Revolution Interrupted: Farmers, Students, Law, and Violence in Northern Thailand

Preface

xi In her poem “Cartographies of Silence,” Adrienne Rich cautions her readers against failing to recognize the full, active nature of silence. Silence “is a presence / it has a history a form / Do not confuse it / with any kind of absence.” The poem traces the fracturing of romance and the growing divide between two people who once cared deeply for one another. Leaving the divide unspoken does not make it disappear but rather makes its edges more pronounced and threatening.Although Adrienne Rich is writing about love,her words succinctly capture one of the dynamics animating Thai political life and history. Since the transformation from absolute to constitutional monarchy on 24 June 1932, governance in Thailand has depended on the silence of marginalized people. This category has included, but is not limited to, farmers, workers, the rural and urban poor, ethnic minority groups, dissidents, and women.Through actions explicit and implicit by those inside and outside the state apparatus with access to power and influence, members of these groups have variously been excluded from the political process, denied legal subjectivity, and given limited access to the possible benefits of development and progress. It is not simply that those with power have not listened to the voices of marginalized people, but rather that political life in Thailand has often required and sustained their exclusion. This book is about a series of challenges to this foundational exclusion made by northern tenant farmers and their student allies in the wake of the 14 October 1973 movement. I trace how the members of the Farmers’ Federation of Thailand (FFT) made concrete demands for laws, policies, and actions that would change the material conditions of their lives, while they simultaneously challenged the very form of the political decision-making structure. As soon as farmers began protesting in front of the provincial hall in Chiang Mai, counterprotestors admonished them to get out of the city so that the civil servants could enter the building without having to walk through the protests. One implication of this statement is that farmers are meant to be out of sight in the countryside, producing rice for the people in the city to eat, but they are not meant to claim the city as a space in which they, too, can speak and demand rights.The gravity of the farmers’challenge can be read, I argue, in the violence with which their demands for legal reform were met. What makes marginalized people a presence,rather than an absence,is that Preface xii . Preface they have consistently challenged their exclusion from rule through organizing , writing, appealing, and protesting, even when they have faced repression, violence, and death. To posit this as a history is not to argue that there is a unifying narrative linking all movements by marginalized people for a greater stake in governance in Thailand in one trajectory.It would be intellectually and politically irresponsible to argue, for example, that the peasant rebellions of the nineteenth century led to the struggles of the FFT in the 1970s and the protests of the United Democratic Front against Dictatorship (UDD) for reform of the political system in the wake of the 19 September 2006 coup. Instead, what can become visible are threads of the challenge to the exclusion of marginalized people from governance and political life more broadly. When the red-shirted members of the UDD occupied the glitzy shopping area of Ratchaprasong in Bangkok in April and May 2010, one of the claims made by their detractors was that they were “hillbillies” (khon bannok) who should go home. Many members of the UDD are from the north and northeast, and this claim can be read as a demand of people in the city who wanted to be able to access their shopping malls again. But like the admonition that the tenant farmers in Chiang Mai should return to the rice fields, the demand that the UDD supporters leave the city is less about the daily conveniences and luxuries desired by the people in the city and actually about the very question of who is meant to participate in rule. The farmers of the FFT and the members of the UDD were meant to follow the decisions made by those with power and remain enveloped in silence, not claim themselves as people who can change the shape of the decision-making structure.These resonant moments reflect the gap between those who can participate in governance and those who cannot...