A Nightmare of Lynching and Burning

Suddenly the nightmare that Bangkok had dreaded was happening: a wild outbreak of kicking, clubbing, shooting, lynching. Youths hurled themselves into the river to keep from being shot. Then the blazing finale as a heap of gasoline-soaked bodies were set afire. Finally, over the radio came last week's terse announcement: "The government cannot govern," said a voice. "To keep Thailand from falling prey to the Communists and to uphold the monarchy, this [military] council has seized power. The country is under martial law."

The voice was that of stately, thickset Admiral Sangad Chaloryu, 61, who just two weeks earlier had retired as armed forces supreme commander and planned to spend his time raising orchids. Said Chaloryu: "You can sleep peacefully tonight. You do not need to live in fear any more."

Judging by the right-wing junta's first decrees, Thai politics indeed appears headed for a kind of sleep. Within a day, 3,000 suspected leftists were rounded up and herded into detention camps. Political parties and any gathering of more than five persons were banned; newspapers, magazines and broadcasts were placed under censorship; and membership in Communist organizations was made punishable by death after trial by courts-martial. A midnight-to-dawn curfew was established on the night of the coup, then dropped--after revelers who ignored it were shot. Constitutional rule will eventually be restored, said Sangad, but only "when the nation is ready for it."

When that might happen is anybody's guess. A mild monarchy under the rule of the figurehead King Bhumibol Andulydej, Thailand is less notable for its democratic tradition than for its periodic military putsches and bottomless corruption. Yet at the height of the Viet Nam War, the U.S. shipped squadrons of bombers and some 50,000 troops to this California-size land, making it a fortress of American power. As the war in neighboring Indochina began to wind down, riotous Bangkok students overthrew Dictator Thanom Kit-tikachorn in 1973 and ushered in a neutralist government that requested U.S. withdrawal. Then began a series of shaky coalitions assembled by groupings of Thailand's 54 parties. Now, TIME's David Aikman cabled, the collapse of Thailand's three-year experiment in democracy was received with widespread relief, for the nation had been teetering on the brink of chaos.

Wild Buffaloes. The new trouble started last month, when ex-Dictator Thanom, after three years of exile in the U.S. and Singapore, slipped back to Bangkok with the saffron robes and shaven skull of a Buddhist monk. His mission, he said, was to do penance at the deathbed of his 91-year-old father. Leftist students at Bangkok's Thammasat University refused to believe it. They demanded that he again be expelled and gave Prime Minister Seni Pramoj a deadline of Oct. 2 to act. The frail, silver-haired Seni, newly appointed to head yet another coalition, vacillated.

Though Thammasat University had been closed, 4,000 students broke down the gates and occupied it. Some staged antigovernment skits; others secretly brought in guns. The students were supported by 43 Bangkok labor unions, which gave the government their own three-day deadline for Thanom's ouster. After that, they threatened, there would be a general strike.

But Thailand's conservative forces, by now fearful of the nation's steady drift to the left and its vulnerability to pressures from its Communist neighbors, fought back. Police seized two students who were putting up anti-Thanom posters and summarily hanged them. Several thousand right-wing vocational students known as "Red gaurs" (wild buffaloes) demanded that the left-wing students be ousted from the university.

A student skit triggered the final crisis, and the coup. Selecting a youth who resembled Thailand's Crown Prince Vajiralongkorn, 24, the leftists staged a mock hanging. Gruesome pictures of the charade were splashed all over Bangkok's daily papers that night. By dawn, an enraged mob of 10,000 rightists armed with rifles, swords and clubs began attacking Thammasat. They were met by M-16 gunfire and grenades. Then the troops moved in.

Spearheaded by a dump truck that smashed through the main gate, Thai paratroops, border guards and marines rushed in. Peppering the buildings with small arms fire, grenades and anti-tank shells, the soldiers swept through the campus. The toll: 41 dead (only two of them police) and 180 injured. "They were out for blood," said one Western newsman who had covered the war in Viet Nam. "It was the worst firefight I've ever seen." Huddled in terror on the central soccer field, student captives were stripped to the waist and kicked around by swaggering soldiers. Shoes, watches, eyeglasses and golden Buddha medallions were confiscated. The wounded were left to bleed--drawing flies in the noonday sun, while military doctors awaited "instructions" from their commanders.

A few desperate students managed to escape by the Chao Phya River at the rear of the campus. Others who ran for the streets were set on by the rightist mob. Several were beaten close to death, then hanged, or doused with gasoline and set afire. One was decapitated. The bodies of the lynched victims strung up on trees were mutilated by rioters, who gouged out their eyes, slit their throats and lashed at them with clubs and chains.

Radio Omens. From Thammasat, the mob moved on to Government House, where a tearful Seni Pramoj, who may well have known about the military's plans, offered his capitulation. "I did my best," Seni told the crowd. "I tried to keep law-and-order in this kingdom, but if you wish, I will go." The military, after taking power, promptly installed Supreme Court Justice Tanin Kraivixien, 49, as the new Prime Minister.

At week's end the junta was apparently in control of Bangkok, but it faces dangerous threats. Communist guerrillas are active in Thailand's northeastern provinces, and Radio Hanoi has denounced the coup as a plot between "American imperialists" and Thai "reactionaries." It was an ominous signal for a nation from which the remaining U.S. forces pulled out just last July, leaving the Thais to their own devices.

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