Grant an amnesty and all hell awaits you

It surely must be a self evident that a person who is a convicted felon and fugitive and refuses to return to his country should most definitely not be given a new passport from that country and one does not need any qualification in jurisprudence to arrive at that conclusion.

Such an act is an utterly perverse affront to justice and reeks of political abuse. I should have expected you to thunder as such, instead you effortlessly pass the task of determining the probity of this onto “all those [with] law degrees from abroad”. To my mind you answered the seemingly perplexing problem with your comparison at the beginning of the editorial. In any world that understands the concept of right and wrong you do not give convicted criminals who are on the run a new passport.

There then follows the matter of amnesty. Perhaps I have missed the point here but Thaksin was convicted of a corrupt abuse of power when the country was stable and in as much a state of normality that it could be. So, are all politicians who are still alive and have been convicted of corruption when they were in office to be given amnesty? Indeed why should politicians be singled out – shouldn’t policemen, soldiers, teachers, businessmen and for that matter the ordinary man in the street be given the same treatment and cleansed of the stain and pardoned?

Why does the amnesty’s Ground Zero have to start with Thaksin’s nefarious activities and run till now? And for that matter should corruption be the only crime – why not cast the net wider? Thailand’s jails currently hold some 200,000 inmates, why should they be overlooked?

Your editorial headline hints at a firm condemnation of the nonsense of amnesty, as it simply reinforces that any wrongdoing can just be rubbed away at a later date in the vile lie of national unity, but it did not deliver the killer punch.

Let us be quite clear that the law has been broken by many people and the talk is of, well, we will forget it this time so we can all be friends again. This is most certainly nothing but the road to absolute ruin. Thailand is already far enough down this particular road for a quantum leap such as this amnesty to be undertaken, constructed as it and given by those who are among the least qualified in the Kingdom to be adjudicators of rectitude in any of it forms.

Be aware that the sole objective of this amnesty nonsense is to gain the return of one man. And then you will get, as you put it so well, “a sort of political emperor in a Kingdom” and all the misery that will follow such a ruinous ascension as any “second coming” will most certainly be accompanied by the slaughter of many more “innocents” this time. And you can expect press freedom and any form of checks and balances to be the first to feel the ruthless steel of the sword. 

Dominic Leighton-Bonner

Bangkok