The main foreign policy mantra that Thailand is a neutral country shows signs of a major crack less than three weeks after the Thai government forcibly deported 40 Uyghurs back to China on February 27 after this week’s vote by the EU Parliament condemning the Thai government, calling the issue to be raised as a leverage in the Thai-EU Free Trade Agreement negotiation, followed by the US State Department sanctioning the Thai government by restricting the visas of Thai officials involved in the deportation – citing safety risks faced by these 40 people.
A small country like Thailand should have known better than when two big powers are in a fierce dispute right at our doorstep, the last thing Thailand should do is to appear to take side with one party. Thailand sided with China in a very visible way by sending the 40 Uyghurs back to China. As a result, the US tried to humiliate the Thai government by announcing to the world a visa restriction on relevant Thai officials.
Regardless of your view on the Uyghur repatriation (and to be fair there’s no consensus among the Thai public), it should be clear that the Thai government’s foreign policy on this matter has failed, because even a less powerful political entity like the EU Parliament has also issued a condemnation. The Thai government is now in a full damage-control mode but its spokesman laughably assured us that China’s PR trip invitation to a Thai delegate led by Deputy PM Phumtham Wechayasai, and a select group of Thai journalists, will be able to allay concerns about the fate of these 40 Uyghurs. It’s a PR trip after all, and the Thai government will definitely do (or ignore) everything to avoid embarrassing the big-brother host.
Of course, America spoke from a moral high ground as a superpower while ignoring its own hypocrisy in the Middle East and beyond, including not ruling out the use of military force to annex Greenland. Nevertheless, the Thai government was too eager to please China, and this makes Thailand weak, not just appeared weak, and meek.
The case shows that the Thai government’s constant claim of neutrality is much easier said than done. The matter could potentially affect Thailand’s trade with the EU and even America, and tens of millions of Thais, and not just some top Thai officials being unable to visit Disneyland in Florida or shopping at Tiffany’s in NYC.
As for this week’s EU Parliament voting to condemn the Thai government regarding the deportation, before anyone gets too alarmed about the EU Parliament’s vote condemning Thailand for sending the Uyghurs back to China (and the controversial lese majeste law issue), I’d like to share a story to temper the concerns that Thailand will be pressed on the matter through FTA negotiations.
Back in 2017, three years after the EU downgraded its relationship with Thailand’s military government of dictator Gen Prayut Chan-o-cha due to the coup d’état Prayut, the EU realised that using a hardline approach was ineffective with the Thai military dictatorship (probably because the dictatorship didn’t care about being isolated, the economic impact).
One day in December 2017, I was invited to a reception at an EU member state’s embassy at a 5-star hotel in the Sathorn area of Bangkok. There, a diplomat from an embassy of an EU member state approached me and informed me that the EU had decided to restore its relations with the Thai military government. He told me: “You know, the EU discussed that it doesn’t make sense at all to continue to downgrade the relations with Thailand under Prayut while maintaining normal relations with Vietnam, even though the level of civil and political liberties in Vietnam is decidedly lower than in Thailand under the military government. Moreover, in the past three years, we’ve lost trade opportunities, etc., to other countries that didn’t downgrade relations with Thailand.”
In case readers aren’t aware, the EU signed an FTA with Vietnam in 2019, even though citizens in that country have limited political freedom, with a single-party holding monopoly on power, and a poor press freedom index, (ranking 174th out of 180 countries in the 2024 annual ranking by Reporters Without Borders while Thailand was 87th last year), and I’m one of the people invited by Reporters Without Borders to help evaluate and score), and the mainstream Vietnamese media entirely state-controlled, with 37 journalists currently being imprisoned, making Vietnam the third-worst country in the world when it comes to jailing journalists (China is Number 1 with 100 journalists and 3 media organization employees imprisoned at present).
And this doesn’t even include the EU’s current increased burdens, such as a potential trade war with the US and the need to spend more money building its own military for self-defense because America is no longer paying.
In conclusion, Thais who are against the Paetongtarn Shinawatra administration should not get too excited or hold lofty expectations that the Thai government will definitely be punished.
What’s more, the US and the EU pushing Thailand too hard would only compel Thailand to move even closer towards China, and that won’t be beneficial to the West, or democracy-loving Thais.
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