THAILAND'S MOMENT OF TRUTH - ZENJOURNALIST

there were three possible scenarios for how Rama VIII could have been killed – he could have
been murdered, he could have committed suicide, or he could have accidentally shot himself
while playing with or examining the Colt .45 he kept beside his bed. It ruled out murder,
saying it had been daylight and there was no evidence of intruders being seen. And it ruled
out suicide, since the king had been cheerful the night before. It concluded that there was no
doubt, therefore, that Ananda had accidentally pulled the trigger.
Many people were totally unconvinced. The international media began investigating
the “friendship” between Ananda and Marylene Ferrari, the daughter of a Calvinist pastor in
Lausanne. Had a lovelorn Ananada committed suicide?
Siamese in Lauusanne, Switzerland, where Ananda went to school, described as
baseless any suggestion that he had taken his life deliberately. Questioned about the
King’s friendship for 21-year-old Marilene Ferrari, pretty daughter of a Lausanne
clergyman, a close friend of the girl said “it was not a serious affair. She know it
could not last.”
Ananda’s former tutor and secretary, Cleon Seraidaris, said he talked to the girl and
that she told him she, too, excluded the possibility of suicide. Seraidaris, to whom the
king wrote regularly each week, said he last heard from Ananda five days ago, and
that the recent letters both to him and to other friends showed the king to have been in
good health and spirits, eagerly anticipating his projected trip to the United States and
his return to school in Switzerland. [Associated Press, Body of Former King of Siam
Lies in State, June 10, 1946]
Many Thais found the theory that Ananda shot himself by accident a little too convenient
to be credible, and also considered suicide unlikely. They suspected foul play: the king was
assassinated Rumours began circulating around Bangkok – whispered in markets, and, at least
once, shouted in a crowded cinema – that Ananda had been killed on the orders of Pridi.
The prime minister was despised by the royalists because of his role in the 1932 revolution.
In the years afterwards, the rivalry between Pridi and army officer Phibun Songkhram
dominated Thai politics. They were the respective leaders of the civilian and military wings
of the People’s Party that had ended Prajadhipok’s absolute monarchy. Pridi was a leftist and
a democrat; as Krueger says:
The solid fact is that he alone of Siam’s leaders from first to last espoused the cause
of the common man and the ideal of parliamentary democracy. [Krueger, The Devil’s
Discus]
Phibun was a Siamese fascist, who had made a determined effort to become a permanent
military dictator ruling Thailand and supplanting the king. He backed the Japanese during
World War II however, while Pridi secretly ran the Free Thai movement inside Siam. So
with Japan’s defeat, Phibun was in disgrace and Pridi was in the ascendancy. The newly
formed, royalist Democrat Party however, and in particular the blue-blooded brothers Seni
and Kukrit Pramoj as well as former Prime Minister Khuang Aphaiwong, were deeply hostile
to Pridi. Senior princes and the Pramoj brothers had done their best to poison King Ananda
and Sangwal’s relations with Pridi, with some success:
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Seni Pramoj, his brother Kukrit, and their friends, forming what came to be called
the Democrat Party, were rightists. They shared the monarchist sentiment of the
aristocratic class to which they belonged…
[Pridi] was too much of the people, preferring the company of plain-spoken men and,
while never himself lacking the courtesies, paying little regard to courtly servility.