A History Of Thailand

by Baker Chris

  Despite the predictions of terrorism experts that the violence would escalate and spread through assistance from Al Qaeda and other international networks, the incidents remained small scale and confined to the three provinces of Pattani, Yala, and Narathiwat, or nearby Songkhla town. The larger incidents also emphasized local symbolism. On 28 April 2004, 107 were killed, mostly inside the Krue-se mosque at Pattani. The date was the anniversary of a 1948 uprising that began the modern phase of the movement. The mosque is a reminder of Pattani’s past as an independent kingdom. The participants had converged on the mosque after a series of local bombings and killings, and had appeared to invite martyrdom. In October 2004, 78 people died from suffocation in army trucks after being arrested at a demonstration in Tak Bai, Narathiwat.

  Interpreting the movement was difficult as there was no manifesto and no demands. Crushing it was difficult as it had a highly disaggregated cell structure and no identifiable leadership. Latent sympathy, disgust at the authorities’ handling of the Tak Bai and Krue-se incidents, and plain fear conspired to ensure the security forces gained little cooperation from the local community. The political meaning of the movement was complicated by the special circumstances of a remote border region. Rebel groups, units of the security forces, and local politicians competed for the profits of smuggling rice, oil, drugs, liquor, and people. The almost daily trail of killing became a running sore that was not susceptible to simple diagnosis, alleviation, or cure.

  Conservative doubts and fears

  The sweeping changes of the 1990s provoked reactions among those who felt it had been too much and too fast. The economy had been greatly opened up to outside forces. International capital had assumed a dominant role. Bangkok had become an international city. Particularly in the aftermath of the 1997 crisis, businesspeople founded associations to press for a more defensive economic policy. Some activists tried to launch a ‘new nationalist’ movement to draw these groups together. Others imagined a deeper loss of cultural identity under the impact of globalization. One ad portrayed Thais being taught the famous Thai smile by a foreigner. In the face of rapid urbanization, some lamented the loss of community values assumed to be intrinsic to an idealized rural society.

  More specifically, some lamented how the rapid production of new wealth was revising the social order, and how the application of that wealth was changing the political order. Remedies were sought. The 1997 Constitution established new ‘independent bodies’ intended to curb political corruption and vote-buying. Transparency International established a branch in Bangkok in the late 1990s. Police corruption was exposed by academic studies and television documentaries. Some senior officials, working through the Civil Service Commission, pressed for stricter rules and codes of conduct in public service. Concern extended to private morality too, especially the changing standards of dress and sexual behaviour among the young under the influence of urbanization and globalization. Fashionable new ways of speaking Thai, with many imported words, flattened tones, and weaker consonants, excited fears about the deterioration of a pillar of the national identity. Scandals involving monks excited similar fears over Buddhism.

  These attitudes were especially strong among the higher ranks of the bureaucracy, still weighted with people of ‘old family’, who feared their social standing and official position carried less and less weight. But such views also found support among an urban middle class of petty bureaucrats, white-collar workers, and small businesspeople who pictured themselves as good citizens in a society that increasingly valued money more than principle.

  Most of the time, these movements and attitudes were scattered. Briefly in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Chamlong Srimuang provided a focal point by adopting an ascetic image as a force against corruption (see next chapter). But after the 1992 crisis, Chamlong was sidelined. Many looked to the palace to provide leadership. In his annual birthday speeches and other pronouncements, the king regularly spoke against corruption and repeatedly emphasized the need for ‘good people’ to run the country. Many of these movements attempted to appropriate the idea of ‘Thai-ness’ as support for conservative projects. In response to this pressure, a Ministry of Culture was created in 2002. Its first task was to draw up a masterplan defining its role. This plan began by defining ‘Thai-ness’ with the vocabulary of diversity, but rapidly moved into a more aggressive mode, hoping to impose proper ‘Thai’ standards of speech, dress, and personal behaviour.

  Conclusion

  Over one generation during the last quarter of the 20th century, Thailand’s society changed with unprecedented speed. Building on the foundations of urban capitalism laid in the American era, big-business families grew not only in wealth but also in social prominence. A new white-collar middle class embraced western-influenced consumer tastes and concepts of individualism. Capitalism drew into the city a much larger working class.

  The borders of the nation were punctured by increasing flows. Total trade grew from 40 per cent of GDP in the early 1970s to 120 per cent at the millennium. Total capital flows grew from less than 1 per cent of GDP in the early 1970s to over 10 times that figure in the 1990s. Tourist arrivals swelled from a few thousand to 12 million a year. Labour flowed in from Burma and other neighbouring countries, and out from Thailand to Japan, Taiwan, and the Middle East. Information, images, and ideas arrived via satellite, television transmission, film, and the internet. The economy became more exposed to global forces, and the society to global tastes and ideas.

  Equally important as globalization was the coming of mass society. Until the 1960s there were few channels through which ideas and images could be shared around. Communities were still relatively enclosed. The government was the dominant national network. From the 1970s, that changed rapidly. Paved roads, tour buses, and cheap motorcycles shrank the nation’s space. National mass media created a social mirror in which the society could begin to see itself. In this mirror, the imagined unity of the nation was fragmented. The reflection revealed the variety of the society’s ethnic make-up, the complexity of its history, the diversity of religious practice, and the scale of social divisions.

  The boom conferred by globalization and the emergence of a national society provided the background for challenges to the paternalist traditions of the nation’s politics.

  9 A political society, 1970s onwards

  The massive economic and social changes begun in the American era spilled into politics over the last quarter of the 20th century.

  After 1976, the senior bureaucracy, palace, and military still clung to the model of a passive rural society that accepted the hierarchical social and political order, and that needed to be protected against both communism and capitalism. The generals and bureaucratic elite laid plans to engineer social harmony and guide ‘democracy’ from above. But economically and culturally, the country was rapidly becoming more urban than rural, more dominated by business than bureaucracy, and more assertive than passive. The paternalist vision was swept away by the advance of industrialization, urbanization, and globalization, and the growth of mass society.

  Through the 1980s, business politicians inside the parliamentary system, and a new ‘civil society’ outside it, pushed the military back towards the barracks, but reluctantly, slowly, and incompletely. An attempt to halt this trend during 1991–92 proved to be a critical transition. Thereafter, the military’s role declined steeply. Political spaces widened. High expectations arose for wide-reaching changes aided by the forces of globalization and the new assertiveness in parts of mass society. The political forces that prioritized the well-being of society and nation seemed set to flourish in the broader political space. But the traditions of the strong dictatorial state had been deeply embedded. When big business and a rural-based populism made a bid to sweep away the old bureaucrat-dominated state, it unleashed a conflict that brought the military back to the front line and placed both liberal democracy and economic growth in peril.

  National ideology and national identity<
br />
  The violence of October 1976 was an immense shock. It violated the official self-image of a peaceable and progressive nation. In the aftermath, the National Security Council, a policy-making body founded in the Cold War era, began to seek ways to ‘create unity between the people in the nation…so that people are of one heart’.1 The Council’s academic advisers concluded that the old triad of ‘nation, religion, and king’ was no longer ‘stimulating’ for a society that had changed so rapidly in the previous generation. Thailand needed a ‘national identity’ to overcome the polarized politics of the 1970s, and a ‘national ideology’ that could capture aspirations for progress, as communism had done for many people in recent years.

  This project concluded that the new touchstone would be ‘nation, religion, monarchy, and democracy with the King as head of state’. In practice, this differed from the old formula in two ways. First, the monarchy would assume a much more prominent role as the focus of national loyalties in comparison to the other two components of the old trinity. Second, democracy was added in recognition that the 1973–76 era had revealed aspirations for liberty, participation, and self-expression that were too powerful to suppress. The ‘national ideology’ was not publicly promoted like Pancasila in Indonesia, but was ‘an instrument of the national leaders…to use with the masses in order to produce change in the required direction’.2 In the late 1970s, a National Culture Commission and National Identity Office (NIO) were established. New magazines and radio programmes were launched to implement the project.

  From research, the National Security Council found that the peasantry, estimated to be 80 per cent of the population, honoured the monarchy and religion, and had no interest in politics. It concluded that they needed a reasonable livelihood and paternal officials to look after them. A book on Thailand published by the NIO in 1984 pictured Thai society as a pyramid, essentially unchanged since the Sukhothai era. At the top was the king; next came the bureaucracy created when ‘the king found it impossible to manage the nation’s affairs single-handedly’; and at the base were peasants living in unchanging, peaceful villages ‘where democracy is practised in its purest form’.3

  The Interior Ministry embarked on ‘political education’ to prepare the people for ‘democracy’. Its own research studies concluded that the Thai people were not ready for democracy because of poor upbringing, an innate lack of ethics or seriousness, or simply a ‘disposition to be under the command of others’. These findings justified education programmes to inculcate the national ideology and the duties of citizenship, not rights and freedoms. The NIO defined ‘Thai-style democracy’ as good government that respected the (undefined) rights and aspirations of the people and hence could rival communism for popular appeal. It would be achieved by ‘good people’, rather than by representative institutions.

  The phrase ‘democracy with the King as head of state’ had appeared in earlier constitutions. Now it became standard. History was adjusted to reflect this close association between the monarchy and Thailand’s progress towards democracy. In 1980, a statue of King Prajadhipok was completed outside the new parliament building. The project had been mooted much earlier, but funded only in the aftermath of 1976. The statue expressed in solid form a history in which Prajadhipok ushered in democracy by granting the constitution on 10 December 1932. In this revisionist version, the People’s Party’s revolution had been a rushed mistake that resulted in fascist militarism and communism. The statue was inscribed with words from Prajadhipok’s 1935 abdication statement in which he refused to cede power ‘to any individual or any group to use it in an autocratic manner’. The monarchy thus became the fount of democracy.

  Political soldiers and ‘premocracy’, 1980–88

  The military assumed the major responsibility for realizing this paternalist vision of the nation and its political future.

  The coup of 6 October 1976 returned the army to power. With a record now stretching back four decades with only two short intermissions, the military domination of politics was deeply embedded. But the impact of the massive US patronage – and then its removal – was unsettling in many ways. The number of generals had rapidly increased (to over a thousand), creating intense competition at the top. From the 1930s to the 1950s, the First Army had managed politics through its ability to control the streets of Bangkok, but now there were several centres of power in the armed forces. The counter-insurgency had increased the size and status of the provincial armies, and of new technical and strategic offices at the centre (like the ISOC). In addition, fighting a political war had politicized the army, especially the middle-level officer cadre. In army journals, different groups debated why the army was fighting a war against its own people and how to oppose communism by political means.

  Politicized groups of mid-ranked officers gained influence because their direct control over men and firepower was critical in the power plays among rival generals. The Khana thahan num, dubbed the ‘Young Turks’, was a group of around 90 middle-level officers who came together in the early 1970s and became prominent in the coup politics at the end of the decade. Most had been trained by the Americans and seen combat in Vietnam. They were not only fiercely anti-communist (several were involved in the 6 October repression) but also fiercely anti-capitalist. They viewed the peasantry as ‘the producers and backbone of the nation’ and believed communism had prospered because ‘the capitalists take too much advantage…these capitalists are destroying the nation, the institutions…destroying everything, not only causing misery for the people’.4 They distrusted parliament because businesspeople could manipulate elections. They believed the military had the right and the duty to control the state in order to manage these social divisions. They were distressed by the army’s fall in status in 1973, which they attributed to corrupt relationships between businesspeople and generals such as Thanom and Praphat. Because of their command over Bangkok troops, they were instrumental in the successful coups of 1976 and 1977.

  The Thahan prachathippatai or Democratic Soldiers came mostly from the ISOC or the general staff. They had been involved in devising political strategy to counter communism, and been greatly affected by working with CPT defectors, such as Prasoet Sapsunthon. Like the Young Turks, they believed that the problem of communism stemmed from capitalism because ‘some groups have been able to take advantage and build up monopolistic power which inflicts social injustice and material hardship on the people, creating conditions for war’.5 Chavalit Yongchaiyudh, one of the group’s leaders, argued: ‘What is even worse are all the “influences” which are deep rooted in the rural society…if they are not happy with someone, that one may die, he may get killed’.6

  The Young Turks revered General Prem Tinsulanond as a ‘clean’ soldier and helped his rise to the premiership in 1980. But Prem did not depend on them. His rise had also been overseen by King Bhumibol who saw Prem as a soldier on whom the monarchy could rely. Prem did not adhere to the Young Turks’ narrow ideology but understood the need to compromise with business as one of the powerful forces in society. In 1981, he took into his Cabinet a soldier and some businessmen whom the Young Turks found objectionable. They launched a coup on 1 April (hence the title ‘April Fool’s Day coup’), which Prem evaded by escaping to his old garrison base at Khorat in the company of the royal family. Against this combination, the Young Turks surrendered. The leaders were jailed but only temporarily, because Prem believed they might still be a useful source of support. In 1985, they launched another failed coup attempt, after which the leaders were cashiered and the group dissolved.

  The Democratic Soldiers were more pliable, and Prem drew on them to plan a ‘political offensive’ to mop up the remains of communism and manage the return to parliamentary democracy. This strategy was issued during 1980–82 in two orders known as 66/2523 and 60/2525. The state under military tutelage would remove the basic causes for communism and dissent:

  Social injustice must be eliminated at every level, from local to national levels.
Corruption and malfeasance in the bureaucracy must be decisively prevented and suppressed. All exploitation must be done away with and the security of the people’s life and property provided.7

  This would be achieved by ‘cutting down the monopolistic power of the economic groups’ and distributing income more evenly. As in the discussion of national ideology, the policy highlighted ‘democracy’ and ‘popular participation in political activities’, but was not committed to full popular representation. The threat of communism still gave the army a ‘sacred’ duty to rule.

  Under Prem’s leadership, this strategy of managed democracy stretched from the parliament down to the village. Under a new constitution, parliament was controlled through an appointive Senate packed with military men. With this support and quiet palace backing, Prem remained prime minister for over eight years (1980–88). Other key ministries (defence, interior, finance, foreign) were reserved for military men and a few trusted technocrats. At the same time, parliament was restored, elections were held from 1979 onwards, and other ministries were allotted to elected MPs. Some generals resigned to support Prem in parliament. This arrangement was dubbed semi-democracy or ‘Premocracy’.