The
Communist Party and the
Resistance to the Dictatorship thailand by Paul Petitjean on March 26 General Chalard Hiranyas Iri fomented a coup and tried to seize power in Bangkok. His expected supporters did not materialize, and after several hours of a war of communiqués between the putschists and the ruling military junta over various Thai radio stations, Charlard's soldiers were disarmed. But in spite of the weakness of the forces committed - General Chalard never had more than 300 provincial troops behind him - and the rapid aborting of this attempted coup, the incident did highlight the persistent internal divisions and weaknesses of the regime. In this sense, it marks the first serious defeat both for the military junta brought to power by the October 6, 1976, coup and for the Thanin government enthroned by the junta. One of the major objectives of the junta, in fact, was to reestablish international "confidence" in the Thai regime. The development of urban and rural mass movements, chronic government instability, and the inability of the Kukrit and Seni Pramoj cabinets to halt the spreading social crisis opened by the fall of the previous military dictatorship in October 1973 had provoked a flight of "national" capital to greener financial pastures (like Hong Kong and Singapore) and a suspension of foreign investment. In 1975 a total of 106 of the 111 investment requests made to the Board of Investment were withdrawn or canceled. In 1976 55 requests out of 199 suffered the same fate. The bourgeoisie was casting a genuine motion of censure - voting with its capital. Consequently, the first measures taken by the junta were aimed both at rees- lishing "order and social peace" and at combatting ". Iversion." The Thanin government has issued incessant appeals to investers. The prime minister himself took over chairmanship of the Board of Investment. A new law favoring the entry of capital at any cost was prepared, re-enacting the measures adopted under the previous dictatorships (Sarit's in 1960 and Thanom's in 1972). The junta tried to safeguard its image by imposing strict censorship on the national press and exerting pressure on international press agencies and journalists, expelling Norman Peagam, correspondent of the Far Eastern Economic Review, for publishing an article speculating on the internal divisions of the regime and the possibilities of new coup attempts. In spite of all this, national capital did not return to the 18 country and foreign investers are still shunning Thailand. The relative redressment of the economic situation after the difficult years of the international recession is not adequate. Political confidence is still lacking. And for good reason. The junta has been unable to impose unity on the sectors of the army which have not benefitted from the October 6 coup. The massacre of students at Thammassat University that same day and the scope of the subsequent repression have provoked an exodus of militants, several thousand of whom have joined the guerrillas of the Communist party or gone to Laos. Some of the factories that had played leading roles in previous struggles, such as the Hara textile factory, have been emptied of their workers. The armed insurrectionary forces of the CP have received political backing from important sectors of the mass movement and the pre-October legal left. Large-scale military operations, organized in the southern part of the country in particular, have not succeeded in breaking the back of the guerrillas and have often come to nothing. Finally, in January, for the first time since the junta came to power and in spite of the rigor of the decrees that have been issued, several strikes broke out: at the Department of Naval Dockyards, the Saeng Fa Battery Company, and the Royal Mosaic Exporting Factory. This upturn of social struggles, limited but nevertheless significant in light of the dangerous repression they court, probably reflects both the maintenance of a combat potential on the part of the urban working class and the effects of the internal divisions of the regime, which encourage action for demands. The balance-sheet of the first six months of the military junta is essentially one of defeat. Hence the virtually incessant rumors of coup - and the abortive attempt of General Chalard. The regime has emerged weakened from the test of March 26. Speculation on who the supporters of the coup may have been is continuing; one attempted coup threatens to lead to another. The junta is not even able to count on political stability. The internal weaknesses of the regime are especially serious - and the uneasiness of business circles is especially profound - since the regime must deal with an insurrectionary movement led by the Communist party, a movement which has a rather strong base in several regions of the country and which for several years now has enjoyed much more favorable
possibilities for development than in the past. Struggles for power are no longer circumscribed to military factions and their imperialist backers. For the first time, the conditions necessary for the emergence of a social opposition of national scope, both rural and urban, to the neocolonial and bourgeois forces seem to be in the process of coming together. The Communist party is now incontestably the only organization in position to take advantage of this situation and to offer the many militants who want to fight the junta a framework of struggle and an orientation. The history of this party is too little known to seriously attempt a reasoned judgment of its action and possibilities. But it is nonetheless necessary to assemble the few facts which are known about this party and to raise certain political questions. From difficult beginnings At the outset, the balance-sheet that may be drawn of the action of the Communist party of Thailand (CPT) seems ambivalent. The CPT is one of the few Communist parties formed in the framework of the Comintern of the 1930s and 1940s which has never acceded to power, been destroyed by repression, or turned to reformism. Although it has never experienced major successes, it remains engaged in a prolonged revolutionary struggle. Twelve years ago it launched an armed insurrectionary movement which successive regimes in Bangkok have been unable to destroy, despite the scope of the resources committed. Nevertheless, the progression of the mass influence and military activities of the CPT, while it has been regular, has until quite recently remained modest and limited to certain regions. To be sure, after the victory of the Indochinese revolution in 1975 and the bloody defeat of the Indonesian Communist party in 1965, the CPT has come forward as one of the most important Communist parties struggling in Southeast Asia. But during the second world war and the 1950s Thailand did not experience uprisings comparable to those of China, Vietnam, the Philippines (the Huk rebellion), Malaya (the CP), or even Burma (the non-communist guerrillas). And, unlike in Indonesia before 1965, in Thailand the urban movement was unable to develop until 1973. The ambivalence of this balance-sheet is explained first of all by objective factors. The Communist movement has run up against very difficult social, political, and ideological conditions in trying to gain a base in Bangkok (except among the Chinese community) and in the central plain. But it has benefitted from the development of Communism in Southeast Asia and has been able to rely on the existence of national minorities and a de facto permanent emigration of Chinese and Vietnamese. Hence its uneven development. The integration of Thailand (formerly called Siam) into the imperialist world market tended to upset the conditions of the peasantry, primarily in the rich central plain. A rice monoculture developed, along with commercialization of agriculture and a more notable concentration of land ownership than elsewhere in the country. But this social turbulence occurred more gradually than in Vietnam, and, according to an inquiry conducted in 1968, it was not until then that the percentage of farmland grew beyond 40% in the central plain and 80% in the provinces immediately surrounding Bangkok. The birth of social movements among the Thai peasantry lagged well behind the imperialist penetration. This was especially true since the monarchy was able to take advantage of inter-imperialist rivalry in order to avoid direct colonization. The maturation of class consciousness among the poor peasants in Thailand was additionally retarded by the weight of cultural and religious traditions. Theravada or Hinayana Buddhism (the "little way") is dominant in Thailand. Its ideology is much more individualistic than that of Mahayan Buddhism. Unlike Sino-Vietnamese Confucionism, it does not pave the way for a political thought. The pre-colonial political system (Sakdina) fostered the perpetuation of relations of patronage, a practice which left deep traces. A codification of the social hierarchy by successive gradations mirrors the perception of the great class blocs. While there was a certain tradition of mutual aid on the village level, it was not institutionalized, and there was no villagetype organization or development of secret societies as in Vietnam or China on which a nascent political formation could have based itself. The authority of the monarchy remains very great even today. The proletariat in the urban centers was primarily Chinese, as were the merchants and small entrepreneurs. This widened the gap between the cities and the countryside. And the Chinese community, lacking political rights, was oriented toward its country of origin. The Chinese bourgeoisie itself was politically impotent. Despite all this, the origin of the Communist movement in Thailand goes back to the end of the 1920s. But the initial implantation seems to have been gained primarily through the Chinese community in Bangkok and the Vietnamese community settled in the Northeast. Ho Chi Minh lived there for some time and published Than Ai, a Siamese counterpart of Thanh Nien. Communism in Thailand thus appears as the product of a confluence of the work done by the Chinese CP among the Chinese emigrant communities of Southeast Asia (at one time organized in the Communist party of the South Seas) and that undertaken by the Vietnamese Communists in Indochina. At the beginning of the 1930s, the Northeast Committee of the Communist party of Thailand served as a sanctuary for Indochinese Communists fleeing the great repression of 1931 in Laos. The exact nature of the Communist organizations of Siam at that time is little known; it is possible that the Chinese Communist party may have continued its activities there during the 1930s. But the dossiers of the French police nonetheless describe the action of a Siamese Communist party organized in five regions (North, Northeast, East, Center, and South). This party is said to have published propaganda material in the Siamese language, even in the Northeast, where the CP apparatus was said to be composed largely of Vietnamese. While it is probably false to present the Communist move-
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THAILAND ment of the time as a foreign implantation in the country, this movement nevertheless had to overcome its marginal situation. It began to do this, very gradually, by gaining a base in the regions populated by minorities. The minorities Present-day Thailand has 41 million inhabitants, 35 million of them Thai. But the Thai ethnic population is itself not homogeneous and remains divided into several groups, the two major ones being the Siamese Thais of the central plain (the majority) and the Lao Thais of the Northeast. They are ethnically close, but the population of the Northeast speaks a different dialect, eats different food, and has a history and socioeconomic conditions which differ from those of the population of the central plain. The Mekong River, which separates Thailand and Laos today, used to be an axis of civilization; it was only with colonization and the carving up of the region into spheres of imperialist influence that the river became a border. A deep particularist sentiment thus seems to have predominated in the Northeast, geographically cut off from the center and much poorer economically. It was apparently during the second world war that the Communist movement began to sink deeper roots in this region. The "revolution" of 1932, which ended the absolute monarchy, did not fundamentally transform the regime in the absence of an indigenous bourgeoisie. But it did result in the emergence of a small socialistic current among the intellecutals, of which Pridi Phanomyong was the spokesman. This current was most active among the regional intelligentsia of Isan in the Northeast. During the second world war the Thai government made an alliance with the Japanese. A Free Thai (Seri Thai) movement arose, which, although it did not become a real threat to the Japanese, seems to have played the role of a catalyst in the Northeast. According to Thadeus Flood, it gave rise to guerrilla forces including as many as 50,000 militants and also generated a new conception of nationalism, detached from the traditional allegiance to the existing state. The loose coalition group that was the Seri Thai movement is said to have been in contact with Chinese Communists from the very beginning. It was out of this contact that the present Communist party of Thailand, officially founded on December 1, 1942, was born. Thus, it was in Isan, in the Northeast, that the CPT gradually gained its first mass base. It was also here that the armed struggle began, in August 1965, and it is here that we find one of the historic bastions of the guerrillas: the mountainous region of Phu Phan. But it is perhaps also here that the CPT has recently suffered some reverses, because of the regime's combined use of terror in the villages and the refugees coming from Cambodia and Laos after 1975. Concurrently, the Communist movement of Thailand penetrated the southern regions - which is now the major field of military confrontation between the government forces and the guerrillas - while the Malayan CP penetrated the Muslim provinces of the Far South. In fact, the majority of 20 the four southern provinces of Narathiwat, Yala, Pattani, and Satun are occupied by a Malayan ethnic population which is Muslim and which has very bad relations with the central administration. The Malayan CP, for its part, was essentially Chinese in composition, which enabled the British to break its resistance after a long period of state of emergency and armed struggle between 1948 and 1960. Retreating to the northern border of Malaya, the Communist guerrillas also developed a base among the local populations of the South of Thailand. Communist influence now appears very strong, particularly in a region like Betong, but it remains divided among Muslim and separatist movements, not to mention the existence of many gangs of bandits. Finally, the CPT has been able to win over some of the Montagnard tribes of the North. This is the case with the Meos, some of whom entered into open dissidence after 1967, especially in the provinces of Nan and Chiangrai. The mass base of the CPT was thus developed largely by relying on the resistance of the populations of peripheral seemed to have enjoyed a broad autonomy, not to mention the independence of the Malayan CP in the Far South. Nevetheless, one of the major successes of the CPT seems to have been its ability to lend a centrepital, national dynamic to this ensemble of dissident movements. The new situation Nevertheless, this was not sufficient to prevent the centrifugal dynamic of the struggles of minorities from prevailing over the perspective of taking power centrally. It was still necessary to assure a mass base among the Thai peasantry and in the urban centers. Without this, and without a rise of social struggles among these populations themselves, the guerrillas were able to resist, and even gradually expand their operations, but they were not able to become a direct threat to the regime. The importance of the period which opened with the beginning of the 1970s is that it permitted this linkup. This was because of the social transformations that had occurred during the past decade and the impact of Thai involvement in the Indochina war - and because of the transformation of the country into a "terrestrial aircraft carrier" for the American intervention in Indochina. Agrarian concentration now affects the peasantry full force. With the aid of a rural exodus, a proletariat of Thai origin has arisen alongside the Chinese proletariat. The gradual integration of Thailand's citizens of Chinese origin is continuing, under more favorable conditions than in Malaya, for example. The development - even relative - of education has opened an acute employment crisis for graduates, while in the past any diploma was a passport to employment, particularly in the administration. By 1973 unemployment among intellectuals had reached major proportions. The moral and ideological effects of the massive presence of American Gls fostered the development of a nationalist cur-
rent among the intellectuals. The imperialist quagmire and then defeat in Indochina accelerated the stimulation of all these processes. The fall of the Thanom-Praphass dictatorship had been desired by sectors of the bourgeoisie and imperialism, as well as by the student and popular masses of Bangkok. Hence the conjunction of forces which permitted victory in October 1973. But the fall of this dictatorship opened a period of intense politicization of the mass movement and a growing class polarization of Thai society. The formation and then the radicalization of the Federation of Farmers of Thailand, the explosion of economic struggles among many sectors of the urban working class, and the linkup that occurred between a portion of the student movement and the militant vanguard of workers and peasants testify to the fact that Thailand had entered the era of modern class struggles for the first time. Nevertheless, the CPT was politically absent from Bangkok when the Thanom-Praphass dictatorship was brought down by the student and popular mass mobilizations. It seems to have played no direct role in the events that preceded and followed the explosion of October 1973. A Communist apparatus certainly existed in Bangkok at the time, but it seems to have been essentially concerned with the organization of aid to the guerrillas and the coordination of ongoing operations in the various regions more than at the development of a mass political base in the capital itself. In Bangkok the CPT was reduced to supporting struggles which it did not direct. But because of its prestige among the most radical militants of the mass movement, and because of the permanent threat of a new military coup, the CPT gained strength in Bangkok rather quickly after October 1973. The rise of far-right terrorist violence in 1974 and 1975 and then the establishment of a new military dictatorship closed the door to any legal alternative for the CPT. Today it remains the backbone of the resistance to the junta, the only force in position to offer an organization capable of resisting repression. But in 1973 this party lost precious months, and even an entire year, because of its lack of presence in Bangkok. How can this be explained? The origin of the Thai Communist movement was urban. In addition, during the semi-democratic interlude of 1945-47, the ideological radicalization of the intelligentsia of Bangkok was quite appreciable. But the social roots of this radical current were too weak to enable it to resist the successive repressive measures which were taken after the 1948 coup. The CPT, which had been legalized in 1946, had an extremely moderate orientation at the time, which remains difficult to judge in the absence of any knowledge of the strategic orientations and internal debates then current. It seems, however, according to Anders Tandrup, that it was only after being constrained and forced after the murder of many personalities that the CPT adopted a new strategy of rural armed struggle. It was the second congress of the party, held in 1952, that sanctioned this turn. But it took fifteen more years for the armed resistance to be born officially and for the first engagement between guerrillas and government forces to occur - an engagement which, moreover, was perhaps more the result of a government initiative than a decision of the CPT itself. Several things indicate that during this period an internal struggle developed within the CPT, which finally ended in the victory of the "Maoist" wing. A portion of the leadership went into exile in Peking. With the aid of geopolitical proximity, the CPT gradually adopted the international orientation of Peking and wound up denouncing "Soviet social imperialism. " Its new ten-point program, adopted in December 1968, explicitly refers to the thought of Mao Tse-tung as the programmatic basis of the CPT. And though it sometimes refers to the alliance with a "national bourgeoisie," the CPT tightly controls the Thailand Patriotic Front, established in 1965. Moreover, in the party's propaganda, reference to the Front progressively gives way to an almost exclusive reference to the CPT itself as the sole leader of the armed struggle. It may be thought then, by way of hypothesis, that the CPT's political absence from the capital in October 1973 resulted both from the very difficult conditions of repression it was facing and from the overall weakness of the workers and Communist movement, as well as from a mechanical application, after much hesitation, of the strategy of "surrounding the cities from the countryside. " Now, in spite of the forcible return to a military dictatorship, the CPT cannot now content itself with returning to its pre1973 policy without running the risk of creating a new gap between the urban and rural movements and between the center of the country and the peripheral regions. The social context has changed with the explosions of class struggle during the three years of civilian rule and the formation of a new class consciousness among a portion of the population. The political context has changed in more than one respect. The anti-imperialist axis, which dominated the propaganda of the CPT during the period of the Indochina war, must be not abandoned but modified. The U.S. forces are no longer massively present and anti-imperialism today is much more directly linked than before to the deepening of the class struggle in the proper sense of the term. A new generation of militants has arisen whose political experience is independent of that of the old leadership of the CPT. The regional and international context has also changed with the victory of the Indochinese revolution, the evolution of the Maoist leadership, and the aggravation of the crisis of the regime in China. The CPT seems never to have become a diplomatic agency of Peking, as other Maoist formations did. But the maintenance of an international orientation systematically aligned with that of Peking could only be very damaging to its struggle. The new situation definitely seems to have had effects on the line applied by the CPT. Explicit reference to the thought of Mao Tse-tung has disappeared from the latest ten-point program, adopted December 1, 1976. The attacks on social imperialism seem to have become increasingly rare on the radio station of the CPT, the "Voice of the People of Thailand. " While it still insists on the primordial importance
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THAILAND of the armed struggle in the countryside - and this importance is certainly great - the CPT also stresses the necessity for constant work in the cities, in spite of the difficulties. Finally, the CPT must be sensitive to the new weight acquired in Southeast Asia by the Vietnamese leadership and, for Thailand, by the Laotian leadership. It is nonetheless the case that many discussions seem to be taking place within the CPT and among the milieu close to it, on international alliances and on the tactics to apply in Thailand. The "populist" dominance of the far left of Thailand, like the absence of written documentation, makes it difficult to interpret these discussions. The programs are succinct, and there is still apparently no detailed class analysis of the agrarian structure or urban society of Thailand. The explicit differences relate to tactics rather than overall strategy -But the stakes of this discussion are high. In spite of the chronic crisis of the regime, the bourgeoisie of Thailand and imperialism are not lacking in resources in their counterrevolutionary struggle. The development of mass movements of the far right is evidence of this. The struggle remains difficult and the army is beginning to employ all the techniques learned from the Vietnam war in order to cut the population off from the guerrillas. Much will depend on the quality of the political intervention of the CPT, and consequently on the importance of its mass base on a national scale. Too little is known about the internal functioning of the CPT and the history of its leading apparatus to be able to judge the possibilities of its evolving profoundly. In fact, the situation requires a political break with its past orientation, both as concerns international alliances and as concerns the relative weight of political implantation and urban work compared with military activity. So far as its activity during the years 1965-1973 can be judged, the party appears to be marked by a "militarist" deviation. The conditions for a comprehensive turn nevertheless exist. The objective situation has changed profoundly, as has the regional relationship of forces. The influx into the CPT zones and into Laos of several thousand peasant, student, and worker militants, many of whom have acquired experience in mass work and sometimes a minimum independent appreciation of the international situation of the workers movement, represents an infusion of new blood. But it is unlikely that such a turn will be able to be made without an internal tendency struggle in the CPT. If this occurs, the CPT could become a major force in the country.
Leonid