But whenever I raise this topic _ that a couple's equal share of household chores is an an indicator of gender equality in society _ I almost always get a blank stare from professionally successful women.

They don't have to do the dishes, you see.

You know the cliche: Behind every man's success is a woman. It works the same way for women. Like men, they need back-up support from someone in the family to enable them to achieve self-realisation and pursue career advancement. Men get it from their wives. And the wives get it from their maids.

Mind you, many single women are caught in the same trap. Since cultural and social expectations fall on daughters to take care of elderly parents, they cannot pursue their careers smoothly without domestic help.

According to Grant Thornton International Business Report 2012, Thailand ranks No.2 in the world for the proportion of women in senior management at 39%. Many attribute this spectacular achievement to equal educational opportunities and cultural openness for women's participation in Thailand.

I have a theory of my own.

It's the same theory that I think can explain why the notion of gender equality has not really taken root here despite the remarkable advancement of women at the top.

True, education and cultural openness are important factors. But equally important is the wide chasm of disparity which ensures a constant supply of poor rural lasses as cheap domestic help so working women can pursue their career goals.

Just when the supply of rural lasses begins to run dry because there are better jobs with higher pay and personal freedom for them to turn to, migrant domestic help comes along in the nick of time to rescue working women.

It's this luxury to have cheap help who look after the kids, cook, do the dishes, wash and iron the clothes, and clean up the mess that makes it possible for working women to chase after their dreams.

By not having to shoulder the double workload that comes with double sexual standards, privileged women therefore do not have to confront the patriarchal values that oppress women as a whole.

Consequently, "successful" women do not feel the need to question why women's work in the home _ be it as mothers or carers of elderly relatives _ is given no economic value and taken for granted as a free service.

Worse, they feel guilty of not being able to fulfil those expectations.

When there is no questioning, they don't see how this labour oppression through gender bias is intertwined with other more subtle forms of gender exploitation which perpetuate the glass ceiling, condone sexual harassment, and blame women for abortion, even rape.

So it's great news indeed that domestic workers are now legally entitled to better protection from the Labour Ministry's new regulations.

By making it mandatory for employers to give both Thai and non-Thai domestic workers a day off each week including overtime pay, annual holidays, and paid sick leave, the new regulations help to ditch the long-held belief that household and care work have little economic value.

More importantly, it helps to dismantle the feudal legacy that robs domestic help of human rights and dignity as equal human beings.

Yes, a lot more still needs to be done. Employers who breach the law need to be taken to court to pay compensation. Working hours and conditions need to be legally spelled out, as well as a minimum wage for domestic help.

If it takes root, this new value for care work will snowball into other policies to give long-overdue recognition to personnel in many fields. The role of nurses, for example, will receive more economic value and remuneration. So will those of teachers and people in social work. It will also help bring about more supportive policies for mothers and those who provide care for ailing relatives.

Hopefully, this refusal to be taken for granted will enable more women to think more seriously about other cultural values that put women down.

Society can no longer take women's nurturing work in the home for granted. Nor can we with our domestic help. If real change in women's gender roles is going to start somewhere, it is here: on the home front.

What do you do when they fake the licences of their trawlers to carry out illegal deep-sea fishing in other countries' waters?

What do you do when they collude with human traffickers to get workers who are treated like slaves on their fishing boats?

Arrest them? Fine them? Send them to jail?

Wrong. Wrong. Wrong.

No, the Fisheries Department does not think that the illegal and
environmentally destructive trawlers should be punished. Instead, the
state agency wants to give those trawlers a blanket amnesty for their
crimes that show no signs of abating.

According to the law, fishing with trawlers is prohibited within a
distance of 3,000 metres from the shoreline because coastal seabeds are
important spawning and breeding grounds for marine life. But the law is
impotent.

Trawlers routinely violate protected seas. Complaints by fisherfolk
in coastal communities who have lost their livelihoods due to the
trawlers' devastating fishing methods have gone unheeded. This problem
has been going on for the past three decades, resulting in many violent
conflicts. When domestic seas are depleted, the trawlers venture into
international waters, often with fake boat licences and fishing permits.

Why such blatant negligence? Ask fishery officials, and they will
cite a lack of budget to monitor the seas. Ask them again, and they will
tell you their hands are tied because the US$4 billion (128 billion
baht) fishing industry is backed by powerful politicians. No one will
tell you, though, about the money paid under the table.

The blissful existence of the trawlers was broken up last year when
the European Union and United States jointly announced they would no
longer import seafood that comes from illegal fishing in order to
protect marine biodiversity and sustainable fishing.

Illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing, they said, is a serious
threat to the world's oceans and deprives legal fishermen and coastal
communities of up to $23 billion of seafood and seafood products
annually.

The boycott warning hit the Thai fishing industry hard because the EU and the US are Thailand's two top seafood importers.

Like a squalling baby, the trawler industry rushed to the Fisheries
Department for help. It got what it wanted _ a promise to get an amnesty
for all trawlers with fake documents, and to quickly receive new, legal
ones.

That's not all.

Our country's deep-sea fishing industry is notorious for using
victims of human trafficking on boats and treating them like slaves.

The country's fishing fleet needs more than 100,000 workers each
year. Due to a severe labour shortage, desperate trawler owners depend
on human trafficking rackets to supply them with crew, with no questions
asked.

Stories abound about young men from neighbouring countries and within
Thailand itself being drugged, abducted or lured into debt bondage
before being sold to fishing boats. Those who have escaped tell horror
stories of forced labour, beatings, enslavement _ even deaths _ at sea.

Such notoriety makes many countries think twice before importing
seafood from Thailand. To avoid a consumer boycott, the National
Fisheries Association wants to set up an independent, self-regulating
body to recruit workers for all fishing boats to ensure migrant workers
have legal status and receive fair treatment.

The proposal, backed by the Fisheries Department, will soon be forwarded to the cabinet for approval.

But wait a minute. Can we feel something fishy here?

It's been shown in the past that the Fisheries Department is totally
spineless when it comes up against widespread misconduct in the
industry. Will giving total power to the fishing operators ease or
worsen the problems?

The fishing industry also wants to issue special identification cards
to their workers to prevent them from changing employers. Isn't this
plan a violation of workers' rights?

The fisheries authorities' plan to whitewash illegal trawlers and
give the industry total control over its workforce shows where their
loyalty lies. This is why there is no chance of human trafficking and
labour exploitation in the fishing industry easing anytime soon.

Back then, the authorities could not deliver any evidence of the
buy-ups, and blamed foreign men with Thai wives for purchasing local
land through proxy ownership. That's why I thought the brouhaha was
simply a case of xenophobia.

Now, I am not so sure.

Thanks to research by farmers rights group GRAIN on worldwide
farmland grabs, I couldn't help wondering if the scapegoating was a ploy
to shift public attention from the real culprits.

GRAIN, an international non-profit group that supports small farmers'
rights, has documented an alarming trend of governments and
corporations buying up farmland on a large scale in more than 60
developing countries to produce basic foods for export.

Renee Vellve, GRAIN co-founder and researcher, said the massive rush was triggered by the food crisis in 2007 and 2008.

To protect themselves, the food-importing countries led by the Gulf
States started to use "farming abroad" to secure direct food supplies.

Meanwhile, the financial crisis in 2007 and 2008 also encouraged the
finance industry to regard farmland as a new source of healthy returns.

According to the World Bank, about 50 million hectares of land were
sold or under long-term lease to foreign governments and investors in
2008 and 2009 alone. It's a conservative estimate. According to Land
Matrix, an online public database of large-scale land deals, 227 million
hectares were involved in this global farmland grab.

That is more than 1,400 million rai of farmland, or half the land area of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations.

As a result of this global land grabbing, millions of poor farmers
are being thrown off their land, local water sources are siphoned to
feed giant agro-industries, and ecosystems are severely damaged by
large-scale chemical-intensive plantations.

In short, poor people are being robbed of their livelihoods to make food security in rich countries possible.

GRAIN was last year awarded the Right Livelihood Award, an
alternative Nobel Prize, for exposing this ruthless global land grabbing
which is driven by rich governments and multinational corporations and
financed by powerful pension funds and multilateral agencies.

Farmland earns high returns, with fertile land becoming scarcer as food prices rise worldwide.

According to Black Sea Agriculture, an investing firm, farmland
earned the highest returns of 635% in 2010, two times more than gold and
stocks, and about six times more than real estate.

The acquisition of massive amounts of farmland in foreign countries
comes in many guises, from direct purchases, state concessions, to
long-term leases.

The business structures also vary, such as direct management, joint ventures, contract farming, and farming companies.

Land is also being sought for biofuels, timber plantations, carbon credits, mining, and tourism.

Among the main countries seeking farmland abroad are the Gulf States,
China, South Korea and Japan. Closer to home are Singapore and
Malaysia, GRAIN says.

More than half of the deals happen in Africa. But the threats are also palpable in Southeast Asia.

For example, Kuwait is reportedly investing US$20 million to irrigate
4,500 hectares in Laos to produce rice for export to Kuwait.

GRAIN has not documented land grabbing in Thailand, but a similar pattern is taking place here.

While the buying up of paddy fields has yet to be exposed, many
scenic areas in resort towns are now in the hands of foreign real estate
businesses.

For years, mountains in the North have been turned into
chemical-intensive orange plantations by Chinese money and corn
plantations by contract farm giants.

Meanwhile, forest dwellers are kicked off their ancestral land for
forest officials' carbon credit money. Old communities are also evicted
from the forests to make way for timber and oil palm plantations.

Concerns about massive land grabbing have nothing to do with xenophobia.

They stem from a desire to hold the government accountable when the
drive to make Thailand the so-called Kitchen of the World ends up
destroying local ecological systems, small farmers' livelihoods, and our
very own food security.

No-ae's long hair was tied in a bun covered by a red turban. His
lips were reddened and teeth blackened from betel nut chewing. His
cotton shirt looked commonplace, but definitely not the bright blue
loincloth he wore when he was walking barefoot toward the court
building.

Plucked from his mountainous home deep in the Kaeng Krachan forest
where Karen natives are still living in isolation, cut off from the
modern world, the ethnic minority man seemed to have travelled across
time to arrive in Bangkok's concrete jungle.

The 51-year-old forest dweller had a special mission to seek
justice. Not only for his family, but also for other Karen forest
dwellers.

His was among some 100 bamboo huts and rice barns torched and
destroyed by a team of forest officials under a crackdown led by Kaeng
Krachan National Park chief Chaiwat Limlikhit-aksorn.

The park chief insisted the Karen were slash-and-burn migrants from
Myanmar who grew marijuana and supported ethnic Karen rebels across the
border.

In short, they were a national security threat. Despite the grave
accusations and full-blown eviction operations that involved military
support, No-ae was the only Kaeng Krachan Karen arrested and sent to
court.

He was found guilty of possessing some simple guns, but the court
let him go free on the ground that those guns were necessary for a
forest dweller's way of life.

When investigated by the National Human Rights Commission, the park
chief initially denied the torching. But his testimony was betrayed by
the raid photos taken by his own team.

The Lawyers Council of Thailand is helping No-ae file a lawsuit
after finding the Kaeng Krachan Karen are Thai nationals, that their
farm-rotation system and subsistent living are not harmful to forest
health and that the allegations about marijuana plantations and links
to the rebel army are empty.

"The forest officials also have no legal authority to torch people's
houses and those allegations fan prejudice against indigenous peoples,"
said rights lawyer Surasit Lueng-arannapa.

Why then is No-ae alone in taking the forest authorities to court?

"Others are afraid," he said through an interpreter.

They should be afraid. The Karen rights advocate Tatkamol Ob-om was
shot dead after threatening to expose abuse of power in Kaeng Krachan.

The police arrested the park chief and the murder case is now in court.

An official in a murder case is normally transferred. But not this
park chief. Not even after the police raided his mansion built with
rare teak logs and found more than 100 rounds of M16 rifle ammunition.

Mr Chaiwat reportedly denied the house was his but said the ammunition was for forest protection work.

Nothing happened either when his team took the liberty of destroying
the carcasses of two murdered wild elephants to take their tusks.

For the Karen, life after forced relocation is full of hardship. "At
the new place, no land to till. No rice to eat," he said. They are
relying on donated rice from their Karen brothers and sisters in the
North.

As his lawyer read to him a list of belongings which were destroyed
in the fire, No-ae mumbled to himself: "Beads. Bracelets." Of little
value to outsiders, perhaps, but they were his priceless ancestral
heirlooms.

The civil lawsuit asks for 2.6-million-baht compensation for physical and psychological damages.

A reader commented in one online board discussion: "So this guy
wants to get rich suddenly?" The sarcasm reflects widespread ethnic
prejudice that supports state abuse.

"All I want is to return to our home and to live our old way of
life," said No-ae, almost pleading. "Look at me. Do you really think
I'm a threat?"

And if the truth be told, foreign ownership of land is a lesser threat than the non-stop illegal land grabs by influential figures that have depleted our fast declining forest cover.

Ombudsman Siracha Charoenpanij’s claim that a third of the land in Thailand is now owned by foreigners by means of exploitation of loopholes in the land ownership law is simply too good or too bad to be true.

Citing an unspecified academic study, the ombudsman said that more than 90 per cent of the coastal land at Rayong’s Ban Phe beach now has foreign ownership, whereas in Pattaya and Hua Hin about 30 per cent of the land there belongs to foreigners.

The study is doubtful at best and Mr Siracha should not have quoted it in the first place without cross-checking the facts or the credibility of the academic or educational institute which did the study.

One-third of the land amounts to some 100 million rai, given the total land mass of the country which is about 319 million rai. It is simply not believable that foreigners or foreign companies could acquire such a huge amount of land. Any man with a pinch of commonsense or a modicum of wisdom will immediately find this study highly incredible and agree that it should not be used as a reference.

But it appears that Mr Siracha was convinced by the study. He said the Office of the Ombudsman would propose a bill to prevent nominees holding property within two weeks.

Despite the excessively inflated figure of land supposedly in foreign hands, about 100 million rai, as stated by the study, there is a grain of truth in that some foreigners have resorted to proxy ownership to evade the land law.

It is true that many farang men have given money to their Thai women to buy land and then to build a house on it. This practice is widespread in several Isan provinces where some communities are literally known as foreign-in-laws villages for the high number of cross-cultural marriages. It is also true that some foreigners who have obtained permanent residency in Thailand have bought up almost all the units in some condominium buildings, in Pattaya, for instance.

But it is simply not possible that the actual level of foreign land ownership is anywhere close to the figure claimed by this unspecified study. Even one-tenth of the figure postulated would still be unrealistically high.

Is foreign land ownership really such a security threat that Mr Siracha feels justified in introducing a new law to plug the loopholes, especially regarding proxy landownership. I don’t think so.

The real threat, the real land ownership problem, and one which is of greater and more urgent concern is the illegal land grab by those influential people, including politicians, exploiting the poor to poach the forests, then occupying the land and turning it into plantations, farms or resorts.

The other real problem is that far too much land is owned by only a few dozen families, while many people do not have even a small piece of land on which build a hut and put a roof over their head to protect them from the rain and the sunshine.

Mr Siracha is simply barking up the wrong tree!

"It is peace," says the widow. "I just want peace back."

Women suffer when their husbands are shot, killed, or detained. "The
responsibilities are suddenly on our shoulders to provide for the
children, and to fight for justice for our husbands and sons.

"It is hard. But we must endure. All we want is peace so our
children can live a normal life _ as we once did before the violence
erupted."

Indeed. How can Yaena and her sisters in the restive South dwell on
such bigger goals as gender justice, equal opportunities, or the end of
gender-based violence, when they cannot even have safety in their daily
lives?

Continuing unabated into its eighth year, the southern turbulence
has claimed more than 5,200 lives and injured nearly 9,000 people. More
than 4,200 of the dead were civilians. The violence has also produced
nearly 3,000 widows and 4,500 orphans.

It is not only the widows who must bear the brunt. More than 7,600
villagers have been arrested and detained as suspected insurgents.
Their wives, mothers, and children suffer.

The police have been able to file security charges in only one out
of every five arrests. Despite the hardship the victims and their
families must go through _ from false allegations, to the authorities'
refusal to give up the practice of netting suspects without sufficient
evidence.

Meanwhile, more than 500 defendants are wilting in jail because they
have no bail money. Again, their wives, children, and mothers suffer in
silence.

And as the insurgents have opted for indiscriminate attacks and
bombings, the number of women as direct victims is also increasing,
says peace activist and Muslim academic, Soraya Jamjuree.

More than 300 women have been killed in the southern violence, she
says. But the number of female casualties will rise manifold if we
include the casualties from maternal mortality.

Compared to other regions, health services in the deep South are
already much poorer. But the protracted violence has made things worse.
Due to limited outreach services, shortage of health personnel from
lack of safety, and the pregnant women's poor health from war stress
and malnutrition, the maternal mortality rate in the deep South has
doubled since the violence erupted on Jan 4, 2004. The mother's poor
health leads to much lower birth weight of the newborn, and much higher
infant mortality. According to the Public Health Ministry, infant
mortality in the deep South is 30% higher than in other regions.

We would not be wrong to say that women and children are the biggest casualties of the southern violence.

It is surely equally painful for mothers to watch their children
trapped in a living death as drug addicts. Go into any village in the
deep South and you will be struck by the large numbers of idle male
teenagers and young men. They cannot be fishermen like their fathers
because the seas have been depleted by trawlers. Decent jobs and social
mobility are limited by political centralisation. The insurgency puts
the final nail in the coffin.

Frustration runs high. Many turn to drugs. "It is the most severe problem in our communities," says Soraya.

The presence of soldiers in local communities has also brought
another problem common in war situations _ sexual violence. The recent
video clip scandal of a rape in Pattani is just the tip of the iceberg.
"Many families have chosen to remain silent to protect the reputation
of their girls," says Soraya.

Even when the relationship is sincere, families are almost always
unhappy with cross-cultural marriages. So are the local boys. Some take
the matter into their own hands and the result is violence.

Soraya and Yaena refuse to give in to the men's war by connecting
the victims with legal help, work opportunities and support for their
families. "The violence must stop from both sides," pleads Soraya. "Men
must start talking. It is the only way we women and children can have
our normal lives back."

Overthrown kingdoms mark the first two highlights of the 62nd Berlin International Film Festival, commonly known as the Berlinale. On Feb 9 the festival, taking place amidst the temperature so cruel to tropical creatures that I'd venture to nickname the event the Brrrrrrlinale, opened with Benoit Jacquot's stylish, wry and fluid "Farewell My Queen", a French Revolution drama that re-tells the final days of Louis XVI through the eye of Marie Antoinette's loyal servant, Sidonie Laborde, played by Lea Seydoux (aka the French assassin in the latest "Mission: Impossible").

Almost the entire film takes place in the hollow chambers of the Versailles, an ignorantly tranquil world whose calm surface is about to tremble with the revolutuinary force. The whispers of the Bastille incident arrive, along with the "decapitation list", and Laborde, whose love for Marie Antoinette suspiciously borders on the erotic territory, grows more anxious by the minute. For a costume drama, the film feels light of touch, a quality that works for and aginst this kind of material. Diane Kruger plays Antoinette, a majestic babydoll who seems to live on another plain of reality, and Virginie Ledoyen, beautiful like a painting, is Duchess Polignac, another peacock in this glittering, mournful zoo.

Then on Feb 10, I made the right choice of going to the evening show of the historic 1928 Soviet film, "Oktober", the propagandistic epic that has just been digitally restored to a marvellous condition by the Munich Film Museum (there are several versions of the film circulating cinematheques around the world due to the various exports and censorships of the original). The film was directed by, of course, Sergei Eisenstein, and the Berlin screening was accompanied by live orchestra playing the newly unearthed score by Edmund Meisel. It was a thunderous, heart-pounding experience -- 116 minutes flew by in a flash as the packed theatre saw the re-staging of the Bolshevik Revolution that toppled Tsar Nicholas in luminous black-and-white. Eisenstein's well-known montage technique, with its fervid cutting and superimposition of symbolic images onto the realistic, crowded action, was incredibly heightened by the skillful orchestra that matches the lightning-quick editing pace with rhythmic precision. And it's the live music that made all the difference: the ham-fistedness and grandiosity of the propaganda might have come across as comical and dated to contemporary viewers, except that Meisel's score restored the film's original earnestness and (blindside) sincerity. A powerful performance -- bravo to the 83-year-old film and the orchestra. 

More report on the films showing at the Berlinale will continue here in the following days (if the cold doesn't finished me off first).