Democracy in Danger

With its unrestricted press and open parliamentary system, Thailand is the most democratic state in Southeast Asia. But with parliamentary elections scheduled for April 4, a wave of political violence is gravely endangering the Thai democratic experiment.

Last week Dr. Boonsanong Punyod-yana, 39, the articulate, American-educated secretary-general of the Socialist Party, was gunned down in his car while returning home from a political meeting. Later in the week a bomb exploded at dawn in Bangkok's Rama VI Engineering School and killed three students. In all, there have been a dozen deaths related to the current election campaign.

Most of the violence appeared to be the work of the country's well-organized extreme right wing. The chief targets have been opponents of the country's still powerful military establishment, which ruled until 1973. Many Thais believe the right is now maneuvering to bring about a military coup. Military men are concerned about the country's strikes (25 major work stoppages last year), almost daily demonstrations and rumors of Communist subversion. Some talk openly of taking power. "This is a weak government, a corrupted government," says one businessman with intimate military contacts. "The longer you let it go on, the worse it will get."

The chief defender of Thai democracy is the country's sophisticated, aristocratic, Oxford-educated Prime Minister, Kukrit Pramoj, 64. The author of 36 fiction and nonfiction books and for 22 years an acerbic, nationally known newspaper columnist, Kukrit led an incredibly complex 17-party coalition government until January, when a controversy regarding the price of rice forced him to dissolve Parliament. During the ten months he was in power, he concentrated on building up the long-neglected countryside by increasing rice and sugar price supports, requiring banks to invest in local agrarian projects and pumping $300 million in direct grants into rural subdistricts. Looking toward the elections next month, he hopes to gain enough new seats for his Social Action Party so that he will be able to create a stable and effective governing coalition.

To discuss the coming election, Kukrit met last week with TIME Correspondent William McWhirter. Sitting on the terrace of his large open house, he talked about Thailand's growing crisis and his own hope that Thai democracy can survive. Kukrit's views:

ON A MILITARY COUP: If and when the military think it their duty to intervene, then I'm out. I don't think I will have anything to do with it. But right now everything is under control and manageable by me. Don't worry. I know everything; I know everybody. I say this without the slightest trace of self-conceit. The whole sense of this country is that we must have legal and constitutional government. The moment has passed for government by the conquest of arms. A legal government is the only solution.

ON ASIAN DEMOCRACY: Democracy is the only reply from this country to the encroachments of Communism all around us. We cannot fight Communism by another kind of dictatorship. This would only play into the Communists' own hands. We must base our weapon on equal challenges and equal opportunity, the right to have individual choices and individual views. If we put away these things, we are lost.

ON CHANGE AND REFORM: China was too big to cure itself, so it had to change completely. But we are small enough to make manageable changes: the gap between rich and poor, social injustices, corruption. If you can reach these problems, society can cure itself; it is not all that impossible. Compared with China, Thailand is only a mouth with a canker sore.

ON HIS POLITICAL STYLE: Poverty, hopelessness, the glaring abundant luxuries of the rich compared with the poverty of the people who live next door --these are the seeds. I don't think about ideals. I'm just going around looking at things in my own country: the errors of poor administration, the corruption, the neglect of the people and the selfishness of everybody. I don't proselytize. I don't go around telling other people what to do. I try to do what most of the people seem to want done. I am able to comprehend what that is most of the time.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.