One last word or two about the Thai political situation. It is not affecting anyone’s daily life at all, except for those who are involved in it. Thaksin is in London “holidaying” as one of newspapers put it; his entire family and retainers are also there with him in the multi-million dollar home that he bought over 6 months ago. More and more information will come out now — and get truly investigated — about how unbelievably corrupt that man was/is. He basically was able to bypass all the measures in the constitution which were setup to maintain checks and balances against abuse of power, including having his own men in the oversight agencies. So, he was able “legally” to do essentially whatever he wanted. When we were here before, there was one maverick woman who was Auditor General and who was insisting on having that office do honest and thorough investigations. You can well imagine that Thaksin had her removed. Well, she’s back!!
As Interim Prime Minister, the junta have chosen a retired general who is past Commander of the Army and a close advisor/confidant to the King. Many people had hoped the appointee would be the head of the Bank of Thailand but this move is generally considered to be OK also. Thaksin had apparently managed to get many of his cronies appointed to key positions in the military (surprise!) so many people feel that the new Interim PM will be able to be a guard against the military who might plan a countercoup.
Now, the question you might have is “How come this terrible man had such an overwhelming majority of the popular vote?” A partial explanation is that Thaksin’s support base is in the rural North and Northeast where most of the poorest and less-educated people live and where his party really and truly bought votes. It is confirmed information that in some villages free cell phones were given out to people who agreed to vote for Thaksin (of course the cell phones were on the network that Thaksin’s children owned so when people had to buy
new phone cards….). Now, being Westerners you might wonder “How did that insure that these same people would then keep their word and actually vote.” Easy, the people distributing the phones took names and checked them on election day. I am also told that in some cases, they actually took the people’s national ID cards and only returned them when they voted. This latter piece of information may be anecdotal, I’m not sure of it, but it came from a friend whose wife comes from one of those rural villages. In any case, this is not following democratic principles.
It is true that Thaksin did some good things with rural projects for those areas, so he is certainly not all bad. One Thai friend who came from the Northeast actually said to Ira and me a couple of years ago that she and the people in her village didn’t care what Thaksin did or how corrupt he was, just so long as he continued to take care of them.
This remark really brought home to us the truth that the survival level of people has to reach a certain comfort level before they’re even able to be or interested in being concerned about the niceties of principles.
Anyhow, I have attached a couple of pictures of the tanks in Bangkok so that you can see the flavor of the response here. Certainly not very threatening. The boys are two of the sons of our friends Yim and Doug.
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Tags: Thailand