Bangkok--Thailand's top cop says his task is to revive trust in a graft-tainted force, but observers believe his real brief is to be a hatchet man for a junta trying to tame the police -- and their patron, billionaire ex-premier Thaksin Shinawatra.
For decades the fortunes of the Thai police and military have waxed and waned depending on who is in government, with money, rank and power bestowed upon the institution of the hour.
Until last May's coup, the stock of the police force had soared under successive elected Shinawatra governments, vexing an army whose primacy is normally assured by its massive budget, ties with the royalist establishment and penchant for seizing power when things are not going its way.
Now it is in charge, the junta appears determined to bring the police to heel.
After sweeping the 2001 election, Thaksin, a former mid-ranking police officer turned businessman, dropped his pointmen into key policing posts.
Those appointments buttressed his family's political base -- especially in the country's north -- reaching deep into local communities, where even low-ranking police wield substantial authority.
His enemies say Thaksin crafted a network of police fiefdoms fuelled by corruption and indebted to his billionaire family, wedding the force's fortunes to his own long after he was toppled by the army in 2006.
Junta-leader Prayut Chan-O-Cha, who marked six months as prime minister on April 17, has been busy severing that alliance.
Amid an immediate purge of senior officers, Prayut made Police-General Somyot Poompanmoung his commissioner, sweeping aside an incumbent picked by Yingluck Shinawatra -- Thaksin's younger sister, who led the administration felled by last year's coup.
Somyot, who has continued to sideline Shinawatra loyalists, bemoans the "shadow of politics" historically cast over the 200,000-strong force -- although he now sits in Thailand's junta-selected National Legislative Assembly.
"Political parties interfere with the police and some police officers have served politicians in the hope of progressing," the 59-year-old Somyot told AFP from behind a hulking wooden desk at police headquarters in Bangkok. "We are ready for a change."
AFP
