Comments

  1. patiwat says:

    Vichai, now you’ve gone too far. It was unfortunate but inevitable for you to incorrectly claim that I supported Thaksin or that I was a liar.

    But it is not OK for you to claim that I have bad intentions towards the King. That’s slander. Read my posts. I was quoting the King and noting what anybody reasonable person would note: that the King was not condemning Thaksin for his conduct in the war against drugs. Vichai, that does not mean that I have bad intentions towards the King.

  2. Vichai N. says:

    I better post how the King’s Dec2003 speech should be translated lest people get deceived by Pundit/Patiwat/Sport that Thailand’s King condoned Thaksin’s murder of the innocents. Here is my translation:

    “Victory in the war on drugs is good. People may blame the crackdown for more than 2,500 deaths, but this is a small price to pay. The lives of many officials are lost in working to bring the drug trade under control. These figures are often not counted, but it could be as high as the number of victims in the war on drugs. There may be only a few deaths for which authorities must be held responsible, so we have to classify those who were killed by fellow dealers, buyers and addicts, and those killed by authorities.”

    Now when you read above, you must read in the context that the Police Chief, the Interior Minister and the Thai Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra were all reporting to the Thai King that MOST of the killings were carried out by drug dealers against drug dealers themselves. HMK had to take these reports at face value . . . pending investigations. Hence HMK’s caveat: “There may be only a few deaths for which authorities must be held responsible, so we have to classify those who were killed by fellow dealers, buyers and addicts, and those killed by authorities.”

    Come on . . . the mass murder of thousands of innocents were Thaksin’s inspiration to distract the village masses while he corrupts and he rifles the country’s treasury.

    The King of Thailand would NEVER condone the murder of thousands of innocents, and, people who suggest otherwise are blatant liars and filled with malice to malign the monarchy, them being pro-Thaksin, in their spite to protect their malevolent hero Thaksin Shinawatra who had been completely dishonored the Kingdom of Thailand and failed the Thai people, and its most revered King Bhumibhol.

  3. […] Controversial ideas, no doubt, and the type of initiative that would, under current circumstances,┬ put some people in Burma in a very cash-rich position.┬ ┬ What Butler overlooks is that almost all logging in Burma happens in the mountainous parts of the States – and in Shan and Kachin areas, in particular.┬ Big and unfathomable questions remain: […]

  4. sport says:

    Vichai, can you read Thai? Someone posted the text of the King’s 2003 speech up earlier, and the King never scolded Thaksin – he praised him!

    If you can’t read Thai, let me translate some of the highlights: “It’s good that we won the war against drugs. Those guys (Vichai, he’s talking to you!) that have been so critical and sayed ‘2,500 people died!’, well that’s nonsense. If the PM didn’t do it, he didn’t do it! Jot this down, alright? Every year more than 2,500 people die due to drugs. People are killed from taking drugs, people on drugs kill other people and burn things up, and they kill government officials as well. Those people die too. But why doesn’t anybody ever talk about them? As for that 2,500 numnber, I don’t believe it. Those drug dealers killed themselves – how can we be held responsible for that?”

    Let me summarize that, in case the King’s informal style gets in the way of easy comprehension:
    – 2,500 dead is nothing compared to those innocents who would have died if we didn’t have a war on drugs
    – Most of the 2,500 dead weren’t killed by the police – they were killed by their fellow drug dealers

    He wasn’t being sarcastic. He was belittling bleeding heart drug-dealer sympathisers (relatives?) people like you, Vichai. If you love drug dealers so much, you should move to Columbia or Afghanistan.

  5. jeru says:

    Sport you are so inappropriately named. Those poor 2,500 villagers extrajudicially murdered by Thaksin were not given any SPORTING chance at all. They were not read their rights, they were not allowed to defend themselves in a court of laws, and they surely did not deserve to be shot right between their eyes just because Thaksin Shinawatra had a whim to bloody thousands for his macho show.

    All the King suggested to the then PM Thaksin in Dec/2002 was that he address Thailand’s amphethamine abuse problems. But the extrajudicial killings, which clearly violated constitutional rule of laws, was Thaksin Shinawatra’s idea alone and nobody else’s; and no one, certainly not the King, obliged him to slaughter thousands of innocents in that horrible Y2003 anti-drugs campaign. You disrespect Thailand’s highest institution by your blatant lie that the Thai King condoned extrajudicial murder of his subjects.

    A very serious crime, mass extrajudicial murder of thousands of innocents in violation of rule of law, was committed. That is all we have to remember when we condemn this despicable horrible man Thaksin Shinawatra as a mass murdering Thai criminal.

  6. Vichai N says:

    Sport – If the King was cheering Thaksin, the King would not have pointedly scolded him in his Dec/2003 speech televised all over Thailand. It is ridiculous and absolutely disrespectful to suggest that HMK would condone extrajudicial killings that violated the rule of law.

    But the what the heck . . . extrajudicial devotee scums will believe anything . . even that they did the country a favour. But did they? All they did was slaughter 2,500 innocent lives who were not even drug lords but at most were small time runners or addicts.

    Sport, whenever I hear anyone arguing for extrajudicial measures, I feel this strong impulse to see it tried on him personally. Extrajudicial killlings is evil. No man is justified in doing evil on the ground of expediency, not even the Prime Minister of Thailand.

  7. […] Paul Handley, the author of this year’s most important book on Thailand, The King Never Smiles, has a short article in Asia Sentinel. In today’s contribution, Handley asks, “Who gets the kingdom’s sceptre when Bhumibol leaves the stage?” While not fully answering his own question, Handley does argue that: The coup was about Thaksin’s ambition and misrule, certainly, but what really got General Sonthi Boonyaratklin and his cohorts to move was the issue of succession to the throne. There was a clear meeting of minds between the crown and the military, through King Bhumibol Adulyadej’s number one aide Prem Tinsulanonda, that they did not want Thaksin in a position to exert influence on the passing of the Chakri Dynasty mantle to Crown Prince Vajiralongkorn. […]

  8. guddie says:

    We THAIS are like A GLASS FULL OF WATER.I wish our monarchy would learn some good pionts from English Monarchy.Also we THAIS should be able to participate (like the Japanese) in the selection of the next King or Queen.We Thais especiaaly Bangkok people are rather BLANK lot but very jelous .The easiest trend to destroy one another is cry out nation,religion and king

  9. sport says:

    jeru, the most horrible thing is that the King, who had an unfiltered view of what was going on, was cheering Thaksin on as well. Just read his comments, untranslated in Thai in post no. 42.

    I can only conclude that the King was cheering on the murder of innocents, or that his intel was telling him that most of the dead were actually drug dealers.

  10. Frustrated says:

    I think guess or suspect is OK in this case, the case which everything is suspiciously behaved, suspiciously existed. You have no chance to know the truth, the whole truth. They won’t tell you or even if they tell you it will never the full story that you can use against them. Guess is the best thing you can do unless our people have a strong mandate and strong request for transparency from every institution in the country, including the monarch.

  11. jeru says:

    polo/sport – That makes it even more despicable. Just the like Roman gladiator show . . people cheering for blood and Thaksin the emperor-wannabe providing the bloody entertainment.

    But the more likely explanation was that Thaksin completely controlled the media at that time . . painting only the nice picture show of his anti-drug successes and quashing news about the innocents (nearly all killed were innocents) slaughtered.

  12. sport says:

    Polo, they were too busy applauding Thaksin… Don’t forget, the drug war was amazingly popular. 92% supported Thaksin’s approach, an unprecedented percentage.

    Only the families of the drug dealers were angry, and they were afraid of getting killed in the cross-fire.

  13. patiwat says:

    Aurel Croissant and Daniel J. Pojar, Jr. wrote an article that surveyed vote buying in the 2005 election.

    They found widely varying accounts. Some academics claimed that there was less vote buying than in 2001, some that there was much more. PollWatch claimed things were worse. There were reports of cellphone cameras being used to take snapshots of ballots as evidence of voting for a candidate (this is why the EC in April 2006 decided to change the format for voting booths – for this they were jailed). Some researcher claimed that much less was spent on vote buying in 2005 compared to 2001. But that person also claimed that 2001 was the dirtiest election in Thai history – despite many other academics claiming 2001 was the cleanest in Thai history. The EC was either warmly praised or viciously blasted by commentators. The police claimed that political violence fell by more than half.

    Basically, any account of vote buying and fraud must be taken with a shovel, no – a barrel, of salt

  14. Curious says:

    Yes, calling the title “supercillious” is a misreading. I think most Thais with long memories know the significance of the phrase. The unspeakable. I’m sure Handley does too; it has nothing to do with bodhisattvas. Again, the hold of Thai royalist discourse over Western academics is remarkable. Why are they so eager to defend the monarchy? And anthropologists of all people. They need to understand that monarchs do not equal “culture”.

  15. […] In relation to previous posts on The King Never Smiles, here is Paul Handley’s response to the review by anthropologist Grant Evans in the Far Eastern Economic Review (thanks to Polo for the link): Nuanced Views of the King One would hardly know from Grant Evans’ September review of my book, The King Never Smiles: A Biography of Thailand’s King Bhumibol Adulyadej, that it highlights the political philosophy behind the Thai monarchy’s support for military coups against elected governments over the past six decades. Nor did Mr. Evans reveal that another main theme is how King Bhumibol mastered and adapted traditional ritual to restore power to the throne and build an overwhelming popularity among the Thai people. […]

  16. Polo: No, it was reported in The Manager.

    Lurker: Thaksin faced criticism in 2004 for the violence in the South and bird flu.

  17. polo says:

    The issue is also, why did so few prominent Thai people — almost nobody, actually — speak out at the time about the killings? Good for Dr Pradit, but who else?

  18. polo says:

    Lurker, Are you sure you didn’t see that reported as fact in the Nation?

  19. patiwat says:

    Andrew, that links doesn’t work. This should.

  20. polo says:

    Handley doesn’t offer any evidence for what he says. Even if it sounds reasonable, how do we know if this is true?

    Anyway, he also has a letter regarding Grant Evans (I think discussed here earlier) in the new Far Eastern Economic Review.

    http://www.feer.com/articles1/2006/0611/free/p006.html