2005). It opens, however, with an account of the NHRC’s origination, tracing it to struggles for equality and democracy. Over footage of 14 October 1973, 6 October 1976, and Black May 1992, it describes the People’s Constitution as the product of protracted democratic struggle, finishing the story with coverage of a parade of people carrying yellow14 flags reading รัฐธรรมนูญ ฉบับประชาชน (People’s Constitution), carrying the national flag, and wearing yellow T-shirts,15 headbands, and caps sporting the same slogan. Finally, many of the parade marchers carried a copy of the constitution, holding it out to the camera as they passed by.
Figure 5. Democracy Monument, 14 October 1973. Photo: Adam Carr.
This wielding of the constitution, as if a shield, is important. Kat explained that protestors of the Thai-Malay pipeline that was being built through the town of Hat Yai in southern Thailand in 2002 used the constitution as a tool, when confronted by police, to argue that they had the right to congregate and to mount their protest. Similarly, when I met with Dr. Sriprapha, chair of the human rights program at Mahidol University, she said that the vast majority of Thai do not know or understand their rights but that the 1990s saw increasing awareness on this front. As an indicator of this trend, she said that many of the rural people she works with in an NGO capacity now carry the constitution with them as a kind of protection: “When the police harass them, they can pull out the constitution, and the police may doubt themselves—they may think this villager knows his rights better he does. But there are no guarantees.”
The constitution in these cases is more than a document that outlines rights but also is symbolically potent, a fact emphasized in the video by the coincidence of the camera panning over the Democracy Monument—the site par excellence of popular democratic struggle and repository of a symbolic constitution—as the narrator talks of this constitution being the first that enjoyed public consultation. What, however, is at stake in showing the Democracy Monument? Benedict Anderson takes monuments to be a form of speech (Anderson 1973, 61) but also cites Robert Musil half-approvingly when he says, “There is nothing in this world as invisible as a monument” (cited in Anderson 1998, 46). This may be so. The Democracy Monument sits directly in the path of traffic moving along Ratchadamnern Klang. It is unavoidable, and yet this quotidian feature may be just what makes it invisible as a monument. Anderson orients his analysis to the contingency of meaning a monument may have—what, as a form of speech, it can say—but I argue that when the NHRC conjures the image of the Democracy Monument, it is less because of what it might mean or say and has more to do with how the history of demonstrations, with their bloodshed and deaths that can be called heroic, at its site gives it affective force. Anderson writes of Indonesia’s National Monument that it is “less a part of tradition than a way of claiming it” (Anderson 1973, 64). Anderson means this as the form of speech he discusses, but the idea behind showing the Democracy Monument while lauding the inclusivity of the constitutional drafting procedure in a video about human rights is to create associations not—or not just—of meanings between them and democratic heroism but at the level of affect: that is how the claim on the democratic tradition arises.
The NHRC Strategic Plan
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