CovOps
 Location : Ether-Sphere
Job/hobbies : Irrationality Exterminator
Humor : Über Serious
 |  Subject: ANCAPS Good News! Thailand: Top (Whining) Statist Bites The Dust!  Thu Dec 18, 2008 5:29 am | |
| BANGKOK — The night before the crucial vote in Parliament, the political defectors were locked for their own protection in hotel rooms, their phones confiscated to shield them from the pleas and payoffs of their former comrades.
Those most at risk of turning back were bundled into Parliament on Monday morning and surrounded in their seats by their newfound allies.
When the vote for prime minister was taken, the defections held and Thailand’s most powerful politician, Thaksin Shinawatra, had lost control of electoral politics for the first time in this decade.
Even after his ouster as prime minister in a coup in 2006, Mr. Thaksin, with his wealth and charisma, had continued — except for a year of military rule — to be the kingmaker in Thailand.
Now, a fugitive from justice, without a home and with $2 billion in assets frozen, his diplomatic passport gone and his regular passport at risk, he has at last been deserted by allies who sensed the shifting of political winds.
“It is over, boss,” one of his closest lieutenants, Newin Chidchob, was said to have told him on the phone. Mr. Newin then refused to take calls from Mr. Thaksin’s powerful wife, Pojaman.
Mr. Thaksin’s name had become enough of a liability in the jockeying for votes that his allies asked him to cancel a live telephone address to a rally of more than 40,000 people last Saturday.
He spoke instead in a recorded video lament. “If you ask me, ‘Am I upset, am I sad?’ ” he said, “yes, I am. I am human.”
But many people here remain wary.
“Yes, the mandate of heaven is drifting away, but I’m not sure it has completely died yet,” said Chris Baker, a British historian and a co-author of books about Mr. Thaksin.
“We know that Thaksin is not a quitter in any way,” Mr. Baker said. “So I think he will continue to play whatever reduced hand he still has, and that must be to try and disrupt this government as soon as possible.”
The government that takes over now is a tenuous coalition led by the opposition Democrat Party and its leader, Abhisit Vejjajiva, which is dependent on some of the people, like Mr. Newin, who had been closest to Mr. Thaksin.
This fragile government faces an economic crisis and intense social and political turmoil that have also shaken two previous governments this year. Some political analysts say it may be as short-lived as its predecessors.
“As long as things don’t look rosy, I think he still has a role,” Mr. Baker said of Mr. Thaksin.
“I think of people like Perón, who remained in the memory of the country’s people for over a decade when he was absent,” he said, referring to Juan Perón, the Argentine president who eventually returned to power after being ousted by the military in 1955.
Mr. Thaksin’s political influence endured throughout more than a year in self-imposed exile after the Thai coup in 2006, and when a new election was held last December, his allies regained power. For the past year, Thai politics have been, in their simplest form, a struggle between pro- and anti-Thaksin forces.
The People’s Alliance for Democracy, which barricaded the prime minister’s office for three months and then took over Bangkok’s airports, focused their anger on Mr. Thaksin and what they called his proxy government.
The courts, which were under his influence during his six years in office, began to rule against him and his allies in a series of politically devastating cases.
In October, Mr. Thaksin was sentenced in absentia to two years in prison for a conflict of interest in a land deal. He faces a warrant for his arrest if he returns home. Shortly after the ruling, Britain, where he and his family had been living, revoked his visa, making him, for the moment, doubly homeless.
“In my view he is politically dead,” said Ammar Siamwalla, an economist. “But the Thaksin brand is something else.”
Mr. Thaksin had presented himself as a can-do chief executive, a prime minister who would run Thailand like a top-down business.
His main political innovation was to win the support of the rural poor, who form an electoral majority, by providing them with low-interest loans, cash and inexpensive medical care.
It is a strategy that Mr. Abhisit, the new prime minister, and the Democrats say they will now pursue as well, challenging Mr. Thaksin’s franchise in the countryside.
“And that means there’s been a takeover,” Mr. Ammar said. “The chairman of the board has been sacked, the C.E.O. has been sacked, but the company remains and its main asset, the Thaksin brand name, is up for grabs.”
At the same time, without a sympathetic government in power to protect him, Mr. Thaksin has become more vulnerable to the workings of institutions he once commanded.
“The police, prosecutors, the stock market regulators and revenue officials will all work under the Democrats,” an English-language daily newspaper, The Nation, said Tuesday. “For a man whose billions of baht remain frozen, he will be very nervous.” The baht is the Thai currency.
For those inclined to be sympathetic, The Nation offered a picture of a cornered man, desperately making calls on Sunday, before the parliamentary vote, trying to stem the defections.
“He was begging many people,” The Nation said, quoting an unnamed source. “ ‘Please save me. Please save my life.’ ”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/18/world/asia/18thai.html?ref=world
Burn motherfucker, burn!
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