21 September 2006
THAILAND’S military coup which overthrew the caretaker government of controversial billionaire Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra is a cause for concern. Once the generals appear to have secured their control, they have suggested that elections for a new government will happen only after a year. In fact, new elections were already scheduled a few weeks hence after the courts had ruled Thaksin’s victory in April’s snap election invalid.
The military has revoked the existing constitution and dissolved Parliament as well as the constitutional court. It says it will appoint an interim prime minister and a new general assembly to draw up a new constitution, without explaining what it thought was wrong with the old one. In the meantime, public gatherings are banned, the press and media censored, international TV stations blocked and Internet connections severed.
Given the Thai military’s long history of intervention in the country’s politics — 17 coups in 59 years, the last of which ended 15 years ago — this leisurely planned return to democracy is a cause for alarm. Many Thais in the capital, who initially welcomed Thaksin’s ouster and the military’s promise of a rapid restoration of the democratic process, may now be less enthusiastic.
Undoubtedly Thaksin’s administration had become increasingly wayward. Elected in 2001 largely with the support of rural voters, he became the first prime minister to win — with a landslide — a second successive general election in February 2005. At that point, perhaps because Thaksin had acquired an inflated sense of his power, things started to go wrong. This year, the $1.2 billion sale by him and his family of their controlling interest in Thailand’s largest telecom company, Shin Corp, to a Singapore company, provoked considerable anger. The anger was all the greater because he contrived to avoid paying tax on the profits.
In response to widespread protests, the prime minister called a snap election in April, which was effectively sabotaged by the refusal of opposition parties to field candidates and a substantial number of spoilt ballot papers. The constitutional court ruled the election invalid and Thaksin undertook to hold fresh elections while staying on as caretaker.
Thailand meanwhile drifted into a political, and indeed economic, limbo — it was impossible to produce a new budget. Public dissatisfaction grew on a number of fronts, including with his bloody attempted suppression of Muslim separatists in the south of the country. There was also concern that the anti-drugs clampdown launched by this former policeman in 2003 had seen more than 2000 suspects gunned down. This gave rise to fears that these initial human rights abuses, which had attracted little protest at the time, were being extended toward his foes in politics and the media. All of this amounted to a very good argument for a re-run election in October or November in which the issues could be debated and decided by the voters. The coup has pre-empted that process and this in itself must give rise to suspicions that the military is foolishly seeking to resume its old political role.
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