The Press FRIDAY, AUGUST 6, 1965. Aid For Thailand

Press, Volume CIV, Issue 30822, 6 August 1965, Page 10

The Press FRIDAY, AUGUST 6, 1965. Aid For Thailand

Announcing the New Zealand Government’s decision to pay £300,000 for machinery and men to help build a road in North-east Thailand, the Prime Minister frankly associated the Dominion with the Thai Government’s counter-insurgency campaign. As a contribution to social and economic development in South-east Asia under the Colombo Plan the road should bring many benefits to people in a neglected and largely inaccessible part of Thailand. The military rulers there have only in recent years given attention to the needs of the people in this remote but now strategically important area. Early this year China’s Foreign Minister, Marshal Chen Yi, said that Thailand was the next target, after Vietnam, for “ liberation ”. Chinese and North Vietnamese radio broadcasts warned that the conflict in South-east Asia would not be confined to Vietnam. This gave a fresh impetus to the Thai Government’s development programme which began five years ago in the provinces which share an 800-mile border with Laos.

For most of its length this border is clearly defined by the Mekong river; but the population is by no means distinctly Thai. It is more Lao than Thai and includes Vietnamese refugees from Laos who fled from the reoccupation by the French after the Second World War. In the absence of any real control by Bangkok, and because of natural affiliations with Laos, the inhabitants of North-east Thailand have been obvious targets for a subversive movement. Incidents that might be taken for evidence of armed insurgency are as likely to be the banditry that has long plagued the border provinces; but Communist agitators have been working to exacerbate unrest against the Thai Government. Events in Vietnam, Chinese propaganda, and the formation of a Thai Patriotic Front in China last year have spurred the Government’s counter-subversion programme.

Combined military and civilian units have been working to develop the north-east provinces in an overdue effort to share the wealth of Thailand more widely and to bring to the people the benefits of medical care, new roads, wells, farming advances, and schools. The road in the province of Buriram to which New Zealand is making its contribution is part of a Thai Government plan to construct 1000 miles of new roads in the area. These roads will have some strategic importance; but they are expected also to facilitate traffic between the countryside and the towns, thus generating increased farm production for wider markets. They should open the rural areas to welfare services.

The roading scheme is the second major Thai project which New Zealand has decided to assist under the Colombo Plan; the other is the building, at a cost of £125,000, of an agricultural department for the University of Khon Kaen, also in the northeast region. Events in South-east Asia have shown the urgent need of carefully chosen development programmes, within the limits imposed by the capacity of countries to carry them out effectively. New Zealand and other nations offering assistance there can be assured that these programmes are important to the political and social as well as the economic advancement of the country. A new constitution and free elections are in sight—-the culmination of a long struggle to convert Thailand into a democratic country—but the fear of Communist infiltration and the doubts of some members of the Government have yet to be dispelled.