I posted this, OT 06-88,before I noticed this thread. Sorry.
I’ve been watching Thaksin for the past four years that I’ve lived in Thailand and the difference between his regime and the one we have in the US seems basically a question of the evolutionary states of the two democracies.
In the US we have a class of yeomen, like the Bushes and the Clintons, who can be relied upon by the plutocrats to run things for their benefit.
Here in Thailand such a “trustworthy” yeoman class has yet to evolve, so the plutocrats must themselves wield the levers of power.
And Thaksin actually enjoys the exercise. He thinks of himself as a businessman. In fact his business successes are built on top of corrupt politicking. Not unlike George W Bush’s, come to think of it.
His idea of governing is stealing everything not nailed down and using crowbars on the rest.
The middle class have seen through Thaksin’s rape of the country and want him out. They imagine alternatives.
Thaksin was nervous about the military so his last act, the last straw, was to oust everyone he felt he could not rely upon in the military. The military in Thailand (still) will not stand still for this.
But Thaksin’s support base is the 60 percent of the country tied to the land, the folks who always get the short end of the stick from Bangkok (Thailand is really a mini-empire with Bangkok as the imperial capital).
The folks who support Thaksin do so because he is sharing the spoils with them, temporarily. That’s more than they’ve ever got from the Bangkok crowd before. The fact that Thaksin’s largess is in fact the stolen fruit of their own production, “given” to them by the thief himself, is transparently obvious to them. So too is the fact that it couldn’t last. Get it while the getting is good.
I live in the north of Thailand and spend some time in the villages and I found that people were not furious with the generals for toppling their man this morning. The kids got a day off from school. Whopeee! Life goes on. I think this is the thirty-third coup since 1932 when the “promoters” ended the absolute monarchy.
If Thaksin has managed to bankrupt the country it will make no difference to them. All they had is their rice fields, and they will still have them and the sustenance they provide both mind and soul come coup or the next generation of exploitative politicians in Bangkok.
Which brings us to the second large difference to between Thailand and the US.
You can live without “real” money in Thailand. Forty percent of the population do already (twenty percent of the Thais, although still tied to the villages, are off hustling a baht in Bangkok or other cities at any given moment).
When the bust comes for them… they won’t really notice.
The folks in the US, and Bangkok, will crash and burn.

Posted by: John Francis Lee | Sep 20 2006 6:03 utc | 3

One of the things that used to worry Latin Americans was that their most promising young officers were sent to train at the US School of the Americas where they perfected soldierly skills, and picked up handy techniques like torture and ways of suppressing civilian demonstrations, unions, etc. They also became personally friendly with US officers.
But politics has changed now, and most South American countries do not send their young officers for extra US training. The US military says that it really misses the old personal contacts.
Anyway, when the news about the Thai coup came out, I wondered how close the Thai military was to the US military.
Quite close, according to Lenin at “Lenin’s Tomb.”
Coup in Thailand.

Posted by: Owl | Sep 20 2006 8:50 utc | 5

I would again like to point out: before Taksin’s 75c hospital visit program – Thailand already had in place a system for providing subsidized medicine to the very poor. The cost of medicine, in Thai terms, was already very resonable. However, the 75c per visit program taxed the hospitals extensively (fewer subsidies per patient). Doctors and nurses went on strike and the hospitals took on large debts as people formerly paying took advantage of the program. While the quality of the public hospitals decreased, private hospitals were now in demand and being bought-up by Taksin. At the same time Taksin was striking deals with his friend’s pharma company to be the exclusive provider of drugs to the hospitals – other pharma companies were driven away for fear of not collecting on orders. Somehow the analogy to the US Medicare situation seems apt.)
It has been my experience that there is corruption in nearly every large government program – and that’s why politicians love them. You can borrow under the pretenses of lofty ends, skim 20+ percent for your company and friends, and leave the populace with debt that won’t be repaid. This type of graft is far more effective than giving yourself a raise at the tax-payers expense – and the net effect is the same.
The King’s military intervention has temporarily ended political corruption and the restored Thailand’s foreign ownership rules. The King has endorsed this action. Amongst the poor, the King’s words are supreme. The middle-class is happy to rid themselves of an individual who was bankrupting the country, hiding the losses by selling property to investors, and lining his own pockets. For those associated with Taksin – the situation is a bit more stressful. For the majority of the population, the King’s intervention is a welcome one.

Posted by: n | Sep 20 2006 13:34 utc | 7

Thaksin was loved by many poor and rural people, but he was not a champion of democracy. He enjoyed the power that voters gave him, but he had no respect for the other elements of democracy, such as a free press, an independent judiciary, and the rule of law. Remember, Thaksin presided over the extra-judicial killing of more than 2,000 people during a three-month “drug war” in 2003. (Most Thais, it must be said, applauded those killings.)
True, those who ousted him cannot be called heroes of democracy, either, but this is not a case of “generals=bad.” Thaksin was deeply undemocratic, his popularity at the polls notwithstanding. The experience of the US shows that the majority of voters can sometimes just be plain wrong, and when that happens the other elements of the democratic system must be strong enough to curb the excesses of the powerful executive. Otherwise, we see unecessary wars, secret prisons, domestic spying and torture, or in the case of Thailand, a kind of super-slick kleptocracy with a populist facade hiding serious human-rights abuses. The Army, with the King’s blessing, stepped in to give democracy another chance. It shouldn’t have had to be that way, but it was. Thaksin was also pursuing a losing and needlessly brutal strategy against the insurgency in the South, whereas Army chief Sonthi has shown signs of wanting to try a more concilliatory approach.

Posted by: Anonymous | Sep 20 2006 23:43 utc | 9

There as many points of view being expressed in here as theories on macro-economic reform and I say that because the 2 are linked in that many people who have visited Thailand whether it be for a dance party on a beautiful island resort and or a debauch in the brothels of Bangkok or Chiang-Mai imagine they know the play but of course the language barrier combined with Thai guardedness concealed behind their formal politeness, makes ‘knowing’ what an individual Thai is mulling over, let alone what the whole mob are up to is damn near impossible. The whole mob of course have a range of opinions in Thailand just as they do elsewhere.
So most of us aren’t going to have a chance of ‘knowing’ what Thai people think about their first coup in 14 years. Apart from JFL whose a lucky man indeed since he’s living about where I had planned on moving to for the rest of my natural until the responsibilities of parenthood overwhelmed my choices, I don’t think any of us have a show of knowing what’s really going on.
That said I’m gonna have a punt. Firstly what about the rural people? If they are so keen on him why haven’t they jumped up and down about his ouster?
Well let’s look at a something noted above by JFL which is that 40% of people can get by without money and tend to do so quite happily well not joyously perhaps, but they do manage, but they won’t turn down a buck when it’s on offer either, so that said consider their relationship with Thaksin.
Whoever is in power in Bangkok is likely to have little if any impact on the rural people so who they vote is normally determined by whose offers the best cash deal for their vote. That has always been Thaksin, so a vote for Thaksin was some rare and infrequent hard currency.
But he had already announced he wasn’t going to run in the election to be held shortly, so there was no more money to be made, so with the harsh practicality typical of peasants throughout this planet, they figured ‘why go in to bat for someone who is of no further use?’
The more important question is why did the army stage a coup after 14 years?
Thailand averaged a military coup every three and a half years between 1932 and 1991, and despite the obligatory rhetoric about saving King and Country, the ulterior motives are rarely quite so noble.
Following ‘black May’ 1992 when protest at the last army coup in 1991 resulted in so much bloodshed and the tarnishing of the the Army’s reputation. Up until that point General Suchinda Kraprayoon’s coup like so many before it had been bloodless.
Both the coup in 1991 and the current one are linked to telecommunications. In 1991, a military coup (led by Generals Sunthorn Kongsompong and Suchinda Krapayoon) ousted Prime Minister Chatchai Choonhavan – ostensibly to remove a corrupt and unpopular administration.
A key motivating factor was the sidelining of military’s business interests in the awards of concessions/licenses for telecommunication sector developments.
The coup in 1991 was bloodless and as per usual the army insisted it would only hold on to power until an election could be held. A diplomat by the name of Anand Panyarachun was installed as interim prime Minister then elections were held earlyish 1992.
The election was dodgy and somehow Suchinda Kraprayoon the general who led the coup, got the gig. The election had been run by the army and the general’s victory reminded many of the military dictatorship’s in the 70’s which were far from bloodless (they were also being organised out of Washington. It would be foolish to say that Washington has no influence in Thailand nowadays, because it does, but the 70’s were the hide tide mark. Since then Thais who are a fiercely independent bunch -they were never colonised, have kept the US as far away as possible, which was aided by the realisation from the US post Vietnam that it had completely fucked up in Indo China).
So the former students of the 70’s turned middle class professionals by ’91e were understandably upset at this turn of events.
The pictures of beatings and shootings; after which approx 40 of the protesters ‘disappeared’ never to be heard from again (a mass grave just outside Bangkok is the rumor) stirred up the international community and resulted in King Bhumibol intervening and summoning Suchinda and the pro-democracy leader Chamlong Srimuang to the palace to sort it out. Some may remember the TV clips of Chamlong Srimuang and the odious Suchinda prostrate in front of Bhumibol.
Elections were held peace and the trappings of democracy reigned until now.
Although subsequent governments have often been fractious, somewhat corrupt and elected into office courtesy of routine vote-buying in the rural provinces, the military’s image has remained severely tarnished.
Its bloody intervention in politics had been so widely condemned it seemed inconceivable that the military would ever be able to interfere in the political process again. Until now.
So why have a coup when there is gonna be an election soon anyway, one which Thaksin wouldn’t have been running in?
The corruption in both 1991-92 and now is over telecommunications. This is also why the army doesn’t need BushCo to tell them to get involved in politics. They are heavily involved in telecommunications already. The military owns 2 national TV networks as well as other ‘jewels’ in their media empire and jealously guard the ‘sanctity’ of their assets.
The career of the now ousted Thaksin Shinawatra and the timely expansion of his business interests into telecommunications and broadcasting in the early 1990s saw Shinawatra Corp grow into a major corporation, responsible for developing Thailand’s “Thaicom” satellite infrastructure, and pay TV and mobile phone services.
Thaksin came into politics sideways as an unelected foreign minister under the Chavalit administration. He sold himself as the new clean style pollie from the brave new world of hi-tech business. The idea was to bring that style into the Thai government. But Thaksin was strictly old school crooked pollie/capitalist.
Not dumb though he maintained the aura of honesty by joining the Palang Dhamma party which was run by Chamlong the bloke who had led the protests back in ’92 and who is honest. Too honest to win a meat tray raffle but handy for assholes to hang around to polish up their image. Wherever you go the game is the same if only there was a way to sort out the main-chancers at birth and render them back to their constituent parts.
Anyhow after bathing himself in the glow of purity by association, Thaksin formed his own political party Thai Rak Thai (Thais love Thais).
By the end of the century Thailand’s economy was in a mess as was most Asian economies. But as Japan recovered so did Thailand and Thaksin managed to convince Thais it was all down to him. This meant he managed to win an election in his own right. Thai Rak Thai didn’t need a coalition partner and that is when he really began to ‘show the love’.
He won outright in 2001 and later that year only just avoided being done-over in an asset concealment scam.
That pissed off the bourgeois urbanites, the needless crackdown on the Islamic separatists in the south annoyed the army and not just because their bossfella along with other officers was a Muslim. this blue has been going on forever and is more about economics and cultures than religion. The thing is that everyone has to live with each other and stirring up a hornet’s nest isn’t the way to win friends and influence people.
Thaksin also blatantly used his office to enrich himself. he changed the law to allow much more foreign owners of Thai assets then flogged his family’s shares in Shinawatra Corp, transferring control of Thailand’s satellite infrastructure to a Singaporean state corporation (Temasek) and pocketing billions of baht, tax free.
He then had the gall to say he did it cause people had been hassling him about conflict of interest!
This didn’t cut it, Thais are very nationalistic to say the least and the idea of selling something as strategically valuable as their satellite communications network to a mob of Chinamen did not go down well.
After a series of mass anti-Thaksin rallies, organised by the People’s Alliance for Democracy (led by Chamlong), Thaksin held a snap election in April to try to regain legitimacy.
So he called the election, paid off the rural peasants who voted for him since all of these shenanigans don’t really mean jackshit to them, but since no one else participated in the election it was deemed unconstitutional. After a stand-off another was organised without Thaksin’s overt participation but a army coup came first.
Wherever Thailand is now it isn’t a good place but it is strictly the result of Thai politics and has fuck all to do with BushCo, the Bliar or any other big time whitefella main-chancer.
Maybe the army were stymieing Thaksin’s new ploy whatever that was, but their primary motive will be to ensure that everything stays safely in the hands of the established Thai ruling class.
p.s. the eyesight is a bit wonky so any typo’s, gammatical f/u’s are here for eternity.

Posted by: Debs is dead | Sep 22 2006 4:16 utc | 11