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Highest Institutional Problems

The increasing difficulty of staying on the right side of the lèse majesté laws can be seen in the travails of two of the leading cabal of the People’s Alliance for Democracy, a movement that up till now has tried to portray itself as firmly in the royalist camp. 

 

PAD leader Sondhi Limthongkul has been issued with a warrant for his arrest, not as a result of anything he said, but for repeating the comments of Daranee Charnchoengsilpakul, better known as Da Torpedo, who had last Friday screamed an anti-PAD diatribe into a microphone for 15 minutes.  She had, according to police who were able to decipher what she said, ‘affected several institutions’.  She was already locked up on lèse majesté charges when Sondhi committed his alleged faux pas.

 

Meanwhile, Somkiat Pongpaiboon, who moonlights as a Democrat MP when not at his PAD day job (or is that the other way round?), has also been charged with lèse majesté, after allegedly denigrating teachers at a certain school by calling them ‘Khmers’.  The school, inconvenienced by the never-ending PAD rally, had successfully asked the courts to restore access to the school for pupils, parents and teachers.  The PAD had then unsuccessfully appealed this decision.

 

Now why this should goad the PAD leadership into calling people names (though they do seem easily goaded into name-calling) and why ‘Khmer’ should be chosen as a term of abuse (so much for friendly relations with neighbouring countries), I cannot explain.

 

But police have explained that the lèse majesté aspect arises from the fact that the school’s name was graciously bestowed by HM the King, who obviously cannot be associated with anything disrespectful.  Or, apparently, Khmer.

 

The implications of these legal charges are rapidly becoming apparent.  An investigating officer at Chanasongkhram Police Station has been suspended from duty when he was found to be listening to a tape of Da Torpedo’s speech.  His claim that he needed to listen to the speech in order to file charges has been dismissed as a flimsy excuse. 

 

Police units around the country have been warned to process all lèse majesté charges without examining the evidence.  Observers, however, note that this opens immense opportunities for malicious prosecutions, since the police would be required to accept any and all allegations as prima facie evidence without further investigation. 

 

Legal opinion is divided on the question as to whether even referring to the existence of lèse majesté cases itself constitutes lèse majesté.  If it does, then the judges, court officials, prosecutors and witnesses in lèse majesté trials may find themselves charged with lèse majesté.  The judicial system would rapidly grind to a halt as it became increasingly difficult to find judges who were not themselves on trial.

 

There are also serious problems with the decision to include disparaging comments against royally-named institutions within the remit of the lèse majesté laws.  This arises partly because HM the King has generously granted so many names over the course of his reign. 

 

Recurring problems with the CTX scanners at Bangkok International Airport, for example, have led to many passengers losing their baggage and in some cases to missing their flights altogether.  Although it is widely believed that this is an ongoing consequence of the corruption scandal surrounding the purchase of the scanners, many passengers have been heard to make derogatory comments about the airport as a whole.  Some have even written letters to the local newspapers on the topic.

 

But since the name ‘Suvarnabhumi’ was chosen for the airport by HM the King, there are now fears that such comments could be construed as cases of lèse majesté.  Rumours have not been confirmed that a special ‘lèse majesté enforcement unit’ of the airport police has quietly been making arrests in the airport concourses.

 

Similarly there has been no confirmation that a zealously loyal official of Srinakharinwirot University has brought charges against a student there.  It is alleged that after a particularly poor showing in his examinations, the student complained that (expletive adjective deleted) (expletive noun deleted) of a (expletive verb deleted)-ing university had been unfair in its grading of his performance.  Since the university’s name was royally granted when it was upgraded from a College of Education decades ago, the student’s outburst may now fall foul of the lèse majesté laws.

 

Ultra-loyalists are campaigning for even more protection of the honour of the highest institution.  There are reports that a bill is being prepared by the Ministry of the Interior to ban all card games where the Ace outranks the King.  The Ministry of Commerce is seeking to ban all merchandise associated with the LA Kings of the National Hockey League, the Sacramento Kings of the NBA, and the newly formed Indian Premier League cricket teams, the Chennai Super Kings and Kings XI Punjab.  And the Ministry of Culture is reviewing ways of ensuring that the late Elvis Presley is not referred to by his nickname.

 

The Ministry of Foreign Affairs is also reportedly drafting an extremely delicate aide-memoire to be communicated to Hampshire County Council after the existence was brought to light of the small parish of Kings Bottomley. 

 

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).

And if you believe any of those stories, you might believe his columns

 

 

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