Reconciliation vital, but still out of reach

A YEAR after the coup, the military’s promise to bring about national reconciliation looks highly unlikely to be achieved with the conflicting political parties doubtful it would be achieved anytime soon. However, all agree reconciliation is still needed.

People’s Democratic Reform Committee (PDRC) co-leader Tankhun Jitt-itsara said reconciliation was extremely hard to achieve due to many issues and factors, but it was necessary. “When political disputes emerge, all sides surely believe they are on the right side, so there must be a broker or a neutral committee the conflicting parties can rely on and accept,” Tankhun suggested.

The PDRC co-leader cited that even though he did not support the coup, the military regime offered the most important window to find out the truth on what actually happened during the protests and bloodshed over the past years, and to unveil these facts to the public.

“There should be arrangements for debate between conflicting parties without causing hate speech or violence, in which they could exchange their thoughts and lead to a better understanding of contrasting ideas – then a lasting reconciliation might be achieved,” the PDRC co-leader said.

Asked whether there was hope for the country to achieve reconciliation within the next few years, Tankhun predicted it would take at least ten years, reasoning that people usually dwell on the past.

He explained that the PDRC wanted to reconcile, adding that reconciliation did not mean everyone believing in the same ideology or holding each other's hands. Rather it was about people in the same society co-existing peacefully without violence and still holding on to their contrasting ideas.

United Front for Democracy against Dictatorship (UDD) co-leader Weng Tojirakarn said the junta had failed to promote reconciliation over the past year. Moreover, the National Council for Peace and Order (NCPO) itself had become an obstacle to reconciliation.

The red-shirt leader said the NCPO had obstructed the process of promoting reconciliation by obscuring the truth about the May 2010 crackdown on red shirts, which led to the combined deaths of at least 99 people, and the role of the so-called “men in black”.

Earlier, said Weng, police had arrested five of the so-called men in black, who many believed were responsible for the killing of at least five soldiers during the red-shirt anti-government protests in 2010.

“How could this lead to reconciliation, because the red shirts do not have an armed unit?” Weng asked. “I want to reconcile, yet promoting it should first be driven by sincerity of the people who want to promote a true reconciliation.”

Weng added a new draft charter was another obstacle, as the current draft constitution was undemocratic.

 “The charter should be more democratic than the one Constitution Drafting Committee [CDC] chairman Borwornsak Uwanno is drafting right now.”

Mahidol University’s Institute of Human Rights and Peace Studies (IHRP) lecturer Ekapan Pinthavanish said that whether or not the Prayut Chan-o-cha government could achieve reconciliation was still uncertain.

“There are reconciliation committees and the like, but the result is still uncertain,” Ekapan said.

He said any reconciliation process must be acceptable to all conflicting parties if there was to be any hope for success. When asked if hate speech by the various sides had subsided, Ekapan said on the surface it might appear so, as “freedom of expression has been curbed”.

“However the public should question that because parties are not expressing their hatred [it indicates] their feelings have decreased or not,” the lecturer said.

Democrat Party deputy leader Nipit Intrsombat said reconciliation could never be achieved as long as people did not change their mindsets and political ideologies, adding that political beliefs were extremely hard to alter.

“Different groups have different gods. The issue that obstructs reconciliation is that conflicting sides do not accept, for example, that in the past political disputes, neither the red shirts nor the PDRC were willing to accept they had used violence against one another. So first we need to put an end to that issue,” Nipit said.

Nipit said the last process in promoting reconciliation surely should end with the granting of amnesty or pardon to wrongdoers – but this would be hard to achieve according to the new charter draft.

This draft stated that an independent reconciliation committee would be established and could request pardons for wrongdoers once they admitted their wrongdoing and provided facts to the committee. “There is no way wrongdoers would come forward to such a committee and say ‘I admit that I was wrong so please grant me a pardon’,” Nipit said.