Royal birthday speeches by the queen are a mixture of royal back-slapping, political statement, long-held preferences and wishes about a country that is no longer what she hoped it was or would be. Essentially, Thailand has passed her by. She has almost no connection to the real world of Thai lives and politics. But that doesn’t mean that she isn’t influential and potentially dangerous. Her recent birthday speech illustrates all of this.
As the Economist has reiterated and as Wikileaks made clear, the queen is close to the royalist Army boss General Prayuth Chan-ocha who is amongst the most hawkish of the anti-Thaksin Shinawatra and anti-red shirt leadership of the military. As the magazine states, his views “reflect those of Queen Sirikit, his patron.”
This year’s birthday speech, as reported in The Nation, has the queen mourning the virtually unknown and mentally-challenged Princess Bejaratana who died recently, giving her support to yet another hopelessly expensive royal funeral that has been ordered by Princess Sirindhorn, the expense falling to taxpayers. These events are as much about supporting the ideological, social and economic position of the living royals as they are about any real mourning.
Being a rabid, nationalist Buddhist – a bit like some of those who are her supporters in the People’s Alliance for Democracy – she also outlined a plan to erect a “32-metre-tall Buddha statue at a Kanchanaburi temple in memory of the giant Buddha statues destroyed in Afghanistan a few years ago.”
As she and the king do every year, she called on “all Thais to unite as a nation for common prosperity, as expressed and encouraged in the national anthem.” She then praised the king and all of his “good works.” Recall that some royals want more emphasis on this as they feel the little people have forgotten how wonderful the royals are.
The queen then got into some deeply worrying political areas. Wikileaks reminds us that the aged queen urged a coup in 2008 and some very senior people reckoned she was a driving force behind the 2006 coup. And the Economist has recalled her “destructive partisanship, particularly towards yellow-shirt protesters in 2008, has been a public-relations disaster (amply detailed in American diplomatic cables obtained by WikiLeaks).” PPT assumes that part of this assessment by the Economist has to do with her support for armed and violent responses by Buddhist Thais in the deep south. She again commented on the south in this speech, mentioning a need for tolerance, but concentrating on Buddhist Thais rather than the toture and repression carried out by the military and police again Malay Muslims.
In this speech, the queen also returned to a favored topic in the palace: anti-drugs efforts. This topic, broached with Thaksin in the king’s 2002 birthday speech in led the the human rights disaster that was Thaksin Shinawatra’s ill-conceived and poorly implemented War on Drugs.
In that speech, as reported by The Nation, the king:
urged his subjects to take an active part in the national effort to eliminate the illicit drug trade, which he described as a scourge of Thai society, in his traditional birthday speech…. The King acknowledged the prime minister’s speech, which catalogued royal contributions to a wide range of national development initiatives and their achievements in raising the living standards of the people, eliminating social ills and bringing about the general happiness of his subjects. But he said the prime minister had omitted to mention his decades-old dedication to stamping out illicit drugs, which have done so much damage to individuals and society, resulting in rising public health costs, social ills and the deployment of huge financial resources for drug suppression.
In her recent speech, as reported by the Bangkok Post, the queen
urged collective efforts by the government and the public to fight drug abuse which she said was “spreading more than quickly than germs.” She said His Majesty had made great efforts in urging hilltribe people to switch from growing opium to other crops. The country, however, is being used as a drug trafficking corridor and for production as well. She condemned those involved in the illicit business as cold-blooded murderers.
She added: “I feel unsettled hearing that drugs are rampant and available in every nook and corner and in schools…. They are acting like murderers, killing their own children in cold blood.”
Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra, who was required to give a birthday and welcome speech, had to praise the queen – it’s compulsory. She “praised the Queen’s dedication and many projects that improved people’s lives, while emphasising the government’s appreciation of her good deeds and its loyalty to her and the monarchy.” We trust that her brother’s problems in following royal advice will be a warning for her and that she’ll be more cautious about a war on drugs proposed by another old war horse.
Update: It is with considerable dismay that we read that Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra is reported to have found it appropriate to state that her government will follow the queen’s “advice” regarding opposing drugs in the country. As we noted above, when Thaksin followed the king’s advice in 2003, a human rights disaster resulted. We would hope that Yingluck’s statement is simply a matter of royal posterior polishing.
At least one human rights organization has heard alarm bells. We think it significant that Angkhana Neelaphaijit, chairwoman of the Justice for Peace Foundation, has spoken out immediately following the queen’s speech.
Angkhana is right to warn that a War on Drugs like that under Thaksin must be avoided at all cost. Yingluck must show that her government can deal with complex social problems while promoting human rights.
An AFP report has received fairly wide attention because it refers to perhaps hundreds of people locked up in part because of being caught/identified by the “magic wand” known as the GT200.
