Had Thailand been a democracy, there would have been no coups
Re: “Apologists for military dictatorship are deluded”, Have Your Say, May 26.
Simon Ordsall has displayed his complete lack of understanding of democracy, the definition of a “failed state”, and above all the anti-government, pro-monarchy protests in 2013-14.
He throws about silly lines like “conspiracy writer”, “warped ideas about democracy” and “democratically elected government”.
As a “conspiracy writer”, I do my research and often write from experience. I was actually on the streets of Bangkok for several months during the protests. I witnessed a partisan police force ignoring blatant armed violations of the law by the supporters of the United Front for Democracy against Dictatorship (UDD). They are the people who believe the right to vote constitutes democracy. It does not. The right to vote was awarded to the Thai people in 1932 at the time of the change of monarchy from absolute to constitutional.
But this legislation failed to establish democracy as the form of government, resulting in the subsequent 20 coups and 20 constitution rewrites to date. Coups do not occur in democracies, only in forms of dictatorship.
The right to vote in isolation of established principles of democracy opens the door to dictatorship, as Thai history shows. It allowed Thaksin Shinawatra to control the country. He realised that all he needed was a majority of votes and he had carte blanche to do as he wished, unconstrained by accountability under a democratic system of laws.
Democracy is a form of government controlled by laws, not people, but where the people have the right to vote for their lawmakers. Outside democracy, a government voted to power is not a “democratically elected government”.
Thailand became a “failed state” because it suffered a total breakdown of law and order with a partisan police force supporting the Shinawatra family due to the “Class 10 syndrome” dating to when Thaksin trained as a police officer. The fiasco at Ratchaprasong in 2010 clearly illustrated this point, as did the fact that police dressed in black actually fired at us from a rooftop and smashed cars occupied by protesters. In 2014, near the Democracy Monument, there was a line of destroyed trucks and cars wrecked and burned out by the police for all to see.
Even now the police force has not changed. Its tactics continue in violation of the Police Academy’s code of conduct. The failings of the police force caused the coup, and it’s disappointing that PM Prayut has not carried out a fundamental reform of civil law enforcement.
JC Wilcox
