No hope for rights, Thai professors say after junta halts democracy seminar
No hope rights will be respected, say professors after Thai junta censors democracy seminar
The university students who organised a seminar in Thailand on the demise of dictatorships knew that one particularly sensitive topic had to stay off-limits: their own country.
Since overthrowing an elected government in May, the nation's military rulers have jailed opponents who dared to speak out and silenced the rest with the threat of prosecution. They have censored the media, dispersed protesters and forbidden open debate over the nation's fate.
So when 150 people showed up to attend the latest in a series of talks Thammasat University called "Democracy Classroom", one weary student reminded all those present they should only discuss failed regimes - "please repeat after me, overseas".
A few minutes after it began, however, the event was cut short by police - triggering a rare public uproar from university professors nationwide over the expanding reach of junta censorship. The incident, the first of its kind on a college campus since the coup, also underscored the fact that the deep societal tensions that have fuelled a decade of political upheaval here are not being healed, but suppressed.
"The military says they want unity and reconciliation," said student Ratthapol Supasopon, who helped organise the September 18 event at Thammasat's Rangsit campus, outside Bangkok. "But how can that happen if we can't even talk to each other?"
Thailand has been beset by upheaval since billionaire former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra was deposed by the army in 2006. His downfall was part of a power struggle that pits the rural north against a traditional, military-backed elite based in Bangkok and the south.
That struggle helped fuel six months of anti-government street protests and sporadic violence that had paralysed the administration of Thaksin's sister Yingluck Shinawatra, culminating in the May 22 coup.
Calm has been restored since then, but few believe the nation's troubles are over.
Our "society remains polarised, it's just that these views are being suppressed", said Prajak Kongkirati, a political science lecturer from Thammasat who was supposed to moderate the cancelled talk last month.
"What we are doing right now is wrong and backward," he said. "When we shut down peaceful channels of communication like those in the media and academia, it will all end with street politics again someday."
After the seminar was called off, 60 professors from 16 Thai universities declared in an open letter that if the right to exchange views cannot be respected, there is no hope that Thailand under the current leadership will ever "become a country that respects people's rights".
The coup leader, Prayuth Chan-ocha, has been unapologetic. He views criticism of the junta as divisive. He said any group that wanted to hold such seminars must get approval first, so the content can be screened - because "if it's about democracy or elections, or how the government is, this they can't discuss".
The Hong Kong-based Asian Human Rights Commission condemned the incident.
Academic leaders asked the junta how they were supposed to work with such prohibitions. Prayuth said there was plenty else to teach - like "the correct idea of democracy" or morality and the "12 core values of the Thai people" - a list he introduced to "return happiness to the people".
