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Student Panusaya Sithijirawattanakul in an interview with SPIEGEL last October
Photo: Karnt Thassanaphak / DER SPIEGEL
The meeting with the woman dated
Thai regime to be broken for climbing onto a stage and reading a poem against the king begins with lemon cake.
"Can you bring her my best cake?" asks the Bangkok pastry chef.
"Maybe over-reaching," I say.
»You have to give her that, you have to tell her that she is my idol, she will set my generation free.«
So with cake to the appointment.
He is handed over to the rebel on the campus of Bangkok's Thammasat University.
Panusaya Sithijirawattanakul, 23, sociology student, enemy of the Thai government, takes the cake as unimpressed as a rock star takes roses from his fans.
In Sithijirawattanakul, young women and men in Thailand see a savior, a fighter for freedom and against the old elites.
But to look at her life and what the fight has already cost her means to ask yourself this question at some point: who will save the heroine?
On August 10, 2020, this young woman, whom everyone calls "Rung", "Rainbow", climbed a stage in the middle of Bangkok.
She wears glasses, shoulder-length dark brown hair, a red blouse.
She reads from the note.
Ten points.
The central ones: a reform of the monarchy.
The king's power and wealth are to be curtailed, the military government deposed and a genuine democracy to follow.
At the time, tens of thousands took to the streets in the Thai capital every week, demanding new elections.
Fueled by the economic hardship of the pandemic and the emergency laws that the government passed during the corona crisis.
Right in the middle is Panusaya »Rung« Sithijirawattanakul, who is breaking a centuries-old archaic law called Lèse-Majesté up there, at the microphone.
The Thai king, it says, must not be criticized.
Anyone who does it anyway faces 15 years in prison.
Before that day in August, there were already people in Thailand who protested, who loudly criticized.
But the king, they always described him like a Voldemort, as »He who must not be named«, they held up three fingers like in the Hunger Games.
Then "Rung" dared what only one demonstrator had previously dared to do publicly: to call the monarch by its name as if it were the center of a great evil.
"I'm shy.
I don't like speaking in front of many people.
But I had to do it that day.
There was nobody who wanted to do it.
Not a man, and certainly not a woman.
I had to lead the way.«
Sithijirawattanakul says she went to the microphone, breathed very shallowly, and almost fainted.
There were these many people who looked up to her with their longing.
Almost no sound came out of her mouth.
She says she was aware of the consequences.
She was terrified.
There is a video on YouTube, a film crew followed Sithijirawattanakul on October 15, 2020 when she again gave a similar speech, for which she was eventually arrested.
Plainclothes security guards can be seen knocking on their door late at night.
Sithijirawattanakul lays on the ground like a stone.
In the end, several women and men lift her into a wheelchair and drive her away.
"Keep on fighting, Rung," her friends shout after the police car, "down with feudalism, long live the people!"
It is easy to assume that a person who has once summoned up tremendous courage and henceforth bears the title of revolutionary will retain that will to fight forever.
But what if your opponent's attacks eventually destroy you?
In mid-October 2021, at the lemon cake meeting, Panusaya Sithijirawattanakul wears a black T-shirt with the Thai king Maha Vajiralongkorn printed on it in an alienated caricature.
She speaks as she walks: slowly, gently, almost rapturously.
The few students who stayed on the big campus despite the pandemic turn to her.
Sithijirawattanakul pretends not to notice.
She's only been out of jail a few weeks, back in her apartment on campus.
She tries to concentrate on her everyday life, on a normal life, but right now nothing is normal anywhere.
Corona and such.
We ask if we can see her small apartment, she says we can't.
Her apartment looks like her life: only chaos.
Sithijirawattanakul narrates.
How, after her first arrest, she becomes depressed in her cell, eats nothing for weeks, hardly drinks, dehydrated.
She didn't dare speak to the other inmates.
"They were maybe murderers, violent criminals, and I'm just a student," she says.
When she went back to prison a few months later, she changed her strategy.
Forget the outside, survive inside.
connect with people.
She shared the food her parents sent to the cell.
Blanked out the protests.
Smiled when she saw the guards and asked them to take good care of them.
Wondered for the first time in her cell, where the power of the state seemed to be pouring down the walls, if it had been worth it.
Ten points on stage.
The only thing she focused on, she says, was the court date, which was fast approaching.
The day she would see her family again.
She was released on bail again.
In mid-November 2021, the Thai Constitutional Court ruled that Sithijirawattanakul's protest was an "abuse of freedom".
Their demands for reform would be tantamount to an attempted coup.
More trials will come to Sithijirawattanakul;
they will be followed by prison terms.
It could be 15 years.
»What the jail destroys«, she says, »you only notice outside.«
She doesn't dream well. Flashbacks like she's back in the cell. The loneliness in prison still sticks to her even when she is free. She often feels alone. Friends advise: "Slow down." She often thinks to herself now: "I don't know why I became the leader of a movement. Why do people say I admire you.«
Sithijirawattanakul is not a revolutionary who comes from the bottom.
Not from where one would expect the people with the great anger towards the powerful.
She comes from a middle-class family.
The parents have a car business and have never been particularly political.
She carries expensive handbags.
She could have pretty much all of the opportunities, the educational opportunities, the opportunities for advancement that are available in Thai society.
She would rather not have fallen into the depths into which one can fall.
Where does her anger come from?
She talks about an exchange year in the USA, the view of Thailand from the outside, which politicized her.
From the moment Prime Minister and ex-General Prayut Chan-ocha banned the Future Forward Party in February 2020, a party that had given hope to many youngsters, including her.
That's when she realized that real democracy is not wanted in her country.
"I want everyone in Thailand to get an idea of what opportunities actually are," she says.
And: »There have been riots in Thailand before.
But the children can't read any of this in their school books.
Because of democracy.
It's a crime to speak your mind here."
A year and a half after all of Thailand got to know Sithijirawattanakul's name, the protests on the streets of Bangkok have almost died down.
It is said because the people who were on the streets in 2020 - young people, students especially - no longer have time to demonstrate.
During the pandemic, you would have to make sure that you get something to eat and find jobs.
But maybe the leader of yore is missing?
She says: »Of course you can say that the movement is over.
I think people are still just as angry.
When Corona is over, they will come back.«
Where will you be?
“I'll continue in the background.
Not so much on stage anymore.
I didn't think much before prison.
Now I can't switch off.
Ask myself: is this or that action worth the consequences?”
Did the state win?
»What I started cannot be undone.
Criticism of the king, it's everywhere now."
She thinks she has achieved something.
She believes she won't be the last to criticize the king out loud.
Back to last October.
On October 6, 2021, hundreds of young men and women gather at a compound in the middle of Bangkok.
They hold up black-and-white images of people lying face down in the grass.
It is the 45th anniversary of the Thammasat massacre.
In October 1976, security forces shot down protesters by left-wing students.
Dozens had died, one was hung in a tree.
Many who are now dissatisfied again identify with the uprising of that time.
Freedom, being heard, democracy.
Against the tyranny of power.
Against standstill.
They believe that the political elite exposed themselves for the first time during the bloodbath.
There's a woman at the anniversary who says the protests in Thailand are always the same, she draws circles in the air,
like to describe a hamster wheel: the people rebel, the state power responds with violence, then the people are quiet again.
Until next time.
Panusaya Sithijirawattanakul is also at the memorial service.
She is sitting on the grass, a little apart.
Young people keep coming to her.
Could you take a selfie with her?
The heroine nods, almost imperceptibly, allowing the photos.
A woman, perhaps in her second semester, says this sentence again.
You are my role model.
But "Rung," the woman who challenged the king, the rebel who no longer wants to be one, says nothing more.
This contribution is part of the Global Society project
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