ABSTRACT
In the first months of 2000, media in Thailand bristled with news of Osama bin Laden’s secretive movements. News reports claimed bin Laden had entered Thailand through Don Muang (Bangkok’s former international airport) numerous times without being questioned or even stopped by immigration officials. Almost daily statements from members of the opposition rationalized that bin Laden, under pressure from the Taliban to leave Afghanistan, had found a safe haven through the lax visa regulations of Thai immigration. In response, Prime Minister Chuan Leekpai regularly dismissed such statements and at one point, in a more complicated instance, blamed some of the rumors on “a political game in Cambodia,” in which false letters to bin Laden designed to incriminate a Cambodian politician were discovered in the Thai border city of Aranyapathet (The Nation 2000: 1). It remains uncertain whether Osama bin Laden ever visited Thailand
during this period. The U.S. Department of State’s yearly Patterns of Global Terrorism, released in May, 2000, contained a detailed analysis of bin Laden’s “global” threats at that time but, in fact, Thailand did not appear in its discussion. Similarly, recent efforts to reconstruct the activities of Jemaah Islamiyah (JI) in Thailand prior to the current violence in southern Thailand also fail to include this popular speculation on bin Laden’s whereabouts.1 Nonetheless, what is clear from this controversy is the way in which even prior to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, discourses of global terrorism had the power to shape daily domestic politics by framing antagonisms between opposition and government politicians and producing anxiety over immigration security.2
