Political Struggle and Human Rights
The previous chapter argued that the way that human rights advocates articulated human rights with Buddhism allowed for experimentation simultaneously with religion and with the political. In this chapter, I show that the political vision of human rights agents like the NHRC does not end with arguments for an egalitarian Buddhism but also seeks to legitimate itself through the inheritance and recuperation of a particular political history, the history of democratic struggle. Such claims are sometimes overt and sometimes implicit, and my argument here is that laying claim to the history of democratic struggle involves promoting a certain way of remembering and memorializing moments of democratic struggle that have been subject to projects of collective forgetting. Just what should count as part of Thailand’s history of democratic struggle has been a matter of contest for two generations, especially over the status of the 1976 student uprising mentioned in the previous chapter. This chapter explores how the NHRC envisions itself as an inheritor of the radical democratic movements in Thailand’s past and in part how it sees human rights in Thailand as a product of those movements and the sentiments that motivated them. To support this argument, I review three critical moments of prodemocracy uprising (in 1973, 1976, and 1992) that preceded the NHRC and discuss the potency of specific political symbols deployed during the uprisings. The NHRC, in what amounts to a declaration of its identity, its foundational strategic plan, recasts these symbols—and, indeed, makes symbols of the demonstrations themselves—to position the NHRC within the heritage of democratic struggles. Just as the articulation of human rights in and with Buddhism transfigured each, as I explored in the first chapter, the recuperation I describe here of Thailand’s radical democratic past as the soil from which human rights have grown gives them a specific hue and cast. Finally, this chapter shows that there is not a single vision of human rights or their advocacy, despite this egalitarian, democratic bent in the NHRC, but that there are plural, sometimes competing visions. The NHRC is then not just a site for defining and promoting human rights but also of contest over their scope and practices.
On my first visit to the ONHRC (the secretariat that supports NHRC commissioners), Kat, a lawyer working there, drew my attention to this contest. Having seated me across from her at her desk, one of the fifteen or so cubicles squeezed into the ground-floor office on Phayathai Road that made up the ONHRC, she asked her assistant to bring us glasses of Nescafé. While we sipped them, she explained that the lynchpin of human rights in Thai society is Buddhism. The refrain is now familiar: the problem is to encourage equality (ส่งเสริมเสมอภาค), but inequality is sustained by the idea that the wealthy have more merit.1 Immediately after this, she said that it was a problem of establishing a new hegemony2 (she used the English term here), an effort that began with the 6 October 1976 uprising and continued in May 1992 but was not yet complete.3 The 1997 constitution (created after the restoration of democracy following the 1992 uprising), she continued, secured the right to equality and was the most progressive constitution Thailand had produced. While Kat emphasized that the effort to settle the problem of equality is not contrary to Buddhism or Thai society,4 here I emphasize the line connecting events from the 6 October 1976 demonstrations through the May 1992 democracy uprising to the 1997 constitution. To that end, I will review the history of democratic struggle that began in the 1970s; how the rise and implosion of the Communist Party of Thailand (CPT) led to a wide-ranging and widespread NGO movement; the ways in which the channeling of many former leftist students, sometimes via NGOs, into the Ministry of Public Health (MoPH) has led to a divergence in human rights methodologies; and how the NHRC, in laying claim to a particular vision of Thailand’s democratic history, struggles to employ, promote, and legitimate the form of egalitarianism that Kat mentioned above.
Democratic Struggle: Three Watershed Events
It is tempting to think of human rights in Thailand as an issue or process of vernacularizing a global discourse.5 When Kat told me “Marxist is no longer a bad word, since the end of the Cold War” (ตั้งแต่สงครามเย็นผู้นิยมลัทธิมากซ์ก็ไม่ใช่คำสาปแช่ง), she alerted me to the ways in which such a thesis of domestication would have to account for the domestication of other global discourses (Marxism and democracy, for example) and the particular variants of these discourses (in the Thai case, Maoism) as they shaped the process of domestication. The statement is also arresting for the sort of sea-change it indicates in Thai politics, a change that sets the demonstrations of 1992 apart in important ways from the student democracy uprisings of 1973 and 1976.
14 October 1973 to 6 October 1976
In November 1971, Prime Minister Thanom Kittakachorn launched a coup against his own government, suspending a three-year-old constitution and dissolving the equally young parliament (Baker and Pasuk 2005, 186). Student organizations had undertaken sporadic demonstrations over Japanese control of the economy and corruption, among other issues, but by June 1973, the demonstrations were better organized, focusing on the restoration of the constitution and democracy (Baker and Pasuk 2005, 186). The military government responded by arresting student leaders, and on 13 October, up to half a million Thai from throughout the country joined student protestors at the Democracy Monument on Ratchadamnern Klang Avenue to demand a constitution, the restoration of elected government, and the release of jailed students. This was the first mass uprising against a Thai military government (Giles 1997, 89). As the police and military presence grew, protestors became uneasy and moved toward the palace both for their security and to appeal to the king to mediate (Baker and Pasuk 2005, 187). Although the generals backed down once the student leaders won an audience with the king, releasing jailed students and agreeing to restore the constitution, the 14 October dispersal of the demonstrators dissolved into chaos, and the military attacked, killing and wounding several hundred.
Thanom Kittikachorn, Praphat Charusatien, and Narong Kittakachorn (Thanom’s son and Praphat’s son-in-law), the junta’s leadership, hastily fled into exile, the last shred of their government’s legitimacy falling with the massacred protesters. Further, it is widely believed that the king pressured them to leave, making way for the restoration of constitutional democracy (Connors 2007, 62). Whether or not this is true, the king did choose the members of a National Convention that elected the National Assembly that would serve as the interim parliament and draft a new constitution. By 1975, Kukrit Pramoj held the prime minister’s office, heading a fragile coalition, but was forced, under pressure from the army, to dissolve parliament. In April 1976, he lost in the polls, to be replaced at the head of the Democratic Party by his brother, Seni, who formed a new coalition government under the banner of reformism (Baker and Pasuk 2005, 191–194).
Over the same period, the reactionary elements of the right wing had reorganized, forming, in particular, two paramilitary and propaganda organizations, the Red Gaurs and Nawaphon (meaning new or ninth force). In concert with the Village Scouts, a rural, anticommunist program started by the border police in 1971 under royal patronage during the Thanom regime,6 these groups undertook a campaign of intimidation and assassination of leftists, student leaders, and labor organizers, following an explosion in 1973 of the number and scale of worker strikes (Giles 1997, 90–92). Their impact and the reluctance of police to intervene emboldened Praphat (temporarily) and Thanom (now donning a monk’s robes) to return from exile in August and September. Students at Thammasat University, located at the western edge of Sanam Luang (Royal Park, which is itself at the western end of Ratchadamnern Klang, before it rises to the Pinklao Bridge), protested the return of the junta leaders.
For roughly a decade, building on the prosperity of the 1950s and 1960s, the demographics of the university population had shifted from elite dominance to include Thai from a much wider range of economic and regional backgrounds, with the result that students were no longer automatically assumed to have the kind of mandarin status they enjoyed in the 1950s and earlier. On the contrary, there was a growing animosity among those Thai who saw students as averse to work and as leftist agitators (Giles 1997, 90; Anderson 1977). On 6 October 1976, the three paramilitary groups mentioned above, those harboring resentment toward students, and the reactionary elements of the