Thaksin Shinawatra Rumored Dead

Embattled former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, one of the most influential, charismatic, yet polarizing characters in Thai politics, is dead according to sources. Mr. Thaksin was the first prime minister in Thailand's history to lead an elected government through a full term in office and remains so to this day. True or not, this rumor has sparked action and Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva has given into Red Shirt demands that he disolve the Lower House and call for new elections.

The current group of Members of Parliament will be unseated September 15 - 30 and new elections, including the election of a new Prime Minister, will be held November 14, Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva said.

The gossip across Bangkok, Pattaya and Hua Hin is that the Thai telecom tycoon is either dead or very close to it. It is known that he was suffering from prostate cancer and has been much less visible recently. There have been no sightings of him in public for more than a week. Previous accounts of his frequent travels to numerous countries are theoretically designed, so conspiracy theorists surmise, to convince his rural Thai following that he is still in full health when many believe that he is either dead or near-death due to terminal prostate cancer.

However, the leader of the Red Shirts political party in Pattaya and one of Mr. Thaksin’s oldest and closest friends, former Member of Parliament Mr. Chanyut Hengtrakul told the Pattaya Times in an exclusive interview, “He is not dead.  I talk to him almost every day to get advice.”

When asked when the last time he spoke to Mr. Thaksin Mr. Chanyut said, “Yesterday.”

Mr. Thaksin’s sister, Mrs. Yawarsaate Chokesuriyakiat, was recently seen entering her Pattaya condo dressed in all black, the color of mourning.  However, this may be a coincidence.

The debate about this conspiracy theory is so widespread that it's verging on the absurd. Many feel that Mr. Thaksin is dead and others think he is using this rumor to add confusion to the current government’s thought process about how to handle the uprising that has caused the US and UK as well as many other counties to issue travel warnings to citizens not to go to Thailand. Some countries have restricted any travel to Thailand.

Supporters say Mr. Thaksin posted photos of him on his Facebook page and made a recent video but people still won't believe that he's alive and well. Opponents say the social networking site uploads were done by someone else and the video is old and point out the fact that the televised video conferences to supporters stopped more than a week ago when the rumor of his death began.

An audio recording of his most recent interview is being circulated on social networking site Twitter where there's intense discussion about its authenticity. The speculation is that the interviewee is a Thaksin double whose voice has been altered to make him sound like Mr. Thaksin.
Rumors are Mr. Thaksin’s family wants permission to return his body to be cremated in his birthplace of Chiang Mai, but government officials fear his death will make him a martyr and could cause more civil unrest and disobedience, sources say.
 
Conspiracy theorists say the recent, unexpected decision by Prime Minister Abhisit was due to the fear of mass rebellion as a last strike on the news of the Red Shirt leader’s death.

When and if Mr. Thaksin died is unclear, but several sources say he died April 30 while he was undergoing chemotherapy injections.

On April 25 his family flew from Thailand to be at his side, rival Yellow Shirt sources say. The sources add his ex-wife, Pojaman, was by his side at his death and used all of her resources to try to get him to a world-class hospital, but because of the conviction in absentia on a conflict of interest charge for which he faced a two-year jail sentence if he returned to Thailand, he could not return home and was blacklisted from entry into all countries with which Thailand has strong relations or reciprocal fugitive agreements.

In his globetrotting to find a country that would let him set up a base of operations and a home he was issued new passports from Nicaragua and Montenegro, but prevented from entering the UK, US, Singapore, UAE and other countries, but was welcomed and made an adviser in Cambodia.

Up until a few months ago Mr. Thaksin conducted a series of high-profile interviews with foreign news outlets slamming the current government as a “puppet of the military” and, in a British newspaper interview, said the land dealing his wife was convicted over was “the same thing all the other Prime Ministers did.” But, he has not been interviewed in more than a month.

 The rumor mill says as his cancer advanced he wanted to go for treatment at the world’s leading hospitals, but he was denied entry to Germany, the UK and every other country with sophisticated medical treatments for prostate cancer.

His wife allegedly was able to get a leading oncologist from Bumrungrad Hospital in Dubai or the main branch in Thailand, location not confirmed, to fly to Turkey where he was bedridden, but the first injection of chemotherapy made him extremely sick and the third killed him, the rumor mill has it.

The Supreme Court has stripped his family of $1.4 billion baht, half his reported net worth, in contested assets over allegations of corruption and conflicts of interest. However, always the fighter, Mr. Thaksin continued to play a leading role in Thailand politics and was able to orchestrate the rebellion and protests in Bangkok and Chiang Mai even though he could not enter the Kingdom, sources say.

Mr. Thaksin was widely believed to be the financial backer, as well as the spirit of the Red Shirt rebellion which today still cripples the shopping district of Bangkok. They call for the current government to dissolve claiming it is an off-shoot from the military coup which ousted the elected leader Prime Minister Shinawatra. The government now, faced by rising pressure, has agreed to dissolve and hold new elections on November 14 of this year.

Mr. Thaksin is enormously popular, especially among the rural poor, but also proved a divisive figure and was deeply unpopular among many of Bangkok's rich elite who backed the Yellow Shirts which helped bring down his government and overtook the Bangkok airports for a time bringing tourism to a grinding halt.

After more than five years in power as an elected Prime Minister, he was ousted in a military coup in September, 2006 accused of corruption and abuse of power. However, he had been legally elected by the people and was not charged or convicted of any crime when he was still Prime Minister and was prevented from returning to Thailand as a military coup ousted him.

Even though he was forced out of the country, he still has a pivotal influence.  A visit to Cambodia to advise the government there in November 2009 stoked considerable tensions between the border countries who were already conflicted with border skirmishes resulting in death over the rights to a world famous temple each country claimed to own.

Born in 1949 in the northern city of Chiang Mai, Mr. Thaksin started his career as a police officer. Later as Prime Minister he vowed to rid Thailand of methamphetamine (yaba) dealers and users. He offered a 90-day grace period for amnesty.  If users or dealers would report to local police stations and admit their guilt they would not be charged with any crime and would receive counseling, drug treatment and vocational training so they could get legitimate jobs. After the period was over, police are alleged to have ridden Thailand of more than two thousand drug dealers and users who did not heed the warning nor take advantage of the amnesty.

This heavy-handedness garnered Prime Minister Thaksin much respect with the police, many military leaders and a majority of the rural poor and working-class urban voters who admired his strong action to resolve a threat to Thai culture and were affected by crime caused by drug users.

In 1973, he received a government scholarship to study for a master’s degree in criminal justice in the United States. He made many friends there and stayed in contact with classmates who later also became powerful people in their own countries.
 
After completing his master’s degree and two years living in America he came to Pattaya to look for business opportunities wearing a T shirt, western-styled shorts and flip flops, says Mr. Chanyut.

There Mr. Thaksin first met Mr. Chanyut Hengtrakul in his Pattaya Tai office, who also had an American influence as his family owned the first and only English-speaking travel agency in Pattaya servicing Americans whom had fought or assisted in the Vietnam War. The two had much in common and became fast freinds, a friendship which almost 30 years later catapulted both of them to the top of the Thailand political mountain.

Thaksin Shinawatra founded the Thai Rak Thai (Thais Love Thais) party in 1998, with the help of Mr. Chanyut and others. Its rapid emergence transformed Thai politics by uniting the rural poor with Thailand’s largest business tycoon which seemed paradoxical, but was amazingly effective and allowed him to stay in office for his full term and to be reelected for a second term.

Mr. Thaksin and Mr. Chanyut would stay close and rise high in the Thai political arena together. Prime Minister Thaksin swept into office in 2001, soundly defeating the old guard from the Democrat Party to which the current Prime Minister belongs.  One of his closest allies was the newly-elected Member of Parliament from Pattaya, Mr. Chanyut.

Later, this association between Prime Minister Thaksin and Member of Parliament Chanyut would bring a great deal of government funding to Pattaya as the reallocation of hotel room taxes and VAT collected in Pattaya allowed a much larger portion of the funds to be returned to Pattaya to build infrastructure projects like a massive waste water treatment plant and new roads.  With new CCTV security systems, more police on patrol and added street lighting crime in Pattaya was significantly reduced. Pattaya became the most visited beach resort in all of Asia.

Nationally, Prime Minister Thaksin’s 30-baht health care scheme, loans for poor farmers and caring of the local sub-district and village leaders endeared him with the masses. Poorer voters liked his offers of cheap medical care and debt relief, his nationalist platform and his contempt for the "Bangkok elite".

But big business also liked him for his CEO style of government and his "Thaksinomics" policies, which created a new boom in a country where the Asian financial crisis of 1997 had begun and catapulted Thailand economically above most of the other former tiger countries of ASEAN.

Prime Minister Thaksin also won wide support for his quick and competent handling of the tsunami relief effort after the 2004 Indian Ocean disaster caused by an Indonesia earthquake, which devastated Phuket and other parts of south-western Thailand.

However, the fallout from his government's suppression of news of an outbreak of Avian bird flu virus, as well as criticism over the violent deaths of more than 2,500 people during a crackdown on drugs in 2003 following the amnesty period began a movement against him and the tax-free sale of Thailand’s first and largest mobile phone company  to a foreign buyer further divided his base separating the Bangkok business people from his coalition leaving mostly the rural poor and his network of police, military and local government leaders on his side.

Yet each time he faced pressure, Prime Minister Thaksin appeared to ride out the storm, his backing among his key supporters - farmers, police and military - apparently unscathed. It was his family's decision to sell its shares in one of Thailand's biggest telecom groups, Shin Corp that led to Mr. Thaksin's downfall.

The early 2006 sale, which netted his family and friends $1.9 billion baht, angered many urban Thais, who complained that the Thaksin family had avoided paying taxes and passed control of an important national asset to Singaporean investors which included the use of Thailand's satellite system, a vital national asset.

Amid large-scale street demonstrations, Prime Minister Thaksin called a snap general election for April 2006, effectively telling opponents to "put up or shut up". But main opposition parties boycotted the polls and many voters chose to register a "no vote".

Faced with the threat of further protests, Prime Minister Thaksin said he would step down. He did for a few weeks, but returned to office the next month. In September that year, following months of political uncertainty, the military seized power while the prime minister was in New York as Thailand’s representative to the United Nations.

This caused immediate condemnation from Ambassadors representing the USA, the UK, Canada, Australia, Germany and numerous others, while China offered military advisers to the new military regime.

 Mr. Thaksin reluctantly relocated to the UK, but shortly after his allies won the first post-coup elections in late 2007, so he again returned home to Thailand. There he and his family faced a plethora of corruption charges and legal battles. His assets were frozen, forcing him to sell his controlling stake in English Premier League football club Manchester City to investors in Dubai who would later harbor him during his exile from Thailand.

Mr. Thaksin left Thailand, failing to return for a court appearance after he was allowed to leave to see the Olympic Games in August 2008, and became a fugitive according to Thai law.

Dear or alive, Thaksin Shinawatra will go down in history as one of the most loved prime ministers in Thailand and may hold the record for keeping power after elected to office. Many of his social and loan programs helped to build Thailand's middle class and assist the poor. He will also be remembered as the most controversial of all Thai politicians.