Relying on law

re: "City protest plan needs a few tweaks" (BP, Opinion, July 4, 2022)  

Dear editor,

So indisputably true is it, Paritta Wangkiat's observation that the central government's "ongoing crackdown on protest leaders and participants as well as the use of excessive force to disperse street protests do not encourage public debates" seems a bit of an understatement. The ruling Thai government, aided by law made up solely for that reason, loyally suppresses peaceful protest, imprisoning many patriotic Thais for no just reason. Among the hundreds so unjustly imprisoned in strict accord with the law are Thailand's internationally honoured human rights advocates, its recipients in 2017 and 2021 of the Gwangju Memorial Prize, which annual award honours South Korea's patriots who in 1980 freed their nation of military interference in civil society and politics.

Those patriotic South Korean protestors thereby enabled South Korea to move forward after decades of stagnation to thrive economically, to take an respected place in the international community, and to becomes a soft power megastar, things which Thailand will continue to fail to attain whilst under the pervasive influence of those who plot, commit, collude in, enable, sign off on, or otherwise support coups against the Thai people's aspirations to become a democratic nation of free people ruled by just law created by a government that reflects a society in which all share equally in basic human rights, paramount being the right to a voice in their society, whence comes the government that makes the laws that all are expected to obey.

The grant by Bangkok Governor Chadchart Sitthhipunt of somewhat sequestered spaces for only approved protest is a small step in the right direction, but what Thailand more desperately needs if the alternating excesses of the likes  of Thaksin and coup committers is to be consigned to history is just law. Law, that is, that rather than suppressing democratic principle enshrines it in the place of highest honour, as justice and democratic principle should be, over all other things in the political realm.

It is more than passing strange, or perhaps merely telling, that those who committed coups allegedly to eradicate the sins of Thaksin and his proxies yet refuse to make the legal reforms that have always been the single best antidote to abuses of the political and legal system by self-serving Thakins. It appears by their acts, by which we must know them, that the self-alleged opponents of Thaksin hate and fear free speech, openness, accountability and other democratic virtues far more than they do Thaksin and his. How is so weird a conundrum to be compassed? 

 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 July 5, 2022, under the title "Relying on law" at https://www.bangkokpost.com/opinion/postbag/2339762/relying-on-law