Thailand’s Queen Mom Sirikit, who introduced glamour to a postwar revival within the nation’s monarchy and who, in later years, would often wade into politics, has died aged 93, the Thai Royal Family bureau has introduced.
The palace mentioned she had been hospitalised since 2019 as a result of a number of diseases and developed a bloodstream an infection on 17bOctober earlier than passing away late on Friday.
A mourning interval of 1 yr has been declared for members of the royal household and family.
Thai prime minister Anutin Charnvirakul has cancelled his journey to the Asean leaders’ summit in Malaysia due to Queen Mom’s dying, a authorities spokesperson mentioned on Saturday.
Sirikit had been out of the general public eye since a stroke in 2012.
Her husband, King Bhumibol Adulyadej, was Thailand’s longest-reigning monarch, with 70 years on the throne since 1946.
For many individuals in Thailand, she will likely be remembered for her charitable work and as a logo of maternal advantage. Her dying will likely be handled with reverence in a rustic the place any criticism is held at bay by strictly enforced lese-majesty legal guidelines, which prescribe potential jail sentences for insulting royals, even those that are lifeless.
King Bhumibol critiques a parade with Queen Sirikit to mark his birthday in Bangkok in 2006. {Photograph}: Chaiwat Subprasom/Reuters
Born in 1932, the yr Thailand transitioned to a constitutional monarchy from an absolute monarchy, Sirikit Kitiyakara was the daughter of Thailand’s ambassador to France and led a lifetime of wealth and privilege.
Whereas learning music and language in Paris she met Bhumibol, who had spent components of his childhood in Switzerland.
“It was hate at first sight,” she mentioned in a BBC documentary, noting that he had arrived late to their first assembly. “Then it was love.”
The couple frolicked collectively in Paris and have been engaged in 1949. They married in Thailand a yr later when she was 17.
Sirikit collaborated with French couturier Pierre Balmain on outfits constituted of Thai silk and by supporting the preservation of conventional weaving practices, she is credited with serving to revitalise Thailand’s silk trade.
For greater than 4 a long time, she regularly travelled with the king to distant Thai villages, selling growth initiatives for the agricultural poor – their actions televised nightly on the nation’s Royal Bulletin.
She was briefly regent in 1956, when her husband spent two weeks in a temple, learning to change into a Buddhist monk in a ceremony of passage widespread in Thailand.
Queen Sirikit together with her husband, King Bhumibol Adulyadej. {Photograph}: Keystone-France/Gamma-Keystone/Getty Photographs
In 1976, her birthday, 12 August, grew to become Mom’s Day and a nationwide vacation in Thailand.
Her solely son, now King Maha Vajiralongkorn, also referred to as Rama X, succeeded Bhumibol after his dying in 2016 and upon his coronation in 2019, Sirikit’s formal title grew to become Queen Mom.
Formally, the monarchy is above politics in Thailand, whose fashionable historical past has been dominated by coups and unstable governments. Nonetheless, generally the royals together with Sirikit have intervened or taken actions seen as political.
In 1998, she used her birthday tackle to induce Thais to unite behind the then prime minister, Chuan Leekpai, dealing a crippling blow to an opposition plan to carry a no confidence debate within the hope of forcing a brand new election.
Later, she grew to become related to a political motion, the royalist Individuals’s Alliance for Democracy (PAD), whose protests introduced down governments led by or allied to Thaksin Shinawatra.
In 2008, Sirikit attended a funeral of a PAD protester killed in clashes with police, implying royal backing for a marketing campaign that had helped oust a pro-Thaksin authorities a yr earlier.
