realTSUNAMI and the greedy aftermath

a beautiful letter from today's Nation re: 'outrage' over the recent filming of a BBC drama about the 2004 tsunami in Thailand:

Re: "Thais hired to play corpses in BBC tsunami TV show", News, June 4.

I was one of the victims of the tsunami. I lost a shop, two cars, three motorbikes, a kitchen, hundreds of trees and two Christmas guests. If this film is to go ahead, I would request a few more starring roles for Thais.

We need one for the interior minister who threatened to fine, jail and deport the foreign volunteers who were rebuilding the Sea Gypsies' homes. We need one for the village headman who pocketed government money for new homes, to build houses for his three children on public land. We need one for the schoolteacher who put her children on a list of orphans to get education allowances from a German charity.

We need several dozen for the unaffected villagers who drove up in their remarkably unscathed SUVs to collect government rehabilitation cash. We need several more for the land-"owners" who suddenly remembered they had tin-mining concessions up and down the coast and evicted the villagers who had been living there for generations.

[...]

Beautiful and so much more REAL than the typically myopic, arrogant, and self-aggrandizing diatribes of a few 'professional' Thai pundits who have covered the filming.