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Crackdowns, Now and Then


Evel_Penivel

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News about crackdowns in Pattaya and Bangkok, as well as proclamations that Pattaya will become a family-oriented destination, are nothing new. Anyone want to guess the years in which the five excerpts below (from articles in the Western press) were published? Two are from this year, three are older.

 

Evil

:devil:

 

1) Thailand has developed into a family-friendly destination offering brilliant value and a warm welcome. With good weather all year round, gorgeous beaches and every type of shopping you could want, it is well worth the 12-hour journey. In fact the land of smiles has been billed as the top long-haul destination for this year, offering some of the best deals around.

 

 

2) The declining U.S. dollar has helped raise Pattaya Beach back to its former prosperity as one of Thailand's most popular tourist resorts. A year ago, its annual hotel occupancy was down more than 50 percent from four years earlier, the beaches were littered with trash, the water was becoming polluted, and tourists complained of harassment by transvestites and prostitutes.

The resort's glut of bars, massage parlors and prostitutes created a severe image problem and scared away middle-class and family tourists, the hoteliers said. A recent survey of Pattaya's visitors reported that 75 percent were male, more than 40 percent of them single- perhaps offering a clue to one of the resort's major attractions. In the past two years the tourism authority, along with Pattaya's hoteliers and the city's semiautonomous government, have tried to clean up the resort's image. The campaign includes promoting the resort as a sports center with events such as car races, yacht and speedboat contests, golf competitions and kite-flying.

 

 

3) Mr. TKTK said he learned Pattaya, a city of 300,000 or more people on the Gulf of Siam, has about 22,000 brothels. Many cater to Westerners -- Americans, Australians, British and Germans -- in a business billed as "sex tourism."

"It's basically full of losers," Mr. TKTK said of the city. "They just use their money for sex."

 

 

4) Pattaya was a sleepy fishing village. Then it was discovered by American soldiers on R&R from Vietnam, and the Thai brand of sun, sea and sex was invented, beginning a boom in tourism. Today Pattaya is a mess. Uncontrolled building has ruined its shoreline. The sea is coated with a film of raw sewage. Last year so many tourists died in mysterious circumstances that even the shady mafia that controls the town was embarrassed. An alarming proportion of the bar girls, many of whom are in fact transvestites, are HIV positive. Lucky is the hotel with 10% of its rooms occupied. The barons of Thailand's tourist industry are worried that the Pattaya ...

 

 

5) The latest crime crackdown in the Thai capital began like any other: police moved off their beats and into the bars, hoping to catch a hostess without her number tag or perhaps topless go-go dancers.

While they worked, the officers enjoyed free beer from the management and maybe a movie or the latest music, supplied in the hope that they would soon go away happy. Instead, they stayed until the newly enforced closing hours.

Customers, mostly tourists, gaped as the official closing time was diligently enforced and bars disgorged their crowds on the stroke of midnight, turning Bangkok's main entertainment strip into a scene resembling the dying moments of a high school dance.

The city's thousands of bar girls, proprietors, touts and pimps tightened their belts, resigned to waiting out the familiar brief storm of Government-enforced morality that frequently coincides with the off-season for tourists.

Bar owners are retaliating against the crackdown by serving only water to visiting policemen. Patrons are adamant that the bars are rarely a source of crime.

''The only rip-offs here are completely legitimate,'' said one regular, referring to the inflated drink prices which also include a chat with a bar girl.

 

 

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I know there are a lot of nightlife venues in Pattaya but 22,000....surely an over-estimate ?

 

A huge overestimate. Supposedly there are 3,500 bars of all sorts (and not all have girls), plus a few hundred massage shops and other venues. There are 30,000 to 50,000 working girls (number varies with season) in Pattaya, according to the Pattaya cops. Most farang business owners consider that a fair estimate.

 

 

 

Just a few more examples. In which years were these articles published?

 

Evel

:devil:

 

6) Tourism is one of the key areas being targeted by a Thai government set on growth, and a major clean-up campaign is to be launched to rid the country of its sleazy sex and drugs image.

 

7) Just say 'nyet' to Russian gangsters in Pattaya

 

Thailand is just coming into the reality that Pattaya, as we once knew it to be back in the old days, may eventually be lost to the thugs fromRussia. If the government and the police do not move quickly Thailand will find that its tourism industry in Pattaya will vanish. The latest incident is just a telltale sign of what's to come. No touristsfeel safe with mafiosi, let alone a foreign mafia in that area.

These Russian gangsters are experts in the fields they choose and have intricate webs of front companies, legal businesses and know-how to move drugs, prostitutes and weapons. One only has to look what has gone on the last two years to see their tentacles have reached throughout Thailand. Foreign business wil evacuate Thailand. Thailand is by far no match for these people, and the police should move quickly to see they are sent out of the country.

 

 

 

 

8) Thailand Restoring Pattaya Beach Resort

PATTAYA, Thailand In a vestige of the Vietnam War, nearly two-thirds of the people who visit Thailand today are men, many of them coming for the kind of red-light district R-and-R that attracted soldiers on leave from the battlefields.

Thailand is working hard to change that image, and its efforts are most visible here 80 miles southeast of Bangkok at the beach resort of Pattaya, which was first popularized by American G.I.'s in the early 1960's.

''Historically, Pattaya has had a little bit of a difficult reputation,'' said ( director of sales for a major hotel). ''We have always had the sort of night life that you would expect troops coming from a war would be looking for.''

The red-light district, with its nightclubs, is still Pattaya's defining landmark.

''But inexorably,'' Mr. TK said, ''we are developing Pattaya as a family resort city, as a resort fit for all.''

Along its beachfront, Pattaya now offers scuba diving, para-sailing and jet skis. There are bowling alleys, tennis courts and eight nearby golf courses. The city is crowded with fine restaurants, fast-food outlets, duty-free stores, cinemas, shopping malls, a Ripley's Believe It or Not museum and a disco that can hold 6,000 people.

''We want Pattaya and the eastern seaboard to become a major center of the Thai economy, both as a center of tourism and business,'' said TKTK, who heads the Tourism Authority of Thailand.

In its brochures, the resort now promotes itself as a destination for families and business conferences, hardly mentioning its famous night life. But the development has brought other problems, including air and water pollution. In response, the Government has begun a $145 million program of new roads and transportation, land reclamation, beautification and water and sewage treatment.

''Obviously, it is hard to sell a beach destination where it is unwise to swim in the sea,'' Mr. TK said. Most swimming here is done in hotel pools.

The development of Pattaya is part of a sophisticated repackaging of Thailand as an all-purpose tourist destination. Package tours are proliferating, offering trips to beaches, hill tribes and historical sites.

 

9) med_1265311109-Pattaya1.jpg

 

10) med_1265311123-Pattaya2.jpg

 

 

 

 

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"Pattaya is not as cheap or simple as it used to be now that Europeans flock to the place on charter flights and a growing number of North Americans are discovering it. But hotel rates are competitive with other seaside resorts throughout the world."

 

The Globe and Mail (Toronto) , Aug. 23, 1980

 

Those two sentences, written nearly thirty years ago, are just as valid today as they were in 1980. The same is true about the sentence below from The New York Times, also written in 1980.

 

 

 

"Lest Thailand be confirmed in the traveler's mind as a place for nothing but pornographic tourism, let it be recorded that behind the front of commercial exploitation of sexual impulses, which has made Bangkok attractive to hordes of lecherous men, mainly European and Japanese, there lies a large Southeast Asian country, which the pimps, shills and touts that hover about the hotels of the capital do nothing to promote."

 

The New York Times, Nov. 2, 1980

 

What's striking is how similar the warnings about Pattaya have been for the past twenty five years or so. Dirty beaches and water, inadequate infrastructure as well as prostitution and all-around sleaziness have been constant topics of discussion. Likewise, crackdowns and the re-birth of Pattaya as a family resort have all been talked about since the 1980s.

 

Despite the dire predictions and threats of cleanup campaigns (both moral and environmental), not that much has changed. The beaches and water are still dirty, the infrastructure as inadequate as it's always been and remains sleazy and vulgar enough to reign unchallenged as the capital of White Trashistan.

 

And it will stay that way until most of us are trying to get a better deal from St. Peter rather than bar girls.

 

Of course, it's not impossible for Thai authorities to shut down the commercial sex activities in Pattaya, or least make them far less noticeable than today. But that's not likely to happen overnight because of the effect it would have on the incomes of some individuals and groups within Thai society. The impact of the disappearance of farang-oriented P4P in Pattaya would have a minimal impact on the Thai economy as a whole. However, and it's a very big HOWEVER, the effect on the livelihoods of a number of Thais, ranging from the bottom to the top of the pile, would be devastating. Until there's a ready substitute for the income generated for Thais through farang-oriented P4P, there won't be a thorough or long-lasting crackdown.

 

Nor can Pattaya be transformed into a family-oriented destination without the expenditure of billions of baht on infrastructure and clean ups of the beaches and water. Even if Pattaya's beaches could be restored to pristine condition (very unlikely), many more spectacular ocean-front destinations exist inside and outside Thailand.

 

For the package tourists from god-awful industrial cities in China and Russia, Pattaya already seems like a tropical paradise. By their standards, it is. But as those countries develop and their citizens become more familiar with the world, Pattaya will lose its attraction even for them.

 

On the other hand, LBFMs will never lose their attraction for farang men. For the Thais making money off Pattaya, it's a safer bet to keep things the way they are, more or less.

 

Evel

:devil:

 

 

 

Here are the dates for the articles in my OP and follow-up:

1) Thailand has developed into a family-friendly destination offering brilliant value and a warm welcome. With good weather all year round, gorgeous beaches and every type of shopping you could want, it is well worth the 12-hour journey. In fact the land of smiles has been billed as the top long-haul destination for this year, offering some of the best deals around.

 

Scottish Daily Record, Jan. 2, 2010

 

2) The declining U.S. dollar has helped raise Pattaya Beach back to its former prosperity as one of Thailand's most popular tourist resorts. A year ago, its annual hotel occupancy was down more than 50 percent from four years earlier, the beaches were littered with trash, the water was becoming polluted, and tourists complained of harassment by transvestites and prostitutes.

The resort's glut of bars, massage parlors and prostitutes created a severe image problem and scared away middle-class and family tourists, the hoteliers said. ...

 

The Seattle Times, 14 June 1987

 

 

3) Mr. TKTK said he learned Pattaya, a city of 300,000 or more people on the Gulf of Siam, has about 22,000 brothels. Many cater to Westerners -- Americans, Australians, British and Germans -- in a business billed as "sex tourism."

"It's basically full of losers," Mr. TKTK said of the city. "They just use their money for sex."

 

The News-Sentinel (Fort Wayne, Indiana) Jan. 20, 2010

 

 

4) Pattaya was a sleepy fishing village. Then it was discovered by American soldiers on R&R from Vietnam, and the Thai brand of sun, sea and sex was invented, beginning a boom in tourism. Today Pattaya is a mess. Uncontrolled building has ruined its shoreline. The sea is coated with a film of raw sewage. Last year so many tourists died in mysterious circumstances that even the shady mafia that controls the town was embarrassed. An alarming proportion of the bar girls, many of whom are in fact transvestites, are HIV positive. Lucky is the hotel with 10% of its rooms occupied. The barons of Thailand's tourist industry are worried that the Pattaya ...

 

The Economist, July 6, 1991

 

5) The latest crime crackdown in the Thai capital began like any other: police moved off their beats and into the bars, hoping to catch a hostess without her number tag or perhaps topless go-go dancers. ...

 

The Globe and Mail (Toronto) 8 August 1981

 

6) Tourism is one of the key areas being targeted by a Thai government set on growth, and a major clean-up campaign is to be launched to rid the country of its sleazy sex and drugs image.

 

MT (Management Today), Dec. 1, 1991

 

7) Just say 'nyet' to Russian gangsters in Pattaya

 

Thailand is just coming into the reality that Pattaya, as we once knew it to be back in the old days, may eventually be lost to the thugs from Russia. If the government and the police do not move quickly Thailand will find that its tourism industry in Pattaya will vanish. The latest incident is just a telltale sign of what's to come. No tourists feel safe with mafiosi, let alone a foreign mafia in that area.

 

The Nation (Thailand), 04-13-1998

 

 

8) Thailand Restoring Pattaya Beach Resort

 

PATTAYA, Thailand— In a vestige of the Vietnam War, nearly two-thirds of the people who visit Thailand today are men, many of them coming for the kind of red-light district R-and-R that attracted soldiers on leave from the battlefields.

Thailand is working hard to change that image, and its efforts are most visible here 80 miles southeast of Bangkok at the beach resort of Pattaya, which was first popularized by American G.I.'s in the early 1960's.

 

New York Times, Dec. 8. 1996

 

And the two scanned artcles:

 

9) New Straits Times (Singapore), Nov. 16, 1991

 

10) New Straits Times, Jan. 8, 1991

 

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