The military made its move on September 19, 2006 — less than one month ahead of a new round of legislative elections. Ominously foreshadowing that something big was about to go down, Thai television stations abruptly cut out of scheduled programming and played soothing, ready-made slideshows bearing still images of the royal family, at times accompanied by music composed by the King. Shortly thereafter, CNN reported that tanks were advancing through Bangkok, rolling down Rachadamnoen Avenue in the direction of the Government House. The capital city — a megalopolis of ten million people — was taken with derisive ease, in a matter of just minutes. A few tanks and a busload of special forces moved in from Lopburi was all it took for the army to re-assert its control of the entire country. Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, hours away from speaking to the United Nations General Assembly, feigned outrage and surprise. But he had long been forewarned.

Cheered in Bangkok and unencumbered by any hint of active popular opposition, the generals solicitously apologized for the “inconvenience” caused, promised to return the country to democracy within a year, and for good measure gave everyone a day off. The edicts that suspended the 1997 constitution and banned all political activities were accompanied by the instruction that soldiers keep smiling in public. Three days later, a pro-democracy demonstration was held in the busy shopping complex at Siam Center; banners read “No to Coup and No to Thaksin.” It was attended by an oceanic crowd estimated at 20 to 100 people. On September 30, a lone protester badly injured himself after crashing his taxi into a tank. The reliably servile Bangkok Post — ever the model of “opium pipe” reporting [These appear to be the words of its own founder Alexander MacDonald, cited in Pickerell and Moore (1958, 94)] — snidely reported the incident in its online breaking news section under the headline: “Tank 1, Taxi 0 in Apparent Protest [Link to the story now outdated].” Democracy had died in Thailand. Few, however, seemed to mourn its passing.

It was argued at the time that the army did not kill democracy. Democracy had only been put out of its misery as the generals brought the elected dictatorship of Khun Thaksin to an ignominious close. Thaksin, after all, had already thoroughly dismantled democratic institutions, imposing a measure of repression and social control more reminiscent of an authoritarian regime than a representative government in a free country. In five years at the helm, Thaksin had systematically subjected dissenting voices to police brutality, legal harassment, and a relentless smear campaign that portrayed them as anarchists and enemies of the nation. He had revived repressive legislation granting the police expansive powers to search and interrogate suspects. He had moved to assert editorial control over the television channels owned by the state. He had routinely pressured the print media to give favorable coverage through threats of legal action and the manipulation of the advertising budget of state-owned enterprises. And he had vanquished independent bodies like the Election Commission, the National Counter Corruption Commission, and the National Human Rights Commission through carrots, sticks, and a wave of partisan appointments. 

More shamefully still, in 2003 Thaksin had launched a “war on drugs” that vowed to eradicate drug trafficking within three months. More than 2,500 people — according to Thailand’s own Office of Narcotics Control Board, as many as 1,400 of whom had nothing to do at all with drugs — were killed in a flurry of extra-judicial executions. Whether the government’s campaign made much of a dent in the lucrative narcotics trade is not clear. Drug abuse was reported on the rise in 2005.

If that weren’t enough, throughout his tenure Thaksin also seems to have done his utmost to inflame long-dormant ethnic tensions in Thailand’s southern provinces of Pattani, Yala, and Narathiwat. Insurgent offensives that targeted army bases and government schools in early 2004 were followed by the government’s brutal reprisals. The military and the police were cited in a number of episodes of torture, abductions, and murders of activists and suspected insurgents. Voices of dissent like those of human rights advocate Somchai Neelaphaijit were forever silenced. On April 28, 113 people were killed in incidents such as those that led to the storming of the Kru-Ze mosque in Pattani, where 28 lightly-armed men who had barricated themselves inside were massacred. The following October, the government’s heavy-handedness caused the death by suffocation of 78 among the hundreds of people who had been loaded onto military trucks during a peaceful protest in Tak Bai. By 2006, what was once effectively contained to a low-intensity conflict characterized by sporadic episodes of minor violence had erupted into a full-scale insurgency, the daily attacks on the representatives and the symbols of the state leaving hundreds dead in their wake.

 In light of Thaksin’s sickening record, I would have sympathized with the argument made in support of the 2006 coup — were it not, that is, for three small details that seem to have escaped many of the coup’s supporters in Thailand and abroad. First, we should have all known better than to think there is any such thing as a “democratic coup d’etat.” To be sure, Thailand has never experienced one — pace the long list of generals who have used the expression with much the same results as putting lipstick on a pig. Second, Thailand is a country where human rights violations (whether perpetrated by the army, the police, or paramilitary death squads) have never (ever) been punished, so it was unclear why things would be different this time. Thanom Kittikachorn? He got a swell state funeral. The Red Gaurs and Village Scouts? They were never even prosecuted. Suchinda Kraprayoon? He was granted blanket amnesty while the bodies of those he murdered were still warm. Third, it’s not like those associated with the coup had a much better human rights record than Thaksin. The coup’s mastermind, Gen. Prem Tinsulanonda, rose to prominence in the 1970s by leading a gruesome counterinsurgency campaign against the Communist Party of Thailand in Isan — a campaign defined by the same extensive, systematic recourse to extra-judicial executions. And Surayud Chulanont, the former general chosen as Prime Minister in the wake of the coup, was the same man who led the special forces responsible for well-documented atrocities in May 1992.
 
Nonetheless, the junta announced it was determined to right Thaksin’s wrongs. And its beginnings looked promising. Shortly after being appointed Prime Minister, Surayud visited the South and extended unusually heartfelt apologies to family members of the victims at Tak Bai. A few months later, the government launched investigations into the human rights abuses committed in the context of the war on drugs and the southern insurgency. At the same time, the generals impaneled a commission to look into 20 government programs suspected to have been tainted by corruption. The Asset Examination Committee was charged with probing Thaksin’s “unusual wealth” as well as specific episodes of tax evasion, corruption, and abuse of power. And the police was instructed explore the possibility of charging Thaksin with as many as 6 counts of lèse majesté.

Fast forward two and a half years. Thaksin has been subjected to a number of judicial proceedings including the infamous Ratchadaphisek land deal, the Exim Bank case, the two- and three-digit lottery case, the sale of Shin Corp, and the shareholder structure of SC Assets Plc. He was convicted, in absentia, and sentenced to two years in prison for his role in the Ratchadaphisek affair. At the same time, Thaksin’s bank accounts were frozen by the AEC, while 76 billion baht may ultimately be seized by the state at the end of an ongoing civil case. All this, however, barely scratches the surface of the atrocities committed by Thaksin’s homicidal regime. No charges were ever filed for the disappearances, the extra-judicial executions, and the brutal crackdown of demonstrators in the south. At the end of the day, Thaksin never paid for his real crimes. Nor will he ever.

The question is why. Why, specifically, did the generals go after Thaksin for fairly pedestrian episodes of corruption but then completely ignored potential crimes against humanity? The Ratchadaphisek case, for instance, is not that much different from the probe into Surayud’s ownership of land at Khao Yai Thiang. And corruption is well-known to have been rampant during Prem’s own tenure as Prime Minister in the 1980s. So graft could hardly be a plausible justification for Thaksin’s removal from office.

Two reasons are typically adduced for judicial inaction on human rights abuses. Sometimes, it is noted that prosecuting these cases may compromise Thailand’s chances to achieve “national reconciliation” — as if there could be any such thing as national reconciliation without a measure of justice. Besides, the military’s support of the PAD hardly seems to have been in the interest of protecting the country from further unrest. In other instances, we are reminded that prosecutions of human rights cases are complicated and messy. So getting Thaksin for comparatively paltry offenses would be Thailand’s equivalent to nailing Al Capone for tax evasion. But though that may well apply to some of the disappearances, in the absence of physical evidence, the state has built a fairly detailed case-file of the Tak Bai incident, which the judiciary seems determined to do nothing about. Not to mention that the case for which Thaksin was recently convicted was no slam dunk either; the kangaroo court that sentenced him to two years in prison did so on the basis of the flimsiest of circumstantial evidence.

So why was nothing done to hold Thaksin accountable for human rights abuses? Here’s a thought. Thaksin is ultimately (and quite possibly criminally) responsible for the abuses, but he wasn’t the one who pulled the trigger on all manners of drug dealers real and imagined. He did not personally storm the Kru Ze mosque. He did not physically torture Muslim youth, nor did he hide Somchai Neelaphaijit’s body in his basement. And he didn’t stack the demonstrators at Tak Bai into the vans that ultimately turned out to be their mass graves. All of these actions might have happened with Thaksin’s knowledge or even at Thaksin’s behest. But, as the government’s own report points out, most such monstrosities were carried out by the military. So Thaksin could never be prosecuted for commissioning murders without subjecting the actual executioners to similar probes. After all, no civilized country considers “I was just following orders” a valid excuse to rape, torture, or kill. And Thailand’s so called “independent” courts, much less the junta itself, were never going to hold senior military officers accountable for their crimes.

Colonel Manas Kongpan, one of the three officers found by a Pattani Provincial Court to be responsible for the massacre at Kru Ze in November of 2006, is a case in point. Not only was the good colonel never fired, arrested, or tried. He is now the head of the Internal Security Operations Command (ISOC) in Ranong — with license to kill Rohingya refugees, provided that the international community is looking the other way. [Manas' superior at the time, Gen. Panlop Pinmanee --- former death squad commander and known PAD supporter --- was appointed by the junta as ISOC advisor after the 2006 coup.] Of course, none if this matters to the retards charged with waving the pompoms for the coup in Thailand’s sycophantic media. In a recent column, The Nation’s Sopon Ongkara rails against Thaksin’s abysmal human rights record in one paragraph. Then he proceeds to dismiss the abuses committed by the same military commanders on Abhisit’s watch as “a distraction.” A distraction? Or an inconvenient revelation that finally draws attention to the hypocrisy of the new government’s ostensible support for human rights and the rule of law?

All of this points to a fairly obvious conclusion. The human rights rhetoric was highly instrumental to the military’s case to overthrow Thaksin, particularly as the generals sought to explain themselves in terms the international community might have sympathized with. But the substance of what Thaksin had done was not particularly objectionable to them. So it was never about human rights, for which the military-bureaucratic elites who removed Thaksin have shown nothing but contempt over the past eight decades. Nor, I would submit, was it ever about corruption. When it comes to abusing public office or plundering state coffers, in fact, generals, top civil servants, and their supporters in Bangkok’s jet-set have never taken a back seat to anyone. And so, trite and increasingly half-hearted protestations to the contrary notwithstanding, this was always about removing the threat that Thaksin posed to their own power. It was always about discrediting Thaksin by labeling him a convicted criminal without seeking any actual justice or redress for his real crimes. And it was always about finding a quasi-legal pretext to seize the assets upon which, undoubtedly, any chance of a comeback now rests. 

All criminals are equal in Thailand. But some criminals are apparently more equal than others.