The Royal Card, part MMDCCCIX | 20.09.06
The New York Times:
Overnight, General Sondhi was shown on television in an audience with King Bhumibol Adulyadej, a clear indication that the revered constitutional monarch endorsed the move.
Funny, I was watching idolatrous television reports about the coup and its stagers all day yesterday — people giving them flowers, 80-percent-plus popular support for the putsch, fast-cut footages of troops movements accompanied by martial music. But I don’t see the reported audience with the king. A Mercedes motorcade carrying the coup cabal into the royal compound, yes, but not the actual meeting.
Doubtlessly the meeting did take place — late into the night, and after tanks have taken strategic positions and assets all over Bangkok, not before. Nobody knows what the conversation was like, and not even the Times claims to do. Does the king have any choices but to “endorse” a successful coup d’etat? There have been more successful military coups in Thailand than I care to count, not least during the current reign. Which ones did the king not endorse?
Yesterday evening, the king appointed General Sonthi as the head of the Ka-na-pa-ti-roop-karn-pok-krong-nai-ra-bob-pra-cha-thip-pa-tai-un-mee-pra-ma-ha-ka-sat-song-pen-pra-mook. That happens what the putsch pushers euphemistically if laboriously call themselves. So the king anointed the coup leader as the coup leader, a position that he had officially held throughout the day since his own formal declaration in the morning. Some endorsement.
Seriously, according to CNN’s Stan Grant, it is precisely that. Needless to say, this hard-headed newsman takes at face value the tortuously named “council” and the little yellow rags soldiers tie to their arms, rifles, and tank cannons.
But anyway, who am I not to defer to the judgment of the international media on Thailand’s royal matters? They have spotted many a “clear indication” that escaped me before.
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