Thailand protests may prove royal words are no longer be enough

There are calls for King Bhumibol Adulyadej, pictured with Queen Sirikit, to intervene in the current bloody standoff in Bangkok. Photograph: Sakchai Lalit/AP

King's intervention over May 1992 demonstrations matched the public mood – 18 years on there is no such common grounds

Monday 17 May 2010
Duncan McCargo
guardian.co.uk

For many observers, Thai politics is defined by a compelling but misleading image: the then prime minister, Suchinda Kraprayoon, and protest leader, Chamlong Srimuang, sitting on the floor on 20 May 1992, while King Bhumibol Adulvadej admonishes the two former generals to settle their differences amicably. Prior to this royal intervention, scores of people, mainly unarmed demonstrators, had been killed in street protests against a government widely perceived as illegitimate. Four days later, Suchinda, the former army commander and 1991 coup maker, resigned.

As the king declared prophetically, "There will only be losers." Suchinda's career was over: I saw him a few years ago getting off a Thai Airways flight in London, a broken man in a crumpled suit. The once feverishly popular Chamlong, an ascetic "half-man half-monk", found his own route to the premiership permanently blocked.

Given the terrible violence of recent weeks, and a death toll now matching that of May 1992, why does the king not intervene again?

The idea that public royal reprimands are a standard Thai operating procedure is not really correct. A royal dressing-down is a last resort, one which relies on those who are summoned to submit meekly and go home quietly. Such interventions are a losing proposition for the political system, and potentially also for the royal institution itself, since the stakes are extremely high. At present, it is an open question how the redshirt leadership would respond to any summons.

In practice, most royal moves take place behind the scenes, and are carried out not by members of the royal family at all, but by "network monarchy" – a loose alliance of courtiers, establishment insiders and freelancers who have no actual hotline to the palace, but are believed to be (or believe themselves to be) acting in the interests of the monarchy. In April 2006, responding to earlier public demands for monarchical intervention, the king made a major speech, in which he declined to act directly, and instead urged the judiciary to resolve the country's political crisis.

Since then, Thailand has experienced a striking judicialisation of politics: the courts have annulled an election, abolished political parties, and given more than a hundred politicians five-year bans from office.

The only alternative to judicial interventions has been the rather disastrous military coup of September 2006, which completely failed in its real aim of reducing former prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra's remarkable popularity. Instead, the coup left a legacy of bitter colour-coded division between pro-Thaksin and anti-Thaksin forces.In recent years, the task of intervention has been delegated to other elements of the state. Whereas in 1992 the king's words matched an emerging consensus that Suchinda had to go – and that Chamlong had gone too far – 18 years later there is no such common ground. Between redshirted Thaksinites and yellowshirted royalists run bloody scars that cut right through Thai society; and these are not wounds that any words of wisdom could easily heal.

Duncan McCargo is professor of Southeast Asian Politics at the University of Leeds and author of Tearing Apart the Land: Islam and Legitimacy in Southern Thailand (Cornell University Press), which won the inaugural 2009 Bernard Schwartz prize from the Asia Society