Watch the trailer for Red Light Jihad: Thai vice under attack
Tourists and sex workers in Songai Golok, Thailand
GlobalPost presents Red Light Jihad: Thai vice under attack, a short documentary on the holy war against sleaze in Thailand’s southern borderlands.
Sungai Golok is a surreal sex tourism hotspot that Thailand’s tourism authorities don’t like to talk about. It’s a little bit Tijuana and a little bit Kabul — a party town raging in the middle of an Islamic insurgency.
Everything that makes Thailand notorious is there: booze, late nights and prostitution. In lieu of Western men, the city’s brothels attract guys from nearby Malaysia, where raunchy nightlife is forbidden under Sharia law. Each night, men wade into a conflict zone where guerrillas wage war to wrench free a new Islamic state. The hostilities have racked up more conflict deaths in the last decade than the Gaza Strip.
Senior Southeast Asia correspondent Patrick Winn ventures to the Thai-Malaysia border to meet sex workers and men who pursue them. He speaks to Islamic separatists who despise Thai-style vice in their claimed homeland. And he meets Buddhist militias sworn to defend their villages from guerrillas.
Filmed by video journalist Mark Oltmanns, Red Light Jihad will debut on Dec. 8.
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