"Rumors of a military coup refuse to die"
Nothing to worry about, aparently, but this is the headline we saw in the english language Bangkok Post yesterday. "Ummm..." we said. "What?"
Anyway, there's some sort of ongoing political crisis going on in Thailand, which this article hints at.
FYI, Thaksin is the telecom billionaire who won the first free elections held here about 5 years ago. Thai Rak Thai is the party he helped found (literally means "Thais love Thais".) Apparently he's under political attack, and there are rumors of a military coup (there have been 19 coup attempts since the one that took power from the King in 1932, 11 of them successful.) Looks like it's nothing, but still a disturbing and exciting headline to see across the room on a newspaper.
Anyway, there's some sort of ongoing political crisis going on in Thailand, which this article hints at.
FYI, Thaksin is the telecom billionaire who won the first free elections held here about 5 years ago. Thai Rak Thai is the party he helped found (literally means "Thais love Thais".) Apparently he's under political attack, and there are rumors of a military coup (there have been 19 coup attempts since the one that took power from the King in 1932, 11 of them successful.) Looks like it's nothing, but still a disturbing and exciting headline to see across the room on a newspaper.
posted by Kenneth at 8:47 AM
3 Comments:
Reads like New Hampshire state representative elections! rumours and coups abound. Cassie
They had papers to read while waiting for the plane this morning in Chiang Mai, so I read a little more about this. The political crisis has been going on since the beginning of the year (my guess is no party got a majority in the last election, and nobody's willing to form a coalition), so there's no clear winner to form a government, so the former PM is the caretaker.
And many of the senior generals in the military are his college buddies (he's a military academy grad), so if there's a coup, it's felt that it would not be to throw out the government, but to sweep the military clean and reorganize it. I have no doubt this version is dramatically simplified from what's really going on.
Anyway, this Thaksin guy needs to draw all the negative criticism from the opposition, while his successor positions himself for takeover. I guess that's what's taking so long.
It's interesting how different the political power players are in different parts of the world.
In this country we normally think of our military leaders as nothing more than obedient lapdogs of the silverbacked chicken-hawks (successfully combining an image of chimpanzee society with the nemesis of Foghorn Leghorn). While a few generals have become president, they are mostly just the leaders of a dangerous sideshow (internationally speaking).
In many other societies being a military officer mean you are a "player", part of the power elite. I remember 2 young Thai naval officers going through US navy flight training who were definitely tapped into the governmental/political power elite. Same with the Iranian, Argentinian and Israeli flight students who were quartered in the same boq as I. Come to think of it why was I stuck in the same building with all them foreigners? They definitely offered me political opinions my 22 yr old brain had never considered.
Several years later while bouncing off the port cities of South America one of the strange phenoms was the deference and respect given to military officers by the local populations (even the US military). While back home we would never travel in uniform in other countries it is a power suit. It was like being presented a chess board with similar looking pieces, but finding out they worked under a whole different set of rules.
A quick check of the net doesn't raise any concerns traveling in Thailand these days, but Burma is a different story.
p.
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