A preposterous - AND DANGEROUS - notion

Lt-General Suchart Pongput, commander of the Army Signals Department, has decided that the reporters ask Prime Minister Prayut Chan-o-cha too many testing questions that undermine the junta’s stated ambition of “restoring happiness to the Thai people”.

He justifies his call for a “workshop for journalists” by saying reporters’ questions had caused a rift between government agencies. “We just don’t want such things to happen again,” he said. He insisted he is acting on his own with this plan, without orders from the Army chief or anyone else.

It’s quite a plan. If successful, perhaps he can copyright it and sell it to authoritarian regimes around the world.

Evidently Suchart has reached his lofty position without ever encountering the more liberal and politically sensitive characteristics that have evolved in modern armies elsewhere. Such virtues make the military more responsive to the needs of the populace it protects – and make most people appreciate it more. Instead Suchart is behaving like a scurrilous con artist trying to sell fake wristwatches to tourists.

Phil Robertson, deputy director of Human Rights Watch in Asia, has described his plan as a “tactic of intimidation” and “a new level of menace mixed with misunderstanding from the National Council for Peace and Order towards the national and international media in Thailand”. This, he said, “is another sign of Thailand slipping further into military dictatorship”.

We might call those understate

 ments, given the preposterous nature of Suchart’s proposal. We are at the door to the Twilight Zone with this notion.

Suggesting that Thailand is becoming more like North Korea might be unfair to the people of that country. At least they have an excuse for being ignorant as to how humankind is evolving because the exchange of information is so tightly controlled by the state. We have no such excuse for bowing to authoritarianism of this breadth.

Nor is Suchart’s claim to be acting alone any consolation. He is a manifestation of the long-standing institution he is now publicly representing. And clearly his superiors share similar sentiments anyway. In a recent interview with the television network Al Jazeera, Prime Minister Prayut called for reform of the media. “I have to advise them. I have to tell them what they can and what they cannot do.”

To be unable to accept the concept of a free press is to be out of touch with the real world, regardless of political circumstances. The military-led government continues to tarnish Thailand’s reputation by detaining dissenters, breaking up peaceful rallies and barring seminars on rights and democracy. Summoning journalists, especially foreign ones, to “re-education camps” would be its most damning action so far.

The junta needs to shed its holier-than-thou attitude and instead rethink its media and public-relations strategy. It might seem the time has come for psychiatric evaluation, but failing that, the hiring of a communications specialist would not be out of order. A consultant who could help put matters in perspective for the military top brass and point out the absurdity of plans like Suchart’s would be a fine way to start.

It’s “a regretful and sad state of affairs,” Robertson of HRW said, “that a country which five or 10 years ago we probably would have said was most free in Southeast Asia in terms of the news media has been dragged so far back.”