The Death of Tolerance in Thailand
The government is ignoring the most hopeful lessons of modern Thai history and destroying what's best about the country.
By MICHAEL MONTESANO
Six months ago, I listened to Suthachai Yimprasoet, a professor of history at Bangkok's Chulalongkorn University, present a learned paper on the 1902 integration of the Malay sultanate of Patani into the kingdom of Siam, as Thailand was then known, in a magnificent lecture hall on that university's campus. Last week, Prof. Suthachai was detained on an army base in Saraburi Province, 100 kilometers northeast of the Thai capital.
The government led by Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva and Deputy Prime Minister Suthep Thaugsuban has yet to reveal what makes the historian such a threat to the country. Mr. Suthachai was not one of the leaders of the "red shirt" occupation of central Bangkok, which the government ended by force of arms on May 19. Since his detention five days later, no formal charges have been filed.
Three days after Mr. Suthachai's detention, he began a hunger strike to protest his jailers' refusing him access to newspapers and to materials to prepare his lectures. Those jailers soon allowed him access to his books. But not before the spokesman for the Abhisit government's Center for the Resolution of the Emergency Situation, Colonel Sansern Kaewkamnerd, defended the government's right to detain Mr. Suthachai under the Emergency Decree of 2005. Appearing to give the professor advice on dieting, Col. Sansern dismissively suggested that if he did not want to eat food, he could eat some jelly instead.
Police officers keep watch over students after the upheaval of Oct. 6, 1976.
The Abhisit government says it wants reconciliation. But Mr. Suthachai's detention, along with aggressive measures to censor the Internet and other media, suggest that it has embarked on a post-crackdown course likely to deepen Thailand's ugly divisions. The government has used its emergency powers to freeze the bank accounts of more than 100 individuals believed either to have helped fund the Bangkok protests, or to be associated with former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, or to back the opposition Phuea Thai Party.
In northern and northeastern Thailand, the security forces have begun a program of surveillance of ordinary citizens. As a small businessman in the north remarked to me last week, the CRES's announcements—along with incessant radio and television broadcasts featuring the song "May Happiness Return"—have made provincial Thais' fear of their government palpable.
Messrs. Abhisit, Suthep and their backers are choosing to ignore the most hopeful lessons of modern Thai political history. Instead they have embarked on a path to destroy what is best about their country.
On Oct. 6, 1976, Thailand suffered a brutal coup against its Democrat Party-led government. Soldiers, police and right-wing vigilantes attacked Bangkok's Thammasat University. They killed tens of student protestors, detained many others and drove still others into the jungle to join the armed insurgency of the "terrorists" of the Communist Party of Thailand. Thailand entered a very bleak period. Bloodthirsty reactionaries charged that leading liberal members of the Democrat Party like Damrong Latthaphipahat and veteran journalist Surin Matsadit and future Prime Minister Chuan Leekpai of the party's formidable southern wing were communist enemies of the nation. The country found itself with a premier, Judge Thanin Kraiwichian, so right wing that the Thai army staged a coup to oust him in 1977.
That coup did little to address the real communist threat that challenged Bangkok's control over sections of northern, northeastern and southern Thailand. Instead, and along with divisions between pro-China and pro-Vietnam factions of the Communist Party, it was a program of reconciliation and amnesty spear-headed by General Prem Tinasulanon that largely defeated that insurgency by the early 1980s. At an institutional level the Thai army remains extremely proud of Gen. Prem's conciliatory approach to counter-insurgency. Now chairman of the king's Privy Council and a leading object of red-shirt enmity, Gen. Prem served as Thailand's prime minister from 1980-88, years that brought the slow consolidation of parliamentary democracy.
The Prem years brought another form of progress along Thailand's path from division and crisis. Following their release from jail or emergence from the jungle, many of the most talented student leaders of the 1970s refused to succumb to bitterness over the murders of their friends and the defeat of the Communist Party. Instead, they trooped overseas to earn graduate degrees in the finest universities of the United States, Australia, Japan and Europe. They returned to Thailand's universities to help give their country the most dynamic intellectual life of any country in Southeast Asia. As contributors of columns to Thailand's lively free press, they shared their insights and perspectives with a wide readership. Mr. Suthachai was a member of this group. Having fought for the Communist Party in the hills of southern Thailand's Suratthani Province, he earned a doctorate at Britain's University of Bristol.
Talent and academic freedom have made Thailand's best universities sites for rigorous examination of the country's past and present, its society, economy, and history. Their scholars' ideas and writings have given the country some much needed historical and cultural ballast in the midst of dizzying economic and social change, though recent years have seen those scholars no less divided between "yellow shirts" and "red shirts" than any other group.
In accusing Mr. Thaksin and the red-shirt leadership of supporting terrorism, the Abhisit government may seek to conjure up in foreign minds images of the bombers of London's public transport or Jakarta's hotels. Within Thailand, however, to label an adversary a "terrorist" is to adopt the divisive approach to political conflict that Gen. Prem repudiated 30 years ago. It is to indulge in the demagoguery that traumatized the southern wing of the Democrat Party out of which Deputy Prime Minister Suthep himself emerged. It is to cast aside a legacy of earlier success in facing down a threat to the Thai nation that in its day seemed no less grave than today's.
Thailand has entered an era of mass politics. For all their liberal pretensions, Messrs. Abhisit, Suthep and their fellow Democrat hardliner Chuan lack the comfort of their nemesis Mr. Thaksin with such politics. They also lack a compelling vision of Thailand's past, present or future. In this regard they are joined by an alarming number of their countrymen, on both sides of the great national divide, in an era of more common "international" education and easier access to the "global" media. This lack of perspective, of historical ballast, is what makes Thailand's current crisis so frightening.
Mr. Montesano is a visiting research fellow at the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies in Singapore.
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