, followed by the rat-a-tat-tat of automatic gunfire. I jumped into the taxi, and told the driver to take me to my hotel. Quickly please. “Boom!”, he said, and laughed. “Boom, boom,boom,” he added, mimicking the act of firing a gun. And laughing once more we drove off into the terrifying night.

For the past four days, journalists have been moving out of their offices into hotels, and then out of their hotels into ones further from the combat zone, as violence escalated across the city of 15 million people in random urban warfare. The military was firing at groups of protesters setting up barricades of burning tyres, behind which they hurled petrol bombs and projectiles with slingshots. At least five journalists have been among the seven foreigners shot. One journalist took a bullet in the chest, but since he was wearing a heavy flak jacket, he just fell down and hurt his back.

A Canadian journalist working for a French television station was not as well protected. He was shot three times — in the arm, leg and abdomen — while covering the protest on Friday, but was recovering in hospital. The spiralling violence that has turned Bangkok’s bustling business district into a war zone has killed 37 people and injured nearly 270 since Thursday. A Reuters television cameraman, Hiro Muramoto was among those killed in the  melee of an April 10 protest that marked the point at which these protests that began rather festively turned violent.

I have moved hotels three times in the past week, as the combat zone widened

I was the last guest to leave the splendid Metropolitan Hotel on Sathorn Road on Saturday. The night before, I had walked back late at night on that road toward a line of soldiers metres away, who were firing on a group of  protesters, muzzle flashes punctuating the darkness. 

Discord in Thai kingdom

 Punchai is arranging strings of flowers under the imposing statue of King Rama VI at the entrance of Lumphini Park in Bangkok. The statue overlooks one end of the sprawling “red shirt” encampment that occupies a 3 square-km area of downtown Bangkok.

An altar has been set up at the base of the statue of a king who ruled from 1910 to 1925 and is generally credited with paving the way for democractic reforms in the kingdom. He is also the creator of Lumphini Park.

(Pro-government supporter raises a picture of Thai King bhumibol Adulyadej at a rally in Bangkok on April 27.  Reuters/Jerry Lampen)

“We put beautiful flowers here for the king, and the people,” says Punchai, a bicycle rickshaw driver in Bangkok.

It’s sundown and it’s fairly relaxed for a place where guys generally roam about with sharpened bamboo spears and which has a medieval-like barricades made of tyres and bamboo poles.

Children run about in the grass near the statue playing with spears. Women stir curries  simmering in big cooking pots for the evening meals. Yesterday, it was tense here. The men stood in rows in front of the barricade, wearing helmets. Women and children were not be seen. Monks wandered amongst the men receiving  “merit” from them, bits of food or spare change that can mean a more accommodating place in the afterlife should death suddenly intervene.

Police and army  troops are stationed all around the encampment, mostly hunkered down in alleyways or in underground walkways, away from the heat and public eye.  Bangkok has been expecting a crackdown on this sit-in for days. And it hasn’t happened. Not likely to, either.  Despite bombastic threats and rhetoric from the civilian government, the army has said repeatedly it won’t go in because it would be just too bloody.

from Russell Boyce:

The promise of seven blood baths in Bangkok and no violence

    With the same ghoulish intrigue that children pull the wings off a fly, the legs off spiders or as motorists slow to look at a scene of a bad accident, I waited to see the pictures from last night's demonstration in Thailand. The "red shirt" wearing supporters of ousted Thai premier Thaksin Shinawatra promised the world the sight of a million cubic centimetres of blood being drawn from the arms of his supporters and then thrown over Government House to demand that Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva call an immediate election.  A million is a bold figure that I tried to picture; a thousand cubic centimetres, one litre, so one thousand litre cartons of milk.  A more compact notion of the volume would be to visualise a cubic metre of blood; or in more practical terms in the UK the average bath size is 140 litres, so that is just over seven baths filled with blood.

A supporter of former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra donates blood during a gathering in Bangkok March 16, 2010. Anti-government protesters will collect one million cubic centimetres of blood to pour outside the Government House in Bangkok, in a symbolic move to denounce the government as part of their demonstration to call for fresh elections. REUTERS/Sukree Sukplang

The pictures are amazing. The frenzy of the demonstrators carrying plastic containers full of human blood. The lines of riot police (what was going through their minds?) facing the crowd. And then suddenly the emotional release as the blood is actually poured at the gates of Government House, leaving a growing crimson pool of human blood spreading towards the feet of the police and towards the buildings of government. 

Riot soldiers and policemen stand guard as supporters of former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra rally outside the Government house in Bangkok March 16, 2010. Thousands of protesters in Thailand donated blood and poured it later outside the premier's office on Tuesday, a "sacrifice for democracy" aimed at energising their movement after the government refused to step down.  REUTERS/Chaiwat Subprasom