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COVER:
CHUAN INTERVIEW:
SILVER LINING:
VIEW FROM WASHINGTON:
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ASIA | March 30, 1998 VOL. 151 NO. 12 |
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The Thai public felt desperate enough from the crisis, and disappointed enough with the previous administration, that it was more than willing to give Chuan a chance. "We don't really trust those politicians from the south," says Naiphan Lukmok, a village headman in northeastern Udon Thani province. "But we're willing to support Chuan since we need somebody new to solve the problem." He has been in this role before, as head of a government in crisis, and by most accounts he failed. In May 1992, the streets of Bangkok erupted into violence. Half a million people, later called the "mobile phone mob" because so many of them were middle-class Thais, demonstrated against the military government's attempts to institutionalize the power it grabbed in a 1991 coup. King Bhumibol Adulyadej intervened, and in elections held four months later, Chuan's Democrats won a slim plurality. He did a credible job in liberalizing the finance sector, promoting development in the rural provinces, restoring confidence among foreign investors after the May '92 riots and attacking corruption in the electoral process. Those efforts got bogged down when rival politicians and the military began flexing their muscles. Ultimately, it was a scandal within his party's ranks that led to his downfall. A laudable program to put property in the hands of farmers was abused by a high-ranking official who had rewarded allies with valuable real estate on the resort island of Phuket. Though Chuan himself wasn't implicated, his government was effectively finished. "This was a huge opportunity for a leader to engineer change," says Chris Baker, a British author of books on Thai politics. "There was a great impulse for reform, but Chuan frittered it away." Chuan's appeal then, as now, is that he represents clean, honest government. The risk, as with the Phuket deal years ago, is that corruption is bigger than he is. "You have 49 cabinet ministers and some 400 in Parliament. It's impossible to put together a government in Thailand that doesn't have somebody who is corrupt," says Kraisak Choonhavan, a Bangkok city administrator and son of former Prime Minister Chatichai Choonhavan, who oversaw a government so crooked it was called the "buffet cabinet," because so many ministers enriched themselves and their friends. The test now is whether Chuan can be tougher than he was during his last stint. Bangkok's élite tend to believe that if Chuan had acted more boldly during his first term, he could have capitalized on public sentiment for political reform. Instead, his legacy was a series of elections tainted by vote-buying and dirty tricks. "People had great hope that Chuan's first government would rehabilitate the political system," says Vanida Tantivitayapitak, an organizer of the Forum of the Poor, a group of rural activists. "But he turned out to be too prudent to actually change anything." The best hope is that Chuan has matured politically since the earlier debacle. In an interview with Time, he ascribes the ineffectiveness of his first term to his shaky coalition of rival parties. Unfortunately, the political geography hasn't changed much. In fact, for all of Chuan's pledges to clean up government, his cabinet includes a deputy minister who was denied a visa to the U.S. because of drug-trafficking allegations, another whose henchmen were accused of doling out wads of cash to voters and yet another who was implicated in the Phuket land scandal. The key difference, perhaps, is that this cabinet knows it must behave itself in the face of crisis. "Last time," says one of his top advisors, Abhisit Vejjajiva, "two of the coalition partners had their own ambitions: they wanted his job, essentially."
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