Legal opponents of the coup need to look deeper

Saturday and Sunday saw a number of anti-coup panellists ranting and raving about the crippling effects the seizure of power had on the political system.

For 10 hours, the red shirts heard rousing speeches portraying their movement as the vanguard of democracy. Legal scholars, known as the Nitirat Group, issued a statement calling for the expunging of decrees and judicial decisions originating from the coup.

In a perfect world, the coup should not, and would not, have happened. In the real world, military intervention happens time and time again to overthrow elected governments.

Democracy advocates have every right to raise anti-coup awareness. But making all that noise will not stop soldiers being marched out of their barracks.

From 1932 to the present, the Thai military has intervened in the political process more than 17 times. Using force to grab power is unacceptable. But are soldiers the only culprits?

From the very first coup in 1933 to the last one in 2006, military commanders were not alone in engineering power seizures. Events leading to every military intervention proved that opposing sides played the military card to outwit one another before ending up mere pawns on their political chessboard.

If politicians keep on involving the armed forces in their power struggles, then there is no guarantee that power seizures will not be repeated.

The red shirts are quick to blame the 2006 coup for causing politics to veer off course. But their diagnosis of the political ailment might be too simplistic.

Although there is no credible justification to seize power, the political turbulence in 2005 should be examined in order to get a full picture of what went wrong. The coup did not just come out of nowhere.

The country's administrative system was at a standstill, as the then prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra could not pacify street protests led by his yellow-shirt opponents. Military commanders, all appointed by Thaksin, decided to intervene.

The red shirts will find their efforts in vain to prevent a repeat of the power seizure if they focus on condemning the military, but neglect to address political issues which triggered the coup.

The Nitirat Group, led by Thammasat University lecturer Worachet Pakeerut, spent years mapping out a legal strategy to renounce, negate and expunge the coup.

Judging from its statement, the group has failed, totally. It is nonsense to rely on a legal roadmap to tackle the coup, which is essentially a political issue. The 2006 coup was a past wrong and not a civil contract that can be nullified.

Furthermore, the group seems to have addressed just one out of several past coups. What is the legal justification to single out one over the others?

The group's call to expunge the 2006 coup's decrees, particularly those related to the work of the Asset Examination Committee, is an invitation to fuel vengeful politics. If the incumbent office holders could have their way to rewrite the charter to counter the suspended provisions, then the vicious cycle of charter revisions to annihilate political foes would never end.

Any charter rewrite should be about improving the political system and not about political vendettas.

The idea of repealing all judicial decisions linked to the work of the coup and the AEC is absurd. Has there ever been legislation to cancel a verdict or a set of judicial decisions?

Lawmakers are entitled to amend provisions which they see as judicial interpretation not to their liking. But to legislate against a verdict is a gross transgression on the separation of executive, legislative and judicial powers.