Word: sarit
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...nation, sealed up unsold stocks and piled almost 9,000 opium pipes, many of ivory and rare mandarin wood, in front of Bangkok's Grand Palace. Drenched with gasoline and set afire, the blaze was watched by thousands until dawn. Boasted Thailand's boss. Field Marshal Sarit Thanarat, who has also closed down nightclubs, "massage parlors" and brothels: "From this day we can proudly claim that we are a civilized people. Gone will be those trying days when we were pilloried by the foreign press, which printed squalid pictures of opium addicts...
Thailand. The open seizure of power by Field Marshal Sarit Thanarat last October has had in Thailand much the same revivifying effect as Ne Win's takeover in Burma. Sarit, who is not in the best of health, seems to have gone through a moral regeneration. He has ordered the end of legalized opium dens; closed 27 Communist or pro-Communist newspapers and magazines; cracked down on hoodlum-run labor unions as well as three shakedown organizations formerly run by the police, and in a final burst of virtue ordered nightclubs to close at midnight. There was a time...
Since seizing power 13 months ago, Strongman Sarit has spent most of his time abroad undergoing treatment for a chronic liver ailment in Walter Reed Army Hospital in Washington, and then in Britain. Back home, his Chart Sang-khom Party seemed safely in control of two-thirds of the seats in the Assembly, after an election he had decreed; his own man, General Thanom Kittikachorn, was Premier; young King Phumiphon was carefully holding himself above politics and giving no encouragement to the opposition. When a Soviet attaché and a Tass newsman spoke slightingly of Sarit this month, the government...
...there were subsurface rumblings. Some of Sarit's own supporters in the Assembly had gone off on freeloading junkets to the Soviet Union. Many of Bangkok's dozens of newspapers were accepting Red bribes in return for attacking Sarit and the U.S. The embittered aristocrats who dream of re-creating the Thailand of the past were giving covert support to the Communists and other opposition leaders. Premier Thanom, who had not wanted his job in the first place, seemed to be floundering...
Reflecting on these symptoms of unrest as he paced in his borrowed estate 25 miles from London, Strongman Sarit decided it was time to reassert himself. He flew back to Bangkok last week. Next day he dissolved the National Assembly, deposed the Premier, banned all political parties, scrapped the constitution and promised to draw up another (which will not be submitted to a referendum), padlocked a dozen publications, and declared martial law because of "pressure of internal and external forces, especially of the Communists." In the name of the "revolutionary party," Sarit promised Thailanders that he would 1) respect...