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By Michael Peel in Bangkok
DJ Ken slips the replica gun from his bag and shows it to the camera, explaining menacingly that this is his “gift for sister Rose”. He drives to what he believes to be the home of his target, a hairdresser who is a splenetic online critic of their native Thailand’s monarchy. Not finding Rose, he spray-paints a Thai flag in red, white and blue on the south London front door.
That video, helpfully uploaded to the internet in June, left DJ Ken – real name Thitipan Rungrawd – facing a possible jail term last week. The west London restaurant worker and freelance royalist enforcer is due to be sentenced next month after pleading guilty to criminal damage and possessing an imitation firearm in a public place.
Part-absurd, part chilling, the case highlights how the ever harsher application in Thailand of lèse-majesté laws protecting the frail 86-year-old King Bhumibol Adulyadej is spilling across continents in uncontrolled and unpredictable ways.
The rise of Thai ultra-monarchism is a proxy for a wide anxiety over who will succeed the recently hospitalised monarch of 68 years, and over the future of the country under its four-month-old royally approved military junta.
“This is deep-rooted, almost like a religious belief,” says one person of the mindset of the expatriate ultra-monarchists who harassed him. “They are so convinced about the rightness of the lèse-majesté law that they are prepared to break the laws of the country they are living in.”
The Thai junta has launched more than a dozen domestic lèse-majesté prosecutions – each punishable by up to 15 years in jail – as part of a crackdown on political dissent since its May 22 coup. In one, a taxi driver was imprisoned for two and a half years for remarks reported to the authorities by a passenger. In another, two students faced prosecution for appearing in a play named The Wolf Bride, which commemorated a 1973 pro-democracy uprising but was deemed offensive to the more than 230-year-old ruling Chakri dynasty.
“The threat of the use of the lèse-majesté laws adds to the chilling effects on freedom of expression observed in Thailand after the coup, and risks curbing critical debate on issues of public interest,” Ravina Shamdasani, spokesperson for the UN high commissioner on human rights, said in August. “We are concerned that more charges may be filed and that more harsh sentences may be issued in the coming weeks.”
The clampdown is part of a wider surge in the number of lèse-majesté investigations during the Thai political crisis of the past eight years, with a handful of cases a year before the last military coup in 2006 rising to hundreds in the years since.
Analysts say the prosecutions have proved an effective weapon for the conservative royalist and militarist urban elite in their power struggle against the political machine of Thaksin Shinawatra, the self-exiled former prime minister whose parties have won a string of elections with the support of the rural poor.
The royal cult has flourished as the longevity of King Bhumibol’s reign has buttressed his inviolability, the young monarch who once jammed with Benny Goodman ageing into a remote, semi-divine figure rarely seen in public.
The king has not spoken directly about the prosecutions, although he did say in a 2005 speech that he was ready to be criticised.
The junta has raised the stakes still further with calls for the extradition of scourges of the monarchy such as Rose, real name Chatwadee Amornpat.
Two other people have been arrested and bailed in the UK over Rose’s case, which has prompted the British government to warn against efforts to export Thailand’s lèse-majesté laws.
In the US, a Thai microbiologist at the University of California, Los Angeles last week made what has been branded the “dorkiest death threat ever” against the author of an article in the Harvard Crimson student newspaper that took a sceptical look at the Thai royal family.
The scientist Peera Hemarajata, said on Facebook: “I swear that if I saw this MF on the street I’d elbow his middle meningeal artery and leave him for dead from epidural hematoma.” UCLA condemned the “hateful comments”, which were quickly taken down.
Critics say the junta’s very public hunts for perceived insults to the throne risk encouraging vigilantism by expatriate monarchists. The results could be deadly: in April, Kamol Duangphasuk, a poet and political activist who had campaigned for abolition of the lèse-majesté laws, was gunned down outside a Bangkok restaurant, in a still unsolved crime.
“It’s irresponsible to keep encouraging extreme behaviour about something that is a very, very deeply held belief,” says one foreign official who covers Thailand. He notes that, among monarchists, “nobody wants to be seen as soft on this”.
As royalist groups from London to the US west coast mobilise on social media, DJ Ken may not be the last royalist to end up with a criminal record over what some Thais see as their overriding duty to king and country. His film of his Bromley visit ended with a flourish. “Mission Complete,” reads the last screen – a triumph he evidently thought worth the later legal trouble.
