Thaksin impolite to King: Sonthi

Council for National Security chief General Sonthi Boonyaratglin has told Time magazine the ousted Thaksin Shinawatra regime was "disrespectful" of His Majesty the King and the Royal Family.

In an interview published in the latest Asia issue of Time, Sonthi says: "There are many cases in which the previous government was impolite to the Royal Family and to the King himself.

"The Thai people cannot and will not tolerate anybody who shows even slight disrespect to the King or his family."

Sonthi led the September 2006 coup that ousted Thaksin and his government.

He defended his action on the grounds that the Thaksin regime failed to deliver true democracy. The military had to step in, he said.

"There was interference with many organisations, especially the independent organisations established to oversee and scrutinise the government's actions. The previous government wanted to control the whole system.

"That [led to] large-scale corruption [and] vote-buying during local and general elections. The people knew about these things, and they could not accept it. As far as the army staging a coup, we could not just do it on our own. We needed the consent of the people to help us preserve democracy," he said.

Meanwhile, Thaksin on Friday delivered a speech to the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London. He called the address "Democracy at a Crossroads".

The former prime minister also told reporters that he wants to help in the political reconciliation process in Thailand and hopes the Council for National Security, which ousted his previous adminsitration, would be successful in returning the country to normalcy.

In his speech, Thaksin ironically talked about the values of democracy in national development.

Thaksin said effective participation, voting equality and free, fair and frequent elections were requirements inherent in the democratic process.

He added that freedom of expression, access to different and alternative sources of information and freedom of association were essential too.

The Nation

The previous government did control most of the whole system, for their own purposes, not the people's. Moving Thailand quickly to an election would bring the country back to where it stood before last year's April elections. Examples have to be set by prosecuting corrupt politicians, no matter which political party they represent, and a new constitution introduced.

While I don't disagree with you. Corruption in Thailand is very deep rooted and prosecuting a couple of politicians won't make any difference in the overall scheme of things.  It's like cutting off bamboo shoots, there are always more shoots to take their place the very next day.  

I've argued long on this.  It's not top down corruption in Thailand - it's bottom up corruption - and is so deep rooted it's part of Thai culture.  You bribe the cop, you bribe someone to get your kid admitted to a decent school, you give the motor testing guy a few baht to answer the questions for you and it goes on and on.  Kids learn from an early age that money talks in Thailand, all us walking ATM's know that, you can get anything you want if you have the cash.  Parents have to teach their children that corruption is wrong and that's not going to happen in any of our lifetimes.  There is just no outcry for them to do so.

My wife' and her professional friends, all Thai, did not have a problem with Thaksin being corrupt.  They had a problem with what openly appeared to be greed on his part.  If he had kept the status quo within the acceptable corruption scale not many of them would have cared.   It was only when he appeared to take too much that Thai's spoke out.

Some posts in this thread have been edited or deleted

Talk Thailand asks its members to refrain from posting any "sensitive" political content

Talk Thailand reserves the right to delete any inappropriate posts

Please refer to our forum rules for more details

http://talk-thailand.com/forum/showthread.php?tid=8

Thread locked