It's always sunset in our land of exiles

Either to Dubai or London, Yingluck Shinawatra has gone West and will likely live the rest of her life in exile. Either in an Emirati villa overlooking the Persian Gulf or a London penthouse by the Thames, she may be contemplating the difference between exile and banishment, or between exile and a holiday, but in the end it doesn't matter: She has fled, and her flight means the old power of Thailand has seen off the element regarded as threat. The ghost has been exorcised, the devil purged -- not once but twice, since there are two Shinawatras -- and now the military will charge ahead on their black horses as they gather us up and gallop us off into sunset (not sunrise).

Meechai Ruchupan, head of the Constitution Drafting Committee, stressed the point about Yingluck's lifelong ban: For the ex-prime minister to file an appeal against her five-year jail sentence, the new organic law, which took effect yesterday (great timing), requires her to do so in person. He also stressed that the statute of limitations in her case does not expire. If she returns -- either tomorrow or in, say, 2037, when she's 70 -- she'll be arrested. If she returns and is put in jail for five years, she'll still be banned from politics for life.

In short, she won't return. Her fate and the fate of the rest of this country -- her supporters or her haters -- are no longer the same.

Since we became a democracy 85 years ago, eight Thai premiers have been forced into exile after being ousted in a coup. All of them men, except Yingluck, and most of them military men. Some exiles lasted just a weekend and others a lifetime. Three of them, at this point excluding the two Shinawatras, dreamed of home but were unable to return. They lived out their last days in the suburbs of Penang, Paris and Tokyo and died that heartbreaking death -- the death in exile.

For those three -- Phraya Manopakorn Nitithada, Pridi Banomyong and Plaek Phibulsonggram -- they braved the years of our young democracy and royalist-v-progressive tussles, those years of ideological feud and open power play. Back then, their exiles rang of sad romance -- they were men with beliefs who found out that the country's destiny wasn't going to be written by them.

The first Thai prime minister portended a dark example: Phraya Manopakorn Nitithada, installed after the People's Party turned Siam into a constitutional monarchy in 1932, was ousted in a coup by a faction of the People's Party itself and went by train to Penang in 1933, from where he never returned.

In Pridi's case, let me quote Pope Gregory VII: "I have loved justice and hated iniquity: therefore I die in exile." Embroiled in a vile accusation following the death of King Rama VIII, Pridi, the brains of the Siamese Revolution, the Free Thai Movement, and veteran of political struggle, left the country following the November 1947 coup to Singapore, then Beijing, where he spent two decades, before going into exile within exile in 1970 to that house in Antony, in the suburbs of Paris, where he died in 1983. An idealist, writer, thinker, a man who believed democracy could promote equality among all Thais, Pridi lived and died without seeing his dream come closer to reality -- and it still hasn't today.

Pridi's friend and rival, Field Marshal Plaek, soldier, revolutionary, dictator, nationalist, lived a tumultuous life in the post-1932 years that ended in his escape by car to Cambodia after Gen Sarit Thanarat, his protégé, ousted him in a coup. Plaek would go into exile in Japan, and he died in a house in Sagamihara in June 1967. His Japanese neighbours said the old man -- who once allowed the Imperial Japanese Army to march through Siam during World War II -- loved playing with his dog, and all the children in the neighbourhood liked him.

And yet not all exile stories are romantic. Gen Thanom Kittikachorn, strongman and four times prime minister, left Thailand in disgrace after the student uprising of Oct 14, 1973, and his return three years later -- as a novice monk -- kindled the horrors at Thammasat University as right-wing militias descended upon students on Oct 6, 1976. Gen Thanom, however, would remain and died in Bangkok in 2004 at the age of 93.

Once the exiles lived in loneliness in a cold place, nursing homesickness and broken dreams. We can't say that about the Shinawatras: Lonely they're certainly not, and we're not sure what their dreams are. But still, history tells us that when a prime minister has been driven out, the country has gone from bad to worse, from one uncertainty to more uncertainties, feeding into a cycle that has led to another coup, another exile. Our first PM went away in 1933, and 84 years later things have hardly changed. It's always sunset, not sunrise, here.