POLITICS-THAILAND: Muzzling the Press Could Backfire say Editors

By Marwaan Macan-Markar Reprint | | Print |

Marwaan Macan-Markar

BANGKOK, Jul 22 2005 (IPS) - A showdown between Thailand’s often feisty print media and the government of Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra is looming up as a draconian decree to quell the escalating violence in the country’s south came into effect this week.

Just what Thaksin is up against was on display through the week as senior editors from across the Thai newspaper spectrum closed ranks to condemn the sweeping powers granted to the prime minister under this decree which included the right to censor the way the media reports the southern conflict.

”This is the first time that editors in Thailand have rallied under one banner to criticise the government since Thaksin became prime minister in 2001,” Kavi Chongkittavorn, a columnist and senior editor of ‘The Nation,’ an English-language daily, told IPS. ”It is because of the common threat they face under Thaksin.”

”At one crazy fell swoop, Thaksin has lost virtually all his friends in the media,” said ‘The Nation’ in a report Wednesday on the mood at a meeting 50 editors at the Bangkok headquarters of the Thai Journalists’ Association on Tuesday.

”Many of his erstwhile friends are not just disillusioned; they have reportedly pledged to become his sworn enemies from now on,” the report said.

The headlines, the editorials and the columns echoed this groundswell of rage. ”Absolute power corrupts absolutely” and ”Too many of our rights in the hands of one man” screamed headlines in the local press.

The last time Thai editors displayed such unanimity was in 1997 during the creation of the National Press Council (NPC) of Thailand. Passions expressed by editors then to oppose moves by the government to control press freedom was part of the national mood that resulted in the birth of the ”people’s constitution” of 1997.

Under the extraordinary powers that came into force on Tuesday, Thaksin may declare a state of emergency in any part of the country if the situation so warrants, authorise the use of military force to counter instability and guarantee government troops complete impunity from possible criminal, civil or disciplinary actions.

Further, the prime minister has the power to detain ”suspects” without any charges, impose curfews, restrict people from moving out of their homes, order evacuations and to intercept written and printed material, such as letters and books, and tape telephone conversations.

Most worrying for the media is what the decree, which was enforced as law without debate or scrutiny by the country’s parliament, says about how the violence in the south can be reported.

It gives the prime minister the power to censor news and also interfere with the way reporters gather information, such as preventing them from getting first-hand accounts of the ground realities.

”That the media needs to be restrained speaks volumes for the biased mindset of the powers-that-be in government,” wrote Veera Prateepchaikul, deputy editor- in -chief of the ‘Bangkok Post’ newspaper in a commentary on Thursday. ”The media has a legitimate role to play which is to tell the truth about what is happening in the region to the people.”

The days ahead will be keenly watched by political analysts to gauge the direction this tussle between the government and the press will take. ”The mood of the journalists is such that it is quite possible they may defy this law,” said Giles Ungpakorn, a political science professor at Bangkok’s Chulalongkorn University.

The attempt to control the media is ”very dangerous,” he added during an interview. ”But the climate the journalists face is not as bad as it was during the military dictatorships of the past, when critics were thrown into jail.”

Thaksin, who is now on a second term as prime minister, used a daring attack by suspected Muslim militants in the southern town of Yala on the night of Jul. 14 as an excuse to push through the executive decree. In that coordinated attack, bombs were thrown, the police were shot at and a power transmission centre was destroyed, plunging the town into darkness.

This assault added a new dimension to a pattern of violence that has spread across Thailand’s southernmost provinces, home to the country’s Malay-Muslim minority. Over 800 people have been killed in the region since this cycle of violence erupted in January 2004.

The majority of the victims died from attacks by still unidentified militants. They include teachers, village leaders, government servants, Buddhist monks, Muslim clerics, civilians, soldiers and the police. The attackers have used bombs, bullets and knives to fell their victims.

Muslims who died at the hands of the state includes the 78 Malay-Muslim boys and men who lost their lives due to suffocation while in military custody in October last year and the over 100 youth who died five months before, in April, during a bloody showdown with Thai troops.

The ongoing violence in mainly Buddhist Thailand is the latest in a long simmering clash between the Malay-Muslims, who currently make up about 2.3 million of Thailand’s 64 million population, and the central government over issues ranging from cultural and religious identity to economic deprivation.

The five southern provinces where most Malay-Muslims live were once part of the Muslim kingdom of Pattani until they were annexed in 1902 by Siam, as Thailand was then known.

”The new laws will do little to improve the situation in the south. In fact, they will make it worse,” Sunai Phasuk, the Thai researcher for the global rights lobby Human Rights Watch, told IPS. ”It will lead to more repression in a region that has been subject to years under martial law.”

For Sunai, as with the Thai editors, the latest decree is the worst they expected from a democratically elected government in a country that has a young democratic culture. ”It is a law that can create a Frankenstein monster,” he said.