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Published on February 21, 2008

Sutham Saengpathum was a student activist at the time. He was put in jail while Samak was part of a right-wing government whose priority was to crack down on liberal intellectuals and students.

Today, incredible as it may sound, Samak and Sutham are on the same side of the political divide. Their October 6 experiences are poles apart. But then, politics makes for strange bedfellows. Imagine putting the two together in a press conference to answer some in-depth questions on what actually happened on that fateful day.

As soon as he was made prime minister, Samak was interviewed by CNN's Dan Rivers. Sutham's personal journal on his traumatic experience on that event is quoted here to demonstrate how two people linked by historical fate can be so dramatically opposed in their political stances - then, and, paradoxically, sharing the same power base, now.  

Dan Rivers: Would you like to take the opportunity now to condemn what happened in 1976?

Samak Sundaravej: Actually it's a movement of some students. They don't like the government.

 DR: But dozens of people, maybe hundreds of people, died.

SS: No, just only one died. There are 3,000 students in the Thammasat University.

DR: The official death toll was 46, and many people say it was much higher than that.

SS: No. For me, no deaths, one unlucky guy being beaten and being burned in Sanam Luang. Only one guy by that day.

DR: So there was no massacre?

SS: No not at all, but taking pictures, 3,000 students, boys and girls lined up, they say that is the death toll, 3,000.

DR: People say that your very right-wing rhetoric inflamed the situation.

SS: What's wrong to be the right wing if it is? The right wing is with the King. The left wing is communist.

DR: So do you think Thailand was in danger of falling to communism in 1976?

SS: Well, a guy called Lomax, he write a book, the book is called "Thailand: The War That Is, The War That Will Be". And he says that this is a domino theory. He says that there will be 10 dominoes around this area. So if Cambodia will be, Vietnam will be, Laos will be, and Thailand will be the number four domino. And from Thailand, it will be Burma, it will be Malaysia, Singapore. Small islands like Singapore. So many islands like Indonesia and later, big islands like Australia and even two tiny islands down under. Ten countries will be communist. We are domino number four.

DR: Do you think it's excusable to kill innocent students in the name of defending the country from communism?

SS: Oh, who kill the students? If the fighting between the military, the military is to defend for the country. Somebody tried to bring communism into our country, it's up to them. The casualty, you must go to check what had happened.

But Sutham Saengprathum remembers the incident as a black hole in Thai political history. He wrote in one of his personal journals:  

"Just before I went to see the prime minister (MR Seni Pramoj) I was in Thammasat campus. The stage set up for public speeches was shot through with bullet holes. We had to evacuate ourselves to continue our activities under that stage. I was hugging my friends to say goodbye. But the scene I saw right then didn't allow me to make the decision to leave. What I saw was a male student in a pool of blood after being shot at right in the middle of the (football) field. A female student, probably a volunteer nurse, ran up to him to help carry him to the Accountancy faculty building. While she was struggling to walk him out of the firing zone, she was shot and killed right in front of where I was standing. A third friend who rushed up to them in the hope of helping them was also cut down by bullets.

"The three of them laid dead right in the middle of the football field of Thammasat University. It's a picture that has stayed in my memory until today…"

Anybody seriously interested in Thai political history would naturally be curious to know what Sutham today thinks of Prime Minister Samak's statement - repeated in his rebuttal against opposition leader Abhisit Vejjajiva's comment in Parliament on Monday - that only one person died in the October 6, 1976 crackdown.

Would Sutham give PM Samak a call to clear things up, now that they belong to the same camp?

(Join the debate in my blog at http://blog.nationmultimedia. com/ThaiTalk)

The Nation