Though Thaksin has taken refuge in London with one of his daughters, he still casts a dark shadow over the Kingdom. Khunying Pojaman and his two other children are in Bangkok. Their former associates, including people in the military, are also still around. We don't know what they are up to, but it would not be too much to assume they are negotiating a way of holding on to their assets.

From London, Thaksin has signalled to Sonthi that he would wash his hands of politics and wait for an interim government to be formed before returning home. It seems hard to believe that Thaksin would ever part with his power. He will likely plot a comeback if the CDRM lets him off the hook. The impression now is that the CDRM does not have a strategy to deal with Thaksin and his associates.

Second, nobody knows who is really in charge or whether the CDRM has a strategy to manage the transitional politics. People are wondering who has the final say in picking people to run the interim government, which will have to be formed over the next week or two.

The CDRM has made a big blunder by picking Meechai Ruchuphand, the veteran lawyer, as head of the legal team to draft the interim constitution. Meechai is not known for putting the public interest first. Why can't we have good people like Dr Amorn Chantrasomboon do this job instead?

Meechai has brought in Dr Wissanu Krea-ngam and Dr Borwornsak Uwanno to help him draft the interim constitution.

Both Wissanu and Borwornsak served in the position of secretary-general of the cabinet under Thaksin. Wissanu moved on to become a deputy prime minister, opening the way for Borwornsak. The two served the Thaksin regime faithfully. At the height of the leadership crisis, Borwornsak led a group of civil servants from Government House to give roses to Thaksin. But then he was among the first to jump ship when he realised that the Thaksin government was going down. He quickly entered the monkhood and started preaching good governance. Wissanu, who served the Thaksin regime almost to the end, followed Borwornsak by submitting his resignation as deputy prime minister. But everyone remembers how he spent three hours in front of a power-point display trying to convince the public that the CTX bomb scanners had been appropriately procured.

Suddenly, Wissanu and Borwornsak are back near the centre of power. Old political animals never die. Borwornsak played a key part in drafting the 1997 Constitution, which was toppled by the military coup last week. Now he is working on the interim constitution. He also would like to play a key role again drafting the next permanent constitution. Wissanu and Borwornsak have also succeeded in preventing Kaewsan Atibhodi, a former senator, from becoming a member of the newly appointed National Counter Corruption Commission (NCCC). Is the NCCC going to have real teeth in going after the ill-gotten assets? We have doubts.

Third, the CDRM appears to lack unity in its search for the new prime minister. This post is of the utmost importance because the interim prime minister will have to serve two years while the process of political reform is under way. We have overheard that Meechai is now one of the top candidates for the premiership. If this is the case, then the CDRM will quickly become a laughing stock.

The world is watching to see how Thailand will emerge from the military coup. The CDRM must pick the right people for the right jobs. If it can't, then its coup will be considered a fresh blast of power politics. The people are giving roses to the soldiers perched in their tanks in the capital. But if people of questionable integrity are allowed to have a role in running the interim government, then those same soldiers could find themselves pelted by rotten eggs.

You can of course try to stretch the point and argue that Thaksin Shinawatra did ask for it. In fact, his arrogance and autocratic proclivity might have served as the last straw, prompting the top brass to opt for the "really inevitable last resort".

While the use of unconstitutional means to topple a democratically elected government can never be justified, some insiders have suggested that Army Chief General Sonthi Boonyaratglin's decision to topple Thaksin through a military takeover was in fact a pre-emptive strike - or a "counter coup" to stave off an even more ignoble "self-coup" planned by Thaksin to establish himself, once and for all, as an all-powerful despot.

General Sonthi's assurances that the top brass have no intention whatsoever to hold on to political power - and his public pledge to "return the power to the people as soon as possible" - might have allayed some of the fears inherent any time the military intervenes in national politics. However, he will have to move fast and convincingly, particularly in determining how to embark on genuine political reforms, to offset the negative impact brought about by the putsch.

Of equal, if not greater, importance is how he can turn this crisis of confidence into an opportunity for real national reconciliation. Whether he likes it or not, Thaksin will always be remembered for his dubious record of having brought Thai society to its most divided point in history, centred on the wild ambitions of just one power-hungry politician.

Paradoxically perhaps, the political havoc Thaksin wreaked through his claims on electoral democracy will have to be healed by Sonthi's extra-constitutional modus operandi. If the Army chief is able to use these "extraordinary means" to solve an "extraordinary crisis" in order to reunify the country and help Thai society put its deep divisions in the past, he might be able to claim, however controversially, that the ends justified the means.

Quite apart from the debate over the pros and cons of this coup, however, this latest political episode underscores a deep-rooted flaw of this country. The fact that this change of government was effected through force shows that, whatever we say about having matured politically, we are basically still an extremely fragile society.

In fact, we are so vulnerable that any politician with sufficient money and clout, plus a shrewd marketing strategy, is capable of whipping a large segment of the population into a frenzy, confusing electoral manipulation with grassroots democracy. Worse, once a corrupt and powerful leader is entrenched, none of the existing constitutional mechanisms are capable of dealing with him.

Military intervention in a democratic system is always a "bad habit" that may stick if we once again allow ourselves the illusion that this will be the last time this dose of strong medicine is required to cure a serious disease.

Even if the first declaration from coup leaders sounded uncharacteristically apologetic ("Forgive us for the inconvenience caused"), once a political precedent of such proportion is set, it invariably stays. True democracy means never allowing coup leaders the excuse to stage their next exercise, even if they say they are sorry for their previous one.

In other words, if we can't devise an effective system to get rid of a despot through constitutional means, that means we haven't really graduated beyond the basics of democracy.

Written by Suthichai Yoon (THAI TALK - The Nation, September 26, 2006)