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THAILAND: Don Challenges Lese-Majeste Law – Risks Jail Term

Marwaan Macan-Markar

BANGKOK, Jan 27 2009 (IPS) - In a country where the culture encourages people to bow, worship and even grovel before authority, Giles Ungpakorn has always been an exception.

Yet the commitment of this Thai academic to be a standard bearer of free and independent thinking faces what some here see as an ultimate test as he readies to take on this South-east Asian kingdom’s draconian lese-majeste law.

‘’I believe the law should be scrapped altogether,’’ Giles told IPS. ‘’There are royalists who want the law to be scrapped too.’’

Such defiant words come in the wake of a lese-majeste charge filed against him in January by the Special Branch for his 2007 book, ‘A Coup for the Rich,’ that condemned the September 2006 military coup, which ousted Thaksin Shinawatra, the elected prime minister at the time.

‘’There are eight paragraphs in my book that is said to have caused the damage. That is what the police told me in the charge sheet,’’ revealed Giles, who has been teaching political science at Bangkok’s prestigious Chulalongkorn University for the past 12 years.

‘’All 1,000 copies of that book have been sold out. But it can be downloaded from the Internet,” he said.

Giles is well aware of the danger that lies ahead: 15 years in jail, the maximum prison term for those found guilty of being on the wrong side of the lese-majeste law. It has given rise to ‘’immense pressure on me and my family,’’ he admits.

Yet his determination to defend academic freedom and the freedom of expression has propelled him to take on the conservative, royalist Thai establishment in a campaign that he wants kept very much in the public domain.

‘’The Thai media are playing the case down as they do with all other lese- majeste cases,’’ he explained. ‘’They (the cases) are being made into secret trials. This is one of the problems. There is no public accountability.’’

‘’The use of the lese majeste Law in Thailand is an attempt to prevent any discussion about one of the most important institutions,’’ Giles declared in a statement after he learnt of his charges. ‘’It attempts to prevent any critical thought and encourage a system of ‘learning by rote’ among the population.’’

The stance taken by Giles is winning praise in some quarters as a mark of courage given the customary route that Thais, hauled up on lese-majeste charges, tend to pursue – stay quiet. Giles, in fact, has been advised to do so by some in Thai academia.

‘’This is the first time that somebody is fighting this law in recent decades,’’ says David Streckfuss, an U.S. academic who has written extensively on the 100-year-old law introduced into Thailand’s criminal code to shield the Thai monarchy from being insulted or defamed by words or actions.

It is also the first case of an academic persecuted by the oppressive law, Streckfuss noted in an interview. ‘’He wasn’t advocating violence; he was expressing an opinion about the events related to the last coup and the dynamics of Thai political society.’’

Already this lone voice has earned support from his peers across the world. A petition signed by 128 academics from several countries is calling for the charges against Giles to be dropped. At home, academics, human rights activists and journalists have rallied together to hold public seminars in the coming weeks to express concern.

Yet Giles could not have asked for a worst time to stand up for his individual rights and his political beliefs in a country whose name, Thailand, means ‘’Land of the Free’’ locally. For recent events suggest the very opposite, pointing to a country where media suppression to protect the revered monarch and his family is the norm, prompting fears that worst is yet to come.

The very week that Giles was charged, a Thai court found Harry Niccolaides, an Australian who had written an obscure novel, guilty of committing lese- majeste and sentenced him to three years in prison. The court ruled that a passage in the 2005 work of fiction described a prince in light that caused ‘’dishonour’’ to the monarchy and suggested ‘’abuse of royal power.’’

Days before that, Suwicha Thakhor was arrested after the police discovered that insulting comments about the king and his aides came from his computer. ‘’His request for conditional release was turned down three days later,’’ stated Reporters Without Borders, the global media rights watchdog.

Elsewhere, the current coalition government, headed by the Democrat Party, is flexing its muscle to crackdown on websites that are accused of having material that insults the Thai royals. Heading this Internet censorship drive is Justice Minister Pirapan Salirathavibhaga, who revealed recently that over 10,000 websites were being monitored.

It came on the heels of Information and Communications Minister Ranongruk Suwanchawee confirming that 2,300 websites had already been blocked for comments that tarnished the image of the Thai royals and a possible 400 more await a court order to be banned.

The information ministry has also been boosted by a 1.28 million U.S. dollar injection of funds to buy special equipment to mount a round-the-clock surveillance operation aimed at targeting websites that defame the monarchy.

The military, which played a prominent role in bringing to power the Democrat-led coalition, is playing its part, too, in this war against dissidents.

Army chief Gen. Anupong Paojinda is backing a special unit that can ‘’tap phones’’ and ‘’record interviews and public speeches,’’ writes Wassana Nanuam, the military affairs columnist for the ‘Bangkok Post’ newspaper. ‘’The army will alert the police to anything that points to lese majeste.’’

It was the same Anupong who, after the 2006 coup, Thailand’s 18th, headed another special unit, Taskforce 6080, whose mission was to monitor websites that had content going counter to the only image permitted of the Thai royals – that they are perfect.

‘’The Thai state has never been so adamant as it has in the recent years in believing that there is an anti-monarchy drive,’’ says Streckfuss, the U.S academic. ‘’There has never been such a concerted effort by so many agencies being given the task to ban alleged comments against the monarchy.’’

Yet for the likes of Giles, the prevailing trend violates a fundamental notion about the country’s constitutional monarchy, that there should be ‘’public accountability and transparency of the institution’’.

He sees it as an attempt to encourage the Thai population to ‘’believe that we live under an ‘ancient system of monarchy,’’ with elements of feudalism, patronage and absolutism.