The Outer Shell and the Snail

"We like democracy. Soldiers like democracy. Everyone likes democracy."

--Thai Army Secretary Kriengsak Chamanan

Less than a month after it ousted the fractious democratic government of Prime Minister Seni Pramoj, the Thai military's 24-man National Administrative Reform Council (NARC) formally turned over the reins of authority to a civilian Cabinet. In ceremonies presided over by King Bhumipol Adulyadej, NARC'S nominal chief, Admiral Sangad Chaloryu, even bade an official farewell to the nation as a new civilian Prime Minister, Tanin Kraivixien, 49, was sworn in. A former justice of the Thai Supreme Court, Tanin announced that Thailand would be "guided" by stages back to full democracy. "From now on," he said, "NARC is the outer shell that protects the snail."

A snail's pace seems an apt metaphor for Tanin's plans to delay transition back to "full democracy" for at least eight years. Meanwhile, NARC's military bosses will remain as Thailand's real rulers, ready to step in if any civilian regime falters.

Most Thais seem to have accepted with relief or resignation the demise of then-chaotic three-year-old "democratic experiment." Bangkok has quickly recovered its sybaritic style. The city's annual autumn festivals, its race track and fleshpots are jammed with tourists. Shares on the local stock market have risen 70% in the past three weeks. The bullet-and-grenade-pocked classrooms of Thammasat University, site of the bloody student rioting that preceded the coup (TIME, Oct. 18), have become something of a tourist attraction. But the total of 41 dead in the riots is not forgotten: cremations and lotus ceremonies are still being carried out in Buddhist temples throughout Bangkok, and four unclaimed corpses remain in the morgue at Police Hospital.

Lessons Learned. Privately, Thais were shocked by the violence, which violated the traditional "Thai kar Thai" (Thai kill Thai) taboo against communal bloodshed. When NARC began arresting "subversives" last month, hundreds began literally running scared--sleeping in a different friend's home every night. To many Thais, NARC's crackdown and its strict press censorship suggested that Seni's paralyzed democracy would be replaced by the kind of lazily corrupt military rule the country had endured in the 1960s and early '70s.

Apparently aware that Thais would not stand for that and reportedly at the behest of the King himself, NARC's 24-man junta moved swiftly to set up Prime Minister Tanin and an 18-man Cabinet of soldiers, civil servants and technocrats as a "clean hands" government. Among its first official acts was the appointment of a committee to probe graft. As Army Secretary Kriengsak Chamanan, NARC's eminence grise, told TIME Correspondent William McWhirter, "We have learned the lessons of South Viet Nam and Laos. In those countries, corrupted politicians were a main cause of their downfall." It remains to be seen, though, if the committee will be able to investigate the military's own swollen private enterprises (among other things, the navy has a shipping company, the army a chain of service stations, and the air force its own airline). Cabinet-level corruption may also be hard to root out.

To help calm the left, Tanin has granted bail to 2,600 of the 3,000 students arrested at Thammasat. He has also restrained the gung-ho anti-Communist sweeps by the army and police, especially in the capital, and has released all but 200 of the 1,000-odd suspects they had corralled. After the initial postcoup excesses, the government is increasingly aware of the danger of providing Thailand's Communist insurgents with a fresh influx of embittered, educated cadres. The threat was underlined when four top members of Thailand's Socialist Party used clandestine Communist radios to blast the "fascist NARC and the puppet Tanin" and call for "violent struggle."

More ominously, the fragile detente that Thai democracy had evolved with its Communist neighbors in Indochina seems to have been derailed. Broadcasts from Hanoi and Vientiane have been sharply hostile to Tanin's government. Still, former Prime Minister Kukrit Pramoj dismisses the possibility that Thai opposition groups--even aided by the Vietnamese--can wage real guerrilla war. Instead, he predicts, those who have gone underground or into exile "will be back on bended knees to ask forgiveness so they can go back to the baths, massage parlors and nightclubs. The jungle is not for them."

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