MANAMA, Bahrain — Thousands of jubilant protesters surged back into the symbolic heart of Bahrain on Saturday as the government withdrew its security forces, calling for calm after days of violent crackdowns.

It was a remarkable turn after a week of protests that had shifted by the hour between joy and fear, euphoric surges of people power followed by bloody military crackdowns, as the monarchy struggled to calibrate a response to an uprising whose counterparts have toppled other governments in the region.

“All Bahrain is happy today,” said Jasim al-Haiki, 24, as he cheered the crowds in the central Pearl Square, aflutter with Bahraini flags. “These are Bahrainis. They do what they say they will do!”

The shift in this tiny Persian Gulf nation, a strategic American ally, was at least a temporary victory for the Shiite protesters, who had rejected a call to negotiate from Bahrain’s Sunni monarch until the authorities pulled the military off the streets.

But the events here were being watched with trepidation in neighboring Saudi Arabia, an adjacent Sunni monarchy with a restive Shiite population, and rippling across the region, where an extraordinary few weeks of antigovernment protests have ricocheted from northwest Africa to the Middle East.

Antigovernment demonstrations erupted again on Saturday in Libya, Algeria and Yemen, with each of those governments turning to violence to stop the protests. The worst carnage was in Libya, where security forces fired on protesters in Benghazi, the country’s second-largest city, killing dozens and pushing the death toll after three days of demonstrations to over 100.

In Algiers, protesters were quickly routed by hundreds of baton-wielding police officers. In Yemen, after both sides clashed in a hail of bottles, shoes and rocks, government supporters opened fire on antigovernment demonstrators, wounding at least four.

In Bahrain, the day started out with a lull, as both sides appeared to have been rattled by the violence of the past week, in which at least seven people were killed. The leaders of the major opposition parties called off the protests for Saturday, telling the public to stay home in an effort to lower the temperature.

But in what appeared to be a measure of who controls the movement now, the people ignored their ostensible leaders. Marchers set out from villages and the city center and by midday converged on Pearl Square.

The police met them with tear gas and rubber bullets. Young men collapsed in the road and others ran for cover, but people kept coming.

The police fired again.

Then the government blinked, perhaps sensing that the only way to calm a spiral of violence that claimed more lives with each passing day was to cede the square to the protesters.

The police left so suddenly and so completely that it took a minute for the protesters, still rubbing the tear gas out of their eyes, to realize they once again controlled the square.

By early evening, tens of thousands of people were pouring into the square, waving flags, some dropping to the ground to pray, and others shouting congratulations to each other. Marching past pools of blood on the road, they savored a moment of bittersweet jubilation, a mix of disbelief and sheer joy that they had prevailed, tempered with sadness for those who had been killed.

“Of course we are happy,” said Hassan al-Freidi, 53. “But I want to tell you: not yet. Today we’re mourning and honoring our martyrs; it is about joy and mourning. But it’ll only be about joy when we get our rights. And I know this day will come. Bullets do not scare us.”

The protesters won the battle on Saturday, although it was still not clear where it would all lead. The government had relinquished the square before, on Wednesday, only to return with a deadly assault on Thursday. On Friday, the army opened fire on a group of about 1,000 peaceful demonstrators trying to walk into the square.

The varying responses appeared to reflect turmoil within the government as it grapples with the uprising. The confrontation on Friday, with the Bahrain Defense Forces firing on Bahraini citizens in daylight, seemed to be the shock that forced a change in the government’s approach.

On Saturday, Crown Prince Salman bin Hamad al-Khalifa, the king’s son and deputy commander of the military, ordered troops to leave the square.

King Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa had ordered the prince, seen as perhaps the most moderate government leader, to open a dialogue with the protesters. But if the killings had softened the government’s posture, they also hardened the mood of the protesters.

The withdrawal of forces from Pearl Square had been the opposition’s precondition for negotiations, but by Saturday the line appeared to have shifted. A movement that began as a call for immediate democratic reform seemed set on nothing less than the removal of the king, or at least, his uncle, the prime minister.

The most common chants heard in the square, where protesters appeared to be setting up a permanent encampment on Saturday night, were “Death to Khalifa!” and “The people want the government to fall.”

In Washington on Saturday, Thomas E. Donilon, President Obama’s national security adviser, telephoned Crown Prince Salman to discuss the Bahraini government’s latest response to the demonstrations. Mr. Donilon’s call came a day after the White House said Mr. Obama had spoken with the king on Friday evening, urging the government to show restraint, especially against peaceful protesters, and pressing for meaningful reform.

In the wake of this week’s violence in Manama, Britain has suspended licenses for arms exports to Bahrain, which includes tear gas and rubber bullets. United States security assistance to Bahrain increased to $20.8 million in 2010 from $5.3 million in 2008. Last year about $1.1 million of the aid went for counterterrorism assistance, including aid to the police and military forces that are battling the protesters. A State Department official said Saturday that suspending security assistance was a possibility, but was not under active consideration.

The longstanding root of the tension here is the sectarian divide, a Sunni royal family ruling over a Shiite majority. For years, the Shiites have complained of discrimination in housing, employment, education and governance.

That rift makes Bahrain, an archipelago about the size of Fort Worth, a potential regional powder keg. The contest for influence in the Middle East has pitted largely Sunni Saudi Arabia, backed by the United States, against largely Shiite Iran. A critical Saudi ally in that struggle was President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, who was ousted by a popular revolt this month, leaving Egypt’s future leadership and loyalties an open question.

Moreover, Bahrain sits just off Saudi Arabia’s east coast, connected by a bridge to the mainland. On the Saudi side lies Eastern Province, an oil-rich region with a Shiite majority, who have an affinity for their fellow Shiites in Bahrain and no great love for the Saudi leaders.

To the north, Kuwait also has a Sunni monarchy and a restive Shiite population. The big fear among Sunni governments is that Bahrain, once part of Persia, could become another Iran, where the Islamic revolution of 1979 produced a bellicose Shiite theocracy.

But the Shiite protesters here insist their revolt is secular and democratic. When the protests started on Feb. 14, in a so-called Day of Rage modeled after events in Egypt and Tunisia, demonstrators called for a constitutional monarchy, an elected cabinet and a constitution written by the people, as opposed to one imposed by the king.

After two protesters were killed in the first two days, both shot in the back by the police, an infuriated and reinvigorated opposition added a new demand: an end to the monarchy.

The government eased off on Wednesday, and then cracked down again on Thursday, attacking the protesters without warning at 3 a.m. as thousands slept in the square beneath a towering monument with a pearl on top. At least five people were killed, though exact figures have not been verified. At least 25 people are still missing from that night, including children.

On Friday night, thousands rallied outside the main hospital, insisting they would avenge those killed and wounded by marching to the square, despite the cordon of police officers blocking every road.

The protesters set off from the hospital grounds with a mix of fear and determination. When they approached the phalanx of the police, officers opened fire and blanketed the neighborhood with tear gas. People were trampled, and dozens ran so frantically that they lost their shoes.

And then, the fight for the square was over.

“This is Bahrain; people are willing to be killed,” said Zaki Khalifa, 37, as he watched the jubilation. “The government can’t control this, and they know it. Today, the people are happy.”

Iranian Ships to Cross Suez

CAIRO (Reuters) — Two Iranian naval ships will sail through the Suez Canal to the Mediterranean on Monday, a Suez Canal official said, in what will be the first passage of Iranian naval ships through the canal since 1979.

(Nadim Audi contributed reporting from Manama, and Eric Schmitt from Washington.)

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/20/world/middleeast/20protests.html?_r=1&hp

Kara N. Tina

This interview with Egyptian revolutionary socialist journalist Hossam el-Hamalawy was conducted on Saturday, February 5th at 8pm (Egyptian time). Due to time limitations we were only able to address half of the questions we had prepared. Below el-Hamalawy comments on the current decisive moment faced by those on the streets of Egypt, working-class participation and action, and the role of the army amongst other topics.

The situation in Egypt is developing incredibly fast, can you describe what’s happening in the streets right now?

As i am talking to you there are more than 15,000 demonstrators in Tahrir square who are still occupying it. Earlier in the day the army came to evict the protestors by trying to destroy the barricades they set up near the Egyptian Museum and although the leader of the Muslim Brotherhood in the square Dr. Beltagui had ordered and called upon everybody via the microphone to not resist the army, people shouted back at him including the base cadres of the Al-Ikhwān [Muslim Brotherhood] who were there. People ran and lay in front of the tanks in order to stop them which they managed to do. Later the army sent the commander of the central region, which is basically Cairo and the surrounding areas, along with three generals, to convince the protesters to leave but they shouted back at him saying “We’re not leaving until Mubarak leaves.”

It’s raining in Cairo now, it’s very cold but the protestors are holding out and more from the other provinces, specifically from Suez, have descended on Cairo to join the occupation today. In the meantime the government is continuing with its witch-hunt and demonization campaign against the protestors, blaming them for whatever malaise the country is going through at the moment which is actually the fault of the government and not the protestors.  This follows twelve days of continuous protests starting on the 25th of January. The 25th of January is National Police Day here in Egypt and that’s when the protests actually started. The Egyptian government wanted to basically liberate the Liberation Square, Tahrir Square, from the protestors today. And they started that in the morning but they have failed. It has been announced that tomorrow the government will resume work and they have called on all civil servants to attend to their jobs and to go to their factories. They wanted to smash the occupation of Tahrir today. But as I’m talking to you that occupation continues.

What are some of the hurdles the protest movement is facing, are there divisions emerging while trying to find common ground?

Yesterday the square was completely packed with more than one million protestors and Alexandria witnessed similar protests as well as the other provinces. But there are definitely big problems that the protest movement is now facing. Which way is the way forward? Today it has been announced that Gamal Mubarak and Safwat El-Sherif, who is one of the most hated figures and was the secretary general of the National Democratic Party, will be removed from their positions and one of Gamal Mubarak’s associates, Dr. Hossam Badrawi was to take the secretary general position instead. There was also news that appeared on Al Arabiya, BBC and Al Jazeera  that Hosni Mubarak had resigned as the president of the NDP, but of course not from his post as President. But now there is confusion because these reports have been denied, then confirmed again and then denied, so we are waiting to see.

It is true that virtually all the opposition groups, whether they are the traditional political parties or the youth groups, have taken part in the uprising but the protests still remain spontaneous. Which means on the one hand, the people always surprise you by their militancy from below that exceeds all expectation, but on the other hand, there is always confusion about what is the way forward and what the clear alternative is. This could pose the threat of this revolution being hijacked. At the moment we have many people claiming to represent the downtown occupation and some of them are even engaged in negations with the government. Some groups say they will not negotiate until Mubarak goes, some think that if Mubarak goes we can negotiate with Omar Suleiman [vice president appointed by Mubarak on January 29th, ex-director of the Egyptian General Intelligence Services and the CIA's go-to-guy on rendition], others say both Mubarak and Omar Suleiman have to go.

Is there momentum towards protestors taking over the means of production and other institutions of Egyptian society?

On the ground, organizing mechanisms are evolving slowly. Protestors have set up security committees to watch the exits and entrances to the square and to defend it from attacks by Mubarak’s thugs. There are makeshift hospitals that have also been erected in the square to treat the injured form the clashes with the thugs.

Discussions continue in circles that the protestors have put together in order to try to reach some unified demands and people take the platform where there is a mic and address the protestors. Whatever resolutions that the people like they cheer and whatever they don’t like they boo. The uprising up until now contained elements from all Egyptian society, whether it is the urban poor, the working class, and even sons and daughters of the Egyptian elite could be seen in the protest. But as the revolution continues, some polarization has started to happen naturally. Between those who are tired, meaning the middle class and the upper middle class who are saying that we should stop now and try to reach some compromise with the government, and those who basically have nothing to loose and who have sacrificed a lot, like the urban poor and the working class.

The intervention of the working class in the movement is also another question mark, because definitely in some of the provinces where mass protests were organized they contained a majority of workers. But we still haven’t seen an independent movement by those workers. Except in very few cases. For example I received a report about a textile mill owned by a company called  Ghazl Meit Ghamr in Daqahliya, which is a province in the Nile Delta. The workers there have kicked out the CEO, they have occupied the factory and are self-managing it. This type of action has also been repeated in a printing house south of Cairo called Dar El-Ta’awon. There as well the workers have kicked out the CEO and are self managing the company. There are two other cases in Suez, where the clashes were the worst with the security forces during the uprising. The death toll is very high in Suez, we don’t actually know the real death toll until now. In two factories there, the Suez Steel Mill and the Suez Fertilizer Factory, workers have declared an open-ended strike until the regime falls. Other than that we have not seen, at least to my knowledge, independent working class action.

The last thing i would like to note is that the so-called popular committees have been springing up in the neighborhoods here in Cairo and in the provinces. This happened following the collapse of our police force and their cowardly withdrawal in front of the people last Friday [January 28th]. The government started whipping up the security paranoia amongst the citizens in addition to sending plainclothes thugs who were affiliated with the security services, just as it happened in Tunisia, to attack public and private property and fire shots in the air. Citizens immediately stepped in and started forming these popular committees to protect their neighborhoods. They have set up checkpoints, they are armed with knives, swords, machetes and sticks and they are inspecting cars that are coming in and out. In some areas, such as the province of Sharqiya, the popular committees are more or less completely running the town, organizing the traffic etc. But in many cases they also work in coordination with the army.

The army has played an important role in the uprising in Egypt, even receiving support from the US. Can you explain the role of the army amidst the protests?

Our army as you probably know is the biggest army in the Arab world. It receives 1.3 billion dollars from the USA every year. The military institution has always been the ruling institution we have in Egypt, even if our President hasn’t put on the military uniform since 1952. Their intervention by descending on to the streets on the night of Friday, the 28th of January, was based upon the order from the chief of the army, who at the end of the day is Hosni Mubarak. When the army first appeared in the streets they were positively welcomed by the people since the police is hated much more than the army here in Egypt. One reason is that the army does not have much contact with the civilians on a daily basis, unlike the police of course. Since people were sick of the police and paranoid of the security situation they initially welcomed the army to the neighborhoods and also to the entrances and exits of Tahrir Square. However we all know that, number one, the army can’t be trusted and number two, that when you hear Obama and the US administration coming out strongly in favor of a power transition supervised by the Egyptian military you understand what their role is in keeping Egypt stable. Specifically making sure there isn’t a radical regime that could threaten the security of Israel, the security of the Suez Canal and the continuous flow of oil.

The US administration itself has probably made a fool of themselves for the zillionth time owing to their position vis-a-vis the Egyptian revolution. Initially when the protests started HIllary Clinton immediately announced that they were not worried whatsoever and that the Mubarak regime was stable. And Joe Biden went on air and refused to label Mubarak as a dictator. Why? Because Mubarak is a friend of United States and a friend of Israel. This shows you the hypocrisy of the Americans when it comes to their barometer of who is a democrat and who is not. And now when they have finally reached the conclusion that Hosni Mubarak was to be overthrown, they are working day and night in order to secure his removal as smoothly as possible.

Cross-national inspiration was crucial for the wave of uprisings that we are witnessing, has there been the emergence of networks of coordination across Arab nations that are continuing and can pose as a viable alternative to the political landscape we see today?

The domino effect was definitely evident after the uprising in Tunisia. When Ben Ali was overthrown this was very much positively received by Egyptians who could draw parallels between the Tunisian situation and the Egyptian situation. There were also several protests that had already broken out in solidarity with Tunisia. The main slogan chanted in Tahrir Square and around the country is “El-Sha’ab yourid isqat el-Nizam” . This was the same slogan chanted by the Tunisians, “The people want the government to fall.” It is true that in the days leading unto the uprising there was much discussions over the internet and Tunisian activists were transferring some of their experiences when it comes to confronting the police, such as activist kits you should have with you when you are facing the police. But we don’t have any concrete mechanisms for coordination yet. All we get are tweets and emails saying “solidarity”, “we like what you are doing”, “you are a source of inspiration” etc. But i’m afraid that there aren’t any governing or coordinating mechanisms between these two movements yet. How will this develop in the future no one knows but I am personally hoping that this will be the start of something bigger. Because already the domino effect is spreading. You’ve seen Yemen. They have had mass protests against their dictator, who had to come out promising not to run again in elections and not to groom his son for succession. There were similar protests in Jordan and the King was quick to intervene and dissolve the cabinet and bring in a new one. There was already a mini-uprising in Algeria even before Egypt, which was put down brutally by the usual force of the Algerian state. But they have also had to make concessions , they removed the emergency law and they lowered the prices of basic commodities. It is still to early to judge, the uprising here is only 12 days old, in Tunisia it took one month. We’ll see how it goes.

Hossam el-Hamalawy’s photography from the streets:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/elhamalawy/sets/72157625821089247/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/elhamalawy/sets/72157625947671262/

His Blog:
http://www.arabawy.org/blog/

His Twitter:
http://twitter.com/3arabawy

The People Come First, not Numbers nor Statistics

By Oscar Olivera Foronda, Marcelo Rojas, Abraham Grandydier, Aniceto Hinojosa Vásquez and Carlos Oropeza

Bolivia

Cochabamba, (La Llajta) December 30, 2010

Sirs;
Evo Morales Ayma and
Alvaro García Linera
La Paz.-

We speak to you through this open letter although it probably won’t be read because you don’t hear of it or because it doesn’t interest you. However, although you may ignore it, although it may not exist, we want to tell you how we, like many of our people, feel today. We tell you, Sirs, because years ago you ceased being our brothers and compañeros, you distanced yourselves from the people, and thus you don’t know what happens down here, below. Your defects – and not your virtues – that we know have multiplied ten times in a worrisome, indignant and sad manner.

Oscar Olivera (wearing baseball cap, interviewed by reporters) with Evo Morales (in the green shirt, to the right of Oscar) during the 2000 “Water War” in Cochabamba.

We still remember when we marched, together with you, Evo, for our people, when we campaigned to get Alvaro out of prison; when the ancient textile workers’ building in Cochabamba became our headquarters to conspire against the bad governments that today look a lot like yours: BAD GOVERNMENT.

You quickly forgot that we sent you into the government not to administrate, but, rather, to transform and change the lives of the people. Today we see all of you transformed and the lives of the people have changed, but badly so, from bad to worse.

Since that December 22 of 2005, when you cried, Evo and Alvaro, you have only busied yourselves making traditional and privileged politics, subordinating and coopting social and union leaders, military and police officials, with money, with positions, disqualifying and stigmatizing everything that has criticized you, everything we said we wanted to do away with. Some of us had the luxury to reject your offers and you converted us into your enemies or simply behaved as if we did not exist. We asked you: Change the economy, worry about the people more than your political enemies, create jobs, industry, work, build solidarity, brotherhood and generosity.

Where is your “obedience leads” slogan that was invented by the Zapatistas? Did the people send you there to pact with the right in the Constituent Assembly? Did the people send you there to fill your cabinet with neoliberals, opportunists, incompetents and advisors for international organizations that we never saw in the struggles of the people, in the streets, the highways, the communities, the hunger strikes and factories? Where were most of the members of your cabinet in 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004 and 2005? Did the people send you there to invite your mayors, governors, “beauty pageant contestants,” and neoliberal technicians into the government? Who decides in this government? The people? Or the llunk’us (a Quecha indigenous word for lackeys and adulators) that surround you in order to not lose the privileges that gives them power?

Álvaro García Linera (vice president of Bolivia) in a 2002 press conference with Oscar Olivera and Raquel Gutiérrez Aguilar, when Olivera joined the hunger strike to demand that the Bolivian government withdraw charges against them.

Who continues controlling the economy of our country? The indigenous and “social movements”? Or the multinational oil and mining companies and large bankers who today have made more money than during any previous government to yours, those which you affectionately call “partners”? They are partners in the conditions of anguish and poor living to which we have been subjected during these last five years. Where are the billions of dollars in fiscal reserves that you constantly tell us are there?

What about the nationalizations that have been a trick against the population, indemnifying the multinational looters with the people’s money? These businesses are being administrated by the old neoliberal and corrupt bureaucracy.

Where is the industrialization of gas in the country? Where is the new economy based on respect for Mother Earth and the balance and harmonious relation with Pachamama that you always proclaim? Haven’t you delivered thousands of acres to the multinational oil and mining companies so they can keep exploiting Mother Earth? Have you given the New Political Constitution of the State to the plantation owners of the Eastern region?

The economic model continues being extractionary, neoliberal, capitalist, all of it contrary to your speeches.

Was it the people who sent you to buy a private airplane for $40 million when millions of “your people” do not have housing nor basic services? Did the people send you to tolerate narcotrafficking like never before and that, sooner or later, will turn our city into a Ciudad Juárez or a Medellín? Maybe the same coca leaf that you promoted so that you could be president will be the same leaf that takes that privilege away from you.

Do you know what it’s like to have to wait on line overnight to sign your sons and daughters into school or to receive inadequate medical attention in the public hospitals? The people don’t have private and privileged insurance for the clinics of the rich.

Felipe Quispe, Evo Morales and Oscar Olivera, in 2003, when they joined forces as the popular “chiefs of staff” in opposition to the government of Gonzalo “Goni” Sánchez de Lozada.

Are you familiar with what it is to get on a public bus or taxi and listen to the sentiments of our people? Have you gone to the markets to bargain the prices of basic foods that each day are harder to obtain to calm the hunger of our families?

Did the people send you there to have so many privileges, bodyguards, assistants, cabinet chiefs who make it impossible to speak directly to both of you? Who pays you? Who pays your food, your transportation, your health insurance, your security, your planes, your costs? We do: the people which you were once part of.

Did the people send you to impose such a brutal, irrational, arrogant and neoliberal “gasolinazo” (an 82 percent hike in gasoline prices) that will make the people, who barely survive if they have the luck to have a stall in the market or a job, even poorer?

You always said that neoliberalism has failed. Is the gasolinazo a revolutionary and popular measure? Or is it that your economic model has failed?

Why must you – like all the governments previous to yours have done – carry out your failures behind the backs of the population, notably over those making minimum wage whose median income is fifty times less than yours and whose needs are one hundred times greater than yours?

Álvaro García Linera at the home of Oscar Olivera.

What a pain that you always say that power is in the hands of the people, that this is an indigenous-popular government, what a pain that all of this is a lie: LLULLAS! (A very strong indigenous Quechua word for “liars.”)

Luckily, thanks to the struggles in which we have been together, we learned something very important. We learned to think and act for ourselves so that never again would anyone tell us what we must do, so that nobody ever again would be able to trick us so that the popular vote, trust and hope that has come in recent times from the most impoverished and humble sectors would be converted into a party for the rich, the well-off, the neoliberals in sheep’s clothing, the “beauty pageant contestants.” The process is not propaganda, it is not a speech, it is not about marketing: the process is to change the lives of the people. And read this well, because we won’t allow ourselves to be tricked again by anybody. That’s the way that people – who come, like you, from the breast of The People – are.

We would like to finish by saying something that an Aymara elder said: The indigenous are not defined by physical traits, nor language, nor last name, nor culture. The indigenous come from an attitude of generosity, of respect, of reciprocity, transparency, of listening to others.

We ask you: Do you have that? From below and to the left, as the Zapatistas say, we see arrogants who decide everything, who don’t listen to anyone, who discriminate, who insult, who disqualify, who defame. Is that how you want to remain in power for many years?

Oscar Olivera and Evo Morales after Morales’ 2005 election to the presidency.

The problem is that you don’t understand the enormous responsibility that you assumed as part of this process with our people and other peoples of the world: of demonstrating that it is possible to govern ourselves, that it is possible to lead by obeying, that it is possible to construct another model of development, of “good living,” that another world is possible. This was a process that delivered itself to you with hope and joy. The legitimate owner of this process is the Bolivian people, the girls and boys, men and women, youths, elders, from the country and from the city, whose effort cannot be worn down, diverted, usurped, expropriated, betrayed or subordinated by anyone, even less by you and those who equivocally decide for us.

We don’t care about governments. We care about the people and this process is losing the social base that it cost us so much to construct while returning it to the right against which we fought and will fight.

To make you understand that we exist we must mobilize and this we will do, do not forget it.

But we will not mobilize to fight among brothers and sisters in the way that you’ve been encouraging in these years in your incapacity, and the result is in Huanuni, Cochabamba, Pando, Yungas, Sucre… where so many brothers and sisters, all children of Mother Earth, have hated and died.

Alvaro, we already told you: The people come first, and later the numbers and statistics.

Do not confront us. Do not provoke us. Do not divide us or ignore us. We exist. We are dignified. We will struggle against everything that harms our daily lives. We seek:

-The repeal of your anti-popular and nefarious Decree 748 -The decolonization of the Plurinational State

-That no political party, not of the left, the center or the right, can benefit from or involve itself in our actions and decisions

-Like in 2000, like in 2003, Cochabama and El Alto defeated the anti-popular policies.

Oscar Olivera Foronda

Marcelo Rojas

Abraham Grandydier

Aniceto Hinojosa Vasquez

Carlos Oropeza

This note critiquing the judgement that setences Binayak Sen for life has been written by ILINIA SEN, SUDHA BHARADWAJ and KAVITA SRIVASTAVA

Raipur, 26 December, 2010

As you are aware the Second Additional District and Sessions Judge of Raipur Sh. B. P. Verma convicted Binayak Sen, Pijush Guha and Narayan Sanyal for rigorous life imprisonment on the 24 December, 2010. A ninety two page judgement was delivered by Judge BP Verma on the 24 December, 2010. What follows is a quick analysis of the facts of the case and the judgement that has finally been delivered.

Important Dates of the case

The FIR was lodged on the 6^th of May, 2007, when Pijush Guha’s arrest was shown. Dr. Sen was arrested on the 14^th May, 2007 from Bilaspur and Narayan Sanyal was only made an accused in July 2007, who was already an under trial detained in the Bilaspur Jail in another case. The Charge sheet was filed in August, 2007. The charges were framed on 27^th December, 2007 and subsequently the trial began. The trial lasted for two years where 97prosecution witnesses and 12 defence witnesses deposed. Many of the prosecution witnesses were policemen. Three judges presided over the two year trial. They were Judge Saluja, Judge Ganpat Rao and finally Judge B P Verma (a judge awaiting confirmation in the lower judiciary). The judgement would have taken longer had it not been for the Supreme Court, which on a bail application filed by Pijush Guha ordered in October, 2010 that the trial be completed in three months.

The Analysis of the Judgement

The Second Additional Sessions Judge, Raipur B.P. Verma has sentenced human rights defender Dr. Binayak Sen, Kolkata businessman Pijush Guha and Maoist ideologue Narayan Sanyal for rigorous life imprisonment and shorter prison terms, to run concurrently under Sections 124A read with Section 120B of the Indian Penal Code, Sections 8(1), 8(2), 8(3) and 8(5) of the Chhattisgarh Vishesh Jan Suraksha Adhiniyam, 2005 (Chhattisgarh Special Public Safety Act) and Section 39(2) of the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act, 1967. Narayan Sanyal has been additionally sentenced under Section 20 of the UAPA Act, 1967. Briefly put Section 124A read with Section 120B of IPC pertains to sedition and conspiracy for sedition; CSPSA, 2005 makes culpable membership of, association with, and furthering the interests, financially or otherwise, of organizations notified and banned under the Act as unlawful. UAPA, 1967 seeks to penalize membership of a terrorist gang or association, holding proceeds of terrorism, or support given to a terrorist organization.

To hold the three accused guilty under the above mentioned laws, the judgment had to establish beyond reasonable doubt that the accused were either directly indulging in seditious activities as individuals or as members of an organization, or conspiring to abet and further seditious activities of individuals or organization. Also, the judgment was to establish beyond reasonable doubt that the accused were either members of organizations notified as unlawful under CSPSA or/ and UAPA, or conspiring to abet and further the activities of such unlawful organizations. Judge Verma’s verdict weaves a flawed legal narrative trying to establish the aforementioned links.

Judge Verma’s narrative hinges on the following points:

• Narayan Sanyal is a member of the highest decision making body, Politburo, of CPI (Maoist) a seditious organization and notified as unlawful under the CSPSA and UAPA. As a basis for this, the judgment cites the content of certain journals purported to be organs of the CPI (Maoist) and certain cases lodged against him for Maoist activities in the states of Andhra Pradesh and Jharkhand. The above-mentioned magazines have been reportedly seized from co-accused Pijush Guha who has contended that they were planted on him by the police. The judge has unquestioningly accepted the version of the police on the basis of the supposed testimony of the seizure witness Anil Singh, ignoring the objections of Pijush Guha and co-accused Binayak Sen to the effect that the seizure witness had claimed to overhear a conversation between Guha and the police in a situation where the police had Guha in their custody, and any statement made by Guha to the police in a custodial situation is inadmissible as evidence under the Indian Evidence Act, 1872. It should not be forgotten that the seizure witness Anil Singh did not accompany the police when they came to apprehend and search Guha, but was supposedly a passerby, who was stopped by the police when Guha was already in their custody. The judge has held Narayan Sanyal to be a member of CPI (Maoist) on the basis of cases against him in other states in which he has not yet been pronounced guilty.

• The central point around which the verdict’s narrative is woven is the arrest and seizure of certain articles, including the abovementioned journals and three letters supposedly written by Narayan Sanyal to his party comrades, handed over to Binayak Sen when he met Sanyal in jail, and then handed over by Sen to Pijush Guha who was supposed to pass it on to Sanyal’s party comrades. This supposedly establishes a chain binding the three in a conspiratorial relationship. According to this supposed conspiratorial chain, Narayan Sanyal is a leader of a seditious organization also notified as unlawful and as such banned; Binayak Sen conspires with Sanyal to pass on his letters to his party comrades through Guha, thus both Sen and Guha assist in the activities of a seditious and unlawful organization. In constructing this conspiratorial chain, the Judge has relied on forensic evidence testifying that the letters were indeed written by Sanyal, but for them being in possession of Pijush Guha, he has relied solely on the evidence of police officers and seizure witness Anil Singh whose versions have been contested by Guha but ignored by the Judge. Guha’s statement before the Magistrate which was recorded when he was produced on the 7^th of May, 2007 says that he was arrested on 1.5.2007 from Mahindra Hotel, kept in illegal custody blindfolded for six days and finally produced before a Magistrate only on 7.5.2007. The Judge has ignored even Guha’s statement to this effect made before the Magistrate as soon as he was produced. Judge Verma has said in his verdict that Guha has failed to produce any evidence in favour of his statement, thereby putting the onus of proof on the accused and not the prosecution, which is bad in law. (Neither the CSPSA or UAPA (2004) puts the burden of proof on the accused.

• The Judge has also ignored the contradiction between the police affidavit filed before the Supreme Court while opposing the bail application of Binayak Sen and the police version presented in the charge sheet filed in the sessions court. In the Supreme Court the police said that Guha had been arrested from Mahindra Hotel (which Guha has alleged in his testimony) but in the sessions court the police have said that Guha was arrested from Station Road where the police supposedly seized the aforementioned incriminating articles in the presence of seizure witness Anil Singh. The police’s flimsy argument, that the discrepancy was because of a typographical error in the affidavit filed before the Supreme Court, has been fully accepted by Judge Verma. Actually, the police officer responsible should be tried for either filing a false affidavit in the Apex Court, or lying in the Sessions court under oath. Accepting Guha’s testimony would have rendered the seizure witness’s statement implausible on which the Judge has centrally relied for his narrative. This would have in turn resulted in a complete collapse of the case against all the accused, especially so against Guha and Binayak Sen, against whom there was no material evidence of either being a member of CPI (Maoist) or being in conspiratorial relationship with  Narayan Sanyal, the principal Maoist character in Judge Verma’s narrative.

• Once the central conspiratorial point and incident has been constructed in the judicial narrative, conspiratorial linkages between the three accused and their common causes and actions before the incident also needed to be established. This has been attempted in Pijush Guha’s case by a reference to his frequent visits to Raipur and a case pending in district Purulia, West Bengal. Judge Verma has ignored the fact that Guha was made an accused in the Purulia case after 6.5.2007, the date on which he is said to have been arrested in Raipur. This fact strongly generates a suspicion of afterthought by the police of the two states acting in collusion. Judge Verma’s verdict also naturally ignores the fact that Pijush Guha’s frequent visits are explained by his being a tendu leaf trader trading in the areas of Chhattisgarh.

• Binayak Sen’s supposed conspiratorial relationship with Narayan Sanyal and his seditious Maoist causes is sought to be established by the following:

1. Testimony of the so called Landlord of Narayan Sanyal

Deepak Choubey’ in his testimony stated that he accepted Narayan Sanyal as a tenant in his house on the recommendation of Binayak Sen some time before Sanyal’s arrest.

The Judge has ignored the fact that Deepak Choubey did not own the house but acted on behalf of his brother in law. More crucially, the Judge set aside Sen’s objection that Choubey’s assertion came in response to a leading question by the Public Prosecutor. Judge Verma’s verdict makes no reference to Sen’s objections against this witness going beyond his statement under Section 161 of the Cr.P.C., and the fact that the witness admitted in cross examination that an earlier statement recorded by the police at the time when allegedly a Maoist leader was arrested from his house was not brought on record. This casts doubt as to the veracity of the statement made subsequently since the same could be manipulated so as to suit the Prosecution story.  Judge Verma rejected Sen’s contention that Choubey’s statement was made under duress because the police threatened to implicate him in context of the said arrest. It also does not take into account the contradiction with the police’s own version that Narayan Sanyal was arrested from Bhadrachalam in Andhra Pradesh to which effect police officers of Andhra Pradesh have testified.

2. Binayak Sen’s thirty three meetings in eighteen months with jailed Narayan Sanyal.

The judge without giving any reason has ignored Sen’s contention that he was merely performing his duty as a human rights activist and a physician in addressing the legal and health issues of an ailing undertrial prisoner on the request of the undertrial’s family. The Judge has not considered the documents exhibited by the defence showing that Sen had permission from the Senior Superintendent of Police for his jail visits. Instead, Judge Verma’s verdict makes a convoluted argument by holding that Sanyal’s sister-in-law’s (Bula Sanyal’s) phone calls to Binayak Sen in this regard proved a conspiratorial relationship between him and Narayan Sanyal, whereas Bula Sanyal is a housewife absolutely unconnected with any kind of Maoist/ unlawful activity. Since the prosecution failed to produce even a single jail official or any other eye witness testifying to any letter or message, oral or written, being passed by Narayan Sanyal to Binayak Sen in their jail meetings, the verdict makes much fuss about certain entries in jail registers referring to Sen being Sanyal’s relative, ignoring the defence contention that these entries were filled in by the jail officials, and not by either the visited or visitor, as apparent from the face of the record. On the contrary, all the applications Binayak Sen submitted to the jail officials, requesting a meeting with Sanyal, were written on the letterhead of his organization – PUCL (a Civil Liberties and Democratic Rights organization founded by leading Sarvodaya leader Jayprakash Narayan). These visits were duly permitted by the jail officials and transpired in their full view and hearing.

3. Binayak Sen’s relationship with the CPI (Maoists)

3.1 That Binayak Sen had a close relationship with CPI (Maoist) is sought to be established by the unsubstantiated testimonies of police officials claiming that Sen and his wife Ilina Sen had assisted alleged hard core Maoists Shankar Singh and Amita Srivastava. Sen has not disputed that Shankar was employed by Rupantar – an NGO founded by his wife Ilina. Nor has he disputed that he and Ilina knew Amita Srivastava whom the latter, on the recommendation of a friend, had helped find a job in a school. But the Judge has just accepted the police’s word, without any other testimony or material evidence whatsoever that Shankar and Amita were Maoists.

3.2 Judge Verma has also wrongly concluded, on the basis of hearsay by the police, that one Malati employed by Rupantar was the same person as Shantipriya, also using the alias Malati, a Maoist leader’s wife convicted for 10 years in a case tried in another court in Raipur. The judge has not even mentioned or verified the defence evidence put on record that the Malati employed by Rupantar was actually Malati Jadhav, whose address was provided by defence witness Prahlad Sahu.

3.3. Judge Verma’s narrative seems to have a particular fondness for police hearsay as he has blindly accepted, without any corroboration by another witness or any material evidence, wild allegations made by police officials Vijay Thakur and Sher Singh Bande, officer in charge of Konta and Chhuria police stations respectively that Binayak Sen, his wife Ilina Sen and other PUCL members and human rights activists attended the meetings of Maoists in their respective areas.  These officials have gone well beyond their Section 161 statements introducing documents not earlier annexed with the charge sheet, and all defence objections in this regard were overruled by the Judge.

3.4 But a certain planted letter, exhibit A-37, takes the cake in Judge Verma’s narrative. This unsigned letter, supposedly written by the Central Committee of CPI (Maoist) to Binayak Sen, was claimed by the police to have been seized from Sen’s house when the police ran a search there. But this letter finds no mention in the seizure list, neither has it been signed by Sen nor the investigating officers nor the search witnesses as per proper procedural requirement. The said letter was also not part of the copy of the charge sheet received by Sen in the court. But the Judge has completely overlooked this obvious planting of evidence, accepting the ridiculous explanation provided by investigating officers BS Jagrit and BBS Rajput that the Article A-37 probably stuck to another article (chipak gaya tha) and hence could not get signed by either Sen or the investigating officer or search witnesses. It is no surprise that the judge has also ignored the very valid testimonies of defence witnesses Amit Bannerji and Mahesh Mahobe in this context.

3.5 The verdict lets the cat of its ideological bias out of the bag , however, when it accepts above the Supreme Court’s wise judicial pronouncements which were brought on record in the case by Sen, the testimony of a mere district collector KR Pisda in charge of Dantewada district that Salwa Judum was a peaceful and spontaneous protest movement of the tribals against the atrocities committed by the Maoists, and not a brutal and armed vigilante operation sponsored by the state. Later in his judgment Judge Verma insinuates that Binayak Sen’s principled opposition as a human rights defender to such a non-legal, repressive, brutal vigilante operation indulging in mayhem and violence put him in the Maoist camp against whom the Salwa Judum was targeted.

Not taking into cognizance the evidence provided by the Defence

The statement made by Binayak Sen, the evidence that he brought on record as to his work as a human rights activist, and the newspaper reports which were exhibited by the defence carrying statements of the then DGP Police threatening to take human rights activists to task, which reveal prima facie malice and motive have not been taken into consideration by the Judge, who appears to have considered and relied only upon that interpretation of the evidence that supported the prosecution case without a reasoned consideration of the lacunae and contradictions therein, the objections of the defence and the evidence adduced by Sen, or even the well settled legal principles on which the defence rested its  arguments.

Using the legal provision of sedition as a political instrument

While weaving a narrative of sedition against Binayak Sen and other accused in the case, the Sessions court verdict violates a well laid judicial principle of the Supreme Court in matters of sedition. InKedarnath Singh Vs State of Bihar the Supreme Court has held that the provision of sedition in the Indian Penal Code must be interpreted in a manner consistent with the fundamental freedom of speech and expression guaranteed by the Indian Constitution. In this regard the Supreme Court held that the offence of sedition, which is defined as spreading disaffection against the state, should be considered as having been committed only if the said disaffection is a direct incitement to violence or will lead to serious public disorder. No speech or deed milder than this should be considered seditious. The Sessions court verdict in the case against Binayak Sen and others fails to establish that the words or deeds of the accused were a direct incitement to violence or would lead to serious public disorder. This would be the case even if it was established beyond doubt that Binayak Sen had passed on Narayan Sanyal’s letters to Pijush Guha, or Pijush Guha was likely to pass on these letters to other members of the CPI (Maoist), or that Narayan Sanyal was a politburo member of the CPI (Maoist).

Final statement of Dr Binayak Sen: http://www.binayaksen.net/2010/12/final-statement-of-dr-binayak-sen/

This article appears in The New Indian Express on the 27th of December, 2010.

In the middle of the above photograph, is the Salwa Judum leader Soyam Mukka, a part of a state-sponsered mob, protesting against Medha Patkar, Sandeep Pandey and a contingent of human rights activists and social workers, in January 2009.

Soyam Mukka is a few feet away from the police and would be, for the duration of the protest on that faithful day in January. It is also a fact that there is a warrant for his arrest, for the kidnapping of a young tribal woman, who’d be eventually gangraped by Special Police Officers in the Konta police station in 2008.

In the above photographs by a local reporter (look at the extreme right and left), one can see the police of Chhattisgarh trying its utmost best to uphold the law.

Soyam Mukka has never been arrested as per 25th of December 2010.

Previously, they hadn’t even accepted the FIR of the girl who was raped. And when the girl was taken to the JMFC Court in Konta, by human rights activists, the police did their best to loiter around the area to harass the girl. Their crowning achievement was the harassment of her family. But the police could not uphold the law. It was difficult for them to fight the Maoists when they’re too busy trying to save their own skins from what is just ‘collateral’ or the ‘spoils of war’.

So they changed their tactics. We should uphold the Law (by making it ours, to do whatever we please), by harassing, beating up, arresting, and chasing away all of these pesky humanrightwallas, who talk about constitutional rights. Nobody has time to go and intimidate witnesses and victims of police atrocities all the time, and we all know that it’s the Maoists who’re using ‘human rights’ as a strategy.  So bugger with human rights.

We need to shoot the messenger, these people calling for the Law. Chase them away like common criminals, and everyone else is scot free.

Now that the good doctor and human rights activist Binayak Sen is sentenced to life for Section 124A Sedition, there is human rights activist, Kopa Kunjam who has been in jail for over a year now for the murder of a man who every witness has so far claimed – he had tried to save.  Then there are CPI cadres, many of whom are elected representatives – Lala Kunjam, Sukul Prasad Nag, Sudru Ram Kunjam, Bhima Kunjam and Kartam Joga, who’re all in jail.

Kartam Joga was even one of the first petitioners in the Supreme Court regarding the illegal killings of the Salwa Judum. Unlike the police, he believed in upholding the law. He believed in the courts.

And while the CPI had called for a rally on the 25^th of November to protest against the police and the administration, on the night of 24^th of November, numerous reports surfaced about the police beating up CPI protestors around Katekkalyan, Pondum and Jhirum villages on Dantewada road. The CPI even demanded that the Home Ministry should take action against the SSP Kalluri, who they claim is responsible for the attack on their party.

And on the 8^th of December, 2010, the CPI along with other organizations under the banner of the Chhattisgarh Bachao Andolan, was part of a rally of over 10,000 people who submitted a petition of one lakh people to the Chhattisgarh State Assembly asking for better implementation of PESA, Forest Rights Act, the end of fake environment hearings, harassment of activists and displacement from land.

Almost everyone in Chhattisgarh seems to want the Law.

Yet let’s not forget the journalists. When the news about the burning of villages, fake encounters, rapes and illegal detentions started to get out, the state forgot that they need to chase the journalists away as well.

Just recently, the new Avatar of the Salwa Judum, the Maa Danteswari Adivasi Swabhimani Manch had made a statement calling for the deaths of three local journalists in the undivided Bastar region of Chhattisgarh.

Anil Mishra, the previous district head of New Delhi-based Hindi-Daily Nai Duniya, NRK Pillai, the vice president of the Working Journalists Union, and Yashwant Yadav of Deshbandu were mentioned in the press release that states, ‘journalists and NGOs who are befriending the Naxals, be it Himanshu Kumar or Arundhati, or even for that matter NRK Pillai, Anil Yadav or Yashwant Mishra, all of you will face consequences. Leaders of CPI, BJP or Congress, in jail or outside – who have been on your side will not be make any difference. Under the garb of human right activists you should know that you cannot last too long. If you do not leave Bastar you will die like a dog.’

This is not the first time the state apparatus or the state-backed counter insurgent group has attacked journalists in Bastar. Over the last four years, full timers and part-timers, Kamlesh Paikra, Maqbool of Sahara Samay, Afzal Khan, and this author have faced the lathis of the police or the Salwa Judum.

NRK Pillai had long made a statement to the journalists in Delhi about the persecution of the press in Dantewada. Yet there was nothing but silence from Delhi. Journalists were soft targets.

In October, 2009, right at the onset of major operations that would then be known-as Operation Green Hunt, the police had ‘requested’ all the local journalists not to go and work in the jungles. And almost no one did. When there were others who accompanied national and international journalists into the field, they were warned, ‘tere koh yah rahna hai, yeh log nikal jayenge.’ (you live here, these people (outsiders) will go away.)

Anil Mishra lost his job at Nai Duniya because he accompanied international and national journalists into the area. And he moved out of Dantewada. And there is no doubt that the recent Maa Danteshwari press release was a reaction to his recent visit to the Jagargonda area of Dantewada.

And the first report of the Maa Danteshwari death threat had come out on citizen’s news portal CGNet Swara. The young adivasi journalist Mangal Kunjam only had to call the CGNet Swara number (080) 4113 7280, to record his report that would be scrutinized by moderaters. Yet a few days after the recording was made available to the world, he would be called to Kirandul police station where he was dutifully threatened.

But why target the poor Binayak Sen? To silence dissent? To act as a deterrence, that no human rights group work in Dantewada? They had arrested him in 2007 and that didn’t deter anyone. There were hundreds of human rights workers and journalists who had visited Dantewada after 2007. There have been fewer visits in the last one year by any outsiders but a brave few who travel incognito, as the state has now attempted to destroy the contact base of the journalists and human rights workers.

Binayak Sen was definitely condemned for political reasons. No sensible court would sentence a man to life in prison, when the evidence the prosecutors present to court, are ‘links to ISI’, which they didn’t bother to realize, was the Indian Social Institute, a Delhi-based advocacy organization.

It seems that the police are using the same strategy that the Maoists use with human rights and the courts. The police often claim all the petitions filed against them in the Supreme Court or the High Court, are strategic tactics by the Maoists to use human rights organizations to keep the police busy dealing with Supreme Court queries of missing petitioners and witnesses, which in their unimaginative self-delusions, can be equated to, keeping the civil rights organizations, and journalists busy with Binayak Sen and not the ground realities of Dantewada and Chhattisgarh.

But for the adivasi in Dantewada facing brutal repression and for Binayak Sen, the Law had been abandoned a long time ago.

The activity was organized by CODEVISE – Committee for the Defense of Victims of Santa Elina and LCP of Rondônia and Western Amazon. The goal was to celebrate the people’s cut of the land already conquered and to deliver the certificates of land ownership. Moreover, the peasants wanted to highlight the importance of conquering  the Santa Elina Farm, which is a symbol of peasant resistance in our country, and was an achievement that cost years of great struggle, work and blood.

The peasants started arriving for the celebration in December 3. Due to the bad condition of roads in that region, many peasants had to walk about 15 km on foot to reach the site of the celebration, which happened in the antique farmhouse. But it was not problem for peasants because they were so excited and happy with the victory over a symbol of landowners and aware that they can overcome any difficulty.

During the three-days celebration, more than 500 persons from different regions of the state of Rondônia were present, both from villages, cities and from peasants areas. Participated peasants and supporters from Alto Guarajus, Rondolândia, Vanessa, Adriana, Vitória da União, Corumbiara, Cerejeiras, Chupinguaia, Vilhena, Espigão, Cacoal, Vila Palmares, Jaru, Ariquemes, Buritis, Machadinho, Canãa, Raio do Sol, Lamarca, Rio Alto, José e Nélio, Jacinópolis and the capital Porto Velho.

On December 4, after the collective lunch, the event was opened with a large fireworks display. Then all presents sang the peasants’ hymn “Conquer the Land.” Shortly thereafter, representatives of democratic organizations were called upon to speak. Besides the CODEVISE and LCP, spoke Socorro Popular (People’s Aid), Cebraspo (Brazilian Center of Solidarity to the Peoples), Abrapo (Brazilian Association of People’s Lawyers), MEPR (Popular Revolutionary Student Movement), MFP (Women Popular Movement), the Workers League, Union of Rural Workers of Espigão d’Oeste, the Union of Construction Workers of Belo Horizonte, People’s School Orocílio Martins Gonçalves, People’s School of Rondônia, Pará LCP, among other popular organizations.

In the end, it was delivered a tribute to all victims of the struggle for the Santa Elina Farm. The name of each peasant was killed was read and all answered: Present! Another honoree was the peasant leader José Bentão (Francisco Pereira do Nascimento), a founder of the LCP in Rondônia, who was brutally murdered by armed gangs of landlords in 2008, in the region of Jacinópolis. In recognize of his memory, the Popular Assembly of that area named the cropped area of Santa Elina Farm as “Revolutionary Area José Bentão”

Overnight cultural activities took place. The highlight was a theater presentation organized by youth who staged the struggle in a village where peasants rebelled against the abuses of the landlords. The activity aroused great interest and many peasants were affected. After, the party continued until late with a lively “forró” (a typical  Brazilian dance).

On December 5 football and volleyball tournaments were performed. Later came the most important and special moment of the whole celebration, which was the ceremony to issue the title of land ownership to the peasants, certificated and given by the Poor Peasants League, which means land title given by the People’s Power.

The names of each peasant were called by the LCP coordinators and each one was handed a certificate to their possession. The joy overflowed in the faces of everyone who received the certificate of their lands. More than the delivery of a document, that ceremony expressed the culmination of a struggle of very 15 years! And that meant also an important settle of scores, as well expressed the representative of the LCP:

“For 15 years the blood shed by the peasants in this ground watered the seeds of struggle in our hearts and minds. This seed grew, blossomed and bore fruit today and its roots are so deep that the landlords can no longer destroy, rather we are the ones who can and must destroy them. We must never forget the peasants who were assassinated by the bullets landlordism and by cursed hands of their tormentors. These fellows carried with them the dream of owning a piece of land to live and work with their families and paid with their lives to believe and fight for this dream.

The death of those comrades was not in vain, because today we are turning this dream into reality, we are heirs and successors of the martyrs of Santa Elina. We’re here to settle the scores, or at least part of them, with landlordism. It’s not far day when we will settle all the accounts, and they will pay very high for all the humiliations, abuses, deaths, misery and misfortune that they caused to past and present generations of poor peasants, black slaves and indigenous peoples!

We are here witnessing and celebrating the destruction of another part of the landlordism, and we know and have said that each stab we apply will make it weaker until one day it will die forever! This is what we believe and have fought for this goal and will continue struggling! Let’s make like fellows of Santa Elina to stare the flag of Agrarian Revolution everywhere destroying the latifundium and building a genuine and New Democracy in our country.”

After the delivery of 250 certificates, all the presents sang the anthem of the workers and oppressed peoples, “The International”. Then, a large fireworks display closed this historical celebration.

Peasant Resistance Newspaper

www.resistenciacamponesa.com

13 December 2010

Last Thursday, the government passed one of the most reactionary and ill-conceived pieces of legislation in this country’s history. At a stroke, the increase in tuition fees promises to destroy publicly funded further and higher education in England, and to consolidate one of the most far-reaching shifts of power and opportunity that has ever been engineered in a so-called democracy. Camouflaged by vacuous reference to “student choice” and a few token concessions to the less affluent, the new law will rig the entire system in favour of the privileged few. It will accelerate the conversion of genuine education into market-driven job training, and it will do irreversible damage to arts, humanities and social science subjects in particular.

Students and staff have mobilised in unprecedented numbers and unprecedented ways to oppose these disastrous education cuts. Unable to sustain let alone win the argument in public debate, unwilling to devote even minimal time for general consultation and discussion, the government has instead opted to quash our demonstrations with naked force, intimidation and collective punishment. Up and down the country, secondary school students have been threatened with expulsion for joining local protest marches. Scores of protesters have been injured by riot police, hundreds have been arrested and many thousands have repeatedly been corralled and detained (and then photographed) against their will.

Attempts to portray the protests as “riots” provoked by a frenzied few are a clichéd evasion of the real issues at stake here. Anyone who has participated in these demonstrations knows that each one has been a massive and powerful expression of revulsion for the government’s plans, an uncompromising rejection of the cuts and the neoliberal priorities they represent. It takes some nerve for a government that is destroying our education system (while waging war in Afghanistan, investing in new nuclear weapons and using “anti-terror” laws to persecute large swathes of its own population) to treat the tens of thousands of students and lecturers defending it as if they were guilty of collusion in violence.

In reality, the great majority of the violence has been suffered rather than inflicted by the protesters. In reality, given the calamity that confronts us, protesters have acted with remarkable discipline and restraint. In reality, although police justify the use of “containment” as a means of preventing violence, most of what violence there was during Thursday’s rally began well after the vast kettling operation was set up.

I imagine that the experience of my own students (studying philosophy at Kingston University, or at Middlesex University where I taught until this past summer) is typical of many others. Most of them have already committed huge amounts of time and energy to the anti-cuts campaign, and many have attended all of the major London rallies over the past month.

Shortly after Thursday’s vote, a policeman hit one of my current MA students on the head with his truncheon. He said it felt like he was struck by a solid metal bar. After being bandaged by other students and released from the kettle on account of his obvious injuries, police medics took a quick look at him, and checked that his eyes were still responding to light. According to my student, they recommended that he make his own way to his local hospital in North London, where he received stitches.

At least a dozen of the students I work with didn’t escape the kettle so quickly, and were among the thousand or so people who were eventually forced back on to Westminster Bridge shortly after 9pm, without water or toilets, without information or explanation, in the freezing cold and wind, long after the media had gone home. They were then crowded together for a couple of hours between solid lines of baton-wielding riot police. Many students say they were beaten with truncheons as they held their open hands high in the air, in the hope of calming their attackers.

“I was standing at the front of the group with nowhere to go,” Johann Hoiby, a Middlesex philosophy student, told me. “My hands were open and visible, when a riot police officer, without provocation, hit me in the face with his shield, screaming ‘get back’ when I clearly couldn’t move. The most terrifying thing was the fact that everyone was screaming that people were getting crushed, yet the police kept pushing us backwards when we had nowhere to go.”

Around the same time, one of Johann’s classmates, Zain Ahsan, was “hit in the abdominal area with a baton; I shouted back at the officer that my hands were in the air and I was being pushed by the people behind me.”

My Kingston students say they saw people having panic attacks, people seized up with asthma, people who fell under the feet of the crowd.

“The fact that there were no deaths on that bridge”, one says, “is a true miracle.”

Some students claim that they were then kicked by police as they were slowly released, single file, through a narrow police corridor. Everyone was forcibly photographed, and many of the people detained on the bridge were then taken away for questioning.

The story of one Middlesex undergraduate who used to sit in on my MA classes, Alfie Meadows, is already notorious. He received a full-on blow to the side of his skull. My partner and I found him wandering in Parliament Square a little after 6pm, pale and distraught, looking for a way to go home. He had a large lump on the right side of his head. He said he’d been hit by the police and didn’t feel well. We took one look at him and walked him towards the nearest barricaded exit as quickly as possible. It took a few minutes to reach and then convince the taciturn wall of police blocking Great George Street to let him through their shields, but they refused to let me, my partner or anyone else accompany him in search of medical help. We assumed that he would receive immediate and appropriate treatment on the other side of the police wall as a matter of course, but in fact he was left to wander off on his own, towards Victoria.

As it turns out, Alfie’s subsequent survival depended on three chance events. If his mother (a lecturer at Roehampton, who was also “contained” in Parliament Square) hadn’t received his phone call and caught up with him shortly afterwards, the odds are that he’d have passed out on the street. If they hadn’t then stumbled upon an ambulance waiting nearby, his diagnosis could have been fatally delayed. And if the driver of this ambulance hadn’t overruled an initial refusal of the A&E department of the Chelsea and Westminster hospital to look at Alfie, his transfer to the Charing Cross neurological unit for emergency brain surgery might well have come too late.

Over the last couple of days the stories of other victims (including the writer Shiv Malik, whose head needed five stitches after another encounter with a police baton) have begun to circulate, but it will take a few more days before the full extent of the injuries suffered on 9 December becomes clear.

With each new protest, we learn a little more about what we are up against.

For decades, the corporate interests that promoted and then implemented their neoliberal “reforms” sought to present them as a form of modernising improvement, one carried by the inexorable progress of history towards the untrammelled pursuit of profit “for the benefit of all”. For decades, this grotesque distortion of reality has helped to mask a relentless assault on the remnants of our not-yet-for-profit services and resources, and to persuade many of those sheltering in the more privileged parts of the world to tolerate such “development” as a necessary price to be paid for their comfort and security. Not any more. The days of “there is no alternative” are rapidly becoming a distant memory, and all over Europe the bankers’ masks have begun hiding behind police visors.

On Thursday, the government converted its assault on further and higher education into law, but only additional reliance on police truncheons will allow them to enforce it. To judge from the government’s response so far, it is now only a matter of time before truncheons are reinforced by water cannon and rubber bullets, and before near-fatal injuries become fatalities. As Michel Foucault understood, however, the successful exercise of power is “proportional to its ability to hide its own mechanisms”. If the neoliberal programme has never yet pushed so deep into the British public sphere, rarely have the means to impose it looked so exposed. No amount of police brutality can enforce an unpopular measure in the face of massive non-compliance. If threats to expel students may intimidate an isolated few, they soon become risible if ignored en masse.

The government has no mandate to treble fees and eliminate the Education Maintenance Allowance, and Parliament offers no credible alternative. The only way to block implementation of the Tory cuts is to mobilise schools and campuses over the coming months in ways that will oblige the government to back down. The Tories have called the question; as Howard Zinn reminds us, you can’t be neutral on a moving train.

Postscript : Peter Hallward is professor of modern European philosophy, Kingston University

Before the major transformation of the state into a centralised capitalist model in the 1870s, “Thailand” as a nation-state did not exist[1]. The back-projection of “Thailand’s history” from the modern era to Sukotai (AD 1270) and Ayuttaya (AD 1350-1782) must therefore be seen as rewritings of history, by people such as Luang Wichitwatakarn and Prince Damrong, to serve modern nationalistic ideology.

Before the 1870s the dominant economic and political system in the central and northern region can best be described as a “Mandala”[2], “Galactic Polity”[3] or “Sakdina”[4] state. This was a loose political entity based on clusters of powerful cities, such as Sukotai, Ayuttaya, Chiang Mai etc., whose political power changed over time and also decreased proportionately to the distance from each city. Not only was there no such thing as a centralised nation-state under an all-powerful king, but political power to control surplus production was also decentralised.

In this Sakdina system, control of surplus production, over and above self-sufficiency levels, was based on forced labour and the extraction of tribute. This was a system of direct control over humans, rather than the use of land ownership to control labour, and its importance was due to the low population level. One estimate puts the average population density in 1904 as 11 persons per square kilometre, compared to 73 in India[5]. The majority of common people (Prai) living near urban centres were forced to perform corvée labour for monthly periods. There were also debt slaves (Taht) and war slaves (Chaleay Seuk). This direct control of labour was decentralised under various Moon Nai (bosses), nobles and local rulers (Jao Hua Muang), who had powers to mobilise labour. The result was that under the Sakdina system both economic and political power was decentralised[6].

Trade played an important part in the economy. Control of river mouths as export centres became more important as long distance trade increased. Local rulers sought a monopoly on this trade in cooperation with Chinese merchants who ran sailing junks as far as China and the Arab world. Ayuttaya was an important trading port, with ships from Europe, China, Java, Persia and Japan calling on a regular basis. The docks in Ayuttaya were run on an international basis. Official languages of trade included Malay and Chinese and one important port official was a Shia trader from Persia. He was the founder of the Bunnarg family.

War was also important. But war in the Sakdina period was not about controlling territory. It was about gaining war slaves, plundering neigbouring cities and proving power.

Since the Sakdina system was decentralised, it was not the only system of social organisation that existed in what is now Thailand. In areas far away from large towns and cities, people of varying ethnic composition also lived in semi-autonomous villages or small clusters of human habitation in various different ways. Apart from this, before the rise of Ayuttaya, there also existed a multitude of different states such the Khmer or Tawarawadi empires.

Imperialism and capitalist transformation

Although the increasing penetration of capitalism and the world market into the region had already increased the importance of money and trade, especially in the early Bangkok period[7], it was direct pressure from Western imperialism and internal class struggle that finally pushed and dragged the Bangkok rulers towards a capitalist political transformation. Evidence for this comes with looking at the effect of the British-imposed Bowring Treaty of 1855. This treaty established free trade and the freedom for Western capital penetration into the area without the need for direct colonisation. While the monopoly over trade, enjoyed by the Sakdina rulers of Bangkok, was abolished, vast opportunities were created for the capitalist production and trade of rice, sugar, tin, rubber and teak. The king of Bangkok quickly adapted himself to gain from these opportunities and fought to centralise the state under his own power in the face of internal and external challenges. Thailand’s capitalist revolution was not carried out by the bourgeoisie in the same style as the English or French revolutions. In Thailand’s case, the ruler of Bangkok, king Rama 5th or “king Chulalongkorn” brought about a revolutionary transformation of the political and economic system in response to both pressure from an outside world which was already dominated by capitalism and class struggle within.

Rama 5th’s revolution was to create a centralised and unified nation-state under the rule of Thailand’s first absolute monarchy[8]. This involved destroying the power of his Sakdina rivals, the Moon Nai, nobles and local Jao Hua Muang. Politically this was done by appointing a civil service bureaucracy to rule outer regions and economically, by abolishing their power to control forced labour and hence surplus value. Forced labour was also abolished in response to class struggle from below, since Prai had a habit of trying to escape corvée labour and both Prai and Taht would often deliberately work inefficiently. Forced labour was replaced by wage labour and private property rights in land ownership was introduced for the first time. Furthermore, investment in production of agricultural goods for the world market became more important than the simple use of surplus production for consumption and trade. This can clearly be seen in the various investments in irrigation canals for rice production in the Rungsit area of the central plains. These investments opened up the land for settlement and work by the peasantry, which had been freed from corvée labour. Thus a temporary class alliance was built between the monarchy and the peasantry against the old Sakdina rulers and bosses, which served to support the new ruling -lass interests in the global rice trade.

The shortage of labour for capitalist accumulation was initially solved by recruiting labour from China in the early part of the twentieth century. Much later, beginning in the early 1960s, a large surge in “indigenous” wage labour occurred as a result of poor peasants being pulled off the land, often from the north-east, into more productive workshops and factories in urban areas, especially around Bangkok. Later still, Thai capitalism started to depended on migrant labour from Burma and other neighbouring countries.

The capitalist transformation and the construction of the first Thai nation-state, a product of continuous change, occurred at a time when similar transformations were taking place throughout colonised South-East Asia. In the neighbouring colonies belonging to Britain, France and the Netherlands, state centralisation and the development of a capitalist economy, based upon wage labour was also taking place. In fact we should view the process of Thai state formation as the “internal colonisation” of the north, south and north-east by the Chakri rulers of Bangkok. Certainly the various north and north-eastern revolts against Bangkok indicate this to be true. The civil war today in the Muslim south also has its roots in this process. The main point to bear in mind is that the changes taking place in “un-colonised” Thailand were not very different from the rest of colonised South-East Asia.

Problems with the Stalinist/Maoist analysis of state formation

The left in Thailand has shown considerable confusion about Thailand’s capitalist transformation and this has influenced much intellectual analysis, way beyond the left, to this day. This confusion results from applying a Marxist model in an extremely mechanical and ahistorical manner, typical of the Stalinist and Maoist tradition. This is not surprising given that the only left-wing organisation of any significance, in terms of ideas and numbers of supporters, was the Communist Party of Thailand (CPT). A prime example of this mechanical analysis is Jit Pumisak’s argument that land ownership was central to the extraction of surplus value in the Thai Sakdina system[9]. This is one of many attempts at trying to fit Thai history into a Western model. Marx never claimed that Asian history followed the same exact path as European historical processes. As an example of a different production system in Asia, he suggested that in certain areas there existed a society based on irrigation canals called the “Asiatic mode of production” (AMP)[10]. There is no archeological evidence that Marx’s model of the AMP, with its complex irrigation system and centralised state, ever existed in “Thailand”, although it might have existed in the Khmer empire, centred around Ankor. Yet, the mechanical Marxists have also tried to prove that pre-capitalist production in Thailand was a mixture of the Sakdina system and the Asiatic Mode of Production[11]. In doing so, they have been forced to transform the meaning of the AMP to mean only a system of village production.

The mechanical approach by the Thai left also betrays a total lack of understanding about the fundamental nature of capitalism. Capitalism, for them, can only exist in the hands of private capitalists. They are unable to understand the concept of an absolute monarchy or military dictator being part of the capitalist class in much the same way that they are unable to understand the theory of state capitalism in Russia which characterised the Stalinist regime as a form of capitalism[12]. Maoist doctrine, which dominated the CPT, insisted that Thailand in the 1970s and 1980s was “semi-feudal, semi colonial”; a model copied directly from Mao’s analysis of China. Even today many intellectuals try to explain the conflict between Thaksin Shinawatra and the conservative royalists by saying that Thailand has yet to achieve its capitalist revolution.

Capitalism is a system whereby capital is invested in the production process with the aim of realising further capital accumulation. This process requires two things: first a significant population of waged workers who are separated from the means of production, in order that the small minority capitalist class can accumulate capital by the extraction of surplus value. Second, capitalism needs the existence, in one form or another of market forces which lead to competition between different groups of capital. The important point about the capitalist class is not its outward form or title or the issue of personal ownership. The important point is the fact that the capitalist class controls the means of production and accumulation. Therefore it follows that the capitalist class, especially in under-developed countries, can be made up of absolute monarchs, government officials, communist party bureaucrats or private capitalists.

The first Thai capitalist state was controlled by the absolute monarchy, which was a key part of the indigenous capitalist class. Under this state, there were three main capitalist groupings in the Thai economy; the royal capitalists, the Chinese capitalist merchants and the “foreign” (Western and later Japanese) capitalists[13].

From the 1932 revolution to the end of military rule in 1973

Thailand was well integrated into the world market by the 1930s and as a result of this suffered the effects of the 1930s economic depression. The political fall-out from this was that a group of civilian and military state officials, under Pridi Panomyong’s Peoples Party, staged a successful revolution against the absolute monarchy of Rama 7th in June 1932. The first declaration of the revolutionaries clearly identified the economic crisis as bringing things to a head, with mass unemployment, cuts in wages and increased taxation experienced by the mass of the population. The royal family was notably exempted from these tax increases!

The 1932 revolution was carried out on the back of widespread social discontent. Farmers in rural areas were becoming increasingly bold and strident in their written criticism of the monarchy[14]. Working-class activists were involved in the revolution itself, although they were not the main actors, and cheering crowds spontaneously lined Rachadamnern Avenue as the Peoples Party declaration was read out by various representatives stationed along the road. Nakarin Mektrairat details this wide movement of social forces which eventually led to the revolution. It is important to stress the role of different social groups in creating the conditions for the 1932 revolution, since the right-wing historians have claimed that it was the work of a “handful of foreign educated bureaucrats”. In fact, there has been a consistent attempt by the right, both inside and outside Thailand, to claim that ordinary Thai people have a culture of respecting authority and therefore show little interest in politics[15].

The 1932 revolution had the effect of further modernising the capitalist state and expanding the base of the ruling class to include the top members of the civilian and military bureaucracy, especially the military. The reason why the military became so influential in Thai politics, finally resulting in 16 years of uninterrupted military dictatorship from 1957, was the fact that the Peoples Party lacked a solid mass base beyond the bureaucracy. In addition to this, the private capitalists and the working class were still weak as social forces able to compete with the military.

The 1932 revolution meant that the role of the monarchy was significantly changed for the second time in less than a century. In the 1870s king Rama 5th abolished Sakdina rule in favour of a centralised and modern absolute monarchy. Sixty years later, the 1932 revolution destroyed this absolute monarchy so that the king merely became one section of the Thai ruling class. It is important to understand this, because there has been a tendency by both the left and the right to exaggerate the importance and “long-lasting traditions” of the Thai monarchy. Today’s king may seem to have the trappings of “tradition”, yet the influence of this institution has fluctuated over the last 60 years and in many cases its “sacredness” has been manufactured by military and civilian rulers to provide themselves with political legitimacy[16].

Many commentators argue that the “weakness” of Marxist or communist ideology in Thailand was mainly due to the fact that there was no mass mobilisation in the struggle for national liberation such as was seen in Indonesia, Burma or Vietnam[17]. It is not true that communist ideology was weak in Thai society, especially in the 1940s, 1950s and mid 1970s, and mass mobilisation for the purpose of nation-building did occur in the 1932 revolution. However, the fact that the Communist Party of Thailand (CPT) placed capitalist nation-building as its primary aim, in a similar vein to all other Stalinist-Maoist parties, did mean that the CPT had little to achieve, since the task of nation-building had already been started by the Chulalongkorn and was subsequently followed through by the 1932 revolution.

The rise of the private capitalists or bourgeoisie

Despite the fact that military dictatorships were overthrown by students and workers in 1973 and 1992, the main beneficiaries in terms of gaining political power have been the private sector capitalists. Thailand’s modern private bourgeoisie, including Thaksin, have cleverly taken advantage of the struggle for democracy waged from below in order to gain political power at the expense of the military state capitalists.

Although arising out of demands made by the May 1992 movement against the military, the drafting of the 1997 constitution was, in fact, an important victory for the modern private bourgeoisie[18]. Liberalism was the main political influence among the drafting committee and the aim of this constitution, for the liberals, was to increase government stability and reduce the more blatant forms of corruption. It was a charter for Thailand’s modern capitalists.

The private capitalist class existed from the earliest period of capitalism in Thailand. Initially they were businessmen of Chinese origin who cooperated with the royal state capitalists in the late 19th century, but after the royal family were removed from state power in the 1932 revolution, the royal capitalists joined the ranks of the private sector capitalist class. Today the king controls important interests in the Thai economy, including real estate, the Siam Commercial Bank and the Siam Cement company. He is a fabulously wealthy capitalist.

The importance of ethnic Chinese businesses, especially those associated with the big banks, increased during the Second World War when Western interests were temporarily excluded from Thailand[19]. Another two important sources leading to the development of major ethnic Chinese businesses were the joint venture import substitution industries, which relied on foreign capital, and the growth of agribusinesses such as the giant CP corporation[20].

Another important section of the private capitalist class grew from military and bureaucratic officials who used their state positions for personal enrichment or advantage during the periods of military domination. Early examples were the family dynasties of the various dictators such as Sarit, Tanom and Prapat, but also the Choonhawan family. However, in recent years other families have become prominent, some from provincial backgrounds.

The booming economy of the late 1980s and early 1990s also produced a new crop of Thai capitalists. Thaksin is a good example. Although Thaksin comes from a trading family from the north, his capitalist career started when he left the police force and started selling computers back to his old contacts in the police department. His IT business interests, however, really took off after the partial liberalisation of the Thai telecommunication market. Initially Thaksin entered parliamentary politics in the mid-1990s by helping to bank-roll the Palang Tum Party. He then set himself up as head of Thai Rak Thai party (TRT).

Left to themselves, the private bourgeoisie would never struggle against military dictatorships, but once mass struggle by workers and students achieved democracy, they were quick to take advantage of the new situation.

The 1970s: the people’s movement and the `October People’

In order to fully understand the people’s movement you need to look at what happened in the so-called “sixties” wave of struggles. Internationally, the sixties movement was characterised by a general rise in the struggle of oppressed groups on a global scale. Central to this struggle was the role of students and a new generation of activists in labour and peasant organisations. This took the form of movements against racism, sexual oppression and especially imperialism. Activists from this period are now to be found playing important roles in political systems throughout the world. However, their present-day role is often in contradiction to their original beliefs during the sixties. In Thailand the “sixties” movement has helped to shape both the policies of TRT and the nature of the NGOs and the people’s movement.

It would be more accurate to talk of the “seventies movement” in Thailand, if we actually look at the decade when the struggle for social equality and democracy reached its peak. But it is important to understand that it is not possible to separate this “seventies movement” in Thailand from the struggles of the “sixties” internationally. This link between the sixties and seventies occurs in two ways. First, the wave of student revolts and the activism among young people in Western Europe and the United states, the “1968 movement”, were an inspiration which ignited the left-wing struggles in the early 1970s in Thailand. Libertarian left-wing ideas from the Western movements entered Thai society by way of news reports, articles, books, music and the return of Thai students from the West, especially art students in the first instance. Second, the victory of communist parties in Indochina after the USA began to lose the war in Vietnam had a massive impact in igniting struggles for a new society in Thailand. These Asian communist victories were also directly linked to the “sixties” movement in the West in a dialectical manner. The radicals in the West were inspired by the local struggles against imperialism and injustice in South-East Asia and other areas of the globe. The anti-Vietnam War movement, which was an important part of the latter period of the “Western sixties”, helped to destroy the ability of the US to continue with the war.[21]

What did the Thai “seventies” look like? The first picture in one’s mind should be half a million people, mainly young school and university students, but also ordinary working people, protesting around the democracy Monument on 14th October 1973. This resulted in the overthrow of the military dictatorship. It was the first mass popular uprising in modern Thai history. The 14th October and the following struggles, victories and defeats that make up the “Thai seventies” have continued to shape the nature of politics and society to this day.

The 14th October uprising

The military domination of Thai politics, started soon after the 1932 revolution, but its consolidation of power came with the Sarit military coup in 1957. The economic development during the years of military dictatorship in the 1950s and 1960s took place in the context of a world economic boom and a localised economic boom created by the Korean and Vietnam wars. This economic growth had a profound impact on the nature of Thai society.

Naturally the size of the working class increased as factories and businesses were developed. However, under the dictatorship trade union rights were suppressed and wages and conditions of employment were tightly controlled. By early 1973 the minimum daily wage, fixed at around 10 baht since the early 1950s, remained unchanged while commodity prices had risen by 50%. Illegal strikes had already occurred throughout the period of dictatorship, but strikes increased rapidly due to general economic discontent. The first nine months of 1973, before the 14th October, saw a total of 40 strikes, and a one-month strike at the Thai Steel Company resulted in victory due to a high level of solidarity from other workers.

Economic development also resulted in a massive expansion of student numbers and an increased intake of students from working-class backgrounds. The building of the Ramkamhaeng Open University in 1969 was a significant factor here. Student numbers in higher education increased from 15,000 in 1961 to 50,000 by 1972. The new generation of students, in the early 1970s, were influenced by the revolts and revolutions which occurred throughout the world in that period, May 1968 in Paris, being a prime example. Before that, in 1966 the radical journal, Social Science Review, was established by progressive intellectuals. Students started to attend volunteer development camps in the countryside in order to learn about the problems of rural poverty. By 1971 3500 students had attended a total of 64 camps. In 1972 a movement to boycott Japanese goods was organised as part of the struggle against foreign domination of the economy. Students also agitated against increases in Bangkok bus fares.

In June 1973 the rector of Ramkamhaeng University was forced to resign after attempting to expel a student for writing a pamphlet criticising the military dictatorship[22]. Four months later, the arrest of 11 academics and students for handing out leaflets demanding a democratic constitution resulted in hundreds of thousands of students and workers taking to the streets of Bangkok. As troops with tanks fired on unarmed demonstrators, the people of Bangkok began to fight back. Bus passengers spontaneously alighted from their vehicles to join the demonstrators. Government buildings were set on fire. The “Yellow Tigers”, a militant group of students, sent a jet of high-octane gasoline from a captured fire engine into the police station at Parn-Fa bridge, setting it on fire. Earlier they had been fired upon by the police.

The successful 14th October 1973 mass uprising against the military dictatorship shook the Thai ruling class to its foundations. For the next few days, there was a strange new atmosphere in Bangkok. Uniformed officers of the state disappeared from the streets and ordinary people organised themselves to clean up the city. Boy Scouts directed traffic. It was the first time that the pu-noi (little people) had actually started a revolution from below. It was not planned and those that took part had a multiplicity of ideals about what kind of democracy and society they wanted. But the Thai ruling class could not shoot enough demonstrators to protect their regime. It was not just a student uprising to demand a democratic constitution. It involved thousands of ordinary working-class people and occurred on the crest of a rising wave of workers’ strikes.

Success in overthrowing the military dictatorship bred increased confidence. Workers, peasants and students began to fight for more than just parliamentary democracy. In the two months following the uprising, the new royal appointed civilian government of Sanya Tammasak faced a total of 300 workers’ strikes. A central trade union federation was formed. New radical student bodies sprang up. On the 1st May 1975 a quarter of a million workers rallied in Bangkok and a year later half a million workers took part in a general strike against price increases. In the countryside small farmers began to build organisations and they came to Bangkok to make their voices heard. Workers and peasants wanted social justice and an end to long-held privileges. A triple alliance between students, workers and small farmers was created. Some activists wanted an end to exploitation and capitalism itself. The influence of the CPT increased rapidly, especially among activists in urban areas.

As part of the political reform process, in December 1973, the king presided over a hand-picked National Forum (often referred to as the “horse track assembly”, due to its location). This forum, which had members chosen from various professions, was tasked with selecting a new parliament. Kukrit Pramote was chosen as the chairperson of the new parliament when it opened on the 28th December, while Sanya Tammasak remained prime minister. However, this parliament and the Sanya government could not solve the increasing tensions in society between the conservatives and the left or between the rich and the poor[23].

The first democratic elections, since the October 1973 uprising, were held in January 1975. Parliament had a left colouring and government policies reflected a need to deal with pressing social issues. Left-wing parties, such as the New Force Party, the Socialist Party of Thailand and the Socialist Front Party gained 37 seats (out of a total of 269) but did not join any coalition governments. The first coalition government, made up of the Democrat Party and the Social Agriculture Party, was established under Seni Pramote. This right-leaning government announced that it would follow “social democratic” policies. However, the government lost a vote of no confidence in parliament in March 1975 and was replaced by a new coalition government headed by Kukrit Pramote from the Social Action Party. The new government introduced a number of pro-poor policies, including job creation schemes. This government presided over a period of increasing social tensions. Strikes, demonstrations and political assassinations occurred on a regular basis. Eventually parliament was dissolved in January 1976 and elections held in April. The April elections resulted in a swing to the right. This was due to a combination of factors, such as intimidation of the left and a right-ward shift among the middle classes who were afraid of radicalism.

The student movement after 14th October 1973

It is important to remember that the 14th October 1973 was the peak of the anti-dictatorship struggle which then developed into a broader struggle for social justice and socialism among students, workers and small farmers. It is interesting to consider the activities of newly radicalised young people who later became known as the October People (Kon Duan Tula). It is this generation which has played an important leadership role in both the people’s movements and in sections of the establishment political parties in present day Thai society.

In the period leading up to the overthrow of the military on the 14th October 1973, many student centres and coalitions were formed in various regions and different educational institutions. However, there were attempts to coordinate the actions of these different groups under a single umbrella: the National Student Centre of Thailand. This and other student centres became even more active in various social campaigns, often as part of the triple alliance with workers and peasants. Nevertheless, the movement was dogged by personal and political splits. Seksan Prasertkul, one of the 14th October student leaders, formed the Free Tammasart Group and Tirayut Boonmi, another student leader from the 14th October uprising, formed the People for democracy Group[24]. These so-called “independent groups” felt that the National Student Centre leadership was too conservative, often refusing to mobilise students on important issues like the successful protest against the return of the ousted dictator Field Marshal Tanom Kitikajorn in 1974. For this reason these various independent groups formed an alternative centre called the “National Coalition Against Dictatorship” with Sutam Saengpratoom as secretary [25].

One important area of activity for students was the struggle against US imperialism and for so-called “Thai independence”. The military dictatorship had been a close ally of the United states during the Cold War, sending token numbers of Thai troops to support the US in both Korea and Vietnam. In 1973 there were 12 US military bases in the country, with 550 war planes and thousands of troops stationed on Thai soil in order to help the US war effort in Indo-China. These bases were legally US territory, a point highlighted by the arrest and execution, by US military court, of a Thai citizen, Tep Kankla, for the murder of a US soldier in December 1973[26] . Apart from this, after the end of the Indo-China war, the US used U-Tapao naval base to attack Cambodia on 14th May 1975, without consulting the Thai government.

The presence of such a large number of US forces, plus what was seen as the economic dominance of US companies in the local economy, seemed to confirm the Maoist analysis by the CPT that Thailand was a “semi-colony” of the USA. After 1973 there was therefore a growing campaign to kick out US bases. This campaign against US bases, which later received a boost from the defeat of the USA in Vietnam, and the resulting new geopolitical consequences, led to Prime Minister Kukrit’s demand in March 1975 that the US withdraw. This was backed up by a massive anti-US base demonstration on 21st March 1976. The US finally withdrew its troops from Thailand shortly after this[27].

Another important area where the student movement was active was in the area of human rights and democracy. Students campaigned to push for more democratic amendments to the 1974 constitution and they led struggles against state repression. On 24th January 1974 government security forces attacked and burnt the village of Na Sai in the north-eastern province of Nong Kai [28]. Three villagers were killed by government forces. Initially the government claimed that this atrocity was carried out by Communists, but Tirayut Boonmi, was able to prove in public that it was the work of the government. Pressure from the student movement finally forced the government to admit the crime and take steps to pay the villagers compensation. General Saiyut Kertpol, head of the Communist Suppression Unit, was also forced to admit that past government policy had been “too harsh”.

The Na Sai incident was followed by the exposure of another state crime in the southern province of Patalung. It is estimated that between 1971 and 1973 government forces had systematically arrested and interrogated villagers, resulting in more than 3000 deaths. In what became known as the Red Drum (Tang Daeng) incident, villagers were killed and then burnt in petrol drums or pushed out of helicopters[29].

In addition to exposing state repression, student volunteers were also involved in the rather patronising state-sponsored campaign to “spread democracy to the rural people” in the summer vacation of 1974[30]. However, this campaign did provide an opportunity for thousands of urban students to observe social problems in the villages at first hand, thus strengthening future cooperation between students and small farmers in the triple alliance. This helped to broaden the activities of students into areas of social justice and they became more left-wing.

On the cultural front, students campaigned for art and literature to be more in tune with the lives of ordinary people. Often this was influenced by narrow and mechanical ideas of Stalinist “socialist realism”, which could be found in the writings of Jit Pumisak[31]. An exhibition titled “burning literature” condemned conservative books which served “feudal” interests. At the same time there was a flourishing of new “literature for the people”, “theatre for the people” and the birth of the “songs for the people” movement, which sometimes added Thai words to tunes from Western protest songs from the same period. A campaign of criticism was also waged against the elitist and competitive education system. This campaign resulted in a government committee being established in 1975 in order to reform education.

One important organisation which came out of these cultural activities was the Coalition of Thai Artists, which held a street exhibition of “people’s art” along Rachadamnern Avenue in October 1975. These artists and art students were also very important in producing agitational posters and banners used in campaigns against the influence of the military and in campaigns against US bases. In many ways the artist movement was more libertarian than many of the student organisations, being influenced by more radical ideas from the 1960s movements in the West, alongside the influence of the CPT[32]. After the 6th October 1976 bloodbath, many artists went to the jungle, but fought to maintain their free spirit amid the narrow Maoist ideology of the CPT.

Student politics within universities and colleges

An important consequence of the successful 14th October 1973 uprising against the dictatorship was the establishment of left-wing student political parties in universities and colleges. These contested elections for the student union. Some won immediate victories, while others gradually increased their influence at the expense of the right-wing. By mid-1976 most universities and colleges had left student bodies, including Kasetsart University, which was previously believed to be a bastion of the right. Once the victory of the left parties was complete, the student body was able to unite once more around the National Student Centre with Kriangkamol Laohapairote [33] as secretary. One effect of the victory of the left in universities and colleges was the temporary demise of the seniority (SOTUS) system[34], as students became more egalitarian and active in trying to change society. Student summer camps were organised in the countryside in order to share experiences with poor villagers and less emphasis was placed on inter-university football matches.

Despite the fact that the various left-wing student parties in various institutions were more or less autonomous in formal structure, they shared the same general ideology which was heavily influenced by the Maoism of the CPT. This can be seen by their concentration on countryside activity, although many groups also worked among urban workers[35]. One prominent labour organiser who was close to the CPT was Terdpum Jaidee. Thirty years later he became a supporter of the semi-fascist Peoples Alliance for Democracy (PAD) and an ardent royalist.

The student movement was basically a socialist movement which shared the CPT analysis of Thailand being a semi-feudal semi-colony of the USA. The armed struggle by the CPT in the countryside was seen as the key to building a better society. Many left-wing student groups also took the side of the CPT leadership in ideological disputes with people like ex-CPT leader Pin Bua-orn. Pin was against the CPT adopting armed struggle and wanted to continue the original Stalinist/Maoist cross-class alliance policy of working with the military dictators, which the CPT had advocated during the Pibun and early Sarit dictatorship period[36]. Student groups also became involved in taking the side of the CPT leadership over the faction fights taking place in China towards the end of the Cultural Revolution[37].

The influence of the CPT within the student movement was no secret conspiracy. It reflected the rise of left-wing ideas among many people in Thai society. In practice this CPT influence in the student body came from three main sources. First, the CPT was the only left-wing political party which had a coherent analysis of Thai society and a clear plan of action. This naturally meant that many of those who were looking for answers would turn to the CPT, especially after the victory of various communist parties in neighbouring Indo-China. Second, some CPT youth members (Yor) and full members (Sor) were activists within the student movement. They had either been recruited while at secondary school or were recruited after they entered university. Recruitment was a long drawn out process, involving small secret study groups organised among contacts, but it helped to educate activists in CPT ideology. Third, articles explaining CPT political strategy were printed in student newspapers such as Atipat and the CPT radio station, The Voice of the People of Thailand, was very popular among many people at the time.

It would be quite wrong to assume that student leaders, even those who were party members, were receiving direct orders from the CPT central committee. For a start the party leaders were far away in the countryside and also the party never saw the urban struggle as being central to the overall Maoist revolutionary strategy. For this reason, it can be assumed that in the period between 1973 and 1976, student activists exhibited a high degree of self-leadership and organisation, while accepting the overall political analysis of the party. This is confirmed by many student activists from that period[38].

As already mentioned, between 1973 and 1976 left-wing student parties gradually won elections. At Tammasart University the Palang Tum Party (Moral Force Party) was established just before the October 1973 uprising and it won a number of subsequent elections, standing Pirapon Triyakasem as its candidate. At the Ramkamhaeng Open University, the Saja-Tum Party (Moral Truth Party) made gradual headway against a more middle of the road party, winning leadership of the student body by 1975. At Chulalongkorn University the Chula Prachachon Party (Chula Peoples Party) won elections in 1976 against a right-wing party and Anek Laotamatat[39] became student president. At Mahidol and Sri-Nakarin left-wing parties also won elections and at Chiang Mai Chaturon Chaisang[40] from the Pracha Tum Party (Peoples Morals Party) won the student union election in 1976.

The gradual shift towards left-wing politics among students throughout the period 1973-1976, until the left became the main influence, reflected the polarisation between left and right that was taking place in wider society. From this we can see why the ruling class became determined to use whatever force necessary in order to destroy the left-wing student movement and their attempts came to fruition with the 6th October 1976 bloodbath at Tammasart University.

The 6th October 1976 bloodbath

In the early hours of 6th October 1976, Thai uniformed police, stationed in the grounds of the National Museum, next door to Thammasat University, destroyed a peaceful gathering of students and working people on the university campus under a hail of relentless automatic fire[41]. At the same time a large gang of ultra-right-wing “informal forces”, known as the Village Scouts[42] , Krating-Daeng and Nawapon, indulged in an orgy of violence and brutality towards anyone near the front entrance of the university. Students and their supporters were dragged out of the university and hung from the trees around Sanam Luang; others were burnt alive in front of the Ministry of “Justice” while the mob danced round the flames. Women and men, dead or alive, were subjected to the utmost degrading and violent behaviour.

From before dawn that morning, students had been prevented from leaving the campus by police who were stationed at each gate. Inside the sealed university campus, violence was carried out by heavily armed police from the Crime Suppression Division, the Border Patrol Police and the Special Forces Unit of the Metropolitan Police[43]. Unarmed women and men students who had fled initial rounds of heavy gunfire to take refuge in the commerce faculty building were chased out at gunpoint and made to lie face down on the grass of the football field, without shirts. Uniformed police fired heavy machine guns over their heads. The hot spent shells burnt the skin on their bare backs as they lay on the field. Other students who tried to escape from campus buildings via the rear entrance to the university were hunted down and shot without mercy. State security methods on the 6th October 1976 bear an horrific similarity to methods used by the Thaksin government in the 2004 crackdown at Takbai in southern Thailand, where half a dozen unarmed protesters were shot and 87 prisoners later murdered in the backs of army lorries during transportation to an army camp.

The actions of the police and right-wing mobs on 6th October were the culmination of attempts by the ruling class to stop the further development of a socialist movement in Thailand. The events at Thammasat University were followed by a military coup which brought to power one of the most right-wing governments Thailand has ever known. In the days that followed, offices and houses of organisations and individuals were raided. Trade unionists were arrested and trade union rights were curtailed. Centre-left and left-wing newspapers were closed and their offices ransacked. Political parties, student unions and farmer organisations were banned. The new military regime released a list of 204 banned books[44]. University libraries were searched and books were confiscated and publicly burnt. More than 100,000 books were burnt when Sulak Sivarak’s book shop and warehouse was ransacked. Apart from obvious “communists” like Marx, Engels, Lenin, Mao or Jit Pumisak, authors such as Pridi Panomyong, Maxim Gorky, Julius Nyerere, Saneh Chamarik, Chai-anan Samudwanij, Charnvit Kasetsiri and Rangsan Tanapornpan appeared on the list of banned books.

The Thai ruling class’ desire to destroy the further development of the socialist movement, especially in urban areas, can be understood by looking at the political climate at the time. Three years earlier, the 14th October 1973 mass movement had overthrown the military, which had been in power since 1957. However, the establishment of parliamentary democracy on its own did not begin to solve deep-rooted social problems. Therefore the protests, strikes and factory occupations intensified. At the same time the USA was losing the war in Vietnam. By 1975 Communist governments were in power in neighbouring Laos, Vietnam and Cambodia and in Thailand rural insurgency by the CPT was on the increase. The events of the 6th October and the subsequent coup were not a simple return to military rule. They were an attempt to crush the popular movement for social justice, to eradicate the left and strengthen the position of the elite. It was not the first or last time that the Thai elite resorted to violence and military coups to protect their interests.

It would be wrong to think that there was a detailed and tightly coordinated plan, by the entire Thai ruling class, which led to the 6th October events. Conversely, it would also be wrong to suggest that only one or two individuals or groups were behind the crushing of the left. What happened on the 6th October was a result of a consensus among the entire ruling class that an open democratic system was allowing “too much freedom” for the left. However, it is likely that there were both areas of agreement and disagreement within ruling circles on exactly how to act and who should act. The general view that “extra-parliamentary methods” would have to be used, led to the uncoordinated establishment of various right-wing semi-fascist groups.

The role of the king in the 6th October events has been discussed by many writers. Most express the view that the king helped to pave the way for a coup, in a broad sense, by showing open support for the extreme right-wing[45]. What we know is that the royal family openly supported and encouraged the Village Scout movement. In addition, the king was close to the Border Patrol Police who established the Village Scouts and also played a central part in the killing at Thammasat. Finally the king and queen supported the return of ex-dictator Tanom by paying him a visit soon after he arrived back in Thailand, just before the bloody events.

The general picture of the ruling class that emerges during 1976 is one of a degree of unity on the need to crush the left, but disunity on how to do so, and, much more importantly, who would rule the country. This had important consequences on the evolution of the dictatorship post-1976. The immediate impact of the bloodbath at Thammasat was that thousands of students went to the countryside to join the struggle against the Thai state led by the CPT. However, within one year the extreme right-wing government of Tanin Kraiwichien was removed from power. Those gaining the upper hand within the ruling class were convinced, not only that the nature of the 6th October crackdown, but also the way the Tanin government was conducting itself, was creating even greater divisions and instability within society and helping the CPT to grow. Not surprisingly, those army officers who advocated a more liberal line were those actually involved in front-line fighting against the CPT. They understood, like so many military personnel in this position, that the struggle against the left must involve some kind of political settlement in addition to the use of force. As General Prem Tinsulanon, prime minister from 1980-1988, observed in an ITV program in 1999:

The students joined the Communists because they were brutally suppressed. The way to undermine the Communists was to establish justice in society.

Three years after 1976, the government decreed an “amnesty” for those who had left to fight alongside the communists. This coincided with splits and arguments between the student activists and the conservative CPT leaders. By 1988 the student activists had all returned to the city as the CPT collapsed. Thailand returned to an almost full parliamentary democracy, but with one special condition: it was a parliamentary democracy without the left or any political parties representing workers or small farmers. Previously, left-wing political parties, such as the Socialist Party, the Socialist Front and Palang Mai (New Force) had won 14.4% or 2.5 million votes in the 1975 general election. These parties won many seats in the north and north-east of the country and outside the arena of legal politics, the CPT also used to have enormous influence. Now the organised left was destroyed.

The problem with the CPT’s Maoist strategy was that it more or less abandoned the city to the ruling class. The CPT argued that since the cities were the centre of ruling class power, a communist victory in Thailand would only come about by surrounding the cities with “liberated zones”. The fact that the ruling class was planning some kind of urban crackdown against the left before 6th October was not a secret. The CPT started to remove key activists out of Bangkok well before the crackdown actually occurred. Their Maoist strategy meant that they never at any time planned to resist a right-wing backlash in Bangkok. Not only did the CPT’s politics fail to defend the left in Bangkok in 1976, it also ensured massive demoralisation among the left when international events began to undermine Stalinism and Maoism as a world current. On the 20th anniversary of the 6th October, a large gathering of former students and former communists came together at Thammasat for the first time since the massacre. Not one speaker from the platform at any of the meetings believed that there was still a future for socialism. The present revival of the Thai left today[46] has had to depend on an anti-Stalinist, Trotskyist tradition which sees the various “communist” regimes which once existed as being the opposite to socialism and Marxism[47].

The experience of students in the jungle with the CPT

There are many explanations for the exodus of the urban students from the CPT strongholds in the jungle in the early 1980s, which eventually contributed to the collapse of the party. CPT old-timers argue that the students were not “true revolutionaries”, that they “had petty-bourgeois tendencies” and that they only went to the jungle to flee the crackdown in the city. The Thai establishment argues something quite similar. It claims that the students were forced to flee the city and that most of them were not really communists (because presumably, no sane, educated person would be a communist). It also argues that the CPT was an “alien” organisation, dominated by “Chinese ideology”. According to the mainstream explanation, the students only flirted with left-wing ideas in their misguided youth. This idea seems to be supported by student activists themselves, especially those who now hold important positions in society and wish to renounce their past. However, these explanations for the collapse of the CPT are very superficial.

Communist ideas from the CPT had a huge impact among young urban activists in the period 1973-1976. This is hardly surprising for two reasons. First, the conservative ideology of “nation, religion and monarchy” had been the mainstay of the military dictatorships for decades. It went hand in hand with corruption at the top and poverty at the bottom of society. Anyone wanting to build a better world would hardly be looking towards ruling-class ideology for solutions. Second, the 1970s were a period when communist parties throughout the world were achieving victories against imperialism and it seemed that alternative societies were being built by communists in many countries. Therefore, despite later denials, the vast majority of students and young activists of the 1970s regard themselves as left wing and they were dedicated to taking part in the socialist transformation of Thai society.

Thousands do not leave their homes and families to take up the armed struggle for justice in the countryside just for the excitement or as part of a fashion. Life in the jungle strongholds of the CPT was tough. They had to fight the army, to grow their own food and to live in primitive conditions. In the rainy season, often their clothes would never dry, gradually growing mouldy. Food was monotonous[48] and fraternisation between the sexes was frowned upon[49]. For this reason it is fair to say that the students who joined the CPT ranks after 6th October 1976 were totally committed to the struggle for socialism. Naturally, this meant different things to different people. Those who were less committed, or had pressing personal reasons, stayed behind in the cities. Despite the terrible events of 6th October 1976, it would have been possible for most students to just keep their heads down and cease to engage in politics. Many did precisely this and very few students were rounded-up and killed in Bangkok after 6th October.

The real reason for the exodus from the CPT camps a few years later was not a lack of commitment on the part of the students. It was the failure of the CPT to develop a credible strategy for the Thai socialist revolution and a failure to relate to the new generation of young activists who joined in the 1970s. This has everything to do with the Stalinist-Maoist politics of the party. First, the emphasis on rural armed struggle in Thailand did not fit reality. Since 1932 all significant social changes have taken place in the cities. Even rural movements come to the city to demonstrate. In addition to this, the struggle by small farmers was and still is important in terms of defending social justice for the poor, but it is fundamentally a defensive and conservative struggle to survive, not a struggle for a future society. Second, the authoritarian nature of Stalinist and Maoist parties meant that the CPT leadership were afraid to agitate among students in such a way as to let them lead their own struggles. The students were certainly capable of self-leadership. After all, they were key actors in overthrowing the military dictatorship in 1973. The main experience of student activists in the jungle with the CPT was a stifling of all original ideas and a lack of any freedom to debate[50]. This helped to destroy the momentum of the urban movement that went to the jungle after the initial honeymoon period following October 1976.

Finally, the CPT’s Maoism backfired when the Chinese government turned its back on the party in order to build a relationship with the Thai ruling class. The resulting demoralisation among activists has helped to shape the politics of the October People and the Thai social movements today.

As the CPT collapsed and the October People returned to open society, the political regime in Thailand was gradually liberalised throughout the 1980s. Partly this was carried out from above under pressure from the revolts of the 1970s, but a mass uprising against a new military dictatorship in 1992 helped to hasten the process. The 1997 economic crisis was a further stimulus for change. Two important results of this change were the constitution of 1997 and the rise of TRT.

The struggle carried out by all those urbanites who joined the CPT after 1976 and the massive polarisation of Thai society was not totally in vain. The ruling class was forced to acknowledge that it could not win the battle against the pu-noi by violence and coercion alone. By the early 1980s they were forced, by the level of resistance, to liberalise the political system. This occurred especially under the rule of Prime Minister Prem Tinsulanon. The ruling class came to a compromise with the urbanites who had fled to the hills and with the working class who stayed behind in Bangkok to fight the bosses. The result was a form of bourgeois parliamentary democracy which did not challenge the interests of the elite. “Money politics” in parliament became more important to maintaining the interests of the bourgeoisie than military power as the economy expanded.

The `post-communism’ shift in ideology

The collapse of the CPT resulted in a shift in ideology within the people’s movement and the academic community towards Autonomism, post-modernism and third way reformism[51]. This happened throughout the world, to a greater or lesser degree, after the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War. Yet, very few people in the Thai people’s movement would admit to being autonomists, post-modernists or third way reformists. This is because the rejection of theory by these two political currents encourages people to deny any political affiliation. Thai activists often articulate various international ideologies while believing that they are uniquely home grown.

Autonomism

Autonomism, as practiced in Thailand, is a form of “localist” anarchism (Chumchon-Niyom)[52]. It is dominant among the leadership of the Assembly of the Poor and among other rural social movements. It is a political ideology that rejects the state, not by smashing it or overthrowing it, but by ignoring the state in the hope that it will become irrelevant. The aim is self-organisation at community level. Autonomists reject the building of political parties and place activity above political theory. It has many similarities with the ideas expressed by autonomists in other continents, such as John Holloway, Toni Negri and Michael Hardt [53].

The British Marxist Chris Harman explained that the strength of autonomism is that it celebrates initiative and creativity from below and it seeks to reject compromise with the system[54]. This was seen very clearly in the fact that the Assembly of the Poor refused to support the Peoples Alliance for Democracy (PAD). The main reason was that they were worried about being dominated by conservative forces inside the PAD, while still being willing to oppose Thaksin. They were also against the call by the PAD, in April 2006, for the king to appoint a new government under section 7 of the 1997 constitution. After the 19th September coup, the Assembly of the Poor also took a principled position against the junta.

On the negative side, autonomists rarely express their views theoretically and this is a weakness in fighting neoliberalism and other ideologies of the ruling class. Again the Assembly of the Poor is a prime example. They warn against the use of theories because many of their activists have had bad experiences with the CPT, which dictated the “ideological line” from above[55]. When autonomists do use theory, such as in the case of Michael Hardt, Toni Negri and John Holloway, they are often highly abstract or they claim their theories are uniquely local. The tendency to reject practical theory means that many autonomists capitulate to right-wing reformism, thus compromising with neoliberalism and the market.

The capitulation of autonomists to neoliberalism and right-wing reformism is due to its de-politicising effect. An important factor is the under estimation of the power of the state. The refusal to build a party of activists, with a united theory and program, means that they turn their back on political agitation and debate within the movement. Nor is it deemed necessary to challenge the prevailing ideology of the ruling class, since each group merely acts autonomously in its own community. Without a serious people’s movement political challenge to TRT, the “tank liberal” argument that there was no alternative to the 19th September coup, appears more attractive to a wide audience in the movement.

Autonomist currents in the movement today support “direct democracy”, such as self-organised local community action[56]. This is preferred to the failed “representative democracy” of the parliamentary process. Autonomists claim that “direct democracy” or “direct action” can pressurise the state without the need to go through parliamentary representatives or political parties[57]. They reject the building of political parties and reject the aim of seizing state power, preferring instead to organise networks of autonomous single-issue movements which can turn their back on the state[58].

The problem is that by rejecting a more democratic model of exercising “representative peoples power”, autonomists are forced to accept the class power of the capitalist state in practice. The Assembly of the Poor advertises that it has no wish to take state power, being content to negotiate directly with the government to solve villagers’ problems and Prapart Pintoptang had a brief flirtation with the 2006 military junta. Autonomists also reject the model of “participatory democracy” built into the recallable representative systems invented by the international working-class movement in times of struggle. The Paris Commune of 1871, the Russian soviets before the rise of Stalin, or the various workers’ and community councils built through struggle in Poland, Iran and Latin America over the last 40 years are good examples.

In the early days of TRT, Wanida and the Assembly of the Poor had some illusions in Thaksin’s party, welcoming its election victory. Niti Eawsriwong[59] is one of many academics who rejects “representative democracy”, or the present parliamentary system. Instead he favours “direct democracy”. However, in January 2005 Niti argued for a vote for capitalist opposition parties against TRT[60]. The lesson is that “direct democracy” cannot be applied in practice without first dealing with the class power of the capitalist state. To do this we need political parties of workers and peasants. This has been a constant Marxist criticism of anarchism or autonomism.

By rejecting a formal political party in favour of loose networks, autonomists also fail to build internal democratic structures for their own organisations. The Assembly of the Poor is thus led by unelected NGO activists rather than by poor farmers themselves[61]. The rejection of “representative democracy” is applied to the internal workings of the movement with dire consequences. Social movements in Thailand are dominated by unelected Pi-liang (NGO “nannies” or advisors) and Pu-yai (NGO “elders”). There is a real problem with the lack of self-leadership among activists and a lack of internal democracy. Young people are expected to respect and listen to their elders in the movement and positions are never up for election. In addition to this, there is the problem of over funding by NGOs, which discourages the building of self-reliant movements which collect membership fees[62]. Individuals who hold the purse strings also dominate the movement by threatening to cut off funds. Many of the participants at the Thai Social Forum in 2006 received funds to attend[63].

Post-modernism

Post-modernism is still popular in Thai universities, despite its decline in other parts of the world. Post-modernism rejects all “grand narratives” or ideologies and is therefore also de-politicising. For post-modernists, individual liberation comes about in the mind, at abstract levels. Post-modernism is the academic sister of autonomism, a theoretical expression of opposition to dictatorship, power and organisation.

Like autonomism, the rise of post-modernism is a product of disillusionment with Stalinism plus a severe demoralisation about the possibilities of struggle, but it can only really exist among academics due to its highly abstract nature[64]. Post-modernism claims to “liberate” humanity by the constant questioning and rejection of grand narratives or big political theories. They therefore reject a class analysis of society and reject Marxism, while also claiming to reject neoliberalism and capitalism. In practice, however, they often end up by accepting the dominant ideology of the market or remaining neutral and passive in the face of a neoliberal onslaught on society.

However, like autonomists, post-modernists have their plus sides. Rejection of authoritarianism and grand narratives by the Midnight University has meant that they rejected the PAD call for the king to appoint a government under Section 7 and that they opposed the 19th September coup, just like the Assembly of the Poor. The Midnight University website was temporarily closed down by the junta because of this. Both the Assembly of the Poor and the Midnight University have also consistently opposed Thai state repression in the Muslim south. This is because they reject narrow-minded nationalism.

Autonomism and post-modernism discourage a class analysis of society. Because of this, there is a great deal of misunderstanding and under-estimation of TRT “populism” among the people’s movement. A class analysis of populism explains that it arises, both from pressure from below, and from the needs of the capitalist class simultaneously. Many in the Peoples Movement saw TRT’s populist measures, such as the 30 baht health care scheme and the various village funds, as a cruel hoax[65]. Many also claim that such policies led to a “patron-client” type of dependency by villagers upon the state. This is nothing more than the old neoliberal criticism made against “nanny state” welfare projects made by the likes of Margaret Thatcher and others.

In short, the people’s movement criticism of TRT was made from the right-wing free-market position adopted by such neoliberals as Ammar Siamwalla and Tirayut Boonmi, rather than from a left-wing pro-poor position[66]. This kind of analysis fails to grasp that TRT populism actually delivers real benefits to the poor. Low-cost health care for all is a real concrete benefit for millions who were previously uninsured and who faced huge financial worries about sickness and ill health. Populism, carried out by a blatantly capitalist party like TRT could not work otherwise.

At a people’s movement Forum in Bangkok, the post-modernist academic Somchai Preechasilapakul, from the Midnight University, stated that the trade union fight against electricity privatisation was nothing to do with the interests of villagers. Yet villagers use electricity and suffer from neoliberalism in other forms.

Another example of the acceptance of the free market can be seen in publications by the NGO-Coordinating Committee which accepted that free trade could be beneficial[67]. Publications circulating at people’s forums also advocate separation of electricity generation and distribution in the interests of competition. Even worse was the illusion that an “independent” commercial television company could be genuinely independent of powerful interests. This was the dominant belief in the people’s movement in the mid-1990s when ITV was established. These illusions were shattered when large capitalist corporations took over the television station.

Thai autonomists and post-modernists cannot put their theories into practice when confronted by the capitalist state and the capitalist free market. When autonomism and post-modernism prove to be powerless in defending the interests of the poor, in the face of attacks from the free market and the state, autonomists and post-modernists fall back into pessimism and lose all faith in fighting for any reforms. Squeezing modest concessions out of the capitalist class becomes an “impossible dream”. This is the same justification for right-wing social democracy adopting the “third way” or the capitulation to neoliberalism.

Single-issue activism is one of the main weaknesses of the Thai people’s movement. In nearly every major forum or grouping, the social movements and NGOs are organised into separate “issue networks”. NGOs also encourage single-issue struggles as they fit with project funding. Autonomism goes hand in glove with the single-issue politics of the NGO movement. They mobilise their own groups to attend meetings and to carry out actions without publicity. This can be seen in the way that the Assembly of the Poor never tried to agitate for solidarity action among other groups and the way in which people’s assembly meetings were organised without any publicity. The result is always that new groups of people are not drawn into activity and little political education takes place among the movement. What is more, the mass base of many autonomist social movements was often built solely on trying to solve single-issue problems in the short term. When the TRT government stepped in to solve some of these problems, in a much more efficient manner and with the resources of the state behind it, the social movements and NGOs lost much their non-political mass base[68]. Today the Assembly of the Poor is a mere shadow of what it was in the mid 1990s.

The fragmentation of social analysis, which goes hand in hand with single-issue activism, is also a reflection of the way in which knowledge and consciousness is fragmented under capitalism in order to hide class power relations[69]. Advocates of the so-called “new social movements” argued that non-class single-issue campaigns were the modern, post-Cold War methods of struggle[70]. Yet international anti-capitalist movements and social forums realised that overcoming narrow single-issue struggles was central to strengthening the movement as a whole. Only by having a full political picture of society can we build a new and better world.

Single-issue activism can have benefits in temporarily uniting large numbers of people of different political beliefs behind a particular campaign, such as opposition to war or opposition to dictatorship. However, sooner or later political analyses and debates come to the fore when discussing the strategies and tactics to push the movement forward. Unfortunately single-issue activism in the Thai people’s movement is not generally about large temporary campaigns, the anti-FTA campaign being an exception. Most of the time single-issue activism is about long-term struggles by social movements dealing with HIV, dams, land, power plants or Indigenous rights etc. Each “problem network” (Krua-kai Bunha) acts independently and has no overall analysis that can link all the people’s movement issues together. Cross-issue solidarity does take place, but it is weak because it is based on “good will”, stemming from putting all the issues together in meetings without actually linking them theoretically. Good will is different from joint struggles based on an understanding of the common political roots of most problems. It is rather like placing each group’s problem files on one table together, rather than explaining that the various problems share the same root cause. A good example of this is the fact that HIV campaigners do not understand why the workings of capitalism, which make HIV/AIDS a problem due to low health funding and drug patents, can also oppress gays, drug users and young peoples’ sexuality, through family morality [71].

The Thai Social Forum (TSF) in October 2006 attempted to go some way in correcting the problem of single-issue activism by organising “cross-issue plenary meetings”. The organising committee of the TSF made a verbal commitment to encouraging cross-issue discussions. The Peoples Democracy Forum which was later built out of the TSF, in order to push forward political reform, was also verbally committed to such discussions. Yet, most meetings at the TSF were still organised by “issue networks” where activists came to listen to discussions on their own problems without any attempts at building a wider political analysis which could cover all issues together. The public hearings of the Peoples Democracy Forum were also organised in such a way as to encourage single-issue discussions.

Third way reformism and lobby politics

Third way reformism is the dominant ideology of the Thai NGO movement. It is an acceptance of neoliberalism and the free market and the rejection of the state’s ability to transform society for the benefit of the poor[72]. The reasoning behind this belief is, again, the collapse of “communism” and the rapid development of globalisation. Another related reason is the pessimistic view that open class struggle is doomed to failure. In fact it is a rejection of the possibilities of serious reforms by those who would like to reform society. Instead, NGO activists turn to “lobby politics”, lobbying any government, whether democratic or not, and even multinational companies.

Yet, during the TRT government there were many examples of open class struggle. One of the most powerful challenges to Thaksin’s TRT government occurred in 2004 when the Electricity Generating Authority Workers Union staged a long drawn-out protest, including unofficial work stoppages of non-essential workers, at the EGAT headquarters just north of Bangkok. This protest was supported by other trade unions in the public sector and many activists from the people’s movement. It was unique in drawing together the rural movements and the state enterprise unions. The annual May Day march in 2004 was much more militant than previous years, with the majority of workers splitting away from the usual government sponsored event to form a clear political protest. Apart from the issue of privatisation, other issues, such as opposition to the war in Iraq and demands for a woman’s right to choose abortion were also raised, mainly by textile workers.

Apart from the electricity workers, pressure from the Assembly of the Poor protests forced the TRT government to open the sluice gates of the Pak Moon dam for limited periods of time. A massive anti-FTA protest in early 2006, involving thousands of well-organised and highly motivated HIV+ activists, forced the negotiations between Thailand and the USA to be postponed. Finally, it should not be forgotten that many aspects of the TRT government’s populist program reflected pressure from below from the people’s movement.

Maoism: its `de-politicising’ effect and its defeat

Maoism is a de-politicising force. It discourages self organisation, political analysis and education. Members of the CPT were encouraged to read only a few texts written by Mao. Marxist works were ignored. The urban working class was also ignored as a force to change society. After the students went to the jungle, urban-based politics with its intellectual debate, open struggle and experimentation were exchanged for the mind-numbing politics of the most politically backward sections peasantry. Political though and analysis were the preserve of a handful of top cadres. Theory was therefore down-played. When the CPT collapsed, and later, when the authoritarian Thai state was liberalised, the left was slow to recover. The booming Thai economy in the 1990s also played a part in keeping the left weak. Until the economic crisis of 1997, things just seemed to be getting better all the time. The overall effect was that the more the people’s movement rejected theory, the more it came to rely on ruling-class ideology. Acceptance of the market and nationalism are examples.

The 1997 economic crisis

The period leading up to the 1997 economic crisis was a period in which the Thai economy grew at a phenomenal rate. Average GDP growth rates reached 8% and on occasions the annual rate was in double figures. The main beneficiaries, naturally, were the rich. Between 1975 and 1988 the richest 20% of the population increased their share of national wealth from 43% to 55.4%, while the share controlled by the poorest 20% dropped from 6% to 4.5%[73]. Many claims were made about the rapid transformation of Thai society. Following the end of the Cold War, pro-capitalist commentators crowed about the “victory of free-market capitalism” and the demise of socialism and class struggle. These claims were supported by many from the “October People”, the ex-student activists who joined the Communists in the 1970s but who were now successful mainstream politicians and wealthy business men and women.

The economic crisis was a shock to everyone for no one had predicted it. Once the crisis broke, political scapegoats were quickly found in order to protect the status quo. The more neoliberal sections of the big business community, who had always harboured a dislike for the “populist” and “unreliable” New Aspiration Party (NAP), quickly suggested the idea that the crisis was all the fault of Prime Minister Chawalit Yongjaiyut‘s government. This ridiculous message was put across at the “Silom Road Business People’s Protests” in October 1997, where businesspeople and professional people came down from their office blocks to demonstrate. They demanded and soon achieved the resignation of Chawalit’s government. The rich were not, however, very good at demonstrating. Many complained about the heat and others brought their servants to make up the numbers and, no doubt, to serve them with cold drinks and drive them to the protest. Chawalit’s resignation served as a public sacrifice in an attempt to satisfy those elements in society who were discontented with the sudden recession.

Once Chawalit resigned, his government was replaced by a Democrat Party-led coalition under Chuan Leekpai, which seemed to have a more modern and international image, but in fact was little different from the previous government. Nevertheless, the new finance minister, Tarrin Nimmanhaemind, was regarded as a reliable “bankers’ man”. This suggestion was borne out by the fact that the government quickly moved to nationalise the private debts of 56 failed banks and finance companies, which the Chawalit government had already closed, and then proceeded to set aside a further 300 billion baht of state funds to boost the capital of existing banks. In total, the government committed at least 1.2 trillion baht of public money to prop up the banking system.

The same enthusiasm for the use of public finances was not shown towards helping the poor and the unemployed who were worst hit by the crisis. The government passed a bill allowing it to withhold state contribution to the private sector employees’ Social Insurance Fund and repeatedly delayed the implementation of an unemployment benefit scheme. Because there was no unemployment social insurance, no reliable unemployment figures were available. The World Bank estimated that in early 1999 the unemployment figure was 2.6 million or 8% of the workforce. Figures quoted by academics varied from 1.5 million to 4 million. The fact that some government agencies defined “those employed” as anyone who has managed to find at least one hour of paid employment per week could only help the confusion. However, a much more reliable indicator of the effect of the crisis on jobs was the “quality of employment”. According to one survey carried out for the National Economic & Social Development Board, there was a 12.6% decline in earnings rates and a 4.4% decline in hours of employment in the first half of 1998. These were the main factors behind a fall in real incomes of 19.2% over this period[74].

In addition to this, the Health Intelligence Unit observed that there was an increase in the number of underweight children born to women with low incomes during the crisis. Finally, the number of students dropping out of school due to poverty in 1998 was estimated to be around 300,000. The absurd nature of the market system can be seen by the fact that while millions were facing a drop in living standards, the financial sector was “overwhelmed by excess liquidity” which could not be shifted. Investing in the poverty alleviation has never been a profitable business.

The racist explanations of the Asian crisis which talked about Asian corruption, Asian crony capitalism and lack of good governance in Asia, are hardly worthy of serious consideration. This is because before the crisis, the same commentators were using such cultural explanations for the “miracle” Asian economic boom. More serious mainstream explanation for the crisis pin the blame on lack of proper controls over investment after economic liberalisation in the late 1980s[75]. Although it is true that the increased free movement of capital in and out of Thailand made the boom and the crisis more spectacular, these highly visible movements of money were more a symptom of what was happening in the real economy rather than the cause of the crisis. The implication of the neoliberal explanation was also that if proper controls were established, then crises would never occur again. Clearly a review of Western economies shows this to be nonsense.

The Marxist theory of capitalist crisis identifies overproduction and falling rates of profit as the key underlying factors causing a crisis. Both these factors result from the uncontrolled competition for profit found under capitalism. The main cause of the general fall in the rate of profit is the increased investment in fixed capital as compared to the hiring of labour (from which surplus value is extracted). However, the falling rate of profit is only an overall tendency with many countervailing factors. Profit rates can be restored temporarily by increased labour efficiency, increased exploitation or the destruction of competitors[76].

In Thailand over-capacity and falling rates of return were not merely confined to the well-publicised real estate sector, which happened to be the initial trigger for the crisis[77]. overproduction should not merely be seen as a national problem, confined to the Thai economy. The declining rate of Thai exports, one important factor which lead to the run on the baht, was due to overproduction of export products on a global scale.

Overproduction in an unplanned world market and the tendency for a decline in the rate of profit caused a shift in the direction of investment away from industry to real estate and share speculation. It is estimated that in 1996 about half of all investment was property related and this accounted for half of annual GDP growth[78].

The Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky once explained during the 1930s that economic crises do not automatically lead to increased class struggle. The crisis can have contradictory effects. On the one hand many ordinary working people can become very angry about what is happening to their standards of living, especially when they feel that they themselves had no part to play in the creation of the crisis. However, on the other hand, the enormity of the scale of the crisis and the threat of losing their jobs understandably plants fear in the hearts of many workers, leading to passivity and a willingness to believe that current political rulers are the only people capable of solving the crisis.

This contradiction can be seen in the way the Thai working class reacted to the crisis. On the one hand, significant groups of workers were very angry when their annual bonus payments were cut. On one occasion, a Japanese-owned electronics factory was burnt to the ground. At many workers’ protest gatherings after that, someone could be relied upon to scare the management with a cry of “Set fire to the bloody place!” Most of the time it was just a bluff. On another occasion workers at Summit Auto Parts blocked a main highway in response to a bonus cut, but they were eventually physically beaten by riot police, supported by volunteer “emergency rescue workers” and right-wing journalists from The Nation and their struggle was defeated.

A more organised response to a bonus cut came when the workers at Century Textiles occupied their factory in April 1998. Unfortunately even this strong response went down to defeat because of a lack of solidarity action by other workers. Only at the Triumph underwear factory, where women workers had a long tradition of building a strong shop stewards network, were workers able to achieve a respectable wage increase after a 20-day dispute in July 1999. The unique nature of the union organisation at Triumph could be seen by the fact that they felt strong enough to reject NGO advisors.

The rate of inflation, which quickly fell (after an initial rise) as the economy went into recession, was also a factor in determining the will to fight. For those who retained their jobs, a further sharp fall in living standards was avoided by the decline in inflation.

Ideology also played an important role in weakening working-class response to the crisis. Most workers did not feel confident that workers’ self-activity could win real benefits in the climate of a crisis. Part of this feeling came from workers being told that they were weak and in need of pity. This has been the line pushed for many years by the CPT, various labour NGOs and “sympathetic” academics.

The dominant ideological response among organised workers and left-wing intellectuals to the crisis, and to the manner in which governments handled economic policy, was in the form of left nationalism. This ideology was a mirror image of ruling-class nationalism. A quick glance through the new book titles in any Thai book shop during the early part of the crisis would quickly have revealed the growing number of publications on “saving the country from the crisis”. In the main these publications were written by left-of-centre academics, many of them ex-CPT sympathisers, who regarded the 1997 crisis as a serious threat to “national independence”.

The cause of the crisis, according to the nationalists, was the imperialist designs of the G7 powers, especially the United states, in attempting to put the Asian tigers under the yoke of economic colonialism. This could be seen from the proposal that the crisis was merely a crisis of a certain model of capitalism: “fast-track” or foreign-investment-led export orientated manufacturing[79]. Much of the left nationalist analysis also leant heavily on dependency theory, which saw the main divide in the world as between the “northern” industrial countries and the “southern” developing countries[80].

A number of solutions were proposed by the left nationalists; all within the framework of the capitalist system. First, there were the naive and utopian ideas of the “community economists” who believed that the Thai economy could somehow “turn back” to a self-sufficient low technology agricultural economy[81]. Instead of foreign capital and technology, Thailand should use traditional “Thai intellectual resources”. The last time this kind of thing was attempted with any real vigour it resulted in the “killing fields” of Cambodia under Pol Pot. However, no one in Thailand was suggesting that such policies be introduced using Khmer Rouge tactics.

Second, there was a proposal to use Keynesian style economics[82]. It was argued that the state should increase public expenditure in order to stimulate consumption. This strategy was eventually used by TRT after their election victory in 2001.

Election of the TRT government

In the general election of January 2001, TRT won a landslide victory. The election victory was in response to previous government policy under the Democrat Party, which had totally ignored the plight of the rural and urban poor. TRT also made three important promises to the electorate. These were (1) a promise to introduce a universal heath care scheme for all citizens, (2) a promise to provide a 1 million baht loan to each village in order to stimulate economic activity and (3) a promise to introduce a debt moratorium for poor peasants.

The policies of TRT arose from a number of factors, mainly the 1997 economic crisis and the influence of both big-business and some ex-student activists from the 1970s within the party. When considering the “October People” today, it is necessary to divide them into two groups according to the trajectory of their political and social careers. On the one hand many activists became part of the people’s movement that we see today, leading social movements and NGOs which flourished from the 1980s onwards. These people ended up supporting the right-wing PAD and the 2006 coup. They also include people who became neoliberal academics and politicians in the Democrat Party. On the other hand, sections of the ruling class also managed to co-opt a number of ex-activists into the political elite in order to help police the movement or in order to produce populist policies, which won the hearts and minds of the people. This process started with Prime Minister Chawalit Yongjaiyut and his New Aspirations Party, but later rose to a fine art under Thaksin’s TRT.

`October People’ who entered the TRT government

Before the first election victory of TRT, the party made very serious attempts to canvas a wide range of views in Thai society in order to come up with serious policies to modernise the country and deal with a number of social evils, such as poverty[83]. There was a growing sense of frustration and unease about the complacency of the Democrat Party government to act in decisive and imaginative ways in order to pull the country out of the 1997 economic crisis. Ex-student and NGO activists, such as Pumtam Wejjayachai, were recruited to TRT and became important links with the people’s movement. Dr Sanguan Nitayarumpong, who had for a long time been an advocate of a universal health care policy, became an important designer of the new 30 baht health care scheme. October People encouraged the prime minister to meet with social movements like the Assembly of the Poor and they coordinated with movement and NGO leaders in order to solve disputes or dampen down protest actions against the government[84].

Pumtam Wejjayachai was the director of the Thai Volunteer Service, which trained young people to become NGO workers. He became an important leader of TRT and held cabinet posts. He was very close to Thaksin. “October People” like Pumtam used their previous involvement with social movements to the benefit of the government. For example, in June 2005, he intervened to demobolise a protest by 5000 farmers who were angry about lack of debt relief. On the other hand, some NGO activists felt that by talking to him they had the ear of the government.

Pumtam explained that Thailand needed a “dual track” development policy, where “capitalism” and the “people’s economy” (community-based activities) went hand in hand [85]. He believed that you could not use one single economic development or political theory and criticised many on the left who he claimed were “unable to adapt their thinking to the modern world”. He attacked the old left for clinging to idealism, thinking, for example, that capitalists automatically exploited the poor. For such people he had a simple suggestion: go back and live in the jungle like in the old CPT days!

Echoing the terminology of “direct democracy” used by the people’s movement, he argued that TRT was using a “direct (sales) approach” to dealing with the problems of villagers, without having to pass through middle men: political or state representatives. For Pumtam the various government schemes to encourage community entrepreneurs were designed to allow villagers to raise themselves out of poverty. He concluded that NGOs needed to adapt themselves in order to cooperate fully with the government and not hinder its work, because, unlike the government, NGOs could not claim to be elected representatives of the people.

October People argued that by entering the TRT government they had seized state power “without having to eat taro and sweet potatoes in the jungle”, a reference to the previous hardships of life with the CPT. Despite serious accusations of betrayal and turning their backs on the movement, in some ways their alliance with what they regarded as the “progressives and modernising capitalists in TRT”, was not much of a departure from the old CPT cross-class alliance strategy. Many old CPT leaders even suggested that it was necessary to back TRT in order to confront the “old feudal power” in society, in other words, the influence of the palace. Of course, we must not forget that this Stalinist/Maoist cross-class strategy has been a proven failure in such diverse countries as China, Indonesia and Iraq.

Most October People in TRT probably sincerely believed that their actions were benefiting society, but as with trade union bureaucrats throughout the world, as their lifestyles became more and more like the capitalists and high-ranking ministers, with whom they rubbed shoulders, they became ever more distant from the people’s movement. Even more importantly, the strategy of co-opting left-wingers into government had the aim of policing the social movements for the benefit of capital. It is widespread throughout the world. The Philippines after Marcos and various Labour and social-democratic governments in the West are good examples. No matter what they may have believed about being close to the corridors of power, they become more of an instrument of the ruling class than advocates for the poor. TRT was no exception. It was a party of the rich capitalists for the rich capitalists and any reasonable social policies it might have had were designed to buy social peace at the cheapest possible price. For example, the government had no intention of taxing the rich and the large corporations in order to properly fund the health care scheme and its support for the rights of drug multinationals in the Thai-US Free Trade Agreement, undermined the efficiency of the 30 baht health care scheme.

Conclusion

What this chapter has tried to do is to set the present political crisis in an historical context so as to avoid over-emphasis on personalities of political leaders. The main argument is that the present situation cannot be understood without using a class analysis which looks at all sections of society in such an historical context. Without this big picture class analysis, commentators are tempted to explain what is now happening in Thai society by only talking about the “corruption” or “authoritarian nature” of Thaksin and his government while totally ignoring the brutal actions of the conservative elites.

For articles by (or about) Giles Ji Ungpakorn published by Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal, click HERE.

[85] See interview in A Dayweekly (2005) In Thai.

Almost everyone now accepts that the United Nations brought cholera to Haiti last month. The evidence is overwhelming and many experts (including the head of Harvard University’s microbiology department, cholera specialist John Mekalanos) made up their minds to that effect several weeks ago.

Poverty and a lack of rudimentary infrastructure compels much of Haiti’s population to drink untreated water, but there has been no cholera there for decades. Haitians have no experience with – and therefore little resistance to – the disease. All the bacterial samples taken from Haitian patients are identical and match a strain endemic in southern Asia. Cholera broke out in Nepal over the summer, and in mid-October a new detachment of Nepalese UN troops arrived at their Haitian base in Mirebalais, near the Artibonite river. A few days later Haitians living downstream of the base started to get sick and the disease spread rapidly throughout the region. On 27 October, journalists visited Mirebalais and found evidence that untreated waste from UN latrines was pouring directly into an Artibonite tributary.

By early November, Mekalanos couldn’t see “any way to avoid the conclusion that an unfortunate and presumably accidental introduction of the organism occurred” as a result of UN troops. Mekalanos and others also refute UN claims that identification of the source should be a low public health priority.

Probably as a result of UN negligence, more than 1,200 people are already dead and 20,000 infected, and the toll is set to rise rapidly over the coming weeks. So is the number and intensity of popular protests against this latest in a series of UN crimes and misadventures in Haiti in recent years, which include scores of killings and hundreds of alleged rapes.

Rather than examine its role in the epidemic, however, the UN mission has opted for disavowal and obfuscation. UN officials have refused to test Nepalese soldiers for the disease or to conduct a public investigation into the origins of the outbreak. Rather than address the concerns of an outraged population, the agency has preferred to characterise the fresh wave of protests as a “politically motivated” attempt to destabilise the country in the runup to presidential elections on 28 November. Protesters have been met with tear gas and bullets; so far at least three have been killed.

So far, in fact, so normal. The truth is that the whole UN mission in Haiti is based on a violent, bald-faced lie. It says it is in Haiti to support democracy and the rule of law, but its only real achievement has been to help transfer power from a sovereign people to an unaccountable army.

To understand this requires a little historical knowledge. The basic political problem in Haiti, from colonial through post-colonial to neo-colonial times, has always been much the same: how can a tiny and precarious ruling class secure its property and privileges in the face of mass destitution and resentment? The Haitian elite owes its privileges to exclusion, exploitation and violence, and only quasi-monopoly control of violent power allows it to retain them. This monopoly was amply guaranteed by the US-backed Duvalier dictatorships through to the mid 1980s, and then rather less amply by the military dictatorships that succeeded them (1986-90). But the Lavalas mobilisation for democracy, which began in the 1980s, threatened that monopoly and with it those privileges. In such a situation, only an army can be relied upon to guarantee the security of the status quo.

Haiti’s incompetent but vicious armed forces, established as a delegate of US power, dominated the country for most of the 20th century. After surviving a brutal military coup in 1991, Haiti’s first democratically elected government – led by president Jean-Bertrand Aristide – finally demobilised this hated army in 1995; the great majority of his compatriots celebrated the occasion. Lawyer Brian Concannon recalls it as “the most important step forward for human rights since emancipation from France”. In 2000, Aristide was re-elected, and his Fanmi Lavalas party won an overwhelming majority. This re-election raised the prospect, for the first time in modern Haitian history, of genuine political change in a situation in which there was no obvious extra-political mechanism – no army – to prevent it.

The tiny Haitian elite and their allies in the US, France and Canada were threatened by the prospect of popular empowerment, and took elaborate steps to undermine the Lavalas government.

In February 2004, Aristide’s second administration was overthrown in another disastrous coup, conducted by the US and its allies with support from ex-Haitian soldiers and rightwing leaders of the Haitian business community. A US puppet was imposed to replace Aristide, in the midst of savage reprisals against Lavalas supporters. Since no domestic army was available to guarantee “security”, a UN “stabilisation force” was sent in at the behest of both the US and France.

The UN has been providing this substitute army ever since. At the behest of the US and its allies, it arrived in Haiti in June 2004. Made up of troops and police drawn from countries all over the world, it operates at an annual cost that is close to twice the size of Aristide’s entire pre-coup budget. Its main mission, in effect, has been to pacify the Haitian people, and make them accept the coup and the end of their attempt to establish genuine democratic rule. Few Haitians are likely to forget what the UN has done to accomplish this. Between 2004 and 2006, it participated in a campaign of repression that killed more than a thousand Lavalas supporters. It laid siege to the destitute pro-Aristide neighbourhood of Cité Soleil in 2005 and 2006, and has subsequently contained or dispersed popular protests on issues ranging from political persecution and privatisation to wages and food prices. In the last few months the UN has also kept a lid on the growing pressure in the capital, Port-au-Prince, for improvement in the intolerable conditions still endured by about 1.3 million people left homeless after January’s earthquake.

Today, cholera or no cholera, the UN’s priority is to ensure that next week’s elections go ahead as planned. For Haiti’s elite and their international allies, these elections offer an unprecedented opportunity to bury the Lavalas project once and for all.

The political programme associated with Lavalas and Aristide remains overwhelming popular. After six years of repression and infighting, however, the political leadership of this popular movement is more divided and disorganised than ever. Fanmi Lavalas itself has simply been barred from participation in the election (with hardly a whisper of international protest), and from his involuntary exile in South Africa, Aristide has condemned the ballot as illegitimate. Many if not most of the party’s supporters are likely to back its vigorous call to boycott this latest masquerade, as they did in the spring of 2009, when turnout for senate elections was less than 10%. This time around, however, half a dozen politicians associated with Lavalas have chosen to run as candidates in their own name. They are likely to split the vote. Haiti’s people will be deprived of what has long been their most powerful political weapon – their ability to win genuine elections.

Since it is almost guaranteed to have no significant political impact, this is one election that might well achieve its intended result: to reinforce the “security” (and inequity) of the status quo, along with the many profitable opportunities that a suitably secured post-disaster Haiti continues to offer international investors and its business elite. “This will be an election for nothing,” says veteran activist Patrick Elie. Properly managed, it may even provide an opportunity for rightwing presidential candidates like Charles Baker to pursue the goal that has long been at the top of their agenda: restoration, with the usual “international supervision”, of Haiti’s own branch of the imperial army.

And if that comes to pass, then when the UN eventually leaves Haiti its departure may only serve as a transition from one occupying force to another, reversing decades of popular sacrifice and political effort. In the meantime, though, it looks as if the UN may soon have more opportunities than ever before to fulfil its mission in Haiti.

22^nd November 2010, New Delhi – The week-long national action against displacement and land acquisition organized by Sangharsh started in the national capital today. The Dharna and demonstration by thousands of people who have gathered in front of the parliament started at 11 am with lighting of a ‘Mashal’ (traditional torch) amidst songs sung by Narmada Bachao Andolan and Krishak Mukti Sangram Samiti representatives. The main focus of the Sangharsh process is the participation of more than one thousand people from Assam, who are struggling against the dams in Assam and North East India and the forest communities from central India.

The key points raised by some of the prominent activists and experts included:

Medha Patkar: Two key foundational pillars of our national existence are under threat today: Democracy and Constitution. We are here in our effort to save India’s democracy and constitution. People’s very legitimate constitutional rights are being undermined and suppressed by this government. Our struggles are not just about resisting displacement or implementing people’s forest or other resource rights, it is also about the very right to struggle. At Jantar Mantar, the designated place to demonstrate in front of Parliament, the police are telling us that we can do only 9am-5pm dharnas. This is ridiculous for our democracy that we ask desperate struggling people to do their demonstrations like going to work and returning.

Ashok Choudhury: Focus of the UPA Govt is to get these amendments passed in whatever way. This is against democratic values and against the parliament itself. UPA is trying to bye-pass the Parliament and go against the recommendations of the Parliamentary Standing Committee on this. Manmohan Singh’s regime is assuming the role of a property dealer and real estate agent. In every nook and corner of the country, corporate / company mafia is created with active government collaboration to grab land. Even the Central armed forced and state police are being used as private militia of corporations. Before bringing on any law on land, two things should be kept in mind by the government:  1) they have to account for the already grabbed land and provide the citizens of this country with a white paper and 2) Land Rights of all citizens of this country must be ensured, especially where progressive and pro-people legislations like Forest Rights Act entitlements are involved. The people’s movements across the country are united and committed on the issue of Land Acquisition Act and we will make sure that this ‘black’ law (amendments) is not passed by the Parliament of India.

Kuldip Nayyar: Power today is vested in the hands of a few ruling elites and they do not care about the well-being of the millions of Indians. The struggles against varied forms of displacement in our country are a big ‘national shame’ as these are caused by our own democratic government/s.

B.D. Sharma: Gram Sabha’s prior informed consent and not just the present style of ‘consultation’ has to become a must for all development planning in the country. It must be noted that ‘commons’ being acquired and public land grabbed does not result in any livelihood rehabilitation or alternate land based employment for the rural poor.  In reality, the Government of India is converting the agriculturally self-reliant populations of peasants and agricultural workers into landless and livelihood robbed unorganized sector working class.

KB Saxena: In a democracy, land should be oriented towards the livelihood of all people, especially the poorer and marginalized sections. In the current bill (amnedments), there is no control over the powers of the Government. The way the bill is drafted, public interest essentially encompasses the profit interests of the corporations and industrial houses. The 70-30% Land Acquisition norm is arbitrary and against the basic structural understanding of land acquisition for public purpose. Land for Land and no compensation for it will do. Land is source for livelihood and not just property for sale.  Un-utilised, but already acquired (for project based public interest) land should not go to the government and instead should be given back to the land dependent populations.

Thousands marched to the Parliament house today in the afternoon, on the issue of Dams across the sub-continent, especially in Assam, Uttarakhand, Orissa, Andhra Pradesh, Maharshtra, Madhya Pradesh, etc. The rally was led by Akhil Gogoi, Gautam Bandopadhyay, Roma, Vimalbhai, Gumman Singh, Rajnish, and other community leaders and activists from across different movements.

Later in the day, the people’s delegations met with Union Cabinet Minister Shri. C.P. Joshi (Ministry of Rural Development) and opposition leader Smt. Sushma Swaraj and held discussions.

Media team for Sangharsh (Vijayan – 9582862682 / 9868165471, Shalini Sharma (9871076165)

Contact Address: Sangharsh, c/o 6/6, Jungpura B, Mathura Road, New Delhi 110014.

Bipin Chander (09868807129), Madhuresh Kumar (9818905316), 011 – 26680883/ 914 email: napmindia@napm-india.org