Thai Coup In Hot Soup
Satya Sagar
It is a staple dish you will not find
in any recipe book on Thailand’s famous cuisine. And yet
for most connoisseurs of modern Thai history a ‘coup in
hot ‘n spicy soup’ is always an eagerly awaited meal.
Less than a month after the Thai
military took power by ousting the government of Premier
Thaksin Shinawatra in a ‘happy’, bloodless coup all
indications are this favourite national delicacy is
being cooked once again.
Stirring the pot are a diverse range
of actors from pro-democracy student activists and
academics to taxi drivers and rural supporters of
Thaksin’s Thai Rak Thai party. Discontent over
imposition of martial law, the composition of the new
‘handpicked’ National Assembly and contradictory
policies introduced by the new regime are providing the
heat required to complete the cooking process.
All this is still happening on a
slow, burning fire but once in a while the flames leap
upward.
On October 1, for example, as
soldiers posted on a key Bangkok thoroughfare following
the coup watched with disbelief, one of the city’s
ubiquitous taxis broke through their check post and
rammed into a tank stationed there. Both sides of the
taxi were sprayed with messages in black reading "the
destroyers of the country", and "martyr" was written on
the taxi's boot.
Later on talking to reporters
Nuamthong Praiwan, the 60-year-old taxi driver, who
broke three ribs in the high-speed crash and was put on
a respirator said, “ I will do it again if I get another
chance”.
To understand the poignancy of this
suicidal act of defiance one has to consider that
displays of such extreme passion even on personal
issues, let alone political ones, are very rare in
Thailand. Sustaining physical injury deliberately for a
cause is quite out of the question normally.
But these are not normal times in
Thailand and that Nuamthong chose to do what he did is
just one small indication of the simmering social
volcano the country is sitting on – never mind the guns
‘n roses images flashed around by the global media.
Even more ominously, in some
districts of northern and north-eastern Thailand,
strongholds of the Thai Rak Thai, there have been
reports of several state-run schools ‘mysteriously’
burning down. Nobody has claimed responsibility but the
arson is believed to be the work of Thaksin’s supporters
or simply those who have bad memories of the Thai
military’s long history of misrule in the country’s
past.
Protests against the coup, though not
as dramatic as ramming a taxi into a tank or schools on
fire, have also been steadily picking up steam among the
Thai intelligentsia.
In Bangkok student protestors
demanding civil and political freedom recently burnt a
copy of the new interim charter announced by the coup
makers in place of the popularly framed 1997
Constitution. The protest was the fifth by the group
since the coup and defiantly staged outside the
headquarters of the Thai Army. Under martial law,
political assemblies of more than five people are banned
in Thailand.
"The military dumped the constitution
drafted by the people, so we are burning the charter
issued undemocratically by them," Chotisak On-soong from
the Students Activities Information Resource group told
Thai media. A dozen labour representatives also showed
up later in black clothing to denounce the military.
The Council for Media Reform (CMR), a
platform of academics, journalists and activists who
fought for greater media freedom under the previous
Thaksin Shinawatra regime, also held a protest at
Bangkok’s Democracy Monument demanding restoration of
the 1997 Constitution.
The CMR has also criticized the
presence of military ‘monitors’ at television stations
imposed after the coup and the resulting climate of fear
among media personnel.
In the northern Thai city of Chiang
Mai, five scholars led by well-known historian Nidhi
Eawsriwong, publicly tore up an imitation of the interim
charter announced by the military junta to symbolise
their opposition to the coup makers.
A day after the protest, the website
of the ‘Midnight University’, of which all the five
academics were members, was shut down by the Information
and Communications Technology Ministry. Their
six-year-old website, had became a platform for people
who disagreed with the coup d'etat to exchange their
opinions.
The Midnight University is a unique
initiative by progressive Thai academics in Chiang Mai
to take their lectures directly to interested members of
the public.
The National Security Council (NSC),
as the military junta calls itself has asked for a ban
on political web boards found to contain ‘provocative’
messages. Other anti-coup websites have also been closed
for containing criticisms of the new military regime.
There is obviously quite a diversity
of motives among those opposed to the coup, though what
binds all of them is a clear rejection of dictatorship
in any form as a ‘solution’ for the problems of a
budding electoral democracy.
Taxi drivers, who number a couple of
hundred thousand in Bangkok, have many reasons to be
upset about the ouster of the Thaksin administration by
the Thai military.
Early on after getting elected to
power in 2000 for example the Thaksin government
cracked down hard on urban mafias that collected
‘protection’ money from the capital city’s motorcycle
taxi drivers, helping them increase their monthly
income. For regular four-wheel taxi drivers it offered
easy loans to buy their own vehicles and cushioned the
impact of rising oil prices by making available cheaper
substitutes like liquefied petroleum and natural gas.
All this together with the fact that
Thaksin – attempting to create an electoral base among
the rural poor- poured money into health, education and
employment schemes in Thailand’s impoverished
northeastern provinces, from where most taxi drivers
hail, made him a hero among them. After all – none of
the numerous regimes that held power in Thailand before
Thaksin thought of taxi drivers as worth paying any
attention to - let alone helping them.
Far from the world of ordinary taxi
drivers, for the protesting academics in Chiang Mai and
student groups in Bangkok, the military coup, is a
severe blow to the development of a mature democratic
polity in the country. Many of them were strong critics
of Thaksin but now the feel the coup, justified by its
backers in the name of preventing ‘social divisions’ and
‘restoring democracy’, is a throwback to the dark old
days from Thailand’s authoritarian past.
The new interim Charter imposed by
the military for instance does not provide at all for
accountability of the new regime to any independent body
let alone the general public. The coup makers have also
unilaterally announced several decrees that have a big
impact on the freedoms of the population.
Coup orders, like the ban on any
political gathering with more than five participants,
have become law without any debate and can be undone
only by fresh legislation passed by a future Parliament.
The current interim charter and the various decrees
issued by the military junta will remain in place for
another year, at the end of which the coup makers have
promised to hold national elections.
A few words are due here about the
1997 Constitution, which was written with wide public
participation and is easily Thailand’s most democratic
charter to date (the country has had 17 constitutions in
seven decades and is now preparing to write the 18th
one).
Among other progressive clauses it
allowed the public to recall members of parliament,
initiate impeachment of bureaucrats, ministers and even
officials of the Supreme Court. It also set up a variety
of institutions that were supposed to provide
independent oversight of government functioning with
substantial powers to make corrections wherever
required.
There were some serious flaws with
the 1997 Constitution though, an important one being the
disbarring of candidates without a university graduate
degree from becoming members of parliament. In a country
where a majority lives in the countryside but only a
privileged few have the means of going to college that
clause more than anything else gives away the deep bias
that the ‘liberal’ framers of the Constitution had
against ordinary ‘illiterate’ Thai folk.
The disdain of the urban middle
classes in Bangkok for rural Thai folk- whom they
contemptuously call ‘village fools’ - comes from the
highly elitist nature of Thai society under which only a
handful of ‘educated’ and ‘cultured’ people are supposed
to know what is ‘best for the country’. While Thaksin
was rightly accused of trying to ‘buy’ support from the
poor, his conservative opponents - as a matter of
traditional ‘right’- expect the masses to keep them in
power without getting anything in return.
(The new government of retired
General Surayud Chulanont and the 250-member National
Assembly handpicked by the coup makers for example, has
hardly any representation from among rural Thais or
urban workers and is instead packed with military men,
bureaucrats and sections of Thai civil society who
opposed the previous government.)
Another problem with the 1997
Constitution was it never took into account the
possibility of the emergence of a powerful political
party with a charismatic leader who could dominate all
democratic institutions. The rise of Thaksin Shinawatra
in 2000 created precisely such a situation,
unprecedented in the usually fragmented Thai political
scenario.
Thaksin, with full domination of both
the parliament and the senate, of course took full
advantage of the situation by packing all supposedly
independent institutions with his own people. Few things
that Thaksin did were ‘unconstitutional’ because those
interpreting the text were very often under his
government’s influence.
Despite such loopholes and flaws the
1997 Constitution, many activists in Thailand feel, can
be the only basis for any new Constitution that the
military rulers may have in mind. The prospects of
getting anything even like the old one however appear
remote.
The coup makers have proposed a
complicated plan of handpicking a Constitution Drafting
Assembly that will come up with a new Constitution
within six months, hold public hearings and even a
national referendum. The catch is that if the Thai
people say ‘No’, the authority to decide the shape of
Thailand’s 18th Constitution reverts back – quite
ominously- to the military junta.
Irrespective of how the new Thai
constitution finally looks like it is becoming clear
that mere tinkering with the paperwork is not going to
solve the problems of Thailand’s fledgling and highly
unstable electoral democracy. One of the less discussed
reasons for such fragility of democratic institutions is
the complete absence of any left political party in the
country.
Anyone surveying the spectrum of
political parties in Thailand currently can easily see
that every one of them is a right of centre front for
one business lobby or the other. This has led to an
obvious imbalance in the country’s electoral democracy,
which stands on just one – right- leg and falls down at
the slightest political or social provocation.
A popular left party – even
garden-variety social democrats – openly taking up
issues of the rural and urban poor, youth, women and
workers will not only provide a much-needed
counterweight to the forces of conservatism but also put
Thai democracy on a much stronger foundation. Thailand
can learn a lot from the South Korean struggle against
authoritarian rule over the past three decades in this
regard.
However anything ‘left’ is still a
sensitive subject in Thailand, which has a long history
of anti-communism dating even prior to the US war on
Vietnam, which obviously shifted policies further
rightward.
Thailand’s first Prime Minister Pridi
Banomyong, was ousted by the Thai military way back in
the late thirties for advocating an allegedly
‘communist’ economic policy of land reforms and state
planning.
Thailand did have a communist party,
like many other countries in the region, but it turned
into a low key armed insurgency only in the early
fifties after being banned and prevented from
functioning openly. The threat of a ‘communist takeover’
has been a bogey for the Thai military and conservatives
to murder their opponents, suspend democratic rights and
stay in power ever since.
In October 1976 a right-wing coup
killed hundreds of students accusing them of being
‘Marxists’, an event that ironically succeeded in
pushing them into the arms of the underground Communist
Party of Thailand (CPT) that till then had very limited
presence among the urban intelligentsia. The CPT,
however collapsed in the late seventies under the weight
of its own contradictions, a pro-China organization
operating from pro-Vietnam Laos.
Interestingly the lack of a
functioning left party has not meant the complete
absence of a left agenda or activities in the country’s
politics either. For what Thailand got in the absence of
an organized left is what can only be called a
‘dispersed’ left.
There are former left activists for
example, in academia, in the media, among artists and in
the dozens of NGOs that have mushroomed in the last two
decades. Many of them are doing outstanding and very
creative work to further the rights of ordinary Thai
people and create greater democratic space.
There are left-wingers in some of the
mainstream political parties also, either there as pure
opportunists or misguidedly trying to ‘manipulate’ the
system for public good. Several former student radicals
for instance were among the advisers driving Thaksin’s
populist schemes, whose success clearly shows the need
for organizations that systematically take up issues of
the poor. (The new military appointed government, in an
interesting imitation of Thaksin’s much-criticised
‘populism’ has announced free healthcare for Thais in
place of the earlier of scheme providing medical
treatment at just 30 baht (80 US cents) per visit.)
Of course there were left wing
critics of Thaksin and his advisers too, many of whom
took to the streets against his government’s
authoritarian behaviour and alleged corruption. On many
other occasions in the country’s past also the
‘dispersed left’’ has played a key role in fighting for
democratic norms.
Even sections of Thailand’s
traditional institutions take up left issues from time
to time. After the 1997 Asian economic crisis that hit
Thailand hard the Thai monarch for example promoted the
concept of a ‘self-sufficient economy’ and criticized
growing consumerism and economic policies that
desperately sought export-led growth without considering
it social consequences.
In other words Thailand is faced with
the amazing situation where there seem to be leftists of
different shades all over the place but not a single
left party to give electoral expression to their ideas
and aims.
A new left party in Thailand (more
than one is also welcome to add some diversity!) need
not of course be a copy of anything that existed in the
past but one based on a better reading of the social,
economic and very importantly – cultural- setting of
Thailand. Maybe it could even be something like what the
Buddha, the world’s best known social revolutionary
before Jesus Christ, would have set up if he were around
in Thailand (he is certainly missing from the local
monasteries!).
As public opposition to the Thai
military grows over the next year and its illegitimate
new regime dissolves into a slow cooking soup, some of
Thailand’s more visionary activists can work on making
sure it turns – with the right ingredients and
temperature- into a very tasty Thai dish.
Satya Sagar is a writer and
video maker based in New Delhi. He spent over a decade
in Thailand during the nineties and can be reached at
sagarnama@yahoo.com
