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Published on February 24, 2008

Dr Thanet Aphornsuvan, dean of Thammasat University's Faculty of Liberal Arts, said he believed that the 72-year-old premier was either "careless" or "forgetful" when he made the controversial remarks in a CNN interview earlier this month.

The premier told CNN that only one person was killed at Bangkok's Sanam Luang during the tragic event.

The right-wing Samak was interior minister following the October 6 massacre, while Thanet was a student activist at Thammasat at the time.

According to a widely accepted non-governmental account (there has never been an official inquiry) the event led to the killings of at least 41 leftist students and activists in Bangkok.

Chulalongkorn University political scientist Ji Ungpakorn also denounced Samak's alleged involvement in inciting right-wing mobs during the event when Samak was elected governor of Bangkok in 2000.

Thanet said the state had obviously dealt with the October 6 movement violently, resulting in many people being killed.

He also recalled that Samak at that time signed a government order banning more than 100 academic books deemed "offensive" because they were left-leaning.

As a step towards resolving this three-decade-long issue, the government should also support the publication of school textbooks that factually explain what happened during those dark days in Thai history.

So far, some key facts are still not in textbooks.

The October 6, 1976 massacre followed the students' uprising on Oct 14, 1973, which overthrew the dictatorial regime of strongman Field Marshal Thanom Kittikachorn.

Interestingly, the Thai student movement during the late 1960s and early 1970s was set against the backdrop of the Cold War, in which the US was the leader of the free world while the former Soviet Union led the communist world.

In this context, Thai students were collectively at the forefront of the democratisation process in Southeast Asia, whereas movements in other nations were still in their infancy.

Most notably, their movement eventually stopped the rise of military dictatorships in Thailand, which had flourished since the 1950s, paving the way for the birth of more democratic regimes in the decades to follow.

Elsewhere, Indonesia, for instance, did not have a democratically elected government until the end of the Suharto regime in the late 1990s and Burma is still being governed by a military regime after several decades of unsuccessful struggles.

Thanet also recalled that the so-called "domino" theory was widespread during the height of Cold War in the 1960s-1970s, predicting that Thailand would soon fall into the hands of communists since its neighbours - namely, Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia as well as China - were already governed by communist regimes.

This had probably further influenced the country's right-wing powers to take extreme action against any left-leaning movements during the 1970s.

Thanet noted that the Thai middle-class appeared to have supported the 1973 student movement against the dictatorial regime but their backing was waning during 1976.

One explanation was that these people probably thought the movement had gone too far. As a result, the right and elitist camps later managed to prevail politically.

In hindsight, it's also ironic that today's communist China and Vietnam have happily embraced capitalism as well as markets and they're both flourishing economically.

This would have been unimaginable just a few decades ago - before the Cold War ended with the collapse of Soviet Union and the Berlin Wall in the late 1980s.

Nophakhun Limsamarnphun

 nop1122@yahoo.com

The Nation