The king never smiles, p.26
The King Never Smiles, page 26
Sarit’s reaction was to jail or eliminate hundreds of the political opposition, journalists, and intellectuals, including Jit, who was imprisoned for eight years. It was perhaps as much this repression as Jit’s ideology that gave birth to the CPT. In June 1961, a popular member of parliament, Khrong Chandawong, who had been a Free Thai operative during World War II and was an advocate for the northeastern poor and Isan autonomy, was arrested and summarily executed for allegedly being a communist. Afterward, Khrong’s wife and daughter and a mixed bag of followers, socialists, farmers’ rights advocates, and ethnic Lao nationalists fled into the Phuphan mountain range in Sakhon Nakhon, in the far northeast. From this redoubt they built contacts with the Pathet Lao and the Viet Minh, to become the core of the CPT.
The CPT slowly expanded in small pockets, encouraged by bombastic propaganda and a small amount of aid from Hanoi and Beijing. From mountain bases in the north and northeast, they recruited hill tribes and lowland farmers who felt oppressed by government officials and local traders. In their support, in late 1962 China launched the “Voice of the People of Thailand” radio broadcasts out of Yunnan province. In early 1964, CPT membership numbered probably in the high hundreds rather than thousands. Nevertheless, alarms rang out in Bangkok and Washington that January, when the communist Pathet Lao army attacked the Laotian border city of Thakhek, only 100 kilometers from the Phuphan hills.
The first real government clash with the CPT took place only 20 months later. In August 1965 in the same region, police stumbled into a small CPT meeting in a village. A scuffle followed in which a villager was shot dead and a policeman was injured. Eight months later, Jit Phumisak, recently released from prison, was arrested and summarily executed by government officials near Phuphan.
Many Thais saw this as evidence that the country faced a full-scale insurgency, like those taking place in neighboring Laos and Vietnam. Government officials said a communist takeover was possible, via either parliament or popular revolt.3Political analysts declared Thailand the next domino. Yet, as one historian of the period put it, “Paradoxically, the counterinsurgency effort not only pre-dated the insurgency, but it outgrew the latter by many times over.”4
Bangkok reacted by forming a counterinsurgency task force, the Communist Suppression Operations Command, or CSOC, run by Deputy Prime Minister Praphas along with U.S. advisers. Behind them was the massive force the United States had built up in Thailand, consuming the country like an occupation. In the early 1960s the Americans, together with Thai soldiers, were already conducting guerilla raids into Laos and launching air strikes on Laos and Vietnam from Thai bases. By 1965 there were roughly 14,000 U.S. military and intelligence personnel in Thailand. A year later the total topped 34,000, accompanied by 400 aircraft. The American force was there as much to prevent the rise of a domestic Thai insurgency as it was to support South Vietnam, and it legitimized the Thai military’s political control of the country.
The United States did not ignore the poverty and exploitation that fed the nascent CPT. Washington threw huge resources at winning the people’s hearts and minds through development, hoping to avoid the problems of Vietnam. U.S.-directed projects built roads, dug fish ponds, and established social services in rural villages. Within a few years U.S. annual spending in Thailand equaled the total economic product of the entire northeast, where the lion’s share of it was deployed, all accompanied by anticommunist and pro-monarchy propaganda.
Arguably, the extensive U.S. presence and aid worsened the problems. Much of Washington’s hundreds of millions of dollars dropped into the pockets of the traditional elite, the landowning aristocrats, Sino-Thai traders, and powerful bureaucrats and generals. Bangkok spent up to three times as much on arms as it did on education, and health services got much less. Strong economic growth came with high inflation near military bases, GIs on holiday carousing drunkenly throughout the kingdom, and a very visible explosion in the sex industry.
Meanwhile, security conditions in the countryside worsened. Following the incident in August 1965, clashes between the CPT or other rebellious groups and the government grew to more than 150 skirmishes during 1966, mostly in the south and the northeast, killing 47 police and government officials and 97 insurgents.5 In 1967 the troubles spread into the north, the number of incidents doubled, and the casualties rose similarly. The alarmists of the Thai government, as well as some of the Americans advising them, insisted that a substantial communist insurgency was already under way, and that it needed to be crushed before it opened the door to invasion by Vietnam. It was highly exaggerated, but the alarmists’ view nevertheless fed a growing hysteria over the communist threat.
In this atmosphere of panic, accompanied by a corrupt and ineffective military leadership, Bhumibol himself came under criticism. At first a small group of conservative intellectuals dared to suggest that the king wasn’t doing anything useful, that he was little different from the dilettantes of European royalty. Sulak Sivaraks, a one-time protégé of Prince Dhani, almost openly taunted Bhumibol to quit playing as king and use his power to lead the country. Criticism like this paralleled international media reports that characterized the king as nice but largely ineffectual, and Thailand itself as uncommitted to its own defense in the Cold War. What could be imputed from the 1966 Time cover story was said more directly by a number of journalists, Thai and foreign, the next year: that Thailand’s military-controlled government was deeply corrupt, that the U.S. presence had a deleterious effect on Thai society, and that poor government and lack of democratic institutions was exacerbating poverty and feeding the insurgency.
Amid all this, the respected leftist American writer Louis Lomax wrote in a book on Thailand that the king was barely material.6 Facing the imminent eruption of “another peoples’ war,” Bhumibol was no more than a “Linus blanket,” he said, referring to the insecure blanket-snuggling character in the cartoon strip Peanuts. At best the king limits the “excessive excesses” of the government, Lomax wrote, but meanwhile, “the military have destroyed his divinity and the intellectuals have destroyed his authenticity.” Referring to rising dissent, Lomax declared, “The king can no longer unify Thailand.”
Beneath his fixed, never-smiling mien, King Bhumibol must have felt the insult painfully. He had already suffered much indignity for the position he inherited two decades before. People saw him as committed not to his subjects’ well-being but to his jazz, sailing, and relic ceremonies. His indignation spilled out when he told Look magazine, a rival of Time, in 1967:
Americans, and writers especially, seem to prefer stereotypes. Now, you are in the exotic Far East. Is that what you call it? With the rajas, the lion hunting, the elephants. But the people who see only the jewels on the temple roof, they do not realize the jewel is in the heart, not on the roof of the temple. Now they call me the “jazz-loving” king. I must put up with it. The truth is, I do not have a saxophone of pure gold, and I never had one. It would probably be too heavy anyway. And the “fast-driving, speed-loving” king. I must live with it. I’m not angry about these stereotypes, but I don’t believe that they are constructive or in the best interests of Thailand and the United States.7
Answering criticism that he was out of touch, Bhumibol fell back to the idea that a dhammaraja had a sort of natural omniscience. Because he was king, he said, people told him things they didn’t tell others: “I believe I am in touch with my people and the government. In government, we have two kinds of reports, official and unofficial. Many departments write unofficial reports about each other, and I see them.”
But the criticisms hit a nerve, and Bhumibol understood Lomax’s point. The rebuilding of the monarchy on the old princes’ model had failed to bring many concrete benefits to his people. Its ritual and symbolic promises of a better world hadn’t fundamentally improved village life. To the contrary, continuing under-development and bureaucratic and capitalist abuse of peasants were driving the CPT’s expansion. One reason Bhumibol’s work had remained mostly ritual and symbolic was that the old advisers from the Chakri ancien régime didn’t imagine him doing anything else but building his image and bolstering national unity. Aside from his hobbylike farm projects, Bhumibol hadn’t himself shown much initiative. But he was nearly 40, an age when many Thai men born into privilege aspire to transcend their lives of ease and really accomplish something. Bhumibol now conducted the routine of kingship by rote. His children were taken care of; the prince was at an English boarding school and Princess Ubolrat was soon to attend university. And he had exhausted his potential in sports and arts.
Moreover, his two decades on the throne had given Bhumibol more intimate knowledge about Thai problems and politics than most Thai leaders acquired. He had a fairly solid understanding of national security issues, thanks in part to his longtime adviser Srivisarn Vacha heading the National Security Council. He regularly met privately with the leaders of noncommunist nations and was briefed by diplomats, intelligence specialists, military leaders, capitalists, and development experts. In addition to receiving daily reports on Thailand from his own government, and a constant flow of letters from his subjects, he monitored Thai and international radio transmissions and news reports in his personal work space in the palace—his “intelligence center” lined with radios, teletypes, televisions, and map-filled cabinets.
When the criticism surfaced, then, it had a galvanic effect. Determined to gain respect as a real leader, Bhumibol curtailed his hobbies, at least in the public eye— the regattas at Hua Hin, the jazz jams on the radio, and painting parties in the palace—and thrust himself into the war against communism. At first, this just meant intensifying the usual activities. Bhumibol and Sirikit’s official appearances and audiences increased from 341 in 1965 to 553 in 1969.8 Ever more royal medals, honors, and titles were dispensed to donors to the king’s charity operations. But now, as a rule, they were given to almost all senior military officers and top bureaucrats.
There was a distinct change in the atmosphere of these rituals, however. There was more of a focus on the idea of national unity against a looming, though often unnamed, threat to nation, religion, and king. Bhumibol increasingly alluded to the insurgent threat and to problems in neighboring states and spoke of the relationship of poverty to Thailand’s situation. To strengthen national unity around the person of the king, Bhumibol began a program of distributing his own Buddha Navarajabophit statues, with his own amulets attached, for display in each of the 73 provinces and to key military units, as representations of his omniscient presence across his realm. The anthropologist Frank Reynolds compared them to Angkor ruler Jayavarman VII’s spreading his own image throughout the kingdom.9 The very first was presented in Nongkhai, the province directly opposite the Laotian capital of Vientiane, which was often blamed for the troubles in Isan. It appeared to be a combination sacral and secular message to the ethnic Lao and communists on both sides of the border that this was Bhumibol’s dominion.
Another anthropologist, Charles Keyes, described one provincial presentation ceremony as well scripted to portray Bhumibol as both head of state and paramount religious leader.10 To Keyes, it “conjured up images of the durbars held in India in the last century at which representatives of the diverse peoples of a particular district were brought together to demonstrate their fealty to the British raj…. The arrangement of the grounds for the ceremony thus made evident the constituent elements of the Thai state: the monarch, the Buddhist sangha, the officials, and the populace.” An adjunct program was the religious affairs department’s effort to designate a royal temple representing the Chakri dhammaraja’s presence in each province, even if the temple had no historical link to the monarchy.
In his new posture, Bhumibol also revealed a distinct militaristic streak, as if he was taking seriously his ceremonial position as head of the Thai armed forces. He began to openly and stridently advocate tough U.S. and Thai military action against the region’s communists. In February 1966, Bhumibol had already pleaded with visiting U.S. vice president Hubert Humphrey for more help to defend against a communist invasion as they discussed the parallels between Vietnam and Thailand. He requested specific equipment for fighting communist infiltration, and also complained of delays in the delivery of aid from Washington.11
That summer, on his holiday in England, Bhumibol declared several times that China and Vietnam seriously threatened Thailand. He told reporters that one of his purposes in Britain was to buy aircraft for his military, and he visited several aircraft factories in England and Germany and attended the large Farnborough military aircraft show.12 Aircraft purchasing for the Royal Thai Air Force wasn’t really among his responsibilities, but he was getting involved. Later the same year he lobbied the United States to escalate its war against Hanoi, even criticizing Washington for pausing in its air strikes on North Vietnam.13 He pressed Thanom to allocate more soldiers to CPT suppression operations in the northeast, and to demand even more American support since Thailand had agreed to Washington’s request for a large Thai combat troop deployment to Vietnam.14
Bhumibol’s view of the Cold War was simplistic, though not out of line with conservative thinking at the time. Despite his awareness of internal causes, he took the position that the roots of the communist threat were essentially external. In his 1967 Look interview, he revealed his view of the imperiled Thai cosmos.
The Chinese have always been a threat to Southeast Asia, because they are an expansive people…. In Thailand, there are many of them, and it is hard to absorb them…. In the northeast villages, the communists are either Thai Chinese or North Vietnamese…. Generally, the people do not believe them, but in the remote areas, if the people do not cooperate, the communists kill them…. Now of course, some government officials upcountry do not do their jobs properly, so the peasants have a reason to become bitter and rebel. But their bitterness is not against Thailand, it is against the officials.
Thai people are not communists. For example, if you consider our religion and consider all of its rules, it is democratic. Thus, the monks all have their rights, and they operate in a manner similar to that of a parliament. Each has the right to say what he thinks. We in Thailand have, then, a basis for democracy and good living.
Communism is impractical. Life is not each to his needs. The one who works today should get the money and the goods, not the one who doesn’t work. Communism can be worse than the Nazis or fascists. In practice, it is more terrible than dictatorship.
Dictatorship, of course, was exactly what Thailand’s generals were being accused of, increasingly by antiwar activists in the United States. Bhumibol told Look that the American student protestors were ignorant, victims of communist manipulation. Thailand had to be wary of such communist trickery and prepare for “a very special kind of war,” he argued. “While millions of Chinese are starving, China has the luxury of the bomb. Now, many people in India want the bomb. We in Thailand have been too modest, but perhaps in the future, the Thai people won’t be so modest. If the Thai people want the bomb, then they shall have it.”
As the king’s statements became more hawkish, he spent more time with the armed forces, strengthening his bonds with the rank and file, and showing his wartime leadership, like a traditional kasatriya. The Mahidols had long paid personal attention to Thai soldiers and police officers injured in the line of duty, visiting them in the hospital and providing funds to their families and sponsoring funerals.
Now the king made an extra effort to visit camps and field positions, wearing combat fatigues, often with a pistol on one hip and a walkie-talkie on the other. The press generously published photographs showing Bhumibol shooting carbines, M-16s, and larger machine guns from forward bases. Queen Sirikit was frequently at his side, likewise clothed in army greens and posing with a carbine. The elite group of soldiers headed for Vietnam became her “Queen’s Rangers.”
Prince Vajiralongkorn joined the family militarization as well. Before being sent off to England to study in January 1966, he was, at 13, named a sublieutenant in all three armed services. Whenever he returned to Thailand on holiday he put on a field uniform and accompanied his father to BPP and army camps. At 15 he participated in military basic training and learned to shoot sidearms. Not long after, he graduated to large-caliber machine guns and grenade launchers. The palace released photographs of father and son shooting together, and the prince learned how to dismantle, clean, and reassemble various weapons.
Showing he recognized the social roots of the insurgency, Bhumibol also ratcheted up his development initiatives. His keystone project was the Hup Kapong area near Hua Hin. Despite the construction of roads and small reservoirs, farming wasn’t taking off. The reason, Bhumibol observed, was that the people themselves weren’t determined enough to overcome poverty. He had expected them to achieve bucolic farming lives once they were provided with the means, but they didn’t work together, he noted. Instead, as soon as roads and other facilities were built, some sold their property to land speculators. It was a cycle that deeply vexed the king all his life: when offered fast cash for their land, peasants took the money and moved to the city or to other state-owned lands, only to end up poor again.
As a way of combating the cycle, in 1967 the king introduced to Hup Kapong the idea of a village farming cooperative modeled on an Israeli kibbutz. If it worked, he wanted the program copied around the countryside, as in Israel, converting poor land into miracle farms while boosting unity and national security. First he communalized the land at Hup Kapong. Using royal and government funds, land was purchased and merged with other land already owned in the community, and then marked out for group farm plots. Ultimately, 120 families shared some 4,000 acres as joint owners, so no one could sell it off. Palace, government, and military officials under the king’s direction improved the soil, constructed irrigation facilities, introduced cash crops that mixed well with rice cultivation, and taught the people new farming methods. They helped set up community credit, buying, and marketing cooperatives, and they installed power and water infrastructure. Merit-seeking Thai businessmen and the Israeli government donated supplies and equipment. With all the inputs, it could hardly fail.
