Shinawatras to face new court rulings
The Thaksin’s case will be heard on 22 August, while his daughter Paetongtarn’s case will be heard on 29 August after her prime ministership was suspended over the latest military confrontation with Cambodia. This marks a new chapter in Thailand’s long crisis; unable to turn the page, the country pursues its long decline.
Bangkok (AsiaNews) – Thailand is heading into difficult times that might last days if not weeks, with the Shinawatra family once again in the middle of it.
Courts could achieve what coups and two decades of challenges to their control of the country, exerted through different political parties that enjoyed electoral success, have failed to do.
The Criminal Court is expected to rule in a case involving Thaksin Shinawatra, a former prime minister, who went into voluntary exile in 2008, encouraged by arrest warrants in his homeland. He returned two years ago and was granted a royal pardon, agreeing to stay out of politics.
However, he was later charged with high treason under Article 112 of the Criminal Code. This is a powerful and difficult-to-counter "legal weapon”, used in recent years to silence those calling for reform of the monarchy and the military's withdrawal from politics.
On 29 August, the Constitutional Court is also set to rule on whether to disqualify his youngest daughter, Paetongtarn Shinawatra. She was suspended from the post as prime minister on 1 July for inappropriate conduct during the Thai-Cambodian crisis, which remains unresolved and has led to a resurgence of nationalism on both sides.
The 38-year-old Paetongtarn fell into a trap laid by Cambodia's "strongman," former Prime Minister and current Senate President Hun Sen.
A former Thaksin ally and Shinawatra business partner, Hun Sen taped a telephone conversation with Paetongtarn on 15 June and then released it. In it, the two are heard discussing the crisis between the two countries that began in late May with Thailand’s young prime minister criticising the commander of the Thai Second Army responsible for the border areas affected by the clashes.
This sparked outrage among Thai nationalists and opposition groups, who called for the court’s intervention. Their motivations vary, but in both cases, they are the result of manoeuvres to once again settle the score with a political clan that has dominated Thai politics since 2001 amid a tense standoff with the country's traditional elites and the armed forces that protect them.
So far, nearly all the electoral gains by the Shinawatras’ loyalists and various political parties have been thwarted by the courts, parliamentary manoeuvring, and coups.
In the game of competing interests, the loser has been democracy, which has been reduced to the act of voting, which has left the country caught between paternalism and nationalism, on the one hand, and populism and nepotism, on the other.
With corruption still at high levels, both sides are verbally committed to pursuing the "Thai way" of progress, but, in reality, both just seek control over the population and resources, while the country has been losing the productive, occupational, and modernisation momentum it has enjoyed since the 1970s, thanks to broad stability often imposed by the military.
Today, Southeast Asia's second-largest economy sees its position threatened by others, starting with an assertive Vietnam, but it is above all, engulfed in a crisis that no one seems capable (or interested) in resolving.
All parties – with the possible exception of the progressive Move Forward Party, winner of the last two elections, but prevented from governing by questionable deeds by other parties in parliament and the courts – continue to focus on the most appropriate and casual practices that allow them to contain the population's demands and expectations, modernising the country's image while accepting more foreign investments and businesses, especially Chinese, whose trade-offs have perhaps not been adequately assessed.
In this context, removing the Shinawatras from power could trigger an even greater crisis since many Thais will see it as persecutory and not passively accept it.
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