The politics of Thai revisionist
history By Brian McCartan
CHIANG MAI - Thailand's new
Prime Minister Samak Sundaravej has been in office less
than a month but he has already stirred
political turmoil with remarks about the country's past
struggle for democracy and its current campaign
against Muslim militants in its southernmost
provinces.
This bodes ill for the
country's first democratically elected government
since former prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra was
ousted in a September 2006 coup and its stated vow
to achieve national reconciliation after years of
political unrest. Samak's remarks came during
interviews with international broadcasters CNN and
al-Jazeera shortly after assuming the premiership
in early February.
Samak's remarks in a
February 9 CNN interview, where
he
claimed only one person was
killed during the violent crackdown on
student demonstrators on October 6, 1976, in Bangkok,
were the first to spark political protests. At least
46 demonstrators were killed during that melee,
which Samak, at the time a police newcomer,
allegedly helped to fuel through his inflammatory
broadcasts over an army radio station in which he accused
student activists of being communists bent on
toppling the monarchy, according to historical
accounts.
He repeated this
in a subsequent interview this month with
al-Jazeera and added new volatile statements. Specifically,
he placed the blame for the suffocation
deaths of 78 southern Muslim suspects on the
detainees themselves rather than the military
which was transporting the bound suspects in
cramped, poorly ventilated vehicles in Narathiwat
province in October 2004.
Rights
groups have already warned that Samak's
statements could further stoke the flames of
insurgency and torpedo hopes that the new
government might reach an accord with the rebels.
Photos and footage of the violent 1976
crackdown and its aftermath show students at the
university being fired on by military and
right-wing paramilitary forces. Protesters are
shown shot, hanged, beaten and their bodies set on
fire. Some images show bodies being mutilated or
dragged by the neck across a football field inside
Thammasat University. Images which contradict
Samak's revisionist claims are readily available
on various Internet websites.
Samak's remarks have drawn condemnation not just among
the political opposition, civil society and
academics, but also from members of his own ruling
coalition - some of whom were among the student
demonstrators in 1976 and later fled to the
jungles to take up arms against the government.
Many of them later became senior advisors in
Thaksin's government and are known to be more
loyal to the ousted premier than to Samak.
An open letter accusing Samak of
distorting historical facts was issued by former
student activists, known locally as the "October
generation", on February 17 at a symposium held at
a memorial in Bangkok dedicated to slain students.
Suriyasai Katasila, secretary general of the
Campaign for Popular Democracy and also a member
of the anti-Thaksin People's Alliance for
Democracy, requested on February 22 that Samak
apologize to the relatives of those killed.
The Thammasat University Student Union has
also issued a statement demanding an apology from
the prime minister to the survivors and the
families of the victims and the opening of a new
official examination of the circumstances
surrounding the event. If pursued with earnest,
several current high-ranking officials, including
Samak, could be dragged into the investigations.
Internal
rifts More significantly, perhaps,
Samak's statements are already causing rifts
inside his own People's Power Party-led
government. Adisorn Piangket, a former student
activist who fled to the jungle after the October
6 crackdown and is now one of the 111 former Thai
Rak Thai Party executives banned from politics for
five years, warned Samak on February 19 that his
version of history could turn some of his
political friends into enemies.
Chaturon
Chaisaeng, the former acting party leader of Thai
Rak Thai after the 2006 military coup, called on
Samak to study the history of October 6 more
closely before making public comments to
international media. He, too, said he was in favor
of a new examination of the events.
Samak,
it would seem, can ill-afford to make new
political enemies. He is already seen by many as
Thaksin's puppet premier and some believe his
position was further undermined last week when
several key appointments of assistants,
secretaries and ministerial advisers went to known
Thaksin loyalists and not his chosen candidates.
This week's announcement that Thaksin will
return to Thailand on February 28 after 17 months
in exile to fight corruption charges has been
viewed by some analysts as indication that he is
unhappy with the way Samak is running his by-proxy
government.
The same analysts speculate
that Thaksin may feel that Samak - who is an
outsider among Thaksin loyalists and according to
one party insider has only spoken with Thaksin by
phone twice since agreeing to head the PPP last
year - needs to be reined in before he does any
real political damage to the party's image and
popular standing.
Already the Democrat
Party is threatening to bring the October 6 issue
up for examination at the next meeting of the
House of Representatives, according to Democrat MP
Thepthai Senpong. Democrat Party deputy leader
Alongkorn Pollabut called on Samak on February 23
to apologize, while also calling for the
establishment of a committee to investigate the
1976 incident.
Some academics and
political observers have accused the Democrat
Party of using Samak's remarks and the resulting
rancor for short-sighted political gains. A
discussion on February 19 by historians at
Thammasat University entitled "From October 14th
to 6th and Bloody May: The Unlearned Lessons of
our History" concluded that the issue was being
exploited for political gain and that it should be
examined honestly.
A former student
activist and now Deputy Prime Minister and Finance
Minister, Surapong Suebwonglee, called on both
sides on February 21 to stop using the event as a
political tool. Samak has said, "I won't object to
anyone doing anything, but for me, I'll stop
talking about this." The events of October 14,
1973, October 6, 1976, and May 1992 remain
unsettled incidents that largely live on in the
memories of participants and witnesses, but are
often glossed over in Thai history books.
Tackling taboos
A "truth commission" may not,
however, be something everyone wants, as too much
dirty laundry may be aired in the debate. The
circumstances surrounding the October 6 incident
have for the past three decades remained something
of a taboo because right-wing groups at the time
claimed to be protecting the monarchy from
communist agitators bent on destroying the
institution, as happened in neighboring Laos after
the communist takeover in 1975.
Samak, of
course, was not acting alone in stirring
right-wing agitators and did not have the power at
the time to order the security forces into action.
Samak may have been the public voice of the right
through his radio broadcasts, but as he has
frequently argued, he did not have any political
or official position at the time of the violence -
although he was appointed minister of interior
after the military launched a coup in the wake of
the crackdown. Still, Samak's self-defense has
been weak and inconsistent.
He has
alternately cited a lack of memory or
incongruously raised his recent political
popularity, including his garnering of over 1
million votes in his resounding 2000 Bangkok
gubernatorial election win. More recently, he has
claimed that an "invisible hand" is at work to
discredit him and bring down his government.
Samak once remarked, "During the
gubernatorial election race, I was verbally
bullied that I was a murderer. But I won over a
million votes and my opponent only got 500,000
votes. Has there been anyone in Thailand winning
over 1 million votes? There is only Samak." In
reference to his previous speeches and prior
acknowledgements of a higher death count, he said,
"Time lapsed for 31 years and I don't know why I
said what I did."
Such statements have
done little to boost public confidence in the
premier, and neither has his February 20 pledge to
no longer comment on the issue.
Distorted
facts A more immediate issue concerns
Samak's distortions of the October 2004 Tak Bai
incident, in which over 1,300 Muslims demonstrated
at a police station in Narathiwat province in the
country's violence-plagued south. The
demonstration was broken up by police and army
forces wielding batons and firing live ammunition.
Seven protesters were shot and killed and 78
others were suffocated or crushed to death while
being transported to an army detention facility in
neighboring Pattani province.
Eyewitnesses
have claimed that demonstrators were thrown face
down in the back of army trucks and were stacked
up four or five people high in the vehicles.
International rights groups at the time expressed
grave concerns about the Thai government's
handling of the incident. The US-based rights
advocacy group Human Rights Watch characterized
the incident as a "massacre".
Both the
Thaksin and General Surayud Chulanont governments
promised justice, but no criminal proceedings have
been brought against any of the commanders or
perpetrators. Lack of prosecution persists despite
the December 14, 2004, conclusions of a
Thaksin-appointed fact-finding committee, led by
then parliamentary ombudsman Pichet Sorntompiphit,
that Thai security forces did not follow
established guidelines during the dispersal of the
protesters.The committee also found that
commanding officers were culpable because they did
not adequately supervise the transport of the
arrested demonstrators.
When questioned
about the incident during the al-Jazeera
interview, Samak pinned the blame for the deaths
of those suffocated on the detained demonstrators
themselves because they hadn't eaten or drunk
during Ramadan and weren't strong enough to remain
upright in the back of the trucks - similar to a
claim Thaksin made about the deaths while he was
in power.
Samak told al-Jazeera, "So
that's it. It's a tragedy. It happened. Nobody
intended to kill them. They die because of their
physical [sic] ... So, so what's wrong with that?
What's wrong with that? What is the execution of
that? What is it?"
Asked whether the
deaths occurred because the suspects lacked air,
Samak replied, "When people got in the truck, in
the good shape, and running, actually nobody think
they will be like that, but if the people happen
not to eat, not to drink, not to swallow, and then
somebody fall down [with] others on the top ... So
78 died out of 1,300."
Rights groups say
that Samak's distorted remarks show a callousness
that could serve to further inflame passions among
Muslims in the violence-plagued deep south,
especially if his comments are a forewarning of
the type of policies his government will pursue in
the region, an area already suffering from the
heavy-handedness of security forces and brutal
tactics of insurgents.
There are similar
concerns as the new government looks set to
re-launch the "war on drugs" - a 2003 Thaksin
campaign, which resulted in the extrajudicial
killing of over 2,500 people, many allegedly
carried out by police forces against unarmed
suspects. To date there have been no prosecutions
for any of those unresolved murders.
If
Samak's comments about past state-sponsored
atrocities are any indication, impunity for rights
abuses will likely be the norm during his
administration as well.
Brian McCartan
is a Thailand-based freelance journalist. He may
be contacted through brianpm@comcast.net.
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