Asia Times Online
Southeast Asia
Apr 15, 2009
By Shawn W Crispin
BANGKOK - While red-shirted protesters manhandled a government security official they had handcuffed and temporarily taken hostage, former premier Thaksin Shinawatra placed a call from exile to his trusted United Front for Democracy Against Dictatorship (UDD) leader, Jakrapob Penkair, who reported back on events from an air-conditioned bus at the back of the UDD's main rally site.
The two shared a laugh over the UDD's siege of the Ministry of Interior earlier that Sunday and briefly discussed international media strategies. Jakrapob was the reputed brains behind the brinksmanship of Thailand's escalated political chaos, which in
recent days developed into scenes of street violence not seen since the breakdown in law and order that eventuated in the fateful military crackdown of May 1992.
The United States-educated former government spokesman Jakrapob was the self-professed chief strategist for prosecuting the "people's revolution" the exiled Thaksin called for during his recent video phone-ins, which on April 8 drew over 100,000 red-shirted supporters. Thaksin's rally cry for insurrection sparked wild scenes of unrest in Bangkok and acts of disobedience targeting symbols of central authority in several provincial capitals.
Jakrapob told Asia Times Online on Sunday that any military crackdown against UDD protesters would be met with a "vigorous self-defense" that could result in "civil war". That dire scenario was averted on Tuesday when troops surrounded the group's main protest stage outside Government House and forced UDD leaders to disperse their remaining few thousand loyal supporters and surrender to police authorities.
Thailand's security situation deteriorated rapidly after the UDD abandoned its earlier claims to non-violence and ramped up the intensity of its protests. UDD supporters left a chaotic mark by blockading major roadways in Bangkok, breaking up an Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) meeting in Pattaya where several world leaders were scheduled to attend and violently confronting security forces after Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva declared a state of emergency on Sunday.
Government and military officials claimed there were no casualties during a pre-dawn operation on Monday to clear protesters from a main Bangkok road intersection. An estimated over 80 protestors were injured in the clash, with over a score severely hurt, according to local news reports. Thaksin rebuked those accounts to international news outlets, claiming that the local press was complicit in a government cover-up and that "some" red-shirted protestors were killed in the melee.
In an SMS text message to international media late on Monday, Jakrapob characterized the government's version of events as "all bullshit" and that the UDD claimed there were "a lot of dead people". In a follow-up message on Monday morning, just before the UDD's surrender, Jakrapob said that "the local media is incorporated with [the government and] trying to make the whole country blindly believe that nothing serious is happening".
The implications of recent events are serious for Thailand's battered and bruised democracy, as the UDD effectively portrayed and pilloried Abhisit's government as propped up by the military and other anti-democratic forces. Despite his frantic last gasps, the 41-year-old, English-speaking Jakrapob distinguished himself throughout the chaos from the UDD's less-polished stage orators and some say he could emerge as the Thaksin-aligned opposition Peua Thai party's next prime ministerial candidate.
Competitive histories
That assumes that Thailand holds future elections and that the military under army commander General Anupong Paochinda stays in the barracks. With the rally's dispersal and its co-leaders' arrests, the history and interpretation of the UDD's escalation and the state's response will be hotly debated in the days and weeks ahead. So, too, will the reason and timing behind Thaksin's surprise lurch towards full-blown confrontation, including his public broadsides against members of King Bhumibol Adulyadej's advisory Privy Council.
One UDD insider says Jakrapob was instrumental in pushing the former premier in that controversial direction and that Thaksin's willingness to publicly criticize royal advisors was crucial to the movement's ability to mobilize the masses that gathered in front of Privy Council President Prem Tinsulanonda's private residence on April 8 to demand his and other royal advisors' resignations.
Many royalists interpreted Thaksin's and the UDD's revolutionary rally calls - which were made within earshot of the royal family's Bangkok palace - as a veiled threat to the monarchy and a harbinger of the challenge both Thaksin and Jakrapob could mount to the institution's role in Thai society after the highly revered 81-year-old Bhumibol eventually passes from the scene. Significantly, the military positioned its largest contingent around the palace when it deployed troops to restore order on Sunday.
Thaksin's recent bombshell allegations that Prem and his close associate General Surayud Chulanont were among the masterminds behind the 2006 coup mirror those first made by Jakrapob, who broke local taboos during the military-appointed administration by publicly accusing the royal advisory body of acting outside of its legal mandate.
Prem has consistently denied the charges and Jakrapob was briefly imprisoned for leading what was then a less potent anti-government protest movement that in July 2007 demonstrated raucously in front of Prem's private residence. It wasn't readily apparent then that Thaksin supported that short-lived protest movement, but Jakrapob successfully shifted Thailand's political debate by directly implicating privy councilors in the coup.
Thaksin's previous reluctance to confront royally affiliated figures was underscored when Jakrapob was knocked from his ministerial position in a democratically elected, Thaksin-aligned government in 2008 after a senior police official filed lese majeste charges against him. According to a well-placed source, Thaksin moved publicly to distance himself from his trusted aide in light of the royally-tinged allegations, but remained in close private contact.
That was when Thaksin was still bidding through behind-the-scenes negotiation for an elite settlement that would allow him to recover US$2.2 billion in family-owned assets now frozen in Thai banks in exchange for a vow to permanently stay out of politics, according to sources familiar with the situation.
Thaksin had been engaged in a secret mediation process with the palace and military led by a European interlocutor to find a compromise solution to the country's political impasse, according to Jakrapob. He told Asia Times Online that the foreign-led mediation process was a non-starter and that any negotiations should be held directly between Thais.
Those negotiations reportedly stalled because of the military's unwillingness to negotiate and the government's invigorated efforts to have Thaksin extradited to serve a two-year prison sentence for criminal conflict of interest charges handed down by a Thai court in 2008.
Muddied motivations
It's still unclear whether those stalled talks drove Thaksin to embrace Jakrapob's more radical vision for the country's political future. Thaksin's recent rally cries for a national uprising against aristocracy and the need for "true democracy" have echoed Jakrapob's long-held views that certain royal bodies should have a diminished future role in the country's democracy.
Nor is it clear that the UDD's provocative calls and tilt towards brinksmanship will enhance or undermine Thaksin's future negotiating position vis-a-vis his now publicly identified establishment adversaries. One UDD organizer, who requested anonymity, suggested that Thaksin's calls for a national uprising were no idle threat and that the protest group could in the weeks ahead stir more trouble at the provincial level.
He claimed that Thaksin operatives had for the past two years clandestinely funneled small arms through Cambodia to his supporters in various northeastern provinces, where Thaksin's grassroots support runs deep. The well-placed source also said the arms had been moved and distributed with the help of former Communist Party of Thailand (CPT) contacts, an ideologically driven insurgent group active in the 1960s and 1970s that frequently criticized the royal family during its years of armed resistance.
The group was disbanded in the 1980s, but some of its former student leaders were among Thaksin's top aides while he was in government. There are no indications Thaksin would support an armed insurgency to push his supposedly democratic agenda, but his vow to return to the country if the military cracked down on his supporters has raised new security questions. Abhisit vaguely acknowledged at the height of the recent unrest that the UDD had stockpiled weapons, but he failed to elaborate if that was only in Bangkok or more broadly across the country.
Those claims cast ominous new light on Prem's recent publicly stated support for the establishment of a new army command to oversee the northeastern region's internal security, which the 88-year-old former army commander characterized as his "last dream", according to news reports. The 2nd Army Region, based in Nakorn Ratchasima around two hours by road from Bangkok, is currently responsible for the expansive and decidedly pro-Thaksin rural region, which in the 1960s and 1970s was home to several pockets of CPT armed resistance.
One seasoned observer saw shades of the CPT's revolutionary rhetoric in Jakrapob's on-stage broadsides against aristocracy and calls for a diminished royal role in the country's political future. During an April 8 speech, Jakrapob said on stage that "privy councilors see the country as their treasure and the people as their flowers" - while asserting that none of the royal advisors, comprised mainly of former high-ranking soldiers, had done as much for the country as the democratically elected Thaksin.
Yet Jakrapob's preferred analogy would likely be with former Thai premier and statesman Pridi Banomyang, the civilian revolutionary who orchestrated the overthrow of Thailand's absolute monarchy in 1932 and a man Jakrapob frequently upheld as a democratic role model during several of his on-stage soliloquies and poetry readings.
Pridi later fled into exile, where he eventually died, after he was accused by military leaders of assassinating King Ananda Mahidol, the reining King Bhumibol's elder brother. In the chaotic aftermath of the UDD's self-proclaimed "final showdown" with the forces of aristocracy, and with those establishment forces so far still standing, it's a political fate some believe Jakrapob and Thaksin are destined to share.
Shawn W Crispin is Asia Times Online's Southeast Asia Editor. He may be reached at swcrispin@atimes.com
Southeast Asia
Apr 15, 2009
By Shawn W Crispin
BANGKOK - While red-shirted protesters manhandled a government security official they had handcuffed and temporarily taken hostage, former premier Thaksin Shinawatra placed a call from exile to his trusted United Front for Democracy Against Dictatorship (UDD) leader, Jakrapob Penkair, who reported back on events from an air-conditioned bus at the back of the UDD's main rally site.
The two shared a laugh over the UDD's siege of the Ministry of Interior earlier that Sunday and briefly discussed international media strategies. Jakrapob was the reputed brains behind the brinksmanship of Thailand's escalated political chaos, which in
recent days developed into scenes of street violence not seen since the breakdown in law and order that eventuated in the fateful military crackdown of May 1992.
The United States-educated former government spokesman Jakrapob was the self-professed chief strategist for prosecuting the "people's revolution" the exiled Thaksin called for during his recent video phone-ins, which on April 8 drew over 100,000 red-shirted supporters. Thaksin's rally cry for insurrection sparked wild scenes of unrest in Bangkok and acts of disobedience targeting symbols of central authority in several provincial capitals.
Jakrapob told Asia Times Online on Sunday that any military crackdown against UDD protesters would be met with a "vigorous self-defense" that could result in "civil war". That dire scenario was averted on Tuesday when troops surrounded the group's main protest stage outside Government House and forced UDD leaders to disperse their remaining few thousand loyal supporters and surrender to police authorities.
Thailand's security situation deteriorated rapidly after the UDD abandoned its earlier claims to non-violence and ramped up the intensity of its protests. UDD supporters left a chaotic mark by blockading major roadways in Bangkok, breaking up an Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) meeting in Pattaya where several world leaders were scheduled to attend and violently confronting security forces after Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva declared a state of emergency on Sunday.
Government and military officials claimed there were no casualties during a pre-dawn operation on Monday to clear protesters from a main Bangkok road intersection. An estimated over 80 protestors were injured in the clash, with over a score severely hurt, according to local news reports. Thaksin rebuked those accounts to international news outlets, claiming that the local press was complicit in a government cover-up and that "some" red-shirted protestors were killed in the melee.
In an SMS text message to international media late on Monday, Jakrapob characterized the government's version of events as "all bullshit" and that the UDD claimed there were "a lot of dead people". In a follow-up message on Monday morning, just before the UDD's surrender, Jakrapob said that "the local media is incorporated with [the government and] trying to make the whole country blindly believe that nothing serious is happening".
The implications of recent events are serious for Thailand's battered and bruised democracy, as the UDD effectively portrayed and pilloried Abhisit's government as propped up by the military and other anti-democratic forces. Despite his frantic last gasps, the 41-year-old, English-speaking Jakrapob distinguished himself throughout the chaos from the UDD's less-polished stage orators and some say he could emerge as the Thaksin-aligned opposition Peua Thai party's next prime ministerial candidate.
Competitive histories
That assumes that Thailand holds future elections and that the military under army commander General Anupong Paochinda stays in the barracks. With the rally's dispersal and its co-leaders' arrests, the history and interpretation of the UDD's escalation and the state's response will be hotly debated in the days and weeks ahead. So, too, will the reason and timing behind Thaksin's surprise lurch towards full-blown confrontation, including his public broadsides against members of King Bhumibol Adulyadej's advisory Privy Council.
One UDD insider says Jakrapob was instrumental in pushing the former premier in that controversial direction and that Thaksin's willingness to publicly criticize royal advisors was crucial to the movement's ability to mobilize the masses that gathered in front of Privy Council President Prem Tinsulanonda's private residence on April 8 to demand his and other royal advisors' resignations.
Many royalists interpreted Thaksin's and the UDD's revolutionary rally calls - which were made within earshot of the royal family's Bangkok palace - as a veiled threat to the monarchy and a harbinger of the challenge both Thaksin and Jakrapob could mount to the institution's role in Thai society after the highly revered 81-year-old Bhumibol eventually passes from the scene. Significantly, the military positioned its largest contingent around the palace when it deployed troops to restore order on Sunday.
Thaksin's recent bombshell allegations that Prem and his close associate General Surayud Chulanont were among the masterminds behind the 2006 coup mirror those first made by Jakrapob, who broke local taboos during the military-appointed administration by publicly accusing the royal advisory body of acting outside of its legal mandate.
Prem has consistently denied the charges and Jakrapob was briefly imprisoned for leading what was then a less potent anti-government protest movement that in July 2007 demonstrated raucously in front of Prem's private residence. It wasn't readily apparent then that Thaksin supported that short-lived protest movement, but Jakrapob successfully shifted Thailand's political debate by directly implicating privy councilors in the coup.
Thaksin's previous reluctance to confront royally affiliated figures was underscored when Jakrapob was knocked from his ministerial position in a democratically elected, Thaksin-aligned government in 2008 after a senior police official filed lese majeste charges against him. According to a well-placed source, Thaksin moved publicly to distance himself from his trusted aide in light of the royally-tinged allegations, but remained in close private contact.
That was when Thaksin was still bidding through behind-the-scenes negotiation for an elite settlement that would allow him to recover US$2.2 billion in family-owned assets now frozen in Thai banks in exchange for a vow to permanently stay out of politics, according to sources familiar with the situation.
Thaksin had been engaged in a secret mediation process with the palace and military led by a European interlocutor to find a compromise solution to the country's political impasse, according to Jakrapob. He told Asia Times Online that the foreign-led mediation process was a non-starter and that any negotiations should be held directly between Thais.
Those negotiations reportedly stalled because of the military's unwillingness to negotiate and the government's invigorated efforts to have Thaksin extradited to serve a two-year prison sentence for criminal conflict of interest charges handed down by a Thai court in 2008.
Muddied motivations
It's still unclear whether those stalled talks drove Thaksin to embrace Jakrapob's more radical vision for the country's political future. Thaksin's recent rally cries for a national uprising against aristocracy and the need for "true democracy" have echoed Jakrapob's long-held views that certain royal bodies should have a diminished future role in the country's democracy.
Nor is it clear that the UDD's provocative calls and tilt towards brinksmanship will enhance or undermine Thaksin's future negotiating position vis-a-vis his now publicly identified establishment adversaries. One UDD organizer, who requested anonymity, suggested that Thaksin's calls for a national uprising were no idle threat and that the protest group could in the weeks ahead stir more trouble at the provincial level.
He claimed that Thaksin operatives had for the past two years clandestinely funneled small arms through Cambodia to his supporters in various northeastern provinces, where Thaksin's grassroots support runs deep. The well-placed source also said the arms had been moved and distributed with the help of former Communist Party of Thailand (CPT) contacts, an ideologically driven insurgent group active in the 1960s and 1970s that frequently criticized the royal family during its years of armed resistance.
The group was disbanded in the 1980s, but some of its former student leaders were among Thaksin's top aides while he was in government. There are no indications Thaksin would support an armed insurgency to push his supposedly democratic agenda, but his vow to return to the country if the military cracked down on his supporters has raised new security questions. Abhisit vaguely acknowledged at the height of the recent unrest that the UDD had stockpiled weapons, but he failed to elaborate if that was only in Bangkok or more broadly across the country.
Those claims cast ominous new light on Prem's recent publicly stated support for the establishment of a new army command to oversee the northeastern region's internal security, which the 88-year-old former army commander characterized as his "last dream", according to news reports. The 2nd Army Region, based in Nakorn Ratchasima around two hours by road from Bangkok, is currently responsible for the expansive and decidedly pro-Thaksin rural region, which in the 1960s and 1970s was home to several pockets of CPT armed resistance.
One seasoned observer saw shades of the CPT's revolutionary rhetoric in Jakrapob's on-stage broadsides against aristocracy and calls for a diminished royal role in the country's political future. During an April 8 speech, Jakrapob said on stage that "privy councilors see the country as their treasure and the people as their flowers" - while asserting that none of the royal advisors, comprised mainly of former high-ranking soldiers, had done as much for the country as the democratically elected Thaksin.
Yet Jakrapob's preferred analogy would likely be with former Thai premier and statesman Pridi Banomyang, the civilian revolutionary who orchestrated the overthrow of Thailand's absolute monarchy in 1932 and a man Jakrapob frequently upheld as a democratic role model during several of his on-stage soliloquies and poetry readings.
Pridi later fled into exile, where he eventually died, after he was accused by military leaders of assassinating King Ananda Mahidol, the reining King Bhumibol's elder brother. In the chaotic aftermath of the UDD's self-proclaimed "final showdown" with the forces of aristocracy, and with those establishment forces so far still standing, it's a political fate some believe Jakrapob and Thaksin are destined to share.
Shawn W Crispin is Asia Times Online's Southeast Asia Editor. He may be reached at swcrispin@atimes.com
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