Effective Citizenship Country's Best Hope

[Jai Dee]

Effective citizenship country's best hope

Rural masses must be weaned off populist excess and the middle class off its dependence on the military

More than four months have passed since the military, acting on the overt consent of the middle class, overthrew the Thaksin government in a bloodless coup. However, very little has been done by Prime Minister Surayud Chulanont's government and the Council for National Security (CNS) to try to bridge the ideological divide between the urban elite and the rural masses, the majority of whom remain loyal to the deposed prime minister. The urban elite may have won the battle after the military seized power from democratically elected Thai Rak Thai leader Thaksin Shinawatra, whom they deemed anti-democratic and corrupt. But people in the countryside, who constitute the majority of eligible voters, continue to be enthralled by Thaksin's ingeniously-designed populist policies, and they may yet win the war when the next general election is held.

The interim government and the CNS have one year or less to clean up the messes left behind by the Thaksin regime and lay the groundwork for a smooth transition that will lead to the restoration of full democracy in this country. Given the time constraints, they will have to make up for lost time and rev up the tempo if their key objectives are to be fulfilled. These objectives are: to prove Thaksin's guilt in at least some of the alleged major cases of corruption and abuses of power; to put the country's slowing economy on an even keel; to bring about reconciliation between pro- and- anti-Thaksin camps and between Thai Muslims of Malay descent in the deep South and mainstream society; and to draw up and promulgate a new constitution and hold a free and fair election. In all of these self-appointed tasks, the Surayud government and the CNS are struggling hard, and their chance of success remains a big question mark.

Proving that Thaksin committed serious wrongdoings while in power has turned out to be very difficult because senior bureaucrats are reluctant to cooperate with the various committees set up to investigate allegations of corruption against Thaksin. This is partly because they don't want to be seen to be mixed up with the scams. That is understandable, because in virtually all cases of corruption, politicians need at least the acquiescence, if not the active participation, of senior government officials to steal public funds or profit from abuses of power.

On economic management, the Surayud government has turned in a disappointing performance with its rigid, half-baked economic policies that have tended to cause confusion and create more problems than they solve. Little progress has been made towards reconciliation. But the constitution-drafting process is under way.

In an effort to roll back Thaksin's staying power among the rural masses, the government and the CNS have revived the Internal Security Operations Command, a long-dormant agency created to wage psychological warfare against communist guerrillas from the 1960s to the early 1980s. It has yet to be seen whether the government and the military council can make effective use of such Cold War-era tactics to counter Thaksin's hi-tech propaganda war in the domestic media as well as on international air waves.

All the while, peace remains elusive in the deep South after almost 2,000 people have been killed since Islamic militants/Malay separatists renewed their armed struggle against the Thai state in early 2004. No ground-breaking ideas are being put forward or major policy shifts being taken towards ending the violence in Yala, Pattani and Narathiwat as insurgents are allowed to harass the civilian population while the military dithers.

The best that we as a society can expect is that before democracy is to be returned to the country the rural masses will have been weaned off the worst form of populism. It is also hoped that the middle-class elite will have shed their over-dependence on the military to guarantee the smooth functioning of our political system, or - when that fails - to intervene in order to rebuild democracy every time things do not work out the way they like. The worst-case scenario would be for the government and military to fail to achieve most of their objectives and for both people in the countryside and the urban middle class to stick to their old habits and stay divisive and confrontational, while Thaksin and his cronies, who manage to avoid prosecution for alleged corruption and other cases of wrongdoing, stage a political comeback.

Editorial Opinion from The Nation - 27 January 2007