A student is helped to an ambulance at Thammasat University campus in Bangkok during the bloody protests of 1976 © AP

Students defy Thai rulers to mark Thammasat University massacre

Young liberals take risks to commemorate 40th anniversary of 1976 campus killings

Michael Peel / Financial Times | 4 October 2016

[Excerpts]

The Chulalongkorn gathering is doubly sensitive because it will highlight the uncomfortable place in Thai history occupied by the October 6 1976 massacre at Thammasat University across town on the banks of the Chao Phraya river. State forces and rightwing royalist mobs shot, hanged or beat to death dozens of students and other demonstrators that day, accusing them of fuelling revolutions such as those sweeping through Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos....

Student activist Netiwit Chotiphatphaisal at Chulalongkorn University © Michael Peel

Mr Netiwit’s years of campaigning against targets ranging from compulsory student haircuts to national military service have earned him the wrath of conservatives, who have attacked his behaviour as inappropriate and disrespectful. He is scathing about how educational institutions generally allow little questioning of ideas or teachers — and in some notorious cases slip into physical abuse. 

“I first became involved in politics by seeing the problems in our educational system,” said Mr Netiwit, who started a group of like-minded students called Education for the Liberation of Siam in 2013. “They treat the students as children, maybe as infants sometimes. We don’t have any freedom.” 

The emergence of Mr Netiwit and other youthful campaigners is a sign that “social and cultural change has already gone ahead of politics”, argued Kaewmala, a social media commentator who prefers to use a pseudonym. Mr Netiwit appeared a “rebel and a radical to many people” only because they had been conditioned to expect a high level of deference to be shown to any authority — even a military that seized power in a coup. 

“Netiwit actually is quite a respectful young man — polite and measured,” she said. “They don't hear what he is really saying because they are busy being offended by his questioning.” 

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