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Chapter 2

Political Struggle and Human Rights

The previous chapter argued that the way that human rights advocates articulated human rights with Buddhism allowed for experimentation simultaneously with religion and with the political. In this chapter, I show that the political vision of human rights agents like the NHRC does not end with arguments for an egalitarian Buddhism but also seeks to legitimate itself through the inheritance and recuperation of a particular political history, the history of democratic struggle. Such claims are sometimes overt and sometimes implicit, and my argument here is that laying claim to the history of democratic struggle involves promoting a certain way of remembering and memorializing moments of democratic struggle that have been subject to projects of collective forgetting. Just what should count as part of Thailand’s history of democratic struggle has been a matter of contest for two generations, especially over the status of the 1976 student uprising mentioned in the previous chapter. This chapter explores how the NHRC envisions itself as an inheritor of the radical democratic movements in Thailand’s past and in part how it sees human rights in Thailand as a product of those movements and the sentiments that motivated them. To support this argument, I review three critical moments of prodemocracy uprising (in 1973, 1976, and 1992) that preceded the NHRC and discuss the potency of specific political symbols deployed during the uprisings. The NHRC, in what amounts to a declaration of its identity, its foundational strategic plan, recasts these symbols—and, indeed, makes symbols of the demonstrations themselves—to position the NHRC within the heritage of democratic struggles. Just as the articulation of human rights in and with Buddhism transfigured each, as I explored in the first chapter, the recuperation I describe here of Thailand’s radical democratic past as the soil from which human rights have grown gives them a specific hue and cast. Finally, this chapter shows that there is not a single vision of human rights or their advocacy, despite this egalitarian, democratic bent in the NHRC, but that there are plural, sometimes competing visions. The NHRC is then not just a site for defining and promoting human rights but also of contest over their scope and practices.

On my first visit to the ONHRC (the secretariat that supports NHRC commissioners), Kat, a lawyer working there, drew my attention to this contest. Having seated me across from her at her desk, one of the fifteen or so cubicles squeezed into the ground-floor office on Phayathai Road that made up the ONHRC, she asked her assistant to bring us glasses of Nescafé. While we sipped them, she explained that the lynchpin of human rights in Thai society is Buddhism. The refrain is now familiar: the problem is to encourage equality (ส่งเสริมเสมอภาค), but inequality is sustained by the idea that the wealthy have more merit.¹ Immediately after this, she said that it was a problem of establishing a new hegemony² (she used the English term here), an effort that began with the 6 October 1976 uprising and continued in May 1992 but was not yet complete.³ The 1997 constitution (created after the restoration of democracy following the 1992 uprising), she continued, secured the right to equality and was the most progressive constitution Thailand had produced. While Kat emphasized that the effort to settle the problem of equality is not contrary to Buddhism or Thai society,⁴ here I emphasize the line connecting events from the 6 October 1976 demonstrations through the May 1992 democracy uprising to the 1997 constitution. To that end, I will review the history of democratic struggle that began in the 1970s; how the rise and implosion of the Communist Party of Thailand (CPT) led to a wide-ranging and widespread NGO movement; the ways in which the channeling of many former leftist students, sometimes via NGOs, into the Ministry of Public Health (MoPH) has led to a divergence in human rights methodologies; and how the NHRC, in laying claim to a particular vision of Thailand’s democratic history, struggles to employ, promote, and legitimate the form of egalitarianism that Kat mentioned above.

Democratic Struggle: Three Watershed Events

It is tempting to think of human rights in Thailand as an issue or process of vernacularizing a global discourse.⁵ When Kat told me “Marxist is no longer a bad word, since the end of the Cold War” (ตั้งแต่สงครามเย็นผู้นิยมลัทธิมากซ์ก็ไม่ใช่คำสาปแช่ง), she alerted me to the ways in which such a thesis of domestication would have to account for the domestication of other global discourses (Marxism and democracy, for example) and the particular variants of these discourses (in the Thai case, Maoism) as they shaped the process of domestication. The statement is also arresting for the sort of sea-change it indicates in Thai politics, a change that sets the demonstrations of 1992 apart in important ways from the student democracy uprisings of 1973 and 1976.

14 October 1973 to 6 October 1976

In November 1971, Prime Minister Thanom Kittakachorn launched a coup against his own government, suspending a three-year-old constitution and dissolving the equally young parliament (Baker and Pasuk 2005, 186). Student organizations had undertaken sporadic demonstrations over Japanese control of the economy and corruption, among other issues, but by June 1973, the demonstrations were better organized, focusing on the restoration of the constitution and democracy (Baker and Pasuk 2005, 186). The military government responded by arresting student leaders, and on 13 October, up to half a million Thai from throughout the country joined student protestors at the Democracy Monument on Ratchadamnern Klang Avenue to demand a constitution, the restoration of elected government, and the release of jailed students. This was the first mass uprising against a Thai military government (Giles 1997, 89). As the police and military presence grew, protestors became uneasy and moved toward the palace both for their security and to appeal to the king to mediate (Baker and Pasuk 2005, 187). Although the generals backed down once the student leaders won an audience with the king, releasing jailed students and agreeing to restore the constitution, the 14 October dispersal of the demonstrators dissolved into chaos, and the military attacked, killing and wounding several hundred.

Thanom Kittikachorn, Praphat Charusatien, and Narong Kittakachorn (Thanom’s son and Praphat’s son-in-law), the junta’s leadership, hastily fled into exile, the last shred of their government’s legitimacy falling with the massacred protesters. Further, it is widely believed that the king pressured them to leave, making way for the restoration of constitutional democracy (Connors 2007, 62). Whether or not this is true, the king did choose the members of a National Convention that elected the National Assembly that would serve as the interim parliament and draft a new constitution. By 1975, Kukrit Pramoj held the prime minister’s office, heading a fragile coalition, but was forced, under pressure from the army, to dissolve parliament. In April 1976, he lost in the polls, to be replaced at the head of the Democratic Party by his brother, Seni, who formed a new coalition government under the banner of reformism (Baker and Pasuk 2005, 191–194).

Over the same period, the reactionary elements of the right wing had reorganized, forming, in particular, two paramilitary and propaganda organizations, the Red Gaurs and Nawaphon (meaning new or ninth force). In concert with the Village Scouts, a rural, anticommunist program started by the border police in 1971 under royal patronage during the Thanom regime,⁶ these groups undertook a campaign of intimidation and assassination of leftists, student leaders, and labor organizers, following an explosion in 1973 of the number and scale of worker strikes (Giles 1997, 90–92). Their impact and the reluctance of police to intervene emboldened Praphat (temporarily) and Thanom (now donning a monk’s robes) to return from exile in August and September. Students at Thammasat University, located at the western edge of Sanam Luang (Royal Park, which is itself at the western end of Ratchadamnern Klang, before it rises to the Pinklao Bridge), protested the return of the junta leaders.

For roughly a decade, building on the prosperity of the 1950s and 1960s, the demographics of the university population had shifted from elite dominance to include Thai from a much wider range of economic and regional backgrounds, with the result that students were no longer automatically assumed to have the kind of mandarin status they enjoyed in the 1950s and earlier. On the contrary, there was a growing animosity among those Thai who saw students as averse to work and as leftist agitators (Giles 1997, 90; Anderson 1977). On 6 October 1976, the three paramilitary groups mentioned above, those harboring resentment toward students, and the reactionary elements of the police and military got their opportunity for revenge. Armed with firearms, rocket launchers, and weapons of opportunity like pipes, sticks, fire, and rope, they sealed all exits from the Thammasat campus and assaulted the students inside. Students who tried to escape were shot or beaten, some being hanged and burned in a no less visible and symbolically charged location than the Royal Park (สนามหลวง, Sanam Luang), which borders the ceremonial Royal Palace and the Temple of the Emerald Buddha, one of the temples most closely identified with the monarchy (Baker and Pasuk 2005, 194–105; Giles 1997, 92–94; Anderson 1977). The military and paramilitary suppression of the protest was brutal and exhaustive enough to allow Praphat and Thanom to return without further opposition. Over the next two years, there were three more coups, until finally, in 1979, General Kriangsak Chomanand succeeded in both maintaining a stable government and turning government policies toward the reformism of the Kukrit premiership. Critical to future developments, he placed General Prem Tinsulanond, who had risen to head the army, in the post of defense minister (and he would become prime minister in 1980, after elections were restored in 1979).

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 and martyrs in the narrative of Thai democracy (Thongchai 2002).

Symbols in Struggle and the Claim to Democratic History

A notable feature of these moments—1973, 1976, and 1992—is that the demonstrators in each instance displayed images of the king, the Thai flag, and Buddhist symbols, sometimes combined in single articles. In certain moments, the national/religious/monarchical symbols had the power to stop bullets temporarily. Alan Klima, present during Black May, describes a scene that is equal parts surreal and terrifying:

It was now fully morning, but not bright. The army battalion was marching forward, while the crowd had come up off the asphalt, where they had been lying prostrate, and were now standing in unison, thankfully singing the national anthem.

Then the crowd sang the anthem to the king.

With that, the soldiers stopped their advance, held their firearms at their side, and stood at attention. For the duration of the anthem to the king, both sides stood at attention. When the people finished singing, they erupted into applause and cheers. For the soldiers’ part, as soon as the song was over, they charged. (Klima 2002, 121)

In no case did these symbols stall violence altogether (as Phra Supoj’s robes also failed to do), but this passage shows that such demonstrative claims to national loyalty, Buddhist faith, and reverence for the king were powerful for all concerned. If protestors knew they risked their lives in each case, they did so literally under the banners of nation, Buddhism, and monarchy, claiming the legitimacy of their struggles by virtue of the allegiances they displayed.

Figure 3. A Thai flag widely distributed in the May 1992 prodemocracy demonstrations bears the phrase throng phra jareun, equivalent to “long live the king.” Photo: Ron Morris.

While there are many photos and some video of the 6 October assault on Thammasat University, virtually all were taken outside the walls of the campus and show acts or the outcome of acts of violence against protestors. Girling argues that the three pillars—nation, Buddhism, and king—played an important role in progressive politics throughout the 1970s, including the Thammasat protestors, but points out that the nation of the progressive movement was a constitutional nation, not the paternalistic nation of authoritarian regimes (Girling 1981, 155). It is this constitutional nation that was the condition of possibility for the NHRC.¹³

“Before, they could forbid people to speak, but with the new constitution they cannot,” Kat told me. The “People’s Constitution” (รัฐธรรมนูญฉบับประชาชน) was drafted with unprecedented popular consultation, allowing for input from a wide range of Thai. Perhaps more significantly, the pressure of private individuals (like Dr. Prawase Wasi) to found a drafting assembly (rather than leaving the production of the constitution to politicians and bureaucrats alone) resulted in the generation of the 1970s (which is to say not just those who participated in 1973 and 1976 but all those who shared the broad democratic aspirations of those demonstrations) to have a decisive role in the drafting process (Ockey 2004, 160–161, 166). The constitution, Kat said, was an effort to change society, and it was to that ethos of change that the NHRC in several ways laid claim.

Figure 4. Demonstrators, Black May 1992. Photo: Tomas From.

In 2005, the NHRC circulated its first educational video compact disc (VCD), focusing on children’s rights (สำนักงานคณะกรรมการสิทธิมนุษยชนแห่งชาติ 2005). It opens, however, with an account of the NHRC’s origination, tracing it to struggles for equality and democracy. Over footage of 14 October 1973, 6 October 1976, and Black May 1992, it describes the People’s Constitution as the product of protracted democratic struggle, finishing the story with coverage of a parade of people carrying yellow¹⁴ flags reading รัฐธรรมนูญ ฉบับประชาชน (People’s Constitution), carrying the national flag, and wearing yellow T-shirts,¹⁵ headbands, and caps sporting the same slogan. Finally, many of the parade marchers carried a copy of the constitution, holding it out to the camera as they passed by.

Figure 5. Democracy Monument, 14 October 1973. Photo: Adam Carr.

This wielding of the constitution, as if a shield, is important. Kat explained that protestors of the Thai-Malay pipeline that was being built through the town of Hat Yai in southern Thailand in 2002 used the constitution as a tool, when confronted by police, to argue that they had the right to congregate and to mount their protest. Similarly, when I met with Dr. Sriprapha, chair of the human rights program at Mahidol University, she said that the vast majority of Thai do not know or understand their rights but that the 1990s saw increasing awareness on this front. As an indicator of this trend, she said that many of the rural people she works with in an NGO capacity now carry the constitution with them as a kind of protection: “When the police harass them, they can pull out the constitution, and the police may doubt themselves—they may think this villager knows his rights better he does. But there are no guarantees.”

The constitution in these cases is more than a document that outlines rights but also is symbolically potent, a fact emphasized in the video by the coincidence of the camera panning over the Democracy Monument—the site par excellence of popular democratic struggle and repository of a symbolic constitution—as the narrator talks of this constitution being the first that enjoyed public consultation. What, however, is at stake in showing the Democracy Monument? Benedict Anderson takes monuments to be a form of speech (Anderson 1973, 61) but also cites Robert Musil half-approvingly when he says, “There is nothing in this world as invisible as a monument” (cited in Anderson 1998, 46). This may be so. The Democracy Monument sits directly in the path of traffic moving along Ratchadamnern Klang. It is unavoidable, and yet this quotidian feature may be just what makes it invisible as a monument. Anderson orients his analysis to the contingency of meaning a monument may have—what, as a form of speech, it can say—but I argue that when the NHRC conjures the image of the Democracy Monument, it is less because of what it might mean or say and has more to do with how the history of demonstrations, with their bloodshed and deaths that can be called heroic, at its site gives it affective force. Anderson writes of Indonesia’s National Monument that it is “less a part of tradition than a way of claiming it” (Anderson 1973, 64). Anderson means this as the form of speech he discusses, but the idea behind showing the Democracy Monument while lauding the inclusivity of the constitutional drafting procedure in a video about human rights is to create associations not—or not just—of meanings between them and democratic heroism but at the level of affect: that is how the claim on the democratic tradition arises.

The NHRC Strategic Plan