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2 ASIA
HAND Sounding out Thaksin's rural
legacy By Shawn W Crispin
CHIANG MAI, Thailand - Ousted Thai prime
minister Thaksin Shinawatra hails from the
northern province of Chiang Mai, part of the rural
heartland where his grassroots political support
is supposed to run deepest. Yet six months after
the populist leader was toppled in a bloodless
military coup, all is calm on the former premier's
home front.
Much has been made of
Thaksin's strong rural support base, which
catapulted him to resounding electoral victories
in 2001 and
2005. After seizing power
last September, the Thai military initially
fretted that Thaksin loyalists, which they then
vaguely referred to as "undercurrents", would try
to stir unrest in protest against his removal. The
junta has harassed a handful of top Thaksin aides,
but to date it has maintained a loose security
policy toward the country's northern provinces.
There is perhaps no better gauge of rural
Thai sentiment than the news and views expressed
on independently run community radio stations.
Asia Times Online recently took the pulse of
nearly 20 different community and commercial radio
stations across northern Thailand, several of
which previously broadcast news that favored
Thaksin's Thai Rak Thai political party.
Since the coup, stations have almost
unanimously changed their tune, shifting from
pro-Thaksin to pro-junta commentary. To be sure,
part of that shift can be attributed to the ruling
junta's initial order to broadcast news that
promotes national unity. But after an initial
meeting with all station managers at regional army
headquarters last September, enforcement of the
military's vague guidelines has been slack - if
not non-existent.
There is no visible
military presence in Chiang Mai city and in
provincial areas barring the provincial airport.
And few if any of the northern region's more than
1,000 community radio stations, which generally
cater to about 20-25 different villages each, have
opted to close down in protest. Moreover,
anonymous call-in radio programs, which were
banned for a few days directly after the coup, are
on-air again.
Nearly all of the station
managers who spoke with Asia Times Online said
callers seldom if ever spoke critically of the
interim military government's performance, nor did
they yearn for Thaksin's return to power. The lack
of grassroots complaints about the coup through
community radio's anonymous interactive channel
sends a complicated signal about Thaksin's rural
legacy - as, too, does the rural grassroots'
apparent easy acquiescence and acceptance of the
abrupt transition from democratic to military
rule.
To be sure, Thaksin's well-marketed
populist policies, including a cheap-health-care
program, a revolving development fund for most of
the country's 77,000 villages, and other populist
handouts, were well received by many rural voters.
Liberal academics have argued that those
well-targeted policies sparked a new political
consciousness in Thailand's countryside, where
rural voters are now more demanding of both their
local and national representatives. Those populist
policies, however, represented only one small part
of Thaksin's larger political strategy toward the
grassroots.
Feudal legacy Rather
than promoting more local-level autonomy and
democracy, Thaksin in effect maintained and
positioned himself atop the local patron-client
relationships that have arguably long hobbled
rural Thailand's political and economic
development. That feudal legacy was slated for
reform through various decentralization measures
included in the progressive 1997 constitution,
which was annulled in the wake of last year's
coup.
Thaksin deliberately - if not
disingenuously - ensured that those
center-to-periphery power-devolving reforms were
never fully implemented. To the contrary, he moved
to reimpose national authority over grassroots
governance, most visibly by taking personal,
benevolent-patron credit for well-targeted
government handouts of taxpayers' money to rural
constituencies, but also through policies such as
his CEO (chief executive officer) governor
program, which gave Thaksin-appointed
representatives huge discretion over budget
outlays.
At the same time, Thaksin often
formed political alliances with local politicians
known or suspected to have links with powerful
organized-crime groups, including the drug- and
human-trafficking trades that run rife in
Thailand's various lawless northern areas.
For instance, Worataan Talugrasit, a
70-year-old community radio broadcaster from
Phetchaboon province, claims that in his village
Thaksin's political supporters took control over
rather than combated the local methamphetamine
trade. When Thaksin launched his controversial war
on drugs in 2003, where more than 2,200 drug
suspects were killed in extrajudicial fashion,
Thai Rak
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