[DEBATE] : (Fwd) Thaksin toppled

[Patrick Bond]

The Irrawaddy News Magazine
Some Coups are Good (Online Commentary)
September 20, 2006
By Bruce Kent


Most coups are bad affairs, normally involving a military figure or 
faction seizing power. Then there are relatively benign ones, not simple 
power grabs but a forceful way to put things right in the country.

The latest one in Thailand on Tuesday night appears to fall into the 
latter category. It will, however, inevitably be condemned by most world 
leaders, particularly in the West, because it constitutes a military 
ousting of an elected government by non-constitutional means. They are 
almost duty-bound to make such statements.

It is normal after many coups for the military victor to proclaim that 
it will only be a short period of military rule before the return of 
civilian democracy. In most cases these prove to be empty words, but 
this is almost certainly not the case in Bangkok. The new controlling 
Democratic Reform Council, comprising powerful Army Commander Sonthi 
Boonyaratkalin, the two other service commanders and the police chief, 
have given similar assurances of a return to civilian rule, but somehow 
they ring true.

The coup was mainly to remove Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra and a 
government that he totally dominated. While popular at election time, 
mainly because of the large vote from the huge poor, rural area of 
northeast Thailand where his populist policies dazzled villagers, he was 
increasingly unpopular with a large segment of the urban population. The 
urban middle-class, most businessmen, academics and professionals, tend 
to be much more aware of what’s happening at the top than rural farmers, 
who have less access to newspapers and rely more on TV and radio, which 
in Thailand are totally under state control.

Thaksin’s critics, who gathered peaceful protest crowds of sometimes 
100,000 earlier in the year calling for him to leave, accused him of 
abuse of power and allowing rampant official corruption. He eventually 
reacted by calling a general election on April 2, which he won because 
the opposition boycotted it. Thaksin said afterwards he wouldn’t be 
prime minister again, and indicated he would be leaving the scene soon. 
The poll was eventually annulled by judges and Thaksin has remained in 
power ever since as caretaker prime minister, with no real signs he 
would leave any time soon.

A new election was scheduled for November, but was massively wealthy 
Thaksin ever going to go, or at least allow an investigation of dubious 
business deals he was accused of? Among other things, his opponents 
accused him of dividing Thailand—between those for and against him—in an 
unprecedented way in a country normally remarkably united and stable. 
And this seemed to be becoming more pronounced the longer he stayed.

Soon after the coup, the new military leaders said they had taken over 
for four main reasons: there were unprecedented divisions in the 
country; widespread suspicion of abuse of power; and activities based on 
lese majeste, a curious law which makes insulting the monarchy a crime; 
and for leaders taking power for a period they promised would be 
temporary. Although not named, these are all charges laid by the 
opposition at Thaksin’s door.

Gen Sonthi is known as a professional soldier. He recently moved several 
of Thaksin’s defense academy preparatory school classmates—Thaksin was 
once a police colonel—from key commands in Bangkok and nearby. There has 
never been any hint he wanted power for himself, or anyone else. He and 
other similarly professional officers were known to be concerned about 
Thaksin’s meddling in the ranks to get his men to the top, particularly 
now, when a reshuffle of top commanders is due in October. Of more 
immediate concern to Sonthi apparently was the threat of violence at a 
massive anti-Thaksin rally planned to be held in Bangkok on Wednesday 
evening. A unit of well-armed forestry police from outside Bangkok was 
rumored to have been martialled by the government to be drafted into 
Bangkok to confront the rally.

Overall, it doesn’t look like Thailand is set to have another prolonged 
military regime, as in the old days. For a start, civilian Thaksin 
opponents, now happy he’s gone, would violently oppose it. So maybe this 
was one of the better coups.

***

New Left Review 39, May-June 2006

The mass-mobilizations against Thailand’s billionaire Prime Minister in 
April 2006, and the role of the Palace–Barracks–Temple triumvirate. 
Kasian Tejapira on the twin conjuncture of 1997—combining a ‘good 
governance’ Constitution with the Asian financial crisis—that put the 
country’s corrupt electocracy into the hands of its telecom magnate.

KASIAN TEJAPIRA
TOPPLING THAKSIN

Thaksin Shinawatra, the Kingdom of Thailand’s billionaire telecom-tycoon 
turned Prime Minister, went on national television on 3 April 2006 to 
claim an overwhelming victory in the referendum-style election the 
previous day. In face of an opposition boycott, Thaksin had won 56 per 
cent of the ballot. His Thai Rak Thai Party’s 16 million votes (out of 
29 million cast) was down on its record February 2005 score of 19 
million, but well above the 11 million that had swept Thaksin into 
office in 2001; and the trt had taken nearly every seat in the House of 
Representatives. [1] Buoyed by his renewed mandate from a largely rural 
electorate, Thaksin looked set to continue in office for the rest of his 
term. Just 24 hours later, after an unscheduled audience with King 
Bhumibol Adulyadej, an ashen-faced Thaksin, surrounded by his stunned 
and tearful entourage, announced from the front steps of Government 
House his decision to stand down as Prime Minister for the good of the 
nation.

Thaksin had weathered an unprecedented storm of almost daily 
anti-government demonstrations in Bangkok and the other main cities for 
two months prior to the election. [2] The anti-Thaksin campaign had 
begun in September 2005 under the personal leadership of Sondhi 
Limthongkul, multi-millionaire owner of the Manager Media Group and 
former crony of Thaksin’s, turned militant oppositionist. When his 
popular talkshow, Meuang thai raisapda, was taken off state tv due to 
its increasingly hard-hitting exposés of government corruption, Sondhi 
turned the programme into a weekly roadshow, attracting boisterous 
anti-Thaksin audiences across the country. His newspapers published the 
sermon of a popular (if controversial) monk from the Laotian border 
region, Luang Ta Maha Bua, alleging that Thaksin was aiming to establish 
a presidency; and an article claiming the pm had presided over a 
merit-making ceremony at the Temple of the Emerald Buddha, the country’s 
holiest site, thus usurping the monarch’s role. Sondhi’s four-month 
blitz, making use of all his mmg outlets—cable tv, newspapers, 
magazines, books, cds and websites—helped the widespread but largely 
passive opposition to break through the government’s media blockade and 
build up political momentum. The travelling talkshows soon became known 
as ‘the Sondhi phenomenon’, and served as dress rehearsals for the mass 
movement of February–April 2006.

The first big anti-Thaksin rally took place in Bangkok’s grand Royal 
Plaza on February 4th, its numbers swelled by popular indignation at the 
tax-free sale for $1.9bn of the Thaksin family’s 49.6 per cent stake in 
the giant Shin Corporation to a Singaporean investment outfit. Four days 
later the People’s Alliance for Democracy was formed, under the 
collective leadership of Sondhi and four others, representing the major 
strands of the opposition. They comprised Major-General Chamlong 
Srimuang, former mentor and ally of Thaksin, ex-governor of Bangkok, 
leader of the May 1992 uprising against military rule and head layman of 
the ascetic Santi Asoke sect; Phiphob Thongchai, a senior ngo activist 
and education reformer; Somsak Kosaisuk, a veteran public-sector labour 
leader; and Somkiat Phongpaiboon, a university lecturer and protest 
movement leader. The five supremos were joined in their nightly 
brainstorming sessions by Khamnoon Sitthisaman, Sondhi’s right-hand man, 
a political analyst and royalist commentator; and Suriyasai Katasila, a 
full-time activist and pad coordinator. The pad’s objectives were to 
remove the Prime Minister from office and dismantle the Thaksin regime 
through a new round of constitutional reform, by petitioning King 
Bhumibol for the application of his Royal Prerogative. The pad 
leadership aimed to build up a nationwide anti-Thaksin network, to 
increase popular pressure but avoid violence and bloodshed. The movement 
staged a series of major demonstrations in downtown Bangkok, with the 
Royal Plaza rally on February 4th followed by another on the 11th, and 
two more at the Sanam Luang ground on February 26th and March 5th.

The pro-government counter-mobilizations began in early February 2006, 
in direct response to the anti-Thaksin movement. Initially, these took 
the usual dirigiste form of deploying local bureaucratic channels to bus 
in throngs of government officials, bemused villagers and wide-eyed 
schoolchildren to Government House, to cheer on the embattled Prime 
Minister by waving roses and pre-printed placards for the tv cameras. 
 From February 24th when, amid resounding calls for him to resign, 
Thaksin dissolved parliament and called a snap election, his Cabinet 
hawks—former communists, provincial bosses and ex-generals—took charge 
of the movement and geared it directly towards confronting the 
anti-Thaksin demonstrations in Bangkok. Throughout March 2006, a string 
of mass rallies was held in Bangkok and other major provinces, 
especially the North and Northeast where trt had a strong base, to 
provide the now caretaker Prime Minister with a show of support and a 
platform for his combative speeches. For the opening rally of the 
election campaign in Bangkok on March 3rd, the 300-plus trtmps and 75 
provincial governors were assigned quotas and expected to draft in, 
respectively, 3,000 or 10,000 supporters. Cheap lodging around the 
capital was fully booked, and hundreds of thousands of people were 
bussed in to Sanam Luang to listen to Thaksin’s hour-long diatribe.

Meanwhile on March 2nd, two contingents of villagers from the North and 
Northeast, each around 2,000-strong and calling themselves Khabuan E-tan 
(‘Column of Buggies’) and ‘Kharavan Khonjon Doenthao’ (‘Caravan of the 
Walking Poor’), had set off on their well-provisioned and widely 
publicized journeys to Bangkok. They converged on the outskirts of the 
capital two weeks later, and were enthusiastically greeted by the 
caretaker pm in person. Moving on to Chatuchak Park, in the north of the 
city, they joined forces with hired taxi and motorcycle drivers and 
camped out in a self-styled Caravan of the Poor & Democracy-Loving 
People Village. This counter-demonstration, by tens of thousands of poor 
beneficiaries of Thaksin’s populist programmes, proclaimed three 
objectives: to give moral support to the Prime Minister, to buttress 
democratic rule via election, and to call for further government help in 
alleviating the manifold problems of the poor.

On March 14th, in an effort to force Thaksin to resign before his 
referendum-style election, the pad led 100,000 demonstrators in a huge 
march from Sanam Luang along the Ratchadamnoen Boulevard to Government 
House, where they camped out. They staged another big rally there on 
March 25th, but Thaksin managed to avoid any face-to-face confrontation 
with the demonstrators. Finally, to put pressure on the still largely 
reticent big commercial interests, the pad organized a rally on March 
29th in the fashionable shopping and tourist centre of Siam Square on 
Sukhumvit Road, and occupied it for two days. Contingents of protesters 
were also dispatched on an excursion to the Silom business centre, the 
Singapore Embassy, the Office of the Election Commission, etc. The 
atmosphere in these demonstrations was generally safe and relaxed, 
festive, resolute, even rowdy and raucous at times, but never violent or 
murderous. Young couples, pensioners and families with small children 
mingled with black T-shirted volunteer guards, groups of ngo and labour 
activists, Buddhist monks, police officers, reporters and a sprinkling 
of foreign tourists. Beside the rousing speeches and announcements, the 
organizers offered a variety of educational and entertaining 
interventions by university professors, dissident senators, 
ex-diplomats, folk bands, classical musicians and an amateur Chinese 
opera troupe.

The Caravan of the Poor avoided any full-frontal clash with the pad 
demonstration, mostly staying put at Chatuchak Park. But it did dispatch 
groups of protesters to various opposition sites in downtown Bangkok 
such as Thammasat University’s Sanam Luang campus, the Manager Media 
Group offices and those of the anti-Thaksin Nation Multimedia Group, 
where some minor scuffles took place. The atmosphere among the Chatuchak 
crowd was folksy and convivial, more like a temple fair than an earnest 
political rally. Pro-government speeches and diatribes against the pad 
alternated with country bands, slapstick comedies and even a 
papaya-salad-making contest. Finally, the Caravan of the Poor dispersed 
and went back home to vote in the April 2nd election, delivering Thaksin 
his unilateral landslide that was to be reversed the following day by 
the ‘whisper from heaven’. [3] If this was an unusual political 
denouement for a constitutional democracy, it was also a reminder that 
the Kingdom of Thailand has never been a democracy per se but always, in 
the peculiar formulation reiterated in the official English translation 
of the 1997 Constitution, ‘a democratic regime of government with the 
King as Head of the State’.

The Thaksin government represented the first assumption of capitalist 
state power by the big capitalists themselves. It combined aggressive 
neo-liberalization with capitalist cronyism, and absolutist 
counter-reform politics with populist social policy, to radically 
transform the existing patterns of power relationships and elite 
resource allocation. But the destabilizing effects of Thaksin’s project 
have aroused extensive opposition, from the old elite—the Palace, 
bureaucracy and military top brass—to Southern separatists, urban middle 
classes, organized labour and grass-roots groups, as well as from 
disgruntled former cronies such as Sondhi. In what follows, I will argue 
that Thaksin’s five-year rule can best be understood within a longer 
historical perspective of the uneven development of Thai politics and 
economics. It was the joint conjuncture of the 1997 financial crash, 
outcome of a decade of delirious growth in the conditions of capitalist 
globalization, and the 1997 Reform Constitution, the attempt by a 
multi-stranded political movement at a major overhaul of Thai 
‘electocracy’, that opened the way for the rise of Thaksin and his trt. 
Despite the denouement of April 4th, given the small circle of the Thai 
ruling elite and their deep business and political entanglements, it is 
unlikely that the Palace and the military will undo Thaksin’s elected 
capitalist-absolutist regime in toto. Nor will the man who liked to call 
himself Thailand’s ceo necessarily retire from power, as well as office.
Capitalist Thailand

The economic formation of modern-day capitalist Thailand dates back to 
the early 1960s and the us war on Vietnam, when the Kingdom did duty as 
a front-line anti-communist state, servicing the eight major American 
military bases on its soil with ‘rest and recreation’ facilities. 
Thailand was then a country of 26 million, with 80 per cent of the 
population working in agriculture, the main source of exports; Bangkok 
was a government-dominated city of 3 million. Import-substitution 
development policies established under World Bank guidance, and with 
massive American aid, were inevitably skewed to us needs; the sex and 
tourist industries were notable results. Over the following four 
decades, the Thai economy grew at an annual average of 7 per cent; per 
capita gdp increased from $100 in 1961 to $2,750 in 1995. By the early 
1980s manufacturing had replaced agriculture as the main contributor to 
exports and gdp. Between 1980 and 1984 Gen. Prem Tinsulanond, then prime 
minister, pushed through a major Structural Adjustment Programme along 
World Bank lines, devaluing the baht and replacing the 
import-substitution model with a labour-intensive export-oriented 
manufacturing sector, based in garments and textiles.

This urban-biased growth reached its zenith in the spectacular 
decade-long boom from the mid-80s to the mid-90s. In the first half of 
the decade, the economy grew at dizzying double-digit rates, and by the 
end of the boom it had multiplied in size two-and-a-half times, with the 
urban middle class more than tripling in number; business employees came 
to outnumber government officials in its ranks. With the yen 
strengthening in the wake of the 1985 Plaza Accord, Japan became the 
biggest source of fdi; manufacturing, real estate, trade and services 
were the principal recipients. By the end of the century the population 
had reached 61 million and, with intensive urbanization, that of Greater 
Bangkok had quadrupled. But class and regional disparities had sharply 
intensified. By 1996, on the eve of the crash, the top quintile had 
increased its share of the national income to 57 per cent, from 49 per 
cent in 1976; the lowest quintile saw its share diminish from 6 per cent 
to 4 per cent in the same period. After four decades of high-speed 
capitalist development Thailand had achieved one of the most unequal 
income distributions in the world, worse than those of its East and 
Southeast Asian neighbours, and comparable to the worst cases in Latin 
America.

The vast bulk of foreign investment had gone to Bangkok and its 
surrounding region, the central plain of the Chao Phraya River delta, 
starving the tropical forests of the mountainous North, the rolling 
savannah of the Northeast and the densely forested Malay peninsula. [4] 
While land ownership has been concentrated in the hands of the upper and 
middle classes, this has not been in traditional forms of landlordism. 
Historically, most Thai peasants were independent smallholders until the 
1960s. The onset of state-promoted capitalist development led to the 
large-scale commodification of rural land, which ceased to be a cheap 
and plentiful source of production in the traditional peasant economy 
and turned into an increasingly expensive object of speculation in the 
market economy. By the 1970s, landlessness had become a national 
problem. Massive peasant protests resulted in a land-reform programme, 
instituted by the civilian government installed following the 1973 
uprising. In order to appease the big landowners, however, private lands 
were not touched by the programme; instead, forests and public lands 
that had been encroached upon or become deforested over the years were 
allocated for distribution to landless peasants—in effect taking them 
from the public and giving them to the poor. In the following decade the 
government, with World Bank support, initiated a land-ownership survey 
to promote investment and farming. However, given widespread corruption 
among local officials, what actually took place was a wholesale 
privatization of community lands for purposes such as building tourist 
resorts, hotels, golf courses and housing estates, or securing bank 
loans on the unlawfully acquired property to speculate on the stock market.
 From dictatorship to electocracy

The modern Thai state constructed by the absolutist monarchs of the 
Chakri dynasty in the late 19th and early 20th centuries was 
deliberately modelled on the colonial regimes in neighbouring British 
India and Singapore. The Kingdom’s ‘constitutionalization’ by successive 
authoritarian military governments between 1932 and 1973 did little to 
alter its basic structure, that of an over-centralized (if fragmented) 
auto-colonial royalist-bureaucratic pyramid. In the student-led mass 
uprising of 14 October 1973, when about half a million people took to 
the streets of Bangkok, the state was confronted with a spectre of its 
own making: the burgeoning bourgeois and petty-bourgeois forces created 
through its unequal socio-economic policies and expanded national 
education scheme. The uprising overthrew the 15-year military 
dictatorship of Field Marshals Sarit, Thanom and Praphat to issue in a 
constitutional democracy.

But if this was Thailand’s 1789, it was rapidly followed by the 
Thermidor of 6 October 1976, when unarmed protesters at Bangkok’s 
Thammasat University were brutally massacred by a right-wing lynch mob 
backed by heavily armed police, on a trumped-up charge of lese-majesty. 
[5] This opened the way for a Palace-engineered coup and the restoration 
of dictatorship. In reaction, some 3,000 students, workers and activists 
from the cities fled to join the Maoist-led guerrilla movement in the 
remote jungle regions, an unprecedented alliance between radical urban 
intellectuals and organized rebellious peasants in the countryside. In 
1977 a ‘counter-coup’ by more far-sighted generals initiated an amnesty 
and a limited political reform. The amnestied student guerrillas 
returned in 1980, exhausted and politically defeated, to find that a 
safely corruptible parliamentary system had been installed which allowed 
for power-sharing between the bourgeois parties and the military. Former 
radicals could be harmlessly absorbed into the mainstream through 
co-optation by ngos, the mass media and so on, [6] while the political 
stage was dominated by a new breed, the nak leuaktang or ‘electocrats’.

The electocrats were elected politicians who usually had a provincial 
entrepreneur-cum-local mafia-boss background, and were hence largely 
ignorant of national and macroeconomic matters; they were mainly 
interested in short-term personal or factional gains. [7] For this 
layer, the student activists’ uprising of 1973 and subsequent 
establishment of a parliamentary democracy were unexpected gifts, which 
provided them with a golden opportunity to convert their hitherto shady 
local wealth and influence into legal power at the centre of national 
politics. The typical electocrat had built his personal fortune in the 
1960s and 1970s under the patronage of corrupt local officials, 
exploiting American aid intended for war efforts against neighbouring 
states and the military government’s market-oriented development 
projects. They generally engaged in semi-legal businesses involving 
licences, title deeds and permits—in short, those in which political 
connections were key—such as land speculation, logging, public works, 
trucking, cash crops, entertainment, gambling, underground lotteries, 
prostitution, bootlegging, gunrunning, drug-trafficking, smuggling, etc. 
Intractable conflicts with business rivals and uncooperative officials 
were often solved with the help of hired gunmen.

Under the new ‘democracy’, these local client networks could be 
laundered and put to good electoral use. Meanwhile, the electocrats 
themselves were transformed from lowly mafia businessmen who had to 
kowtow to local officials into respectable members of parliament or 
Cabinet ministers, with jurisdiction over the promotion (or demotion) of 
their former ‘patrons’. Once elected, they treated politics as a kind of 
business, effectively selling public policy, office, concession or title 
deed to the highest bidder. Shameless avarice was fuelled by the need to 
gather enough ‘ammunition’ for election campaigns to enable them to stay 
in power. [8] The political system in Thailand from the late 1980s up to 
the promulgation of the 1997 Reform Constitution can best be described 
as rabob leuaktangthipatai bon than rat ruamsoon,or an electocracy 
perched on top of a centralized bureaucratic state, consisting of four 
different layers: the national electorate, the local canvassers, the 
party factions, and the Cabinet. Let us consider these components in 
turn. [9]

At the base of the electocracy lay the 40 million voters, the majority 
of whom were poor, ill-educated and rural-based. With most of their 
constitutional rights routinely trampled by arrogant officials, local 
mafia bosses and politicians, they had to take advantage of the one that 
remained: to sell their votes to their local political patrons for 
money, jobs, protection or informal welfare benefits. Their interests 
long ignored by urban policy-makers, their local resources depleted by 
both state and private sectors, these voters perforce became willing 
accomplices of the electocrats in the systematic corruption of electoral 
‘democracy’. They learned the hard way that, unless they sold their 
votes at election times, they would have no other tangible benefits from 
the system. The rural majority thus formed a massive, rock-solid 
electoral base that secured the victory and political power of the 
electocrats and were conveniently inaudible when it came to policy-making.

Rural Thais’ numerical superiority, coupled with their unofficial 
‘right’ to sell their votes, was experienced by urban middle-class 
voters, especially in Bangkok, as ‘the tyranny of the rural majority’, 
which allowed the unscrupulous and rapacious electocrats from the 
country to misrule the city and mismanage the economy. Meanwhile, the 
liberal principle of property rights and the city’s greater purchasing 
power and undemocratic economic freedom to trade, invest, consume, 
overspend, exploit and pollute were in turn regarded by the rural folk 
as constituting an ‘urban uncivil society’, which dispatched hordes of 
avaricious government officials to plunder the countryside. This ‘tale 
of two democracies’, rural versus urban, made for a divided society that 
sustained and reproduced the electocracy, and yet was powerless to 
control it. [10]
Canvassers and factions

Local canvassers, numbering around a million, formed the strategic link 
between usually absentee electocrats and their rural constituencies. 
During election campaigns, they secured bloc votes for the candidates 
and dispensed money or favours to the constituents in return. Rooted in 
local government, religious, education or business sectors, licit or 
illicit, the canvassers were able to build long-term relationships and 
win the voters’ trust by providing helpful services in hours of need, or 
mediating on their behalf with agents of the state or market. These 
cadres were indispensable for ensuring a candidate’s electoral victory 
and, unlike the widely available alternative candidates or financial 
backers, they were practically irreplaceable at short notice. The 
drawback for the canvassers was that, come election time, they were 
usually prime targets for assassination by the hired gunmen of rival 
candidates, and hence the first to die an involuntary martyr’s death for 
the sake of ‘democracy’.

Formally speaking, the electocrats were supposed to belong to political 
parties. In reality, however, they were organized into mung (literally, 
‘mosquito nets’) or factions. The ultimate aim of every faction was to 
join a ruling coalition and then use its votes to bargain for Cabinet 
seats for its leaders, according to the principles of political 
arithmetic. Under electocracy, political parties were highly unstable 
and mostly short-lived, often set up and dissolved at will, while 
factions in general were far more cohesive, and tended to stick together 
despite their frequent moves from one party to another. Factions were 
therefore everything in Thai electocratic politics while parties were 
almost nothing.

It was in the factions that the key political process of interest 
aggregation took place. However, only the interests of the 
well-connected networks of patrons really counted, and there was no 
serious attempt at formulating alternative policies as a whole. Factions 
and parties simply derived their platforms from the framework already 
laid down by state technocrats, and which they in turn had picked up in 
New York or Chicago.

Being in effect the executive committee of faction leaders, the Cabinet 
was the institutional pinnacle of Thai electocracy and the highest 
patronage-dispensing body whose real function, under the pretext of 
governing the country and managing the economy, was to misappropriate 
public resources, exact economic rent, and transfer these through 
private and factional channels to lower layers of the electocratic 
system. As the Cabinet’s Number One faction leader, the Prime Minister 
did not have much real power over his colleagues, who often threatened 
to withdraw their factions’ support for his government. Their effective 
veto severely debilitated government decision-making. The upshot, in the 
words of a central leader of the political-reform movement of 1994–97, 
was a stagnant, ‘corruption-prone, efficiency-excluding and 
leadership-incapacitating’ political system, which militated against any 
independent articulation of class interests. [11] Any social group, 
including the capitalists themselves, lacking a patron–client 
relationship with the electocrats found it virtually impossible to 
access the political system and bring their demands to the legislative 
process. In short, electocracy became a government of, by and for the 
electocrats and their patrons.
The Crown

The Head of the State and summit of the political system was, of course, 
the King. Thongchai Winichakul has recently suggested that the profane 
‘lower tier’ of electocratic politics suffered from a chronic legitimacy 
deficit, and so depended on this ‘upper tier’ of the Crown for 
legitimation. [12] The latter was popularly held to be an ethereal 
sphere of non-politics, devoid of bickering or factional interests. The 
King had only the national interest at heart, and devoted himself in a 
wise and fatherly way to the well-being of his childlike subjects, 
working tirelessly and selflessly to ensure that the country remained 
prosperous and united. The King and his trusted Privy Councillors would 
only descend from this lofty realm to intervene in normal politics when 
absolutely necessary. Since the King was viewed as the sole 
non-political and purely moral being in the Thai electocratic universe, 
his political interventions were almost universally welcomed by the 
public as neither ‘political’ nor an ‘intervention’ at all, and the call 
for an unconstitutional use of his Royal Prerogative could be made in 
all ingenuousness in the name of democracy.

The image of the King is ubiquitous in Thailand. His portraits adorn the 
shacks of the rural poor and the air-conditioned offices of the 
multinationals, austere Buddhist temples and back-alley brothels, the 
huge billboards that line the congested city streets, the banknotes and 
coins in everyone’s pockets. Identical newsreels showing the latest 
public functions of the King and Royal Family are broadcast at 8pm every 
evening on the six free tv channels. The King’s occasional speeches are 
filmed, carefully edited, and later simultaneously broadcast on all the 
channels in accordance with his wishes. Their transcripts are 
subsequently published in all major newspapers and magazines. The King 
has methodically stamped his imprint on the life-course of virtually 
every member of the country’s elites. For over forty years, every 
university graduate has formally received his or her degree from the 
hand of the King; every military or police general has been personally 
‘knighted’ by him in a solemn ceremony. By tradition, a photograph of 
that glorious moment is given pride of place in every office or living 
room. The omnipresent benign, fatherly images look innocuous enough 
until one realizes that what they represent is indeed the totalizing 
embodiment of Thai statehood and public morality; then one begins to 
have a peculiar feeling of being watched everywhere, all the time.

Although the 1932 Constitutionalist Revolution by the middle-ranking 
officers and government officials of the People’s Party had deprived the 
monarchy of absolute power, a cultural passive counter-revolution over 
the past five decades has rendered King Bhumibol (b. 1927) the most 
hegemonic monarch in modern Thai history, effectively far more powerful 
than most of his absolutist predecessors. Coming to the throne 
unexpectedly at the age of 19, in succession to his elder brother King 
Ananda Mahidol who died of a gunshot wound in mysterious circumstances, 
King Bhumibol had neither political experience nor a power base in 
Thailand, having spent most of his boyhood in the us and Europe. 
Returning home in 1951 after completing his education abroad, the King 
gradually built up his cultural-political power under the protective and 
possessive rule of successive military strongmen.
Constructing royal hegemony

With no existing tradition of constitutional monarchy to speak of, the 
Palace was obliged to invent one. From the early 1950s, the King 
travelled around the country, visited remote villages and initiated 
thousands of development projects, aimed both at alleviating poverty and 
combating communist subversion; the goal was to create a solid peasant 
base of counter-revolution in the countryside. [13] By the 1980s, the 
royally initiated projects were so extensive that a new government 
agency had to be set up under the Office of the Prime Minister to 
co-ordinate them, with an annual budget of around 2bn baht, or $50m. 
[14] During his trips up-country, the King also methodically enlisted 
government officials, police and military officers and civilians in a 
personal network of contacts. A special team was assigned to keep a card 
index of this monarchical network, which was estimated to include some 
6,000 people by the mid-1970s. [15] In addition to this organizational 
framework, the status of the King is also of course enforced by the laws 
of lese-majesty. Section 112 of the Penal Code stipulates a jail 
sentence of 3–15 years for any insult, abuse or expression of ill will 
towards the Royal Family; a charge often applied against political 
opponents since in Thai culture it carries a potent and even deadly 
social stigma, as evidenced by the October 1976 massacre of left-wing 
protesters at Thammasat University.

A crucial factor in constituting monarchical hegemony has been the 
development of a specifically Thai ideology of royal-nationalism. As 
articulated by loyal intellectuals and ideologues, this has two 
principal themes. The first involves a mythologized account of the 
colonial period, in which the wise monarchs of the Chakri 
dynasty—especially King Chulalongkorn (1868–1910), grandfather of the 
current king—are held to have ‘saved’ Siam from European occupation 
through timely modernization and state reform. [16] The second theme 
portrays the monarchy as the guarantor of democracy. In accounts of the 
1932 Constitutional Revolution, pride of place is given not to the 
People’s Party insurrectionaries but to King Prajadhipok (1925–35), 
uncle of the current king, who selflessly gave up his absolute power to 
help bring about a peaceful transition to a democratic-constitutional 
monarchy.

After the October 1973 uprising, the two themes came together: King 
Bhumibol was credited by the Thai bourgeoisie with saving both the 
nation and democracy from military dictatorship and communist threat. 
[17] In the context of large-scale anti-government demonstrations and a 
crisis of ruling-class legitimacy, the King’s personal intervention was 
decisive in restoring law and order, and replacing the hated government 
with a royally appointed one. The perceived threat to the 
monarchy–nation–democracy triplet was removed, and the King’s prestige 
further enhanced, so much so that he became popularly regarded as the 
fount of political legitimacy.

Yet the ultimate outcome of 1973 and after was, as we have seen, the 
emergence of the parochial and cronyist electocracy. Viewed in this 
light, the short-lived 1991 military coup could be seen as a belated 
attempt to resolve the manifold problems of the electocratic system 
through the traditional method of martial law. Under the so-called 
National Peace-Keeping Council, the unaccountable assets of ‘unusually 
rich’ politicians were arbitrarily confiscated, and a new constitution 
promulgated to restore the old order. But the generals were out of step 
with the post-Cold War times. During the 1980s boom the Thai bourgeoisie 
had grown in size, wealth and confidence, the economy had become more 
open and globalized, and the middle classes had developed to such an 
extent that ‘semi-democracy’ was no longer acceptable. The popular 
uprising of May 1992 that overthrew Gen. Suchinda Kraprayun’s regime 
differed from that of October 1973, even as it seemed to re-enact it: 
the former communists and radicals were older, perhaps richer, and there 
was no subsequent massacre. [18] But once again the King’s intervention 
proved the turning point, as he stepped in to restore order and appoint 
a new government. The unconstitutionally seized assets were returned to 
their rightful if shady owners, and the military retired to the 
sidelines, behind the King. [19]
Democratization?

Yet Thai politics emerged from the uprising of May 1992 to find exactly 
the same problem: the electocracy. Hence began a political-reform 
movement that aimed to tackle electocracy without resorting to 
unconstitutional means, culminating in the drafting of the 1997 Reform 
Constitution. There were two different, at times conflicting, strands to 
this movement which should be distinguished: the liberal and the 
democratic-reform projects. The first reflected the growing social 
weight and confidence of the new commercial classes, many of ethnic 
Chinese extraction, who saw professional ceos or financial managers as 
more legitimate candidates for office than generals or electocrats, who 
had no idea how to manage globalization. They rallied to the liberal 
consensus of the international institutions: a desirable political 
system would subscribe to human rights, limit state intervention and 
ensure the development of a deregulated free-market economy. Leading 
advocates of the liberal reform project included big-business 
executives, urban politicians, mainstream economists, state technocrats 
and human-rights campaigners.

The democratic-reform strand, by contrast, laid stress on ‘people’s 
politics’, and hoped to build a nationwide network from an alliance of 
local campaigns and organizations, development ngos and public 
intellectuals, under the banner of an egalitarian, rural-community based 
‘self-sufficient economy’. In the more open atmosphere that followed the 
ousting of the military, the post-92 period saw an upsurge in 
grass-roots protests against the socio-economic and ecological 
inequities of the neoliberal boom. There were reportedly 739 mass 
demonstrations in 1994, 754 in 1995 and 1,200 in 1997. [20] As veterans 
of the 1970s Octobrist generation, the ‘people’s politics’ activists 
most involved in these protests shared a common background, mentality 
and style, favouring mobilizations that disregarded Parliament and other 
formal institutions. Their preferred political arena was the street and 
their ideal a direct, participatory democracy; at the same time, they 
aimed to transform the state bureaucracy into a public forum for 
negotiation between various interest groups.

Generally speaking, the ‘people’s politics’ movement gave pride of place 
to the peasantry and the countryside, at the expense of city dwellers 
and workers. Its discourse tended to de-emphasize class and class 
conflict, and preferred to speak of ‘the poor’ or ‘the marginal groups’. 
In contrast with the radical left of the 1970s, the ‘people’s politics’ 
movement paid allegiance to the royal-nationalist, democratic discourse 
of constitutional monarchy. In the final analysis, it constituted a 
loyal extra-parliamentary opposition under the official Thai formula of 
a ‘democratic regime of government with the King as Head of the State’.
1997 Crash and Constitution

 From the mid-90s, the two strands converged under the leadership of Dr 
Prawase Wasi, former pm Anand Panyarachun and Prof. Chai-anan 
Samudavanija to form a nationwide reform movement which succeeded in 
pressuring the political establishment into drafting a new constitution. 
The lengthy document that resulted affirmed, of course, the nature of 
the Thai polity as a ‘democratic regime of government with the King as 
Head of the State’, and asserted the usual rights to private property 
and civil liberty. The legislature was overhauled, to create an elected 
500-seat House of Representatives and 200-seat Senate, with a 5 per cent 
bar militating against smaller parties. It also established eleven 
further independent bodies, including an Election Commission, a 
Constitutional Court and a National Counter Corruption Commission, with 
the aim of ensuring transparent and non-corrupt electoral and 
legislative processes. Ministers were obliged to declare their assets on 
taking office.

Most importantly, the Reform Constitution attempted to redress the 
inefficiencies of the electocracy through an unprecedented concentration 
of executive power in the Prime Minister, over and above the Cabinet, 
state bureaucracy and parliament. It gave the pm wide-ranging powers to 
appoint and dismiss ministers and top officials, and to restructure 
state agencies by decree. It also made it harder for the opposition to 
propose a no-confidence motion in the government. It is this third, 
understated authoritarian agenda that makes the 1997 Constitution a 
deeply ambiguous document. Behind the liberal-democratic façade, it also 
contains some purely elitist elements, for example that no one can be 
elected to Parliament who does not have a ba. Inserted by ‘urban 
minority’ academics hostile to the ‘tyranny of the rural majority’, the 
provision does nothing to raise the educational level of 
parliamentarians—corrupt politicians can buy cheap bas from diploma 
mills with no problem—but clearly says to millions of poor Thais: this 
Constitution is for us, not for you.

Yet the Reform Constitution might have lingered in legal limbo had it 
not been for the financial crisis that erupted in July 1997, leading to 
the worst economic crash in modern Thai history. The Kingdom had 
trustingly followed the twists and turns of us economic orthodoxy 
throughout the postwar period, from the import-substitution programmes 
of the 1950s and 60s to the structural adjustments of the 1980s. In the 
1990s, it was a matter of ideological loyalty to peg the baht to a 
rapidly strengthening dollar, soon eroding the competitiveness of 
export-led manufacturing (garments, textiles), and increasing the 
difficulties of the import-dependent high-tech assembly sectors 
(computer accessories, auto parts). From 1995 onwards, the widening 
current-account deficit was only financed by short-term capital inflows; 
the credit-fuelled boom proceeded on the basis of unregulated and often 
reckless investment. The crunch of overcapacity, falling exports and 
non-performing loans came in the summer of 1997. Foreign capital fled. 
Panicking Bank of Thailand officials threw most of the country’s 
foreign-exchange reserves into a desperate bid to shore up the baht; to 
no avail. The Bank was forced to abandon the dollar peg on 2 July 1997, 
and the currency went into free fall. In the following year, gdp 
contracted by a massive 10.5 per cent. As the crisis unfolded, nearly 
two-thirds of big Thai capitalists went bankrupt, thousands of companies 
folded, and two thirds of the pre-crisis private commercial banks went 
under and changed hands. One million workers lost their jobs and three 
million more fell below the poverty line. [21]

One effect of the crisis—aggravated, though by no means solely created, 
by the macroeconomic mismanagement of successive electocratic 
governments—was to stiffen political will for reform; the new 
Constitution was enacted in October 1997. Another was to prompt a 
broader scepticism about the neoliberal globalization project. Thai 
manufacturing industry, especially the larger export-oriented companies, 
were driven to the edge of bankruptcy; most survived only after being 
taken over by their multinational partners. Among this layer—as also for 
the many workers laid off—there was a widespread resurgence of economic 
nationalism in response to the crash, with ‘the Thai nation’ defined in 
opposition to globalization. The middle classes were deeply ambivalent: 
they owed their climb up the social ladder to a relatively free and open 
economy, yet at the same time discovered that they might lose everything 
within it, as indeed many of them did. This traumatic revelation of 
their insecurity has nourished a new culture of mutual indifference, 
alongside the growth of economic nationalism. In their desperate 
individual struggles to adapt to the crisis, they could not but turn 
their faces away and pretend not to see other people’s suffering, for 
the simple reason that they themselves could hardly survive. The result 
was a sharp decrease in collective action for mutual protection, and 
hence a severe weakening of civil society. [22]

Yet not everyone did badly out of the crash. Typically, the survivors 
were those who had made their billions through monopolistic concessions 
on the domestic telecoms market. They still had money to burn when other 
domestic capital had collapsed or been taken over. They could buy up mps 
or prospective candidates at a time when electocrats’ factions were 
hurting for liquidity. From the point of view of the big-business elite, 
the rationale for a new political set-up was quite obvious. Confronted 
with the risk-ridden turbulence of the globalizing capitalist system, 
and with the restive and emboldened protest movements at home, it was no 
longer enough to have a government that worked on their behalf and yet 
was run by others, be it the military, the technocrats or the 
electocrats. These old ruling elites had failed to protect big-business 
interests. That was why Thaksin and others deemed it imperative to set 
up their own party, to take control of the state to re-manage the risks 
and opportunities of economic globalization for themselves and their 
cronies. [23] It was these business groups and their families who formed 
the core of the Thai Rak Thai Party and the Thaksin government.
Road to power

Thaksin Shinawatra was born in 1949, in the northern province of Chiang 
Mai, into the third generation of a Thaified ethnic Chinese family of 
the Khu clan, with extensive interests in the silk trade and well 
established in the local business and political elite. Thaksin’s father 
dabbled in politics, and was twice elected mp for Chiang Mai. The son 
attended military cadet school and went on to study at the Police 
Academy, where he graduated top of the class in 1973. Thaksin served his 
political apprenticeship with Prida Patthanathabut, a friend of his 
father’s in the Prime Minister’s Office. His tasks included ‘collecting 
money from some big army figures, borrowing from certain ministers, and 
distributing the money to mps and ministers whose “hand” or vote the 
government needed’. [24] After gaining a doctorate in criminal justice 
in Houston (1974–78), Thaksin returned to launch a series of business 
ventures, and married into a top-ranking police family. His breakthrough 
came with a deal to computerize a major police centre.

During the early 1990s, the flourishing electocracy, bubble economy and 
neoliberal orthodoxy provided the ideal opportunity for Thaksin to build 
up his telecom empire and launch his political career. Combining 
high-tech know-how and political know-who with open-handed oiling of the 
wheels, he adroitly cultivated relations with senior bureaucrats and 
Cabinet ministers to win a string of lucrative telecom concessions and 
licences, including paging, mobile phone, cable tv, satellites, etc. 
Thaksin successfully lobbied the Finance Ministry to have his 
concessionaire companies listed on the booming stock market, flooded by 
foreign inflows following financial deregulation. By 1994, the total 
asset value of the Shinawatra companies was $2.4bn. Thaksin had been 
transformed from struggling businessman into a billionaire telecom 
tycoon in just four years.

Given the close entanglements between telecoms and the 
concession-granting government ministries, it was understandable that 
Thaksin found it imperative to go into politics. Wielding his new-gotten 
billions, he joined the aptly named Phalang Tham (Moral Force) Party, 
and soon took over its leadership from Major-Gen. Chamlong Srimuang. 
However, Thaksin’s image as a concession hunter dogged his stints in the 
Cabinet and finally destroyed the party. Thaksin quit Phalang Tham and 
founded his own Thai Rak Thai Party in July 1998. He was well positioned 
to take advantage of the conjuncture of a desperate economic crisis and 
a fervent if ambivalent agenda for political reform. For the January 
2001 election, the first held under the provisions of the 1997 
Constitution, Thaksin recruited former 70s activists to run a high-tech 
campaign with a raft of populist measures to appeal to rural voters. 
Helped by the new electoral rules, the trt won an unprecedented 11 
million votes and 248 seats in the House of Representatives, 
marginalizing the other parties—of whom the (relatively speaking) 
centre-right Democrats remained the largest force.

His backers included Sondhi Limthongkul, whose Manager Media Group 
initially hailed Thaksin as the best Prime Minister Thailand had ever 
had. The parallels between the two careers are striking. Sondhi, alias 
Lin Ming Da, was born to an immigrant Kuomintang family in Bangkok in 
1947. His father, a former officer at the Whampoa Military Academy, set 
up a publishing company to sell Chinese works to fellow settlers. 
Sondhi’s elite education included a French missionary boarding school, 
Chinese and mechanical engineering courses in Taiwan, then history at 
ucla and Utah State University. Returning home in 1973, he became 
executive editor of the left-leaning Prachathipatai (Democracy) at the 
age of 27. By 1983 he had launched a string of publications, and 
succeeded in getting Manager Media Group listed on the booming stock 
market in 1990.

Briefly in exile for his opposition to the military coup of 1991, Sondhi 
positioned his group at the forefront of the post-1992 celebration of 
the ‘new economy’, propagating the rapidly fashionable talk of 
globalization, the information revolution, knowledge society, and so on. 
Sondhi himself not only glibly talked the new talk, but 
also—recklessly—walked the new walk. With the enormous loans secured on 
his overpriced shares, he went on a buying spree of it firms, publishers 
and magazines, invested heavily in a joint satellite project with the 
Lao government to beam digital tv to an audience of two billion in the 
Asia–Pacific region, and planned to enter the cut-throat cellphone 
market. On the eve of the 1997 crash, the jet-setting, heavy-tipping 
aspirant ‘Media Mogul of Asia’ was reported by Fortune magazine to be 
worth $600m.

When the crisis hit in July 1997, Sondhi’s overextended business empire 
was 20bn baht in debt while Sondhi himself owed 1.5bn baht to the Krung 
Thai Bank and was declared bankrupt for three years. Blaming his 
misfortunes on the Chuan Leekpai government under imf tutelage, he swung 
his Phoojadkan Raiwan newspaper behind Thaksin in 2001 and saw an almost 
immediate reversal of fortunes, owing in no small measure to the 
long-time friends and colleagues who now staffed the government’s inner 
circle. Thaksin’s new Commerce and Finance Minister was Somkid 
Jatusripitak, co-founder of the Manager Media Group and columnist for 
Phoojadkan Raiwan. His chief policy adviser was Pansak Vinyaratn, editor 
of Sondhi’s now defunct Asia Times. The president of the Electricity 
Generating Authority of Thailand was Chai-anan Samudavanija, resident 
intellectual of the Manager Media Group and head of several of Sondhi’s 
foundations. The executive director of Thai Airways International was 
Kanok Abhiradee, head of one of Sondhi’s companies, and the ceo of Krung 
Thai Bank was Sondhi’s former banker Viroj Nualkhair. Big advertising 
money from state enterprises started to pour into the Manager Media 
Group. Most of the 1.8bn baht debt to Krung Thai Bank was generously 
forgiven. Manager Media launched a satellite tv service (astv) in 
Taiwan, to serve the Asia–Pacific region. A state tv channel allotted 
airtime to Sondhi’s hard-hitting, pro-government weekly talkshow.
State-funding Thaksin’s vote

The Sondhi case, which applied in different degree to many others, 
illustrates the strategy of ‘crony capitalist-oriented globalization’ so 
vigorously pursued by the Thaksin government—to the applause of the 
Western financial press. It combined an ambitious privatization 
programme (energy, water, transportation, telecoms), providing 
billion-baht pickings for his cronies, with some showy infrastructural 
projects and a scattering of crumbs to his electoral base in the 
villages: micro-loans, farmers’ debt relief, a reduced charge of 30 baht 
(around 75 cents) per hospital visit. The Village and Urban Community 
Fund allocated roughly $25,000 (1m baht) to each of Thailand’s 
70,000-plus villages and 4,000-plus urban communities. The ‘Thirty-baht 
per Hospital Visit’ programme was welcome, as are any improvements in 
rural healthcare, but it was hastily implemented, poorly managed and 
underfunded, resulting in overworked and demoralized medical staff and 
near-bankruptcy at many rural hospitals. As for the micro-credit 
programmes, if they enabled an expansion of the cellphone and 
motorscooter markets, they also saw average household indebtedness rise 
from 70,586 baht ($1,764), or 5.7 times the average household monthly 
income in 2000, to 84,603 baht ($2,115) or 6.1 times monthly income in 
2002. In the poorest households, the rise was from 20,083 baht, or 11.5 
times monthly income, to 24,188 baht or 15.2 times monthly income, in 
the same period.

A 2002 survey found that, as a result of land speculation in the bubble 
economy, 500,000 farmer households were landless, while 30 million rai 
of arable land (one rai is equal to 1,600 square metres) were left 
uncultivated. A major land redistribution programme is the only rational 
response. Lacking that, the Thai peasantry has been forced to adapt. 
Though some 70 per cent of the population still lives in the 
countryside, 60 per cent of their income now derives from employment in 
non-agricultural sectors. This includes paid work in the local informal 
economy and wage labour in the towns, arranged by local middlemen. This 
type of employment is irregular and insecure, and falls outside social 
security provision. As they become more deeply involved in the money 
economy and consumerist lifestyles, the cash nexus replaces community 
solidarity for these young workers, and credit culture assumes the 
function of a disappearing community safety net. Economically speaking, 
they come to rely increasingly on the middlemen who are the linkage 
between the city and the countryside—cash-crop traders, labour brokers, 
agents of urban-based creditors, heads of groups of contracted 
farmhands, local subcontractors, etc. Politically, these middlemen also 
serve as local canvassers who mobilize their respective networks for the 
electocrats. In this regard, Thaksin’s populist policy amounts to the 
use of the government budget to buy up these canvassers wholesale for 
his Thai Rak Thai party.

In Thaksin’s hands—as if the dreams of the post-1992 reformers had 
undergone some monstrous genetic modification—the 1997 Constitution has 
proved perfectly adapted for an authoritarian-populist government by and 
for big business. Making full use of his financial resources, enhanced 
executive power and overwhelming parliamentary majority, Thaksin lost no 
time in packing or bending the constitutionally created bodies set up as 
checks and balances, to undermine or neutralize their power. [25] The 
government has intervened in the selection of candidates for some of 
these organs, refused to co-operate with them, obstructed their work or 
even offered them bribes. [26] An early test case came when the National 
Counter-Corruption Commission accused Thaksin of having concealed assets 
worth around $100m, or 4.5bn baht, when a minister in 1997–98; the 
assets in question had been registered through his housekeeper, maid, 
driver, security guard, etc. The case was referred to the Constitutional 
Court, where Thaksin faced a mandatory ban from politics for five years 
if found guilty. In August 2001, under intense pressure, the Court found 
in Thaksin’s favour by a controversial 8–7 split decision. The Prime 
Minister regained the initiative by launching a series of ‘wars’ on drug 
dealers, mafia bosses, human-rights and development ngos, grass-roots 
protest movements and Malay Muslim separatists in the South, in which 
success was measured in terms of body count.
The South

The separatist insurgency in the South—the provinces of Pattani, Yala, 
Narathiwat, Satun and Songkhla, bordering on Malaysia—began shortly 
after the Second World War in response to a history of annexation, 
repression and discrimination by the Bangkok-centred, Buddhist-majority 
Thai state. The separatist movement had its ups and downs, depending on 
government policy and internal strife. In 1981, under Gen. Prem 
Tinsulanond, a Southern Border Provinces Administrative Centre (sbpac) 
and a joint civilian–police–military task force (cpm 43) were set up to 
function as ‘a government at the forefront’, thus streamlining 
bureaucratic chains of command, and providing local religious and 
community leaders with direct access to governmental power. The 
separatist insurgency had subsided, with many rebels surrendering to the 
authorities so as to resume a normal life, and some turning to border 
smuggling and the black market under the protection of local government 
officials. Thus, for two decades, there had been in the South a corrupt 
peace, but peace nonetheless, maintained by the sbpac and cpm 43 acting 
as a clearing-house for local interests and communities, under the joint 
domination of the Fourth Army Area, the ‘monarchical network’ and the 
local politicians of the Democrat Party.

Thaksin’s aim was to dismantle this order and replace it with one of his 
own, under police control. Informed by the Police High Command that the 
remaining troubles in the area were criminal in nature, caused by a few 
hundred ‘petty bandits’, and inclined by his own police background and 
autocratic ceo style of leadership to criminalize intractable social 
problems and adopt a strong-arm approach, Thaksin abolished the 
long-standing sbpac–cpm 43 structure in April 2002, pulled the army back 
to barracks and put the police in charge, overruling objections by local 
military commanders. The Southerners had no direct access to the new 
structures, which were subservient to Bangkok rather than responsive to 
their grievances and demands. The police, as newcomers to the area, 
tried to gather information by abducting local contacts in the army 
intelligence network and squeezing it out of them. Some were later 
simply killed. To make matters worse, the Thaksin government’s murderous 
2003 ‘war on drugs’ took its toll on the drug-infested South. By then, 
police officers in the area had become the targets of mysterious gun 
attacks, in which scores of them were killed.

The re-igniting of the separatist insurgency in the South was thus a 
direct consequence of Thaksin’s normalization policy. On 28 April 2004 
there were eleven coordinated separatist suicide attacks in Pattani, 
Yala and Songkhla. On the same day, the ancient Krue Se mosque, where 
thirty-two lightly armed Malay Muslim militants had taken refuge, was 
stormed by heavily armed troops under the command of Gen. Panlop 
Pinmanee, a former anti-communist death-squad leader in the Royal Thai 
Army. None of the militants survived the ensuing bloodbath. On 25 
October 2004 a mass demonstration of Malay Muslims outside the Takbai 
District Police Station in Narathiwat province was violently dispersed 
by the police and the military. At least eighty-five Muslim men and boys 
were killed, many of them dying of suffocation after being locked in 
army trucks for transport to a military base. [27]

Thaksin’s response to the flare-up was everything a militant group could 
hope for: thoughtless comments, angry retorts and patronizing boasts. 
More seriously, his government’s reaction to the situation in the South 
has consisted of three components. Firstly, state terror—blacklisting, 
round-up, torture, detention-cum-political re-education, the forced 
disappearance of at least 160 local people, and extra-judicial killings 
of captured insurgents, local religious leaders, teachers and in some 
instances whole families of alleged separatists. Secondly, authoritarian 
legislation—first martial law and then successive declarations of a 
state of emergency—which have had the effect of suspending 
constitutional rights for Thai citizens in the affected provinces, 
without improving the security situation. Thirdly, militarization: some 
20,000 soldiers are now deployed in the deep South, most of them ethnic 
Thai or Laotian Buddhists who do not speak the local Malay dialect and 
know nothing about Islam or Malay culture, yet were authorized by 
martial law to wield wide-ranging powers over the local population. With 
their big tanks and m16 rifles they are highly visible, guarding 
checkpoints, government offices, universities, schools, airports, 
stations and street markets, in their combat fatigues; ready to open 
fire, making arbitrary arrests and conducting warrantless searches of 
religious schools, student dormitories and family houses, accompanied by 
‘unclean’ sniffer dogs. Their overwhelming presence makes the deep South 
seem an infidel-occupied country, like Iraq.

Alarm at the sharply deteriorating situation in the South led to 
objections from the military, the Palace and the Privy Council, as much 
as from local Islamic leaders and human-rights groups. As a result, the 
government yielded to the establishment of a National Reconciliation 
Commission chaired by former pm Anand Panyarachun, in March 2005. Faced 
with interventions on the matter of the South from powerful domestic and 
foreign forces the super-ceo had to compromise. This made for rudderless 
government, with different agencies and security forces pursuing their 
own approaches in conflict with one another. The upshot has been a 
growing number of districts in which state terror reigns supreme.
Gathering opposition

While the trt was, understandably, all but wiped out in the South in the 
elections of February 2005, elsewhere Thaksin’s party increased its 
support, winning a record 19 million votes and an unprecedented absolute 
majority in the House of Representatives, with 377 out of the 500 seats. 
Nevertheless, the year 2005 witnessed a convergence of factors that 
would lead to Thaksin’s ouster. Firstly, the steep rise in oil 
prices—itself the result of an increasingly tense world political and 
economic situation—and the effect of free trade agreements with China 
and other countries worsened Thailand’s balance of trade, which began to 
run into the red. The unprotected economy was also increasingly 
vulnerable to such natural or man-made disasters as global pandemics 
(avian flu, sars), tsunamis, hurricanes, wars and terrorist attacks, 
which between them had a devastating impact on local food, agricultural 
and tourist industries. The on–off recovery from 1997 seemed to be 
faltering again. Government spending and credit programmes had emptied 
the treasury reserves and soaked up excess liquidity in the commercial 
banking system. As deflation gave way to burgeoning inflation, interest 
rates started to climb, and the Thaksin government was no longer able to 
honour its double electoral promise to ‘the two democracies’, i.e. 
economic growth with stable prices for the urban middle class, and cheap 
credit to get a foothold in a consumerist lifestyle for the rural grass 
roots. Something had to give, and it was the urban middle class that was 
the first to go.

Secondly, Thaksin’s policies in the South had hardened the—initially 
mainly cultural—antagonism towards him from the old elites, the military 
as well as the Palace and Privy Council. By the end of the twentieth 
century, King Bhumibol’s power was at its zenith. The Thai counterparts 
of the social and political forces that had overthrown the monarchy in 
neighbouring countries—the military in Cambodia, the communists in Laos 
and the bourgeoisie in China—had all fallen under his hegemony. Even 
though, constitutionally speaking, he is not a sovereign ruler, his 
leadership role carries overwhelming weight in Thai society. Signs of 
tension between the father-like King and the nouveau riche Thaksin—with 
his big mouth, presidential disposition, multi-billion baht ‘new 
economy’ fortune and massive popular vote—were apparent as early as 
mid-2001, when a top-ranking bureaucrat and a well-respected Cabinet 
minister who resigned from their posts due to conflict with Thaksin were 
immediately appointed to the Privy Council. Intermittent skirmishing 
between the government and the Palace began at the end of 2001, with a 
variety of royal speeches obliquely or frontally castigating the Prime 
Minister’s arrogant behaviour, his autocratic, ceo style of leadership, 
his capitalist–populist economic policy, and worsening corruption in the 
government and bureaucracy; speeches of a different tenor to those he 
had made against the shortcomings of the electocracy.

An address to provincial governors on 3 October 2003, in which the King 
famously put a curse on corrupt government officials, became the basis 
for a nationwide campaign against corruption, spearheaded by members of 
the Privy Council. Taking up the imf–World Bank tropes of ‘good 
governance’, translated and naturalized as Thammaraja or ‘the righteous 
king’, the campaign mobilized tens of thousands of local contacts in the 
monarchical network and urged them to denounce corruption and expose bad 
rulers. A huge televised convention of the anti-corruption groups was 
held in December 2005, with a series of similar conventions in every 
region of the country in the pipeline. Needless to say, these activities 
took place amidst the continuous eruption of scandals involving the 
Thaksin government and its cronies. April 2005 saw the exposé of the 
‘ctx scandal’, involving allegations of bribes from American contractors 
in the $100m purchase of bomb-scanning machines for the new Suvarnabhumi 
international airport that led to a censure debate on the then Transport 
Minister, Suriya Jungrungreangkit. July 2005 saw the opening of the $10m 
libel suit against media activist Supinya Klangnarong by the Shin 
Corporation, for having linked its soaring profits to political 
decisions by the Thaksin government.

Sondhi’s turn against ‘the best Prime Minister Thailand ever had’ may 
not be unrelated to the involuntary departure of Viroj Nualkhair from 
Krung Thai Bank, due to the discovery of problem loans worth 40bn baht 
in its accounts; or to the government’s decision to scrap a plan to 
develop two new tv channels by splitting up an existing one, in which 
Sondhi had already invested. As for the peculiar fierceness of the 
‘Sondhi phenomenon’, once his weekly talkshow had been taken off air, a 
deeper psycho-cultural cause might account for it. The two are much the 
same person: both grew rich by speculating in the booming 1990s stock 
market, both spoke in the bombastic terms of the self-styled global ceo, 
both made friends within the narrow circle of the intellectual and 
professional elite, both were braggarts and risk-takers who liked to 
boast about their visionary ideas. The main difference was that while 
one made it big, the other, more reckless, did not. The fact that each 
saw the other’s dark side only made it more difficult for them to reach 
a compromise.

A further factor in the alienation from Thaksin was the announcement of 
‘The Kingdom of Thailand Modernization Framework’ that would throw open 
a wide variety of state assets and functions—utilities, transport, 
natural resources, telecoms, it, national security and intelligence, 
agriculture, culture, public health, medical services—to open bidding by 
foreign investors in partnership with the state. This exacerbated 
middle-class rage and insecurity, fearing that their dear old Kingdom of 
Thailand, based on cheap labour and underpriced services guaranteed by a 
sympathetic patron government, would be part-privatized by Thaksin and 
his cronies and then sold off to their foreign partners in the 
not-too-distant future. Initially impressed with the government’s 
forceful, innovative and output-oriented leadership that seemed to lead 
to rapid economic recovery and reduction in drug-related crimes, members 
of the urban middle classes, especially in Bangkok, became increasingly 
disillusioned with it due to the proliferating number of scandals, 
conflicts of interest, kickbacks on government procurement projects, 
insider trading, stock-price manipulation, etc. With Thaksin’s image as 
a selfless honest patriot utterly shattered, they came to see him in a 
new light as just a greedy little cheat who, as rich as he is, still 
wants to take the lion’s share of the spoils by abusing his privileged 
status, leaving only crumbs for non-cronies ‘like us’. The Prime 
Minister’s typically brash, intolerant and outright rude retorts to any 
unfavourable comments alienated them further. [28] The tax-free sale of 
his family’s public holdings to the Singapore government’s investment 
arm for a huge profit, along with control of vital national assets such 
as mobile phone, satellite, tv station and civil aviation concessions 
and licenses, was simply the last straw.

For the traditional elites—military, civil service, technocratic, 
electocratic—the choice under Thaksin was stark. They could swallow 
their pride, submit to Thaksin and the trt and get their share of the 
spoils; or retain their dignity and independence, even stand up to him 
and speak their mind, and then be harassed, elbowed out of the way and 
marginalized, losing their status and opportunities as a result. No 
wonder former Cabinet ministers, senators, mps, dismissed trt 
executives, retired generals, ambassadors, corporate ceos and even Royal 
Family members who chose the latter option, and suffered the 
consequences, were seen queuing up at anti-Thaksin rallies to thunder at 
the top of their voices: ‘Thaksin—ok pai!’, ‘Thaksin—out!’ [29]
Calling on the Crown

The ranks of the anti-Thaksin forces thus ranged from old-time 
bureaucrats and officers who disliked the government’s autocratic, ceo 
style of administration as well as the nepotism and cronyism of its 
appointments, to business rivals and opposition politicians who 
complained of unfair treatment at the hands of police, tax or electoral 
authorities, to conservative technocrats and economists who disapproved 
of the government’s easy-credit populist social measures, to organized 
public-sector workers resisting its privatization policies, to community 
and ngo activists opposing the environmental effects of its 
infrastructural and energy-development projects, to liberal 
intellectuals, lawyers and human-rights campaigners who condemned its 
systematic abuse of power and extra-judicial killings, to critical 
journalists and broadcasters subjected to government intimidation or 
outright censorship, to the Malay Muslims in the South, at the mercy of 
the state-sanctioned terror of the security forces.

Yet the above groups were too diffuse, ideologically and politically, to 
forge a coherent opposition to the Thaksin government. In the end the 
only rallying point for these disparate forces was the King. The central 
demand of Sondhi’s four-month media crusade was a call for the 
restoration of the Royal Prerogative and the King’s appointment of a new 
prime minister and cabinet in Thaksin’s place—although, strictly 
speaking, this would amount to an unconstitutional coup. [30] The 
‘Sondhi phenomenon’ drew its legitimacy from the Privy Council-led 
Thammaraja anti-corruption campaign, in which a broad 
layer—anti-censorship media activists, anti-statist ngos, 
anti-privatization trade unions, anti-capitalist development 
groups—found common cause, as they did with the royal Setthakij 
pho-phiang (self-sufficient economy) proposals. Despite the controversy 
surrounding the Royal Prerogative demand, the People’s Alliance for 
Democracy which assumed formal leadership of the fast-growing 
anti-Thaksin movement swiftly approved it and put it forward as their 
own. The movement was thus given a collective royal-nationalist 
political identity, by defining Thaksin and his regime as the enemy of 
the nation, the Buddhist establishment and the King. The contrast with 
the gathering rebellion in Nepal during these same months could hardly 
have been starker.

The Palace, taking note perhaps of the scale of the pro-Thaksin 
mobilizations and popular vote, ducked the open use of the Royal 
Prerogative and used the more discreet device of the ‘whisper from 
heaven’ instead. The Thai government remained in suspension for several 
weeks after Thaksin stepped down on April 4th, while the various Courts 
investigated the election results; since all its 500 seats had not been 
filled, the House of Representatives was technically inquorate. On April 
25th the King intervened again in a televised speech to the country’s 
judges, in which he posed the question:

Should the election be nullified? You have the right to say what’s 
appropriate or not. If it’s not appropriate, it is not to say the 
government is not good. But as far as I’m concerned, a one-party 
election is not normal. The one-candidate situation is undemocratic. 
When an election is not democratic, you should look carefully into the 
administrative issues. I ask you to do the best you can. If you cannot 
do it, then it should be you who resign, not the government, for failing 
to do your duty . . . I was watching tv a while ago; a ship weighing 
several thousand tons was hit by a storm and sank 4,000 metres under the 
sea. Thailand will sink more than 4,000 metres under the sea. 
Irretrievable. We would not be able to rescue it. So you would also 
sink, and innocent people would also sink below the ocean . . . You have 
to think carefully how to solve this problem . . . Thank you for doing 
your duties well. [31]

Shortly after the King’s intervention the Constitutional Court went into 
continuous session, to emerge on May 8th with the ruling—by a majority 
of eight to six—that the Election Commission’s holding of the April 2nd 
election was unconstitutional and therefore null and void. A new 
election will be held later this year, after the June celebrations of 
King Bhumibol’s sixty years on the throne. In the ensuing interregnum, 
however, the trt ‘caretaker’ cabinet remains in office. On May 20th, 
Thaksin returned to Government House, declaring that he was ending his 
‘leave of absence’.

The hopes of the post-92 reform movement, the insecurities of white- and 
blue-collar workers in the wake of the 1997 crash, and the neediness of 
the rural poor were hijacked by Thaksin into a crony-capitalist project 
of corruption, repression and privatization. The confrontation of the 
‘two democracies’ in Bangkok during the mass mobilizations of 
February–April 2006 obscured the possibility of shared class interests 
between the two, or of a political alternative other than Thaksin’s trt 
or King Bhumibol’s self-sufficient economy and ‘monarchical network’. 
But the economic interests of Thaksin and other elite groups are 
entangled and the fundamentals of the ‘Thaksin regime’ remain in place.

How best should this regime be targeted? One priority must be the fight 
for a thorough-going reform and development policy for the countryside 
that will raise the current miserable living standards without creating 
widespread indebtedness, and will guarantee a real improvement in rural 
healthcare. But the immediate task should be to remove the linchpin of 
the corrupt and criminalized system, who should face the due process of 
law for the crimes alleged against him—the scores of extra-judicial 
killings that have been sanctioned in the cities and the South, and the 
Shin Corporation’s tax-free privatization of national assets. The 
malfunctioning constitutional bodies, set up as checks and balances, 
need to be thoroughly investigated and, if necessary, purged of crony 
members, as a prerequisite to the establishment of the rule of law—as 
urgent in the South as elsewhere. Finally, the ambiguities of the 1997 
Constitution need to be revisited, and its concentration of executive 
powers in the hands of a presidential prime minister revised. These 
would be the minimum legal-political requirements for transcending 
Thaksin’s globalized electocracy.

22 May 2006

[1] The Thai Rak Thai (Thais Love Thais) Party was founded in July 1998 
with Thaksin as its financier and leader. The April 2006 vote fell along 
typical populist lines, with the majority rural electorate and some 
urban poor voting trt while the minority urban middle and upper classes 
voted against. In 30 urban centres, including Bangkok, abstention 
ballots outnumbered pro-trt votes.

[2] See Sondhi Limthongkul and Sarocha Porn-udomsak, Meuang thai 
raisapda sanjorn chabab thawai kheun phraratchaamnaj [The ‘Thailand 
Weekly’ Mobile Show on the Restoration of Royal Prerogative], Bangkok 
2006; ‘Chronology’, Bangkok Post, 5 April 2006; Nitiras Bunyo,‘Yeudyeua 
yaonan: mai chana mai loek?’ [Protracted Protest: No Stop till 
Victory?], Nation Sudsapda, 31 March 2006.

[3] Answering the protesters in his weekly radio broadcast of February 
4th, the pm had announced: ‘The only person who can tell me to quit is 
His Majesty the King. If His Majesty whispers to me, “Thaksin, please 
leave”, I’ll go.’ See ‘From the Royal Plaza’, www.nationmultimedia.com.

[4] Regional disparities continued to increase under the Thaksin 
government. In 2004 Bangkok, with 17 per cent of the country’s 
population, had 44 per cent of gdp, while the rest of the Central region 
(excluding Bangkok) had 17 per cent of the population and 27 per cent of 
gdp. By contrast, the South has 14 per cent of the population, but 9 per 
cent of gdp; the mountainous North has 18 per cent of the population, 
but 9 per cent of gdp; the Northeast has 34 per cent of the population 
but only 11 per cent of gdp. Income disparities between economic sectors 
were equally severe, with agriculture accounting for 42 per cent of 
employment but 10 per cent of gdp, whereas industry accounted for 21 per 
cent of employment and 41 per cent of gdp, and services for 37 per cent 
of employment and 50 per cent of gdp.

[5] The best account of these two watersheds in modern Thai history 
remains Benedict Anderson’s ‘Withdrawal Symptoms’ (1977), reprinted in 
his The Spectre of Comparisons: Nationalism, Southeast Asia and the 
World, London and New York 1998.

[6] For a study of this decade-long ‘semi-democracy’ see Anek 
Laothamatas, Business Associations and the New Political Economy of 
Thailand: From Bureaucratic Polity to Liberal Corporatism, Boulder, co 
and Singapore 1992.

[7] See also Benedict Anderson, ‘Murder and Progress in Modern Siam’, in 
Spectre of Comparisons; and Ruth McVey, ed., Money and Power in 
Provincial Thailand, Singapore 2000.

[8] The Thai terms nak leuaktang and rabob leuaktangthipatai were coined 
circa 1993–94 by Khamnoon Sitthisaman, political editor of Phoojadkan 
Raiwan, the top Thai-language business daily. Their translations as 
‘electocrat’ and ‘electocracy’ are mine.

[9] The following analysis is my elaboration of the framework suggested 
by James Ockey, ‘Political Parties, Factions and Corruption in 
Thailand’, Modern Asian Studies, vol. 28, no. 2, 1994; see also Michael 
Wright, ‘Travels of King Chulalongkorn misrepresented’, The Nation 
(Bangkok), 5 July 1997; and Thongchai Winichakul, ‘Prawattisat thai baeb 
rachachatniyom jak yuk ananikhom amphrang soo rachachatniyom mai reu 
latthi sadejpho khong kradumphi thai nai pajjuban’ [Royal-Nationalist 
History from the Age of Crypto-Colonialism to the Current New 
Royal-Nationalism or the Thai Bourgeoisie’s Cult of the Father-King], 
Sinlapawatthanatham, vol. 23, no. 1, November 2001.

[10] See Anek Laothamatas, ‘A Tale of Two Democracies: Conflicting 
Perceptions of Elections and Democracy in Thailand’, in R. H. Taylor, 
ed., The Politics of Elections in Southeast Asia, New York 1996.

[11] Prawase Wasi, ‘Patiroop kanmeuang-patiroop kanjadkan: thangok jak 
saphawa wikrit’ [Political-cum-Management Reform: The Way out of the 
Current Crisis], Phoojadkan Raiwan, 11 April 1995.

[12] See Thongchai Winichakul, ‘Kham hai phon prachathipatai baeb lang 
14 tula’ [Transcending Post-14 October Democracy], Fa dieo kan, vol. 3, 
no. 4, Oct–Dec 2005, pp. 142–64. The theme of this issue of Fa dieo kan, 
a radical journal of political analysis, is the monarchy and Thai 
society. It includes an interview with Sulak Sivaraksa, a maverick 
conservative royalist who declared against Thaksin. Pro-Thaksin 
demonstrators alleged that the interview insulted the King and burned a 
copy on stage on 28 March 2006; police also issued a banning order. Ten 
days later, Sulak and the journal’s editor, Thanapol Ewsakul, were 
charged with lese-majesty.

[13] See the pioneering research by Chanida Chitbundid, ‘The Royally 
Initiated Projects: The Making of Royal Hegemony’, ma thesis, Thammasat 
University, 2004.

[14] After the 1997 crash royal-nationalism was supplemented by a 
concept of Setthakij pho-phiang, or economic self-sufficiency, in which 
the King promoted a simple way of life over consumerism and materialist 
values. Estimates of the Royal Family’s personal assets range from $2bn 
to $8bn, managed by the Crown Property Bureau, with equity stakes in 
companies such as Siam Cement and the Siam Commercial Bank. Around 
36,000 of the cpb’s properties are leased or rented to third parties.

[15] For the concept of ‘network monarchy’ see Duncan McCargo, ‘Network 
monarchy and legitimacy crises in Thailand’, Pacific Review, vol. 18, 
no. 4, December 2005.

[16] An alternative view would see the King as deeply dependent on the 
capital and weaponry of his European advisors, after they had eliminated 
Siam’s traditional Burmese, Khmer, Vietnamese and Malay enemies. See 
Anderson, ‘Withdrawal Symptoms’, p. 162.

[17] These arguments draw on Thongchai, ‘Prawattisat thai baeb 
rajachatniyom’; and Benedict Anderson, ‘Studies of the Thai State: The 
State of Thai Studies’, in Eliezer Ayal, ed., The Study of Thailand, 
Athens, oh 1978.

[18] For a succinct analysis of the 1992 uprising, see Anek Laothamatas, 
‘Sleeping Giant Awakens: The Middle Class in Thai Politics’, Asian 
Review 7, 1993, pp. 78–125.

[19] After 1992, the conflict between different classes of Chulachomklao 
Military Academy graduates that had dominated factional politics in the 
armed forces subsided, as ‘professional’ officers who considered 
themselves first and foremost ‘soldiers of His Majesty the King’ 
asserted control. Prominent was Gen. Surayudh Chulanond, C-in-C of the 
Army from 1998–2002, then Supreme Armed Forces Commander until 2003 and 
appointed to the Privy Council after retirement; a close aide-de-camp to 
Gen. Prem Tinsulanond, 1980s Prime Minister and former C-in-C, currently 
President of the Privy Council and one of Thailand’s two royally 
appointed Honorary Statesmen.

[20] See Prapart Pintobtaeng, Kanmeuang bon thong thanon [Street-Level 
Politics: 99 Days of the Assembly of the Poor and the History of Mass 
Demonstrations in Thai Society], Bangkok 1998, p. 121. For other studies 
of the post-92 ‘people’s politics’ movement, see Pasuk Phongpaichit et 
al,Withi chiwit withi soo [Way of Life and Method of Struggle: 
Contemporary People’s Movements], Chiang Mai 2002; Seksan Prasertkul, 
Kanmeuang phak prachachon nai rabob prachathipatai thai [People’s 
Politics in the Thai Democratic Regime], Bangkok 2005.

[21] See the Nukul Commission’s ‘Report on the Analysis and Evaluation 
of the Facts behind Thailand’s Economic Crisis’, Bangkok 1998; see also 
Pasuk Phongpaichit and Chris Baker, Thailand’s Crisis, Chiang Mai 2000. 
For a comparative region-wide perspective see Benedict Anderson, ‘Sauve 
Qui Peut’, Spectre of Comparisons, pp. 299–317.

[22] See the observation by the Thai historian Nidhi Aeusrivongse in the 
human-rights discussion reported in Matichon Raiwan, 8 August 2004.

[23] Pasuk Phongpaichit, ‘A country is a company, a pm is a ceo’, 
Bangkok Post, 21 April 2004.

[24] Pasuk Phongpaichit and Chris Baker, Thaksin: The Business of 
Politics in Thailand, Chiang Mai 2004, p. 38. This is the best account 
available in English of the Thaksin regime.

[25] See Rangsun Thanapornpun, ‘5 pi patiroop kanmeuang thai nai mummong 
setthasat’ [5 Years of Political Reform from the Perspective of 
Economics], Fa dieo kan, vol. 1, no. 3, July–Sept 2003; Saneh Chamarik, 
‘Wikrit ratthathammanoon 2540 kheu wibakkam khong phaendin’ [The Crisis 
of the 1997 Constitution Is the Country’s Terrible Ordeal], Khao Sod, 13 
January 2003.

[26] Examples include: ‘Warning on “secret killings”’, Bangkok Post, 3 
February 2003; ‘Groups lament govt meddling in media’, Bangkok Post, 3 
February 2003; ‘A terribly important short-cut?’, Bangkok Post, 23 
August 2003; ‘Govt rejects rights panel’s probe report; Commission finds 
police in the wrong’, Bangkok Post, 27 August 2003; ‘Judge “lobbied” in 
pm’s assets case; Court told of judge’s reluctance to face fact’, 
Bangkok Post, 14 October 2004.

[27] The Thaksin government responded to international condemnation by 
launching a ‘peace bomb’ initiative in which 100m paper origami birds 
were folded en masse and dropped from military planes onto restive areas 
in the South as tokens of goodwill.

[28] Examples of such ‘Thaksin talk’ abound. The more infamous ones 
include: ‘All that bastard ever does is criticize the government; why 
does he feed on a public salary then? If he wants to criticize, he 
should join the Opposition’; ‘The human rights lawyer disappeared 
because he had an argument with his wife’; ‘Those who criticize the sale 
of my family’s shares are just envious of us’; ‘In fact, I have paid 
more taxes than all the protesters ever did combined’; ‘The protesters 
are crazy . . . They number just a few thousand and yet they tell me to 
quit’.

[29] A comprehensive list of speakers at anti-Thaksin rallies is 
available at www.managerradio.com. The fact that Sondhi has 
conscientiously devoted all the media at his disposal to recording it 
makes the anti-Thaksin campaign probably the best documented protest 
movement in Thai history.

[30] Legal justification for the Royal Prerogative was sought in Section 
7 of the Constitution: ‘Whenever no provision under this Constitution is 
applicable to any case, it shall be decided in accordance with the 
constitutional practice in the democratic regime of government with the 
King as Head of the State’. This is clearly inapplicable to the 
appointment of the prime minister, to which other provisions apply, 
especially Section 201.

[31] The Nation (Bangkok), 27 April 2006.