Word: thanom
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...DIED. THANOM KITTIKACHORN, 92, former Thai strongman whose military regime was overthrown in a bloody student-led uprising in 1973; in Bangkok. Thanom ruled Thailand in the '60s and early '70s as part of a triumvirate of dictators known as the "Three Tyrants," and allowed tens of thousands of U.S. troops to be stationed there during the Vietnam War. He fled into exile after being overthrown but returned in 1976, became a Buddhist monk, and never entered politics again...
...bottomless corruption. Yet at the height of the Viet Nam War, the U.S. shipped squadrons of bombers and some 50,000 troops to this California-size land, making it a fortress of American power. As the war in neighboring Indochina began to wind down, riotous Bangkok students overthrew Dictator Thanom Kit-tikachorn in 1973 and ushered in a neutralist government that requested U.S. withdrawal. Then began a series of shaky coalitions assembled by groupings of Thailand's 54 parties. Now, TIME's David Aikman cabled, the collapse of Thailand's three-year experiment in democracy was received...
Wild Buffaloes. The new trouble started last month, when ex-Dictator Thanom, after three years of exile in the U.S. and Singapore, slipped back to Bangkok with the saffron robes and shaven skull of a Buddhist monk. His mission, he said, was to do penance at the deathbed of his 91-year-old father. Leftist students at Bangkok's Thammasat University refused to believe it. They demanded that he again be expelled and gave Prime Minister Seni Pramoj a deadline of Oct. 2 to act. The frail, silver-haired Seni, newly appointed to head yet another coalition, vacillated...
Though Thammasat University had been closed, 4,000 students broke down the gates and occupied it. Some staged antigovernment skits; others secretly brought in guns. The students were supported by 43 Bangkok labor unions, which gave the government their own three-day deadline for Thanom's ouster. After that, they threatened, there would be a general strike...
...Thailand's conservative forces, by now fearful of the nation's steady drift to the left and its vulnerability to pressures from its Communist neighbors, fought back. Police seized two students who were putting up anti-Thanom posters and summarily hanged them. Several thousand right-wing vocational students known as "Red gaurs" (wild buffaloes) demanded that the left-wing students be ousted from the university...