BANGKOK
Fresh on the heels of an order for school history books to be rewritten and students to recite a list of his personally-penned “moral values," General Prayuth Chan-ocha is moving his campaign to restore morality to Thailand to the TV screen - he will now edit soap opera scripts that are deemed threatening to public unity.
“In our country, television dramas make people fight and they create divisions so we have much improvements to make in this area,” Chan-ocha - who doubles up as the prime minister - told local media.
“I have ordered that scripts be written, including plays on reconciliation, on tourism and on Thai culture. A team of government writers is writing plots at the moment and if they can’t finish it, I will write it myself,” he added.
The move is the latest to clamp down on freedoms of speech in Thai society. Academic forums are banned - unless previously authorized by the junta - and all signs of criticism of junta or government policy - however small - trigger immediate military reaction.
Scores have been arrested for flashing a three-finger salute first used in the French revolution but now synonymous with "The Hunger Games" series of films, and others have faced similar consequences for reading George Orwell's critique of totalitarian society "1984” in public places.
Since he seized power May 22 by overthrowing Yingluck Shinawatra’s elected government, Chan-ocha's weekly TV bulletins have frequently focused on morality. He has asked all schools at primary and secondary levels, as well as vocational colleges, to make students recite the 12 “moral values," which include love for the nation, the religion and the king, and gratitude towards parents and teachers.
But Friday was the first time his focus fell on TV entertainment, in particular the dramas which are followed passionately every evening by millions of viewers. Typically, they are set in an upper class Bangkok full of extravagant mansions and luxury sport cars. Plots revolve around infidelity and the mafia, with most action involving people crying, being shouted at or slapping each other.
Television soap operas promote violence and divisions in society, underlined the general.
“I have ordered that scripts be written. One plot will be two foreign families who come to visit Thailand, they meet each other and come to love each other,” he said.
The move is not the first time Chan-ocha has ventured into artistic fields. In the coup's immediate aftermath he composed a song titled “Bring back happiness to Thailand” which has since become a staple of local radio broadcasts.
The general, however, is not the only one playing the media game - Arch-nemesis Thaksin Shinawatra, Yingluck’s elder brother and himself a prime minister from 2001 to September 2006 when he was ousted in a previous coup, has also taken to the visual arts to maintain his presence, albeit in a very different way.
Earlier this month, Thaksin's son Panthongtae launched an Internet cartoon that depicts the life of his father under the title “Looking at the stars with feet on the ground, this is Thaksin who always defies his fate.”
In the cartoon, Thaksin is shown growing from a child in his family coffee shop in northern Thailand to an “honest and fearless” officer in the police force. The video ends with skyscrapers and factories rising from the Bangkok earth, a joyous pop song providing the soundtrack, as a boyish-looking Thaksin - now in shirt and tie - and his family bounce down a road as a new gleaming metropolis rises behind them.
Despite initial rumors that Thaksin and his followers were planning to set up a government in exile, he has been relatively quiet of late. He has himself been living in exile, mostly in Dubai, since being sentenced to two years in jail for abuse of power in 2008, and last month asked his allies in the Puea Thai political party not to publicly criticize the junta and the military government - a move analysts saw as an effort to publicly illustrate that he didn’t want to foment public dissent.
In private, however, he has been regularly meeting Puea Thai politicians elsewhere in Asia.
Since the military seized power, the National Council for Peace and Order (the junta's official name) has abrogated the constitution and the senate, and banned all opposition and criticism of the junta’s orders. Meanwhile, former Prime Minister Yingluck, who is still under investigation for neglect of duty in relation to a disastrous rice-subsidies scheme, and Puea Thai politicians have been keeping mostly silent.
Meanwhile, hundreds of activists, academics, journalists and politicians have been summoned and detained in military camps; most of them released after the seven-day detention period allowed by martial law.
On September 11, Amnesty International released a scathing report on the post-coup human rights situation in Thailand, emphasizing what it called “hundreds of arbitrary detentions, reports of torture and ill-treatment” and “sweeping restrictions on freedom of expression and peaceful assembly.”
It denounced the junta's arrests and detentions of scores of people in order to “adjust their attitude” – the junta’s euphemism for the stifling of any opposition to the coup.
The Thai junta has acknowledged the report, but has claimed it is “one-sided.”
In a column published Friday in the Bangkok Post, Thitinan Pongsudhirak, a political scientist at Chulalongkorn University, warned the military authorities of the future effects of their clamp down on dissident opinions.
“The NCPO can have instant gratifications by suppressing basic civil liberties, but this will [eventually] bring adverse consequences down the road,” he stated.
