Courts can now take over ongoing national woes

Things are happening thick and fast in Thai politics. The good news is that they are happening without - or with a relatively smaller number of - threats of violence or intervention by the men in uniform. The bad news is that Thailand is becoming so tangled up in its long-standing crisis that we will have to live with unpredictability way into the foreseeable future.

With everything being equal, we welcome this option of giving the judiciary the final say on matters that have divided the country - the biggest one being the question of whether Thaksin Shinawatra was corrupt.

We welcome the judiciary's decisive role, not least because it removes a huge amount of tension from the streets. As economic storms keep battering Thailand and other countries, nobody knows how much longer the country can take the kind of trauma that overwhelmed all Thais on June 20, when anti-government protesters pushed through police barriers to besiege Government House. And we are through being kept on the edge by our prime minister whenever he feels like issuing a threat to use force to end the demonstrations.

Questions about the legitimacy of many of the cases going to the courts will linger. The best way to get out of the chicken-and-egg debate over whether the investigations against Thaksin are fair and legal is to look at the cases with an open mind. Of course, the investigations took place as a direct result of a military coup, and were carried out by panels appointed after the overthrow of the Thaksin government, but we will go nowhere claiming the investigations were illegitimate.

What Thais should look into is whether Thaksin and his associates broke any pre-coup law. It's the duty of the judiciary to answer that, but we should not play the role of passive observer. With everyone watching, it will help prevent any attempt at a summary crackdown on Thaksin under the guise of "legal process". If he is to be punished, society will have to help make sure the evidence against him was genuine, and laws had really been broken.

Thaksin's defence, on the other hand, should not waste its time questioning the legitimacy of the Assets Examination Committee and instead focus its efforts on proving that, for example, by approving his wife's bid for the auctioned Ratchadaphisek land, he didn't break any law governing people doing business transactions with the state.

For too long, this political war has involved attempts by rivals to outwit each other over technicalities. This is time for a real fight because otherwise the whole country will continue to get stuck in a detrimental battle of wits. Thailand's crisis started off as a legal crisis - should Thaksin have paid taxes? Was the Ratchadaphisek land deal legitimate? Were Ample Rich and Win Mark acceptable business transaction tools or part of illegal tax-evasion schemes? etc - but the lack of effective legal mechanisms to tackle the issues made it snowball into a political catastrophe.

Throwing those questions back to the court now is the best we can do, although we paid a big price for the gathering of evidence. Had our justice system been allowed to function independently when Thaksin was in power and tackle such issues as the Ratchadaphisek land purchase and Khunying Pojaman's share transactions, Thailand most likely would not have been so deep in this mess.

Critics are entitled to question the neutrality of this whole new legal process, but only if they had earlier protested the ineptitude of the Thaksin-era justice system at the top of their lungs. The coup was a fait accompli and the only way to live on with heads high is for Thais to scrutinise the cases again with clear eyes and open minds. Only then will justice be served.