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2 ASIA HAND Thaksin's
loss, US's gain By Shawn W
Crispin
BANGKOK - Thailand's unfolding
political drama pitting exiled former prime
minister Thaksin Shinawatra against the
military-run Council for National Security (CNS)
that ousted him has cast the United States in an
awkward but familiar position, where realpolitik
imperatives now, as historically, have trumped
Washington's stated public position of non-support
to governments that seize power through
anti-democratic means.
When coup makers
ousted Thaksin last September 19,
Washington was legally bound
to suspend about US$14 million in
military-to-military aid earmarked for Thailand.
The US State Department on cue publicly admonished
the CNS for seizing power through undemocratic
means and urged a quick return to democracy, which
the junta has promised for this year.
That's still the State Department's public
line, but President George W Bush and senior US
envoys in Bangkok have signaled clearly to the
junta that Washington has scant intention of
downgrading bilateral relations because of the
coup.
In many ways, Thailand's coup has
served US regional interests well. Thailand is
historically Washington's most trusted strategic
ally in Southeast Asia, and US officials are
leveraging their senior military contacts now in
government in a bid to counterbalance China's
expanding regional influence. While the US
maintained strong ties with Thaksin's
authoritarian administration, particularly through
cooperation on counter-terrorism issues, there
were concurrent concerns in Washington that the
ethnically Chinese Thaksin [1] was gradually moving
Thailand closer to Beijing at the United States'
strategic expense.
Those concerns would
help to explain why Bush received coolly last
April Thaksin's pleading personal letter, where
the then-embattled premier claimed
"anti-democratic" forces were attempting to knock
him from power through "extra-constitutional"
means. Of course those anti-democratic forces -
the royalist military officials who spearheaded
the coup - were and remain some of the United
States' best in-country contacts. And since
Thaksin's ouster, to the deposed premier's
apparent chagrin, the US has kept close working
tabs with the junta and its interim civilian
administration.
Importantly, the
suspension of military aid has so far been more
symbolic then substantive. As required by law, the
US has suspended its International Education and
Training Program for Thai military officials, but
the US Defense Department has conspicuously
tarried on decisions whether to scrap a joint
memorandum on military-to-military logistics, an
arms-procurement program that provides cheap loans
to the Thai military when purchasing US hardware,
the United States' continued use of U-Tapao Air
Force Base, and the annual Cobra Gold joint
military exercises.
"The official US
policy is mandatory, but we sense the [US] Defense
Department is trying to work its way around the
measures," said an adviser to the Thai prime
minister. "Washington understands fully well that
the military is in the driver's seat and China is
waiting in the wings." To underscore that point,
he said, coup leader and army commander General
Sonthi Boonyaratklin made a recent trip to Beijing
for undisclosed reasons.
Moreover, the
sanctions notably did not require the US to sever
funding for the secretive Counter-Terrorism
Intelligence Center (CTIC), established jointly in
2001 between the US Central Intelligence Agency
(CIA) and select Thai intelligence officials. As
of 2002, the US was providing annually between $10
million and $15 million as well as advanced
surveillance equipment to the CTIC, which is
tasked with tracking and hunting down regional
Muslim terror suspects.
According to the
Washington Post, Thailand also hosted one of the
CIA's now-notorious secret prisons, where Muslim
terror suspects were held without trial and at
times administered interrogation techniques that
rights groups say are tantamount to torture.
Thaksin had publicly denied the existence of any
CIA prison on Thai soil, but because the US ally
is not a signatory to either the United Nations
Convention Against Torture or the International
Criminal Court, which hypothetically could attempt
to try US soldiers and CIA agents for war crimes,
European diplomats contend that Thailand would be
a legally logical and secure location for such a
facility. (US officials in Bangkok have
consistently declined comment on the secret-prison
allegations.)
That said, senior Thai
police counter-terrorism officials have openly
carped that US Federal Bureau of Investigation
terror-related sting operations have frequently
impinged on Thai sovereignty. Despite these
official complaints, and Thaksin's push for a
highly unpopular free-trade agreement with the US,
the anti-government demonstrations that paved the
way for his military ouster notably never took on
an anti-US bent - as did, for instance, the
popular uprising of 1973 that led to the downfall
of the corrupt and heavy-handed regime of
then-US-backed Field Marshals Thanom Kittikachorn
and Praphat Charusathien.
Xenophobic
energies The anti-Thaksin movement
concentrated its xenophobic energies instead on
Singapore, which through its state-run investment
vehicle Temasek purchased Thaksin's family-held
Shin Corporation in a controversial $1.9 billion
transaction only months before his ouster. The CNS
has since inflamed still-simmering popular
resentments against Singapore, accusing the island
state of using the satellite it purchased from
Thaksin to tap the mobile-telephone conversations
of senior military officials.
That the CNS
has played its foreign-bogey card against
Singapore rather than the US underscores the
strong personal connections top coup makers have
with senior US political and military officials.
While Thaksin pays US lobbyists to plead his case
on Capitol Hill, in Bangkok US officials are
leveraging their military contacts to score
diplomatic points over China, which has pursued
its diplomacy toward Thailand more through
political and economic rather than military
channels.
The US military jump-started
Thailand's move toward capitalism, pumping more
than $2.5 billion between 1951 and 1975 in
Head
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