A Thai pointer for the Philippines
By Roby Alampay
BANGKOK - Ordinary Thais have been posing for pictures beside tanks and
offering flowers to smiling soldiers, a strong signal that Thailand's bloodless
military coup on Tuesday has been warmly received by the country's urban-based
upper and middle classes.
Their new military leaders have assured the country that power will be restored
to a civilian government within two weeks of the
coup that deposed caretaker premier Thaksin Shinawatra. Under a timetable laid
out by the coup leaders, new general elections should be held by October 2007,
perhaps in time for a new democratically elected government to ratify a new
constitution.
Before and beyond all that, however, Thais have also begun a process of
soul-searching for their democracy. Underneath the celebratory mood that has
embraced the military in Bangkok, there are questions and anxiety over what
exactly they are thanking their generals for.
Interestingly, it is not only Thais who are keen to learn from their
reflections. Filipinos, who are not known to stay in touch with Southeast Asian
politics as much as they are deeply aware of US foreign policy, have
uncharacteristically been following the developments in Thailand like genuinely
concerned - or at least curious - neighbors.
On one level, "Martial law in Thailand" was a striking headline and a
convenient news peg for Philippine reflection on September 21, the same day
Filipinos observed the 34th anniversary of the imposition of military rule
under the Ferdinand Marcos dictatorship. Beyond the date, however, the
Philippines is watching Thailand because of the uncanny parallels in the
travails of Southeast Asia's minority democratic states.
In particular, Filipinos see in the Thai saga much of what they had contended
with under former president Joseph Estrada and the incumbent who replaced him,
Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo. Arroyo's ascension to the presidency in 2001 after a
"soft" military coup - backed by the middle class but resented by the majority
poor who had elected Estrada - raised painful questions for Philippine
democracy, and bruised the very notion of "people power" in the country that
gave birth to the term.
Since then, questions over her government's legitimacy, charges that she and
her family are corrupt, and the perception validated by Supreme Court
reprimands that she had been flouting the constitution to weaken all opposition
to her government have left Filipinos divided over Arroyo's full six-year term.
Like Thaksin, however, Arroyo actually won that term in open elections. Her
party's majority control of Congress, in fact, has defeated all attempts to
impeach her. Now she wants to amend the constitution and shift the Philippines
to a parliamentary form of government, raising even more hackles because under
current laws she is not eligible to run for re-election as president but
conceivably could as prime minister.
After the coup in Thailand, many Filipino politicians are wondering aloud about
the possibilities should the parallels be allowed to continue. It is clear that
Thaksin's ouster is being welcomed by the powerful middle class, and perhaps
even by investors, and the understanding that the coup had the blessings of
Thailand's revered King Bhumibol Adulyadej has calmed the rest of Thai society
- including, most notably, the poor and rural communities from which Thaksin
derived his political base.
Abusing democracy
Thailand's Bangkok-based voters came to loathe Thaksin after five years in
power because of widespread perceptions that his administration was unusually
corrupt and greedy, and because his dominant Thai Rak Thai (TRT) party clearly
had designs on installing a de facto one-party system in the kingdom. The poor,
on the other hand, embraced Thaksin's populist policies that, among other
things, gave them universal health care and debt relief, though without fully
explaining how his government would pay for all these gifts down the road.
With this as a backdrop, a consensus had built that Thaksin was driving a wedge
between rich and poor so as to entrench himself in power. He was forced by
massive Bangkok-based anti-government demonstrations to declare snap elections
this April. After massive irregularities, those poll results, which his party
won with a diminished majority, were annulled and new elections were scheduled
for November. The conventional wisdom until the coup was that Thaksin's TRT was
bound to lose votes, but also that it would retain its parliamentary majority.
In other words, after last year's and this year's Thai "people power" street
protests, the nullification of an election result and the dissolution and
revamping of the country's Election Commission, Thaksin seemed destined to
emerge again as democratically elected prime minister. But Thai society would
have been further divided by a victory for the status quo.
Hence the coup that many in Thailand insist has provided a way out of the mess.
But there is now also a clear ambivalence - as Filipinos felt in 2001 - over
the fact that it took the military to break a political impasse. When it takes
the army to move a stalled democracy, in which direction is society really
headed?
Thitinan Pongsudhirak, a political-science professor at Chulalongkorn
University in Bangkok, acknowledges that Thai democracy has taken a blow: "With
the revocation of the Thai constitution, this is a 15-year reversal."
But democracy, he told a capacity crowd at the Foreign Correspondents Club in
Bangkok the day after the coup, "is not one size fits all". He urged the
Western world for "a more nuanced definition. I don't condone the coup, but it
must be taken in a broader perspective."
That perspective includes the premise that Thai democracy is not merely
imperfect; like that of the Philippines, it is deeply flawed. Both countries
had emerged from decades of military rule with progressive constitutions,
committing themselves to democracy and all its trappings: independent courts,
press freedom, institutionalized checks and balances - everything to free their
people as well as to impress the wider world, Western democracies in
particular.
And yet Filipinos and Thais over the past six years could only concede that,
among other things, the checks and balances weren't working. Elections weren't
free of money and fair for all. The constitution is shot full of loopholes that
elected politicians gleefully exploit. Corruption is getting worse, not better.
Thitinan says the problems feed into a vicious cycle of constitutional change,
elections, corruption, public discontent, military intervention, and then back
to constitutional change again. Through it all and at every stage, he said, "a
sense of entitlement" fuels the cycle and corrupts every intervening player, be
it the military, the opposition, the media, or even civil society. To break the
cycle, he offered that this sense of entitlement must be defeated and that "we
must not rely too much on constitutional change".
Back in the Philippines, oppositionists have seized on the Thai coup to rebut
Arroyo's insistence that a shift to a parliamentary government will bring about
stability. Clearly, they say, it is all messier than that. As outgoing Thai
senator Kraisak Choonhavan poignantly put it: "Outsiders do not understand what
we have to go through to fight an elected government."
It is a painful conclusion to reach: that the democracy you fought so hard to
regain has been abused to the point that it is no longer recognizably different
from what it ostensibly replaced. But when that conclusion is perceived to be
unassailable, Thais ask, what choice is there to be had? It is the same
question Filipinos have been asking for years.
Roby Alampay is a Filipino journalist currently based in Bangkok as
executive director of the Southeast Asian Press Alliance. The article reflects
his personal thoughts and commentary.
