Human Rights in Thailand. Don F. Selby
symbols had the power to stop bullets temporarily. Alan Klima, present during Black May, describes a scene that is equal parts surreal and terrifying:
It was now fully morning, but not bright. The army battalion was marching forward, while the crowd had come up off the asphalt, where they had been lying prostrate, and were now standing in unison, thankfully singing the national anthem.
Then the crowd sang the anthem to the king.
With that, the soldiers stopped their advance, held their firearms at their side, and stood at attention. For the duration of the anthem to the king, both sides stood at attention. When the people finished singing, they erupted into applause and cheers. For the soldiers’ part, as soon as the song was over, they charged. (Klima 2002, 121)
In no case did these symbols stall violence altogether (as Phra Supoj’s robes also failed to do), but this passage shows that such demonstrative claims to national loyalty, Buddhist faith, and reverence for the king were powerful for all concerned. If protestors knew they risked their lives in each case, they did so literally under the banners of nation, Buddhism, and monarchy, claiming the legitimacy of their struggles by virtue of the allegiances they displayed.
Figure 3. A Thai flag widely distributed in the May 1992 prodemocracy demonstrations bears the phrase throng phra jareun, equivalent to “long live the king.” Photo: Ron Morris.
While there are many photos and some video of the 6 October assault on Thammasat University, virtually all were taken outside the walls of the campus and show acts or the outcome of acts of violence against protestors. Girling argues that the three pillars—nation, Buddhism, and king—played an important role in progressive politics throughout the 1970s, including the Thammasat protestors, but points out that the nation of the progressive movement was a constitutional nation, not the paternalistic nation of authoritarian regimes (Girling 1981, 155). It is this constitutional nation that was the condition of possibility for the NHRC.13
“Before, they could forbid people to speak, but with the new constitution they cannot,” Kat told me. The “People’s Constitution” (รัฐธรรมนูญฉบับประชาชน) was drafted with unprecedented popular consultation, allowing for input from a wide range of Thai. Perhaps more significantly, the pressure of private individuals (like Dr. Prawase Wasi) to found a drafting assembly (rather than leaving the production of the constitution to politicians and bureaucrats alone) resulted in the generation of the 1970s (which is to say not just those who participated in 1973 and 1976 but all those who shared the broad democratic aspirations of those demonstrations) to have a decisive role in the drafting process (Ockey 2004, 160–161, 166). The constitution, Kat said, was an effort to change society, and it was to that ethos of change that the NHRC in several ways laid claim.
Figure 4. Demonstrators, Black May 1992. Photo: Tomas From.
In 2005, the NHRC circulated its first educational video compact disc (VCD), focusing on children’s rights (สำนักงานคณะกรรมการสิทธิมนุษยชนแห่งชาติ 2005). It opens, however, with an account of the NHRC’s origination, tracing it to struggles for equality and democracy. Over footage of 14 October 1973, 6 October 1976, and Black May 1992, it describes the People’s Constitution as the product of protracted democratic struggle, finishing the story with coverage of a parade of people carrying yellow14 flags reading รัฐธรรมนูญ ฉบับประชาชน (People’s Constitution), carrying the national flag, and wearing yellow T-shirts,15 headbands, and caps sporting the same slogan. Finally, many of the parade marchers carried a copy of the constitution, holding it out to the camera as they passed by.
Figure 5. Democracy Monument, 14 October 1973. Photo: Adam Carr.
This wielding of the constitution, as if a shield, is important. Kat explained that protestors of the Thai-Malay pipeline that was being built through the town of Hat Yai in southern Thailand in 2002 used the constitution as a tool, when confronted by police, to argue that they had the right to congregate and to mount their protest. Similarly, when I met with Dr. Sriprapha, chair of the human rights program at Mahidol University, she said that the vast majority of Thai do not know or understand their rights but that the 1990s saw increasing awareness on this front. As an indicator of this trend, she said that many of the rural people she works with in an NGO capacity now carry the constitution with them as a kind of protection: “When the police harass them, they can pull out the constitution, and the police may doubt themselves—they may think this villager knows his rights better he does. But there are no guarantees.”
The constitution in these cases is more than a document that outlines rights but also is symbolically potent, a fact emphasized in the video by the coincidence of the camera panning over the Democracy Monument—the site par excellence of popular democratic struggle and repository of a symbolic constitution—as the narrator talks of this constitution being the first that enjoyed public consultation. What, however, is at stake in showing the Democracy Monument? Benedict Anderson takes monuments to be a form of speech (Anderson 1973, 61) but also cites Robert Musil half-approvingly when he says, “There is nothing in this world as invisible as a monument” (cited in Anderson 1998, 46). This may be so. The Democracy Monument sits directly in the path of traffic moving along Ratchadamnern Klang. It is unavoidable, and yet this quotidian feature may be just what makes it invisible as a monument. Anderson orients his analysis to the contingency of meaning a monument may have—what, as a form of speech, it can say—but I argue that when the NHRC conjures the image of the Democracy Monument, it is less because of what it might mean or say and has more to do with how the history of demonstrations, with their bloodshed and deaths that can be called heroic, at its site gives it affective force. Anderson writes of Indonesia’s National Monument that it is “less a part of tradition than a way of claiming it” (Anderson 1973, 64). Anderson means this as the form of speech he discusses, but the idea behind showing the Democracy Monument while lauding the inclusivity of the constitutional drafting procedure in a video about human rights is to create associations not—or not just—of meanings between them and democratic heroism but at the level of affect: that is how the claim on the democratic tradition arises.
The NHRC Strategic Plan
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