Abhisit pans KPI's report as one-sided

Democrat Party leader Abhisit Vejjajiva yesterday slammed the reconciliation report by King Prajadhipok’s Institute (KPI), saying the independent think tank distorted the facts to present a positive picture of the Pheu Thai-led government.
“The report could be seen as being biased to please a certain group of people. The report provides ‘justice for winners’, rather than seek a common solution for the people as a whole in the country,” Abhisit, who is also the Opposition leader, said in an open letter.
The institute, which works under a budget from Parliament, was assigned by a House special committee to study the causes of Thailand’s political conflicts as part of efforts to foster reconciliation.
Abhisit said the report had several flaws. Most of all, it ignored anything negative about former prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra, he said. For example, the Truth for Reconciliation Commission of Thailand (TRCT) concluded that the Kingdom’s political conflict dated back to the Constitution Court’s ruling on Thaksin’s first assets-concealment case, which let him escape the charges, Abhisit said.
The TRCT saw that certain Constitution Court justices at that time were apparently corrupt, allowing Thaksin to remain in office and create controversies that led to the current political conflicts, but the institute failed to mention this verdict at all, he said.
Other factors were also neglected, such as the destruction of the rule of law and interference in the work of independent organisations, the killings of over 2,000 people during the war on drugs, which even Thaksin admitted was a mistake, and the heavy-handed operations in the deep South, which erupted in the Tak Bai and Krue Se Mosque killings, he said.
On the contrary, the institute focused on portraying the strength of the Thaksin government and even made a mistake by saying Thaksin’s Thai Rak Thai Party won a majority of House seats and became a one-party government. The first Thai Rak Thai government was a coalition, he said.
The institute glossed over the causes of the September 19, 2006 coup, saying only that the political conflict led to the coup without explaining why the yellow shirts had to come out to hold demonstrations, he said.
However, the institute seemed to glorify the red-shirt protesters, going into detail on why they had to protest, but omitting the violence they caused, like arson attacks on a few Bangkok shopping malls and some provincial halls, he said.
The men in black, who used took up arms against the authorities during the red-shirt rallies, were nowhere to be found in the institute’s report, he said.
The institute also overlooked Thaksin’s role in the political violence by making phone or video calls to inflame red-shirt protesters into using force to fight the authorities, he added.