Stop fussing about martial law and focus on reform

The fact that a couple of bombs can still be detonated despite martial law being in place is hardly justification for cancelling it. Martial law did not prevent the uprising against Libya’s Gaddafi, nor did it prevent the assassination of Heydrich, the Nazi governor of wartime Czechoslovakia. In other words, martial law is always conditioned by context and circumstance.

In Thailand the measures constituting martial law are surely softer than in most historical examples. Its purpose here is to facilitate arrests (suspects can be held without charge for seven days), to expedite some trials (no appeals in a military court) and generally to allow military intervention across the board without restriction.  As I found out the other day, you can’t make a claim against the Army, even if one of their trucks dents your vehicle. Yet some pretty undesirable things do happen in countries not using martial law. In China and elsewhere, the Internet and especially social media are suppressed. In Britain the surveillance of citizens by closed-circuit TV outmatches anything you’ll ever see in Thailand. In Hungary the suppression of racial minorities is nothing short of a scandal. The Americans allow some prisoners to languish in jail for years without charge.

As a mere farang, I don’t know whether martial law here is necessary or not. Perhaps Section 44 of the Constitution – which gives the NCPO power to issue any order for the sake of national harmony – could do what the military government wants anyway without the negative connotations of the term “martial law”. What really disturbs me is a return to “democracy” in Thailand before a battered and broken political system, designed to allow kleptocracy on a huge scale, receives at least a modicum of reform. That is surely necessary if Thailand has any hope of playing a leading role in the implementation of the coming Asean Economic Community.

Barry Kenyon