Thailand's junta shows its (heavy)
hand By Shawn W Crispin
BANGKOK - Thailand's military coup last
week nominally aimed to break the country's
grinding political deadlock and usher in a new era
of democracy and political reform. But the new
ruling junta's handling of the transition from
democratic to military rule is raising hard new
questions about the country's political direction.
The military-run Council for Democratic
Reform under Constitutional Monarchy (CDRM) has
vowed to promulgate an interim constitution this
week, hand power to a civilian-led
administration of its own
choosing next week, and restore full democracy
through new parliamentary elections within one
year.
At the same time, the junta has
moved to consolidate its political power with a
surprisingly heavy hand, which, if sustained under
its civilian-led incarnation, threatens to erode
the general goodwill the royally endorsed coup has
so far received and could put the country's
conservative and progressive forces on a new
collision course.
The junta's
anti-democratic tendencies are already raising the
hackles of sections of Bangkok's intelligentsia,
which favored premier Thaksin Shinawatra's removal
through legal channels rather than military ones,
and is peeved that at least the first phases of
the CDRM's promised political-reform program have
led to less democracy, not more.
Six days
after seizing power, it's still unclear whether
Thailand's coup leaders have a well-thought-out
plan to return the country to democracy, or
instead are administering the country in a clumsy
and potentially dangerous ad hoc manner. What is
clear, however, is that the CDRM is spooked about
the possibility of a popular backlash in Thaksin's
favor, and it has clamped down hard on civil
liberties and media freedoms to suppress any
pro-Thaksin public expressions.
Soldiers
have been stationed inside television newsrooms,
and at least one website critical of the junta,
www.19sept.com, has been forcibly shut down. When
government-run Channel 11 attempted to air footage
of Thaksin speaking from London, soldiers blocked
the signal and warned station managers they faced
reprisal if they broadcast any clips of the ousted
premier. The junta has also unplugged hundreds of
community radio stations across the country's
northern regions, where Thaksin's political
support was strongest.
Those tough tactics
have hardened already skeptical international
opinion against the coup, including from key
Western allies in the United States, the United
Kingdom and Australia. Washington may be required
by law to break off relations with the new
military-installed government, representing a
potential diplomatic disaster for the junta.
Thailand's coupmakers have generated torrents of
negative Western press, as op-ed writers in
Washington, London and Canberra have universally
decried the suspension of democracy.
Significantly, the military intervention
was well received by Bangkok's upper and middle
classes, with one at least until-now-independent
poll suggesting that more than 80% of the
population approved. That's largely because the
coupmakers have so clearly had the blessing of the
country's highly revered monarch, His Majesty King
Bhumibol Adulyadej.
Top coup leader
General Sonthi Boonyaratklin, until recently a
professional soldier and a relative political
unknown, has since moved to distance the palace
from the initiation of last week's coup, telling
Bangkok-based Western diplomats that he
independently made the decision to act, and
threatening to "retaliate" against foreign news
organizations that the CDRM contends
inappropriately referred to the monarchy in their
reports.
Yet several Bangkok-based
political analysts who spoke with Asia Time Online
agree that Sonthi wouldn't have likely moved
against Thaksin without the explicit support of
the Privy Council, the monarch's advisory body.
And because the coup now has such strong royal
endorsement - inherent in the word "monarchy" in
its title - it is crucial to the institution's
future integrity that the CDRM arrives smoothly at
a lasting, democratic alternative to Thaksin's
authoritarian misrule.
Still, the new
junta is on edge, signaling that rather than the
final act, the coup could have been the latest
scene in a longer-term political drama - one in
which deposed Thaksin promises to figure
prominently. Credible news reports have emerged
since the coup that two of Thaksin's key aides
were in the process of organizing a pro-government
protest group with marching orders to confront an
anti-government rally staged by the People's
Alliance for Democracy that was scheduled for last
Wednesday, the day before the coup.
The
plot, it seems, aimed to cause a violent clash
between pro- and anti-government protesters,
creating a situation where Thaksin could have
declared a state of emergency and leveraged the
chaos into demoting senior army officers loyal to
the palace, including Sonthi, and elevating his
pre-cadet Class 10 loyalists into the highest
commands, thereby consolidating his power over the
armed forces.
That Thaksin was so close to
consolidating his power inside the military, the
palace's final bulwark against a challenge to its
authority, from the coupmakers' perspective, is
obviously still cause for alarm. Contentious
negotiations avoided a confrontation between
pro-palace and pro-Thaksin military factions on
the night of the coup, but it's still unclear
whether military officers loyal to Thaksin will
stand by idly as their power is neutralized by
CDRM-led demotions.
In the shadows Few political analysts have taken seriously
Thaksin's statement from London that he intends to
take a break from politics and that he is
considering taking up charity work rather than
contesting the coupmakers' legitimacy.
Thaksin was viewed in some palace circles
as a threat to Bhumibol's authority, and the coup
derives much of its moral justification from
thwarting what they perceived to be a long-term
threat to the royal institution. In unprecedented
fashion for an elected Thai politician, Thaksin
publicly sparred with Privy Council members and
other elder statesmen known to be close to the
monarch.
He was seen in those same palace
circles as trying to co-opt the monarch's
popularity in the grassroots countryside through
his various populist policies, many of which were
modeled on the palace's popular rural Royal
Development Projects. Moreover, Thaksin included
veterans of the 1973 and 1976 left-leaning student
uprisings among his inner circle, many of whom
joined the Communist Party and fought against the
royally backed Thai army into the 1980s.
Thaksin and many of his supporters still
clearly consider themselves the country's rightful
democratically elected leaders, even though the
April 2 elections were nullified because of gross
irregularities and Thaksin's Thai Rak Thai (TRT)
party faced charges of subverting democracy and
the opposition accused him of illegally clinging
to power at the time the coup was launched.
It's unclear whether Thaksin from exile
and with many of his top aides either in military
custody or in hiding could mount the same popular
support he could have just a week ago. But the
junta clearly isn't taking any chances, witnessed
in its ban on political assemblies of more than
five people and harsh restrictions on the media.
Obviously, the CDRM's nightmare case scenario
would be a pro-Thaksin, disguised as a
pro-democracy, rally that spins out of control and
compels soldiers to crack down with little
royal-yellow ribbons dangling from their firearms.
Still, popular protest is not
inconceivable. Even if, as planned, next week the
coupmakers hand power to a civilian-led
administration, it will not be lost on Thailand's
outspoken progressive movement of non-governmental
organizations, pro-democracy groups and academics
that they are under behind-the-scenes military
rule for at least a year - an eternity in Thai
politics, as Thaksin can now attest.
To be
sure, it is also possible that the junta will
achieve its stated mission of national
reconciliation and eventually push Thai politics
on to a higher democratic plane. The CDRM has so
far played divide-and-rule politics masterfully
inside the TRT, detaining and interrogating
certain key aides and representatives, while
allowing others to return to the country or come
out of hiding without harassment.
Some TRT
members have already expressed their doubts about
the party's future, and high-profile politicians
who eventually don't face corruption charges will
no doubt be encouraged to establish new political
parties around their factions and contest next
year's promised democratic polls. For better or
worse, that would return Thailand to the
competitive yet unstable democracy of the 1990s,
when many middle-sized political parties
horse-traded to form wobbly and sometimes
incoherent coalition governments.
To
manufacture such a democratic transition, the CDRM
will need to appear even-handed rather than
heavy-handed in its tactics. Most important,
perhaps, to maintain its credibility it will need
to re-establish rather than further undermine the
independence of the judiciary. Before the coup,
Thaksin was embroiled in various lawsuits that
threatened to depose him and dissolve his party
through legal channels.
The CDRM has
established by decree a new eight-member special
corruption investigation panel to look into
various projects initiated by Thaksin's
government, has re-established the National
Counter Corruption Commission, and has received an
allegedly damning corruption report from the
Auditor General's Office implicating senior TRT
politicians.
But as long as the junta
exercises its political power in unilateral
fashion, if Thaksin is finally convicted on
corruption charges, his supporters will always
doubt whether the toppled premier received a fair
trial, a potentially new perception that for once
the courts were stacked against Thaksin rather
than in his favor.
Shawn W
Crispin is Asia Times Online's Southeast Asia
editor.
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