Time for tales from a past that many today would like to forget. Best to get this out of the way before Samak Sundaravej assumes the powers of the Internal Security Act. You never know what we'll be able to say a week or so from now.
As the People Power Party leader tots up his MPs, subtracts an allowance for red cards from a hostile Election Commission, and calculates how many ministries he can afford to throw to the minor parties so that he keeps the Democrats in impotent opposition, it may be time to recall that Samak was once a member of the Democrat Party.
In the sad, sorry, vacillating mess that was the Seni Pramoj government in 1976, Samak was Deputy Minister of the Interior. The ‘democratic interlude' that began 3 years earlier with the October 14 uprising was slowly being strangled to extinction. Right wing groups proliferated as fast their powerful backers wanted them to.
The random violence of disaffected vocational students was given an ideological focus as the Krathin Daeng (Red Gaur) by Internal Security Operations Command's Col Sudsai Hasdin. Village Scouts were mass produced by the Border Patrol Police using training methods straight out of a communist commissar's handbook. Navapol took over the mumbo-jumbo paraphernalia of sacred oaths and ambiguous etymologies - was it ‘New Power' or, dynastically, the ‘Ninth Power'? And Young Turks like Chamlong Srimuang even had time to set up a middle-class housewives' group, modelled on anti-Allende protests, to take to the streets banging pots and pans. Except that the Thai version was too genteel to bang their own pots and brought their maids with them to do the actual banging.
A former military dictator sneaked back from exile and was quietly ensconced in a royal temple. What today would have been called civil society, but which then was given far nastier names, was putting up posters, organizing, massing, and getting murdered by the police. Newspapers doctored photographs in a way calculated to arouse a nationalist frenzy. There was even a maverick monk ready to argue that killing communists was not a violation of the First Precept of Buddhism, but rather a meritorious act of cleansing society.
And we had the lunatic rumours. Vietnamese oranges made your willy shrink because they were communist. The students were burrowing nefarious tunnels under Bangkok. And in the rainy season at that.
As this seething brew of hysteria was being stoked to a boil, Seni could think of nothing more convincing than to wait for the next report from an uncooperative bureaucracy.
So if you were a junior minister in this time of peril, what would you do to restore calm, to inject some sanity, to take the heat out of the situation?
Samak decided to resign, suddenly and spectacularly, throwing the cabinet into turmoil.
Within days students were being beaten to death, hanged, burned alive, raped and arrested by the thousand. The press was shut down, books were burned, snatch squads with hit lists roamed the curfew hours, and the Communist Party of Thailand had never had a recruiting drive like it.
The military stepped in to ‘save the monarchy', installed the most reactionary civilian Prime Minister we've ever had, and planned the restoration of democracy. It was going to take 16 years.
And Samak emerges as Minister of Interior.
Actually, he emerges as Superman. If Dr Puey Ungpakorn, who barely escaped lynching by a right-wing mob at Don Mueang, tours the world capitals telling the truth of what had happened, Samak will go round after him with his own story. If a bomb goes off at the airport, Samak will be on the scene as fast as the old 2-lane Superhighway allows, identifying the culprits in an instant investigation.
But perhaps the most cack-handed escapade of our do-something-quick-however-stupid PM-elect was the case of Norman Peagam of the Far Eastern Economic Review as was. Having made a name for himself reporting the Pathet Lao takeover by the cunningly simple expedient of bicycling round Vientiane, Peagam gets promoted to the Bangkok office.
Now the post-1976 government, like most military-engineered governments that have more power than brains, quickly got itself involved in some very silly antics, one of which concerned the implosion of Cambodia and the repercussions on the Thai border. Monks were caught gun-running, a military field commander took a pot shot at a Minister's helicopter and some fortunes were made in suspiciously quick time. Peagam's sniffing along the border was exposing a lot of this, until Samak's patience snapped.
He stormed into Peagam's office and ordered him out of the country immediately. So immediately that Samak frogmarched him to his bank so he could withdraw some cash, and then to the airport where he was ordered onto the next flight out. Which happened to be Union of Burma Airways to Rangoon.
So when he gets to Rangoon, Peagam calls head office who tell him it's no use being parked out there, catch the next flight to Hong Kong. Which again is Union of Burma Airways. Via Bangkok. And when the plane gets to Bangkok that evening, it develops a mechanical fault (well it was Burmese). Samak's government has imposed a curfew, and there's no waiting allowed at the airport. So the same day that Samak has expelled him permanently from the Kingdom, Peagam finds himself in a Bangkok hotel room.
One hopes that Samak's tenure as PM will be as effective, if perhaps a little less blustery.
