Jatuporn Promphan and "secret tapes" are no strangers. He has been living politically by them, almost.
This time, though, at stake is his international reputation, which is already hanging in the balance following the bloody political violence in April and May.
He is calling for the head of Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva's aide, Sirichoke Sopha, claiming there is a tape recording featuring Sirichoke's conversation with alleged Russian arms dealer Victor Bout. "In a couple of days, the tape will come out," Jatuporn said.
Earlier, Jatuporn had made another bombshell claim, that Sirichoke went to meet Bout in prison to ask the suspect to implicate Thaksin Shinawatra in international arms smuggling. That allegation and the proclaimed secret tape have further clouded the Bout extradition issue that has placed Thailand awkwardly in between two superpowers, the United States and Russia.
All of a sudden, Victor Bout has become a big part of intertwined international and domestic intrigues spreading from Russia, to North Korea, to Bangkok, to Ukraine, to Sri Lanka and to America. Sirichoke has had a hand in this as well, as his April meeting with Bout is becoming very much politicised and bringing the likes of Sri Lanka into the frame.
The Thai government has tried to fix the initial damage by having Sirichoke admit that he had met Bout out of suspicion that there could be a linkage between the April 10 political violence and the illegal heavy weapons founded on a mysterious multinational aircraft that landed here last December. As a government MP and prime ministerial aide, Sirichoke could get away with that kind of meeting. But he wouldn't if he did what Jatuporn has alleged - tried to force Bout to frame Thaksin.
It would be very naive of Sirichoke to ask a reputedly shrewd foreign suspect to do anything like that. That said, it would be very naive of Jatuporn as well to make such a claim without concrete evidence. Again, Jatuporn's reputation hangs on whether a tape, that could prove him right, does exist.
Sirichoke is in no better shape. His meeting with Bout was apparently based on the fact that the arms-smuggling plane landed in Thailand about the same time Thaksin visited Sri Lanka. Suspicion of a possible link might also have come from attacks on the Sri Lankan president by his rivals, whose challenges for him to come clean on his "dealings" with Thaksin appeared on a few websites.
The issue has provided a considerable distraction as Thailand is caught between Washington and Moscow, both of whom must have been almost equally surprised by the decision of the Thai Appeals Court to overrule the lower court's anti-extradition ruling. And the Thaksin ghost has managed to add to the triangular tension in the form of rumours, again circulated by Jatuporn. The rumours had it that Thailand and Russia, at a secret meeting in Vietnam, discussed a quid pro quo deal in which Thaksin, who reportedly had visited Moscow a few times, would be arrested and swapped with Bout.
Despite the waters being muddied, Bout's extradition issue has become quite a straightforward matter once the Appeals Court made its ruling. Now what is deterring extradition are legal complications caused by additional charges filed by the Americans as a "back-up" plan during the appeal process. There aren't too many political ways to deal with those legal complications, so in a few days things should become clearer.
As the problems with Cambodia have demonstrated, international |diplomacy and domestic politics |are a match-up made in hell. All |parties in Thailand, in this case |represented by Sirichoke and |Jatuporn, must keep that in mind.