October issue 2006

“As in the Philippines and Burma,” Simon Tisdall commented in The Guardian late last month, “democracy in Thailand is in danger of being musharrafed.” It’s hard to say for certain whether this is the first time the name of Pakistan’s military ruler has been employed as a verb, but the usage obviously offers little cause for pride.

There are, naturally, several significant differences between what occurred in Islamabad in October 1999 and last month’s events in Bangkok. But there are some striking parallels, too. An elected prime minister is overthrown because he is said to be making a mess of things and, not least, accused of attempted interference in the functioning of the army. The junta that takes over, is reluctant about its action being interpreted as a “coup” — it prefers the designation “political change.” It promises an improved democracy a year or so down the road, and begins to investigate the deposed prime minister’s corruption.

There is, of course, no likelihood of Thaksin Shinawatra ending up in Saudi Arabia, but the takeover was effected while he was in New York for the annual gathering of heads of state and government at the United Nations, and at the time of writing he was effectively in exile in Britain. There have been persistent rumours that a great deal of luggage, ostensibly belonging to Thaksin, was flown out of the country in the days preceding the coup, suggesting that he was at least tangentially aware of what lay in store.

Like Pakistan, Thailand is no stranger to the putsch syndrome. In fact, in any competition it would win hands down, with 18 coups under its belt over a 72-year period. That works out to an average of one every four years. One reason for Pakistan’s lower rate of attrition is not particularly complimentary: we tend to tolerate military dictators for much longer. Ayub Khan and Zia-ul-Haq ruled the roost for 11 years each, and Yahya Khan might have clung on for longer than a little over two years had he not blundered into genocide in East Pakistan and, consequently, a war against India. Pervez Musharraf’s regime is seven years old and still, on the face of it, going strong, with the general usually able to deflect pressure regarding his formal attire.

There have, of course, been cases of military officers acquiring power through a coup, and going on to retain it in the long run, by putting themselves up as presidential candidates — which is clearly more acceptable than completely ignoring the popular will, provided the elections are not manipulated and the franchise is universal. Africa is, by a long stretch, the leader in this field: Libya, Guinea, Burkina Faso, Sudan, The Gambia, the Central African Republic and Mauritania are all ruled by men who initially came to power through a coup. Muammar Gaddafi took this route in 1969, while Mauritania’s Ely Ould Mohammed Vald grabbed the reins as recently as last year.

As continents go, until 20 years or so ago, the coup syndrome was most commonly associated with Latin America, where civilian rule was often the exception. Times have changed. Perhaps the closest thing today to a former coup leader, in that part of the world, is Hugo Chavez. As a relatively junior military officer, he attempted a takeover in Venezuela, failed, and was imprisoned for his troubles. After serving his term, he opted for a purely political tack, and now has several landslides to his name. What’s more, a US-supported coup bid against him — organised in the classical style, through a conspiracy between senior officers and the so-called captains of industry — floundered in the face of popular resistance and opposition, within a substantial section of the army.

One reason why the lure of military rule has diminished in recent decades is because the US has discovered that civilian regimes can offer, more or less, the same quantum of loyalty, and they can generally do so without human rights transgressions, on a par with the repression associated with the likes of the Pinochet junta in Chile. By and large, this change of approach has worked well enough: even the ostensibly socialist-led governments in Chile and Brazil have not deviated too sharply from the neo-liberal path so many Third World countries were compelled to follow in the 1980s. As long as they don’t interfere with the operations of transnational corporations, mild dissent — such as on the question of Iraq — is tolerated. Problems arise, however, when people elect leaders who threaten or attempt to topple the rotten edifice of the existing economic order and replace it with something less inequitable and more humane. Hence the alarm in Washington over events in Venezuela and Bolivia. Hence, too, American encouragement for the military-industrial effort to unseat Chavez.

There is, however, no reason to believe that the US had any particular interest in Thaksin’s overthrow. Nor is it particularly surprising that western protests over the Thai generals’ decision to stop democracy in its tracks have been remarkable subdued. Thaksin — who was a policeman before he went into business and became a billionaire, acquiring political ambitions in the process — gave the impression of seeking to establish himself as an independent Asian leader, in the style of Malaysia’s now retired Mahathir Mohamad. Although, it is unlikely that he intended to follow in Mahathir’s footsteps, to the extent of becoming a leading international critic of the US and the west, he was certainly careful to hedge his bets by making a token contribution to the American-led war in Iraq, but was sufficiently unpredictable to stir a degree of concern.

Sonthi Boonyaratglin. Photograph: AFP

Thaksin was a controversial figure in his homeland, popular among the rural poor who benefited from his reforms, but held in contempt by the urban middle classes. This helps to explain why Bangkok was relatively quiet in the aftermath of the takeover, amid some celebrations. The much-photographed instances of ordinary citizens fraternising with patrolling soldiers, and children planting flowers in the barrels of their guns, helped to reinforce the impression that army chief Sonthi Boonyaratglin and his fellow generals wished to convey, of a popular transition rather than yet another mundane bout of martial law.

It was vital for the generals to gain the royal stamp of approval for their action, given that King Bhumibol Adulyadej, after 60 years on the throne, is by all accounts widely revered — even deified — among Thais. Bhumibol played a crucial role in bringing General Suchinda Kraprayoon’s rule to an end back in 1992, following considerable violence in the streets; at the time, many looked upon that year’s events as signifying Thailand’s final emergence from an era that began back in 1932, when the army seized power in what was then still known as Siam. That was not to be, as volatility persisted, and last month’s developments suggest that the Thai army remains reluctant to relinquish its political role.

In the days following the bloodless coup, Bhumibol did not react directly, but the generals lost little time in announcing that they had won his assent, and the palace offered no contradiction. His Majesty may well have been hedging his bets, much like the world at large, waiting to see how the generals behaved before publicly blessing their move. The junta announced restrictions on the freedom of assembly, but took no action against the first pro-democracy protest in Bangkok, which attracted only a few hundred participants. Will this reserve be maintained in the face of larger protests? A severe media clampdown was claimed to be temporary: the state of the press, in the months ahead, will serve as another litmus test for the generals’ intentions.

In another parallel with Pakistan, Sonthi and his fellow conspirators struck to thwart what they perceived as Thaksin’s interference in the army’s affairs: Musharraf’s antipathy towards Nawaz Sharif was driven to a considerable extent by the latter’s efforts to ensconce favoured officers in positions of power. Shortly after the Bangkok coup, Thaksin’s supporters within the military were sidelined, while those who had assisted in the putsch were promoted.

There are said to be 10,000 claims of graft against the Thaksin administration, and perhaps the most egregious violation of ethics directly associated with the prime minister was the sale of Shin Corp, a telecommunications giant owned by his family, to Singapore’s Temasek Holdings for $1.85 billion: a sale on which no taxes were paid, and which, at the same time, undermined Thaksin’s nationalist posturing. Apart from the corruption charges, the Thaksin regime sought to crush a Muslim insurgency that erupted in 2004 in Thailand’s three southernmost provinces by using the most brutal of methods: random killings, mass arrests and torture, with innocent civilians frequently being victimised. The separatist revolt continues to fester. General Sonthi, himself a Muslim, advised caution and negotiations, but was ignored.

Earlier, in 2002-03, one of the priorities of the Thaksin government was a so-called war on drugs, which resulted in the arbitrary execution of at least 200 “drug dealers”: many of the fatalities involved either small-time drug peddlers or innocent citizens targeted by the police force, in order to show it was diligently carrying out orders.

In some ways, Thaksin and his Thai Rak Thai (Thai Loves Thai) party is more reminiscent of Silvio Berlusconi and his Forza Italia, rather than Nawaz Sharif and his faction of the Pakistan Muslim League. It would only be fair to point out that at least some of the Thaksin government’s measures — such as a health insurance scheme that enabled all Thais to seek any sort of medical treatment at a cost of only 30 baht — were popular, and the prime minister also succeeded in persuading the bulk of the rural population that he had their best interests at heart. But even if his abuses of power outweigh any good he might have done, it does not necessarily follow that a military coup was the ideal means of removing him from power.

The opposition parties boycotted the snap election Thaksin called last April, and, amid widespread protests in Bangkok, Thai Rak Thai’s landslide triumph was adjudged to be untenable after Bhumibol stepped in as an arbiter. Following a brief period of penance, Thaksin returned to the helm as caretaker prime minister. One of the army’s post-hoc justifications for the coup is that forthcoming protests would have led to clashes between pro- and anti-Thaksin demonstrators, resulting in much bloodshed. There is, inevitably, an element of conjecture in that conclusion. The point is, Thaksin’s caretaker mode was a short-term arrangement: to remain head of government, he would have had to win another election. Unfortunately for his opponents, he appeared to be perfectly capable of doing that. The question, then, is: Was the coup primarily intended to pre-empt the possibility of Thaksin’s re-election?

It is unlikely Thailand will end up in a position analogous to that of Burma/Myanmar, which has suffered an uninterrupted acquaintance with military rule since 1962. But even in nations whose military high command consists of less intense control freaks, the generals often demand a high price for staying on the political periphery: they seek a permanently institutionalised military role in political affairs. There is a high probability that Thailand’s constitution, once it has been revamped at the behest of the generals, will include clauses that reflect this urge. In Pakistan, it is hard to imagine a post-Musharraf scenario in which the army minds its own business. In Turkey, land forces chief General Ilker Basbug recently warned the government of Recep Tayyip Erdogan that the level of Islamism had reached alarming proportions, and declared: “The Turkish armed forces have always taken sides and will continue to do so in protecting the national state, the unitary state and the secular state.”

The obscurantist tide, indeed, provides considerable cause for concern in countries such as Turkey and Pakistan, but many people would disagree with the idea that military force is the ideal means of turning it back. Nor is religious fundamentalism, by any means, the only trend that generals might oppose: in Latin America, for instance, they were considered the guarantors of an iniquitous economic status quo; besides, in Pakistan at least, much of the extremism that now poses a problem for “enlightened moderates” was either introduced or encouraged amid the gloom of Zia-ul-Haq’s martial law, yet not a word of criticism aimed at his less than illustrious predecessor has ever passed Musharraf’s lips.

As a rule of thumb, countries where the army establishes itself as a political player are, invariably, worse off than others. Musharrafisation does not offer an acceptable solution to the dilemmas of democracy. Notwithstanding the profound flaws of the Thaksin administration, Thailand appears to have taken a step in the wrong direction. Just as Pakistan did in 1999.