Daniel Pedersen

So who are the republicans waiting in the wings?

Don Talenywun

May 25, 2010

Everyone denied responsibility for the red and white stickers plastered around Bangkok during the melee these past weeks.

Spooked Bangkok residents first spotted the garish stickers well before the killing started in central Bangkok.

The stickers carried the message: “New Thai State under President Thaksin Shinawatra.”

Thaksin immediately denied he had anything to do with the stickers or the message they bore, and the red shirts said they didn’t know where they had come from.

But the stickers were there, on walls, trumpeting the proposition of Thailand becoming a republic with Thaksin as head of state, or president.

The red shirt campaign has been painted as Thailand’s have-nots challenging the rich elite.

Many protestors may well have mustered to fight for democracy and the chance of a fairer go, embracing the leaders’ propaganda, but the appearance of the stickers would suggest a broader campaign, perhaps still in its infancy, to re-write Thailand’s constitution.

The stickers were placed to seed a thought, perhaps gauge public opinion.

It is both alleged and denied that Thaksin and a group of peers, many of whom were to become founding members of the now-disbarred Thai Rak Thai (Thai Love Thai) Party, met in Finland in 1999 to hatch a plan to instrument major changes to how Thailand is governed.

They are said to have laid down plans to change Thailand forever, off-loading its form of constitutional democracy.

The meeting would constitute prima facie treason on behalf of all those who attended.

Should such a bid to transform Thailand’s constitutional status to that of a republic succeed, the revered Royal family’s assets, its holding companies and their largely tax-free existence could face a shakedown.

The Crown Property Bureau controls a formidable portfolio of properties that help to make the King Thailand’s richest man.

The CPB owns land that includes some of Bangkok’s best real estate.

Its tenants include Siam Paragon, Central World and MBK.

Central World was coincidentally one of the buildings destroyed by arsonists as the red shirt protestors abandoned their central Bangkok compound on Wednesday, May 19.

Since 1932, when Thailand transformed from an absolute monarchy to the constitutional democracy it is today, the former Kingdom of Siam can only have been considered a tin-pot democracy at best, a flat-out military dictatorship at worst.

With eight military coups since 1932 and another three attempted coups thrown in, repeated collapse of government and an array of snap elections, Thai democracy has proven itself dynamic if nothing else.

Yet Thailand’s monarchy, while officially removed from decision-making processes, is still the sounding board of coup-makers and governments in crisis alike.

Unconditionally adored by the masses, King Rama IX is the world’s longest-serving,living monarch.

But the same cannot be said of his son, Crown Prince Maha Vajiralongkorn, whose reputation as a ladies’ man and a bit of a wheeler-dealer precedes him.

It was suggestions of burgeoning business links between the Crown Prince and then Prime Minister Thaksin in a short article in the Far Eastern Economic Review in 2002 that led to two journalists’ visas being suspended.

Shawn Crispin and Rodney Tasker were told to prepare for deportation in late February 2002.

On the government’s behalf, the episode appeared to be a poorly-executed attempt to subdue foreign correspondents residing in Thailand.

They were threatened with charges of lese majeste and described as a threat to national security.

This uncharacteristic lack of finesse on the Thais’ behalf appeared to be a blatant and apparently quite-hurried attempt to quash the matter, shoot the messenger and declare the subject of the article illegal in the Kingdom.

And the Thai authorities threatened two correspondents from a prestigious magazine with deportation to show they meant business.

ENDS