THAILAND: One-man Crusade Dogs Thaksin

By Marwaan Macan-Markar Reprint | | Print |

Marwaan Macan-Markar

BANGKOK , Feb 27 2006 (IPS) - It was an hour before midnight but there was hardly a hint of sleep on Sondhi Limthongkul’s face. Dressed in his trademark white T-shirt and pants and yellow scarf knotted around his neck, the 58-year-old Thai paced behind a huge stage like a prize fighter who had drawn first blood.

In front of the stage was a scene that explained his mood. Under the Sunday night sky was a sea of heads, a crowd of over 50,000, holding on to small paper flags that bore the same yellow of Sondhi’s scarf. This gathering of the elderly, middle-aged and youth, mostly from Bangkok, had come to join him in his crusade to get rid of the country’s prime minister, Thaksin Shinawatra.

He did not disappoint the crowd, spread across an open park in a historic part of the Thai capital. He led them in a chant, bellowing into the mike, ”Thaaaaaaksin!” And the crowd roared back: ”Get Out!”

”We are fighting for what is right and wrong and not about winning and losing,” the feisty media personality said in an interview after his speech. ”We will stick to our mission to simply ask for Thaksin to resign.”

It was a message with a slight variance that he delivered in September last year, after the Thaksin administration pulled the plug from a popular television show he was hosting, in which he had begun to expose financial irregularities linked to the government.

He defied the government’s act of censorship by taking his show on the road. He held live weekly programmes in a large hall at Bangkok’s Thammasat University. The government shot back, filing several libel cases, demanding up to 25 million US dollars in some instances, to shut him up.

Rather than be silenced by an administration that had gained notoriety for crushing its critics and intimidating the media, Sondhi began a campaign that soon attracted a following. In November, thousands from Bangkok’s middle classes were attending his Friday night revelations of Thaksin and his cabinet at a park close to the financial district.

He was also making waves in cyberspace by then. The website of his ‘Manager’ media group saw a two-fold increase in hits, going from a daily average of 80,000 to an estimated 150,000 hits per day.

February saw this one-man crusade enter a new realm, when two demonstrations in an open plaza close to the parliament attracted a much larger crowd than before. The first of them, on Feb. 4, had between 30,000 to 40,000 people.

By the last weekend of February, there were more diverse voices angered by Thaksin’s record of alleged corruption that joined forces with Sondhi to lend weight to his stated mission. They included highly respected figures such as Maj.Gen. Chamlong Srimuang, leader of a Buddhist sect, members of the Thai senate, academics, activists and student leaders.

Even some of the country’s musicians known for their ballads with political and socially conscious lyrics mounted the stage to be counted on the anti-Thaksin bandwagon. A quartet called the ‘Hope Family’ was among them. This group of a father, mother and two daughters sang about the need to find strength in crowds.

”We are here because we want to do something,” says Varittarat Tawanavivattanagul, who at 19 is the youngest in the family. ”We cannot sit in our homes and watch TV. We have to fight and let the people know we are with them.”

Budsapart, her mother, adds: ”Songs are important. They are a soft way of fighting, than using guns.”

For Nirand Pithakwatchara, a ranking member of the senate’s committee on human security and social development, the protest movement had gained a legitimacy of its own. ”This is a historic day for people’s participation in Thai democracy,” he said before members of the upper-house addressed the anti-government demonstration.

”Thaksin is leading the country down a dangerous road,” he added. ”He wants absolute power. He wants to monopolise power.”

It is a view that mirrors a slice of Thailand’s political reality, since the party Thaksin leads, Thai Rak Thai (Thais Love Thai – TRT), was re-elected in February last year by a huge majority, over 370 seats out of 500 in the parliament. Such power, coupled by the sizeable majority the TRT had in its first term in office four years before, has virtually crippled the independent institutions set up to check constitutional violations, election fraud, corruption and human rights abuse.

While charges of financial irregularities have dogged Thaksin since his first term began in January 2001, it was a business deal revealed in January, involving a telecommunication conglomerate that he founded, Shin Corp, and the investment arm of the Singapore government, Temasek, that has triggered the most passionate backlash.

Thaksin, a billionaire before becoming the premier, was viewed as having fixed new government policies to enable this sale of Shin Corp to Temasek for 1.8 billion U.S. dollars. It was a deal where his family got away without having to pay any taxes.

Thaksin’s attempt to reclaim the political ground he has lost by deciding to dissolve parliament on Feb. 24 and call for a snap election in early April will do little to improve his image among the growing thousands of his critics, led by Sondhi.

”This is a force to be reckoned with and one that is not going to go away easily,” Thitinan Pongsudhirak, a political scientist at Bangkok’s Chulalongkorn University, told IPS. ”Thaksin has lost his legitimacy in the eyes of the people. This is about morality that Thais expect their leaders to have.”

”It is a dynamic day-to-day process that Sondhi has created over the last few months,” he added. ”There are new political uncertainties.”

By late Monday afternoon that appeared so. Reports began spreading across Bangkok that the three main opposition parties in parliament were preparing to boycott the April poll.

That should come as another victory for Sondhi, who has promised to keep up the fight, even if it means daily demonstrations, till he gets his political prey.