On the 5th October the Tank Corps Radio station called for a mobilisation of right-wing forces to “deal with” the students. Announcers urged people over the radio to “kill.. kill... kill” studentswrote Prof. Ji Giles Ungpakorn in an essay. A massacre on the campus of Thammasat University -- in which dozens, perhaps hundreds of students were killed -- followed the next morning.
Sounds like something out of Rwanda. But that was Thailand in 1976. Two weeks ago, a popular announcer at a military radio station back in 1976 was sworn in as prime minister of Thailand. His name is Samak Sundaravej. And last weekend, in interviews with CNN and Al Jazeera, the new Thai prime minister emphatically declared the massacre at Thammasat did not happen. A recent news report* on Samak states:
As Thailand's interior minister in the 1970s, the ran a wildly popular anti-communist radio show. In 1976, his show helped convince an angry mob to storm a student protest in which dozens of activists were burned to death. Samak claimed the massacre was the work of Vietnamese communists. His evidence? There were burned dog corpses among those of the students. The Vietnamese, he claimed, liked to eat dog. He was also quoted at the time as having said that "it's no sin to kill communists.It seems that at one time Samak was telling a fanciful tale about the massacre, and now he denies that the event occurred. It not necessary for a person to have been at the scene of the massacre for him to be culpable for what transpired. Although Samak was not interior minister at the time of the massacre, the question remains: Did or did not the prime minister of Thailand run a radio show that helped to incite the massacre of 1976?
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* Asia News Weekly, Vol. 2, Issue 5.
Note: See my previous posts on Samak's big lie -- here and here. Giles Ji Ungpakorn's "Marxist political writings about Thailand" text repository is here.
Funny how only Samak?
ReplyDeleteNo one else and no other side to the story, are we to believe there was no communism in Thailand?
Its like Thailans should be Excuseland., there were no Japanese
occupation, just a place for R&R?
Gee Jotman, this is a little
ReplyDeletelikeno democracy you need to
review first? Is this the McCain
Feingold wya of doing things
or is this another censorship?
You write freely; if you do not like it take it down after someone complains
With the election of this criminal and the inaction against the military coup makers like Prem, Thailand as a nation is bankrupt for ideas and is collapsing from within. We may not openly say the truth. I encourage my neighbors to ignore the national level and rebuild the foundation of democracy and quality of life in their neighborhood. We are years from creating a democracy here.
ReplyDelete