A History Of Thailand

by Baker Chris

  Chatichai’s career symbolized the changing foundations of power over the past generation. He had begun as a cavalry officer leading Bangkok troops in the 1947 coup. After Sarit’s rise to power in 1957, he left the military and became a diplomat. He and associates in the Ratchakhru group concentrated on business interests in finance, textiles, and joint ventures with the Japanese. In 1975, they formed the Chat Thai Party. Chatichai established an electoral base in the northeastern regional centre of Khorat, where he allied with a group of local businessmen. By 1988, Chat Thai had become the most successful party at aggregating the factions of provincial businesspeople.

  Chatichai’s Cabinet set out to transfer power from officials to elected MPs. The key ministries of defence, interior, and finance were given to elected politicians rather than technocrats or generals. Ministers removed senior officials from key bureaucratic posts and state enterprise boards, substituting more pliant candidates and intimidating officialdom to become more obedient to elected political masters. The parliament cut the military budget, demanded more transparency in its usage, and raised queries over ‘irregularities’ in arms purchases. The old dictatorial press law was cancelled. The National Economic and Social Development Board (NESDB) was relieved of its key role in planning development budgets and in big projects, such as the Eastern Seaboard scheme. Chatichai set up a think tank (‘Ban Phitsanulok’), headed by his ex-activist son, Kraisak, and manned by young academics. This group took the initiative for making policy away from ministry technocrats. The Chatichai government represented an end to the military’s post-1976 strategy of guided democracy, and a dramatic attempt to shift power away from the bureaucracy and military to the Cabinet and business.

  The ‘Ban Phitsanulok’ policy team proposed that the government change its regional policy by ‘turning battlefields into marketplaces’, namely ceasing to consider the communist and ex-communist neighbours as enemies, and exploiting the opportunities in their economic liberalization. This policy resumed the attempt, begun by Kukrit in 1975, to obliterate the divisions imposed on the region by the Cold War. It rejected the military concern for security in favour of business’s desire for profit. It challenged the military’s ability to make foreign policy, and threatened the military’s control over border zones and their lucrative trades.

  The bureaucracy, and especially the military, reacted angrily against these attacks on their powers and privileges. Through the mid-1980s, a new group of officers belonging to Class Five of the military academy rose to dominate the armed services. They disdained the ideological concerns of the Young Turks or Democratic Soldiers, and represented a return to the traditions of Sarit. They claimed to be directly loyal to the king and were openly sceptical of elected politicians. They also saw no problem with becoming involved in business, and were personally wealthy from construction and other ventures. Over 1989, the Class Five military clique established a dominating position in the military hierarchy and began manoeuvres to undermine the Chatichai Cabinet. The issue of corruption gave them a handle to build wider support for this attempt.

  Elected ministers had more power over budgets than ever. With the economy hitting a heady phase of double-digit growth, the budgets were bigger. Many large projects were launched to upgrade the country’s increasingly inadequate infrastructure of roads, ports, telecommunications, schools, and other facilities. In December 1990, Banharn, the MP who had been most successful at diverting an excess share of the national budget to his home constituency, was appointed finance minister. Some MPs began to accuse their more successful peers of malfeasance.

  The rise of ‘money politics’ created a reaction, especially among the new urban middle class. In 1985, Bangkok elected as mayor Chamlong Srimuang, a former Young Turk turned lay ascetic, who promised to clean up corruption. In 1988, he formed the Phalang Tham (moral power) party to take the same crusade into parliament. During 1989–90, press attention switched from scandals over the military budget to stories of kickbacks on infrastructure projects. The transliterated term khorrapchan entered the language and became a major theme of the daily press. In a deft play on the phrase kin mueang (‘eating the state’, meaning traditional remuneration from the profits of office), Chatichai’s government was dubbed the ‘buffet Cabinet’.

  The press exposure of corruption undermined urban middle-class support for the government and made Chatichai more vulnerable to Class Five’s manoeuvres. On 23 February 1991, the generals seized Chatichai at gunpoint and declared a coup.

  The political crisis of 1991–92

  The coup represented a complex transition. On the one hand, it was a step back into the past. The military was moving to protect its privileged position in the state and its self-appointed role to guide democratic development. The Class Five generals justified the coup to stop the corruption of the elected government and to clear up rumours of plots against members of the royal family several years earlier. They sacked parliament and formed themselves into a National Peacekeeping Council (NPKC), whose Thai name meant ‘the council to preserve the peace and the orderliness of the nation’. They later formed a political party named Samakkhitham, or unity. This vocabulary restated the old military ideology of creating unity and orderliness from above. They hand-picked a body to draft a new constitution that restored the military’s ability to manipulate parliament through the Senate. The senior bureaucracy quietly supported the coup because it removed the elected politicians who had aggressively encroached on its powers.

  On the other hand, the coup expressed the wish of Bangkok business and the urban middle class to find a solution to the ‘money politics’ of the provincial business politicians. The Class Five generals established a commission that arraigned Chatichai and his colleagues on corruption charges. They also sacked parliament and picked a former foreign service official turned businessman, Anand Panyarachun, to serve as prime minister. Anand formed a Cabinet of leading technocrats which, free of parliamentary scrutiny, rapidly passed a string of liberal economic reforms. Bangkok business and the middle class were initially enthusiastic.

  But ultimately these two agendas were in conflict. As with previous dictatorial cliques, the Class Five generals’ wish to oversee the state could not be separated from their wish to use it for personal benefit. These generals presented a contrast to Prem’s discreet, almost ascetic style. They were already rich from business and enjoyed flaunting their wealth and power. At a class reunion, one proclaimed: ‘Now we control everything except the moon and the stars’. Perhaps Thailand’s first internet revelation appeared to show a member of the junta cavorting with a famous former beauty queen. The generals took control of the Defence Ministry and resumed the arms purchases blocked by the Chatichai government. They also gained influence over the Communications Ministry and awarded a huge contract to the CP conglomerate for laying 3 million telephone lines, and confirmed another contract for rising entrepreneur Thaksin Shinawatra to launch a satellite. The junta’s own hand-picked premier, Anand, challenged the telephone contract for corrupt over-pricing and conflict of interest (a leading member of the junta was connected to the CP company through marriage). Business support for the junta slipped after foreign governments and financial experts warned foreign tourists and investors to avoid a coup-ruled country. With the added impact of the Gulf War, the growth rate slackened and the stockmarket index lurched downwards.

  Against this background of waning urban support, the announcement of the military’s new constitution provoked a revival of pro-democracy groups from the 1973–76 era. These came together in the Campaign for Popular Democracy (CPD), which protested against the ‘despotic’ provisions of the constitution draft to show that ‘the army could not claim they had the full support of the country’.20 Yet, in his birthday speech in December 1991, the king advised: ‘Anything can be changed…if it does not work smoothly, it can be amended’,21 and the protests faded. But the respite was temporary. In early 1992, the junta cancelled the corruption proceedings against seve
ral of Chatichai’s ministers, who shortly afterwards joined the Samakkhitham Party formed to support the military. At elections in March 1992, this party won the largest number of seats and prepared to form a government. After its initial candidate for premier had to withdraw under suspicion of drug trading, the junta leader General Suchinda Kraprayun stepped into the breach, contravening a public promise never to aspire to the premiership. His Cabinet was a mixture of military figures and prominent money politicians, including Banharn at the helm of the lucrative Communications Ministry. The junta had metamorphosed from the scourge of ‘money politics’ into its patron.

  When the CPD relaunched demonstrations in May, the urban middle class gave open support. The anti-corruption Bangkok mayor, Chamlong, who had been re-elected in 1990 by a landslide, pushed himself into a leading role in the protest. On 17 May 1992, around 200 000 joined a mass demonstration in Bangkok. The press noted the large middle-class showing, dubbed it the ‘mobile phone mob’, and drew a contrast with the student demonstrations of the 1970s. In fact, the crowd was a cross-section of Bangkok, including many rural migrants, workers, and students. Parallel gatherings met in many provincial centres.

  The NPKC junta responded with a strategic plan designed for a communist insurrection, using fully armed soldiers imported from the jungle areas on the borders. Violence continued over three nights (Figure 23). Soldiers shot into the crowd. Buildings and buses were burnt. Chamlong was arrested. Suchinda claimed the demonstration was an attack on nation, religion, and king. He said: ‘They want to destroy the system of government, overthrow the constitutional monarchy, and bring in a government that will machine gun people in the streets’.22 State-controlled television showed only property destruction by demonstrators, but CNN and the BBC broadcast footage of military violence that soon circulated locally on videotape. The press defied censorship and published full reports. On the night of 20 May, when events seemed to be moving to a bloody climax, the king summoned Chamlong and Suchinda to the palace and, in a scene broadcast on television, ordered them to stop the violence.

  Figure 23: Black May. A demonstrator being beaten on Ratchadamnoen Avenue on the night of 17 May 1992.

  Suchinda’s government resigned. The constitution was amended. Anand was brought back for the interim. New elections were held and a new elective Cabinet formed in September 1992.

  The damage to the military’s status and political role was enormous. The death toll of May 1992 was initially estimated at several hundred, but later reduced to a range of 40–60. For a short time, men in military uniform were abused in the streets and refused treatment in hospitals. Anand dismissed members of the NPKC from the military, and pulled many military figures out of sinecures in state enterprises and public services. He appointed an army head who swore to keep the army out of politics – a litany repeated by his successors.

  The military’s political decline continued through the mid-1990s. When half the Senate came up for renewal in 1995, many military men were replaced by civilians. Generals disappeared from most boardrooms. The military’s share of the government budget declined from 22 per cent in 1985 to 13 per cent in 1996, and 6 per cent in 2006. Unofficial income sources were also cut because arms buying, construction, and other military projects came under close public scrutiny. Several lower-ranked personnel freelanced as security guards or by selling protection, particularly in the entertainment industry. Some 700 generals (almost half the total) had no substantive job. Many played a lot of golf, and some exercised their leadership skills by heading national sports associations.

  Through the 1990s, the military cast around for a new role that might halt this slide. A 1994 White Paper argued that growing economic competition in the region raised the likelihood of conflict with neighbouring countries, making the army important for ‘protecting national economic interests’.23 Other documents proposed giving the military a larger role in economic development. Some units even opened their facilities to assist tourism. In the late 1990s, the military pressed for a larger role in policing the social conflicts thrown up by economic growth.

  None of these claims moved the new elected politicians. The financial crisis of 1997 brought an especially savage fall in the military budget. The Democrat-led government deliberately broke the convention that the defence minister should be a military man, and repealed the anti-communist law that gave the military considerable special powers. This government also installed General Surayud Chulanont as army chief with a mandate to modernize the army, especially by reductions in numbers of recruits and officers.

  Yet the military establishment resisted the worst of this assault, mostly through a strategy of inertia. The modernization scheme went nowhere. The number of appointments to the rank of general dropped only slightly. Attempts to remove some of the vast tracts of land acquired in the army’s heyday were rebuffed. The military hung onto its control of two television channels and several hundred radio stations, and was able to use these outlets for constant propaganda on the importance of the army to the nation. The armed forces also benefited in the public mind from their close association with the monarchy. Opinion surveys in the early 2000s showed that the army was an admired institution, particularly in contrast to the police and politicians.

  Ultimately, globalization furnished the military with the new role it sought. Thailand’s borders were crossed by growing flows of illegal migrants trafficked people, drugs, contraband, international terrorists, and arms. In particular, by the early 2000s, the Thai–Burmese border was crossed each year by hundreds of thousands of illegal migrants and millions of methamphetamine pills. Policing these borders became a major part of the army’s official role and also an avenue for unofficial earnings. In 2001, the army’s biggest operation since the anti-communist campaigns was launched in an attempt to block the massive flow of drugs across the Thai–Burmese border. Around the same time, names of several officers turned up as directors of companies laundering the profits of this drug trade.

  The military era seemed finally over. By keeping clear of politics for a decade, and finding a new role at the borders, the army had begun to acquire a new reputation for professionalism, symbolized by figures such as General Surayud. Yet its numbers had scarcely fallen, particularly at the upper levels. Its command of media was unscathed. And its presumption of a political role, justified by ‘national security’, had become part of the military’s internal culture.

  Reform versus ‘money politics’

  The military’s forced retreat from the political front line opened up new political space that businesspeople and activists hoped to fill. The fear that investors and tourists would flee Thailand in 1992 convinced businesspeople that the globalized economy could no longer be entrusted to generals with outdated agendas. During the 1992 crisis, the three peak business associations of commerce, industry, and banking, which normally kept a distance from public politics, openly called for a return to parliamentary rule. Several prominent Bangkok businesspeople announced their intention of entering politics.

  At the same time, intellectuals argued that 1992 was a ‘crossroads’ (Chai-Anan Samudavanija) or the ‘turning point of an era’ (Thirayuth Boonmi), with the opportunity to sweep away the legacy of half a century of dictatorial rule. Democracy activists advocated comprehensive constitutional reform to change the balance of power between the state and civil society, liberation of the electronic media from military control, reform of education to emphasize skill and creativity rather than nation-building, and democratic decentralization in place of the Interior Ministry’s centralized colonial-style system.

  At first, it seemed that parliament would be the channel to achieve this ‘turning point’. The press portrayed the elections to reinstall parliamentary democracy in September 1992 as a contest between ‘devils’ who had supported the junta and ‘angels’ who represented hopes of reform.

  Through the 1990s, the fragmented array of parliamentary parties and factions fell roughly into two groups. On one sid
e, the ‘angel’ coalition at the September 1992 elections was headed by the Democrat Party. Over the 1991–92 crisis, the party refashioned itself to reflect the aspirations of businesspeople and the urban middle class. It recruited bankers and technocrats who gave the party the credentials for managing the modern globalized economy. It also recruited a new younger generation of politicians who gave the party an image of urban modernity that differentiated it from other provincially based parties. It enjoyed support from Bangkok and from the southern region, which had a high proportion of urban population clustered in old port towns down the peninsula, and which had an export-oriented economy based on rubber, tin, fishing, and tourism. The Democrats projected a liberal image, promised to modernize the economy through law and institutions, encouraged neighbouring countries (especially Burma) to democratize, and tried to complete the demilitarization of politics. The Democrats were the most successful party of the decade, heading the coalition for all but 28 months between September 1992 and January 2001.

  On the other side were the politicians who had supported Chatichai and switched to the military’s Samakkhitham in 1992. They came mainly from the central and northeastern regions characterized by an agrarian economy and rather new provincial towns. Their interests were more parochial and commercial, focusing particularly on the distribution of budget to the provinces. They viewed neighbouring countries, as had Chatichai, as economic opportunities to exploit, not political problems to solve. They were not averse to cooperating with the military’s efforts to revive its political fortunes.