Banging about in the barracks

11 oct 2004

On 22 September, the prime minister announced General Chettha Thanajaro would be placed in sole command of military operations in the south. A week later, he announced General Chavalit Yongchaiyudh would be given this duty. Another week later, General Chettha was booted out as defence minister, and General Chavalit was rumoured to be on the point of resigning.

In the middle of all this, a TRT deputy spokesman told the press that members of the military academy’s Class Seven had been plotting a coup. The prime minister’s men came out strongly to smother the news. This incident echoes the reaction to Ekkayuth Anchanbutr and his allegations of stockmarket chicanery. In reality, this dubious businessman is no political threat to Thaksin. Similarly, the real likelihood of a coup by a group of passé officers is very slight. But the army, like the stockmarket, is an important foundation of the current regime. And hence the government’s reaction is out of all proportion to the threat.

On his ascent to power, Thaksin perhaps assessed the military using the business-school SWOT technique of strength, weakness, opportunity and threat.

The threat was clear from the example of the Chatichai cabinet of 1988-91. Thaksin’s heady mix of business and political ambitions resembles the Chatichai era more closely than anything we have seen since. Many ministers, advisers, and hangers-on from the Chatichai government have reappeared in the current one. Rather like Thaksin, Chatichai put the economy into overdrive and believed there would be “no problem” with anything. But he hit one big problem – a coup.

The opportunity which the military represented for Thaksin came from its mix of strength and weakness. After the crisis of May 1992, the generals were forcibly removed from the political frontline. They also lost many comfortable sinecures in state enterprises, many opportunities for secondary income earning, and a great slice of their prestige. They spent much of the following years trying to get the government and public to accept new roles for the military so they could recover some of what they had lost.

But after May 1992 the military also hung on to a lot of its strengths. It successfully resisted attempts to reduce its overall numbers and thin down the bloated officer cadre. It kept its considerable interests in the electronic media – two television channels and hundreds of radio stations. These assets became more lucrative with the booming economy, and more politically important with the development of electoral politics.

The military’s combination of strengths and weaknesses gave Thaksin the opportunity to make a deal. He would increase the military budget, drop plans for serious restructuring, hire underemployed generals on to his advisory teams, give the military an expanded role in internal security, restore the convention that the defence minister must be a military man, and invite the military back into the political life of the nation. As quid pro quo, the military would be an asset for the prime minister, especially by cooperating with his plans to micro-manage the media, and assisting with projects to suppress protest and intimidate dissent.

For the generals, the deal has been a great success. They are back. Over the last three years, the tussles over the military promotion list have regained almost all the news prominence that they once had when the military ran everything.

But for Thaksin, realising the opportunity and preventing the threat depended crucially on finding the right people and building the personnel connections in the military hierarchy. Here, Thaksin had three assets available to him. He had spent two years in the military cadet school and thus had a “class” of old schoolmates. One branch of his family had gone into the military two generations back. While dabbling in politics in the mid-1990s, he had made contacts among the ex-military men who drifted from the barracks to the parliament as the pattern of power changed.

In the reshuffles from 2001 onwards, Thaksin accelerated the careers of his Class Ten colleagues so that they are now in prime positions across all three branches of the military, the defence ministry, various security agencies, and other useful bodies. But in terms of age and seniority, they must still wait a couple of years before they can control the top posts.

Hence Thaksin looked to his relatives and political contacts to hold the fort during this interval. He leapfrogged his cousin, General Chaisit, up the military hierarchy to the post of army commander. He relied especially on General Chavalit’s network of military connections to handle the old guard.

But things have still been difficult. On appointing Chaisit as army chief, Thaksin insisted “The best decision has been made, based on national interests” and “The promotion can be justified rationally.” But a year later, he had to remove him in an atmosphere of scandal and failure. Chavalit has both good friends and deadly enemies in the military hierarchy, and his grip is waning since he quit the force fifteen years ago.

Besides, the military hierarchy is far from unified. The official chain of command has to compete with ties based on personal connections, political alliances, and business interests. The usual internal fragmentation and tension has been heightened by events on the national borders. In 2001-2, many officers had to be removed from the western border so that the government could target the drug trade, and create the right environment for political and business overtures to Rangoon. Since mid-2002, the growing conflict in the south has again demanded repeated shifts in postings and responsibilities. Such changes are disruptive.

The prime minister’s flip-flopping over key appointments suggests matters are slipping out of his control. The over-reaction to a “coup” rumour which was probably a few officers grumbling into their scotch confirms this hint of panic. Sadly, one main consequence of this growing mess is that the management of the south is gradually becoming solely a military matter, increasingly dominated by hardliners, with lessening chance of any solution except violence.