A whole lot more went wrong before and after the coup

A wonderful image, Somsak Pola, but you’ve got the wrong button in the wrong place yourself. Launching the 2006 coup was not the first but the second wrong hole that so messed the shirt up.
The TRCT Commission makes it very clear that the “root cause” of the present crisis goes back five full years before the coup, when the Supreme Court failed to check the run-away power of the executive.
A majority of the judges in the 2001 case found the prime minister at the time, Thaksin Shinawatra, guilty of hiding his assets but somehow allowed the final tally to acquit him, 8-7.
An “illegal” summation, the TRCT called it in its second report, and indeed encouraged the whole country to look at it in detail, and to ask how such a distortion could possibly have been allowed to stand?
So what do we have to look at? In a nutshell, the Thai judiciary failed in its duty as early as 2001. At that moment Thaksin was allowed to ride roughshod over whatever checks and balances remained until there was nothing left to stop him but the Army.
And that was a tragedy indeed for the Thai people. But if we don’t understand why it happened, we’ll be right back there again.
And what have we now? At this very moment we have a government headed by the same ex-prime minister’s sister that has pledged to the Thai people not only to fudge all the rest of the verdicts, but also to throw out the whole court so there can be no more judicial “inconveniences” in the future.
And that’s the mother of all big wrong holes, Somsak, so Thailand’s shirt is going to remain hopelessly tangled until we have the courage to look at what’s been happening all along.
We need to understand the cultural dynamics that facilitated what happened in 2001. We need to understand why we have learned nothing from that glitch, even to the extent that we feel fine about a Thai convict giving political speeches that trash our judiciary all over the world today… And even select as our top-law-and-order minister to oversee the police a man who is proud to help his son, a deserter with a long history of gratuitous violence and arms violations, not only to rejoin the police force but to teach shooting!
Answering those parallel anomalies must happen before we can even begin to sort ourselves out!
Lung Kip
Chiang Mai