It's the status quo

re: "Renew graft fight pledge" (BP, Editorial, January 2, 2023) 

Dear editor,

Like the annual rite of calling for reforms and crackdowns to reduce Thailand's horrific road toll, the Bangkok Post's editorial "Renew graft fight pledge" is another that has been faithfully repeated for decades. If a different outcome is to be expected, it is necessary to allow reform that might work.  

The Post's call to "encourage more ethical behaviour," sounds wonderful. It has sounded exactly as wonderful for all of those same decades of failure to reduce corruption, some recent examples of which the editorial lists as evidence of the persistent failure. Calling for "more ethical behaviour" has merely papered over corruption as usual. The current and several previous Thai constitutions have also piously spouted "good morals" and "good public  morals." As the use of Thai law by those intent on propping up unchanged and unreformed the traditional pillars of Thainess attests, such vague phrases are the enemy not only of democratic principle inimical to corruption, but are collaterally powerful tools for maintaining the status quo of many decades. 

With this latest call to reform, is the Post now joining the Thai youth peacefully calling for such specific democratic principles as openness, transparency and accountability, which are indeed essential antidotes to corruption, and for which calls those Thai patriots are often imprisoned in strict accord with Thai law made up to keep exactly the same status quo in place that has for decades faithfully bred corruption, perhaps as intended? Does the Post not see how this latest call flatly contradicts its failure to report on the use of anti-democratic law to persecute those who would reform the traditional fonts of corruption protected from just reform by such bad law?

More positively, the editor's call "to engage with civil society" is both more consistent with democratic principle and at least a very little less uselessly vague. This call also raises a useful question: Who exactly is supposed to do this engaging? The government of the Thai people is itself surely already a part of civil society, so it cannot be the government of the Thai people that the Post has in mind. Who then? What are those other institutions promoting and profiting from pervasive, systemic corruption who are not to be considered a part of it but in need of engaging with Thai civil society?

The call to engage civil society is echoed by widely respected former Prime Minister Anand Panyarachun, who in addition to pointing out that "military takeovers have been shown to be useless in ending conflicts" ("Ex-PM Anand says coups have retarded Thai democracy", Bangkok Post, Mar 22, 2022), also identified coups as both retarding Thailand's democratic development and "leaving a legacy of failed administrations and corruption" (ibid.). With so many decades of evidence backing it, could anyone dispute Anand's bluntly stated insight?

Until the 1980s, Thailand was on a similar path to development politically and economically as South Korea and Taiwan, albeit not as a republic but a constitutional monarchy, a perfectly decent form of democratic governance as proved by the examples of Belgium, the Netherlands, Norway, and Sweden. Both Taiwan and South Korea went on to develop flourishing economies and vibrant democracies with plenty of healthy, heated debate. What prevented Thailand following their example as the Thai people deserve? Who or what has deprived the Thai people of the same political, social, moral and economic development that the citizens of Taiwan and South Korea have come to enjoy by allowing democracy to solve political and social disagreements and problems, including corruption, through free, open debate in and out of parliament? 

Let us hope with the Post's editor that next year a fresh new Thai parliament with true vision to move the nation forward will have the courage to make the reforms that Thailand has so desperately needed for so long, something that the old parties and the new parties of old men clinging to power have manifestly failed to deliver the Thai people. 

Let us hope that the Post will not need to republish the same editorial yet again with an updated list of corruption scandals. 

 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 January 4, 2023, under the title "It's the status quo" at https://www.bangkokpost.com/opinion/postbag/2474789/hardly-democratic