The two versions of General Chavalit

4 April 1997

Is General Chavalit just another military man who has fallen in love with power and its perquisites? Or is he a visionary reformer who plays the dirty political game because that is the only way to change it?

Certainly, he plays the political game well. In the army, he was known as a strategist. In politics, he has worked out the strategies for success. His career serves as a primer for the era of money politics, with twelve lessons:

1. Build a rock-solid electoral base for yourself. Choose a poor and neglected province where a little patronage will go a long way. Donate to a few temples and charities. Use your influence to have some roads built, some government projects started. Help some local businessmen get rich on all the contracting this generates. Win your seat by a landslide.

2. Position yourself as a man of the provinces rather than a man of the city (simple arithmetic: the provinces have 90 percent of the seats). Identify yourself with the northeast (by far the largest region). Don’t be bashful. Dub yourself a "son of the northeast", even though you don’t speak the dialect.

3. Start your own party, and make sure it is really your party. Include a few other known faces for credibility at the start. But in the long term, they may steal your limelight or threaten your leadership. Best to drop them along the way.

4. Build a strong base in the army. Wear your uniform often. Keep up with all that ritualised camaraderie. Go to all the birthday bashes and funerals.Move your men into powerful positions in the military hierarchy. Help to build up the military’s pride after the disaster of 1991-2. Encourage your chosen army head to speak his mind on political matters. Halt the slide in the military budget. Champion prestige spending projects. Try to develop some new sources of revenue for soldiers through the Veterans organisation, and those vast expanses of army-owned land. Rehabilitate officers who came off badly in the wars against democracy.

5. Make friends with lots of provincial godfathers. Promote big projects (Green Northeast) which generate lots of local contracting. Have your photo taken with them so they can display it at home. Visit them in hospital. Welcome them into your political party.

6. Generate a lot of cash. This is the necessary magnetic core for a Thai political party. Concentrate on very high-profit activities like logging, land deals, arms purchasing, stock manipulation. Avoid any direct personal involvement which could cause embarrassment (see Chatichai, Banharn). Develop close friends and business associates as trustworthy cutouts.

7. Master the art of logrolling. This is how you create a big political party in the runup to an election. Most politicians want to be a part of the ruling coalition, so the trick is to persuade enough of them that you are the best bet. Samakkitham showed how to do this in 1991-2. Chatichai failed in 1992. He jiggled a few logs out of Chat Thai and the Democrats, but the momentum was not enough for a landslide. Banharn did it brilliantly in 1994. Don’t worry who you log-roll into your party or coalition. Past history no bar. This is a numbers game, not a beauty contest.

8. At the general election, rely on money and officials. Make a list of all the profitable monopoly businesses (existing and potential), and go round with the campaign collection box. Build up your influence in the Interior Ministry well in advance. Pay special attention to teachers and village heads who tell the villagers how to vote. Don’t worry about PollWatch. Unless your candidates are caught personally stuffing money into the pockets of the voters, they can get away with anything.

9. Manage your Cabinet as General Prem did during his record-breaking stay in the premiership. Have an inner cabinet which controls the key ministries (interior, finance, defence), runs the Cabinet agenda, and does the real work. Let the other ministers graze at will. Remember these other ministerships are little more than faction fodder. No need to distribute the deputy posts at a regular two per ministry. Instead distribute according the ministry’s relative profitability. Lots of posts in honeypots like Interior and Communications. None at all in barren wastes like Foreign.

10. Don’t let anyone else control the men in uniform. Put your own man in charge of the police. Keep a personal grip on the Defence Ministry. Get the security agencies under your thumb. The ability to snoop on your friends is one of the keys to power.

11. Pay proper attention to PR. Put your own men in the TV stations. Call the press editors in for cosy chats. Mutter threats if really necessary. Even more effective, generate distractions. Include in the Cabinet a troupe of three or four clowns who supply the press with an endless stream of hilarious copy. Whenever necessary, let these clowns play practical jokes on the opposition.

12. Find a policy wonk to act as your mouthpiece. Should be young, smart, personable, ambitious. Academics are best because they come with some built-in credibility. A good family background and heaps of personal money help too

With some trial and error, General Chavalit has done very well. That does not make him a great leader or a great democrat. It simply means he has mastered the mix of money, influence and networking which are the ingredients of present-day political success. In an era of money politics and "dark influences", he is simply jao phor ber neung, number one godfather, the darkest influence, the king of patronage.

But here’s the twist. Chavalit has become an ace at the political game, and now he tells us he wants to change the game. After his thousand-mile journey to reach the summit, he is going to blow up the mountain. Having climbed to the top of the greasy pole, he is going to set fire to it.

Since he stepped from military to civilian life, Chavalit has presented himself as an agent of change. Consider how he named his political party. Not the standard vocabulary of People/Nation/Development/Solidarity which other parties used. But "New Aspiration". A name promising change, almost revolution, with overtones of religious fervour.

At the last election, he presented himself as a "new kind of leader". All those yellow jigsaw pieces promised to create a new picture.

From time to time, he has promoted political structures that are new to Thailand. The presidium. The dream team. A national government. In the election campaign, he committed himself to "political reform". While other campaign promises have melted away, "political reform" has solidified. Chavalit has triggered the biggest overhaul of the constitution in a quarter-century.

On top of this, Chavalit’s policy mouthpiece has begun talking of further large changes in the political framework. Pokin has announced the government will change the way the government budget is managed, in order to concentrate money on core priorities. This would require changes in institutions, systems, habits which have been burned into the operating practice of the bureaucracy for almost half a century.

Pokin has also talked of plans to reform the whole structure of government, particularly the allocation of power between centre and provinces. This would tamper with the Interior Ministry, the core of the Thai government for over a century. It is rather as if the Vatican government announced it was planning to disestablish the catholic church.

On the economic side, many Cabinet ministers are announcing plans to liberalize and privatize - telecommunications, power, transport, tapioca quotas. These plans could destroy the rich networks which link politics and business, and which generate the funding for election campaigns and the wives’ jewelry.

Which Chavalit should we believe in? The ringmaster of a corrupt circus. Or the man who is going to take down the circus tent. The godfather of godfathers. Or the man who will do away with godfather politics.

In the short term, Chavalit profits from this uncertainty. He gets support from people who believe in either version. Old-style politicos have flocked to his party, and been welcomed into the grazing posts in the Cabinet. But many new idealists also give him support. 1973-6 veterans are sprinkled through the party and ministry (and were horrified by the Narong affair).

But which is the true version? In recent weeks, he has begun to look more like an old-style power broker, whose talk of reform is just a smokescreen. His fans still say that he plays the power game because he needs power to bring about reform. But what real chance does he have of changing the system when he relies on the support of who profit so well from it?

Will Chavalit’s great ship of reform be scuttled by its own passengers? And will the captain go down with the ship?