Thai PM Yingluck struggles to stay in power | Asian Correspondent

Thai PM Yingluck struggles to stay in power | Asian Correspondent
AP News, Jan 18, 2014

BANGKOK (AP) — From inside her “war room” in a temporary office at the Defense Ministry, Thailand’s beleaguered Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra is watching television feeds of flag-waving protesters trying to bring down her government.

The demonstrators have taken over key pockets of central Bangkok, blocking off their territory with sandbag walls guarded by supporters. They refuse to negotiate, and they’re trampling campaign billboards bearing Yingluck’s image amid increasing doubt that the election she called for next month can be held.

Yingluck can’t order a police crackdown for fear of triggering a military coup. And she is now facing a serious legal threat: The country’s anti-corruption commission has announced that it will probe her handling of a controversial rice policy, an investigation that could force her from office if it is successful.

What’s the best way to deal with it all?

“Keep calm. And stay cool,” Yingluck said, flashing a brief smile as she rode an elevator at the Defense Ministry this past week, headed for a meeting to monitor the crisis and discuss strategy with top advisers.

Thailand has been plagued by sometimes bloody bouts of unrest ever since then-Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra — Yingluck’s older brother — was overthrown by the army in 2006 amid charges of corruption and alleged disrespect for the monarchy. The coup touched off a societal schism that in broad terms pits the majority rural poor, who back the Shinawatras, against an urban-based elite establishment that draws support from the army and staunch royalists who see Yingluck’s family as a corrupt threat to their power.

The struggle has taken place against what analysts also see as a battle for control over a crucial transition period when the country’s 86-year-old monarch, King Bhumibol Adulyadej, passes from the scene. But for much of it, Yingluck had stayed out of the spotlight.
Just three years ago, she was largely unknown — the director of a family real estate business, a political neophyte with no experience in government. Today, she is in the political fight of her life — a besieged prime minister who cannot use her own office and whose government has been displaced to myriad backup offices across Bangkok because demonstrators have surrounded her ministries.

“We’ve had to adapt the way that we work. I have ordered every ministry to adapt,” Yingluck said Thursday. “It’s like we are working by remote.”

Protest leader Suthep Thaugsuban — who is wanted by police on charges of insurrection — brazenly vowed to “capture” Yingluck and her Cabinet this past week. The threat is not taken seriously, but Yingluck takes no risks.

“I don’t go to anywhere deemed dangerous,” she said, responding to a question about her safety.

Since Monday, anti-government demonstrators have tried to keep up the pressure by marching across Bangkok, and seizing parts of the city. The protests have been peaceful, but violence has occurred nearly every night, with shooting attacks at protest venues and small explosives hurled at the homes of top protest supporters, including the city’s governor, a political rival of Yingluck’s.

On Friday, a grenade was hurled at marching demonstrators, killing one man and wounding dozens of people. Suthep, who was in the procession but was not wounded, quickly blamed the government. Yingluck urged the police to quickly make arrests, saying she opposed the use of force and was concerned that the situation was becoming increasingly chaotic.
Since assuming the premiership after 2011 elections, Yingluck has struggled to overcome allegations that she is her brother’s puppet. The Pheu Thai party’s landslide victory came largely thanks to Thaksin. The campaign slogan — “Thaksin Thinks, Pheu Thai Acts” — made the party’s political mechanics blatantly clear.

Yingluck’s opponents say she is carrying on the practices of her billionaire brother by using the family fortune and state funds to influence voters and cement her grip on power. But she has widespread support among Thailand’s poor majority because of the populist policies that have brought them things like virtually free health care.

During her first two years in office, Yingluck walked a careful tightrope with the army and her political rivals, managing an unspoken truce that kept the nation calm. But the last few months have badly shaken her grip on power. Critics say she brought much of it on herself with a badly misjudged attempt to rehabilitate Thaksin in a general amnesty bill that triggered widespread opposition. Thaksin, now living in Dubai, has lived overseas since 2008 to avoid a jail sentence on corruption charges that he says were politically motivated.

Yingluck’s economic competence has also come under attack, particularly over a disastrous rice pledging scheme that has cost the government billions of dollars, left it with massive amounts of unsold rice and drawn criticism from the International Monetary Fund. On Thursday, Thailand’s anti-corruption commission announced that it would investigate her role in it, saying she may have been criminally negligent.

A separate corruption case now under scrutiny could also see Yingluck’s party thrown out of office and its members barred from politics.

Although clashes between police and protesters have occurred, Yingluck has mostly taken a soft approach to dealing with the latest unrest, ordering security forces to avert violence. It is a strategy that risks making her appear weak, but one she must pursue because she does not want to give the army any reason to intervene.

Last month, Yingluck dissolved the lower house of Parliament and called Feb. 2 elections to ease tensions. But Suthep is demanding reform before any vote is held. The protesters want to install a non-elected council of “good people” to take power, while Yingluck says the constitution bars her from stepping down as caretaker prime minister and allows no legal means to delay the ballot.

The result is deadlock, with no clear way out.

“She’s not done a bad job, given that she has responded to everything that has been thrown at her,” said Chris Baker, a political economist who has co-authored several books about Thaksin. “I don’t think there’s very much she can do in terms of negotiation at the moment.”

The tone of the protest movement has become venomous in recent weeks. The Thai tradition of politeness has been cast aside, and Yingluck’s femininity, an asset at the start of her term, has been used against her in crude tirades from the protest stage.

The strain has been evident, and Yingluck has occasionally teared up in public, once asking: “Do you not want me to set foot on Thai soil anymore?”

On Friday, a confident Yingluck said she was doing her best.

“I don’t know what happened to democracy in Thailand,” she told reporters. “But we have to keep (our) democracy. That’s why we have to … have elections as soon as possible.”

Looking for democracy in Thailand’s Democrat Party | Asian Correspondent

Looking for democracy in Thailand’s Democrat Party | Asian Correspondent
AP News Dec 12, 2013

BANGKOK (AP) — The Democrat Party has seen the enemy.

The Democrats, whose veterans are at the forefront of the anti-government protests that have shaken Bangkok for the past six weeks, say the enemy is a brutal system that has allowed their political nemesis to remain politically powerful, even from far away in Dubai, in exile. The system has driven them to launch angry protests that have left at least five people dead and littered a few streets with the carcasses of burned-out police trucks. It has kept the party from winning a national election for two decades.

The enemy of the Democrat Party? It’s democracy.

Or as protest leader Suthep Thaugsuban calls it, “the tyranny of the parliamentary majority.”
When Thailand’s elected prime minister refused an opposition demand to step aside, Suthep’s answer this week was to effectively declare a new government, in the form of a self-appointed “People’s Democratic Reform Committee.” He ordered civil servants to answer to the committee, called for a shadow system of volunteers to replace the police and issued an order that Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra be prosecuted for insurrection.

“Today will be a historic day,” Suthep roared Monday to tens of thousands of protesters crowding streets around the prime minister’s office. Suthep was a Democrat Party leader until he symbolically resigned shortly before the protests began, though he remains strongly identified with the party.

“This will be the first time that the people, the owners of the country, stood up to take back their sovereign power.”

On Wednesday, most civil servants appeared to defy Suthep’s order to report to the Reform Committee, but the move represents an uncertain and potentially dangerous division in Thai politics, which has been convulsed by repeated, often-violent protests since a 2006 coup ousted Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, Yingluck’s brother.

The coup exposed a deep division in Thai society. Thaksin’s supporters are mostly poor, rural people from the country’s north and northeast, drawn to him by government programs he created offering everything from nearly free medical care to guaranteed crop prices.
The traditional elite, meanwhile — high-level civil servants and military officers, aristocrats, professionals and businessmen — remain with the Democrat Party.

While Thaksin’s supporters are relative newcomers in Thai politics, they wield the power of numbers. Thaksin or his loyalists have won every national election since 2001.

Thaksin, a billionaire who made his first fortune in telecommunications and has been dogged for years by accusations of shady dealings, has lived in exile since 2008, fleeing a corruption conviction he insists is politically motivated.

His sister Yingluck, who is widely seen as a proxy for her brother — even by many of her own supporters — took power after a landslide victory in 2011.

On Monday, hours before Suthep announced the powers of the new Reform Committee, Yingluck dissolved Parliament and called new elections for Feb. 2. Suthep dismissed the vote a political ploy.

He also knew, however, that there was no way his party would win.

In many ways, the Democrats want a democracy that would have looked at home in 18th-century America or ancient Rome, a democracy where the uneducated masses are kept out of mainstream politics and a small corps of rotating elites sit at the top of the political pyramid.

Protesters believe in Suthep’s vision of what he sometimes calls a “perfect democracy,” where one man can simply claim the power to anoint a new government if there are enough protesters in the streets.

“Please tell people in your country that we are not crazy,” Nuanchan Poonpatana, 50-year-old Bangkok resident dressed in a pink jacket and pink shoes, said at a recent morning as she walked to an anti-Thaksin protest.

Like many of Thaksin’s opponents, she sees his government aid programs as national bribery schemes to buy votes.

“The farmers and poor people receive money from him,” she said, adding that new elections would change nothing. Yingluck would simply win again.

Suthep’s announcement of the Reform Committee was warmly welcomed among the protesters.

Ekgarin Khunchaiprasert, a thin, 27-year-old airport worker, was in the crowds at Suthep’s Monday speech. Asked if the self-appointed committee represented the abandonment of democracy, he shook his head.

“Democracy has just begun here today.”

Ex-Thai PM to Face Murder Charges for Crackdown | The Irrawaddy Magazine

Ex-Thai PM to Face Murder Charges for Crackdown | The Irrawaddy Magazine
THANYARAT DOKSONE / AP WRITER| December 7, 2012 


BANGKOK—Investigators say they plan to file murder charges against Thailand’s former prime minister and his deputy in the first prosecutions of officials for their roles in a deadly 2010 crackdown on anti-government protests.

The protests and crackdown left more than 90 people dead and about 1,800 injured in Thailand’s worst political violence in decades. Former Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva’s Democrat Party, now in the opposition after being ousted in elections last year, and “Redshirt” supporters of the ruling Pheu Thai Party have blamed each other for the bloodshed since.

Department of Special Investigation chief Tharit Phengdit said Thursday that investigators found Abhisit possibly culpable in the death of a taxi driver because he allowed troops to use war weapons and live ammunition against protesters.

Abhisit and former Deputy Prime Minister Suthep Thaugsuban, who was in charge of the ad hoc security agency set up to contain the protests, will be summoned Wednesday to be formally charged. The courts must accept the case before it can go to trial.

Democrat Party spokesman Chavanond Intarakomalyasut called the decision “an abuse of government’s power to threaten its opponents.” He noted that it was done while parliament is in recess so the two men’s immunity from arrest is lifted.

Tharit denied that the decision is politically motivated and said the case is significant “for society because the deaths were inflicted by an act of government officers.”

The deaths occurred during the red shirts’ nine-week anti-government protest in the heart of the capital that had sought to force Abhisit to call early elections. Central Bangkok was garrisoned by soldiers until they moved in to crush the protest on May 19, 2010.

The protest was staged primarily by supporters of former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, who was ousted by a 2006 military coup after being accused of corruption and disrespect to the monarchy. His supporters and opponents have vied for power since then, and Thaksin’s sister Yingluck Shinawatra now leads the government.

A Criminal Court inquest recently found that taxi driver Phan Kamkong was killed by guns used by military personnel during the crackdown.

Chavanond alleged that the inquest was a one-sided trial in which the accused could not defend themselves and that no one was pinpointed as the shooter.

He insisted the security body set up to contain the protests issued no order to use force against or kill civilians, only to keep order in dealing with “black shirts,” armed men who served as guards for the demonstrators.

“To use the court’s inquest to conclude that the two men had the intention of murder was groundless and against the law,” Chavanond said.

He said both Abhisit and Suthep “are ready to prove their innocence,” and that “those who brought up false charges will have to take responsibility.”

DSI chief Tharit said factors leading to the planned charges include the continuing use of force over time and the killing of civilians without resorting to other methods of controlling protesters.

Thaksin wants to make deals, says Thai Democrat | The Nation / Thailand

Thaksin wants to make deals, says Thai Democrat | The Nation / Thailand
The Nation, June 16, 2012

Thailand's veteran Democrat politician Suthep Thaugsuban insisted yesterday that former prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra had sent negotiators over to see him and ask the party to stop opposing his sister, Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra.

Suthep said he responded by saying that if he were Thaksin, he would stop going against the will of the public and would withdraw the charter amendment and reconciliation bills. He said withdrawing these bills would secure Yingluck's job through to the end of her four-year term.

When asked if he was sure Thaksin had sent these negotiators, Suthep said: "Certainly! These mediators have been used by Thaksin several times."

Meanwhile, Thida Thawornseth, chairwoman of the red-shirt Democratic Alliance against Dictatorship, said she believed that the former PM had spoken to everybody, including the Democrats, the Army, businesspeople and even the ammart (elite).

"This is called a game at the top of the pyramid, because it involves talking to the elite. I know that the elitists don't want the reconciliation bill or the charter amendment. Therefore, I'm not surprised that they have exchanged proposals as they [the elite] had worked hard on the 2006 coup before gaining the 2007 Constitution," she said.
However, she said she did not think the Pheu Thai Party would make such deals, because as long as the 2007 Constitution stays in place, the people will remain under the power of the ammart.

Pheu Thai spokesman Prompong Nopparit said he thought Suthep was making up stories, otherwise he should provide evidence.

"It appears Suthep is making this up, because it is just part of a political game. It is ridiculous! Who would be naive enough to contact Suthep? And even if they contacted Suthep, I don't believe he can make decisions for the Democrat Party," Prompong said.

Meanwhile, Thaksin's legal adviser Noppadon Pattama said yesterday that the former PM was indeed in Hong Kong as reported by the media and it was normal for people to fly over and meet with him or have meals with him.
However, he said, these visitors were not likely to discuss the Cabinet reshuffle, because Thaksin respected his sister's decisions.

He added that he did not know where Thaksin would be headed next, but confirmed that it would be in Asia.

Suthep, Former Thai Deputy PM, meeting with police for crackdown on red-shirt protesters

Suthep, Former Thai Deputy PM, meeting with police for crackdown on red-shirt protesters
Bangkok Post, December 14, 2011

Former deputy prime minister Suthep Thaugsuban was meeting with police investigators on Wednesday for the second time to give more information on his role in connection with his handling of the crackdown on red-shirt protesters in April-May last year.

Mr Suthep arrived at the Metropolitan Police headquarters at 2pm with more documented evidence for the investigators.

He was greeted on arrival by about 10 red-shirts holding up placards and hurling verbal abuse at him.

Suthep, Former Thai Deputy PM, meeting with police for crackdown on red-shirt protesters