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The quotation is taken from a writer to FACT, Freedom Against Censorship Thailand, a popular and highly charged no-nonsense website currently grilling Thailand’s lèse majesté laws. The site’s commentaries have increased in intensity after Australian national Harry Nicolaides was arrested last August, remanded for several months without charges, and finally in January 2009 sentenced to three years in prison for insulting the royal family.
Niocolaides’ great crime seems to be that he included a reference to Thailand’s crown prince that can be seen on Wikipedia at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thai_crown_prince .
While free speech advocates are up in arms, diplomats and foreign businesses have remained unsurprisingly subdued. Thai authorities are rushing pell-mell to further strengthen the kingdom’s archaic lèse majesté laws in efforts to totally silence any criticism of a monarchy whose king himself has gone on record as saying, “I want to be criticized.”
More disturbingly, the abuse of lèse majesté laws is also to silence political dissent.
Harry Nicolaides wrote a 56,000-word novel, “Verisimilitude,” that reportedly sold only seven copies and ran a print edition of 50. He had sent the book to Thai authorities, including the Royal household, for review but received no reply – until Aug. 31, 2008, when Thai police arrested him at Suvarnabhumi Airport in Bangkok as he was heading home to Australia. Note that the Thai court had, in its sentence against the author, indicated that the book was “widely distributed.”
The book is singular for several reasons: it is a work of fiction, it had extremely limited distribution, and its offending content consisted of a sole paragraph on page 115 of the 226-page novel that at the time of this writing is still on the shelves of Thailand’s National Library.
Those 102 words have damned Harry, and in a larger sense Thailand, because of the intense response that his arrest, incarceration and sentencing have produced around the globe. Rather than achieving the objective of protecting the country’s monarch, surprised and disappointed as well as now very frightened critics are asking whether Thai authorities really have any idea of how much damage recent efforts to protect the monarchy are causing Thailand’s image and reputation.
Hopefully, someone cares. But the drum rollers have induced fear into all of Thai society, scaring even CNN from reporting details on the case for fear of retribution against its staff in Thailand.
The book is available through FACT, at http://facthai.wordpress.com/, upon request; it is a photocopied PDF version. But don’t look for astounding jump-out-of-the-pages narrative that will cause you to say, “Ah, now I know why he was arrested.”
The book is not a great novel by any stretch of the imagination. “Verisimilitude” would not have appeared even as a blip on the global radar screen if its author had not been arrested. Thai authorities, in taking action against its author, increased the country’s perceived hysteria index and undermined official credibility in government claims that the monarchy needs to be better protected.
People are not even wondering anymore what they need to be protected from, but are asking themselves things like, “When will Thai police knock on my door at 3:00 in the morning?” and “When are they going to start beheading people in the streets?”
A Thai Foreign Ministry spokesman has indicated that criticism of the country’s efforts in tightening the screws on lèse majesté has been criticized by foreigners in a narrow-minded and condescending manner. Yet those very words, “narrow-minded and condescending,” need to be held up for review by the country’s policymakers, the vanguard of what may be called an intellectual pogrom.
Several foreigners have said, in response to Thailand’s new campaign, that they will be leaving the country or will not bother to visit given the horrible consequences that are now plain to those who are deemed to have insulted the royals. With anyone at all able to file a lèse majesté complaint, and official sensitivities totally off the logic chart, many former friends of Thailand are telling themselves that the country is no longer worth it.
In their zest for clamping down on perceived lèse majesté, Thai authorities may be deemed instead to be steering the country toward shameful notoriety. But in the human rights area notoriety is not new for the Land of Smiles.
Strangely enough, an online commentator who supports the governments’ efforts wrote to critics of the lèse majesté policy, “Get out of Thailand! (Expletives deleted.) There are no human rights here! Go back to your country!”
This is the kind of riffraff that strengthens official Thai government resolve to carry on a wholly misguided and ill-advised policy. With over 10,000 websites identified by Thailand as containing lèse majesté material, what some see as mass intellectual butchery is sadly going to continue unless the price becomes too great.
“Verisimilitude” begins with a single-page quotation from the Russian novelist Vladimir Nobokov, which symbolizes what has become of Harry: “I am the shadow of the waxwing slain, that has flown against the false azure of my window pane.” The author never saw the pane or the pain.
Nor apparently are Thai authorities seeing the consequences which seem to be increasing. The Times Online from the United Kingdom, for example, wrote in a Jan. 20 editorial: “The three-year jail sentence passed yesterday on an Australian who referred, glancingly but unflatteringly, to the crown prince in a book that sold a total of seven copies is a grotesque abuse of the law and the institution of constitutional monarchy.” Let Harry go.
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(Frank G. Anderson is the Thailand representative of American Citizens Abroad. He was a U.S. Peace Corps volunteer to Thailand from 1965-67, working in community development. A freelance writer and founder of northeast Thailand's first local English language newspaper, the Korat Post – www.thekoratpost.com – he has spent over eight years in Thailand "embedded" with the local media. He has an MBA in information management and an associate degree in construction technology. ©Copyright Frank G. Anderson.)
