Sonthi won't be allowed to take coup secrets to the grave

General Sonthi managed to wriggle out of the grilling thrown at him quite unexpectedly at a public seminar on national reconciliation last week by Major General Sanan Kachornprasart. The latter said he had posed the questions in public simply to get the truth out of the horse’s mouth, for the sake of national reconciliation.

General Sonthi created quite a stir with his answer: some facts just have to go with him to the grave. What’s the point of digging up the past when the more important issue is national reconciliation? But then, the next day, on a TV programme, Sonthi said “only one or two persons” were involved in the coup plot, suggesting but not officially confirming, that Prem had no part in the coup.

But then Sanan seemed to already have the answer before tricking Sonthi into public humiliation. He said he had his own “intelligence source” that had suggested to him that Prem hadn’t been involved in the coup in the first place.

It wasn’t exactly a coincidence when a retired general, Banchorn Chawalsilp, out of nowhere, confirmed to reporters that General Mongkol Ampornpist, a former aide to Prem, had told Sonthi to come out in public to clear Prem of any association with the coup.

Banchorn said he had arranged the telephone call between Mongkol and Sonthi. But he said Sonthi never complied with that request. The request was never heeded.

Banchorn confirmed what Sanan had suggested: Prem had nothing to do with the coup.

The Mongkol-Sonthi link-up was said to have coincided with the red-shirt rallies in 2007, during which Prem was blamed as the “mastermind behind the coup”.

Prem himself has kept mum throughout this episode. Former premier Thaksin Shinawatra has often referred to him as a political enemy. But Premier Yingluck has publicly sought Prem’s blessings.  It’s a political game that gets played out every now and then, with no clear ending in sight. 

The opposition Democrats were obviously caught unawares as well when Sanan did his acrobatic double take on Sonthi over the Prem issue – so much so that some cynics within the opposition camp suggested that Sanan might have been doing Thakin’s bidding by raising the questions about Prem with Sonthi. 

The ruling Pheu Thai Party probably stands to gain from Sonthi’s public humiliation, but none of its members will want to show any public support or sympathy. After all, any indication that Prem wasn’t part of the 2006 coup plot would go against what the red shirts have been claiming all along – that some “extra-constitutional influence” was behind the move to oust Thaksin in the first place.

Sanan’s surprising move has therefore been interpreted by the two political camps as having two diabolically different motives: On the one hand, Sanan was trying to free Prem of any lingering doubt about the senior statesman’s role in the 2006 plot; on the other, he has been accused by another faction of trying to help Thaksin pin the blame on the Privy Council president. Sanan’s own public stand is that he only wants the truth to come out so that national reconciliation can be realised.

If anything, the whole affair has confirmed that Sonthi is a terribly confused man. And he has only himself to blame.

When he staged the coup almost six years ago, his story was of a country in crisis with Thaksin to blame. Now he heads a House committee on reconciliation that is bent on accepting a proposal by King Prajadipok’s Institute to undo every major decision prompted by the coup – which could mean the possibility of offering amnesty to Thaksin.

How does one describe someone who decides to overthrow a democratically elected government and later tells a military affairs reporter that his highest ambition is to be a popularly elected prime minister?

He is supposed to have written a book on the “secrets” behind the 2006 coup that will be published only after his death. But it seems the facts are well known. He won’t be allowed to carry them to his grave after all.