Cleansing democracy of socialism

Cleansing democracy of socialism

Crushing the Thai Left on the 6th Oct 1976 and the consequences for present day politics
(Paper presented at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, September 2001
บทความนำเสนอที่ S.O.A.S. มหาวิทยาลัยลอนดอน กันยายน ๒๕๔๔)

Assistant Professor Ji Giles Ungpakorn
Faculty of Political Science, Chulalongkorn University,
Bangkok 10330, Thailand.
(Secretary of The 6th October 1976 Fact Finding Committee)
E-mail: Giles.U@Chula.ac.th



Abstract

On the morning of 6th October 1976, Thai uniformed police, alongside armed semi-fascist thugs, crushed the student movement in Thailand. This brutal state crime was supported, either directly or indirectly, by all sections of the Thai ruling elite. Their aim was not so much the crushing of the young parliamentary democracy, which had arisen after the mass popular uprising three years earlier, but the destruction of the growing socialist movement throughout the country. This was achieved in the long term also by the subsequent collapse of the stalinist Communist Party of Thailand. This destruction of the left came not only in organisational form, but also in terms of the present collective historical memory about the Thai left. The results of “cleansing democracy of socialism” can be seen in the present corrupt and money dominated system of Thai parliamentary politics. Yet, the impact of the Asian Economic Crisis and a whole new generation of people with little knowledge of the 1970s, means that socialism may yet creep back into Thai democracy. The Populist policies of the new Thai Ruk Thai government may be an indication of social pressure from below and the re-emergence of class-based politics.


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Crushing the Left in 1976


The received wisdom in Thai society states that “socialism is an alien creed, not popular with Thais”. Yet there was a time when a significant proportion of the population openly supported socialist ideas. In the General Elections of January 1975, three left-wing parties, The Socialist Party of Thailand, The Socialist Front and New Force Party won a total of two and a half million votes or 14.4% of the total vote (Morrell & Samudavanija 1981; 265). In addition to this, the ideological influence of the illegal Communist Party of Thailand was particularly significant among young students, trade unionists and farmer-activists. In present day Thai politics all political parties are allied to capital and business and even the memory of 1970s radicalism seems to have been eradicated. How did this happen?

In the early hours of 6th October 1976, Thai uniformed police, stationed in the grounds of the National Museum, next door to Thammasat University, destroyed a peaceful gathering of students and working people on the university campus under a hail of relentless automatic fire . At the same time a large gang of ultra-right-wing “informal forces”, known as the Village Scouts, Krating-Daeng and Nawapon, indulged in an orgy of violence and brutality towards anyone near the front entrance of the university. Students and their supporters were dragged out of the university and hung from the trees around Sanam Luang; others were burnt alive in front of the Ministry of “Justice” while the mob danced round the flames. Women and men, dead or alive, were subjected to the utmost degrading and violent behaviour. One woman had a piece of wood shoved up her vagina. Village Scouts dragged dead and dying students from the front of the campus and dumped them on the road, where they were finished-off. A young man plunged a sharp wooden spike into the corpses while a boy urinated over them. Not only did the state’s “forces of law and order” do nothing to halt this violence, some uniformed members of the police force were filmed cheering-on the crowd.

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We Do Not Forget the 6 October

We Do Not Forget the 6 October

The 1996 Commemoration of the October 1976 Massacre in Bangkok
Presented at the workshop on 'Imagining the Past, Remembering the Future'
Cebu, the Philippines, March 8-10, 2001
Thongchai Winichakul
University of Wisconsin-Madison


On the morning of 6 October 1996, a symbolic cremation was held at the soccer field inside Thammasat University in Bangkok for over forty people who were killed in the massacre at the same place twenty years earlier. After the massacre, a little over half of that number were identified and claimed by their families, presumably for proper cremations. Nobody knew the whereabouts of the rest since the day they died. The cremation was only symbolic because no corpse was actually cremated. Each of them was represented in a simple, undecorated sheet of paper with his or her name written on it. All of them were put in an urn – the kind that was normally reserved for people of high status -- that was elevated on top of a big platform on one curve of the soccer field. Some pictures of the identified ones were put on that platform for people to pay respect. But most had no picture, except the ones of what happened to them in the massacre. Yet, all were honored as individuals who had faces, bodies, names, and families like everybody else in the world, but whose lives ended abruptly on the Wednesday morning of the 6 October 1976.

The symbolic cremation was performed according to the Buddhist tradition. In addition, spiritual leaders of other faiths also provided services. Many respected civic leaders delivered speeches. Then a modified Buddhist ritual was “re-invented”. About fifty Buddhist monks and nuns presented at the event led a quiet walk anti-clockwise three times around the soccer field. Everybody at the cremation participated, led by those who carried wreaths and flowers in dedication to the fallen heroes and heroines. In the middle of the field, a small platform was a set up for a huge gong. The sound of the gong, the very low pitch and its echo, was the only noise accompanied the walk. It was a Dhamma walk, a form of meditation and merit-making, during which participants were instructed to consider the truth of life and death. After the walk, everybody paid the final respect to all “bodies” in the urn. We put paper flowers for the death underneath the urn, as we normally do in a normal cremation at a Buddhist temple. We prayed for them one last time. At that moment, the reality struck very hard on me. Most of them never got cremated properly after their death, let alone any other forms of respect for humanity. It took twenty years to have them cremated properly in public, from the place where their lives were unjustly cut short. In a Buddhist country where compassion and kindness are said to be abundant, twenty years was such a cruelly...long time.

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