What they fear the most

An equal number of those voters believed Obama wasn’t born in America and therefore shouldn’t be allowed to run for president. That’s about the same as the number of Thais who have come to believe Abhisit Vejjajiva doesn’t have a Thai birth certificate and shouldn’t be allowed to be prime minister either, which is almost 30 per cent of the entire population of Thailand!

The draft-dodger gambit has nothing whatever to do with the truth, or indeed with any legal instrument or action – the Army has said for some time the matter is closed, and no court has so far examined the Ministry of Defence’s so-called “evidence”. 

The draft-dodger sound-byte is designed specifically for its propaganda effect, that’s all, adding as it does “unpatriotic”, “dishonest” and “hypocritical” to the tar and feathers daubed almost daily on Abhisit’s person by the current government in its effort to ride its most honourable and articulate opponent out of town on a rail. 

Thaksin Shinawatra is afraid of Abhisit not because Abhisit wins elections, but because he represents everything Thaksin isn’t. Thaksin knows very well that sooner or later the Thai people will wake up to the fact that what Abhisit represents is more precious to them than anything any tycoon can offer them on his golden plate.

Abhisit has come to be a window of opportunity for alternative thinking in Thailand, a new and, as of yet, little understood model for the future. I agree that that window is unlikely to be the Democrat Party, at least as it’s currently constituted, or even to be Abhisit himself, unless of course he joins a new “Alternative Party” which, if it’s truly representational, will include the majority of the red shirts. 

In the long run Thailand will come to realise that it’s Barack Obama they want and not Mitt Romney. That’s what Thaksin fears above all, that the Thai people will in the end choose sustainable, compassionate, communal development over his selfish, unregulated financial cronyism. And I choose my words carefully in making this statement too, as I choose carefully whom I hold up as a model for my children.

Lung Kip

Chiang Mai