Institutional cancer

re: "Police power must belong to the people" (BP, September 4, 2021)

 
Dear editor,

Wasant Techawongtham is spot on that the latest scandal confirming the long-standing reputation of such institutions as the Royal Thai Police (RTP) is but one case of an "infected sore that happened to burst in public." But are the RTP the root cause of the pandemic corruption that has for many decades characterized that group and others supposed to serve the Thai people? They are not. The malignancy afflicting the RTP is merely one case of a wider cancer in Thai institutions. The RTP do but faithfully follow precedent.

Other Thai institutions set the example that the voice of the people doesn't matter. The morally indefensible example of holding the wishes of the Thai people in contempt has been set for decades every time the people's popular government is overthrown. Every such abuse proclaims not that the law and the state are to be directed by the people, but that the people must slavishly obey authority, however unjust, and bow down before the brutish power of the state and its officers, abusive though they be. Only fools could have expected anything such as the RTP, to become decent under Prayut Chan-o-cha. That is not the reason the popular democratic form of government that the people aspire to have respected is regularly overthrown by Thai institutions deeming themselves above the wishes of the Thai people.

Any spirit of progress or reform, of moving the Thai nation forward to a better future for all Thai people requires transparency and accountability, which in turn require that the voice of all people on all matters be respected by strong legal protection. Sadly, the government of Prayut Chan-o-cha has, like too many such governments before, consistently done the opposite. From sending people for "attitude adjustment", to banning healthy debate about his new constitution, to blocking websites for no good reason, to imprisoning peaceful protestors merely for saying something alleged to have offended someone. Such acts enforce unjust law to subjugate the Thai people, ruling arrogantly over them with impunity to abuse, the outcome seen all too clearly in that infamous video showing the vile abuse committed on their official premises by members then in good standing of the Royal Thai Police.

 Felix Qui
 

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The above letter to the editor is the text as submitted by Felix Qui to the Bangkok Post.

 
The text as edited was published in PostBag on September 6, 2021, under the title "Institutional cancer" at https://www.bangkokpost.com/opinion/postbag/2176935/institutional-cancer