Daily Office:
Friday
¶ Matins: Now that, for the first time, Thai King Bhumibol is unable to make an important regular appearance, the uncertainty of his country’s future greatly intensifies, over and above the chaos caused by last week’s occupation, by the pro-royalist (and thuggishly anti-democratic) PAD, of the major airports. The king is widely regarded as standing above the fray, and always inclining his support toward the cause of democracy. The Economist, long opposed to Thailand’s stringent lèse-majesté laws, challenges this “fairy-tale” view.
¶ Nones: And in Turkey, Leyla Zana, Kurdish politician and winner of the 1995 Sakharov human rights award, has been sentenced to ten (more) years in prison, for terrorist speech.
Oremus…
§ Matins. From the report filed today:
At a pro-Thaksin rally in July a young activist ranted against the monarchy, calling the king “a thorn in the side of democracy” for having backed so many coups, and warning the royal family they risked the guillotine. She was quickly arrested. What shocked the royalist establishment was not just the startling criticism of the king—but that the activist was cheered. “It is more and more difficult for them to hold the illusion that the monarchy is universally adored,” says a Thai academic.
This illusion is crumbling amid growing worry about what happens when the king’s reign ends. The fears over Mr Thaksin’s past influence on the crown prince are overshadowed by far deeper ones about the suitability of the heir to the throne. Vajiralongkorn has shown little of his father’s charisma or devotion to duty, and in his youth suffered from a bad reputation. In a newspaper interview he defended himself against accusations that he was a gangster. But even his mother, in an extraordinary set of interviews on a visit to America in 1981, conceded he was a “bit of a Don Juan”. “If the people of Thailand do not approve of the behaviour of my son, then he would either have to change his behaviour or resign from the royal family,” she said.
Succession issues are just what Thailand doesn’t need right now.
§ Nones. From this distance, it’s easy to dismiss the sentence as a counterproductive overreaction: Ms Zana is probably just doing politics as usual, not abetting terrorism; and, as a Sakharov laureate, she has Europe’s attention. If ever there were a problem for the UN to grapple with, demonstrating its maturity, it is the (inevitable?) formation of a Kurdish state.
“The King and I” — a work once banned in Thailand and loathed with good reason by the people — the current situation ain’t, as they say. Historically, of all of SE Asia, Thailand has been able to do the diplomatic dance with the west and maintain some semblance of order, at least when compared to her hopelessly corrupt and sad neighbors (Burma, just to name one), but after hundreds of years I suppose you can say that nothing lasts for ever. That the country survived the influx of Americans on R & R during the Vietnam war, when the brothels flourished and the streets teemed with randy servicemen says something of the people’s resilience, more so after the US pulled out and the inflated economy collapsed. There was a coup, of course, and they survived. But how many coups can one country handle? Throw in a Don Juan for a crown prince and you’ve got a recipe for disaster. Sad. I was there in ’70, just as Nixon started bombing Cambodia. A lovely place back then.