Maya Cove, December 1998
HOLLYWOOD IN PARADISE
9 August, 2016, Bangkok
Dear Foreign Friend,
Let’s
waste no time on the Referendum Melodrama. I have a real story for you though
it’s not news.
Four years ago today (9 August
2012) artist Manit Sriwanichpoom, our producer, & I were at the
Administrative Court, filing with the help of Wasan Panich of the Lawyers’
Council, a case of discrimination & power abuse against the Censors, the
Film Board (chaired by then PM Yingluck Shinawatra) & the Ministry of
Culture for banning our Thai Macbeth, ‘Shakespeare Must Die’ as a threat
to national security. 4 years on and all is silent as the grave.
We did get our day in court
nevertheless last Wednesday 4 August. The Claims Court had summoned both of us
as witnesses in a case that’s almost 20 years old: Phi Phi Islanders vs the
Hollywood movie ‘The Beach’ over the rape of Maya Bay. I’m using that
word with justification after due consideration.
The case was filed by the
Lawyers’ Council of Thailand on 11 January 1999. Defendant#1 Minister of
Agriculture; Defendant#2 the Forestry Department; Defendant#3 Forestry
Director; Defendant#4 Santa International Film Production (‘The Beach’
Thai fixer); Defendant#5 Twentieth
Century Fox.
I was summoned to testify as an
eyewitness to the destruction & as the writer of a book with in-depth
content on the Phi Phi Islands – Nopparat Thara Beach national park & the
long struggle to preserve the sanctity of the National Park Protection Act.
Though the book was published years before ‘The Beach’ came to Maya, it
detailed the islands before the events & its 4th edition was
dedicated to the memory of the National Park Protection Act, “Born 1961, Died 1999”.
This letter’s headline is the
title of a documentary about the Maya war, which I never completed despite
having obtained some of the most explicit & sensational footage any
environmentalist filmmaker could ever hope for. But what was the point when the
war was already irretrievably lost? Just to shame people? I couldn’t find
enough motivation to force myself to relive, in the editing, the traumatic
equivalent of the gang rape of my mother and such blatant & obscene
subversion of truth & beauty.
The court summons resurrected old
demons. It’s not easy to be dragged from a quiet, harmonious life back into the
jaws of a grievous injustice. I was relieved to hear from Varin Thiemjaras, the
lawyer who for 16 years has doggedly pursued the case through court after
court, provincial & national, that Krabi artist Boonkasem ‘Paeh’ Saekow
(now Kow-Santi) “had worse symptoms” (of reluctance to testify) than I did.
Of all its human victims,
Boonkasem & I suffered the worst threats & damage to our lives. For
years afterwards, he was exiled from his home town to teach art in neighbouring
(safer & more democratic) Phuket. They flat-out told him to get his face
out of sight for a while & that he was only alive because he was a local
man, the relative of relatives of relatives. Such courtesy did not extend to me
& Manit, which is why neither of us has gone back since the day national
park officials & a local heavy hounded us out of the province, going so far
as to stalk our car along the highway until it left the Krabi border. Even in
Bangkok, anonymous men phoned my house to leave “a message from the Forestry
Department”, which consisted of nothing but a detailed description of where I
live.
The case is in its final stages
but still pending. I’m not permitted to describe anything except my own
testimony. Not having done this before, I thought I could refer to notes I had
prepared, or even read a statement to the judges. But obviously no notes were
allowed so I’m posting it here:
“Filmmaking is
make-believe. You don’t need to actually kill people in a war movie because
movies tell their stories through pictures that are cut & joined together.
For instance, one close-up of a man followed by a wide shot of what he sees is
enough; you don’t actually have to show the man & 360
degrees around him, especially if your insistence on doing
it all in one take entails horrific environmental destruction. No film is worth
that.
‘The Beach’ people didn’t
need to relandscape Maya Bay. That they insisted on doing this despite all the
protests shows an unreasonable stubbornness, a deliberate intent to transgress
both the laws of Thailand and the laws of nature.
‘The Beach’ filmmakers did
this because they could. They could not have done it in the Great Barrier Reef,
the Grand Canyon or the Lake District national parks in their home countries.
Clearly, they viewed Thailand as a lawless, powerless third world country where
they could do whatever they wanted.
This is most painful for the
local community & all Thai people. That they were able to bulldoze the sand
dunes of Maya is proof before the eyes of the whole world that Thailand really
is a savage land whose laws are not sacred & need not be respected. Since
even Maya Bay, which is like our crown jewels, was suffered to be relandscaped
according to the whims of those with enough clout & cash.
Even though the case involves
bare-faced, outright wanton destruction before our very eyeballs, an academic
(Dr Suraphol Sudara, now deceased of liver cancer, not long after his fateful
decision to side with ‘The Beach’) was found to say that the relandscaping
should be allowed because any damage that might occur could be restored. The
Maya war is probably the first time that an academic ‘expert’ was used to
contradict the facts in a controversy, a practice now common and even routine
especially in politics.
This defanging of the National
Park Protection Act had an immediate, obvious (& foreseen &
preventable) impact: after ‘The Beach’ was given a free pass to alter
Maya Beach with earth-moving equipment, there was a visible rise in national
park encroachment by resort hotels.
From the testimony of many local
park officials & my own direct experience as an investigative journalist,
encroachment usually begins by hiring some villager to poison big standing
trees (with root killer, like ‘Round-Up’) to downgrade the desired area from
protected forest or national park to ‘degraded forest’ (a less strictly
controlled category of land), which soon becomes a coconut or cashew
plantation. Sometimes seeds or coconuts are tossed into the jungle which is
gradually cleared as the coconut grows. There have been instances of ‘magic
coconut’ plantations that rise overnight by transplanting trees over ten years
old from somewhere else. This “old family agricultural use land” then acquires
some thatched beach huts. Once the perpetrators are fairly confident that they
won’t be evicted, the huts are replaced by permanent solid structures, usually
involving prominent investors whose very presence ensures that the process
becomes virtually irreversible. (Though last year’s court decision to evict
Krabi businessman Chuan Phukaoluan’s resort hotel from iconic Podah Island—the
one with the long neck of sand at low tide— in the Phi Phi Islands park is both
miraculous & welcome; it hardly made any news.)
In Khao Lak, for instance, many
hotels were erected after the Maya example successfully eroded the real estate
sector’s fears of the National Park Protection Act. Hotels were built where no
hotel should be. This is why the 2004 tsunami resulted in so much damage and
loss of lives in Khao Lak and Phi Phi.
This is a DIRECT impact of the
destruction of the National park Protection Act by the filmmakers of ‘The
Beach’ as well as by the Forestry Director, (Plodprasop Suraswadee, yes the
very same who was in Yingluck’s cabinet, but in those days he was still friends
with the then government led by Democrat leader Chuan Leekpai) and the Minister
of Agriculture (Pongpol Adireksan) who signed the permission after receiving an
over-the-table ‘donation’ to the department of some 4 million baht (Forestry
figure widely quoted in mass media). It was Pongpol’s signature that signed way
the fate of Maya Cove & the 1961 National Park Protection Act.
Maya protest, 1998
‘The Beach’ filmmakers
must also have known that such an action also transgressed the law of their own
nation, namely the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act which forbids US companies
from ‘persuading’ foreign officials to break their own country’s laws.
They know of the FCPA because
Thai environmental groups sent them a clear & public warning by filing a
complaint with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) through its local
office at the US embassy on Wireless road in Bangkok. Even though the FBI’s
local man didn’t see the case as important enough to proceed in any way,
perhaps deterred by the prominence & glamour of the perpetrator, notice had
been given that this action went against their own law, the FCPA.
(Years later, the FBI
successfully enforced the FCPA in the corruption case against the US couple
that bribed the Governor of the Tourism Authority of Thailand to win the bid to
organize the Bangkok International Film Festival.)
The
living natural site was not the only casualty. Great damage occurred as well to
the National Park Protection Act, which lost its effectiveness as a deterrent
to crime the very moment that permission was given to Hollywood filmmakers to
desecrate with bulldozers a sacred site of this land merely to stick coconut
trees into the ground like toothpicks as set-dressing, to conform to colonial
fantasies of a tropical paradise.
Maya Cove is well-known as a
sacred site for the sea gypsies who have lived in these islands since time
immemorial. Every year around March they stage ceremonies of worship by making
simple offerings in seashells adorned with little paper flags to the presiding
Spirit of Place.
Before the filmmakers began work
on Maya Bay, the local Influential Figure who helped to eject environmental
protesters (including Wanida Tantivitayapitak of the Assembly of the Poor who
staged a camp-in at Maya) from the area did organize a ceremony, going so far
as to sacrifice a buffalo to propitiate the spirit of the bay. Though it was claimed that this was part of
the annual ritual, this didn’t usually involve buffalo blood sacrifice. Felling
a buffalo in ritual was a serious matter in the Phi Phi Islands, perhaps still
is. (When asked, ‘The Beach’ publicist declined to confirm the truth or
untruth of the local people’s story.) It is highly probable then that the
filmmakers knew that Maya was a sacred site deserving to be treated with
reverence, not dug up and bulldozed.
Maya is sacred to every person
who loves nature—indeed, anyone with eyes can see its sanctity. Its shocking
beauty has power to inspire in human beings a great love for the earth so that they’re
willing to protect such beauty with their lives. In both material &
spiritual terms, Maya is an invaluable national treasure, the heritage of our
children, the safety net of their future.
The physical damage that resulted
is on a national scale. Encroachment on reserved forests and national parks
have become extensive & entrenched, the most recently exposed case being
the total disaster of Phu Tub Berg mountain. In such cases, it’s the A1
watershed forests that are destroyed, affecting our survival & livelihood,
because bald mountains result in dried up rivers, as we have seen.
When
the massive scale of the damage that was inflicted is taken into consideration,
damage both on the site and on the law, clearly the perpetrator should be made
to atone for it in a public manner. A clear example should be made for the Thai
people & the world to witness, given that the instigator of the action is a
transnational corporation presiding over one of the biggest, if not the biggest,
media empires on earth, of which Fox News & 20th Century Fox are
but a part.
The atonement should also reflect
the damage to the law, to notify the world that Thai national park laws have
regained their original potency, and that we intend to protect & preserve
our heritage better than we have been doing especially these last 20 years.
One scene from this experience has
really stuck with me: The Beach’s Australian landscape gardener pushing
my camera lens and shouting “Call the police!” Which is to say, this foreigner,
a corporate colonialist with his earth-moving machines, was calling Thai police
to arrest a Thai environmentalist who was trying to witness & record the
destruction of a legally-protected national treasure. His digger was poised
above the ancient virgin sand dunes, higher than a man, that had shielded the famous
spider-lily sanctuary of Maya; I was in his way. So his driver, laughing, slammed
the digger down, hard, missing my feet by inches. The policeman duly came, and
he was there to protect the attackers. Such a scene may explain why the Maya
case destroyed my faith in my own country and why I’m no longer a journalist.
When facts no longer work as a weapon, there is no hope.”
Maya, December 1998
The verbal testimony I gave was
almost the same, except I did tell the court about a strange and unlikely meeting
with ‘The Beach’ director Danny Boyle, years after the destruction of
Maya, at the Toronto film festival when I (there with ‘Citizen Juling’) picked
a number from a hat & was sent to a breakfast table presided over by
Catherine Bigelow (there with ‘Hurt Locker’) & Danny Boyle (with ‘Slumdog
Millionaire’). I told the court how he remembered me, moved over beside me
& said (as I fantasized that he might express regrets), “We didn’t manage
to get our side of the story out there very well.”
Danny Boyle appeared to believe this
despite the fact that the whole Rupert Murdoch Empire which runs 20th
Century Fox was behind him, bound to defend their investment whether they liked
it or not, so that environmentalists & locals opposed to their rape of Maya
Bay have been described as misled, at the very least, by publications as
diverse as Outside & Vanity Fair (DiCaprio interview by Evgenia Peretz. The distortion is in the writer’s
words, not a direct quote).
The spin is that these silly, unhip killjoy
cinema-hating people staged a protest against the “filming” and the “planting
of coconut trees on the beach.” But the bare fact was simple as this: they bulldozed the cove’s sand dunes &
their plants, drilled countless deep holes (1 metre x 1 metre) all over the
sliver of fragile coastal land behind the dunes, to stick in full-grown coconut
trees as set dressing for a backpacker fantasy movie, which trees then die
having not been planted but merely stuck in the sand & kept alive with
constant watering which ended when the production crew left. The unrooted,
loosened soil & sand dunes then turned to dust, clouding the lagoon and
killing the coral reef, and all the plant life is washed away in the fearsome monsoon
of the Andaman sea.
Why
didn’t we set the record straight? Because we know that whatever we send would
not be printed, or printed with malicious distortions. If we can’t get a letter
into the Bangkok Post, how would we rate with Vanity Fair? You
will not see our version anywhere. These were the (very last) days before
YouTube & social media; there was no alternative to protesting on the
pavement with actual paper leaflets in the real world, at the total mercy of
network TV & print media.
It was a shock to me that Danny
Boyle showed not a hint of remorse. Quite the reverse: still on the attack
having learned nothing from perpetrating one of the most wanton acts of
destruction on one of the earth’s rarest temples to beauty. His leading man, Di
Caprio, was at least driven to overt environmental activism, as if to atone for
his complicity in this crime. For it was his star power, fresh off the Titanic,
that was used to doom Maya Cove and discredit those who tried to save her and
failed.
With Love from Bangkok,
Ing Kanjanavanit
PS. Below is an ‘antique’ protest leaflet from the turn of
the millennium, a treasure rediscovered while rooting through my Maya box:
“SUICIDE NOTE and APOLOGY from
LEO Di CAPRIO THAITANIC
To All Whom I have Wronged,
Especially Mother Earth:
I, Leonardo DiCaprio
Thaitanic, hereby bow down before the world in abject humiliation, to apologise
for my active defence of the grievous ecological crime committed in the making
of my last film, THE BEACH.
As I have repeated said, I am
a serious environmentalist. As Chairman
of Earth Day 2000, I earnestly urge you to BOYCOTT ‘THE BEACH’ (which critics
in my home country say is a stinker anyway. If you must see it, wait for the
video—they get less that way). Help me send the message that CRIMINALS MUST NOT
PROFIT FROM THEIR CRIMES, and that international corporations like 20th
Century Fox should not profit from the bulldozing of a Third World country’s
national park and conservation laws—something they would not dare to do in
their own First World countries.
Aside from joining the
international BOYCOTT CALL AGAINST ‘THE BEACH’, there is nothing more I can do
to pay for my sins and prove my heartfelt sincerity…except to kill myself in
shame.
May my manly dignity be
restored through this fearless samurai act of Hara Kiri.
Love Y’all!
Leonardo DiCaprio Thaitanic
xxox
LEO DiCAPRiO’s HARA KIRI* WILL
TAKE PLACE ON
TUESDAY 7 MARCH AT 5.30 PM
in front of MAJOR CINEPLEX
RACHAYOTHIN
occasion: THE BEACH’S THAI
PREMIERE”
[*Leo was performed by Manit Sriwanichpoom. His guts, in a
plastic bag taped to the performance artist’s belly, were a mix of red cherry
syrup, tapioca pudding & blackbeans, which some criticized as being
horribly violent.]
____________________________________________________________
A pioneer of environmental investigative
reporting, Ing Kanjanavanit is a filmmaker, painter & bilingual writer,
best known in Thai for the cult classic travelogue/handbook for environmental
activism, ‘Khang Lhang Postcard’ (‘Behind the Postcard’) under the nom de
guerre Lharn Seri Thai (136)—‘Free Thai Descendent/Force 136’, to evoke the
Free Thai Movement against fascist forces during World War 2, which fought for
the Allies then after the war was betrayed by the Allies. Sadly, she no longer
attends Free Thai merit-making rites, not since Thaksin’s redshirts
appropriated the name & equated Thaksin with Free Thai leader Pridi
Banomyong, which is a travesty & a sacrilege.
