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2 Thai coup makers losing their
grip By Rodney Tasker
Far from being the authoritarian ogre once
dutifully denounced by Western governments,
Thailand's military-installed government appears
instead to be too soft and rapidly losing its way.
The robust support it once enjoyed
domestically from mainly urban circles is
withering, as those who earlier viewed last year's
September 19 coup as the only option to remove
entrenched former prime minister Thaksin
Shinawatra become increasingly
restless amid a series of
botched political and economic moves.
Wednesday's surprise resignation of Deputy
Prime Minister and Finance Minister Pridiyathorn
Devakula represents the latest lurch that has
undermined domestic and foreign confidence in the
interim government's stability.
Pridiyathorn was the military government's
chief economic lieutenant and widely viewed as the
architect of the government's controversial
December 19 decision to impose capital controls on
certain types of foreign investments to curb
appreciation of the baht, a contrarian move that
caused a record single-day drop on the Thai
bourse.
He also sent a series of confusing
signals to foreign investors when revealing
tentative government plans to amend the Foreign
Business Act, including legal changes to foreigner
investors' ability to use local nominees in
structuring their Thailand-based investments that
raised concerns that the government could
eventually expropriate certain types of foreign
investments.
Nevertheless, it is unclear
if Pridiyathorn's departure will allay or
accentuate foreign investor concerns about the
interim government's economic stewardship.
Meanwhile, the current leadership of
serving and retired generals, aged bureaucrats and
technocrats is proving an ineffective political
match for the wily self-exiled Thaksin. The former
premier seems to be able to run rings around his
post-coup successors as he hops from country to
country, giving media interviews in which he
portrays himself as a democratic victim of
unelected usurpers.
Thaksin is renowned as
a master of street-level politics, while new Prime
Minister Surayud Chulanont, a former army
commander and privy councilor, and others now in
power, are comparatively politically inexperienced
and seem unable to present a coherent image to the
international community.
Central to the
government's problems is its confusing authority
structure. It has never been quite clear who is
really in charge: Surayud, with his elderly
lethargic cabinet, or General Sonthi
Boonyaratglin, the army commander who spearheaded
the coup and now heads the ruling Council for
National Security, or CNS. While Sonthi has long
had respect as a professional soldier, he largely
remains just that.
He appears to grapple
with affairs of state, rather than confront them
decisively. He is currently in the middle of a
spat with Singapore, where he has made confusing
statements about his intention to regain control
of three satellites, once owned by the Thaksin
family's Shin Corp, and now in the hands of the
Singapore government's main investment arm,
Temasek.
Surayud, while an even more
respected former military figure and latterly a
leading member of His Majesty King Bhumibol
Adulyadej's prestigious Privy Council, is known to
have been reluctant to take over as an appointed
prime minister and has likewise lurched from one
policy flip-flop and faux pas to another.
The resulting situation is unsettling for
those glad to see the back of a prime minister
whom they saw as a totally self-serving, corrupt
figure who was bent on making all of Thailand his
consolidated power base and business milk-cow for
his family, political allies and business cronies.
A growing number see the current
military-backed leadership as squandering a golden
political opportunity to use its powers to
prosecute Thaksin and his ousted band for all
their alleged ill-gotten gains and regret the
interim administration has not shown more
fortitude in subduing lingering support for the
ousted premier. Much of this remains among the
rural masses who reveled in Thaksin's populist
policies, not realizing that much of what they
assumed were government hand-outs were in reality
repayable political chits.
Critics now
point to the fact that there has been little
movement on the four major issues pronounced by
the coup makers as the reasons for their bloodless
coup. There have been few substantial corruption
cases prosecuted against any prominent Thaksin
regime figures, apart from a half-hearted attempt
to nail the ex-premier's wife, Pojamarn, for tax
avoidance on the movement of Shin Corp shares and
a dodgy land deal she entered with a government
agency. In fact, Pojamarn has just been allowed to
shift 500 million baht (US$14.6 million) out of
accounts held in Thailand to buy property in
London.
The Bank of Thailand had initially
blocked the move because Thais are only allowed to
take a maximum 200 million baht out of the country
without government approval. Pojamarn is known to
hold substantial sway over her husband's financial
management, and the sum involved indicates the
fabulous wealth accumulated by Thaksin's family
from its once sprawling telecommunications empire,
which accelerated during his five years in
political power.
Moreover, there has been
no move to prove the coup makers' claim that
Thaksin had demonstrated disrespect to the
monarchy, an incendiary allegation in a country
where King Bhumibol is widely and deeply revered.
Nothing has apparently been done on the national
front to reunify a Thai society still badly
polarized between Thaksin's mainly rural
supporters and his urban foes who
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