Jan. 17, 2005
By SUSAN TAYLOR MARTIN
Published January 17, 2005
BANGKOK, Thailand - Before Kathleen and I left Thailand tonight, we had a few free hours so we visited one of this country's must-see sights.
Established in 1782, the Grand Palace is a city within a city, housing the royal residence, throne halls, governments offices and the Temple of the Emerald Buddha. The image is actually carved from jade, and its dress is changed according to the season (summer, rainy and winter) in a ceremony president over by the King of Thailand.
With such a central place in the nation's history, it seems fitting that the palace complex should serve as a temporary memorial of sorts to victims of a truly epic event - the Asian tsunami. For it is in one of the great halls that the king's grandson now lies in state, awaiting cremation.
Bhumi Jensen, 21, was vacationing at a resort in Khao Lak, one of the hardest-hit areas, when the waves hit. His body was soon recovered and now rests, we were told, in a huge white urn surrounded by floral tributes from government ministers and other dignitaries.
The hall had been open so members of the public could pay their respects, but it was closed when we arrived because of a state visit by the president of Singapore. Among those pressing their noses against the windows trying to get a peek inside was 12-year-old Pailin Murphy of Pleasantville, Calif.
"My name is the same as his sister's," explained Murphy. Like the royal siblings, she is also Thai-American.
The king's late grandson was the son of an American architect and the eldest of the king's three daughters. Jensen did his early schooling in California, but returned to Thailand when his parents divorced several years ago. Autistic, he was a kind-hearted young man who had recently become more comfortable in social settings, a former instructor told a Bangkok paper.
Jensen will be cremated in a royal ceremony after 100 days of mourning. The government plans to create a national park near the site of his death, and his sister is selling a charcoal sketch of a traditional Chinese figure for 100,000 baht (about $2,500), our government-licensed tour guide told us. Proceeds will got to a tsunami memorial fund.
Unlike the royal grandson, thousands of tsunami victims remain unidentified. That has caused an unseemly flap between the Royal Thai Police Office and the country's best known forensic expert.
With her spiky hair, dramatic makeup and stone-washed jeans, Porntip Rojanasunan looks like a character out of a Carl Hiassen novel. In fact, she, too, is an author - her Corpses Can Talk is a collection of magazine pieces about the ways scientists can determine the cause of death - even the perpetrator - from clues on the body.
Rojanasunan's main job, though, is deputy chief of the Central Institute of Forensic Science in Bangkok. When the police were extremely slow to act after the tsunami, she and her staff quickly began the task of identifying bodies even though her jurisdiction includes only areas around the capital, not the tsunami-stricken provinces.
Controversy flared last week when the police charged that bodies were not being examined in accordance with international standards. The government ordered hundreds of corpses to be exhumed, prompting threats from Rojanasunan to quit and start her own forensic institute.
"Where have they been these past two weeks?" she angrily demanded, referring to Thai police.
Now a compromise has been reached, the Bangkok Post reports: She and her staff will continue their work until all the bodies are examined and hopefully identified. Then the information will be handed over to the police, and the bodies moved from two Buddhist temples where they are now stored to a victims identification center in Phuket jointly operated by Thai police and Interpol, the international police organization.
In a country where many people view the police as corrupt, it seems election-year politics had a lot to do with the compromise.
Rojanasunan "and her team of forensic experts can rest assured that they have the full support of the public, if not the full support of the government, which, understandably, does not want to risk offending the police too closely by siding with (her) in the lead-up to the election just three weeks away," a Post columnist wrote.