SCMP-Misplaced sympathy borders on

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Subject: SCMP-Misplaced sympathy borders on bizarre

South China Morning Post
Wednesday, September 8, 1999
THE MEKONG REGION

Misplaced sympathy borders on bizarre
CURRENTS by WILLIAM BARNES

They may not be thinking this right now, but Motala the crippled elephant
and James Mawdsley the Anglo-Australian now languishing in a Burmese jail
have something in common.
Both went foraging into Burma with painful consequences; both of their
cross-border journeys ended up being splashed around many of the world
newspapers.

And in their separate ways their experiences offer some insights into the
ways of the world.

Motala was a logging elephant who stepped on a landmine.

The animal managed to stumble back across the border and into the hands - or
rather the slings and lifting machinery - of a prominent local elephant
hospital.

A rocket launch in Thailand would not have secured greater publicity.

An operation had to be postponed because the hundreds of visitors to the
open-air jungle surgery had churned the ground into a slurry.

The doctors are proposing to give her a wooden leg.

Mawdsley also stumbled into Burma - to stick pro-democracy posters around a
border town.

Statisticians might like to contrast the risks of tramping through a
minefield with pushing democracy in Burma - the rest of us would probably
decide to call it even.

The 26-year-old Mawdsley was given 17 years in jail in the time it might
have taken him to eat an oily Burmese curry.

He had twice previously tried similar incursions. Perhaps he thought it
would be third time lucky.

If Motala lives she will have enough money to afford a decent country home
with serving girl, so to speak.

There have certainly been no Thai television specials about the scores of
horribly maimed Karen refugees who have been carried to the border.

They have to take their chance in the refugee camps and in local clinics.

Moves have been made to charge Motala's mahout with feeding her
amphetamines.

But Thailand will not, of course, accuse the Burmese military of tormenting
the Karen people.

In England, Mawdsley's father, David, has become something of a media
celebrity with a ready soundbite: "For all I know they could be beating him
right now."

Tomorrow's 9-9-99 Day of Protest has hardly been mentioned.

Perhaps there is little wrong with the way the Motala and Mawdsley stories
have been played out - simple, tragic stories often bring out the best in
people.

But the philanthropic impulse to promote Motala must surely also be
regularly spread towards more awkward and complex targets where sympathy is
less easily distributed.