Sunday, 23 May 2010
Saturday, 22 May 2010
"Thailand's bitter divisions widened by bloodshed"
The Australian | 20 May 2010
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/opinion/thailands-bitter-divisions-widened-by-bloodshed/story-e6frg6zo-1225868873337
WHATEVER the immediate outcome of Bangkok's spasm of violence, the conflict in Thai society is now deep, wretched and bitter. The demonstrations and violence of recent weeks have polarised the population. One of the strangest things is the way the Red Shirt demonstrators have won the public relations war.
The divisions in Thailand are complex. The Red Shirts of the United Front for Democracy Against Dictatorship have their base in the relatively impoverished rural north-east of Thailand. They support former prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra, who was ousted from office in a coup in 2006.Originally elected in 2001 and re-elected in 2005, he is a multi-billionaire who continued to run his family conglomerate, at great profit, while in office. He became popular with the poor by distributing money to rural village chiefs and undertaking other populist economic measures. The poor also liked his tough, not to say gruesome, war on drugs and his hard line against Muslim separatists in the south.
Corruption roared under Thaksin. He took heavy-handed measures against the liberal press. Sophisticated and liberal Bangkok came to hate him. The old Thai elite, retired military officers, some figures around the palace and much of the Bangkok business community also had it in for him.
After the coup there was a democratic election in 2008. Thaksin couldn't run but his allies won again. After less than a year in office, they were confronted by mass Yellow Shirt demonstrations, which paralysed the airport. The courts ruled some of Thaksin's allies ineligible for politics, there were some parliamentary defections and all of a sudden Thailand had a new government, led by Abhisit Vejjajiva, of the estimably liberal Democrat Party.
Up to that point, you might say Thaksin's followers had the balance of the moral argument. Twice their democratically elected governments were removed from office without an election. Thaksin had fled overseas but he never really went away. Instead he financed, and his lieutenants organised, the Red Shirt protest movement. Somewhat emulating the Yellow Shirts, they decided to paralyse Bangkok with demonstrations, to force Abhisit from office and to secure immediate elections, which they believed they would win.
The army commander, General Anupong Paochinda, whose term in office ends in October, does not want to end his career with the kind of reputation that one of his predecessors, Suchinda Kraprayoon, acquired in 1992 when he used force to suppress demonstrators. So he has tried to act with restraint. Nonetheless the army, the government and the police have basically hung together, and the army has acted to reassert control of the streets of Bangkok.
The danger of a sudden and savage escalation in violence remains great. It is extremely difficult to see where Thailand goes from here. Abhisit offered the Red Shirts a speedy dissolution of parliament and elections in November. Without completely surrendering to mob rule, that was pretty much as far as he could go. The Red Shirts lost all moral high ground when their demands became unreasonable. They wanted Abhisit gone instantly, various of his deputies on trial for the deaths that have occurred in Bangkok, mediation by the United Nations.
The Thai government is intensely frustrated that it has so comprehensively lost the PR battle when the Red Shirts' more militant leaders have clearly been unreasonable. Analysts see the media savvy skills of Thaksin in all this. The Red Shirts nonetheless are divided. There are hard-liners among them who want to provoke violence and polarisation as they presumably see this as the path to power.
One sagacious long-term observer of Southeast Asia sees a protracted conflict ahead. The hatred between the Yellow Shirts and Red Shirts is now so great they want to kill each other, he suggests. Each is a genuine social movement with wide grass-roots support. If that is true then the conflict can only end when one side vanquishes the other.
The problem is there are good arguments for and against each side. Abhisit can claim democratic legitimacy because he is supported by a majority of parliamentarians, but the Red Shirts can claim they won two elections.
Abhisit's government continued many of the economically populist policies of Thaksin and added more of its own, but Abhisit will never be legitimate in the eyes of the Red Shirts. Conversely, if the Red Shirts win in November, or whenever an election is held, will the Bangkok establishment accept their legitimacy? Will a new pro-Thaksin government rule with sufficient skill and a sense of reconciliation such that either the Yellow Shirt movement, or some other manifestation of Bangkok opinion, does not try to drive them from office? Thais have lost faith in the institutions of democracy.
In all this, the outside criticism of the king and the royal family is over-blown. King Bhumibol Adulyadej is 82 and in frail health. There are accusations that some of his advisers were acquiescent in the 2006 coup. But the king was not personally involved. Nor can he possibly be held responsible for the mess today. He is revered by the Thai people and on occasions has been able to use his moral authority to defuse tense situations. It seems the monarchy may have lost some authority. All he could possibly do is ask Abhisit to offer early elections, which Abhisit has already done. If the king tried to exert moral authority and was unsuccessful, that would be worse.
There are rumours Abhisit may step down, as a gesture to appease Red Shirt emotion, and be replaced in the short term by his Defence Minister, General Prawit Wongsuwan. But none of these gestures looks enough to resolve social divisions embittered by a fresh round of bloodshed.
Thursday, 20 May 2010
"Resistance, then surrender, in a doomed last stand"
The Sydney Morning Herald
May 20, 2010
http://www.smh.com.au/world/resistance-then-surrender-in-a-doomed-last-stand-20100519-vfbu.html
After more than two months of protests, the end of the Red Shirts' occupation of the city came swiftly, writes Ben Doherty.
Troops began massing in the pre-dawn darkness. The armoured personnel carriers rumbled onto Bangkok's deserted streets and hundreds of balaclava-wearing soldiers fanned out in a giant cordon.
The city slept. Rumours of an early morning ''final crackdown'' by the military had swept Bangkok the night before, but there had been rumours before, and nothing had happened.
This time it was real.
Shortly after the sun came up, the ''operation'' - in government parlance - began.
No signal marked its beginning, just the stealthy march of soldiers into Lumpini Park - central Bangkok's biggest - in the grey early morning light.
Firing began almost as soon as the soldiers entered the park.
Simultaneously, the troop carriers were driven at the monstrous barricades of tyres and sharpened bamboo staves, the fortifications that had protected the Red Shirts, and marked their territory, for more than a month.
The Red Shirts were ready. Many of the hardcore element within had vowed to fight to the death. Yesterday, many did.
Sensing their stand was doomed, and prepared to burn their city if they could not hold it, they set fire to the barriers.
The fire quickly consumed the structures, symbolic of the Reds' long-maintained but crumbling resistance.
Massive plumes of acrid black smoke filled the air.
As soldiers drew closer, and the battle grew more and more fierce, the Herald saw several Red Shirts carrying handguns and assault rifles, putting the lie to the claims from protest leaders that their people were unarmed. Some tried to maintain the ruse, running with rifles wrapped in mats, but they were soon revealed as fighting intensified and the weapons were put into use.
But for the most part, the protesters were hopelessly outgunned, and overwhelmingly outnumbered.
The soldiers moved steadily closer and the gunfire grew steadily heavier. Flash grenades pushed resistance back. Snipers on an elevated railway took careful shots at unknowing protesters below.
The Reds, under irresistible attack, retreated.
The Herald saw a man shot as he crouched behind a phone box. He rolled in the gutter, unable to stand, and cried out for help. Fellow protesters ran out, under a hail of bullets, to drag him to safety.
But help was unable to reach other victims. Another man shot in Ratchadamri Road lay stricken, alone and unmoving.
An ambulance that drove to him was fired upon and, ultimately, forced to abandon him.
He would lie in no man's land for another hour at least before being reached by soldiers.
Retreating to the north-western corner of Lumpini Park, furious protesters hastily constructed another barrier out of wood, rubbish, chairs, whatever they could find lying around. But the detritus of months of protesting and a week of violent fighting would hold back the troops barely minutes.
''The Thai army bad. Shoot people. Shoot Thai people. They should not. Army bad,'' one Thai man yelled to the Herald as he threw wooden pallets into a pile, a pathetic resistance to the oncoming onslaught.
The soldiers, in charge now, fired indiscriminately.
Bullets flew past, slamming into buildings and cars behind.
The windows on an ambulance shattered as it came under heavy fire. Protesters and journalists fled to the relative safety of the centre of the protest site, as yet unreached by the troops.
They would soon come.
As soldiers swarmed the streets below and gun battles raged all around, the Herald spent the afternoon bunkered in a room on the top floor of a building in the middle of the Red Zone. A Red Shirt leader, Sean Boonpracong, sought refuge there, watching a train station burn below.
He vowed there would be no surrender.
''They [the Red Shirts] are not resigned, they are enraged that they are being shot without having any defence. Those people who have come to help us are no match for the firepower of the military.''
Across Thailand, Red Shirt supporters and sympathisers staged their own rallies. The Khon Kaen town hall was captured by protesters; in Udon Thani, they torched theirs.
But in the afternoon in central Bangkok, as soldiers drew ever closer, the Red Shirt leaders realised the fight could not be won.
Jatuporn Prompan stood on the main stage, smoke billowing from the crumbling ruins of his resistance. After 68 days of protest he begged the demonstrators to leave peacefully.
''Though the fight didn't reach our goal, we tried our best. Go home. We are sorry for not sending you home earlier. Go home safe.''
Thursday, 6 May 2010
Thailand PM Gains Upper Hand in Protest Crisis /TIME
By Robert Horn / Bangkok
TIME Wednesday, May. 05, 2010
The troops were in place. Armored personnel carriers were at the ready. It was clear the crackdown was finally coming. At the start of the seventh week of anti-government demonstrations in the Thai capital of Bangkok, security forces were preparing to dislodge thousands of Red Shirt protesters who were barricading themselves inside the city's main commercial district. The Red Shirts, armed with grenades, assault rifles and other weapons, vowed to go down fighting. Bloodshed appeared inevitable. And if it came, its biggest casualty could have been the man who ordered in the troops, and who some regard as Thailand's brightest political star: Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva.
"In Thailand, the conventional wisdom is that you can not have any injuries, any casualties when dispersing a protest," Abhisit said during a weekend interview with foreign journalists. The setting was an army base in northern Bangkok where, because of threats to his personal safety, the Prime Minister had been living and working since the protests began on March 14.
Read more: http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1987118,00.html#ixzz0n9l69xfq
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