Post-forum squabbling casts doubt over real intentions
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THE FORUM "Uniting for the Future: Learning from Each Other's Experiences", held at the Plaza Athenee Bangkok Hotel on Monday, gained much attention from Thais due to the many famous speakers taking part.
Among the participants were former British premier Tony Blair, Finland’s ex-president and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Martti Ahtisaari and Priscilla Hayner, an independent expert on transitional justice and senior adviser to the Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue.
Listening carefully to the speakers’ messages was a useful experience. They might have limited knowledge and understanding of Thailand, and the suggestions they made were all proposed earlier by Thai political groups, but they themselves came from different groups and backgrounds.
Application of the rule of law, morality and justice with democracy – as in the Finnish model – was among the proposals of the red shirts, who also called for revealing the truth about political incidents.
Ahtisaari referred to the Truth for Reconciliation Commission of Thailand’s proposal that the government open up and facilitate groups in society to build trust among one another. This notion is the same as one that has been agreed by the Democrats and anti-government groups.
Hayner, meanwhile, said reconciliation should not take place behind closed doors, nor is it a matter of forgetting what has happened or forcing anything through. It will fail if there is any hidden agenda, she insisted.
Reconciliation must be able to build trust between parties in order to identify the common national interest. It cannot be rushed, she said.
Blair talked in particular about “real democracy” – not just elections, but a system that opened up space for the majority and the minority to join hands, without any suppression.
After all, the government must be transparent so that reconciliation is more possible, he said.
“Democracy is not just a way of voting, but also a way of thinking. Democracy is not just about how a majority takes power, it is how the majority relates to the minority,” he said.
“The shared sense of opportunity and potential is large, but you need united determination to overcome the past in order to exploit this sense of opportunity,” the former British prime minister added.
Kent Harstedt, a member of Sweden’s parliament, said that decisions about reconciliation must be made by the Thai people.
He said that while Thais have all the necessary resources in their hands, they should not destroy their own opportunities.
None of what was said by the foreign experts was really new – the Thai public and Thai politicians know all of this. Some have even talked about it, but must they wait for foreigners to speak up so that people would really listen?
However, forgetting so soon what the foreign speakers said about reconciliation, Thai politicians have already turned those remarks into tools to attack their rivals for seeking legitimacy for themselves and attacking the speakers if they said anything that was not beneficial to their side.
If we continue like this, this week’s forum will have been a fruitless exercise, as Thais are ignoring their own opportunities to reconcile. Maybe, in fact, no one really listened as they did not care for reconciliation in the first place.
