To Secretary Daniel Russel: Please open your mind and be fair

When it comes to Thailand’s politics, there are some pertinent points to which the US should open its eyes.
First, the country under the elected government of Yingluck was no democracy. Think Sheldon Silver – the recently arrested speaker of the New York Assembly who for the past 20 years took millions from seedy deals. Think former Virginia governor Bob McDonnell, who pocketed millions through plain graft.
Then please multiply that corruption a thousand times to go beyond millions to billions of taxpayers’ dollars squandered, while the culprits walked free, holding their heads up high because they knew they were untouchable. Thailand was a kleptocratic nation. Kleptocracy is “a form of political and government corruption where the government exists to increase the personal wealth and political power of its officials and the ruling class at the expense of the wider population, often with pretence of honest service” (Wikepedia). That precisely describes Thailand, and it got worse by the day.
That’s why the top priority of the government after the May 22 coup was an anti-corruption campaign. People have had enough. As a nation, we were robbed blind.
Second, think the grievances of the people of the District of Columbia – “taxation without representation” – and again, multiply it a thousand times. Do you think the voice of the Thai people was heard and effectively represented in Parliament under the previous government? Do you know how hard we begged and pleaded the government to please stop the sleazy and utterly wasteful rice scheme? Our opposition MPs tried the hardest, coming up with piles of evidence of wrongdoing involving the scheme, but we failed miserably to get our voice heard. We simply lost on numbers – the number of parliamentary seats held by the ruling party.
International media like to call us “a minority Bangkok elite”, but we haven’t the faintest idea what that term means. We work from morning to night, we struggle to make ends meet, we keep pounding pavements to do our job right and honestly, we worry about our children, our parents, our health, our homes, our future.
The only part of the definition we might recognise is “minority”. The country’s political system was in fact a tyranny of the majority. The 122 seats from the Northeastern provinces plus over 100 from the North represented the controlling block in Parliament. The Pheu Thai Party’s decision to focus their campaign efforts in these two regions was a shrewd one. Contrary to the picture international media like to paint, people in these provinces are not poorer than those in the rest of the country. Pheu Thai won so many seats in these two regions because it had the best-organised and best-funded (mostly by taxpayers’ money) political machinery in place. There is nothing wrong with that, except for the fact that such an overwhelming majority left many of us in the dust, without real representation, while we kept dutifully paying our taxes.
Third, due to public disenchantment, the previous government lost its ability to govern. Thailand was becoming a bona fide failed state. The fires of divisive hatred were being fanned higher and higher for political gain. They crept into the smallest unit of society – the family. Fights erupted between husband and wife, parent and child, neighbour and neighbour. In what other democracy in the world, Mr Secretary, would you find this saddest state of social disintegration?
Where else, Mr Secretary, were war weapons and grenades being used against unarmed civilian crowds?
Fourth, anybody who knows the current prime minister knows he had no aspiration to enter politics. Military environment and order suit him well. But a political situation that spiralled out of control into escalating violence prompted him to act.
The Western world seems to have forgotten that democracy is not possible without stability. If you don’t want to take our word for it, heed Francis Fukuyama’s argument that democracy is not defined by elections, but by a good balance between three crucial elements – a strong state that fosters a well-ordered society, the rule of law, and democratic accountability. And more importantly, Fukuyama says, the sequence must be right. Democracy doesn’t come first – a strong state does. And states that democratise before acquiring the capacity to rule effectively will invariably fail. Democracy, he says, exacerbates existing failings rather than correcting them, because, paradoxically it eats away at the capacity of the government to govern. That in fact is what the current government is trying to address, by restoring law and order so the country can move forward steadily towards democracy, and we do not fumble into failure again.
Fifth, on freedom of expression, we grant that it is a fundamental right, but you will recognise that it is by no means absolute. Think Wikileaks, think Snowden, think anti-Semitism and the doctrine of racial purity that brought the Holocaust and the loss of many millions of lives.
Thailand remains a free country despite martial law. Criticism of the sitting government is everywhere. The young son of a former prime minister issued an open threat after the decision of the National Legislative Assembly to impeach Yingluck – “Are you Thais ready?” He remains a free man. 
Lastly, on the accusation that the impeachment was politically driven, please turn your mind back to Watergate. Without the break-in and the subsequent cover-up, would there have been impeachment proceedings? They went ahead because Nixon broke the law, a law of your land whose penalty was impeachment, and we did not interfere. In Yingluck’s case, the law of our land was exercised properly, without political motivation.
It was dereliction of duty that got her indicted. She cannot deny responsibility for the large-scale fraud in the rice scam, because as prime minister, the buck stopped with her. Secretary Russel, we respect your opinion and appreciate America’s role as the champion of liberal democracy – as “the Shining City Upon a Hill”. But we would like you to keep a balanced perspective, and be fair to Thailand. We are a country in transition and our people need a chance to forge a genuinely democratic nation.
Our people deserve much better than to live under a fake banner of democracy that masks kleptocracy and a tyranny of the majority.
A chance. That’s all we would like. And that should not be too much to ask from our oldest ally.