Cruel and beloved father

Published on October 7, 2007

The Nation

When a monument to Sarit Thanarat was inaugurated in its own park in downtown Khon Kaen in 1983 - Thailand's only monument to a prime minister - Army Commander-in-Chief Arthit Kamlang-ek was among the most prominent witnesses. He may in fact have sponsored the grand tribute to his former boss, then dead 20 years, in a bid to invoke his auspicious magic.

Arthit was at the time scheming to unseat the incumbent premier, Prem Tinsulanonda, but Prem proved to be too soundly shielded by the monarchy and his own military tapestry, and the country would have to wait another eight years to see generals snatch power away from an elected government. When it did happen, Sunthorn Kongsomphon and Suchinda Kraprayoon used exactly the same proclamations, verbatim, that Sarit had used in his coup d'etat of 1957.

Such are the echoes that reverberate spookily down the corridors of history in Thak Chaloemtiarana's newly revived treatise on Sarit and "The Politics of Despotic Paternalism".

In September 2006, even as the Cornell University political scientist was finalising this fresh English edition of his 30-year-old textbook on coups and the people who stage them, another one happened. Thak had time to take a breath and add some thoughts on Thaksin and Sonthi to his foreword, but like everyone else, he was initially bewildered by it all.

He certainly has the coup-makers of his 280-page history figured out, however. The story is primarily that of Sarit, the muscleman of the late '50s and early '60s, and Thak's dissection of him and his predecessor Plaek Phibulsongkhram deservedly became required reading for college students when it first appeared.

More importantly, it remains so today. The Thai Textbook Project Foundation revived the Thai-language version to commemorate the 72nd anniversary of the 1932 coup that plunged Siam into democratic waters well over its head, and Cornell University and Silkworm have now done likewise with the English edition that first appeared in 1979.

This is a scholarly work of thirsty prose, at times befogging the casual reader with its cascading footnotes and academic leaps in context, but perseverance pays off in a systematic breakdown of what took place and why. If there is anything disappointing about it, some may feel cheated because Thak never pulls the trigger on Thailand's cruellest-ever political leader, nor does he even come close to condemning the terrible things that Sarit did.

"A scholar should not seek to indict or eulogise the subject under study," Thak writes in his own defence, content to instead sift through the policies that made Sarit an "effective leader" despite being "hated and feared".

Sarit accomplished this by restoring the hierarchy of a bygone day. In the interest of Siam's modernisation, the Promoters behind the 1932 coup, and then Phibul, who emerged pre-eminent among them, pushed aside the monarchy and religion and embraced the West and its brand of democracy.

They were, nevertheless, relentlessly corrupt, and a series of domestic crises during the summer of 1957 allowed Sarit, who had long aided Phibul in maintaining control, to wrest it from him and his other top enforcer, Phao Siyanon, the national police chief who had never walked a beat.

When Sarit's tanks rolled on September 16, Phibul fled the country in a panic and Phao was allowed to pursue exile in Switzerland. Over the course of the next year, and even more so after Sarit staged a second coup in October 1958 to effect his ultimate "revolution", the ancient regime of "Nation, Religion and King" was restored and the Western approach to progress jettisoned. Sarit and his officer class had had limited experience with foreigners compared to the Promoters and opted instead for "democracy in the Thai context".

He was, all the same, a dictator, although Thak prefers to characterise him as a paternalistic despot, a pokhun. The book's central thrust seeks to justify this distinction by recalling that Sukhothai's kings had been pokhun. They were father figures, close to their subjects, quite unlike the remote god-kings of Ayutthaya.

Whereas Phibul had fashioned himself a phunam - a supreme leader in the Hitlerian sense - Sarit took this prototype and cloaked it in the reassuring wool of fatherhood. The divinity of Siamese rulers he left to the actual King, and His Majesty was for the first time, Thak writes, "incorporated" into national politics and "induced" to get out and meet the people, bestow honours, and renew the ritual glories and public spectacles. Phibul feared the throne and its prestige; Sarit thrived in its glow.

But Sarit, having gained Thai acceptance for his revolution by doling out cheap commodities and slashing the cost of electricity and train tickets, and keeping Washington onside by naming as premier Thanat Khoman, the erstwhile ambassador to the US, could be a cruel father.

The revolution involved "major surgery", as Thak puts it. Political parties were banned, the constitution was iced, newspaper editors were arrested en masse and labour unions and bookshops were shut down.

The public at large was on Sarit's side. Privatisation, industrialisation and the commercialisation of agriculture brought concrete benefits, and even Sarit's flaring temper was widely admired, as when he personally lectured young hoodlums and prostitutes as they were being released from detention, and especially when he personally executed arsonists.

Astonishingly, for taking these lives, Sarit publicly promised, as a Buddhist, to bear all of the karmic debt that accrued, thus guarding the country from ill fate. "That perhaps," says Thak, "added to his aura of power: as someone with amply stored merit, he was the most meritorious and most powerful in the land."

His ban on Elvis haircuts and Chubby Checker's dance craze the Twist may have been irksome, but he was steadfastly making sure that everything in Thai society was riaproy, and people appreciated that. As pokhun, he was the protector of public health and morality.

"I remember that, growing up during and after the Sarit coup of 1957, there was some excitement in the air, a sense that something was happening or was about to happen," Thak writes. "People became fascinated once again with a strong and decisive leader, one who exuded (and cultivated) charisma, one who valued modern scholarship (the advice of technocrats and the World Bank), and a military man who was prone to use harsh and decisive measures against those deemed as enemies of the state and public decency."

The designated enemies of so many states in that era were, of course, the communists. It was indeed worrying when in 1953 the Chinese formed the Thai Autonomous People's Government in Yunnan, and in '54 when the Viet Minh established the Free Lao government, but many, if not most, of the "communists" who were "discovered" in Thailand itself during Sarit's reign were nothing more than excuses for securing US development and military funding.

The first prime minister to hit the road, Sarit toured Isaan, greeting the farmers and camping out in tents in their villages, and he promised to build them roads and ensure there was enough water for their crops. Then, with Laos lurching to the left, these priorities were skewed in favour of national security. The Northeast got roads and water, but for the most part they serviced US and Thai military bases, not farmers.

In the end, Sarit was as corrupt as anyone else, likely more so. After he died in 1963 it was discovered that he'd bilked the treasury of many billions of baht. A lot of the money had kept his dozens of minor wives happy. He had 51 cars and properties all over Bangkok and across the country. The family fell to squabbling over the spoils and the newspapers had a field day. And still Sarit's mystique prevailed.

"Corruption was not novel to Thai politics," writes Thak, "but apparently a leader who could get things done was. Thus, in spite of the scandalous revelations, many people still believed that Sarit was better than past leaders. According to their logic, although it was true that Sarit had kin (literally 'eaten', ie taken money), the country nevertheless prospered."