Dictatorship Of The Poo Yai

[Gravelrash]

Khi Kwai Blog - Sections edited for making reference to Lese Majeste or anything else that might push forum rules.

The 2007 Constitution of the Kingdom of Thailand begins with a tawdry, obscene fabricaton. With Orwellian audacity, its preamble states: โดยที่การปกครองของประเทศไทยในระบอบประชาธิปไตยอันมีพระมหากษัตริย์ทรงเป็นประมุขได้ดําเนินวัฒนามากว่าเจ็ดสิบห้าป. The official English translation is still more unequivocal, removing any language referring to the “development” of democratic institutions: “Thailand has been under the rule of democratic government with the King as head of the state for more than 75 years.” There you have it. No mention is made of aborted transitions and military takeovers. No significance is granted to the decades of repression Thailand experienced under the thumb of ghastly military dictators who governed the country with a level of savagery only exceeded by their greed. No meaningful role is attributed to the hundreds of brave young Thais who lost their lives so that others would have some say on how they should live theirs. Not so much as a footnote is reserved for the pro-democracy students at Thammasat University, whom paramilitary death squads raped, murdered, and hanged from trees — their bodies mutilated, eyes ripped out of their sockets, mouths stuffed with old shoes — in October of 1976.

The official, comic-book version of Thai history that the government routinely stuffs down the throats of millions of school children nationwide has no place for the Thai people’s painful struggle for democracy. Those who died, lost limbs, went to jail, or fled into the jungle for the cause did all of this for no reason whatsoever. ...CUT... The 1973 and 1976 massacres? The students were misguided. And, under the circumstances, Thanom really wasn’t all that bad. Black May 1992? Again, it’s hard to see why the demonstrators were in such a rush to topple Suchinda. The constitution his government wrote was already reasonable. In any event, had the protesters just waited a little while, they could have amended it via the democratic process, which of course has been functioning uninterruptedly for over 75 years.

Plenty of elections have been held in Thailand since 1930s, at a frequency that has at times surpassed that of countries with rather more distinguished democratic records. But many such elections took place under conditions of severely limited competition, had their outcome predetermined by fraud or massive deployment of state resources, or in any case turned out to be irrelevant to the exercise of real political power. For much the intervening time, moreover, government alternation has typically been accomplished through coups, not elections. And though introducing, restoring, or otherwise saving democracy has reliably served as the rationale for many of the plentiful coups that have forcibly, if often bloodlessly, removed a succession of Thai governments since 1932, most of the “permanent” constitutions that have cyclically been promulgated, suspended, and flushed down the crapper were designed as a way to provide the regime of the day with the veneer of a legal foundation more than to regulate anything vaguely resembling democratic competition.

Government propaganda notwithstanding, Thailand has only been a “democracy” in any meaningful sense of the word for a relatively small portion of its post-absolutist history — a brief interlude in the 1970s (1973-1976), another short stretch between 1988 and 1991, a longer but equally ill-fated period between 1992 and 2006, and the year since the military last retreated to its barracks in December of 2007. Some of the recent events, however, call into question whether Thailand is now, or has indeed ever been, a democracy.

To be sure, definitions of democracy are contested. But most people who make a living studying this issue tend to agree that a system of government can be described as a “democracy” if and only if, at the very minimum, it satisfies seven procedural requirements Robert Dahl spelled out in his 1971 book Polyarchy.

1. Control over government decisions about policy is constitutionally vested in elected officials.

2. Elected officials are chosen in frequent and fairly conducted elections in which coercion is comparatively uncommon.

3. Practically all adults have the right to vote in the elections of officials.

4. Practically all adults have the right to run for elective offices.

5. Citizens have a right to express themselves without the danger of severe punishment on political matters broadly defined.

6. Citizens have a right to seek out alternative sources of information. Moreover, alternative sources of information exist and are protected by law.

7. Citizens also have the right to form relatively independent associations or organizations.

Philippe Schmitter and Terry Karl (Journal of Democracy, 2: 75-88, 1988) later introduced two additional requirements that have won broad acceptance in the literature:

8. Popularly elected officials must be able to exercise their constitutional powers without being subjected to overriding (albeit informal) opposition from unelected officials.

9. The polity must be self-governing.

It goes without saying that in many countries, even the most “democratic,” the rights and freedoms citizens enjoy are rarely absolute. In practice, many countries impose restrictions on who exactly can vote or run for office - some exclude citizens who are insane, have been convicted of a crime, or have recently declared bankruptcy; others impose age qualifications on exactly who can vote in some elections (e.g. only those voters over 25 years of age can cast ballots in Italian Senate elections) and run for particular offices (e.g., 35 years of age to be eligible for the Presidency of the United States). And, in most countries, the process by which political parties and organizations are formed is subject to some form of regulation that inevitably renders freedom of association never completely free.

So the problem is not really that some of these rights are not absolute in Thailand, but rather that the Thai government has restricted them to a point where it makes little sense to speak of the country as little more than a bastardized version of democracy. The deal-breakers, more specifically, are the inadequate protections that Thailand offers to expression, alternative sources of information, and association as well as the oversized role of powerful unelected institutions over elected politicians (requirements 5-8).

A song by The Clash captures freedom of expression as it exists in Thailand these days: “You have the right to free speech as long as you’re not dumb enough to actually try it.” ........CUT

......Now there are typically three ways in which Thai officials explain the compatibility of “democracy” with these medieval restrictions on freedom of speech. Each is worthy of some consideration and rebuttal.

First, it is often noted that many countries typically described as democracies have laws that protect heads of state from vilification. That is certainly the case, but it should be noted that: .... CUT.... Nor, it should be noted, am I aware of any Thai citizen convicted in a Thai court of law for offending a foreign head of state. Foreign Minister Kasit Piromya recently called Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen something along the lines of “deranged,” but no one has yet bothered to initiate the idiot’s prosecution.

Second, it is sometimes noted that countries like Italy and Germany criminalize offenses such as “the apology of Fascism” or the advocacy of Nazism, or that countries like the United States have laws that attach stiffer penalties to those who engage in violent offenses classified as “hate crimes.” Indeed, I believe that this is the best argument that Thai officials have at their disposal because these restrictions contradict a quintessentially “democratic” principle: the idea that you only support free speech if you are willing to champion someone else’s right to express the very views you most abhor. However, it should be noted that: 1) Again, these laws are enforced in very rare occasions - typically only when they are accompanied by violence or threats of violence; 2) It seems quite ludicrous to equate Nazism or Fascism - two ideologies responsible for the deaths of 50 million people in the twentieth century, with republicanism; 3) ...CUT... I would submit that far more damage to the institution of the monarchy is inflicted by PAD activists caught on worldwide television holding up a portrait of the revered King while they are shooting at Thaksin supporters on the streets of Bangkok. Because, however, the PAD’s political agenda dovetails with that of Thailand’s urban/bureaucratic/military elites, these people were naturally never subjected to prosecution.

Third, lèse majesté laws are often defended on the grounds that they protect Thai culture. Sometimes this claim is accompanied by the assertion (though not really much in the way of argument) that they protect “national security.” That is fair enough; in fact, an overwhelming majority of the Thai people probably supports the laws on these very grounds. But you can’t have it both ways. You cannot have, at the same time, a form of government you call a “democracy” while at the same time restricting someone’s right to call for political reform. Democracies guarantee freedom of speech precisely because 1) It is believed people have a right to call for political, economic, and social change; and 2) Especially in need of legal protection are minority viewpoints that the majority of the people resents (for cultural, ideological, or any other reason).

...CUT...

The discussion of the restrictions placed on freedom of association in Thailand requires us to make a slightly more subtle point. On the one hand, political parties are acceptably free to form, register, and compete in elections. On the other hand, potentially more troubling is legislation (and its arbitrary enforcement) concerning party dissolution. The dissolution of the People Power Party, Chat Thai, and Matchima Thipataya recently ordered by the Constitution Court is illustrative of the fact that the rules on party dissolution are little more than a way for unelected institutions to restrict freedom of association in pursuit of a broader, distinctly undemocratic political agenda.

Ostensibly, these constitutional provisions are an instrument at the disposal of the Thai state to tackle the country’s endemic levels of electoral fraud. Any party whose Executive Committee includes at least one member who has been disqualified for egregious violations of the law by the Election Commission of Thailand is liable to be dissolved and have its ENTIRE Executive Committee banned from office for a period of 5 years. Laws this draconian are almost unheard of in democratic countries, where it is typically left to voters to decide which parties should survive and which should not. Even countries like India, where democracy works much better than it does in Thailand in spite of still more pervasive levels of corruption and vote buying, no such rule is on the books. And, considering that these provisions were written into the constitution by the 2006 coup-makers, who generally sought to put new legal safeguards in place against the return to power of ousted Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, it is hard not to wonder whether there is more to these rules than the fight against corruption.

In fact, the manner in which these rules have recently been enforced appears to substantiate these suspicions. In particular, it is worthy of note that the Constitution Court (an institution that many observers have had good reason to believe to be controlled by those very urban/bureaucratic/military elites) recently dissolved the PPP, brought about the downfall of its elected government, disqualified its executives for 5 years, gave the losers of the last elections the numbers to form a new government, and precipitated by-elections that subsequently strengthened Abhisit’s legislative majority due to the infractions of a single man - former PPP deputy leader and House Speaker Yongyuth Tiyaparat, found guilty of vote buying shortly after the 2007 election. Meanwhile, of course, the Democrat Party has been spared the same fate, as the ECT took a characteristically more lenient approach to the peccadillos DP candidates were accused to have engaged in. Just today, the ECT threatened PPP’s successor (the Peua Thai Party) with dissolution, should it move forward with a proposal that isn’t even explicitly banned by the constitution - appointing a person who has been barred from politics (in this case, Thaksin Shinawatra himself) to an advisory position - if the ECT finds that Thaksin’s appointment “adversely affects the country’s stability.” Of course, no one at the ECT batted an eye when banned politician Newin Chidchob openly negotiated with Abhisit the terms (and price) of his parliamentary faction’s support of the new government.

The undemocratic restrictions that exist in Thailand against speech, association, and access to alternative sources of information bring us to what is possibly the most important (if perhaps less visible to the casual observer) aspect of the country’s failure to conform to any reasonable definition of “democracy.” As the events of the past few months have rendered all too clear, Thailand is a place where real political power does not rest with elected officials.

To be sure, elected representatives and ministers drawn from their ranks have ample freedom to use their positions to get rich, help their proteges get ahead, and repay contributors of their support by plundering state coffers with impunity. What elected officials cannot do under the present circumstances is set national policy, especially of the kind that benefits the provincial masses. It’s when they try that the unholy alliance of Thailand’s military brass, bureaucratic elites, and what has been called the “blue blood jet set” based in the nation’s capital springs into action. If they can, they will use their control of the courts to overturn the results of elections through means that have the appearance of being legal. If they need to, they will send onto the streets gangs of paramilitary thugs like the PAD to castrate the government and paralyze the country, all the while guaranteeing that the nation’s laws will not apply to them. And, if they absolutely must, they will roll out the tanks and the special forces - formally taking power just long enough to write a new constitution that corrects the inability of the previous one to insulate Thailand’s ruling class from the nuisance posed by elected officials.

Of course, authoritarian rulers in Thailand - from Phibun to Sarit, all the way down to Prem - have a long history of vindicating the irrelevance of supposedly Western standards as well as invoking the amorphous concept of “Thai-style” democracy as an alternative better suited to the country’s history, values, and traditions. The problem is that a government without free speech, free association, and free access to alternative sources of information is no democracy at all. And, quite frankly, the form of government that has been evolving in Thailand over the last 75 years appears to be a uniquely Thai variant of dictatorship - one where an unelected, ruling class has sought entrench its power while rendering itself increasingly invisible (and, therefore, unaccountable) to the Thai people and the international community. In this sense, it is natural that Thailand’s real power holders and their vile propagandists in the local press would want to cloak their ”dictatorship of the poo yai” in the benign, legitimizing language of culture and democracy. It is the world at large, not to mention the good people of Thailand, who should wake up to the fact that “Thai-style democracy” is but the proverbial turd sandwich coated in a thin layer of chocolate.

Edited January 23, 2009 by Reimar
remove apostrophe from topic titel

[noahvail]

"To be sure, definitions of democracy are contested. But most people who make a living studying this issue tend to agree that a system of government can be described as a "democracy" if and only if, at the very minimum, it satisfies seven proceduracccal requirements Robert Dahl spelled out in his 1971 book Polyarchy.

1. Control over government decisions about policy is constitutionally vested in elected officials."

I'm not going to get into the whys and wherefores of this post. It's obviously prejudicial in its tone, and I'm not sure it should be here. That being said, I have to comment on the above:

Yup, I'll contest this definition of 'democracy.' It is, in fact, the definition of 'republic' - which definition still stands. Dahl is a very learned man, no doubt - an academician who published a book in 1971 attempting to change the definition democracy and not succeeding, and who has made a career out of it writing papers and books, gaining tenure and and reaping the many honoraria he has no doubt amassed. Google republic definition, google democracy definition, and look at the fundamental differences. Please, do not say that a republic is a descendant of, or a variety of, a democracy. It's not simply semantics that is being argued here. There's an enormous difference between a democracy, which is government by all the people, and a republic, which is government by a relatively few people who are elected by (reasonably speaking) all the people. Just think of when your elected representative goes against the wishes of virtually all his constituents and 'votes his conscience.' A democracy would not cast their votes for the same position. Anyway, they are too fundamentally different concepts.

Now, if I remember back in my old school days (around the time of the Medici family) if the foundation of your position is incorrect, your entire argument pretty much falls apart. Perhaps it has, perhaps it hasn't. But you've copied a person's rant pretty much intact, and the ranter's position doesn't seem to work, imho. After all, isn't Thailand a constitutional monarchy?

Edited January 23, 2009 by noahvail