Sounding out Thaksin's rural legacyBy Shawn W Crispin CHIANG MAI, Thailand - Ousted Thai prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra hails from the northern province of Chiang Mai, part of the rural heartland where his grassroots political support is supposed to run deepest. Yet six months after the populist leader was toppled in a bloodless military coup, all is calm on the former premier's home front.
Much has been made of Thaksin's strong rural support base, which catapulted him to resounding electoral victories in 2001 and 2005. After seizing power last September, the Thai military initially fretted that Thaksin loyalists, which they then vaguely referred to as "undercurrents", would try to stir unrest in protest against his removal. The junta has harassed a handful of top Thaksin aides, but to date it has maintained a loose security policy toward the country's northern provinces.
There is perhaps no better gauge of rural Thai sentiment than the news and views expressed on independently run community radio stations. Asia Times Online recently took the pulse of nearly 20 different community and commercial radio stations across northern Thailand, several of which previously broadcast news that favored Thaksin's Thai Rak Thai political party. Since the coup, stations have almost unanimously changed their tune, shifting from pro-Thaksin to pro-junta commentary.
To be sure, part of that shift can be attributed to the ruling junta's initial order to broadcast news that promotes national unity. But after an initial meeting with all station managers at regional army headquarters last September, enforcement of the military's vague guidelines has been slack - if not non-existent. There is no visible military presence in Chiang Mai city and in provincial areas barring the provincial airport. And few if any of the northern region's more than 1,000 community radio stations, which generally cater to about 20-25 different villages each, have opted to close down in protest.
Moreover, anonymous call-in radio programs, which were banned for a few days directly after the coup, are on-air again. Nearly all of the station managers who spoke with Asia Times Online said callers seldom if ever spoke critically of the interim military government's performance, nor did they yearn for Thaksin's return to power.
The lack of grassroots complaints about the coup through community radio's anonymous interactive channel sends a complicated signal about Thaksin's rural legacy - as, too, does the rural grassroots' apparent easy acquiescence and acceptance of the abrupt transition from democratic to military rule. To be sure, Thaksin's well-marketed populist policies, including a cheap-health-care program, a revolving development fund for most of the country's 77,000 villages, and other populist handouts, were well received by many rural voters.
Liberal academics have argued that those well-targeted policies sparked a new political consciousness in Thailand's countryside, where rural voters are now more demanding of both their local and national representatives. Those populist policies, however, represented only one small part of Thaksin's larger political strategy toward the grassroots. Feudal legacyRather than promoting more local-level autonomy and democracy, Thaksin in effect maintained and positioned himself atop the local patron-client relationships that have arguably long hobbled rural Thailand's political and economic development.
That feudal legacy was slated for reform through various decentralization measures included in the progressive 1997 constitution, which was annulled in the wake of last year's coup. Thaksin deliberately - if not disingenuously - ensured that those center-to-periphery power-devolving reforms were never fully implemented. To the contrary, he moved to reimpose national authority over grassroots governance, most visibly by taking personal, benevolent-patron credit for well-targeted government handouts of taxpayers' money to rural constituencies, but also through policies such as his CEO (chief executive officer) governor program, which gave Thaksin-appointed representatives huge discretion over budget outlays.
At the same time, Thaksin often formed political alliances with local politicians known or suspected to have links with powerful organized-crime groups, including the drug- and human-trafficking trades that run rife in Thailand's various lawless northern areas. For instance, Worataan Talugrasit, a 70-year-old community radio broadcaster from Phetchaboon province, claims that in his village Thaksin's political supporters took control over rather than combated the local methamphetamine trade. When Thaksin launched his controversial war on drugs in 2003, where more than 2,200 drug suspects were killed in extrajudicial fashion, Thai Rak Thai party heavies arranged the murder of their pill-peddling rivals, Worataan claims. "People were scared of influential people connected to Thaksin.
Things are better after the coup." In northernmost Chiang Rai province, Thaksin likewise formed political linkages with local politicians known to have ties to human-trafficking rings, including at least one prominent member of his former inner circle whom the military hauled in for questioning after launching last year's coup. According to sources familiar with the situation, the US Central Intelligence Agency before the coup alerted a foreign aid worker investigating trafficking issues in the province to leave the area because the politician in question had placed an assassination order against him.
Meanwhile, grassroots activists and opposition politicians spoke out against Thaksin and the development projects his government designed for Chiang Mai city, which often put his political associates' and his own family's business interests ahead of local-community livelihoods, including the forced evictions of villagers to make way for his family's Night Safari tourist attraction. "Although he was born here, to many in Chiang Mai he was just another rich politician," said Jiraporn Witayasakpan, a lecturer of mass communications at Chiang Mai University. "Some may have liked him, but there was a widespread perception that he did things more for his political party and underlings than the general public.
In the end, ordinary people didn't get much from his government." Unrevealed realitiesIn Chiang Mai, those on-the-ground political realities, often unrevealed to visiting news reporters who focused on Thaksin's billboard-marketed populist policies, from the start raised hard questions about his frequently stated commitment to democracy and law and order. But those perceptions would go a long way in explaining the grassroots silence surrounding Thaksin's unceremonious demise, including in rural areas where his support was supposed to be strongest. Liberal academics like to perpetuate the scenario of a politically conscious rural mass, peeved by the new draft charter's likely proviso allowing for an appointed rather than elected prime minister, descending on Bangkok to demand a return to Thaksin-led democracy.
Left-leaning Thai newspapers, including the English-language daily The Nation, likewise dispense dire predictions of a clash between the military and yet-to-coalesce street protesters, similar to the cataclysmic events in 1992 that saw soldiers gun down perhaps hundreds of pro-democracy demonstrators in the capital. Recent front-page reports have focused on a small fringe of anti-coup groups, which to date have yet to mount more than 1,000 protesters. Previous pro-democracy protests in the direct aftermath of the coup led by a radical Marxist academic attracted more journalists than actual protesters. Meanwhile, the army's comparatively under-reported "good morals" drive last weekend attracted more than 10,000 participants. If the prevailing mood in Chiang Mai is any indicator, rural-led protests are not on the foreseeable political horizon. And they likely won't be even if the coup makers, as expected, introduce a less democratic new constitution that allows them to appoint the prime minister and maintain some sort of role in politics after this year's general elections.
"Thaksin's grassroots support was always more financial than philosophical," said a researcher connected with Chiang Mai University's Social Research Center. "After the coup, those allegiances broke down. Now that the military is stepping in to fill [the] financial gap, now the people are suddenly on their side." If so, Thaksin's own anti-democratic legacy toward rural areas sowed the seeds of his own political demise. Despite his strong electoral mandate, he was widely viewed more as a strong leader than a liberal democrat. And now the military has adroitly inserted itself atop the same political-patronage pyramid that Thaksin - albeit more skillfully - once presided over through populist handouts. To be sure, the military's mobilization of royal symbolism from the start signaled to the rural masses - who deeply revere His Majesty King Bhumibol Adulyadej - that the military's intervention had palatial consent. Since, the royal association with the military-appointed interim administration led by former army commander and privy councilor General Surayud Chulanont has purposefully been less stark.
The local print media have now taken to skewering Surayud's government of once-retired bureaucrats, soldiers and technocrats for its indecisiveness and policy miscues - news reports that the military has notably not moved to censor. That's because the political psychology of Bangkok-based newspaper editors and the country's rural masses are in many ways at direct opposites. Thailand's rural countryside, and even urban-based middle class, frequently demonstrate a strong conservative streak in their political behavior, often to the consternation of left-leaning academics and reform activists. If King Bhumibol were symbolically to cast the first vote during the planned national referendum on what is expected to be a less democratic constitution, the rural countryside would obediently follow the royal lead. And even if the monarch chooses to remain aloof from the upcoming referendum, there are no indications yet that Thailand's rural masses are prepared to mount any protest against a sustained military role in politics - not even in Thaksin's own home town. Shawn W Crispin is Asia Times Online's Southeast Asia Editor. (Copyright 2007 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact us about sales, syndication and republishing.)
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Blog Master said.... Its good article ! You have to know about Thais , they're always be in quiet , but if they explode their emotion out , its terrible thing. They have ever found PM like Thaksin before, He's unique. This's article shown that microphone of the press've never told the truth what the people's think like a national votes.
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