By Chris Beale
After narrowly winning the general election on September 13, Thailand's new pro-democracy government is already being destabilised by a series of bomb attacks.
The same bombing and assassination tactics used during the election are now being mounted, many fear, to prepare a coup.
The two most recent incidents have been a bombing of the Interior Ministry and an explosion at the Burmese embassy. The latter occurred when no embassy staff were present; the building had been under renovation for weeks.
Burmese dissidents strenuously denied launching an attack which would endanger their ever-threatened shelter in Thailand.
Bomb threats have also been delivered to the Bangkok offices of British Airways, Swiss Air and Gulf Air. These vowed to blow up any airline which flew former caretaker Prime Minister Anand or his family out of the country.
Anand is said to have made a lot of enemies in the military, when he took unexpectedly tough measures against senior officers involved in the May bloodbath.
Thailand's lower house of parliament recently overturned the amnesty which Suchinda granted himself and everyone else involved in the May events before stepping down as prime minister. The vote was unanimous, but pro-democracy activists suspect that pro-military parties supported this as strategy for another coup.
Lifting the amnesty means that it will be legally possible for the military to round up thousands of activists at any time.
Suchinda is the only person from the military now placed in a position where he can be prosecuted by families of those who died in May through civilian courts. Everyone else involved in the orders to shoot unarmed demonstrators will have to be tried in military courts.
Civil actions against Suchinda will take years to work their way through the legal system — by which time Thailand may well have experienced its 18th coup since 1932.
The new interior minister, Chavalit — a former Army Supreme Commander who kept his promise never to stage a coup — is now ringing alarm bells about imminent "intense political
conflict".
The bombs which exploded at the Interior Ministry and the Burmese embassy were of identical make. The Bangkok Post reported that "a police bomb expert said the explosives used in the embassy attack were the type ... only available to the military".