Little change since 1976, say Thai massacre survivors

By Max Constant

BANGKOK (AA) - On Oct. 6, 1976, around 100 students at a Thai university were lynched, burnt alive and shot by right wing militias, spurred on by their chanting and smiling countrymen -- many of whom were convinced that their army was purging the country of communist anti-monarchy forces.

But 40 years on, some of the students who stood by helplessly as barricades were broken down and their colleagues dragged to their deaths claim authorities are still unable to admit their role in the event, and that little has changed in how the country is run.

“No Thai government so far has been willing to face the fact that on that day, authorities committed unacceptable cruelty against students who were fighting for nothing but democracy," Krisadang Notcharit, a 59-year-old lawyer, told Anadolu Agency.

The government was run at that time by Seni Pramoj, a conservative politician from an aristocratic background, who, according to then-Thammasat University rector Puey Ungphakorn, ordered the assault.

Notcharit, who was a 19-year-old student at Thammasat at the time, said he only managed to escape the massacre by fleeing to the back of the university in the historic area of Bangkok and diving into the Chao Phraya river, from where he was able to hide in a nearby house with the help of sympathetic residents.

“On that day, my dominant feeling was the fear of being killed,” he said.

On Thursday, tributes will take place across universities in the Thai capital to those who died and suffered at the hands of the police and right-wing groups -- many of which carried names akin to boy scout movements; the Red Gaurs, Nawaphon and Village Scout.

The groups accused the students of having communist sympathies and of trying to destroy the Thai monarchy, and of fueling the revolutions that had overthrown corrupt feudal systems in neighboring Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos.

Much of the anger was fueled by members of extreme right-wing, patriotic Buddhist organizations active during the country's short democratic period in the mid-1970s.

One -- Nawaphon (new or ninth force) -- was influenced by then popular monk Kittiwuttho Bhikkhu, who was opposed to parliamentary democracy, campaigned for the three principles of nation, religion, and monarchy and infamously claimed in 1976 that the killing of communists was not a sin -- effectively encouraging the act in majority Buddhist Thailand.

Scores of students were killed during the assault in what became known as the most traumatic event in Thai contemporary history.

Images taken on the day and quickly smuggled out of the country for fear of them being destroyed show students being beaten and lynched on tamarind trees in front of laughing crowds.

Others were dragged along the lawn of the nearby Royal Plaza by nooses strung around their necks, while hundreds were stripped and forced by armed policemen to lie on the university football pitch.

Today -- Oct. 6, 2016 -- most of the dead have still not been named.

Although the official death toll was 46, students’ organizations and victims’ relatives say at least 100 people lost their lives.

Notcharit told Anadolu Agency that when he returned to the site of the beatings to study "two or three years after", he was fraught with anger.

"I resented the injustice. I was thinking, we have to punish the culprits, we have to punish those who assassinated my fellow students,” he said.

“But now, I think that October 6 must be a lesson through which the new generation learn to fight for their rights. And that lesson is: don’t fall into the trap created by the authorities who are trying to incite hatred among various groups of citizens for their own benefit.”

Vipar Daomanee participated in the student movements of 1976, but she says she was not in Thammasat on that fateful day.

Talking to Anadolu Agency, Daomanee -- now 60 years old -- says after losing many friends on the day, she has since campaigned to keep their memory alive.

She says that 15 years ago along with fellow campaigners she finally managed to convince the government of the time to allow the construction of a small memorial to the dead in a corner of quiet Thammasat.

But getting authorities to recognize the injustice of the day has been a completely different matter.

“We were not authorized to build it in an open public space, as there is not yet any recognition of October 6 in Thai history”, she underlined.

“It is not in the school books, contrary to the October 14, 1973 popular revolt.”

On October 14, a mass pro-democracy uprising across the country was brutally repressed by then dictator Field Marshall Thanom Kittikachorn.

Dozens of people were killed in Bangkok in street battles when Kittikachorn's troops opened fire on demonstrators.

Soon after, Kittikachorn was forced to cede power and went into exile after he lost the support of the military and King Bhumibol Adulyadej.

“For October 14, 1973, we are allowed to shout that this is the victory of the people's movement against dictatorship," Daomanee said.

"But for 1976 it is a completely different matter; we are seen as communists, as enemies of the state,” she added.

In today's Thailand, a new generation of student activists opposed to the country's latest junta see parallels between their struggle against authoritarianism and that initiated by their elders 40 years ago.

“I learnt a lot from the activists of that time,” Nettiwit Chotiphatphaisal, a 19-year-old student activist involved in preparing events to commemorate 1976, told Anadolu Agency on Tuesday.

“We are like them at that time: teenagers with the will to improve our country. Like them we are dissatisfied by the way adults behave on the political scene,” he stressed.

Thammasat survivor Notcharit says his biggest regret is that little has changed in the way the country is run in the last 40 years.

“Forty years ago, conservatives justified the killings by claiming that those being targeted were communists. Today, conservatives try and pull the same trick by claiming that progressive students fighting are simply allied with [junta nemesis] Thaksin [Shinawatra] or are quite simply opposed to the monarchy,” he said.

Ex-PM Shinawatra -- deposed by the junta in 2006 -- is the elder brother of Yingluck Shinawatra, whose government was overthrown in 2014 by the present military junta.

“What is happening in Thailand in the last two, three years is like October 1976, less the killings,” Notcharit underlined.