Military, Monarchy and Repression

Kevin Hewison, Veerayooth Kanchoochat

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781315443300
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Thailand's politics has been contentious in recent years. With a military coup in 2006 and another in 2014, the country has moved from being a promising electoral democracy to a military dictatorship. Electoral politics was embraced enthusiastically by some groups, including those in rural areas of the north and northeast, but came to be feared by groups variously identified as the old elite, royalists and the establishment. The transition to authoritarianism saw large and lengthy street protests and considerable violence. This book examines the background to and the sources of conflict and the turn to authoritarianism. It addresses: the return of the military to political centre stage; the monarchy's pivotal role in opposing electoral democracy; the manner in which sections of civil society have rejected electoral politics; and the rise of powerful non-elected bodies such as the Constitutional Court.

The 2014 Thai Coup and Some Roots of Authoritarianism

Chris Baker

Independent scholar, Bangkok, Thailand

ABSTRACT

Thailand is the only country currently ruled by a coup-installed military government. The 2014 coup aimed not only to abolish the influence of Thaksin Shinawatra but also to shift Thailand’s politics in an authoritarian direction. While the army authored the coup, the professional and official elite played a prominent role in engineering the coup and shaping political reforms. This article examines some historical antecedents of this authoritarian turn, first in the broad trends of Thailand’s modern political history, and second in the emergence and political evolution of the Bangkok middle class.

Five months after the Thai coup of May 22, 2014, the president of the West African state of Burkina Faso, who had come to power by coup 27 years earlier, was forced to resign by popular demonstrations. The army announced it was taking over, and nominated an officer as head of state. He lasted 16 days. Political parties, civil society groups and religious leaders forced the army to back down and accept a civilian-led interim government. In the 1980s, military-led governments installed by coup were the norm across much of Africa and Latin America. Now they have all disappeared. So too have the Asian examples in Myanmar, Pakistan and Indonesia. As the Burkina Faso story shows, even an interim military government is unacceptable. In world-historic terms, this makes Thailand’s 2014 coup regime unique.

The coup came after a decade of fractious politics.¹ It was carried out to eliminate the influence of Thaksin Shinawatra as a leader and to block a mass movement which had discovered the power of the electoral franchise to alter the distribution of power and resources. Because Thailand has a monarchy, and because the authority of the monarchy has been used to oppose democracy, some popular and academic accounts virtually equate the conservative elite with the monarchy and its entourage. Yet on a global scale, monarchy as a political force has been greatly weakened over the past century. In this article I suggest that understanding Thai conservatism needs a broader view.

The first section below argues that the 2014 coup counts among a select group of Thai coups which aim to shift the trajectory of the country’s politics. While the military authored the coup, the social forces behind such a shift must be sought elsewhere. The second section of the article examines the six months of agitation that preceded the coup. The agitation had heavy financial backing, most likely from corporate sources. More strikingly, the professional and official elite took an unusually prominent role in undermining the legitimacy of the elected government, openly demanding its overthrow, and shaping the political future under the coup regime.

The third and fourth sections examine some historical roots of these politics. The third section takes a broad view of Thailand’s modern political development. Thailand avoided the crises and disruptions which elsewhere undermined old elites and provided opportunities for democratic forces. The three pillars of the old establishment – monarchy, military and bureaucracy – remain strong and have developed explanations of their own legitimacy which challenge the democratic principle. They have been flexible in incorporating new power centres to defend the principle of oligarchy. The fourth section examines the historical background to the conservative activism conducted in the name of the middle class. It argues that the passion and violence of Bangkok middle-class activism is rooted in the class’s recent formation, its fear of rural Thailand, and its aspirations.

The 2014 Coup

Although Thailand has famously had many coups since 1932, there is no standard model. They differ greatly in how they are done, who is involved and what impact they have on the country’s political history. Some have been mainly internal to the military, generated by the ambitions and fears of groups and individuals within the hierarchy. A few have altered the course of the country’s political history: the coup in 1932 replaced the absolute monarchy with a constitution and parliamentary system; Field Marshal Sarit Thanarat’s coup of 1957 revived the political role of the monarchy and confirmed Thailand as a US client in the Cold War; and the 1976 coup initiated the era of “democracy with the king as head of state.”

The 2006 and 2014 instances are sometimes seen as twin coups because they originated within the same group in the army and because they had the same primary aim of excising the political influence of Thaksin. But events between the two dates made them very different. The 2006 coup followed an old model in which removing and exiling an unwanted leader was enough to annul his influence. The coup-makers’ subsequent adjustments to the political system were relatively minor; the re-written 2007 constitution retained the framework of the 1997 model with some adjustment in the weighting of power between institutions (see Mérieau 2016). Discovering they had underestimated the strength of the new political forces roused by Thaksin, the anti-Thaksin forces subsequently mounted street demonstrations which prejudiced the economy and Thailand’s international standing, exploited the moral authority of the monarchy to a dangerous extent, and relied on a string of judicial decisions that were politically biased, legally fraught and often patently absurd. The damages incurred were difficult to ignore. As a result, the 2006 coup was retrospectively condemned by its own backers as a “waste” (sia khong) and a different kind of coup was planned.

The 2014 coup had several features which collectively distinguish it from the four coups since 1976 and place it among the select group of major Thai coups.

The junta did not step back from the front line and install a nominally civilian government to placate local and, more importantly, international opinion. Instead, the coup group installed themselves at the apex of the political system, and appointed four of their own number as prime minister and other key posts in the cabinet. Although the cabinet included some civilians, this was clearly a military government of a kind not seen in over 40 years. In the face of expressions of regret from foreign governments, the coup makers were dismissive and defiant.

The junta used repressive regulations and techniques of intimidation to silence opposition in a more aggressive way than any coup since 1976. They retained martial law nationwide for over ten months and then replaced it with the draconian Section 44, similar to one used by Sarit in the late 1950s.² A small number of people were subject to violent interrogation techniques and possibly torture (always strenuously denied), intimidating everyone. In his weekly television addresses and daily interactions with journalists, the junta head, General Prayuth Chan-ocha, deployed a strong undertone of violence through semi-jocular threats to “execute” persistent journalists, and references to “getting rid of human garbage.”

The junta restricted debate on politics. Immediately after the coup, the junta outlawed meetings of five or more people and banned all expressions of political opinion. Although the media gradually created some space for discussion, the junta restricted this space by issuing orders and threats, such as General Prayuth querying an insistent reporter, “Are you a Thai or not?” (Khaosod 2015), recalling the pre-massacre demonisation of students as “non-Thai” in 1976.

Most significant of all, the junta set up an elaborate machinery to restructure the country’s political system, not only through a totally redesigned constitution, but through a programme of “reform” to be designed by a hand-picked council and made into law by a hand-picked legislature. As the machinery began its work, it was announced that this programme of “reform” would cover 11 areas (politics, public administration, law and justice, local administration, education, economy, energy, public health and environment, media, society, and others) and extend some 20 years because of the volume of legislation required.

In sum, the junta kept tight control, suppressed all opposition and outlawed all debate in order to push through a large-scale programme of change. This placed 2014 on the list of Thailand’s major history-changing coups with 1932, 1957 and 1976.

But what were the forces behind this ambitious project? To answer this question we have to look at the events leading up to the coup.

Engineering the 2014 Coup

Since around 2004, Thaksin’s combination of exceptional wealth and an unprecedented level of mass support provoked the formation of a coalition of opponents, including the Democrat Party and its support base in southern Thailand, the banks and other parts of Thailand’s established big business, the controlling faction within the military, much of civil society, and swathes of the middle class. These highly disparate interests were glued together by the brilliant tactic of portraying Thaksin as a threat to the throne.

The victory of Thaksin’s sister, Yingluck, at elections in July 2011 crushed the opposition coalition’s hopes of destroying Thaksin’s influence within the political structure that had developed since the 1970s. Immediately after the poll, Suvit Maesincee, an academic closely associated with business, said in interview:

I don’t think the fact that [Yingluck’s party] Pheu Thai won decisively at the polls means much. Ultimately, Thailand might need to consider whether the system of one man, one vote is best for us or not…I think in the future we will see more class warfare. It is the middle class that pays taxes, but it is the lower class that benefits from populist policies (Bangkok Post, August 15, 2011).

Suvit’s views were not new. The People’s Alliance for Democracy (PAD) had developed the classic theme of wasteful populism and the tax burden to appeal for middle-class support since 2005. It had also toyed with the idea of abandoning one-person, one-vote in favour of some other form of franchise. What is interesting about the quote is that Suvit linked these two themes together, and that Suvit had not been part of the PAD’s theatrical street conservatism. Suvit had a PhD in marketing from Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, had worked at Booz-Allen and Hamilton Consultants, taught at Thailand’s premier business school (Sasin at Chulalongkorn University), and had co-authored a book with the American marketing guru Philip Kotler. In short, he was part of the professional elite.

Attempts to bring down the Yingluck government began immediately after the election. Several generals muttered about another coup. The PAD undertook to “overthrow” the government. Several new anti-Thaksin organisations appeared, including Pitak Siam (Save Siam), headed by a hitherto unknown retired general, which called for a coup to put Thailand into a “deep freeze” (Bangkok Pundit 2012; Bangkok Post, December 26, 2012). None of this noise threatened the government until it botched the passage of an amnesty bill on the night of October 31/November 1, 2013. From that point onwards there was almost six months of constant protest which created the context for the coup of May 22.

Street Protest³

The initial protest against the amnesty bill took the form of flash mobs organised through social media. Participants were mainly office workers or similar, mostly under the age of 40, and fairly evenly divided by gender. They convened at city intersections easily reachable by mass transit for a short demonstration during lunch break. These gatherings were high-spirited and clearly great fun. These mini-rallies were supplemented by larger-scale marches on the first two weekends which attracted a slightly broader social spectrum. Significantly, these gatherings rejected the yellow colour associated with the king and which had been the uniform of the anti-Thaksin movement since 2004 and the ubiquitous hand clappers which had been its plastic “weapon” at rallies, and instead adopted the tricolour of the national flag and a whistle, symbolic of calling time on the Yingluck government.

Four weeks later, when Democrat Party politicians took control of the protest and established the PDRC as an organising body, these rallies ceased, and the young office workers were not prominent in the PDRC campaign that extended over several months.

Under the PDRC, the style of protest returned to the form pioneered by PAD: permanent encampments at city intersections with video facilities and broadcast links. The crowd quickly metamorphosed from the young office-worker profile of the flash mobs to the familiar spectrum from PAD protests, dominated by what McCargo (2009, 16) memorably called “middle-aged women having the time of their lives.” After some initial enthusiasm, the striking thing about these protest camps was how few people were there – a scattering during the day, a few hundred when speakers and entertainers appeared in the evening, and a larger crowd only on the weekend. Over a space of several weeks in early 2014, these sparse crowds were thickened by importing people from the democrat’s electoral stronghold in the south. At each of the protest sites appeared a tent city, mostly using one standard bivouac (possibly army-sourced), and a larger encampment appeared in Lumpini Park, much of it divided into areas for different provinces and districts from the south.

The organisation of the street protest sites required considerable hardware and software. Areas were marked off by several kilometres of portable barriers. Many “guards” were present to police these barriers, manage the flow of traffic and pedestrians, patrol bridges and other high places and guard the encampments at night. At each of the sites, there was a large stage with multiple high-quality video screens, sound systems, generators, lighting gantries, and a team of technicians. Mobile broadcast units relayed the events to the Democrat Party’s Blue Sky TV channel.

All of this cost money. Some, such as electronic hardware, may have come from in-kind donations. The protest leaders took collections, but these were nowhere near the amounts expended. The Siam Intelligence Unit, a Bangkok think tank, estimated the daily cost was around five million ba...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: Understanding Thailand’s Politics
• 1. The 2014 Thai Coup and Some Roots of Authoritarianism
• 2. Inequality, Wealth and Thailand’s Politics
• 3. The Resilience of Monarchised Military in Thailand
• 4. Thailand’s Deep State, Royal Power and the Constitutional Court (1997–2015)
• 5. Thailand’s Failed 2014 Election: The Anti-Election Movement, Violence and Democratic Breakdown
• 6. Reign-seeking and the Rise of the Unelected in Thailand
• 7. Rural Transformations and Democracy in Northeast Thailand
• 8. Redefining Democratic Discourse in Thailand’s Civil Society
• Index