Coups are a regular feature of Thai political life. Since the end of the absolute monarchy on 24 June 1932, there have been twelve coups and at least seven coup attempts. The most recent coup, launched on 22 May 2014 by a junta calling itself the National Council for Peace and Order (NCPO), produced a regime whose repression of dissent has recalled the counterinsurgent dictatorships of the 1960s and 1970s. After almost five years, elections set for 24 March are to begin an end to military rule.

The 2017 constitution, drafted by an assembly hand-picked by the NCPO and validated in a referendum in which criticism of the draft was criminalised, is meant to provide a stable role in politics for the military for the foreseeable future. But support for both the long-popular Pheu Thai Party and the emergent new vision of the Future Forward Party, combined with a general sense of being fed up with dictatorship, indicates that the democratic future may be soon at hand. As the country is poised on the eve of a possible transition, reflection on how the NCPO has suppressed dissident thought since 2014 illustrates how much space must be reclaimed after the election and highlights the latent cultural resources awaiting those who will do so.

The first weeks following the coup were marked by the frequent interruption of all radio and television broadcasts with summons of individuals to report to the NCPO, including writers, academics, editors, human rights activists, opposition politicians and others. Under the terms of martial law, put in place by the army two days prior to the coup, those who reported were then held for up to seven days of arbitrary detention. Unsettled by domestic and international criticism that Thailand was derogating from its human rights obligations, the junta complained that the term “detention” was inaccurate. Those summoned were instead “invited” for “attitude adjustment”.

As the regime took hold over more than four years, the uncertainty engendered during the first months after the coup solidified into a stable course of zealous political prosecution coupled with surveillance and harassment of dissidents. Thai Lawyers for Human Rights (TLHR), a documentation and advocacy group established on the first evening of the coup, tracked hundreds of prosecutions for peaceful demonstration and expression of opinion, actions cast as seditious and dangerous to the state.

The most feared charge is known by a three-digit number: 112. Article 112 of the Thai Criminal Code is the measure that defines the crime and stipulates the punishment for it: Whoever defames, insults or threatens the king, queen, heir-apparent or regent, shall be punished with imprisonment of three to fifteen years. Although Article 112 has been part of the code since its last revision in 1957, the 2014 coup inaugurated the period of both its most frequent use and the harshest sentences meted out under it. While the monarchy has been officially “above” politics since the end of the absolute monarchy, the involvement of both the institution and the figures that compose it in governance and the exercise of power is murky. The law means that examining this murkiness, or even acknowledging it publicly, is difficult and risky.

The coup also coincided with the decline of King Bhumibol Adulyadej (Rama IX), who died on 13 October 2016, and the rise of King Maha Vajiralongkorn (Rama X). The coup and the use of Article 112 severely limited open questions about the transition to the reign of the new king.

TLHR notes that during the first four years following the coup, at least 162 people were charged with violation of Article 112. Actions such as performing theatre plays, conversing in taxicabs, scrawling graffiti in bathrooms and, above all, writing posts on Facebook, became criminal acts worthy of long periods, even lifetimes, behind bars. Court proceedings have emphasised the need for the accused to demonstrate unquestioning loyalty to the monarchy, rather than for the prosecutor to demonstrate harm. This means that innocent verdicts are very rare and, combined with an automatic halving of one’s sentence if one pleads guilty, then leads to the vast majority of those accused of violating Article 112 choosing to plead guilty.

Pronthip Mankong and Patiwat Saraiyaem were sentenced to two years and six months in prison for performing The Wolf Bride, a satirical play deemed defamatory. Yutthasak, a taxicab driver, was sentenced to two years and six months on the basis of a recording of a conversation with a passenger that she made and then turned in to the police. Opas, an elderly man, was sentence to one year and six months in prison for writing graffiti judged to contain lèse majesté content in a bathroom in a Bangkok shopping mall. Sasiwimol, a single mother of two daughters in Chiang Mai, is serving twenty-eight years in prison for seven Facebook posts. Had she not confessed, she would instead spend fifty-six years in prison.

The active use of the courts to punish dissent and sow fear has been accompanied by harassment of those who have not crossed the invisible line of the law but must be sanctioned. Soldiers and police in and out of uniform attend university and other public seminars on political and social topics and cancel those that they deem too sensitive. Their presence is so ubiquitous that speakers often acknowledge and greet the intelligence officers, who are conspicuous in their ironed jeans and with their propensity to nap during long seminars. Same Sky Books, a progressive publishing house whose editor, Thanapol Eawsakul, was one of those summoned by the NCPO during the first week after the coup, was visited by soldiers once a month during the first years after the coup. Activist students and faculty were warned by university administrators not to express their critical opinions too loudly, or face disciplinary sanction. Villagers with long-standing struggles against resource extraction projects in their communities found that collusion between the junta and capital makes working for basic health and environment protections dangerous.

Thongchai Winichakul, a historian and long-time activist, wrote his essay “Anti-University” after Somsak Jeamteerasakul was summarily dismissed from his position as a lecturer in the department of History at Thammasat University in February 2015. Fearing for his life and liberty, Somsak fled Thailand shortly after the coup, and rather than defending him against the NCPO, the university colluded in the regime’s repression. Somsak, a former student activist and incisive political historian of the monarchy and state, went into exile in France and suffered a stroke in late 2018. Thammasat’s dismissal of him characterised what Thongchai calls the “anti-university”, which suppresses critical thought, and ultimately society, rather than fostering their development. Thongchai called on universities to come to their senses and instead act as beacons willing “to stand alone amidst the darkness of a swiftly moving sea”.

Similar to the request to refer to arbitrary detention as attitude adjustment, General Prayuth Chan-ocha, the head of the NCPO, has preferred to call his regime a “Thai-style democracy” rather than a dictatorship. But as the widespread hunger for regime change evident in the growing crowds at speeches by hopeful politicians who oppose the NCPO across the country and in the lyrics of the smash anti-dictatorship rap “Prathet Ku Mee” (“My Country’s Got”), which describes the misdeeds of the NCPO and has almost 60 million hits on YouTube, the people have not been fooled. The mood is perhaps best summed up in the words of the vendor from whom I bought my lunch yesterday in suburban Bangkok: “Enough already, older sister. Economy is terrible. The soldiers cannot run the country. We have to go back and try democracy again.” On the eve of the election and as democracy begins to appear from the shadows of dictatorship, four years after Thongchai wrote his essay, the need for beacons to reveal the truths not easily spoken in Thailand is sharper than ever. It is the activists, writers, and artists who have been suppressed and silenced during the past nearly five years under the NCPO who are poised to do so. But so too are ordinary citizens who first witnessed military rule quietly, but will take the first step towards speaking out when they cast their votes on 24 March.

• Tags: Free to read, NCPO, Tyrell Haberkorn