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2 ASIA HAND Sounding out Thaksin's rural
legacy By Shawn W Crispin
Thai party heavies arranged the
murder of their pill-peddling rivals, Worataan
claims. "People were scared of influential people
connected to Thaksin. Things are better after the
coup."
In northernmost Chiang Rai
province, Thaksin likewise formed political
linkages with local politicians known to have ties
to human-trafficking rings, including at least one
prominent member of his former inner circle whom
the military hauled in for
questioning after launching
last year's coup. According to sources familiar
with the situation, the US Central Intelligence
Agency before the coup alerted a foreign aid
worker investigating trafficking issues in the
province to leave the area because the politician
in question had placed an assassination order
against him.
Meanwhile, grassroots
activists and opposition politicians spoke out
against Thaksin and the development projects his
government designed for Chiang Mai city, which
often put his political associates' and his own
family's business interests ahead of
local-community livelihoods, including the forced
evictions of villagers to make way for his
family's Night Safari tourist attraction.
"Although he was born here, to many in
Chiang Mai he was just another rich politician,"
said Jiraporn Witayasakpan, a lecturer of mass
communications at Chiang Mai University. "Some may
have liked him, but there was a widespread
perception that he did things more for his
political party and underlings than the general
public. In the end, ordinary people didn't get
much from his government."
Unrevealed
realities In Chiang Mai, those
on-the-ground political realities, often
unrevealed to visiting news reporters who focused
on Thaksin's billboard-marketed populist policies,
from the start raised hard questions about his
frequently stated commitment to democracy and law
and order. But those perceptions would go a long
way in explaining the grassroots silence
surrounding Thaksin's unceremonious demise,
including in rural areas where his support was
supposed to be strongest.
Liberal
academics like to perpetuate the scenario of a
politically conscious rural mass, peeved by the
new draft charter's likely proviso allowing for an
appointed rather than elected prime minister,
descending on Bangkok to demand a return to
Thaksin-led democracy. Left-leaning Thai
newspapers, including the English-language daily
The Nation, likewise dispense dire predictions of
a clash between the military and yet-to-coalesce
street protesters, similar to the cataclysmic
events in 1992 that saw soldiers gun down perhaps
hundreds of pro-democracy demonstrators in the
capital.
Recent front-page reports have
focused on a small fringe of anti-coup groups,
which to date have yet to mount more than 1,000
protesters. Previous pro-democracy protests in the
direct aftermath of the coup led by a radical
Marxist academic attracted more journalists than
actual protesters. Meanwhile, the army's
comparatively under-reported "good morals" drive
last weekend attracted more than 10,000
participants.
If the prevailing mood in
Chiang Mai is any indicator, rural-led protests
are not on the foreseeable political horizon. And
they likely won't be even if the coup makers, as
expected, introduce a less democratic new
constitution that allows them to appoint the prime
minister and maintain some sort of role in
politics after this year's general elections.
"Thaksin's grassroots support was always
more financial than philosophical," said a
researcher connected with Chiang Mai University's
Social Research Center. "After the coup, those
allegiances broke down. Now that the military is
stepping in to fill [the] financial gap, now the
people are suddenly on their side."
If so,
Thaksin's own anti-democratic legacy toward rural
areas sowed the seeds of his own political demise.
Despite his strong electoral mandate, he was
widely viewed more as a strong leader than a
liberal democrat. And now the military has
adroitly inserted itself atop the same
political-patronage pyramid that Thaksin - albeit
more skillfully - once presided over through
populist handouts.
To be sure, the
military's mobilization of royal symbolism from
the start signaled to the rural masses - who
deeply revere His Majesty King Bhumibol Adulyadej
- that the military's intervention had palatial
consent. Since, the royal association with the
military-appointed interim administration led by
former army commander and privy councilor General
Surayud Chulanont has purposefully been less
stark.
The local print media have now
taken to skewering Surayud's government of
once-retired bureaucrats, soldiers and technocrats
for its indecisiveness and policy miscues - news
reports that the military has notably not moved to
censor. That's because the political psychology of
Bangkok-based newspaper editors and the country's
rural masses are in many ways at direct opposites.
Thailand's rural countryside, and even urban-based
middle class, frequently demonstrate a strong
conservative streak in their political behavior,
often to the consternation of left-leaning
academics and reform activists.
If King
Bhumibol were symbolically to cast the first vote
during the planned national referendum on what is
expected to be a less democratic constitution, the
rural countryside would obediently follow the
royal lead. And even if the monarch chooses to
remain aloof from the upcoming referendum, there
are no indications yet that Thailand's rural
masses are prepared to mount any protest against a
sustained military role in politics - not even in
Thaksin's own home town.
Shawn W
Crispin is Asia Times Online's Southeast Asia
Editor.
(Copyright 2007 Asia Times
Online Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact us
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