”The infamous Thai smile once again?”

The former prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra was ousted in a military coup in 2006. Since then he has lived in exile. Later much of his fortune has been confiscated by the Thai state due to corruption charges and verdicts. As the cases date back to 2005, you can just wonder why charges were not made at that time. Then he could be moved legally from office. Not illegally by the army generals in a military coup. Maybe the courts were biased back then, and maybe they are biased now, too.

I do NOT say that Thaksin was not corrupt – they said corruption peaked when he was prime minister. Under his rule there was a bloody crackdown on drug use, but mostly the small fish were caught and killed. To almost no avail. But he won the elections in a landslide vote for the party ”Thai rak Thai” (Thai people love Thailand). He won the consecutive elections four years later, too.

They say that Thailand has a silver medal locked up some place won in the world championship of corruption – if this is true I don’t know for sure. But what I know is that the army generals responsible for the coup made some new laws securing that they could NOT be punished before they gave power back to the people. If this is not corrupting the legal system, I do not know what it is. I guess the retired generals have been smiling the infamous Thai smile every day since they took power illegally and later secured their own retirement.

New elections made Samak, a supporter of Thaksin, new prime minister. He was removed because he wanted to finish a series of cooking programs on TV. As a prime minister, due to a change of laws, he could not receive money for doing this, and then was forced to resign. More ”finicky” business from the Abhisit side, and the occupation af the airport and government offices by the ”yellow shirts”, made another government resign. Still no yellow shirt leaders have been to court for these illegal actions. In comparison several hundred ”red shirts” now are detained. Reminds me of Orwell’s ”Animal Farm”: ”Someone is more equal than others.”

Now Thailand (read Abhisit and his cronies) goes to Interpol to have Thaksin extradited on terrorism charges from wherever he is. See http://www.nationmultimedia.com/home/2010/05/27/politics/Will-Interpol-act-30130317.html and http://www.bangkokpost.com/news/politics/37759/dsi-pushes-for-interpol-global-alert Both Internet newspapers are biased in favour of the Thai government.

If Thailand does not succeed in this effort, if Interpol decides this is an internal Thai affair, the country (read Abhisit and his cronies) will lose face internationally.

If the army does not initiate a new military coup, the elite in Thailand will probably lose the elections which are scheduled in autumn next year.

SO KEEP SMILING, GUYS! MAYBE THAT WILL MAKE PROBLEMS DISAPPEAR.

And the infamous Thai smile will only survive in tourist leaflets and to those that do not know that the typical Thai smile is a way of avoiding conflicts in daily life.