Betrayal in Thailand

Giles Ji Ungpakorn

Version July 2012

Betrayal in Thailand as Reconciliation Protects Status Quo Giles Ji Ungpakorn http://redthaisocialist.com/

Two years after the brutal crack-down against unarmed pro-democracy Red Shirts in Bangkok and only a year after the election victory of the Pua Thai Party government, the real meaning of reconciliation has become crystal clear. It means betrayal.

Lse Majest - the litmus test for Thai Democracy In July 2011 millions of Red Shirts turned out to vote for the Pua Thai Party, headed by Yingluk Shinawat. The party won a landslide majority despite various attempts by the military, the media and the elites to place obstacles in the path of the partys election victory. The election result was a slap in the face for the military and the party of the military (the miss-named Democrats). But the signs were bad for the Red Shirts from the beginning. In the early days the new government did nothing about the Red Shirt political prisoners, and it ignored the important issue of bringing ex-Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva, his deputy Sutep Tuaksuban, and the military generals Prayut Junocha and Anupong Paojinda to justice for their key roles in gunning down nearly 90 prodemocracy civilians in 2010. Later, as Thailand was inundated by the worst flooding in half a century, Yingluk was seen in friendly poses with general Prayut, touring the flood areas. She also welcomed cooperation with Abhisit. Later, she went to pay her respects to Privy Council Chairman General Prem Tinsulanon. Many nave Red Shirts said that we should be patient and wait because the flooding was a serious crisis which the new government had to deal with before addressing democracy, freedom of speech and justice, which had all been trampled underfoot by the military ever since the 2006 coup. After the waters receded, the excuses changed. It was argued that the Yingluk Government was biding its time and waiting for an opportune moment to reduce the power of the military. Later, as it became crystal clear that a deal had been struck with the military, those desperate or nave Red Shirts who were in denial, claimed that Pua Thai was conducting a clever and secret plan to get the better of the generals by lulling them into reconciliation. Some, however, claimed that nothing could be done because power did not lie in the hands of the government and the military would stage another coup if the government tried to create justice and democracy. The Yingluk Government talked constantly about reconciliation with the military and the extreme royalists, but these conservatives did not immediately reciprocate in public. They frustrated the governments flood rescue work and used the floods to accuse the government of incompetence. As far as the conservatives were concerned, it did not mean that there was no back-room agreement with Taksin Shinawat and Pua Thai. It just meant that they continued the bargaining. 1

Betrayal in Thailand

Giles Ji Ungpakorn

Version July 2012

The extreme royalists in the Democrat Party, the military and other sections of elite society, also kept up a constant barrage about Pua Thai and Red Shirt Republicanism. The Republican mood which has swept through the Red Shirts, but not through the Pua Thai Party, was created by the royalists themselves, ever since the 2006 coup. Every repressive act was justified on the grounds that it was for the King. As a result, millions of Red Shirts even came to believe that the King had engineered the floods to punish Pua Thai and the Red Shirts. The enfeebled King, sitting in his hospital apartment for the last few years, was never strong-willed enough to organise any political action. Now he can hardly talk or stand up. But the military and the conservatives are happy to use him as a puppet and for the Thai people to think that he wields all the power1. There can never be democracy and social justice in so long as repressive laws such as lse majest and the Computer Crimes law remain on the statute books. There can never be democracy and social justice until state murders are brought to justice. Therefore any agreement or reconciliation pact with the military that agrees not to change repressive laws or prosecute state murderers will be a serious obstacle to achieving the dreams of millions of red shirts in building a future of democracy and social justice in Thailand. One of the most disgusting actions taken by the new government is to increase political repression against dissidents and any unfortunate people who fall foul of the lse majest law and the Computer Crimes law. More and more people are being prosecuted and jailed. A 60 year old man, A-Kong, was recently imprisoned for 20 years for supposedly sending text messages. The evidence was extremely questionable. He later died in prison because the authorities refused him timely medical treatment2. Many other individuals, such as Somyot Pruksakasemsuk and Surachai Darnwatanatrakun have been systematically refused bail while awaiting trial and made to appear in a number of different courts throughout the country in chains. This is now causing outrage among progressive Thais, some of whom are not Red Shirts. The two odious politicians who are most responsible for pushing for more lse majest repression are ICT Minister Anudit Nakorntup and Deputy Prime Minister Chalerm Yubamrung. Chalerm is a known gangster politician who made sure his gangster son avoided prosecution for shooting a policeman in a pub brawl. Meanwhile, the generals and Democrat Party politicians are braying for more blood. All those progressive Thai citizens who propose legal reforms are told to leave Thailand because they dont conform to Thai conservative culture. The irony is that all this verbal fascism was going on during the ridiculous funeral ceremony for North Koreas Kim Jong Il. Maybe the conservative Thais should have moved to North Korea. The Chairman of the previous governments Truth and Reconciliation Committee, the conservative lawyer Kanit Na Nakorn, suggested that lse majest should be reformed so that the maximum punishment would be 7 years in jail and lse majest could only be used on the say so of the Palace Secretary 3. But Kanit Na Nakorn deliberately missed the point. lse majest is an authoritarian law which tramples on the freedom of speech. It cannot be reformed. It protects public figures like the King from any accountability or transparency and more importantly it protects the
See Giles Ji Ungpakorn (2011) Lse Majest, the Monarchy, and the Military in Thailand. Paper given at the Department of Peace and Conflict Studies (Pax et Bellum), University of Uppsala, Sweden, 29th April 2011. Also Giles Ji Ungpakorn (2010) Thailands Crisis and the Struggle for Democracy . WD Press, U.K., Chapter 3. The Monarchy. Myth or Reality? All available from http://redthaisocialist.com/ 2 http://www.humanrights.asia/news/news/alrc-news/human-rights-council/hrc20/ALRC-CWS-20-09-2012
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http://www.prachatai.com/journal/2011/12/38535

Betrayal in Thailand

Giles Ji Ungpakorn

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military because they always hide behind the King. The military, as an unelected body, are the main beneficiaries from lse majest, since the law helps them to justify all that they do, including killings and coups, by claiming to protect the monarchy or even claiming to have received orders from the King. In general lse majest is an instrument to strengthen the entire modern Thai capitalist class. This is why Taksin, the military, the civilian bureaucracy and the big corporations all support and promote the monarchy. Taksins government did much to create the royalist yellow shirt mania around the Kings 60th anniversary. There are also some details about lse majest sentencing which need to be considered. If individual sentences were capped at 7 years, some could still go to jail for 30 or more years. This is because people have been sentenced to more than one charge and the sentences are added together. There is also the question of the Palace Secretary who is bound to be an army appointee. Kanit justified this maintenance of lse majest, albeit in a reformed state, with the usual rubbish about the need to conform to Thai Culture. Yet no society has a single culture. The Thai culture of the conservatives involves people grovelling on the floor to royalty and severe repression and exploitation of the population by the elites. It also involves the elites divine right to murder prodemocracy citizens. Opposed to this is the democratic culture of most Red Shirt citizens, which has been growing over the last few years and developed out of a long Thai tradition of resistance to the elites since the 1930s. The problem is that too many weak-willed, well-meaning Thai reformers also miss the point about the fundamentally authoritarian nature of lse majest. They fall for the Thai Culture nonsense and are fearful of calling for the total abolition of the law. But without abolishing lse majest there can be no democracy. Thai citizens cannot even ask whether the Constitutional Monarchy should protect the Constitution and an elected government from a military coup!4 Even these mild reforms, proposed by Kanit, were vigorously opposed by Deputy Prime Minister Chalerm, who was eager to please his military friends.

Protecting the status quo The reality of Pua Thais talk of reconciliation is that the government, and Taksin himself, have done a deal with the military. So reconciliation means capitulation to the conditions laid down by the military. These include no change in the status of the monarchy, no reform of lse majest, no release of political prisoners5, no reform of the judiciary and no prosecution of state murderers. In return, the military will happily live with a Pua Thai Government. In fact, the military now realise that a Pua Thai Government and its supporters in the leadership of the UDD (Red Shirts) are much better placed to police and demobilise the Red Shirts than the previously military-appointed Democrat Party Government. Part of the deal also includes Taksins right to return to Thailand in the near future.

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I was charged with lse majest for posing such a question in my 2007 book A Coup for the Rich. I have been in exile ever since.

Allowing some red shirt political prisoners (but not lse majest prisoners) to be released on bail is not the same thing as dropping all charges and releasing them.

Betrayal in Thailand

Giles Ji Ungpakorn

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The Government has no intention of bringing the state murderers of 2010 to justice. Red Shirt apologists for Pua Thai claim that to do so would be to invite a military coup. But the government could easily start prosecutions inside Thailand or at the very least pass a cabinet resolution asking the International Criminal Court to step in and take action. Such action would be very popular among millions of Red Shirts and the movement could be mobilised to defend the government against any possible coup. But Pua Thai do not intend to change the status quo by encouraging and building a mass movement. They will also not release Red Shirt political prisoners, especially those charged with lse majest. The only concession was to move non- lse majest prisoners to a political prison and release some on bail, pending trial. On Friday 6th January 2012, representatives of 9 political parties, including Pua Thai, met under the chairmanship of ex-coup leader Gen Sonti Boonyarakalin to agree that the lse majest law should remain totally intact without any reforms. The idea that the military officer who staged the 2006 coup against an elected government should now be heading the parliamentary reconciliation committee instead of standing trial is an abomination. By 2012 it was clear that Pua Thai had stabbed the Red Shirts in the back and was attempting an elite agreement in order to protect the old order. The use of elections in order to create the image of democratic change, while maintaining the old order, is also an Egyptian phenomenon. Both Pua Thai and the Muslim Brotherhood were expecting to police the democracy movement and prevent it from toppling the status quo. One significant difference between Thailand and Egypt, however, is that important sections of the Egyptian revolutionary movement are independent from the Muslim Brotherhood and are also linked to the trade unions. Even within the Muslim Brotherhood movement there are many who are more militant than the leadership. However, the Red Shirts have yet to develop a leadership independent from Pua Thai 6. What is more worrying is that the UDD leadership of the Red Shirt movement decided to do nothing and let the movement slowly die. All they talk about is protecting the government from a coup. But the military do not need to stage a coup. The new government is the new party of the military. A very distasteful aspect of so-called reconciliation has been to throw money at the relatives of those killed or to those who suffered in various ways during the political unrest. One is reminded of the arrogant rich buying off the families of the poor after they have killed people. The difference is that the money comes out of public funds, originating from taxes on the poor. No compensation is being paid out of the pockets of the butchering generals. In the South, money is also being thrown at relatives of civilians who were murdered in cold blood by the Army. Thai Prime Minister Yingluks May 2012 trip to meet the Butcher of Bahrain, was also an insult to the heroes of democracy in Thailand and in Bahrain. This trip came on the second anniversary of the deliberate shooting of pro-democracy Red Shirts by the military in Bangkok. It also came a few days after the death of political prisoner Aakong in a Thai jail. The official leadership of the Red Shirt Movement (UDD) has made meaningless noises about not forgetting the dead and the need to help prisoners. It is pushing for minor constitutional reforms,
See Giles Ji Ungpakorn (2011) Thai Spring? Paper given at the 5th Annual Nordic NIAS Council Conference organised by The Forum for Asian Studies/NIAS. 21-23rd November 2011, Stockholm University, Sweden. Available from http://redthaisocialist.com/
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Betrayal in Thailand

Giles Ji Ungpakorn

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but is refusing to back the reform or abolition of lse majest and it has refused to criticise the Government.

Taksin, Pua Thai and the UDD write military atrocities out of history Because Taksin and Pua Thai have done a deal with the military, they have stopped mentioning the role of the generals in murdering Red Shirts in 2010. They are air-brushing the military atrocities out of history. The Pua Thai government and the leadership of the UDD have been only talking about former Prime Minister Abhisit, and his side-kick Sutep, as being the ones responsible for the Red Shirt deaths. Taksin has also been trying to re-write history to say that the Thai crisis and 2006 coup were just about a parliamentary dispute between him along with his followers and the Democrat Party and their followers. The military have slipped from history and the Red shirts, according to Taksin, were merely his underlings7. The latter view about the Red Shirts also corresponds to the views held by conservatives, NGO activists and right-wing academics who have only contempt for mass movements of ordinary people. In fact, Taksin played no role in creating the Red Shirt movement and never actively led resistance to the military junta before that. He provided some funds for the movement after it was established, but in the main it was a democracy movement built at grass-roots level. He is now denying the strong pro-democracy current among most Red Shirts and even the republican mood which resulted from prolonged struggle. The Red Shirt movement was the biggest social movement to ever arise in Thailand. Its members have a dialectical relationship with Taksin, Thai Rak Thai and Pua Thai. While they supported Taksin and his parties, rank and file Red Shirts were also fighting for their own dignity, freedom and democracy and they made huge sacrifices for their goals. Their support for Taksin was also based on a hard-headed assessment of their political, economic and social interests within the frame work of mainstream Thai politics. Abhisit is a weak but vicious politician who only became Prime Minister because the army put him there. He has now become Taksin and Pua Thais play thing to be kicked around and blamed for the 2010 blood bath. But the attacks on Abhisit are just for show. The elites all know that no one will be prosecuted in the end. Taksin himself has much to lose if the killers of 2010 are brought to court. He might find himself facing charges for his own role in murdering scores of innocent Muslim Malays in the south at Takbai in 2004. Taksin also said that the relatives and friends of those killed should be prepared to make sacrifices. It is a forgone conclusion that the lse majest political prisoners, like Somyot Pruksakasemsuk, Surachai Darnwatanatrakoon and Da Torpedo will be left to rot in jail.

See interview with Jom Petpradab in Cambodia on 17th April 2012. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uwu0tuhRo9o&feature=plcp&context=C4c54377VDvjVQa1PpcFM3hZ3UJU4UBnc_Lmy8tzbVKe9n5DQ pUoE%3D

Betrayal in Thailand

Giles Ji Ungpakorn

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Part of the elaborate play about reconciliation is the hiring of the lawyer Robert Amsterdam to investigate the Red Shirt deaths and take the issue to the International Criminal Court. Amsterdam has done a good job and uncovered much evidence about how the military and the Democrat Party murdered pro-democracy demonstrators. But his hands are tied like all lawyers. Amsterdam can do nothing about prosecuting the generals or Abhisits deputy Sutep because the government has refused to pass a cabinet resolution inviting the International Criminal Court to investigate them inside Thailand. So all he can do is to try to prosecute Abhisit outside Thailand because Abhisit also holds British citizenship. This is very convenient for the ignoring of military.

Constitutional Court carries on the horse-trading The existence of an agreement between Taksin/Pua Thai and the military does not mean that there is an end to all arguments and horse-trading among the elites. As Karl Marx once wrote, the ruling class are a bunch of warring brothers. If there is an opportunity to gain an advantage or jockey for power, this will be done. Taksins old foes do not want him to think that his return will be easy. They tried to prevent a Pua Thai election victory, they tried to blame Yingluk for the suffering during the floods and in June 2012 the Constitutional Court ordered the suspension of a reconciliation bill going through parliament which would have granted an amnesty to all state killers and Taksin. On their part, Taksin, Pua Thai and the UDD attacked Abhisit, blaming him for the murders of Red Shirts. Despite the fact that this disgusting reconciliation bill was designed to only support the elites and sweep state crimes under the carpet, the actions of the Constitutional Court raise fundamental issues about democracy. Firstly, there is the question of why an unelected court should have the right to rule on the actions of an elected legislature. Secondly, there is the question of the legitimacy of the present 2007 Constitution, which was written by a military junta and which the Court claims to be defending. Thirdly, in order to try to over-turn the courts ruling, the elected parliament had to sit with the Senate in order to vote. Half the Senate was appointed by the military and the vote was unsuccessful.

Why the judicial system needs root and branch reform Thailand has the 17th highest proportion of citizens in prison in the world, with 340 prisoners per 100,000 people. This compares to 64 for Norway and 94 for France 8. Thailands judiciary only serve the authoritarian ruling elite. They are protected by a draconian contempt of court law, much like lse majest, which prevents citizens or the media from criticising any judges or court judgements. For this reason there is no transparency or accountability in the judicial system and there is also no jury system. Judges, police and court officials treat the general population with contempt. The poor are usually guilty before trial. Often judges do not bother to come into the court room and defendants have

http://www.apcca.org/stats/5th%20Edition%20(2004).pdf

Betrayal in Thailand

Giles Ji Ungpakorn

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to speak to the judge through a close-circuit TV system 9. On many occasions judges speak so quietly that defendants and members of the public cannot hear what they are saying or what they have decided about the case. Prisoners awaiting trial are often locked in police vans in the hot sun for hours. Court official create obstacles to granting bail in order to force poor people into buying expensive commercial bail bonds from entrepreneurs. In the case of lse majest, the general population and the media cannot discuss any details of the case and debate its merits as everything is secret. The basic premise that defendants are innocent until proven guilty is never applied in practice, despite being written in the Constitution. Many defendants, especially in lse majest cases, are refused bail before trial. The mere accusation that people have sold drugs, are seeking to overthrow the monarchy or are terrorists is enough for mass extra-judicial killings. Defendants in trials are shackled and forced to wear degrading prison uniforms. It is like the Middle-Ages. This means that they are abused before the outcome of the trial and have to attend court looking like criminals. This results in gross miscarriages of justice. This applies to many cases, including lse majest trials. Also in lse majest trials you can be found guilty even if what you said and wrote was factually true. For too long there has been no genuine debate in Thai society about the role of prisons. Prisoners who are found guilty and locked-up have no human rights whatsoever and few people seem to care. The main reason for this is that the Thai ruling class does not even regard ordinary people as citizens with rights. They are made to grovel to the rich and powerful and prisoners are treated even worse. So are migrant workers for neighbouring countries. Thai prison conditions are appalling. Often at night prisoners are chained together, 30 to a room, with no proper beds. The toilets are a disgrace, the food is very bad, there are no proper libraries or exercise facilities and the prison guards are totally corrupt. In short, prisoners are treated like animals. Prisoners are also made to work in the streets of Bangkok, digging out filthy slime, by hand, from drain pipes. Like in most countries, Thai prisons are full of poor people, mainly on charges related to theft and drugs. There is no mainstream discussion about the causes of crime or the need for drug policies which reduce harm. For the rich and powerful, the sons of corrupt politicians and the generals, all their crimes go unpunished. Politicians and the military can just shoot down unarmed civilians with absolute impunity. They have done this in 2010, 2004, 1992, 1976 and 1973. Punishment in the Thai judicial system is totally out of proportion. People get just a few years in prison for murder or violence, while lse majest political prisoners are sentenced to anything from between 20 to 40 years.

I observed this at a trial of trade unionists in a court just north of Bangkok.

Betrayal in Thailand The importance of Nitirat

Giles Ji Ungpakorn

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All this is why the political reforms proposed by the Nitirat Group and those reforms proposed by all those who want to abolish or reform lse majest are so important today. The old order, including the Pua Thai Government, the military, and even the UDD leadership, are opposed to any change. They cloak themselves in lies about reconciliation. But reconciliation can only start when the state mass murderers are sent to trial, the political prisoners released and the judicial system is thoroughly reformed. As the Pua Thai government, the military, the Palace and Taksin join hands in reconciliation over the dead bodies of pro-democracy activists, spitting in the faces of those political prisoners rotting in jails, the only glimmer of hope is with the Nitirat Movement 10 and the Movement to Reform Lse Majest. Nitirat law academics want to abolish all laws resulting from the 2006 coup in order to open the way to prosecute the generals. Recently a leading Nitirat academic was violently attacked by royalists. Both these movements are acting as important poles of attraction for progressive Thais inside and outside the Red Shirt movement.

The bankruptcy of Thai activists who rejected building a revolutionary party If the terrible betrayal of the Red Shirts by Taksin and the Yingluk Government proves anything, it proves the importance of organising a political party of the working class and peasantry independent of ruling class parties and not relying merely on loose collections of progressive activists within a social movement such as the Red Shirts. It also proves that the refusal by some activists to fight alongside mainstream Red Shirts, merely because the Red Shirts had illusions in Taksin, resulted in missed opportunities to influence the movement. Before 2006, the anti-party and anti-politics ideology of autonomists within the NGO movement led NGO activists into siding with extreme right-wing royalists who supported the military coup. Instead of protecting the independence of activists in the struggle for democracy and social justice, such anti-party autonomist views have ensured that NGO activists have been pulled along behind the royalist generals and many Red Shirts have been pulled along behind Pua Thai, Taksin and the UDD. It is in times of crisis that activists face difficult tests and choices. Political positions that previously seemed to be roughly in line with democracy and social justice can, in times like this, be put to the test and be found wanting. No social activist operates in a vacuum of theory, even if they declare that they are only practical people, uninterested in theory, as many NGO activists are prone to do. The importance of political theory in determining practice has been proved by events in Thailand since the 2006 military coup. This is clearly highlighted by the dreadful behaviour of most Thai NGOs in the political struggles between the royalist conservatives (the Yellow Shirts) and the Red Shirts.

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http://www.enlightened-jurists.com/

Betrayal in Thailand

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The yellow-shirted PAD began as an alliance between disgruntled royalist media tycoon Sonti Limtongkul and a handful of NGO and social movement leaders. They attacked Taksins government for corruption. But they were never interested in criticising his human rights abuses or attacking the rampant corruption of other elites. Rather than accepting that the electorate support for Taksin was because of the governments first ever Universal Health Care scheme and many other pro-poor measures, Taksins opponents, including the NGOs, claimed that the poor did not understand Democracy, lacked information and should not have the full right to vote. This was the excuse for rejecting representative democracy. The NGO and social movement leaders of the PAD moved sharply to the Right during the enfolding crisis, calling on the King to sack Taksins elected government. This, the King refused to do, but the PAD demands were seen as a green light for a military coup and the military obliged in September 2006. PAD leaders, aristocrats and military junta leaders were later seen celebrating their victory at a New Year party in 2007. After the 2006 coup, the P.A.D. descended into a fascist type of organisation. It took on ultra-Royalist and ultra-Nationalist politics, yet the NGOs never seriously changed their position. Like most countries throughout the World, Thailand went through a process of mass radicalisation in the late 1960s, early 1970s. The high point was when a mass movement of students and urban workers overthrew the military dictatorship in October 1973. The Maoist Communist Party of Thailand (CPT) was the organisation which gained most from this radicalisation, especially after the ruling elites fought back with a blood bath in October 1976. However, the Maoist rural armed struggle strategy eventually failed. Into this vacuum on the Left, stepped the NGOs. After the collapse of Communism the NGO movement turned its back on politics and the primacy of mass movements and political parties in the 1980s. They argued that the state could not be overthrown as the communists wanted. Instead they embraced lobby politics and/or Community Anarchism. Despite the apparent contradiction between lobby politics, which leads NGOs to cooperate with the oppressive state, and state-rejecting Community Anarchism, the two go together. This is because they reject any confrontation or competition with the state. Lobbyists cooperate with the state, the military and mainstream politicians, while Community Anarchists hope to ignore them. They both reject building a big picture political analysis. Instead of building mass movements or political parties, the NGOs concentrated on single-issue campaigns as part of their attempt to avoid confrontation with the state. This method of working also dove-tailed with grant applications to international funding bodies. It led to a de-politicisation of the movement. Thus, NGOs cooperated with both military and elected Governments in Thailand since the early 1980s. Initially, in 2001, the NGOs loved-up to Taksins TRT Government. They believed that it was open to NGO lobbying, which it was. TRT took on board the idea of a Universal Health Care System from progressive doctors and health-related NGOs. But then, the NGOs were wrong-footed by the Governments raft of other pro-poor policies that seemed to prove to villagers that the NGOs had only been playing at development. After the 2006 coup, some Thai NGO leaders, such as Rawadee Parsertjaroensuk (NGOCoordinating Committee), Nimit Tienudom (AIDS network), Banjong Nasa (Southern Fisher Folk network), Witoon Permpongsajaroen (Ecology movement) and Sayamon Kaiyurawong (Thai Volunteer Service) etc. put themselves forward in the hope that the military would select them as 9

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appointed Senators. Earlier, these NGO activists attended PAD rallies. Some NGO activists became government appointees under the military junta. Most had ridiculous illusions that the military would clean up Thai politics with their new constitution, conveniently forgetting the long history of military corruption. Many NGOs oppose Representative Democracy, along Anarchist lines, because they believe it only leads to dirty Money Politics. But the Direct Democracy in village communities, which they advocate, is powerless in the face of the all-powerful state. It also glorifies traditional and conservative village leaders which are not subject to any democratic mandate. Eventually, the idea goes together with a failure to defend Parliamentary Democracy. Their anarchistic rejection of representative politics, allowed them to see no difference between an elected parliament controlled by Thai Rak Thai (TRT) and a military coup. Instead of bothering to carefully analyse the political situation, the distrust of elections, votes and Representative Democracy allowed NGOs to align themselves with reactionaries like the PAD and the military, who advocated more appointed public positions. The NGOs became viciously patronising towards villagers. Many Thai NGO leaders are selfappointed middle class activists who shun elections within their organisations and believe that NGOs should nanny peasants and workers. They have become bureaucratised. They are now fearful and contemptuous of the Red Shirt movement. On the opposite side, the progressive Red Shirts who oppose Pua Thai and lse majest are weakened by a lack of centralised coordination and unclear alternative political agendas and strategies.

The way forward? Given the betrayal of the democracy movement by the elite agreement between Pau Thai and the military, it is not surprising that many Red Shirts are disillusioned and angry with the government and the UDD leadership. The government suffered a number of local election and by-election defeats in 2012, although it is not clear that this was due to betrayals in the name of reconciliation. It is impossible to make an assessment of the numbers of progressive Red Shirts who are angry with Pau Thai and the UDD leadership without conducting a systematic poll or without these progressive activists organising themselves into a new activist political party. Such an activist party would have to place its emphasis on extra-parliamentary mobilisations, especially among trade unionists and disillusioned Red Shirts. This would also act as a pole of attraction for those Red Shirts who are unhappy with the Pua Thai Government but are lacking in the confidence to believe that there is a practical alternative to Pua Thai policies. At the very least, progressive Red Shirts should coordinate their activities together and coalesce around key demands such as support for the Nitirat Proposals, scrapping of lse majest, release of all political prisoners, reform of the judiciary and bringing the state killers to justice. Demands for a welfare state would also strengthen the struggle for social justice and win widespread support. However, without coordinating this alternative political leadership of the Red Shirts, the UDD will continue to police the movement and turn it into a passive supporters club for Pua Thai and Taksin.

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