U.S., Australia pressure Thai junta
BANGKOK — Thai police and soldiers flooded downtown Bangkok yesterday to pre-empt further protests against a May 22 coup after the army chief said a return to democracy will take more than a year.
In a televised address late Friday, Gen. Prayuth Chan-ocha said the military will need time to reconcile Thailand’s antagonistic political forces and engineer reforms.
Prayuth, who ousted the government of Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra after months of sometimes-violent protests, appealed for patience from Thailand’s international allies after outlining his reform plan.
But the response from foreign governments was to keep up the pressure on the ruling junta to call elections quickly.
At a conference in Singapore yesterday, U.S. Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel urged the Thai armed forces to release detainees, end censorship and “move immediately to restore power to the people of Thailand, through free and fair elections.”
Australia scaled back relations with the Thai military yesterday and banned coup leaders from traveling there.
“We understand that we are living in a democratic world. All we are asking for is, give us time to reform,” Prayuth said in his address on Friday. “We believe that you will choose our kingdom before a flawed democratic system.”
At the heart of nearly a decade of political turmoil in southeastern Asia’s secondbiggest economy is conflict between the Bangkok-based royalist establishment dominated by the military, oldmoney families and the bureaucracy, and an upstart clique led by former telecommunication mogul Thaksin Shinawatra that draws much of its strength from the provinces.
Shinawatra, who was ousted in a 2006 coup and has lived in self-exile since a 2008 corruption conviction, was the real power behind the deposed government of his sister, Yingluck.
Security was tight in the normally traffic- and pedestrianclogged Victory Monument area where protests flared last week. The closure of the overhead city rail station at the landmark reduced the number of people on streets and walkways.
Security was being enforced predominantly by police, who had at least seven large trucks parked nearby. Officers stood taking photos of each other and chatting with a small group of soldiers standing around a Humvee with a loudspeaker strapped to the top.
Trucks and police officers also lined the road near a central shopping mall where demonstrations took place a week earlier, but there was no sign of a rally.
A man was arrested and another fled when police thwarted their attempt to hold a protest at another downtown shopping center. One of the men held up a sign before a media scrum that said “election only” for less than a minute before police pounced and bundled him into a police truck.
Later, three women sat on the steps of a McDonald’s restaurant and sang a song seeking the return to democracy.
“There are only three of us, not five,” one of the women shouted at police, referring to a ban on gatherings of five or more people.
Despite martial law and a ban on gatherings, small protests against the military takeover have been held almost daily in Bangkok. There has been no serious violence.