The perils of insulting King Bhumibol

Wednesday, 11th February 2009

Eric Ellis ponders the Thai monarch’s political role as an Australian writer is prosecuted for lèse majesté

Where this is all the more bizarre is that King Bhumibol himself has suggested that the lèse majesté laws are abused. In his 2005 birthday speech, he said, ‘If they get sent to prison (for criticising his rule), I pardon them. If they don’t go to prison, I won’t sue them, because those who violate the King and are punished are not the ones who are in trouble. It would be the King who was in trouble. It is strange, but the lawyers like to send people to prison.’ I’m told that a royal pardon for Nicolaides is in the works, as is the fashion, but that doesn’t address the deeper problem.

So where in all this is the dispassionate wisdom of the elder statesmen of Bangkok’s foreign press corps, the veteran newsmen of the Vietnam war, now comfortably and cheaply ensconced one country removed? A younger one of their number, the BBC’s Jonathan Head, stands accused by a zealous policeman of lèse majesté in his reporting. Surely clear-headed hacks are a collective voice of reason amid this madness?

Perhaps. The doyen of the press corps, 34-years-in-Thailand Associated Press bureau chief Denis Gray, was recently the editor-in-chief of a glossy coffee-table paean to King Bhumibol, which took three years to assemble. The King of Thailand in World Focus — the BBC was reportedly a minor contributor — seems to be a labour of love. Gray told Bangkok’s Nation newspaper last year that ‘His Majesty King Bhumibol has consistently enjoyed the kind of press most world leaders can only command in their daydreams.’ Given that it is illegal to report his foibles, is it any wonder? Gray was among the most vocal of local hacks in criticising the Economist’s recent banned-in-Thailand cover story that examined — and, yes, blamed — the King’s meddling for Thailand’s chronic political and social chaos. After supping with palace Richelieus in October, Gray speculated, apropos of Iraq and Afghanistan, whether it had been so awful for Thais to have been unquestioningly ruled by Bhumibol for 60 years, a reign marked by 15 military coups. Somewhat cold-bloodedly, Gray pointed out that Thailand’s past six months of turmoil, which plunged the country into a deep recession and caused incalculable damage to its image and stability, had claimed just eight Thai lives, ‘the average dead in Mosul on a quiet day’. I’m sure that makes Harry Nicolaides and his family feel a lot better, if not the eight dead Thais.

Ironically then, with Thailand dominating headlines for all the wrong reasons at the worst possible time and threatening to take the region down with it, Bangkok’s Vietnam-hardened foreign press clique will not need reminding that there’s a whiff of ‘Ben Tre logic’ about the way the monarchy’s apologists are protecting their beloved institution: throwing people in jail, silencing the media, blocking the internet, savaging free speech, drawing needless attention to ‘criticism’ no one had read.

Ben Tre is, of course, the Vietnamese village that the US military infamously had to destroy in order to save.