Tyranny goes by the name of Chuan

It's your detached haughtiness and your contempt for the plight of the poor that did it. All the Pak Moon villagers need is a gesture of political commitment to end their long suffering. It takes only a smidgeon of compassion to see this. But you think you're too high to meet dirt. So you feel nothing in seeing the poor who seek justice beaten and locked behind bars.

Listen to your justifications for the crackdown: the need to protect the rule of law; the conspiracy theory of a third party instigating things; the need to protect the country's image.

Aren't they the very same lame excuses military dictators used to oppress the people?Many Thais have died to throw off the yoke of military dictatorship. What we got in exchange is money politics whereby politicians use the election ritual to continue the rape of natural resources in collusion with the authoritarian bureaucracy and big business.

The result is a devastation of nature, the source of villagers' livelihoods. Naturally, they want back the right to manage their environment. That's what the demand for Egat to open the Pak Mon dam gates and let the Moon river flow naturally again is all about.

Civilian administrations always claim legitimacy through the election ritual when they deny small people their voice and their civic movements for direct democracy.

It takes a small leap for old-world politicians to become tyrants. Other civilian governments may have been equally full of dinosaurs. But in line with Thai political paternalism, they at least had the decency to make a pretence of listening to the poor. Tyrants just shrug their shoulders after crushing the people. Mr Chuan, you and your men fit that bill nicelyAfter decades of destructive development policies, the storm of civil unrest is brewing over conflicts involving the management of natural resources across the country. Pak Moon is just one example.

We need a government that acts as a conciliator and has the political will to defuse conflicts. We need mechanisms for conflicting groups to resolve their differences peacefully and justly.

Instead, Mr Chuan takes the side of the bureaucracy, the protesters' nemesis. By siding with Egat, he effectively killed the dialogue process by reneging on all the promises made to the grass-roots movement by the Chavalit government. His administration has used the state media to discredit the Pak Moon struggle through lies and distortion. And it went back on its own word when the recommendations made by the Pak Moon committee did not serve Egat. This drove the villagers to desperation.

The Pak Moon protesters were accused of breaking the law. But isn't the law a tool in the service of social justice? What to do when the government demeans justice and uses draconian laws to persecute dissidents?The charge of law-breaking rings hollow when the government continually breaks the higher values of truth and justice. And if our legal and bureaucratic systems stand in the way of justice, they must be changed.

The Democrats' crackdown on the Pak Moon villagers opens a new round in the struggle of popular movements for participatory democracy.

We face a new challenge-to make the aloof Bangkok middle-class realise that the problems of the rural poor with state accountability are their problems as well. And that their involvement will speed up political reform.

But with or without middle-class support, for the poor, with their backs against the wall, there is no turning back.pf