Democracy Now?

Dawn broke over Bangkok at 6 o'clock on Wednesday morning, October 6, 1976—my 32nd birthday. It was already 77 degrees, en route to 91, balmy, though the air was already dripping with 81 percent humidity. The "cool" season, with its moderate temperatures that sent children scurrying for wool sweaters, was some weeks away. Still, it would be one of the rare rainless days in the Thai capital at the tail end of the rainy season—in itself, perhaps, an omen in a nation that pays attention to portents.

The capital was on edge. On Monday, some 2,000 left-wing students had barricaded themselves inside Bangkok's politically volatile Thammasat University where demonstrations, often violent, by both the left and right had become a routine component of the core curriculum. The leftists, who dominated the campus, demanded the nation's former military dictator, Field Marshal Thanom Kittikachorn, who'd returned to Thailand nearly three weeks earlier and took refuge in a Buddhist pagoda, be deported and called for the punishment of the policemen who garroted to death two leftists for distributing anti-Thanom posters. There were reports the students had armed themselves with automatic rifles and pistols, which were ubiquitous barely 18 months after the end of the wars in neighboring Indochina. The rumor was that the left-wing students were preparing to defend their campus against assaults by the police and right-wing students who had surrounded the grounds.

By mid-morning, the worst fears had been realized. Police and students were locked in pitched battles that killed 30 and wounded hundreds. One of the victims was my close friend, NBC producer/ cameraman Neil Davis, who'd survived years of war in Vietnam and Cambodia only to get caught in a vicious crossfire in what was supposed to be one of Southeast Asia's bastions of peace, tranquility, and democracy. The conflict also produced one of the iconic pictures of the 1970s—a crowd looking on at the burned body of a left-wing student, hanging by his neck from a tree, a right-wing youth beating him with a metal folding chair. It won the Pulitzer Prize for the photographer, Neal Ulevich of the Associated Press.

At 6 p.m., with the blessing of King Bhumibol Adulyadej, the Thai military made its move. Defense Minister Admiral Sa-ngad Chaloryu announced over the state-controlled radio and television that the armed forces had seized control of the country—Thailand's eighth change of government in four years. The nation of 45 million people, he said, would be ruled by an Administrative Reform Committee—a junta, headed by himself. Meanwhile, the new Constitution, ratified just two years earlier, was abolished (not suspended), all newspapers and periodicals were banned, and a midnight to 5 a.m. curfew was in force. The defense minister, a noted anti-communist, attributed the military's decision to the failure of the six-month-old democratically-elected government of Prime Minister Seni Pramoj to cope with the protests of the students who, Admiral Sa-ngad charged, were backed by communist elements.

"We've set our sights too high as far as democracy was concerned," the leader of the junta told the Thai people in his broadcast. "The people in charge were not highly qualified. We have taken this action to have a change at every level and then, after everything has been set to order, to hand it over again to the civilian government."

It would take nearly three years for the military to set the nation to order and hold a new general election. During that time, the junta embarked on a widespread roundup of writers, journalists, educators, and political activists, indeed anyone who'd demonstrated any leftwing sympathies—imprisoning hundreds without charges, driving thousands more into neighboring Laos and Cambodia or even farther abroad.

Today, 35 years and six coups later, Thailand has a new, democratically elected government. Again, there is a leader-in-exile—the brother, as it happens, of the newly elected prime minister. Yingluck Shinawatra is the first woman ever elected to that office. And there is talk of yet another...