Thailand’s Buddhist temples have long been tainted with allegations of greed, corruption, sex, murder and child abuse, while monks, sworn to lives of abstinence, have often been caught living flashy lifestyles.
However, while there were previously seen as untouchable, the Thai military government over the past month has suddenly moved to crack down on corruption in temples, arresting six of the nation’s most high-profile monks.
It is the military junta’s boldest move toward cleaning up the Sangha, the name of the Thai Buddhist order, and among the six arrested are several elderly monks on the Sangha supreme council, the nation’s Buddhist governing body.
Photo: Reuters
Two senior abbots at Bangkok’s famous Golden Mount temple were also among those arrested, but most surprising was the arrest of Phra Buddha Issara, a right-wing firebrand monk known both for his political activism and his alleged ties to Thai Prime Minister Prayuth Chan-ocha. Both serve in the Queen’s Guard military unit, although Prayuth now denies any connection to Issara.
“The arrest of these monks is clearly designed to place the state in control over any monks who might stray from loyalty to the junta, especially as we are approaching elections,” said Paul Chambers, a lecturer at Naresuan University who specializes in Thai politics. “This is their way of demonstrating that the state is really above the Buddhist Sangha.”
While the military junta have long pledged to stamp out corruption, the timing of the four temple raids has been seen as significant and politically motivated.
Prayuth’s government is under greater pressure than ever to follow through on its promise to call elections in February next year, and cleaning up corruption in temples is perceived as a canny move that would play well to the electorate.
The junta’s past attempts to exert its authority over the temples have not proved successful. In February last year, it raided the popular Dhammakaya temple, looking for its spiritual leader Phra Dhammachayo on allegations he had embezzled US$37 million of temple donations.
The temple’s well-known allegiances to former Thai prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra, who is despised by the military and was toppled in a military coup in 2006, was also perceived as a motive of the raid.
However, Dhammachayo eluded arrest and there was a backlash against the military government for being too heavy-handed in the raid, which saw 4,000 officers descend on the temple for three weeks.
“After the siege of the Dhammakaya temple, people really started to look askance at what the military was doing to the monks and question their motives, and it really did damage to Prayuth’s reputation,” Chambers said. “So these new arrests might be designed to give the military a more popular image and make people forget about the failed mission last year.”
After the failure of the Dhammakaya siege, the junta in March last year announced that it was drafting a law that would significantly weaken the Sangha council. It has not yet presented it to the legislature, but the arrests could be laying the groundwork for the legislation.
Perhaps the most surprising of the recent arrests was Buddha Issara, who was formally stripped of his position as a monk and sent to Bangkok remand prison to await trial on charges of robbery, forgery and illegal detention of officials during the protests in 2013 and 2014, prior to the coup.
Issara had long been a advocate for reform in Buddhism and in August last year condemned the military junta for not acting on its promise to clean up the temples.
The arrest of Issara has been perceived as a sign that either the junta fears he is too much of a loose canon politically or that the junta is attempting to prove itself as ethical and deserving of political longevity to the Thai King Maha Vajiralongkorn, who inherited the throne last year.
Thailand has seen a rare upsurge in protests and demonstrations, and the arrests have also been seen as the junta giving the monks a strong signal of what would happen if they do not toe the line politically, especially the large number who still have loyalty to the pro-Thaksin Red Shirt movement.
Investigations are still ongoing and it is thought there are to be more arrests.
ROCKY RELATIONS: The figures on residents come as Chinese tourist numbers drop following Beijing’s warnings to avoid traveling to Japan The number of Chinese residents in Japan has continued to rise, even as ties between the two countries have become increasingly fractious, data released on Friday showed. As of the end of December last year, the number of Chinese residents had increased by 6.5 percent from the previous year to 930,428. Chinese people accounted for 22.6 percent of all foreign residents in Japan, making them by far the largest group, Japanese Ministry of Justice data showed. Beijing has criticized Tokyo in increasingly strident terms since Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi last year suggested that a military conflict around Taiwan could
A retired US colonel behind a privately financed rocket launch site in the Dominican Republic sees the project as a response to China’s dominance of the space race in Latin America. Florida-based Launch on Demand is slated to begin building a US$600 million facility in a remote region near the border with Haiti late this year. The project is designed to meet surging demand for the heavy-lift rockets needed to put clusters of satellites into orbit. It is also an answer to China’s growing presence in the region, said CEO Burton Catledge, a former commander of the US Air Force’s 45th Operations
Germany is considering Australia’s Ghost Bat robot fighter as it looks to select a combat drone to modernize its air force, German Minister of Defense Boris Pistorius said yesterday. Germany has said it wants to field hundreds of uncrewed fighter jets by 2029, and would make a decision soon as it considers a range of German, European and US projects developing so-called “collaborative combat aircraft.” Australia has said it will integrate the Ghost Bat, jointly developed by Boeing Australia and the Royal Australian Air Force, into its military after a successful weapons test last year. After inspecting the Ghost Bat in Queensland yesterday,
A pro-Iran hacking group claimed to breach FBI Director Kash Patel’s personal e-mail inbox and posted some of the contents online. The e-mails provided by the hacking group include travel details, correspondence with leasing agents in Washington and global entry, and loyalty account numbers. The e-mail address the hackers claim to have compromised has been previously tied to Patel’s personal details, and the leaked e-mails contain photos of Patel and others, in addition to correspondence with family members and colleagues. “The FBI is aware of malicious actors targeting Director Patel’s personal email information,” the agency said in a statement on
RSS