Our readers may recall that the editor was charged twice for lese majeste. In the three previous issues we published the translation of the editor’s letters to the prime minister and the acting national police chief asking them to drop the case. On the eve of the Coronation Anniversary, May 4, we were informed by two most reliable sources that the secretary-general to His Majesty had telephoned the acting national police chief that H.M. wanted the cases against our editor be dropped. We are all very grateful to the king for his magnanimity and generosity. Yet so far we have not received anything in writing that the editor is really a free man.
Indeed His Majesty had declared openly on the eve of his birthday, December 4, 2005, that whoever brought the case of lese majeste to the police is in fact harming the king personally as well as undermining the monarchy. Yet those who claimed to be his loyal subjects kept on bringing such cases to the authority. The former prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra had accused many of his so-called enemies of this charge, our editor being one of them. And as late as July 20, 2007, we were told that Mr. Boonsong Chaisinghakananon, an assistant professor at the Faculty of Arts, Silpakorn University, may be charged with this serious crime because he is a man with moral courage who would not kowtow to the administrators who are known to be corrupt. So the lese majeste law is used as a political witch hunt against him—not dissimilar to the inquisition of the Holy Catholic Church during the Middle Ages and the totalitarian regimes of Hitler and Stalin more recently—not to mention McCarthyism in the USA.
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