тАЬThailand Unhinged: Unraveling the Myth of a Thai-Style Democracy offers a trenchant analysis of Thai politics and society over the tumultuous years that followed the ouster of former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra. Thailand's ongoing political crisis is explained through the prism of the country's painful post-absolutist history тАУ a history marred by the systematic sabotage of any meaningful democratic development, the routine hijacking of democratic institutions, and the continued suffocation of the Thai people's democratic aspirations orchestrated by an unelected ruling class in an increasingly desperate attempt to hold on to its power.тАЭ http://equinoxpublishing.com/
Federico Ferrara, Thailand Unhinged: Unraveling the Myth of a Thai-Style Democracy.
Jakarta, Kuala Lumpur: Equinox Publlishing, 2010. 152 pages
ISBN-10: 9793780762, ISBN-13: 978-9793780764
Opinions: http://www.amazon.com/Thailand-Unhinged ... 793780762/ (http://www.amazon.com/Thailand-Unhinged-Unraveling-Thai-Style-Democracy/product-reviews/9793780762/)
[X] A very short book for all those who want to understand Thai politics.
Chatchai Puipia: Siamese Smile.
http://www.equinoxpublishing.com/images/97897937807643d.jpg
In his book Federico Ferrara writes:
For the people of Thailand, who deserve better.
What I have done this time was for the nation and for the majority of the people. I thought we are born only once, and when there is a chance to do something, we should do it. I should not behave like the scum of the earth. тАФ Pridi Banomyong, Letter to Phoonsuk, July 3, 1932
'Who controls the past,' ran the party slogan, 'controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.' тАФ George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four
They call it a 'democratic coup d'├йtat,' see. You have to have lots of coups d'├йtat. Otherwise it isn't a democracy. тАФ Khamsing Srinawk
тАЬTo this date, as many as seven out of every ten of the King's subjects reside in thousands of villages and small towns dotting Thailand's vast rural landscape. As a result, elected legislatures are invariably stacked with representatives whom urban voters despise for their boorishness. gross incompetence, and overbearing avarice. Inept, predatory administrations, in turn, generate profound disillusionment in Bangkok triggering a crescendo of support for the kind of military intervention that might once and for all deliver the country from the corruption and moral turpitude of its provincial politicians. The cycle begins anew when the urban middle class awakens to find military rule unpalatable, takes to the streets, suffers the requisite number of casualties, and somehow forces the generals back to the barracks.
This simple narrative recurs with some variation in the foreign scholarship and the Bangkok press, as it does in the work of Thai writers who are openly sympathetic to the plight of provincial voters. It arguably works best as an explanation for democracy's collapse in 1991, its subsequent return in 1992, and the bloodshed that marked the intervening period.
For their part, provincial Thais aren't as foolish as those who belittle their loutishness or romanticize their pastoral innocence would have us believe. It should he noted, in this regard, that until very recently provincial voters had never quite been given the option to choose between competing visions of how the country should he governed - and hence put to the test the widely shared notion that their unsophistication would prevent them from making reasoned judgments about national policies and rival campaign platforms. Weak as they were because of intermittent repression and internal divisions, political parties never offered much in the way of clear programmatic distinctions that could even faintly appeal to rural voters. Confronted with fast-approaching elections, political parties always took the easy road to victory relying on the voters' loyalty to local notabilities rather than establishing their own. That provincial Thais don't vote an ideology, then, has less to do with the fact that party platforms would be too difficult to understand or too abstracted from their immediate concerns than with the reality that a coherent set of competing ideas has rarely been on offer. The problem is in the supply as much as the demand.
Ironically, while former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra is loathed by many in Bangkok on account of his penchant for buying or otherwise rigging elections, his enduring popularity is much less a function of his ability to outbid the competition in the market for votes than it is the consequence of actual policies he implemented. As Thailand's richest man, Thaksin had plenty of money to spend and enough ambition to gamble almost all of it away on his political career. But the real game-changer, not to mention his most unforgivable crime, was that Thaksin for the first time "nationalized" elections in the provinces by crafting a simple platform that resonated with voters well beyond the popularity, wealth, and stature of any local candidate. In the wake of the 1997 Asian Crisis, Thaksin effectively combined the old money politics with a program unprecedented for its detail and its focus on long-neglected regions and social classes. Provincial voters rewarded him in spades. Thai Rak Thai won an unprecedented near-majority in the 2001 elections and a still more commanding mandate in 2005. As expected, when Thailand re-emerged from military rule in late 2007, the same voters handed the People Power Party the first re-incarnation of the now dissolved TRT another decisive victory at the ballot box.
At the same time, provincial Thais can hardly be mistaken for paragons of democratic virtue. Lest we forget, it is their support that enabled Thaksin to make of kidnapping, torture, and murder semi-official state policy. To be sure, at the height of his power Thaksin was different things to different people. Some voters probably believed his government's half-hearted denials of any involvement in the extra-judicial killings and the muzzling of the media. Others, who no doubt understood quite well what the government was doing, might simply have taken the good with the bad having deemed Thaksin's authoritarian turn the acceptable cost of his populist platform. But to many among Thaksin's supporters, the government's heavy-handedness in dealing with protesters, journalists, drug dealers, and presumed insurgents was simply the natural extension of his leadership and management style. As such, these policies were widely applauded. The War on Drugs was found to have the backing of as much as ninety percent of the Thai electorate. And his suicidal approach to counterinsurgency sparked a wave of nationalist fervor that, at least initially, strengthened Thaksin against his critics in the legislature, the Privy Council, civil society, and the media.
The overwhelming public support that Thaksin's most anti-democratic policies enjoyed can only be understood with reference to the context in which his ascent took place. In the midst of a devastating economic crisis, the Chuan government was seen as weak and indecisive, paralyzed by internal dissension and subservient to foreign interests. Splintered, factionalized, and porous as they were, the existing political parties presented no alternative to get Thailand out of its rut. As least as much as his ideas, it was Thaksin's biography, his projection of strength and decisiveness, and his brash, in-your-face style that offered something really new. Power-hungry politicians with no mission in politics but their own enrichment and little to show for their work but an endless cycle of re-shuffles, fence-jumpings, and no-confidence motions seemed incapable of confronting the serious challenges the country was facing. Thaksin promised to do so; the aggressiveness with which he subsequently rammed his agenda through what had once been a fractious, do-nothing legislature demonstrated he damn well could.
If the economic crisis had given rise to a wave of "chauvinist resentment" that Thai Rak Thai's brand of nationalism appropriated and then further inflamed, it was in his self-appointed role as the country's strenuous defender from a host of malevolent outsiders that Thaksin successfully recast his opponents as the country's enemies. It was thus that his critics in the media and civil society were accused of "damaging the country." It was thus that everyone killed by Thaksin's death squads during the orgy of violence of the War on Drugs was branded "scum" and a "threat to society," that anyone investigating the killings was slandered as being on the drug cartels' payroll, and that every individual or organization who condemned the administration was labeled a menace to Thailand's independence. It was thus that the southern youths who were massacred by the army and police came to be referred to as "beasts." It was thus, at the end of the day, that democracy died in Thailand. By and large, provincial voters enthusiastically approved.
Much like the boors upcountry, the Bangkok middle classes could be said to be neither as high-minded nor quite as effete as the alternative spins to the same conventional wisdom suggest. For all their sophistication, they have shown themselves eager to embrace, unreservedly, a barrage of propaganda extolling the unfailing virtue of characters with questionable motives, dubious associations, and a rather thin record of accomplishment beyond the spiritualization of their own power. All their democratic values and good-government ideals, moreover, never quite prevented Bangkokians from acquiescing to corrupt, repressive regimes тАФ notwithstanding the occasional bursts of mass indignation that punctuated Thai-land's long spells under military rule.
Quite aside from any personal animosity, though, most offensive to Sondhi's ilk was Thaksin's economic policy. For the Bangkok elites, it was never about the extra-judicial killings, the corruption, the vote-buying, or the intimidation of the press. The real issue was "Thaksinomics." Once again, on this issue the PAD had a decent case to make. There is no question, in particular, that Thaksin's policies reflected his determination to build a more efficient and expansive network of patronage one that would maximize his own power by going over the heads of provincial bosses rather than promote real rural development. There is little doubt that the village loan funds were doled out selectively by local politicians to further their own interests, while monitoring mechanisms verifying that the loans would be destined to investment and not private consumption were weak or non-existent. And it is beyond dispute that Thaksin employed dubious accounting practices to keep track of public expenditures on those very programs.
But that's not the point. Sondhi and his friends regularly have recourse to their own political connections to get cash, contracts, and concessions from the government on the taxpayers dime. Indeed, that s precisely now some of them, Thaksin included, got rich in the first place. After all, it was only thanks to incestuous, corrupt deals that a few dozen, mostly Sino-Thai business families now the lifeblood of the PAD concentrated such an astounding amount of wealth in the hands of so few people. At least since the late 1930s. wealthy families have shared their largesse with big men in the military and civilian bureaucracy, appointing them to spectacularly lucrative positions on their companies' boards of directors and funneling money to state-sponsored or privately owned firms controlled by generals. In return, they got favorable legislation, tax breaks, government contracts, protection from competition, and much sought-after concessions that allowed them to turn most sectors of Thailand's economy into oligopolies. Suffice it to say that on the eve of the Asian Crisis, the combined revenues of Thailand's top 200 companies, most of which remained family-owned or family-controlled, amounted to 62 percent of GDP: that of the top thirty companies, almost forty percent of GOP. Among many others, the PAD could now count on the generous financial backing of families leading Thailand's four largest private conglomerates - Bangkok Bank, Kasikorn Bank, Charoen Popkhand. and TCC. For much of 2008, big business bankrolled the PAD'S operations to the tune of a million baht per day.
Predictably, Thai Rak Thai would win the elections in a landslide, outdistancing its rivals by millions of votes - the kind of margin that would make the tens of thousands of people his opponents had brought out to the streets of Bangkok seem paltry by comparision. Knowing very well they stood no chance of denting Thaksin's electoral dominance, all opposition parties boycotted the contest. Despite Thai Rak Thai's success, the PAD caught a major break when about a third of the voters who bothered to show up cast a ballot rejecting all candidates.Shortly thereafter, His Majesty the King gave a famous speech to a newly appointed judges in which he urged the judiciary to "solve" the country's current "problem" and reminded them of their oath "to work for democracy." He then asked a rhetorical question: "Should the elections be nullified?" His Majesty would not say, but noted that at least in his opinion the conduct of the election had been "undemocratic." The Constitutional Court voided the elections two weeks later. Before Thaksin could sweep a new round of voting scheduled for October 15, the army moved in and seized power. The PAD formally disbanded and disappeared from the scene.
ORWELL тАФ His mind slid away into the labyrinthine world of double-think. To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them; to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy; to forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again: and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself. That was the ultimate subtlety: consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed. тАФ George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four
Government propaganda notwithstanding, Thailand has only been a "democracy" in any meaningful sense of the word for a relatively small portion of its post-absolutist history. In each such instance, the military had to step in to "restore order" and "protect the unity of the nation." Of course, in light of Thaksin's sickening record, one could be forgiven for having sympathized with the argument made in support of the 2006 coup. Certainly, the case against Thaksin was at least more cogent than the one cooked up to justify the removal of Chatichai Choonhavan's own "elected dictatorship" in 1991. But we should know better than to think there is any such thing as a "democratic coup d'├йtat." At least Thailand never experienced one.
Thailand, moreover, is a country where human rights violations - whether perpetrated by the army, the police, or paramilitary death squads - have never been punished. Thanom Kittikachorn got a swell state funeral. The Red Gaurs and Village Scouts were never even sought for questioning. Suchinda Kraprayoon was granted blanket amnesty while the bodies of those he murdered were still warm. So it was unclear why things would be different this time. Besides, it's not like those associated with the coup had a much better human rights record than Thaksin.
All this, however, barely scratches the surface of the atrocities committed by Thaksin's sanguinary regime. No charges were ever filed for the disappearances, the extra-judicial executions, and the brutal crackdown on demonstrators in the South. At the end of the day, Thaksin never paid for his real crimes. Nor will he ever.
The question is why. Why, specifically, did the generals go after Thaksin for fairly pedestrian episodes of corruption only to ignore potential crimes against humanity? The Ratchadaphisek case, after all, isn't much different from the probe into Surayud's ownership of land at Khao Yai Thiang. And corruption is well-known to have been rampant during, Prem's own tenure as Prime Minister in the 1980s. Two reasons are typically adduced for the judiciary's inaction on Thaksin's human rights abuses. Sometimes, it is argued that prosecuting these cases may compromise Thailand's chances of achieving"national reconciliation" as if there could be any such thing as national reconciliation without a measure of justice. Besides, the military's support of the PAD hardly seems to have been in the interest of protecting the country from further unrest. In other instances, we are reminded that human rights prosecutions are complicated and messy. So getting Thaksin for comparatively venial offenses would be the Thai equivalent of nailing Al Capone for tax evasion. But though that may well apply to some of the disappearances, in cases where human remains could not be located, the judiciary seems determined to do nothing about the well-documented Kru Ze and Tak Bai incidents. Not to mention that the case for which Thaksin was recently convicted was no slam-dunk either; the court that sentenced him to two years in prison did so on the basis of flimsy circumstantial evidence.
So why was nothing done to hold Thaksin accountable for human rights abuses perpetrated on his watch? Certainly, Thaksin is responsible quite possibly, criminally responsible for the abuses. But it was not Thaksin who pulled the trigger on thousands of drug dealers, real and imagined. Thaksin was not present at the Kru Ze mosque. Thaksin did not physically torture Muslim youth, nor did he hide Somchai Neelaphaijit's body in the basement of his house in Thonburi. And Thaksin did not stack the demonstrators at Tak Bai into the vans that would ultimately prove to be their death chambers. All of these crimes may have been perpetrated with Thaksin's knowledge or even at Thaksin's behest; but most such monstrosities were carried out by the military. So Thaksin could never be prosecuted for commissioning murders without subjecting the actual executioners to similar probes. After all, no civilized country considers the Nuremberg routine about following orders a valid reason to rape, torture, or kill. And Thailand's so-called "independent" courts, much less the junta itself, wore never going to hold senior military officers accountable for their crimes.
All of this points to a fairly obvious conclusion. The human rights rhetoric was useful to the military when Thaksin had to be overthrown, particularly as the generals sought to explain themselves in terms the urban electorate and the international community could sympathize with. But the substance of what Thaksin had done was not particularly objectionable to them. So it was never about human rights, for which the military-bureaucratic elites have shown nothing but contempt over the past eight decades. Nor was it ever about corruption. Trite and increasingly half-hearted protestations to the contrary notwithstanding, the 2006 coup was about removing the threat that Thaksin posed to their own power. The ensuing prosecutions aimed exclusively to discredit Thaksin, to label him a "convicted criminal" and then a "fugitive" without seeking any actual justice or redress for his real crimes, and to establish quasi-legal grounds to seize the assets upon which, undoubtedly, any chance of a comeback would rest.
When Thaksin did come back, if only by proxy, out came the paramilitary thugs that softened the government's support by raising the terrifying specter of an ugly civil war. And when the people had enough of that, out came the Constitutional Court's dissolution of the People Power Party. Chat Thai, and Matchima Thipataya.
The legal provisions that formed the basis of the Constitutional Court's verdict are a good illustration of the big men's opus moderandi. Ostensibly, the legislation concerning party dissolution was included in the 2007 constitution as an instrument to tackle the country's endemic levels of electoral fraud. Under the old statute - the Organic Law on Political Parties introduced in 1998 - the Constitutional Court was only empowered to dissolve political parties found to have endangered the security of the state as well as parties deemed to have either damaged or conspired to overthrow the "democratic regime of government with the King as Head of State. It is under this statute that the junta-appointed court dissolved Thai Rak Thai in 2007. Under the new laws, any party whose executive committee includes at least one member who has been disqualified for egregious violations of the law by the Election Commission of Thailand is liable to be dissolved and have its entire executive committee banned from office for a period of five years. Laws this draconian are almost unheard-of in democratic countries, where it is typically left to voters to decide which parties should survive and which should not. Even countries like India, where democracy works much better than it does in Thailand in spite of still more pervasive levels of corruption and vote-buying, no such rule is on the books.
Considering that the provisions were written into the constitution by the 2006 coup-makers, one cannot help but wonder whether there isn't more to these rules than their staunch determination to fight corruption. Indeed, the manner in which the new statute has been enforced corroborates the suspicion that the rules on party dissolution are little more than a way for unelected institutions to restrict freedom of association in the pursuit of a distinctly undemocratic political agenda - an insurance policy of sorts against the possibility that voters might elect a government the big men dislike. It bears repeating that the Constitutional Court recently dissolved the People Power Party, brought about the downfall of its elected government, and disqualified its executives for five years owing to the infractions of a single man - former deputy leader and House Speaker Yongyuth Tiyaparat. found guilty of vote-buying shortly after the 2007 election.
More fascinating still, what would be the final price extracted by those filthy whores the Thai people call their representatives, in this most frantic and undignified of livestock auctions? Would the forty million baht promised to former People Power Party MPs be enough to lure them out of one marriage of convenience and into another? Would the fifty million baht reportedly offered by Peua Thai convince enough deputies to call in sick? Could it go even higher than that?
In a place where such a large number of legislators are eager to sell themselves off to the highest bidder, it appeared next to inconceivable that the government would last more than a few months.
In addition, whereas Thai Rak Thai's growth, as measured in seat shares, attests to a reduction in the number of parties, these numbers fail to tell an equally important side of the story. Thai Rak Thai, that is, was much more of a "real" party than any of its predecessors. Its organizational structure was highly centralized; its parliamentary wing sternly enforced party discipline through tough hardball tactics. Local politicians remained important for mobilizing votes in the provinces, but they were no longer the locus of the party's financial and organizational resources. And while as many as fifteen factions operated within TRT, their importance, their power, and their independence were quashed under Thaksin's leadership.
The question remains, however, why the parties and factions that saw their influence and independence shrink with every merger and the addition of every new coalition member did not desert Thaksin and put together a government that would guarantee them a larger share of the pie. In this regard, it certainly helped that 'Thaksin paid his MP's rather handsomely for their support somewhere in the neighborhood of $5000 per month plus a bonus of at least $20,000 awarded during various festivities and millions of baht for their campaigns.
ORWELL тАФ If it once became general, wealth would confer no distinction. It was possible, no doubt, to imagine a society in which wealth, in the sense of personal possessions and luxuries, should be evenly distributed, while power remained in the hands of a small privileged caste. But in practice such a society could not long remain stable. For if leisure and security were enjoyed by all alike, the great mass of human beings who are normally stupefied by poverty would become literate and would learn to think for themselves; and when once they had done this, they would sooner or later realize that the privileged minority had no function, and they would sweep it away. In the long run, a hierarchical society was only possible on the basis of poverty and ignorance. тАФ George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four
In a country where tens of thousands of young women possibly as many as several hundreds of thousands copulate for a living, one might ask what the hell is the point of imposing a ban of internet pornography, of lamenting the dangers of pre-marital sex, or of expressing alarm over a handful of students who screw their classmates to finance their weekend shopping. And if modesty, chastity, and innocence are so important to the idea of "Thainess" (kwahm bpen thai), it may baffle some that purists and cultural warriors would spend so much time fending off comparatively small threats to that ideal. What many foreigners do not understand, however, is that the filthy whores who have spent decades fueling the nation's growth, keeping entire villages afloat, and filling to the brim the coffers of the state simply don't count. Nor do the large numbers of provincial women in Bangkok whatever their day job happens to be - who are well known to be available for liaisons involving some, if perhaps less direct form of cash payment.
For the smug bourgeoisie, whose broken English is just good enough to read brain-dead editorials in the Bangkok Post or The Nation, the provincial girls who live in Bangkok are not really citizens of Thailand - not the same way they are. These women, after all, belong to a social class whose sole prerogative, in the heinous cosmology of the phoo yai ("big man"), is to grovel. Their duty is not merely to be poor if not so poor as to inconvenience the highest authorities of the state into making token gestures of support - but rather to be content with the prospect of forever remaining poor. At least since the dictatorship of Sarit Thanarat, the notion that the provincial masses belong in the fields, that they should not take part in materialistic pursuits on the streets of the capital city, has been a centerpiece of Thailand's official ideology. So economic migrants to Bangkok, especially those whose unsightly occupations reflect poorly on the country's leadership, have long been treated as outcasts - their insolence and stubborn refusal to embrace their station in life threatening the "deterioration" of Thai culture and society. As such, debates in the Thai media focus almost exclusively on the sexual mores of middle- or upper-class city girls and, occasionally, the peasant women who are still expected to serve as a symbol of cultural purity for the comfort of the Bangkok elites. The ubiquitousness of the sex industry in Bangkok is not inconsistent with the elites' image of Thailand as a sexually demure, conservative country. Nor, for that matter, does it undermine their self-appointed role as the upholders of that myth. The army of streetwalkers, go-go dancers, and tentacled masseuses working in Bangkok, then, are not commonly regarded as the long-lost daughters whom the double-breasted, uniformed, and garishly bejeweled fathers of the nation have sold into prostitution. Far from being gratefully acknowledged for the heroic contribution they have made to the country's prosperity, they are rather more conveniently ignored.
But who exactly is responsible for pimping Thailand's provincial youth? Who, if not the country's self-styled paternalistic leadership? And why, if not for the benefit of the urban elites? This nativist reasoning conveniently ignores the fact that the transformation of Thailand into the West's playroom was conscious and deliberate, motivated by the opportunity for massive financial gain it presented to those who had already been blessed with riches and power - politicians, generals, noble-men, and their friends in the business community. And it neglects to consider how it benefits the high-minded bourgeoisie, who can go about their business without wasting too much time thinking about exporting a measure of economic opportunity to the provinces.
At the end of the day, who owns the hotels, the shopping malls, and massage parlors that foreign tourists and rich locals patronize? Who leases the land, lends the capital, supplies the construction materials, and oversees the building of mega-projects in popular tourist destinations? And who sells the ugly Westerner the beer he drinks, the food he eats, the condoms he wears, the cigarettes he smokes, and the souvenirs he brings home as evidence he didn't spend his entire trip holed up in a brothel? Follow the money. For every miscreant who descends upon Thailand, weighted down by the oversized baggage of smug condescension Westerners carry with them everywhere they go, then are thousands of enablers in this country.
It is in this light that one should read the recent, albeit now effectively defunct, debate over the legalization of prostitution in Thailand. It is questionable whether Western sex tourists have much to gain from the decriminalization of the trade or its increased regulation. Prostitutes could hardly be more widely or more openly available. At the same time, in an effort to keep the authorities' attention elsewhere, most go-go bars and brothels patronized by Western tourists have, on their own initiative, taken aggressive steps to make the girls disease-free. In all but the filthiest establishments, each "entertainer" and "special service" girl submits to monthly HIV tests and bi-weekly gynecological inspections. Legalization, in this sense, would change only one thing. Not only would the licensing and registration requirements put an official imprimatur on today's much disputed, unofficial estimates, thus bursting the illusion nurtured by those in the elites who still claim Thailand to be a sexually modest, conservative country; the fact that all that would now be allowed to happen legally, on the watch of the self-righteous bourgeoisie, would expose them as co-responsible for the phenomenon knocking them off the pedestal of stalwart cultural guardians to which they have long elevated themselves. Unsurprisingly, the opposition to the proposal that Thailand allow de jure what has de facto been encouraged for decades was framed precisely around the need to defend Thainess and its values - as if to formally prohibit something one is informally peddling would do anything to affirm Thai morality. Then again, that was the whole point. So long as it is not enforced, the law as it stands has no adverse effect on tourism revenue streams. The veneer of cultural purism coming at no cost whatsoever, there is no point being seen wallowing in feces with all manners of Western swine.
For the Thai bourgeoisie, the great thing about the status quo - beyond the fact that tourism makes businesses more prosperous, jobs more remunerative, and taxes less burdensome - is that while the measly sums families upcountry receive from their daughters keep them afloat and hence muffle the clamor for a more interventionist role of the state, in the absence of real economic development millions of provincial bores never go far beyond mere subsistence. Incidentally, though "sufficiency" is all the elites and the local press say provincial Thais should aspire to, the continuing reality of rural poverty perpetuates the incentive structure that makes prostitution the best possible career choice for upcountry girls by the hundreds of thousands. You can force people into mere subsistence, but it is quite another thing to extinguish any yearning for self-advancement, to sear upon people's faces idiotic smiles of contentment. Nor, for that matter, would the elites really want for the slogging proles to surrender all hopes of a better life - not lest they piss away the steady supply of cheap labor that makes their parasitic lives so comfortable.
In Thailand, of course, the word "democracy"has been a centerpiece of the state's official ideology since the absolute monarchy was toppled in 1932. Still, authoritarian rulers from Sarit on down have long asserted the irrelevance of supposedly Western standards invoking the amorphous concept of "Thai-style" democracy as an alternative better suited to Thailand's history, values, and traditions. To be clear, the "Thai-style" in "Thai-style democracy" speaks to the restrictions that should be placed on both the freedoms enjoyed by the country's citizens and the autonomy exercised by its elected officials.
The idea of Thai-style democracy first surfaced in the late 1950s, as a post-hoc rationalization for Field Marshal Sarit Thanarat's conservative "revolution," and then as the ideological underpinnings of his manifestly undemocratic rule.
That "Thai-style democracy," with the oversized role it has historically conferred upon unelected institutions, would amount to little more than a bastardization should be transparent enough by now. Perhaps less obvious is the notion that, in principle as well as in practice, "Thai-style democracy" has even less to do with Thai culture than it has with democracy. In this sense, advocates of democratization tend to defer much too readily to the sniveling apologists of the current regime on the true content of Thai culture. And those fancying themselves the proud defenders of Thailand's cultural heritage -that is, those for whom cultural discourse is more than a cheap trick to justify a privileged elite's monopolization of power often betray a rather cartoonish view of both the "culture" they seek to defend and the alien cultures whose encroachments they so stalwartly oppose.
Notwithstanding the lip service frequently paid to the customs, practices, values, norms, and beliefs that cumulated over centuries of Thai political development, there is nothing "Thai" about lining up dissidents against the wall of a Buddhist temple and mowing them down with machine guns. There is nothing "Thai" about the shameless hypocrisy required to praise a military dictator who stole billions and murdered hundreds, with the blessing of the country's highest authorities, and in the same breath adduce "corruption" and 'human rights violations" as justification for staging military coups against elected leaders guilty of a fraction of those offences. There is nothing "Thai" about turning religion into an instrument of political legitimacy. There is nothing "Thai" about cults of personality. There is nothing "Thai" about the enlistment of mass media and schools in the dissemination of propaganda. And there is nothing "Thai" about repressing the poor to benefit the rich. These are not the hallmarks of culture. Thai or otherwise. These are rather the attributes of authoritarianism the main features of which were pioneered, for the most part, by generations of Western dictators.
RAMKHAMHAEMG тАФ In the time of King Ramkhamhaeng this land of Sukhothai is thriving. There is fish in the water, rice in the fields. The lord of this realm does not levy toll on his subjects for traveling the roads; they lead their cattle to trade or ride their horses to sell; whoever wants to trade in elephants, does so; whoever wants to trade in horses, does so; whoever wants to trade in silver or gold. does so. [...] When commoners or men of rank differ and disagree, [the King] examines the case to get at the truth and settles it justly for them. He does not connive with thieves or favor concealers [of stolen goods]. When he sees someone's rice he does not covet it; when he sees someone's wealth he docs not get angry. [...] When he captures enemy warriors, he does not kill them or beat them. He has hung a bell in the opening of the gate over there: if any commoner in the land has a grievance which sickens his belly and gripes his heart, and which he wants to make known to his ruler and lord, it is easy: he goes and strikes the bell which the King has hung there; King; Ramkhamhaeng, the ruler of the kingdom, hears the call; he goes and questions the man, examines the case, and decides it justly tor him. So the people of this muang of Sukhothai praise him. тАФ Inscription on the throne of King Ramkhamhaeng of Sukhothai (1292 CE)
ORWELL тАФ Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows. тАФ George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four
As they have for the past eight decades, if perhaps in terms that have never been more stark, the Thai people face a choice that offers no real alternative. Before them stand two factions, divided more by competing private agendas than alternative visions for the future of the country. On one side, in yellow, safely ensconced behind their tanks, their guns, and a frenzied, yah bah-powered army of street thugs, are the big men drawn from the country's bureaucracy, the army, and parts of Bangkok's rapacious business community. These are the people who have ruled Thailand for much of the past 75 years, under the pretense of protecting the country's most sacred symbols. But they have never met, much less served, a cause greater than themselves. To them, the people are mere beasts of burden, the producers of wealth they can plunder with impunity, the breeders of daughters they can sell into prostitution. For decades, the phoo yai have told the people that they are too stupid, ignorant, and lazy to be entrusted with the destiny of the nation that they have no business demanding the right to drive the entire country into the ground. For decades, they have branded anyone who dared challenge their right to use the state as personal pelf a traitor, a communist, a republican, or an agent of shadowy international conspiracies. And, for decades, they have smothered the people's aspirations in the blood of their bravest young men and women. Now they stand before the people, pressing a knife to their throat. It's their way or chaos, economic catastrophe, and civil war. Prostrate and crawl. Obey. Or else.
On the other side, in red, stand the big men of a different kind - provincial gangsters, corrupt upcountry politicians, and Bangkok-based businessmen who have fallen from the grace of the military and bureaucratic elites. They too want the whole pie for themselves. They too have used public office to line their own pockets, reward their cronies, and silence their critics. They too have labeled their opponents foreign agents and threats to society. They too have ruled with the crassest disregard for the for human rights and democratic freedoms. They too have exploited the people's fear of тАЬthe otherтАЭ - supposed deviants, presumed insurgents, and purported foreign invaders тАУ to bolster their credentials as the defenders of Thailand's social cohesion, independence, and traditions. They too have tortured and killed. The difference? Instead of viewing them as a threat, those in the red shirts see the people as an opportunity. Instead of telling them, to their face, that they have no right to a government that works for them, they seek to ride the people's long-frustrated aspirations all the way back into executive office. What they offer in return is a chewed-up, leftover bone - mere scraps of the spoils of power they once again seek to hoard for themselves and their henchmen.
Should Bangkok's students, professionals, and middle-income white-collar workers rise up just as they did when they caught on to a similar fraud eighteen years ago they would not only deprive the new regime of a constituency whose tacit support it needs to survive. This time, the urban middle class has a chance to parlay a potentially invincible alliance with the once-dormant rural populace into sweeping, long-awaited social change.
The failure of the Songkran rebellion demonstrated that the red shirts could not yet count on the support of the key swing constituency - Bangkok's masses of ordinary people. Characteristically, it's the capital's millions-strong army of secretaries, clerks, accountants, computer programmers, and shopkeepers that will ultimately decide the fate of the old order. But when, if not now? What is it going to take for the provincial masses and the urban middle class to join hands in a movement that is neither red nor yellow, but rather embodies the noblest sentiments of each? At the very minimum it will take for them to meet half-way. It will take for the provincial masses to recognize that the gangsters they have often called their representatives are as much an obstacle to their empowerment as are the big men in Bangkok. It will take for them to throw Thaksin under the bus, embracing the urban electorate's desire for a more transparent, more honest, more responsive government. It will take for the urban middle classes to acknowledge that the Bangkok-based phoo yai are as much an impediment to the country's progress as the provincial politicians they so viscerally despise. And it will take for those among them who share with the PAD rank-and-file an unfeigned reverence for Thailand's highest institutions to openly reject the PAD's elitism, its contempt for democracy, and its fascist fantasies.
Thanks to its guns, its money, its magic, and its traditional stranglehold on the media, the old order lives on. The military and bureaucratic elites are still in charge. They still have the population's apathy on their side not to mention that the Thai people understandably have little taste tor the kind of chaos the elites unleashed upon the country in the tall of 2008. What is more, Thaksin's coalition may now be irreparably fractured. But those who yearn for real democratic change - those whose ideals transcend the restoration of Thaksin to an office he occupied legitimately and abused shamefully - should take heart in the realization that the events of the last few months may have already undone decades of establishment propaganda. Old taboos are being shattered. Old myths are being demolished. And, at long last, the iniquity of old untouchables is increasingly being exposed to well-deserved public disgust. Judging from the government's thrashing, panic-stricken reaction, the old elites don't quite know what to do about it.
So this is the people's chance. A chance to substitute European-style dictatorship with a real, Thai-style democracy. A chance to honor the distinctive traditions that make Thailand a unique, special place without subjecting dissenting views to censorship, legal harassment, or violence. A chance to reject the simplistic, vulgar reduction of Thai culture to the mere requirement that the most wretched must always grovel before the most fortunate. A chance to recognize that tolerance, freedom, and non-violence are as integral a part of Thai culture as sakdina-based social hierarchy. A chance to restore Buddhism to more than just the legitimation of social inequalities. A chance to bring the military under civilian control. A chance to come clean about recent history. A chance to write a constitution that begins with an ideal instead of a lie. A chance to acknowledge that the story of the last 75 years is not the "development" of democratic institutions, but rather the elites' increasingly desperate attempt to deny the people real democracy. A chance to pay homage to the sacrifice of those who died for democracy by telling the truth about their executioners. A chance to stop taking human rights abusers for statesmen and heroes for troublemakers. A chance to put the elites in their place. A chance to make1 government work. A chance to empower the people through equitable development, education, rights, and participation. A chance to lead Thailand into the developed world not through the back door of repression and exploitation, but as the nation of laws, freedom, justice, and opportunity it has always aspired to be.тАЭ
http://media.primezone.com/cache/189/int/8385.jpg
http://www.defenseindustrydaily.com/Ris ... LEMV-06438 (http://www.defenseindustrydaily.com/Rise-of-the-Blimps-The-US-Armys-LEMV-06438)
http://www.hybridairvehicles.net/
http://www.bangkokpost.com/opinion/opin ... -have-here (http://www.bangkokpost.com/opinion/opinion/184322/more-a-professional-farce-than-force-that-we-have-here)
Thailand's state of emergency: Irreconcilable differences
Despite talk of reconciliation, the government feels the need for repressive laws
The Economist | Jul 8th 2010 | BANGKOK
EMERGENCY rule means the suspension of normal rules during extraordinary times. For the Thai government, it seems to be the new normal. On July 6th the prime minister, Abhisit Vejjajiva, extended a state of emergency that he had declared in April during rowdy demonstrations by opposition тАЬred shirtsтАЭ. The army ended the protests on May 19th and red-shirt leaders are in jail or in hiding. In the aftermath, Mr Abhisit launched a national reconciliation plan, but without a promise of early elections, as protesters had demanded.
The security forces insist that danger lingers. So Mr Abhisit, who leads a shaky coalition government formed with the armyтАЩs backing, extended emergency rule in Bangkok and 18 other provinces. In five quiescent provinces emergency rule was lifted. The rules allow the authorities to detain suspects without charge, censor the press, ban public gatherings and freeze bank accounts.
Opposition politicians argue that Mr AbhisitтАЩs reconciliation is a sham. Indeed, the government seems more intent on crushing the red shirts. But the anger and alienation that fed the protests is unlikely to fade away. The International Crisis Group, a think-tank, has called for the government to lift emergency rule. It argues a legitimate movement may be driven underground. A by-election in Bangkok on July 25th, in which a red-shirt leader is running from jail, may test the public mood.
Bangkok is still reeling from the protests, in which 89 people died in bloody clashes. ThailandтАЩs supine media have largely dropped the topic, in favour of upbeat accounts of the governmentтАЩs efforts to regain international confidence. The names and circumstances of the dead, mostly rural and working-class protesters, barely rate a mention. Last month the government appointed a retired attorney-general, Kanit na Nakhorn, to investigate the violence, as part of its promised programme of reconciliation.
But anyone wanting a swift investigation into how so many people died on the streets of Bangkok, and the identity of the mysterious gunmen who fought alongside the red shirts, will be disappointed. Mr KanitтАЩs panel has a two-year time-frame, though it is required to report on its work every six months. Human-rights groups complain that there is no provision to prosecute those suspected of crimes. The emergency decree also grants officials immunity from prosecution for actions taken under its provisions.
The other commissions are even less promising. One is supposed to examine press reform. Another is to propose amendments to the 2007 constitution drafted by military appointees. Both are bereft of opposition voices. Mr Abhisit has also set up parallel panels on social, political and economic reforms. One is to be chaired by Anand Panyarachun, a British-educated royalist and former prime minister, now aged 77. The other is reserved for Prawase Wasi, a doctor and academic who helped write the previous, 1997, constitution. They have a leisurely three years in which to make recommendations on how to bridge ThailandтАЩs deep divisions.
Both men played similar roles in the 1990s, when a loose alliance of NGOs, intellectuals, trade unions and others thrashed out a consensus on a new constitution. The liberal charter that resulted in 1997 was torn up in 2006, after a royalist coup against a popular prime minister, Thaksin Shinawatra. He refused to go quietly, setting Thailand on its present self-destructive path.
Duncan McCargo, of the University of Leeds, sees parallels between ThailandтАЩs fumbling response to the red shirts and its approach to Muslim insurgents in the troubled south. In both cases, he says, authorities have glossed over political grievances and focused on individual troublemakers like Mr Thaksin. Security forces have behaved badly. When the violence got out of hand, reconciliation commissions were set up to find a solution. Not surprisingly, the same names turn up: Mr Anand chaired a 2005 commission on the southern violence. Mr Prawase also served on it. Its findings were largely ignored. And the conflict shows no sign of ending, despite five years under emergency rule.
Some have predicted a similar red-shirt uprising. A few bombs have gone off. But the leadership is in tatters. Terrorism charges have been filed against 53 people, including Mr Thaksin, a fugitive who already faces a two-year sentence for abusing his power. Hundreds of others are in jail. Red-shirt media have been shut down, including popular radio stations. In the provinces there are whispered claims of state-sanctioned killings. But, for now at least, repression seems to be working.
Mr Abhisit has been busy trying to woo voters with catchy giveaways, such as free bus- and train-rides for the poor and a pay rise for civil servants. How to finance these populist policies is another matter, though the Thai economy is doing quite well, despite the political upheaval. Nomura, a Japanese bank, says it could grow by 6% this year, thanks to robust exports.
This week Thais were encouraged to call a hot line and speak their mind. As television cameras rolled, Mr Abhisit and his ministers took a few of the calls. The telethon was billed as тАЬSix days, 63m opinionsтАЭ. Some callers complained of economic problems. Others expressed political views. Politicians love this sort of thing. There is a much more systematic way to find out what the Thai population wants. It is called an election.
http://www.economist.com/node/16539306? ... d=16539306 (http://www.economist.com/node/16539306?story_id=16539306)
Powered by vBulletin® Version 4.2.5 Copyright © 2024 vBulletin Solutions Inc. All rights reserved.