In Thailand, a Growing Intolerance for Dissent

International New York Times | 6 June 2014

Jakrapob Penkair, a former spokesman for the Thai government, has been living in exile in Cambodia for five years. Credit Adam Ferguson for The New York Times

PHNOM PENH, Cambodia — Thailand, long the liberal bastion of Southeast Asia, has traditionally been a haven for refugees from its less democratic neighbors. Now, in the wake of a recent coup, a small group of Thailand’s intelligentsia are making the reverse journey — heading to Cambodia and other more repressive nations as their own country cracks down on dissent.

A leader of the exile community, Jakrapob Penkair, says dozens of professors, activists and politicians have fled Thailand in recent weeks as the leaders of the Thai junta detained hundreds of prominent people in what many consider a campaign of fear meant to silence critics or drive them out.

“Lots of us won’t be coming home very soon,” Mr. Jakrapob, a former government spokesman, said at a riverside restaurant here in the Cambodian capital, where he has met regularly with other Thai exiles since arriving in 2009.

He now hopes to organize some type of resistance to the junta from outside the country, though he said he would have to proceed carefully so as not to put “friendly countries in an awkward position.”

In decades past, the notion of fleeing Thailand for an authoritarian country like Cambodia would have seemed absurd to those accustomed to Thailand’s freedoms, even amid a series of coups over several decades. Instead, relatively wealthy Thailand has been a haven for the oppressed, whether it was families fleeing the genocidal rule of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia four decades ago or persecuted hill tribes in Myanmar escaping attacks by the Burmese military.

That migration continues, but as Thailand has lurched from one political crisis to the next, some say they feel they have had little choice but to flee from what they call increasing intolerance of dissent.

Exact numbers are hard to confirm since many of those who left fear they are being hunted by the Thai military and are cautious about revealing their whereabouts.

One of those exiles, Chinawat Haboonpat, a former member of Parliament for the deposed governing party, wrote a message to his supporters on Facebook on May 22, the day the generals seized power in Thailand.

“Brothers and sisters, I am not escaping,” he said, adding that the former interior minister, Charupong Ruengsuwan, was with him. But Mr. Chinawat forgot to turn off a function on Facebook that added his location to the bottom of his message: Toul Kork, Cambodia, a district of Phnom Penh. (The message was subsequently deleted.)

The Thailand the exiles are leaving is hardly the picture of a typical military dictatorship. The curfew imposed after the coup has been lifted in tourist areas and is loosely enforced from midnight to 4 a.m. in other parts of the country. Most of the scores of those detained in the early days of the coup have been freed, including former Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra.

But freedom of expression has been sharply curtailed. Thailand’s cacophonous news media has been partly silenced by the military junta, which closely monitors television news and has released detained journalists only under the condition that they not speak out.

The junta has also banned gatherings of five people or more — a rule that does not apply to its own attempts to manage the public mood, which have included staging performances in Bangkok, titled “Return Happiness to the People.” The shows feature women dancing and singing in camouflage miniskirts and were organized by specialists in psychological warfare, according to the Thai news media. 

Nearly every evening, the military announces on television the names of people summoned for questioning or detention. Democracy advocates, academics and anyone who speaks publicly about politics now watch with anxiety to see whether their names are added to the list of more than 350 people already summoned. Those released from detention are forced to sign an agreement that bars them from taking part in “political movements.”

“If I violate these conditions or support political activities, I consent to face legal action immediately and consent to the suspension of my financial transactions,” says the military’s document, which the coup makers posted on their Facebook page. The army has threatened to try dissenters in military courts.

Some of those who have been summoned are affiliated with Thaksin Shinawatra, the former prime minister, deposed in a 2006 military coup, who founded the highly successful populist movement that the military is seeking to dismantle.

On Wednesday, Thailand’s junta issued a summons for Mr. Jakrapob, the exile in Cambodia helping organize others who have fled. Mr. Jakrapob, who helped bring the 7-Eleven chain to Thailand, served in one of Mr. Thaksin’s governments and maintains ties with Mr. Thaksin, who is also in exile.

But also among those who have fled Thailand are researchers and commentators who, although outspoken, were not involved in politics.

Verapat Pariyawong, a Harvard-trained lawyer who has been critical of recent court decisions against Mr. Thaksin’s supporters that he saw as politicized, left for London after he said a man riding on the back of a motorcycle fired shots into his house.

“I have to admit,” Mr. Verapat said in a YouTube video uploaded after he left, “I am not sure I would be safe in Thailand.”

Mr. Verapat says he has no connection to Mr. Thaksin and has never spoken with him.

The coup was supported by many members of the Bangkok establishment and the urban middle class. They saw a military takeover as an effective way to scrub the country of the influence of Mr. Thaksin, whose movement has broad support in the countryside thanks in large part to policies that the Bangkok elite consider wasteful, like subsidies for farmers.

Mr. Verapat and many intellectuals saw new elections as the answer to the impasse. But opponents of the government run by Mr. Thaksin’s sister, Ms. Yingluck, earlier this year disrupted attempts to hold elections, which the party was widely expected to win.

As a measure of the passions in Thailand, Mr. Verapat’s Facebook page has both supportive comments and invective from backers of the military coup.

“I think a person like you should die abroad and never return to this country,” one comment under the name Tanan Tanaratanapisit read.

Pavin Chachavalpongpun, a Thai scholar at the Center for Southeast Asian Studies at Kyoto University in Japan, said he and many Thai scholars outside the country are now afraid to return to Thailand.

“Most academics I know have left the country,” Mr. Pavin said. “It is no longer safe for them.”

He called the military’s summoning of professors and intellectuals “a cunning strategy of the coup makers in creating a climate of fear rather than to launch a brutal crackdown against their critics.”

Even some people who are not public figures say they find the current political environment stifling, especially the online “witch hunts” by coup supporters targeting those who call for elections.

“I think there will be problems in this country for a generation or two,” said the owner of a catering business in Bangkok who is looking to move to Taiwan. “I’d like to get out of the country safely.”