|
The history of Thailand from 1932 to 1973 was dominated by the military dictatorship which was in power for much of the period. The main personalities of the period were the dictator Phibun, who allied the country with Japan during the Second World War, and the civilian politician Pridi, who founded Thammasat University and was briefly prime minister after the war. A succession of military dictators followed Pridi's ousting — Phibun again, Sarit and Thanom — under whom traditional, authoritarian rule combined with increasing modernisation and westernisation under the influence of the U.S. The end of the period was marked by Thanom's resignation, forced after a massacre of pro-democracy protesters who were led by Thammasat students.
Military rule
 Troops on the streets of Bangkok during the 1932 coup The military came to power in 1932, and retained it (with intermittent periods of civilian rule) until the failed coup of 1992. The army's dominance can be attributed in part to its role as an avenue for advancement for ambitious young Siamese when the Chinese dominated the business world and the educated middle-class was still small.
The new regime of 1932 was led by a group of colonels headed by Phraya Phahonphonphayuhasena and Phraya Songsuradet. In December they produced a constitution, Siam's first, with a National Assembly half appointed and half indirectly elected. Full democratic elections were promised when half the population had completed primary education - expected to be sometime in the 1940s. A prime minister and Cabinet were appointed and a facade of constitutional rule maintained.
Although real power remained with the army, the civilian democrats, of whom Pridi Phanomyong emerged during the 1930s as the leader, at first accepted the new system as an improvement on absolute monarchy. In late 1933 there was a royalist rebellion in the north, which troops led by Colonel Luang Phibunsongkhram (originally named Plaek Phibunsongkram, and generally known as Phibun) put down. As a result, the king went into exile in Europe and in 1934 he abdicated. His ten-year-old son Ananda Mahidol was proclaimed as Rama VIII, but remained in Europe. Thereafter the king remained a marginal figure until the late 1950s.
The new regime carried out some important reforms. The currency went off the gold standard, allowing trade to recover. Serious efforts were made to expand primary and secondary education. Elected local and provincial governments were introduced, and in 1937 democratic development was brought foward when direct elections were held for the National Assembly, although political parties were still not allowed. Thammasat University was founded, at Pridi's initiative, as a more accessible alternative to the elitist Chulalongkorn, and became a hotbed of radicalism. Military expenditure was also greatly expanded.
 Field Marshal Luang Phibunsongkhram The military, now led by Field Marshal Phibun as Defence Minister, and the civilian liberals led by Pridi as Foreign Minister, worked together harmoniously for several years, but when Phibun became prime minister in December 1938 this co-operation broke down, and military domination became more overt. Phibun was an admirer of Benito Mussolini, and his regime soon developed some fascist characteristics. In early 1939 forty political opponents, both monarchists and democrats, were arrested, and after rigged trials eighteen were executed. Phibun launched a demogogic campaign against the Chinese business class. Chinese schools and newspapers were closed, and taxes on Chinese businesses increased.
Also in 1939, Phibun changed the country's name from Siam to Prathet Thai, or Thailand, meaning "land of the free." This was a nationalist gesture: it implied the unity of all the Tai-speaking peoples, including the Lao and the Shan, but excluding the Chinese. The regime's slogan became "Thailand for the Thai."
In 1940 France was occupied by Germany, and Phibun immediately set out to avenge Siam's humiliations by France in 1893 and 1904. By agreement with Japan, Thai troops occupied Lao territory west of the Mekong, and also western Cambodia. This caused a rapid deterioration of relations with the United States and Britain. In April 1941 the U.S. cut off oil supplies to Thailand. The democratic forces were anti-Japanese, and in August the National Assembly voted to resist Japanese pressure by a mass popular mobilisation. But Phibun controlled the army, and when World War II broke out in the Pacific in December, after a brief show of resistance at the battle of Prachuab Khirikhan, he allied Thailand with Japan, allowing Japanese troops to pass through the country to attack the British in Malaya and Burma.
 Seni Pramoj in 1948 As a reward, Japan allowed Thailand to annex the Shan States in northern Burma, and to resume sovereignty over the sultanates of northern Malaya. In January 1942 Thailand actually declared war on Britain and the U.S., but the Thai Ambassador in Washington, Seni Pramoj tactfully decided not to inform the State Department of this fact. When Pridi and the other democratic ministers were forced out of the government and the National Assembly suspended, Seni denounced the regime as illegal and formed a Free Thai Movement in Washington. Pridi led the resistance movement inside Thailand.
By 1944 it was evident that the Japanese were going to lose the war, and their behaviour in Thailand had become increasingly arrogant. This, plus the economic hardship caused by the loss of Thailand's rice export markets, made both the war and Phibun's regime very unpopular, and in July Phibun was forced to resign as Prime Minister. The National Assenmbly reconvened and appointed Pridi as Regent and Khuang Aphaiwong as Prime Minister. The new government hastily evacuated the British territories that Phibun had occupied and asked the Japanese to leave. The British were in favour of treating Thailand as a defeated enemy, but the Americans had no great sympathy for British and French colonialism and decided to support the new government. Thailand thus received little punishment for its wartime role.
Postwar Thailand
 Pridi Phanomyong Seni Pramoj became Prime Minister in 1945, and promptly restored the name Siam as a symbol of the end of Phibun's nationalist regime. Pridi as regent was the real power in the new government, which held democratic elections in January 1946. These were the first elections in which political parties were legal, and Pridi's People's Party and its allies won a majority. In March 1946 Pridi became Siam's first democratically elected Prime Minister. In 1947 he agreed to hand back the French territory occupied in 1940 as the price for admission to the United Nations, the dropping of all wartime claims against Siam and a substantial package of American aid.
In December 1945 the young king Rama VIII had returned to Siam from Europe, but in July 1946 he was found mysteriously shot dead in the palace. Three palace servants were tried and executed for his murder, but Thai society has preferred not to dwell on the event rather than to investigate its causes. The king was succeeded by his younger brother Phumibol Adulyadej (Rama IX), who was a schoolboy in Europe. In August Pridi was forced to resign amid suspicion that he had been involved in the killing. Without his leadership, the civilian government floundered, and in November 1947 the army, its confidence restored after the debacle of 1945, seized power. In April 1948 the army brought Phibun back from exile and made him Prime Minister. Pridi in turn was driven into exile, eventually settling in Beijing as a guest of the People's Republic of China.
Phibun's return to power coincided with the onset of the Cold War and the establishment of a Communist regime in North Vietnam. He soon won the support of the U.S., beginning a long tradition of U.S.-backed military regimes in Thailand (as the country was again renamed in July 1949, this time permanently). Once again political opponents were arrested and tried, and some were executed. There were attempted counter-coups by Pridi supporters in 1948, 1949 and 1951, the second leading to heavy fighting between rival army units before Phibun emerged victorious. In the 1951 attempt, led by naval officers, Phibun was nearly killed.
In 1949 a new constitution was promulgated, creating a Senate appointed by the king (in practice, by the government). But in 1951 the regime abolished its own constitution and reverted to the 1932 arrangements, effectively abolishing the National Assembly as an elected body. This provoked strong opposition from the universities and the press, and led to a further round of trials and repression. The regime was greatly helped, however, by a postwar boom which gathered pace through the 1950s, fuelled by rice exports and U.S. aid. Thailand's economy began to diversity, while the population and urbanisation increased.
 Field Marshal Thanom Kittikachorn By 1955 Phibun was losing his leading position in the army to younger rivals led by Field Marshal Sarit Thanarat and General Thanom Kittikachorn. To shore up his position he restored the 1949 constitution and called elections, which his supporters won. But the army was not prepared to give up power, and in September 1957 it demanded Phibun's resignation. When Phibun tried to have Sarit arrested, the army staged a bloodless coup on September 17, 1957, ending Phibun's career for good. Thanom became Prime Minister until 1958, then yielded his place to Sarit, the real head of the regime. Sarit held power until his death in 1963, when Thanom again took the lead.
Sarit and Thanom were the first Thai leaders to have been educated entirely in Thailand, and were less influenced by European political ideas, whether fascist or democratic, than the generation of Pridi and Phibun had been. Rather, they were Thai traditionalists, who sought to restore the prestige of the monarchy and to maintain a society based on order, hierarchy and religion. They saw rule by the army as the best means of ensuring this, and also of defeating Communism, which they now associated with Thailand's traditional enemies the Vietnamese. The young king Rama IX, who returned to Thailand in 1951, was happy to co-operate with this project. The Thai monarchy's present elevated status thus has its origins in this era.
The regimes of Sarit and Thanom were strongly supported by the U.S. Thailand had formally become a U.S. ally in 1954 with the formation of the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO). While the Vietnam War was being fought between the Vietnamese and the French, Thailand (disliking both equally) stayed aloof, but once it became a war between the U.S. and the Vietnamese Communists, Thailand committed itself strongly to the U.S. side, concluding a secret agreement with the U.S. in 1961, sending troops to Vietnam and Laos and allowing the U.S. to open airbases in the east of the country to conduct its bombing war against North Vietnam. The Vietnamese retaliated by supporting the Communist Party of Thailand's insurgency in the north and northeast.
The Vietnam War hastened the modernisation and westernisation of Thai society. Bangkok became a major service and recreational center for the U.S. military, hugely boosting the city's economy and increasing prostitution. Thais were exposed to the full force of western culture via television and the movies. As the economy boomed, the middle class and the intelligentsia grew rapidly through the spread of higher education. The population began to grow explosively as the standard of living rose, and a flood of people began to move from the villages to the cities, and above all to Bangkok. Thailand had 30 million people in 1965, while by the end of the 20th century the population had doubled. Bangkok's population had grown tenfold since 1945 and had trebled since 1970.
All this made the traditionalist ideology of the military regime harder to maintain, and the suppression of democractic politics increasingly difficult. In 1968 Thanom had introduced another new constitution, and elections were held in 1969, but the military continued to rule behind a constitutional facade. In 1971 Thanom tired of even this and arbitrarily dissolved the National Assembly. Bangkok's large population of university students, particularly at Thammasat University, influenced by the U.S. antiwar movement, launched their own movement for democratic change in 1972. In October 1973 enormous demonstrations were held in Bangkok, demanding the end of military rule. Thanom responded with force, and up to 70 demonstrators were killed in the streets — something not seen in Thailand for many years. This prompted the king to make his first intervention into politics by withdrawing his support for the military regime, and on October 14 Thanom resigned and left the country.
|
