A History Of Thailand

by Baker Chris

  From 1947 the CPT, influenced by those returning from China, began to adopt a Maoist line of rural-based revolution. In 1950, this was defined in Udom Srisuwan’s Thailand: A Semi-Colony, which rewrote Thai history in the Marxist framework, condemned the 1932 revolution as a failure because it lacked mass support, and concluded that Thailand was a ‘semi-feudal semi-colonial’ state, similar to pre-revolutionary China. It argued that the revolution had to be pursued, as in China, by a broad coalition spearheaded by both workers and peasants.

  Within this left milieu there was a strand that tried to build a bridge between Buddhism and Marxism on a common platform of social justice. Many activists were attracted by the ideas of a Buddhist thinker, Buddhadasa, who had distanced himself from the Sangha authorities at a forest temple, Wat Suan Mokh in Surat Thani, and who in the 1940s began to publish booklets arguing for a more democratic and this-worldly interpretation of the fundamental Buddhist texts. Kulap Saipradit attended Suan Mokh, wrote in Buddhadasa’s journal, and summarized Buddhadasa’s ideas in the left-wing Bangkok press. Samak Burawat, a London-educated geologist who translated Stalin, also taught philosophy at a Buddhist academy, attended Suan Mokh, and wrote comparisons of Buddhadasa’s Buddhism and Marxism. Pridi considered forming a branch of Suan Mokh in Ayutthaya, and later, from exile in China, wrote a blend of Buddhism and Marxism, serialized in the Bangkok press as The Impermanence of Society. One of Pridi’s followers returned from Beijing to found a party named after Sri Arya Mettraya, the future Buddha who ushers in a utopian age metaphorically similar to the ultimate goal of Marxism.

  Guerrillas

  In late 1948, inspired by the Chinese revolutionary movement, the CPT resolved to pursue a Maoist-style revolution by organizing the peasantry. Cadres began working in villages, particularly in the northeast where they had earlier organized anti-Japanese cells. A party congress, held secretly in Bangkok from February 1952, confirmed the strategy was ‘mobilize the masses in thousands and millions, go to the countryside’.14 But there were some dissenters, including Prasoet Sapsunthon. However, the Peace Movement sweep in November 1952 jailed several party activists and some of the early rural recruits in the northeast and south. Many remaining party members escaped to attend training at the Marxist-Leninist Institute in Beijing. For five years, party activity lapsed. In Beijing, Prasoet Sapsunthon argued that the rural strategy was misguided and proposed that the party seek power through the ballot box. He was expelled from the party and after the 1957 coup he offered his services to Sarit.

  Other trainees returned from Beijing in the late 1950s. A third party congress in 1961 confirmed the rural strategy (‘encircling the cities from the rural areas’), adopted armed struggle, and moved the party headquarters out of the city. Several, including the ideologist Udom Srisuwan and the poet and historian Jit Phumisak, moved to the forests of the northeast.

  The party began to harvest not only the urban intellectuals’ increasingly bitter frustration against military dictatorship, but also the peasants’ reaction against the market, and the outer regions’ opposition to the imposition of the nation-state with its intrusive bureaucracy and demands for linguistic and cultural uniformity. The party formed its first base in the Phuphan area of the northeast where Khrong Chandawong had recently been executed. His daughter became a leading cadre. A second base was formed in the hills of the south, and linked with the separatism in the Muslim far south and the communist rebellion in Malaysia. A third major area formed in the north and garnered support from many hill villages, including Hmong, Yao, and Lua. With Chinese cooperation, the Voice of the People of Thailand (VOPT) radio began to broadcast from Kunming. Supply routes were created through Laos.

  The rebellion spread widely in a peasant society disrupted by the intrusion of teachers, bureaucrats, police officers, and primitive capitalism backed by a mighty foreign power. A chance encounter between a police patrol and a guerrilla band in Nakhon Phanom on 7 August 1965 began armed confrontation (the ‘first shot’ or ‘gun firing day’). The number of clashes between guerrillas and government forces rose from around one per day in the late 1960s to a peak of around three per day in 1977. The Thai army treated communism as a foreign invasion. The USA was interested in Thailand as a base for its war in Indochina and initially paid little attention to the roots of the local rebellion. The armed forces relied on military sweeps, bombing and napalming villages, and deliberate atrocities, such as burning captured guerrillas alive. There was little attempt to understand the principles of Maoist guerrilla warfare, with the result that major armed assaults on CPT bases, such as at Phu Hin Rongkla and Thoeng in 1972, were military disasters. Attempts to garrison villages and organize village defence forces often failed because soldiers used the power of their uniform and guns to dominate, loot, and rape.

  By 1969, the armed forces counted ‘communist-infested sensitive areas’ in 35 of the 71 provinces. By the mid-1970s, it estimated there were some 8000 armed guerrillas, 412 villages totally under CPT control, and 6000 villages with a total population of 4 million under some degree of CPT influence.

  In 1967, the police captured some CPT members who had opposed the rural strategy, including Prasoet Sapsunthon. The Communist Suppression Operations Command, set up in 1964 by the USA to coordinate counter-insurgency and later renamed as the Internal Security Operations Command (ISOC), recruited their help to plan a more effective strategy. The organization began to work at the village level, forming village defence organizations, and lavishing money on local development under the Accelerated Rural Development programme. But the army command resisted widespread adoption of this strategy, and used every setback as an argument for more firepower and more violence. Between 1973 and 1978, almost 6 million rai of forest was destroyed each year as the army attempted to deny the guerrillas access to forest bases. Even so, a military expert concluded: ‘The inescapable reality is the insurgents and communist revolutionaries…have grown steadily, virtually untouched, for as much as ten years…they are largely secure in their jungle and forest base areas where the government forces, police or military, rarely care to venture’.15 By 1976, government estimated that 2173 guerrillas and 2642 government troops had died in 3992 clashes since 1965.

  Students

  The guerrilla war was just one form of opposition to military dictatorship and its US backing. Other forms of dissent developed in urban society. They too were influenced by the Cold War’s worldwide polarization into left and right, and its accompanying vocabulary (communism, revolution, free world, and so on). But they were also tinged with nationalism, Buddhism, cultural defence, and the aspirations of maturing groups of businesspeople and urban middle class.

  The enthusiasm to ‘develop’ Thailand rapidly increased the numbers in higher education. Tertiary students increased from 18 000 to 100 000 between 1961 and 1972, while growing numbers also went overseas, especially to the USA. The catchment area for higher education extended beyond the old elite. Many were drawn from the provinces to the colleges in Bangkok. In the short stories through which this generation shared their experience, the central character is often a provincial boy or girl who escapes from poverty through education, but remains angry at the exploitation of others less fortunate. Any overt political activity on the campuses was rigorously suppressed. According to Sulak Sivaraksa, ‘By 1957, there were no intellectuals left…The universities were controlled entirely by the military’.16 But from the early 1960s, student publications began to articulate dissatisfaction. The journal, Sangkhomsat Parithat (Social Science Review), founded by Sulak in 1963, leaned to the school that tried to merge socialism and this-worldly Buddhism. Its writers, including Sulak and Sujit Wongthet, criticized the Americanization of Thailand because of its crass materialism and its destruction of Thai culture.

  By the late 1960s, this and other journals also began to carry articles from overseas students describing the intensity of the movement against the Vietnam war and the rise of leftist ideologies in the USA and Europe. In th
e early 1970s, Thai students began to discover and translate New Left writings from Europe and the USA. Young academics produced political economy analyses of modern Thai society that highlighted the poverty and exploitation of the peasantry, the dismal conditions of urban labour, and the roots of social injustice in the traditional social order. Writers from the post-war period were rediscovered and republished, including Kulap Saipradit, who had lived in exile in China since Sarit’s coup, and Jit Phumisak, who had joined the CPT’s rural movement in 1965 and been shot dead in Phuphan a year later. Literary circles and discussion groups mushroomed. In 1972, Thammasat students printed a pamphlet, Phai khao (White Peril), attacking US imperialism in Thailand.

  This growing readiness to criticize military dictatorship was not confined to the students. From the late 1960s, the king began to make public comment on political matters, often specifically directed at the emergent student activism. He wondered aloud about the army’s use of violence, which sometimes seemed to drive villagers into the hands of the guerrillas. He criticized the army’s attempts to remove settlers from the forests. He recognized that farmers were angry because they wanted to be left alone. He noted that ‘foreign’ communists ‘incite the people into thinking that they must fight for freedom and economic liberty. This, however, may be partly true since many in Thailand are poor’.17 He began allusively to criticize capitalism for encouraging values destructive of the humanitarian empathy in Buddhism. He urged students to campaign against the corruption that flourished under dictatorship. At the same time, he advocated gradual change and denigrated the growing enthusiasm for revolutionary methods. Privately, he told the British ambassador that ‘students must be controlled’ and that student demonstrations were ‘very wrong’.18

  In 1968, the king nudged the military government to complete the constitution promised a decade earlier and to restore an elective parliament. The 1968 constitution copied earlier military models of a parliament dominated by an appointed Senate. Despite the charter’s restrictions, MPs were bolder than ever before in using parliament as a forum to critique and qualify military rule. They blocked the military budget, demanded more funds for provincial development, and exposed corruption scandals. The prime minister, Thanom Kittikhachon, seemed deeply shocked by these intrusions on the generals’ power and privilege: ‘Never, in my long political career, have MPs caused such trouble to government administration as in these recent times. Some of them even attacked me over my private affairs’.19 In November 1971, Thanom executed a coup against his own government, revoked the constitution, and dissolved parli-ament.

  Student demonstrations about the war, corruption, and other issues began tentatively in 1968. In 1972, they became better organized and more forceful. The CPT recognized the potential and began to publish leftist literature and to recruit student leaders. But leftist ideas were only one element in an ideological swirl that included democratic liberalism, Buddhist notions of justice, and nationalist opposition to exploitation by both the USA and Japan. Many of the student activists came from a provincial background (especially the south), were the first members of their lower-class or lower-middle-class families to gain higher education, and were among the brightest. Thirayuth Boonmi was the son of an army sergeant and had been placed first in the nationwide secondary school examinations. Seksan Prasertkun was the son of a fishing-boat builder and a brilliant political science student.

  In November 1972, Thirayuth organized a 10-day protest against Japanese goods. In June 1973, the demonstrations began to focus on the issue of restoring the constitution and democracy. The generals refused to negotiate and arrested the student leaders. Meeting in the Interior Ministry, they agreed that ‘2 per cent of the student population’ should be ‘sacrificed for the survival of the country’.20 Publicly they claimed that the students were manipulated by ‘communists’.

  The press cautiously supported the students. On 13 October 1973, half a million people joined a Bangkok demonstration to demand a constitution (Figure 17), and parallel gatherings formed in major provincial towns. The generals backed down and released the student leaders, but the protest now had a momentum of its own. In the afternoon, the crowd moved towards the palace to avoid military harassment, and appealed to the king to mediate.

  Figure 17: The people arrive in Thai politics. The mass demonstration on the eve of 14 October 1973 around Democracy Monument. In the distance can be seen the landmark ‘dome’ of Thammasat University, where the protest began.

  The student leaders extracted a promise from the generals to reintroduce a constitution within a year, and were granted an audience with the king. But the dispersal of the demonstration on the morning of 14 October 1973 deteriorated into violence. Soldiers fired into the crowd, killing 77 and wounding 857. The shedding of young blood on Bangkok streets undermined any remaining authority of the junta, and allowed the king and other military factions to demand that the ‘three tyrants’ (Thanom, Praphat, and Narong, Thanom’s son married to Praphat’s daughter) go into exile.

  The king took the unprecedented step of nominating a new prime minister (Sanya Thammasak, a judge and privy councillor) and laying down the process for writing a new constitution to re-establish parliament. The final collapse of military rule catapulted students into a historic role, and elevated the king as a supra-constitutional force arbitrating the conflicts of a deeply divided nation.

  Radicals

  The events of 14 October 1973 began an extraordinary period of debate, conflict, experiment, and change. The immediate aftermath of the generals’ fall saw a complex interplay between students and other radical forces on the one hand, and a much more moderate agenda to found a post-military state and social order on the other.

  For the next year, street protests were almost daily events. They maintained pressure on the government’s procedure to restore constitutional democracy. They campaigned for ending the American use of Thailand as a base. They widened the agenda to issues of social and economic justice. The university campuses, especially Thammasat, were converted into open debating halls. Writing on Thai history, society, and culture mushroomed. Jit Phumisak’s writings were republished and revered, especially his call for a politically committed literature and art, and his challenge to traditional Thai historiography, which identified Siam as a feudal society and the monarchy as ‘great landlords’.21 The CPT helped to nudge the student movement leftwards.

  The student protests catalysed resentments that had developed but been suppressed over the past two decades of ‘development’. Labour disputes and labour resentment against institutionalized repression had increased in the late 1960s and broke out in a wave of strikes in 1972. The years 1973 and 1974 saw more strikes (501 and 357, respectively) than at any previous time, mostly for improved wages and working conditions. In mid-1974, when some 6000 textile workers in the Bangkok industrial suburbs went on strike against attempts to lay off workers in the face of a market downturn, students helped to organize the strike, form a new coordinating body for the labour movement, and pressure the government for labour reforms. The government responded by raising the minimum wage, arbitrating strikes, and passing a new labour law that legalized unions and created the machinery for disputes.

  Starting in early 1974, peasants in the north and the upper central region agitated for higher paddy prices, controls on rents, and allocation of land to the landless. In June, some 2000 people travelled to Bangkok to rally. Again, the government reacted positively by establishing a price support scheme and introducing a rent control Act. But it did not have the machinery to implement these schemes. Local offices were deluged with petitions from farmers detailing how moneylenders had cheated them of their land. Farmers complained that local officials sided with the local landed and monied elite. In late 1974, they created the Peasants Federation of Thailand (PFT), which within months grew to have branches in 41 provinces and a membership of 1.5 million. PFT leaders travelled around villages educating farmers about their rights. At a PFT rally
in Bangkok in November 1974, young monks occupied the front rank. One explained, ‘We take pity on the farmers who are the backbone of the country…Being the children of farmers, we cannot turn our backs on them when they need help’.22 In May 1975, students, workers, and peasants announced a ‘tripartite alliance’ to fight for social justice, beginning with the farmers’ issues.

  Reformers

  Students felled the military dictatorship, but other forces in urban society emerged to shape the successor regime. Over the prior quarter-century, business had grown richer, more sophisticated, and more self-confident. The leading conglomerates no longer wanted to kowtow to the generals and share their profits with them. They sought more power to influence policy. A small but influential elite of technocrats wanted to divert resources away from the military towards development. Many businesspeople and professionals were frightened by the polarizing logic of militarism and radicalism.

  Kukrit Pramoj emerged as the representative of this reformist agenda. He was a minor member of the royal family and an enthusiastic practitioner of traditional high culture. He had been educated at Oxford and was thoroughly westernized in the style of the early 20th-century court. But he quit a bureaucratic career to enter banking and then journalism. He moved among the new businesspeople and boasted about a Chinese element in his heritage. His business took him upcountry and he claimed to know and understand the peasants. In 1974, he left his business career to found the Social Action Party, which attracted many big business people.