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Thai
Prime Minister Yingluck Shinatwatra (center) and
army chief General Prayuth Chan-ocha (right).
(Picture via
Flickr,
licensed under CC)
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By Saksith Saiyasombut
AsianCorrespondent.com
The East Asia Forum recently
published a column on the current political role of Thailand’s military
written by John Blaxland, Senior Fellow at the Strategic and Defence
Studies Centre at the Australian National University with 30 years of
service experience with the Australian Military and also a graduate of
the Royal Thai Army Command and Staff College. In short: Dr. Blaxland
has lots of military experience.
In the column, also republished
in The Australian, he criticizes “the classic Western liberal tendency
of painting complex situations in black-and-white terms” where the Thai
military is being portrayed power-hungry, coup-happy force. Blaxland
takes the 2006 military coup and its consequences as precedence for the
Thai armed forces to be hesitant to stage another one, despite repeated
cycles of rampant rumors.
Blaxland assumes that the
military acted on their own in September 2006, although many heavily
disagree with this notion. He also notes that the 2008 change of
government was merely an act among political parties, not mentioning
the fact that the Democrat-Bhum Jai Thai coalition was reportedly
brokered in the residence of then-army chief General Anupong Paochinda
and in presence of his successor and then-chief-of-staff General
Prayuth Chan-ocha.
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