“Thirayuth Boonmi was the son of an army sergeant and had been placed first in the nationwide secondary school examinations. Seksan Prasertkun was the son of a fishing boat builder and a brilliant political science student.
In November 1972, Thirayuth organized a ten-day protest against Japanese goods
. In June 1973, the demonstrations began to focus on the issue of restoring the constitution and democracy. The generals refused to negotiate, and arrested the student leaders. Meeting in the Interior Ministry, they agreed that ‘ 2% of the student population’ should be ‘sacrificed for the survival of the country’
. Publicly they claimed that the students were manipulated by ‘communists’.
The press cautiously supported the students. On 13th October 1973, half a million people joined a Bangkok demonstration to demand a constitution, and parallel gatherings formed in major provincial towns. The generals backed down and released the student leaders, but the protest now had a momentum of its own. In the afternoon, the crowd moved towards the palace to avoid military harassment, and appealed to the king to mediate.
The student leaders extracted a promise from the generals to reintroduce a constitution within a year, and were granted an audience with the king. But the dispersal of the demonstration on the morning of 14 October 1973 deteriorated into violence. Soldiers fired into the crowd, killing 77 and wounding 857. The shedding of young blood on Bangkok streets undermined any remaining authority of the junta, and allowed the king and other military factions to demand that the ‘three tyrants’ (Thanom, Praphat and Narong, Thanom’s son married to Praphat’s daughter) go into exile.
The king took the unprecedented step of nominating a new prime minister (Sanya Thammasak, a judge and privy councillor) and laying down the process for writing a new constitution to re-establish parliament. The final collapse of military rule catapulted the students into a historic role, and elevated the king as a supra-constitutional force arbitrating the conflicts of a deeply divided nation.”