Prachatai, 4 December 2009
Palace Office Pleads for Respite
In an unprecedented public statement, the Office of His Majesty’s Principal Private Secretary yesterday called for a temporary moratorium on petitions to the Office. ‘We ask this as a mark of respect on the occasion of His Majesty’s birthday,’ said an exhausted Office spokesperson, who asked to remain anonymous.
The Office spokesperson revealed that since August 17, when the red shirt petition on Thaksin Shinawatra was presented, together with the signatures (as yet unverified) of over 5 million voters, the Office had been inundated with 374 more petitions.
The Thaksin petition was quickly followed with one sponsored by the Ministry of Interior and the Bhum Jai Thai party countering the previous red shirt petition. Arising from the spontaneous outrage of all right-thinking Thais opposed to the red shirt petition, a sign-in campaign had been organized by the Ministry. Official orders were sent to numerous government institutions demanding that officials, employees, schoolchildren and their parents all sign. Suspiciously, the number of signatures on this petition was slightly higher than those on the first petition, but again these have yet to be verified. Especially the last few thousands of photocopied pages.
This petition was quickly followed by an amended petition, asking that the red shirt petition be considered as an act of lèse majesté in that it improperly involved the Institution in politics. Reports do not give a figure for the number of signatures for this petition but many seem to be the same as for the un-amended petition.
This provoked a petition calling for all signatures on the counter-petition that also appeared on the amended counter-petition to be voided. This petition, sponsored by the UDD, a group of Phuea Thai MPs and a previously unknown Association of Hair-Splitting Pedants, itself carried barely a hundred signatures.
There then followed an amendment to the amended counter-petition, asking for the cases of lèse majesté under the modified counter-petition to be punished by the death penalty. This doubly amended petition was sponsored by members of the former Council for National Security, which staged the 2006 coup d’état and carried only 9 signatures, but they are Very Important Signatures.
This death penalty petition in turn was opposed by a petition calling for the death penalty not to be used against 5 million Thais on the grounds that they were only exercising the right to freedom of expression. It also claimed that this call for the death penalty was improperly involving the judiciary in politics. This was supported by local human rights groups and carried the signatures of a few dozen of the regular suspects.
Subsequently a petition was presented demanding the right to petition to be excluded from the right to freedom of expression. This was initially challenged on logical grounds. How could a petition be used to demand that there be no petitions?
However, a follow-up petition, again arranged by the Ministry of Interior using the mass signature mobilization capacity of the Departments of Provincial and Local Administration, called for petitions to be allowed as long as the petitioners were asking for the Right Thing. Only petitions on incorrect topics would be subject to a ban. Decisions on what was a correct or incorrect topic would be made by the Minister.
By the end of September, the number of petitions arriving at the Palace was accelerating sharply and it was becoming difficult to keep track. Officials of the Office of His Majesty’s Principal Private Secretary have tried to group them by general characteristics.
‘Most petitions are concerned about involving the Institution in politics,’ an official explained. ‘But others are worried about dragging the Institution into judicial matters, about dragging the judiciary into politics, or dragging the executive into judicial matters, or the judiciary into legislative matters, and so on. It’s really quite confusing.’ There have even been petitions against dragging the judiciary into judicial matters, according to the official.
When the flow of petitions turned into a deluge through November, it became necessary to separate out all petitions coming from the Ministry of Interior. ‘They arrive by truck, each with over 5 million signatures. Page after page are in the same ink and the same handwriting. It will be a nightmare verifying all those signatures,’ the official said.
‘We were alerted to this problem when we received a strange petition from Interior Ministry officials, kamnan and phuyaiban. They were petitioning for overtime pay for the extra work they had been forced to do in preparing petitions. What gave it away was that they wanted the OT calculated on the number of signatures each official had to forge.’
About author: Bangkokians with long memories may remember his irreverent column in The Nation in the 1980's. During his period of enforced silence since then, he was variously reported as participating in a 999-day meditation retreat in a hill-top monastery in Mae Hong Son (he gave up after 998 days), as the Special Rapporteur for Satire of the UN High Commission for Human Rights, and as understudy for the male lead in the long-running ‘Pussies -not the Musical' at the Neasden International Palladium (formerly Park Lane Empire).
