FACTback – Freedom Against Censorship Thailand (Backup)

How Thailand Censors the Internet

No. 72  – Freedom Against Censorship Thailand (FACT)

The details of FACT’s website censorship have finally become clear as Thai ISPs have provided FACT with concrete data, including the email requests from both Royal Thai Police and the ICT Ministry. This is the Thai public’s first real look at the implementation of Internet censorship in Thailand which is usually accomplished by  government-in-secret.

On April 22, 2009 at 16:45:47 from IP address 124.108.115.147 (ESMTP id 25FD7274C64F) email was sent from the Royal Thai Police High-Tech Crime Center <htcc@police.go.th> to Aree Jivorarak, Chief of MICT’s IT Regulation Bureau <aree.mict@yahoo.co.th>. It is certain that a blocklist of banned websites was attached to this email.

On April 23, 2009 06:49:43 Aree forwarded the Police email to 94 ICT contacts at 38 of Thailand’s more than 100 ISPs and mobile telephone providers–CAT Telecom, Pacnet Thailand, ISP-Thailand, Internet Thailand, Advanced Datanetwork Communications [Buddy Broadband], KSC Commercial Internet, True Internet, CS Loxinfo, Telephone Organisation of Thailand [TOT] Public Co. Ltd., Jasmine International Net [JI-net], ANET Internet, Far East Internet Co. Ltd., Milcom Systems [WLANNet], World Internetwork Co. Ltd. [INTERNET Thai], Otaro [you may remember they were the first company to delete the website of Same Sky Books/Fah Diew Kan], 101 Global Co. Ltd., Kirz Communications, TT&T Public Co. Ltd. [Maxnet], Proen Internet, Jasmine International Public Co. Ltd., IT.co.th, Infonet Thailand, Inter University Network [UniNet--are these the people responsible for the censorship at Kasetsart University, Mahidol University and others?], Alltelecom Co., SIPphone Unlimited Communication, TOT ISP, TOT International Gateway, Internet Solution & Service Provider Co. Ltd. [ISP-Thailand], NTT Communications (Thailand) Co., Ltd., BB Broadband Co. Ltd. [Beenet Broadband Internet], CAT Public Co. Ltd., Hutchison CAT Wireless Multimedia Ltd. [formerly Tawan Mobile Telephone Co.], Upload Today, True Corporation Public Co. Ltd., Samart Infonet Co. Ltd. [Samtel], Total Access [DTAC], Advanced Info Service [AIS], CAT Internet Data Center–with a the subject “ส่งต่อ: ขอส่งรายชื่อเว็บไซต์ที่มีผลกระทบต่อความมั่นคง”  (” Fwd: We send a list of sites that affect security”). The email’s message was ”เรียนผู้ isp และผู้เกี่ยวข้อง เพื่อโปรดดำเนินการ อารีย์ จิวรรักษ์ ”  (“to ISPs and whom it may concern to take action”) followed by ”หมายเหตุ: แนบจดหมายที่จะส่งต่อแล้ว” (“Remarks: Forwarded mail attached”) which is obviously the original Police email. (Full details below.) This message may well have been truncated before it was sent to FACT. Why did Aree send this email before seven a.m.? To take advantage of the government’s Emergency Decree?

Although FACT was not made privy to the ICT Ministry’s blocklist itself, as FACT’s website started to be blocked by some ISPs around noon April 25, 2009 and diverted to MICT’s blockpage at http://w3.mict.go.th, it is safe to assume we were on it!

Further information from another ISP states that FACT’s website was included on the list of 71-plus alleged “Red-shirt” websites blocked.

Of course, FACT is not a Red-shirt (nor any-shirt) front nor do we play partisan politics. One can readily see how easily any website can be swept up by government paranoia. This is the first time FACT’s website has been blocked since our inception on November 15, 2006. We are proud to join the ranks of our colleagues at Midnight University, Sept19,org, Same Sky and Prachatai; we wear our censorship as a badge of honour.

FACT will defend anyone censored in Thailand because the public has a basic human right to freedom of information. We will continue to expose secret censorship in Thailand and provide circumvention strategies and software to enable Internet users to ignore the censorship.

When these 71-plus websites were unblocked by MICT on April 26, why was FACT not included in the list? FACT was finally unblocked by at least one ISP by request of MICT at 01:29 on April 28, 2009. We have yet to receive of copy of MICT’s email to ISPs or order FACT unblocked but we know there to be one.

The email exchange also raises further interesting questions. Who surfs the Internet looking for illegal content? Does Internet censorship always start with the Police or are there censors in other agencies such as the ICT ministry and Ministry of Culture? How many people are employed to censor?

This gives a real glimpse into the shadowy, clandestine world of censorship in Thailand. And it shows that F/freedom is under police scrutiny in Thailand.

Nothing has changed at Freedom Against Censorship Thailand (FACT). We didn’t change, edit, alter or deleted any information, postings or comments on our website before, during or after MICT’s censorship.

So why did they censor FACT in the first place and why did they unblock us so rapidly?

The Prime Minister’s Emergency Decree was in effect April 12 – April 23, so it would appear that legally MICT was not required to seek a court order for blocking under the provisions of the Computer Crimes Act 2007 as normal laws were suspended. For those FACT supporters who were hoping FACT would be the first to challenge MICT in court over Internet censorship, it appears MICT acted legally. We’re saving that fight for next time!

The moral of this story: FIGHT BACK! Take back the power! Freedom NOW!

This has been an interesting and valuable exercise because now we know who the censors are and how they operate. If your website in blocked, notify FACT, call all media you can think of (FACT will help with this) and get in touch with MICT at 02-505-6213 <aree.mict@yahoo.co.th> to request immediate unblocking.

Freedom Against Censorship Thailand (FACT)

http://facthai.wordpress.com

—– Forwarded Message —–

From: aree jivorarak <aree.mict@yahoo.co.th>

To: kittipong m <kittipong.m@cattelecom.com>, admin-thix@cat.net.th, schaka@cat.net.th, varin c <varin.c@cattelecom.com>, noc@pacific.net.th, thaweesak@isp-thailand.com, support@isp-thailand.com, csupport@isp-thailand.com, noc@adc.co.th, ktnrg@adc.co.th, nattapong@adc.co.th, top kab <top.kab@hotmail.com>, noc@cat.net.th, noc th <noc.th@pacnet.com>, chakrit@inet.co.th, noc@inet.co.th, ictcensor@ksc.net, ictcensor@trueinternet.co.th, webblacklist@csloxinfo.net, network@trueinternet.co.th, watanyu chu <watanyu_chu@trueinternet.co.th>, boonmak@tot.co.th, sathinut@ji-net.com, boonma1222@yahoo.com, nprattha@jasmine.com, noc@ji-net.com, psanti@anet.net.th, system@anet.net.th, admin@fareast.net.th, surasak@fareast.net.th, patcharabuls@milcom.co.th, tomesiam@hotmail.com, support@internetthai.com, noc@otaro.com, support@101g.com, thana@kirz.com, narits ss <narits_ss@ttt.co.th>, ekkarachu ss <ekkarachu_ss@ttt.co.th>, noc@proen.co.th, taewa k <taewa.k@jasmine.com>, kung@it.co.th, sarayuth@infonetthailand.com, noc@uni.net.th, cindy@alltelecom.co.th, BIOICE1981@hotmail.com, nocworldweb@hotmail.com, info@sipphone.co.th, noc@totisp.net, blockweb@totisp.net, sittiraj tot <sittiraj.tot@gmail.com>, neeyada sirisampandh <neeyada.sirisampandh@pacnet.com>, duangjai s <duangjai.s@jasmine.com>, noc@totiig.net, bkriengsak@cat.net.th, chaiwat@isp-thailand.com, admin issp <admin_issp@isp-thailand.com>, surachaiji ss <surachaiji_ss@ttt.co.th>, matisa@ttt.co.th, issn ss <issn_ss@ttt.co.th>, totnoc@tot.co.th, sarayut@kirz.com, channira no <channira.no@ntt.co.th>, apinan k <apinan_k@beenets.com>, suchok@cat.net.th, suchok@bulbul.cat.net.th, helpdesk@isp-thailand.com, suttiporn y <suttiporn.y@cattelecom.com>, wasan s <wasan.s@cattelecom.com>, chatree@isp-thailand.com, sariya s <sariya.s@hcwml.com>, rommuk p <rommuk.p@hcwml.com>, jirawan c <jirawan.c@jasmine.com>, info@uploadtoday.com, Surparsorn Run <EAK@ISP-THAILAND.COM, ict@tttmaxnet.com, Nongluck p <Nongluck.p@jasmine.com>, prasitchai v <prasitchai.v@samtel.samartcorp.com>, se@samart.co.th, tsutee@jasmine.com, suvinit@proen.co.th, mars2551@yahoo.com, kalant@ntt.co.th, uthai@ntt.co.th, jaroonchai@ntt.co.th, uaichai@anet.net.th, Parinyar@dtac.co.th, uraiporn s <uraiporn.s@jasmine.com>, mubooh@gmail.com, naruepoi@ais.co.th, krits@ais.co.th, premchai@anet.net.th, support@idc.cattelecom.com, phup@csloxinfo.net, aree mict <aree.mict@yahoo.co.th>

Sent: Thu, 23 Apr 2009 06:49:43 +0700 (ICT)

Subject: ส่งต่อ: ขอส่งรายชื่อเว็บไซต์ที่มีผลกระทบต่อความมั่นคง

เรียนผู้ isp และผู้เกี่ยวข้อง เพื่อโปรดดำเนินการ

อารีย์ จิวรรักษ์

หมายเหตุ: แนบจดหมายที่จะส่งต่อแล้ว

______________________________________________

Details of original Royal Thai Police email to MICT:

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[FACT comments: FACT’s signer Junya’s current political analysis is groundbreaking here. Every Thai and expat should read this essay in full.]

The ‘Voter’s Uprising’ that is changing perceptions in THAILAND

Junya Yimprasert

TimeUpThailand: April 2009

http://timeupthailand.blogspot.com/2009/05/voters-uprising-that-is-changing.html

This article was first distributed at a Consultation on ‘Gender, Development and Decent Work: Building a Common Agenda’,
OECD Headquarters, Paris, 27th April 2009.

Some errors in the initial draft have been corrected. A fully accurate account of the chaos and turmoil of the recent weeks, months and years in Thailand is not possible.

FOREWORD

After the September 2006 military coup that deposed Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra we pointed-out that whatever the justifications used to legitimise the Coup, the action of the military was as disloyal as always to the legitimate demands of the people, and we made a simple observation: “. . if there is going to be anything resembling sustainable development in Thailand, the emphasis in Thai politics must be on making sure that the political demands of the new, urban classes are satisfied without further undermining the livelihoods and life-styles of the agrarian community upon which the future of Thailand depends.”.

Part One

80 years of struggle for democracy

End of absolute monarchy 1932

At dawn on 24 June 1932, the tiny People’s Party Khana Ratsadon carried-out a lightning and bloodess coup d’état that abruptly ended 150 years of absolute monarchy under the Chakri Dynasty, and opened the way to democracy for Siam (Thailand), but the road has been painful.

Khana Ratsadon consisted of an elite group of civilians, government officials, aristocrats and military officers. The coup was led by Pridi Phanomyong with Lieutenant Colonel Pibulsongkhram in charge of the military wing. Completely unknown to the people of Siam, within the space of a few hours Siam was changed from an absolute to a constitutional monarchy. The new but military-dominated Government introduced a Charter which did at least aim at some kind of democracy.

Khana Ratsadon came into power with the announcement of six primary tasks:
v To maintain absolute national independence in all aspects, including political, judicial and economic…
v To maintain national cohesion and security…
v To promote economic well-being by creating full employment and by launching a national economic plan…
v To guarantee equality for all…
v To grant complete liberty and freedom to the people, provided that this does not contradict the afore-mentioned principles and…
v To provide education for the people.

Royalist opposition to the coup was strong and the Permanent Constitution that was adopted in December 1932 returned some authority to the Monarchy, but in 1935 King Prajadhipok, tired of the power-play, decided to abdicate.

Thailand’s first ‘democratic’ elections were held in 1933 – for half of the 156-seat so-called People’s Assembly, the other half being appointed. This was the first time that women were given the right to vote and stand for election. (It took until 1949 for Thailand to actually elect a woman MP.)

The 1932 Constitution stated that sovereign power was held by the people of Siam (Thailand), but in practice, after 77 years, such times have still not yet arrived.

Pridi v. Pibun

Pridi Phanomyong is none-the-less regarded as the founder of Thailand’s still nascent democracy. Pridi was born in Ayutthaya in 1900 to a family of well-off rice farmers. He was an exceptionally bright student and completed law school studies in Thailand at the age of 19 and, with the help of a Thai government scholarship, completed doctoral studies in law, economics and politics at the Sorbonne in 1926. In Paris he founded the Khana Ratsadon with a group of Thai that included a young officer called Plaek Pibulsongkhram. In 1927 Pridi returned to Thailand and began a fast rise through the hierarchy.

Plaek Pibulsongkhram, known commonly as ‘Pibun’, was a graduate of the Royal Military Academy in Thailand and in France for advanced military tuition. After the 1932 coup d’état he fashioned himself into the first of a long string of Thai generalissimos, functioning as Thailand’s war-time Prime Minister from 1938 to 1944 and as an acting-Prime Minister or Dictator between 1948 and 1957.

Pridi worked assiduously for the six objectives of the Khana Ratsadon, and in 1934 he and others founded the University of Moral and Political Science, known today as Thammasat University.

Between 1933 and 1946 Pridi served as Minister of Interior, Minister of Foreign Affairs, Minister of Finance, as Regent and as Prime Minister. As Minister of Foreign Affairs (1935 – 38) he oversaw the signing of the treaties that revoked the extra-territorial rights of 12 countries, thus returning Thailand to (almost) complete independence for the first time since the Bowring Treaty with Great Britain in 1855.

In 1938, as Prime Minister, the strongly anti-Chinese Pibun, opposed by Pridi, changed the name of Siam to Thailand.

When the Japanese invaded Thailand in December 1941 and pro-Japan Pibun saw how easily they pushed the British out of Malaysia, Pibun declared war on the Western Allies – in January 1942.

Pridi refused to sign the declaration of war and was removed from Government. With Thailand’s still un-crowned King Ananda Mahidol being schooled abroad, Pridi was given the symbolic rank of Regent, and it was as Regent that the thoroughly anti-Japan Pridi turned to building the underground Free Thai Movement (Seri Thai).

With the war coming to a close the out-of-favour Pibun was ousted by the Seri Thai Movement, and Pridi became Thailand’s 7th Prime Minister in March 1946 – for a few months.

In September 1945 an exhausted Thailand was glad of a visit from their young King-to-be, who was studying law in Switzerland, and in May 1946 they also welcomed-in Pridi’s new Constitution, this time with a fully-elected 176-member House of Representatives.

On 9 June 1946 young Mahidol, still only 21, was found in bed in the Grand Palace in Bangkok with a bullet through his head. Pibun the Dictator accused Pridi the idealist of being involved in the regicide, and Thailand descended into chaos. (The truth behind the death of the King has remained shrouded in mystery. The execution, on grounds of complicity in suspected murder, of two of the King’s servants and a Senator in 1955 satisfied nobody.)

In November 1947 a powerful group of officers (including Sarit Thanarat and Thanom Kittikachorn, both dictators-to-be) staged a coup. Armoured vehicles were dispatched to storm Pridi’s residence, but Pridi was already on his way to Singapore. Pibun, now a self-appointed Field Marshal, tore-up the 1946 Constitution and took-on the role of Prime Minister.

To neutralise the House of Representatives, Pibun replaced Pridi’s 1946 Constitution with a Charter that gave the Monarch a Supreme State Council, a 100-member Senate and many other powers, including the right to declare martial law.

After a failed attempt at a come-back in February 1949, Pridi fled alone to China, leaving behind his pregnant wife, Phoonsuk. This so-called ‘Palace Rebellion’, during which Pridi occupied the Grand Palace, was easily crushed by Pibun, but not without some hours of heavy, street-fighting between Pibun’s military and Pridi’s supporters – who included the Royal Thai Navy. Immediately after the Rebellion four socialist MPs (ex-Cabinet ministers) and many other leaders were caught and executed without trial.

In China, Pridi was well-received by Zhou Enlai. In November 1952 Phoonsuk and her eldest son Pal were charged with offences against the internal and external security of the Kingdom. During 84 days in detention, Phoonsuk slept on the floor of a small cell with two other women, but never requested bail. When freed in February 1953 she went in search of her husband, who she knew was somewhere in China. In December 1953 she joined him with 2 of their six children. Pal joined them in 1957, after his release from prison. In China the family was more than well-provided for, but, to be able to better connect with the world and with Thailand, in 1969 the family moved to a small house in the Paris suburbs, where Pridi died peacefully in May 1983. His passing was totally ignored by the Thai State. After years of work to clear accusations, eventually, in 1999, the UNESCO General Conference added the name of Professor Dr. Pridi Phanomyong to the list of the world’s Great Personalities, the third Thai commoner to receive that honour. In 2005, on International Women’s Day, Than Phuying Phoonsuk Phanomyong, President of the Pridi Phanomyong Foundation in Bangkok, received the ‘Outstanding Women in Buddhism Award’ for her peaceful courage in the face of grave personal hardship and political crises.

Pibun’s 1949 Constitution turned the Supreme State Council into the King’s own Privy Council, gave the King the sole right to appoint all members of the Senate and ruled that the House of Representatives required a 2/3 majority to over-rule a royal veto.

In short the model of royalist-military control over the political life of the people of Thailand was cast for the next 60 years.

At the age of 23, Bhumibol Adulyadej, younger brother of the deceased Ananda Mahidol, was crowned King on 5 May 1950.

Coups, rebellions and popular revolts (incomplete):
1912 Palace Revolt (First movement for democracy)
1932 Coup d’État (end of absolute monarchy)
1933 Royalist coup (June)
1933 Royalist coup (‘Boworadet Rebellion’, October)
1935 Rebellion of the Sergeants
1939 Songsuradet Rebellion (royalists)
1947 Military coup
1948 Army General Staff Plot (anti-Pridi)
1949 Palace Rebellion (Pridi’s attempted come-back)
1951 Manhattan Rebellion (Navy rebellion, June)
1951 Military coup (‘Silent Coup’, November)
1953-55 Peace Rebellion (Uprising and crack-down)
1957 Military coup
1958 Military coup
1964 Air force Rebellion
1971 Military coup
1973 Uprising (October)
1976 Uprising and crack-down (October)
1976 Military coup (October)
1977 Military Rebellion (March)
1977 Military coup (October)
1981 Military rebellion (Young Turks)
1985 Military rebellion (Young Turks)
1991 Military coup
1992 Uprising (‘Bloody May’)
2006 Military coup
2009 Uprising (‘Voter’s Uprising’, April)

During the years of Pibun’s dictatorship, King Bhumibol remained a ceremonial figure, but as Pibun’s power waned and social unrest grew, Pibun was challenged by the man who had defeated Pridi’s coup – General Sarit Thanarat. In 1957 Pibun went to the King for support. The King refused him and asked Pibun to resign. When Pibun refused, Sarit seized power in a US-backed, pro-royalist military coup. The King imposed martial law and declared Sarit ‘Military Defender of the Capital’. Pibun fled to Japan, where he died in 1964.

Cold War and the ‘People’s War’

Since 1932 the people of Thailand have had to face more than 20 attempted or successful military coups. The people have had to deal with 18 constitutions and 27 Prime Ministers, most of them military generals. In the 77 years since 1932 only one elected Prime Minister has managed to complete the full 4-year term (the now self-exiled, convicted, embattled Thaksin Shinawatra).

In 1954 the Vietminh pushed the French out of Vietnam and fear of communist insurgency took hold in Thailand.

The dictatorship of Field Marshal Sarit, and of those that followed him, concentrated on building-up and promoting the role of the monarchy – mainly to legitimise their oppression of the poor (and their personal corruption). The military re-introduced palace ceremonies to the Affairs of State and used billions of public money to build palaces and royal projects all over the country, especially in the north, north-east and south where they faced strong opposition from local populations e.g. in the Phupan Mountains (1975) and in Songkla Province (1975) and in the Khaokao Mountains (1985).

In this civil war, sometimes called the ‘People’s War’, which raged on into the 1980ies, hundreds of thousands of poor people were mindlessly classified as ‘communists’ and a threat to monarchy. Thousands went ‘missing’, were imprisoned without trial and/or murdered.

Sarit the monarchy-builder died in 1963 and received a royal cremation. His death revealed the full depth of his personal corruption. Besides the 50 or so mistresses he retained, the squabbles over his fortune exposed the existence of wealth in terms of thousands of hectares of land, dozens of houses and hundreds of millions in cash. He was replaced immediately by General Thanom Kittikachorn, his long-time stand-in-dictator. In a public show against corruption Thanom confiscated 600 million Baht from Sarit’s ‘estate’ and returned it to Government use. Thanom then appointed himself Commander-in-Chief of the Army, Field Marshal, Admiral of the Fleet and Marshal of the Royal Thai Air Force etc., and continued Sarit’s pro-American, anti-Communist politics, thus ensuring himself massive US economic and financial aid during the Vietnam War.

Between 1950 and 1987 the US provided Thailand with more than 2 billion USD in military assistance.

From the early 1960ies Thai society was exposed, for the first time, to the full onslaught of mainstream western culture, especially American culture. The growing communist insurgencies in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia coupled with demands to modernise Thai society placed the people of Thailand under enormous new pressures. Huge amounts of foreign capital flowed into the country to support not only the military build-up but the development of new infra-structure – the roads, dams, irrigation schemes and administrative centres required to tame and control the provinces and promote the so-called Green Revolution. As well, to sustain itself as an independent nation-state, Thailand needed hospitals, schools and universities. Forest cover was reduced from 53% to a mere 28% between 1961 and 1989. During the same period the population doubled, from just over 26 million in 1960 to 54.5 million in 1990.

Millions of small farmers found themselves unable to cope with the Green Revolution’s cash crop imperatives and the rising cost of living. Millions left the land in search of money in the increasingly export-oriented industrial sprawl of Bangkok. The Cold War years in Thailand, dominated by Thai militarism, American military bases, Green Revolution and export-oriented industrialisation, introduced Thai society to the idea that – there’s nothing money can’t buy (50 000 GIs = 50 000 ‘GI-women’).

Extreme exploitation of cheap labour led to increasing industrial unrest and, as the level of education rose, increasing numbers of young people became increasingly critical of the Vietnam War, Thailand’s deep involvement with US imperialism and the immensely corrupt, autocratic character of the Thai state.

Uprising and crack-down – October ’73 & ’76

By October 1973, general public unrest reached a climax. Hundreds of thousands of students, workers, farmers and new middle-class intellectuals gathered in demonstrations on the streets of Bangkok – demanding an end to 10-years of despotic rule under Thanom.

On 14 October 1973, the students faced hand-grenades and machine-gun fire – from the ground and from a helicopter in which the son of Field Marshal Thanom (Lt-Colonel Narong Kittikachorn) manned the machine-gun. Around one hundred students died in the confrontation with the military on the campus of Thammasat University.

The King was forced to step into the open. Thanom was requested to leave the country and the King appointed a new Prime Minister. However, the pride of the Thai military, well-stuffed by the US and others, remained irked by the constantly increasing public unrest. By 1976 the military-controlled mass-media was letting it be known that killing ‘communists’ was OK – like ‘making merit’, and political assassinations became commonplace.

On 6 October 1976, in the name of “Nation, Religion and King”, a large force of military and para-military thugs (New Force, Village Scouts, Red Gaurs etc.) moved against students at Thammasat University who were protesting the return of Thanom. (Thanom, in the robes of a monk, had been welcomed back to Thailand by the royal family.)

According to official figures, on campus and in the adjacent Royal Grounds of the Grand Palace, 41 students were shot, burnt alive or beaten to death in an orgy of violence, with over 700 wounded. Unofficial figures say many more.

Many of the students not imprisoned on that day fled to the ranks of the Communist Party of Thailand (CPT) in the jungle and villages, and hundreds of student leaders from universities all over Thailand followed them. They became known as the ‘October People’.

Three decades of fearfully destructive civil war led eventually to the issuing of an Amnesty by Prime Minister Prem in 1982. The CPT disappeared from the stage and many of the October People returned to political life – as university lecturers, human-rights activists, NGO leaders and entrepreneurs, to the Democrat Party and some eventually to Thaksin’s party. Thanom himself lived-out his life in luxury and was given a royal cremation.

Prem’s era

General Prem Tinsulanonda, Thailand’s current ‘Master-of-military-coups’, Prime Minister from 1980 – 1988, member of the Privy Council since 1988 and Chairman since 1998, loves to play middle-man between the Monarchy and the Government and the general public. He himself survived two attempted military coups – by the Young Turks – during his time as PM. (Note: All of the 18-member Privy Council are appointed by the King. About half are Army Chiefs of Staff and the remainder former Chief Justices, Prime Ministers etc.)

Prem managed the military coup of 1991 and the crushing of the May 1992 uprising, and enjoyed architecting the military coup that ousted Thaksin in 2006, for which purpose he went around preaching (effectively it seems) that military and civil service personnel are ‘Servants of the King’.

In fact Prem stands accused of kicking-out four elected Prime Ministers – Chatchai Choonhawan in 1991, Thaksin in 2006, Samak in 2008 and Somchai in 2008. Immediately after he had Abhisit, the current Prime Minister, in place in April 2009 he made a public address to explain what a good PM he will be.

After 40 years in politics ‘Pappa Prem’ continues to wield much power in Thailand.

For the tens of millions of people beaten-down by decades of military dictatorship, it required yet another bloody uprising in May 1992 to crack the walls so carefully built to exclude them from participation in governance.

The Bloody May massacre of 1992 saw 48 citizens shot dead in the streets of Bangkok.

In a by-that-time standard procedure, the King stepped-out (after the massacre) to mediate the uproar and appoint a new Prime Minister.

It took another 5 years of struggle after the Bloody May massacre to establish a so-called People’s Constitution in 1997, and another 8 years before an elected Prime Minister was able to complete a full 4-year term (in 2004).

Rise and fall of Thaksin (1994 – 2006)

Thaksin Shinawatra (59), of Chinese descent, was born into a wealthy merchant family in Northern Thailand, from Chiang Mai. He graduated from the Thai Police Cadet Academy in 1973, studied criminal justice in the US, and reached the rank of lieutenant colonel in the metropolitan police (in Thailand) before moving openly into business in 1987 and politics in 1994. Thaksin seemed to enjoy being on the front-line and, enormously ambitious, succeeded in becoming Thailand’s first-ever elected PM to complete a 4-year term in office (2001 – 2004).

Thaksin did not appear strongly anti-Royalist. He did his best to buy the acceptance and support of the monarchy, but no matter how many billions of private and public money he pushed in that direction it was never sufficient. His style and approach to governance was that of the corporate CEO, welcomed by some but alien and somewhat abhorrent to much of the hierarchy that perceived him as a threat to the established order. He ran fast over, around and under the Establishment when partnership did not suite his purpose.

On the domestic front he managed a ‘rural-poor populist strategy’ which gave him his solid majority in the electorate. In 2001 he kick-started Thailand’s first ever universal health-care scheme – the ‘30 Baht Scheme’. He oversaw the implementation of a ‘0ne Million Baht Village Fund’, a scheme that provided every village in Thailand with a one million cash bonus to be administered at will. He attempted to promote village productivity and assisted farmers in managing their debt burden. He introduced cheap loan programmes for low-income people to buy houses and even taxis. How much of all this was political opportunism and how much genuine concern is largely irrelevant. The rural poor, in the villages of Thailand, yearned to be respectfully acknowledged. They were grateful and gave him their support. He also promoted a vision of Thailand as the ‘Kitchen of the World’, not an especially flattering title, but one that did underscore the importance of the agricultural sector in Thailand’s future.

His ‘War on Drugs’ he did pursue with the most reactionary elements of the Establishment. The countryside was cleaned-up – for a while, but some 2 500 people, innocent and otherwise, lost their lives, often mercilessly. This brought him many enemies, especially amongst the NGOs and, needless-to-say, the drug trade is flourishing again.

With regard to foreign policy, his over-enthusiasm for neo-liberal globalisation and the right he bestowed upon himself to negotiate as well as sign Free Trade Agreements with less than minimal or zero consultation with those affected, was much less than welcome. The immediate and long-term damage caused by Thaksin’s megalomanic manoeuvring on the global stage will take years to repair.

Also, without reserve, Thaksin channelled money to his own family. He was perhaps no more crooked than the others, he just out-manipulated them at their own game – in business and politics. In other words, in the mind of the Establishment, Thaksin had to be got rid of. He has only his own super-ego to blame for his downfall.

In February 2005 Thaksin won a landslide victory with 67% of the vote (19 million votes), but in Thailand that still means next to nothing. His best enemies had already decided that he had to go. A military coup was staged for September 2006 – when Thaksin was in New York attending a meeting of the UN General Assembly. Despite the usual tanks-in-the-streets phenomenon, the coup that deposed Thaksin’s government turned out to be bloodless. Convicted in-absentia for violating political ethics Thaksin has yet to return to Thailand.

The King approved the military junta that replaced Thaksin’s government, and thus also the restoration of Thailand’s customary feudal order – for a few more months.

The 2006 junta began as the ‘Council for Democratic Reform under Constitutional Monarchy’ but, a little too obvious, the name was soon changed to the Council for National Security.

Part Two

3 years of PAD chaos

The People’s Alliance for Democracy, the PAD, was founded by the Bangkok media tycoon Sonthi Limthongkul in February 2006, for the purpose of bringing-down Thaksin.

Sonthi had been an ally of Thaksin – declaring at one time that Thaksin was the best PM that Thailand had experienced, but they parted company and, in mid-2005, with accusations of corruption and disloyalty to the Crown, Sonthi turned against Thaksin. When Thaksin shut-down Sonthi’s TV programme, Sonthi launched his own 24-hour Asia Satellite TV.

With ASTV increasingly effective as a tool for spreading negative gossip about Thaksin, Sonthi was able to ally the State Enterprise Labour Relation Confederation with members of the Democrat Party and with a wide assortment of NGOs, celebrities, intellectuals and civil servants. Decked-out in yellow, this assortment of mainly middle-class Bangkokians called itself the People’s Alliance for Democracy.

Claiming that Thaksin was the sole cause of Thailand’s innumerable problems, and completely ignoring the fact that, whatever Thaksin was not, he was a legally elected PM with a huge electoral majority, the PAD conjured-up some ‘new politics’ which included replacing most elected politicians with appointed “good people”. Appointed by who was left to imagination.

The Democrat Party boycotted the 2006 election and refused to acknowledge that 16 million Thai had voted for Thaksin. The PAD slandered Thaksin’s voters, mainly small farmers, as illiterate morons too ignorant to participate in democracy. The Democrat Party and PAD let it be known that they wanted the King to intervene and appoint a new PM, but the King considered that proposal out-of-order.

The PAD placed itself in a win-or-lose situation and, with slogans like ‘Thaksin out no matter what’, began to court the assistance of like-minded military.

The September 2006 military coup was sprung, as said, when Thaksin was in New York – a bloodless Coup with press pictures of pretty Bangkokians posing with flowers as chums of soldiers and tanks.

Immediately after the Coup many of the intellectual elite, whose feathers Thaksin had ruffled for one reason or other, came forward with the usual platitudes ‘. . although the Coup was wrong we could do nothing about it.’ . . ‘For the sake of the nation it is best for all to allow the Junta to arrange a new election’. Etc.

The Junta’s first step was to annul the hard-won People’s Constitution of 1997. The second step was to give General Surayud Chulanont, a member of the Privy Council, a list of tasks that included forming a new Government, writing a new Constitution, dissolving Thaksin’s Thai Rak Thai Party (TRT), arranging a General Election, and increasing the military budget by 33%.

General Surayud became Thailand’s 24th Prime Minister in October 2006 and scheduled a General Election for December 2007.

Thaksin, wrongly or rightly accused of rigging the 2006 General Election, saw his TRT Party dissolved by the Constitutional Court on 13 May 2007.

Of the 377 elected Members of Parliament in the TRT Party, 111 of the leading MPs were banned from politics for 5 years. Those not banned had just enough time for a re-mould before the December election and stood for re-election as the People Power Party (PPP). The Thai Parliament has 480 seats.

The election of December 2007 was the third electoral contest between ‘Thaksin’s people’ and the Democrat Party.

With Thaksin in self-imposed exile and 111 of his leading MPs banned from politics, the way seemed clear for the Democrat Party and, with the eager support of the PAD, the Democrat Party campaigned vigorously with high hopes of victory.

But, alas alack, Thaksin’s people won the day, with the PPP taking 233 seats (with 14 million votes), leaving the Democrat Party with 164 seats.

Again the PAD leadership, which included a Democrat Party MP, refused to accept the result, and resumed their agitation: all traces of ‘Thaksin cronyism’ and his ‘family business’ must be wiped from the pure face of Thai politics.

Short on leaders, the PPP set up government under the large frame of Samak Suntornvej, best known for his interest in cooking.

By this time the PAD leaders were on their way to losing their cool altogether, clarifying their new democracy model with a proposal that 70% of MPs should be good people appointed by good people and only 30% elected.

The PAD’s actions became increasingly wild and lawless.

In May 2008 yellow-clad PAD demonstrators laid siege to Government House. The Royal Thai Army and Royal Thai Police informed PM Samak that they were unable to clear Government House. Reason, law and order began to disintegrate. After 3 months of siege, on August 26 the PAD mob (yellow-shirts) occupied Government House. It seems that the State Enterprise Labour Relations Confederation had promised a General Strike, but in the event only some sectors of the Confederation responded.

For three months Thailand’s Cabinet was chased around Bangkok by the PAD until the Chiefs of the Army and Police suggested to Samak that he dissolve the Parliament, but this didn’t suit the Democrat Party – who had no chance of winning an election. The PAD ‘strategy’ worked better with ‘Samak out’, but Samak was in no mind to give in easily, so he gave the Premiership to Thaksin’s brother-in-law, Somchai Wongsawat, which did nothing to please the PAD. Somchai achieved the distinction of becoming the first PM in Thailand to have never seen the inside of Government House.

The PAD became increasingly provocative. At the start of October demonstrators attacked National Broadcasting TV, the Ministry of Finance and several other government buildings, cutting their water and electricity supplies.

On 7 October the PAD mob attacked the Parliament House – and what a fiasco. Under Government orders the Royal Thai Police attempted to defend the Parliament but (without military backing) found themselves in a sticky situation. The PAD mob fought magnificently with ping-pong bombs, catapults, bricks and metal pipes, stabbing at police with flagpoles and staves and attempting to run them over with pickup trucks. Democrat Party leaders were cheered out of the main entrance of the Parliament House while PM Somchai & Company had to escape by climbing over a fence. In clouds of tear gas the police were beaten back and ended-up defending their own Bangkok Police Headquarters. Five police received gunshot wounds, one front-line PAD woman died and one of the PAD‘s own para-military leaders (an ex-police lieutenant) died when the bombs he was carrying in his own car exploded outside Parliament House. In total, according to the Public Health Ministry, 443 people were wounded.

The PAD leadership had frequently indicated that they had support in the Palace. This claim seemed validated when the Queen, a princess, members of the Privy Council and the military high command and leaders of the Democrat Party, including Abhisit, showed-up for the cremation of the dead PAD woman. For the Thai public this was their ‘Eye-opening Day’.

Never-the-less, Somchai, with his Cabinet in retreat in the north of Thailand, was proving a tougher-than-expected cookie and showed no signs of capitulation. Increasingly desperate the PAD’s actions became increasingly desperate.

On 25 November the PAD mob descended in free-style on Bangkok’s ultra-modern international airport (a successful Thaksin project). With strong indications that the Palace was supporting the PAD, the Police and Army did no more than shuffle their feet, and the PAD mob had no problem in taking-over and completely shutting-down both of Bangkok’s international airports and four other important airports including Phuket. Their action stranded more than 80 aircraft and 300 000 tourists and stopped all international and domestic flights for over a week.

On 26 November the Commander in Chief of the Royal Thai Army proposed that Somchai dissolve his cabinet and that the PAD stop demonstrating, but nobody agreed. And so, on 2 December, the Constitutional Court stepped-in once again and ordered the dissolution of the PPP and also the two other main parties of Somchai’s governing coalition. On 3 December the PAD left the airports and ended their demonstrations.

At long last Abhisit Vejjajiva, the Eton and Oxford educated leader of the Democrat Party and active PAD supporter, was able to proffer himself to the exhausted and depleted Parliament. On 15 December Abhisit finally acquired his much awaited Premiership, and proceeded immediately to reward PAD leaders for their efforts, most notably with the portfolio of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

In the street fighting between May and December 2008 about 800 people were wounded and 8 people died. More than 160 legal cases have been filed against the PAD, but as yet no disciplinary action has been taken by any authority against any PAD leaders or supporters. (The Police are said to be investigating!)

All this has, naturally, contributed to a growing sense of disgust amongst the majority of the population, and also to a growing anger.

Already on 2 September 2008 there had been a street battle between PAD yellow-shirts and the red-shirts of the new United Front for Democracy against Dictatorship (UDD) that was gathering strength to oppose them. In that battle 40 people were wounded and one red-shirt beaten to death.

Frustration boils over

After watching in sober amazement as the great and powerful Thai forces of law-and-order sat back and allowed the yellow-shirts and royalists to take their legally-elected Government hostage, wreck Government House, attack Parliament House, occupy both of Bangkok’s main airports and four other international airports, and after watching the blatant manipulations that brought Abhisit and his Democrat Party to power, the level of disgust felt by many sectors of the voting public in Thailand reached boiling-point.

When the UDD called for mass-mobilization a red wave of protest began rising over the landscape.

On 26 March 2009 people began to assemble outside Government House – this time in red shirts. By 8 April half a million protestors representing a wide spectrum of grass-root civil organizations were making their presence felt through peaceful assemblies, not only in Bangkok but also in about 40 of Thailand’s 77 provincial capitals.

After nearly 80 years of non-stop political corruption, uprisings, coups and violent oppression, it is obvious to most outsiders that the root cause of the failure of democratic procedure in Thailand stems from fear of the monarchist establishment’s carefully accumulated instruments of power, which, as each crisis of governance emerges, are used to execute whatever is required to ensure that the majority of Thai people cannot participate effectively in the political life of the country.

In Bangkok in April, the number of people protesting their frustration with the State administrators, in particular with the Privy Council, reached around 300 000, the largest number of protesters on the streets of Bangkok since 1973.

As usual, during times of direct confrontation between the people and their patrons, in April 2009 Thailand’s mainstream media failed to provide the public with accurate reportage on the scale or ferocity of either the uprising or crack-down, and, as usual, in the people’s hour of crisis, studiously side-stepped the real reasons why hundreds of thousands of people representing tens of millions of rural, urban and industrial workers, were demonstrating.

In this manner Thailand’s hamstrung mainstream media usually contributes to the confusion and, by default, to the deepening of social divisions.

ASEAN Summit violence

The eager-beaver Abhisit Government had planned an ASEAN Summit for 10 – 13 April in the east coast resort of Pattaya. Anti-Abhisit demonstrators went to Pattaya to deliver a statement to the ASEAN Secretary General – to underline the fact that Abhisit had no mandate from the people to represent Thailand.

The Statement was delivered to the ASEAN Secretary General in the Pattaya Hotel on 9 April, by about 1 000 people. However, some Abhisit aides had, foolishly, already given the green light to para-military royalist forces to disrupt the demonstration. As the protesters withdrew from the hotel they were attacked by about 500 thugs with ‘Protect the Monarchy’ across their shirts.

Thousands of people from Bangkok and Pattaya moved rapidly to support the anti-Abhisit protest in Pattaya. On the morning of 10 April several thousand descended on the Pattaya Hotel. The Summit was cancelled. Abhisit, his authority badly stung, fled the scene in a Blackhawk helicopter, vowing to restore law-and-order and declaring the red-shirts the “enemies of the nation”.

To this point in time the somewhat divided Police and Army had kept themselves out of the play, but some units did respond to Abhisit’s call for help in Pattaya. The leader of the protesters in Pattaya was arrested by police in the early hours of 11 April and then handed to the Army.

After the arrest of the Pattaya leader, a former TRT MP, the confrontation between the Government and the protesters passed out of all control.

The battle for D-Station

On 11 April Abhisit declared a state-of-emergency in and around Bangkok, and issued orders for demonstrators to be cleared from outside Government House within 4 days, and for all UDD communication channels to be cut, especially their on-line satellite TV, the so-called Democracy Station, ‘D-station’ or DTV, that had been set-up in January (2009) to counter the PAD’s ASTV.

For UDD leaders responsible for the demonstration at Government House it was essential to be able to maintain communication with the vast number of demonstrators in different parts of Bangkok, with their tens of millions of supporters across Thailand e.g. in the provincial capitals of Chiang Mai, Udon Thani and Khon Kaen, with the Thai public in general, as well as with the international community. In other words ‘D-station’, their only communication channel, had to be defended.

In the afternoon of 12 April army units with tanks and armoured vehicles started to appear on the streets in different parts of Bangkok, moving in on Government House where red-shirts had set-up road-blocks. Exactly who gave the orders remains unclear. The movement of the troops appears to have been somewhat un-coordinated, some units displaying more resolve than others, with some covering the name of their units to avoid being identified.

Violent confrontation broke-out at Din Daeng, an important inter-section just north of Government House, with the military resorting to tear gas and live ammunition.

A 500-strong column of regular soldiers, commandos with automatic weapons and a humvee mounting a 50mm machine gun advanced to take control of a ThaiCom building in north Bangkok, where several hundred demonstrators had gathered to guard ‘D-station’ transmission.

In the still dark hours of the morning of 13 April a wide area around Government House was turned into a war zone, with chaotic fighting between red-shirts, army units, para-military gangs and also local residents that formed gangs mainly to defend local people and property. The battles raged out-of-control for several hours. From Din Daeng violence spread to other parts of the city. Banks and even a mosque were set ablaze, and there are reports of ‘non-red’ people being paid to commit arson and so on. Many innocent people were caught-up in the ruckus.

Withdrawal

Din Daeng fell to the army at around 07.30, Victory Monument at around 12.30. Army units with tanks and heavy machine guns closed-in on Government House. With red-shirt numbers dwindling UDD leaders, with arrest warrants on their heads, surrendered on the morning of 14 April – to avoid further bloodshed. They were taken to different army camps, charged for a variety of crimes and later released on bail for sums in the region of 10 000 euro.

Amidst the lies, cover-ups and exaggerations, accurate casualty figures take time to emerge – in Thailand often months or years. Two people were shot dead. At least 100 people were wounded, some by gunfire. About 20 soldiers were wounded. Some reports say more than 150 people are missing. In military crack-downs in Thailand, the military usually take care to remove the dead or near-dead from the battlefield e.g. as in the May 1992 uprising, when about 20 of the 46 bodies known to have been removed by the military were never seen again.

Exactly who was responsible for what will never be acknowledged, but the people ask – and the ASEAN and the International Community must ask – what in the name of hell is the reason why tanks and heavy infantry keep appearing on the streets of Bangkok?

Summation

It is not famine, poverty or money that is bringing the poor onto the streets in their hundred of thousands, nor a great love of Thaksin the business tycoon – although he did play a significant role with his ‘phone-ins’ urging revolution.
As poor people will do everywhere, the tens of millions of poor people in Thailand are rising in protest because they can no longer abide the autocratic double-standards of their patrons and administrators, a perfect example of which is provided by Abhisit, twice defeated in elections, active supporter of the long list of yellow-shirt major crimes, and now, as Prime Minister, himself throwing opposition leaders in jail.

The people came onto the streets demanding . .
- reinstatement of their hard-won People’s Constitution (1997);
- a General Election to bring back electoral justice;
- a stop to the non-stop interference of the King’s Privy Council under General Prem Tinsulanonda in the struggle of the Thai people for their democratic rights.

The military crack-down in April was all too familiar. Abhisit may have received some praise from above, but it will be the brave, grass-root women and men who stand firm for the democratic rights of the people who will be honoured in Thai history, not Oxford graduates who order tanks and commando units to confront the legitimate protests of the poorest citizens with live ammunition.

2009 is no longer 2006, no longer 1992 and no longer 1976. After 80 years of struggle and quasi-democracy, Thailand’s new generation pro-democracy activists have decided to stand their ground. As the new wave of democracy activists grows, the autocrats will find it harder and harder to paint their strategies with yellow and gold.

The UDD leaders were arrested and charged. The PAD leaders that vandalised Government House, attacked Parliament House and attacked and occupied international airports now sit smug in a royalist government.

How come the International Community finds playing-along with the sick games of the Thai power-elite so easy? How come it is still talking and wheeling and dealing with Thailand? Is the body-count too low? It would not be difficult for the International Community to condemn the forms of suppression and oppression practiced in Thailand. It would be so refreshing for all if they would.

Beneath the marketed image of Thailand, tens of millions of poor people are being actively, cruelly, and also artfully, prevented from realising their potential as citizens of the 21st century.

The ‘surrender’ of the people’s leaders in April 2009 marks not the end but the beginning of a new phase in the struggle of the poor to remove the corrupt hierarchies that block their road to equal rights, democracy, sustainable development and peace.

Part Three

The specter of civil war?

Besides the loss of just a dozen or so lives and a few hundred injured here and there, what has three years of PAD-inspired, Palace-supported, political chaos produced?

The September 2006 military coup had several objectives: to destroy the 1997 People’s Constitution, to weaken the power of elected Government and to strengthen the power of bureaucracy in the name of the Monarchy.

The recent years of political chaos have brought a raft of ugly, new legislation, for instance: Section 17 of the Emergency Decree of 2005 (introduced by Thaksin) exempts, in very loosely defined ‘emergency situations’, high-ranking persons, state officials and police from civil, criminal or disciplinary liability provided that their actions are ‘performed in good faith, non-discriminatory and not unreasonable in the circumstances’. In other words the decree openly breeches Thailand’s international obligations under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.

Thailand’s archaic Lès Majesté laws (from the Latin laesa maiestas ‘injury to majesty’) are being increasingly abused, and the Democrat Party is attempting to raise the penalty for alleged disrespect for Monarchy from 3 – 15 years to 5 – 20 years imprisonment.

In Thailand today there is growing a miserable kind of sickness around Lès Majesté, as people have started to sneak information to the authorities about whom they think is being disrespectful, or not respectful enough. It is a sickness than can wipe the last real shine from the smile of the Thai – a very debilitating sickness.

With regard to international trade, after ousting Thaksin the military Junta just jumped straight into his shoes, adopting exactly the same non-democratic approach to negotiating Free Trade Agreements. (In April 2007 General Surayad signed a wide-ranging, far-reaching FTA with Japan that was already in force by November.)

When Abhisit finally reached power he distributed 2000 Baht (40 euro) to 8 million employed people as some kind of ‘stimulus package’, but somehow forgot the 23 million informal sector workers (small farmers, self-employed and un-employed).

The 2006 military coup and last 3-years of chaos have been thoroughly successful in increasing distrust of the state machinery and Monarchy, and in deepening the divide between rich and poor.

On the positive side the chaos has served to shake-up the grass-root sectors and the more enlightened sectors of the middle-class. Thailand is experiencing a new wave of farmers, factory workers, students, academics and grass-root movements that are determined to resist being bottled-up as pawns, fodder and bell-boys for the benefit of Thailand’s image, own greedy elite and multi-national corporations.

New wave fighters for democracy

During the 19 September Coup in 2006, Nuamtong Praiwan, a 60 year-old taxi-driver and life-long human rights activist, rammed his taxi into a military tank. He survived the impact but decided to complete his protest by hanging himself on 31 October 2006. His decision sent a shock-wave through Thailand’s grass-root communities, and a warning to Thailand’s increasingly self-indulgent middle-class that the ‘un-educated’ know and care about the meaning of democracy.

The name of Nuamtong has been raised again and again in the pro-democracy movement. Bangkok has over 100 000 taxi-drivers. On 8 April 2009 taxi-drivers came in large numbers to assist the red-shirt protest outside Government House. On 9 April many took action to jam the streets of Bangkok. On 10 April several hundred taxis were engaged in transporting people from Bangkok to the protest against Abhisit’s ASEAN Summit in Pattaya. When the Army brought tanks onto the streets of Bangkok on 12 April, taxi-drivers risked their taxis and their lives to block the tanks and protect the people.

New wave cyber army

When all media channels were cut or tightly censored in the May 1992 Uprising, it was telephones and fax machines that mobilised people and kept them informed. In April 2009 it was the people’s cyber army that kept information flowing.

Calling for the Government to crush the red-shirts, the chat boards of conservative reactionaries showed their concern for the image of Thailand in relation to economic stability, foreign investment and tourism.

With Abhisit doing all possible to control the media, the cyber chat boards supporting the people’s protest played an important role in countering the absurd accusation that the red-shirts were wreaking havoc with Thailand’s fragile ‘stability’.

With little or no space in Thailand’s mainstream media for airing their thoughts and feelings, the new wave of people’s representatives in cyber space are working hard to by-pass censorship, and inform and warn their sisters and brothers of the dangers they face and why.

Through cyber space the irony of the military crack-down in April is identified as a clone of the 1976 crack-down – 33 years ago. Through cyber space the absurdity of needing mass demonstrations in the 21st century to oppose institutions of monarchy is discussed and analysed. Through cyber space people across the nation are being brought closer to discussion about why, when it comes to welfare and services, civil servants, academics and white collar workers receive preferential treatment.

How come the poor are accused of being a threat to ‘stability’?

The regular citizenry needs little help to understand that it is not they who have sent Thailand into recession, and it is not they who are the reason why Abhisit is now begging for 23 billion USD.

The poor know that it will be they who suffer in the struggle to pay-back Abhisit’s loans – the debts of the elite. The Thai know only too well that the wealth, privileges and splendour of the high echelons of Thai society are entirely dependent on the schemes the ruling elite maintain to limit the participation of the tens of millions of poor people in genuine, democratic procedure.

After the ‘surrender’ of the red-shirt leaders in April, the chat boards became a source of comfort, a space where poor people could share events as they had experienced them, and their frustration at being confronted with yet another military crack-down.

The cyber army plays an important role in helping to track and inform on the health and whereabouts of arrested leaders, and in the search for the dead and missing. In countering government-controlled misinformation the chat-boards throw up important questions. What kind of government blocks discussion on real issues and permits statements like ‘red-shirts are not Thai, not human and should be shot on sight’? How come the Monarchy, Army, Police and the whole academic community do not actively condemn such incitement?

The poor are becoming increasingly conversant with understanding that the ‘stability’ they are being accused of disrupting is, in term of sustainable development, a false construct.

In speaking to the crowd, a co-ordinator of the Farmer’s Network said . . “Farmers have been classified as illiterate fools when it comes to democracy, but we have always participated in the people’s demonstrations against dictatorship – in 1973, 1976, 1992 and 2006. We were never strong enough, but if the military crack-down on demonstrations this time, the farmers will block every road to Bangkok..”

The anger of poor working women was in evidence throughout the April uprising. Women took a leading role in the action at the ASEAN Summit in Pattaya. After Abhisit declared a ‘state-of-emergency’ in Bangkok it was women who found and chased him. It was women who commandeered public buses to block the roads against military tanks. In our struggle for democracy the stories of these bold working-women will be cherished.

Love or fear of monarchy?

Thai people are educated to love their monarchy unconditionally and unquestionably. The problem is that people face the 21st Century, not the 19th Century. The Thai have no other option than to question the repetitiveness of military crack-downs on the legitimate interests of the majority of the population.

As citizens of a world that has now identified and agreed to stand-up for universal human rights, modern-day Thai are duty-bound to question the use of Lès Majesté laws which, with origins in Ancient Rome, have always been related to the bolstering of political power. All phenomena can be connected but most people agree that the connection between Lès Majesté laws and love is tenuous and, in today’s world, nothing less than highly suspect.

It would be extremely foolish for the Palace and the Army to ignore the extent to which people all across Thailand (and across the world) are questioning the relation between their Monarchy and their Parliament.

Largely silenced by fear of Lès Majesté laws, Bangkok-based media is no longer able to represent the majority of the people of Thailand and, consciously or not, tends to aggravate rather than mediate the growing divide between the interests of the rural community and those of the new urban middle-class.

Some observers avoid confrontation with the, at present, increasingly odorous application of Lès Majesté laws, by saying they will fade with time. That’s for sure, but in the meantime, in both passive and active form, they continue to protect the vast, capital wealth and business interests of the Monarchy (by far the richest Monarchy in the world). Thailand’s Lès Majesté laws are an effective tool for constructing the image of ‘the land of smiles’, a cruel instrument that diplomatic missions love to compliment and multi-national sharks love to exploit. For them Thailand is Paradise.

If in the 21st century the specter of civil war rises over the horizon of a country that is endowed with all the natural resources that any society could ever hope for, there must be some substantial reasons.

All analysis of Thailand’s current domestic crisis places the Monarchy at the epicentre of debate, that is to say – the Palace and Privy Council face real problems – surely not because of the poor people but because of what they do.

Thailand needs a Royal House and the Thai want to love their King and Queen, and so can it be, when the Royal House recognises that it must make way for democracy. It would make life much easier for the Royal Household if it did.

In the modern world, military Juntas are an anathema, a truly ugly phenomenon symbolising retarded governance.

Are the ASEAN peoples going to allow their future prospects to be over-ruled by a resurgent militarism?

Together for democracy

The growth of the Port of Bangkok was no accident, and nobody has benefited more than the Crown Property Bureau – the wealthiest landlord in the world.

Nobody wants a yellow-red confrontation in Bangkok to drag Thailand any further into the mud, let alone to civil war.

Thailand’s rural communities and urban poor are just saying that ‘We’ve had enough . . of seeing our lives degraded. We are no longer prepared to vote for the interests and well-being of the urban middle-class. Why should we?’.

Too many Bangkokian academics and journalists have become accustomed to imagining that their own voices are the only voices that matter.

Why should the rural people tolerate double-standards cooked in Bangkok – by Abhisit and his so-called Democrat Party? Because this party knows it cannot win at the ballot box?

Why should the small farmers, the rural blood of Thailand, and their children who slave in export-oriented Free Trade Zones, allow themselves to be manipulated out of existence in the name of ‘economic stability’? Who’s economic stability? The rural blood of Thailand is Thailand. Without healthy, productive, joyous rural communities Thailand is nothing – an empty soap-box tied-up with a yellow band.

We all need to protect ourselves from the excesses of the neo-liberal capitalist agenda, which by definition places economic stability above social welfare and is, beneath all propaganda about democracy and freedom, too frequently just waiting to party with privy councils and wink at military juntas.

The current, predicted, expected and necessary melt-down of the trans-national global finance institutions provides a moment for people across the planet to re-assess the politics of liberation – bottom-up. This is now happening in Thailand, but the people’s pro-democracy movement in Thailand needs to be recognised by people on the outside. This is important because the success of the pro-democracy movement in Thailand has great significance for the whole Indo-China Peninsula, for not just tens but for hundreds of millions of poor and displaced persons.

In the current economic depression nobody can know what the future will be, but in the name of peace, justice and human rights, in the name of sustainable development, challenging unjust ‘comparative advantage’ and the pyramids of capitalism is the sanctioned order of the day.

In fact Thaksin Shinawatra did his bit. He was responsible for his own downfall, but he can be thanked too, and will be well-remembered by the rural poor – for letting them know that they exist and are important in their own right, and for kick-starting a new wave of resistance against autocratic governance.

The current phase of struggle of the rural peoples of Thailand is extremely important, not just because they form the majority of the population, but because the future of the economy of the planet is all about food security and investment in organic productivity. What happens in Thailand with respect to rural cultures and traditions and to the hugely valuable knowledge of Thailand’s small farmers and fisher-folk has significant impact on what happens to cultural and biological diversity across the whole Indo-China Peninsula, and thus also, as one of the most productive and simultaneously bio-diverse areas of the planet, on the future of all humankind.

For Thailand’s sake (and the Monarchy), it is absolutely necessary for the rural communities – the workers, the women and men of the land that are the true guardians of this great ‘garden of the world’ – to stand their ground and not stoop to the low practices of the PAD and Abhisit’s mis-named Democrat Party.

The red-shirts in Thailand, who have fought so many battles over the past 70-80 years, need the recognition, support and solidarity of worker and small farmer movements around the world.

The villages of Thailand still have honest women and men. New leaders will rise to throw-off the cobwebs of intrigue and the dross of Americanisation – to re-establish the dignity of the people of Thailand in the light of common struggle to rebuild the global economy on a sound, organic, sustainable, egalitarian foundation.

The days of compromising the fundamental principles of human rights in order to serve fabricated concepts of ‘economic stability’ designed to feed false concepts of progress are at an end.

The privileged civil servants and urban middle classes need to understand that they face a choice: share the profits of progress with the farmers and workers (upon the strength of whose backs our life-style depends) or face a civil war which cannot be won.

The common aim of all self-respecting Thai has to be the strengthening of parliamentary democracy. The half-baked, half-wit schemes the mess of Thai politics produces, like the PAD’s 70:30 (or was it 74:26?) proposal for appointed and elect MPs, must be placed where they belong – in the garbage can with the ice-cream wrappers.

One can note here that the People’s Constitution of 1997 was also far from perfect. For instance the worker’s movement is campaigning to remove an article – that appeared for the first time in 1997 – stipulating that only ‘bachelor degree people’ can stand for election to Parliament – and so on.

Democracy is not a ‘western invention’. In some form or other democracy has existed and been practiced throughout human history, to some degree or other, whenever and wherever people can experience life without dictatorship – from the Kalahari to the Amazon to Greenland to the Tibetan Plateau to the villages of Northern Thailand.

Democracy belongs to the natural process of the evolution of human consciousness. It is not a product of greed or capitalism. As a viable alternative to dictatorship, it evolves and emerges, through – and as result of people having to face the management of – population growth, increased literacy, diminishing non-renewable resources, increasing economic risk, and our common-sense demand for peace and establishment of social, egalitarian civilization.

There is no escape from democracy in the 21st century – and no need to avoid it.

In a world where all are literate, in contact with each other and looking at the future with hope, interest and honest, common concern, a ‘Parliament of the People’ cannot be evaded or avoided.

The symbolic Head of State, the Faith of the Land, and the Military, have nothing to fear from a ‘Parliament of the People’, if they have the moral courage, honesty and wisdom to respect the decisions of the majority.

Closing words

For more than 70 years parliamentary democracy in Thailand has been hopping around with it’s feet tied – one step forward one step back and down again, in some kind of a pathetic ‘dance with the generals’.

Today the people of Thailand are in the process of cutting the thongs that prevent them from growing-up into the 21st Century. Contemporary photos of civilian red-necks taking control of tanks in the streets (whatever the colour of their shirts) are symbolic of the fact that, in the world today, educated, regular, rank and file soldiers are loathe to act against civilians.

The people of Thailand are tired of divisive authority, of seeing and hearing oppressed fractions of the population beaten-down and crushed whenever and wherever they attempt to make themselves heard. Thailand as a society is tired of seeing legitimate human interests, whether those of the small farmers or the Muslims, or the hill tribes or the millions of Thai sweat-shop workers, or millions of Burmese migrant workers, seconded to preservation of the image of a glittering, hegemonic hierarchy.

There will be no peace or stability or maturity of mind and spirit in Thailand until the institutions of the Monarchy stop abusing power and wealth. The military generals that created Thailand’s post-war Monarchy – with billions in US ‘AID’, have totally failed to balance the two main, perfectly compatible requests of the Thai people – to have a Monarch they can love and a just, healthy, democratic order.

The extremes of behaviour seen in Thailand today are tearing the country into pieces. The threat of a protracted, messy, underground civil war, which could destabilise the whole region, is once again fouling the horizon.

By constantly appealing to the monarchy to settle their differences, Thailand’s intelligentsia is forever delaying the need to grow-up – to be responsible, to take responsibility for the on-going poverty of tens of millions of our own people, not to mention responsibility for scenes of tragic carnage in our streets.

Who is responsible for the on-going oppression of the hopes of the poor – for recognition and justice? Is it colonialism, the big-bad-outside-world, some secret inside mystical force? Or could it be the Thai people themselves who are responsible for their own suffering?

What kind of ‘Thai-ness’ is this that we practice now: this occasional, almost ritualistic granting of permission to occasionally kill a few dozen people on the pretext that this avoids a greater body-count?

Is this what Thailand calls democracy? Is this the Thai-ness with which we want to identify, with which we want to be identified?

The traditional state policy of allowing the state bureaucracy, at every level, to exploit the Monarchy for the purpose of legitimising suppression and oppression of poor people must be radically reversed – through the establishment of real parliamentary democracy. This is the only way Thai people can prevent themselves from becoming a joke on the global stage, if not a failed state.

The current Thai government has no democratic legitimacy.

Thailand needs a General Election now, but acting-Prime Minister Abhisit knows he cannot win. He will delay a General Election for as long as possible, in order to be able to take maximum advantage of state-controlled media and all the other subversive weapons that corrupt State administration has managed to accumulate during decades of corrupt power-building. In other words, Abhisit and the neo-liberal elitists are ‘banking’ on their own wishful thinking that time is on their side – that resistance to their collective hypocracy will fade!

Once again the Thai electorate, especially the poor and working classes, is, yet again, having to face the spectacle and phenomenon of gross, governmental corruption.

It is Thailand’s increasingly alienated masses, not their rotten government, that needs the support of the international community, of the movement of Global Unions and civil rights activists around the world – who probably also need to discard at least some of the dazzling image they may have of Thailand, and take more notice of ground-level realities in Thailand, and the relation between ground-level realities in Thailand and the political stability and welfare of the whole region.

The ASEAN has failed the people of Burma and cannot afford to repeat such incompetence.

With the Thai Monarchy at the centre of a potentially massive, violent furore, it is to be hoped that Thailand’s Royal Household will see the light of day and use their influence to instruct their Privy Council to revise itself, support the return of the People’s Constitution and permit a free and fair General Election before the yellow-red civil war, which the Privy Council has fostered, makes the situation impossible for all.

In the 21st century ‘stability’ resides on the other side of a door called universal human rights, and Abhisit’s cabinet cannot, as we say, ‘cover the sky with their hands’.

The people will not retreat, the red-shirts will not turn yellow and the world will not stop watching Thailand’s super-rich Monarchy and it’s bevy of generals in the Privy Council.

The Thai want to love their Monarchy, and may continue to do so if the generals would be the gracious gentlemen they would like to be, and let the people get on with the work of building democratic institutions, and let the Royal Household get on with the Royal Household’s work of setting a true example – in honesty, humility, tolerance, compassion and self-sufficiency, for which military assistance is not required.

I wish to say that this was a difficult article to start writing, because it talks about things which people in Thailand don’t dare talk about. Having written what I have written I feel a strong sense of release, and I know that I want to share this feeling with 60 million other people in Thailand, especially with women and with all our young, new wave democracy fighters.

◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊

Note of acknowledgement.

I could not write this article without assistance from a native English speaker who has a compassionate understanding of Thai history and the struggle of rural people to maintain their livelihoods, dignity and respect. I thank my friend Riku for his assistance with this article. JY.

CURE publishes research on prisons around the world. This is one just sent about Ethiopia. The third world leads again in showing compassion towards its prisoners. The humanity of prisoners is recognised and everyone gets the benefits including community development skills. Especially Interesting is the fact that prisoners govern themselves through prisoner committees. And families are welcome inside. I think we need to look at how other countries value public participation and free expression and are better for it.

Prison and Justice Assessments in Africa

International CURE (Citizens United for the Rehabilitation of Errants):

May 11, 2009

http://www.internationalcure.org

Below is a fifth country-report, another installment in International CURE’s project of Prison and Justice Assessments, in African countries. These reports provide light and insights on prisons and criminal justice in many countries, which will help to guide on-going promotions of criminal justice reform. Additional country-reports are forthcoming, and we encourage you to save the entire series.

We here present a report on:

Ethiopia Assessment[1] <#_edn1> [2] <#_edn2>  3

1. FAIR JUSTICE

1.1 Judicial system capability.

Delays in criminal procedure are immense due to the backlogs in the offices of the prosecutor and in the courts. Few remand prisoners know when their case will be heard in court. Often the period spent in remand exceeds the final sentence. Sentenced prisoners are not told by the authorities whether or when they are eligible for parole. 1

Although the civil courts operated with independence, the criminal courts remained weak, overburdened, and subject to significant political intervention and influence. Constitutional interpretation remains solely with the upper house of parliament, exclusively comprised of ruling party members, which also handles judicial appointments and reviews judicial conduct. Judicial practice allows the court unilaterally to convict defendants on charges not raised by the prosecution at any point preceding the court’s decision on guilt. This practice effectively impedes defendants from presenting an adequate defense as they may not be aware of the potential charges they face. 3

1.2 Legal assistance to persons living in poverty.

Authorities regularly detained persons without warrants and denied access to counsel and family members, particularly in outlying regions. Although the law requires detainees to be brought to court and charged within 48 hours, this generally was not respected in practice. While there was a functioning bail system, it was not available in murder, treason, and corruption cases. In most cases authorities set bail between 500 and 10,000 birr ($494-975), which was too costly for most citizens. Police officials did not always respect court orders to release suspects on bail. With court approval, persons suspected of serious offenses can be detained for 14 days and for additional 14‑day periods if an investigation continues. The law prohibits detention in any facilities other than an official detention center; however, there were dozens of unofficial local detention centers used by local government militia and other formal and informal law enforcement entities. The government provided public defenders for detainees unable to afford private legal counsel but only when their cases went to court. While in pretrial detention, authorities allowed such detainees little or no contact with legal counsel. 3

One of the reasons remand prisoners have to wait such a long time before their case is heard in court and one of the reasons detainees eligible for parole are not discharged at the earliest moment possible is the almost total absence of affordable legal aid. Almost no (remand) prisoner can afford to pay a defence-lawyer, which means they are virtually absent in the Ethiopian criminal procedure. Only ‘Dergue’ prisoners are being assisted by government-paid lawyers. As a consequence the Ethiopian criminal procedure is not really contradictory: there is no real check by defence lawyers on the doings of the police, the prosecution, courts and prison system. This circumstance represents a major flaw in the Ethiopian judicial system. The ‘rule of law’ only can flourish in a judicial system with a critical and independent bar association that is able and willing to provide (free) legal aid to defendants and convicts.2

The present bail system is not very effective in the battle against the overcrowding of police jails and prisons. Only a few suspects are able to find the required sureties.  It should be considered to introduce the possibility to suspend remand conditionally. The militia in the kebele where the suspect lives could be entrusted with the control over the conditionally remanded suspect. If he re-offends before his case is handled by the court, he will be put into remand custody.2

1.3 Justice for women and juveniles.

Women and girls experience gender-based violence daily, but it is underreported due to shame, fear, or a victim’s ignorance of legal protections. In the context of gender-based violence, significant gender gaps in the justice system remained due to poor documentation, inadequate investigation, and lack of special handling of cases involving women and children. 3

The law criminalizes rape, calling for five to 20 years of imprisonment depending on the severity of the case. The law does not include spousal rape. The government did not fully enforce the law, partially due to widespread underreporting. The Addis Ababa 2006 annual police report listed 736 rape cases out of an estimated population of five million persons. Statistics on the number of abusers prosecuted, convicted, or punished were not available at year’s end.3

Domestic violence, including spousal abuse, was a pervasive social problem. The 2005 Health Survey found that 81 percent of women believed a husband had a right to beat his wife. A 2005 World Health Organization (WHO) study found that in two rural districts, Meskan and Mareko, 71 percent of women were subject to physical or sexual violence, or both, by an intimate partner during their lifetime. While women had recourse to the police and the courts, societal norms and limited infrastructure prevented many women from seeking legal redress, particularly in rural areas.3

The law prohibits trafficking in persons; however, there were reports that persons were trafficked from and within the country. The law prescribes five to 20 years imprisonment for such crimes. The country is a source country for men, women, and children trafficked primarily for the purpose of forced labor and, to a lesser extent, for commercial sexual exploitation. High unemployment, extreme poverty, and the chance at better opportunities abroad drive migration. Local NGOs estimated 30,000 to 35,000 persons were trafficked internationally between March 2007 and March 2008. More females than males were trafficked. Young women, particularly those ages 16-30, were the most commonly trafficked group, while a small number of children were also reportedly trafficked internationally.3

Rural children and adults are trafficked to urban areas for domestic servitude and, less frequently, commercial sexual exploitation and other forced labor, such as street vending, begging, traditional weaving, or agriculture; situations of debt bondage were reported.

Women are trafficked transnationally for domestic servitude, primarily to Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates, but also to Bahrain, Djibouti, Kuwait, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen. Some of these women are trafficked into the sex trade after arriving at their destinations, while others have been trafficked onward from Lebanon to Turkey, Italy, and Greece. 3

Internationally funded centers in Addis Ababa provided shelter, medical care, counseling, and reintegration assistance to girls victimized by trafficking. Other international NGOs provided assistance to children engaged in commercial sexual exploitation, including such services as a drop-in center, shelter, educational services, skills training, guidance, assistance with income-generating and employment activities, and family reunification.3

1.5 Arbitrary or severe penalties.

Article 112 opens the possibility to grant prisoners parole after having served 2/3 of their sentence. Those who serve a life sentence are eligible for parole after 20 years only. 1

1. PRISON SYSTEMS BASICS.

2.1 Structures and alternatives.

The country has three federal prisons, 117 regional prisons, and many unofficial prisons. Prison and pretrial detention center conditions remained harsh and life threatening.[3] <#_edn3>

A special phenomenon in all prisons is the presence of prisoners’ committees that operate very professionally and rather autonomously. They run – with the full consent of the governor – a kind of shadow-administration. Every zone of a prison elects its own committee. All zones elect members of a central prisoners’ committee. The commander of the prison police can reject elected candidates however. The central prisoners’ committee in Addis Ababa runs its own office, where an administrative function is kept. Every member of the committee has a specific task (education; welfare; health; financial matters; the management of prison shops, etc.). One member of the committee keeps records on the eligibility of fellow-prisoners for parole. In short: where prison management fails to provide services, prisoners committees try to handle matters by themselves. Zonal prisoners’ committees are empowered to elect fellow prisoners for remunerated jobs. They have certain disciplinary power too and can ‘sentence’ fellow prisoners to sanctions like collecting garbage, carrying loads or clean the premises. These zonal committees determine which prisoners are recommended to the central committee for entering the procedure for parole. If the central committee accepts a nomination for parole it will send the file to the prison governor who will refer the case to the proper court of justice.1

Prison governors are very happy with these prisoners’ committees and regard these as very useful instruments for maintaining good order in their institutions, which they cannot manage properly themselves, for want of sufficient trained personnel.1

One prison is divided into 6 zones, each of which has its own Prisoners Committee. The zonal Prisoners Committees are elected by the prisoners. The head of the prison police may reject candidates for these committees. This Central Prisoners’ Committee consists of: a chairperson, a secretary and members responsible for: the social department (health, education, training, work); the financial management of the central shop, the small shops, the tearoom, the profits of which are used to support the prisoners; the inspection of the shops and the economical-planning of the shops. One committee-member runs the department of Safety and Justice, which (among other things) keeps track of the dates of release (parole) of prisoners. This is necessary because the prison administration is not failsafe in this respect. It also tries to speed up procedures, which is necessary because the criminal courts are coping with a huge backlog.2

The prisoners’ committees are empowered to assign jobs and to mete out disciplinary punishments. To this end every zonal prisoner’s committee disposes of its own ‘judges’, each of which is responsible for one cell. Disciplinary sanctions are: 1) physical exercise; 2) garbage disposal; 3) transporting materials; and/or 4) cleaning of the zonal compound. 2

Serious infractions of prison discipline are dealt with by the prison administration. In emergency cases the zonal committee can make use of instruments of restraint like manacles. Internal regulations regulate the power of the prisoners’ committees.[4] <#_edn4>  Cases of alleged abuse of power by members of the prisoners’ committees are reported to the unit cell-heads and handled by the zonal and if necessary by the central prisoners’ committee. If this proves to be not sufficient the case can be transferred to the prison director.2

The prisoners’ committees are entrusted with the first screening regarding the eligibility of prisoners for parole. The above-mentioned ‘judges’ keep records of all prisoners belonging to his cell. He checks whether the candidate-parolee has posed disciplinary problems and if he deems someone fit for parole he advises such to the zonal prisoners’ committee, which sends its advice to the prison administration. 2

2.2 Physical space and separations.

Severe overcrowding was a problem. In September 2007 it was reported that there were 52,000 persons in prison. Earlier in the year, prison populations decreased by 10,000 due to pardons but reportedly again increased due to increases in ethnic conflict and economic crimes. Prisoners often had less than 22 square feet of sleeping space in a room that could contain up to 200 persons, and sleeping in rotations was not uncommon in regional prisons. 3

In all prisons visited, during the night some 70-150 persons were squeezed together in rooms of about 200 m² floor space. Bedding is of very poor quality: most people have to lie on old, filthy rags, if any. No beds, mattresses or blankets were to be seen.1

The commissioner of the Addis Ababa police reported that on the 10th of July 2003 1,254 people were being held in custody in the 29 cells of the 28 police districts of Addis Ababa. 2

To get a grip on the problem of prison overcrowding alternatives for imprisonment, like community service orders and educational orders should be introduced in the Penal Code. The implementation of these kinds of ‘alternative’ penal sanctions certainly is expensive when it is entrusted to a kind of probation service, like is the case in several Western-European countries. The administrative structure of Ethiopia with the kebele as basis may offer a unique opportunity to entrust the execution of the alternative penal sanctions to the kebele administration under the supervision of the social courts.2

Article 36 of the Constitution requires that juveniles be kept segregated from adult prisoners. In this respect the Penal Code is more specific, stating that persons between the ages of nine and fifteen years may not be detained together with adults. 1, [5] <#_edn5>

The Penal Code also requires that remand and sentenced prisoners be kept separated from each other, that only sentenced prisoners are obliged to work[6] <#_edn6> and shall receive remuneration for that.2

3. PROTECTION OF INCARCERATED PERSONS

3.1 Grievances.

The Prisons Proclamation is to be replaced by a new ‘Federal Prisons Commission Establishment Proclamation’, drafted in 2003.  Conspicuous omissions are: the right of prisoners to lodge complaints and external independent supervision.2

3.2 Abuse of incarcerated persons.

Article 18 of the Constitution prohibits cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment of anyone.1

3.4 Correctional Officers.

The guards are trained in a special training centre in the village of Aleltu, some 30 kilometres outside this city. Training of prison personnel is militaristic and hardly welfare oriented. Very little time is spent on prisoner’s rights and treatment programmes for offenders. 1

One of the main challenges of prison reform will be to change a militaristic and punitive approach of management and other staff into a prisoner-oriented attitude, with a strong focus on their reintegration into free society. This calls for a reorientation of the training of personnel on all levels. Training schedules should include courses in human rights and rehabilitative treatment of offenders. Prison guards needs to be transformed into penitentiary workers, and should shift their professional focus from mere maintaining order to helping prisoners to become law abiding citizens. Prison personnel should no longer be part of the police service, but should be transformed into a special service of prison personnel with its own training centres, its own set of values and guidelines and its own uniforms – even if it would mean a loss of status in the eyes of some. 2

4. HEALTH SERVICES FOR INCARCERATED PERSONS

4.1 Health Care.

The daily meal budget was approximately 5 birr (50 cents) per prisoner. Many prisoners supplemented this with daily food deliveries from family members or by purchasing food from local vendors. Prison conditions were unsanitary and there was no budget for prison maintenance. Medical care was unreliable in federal prisons and almost nonexistent in regional prisons.3

Sanitary provisions like (open) toilets and douches usually are in a deplorable condition. The annual budgets of the prisons are not sufficient to feed the prisoners three times a day. Only with the help of visitors bringing food is it possible for them to survive. Prisoners lacking the support of their family must work in prison shops in order to earn some money for food or have to render services to fellow prisoners.1

5.0 RESTORATIVE PRACTICES

5.1 Rehabilitation Programs.

Art. 110 of the Penal Code limits the obligation to work to prisoners serving a sentence with deprivation of liberty and stipulates that such work shall be in accordance with the prisoners’ ability and shall be of such a nature as to reform and educate him and to be conducive to his rehabilitation. Working prisoners are entitled to ‘commensurate remuneration’ for their work. 2

Perhaps the biggest challenge for prison reformers will be to convince the courts, prison administrators, politicians and the general public that it is really worthwhile to offer prisoners programs that facilitate their rehabilitation. This means that on all levels people become aware of the fact that mere ‘warehousing’ prisoners in ‘universities of crime’ does not diminish recidivism at all. The new Penal Code should emphasise the importance of rehabilitation and reintegration as most important justifications for imprisonment. Given the opportunity to acquire some vocational skills and/or some basic education during their time in prison, to learn something useful, combined with the support of a rehabilitation or probation service after release, can give ex-convicts the chance to live a crime-free life and will enhance the safety of the public. Mere imprisonment doesn’t solve anything, not for the convict, his victim, nor society. Most people are aware of this, but for many this will require a radical change in thinking about crime and criminals and how to deal with them. 2

It will be necessary but not sufficient to embed the concept of rehabilitation in criminal and penitentiary law. The general public and the officials concerned (first and foremost the prison administrators and prison police) have to get used to viewing prisoners as fellow-citizens, who after their detention have the right (and the duty) to reintegrate into free society. 2

[1] <#_ednref1> Gerard de Jorge, “The Ethiopian Penitentiary System

[2] <#_ednref2> Gerard de Jonge, report on the visits to Ethiopia from 7-21 July 2003. And from 20-25 October 2003 , University of Mmaastricht -the Netherlands. Acting for the Dutch Centre for International Legal Co-operation (CILC).

[3] <#_ednref3> U.S. Human Rights 2008 Country Reports, http://www.state.gov/g/drl/rls/hrrpt/2008/af/119001.htm

[4] <#_ednref4> The Head of the A.A. federal prison provided the author with a set of the regulations in the Amharic language.

[5] <#_ednref5> In Ethiopia criminal liability starts at the age of nine.

[6] <#_ednref6> In this sense the Penal Code is more specific than the Constitution.

Major Source of Pirated iPhone Apps Closes Down

enigmax

TorrentFreak: May 5, 2009

http://torrentfreak.com/major-source-of-pirated-iphone-apps-closes-down-090505/

A site thought to be the source of up to 60% of cracked iPhone apps added to the Appulous app database has ceased its operations. The site, home to well known cracker ‘kidmoneys’, is believed to have made use of hacked iTunes gift cards to maintain the supply of apps, but now says it will stop its operations.

In a major blow to the iPhone app scene, a site made home by some of the most prolific iPhone app crackers/suppliers has stopped its operations. iTunes Card VN (iPhone Vietnam Groups) turned out dozens of brand new releases every day.

The site was run by a very well known iPhone app cracker called ‘kidmoneys’ and it’s believed the message currently on the site’s homepage is his:

I won’t crack apps/games anymore

People who used the Installous application from Hackulo.us will be familiar with Appulo.us. Functioning a little like a torrent index, Appulo.us carries links to cracked iPhone applications hosted elsewhere, without carrying any of its own content. It’s believed that kidmoneys and other crackers from iTunes Card VN supplied around 60% of everything added to Appulo.us each day.

TorrentFreak spoke with most_uniQue, a cracker from Hackulo.us who explained the significance of the closure. “iTunes Card cracked about $1000-1500 worth of apps each week,” he told us. “About 50 apps a day.”

Of course, all these apps have to be purchased from the Apple App Store before they can be cracked and distributed, but we were told that some crackers use cracked iTunes gift card codes to make their purchases from Apple.

A physical card isn’t needed, the code from a card is enough and these are generated by crackers with the use of keygen-like software. most_uniQue told TorrentFreak that a $1000 worth of credit can be purchased for $50 and a quick search turned up offers even lower than that.

Since all requests for Apple apps were fulfilled on the iTunes Card site (kidmoneys had 23K+ ‘thanks’ from users), the speculation is that they used cracked iTunes gift cards to fund the purchase of the apps.

TorrentFreak was told that many of the most expensive apps did in fact originate from the iTunes Card website.

Although it seems to be the end of the road for iTunes Card VN, some of the residents have already moved on to a new home ready to crack another day. Indeed, a brief look at Appulo.us today shows plenty of new apps.

FACT censored [and how to resist]
Political Prisoners in Thailand: April 28, 2009

http://thaipoliticalprisoners.wordpress.com/2009/04/28/new-fact-censored-and-how-to-resist/

On 26 April 2009, Freedom Against Censorship reported that access to their site was being blocked by at least ISPs in Thailand: TOT ADSL, Kasetsart University, and Buddy Internet. FACT has issued a letter of protest and has also asked readers to let them know if other providers are blocking their site. Read the full article here: “Freedom Against Censorship Thailand CENSORED!”

On 27 April 2009, FACT posted a workaround. If you are having difficulty using the original site, then access the site here. [Note: http has been replaced by https]. Share this information widely.

Hackers dive in to Amazon ‘adult’ glitch
Josephine Tovey
The Age: April 14, 2009

http://www.theage.com.au/news/technology/hackers-dive-in-to-amazon-adult-glitch/2009/04/14/1239474855244.html?page=fullpage#contentSwap1

Online bookseller Amazon.com ignited a storm of protest on the internet and prompted accusations of censorship of gay, lesbian, erotic and feminist material over a cataloguing change in which thousands of titles were mistakenly labelled as “adult” and removed from some searches.

But while the company immediately took responsibility for the problem and labelled it a technical glitch, a hacker has claimed responsibility for what he claims was a masterful hoax.

Social networking and blogging sites have been abuzz with the controversy over the last three days, which was dubbed “amazonfail” and has been a leading topic on Twitter.

The cataloguing change came to light late last week when US author Mark Probst realised his gay teen novel The Filly had been removed from sales rankings.

Probst contacted the company and received the following response, which he posed on his LiveJournal blog.

“In consideration of our entire customer base, we exclude ‘adult’ material from appearing in some searches and best seller lists. Since these lists are generated using sales ranks, adult materials must also be excluded from that feature,” the email from Amazon.com said.

When a book’s sales ranking is removed it does not mean the book is no longer for sale, but rather that it might not appear in searches.

As news of the change spread across the internet, people began searching for other titles and found that thousands of other books, including Brokeback Mountain, Ellen DeGeneres: A Biography and Lady Chatterley’s Lover, have also been labelled adult and had their sales ranking removed.

Some bloggers claimed the removals meant that, when they used the subject search “homosexuality” on the website on Sunday afternoon, they were only directed to anti-gay titles such as A Parent’s Guide to Preventing Homosexuality.

Accusations of homophobia prompted a snap internet campaign against the bookseller. About 19,000 signed a petition called “In protest at Amazon’s new ‘adult’ policy”. People also protested on Facebook and Twitter.

On Sunday evening a company spokesperson told the website Publisher’s Weekly the change was a “glitch” and denied there had been any change to Amazon’s adult policy.

The brief explanation only inflamed online protest, and prompted a new popular Twitter thread called #glitchmyass.

On Monday afternoon in the US, a more comprehensive explanation was offered by Amazon.com’s communications director Drew Herdener.

“This is an embarrassing and ham-fisted cataloguing error for a company that prides itself on offering complete selection,” he said in a statement.

He said that 57,310 books had been affected across a range of genres.

“Many books have now been fixed and we’re in the process of fixing the remainder as quickly as possible, and we intend to implement new measures to make this kind of accident less likely to occur in the future.”

Following the company’s admission several theories have surfaced as to how the problem occurred.

One internet troll, who goes by the moniker “Weev”, claimed responsibility for the change, saying he was able to manipulate Amazon.com’s system whereby users can flag products as “inappropriate” and have their rankings removed.

But other hackers have doubted whether he could have pulled off the changes and have accused him of trying to gain publicity out of the fiasco.

Amazon.com has already returned the sales ranking to many of the affected titles.

While many online writers are still doubtful the changes were simply a technical hitch, Probst has accepted the company’s response.

“Amazon admits they goofed, and I, for one, shall give them the benefit of the doubt and say I do not believe that there was any malicious intent,” he wrote on his blog.

Aussie classification site hacked in censorship protest
Conroy speaks out on ‘technical errors’
John Oates
The Register: March 26, 2009

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/03/26/aussie_hack_censor/

[EXCERPT]

Hackers broke into the Australian government’s film and videogame classification website yesterday and posted a message opposing comms minister Stephen Conroy’s trial of internet filtering.

At the time of writing the site is still unavailable – but here is a screengrab of the front page kindly sent in by an Antipodean Reg reader.

Welcome to the Classification Website

This site contains information about the boards that have the right to CONTROL YOUR FREEDOMZ. The Classification Board has the right to not just classify content (the name is an ELABORATE TRICK), but also the right to DECIDE WHAT IS AND ISN’T APPROPRIATE and BAN CONTENT FROM THE PUBLIC. We are part of an ELABORATE DECEPTION from CHINA to CONTROL AND SHEEPIFY the NATION, to PROTECT THE CHILDREN. All opposers must HATE CHILDREN, and therefore must be KILLED WITH A LARGE MELONS [sic] during the PROSECUTION PARTIES IN SEPTEMBER. Come join our ALIEN SPACE PARTY.

Conroy was appearing on ABC TV show Q&A last night and from all accounts did not win many new recruits to his plan to filter internet content for all Aussies. The show should be available for download from here a little later.

[FACT comments: Finally, a legal use for Bit Torrent!]

Marine One details leaked from P2P net
Richard Koman
ZDnet: March 1, 2009

http://government.zdnet.com/?p=4387

A company that monitors P2P networks says it found details about the president’s helicoper, Marine One, on a computer in Tehran. Pittsburgh station WPXI reports.

Bob Boback, CEO of Tiversa, said, ”We found a file containing entire blueprints and avionics package for Marine One. … What appears to be a defense contractor in Bethesda, MD had a file sharing program on one of their systems that also contained highly sensitive blueprints for Marine One,” Boback said.

Retired Gen. Wesley Clark, an adviser to Tiversa, added:

We found where this information came from. We know exactly what computer it came from. I’m sure that person is embarrassed and may even lose their job, but we know where it came from and we know where it went.

It’s no acceident the information wound up in Iran, the company said. Countries like Iran, Pakistan, Yemen, Qatar and China are “actively searching for information that is disclosed in this fashion because it is a great source of intelligence,” Boback said.

Rep. Jason Altmire said he will ask Congress to investigate the risk to national security of this sort of exposure.

Cnet’s Charles Cooper interviewed the Tiversa’s Sam Hopkins (Cooper says he’s the CEO but the original report said Boback is CEO; the company website doesn’t list executives), who said someone at the company was running a Gnutella client – possible a buggy one.

Hopkins said it’s hardly an unusual occurence – although presumably the usual breaches aren’t so closely connected to the President.

Everybody uses (P2P). Everybody. We see classified information leaking all the time. When the Iraq war got started, we knew what U.S. troops were doing because G.I.’s who wanted to listen to music would install software on secure computers and it got compromised. … We see information flying out there to Iran, China, Syria, Qatar–you name it. There’s so much out there that sometimes we can’t keep up with it.

Bottom line: P2P is the biggest disaster for security “of all time.”

We’ve had people come into our data center and we’ve shown them things that are out there on P2P and they go away with their minds blown.

As a lawyer and technology writer, Richard Koman brings a unique perspective to the blog’s intersection of law, government and technology. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.

A cyber war in Malaysian politics?
Ooi Kee Beng
Malaysian Insider: February 19, 2009

http://www.themalaysianinsider.com/index.php/opinion/ooikeebeng/18721-a-cyber-war-in-malaysian-politics

Once upon a time, before the Internet became as common as the television in Malaysian homes, public figures made local speeches that were tailored to suit the audience that was physically present.

This worked well for politicians wishing to entertain the parochial tendencies of the audience of the day without jeopardising their prospects of becoming nationally relevant.

Today, however, such speeches quickly leak into the wired world of the Internet, putting things into a different context, and revealing the speakers’ supposed real values to the world.

Playing local politics with the awareness that the audience is always the whole wide world is no easy task, especially for those who have been in politics and in power long before the Internet changed everything.

The dominant Umno learned this the hard way three years ago when it decided to telecast “live” its national assembly. The parochialism and racism expressed by its candidates on that occasion for the nation to hear soon forced it to backtrack.

Defensive arrogance does grow out of the inability to evolve.

The attempt to block access to Raja Petra Kamarudin’s controversial Malaysia Today website last year managed to stop traffic going to that site, but did not stop access to its contents. Mirror sites sprung up immediately to nullify the censorship.

The police decision in September 2008 to use the Internal Security Act to jail Raja Petra, along with prominent opposition politician Teresa Kok and journalist Tan Hoon Cheng, merely backfired. The de facto minister of law, Datuk Zaid Ibrahim, soon resigned in protest.

Publicly calling female bloggers liars, as then Tourism Minister Tengku Adnan Tengku Mansor did in March 2007, is also not a very smart thing to do. The negative reaction on the web on that occasion was tremendous.

Opinions expressed for local consumption becoming national news is part and parcel of a revolution in information technology which carries enormous consequences for the near future. Some are positive, and some will certainly not be.

Through the Net, you can sell old useless books you have under the stairs on the world market; you can get to know strangers on the other half of the world merely by being on chat sites; and you can arrange an entire holiday to the south of France without talking to any salesperson at all.

In Malaysian politics, we have witnessed how SMSes, videos and phone cameras have come into play. While these can uncover abuse of power, as in the case of the woman forced to do ear-squats naked while detained by the police in December 2005; reveal dubious practices, as in the case of the Lingam Tapes released in 2007 showing a prominent lawyer boasting about his ability to fix top judge appointments through political connections; and contribute to court cases, as in SMSes supposedly sent by Deputy Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Razak to a lawyer, discussing the detention of a close associate then charged with involvement in the murder of a Mongolian woman.

The latest political incident involving IT innovations concerns the circulation of nude pictures of prominent opposition politician Elizabeth Wong, secretly taken on a phone camera.

The case of Wong (also a blogger), who has offered to resign from her position as state assemblywoman for the opposition-held Selangor, adds worrying dimensions to the political use of modern IT.

First, it is not only the line between the local and the national that is being erased. The line between the private and the public is fading fast as well.

That is worrying indeed. Most urbanites in Malaysia of all races, especially in the Klang Valley where Wong lives, would undoubtedly consider Wong the victim. Mass media attempts to class the case as a “sex scandal” — and this happened on both sides of the Causeway — smack of shameless sensationalism, journalistic amateurism and political opportunism.

In the sanctity of her home, surely she is allowed to walk scantily dressed, sleep half-naked, even shower nude, and yes, have sex without clothes on.

The culprits deserving punishment are those who facilitated the publicising of those pictures, regardless of whether they were taken with her permission or not.

The fact that she is an unmarried woman, and not a man, has had a serious impact on how the incident is being interpreted. Should a male politician, married or not, such as former Selangor Menteri Besar Datuk Seri Dr Khir Toyo, for example, have been photographed in the nude while asleep, the fallout would have been minimal, even comical.

The Wong case also shows the disturbing shrinkage of moral space when the private and the local are technologically subsumed under the public and the national.

Moral values do differ geographically, individually, culturally and according to lifestyle. This diversity is denied when such a case gets politicised, and here, the supposed sensitivities of the vocally most religious, most parochial, most traditional and most rural are allowed to define the national public norm. Wong is being sacrificed to appease illiberal elements within the opposition. Surely, this is not what the Pakatan Rakyat is fighting for.

A political cyber war has started in Malaysia. While we thought that the old would be at the mercy of the new in such a showdown, it is time to realise that, in truth, the more desperate and more immoral has the edge.

The writer is a Fellow at the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies. His latest book is “March 8: Eclipsing May 13″ (with Johan Saravanamuttu and Lee Hock Guan, ISEAS).

Jacqui’s jihad on web extremism flops
Counter terror ambitions countered by reality
Chris Williams
The Register: February 13, 2009

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/02/13/jacqui_smith_web_extremism/

More than a year after Jacqui Smith gave a major speech on counter terrorism, in which she said she wanted jihadi literature removed from the web, the internet industry has seen scant sign of action from the government.

ISPA, the trade association that represents internet providers, told The Register it had received one “very informal” approach from officials following the speech. A spokesman said: “There have been no formal discussions and no contact at all during the back end of last year.”

On January 17 2008, Smith told an international conference on radicalisation that material that “glorifies terrorism”, made illegal under the Terrorism Act 2006, should be blocked. “Where there is illegal material on the net, I want it removed,” she said.

Earlier that day she had told Radio 4′s Today Programme: “We need to work with internet service providers, we need to actually use some of the lessons we’ve learned for example about how to protect children from paedophiles and grooming on the internet to inform the way in which we use it to prevent violent extremism and to tackle terrorism as well. We have a responsibility… to cut off the supply of those who want to look to violent extremism.”

Her comments were widely interpreted as a signal that the government wanted to create arrangements for blocking extremist websites similar to the Internet Watch Foundation, which maintains a blocklist of websites hosting child abuse material. The Home Office officials that made the informal approch to ISPA following the speech indeed asked about the possibility of such technical measures to bar extremist websites.

Another senior internet industry source, independent of ISPA, reported similar Home Office enquiries early in 2008, followed by silence.

In a statement, the Home Office asserted it had taken significant action against web extremism. “The Home Secretary has made it clear that unlawful material should be removed from the internet and those that are vulnerable to violent extremist messages should be protected,” it said.

“Following the Home Secretary’s speech in January 2008, industry representatives attended a ministerial meeting to discuss ways to work together to tackle online radicalisation. As a result of these and ongoing discussions a growing number of filtering and parental control software products now provide an enhanced level of protection against material that promotes terrorism.”

According to a Home Office press release in November, the result of such liaison with the internet industry was that “web users now have the opportunity to download software allowing them to restrict access to websites”.

In fact, major ISPs have long offered such parental control systems and they fall a long way short of Smith’s stated aim that extremist websites should be “removed from the internet”.

A Home Office spokesman said any suggestion that there has not been tangible action would be a misrepresentation. He declined to explain how optional filtering software, available from ISPs for several years, was a move towards Smith’s stated ambition to “cut off the supply” of extremist material.

Update
After this story was published, ISPA sought to clarify its spokesman’s comments with the following statement: “There was one formal approach directly following the Home Secretary’s announcement last year. There have been informal discussions since, but none since the end of last year, although ISPA remains in contact with the Home Office.”