The gnawing scandal over Deputy Prime Minister and Defence Minister Gen Prawit Wongsuwon's dubious and expensive watches has become tantamount to the amnesty bill that upended the previous elected government of Yingluck Shinawatra, who is now on the run after being overthrown and subsequently convicted over the rice-pledging scheme. These two cases are ostensibly different but in fact they both spell the beginning of an inexorable end.
Even if Gen Prawit resigns in the coming days, it may not be enough to stop the slide in public support and legitimacy of the government of Gen Prayut Chan-o-cha. Moreover, the two coup-leading generals are fraternal and comrades-in-arms, who seem set to come into and leave power together, not apart. The one fundamental and foreboding difference between the watch scandal and the amnesty bill is the military's role.
Thitinan Pongsudhirak teaches at the Faculty of Political Science and directs the Institute of Security and International Studies at Chulalongkorn University.
In Yingluck's case, the military aided and abetted a street-led movement that represented a coalition of interests against the rise, rule and resilience of Yingluck's brother, Thaksin Shinawatra, and his power clique. This time, the military itself is entrenched in power and dug in for the long haul, with an embedded role in the new constitution that includes a one-third quota in parliament. Unseating the military-supported Prayut-led government will be much harder and fraught with dangers as the power-holders are also the owners and operators of guns and tanks.
Lest we forget, Yingluck's amnesty disaster from October-November 2013 that paved the way for political instability until the May 2014 coup stemmed from a dubious set of circumstances. Just as her government survived past midway of its four-year term and overcame periodic street protests, the lower house expanded on a senate draft that proposed a limited amnesty for minor political offences. Orchestrated in the wee hours of Friday, Nov 1, 2013, the lower house, with a majority under the Pheu Thai Party, voted 310 to 0 to approve a twisted version of the draft that would have exonerated political wrongdoers all the way back to 2006.
Subsequent government manipulation for the senate to drop the draft law came to naught. By then, the genie was out of the bottle, as the People's Democratic Reform Committee was in full swing. At issue was not just the amnesty bill but a wide array of fiscal profligacy, conflicts of interest and corruption, led by the rice-pledging policy. Nothing short of the Yingluck government's demise would suffice. As a result, Yingluck's retreat by dissolving the lower house and calling a new poll did not work, while the military waited for its time to intervene. The four-year anniversary of that putsch, led by Gen Prayut and the National Council for Peace and Order, is just weeks away.
We are still far from all that at this stage. But the omens are not good. Gen Prawit's watches, now numbering more than two dozen and over US$1 million in total, have sparked a public outcry and a loss of trust in the government performance the same way the amnesty bill did to Yingluck. Gen Prayut's military government was supposed to be about reform, reconciliation and anti-corruption. None of these aims has really been achieved. The Thai people tolerated military rule all this time mainly because our country was going through a once-in-a-lifetime royal transition. Now that it has transpired smoothly, the military government's main job is done. If it wants to stay on longer, it will have to earn people's trust.
The watch scandal has done the opposite. That the National Anti-Corruption Commission, headed by a Prawit loyalist, has come out to support the defence minister has only inflamed suspicions. The NACC surmised, for example, that the watches may be fewer but merely used with different straps, and that Gen Prawit needed only to declare his own assets, not the watches if he had indeed borrowed them from friends. Meanwhile, Gen Prawit's outrageous claim that a now-deceased friend lent one watch to him has not gone far in public acceptance.
For his strongman instincts, Prime Minister Prayut has taken Gen Prawit's watch scandal in stride. It is understandable because both generals are as close as comrades can be to real brothers. But it smacks of hypocrisy because Gen Prayut has used absolute power through Section 44 of the interim charter repeatedly to right this and that wrong. In addition, the prime minister has revved up his belligerent tactics and badgering ways at reporters and critics as if he were unassailable and untouchable, a supposedly benevolent dictator morphing into a bullying tyrant.
What is likely to happen now is that the government will try to ride out the storm with or without Gen Prawit's resignation, which may be too little and too late by the time it takes place. In turn, the scandal over the watches has reassembled some of the civil society voices that have been divided in recent years. They still have fundamental differences over how Thailand should proceed in the years ahead but for now they are united in standing against apparent graft.
Protests against the government's long-term plan to stay in power are likely to expand and will increasingly include more than the usual faces of dissent. Yet the various anti-coup voices are likely to play more of a complementary than a decisive role. When those who egged on the coup become the opponents of the coup-wrought government, those in the current military regime are in trouble. These government opponents are likely to prove more consequential and decisive.
