When Kat was describing the history of human rights’ formation in Thailand, she explained that there was a rift within the upper echelons of the military between the doves and the hawks (ทหารมีนกพิราบ เขาเรียกร้องสันติภาพและมีเหยี่ยว), the doves trying to keep the military out of the political process and the hawks being ferociously anticommunist, with several having been involved in the attack on 6 October.7 The significance of Kriangsak and, in particular, Prem rising to office is that they favored a political rather than military response to the threat of communism, emphasizing an agenda of rural development (to reduce the appeal of joining or supporting the CPT and to undermine CPT propaganda) and conciliation. The support of the “doves” was crucial to the success of such a strategy in the face of CPT numbers swelling as leftists, student activists, and labor organizers left Bangkok for the jungle after 6 October. When Kriangsak began to normalize relations with China, however, the CPT lost Chinese support, and when Prem initiated amnesty policies in 1979 and 1980 to allow disaffected CPT members to return to the fold of Thai society, they did so in droves, evacuating the CPT of the bulk of its fighting force by 1983 (Baker and Pausk 2005, 197; Giles 1997, 95–96). To all appearances, the left had dissolved.
“Black May” 1992
The 1980s and 1990s, however, did not see the dissolution of the left as much as its reconfiguration. After Prem’s amnesty program, many of those who returned from the countryside and from armed resistance refocused their attention away from social revolution toward NGO work on particular social issues. Individuals who, as CPT members or student activists, had faced imprisonment or death in armed conflict with the state or violence at the hands of paramilitary groups could now work openly and legally. Although NGOs existed before the 1980s, they blossomed during this period. They had a range of foci, from rural development to poverty alleviation in Bangkok slums, but of particular interest here is the participation of doctors in NGOs. During the 1990s, there was an increasing NGO emphasis on HIV/AIDS treatment and prevention, but before that, there were NGO programs focused on the health of the rural poor and on providing primary health care (Bamber 1997, 238–239). During the mid-1980s, a particularly close relationship developed between the MoPH and a number of NGOs like the Rural Doctors Society. Below, I will discuss a bifurcation in NGO methods that has everything to do with the MoPH adopting a welcoming posture to left-leaning or activist medical personnel (Bamber 1997, 239). The important thing here is that, between 1976 and 1991—the better part of a generation—there was an explosive growth in NGOs and NGO members alongside relative political calm. In 1988, for the first time since 1976, there was an elected prime minister, Chatichai Choonhavan. There had been no regime changes during the “Premocracy” (Baker and Pasuk 2005, 232), from 1980 to 1988 (despite three attempted coups), but at the same time, Thailand had yet to see an elected prime minister complete his term. Prime Minister Chatichai would be no exception.
The Chatichai government took corruption to levels that neither the public nor the military could stomach. The government became widely known as a “buffet Cabinet” (Baker and Pasuk 2005, 242; Connors 2007, 96–97). This stemmed from a biting reference to an antique model of governance. Members of the Thai public replaced, in their discussions of the Chatichai regime, “politics” (การเมือง, or kan meuang) with the phrase kin meuang (กินเมือง).8 Kin (กิน) means “eat,” but the compound word kin meuang refers to a specific system of “traditional remuneration from the profits of office” (Baker and Pasuk 2005, 242). Somboon discusses this model as characteristic of the period preceding 1892, ending during the reign of King Chulalongkorn. Before then, provincial administrators (chao meuang) appointed by the king received no salary and so raised their income from taxes and corveé labor. In this decentralized system of authority, it also gave the chao meuang control of the judicial administration, permitting self-serving interpretations of law. In some cases, the office of the chao meuang became semi-hereditary (Somboon 1981, 26; 1982, 33). When Thai referred to the Chatichai government with the epithet kin meuang, then, it indicted Chatichai for trying to reinstall a system of unmerited rewards for elites who, by virtue of their office and the command it afforded of the law, felt entitled to consume the people they ruled.
The military in the mid- and late 1980s saw a new group of officers, disdainful of the ideological debates of the hawks and the doves, emerge as a dominant faction at the same time that the political status of the military was on the decline. Forming the National Peace Keeping Council (NPKC) in 1991, they saw the general disgust with the Chatichai government’s excesses as the opportunity they sought to restore the military as a commanding political presence (Baker and Pasuk 2005, 242ff.; Connors 2007, 96–100; Chai-Anan 2002, 173). In February 1991, the NPKC seized the reins of the state in a bloodless coup d’état, arraigning Chatichai on corruption charges and dissolving parliament. The NPKC appointed Anand Panyarachun as prime minister until elections could be held in March 1992. The process met with little public resistance, until the junta leader, General Suchinda Kraprayoon, breaking his earlier promises not to seek public office, stepped unelected into the premiership to replace the candidate of the winning party (Samakkhitham, a party created by the NPKC for the election), who withdrew amid drug trafficking allegations (Baker and Pasuk 2005, 244; Connors 2007, 99–100; Klima 2002, 90–91). Large protests at the Democracy Monument (steps from Thammasat University and Sanam Luang) began late in April at the urging of the Campaign for Popular Democracy, led by Chamlong Srimuang, the popular former mayor of Bangkok and key member of Santi Asoke, discussed in the previous chapter. Early in May, Chamlong began a hunger strike9 that he vowed to maintain until Suchinda stepped down. Whereas Suchinda defended breaking his promise by saying, “I sacrifice my honor for the sake of the nation,” Chamlong responded, “I sacrifice myself for the sake of the nation” (Klima 2002, 112). The campaign drew demonstrators across Thai society,10 reaching around 200,000 on 17 May (Baker and Pasuk 2005, 244). The Suchinda government’s response took its cue from the 1970s, starting with a massive show of military power that escalated to violence lasting for three days and nights.
My friend Bun told me that while he was training to become a commercial jet pilot, he met a retired air force officer who explained the use of violence this way: “He said that the military makes people stupid, because it rewards people who follow orders, not people who think. In 253511 [1992], they brought soldiers in from upcountry, who had no idea what was going on in Bangkok. They did not use troops from around Bangkok, because those troops saw the news, and saw the people gathering at Democracy Monument for a long time, so maybe they wouldn’t fire on them. The soldiers from upcountry, when they were told to shoot, they followed orders.”12
The ensuing bloodshed, claiming dozens of lives, ended only when the king summoned Suchinda and Chamlong and ordered them to come to a peaceful resolution. The damage to the military’s reputation was thorough, and Suchinda stepped down, bringing Anand back as interim prime minister until elections in September. While in office, Anand gutted the NPKC, and the doves about whom Kat had told me were assigned control of key military posts. High though the price was in terms of human lives and well-being, in this case, large-scale peaceful protest had succeeded not just in ousting an unelected government, but in the process the protestors became, like the students in 1973, heroes