Letters to the Editor
-
More like backing into a canal ...
That's what we would say in thai.
The socio-political history and reality is that the military has always ruled Thailand. All the illicit (& even some perfectly legal) money-making ventures you can think of, they've got a cut off of it, in league with the police & whichever civilian leadership that's in office at any given time. The idea being that politicians are expected to come & go (on average an election every 2 years) , taking turn enriching themselves. The situation changed somewhat about 5 years ago with Taksin, who served a full 4-year term, first time in the country's history. In all, he won 2 landslide elections, the 2nd came right after the Tsunami last year, increasing his majority from ~330 to ~370 out of 500 seats. This is due to a combination of slick PR & actual good results, in the economy, administrative reform, near-free universal healthcare, the handling of Tsunami disaster & the controversial crackdown on drugs and underground gambling.
The trigger for this well-funded & hardly-spontaneous crisis in the past year is the direct consequences of this 2nd win His enemies realised that he's going to be around for a long while, and something must be done. Stupidly, he gave them an excuse with the offloading of his entire telecom conglomerate to a partly foreign ownership, which netted him a billion or so in cash.
The tax evasion issue is actually bogus, since this type of share trading has always (or for many years) been tax-free in Thailand. The dodgy part was the passing of the law that allowed him to sell them in the first place. But if he hadn't sold the shares, he'd still be condemned for conflict of interest, anyway. And the unrest would still have happened, regardless.
The snap election early this year was moot, because of the opposition's boycott, citing unfairness ...I think it's just that they knew they're going lose anyway, so decided to save money for when they could win, by drawing this mess out for as long as possible. And so here we are.
As for the king, he has spiritual and inspirational roles, and while deeply respected and revered for his integrity & 6 decades of works for the rural poor, he's no match for uniformed men with tanks. He's even talked about getting 'taps on the shoulder' when he tried to fully speak his mind, here we all know what that means.
The generals want to stay for a year or so, I suspect that the 19 millions (mostly rural) who voted for Taksin last year would have something to say about that. In the meantime, we may have to kiss good-bye to any number of much needed infrastructure mega projects (which depend on overseas financing) currently in planning, for the near future.
Either way, this is a right fucking mess, indeed.