This past week, the Thai Department of Special Investigation (DSI) charged former prime minister Abhisit Vejjajiva and former deputy prime minister Suthep Thaugsuban for authorizing the shooting and killing of protestors in spring 2010, during the worst street violence in Bangkok since 1992. According to the Bangkok Post, the DSI issued these charges since “the pair failed to stop issuing orders to quell the protests when people were killed as a result of the crackdown orders.” But, the Post reported, DSI is not going to bring any charges against soldiers involved in the crackdown. Read more »

While much has been written about President Obama’s recent tour of Southeast Asia, less attention has been paid to the simultaneous visit by U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta to the region.  On November 15, during a stopover in Bangkok, Panetta reaffirmed the United States longstanding military ties with Thailand with a new agreement, the 2012 Joint Vision Statement for the Thai-U.S. Defense Alliance. The next day, the United States also reiterated its military ties with Cambodia during a meeting between Secretary Penetta and Cambodia’s defense minister, General Tea Banh. Read more »

Amidst all the chaos in Bangkok over the Pitak Siam rally —a group of monarchists opposed to the Yingluck government who were supposed to bring hundreds of thousands of supporters into the streets— another, similarly important piece of news about Thailand’s decline emerged. As it turns out, the Pitak Siam rally was mostly a bust. Only about 20,000 supporters actually turned out to rally sites in Bangkok, a far cry from the hundreds of thousands of people who came out in 2006 for anti-Thaksin rallies that ultimately helped precipitate the 2006 coup. Read more »

President Obama kicked off his tour of Southeast Asia this week with a visit to Bangkok, Thailand where he and Secretary Clinton were granted a royal audience with the country’s ailing monarch, King Bhumibol Adulyadej.  The Washington Post yesterday had an excellent account of the meeting, which took place at the Siriraj Hospital where the king has been hospitalized since 2009. The United States’ courtship of the monarch dates back to the 1950s, when the king and his close ally, then-military leader Sarit Thanarat, allowed U.S. troops to base out of Thailand during the Vietnam War. Washington came to view the monarch as invaluable to stemming the growth of communism, both in Thailand and region-wide. Read more »

As President Barack Obama sets off this weekend for a historic trip to Southeast Asia, he arrives at a high point for himself —and a low point for the region. Obama, making his first trip since winning re-election at the polls, will be the first sitting American president to visit Myanmar. The country has undoubtedly embarked upon historic reforms, yet is also embroiled in brutal ethnic violence. Thailand, another stop on Obama’s trip, is bracing for what could be a hugely disruptive leadership succession fight. In Cambodia, he will attend the East Asia Summit, as well as the Summit of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), an organization in the throes of a crisis. Read more »

Over the past six months, the insurgency in southern Thailand, which seemed to be cooling off late last year, has once again heated up. Incidents of daily violence are up, and the insurgents are using increasingly sophisticated bombing and gunning techniques. The recent ceasefire deal in the southern Philippines between Manila and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front has shifted attention to the south Thailand insurgency, yet the prospect of change in the Thai south looks remote. Read more »

In the wake of the Philippines government announcing last weekend that Manila and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) had agreed upon a peace plan after fifteen years of negotiations and forty years of war, many Thai news outlets are wondering whether Manila could teach Bangkok a lesson in how to deal with the southern Thailand insurgency. The Nation today, in an editorial titled “A Lesson for Thailand from the Philippines,” offers that the Philippine agreement has many key points for Thai policymakers to learn from, a mantra echoed by several other Thai media outlets. Yet there are key differences between southern Thailand and southern Philippines that, at this point, will make it hard to apply many of Manila’s lessons to Thailand: Read more »

Last year, flooding in Thailand breached defenses across the country, ruining many of the industrial estates on the outskirts of Bangkok, bringing the capital to a halt, and resulting in billions of dollars in damage and decisions by several major electronics components manufacturers to either abandon Thailand operations or open new operations to build disc drives and other parts in countries safer from flooding. Last year’s flooding was also horrible for the public image of the government of Yingluck Shinawatra, which appeared to be slow to respond, as compared to the army, which utilized the flooding, and its rapid response, to somewhat rehabilitate its image in the minds of many Thais after the army’s killing of at least ninety protestors in the streets of Bangkok in spring 2010. Read more »

In today’s Washington Post, there is an excellent overview of how the austerity programs in many countries in Europe have led to pressure on monarchies to cut costs and reduce their lifestyles. Most notably, the criticism has extended to even the Spanish monarchy, which for years in Spain was all but exempted from public and press criticism because of the role that King Juan Carlos played in the late 1970s and early 1980s in helping to promote democratization and to prevent a coup from succeeding. The very socialists who, in other countries, might have been used to criticizing the monarchy usually avoided any critiques of Juan Carlos, as the socialists had benefited enormously from the democratization period, dominating the Spanish government for years. Read more »

After some time on vacation, I have returned to find that Thai politics, which almost couldn’t get worse, actually has. Last month, Thitinan Pongsudhirak, in my opinion the most astute observer of Thai politics, captured the fundamental tension in Thailand today in an op-ed:

Thailand’s problem is that those who keep winning elections are not allowed to rule, whereas others who ultimately call the shots cannot win elections. [Thanks to Bangkok Pundit for pointing me to Thitinan’s op-ed]

 That, in a nutshell, is Thailand’s dilemma, one shared by many middle-income developing nations where middle classes are becoming increasingly skeptical of the benefits of democratization, as I discuss in my forthcoming book The Decline of Democracy (Yale University Press). Read more »