In 2006, a Pole called Hubert Hoffman was minding his own business, waiting on a platform at Warsaw’s train station, when he was approached by two policemen. Hoffman didn’t like the way he was addressed, remarking to the cops that the Kaczynski twins — Lech the president and Jaroslav the prime minister — ran the country like the brutal Stalinist dictators of old. The police told him to show more respect for Poland’s rulers, at which point Hoffman promptly broke wind. His admirably controllable flatulence got him arrested and charged for ‘contempt for the office of the head of state’. Hoffman was bailed, but when he didn’t show up in court, the judge — presumably the Kaczynski triplet separated at birth from Lech and Jaroslav — ordered police to mount a nationwide manhunt for the hapless Hubert. The whole farce was an own goal for the Kaczynskis, making them a laughing stock at home and abroad.
I was reminded of Hubert last week when I saw Melbourne writer Harry Nicolaides’s sad and mystified face peering from the front page of the Bangkok Post. Sweating in chains, gormless Harry had been sentenced to three years in a putrid Thai jail for lèse majesté, the archaic crime of offending a monarch’s dignity, which he supposedly did in a self-published book no Thai had ever read. Where the Polish media gleefully reported the details of Hoffman’s malodorous discharge, Thais instead had to imagine what precisely Harry had done. To publish details of the matter could also be an offence, as could reading it. And so it circularly goes in Kafka’s Thailand.
CNN reported the jail sentence but ‘chose not to repeat the allegations made by Nicolaides because it could result in CNN staff being prosecuted in Thailand’. Consider that the next time CNN boasts of its fearless commitment to the truth.
(For the record, these are the offending passages from Nicolaides’s mostly unread book Verisimilitude: ‘From King Rama to the Crown Prince, the nobility was renowned for their romantic entanglements and intrigues. The Crown Prince had many wives, major and minor, with a coterie of concubines for entertainment. One of his recent wives was exiled with her entire family, including a son they conceived together, for an undisclosed indiscretion. He subsequently remarried with another woman and fathered another child. It was rumoured that if the prince fell in love with one of his minor wives and she betrayed him, she and her family would disappear with their name, familial lineage and all vestiges of their existence expunged forever.’)
As Harry and Australians now know, Thailand has the world’s severest lèse majesté laws, and the shabbiest and most abused too. In Thailand’s long years of political turmoil, they have become a useful weapon for allcomers to neutralise political enemies. Next- door neighbour doesn’t have a royal portrait? You’re nicked! Decided red — the anti- government shade — looks better on you than royal yellow? Hmmm. I exaggerate, but only just. Consider the poor fellow who opposed the pro-royalist military coup that ousted the admittedly odious, probably corrupt but hugely popular prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra in 2006. He refused to stand in a cinema when the royal anthem and King Bhumibol’s visage appeared on screen. Pelted with popcorn and doused with soft drinks, he complained to the police, who promptly arrested him for lèse majesté. Any Thai can point the finger at anyone else they think has abused the monarchy.
It’s true that many Thais fervently love their king, whom they regard as divine. But its also true that some demand a near-North Korean obsequity to the paramount leader (did I mention that Thailand regards itself as a robust democracy?) if it helps keep opponents, real or imagined, at bay. The corollary is that the palace could be, in essence, the world’s most omnipotent institution in affairs in its realm. Should it desire, it could do anything it chooses, and it would be illegal to call it to account, or even critically discuss it.
Nicolaides is a victim of timing, and of hidden hands. He’s one of a dozen high-profile people accused of lèse majesté. Unlike Harry, the others are Thais, and government critics. The Thai establishment was spooked by Thaksin, who started doing things only royals do, like rivalling them for national regard and symbolism and championing the poor. The elites, led by the royalist military as the kingdom’s traditional custodian, saw Thaksin, his 75 per cent parliamentary majority and his billions as threats. So they plotted to oust him. He was posited as a closest republican. Thaksin’s greed helped when in 2006 he didn’t pay tax on a $3 billion business deal. That provided a pretext for genuine dissent, and when things got out of hand, the military swooped. After a few false starts and an $8 billion airport blockade, the establishment now has a government it likes, winding back the Thaksin era. It’s a monarchist triumph, and having succeeded, the victors must now be seen to jump on any perceived threat to the palace’s primacy.
The mysteries surrounding lèse majesté posed a particular issue for me a few days later when I interviewed Thailand’s new royalist Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjaviva and his similarly aristocratic finance minister Korn Chatikavanij. Both urbane and seemingly capable men, my interviews with them were conducted in rooms full of their aides. The palace is supposed to be above politics so, I pondered, might even asking about its role in Thailand’s recent political turmoil constitute lèse majesté? But I wasn’t about to express lifelong fealty to the royal establishment when legitimately inquiring of a government many believe had been helped into office by it. I was interested to know what the PM thought the frail 82-year-old King Bhumibol’s eventual demise might mean for any emergent Thai republicanism, given that his son and heir possesses less of his father’s lustre. Such is the current fervour for lèse majesté prosecutions that Thais seem virtually obliged to dob in to the authorities anyone who mentions the palace in anything other than a laudatory context. So would the ministerial aides, in the service of Thailand’s fourth government in a year, be offended? Would we all turn to dust when I mentioned the R-word? More alarmingly, would I soon be following Harry into the Bangkok Hilton? I consulted a Thai nobleman friend, who advised me to preface my overtly political question with the disclaimer ‘I mean no disrespect when I ask the following question’, as I duly did. The quick-witted Korn, a multi- millionaire former boss of JP Morgan’s Bangkok operation, interrupted me as he theatrically gestured to his aides, ‘Here comes the monarchy question!’
But as the old aphorism goes, consider what is done with more regard
than what is said. When I asked the Eton and Oxford-educated Abhisit
about the lèse majesté laws, he seemed almost apologetic about the
fuss caused, not least the shackles around Harry Nicolaides’s
ankles. ‘When a law is in place, you have to enforce the law, (but)
the unfortunate thing is I think this law has been abused and often
misinterpreted by the people involved. That needs to be fixed. At
the same time, because we want to keep our monarchy above all
conflicts, we need a mechanism of protection for the institution,
just as you have contempt of court laws. Why do you have that?
Because you want to keep the sanctity of the court. So we do the
same thing. We just have to make sure enforcement is not done in a
way that actually exacerbates the problem.’
So, I asked, how would he approach such a sensitive matter? ‘Well, I have already talked to the police and now have to talk to the Information and Communication Technology ministry as well, because a lot of violations are on websites so there should be a review of the way we do things.’
That was 24 January. As we spoke in Bangkok’s creaking government house, surrounded by faux Versailles antiques, a website called protecttheking.net was being created, urging Thais to email information on anyone suspected of insulting or criticising the monarchy to a parliamentary email address. It was launched a week later on the internet. Abhisit had insisted to me he was neither a puppet of the palace or the military, as many Thais suspect. He was, he said, his own man.
Where this is all the more bizarre is that King Bhumibol himself has
suggested that the lèse majesté laws are abused. In his 2005
birthday speech, he said, ‘If they get sent to prison (for
criticising his rule), I pardon them. If they don’t go to prison, I
won’t sue them, because those who violate the King and are punished
are not the ones who are in trouble. It would be the King who was in
trouble. It is strange, but the lawyers like to send people to
prison.’ I’m told that a royal pardon for Nicolaides is in the
works, as is the fashion, but that doesn’t address the deeper
problem.
So where in all this is the dispassionate wisdom of the elder statesmen of Bangkok’s foreign press corps, the veteran newsmen of the Vietnam war, now comfortably and cheaply ensconced one country removed? A younger one of their number, the BBC’s Jonathan Head, stands accused by a zealous policeman of lèse majesté in his reporting. Surely clear-headed hacks are a collective voice of reason amid this madness?
Perhaps. The doyen of the press corps, 34-years-in-Thailand Associated Press bureau chief Denis Gray, was recently the editor-in-chief of a glossy coffee-table paean to King Bhumibol, which took three years to assemble. The King of Thailand in World Focus — the BBC was reportedly a minor contributor — seems to be a labour of love. Gray told Bangkok’s Nation newspaper last year that ‘His Majesty King Bhumibol has consistently enjoyed the kind of press most world leaders can only command in their daydreams.’ Given that it is illegal to report his foibles, is it any wonder? Gray was among the most vocal of local hacks in criticising the Economist’s recent banned-in-Thailand cover story that examined — and, yes, blamed — the King’s meddling for Thailand’s chronic political and social chaos. After supping with palace Richelieus in October, Gray speculated, apropos of Iraq and Afghanistan, whether it had been so awful for Thais to have been unquestioningly ruled by Bhumibol for 60 years, a reign marked by 15 military coups. Somewhat cold-bloodedly, Gray pointed out that Thailand’s past six months of turmoil, which plunged the country into a deep recession and caused incalculable damage to its image and stability, had claimed just eight Thai lives, ‘the average dead in Mosul on a quiet day’. I’m sure that makes Harry Nicolaides and his family feel a lot better, if not the eight dead Thais.
Ironically then, with Thailand dominating headlines for all the wrong reasons at the worst possible time and threatening to take the region down with it, Bangkok’s Vietnam-hardened foreign press clique will not need reminding that there’s a whiff of ‘Ben Tre logic’ about the way the monarchy’s apologists are protecting their beloved institution: throwing people in jail, silencing the media, blocking the internet, savaging free speech, drawing needless attention to ‘criticism’ no one had read.
Ben Tre is, of course, the Vietnamese village that the US military infamously had to destroy in order to save.