Thailand
Awaiting Elections

Ousted prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra is contesting the election, slated for 23 December, by remote control. It is the first time an election campaign is being masterminded by someone the other side of the planet using a mobile telephone, writes Justin Wintle

  True to its word, Thailand’s ruling military council, having pledged a return to democracy and full civilian rule, has called a general election slated for 23 December. Led by General Sonthi Boonyaratglin, the army seized power on 19 September last year. This seventeenth coup in the country since 1945 was not just a bunch of soldiers behaving badly. Sonthi had the nod from Privy Council president Prem Tinsulanonda. A former prime minister as well as general, Prem is unlikely to have given Sonthi the green signal without tacit approval of their majesties King Bhumibol Adulyadej and Queen Sirikit, to whom Prem has been unswervingly loyal down the years. In a sense, therefore, it was also a royalist coup, widely welcomed among a population whose reverence for the throne is one of the fundamentals of Thai political and social life. This comes into sharper focus when the republican sympathies of the ousted prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra are taken into account. His critics point out that his party, Thai Rak Thai (TRT), was founded on Bastille Day in 1998. Its name too, meaning ‘Thais Love Thais’, smacks of pointless populism. Those of us in Bangkok at the time smiled warily. Thai Rak Thai sounded like a National Front with lipstick.
   But Thaksin was no mere make-up artist. He meant business, whatever the consequences. He embodied a can-do attitude unprecedented among his predecessors. While encouraging fellow entrepreneurs and businessmen, he set out to build a power base among the underprivileged, particularly the rural poor in Isan in the north-east, until then generally disregarded by other political parties. He built roads and loaned a million baht to every village in the land. He also instituted a rudimentary national health service, known as the 30-baht scheme. Patients at government hospitals were to be charged less than a dollar per treatment.
   Not surprisingly, Thaksin became the first prime minister to be re-elected, in 2005, the TRT having first come to power in 2002. But by then the Thaksin administration was already unravelling. While continuing to enjoy the support of much of the rural electorate, Thaksin enraged many urbanites and the establishment by selling off his family company, the Shinawatra Corporation also known as Shin Corp, to the Singaporean Temesak Holdings for two billion dollars, no tax payable.
   Shin Corp enjoyed virtual monopoly in mobile telephony in Thailand, and was the source of Thaksin’s massive wealth, used by him to secure political position. Immediately prior to its sale, Thaksin as prime minister overturned a law restricting foreign shareholding in any Thai telecommunications enterprise to 15%.
   But there was more to Thaksin’s audacity than personal advantage. At the outset of his prime-ministership, in 2002, he launched a ‘war on drugs’. Amphetamines especially had become the scourge of Thailand’s youth, and something needed to be done. But Thaksin’s solution backfired horribly. On his orders, the police were instructed to shoot on sight known dealers. What followed was an exercise in ‘cutting the link’. Small pushers were killed to protect the real drugs barons. And, the current government claims, many innocents died as well. In all, according to human rights agencies such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, several thousand ‘extra-judicial killings’ occurred.
   Next, Thaksin decided to go after Muslim separatists in Pattani and other southern provinces with the same recklessness. A relatively small problem became a big problem as the body count mounted. Although Muslim insurgents themselves resorted to violence, Thaksin turned the south into a no-go area.
   Parallel with these initiatives was a relentless campaign against media freedom. In a celebrated case, Shin Corp sued a young activist journalist, Supinya Klangnarong, for $10 mn when all she did was merely to point out how Shin Corp’s profits had trebled during the first two years of the Thaksin administration.
   It also became clear that in practice Thaksin’s wondrous 30-baht health scheme meant that cheap, sometimes ineffectual, medicines were being dispensed. Nor did it help when Thaksin, visiting Bangkok’s legendary Emerald Buddha temple, ostentatiously sat on a chair traditionally reserved for the monarch.

   By 2006 many Thais had had enough of the former police lieutenant-colonel, nicknamed Square Face. Huge demonstrations rocked Bangkok, and along highways posters appeared on billboards beseeching ‘Army, where are you?’ As military coups go, 19 September was uniquely popular. On 15 October an anti-coup demonstration was staged at Bangkok’s Victory Monument. There were no more than a score of protesters, as against fifty police, who watched benignly.
   Even though wherever possible his assets (reckoned at around $7 bn) have been frozen, and the TRT has been forcibly disbanded, Thaksin is not finished. General Sonthi’s mistake was to stage the coup when Thaksin was out of the country, in New York addressing the UN. Although arrest warrants against Thaksin have been issued, he is at liberty in Britain, where he fled with an estimated $500 mn and promptly bought premier league football club Manchester City.
   Thaksin’s police academy contemporaries do not recall that ‘Square Face’ had any particular interest in any sport other than golf. But large swathes of the Thai population are addicted to English football, and every victory won by former England manager Sven Goran Eriksson is a reminder to the Thai people of their ousted leader’s upside.
   And so to the election. TRT may no longer exist, but in its place has emerged a new National Front with lipstick, the People Power Party (PPP), headed by Thaksin ally Samuk Sundaravej. In effect, Thaksin is contesting the election by remote control. If the PPP wins, either outright or with enough seats to undermine any coalition, it will be the first time an electoral victory would have been masterminded by someone the other side of the planet using a mobile telephone.
   A PPP victory would signal either a pardon for Thaksin, and his return home to resume power, or another intervention by the military. Either way, a country recognised around the world as a tourist paradise risks becoming deeply destabilised at a time when there are concerns about octogenarian King Bhumibol’s health.
   As of mid-November, some 18 parties had entered the contest. The PPP’s most serious rival is the Democrat Party led by Abhisit Vejjajiva, a thoughtful, clear-headed, soft-featured and self-effacing man who is in every respect Thaksin’s antithesis.
   Opinion polls put the PPP ahead of the Democrats, but the Democrats look better placed to form a coalition with other lesser parties. In any event, the election promises to be the most closely fought, momentous, and perhaps dirtiest, in Thailand’s on-off democratic history. Given Thaksin’s naked thirst for power as a means to self-enrichment, one keeps one’s fingers crossed for the more modest and more moral Abhisit.
   Whatever the outcome, Thai politics, until now notoriously short on ideological content, has been permanently altered. At stake is the creation of a welfare state and a more equitable distribution of the nation’s considerable wealth than has hitherto obtained.

Justin Wintle is the author of Perfect Hostage, a political biography of the Burmese Nobel Peace Laureate Aung San Suu Kyi (Hutchinson 2007)

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