Surayud Chulanont

Surayud Chulanont: The Soldier Who Inherited Two Thailands

His father walked out of the Royal Thai Army to become a leader of the communist insurgency. His maternal grandfather, Phraya Sri Sitthi Songkhram, was a royalist commander in the Boworadej Rebellion. Surayud Chulanont therefore began life holding both halves of the twentieth-century Thai quarrel in the same bloodline, and spent forty years proving his loyalty to the side his father had abandoned. He ended up running the army, then the country, and finally the Privy Council of the King.

The Defector's Son

He was born on 28 August 1943 at Chakrapong Camp in Mueang Prachinburi. His father, Lieutenant Colonel Phayom Chulanont, defected from the army and became a communist leader — a fact that in Cold War Thailand ought to have ended a son's military prospects before they began. Surayud went to Saint Gabriel's College and Suankularb Wittayalai in Bangkok, entered the first-ever class of the Armed Forces Preparatory Academy, and graduated from the Chulachomklao Royal Military Academy with Class 12. He was commissioned in 1965. The debt he felt he was paying shaped everything that followed.

Special Warfare

He built his career in Thailand's special forces, teaching at the Special Warfare School from 1972 to 1978 and rising to command Special Warfare Command. That posting placed him at the centre of the worst moment in modern Thai civil-military relations: Black May in 1992, when troops fired on demonstrators in Bangkok. Surayud denied ordering his men to shoot. He carried the association nonetheless, and the episode plainly informed the doctrine he later preached — that the military should never be involved in politics.

Commander-in-Chief

He was made Commander-in-Chief of the Royal Thai Army in 1998, under the government of Chuan Leekpai, and Supreme Commander of the armed forces in 2002. In those years he did things that were unusual for a Thai general. He ended the policy of deporting Burmese refugees. He committed Thai troops to United Nations peacekeeping in East Timor. In 2002 he ordered major operations against narcotics trafficking across the Myanmar border. He also had a long personal history with Prem Tinsulanonda, the former prime minister and Privy Council president, having served as Prem's close aide during Prem's own premiership — a relationship that would define the second half of his career.

The Palace

On 14 November 2003 King Bhumibol appointed him to the Privy Council. Working alongside Prem, Surayud backed the promotion of General Sonthi Boonyaratglin to army commander. Three years later, on 19 September 2006, Sonthi overthrew the elected prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra. The general who had spent his career insisting that soldiers stay out of politics was then handed the government by a soldier who had just seized it.

Prime Minister by Appointment

He was sworn in as Thailand's twenty-fourth prime minister on 1 October 2006 and held office until 29 January 2008. His premiership divides sharply into decency and damage.

The decency: he issued a formal apology for the Tak Bai incident, in which Muslim protesters died in army custody, an unprecedented admission from a Thai head of government about the southern insurgency. And in a genuinely audacious move his government issued compulsory licences on patented medicines — breaking Abbott's patent on the HIV drug Kaletra and Sanofi-Aventis's on the heart drug Plavix — to produce generics at a saving of roughly US$24 million a year. Multinationals were furious; public-health campaigners were not.

The damage was structural. His government raised military spending by thirty-five per cent in 2007 and imposed capital controls to hold down the appreciating baht; the stock market fell 820 billion baht — about US$22 billion — in a single day. Growth slid to the lowest rate in the region and consumer confidence to a five-year low. Censorship expanded on a scale that is easy to state and hard to defend: blocked websites rose from 2,475 before the coup to 13,435 by January 2007, a 443 per cent increase. Troops sat in television stations. Thousands of community radio stations were closed. Anti-coup activists were arrested.

The public verdict was swift. Approval stood at 60 per cent in October 2006, 34.8 per cent by February 2007, 31.3 per cent in early March, and 12.5 per cent by the end of that month. Nor did his apology in the south hold: the day after he made it, forty-six violent incidents were recorded, against a previous daily average of nine.

The Mountain and the Train Carriages

For a man whose entire political value rested on being clean, the scandals were badly chosen. He was accused of illegally holding land in a forest reserve on Khao Yai Thiang in Nakhon Ratchasima, bought for 50,000 baht when he commanded the Second Army Region. He did not deny owning it and promised to resign if found guilty; in February 2010, after Red Shirt demonstrators made an issue of it, he handed the land back to the Royal Forestry Department and no case was brought. A separate row concerned railway carriages he was accused of acquiring improperly for a resort house; an enthusiastic collector of model trains, he said the items at his Bangkok home were decorative. Even so, a business-community poll in January 2007 found only fourteen per cent believed his administration's senior figures were corrupt — a number most Thai governments would envy.

Why Surayud Is Called a Genius

The honest answer is that almost nobody calls him one, and the sources do not support the claim in its usual sense. He wrote no doctrine, won no campaign, and left no body of thought. What he had instead was a scarce and specific asset in Thai public life — a reputation for personal probity — and an unusual talent for surviving inside institutions that had every reason to distrust him.

Consider the starting position. The son of a communist defector should not have been able to command the Royal Thai Army, let alone sit in the King's Privy Council. Surayud reached both by being conspicuously more disciplined, less acquisitive and less politically entangled than his contemporaries, and by attaching himself early to Prem Tinsulanonda, the shrewdest patron in the country. That is a form of intelligence — institutional, patient, largely invisible — but it is political craft rather than intellect, and worth naming as such.

The counter-case is that the asset was spent badly. Having preached for years that soldiers must stay out of politics, he took the premiership from the general he had helped promote, then presided over mass censorship, a capital-control panic that erased US$22 billion in a day, and approval that collapsed from sixty per cent to twelve and a half in five months. His two best decisions — the Tak Bai apology and the drug patents — were moral rather than technical, and the first did not reduce the violence it addressed. The reputation survived the government, which is telling in both directions.

Legacy

Surayud returned to the Privy Council in January 2008. He became its acting president in May 2019 when Prem died, and its president on 2 January 2020, presiding the same year over the Royal Ploughing Ceremony on behalf of King Vajiralongkorn. He is, in the end, the establishment's chosen safe pair of hands — the soldier whose life's work was to demonstrate that a defector's son could be more loyal than anyone.