ATO: Sifting through Thailand's ashes

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Sifting through Thailand's ashes

By William Barnes

 

BANGKOK - If Thailand's red revolution ever succeeds, no doubt a statue will be erected of a proud "serf" in ragged clothes carrying a M-79 grenade launcher, perhaps with cans of gasoline arranged at his or her feet.

 

A rolling two-month protest by the United Front for Democracy Against Dictatorship's (UDD) was smashed by the Thai military on Wednesday, with heavy loss of life and the burning down by protesters of much of the swish Rajaprasong shopping district in the city center.

 

The self-proclaimed non-violent movement has always had a violent edge that was explicit in words and symbolic deed, and

 

 

 

understood as such by its membership based on interviews conducted by this correspondent.

 

The protesters' hero, financial backer and putative return leader, self-exiled former premier Thaksin Shinawatra said on Friday from his self-imposed exile, "I resolutely reject all allegations with regard to any illegal or violent activities in the Kingdom of Thailand, and underscore the fact that this heroic and inspiring grassroots movement is completely autonomous and independent from myself. Let me state this clearly: the struggle of the red shirts is a struggle for the democratic rights of the citizens."

 

Thaksin's prepared statement, issued through an international legal outfit, Amsterdam and Peroff, also said the Thai government's use of the term "terrorism" against those who "disagree with its policies raises significant concerns of political persecution".

 

However, the strong suspicion of many observers is that Thaksin preferred to foment a disruption of historic proportions rather than risk any ordinary political compromise (even one where his proxy party won an election) that did not guarantee the wiping clean of his jail sentence for corruption and other alleged crimes, and the return of a confiscated US$1.4 billion.

 

"This was always going to end in tears. There was a very obvious attitude of 'Give us power now or we will f**k you up!'," said one senior government advisor using English language expletives.

 

Thaksin said this week that even if the protest in Bangkok was broken up that his supporters could resort to "guerilla" tactics, according to local press reports. Analysts believe that could involve some kind of uprising in the rural north and northeast, where his support runs strongest.

 

The UDD leadership has repeatedly claimed that it is a non-violent protest movement, yet during the two-month long (initially in the old royal quarter, later in Rajaprasong) it unleashed almost hourly, deeply vituperative abuse against Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva and the so-called "amartipataya" - a vague term for those members of the military, bureaucracy, palace and corporate world who allegedly deprive poorer Thais of their deserved rewards.

 

Many of the reds' sported T-shirts bearing the Thai word for "serf", even though most academic experts reckon the cell-phone toting, pick-up truck driving protesters are in global terms relatively well off - though the inequality gap with higher income Thais has widened in recent years.

 

Michael Nelson, a visiting scholar at the faculty of political science at Chulalongkorn University and no apologist for official Thailand, said he found it difficult to listen for more than a few minutes to the invective the UDD poured almost constantly from the protest stage in high-end retail and hotel district that was Rajaprasong. "It was pretty awful to listen to - at least for me. The tone of voice, the hostility, the anger - the volume!"

 

Most ordinary protesters in the sprawling red citadel were charming hosts who offered chewing gum, tiny plastic cups of coffee (the supplier of Nescafe in Thailand is known to be close to Thaksin) or sometimes a precious can of beer. Sometimes they would show their open hands saying with heavy sarcasm: "I am a terrorist! These are my weapons!"

 

Yet the weeks of blunt political speeches, fiery songs of revolution and the cult of the rogue army general Major-General Khattiya Sawasdipol (shot dead by an assassin just outside the red barricade on May 13) clearly stirred the emotions of a people brought up to believe that even in a democracy political power is based around personalities, social networks and, ultimately, force.

During the course of the protest the focus of the speakers' invective appeared to switch from the wider "aristocracy" and royal institutions like the Privy Council and the urgent need for fresh elections to the simple demand that Abhisit dissolve the house.

 

Many ordinary red shirts drifted away before the final stand was uprooted by the military on Wednesday. Those that remained seemed to hold hazy ideas about what was the purpose of their extended resistance.

 

This correspondent was repeatedly told that the government had brought Cambodian thugs into Bangkok to do the dirty work of killing Thais. On Tuesday, one earnest young man sat next to me to reveal the secret of Thailand's troubles: "Abhisit is a communist. And you know, his blood is Vietnamese." His claim was made within sight of red shirt stalls offering communist tracts and paraphernalia.

 

The need to drive hard to succeed seems to have been bubbling under the surface of the movement from the beginning. In April 2009, the red shirts invaded and broke up a regional meeting with world leaders in attendance at the coastal town of Pattaya and closed down much of the capital for a few days in an earlier attempt to show that the government had lost control.

 

Many observers think this year's attempt to bring down a coalition government - that gained power in December 2008 after many Thaksin-linked politicians were banned for election irregularities and after the military persuaded one political faction to switch sides - was always going to be significantly more violent.

 

"For me 2009 was a trail run. They decided then that Abhisit was too mild and too steeped in English soft-power to crush them. So they ratcheted up the violence this year," said Therdpoum Chaidee, a former communist colleague of some UDD leaders. (Abhisit was educated at elite Eton public school and Oxford University in England.)

 

When the number of protesters fell far short of the million people Thaksin predicted would flood Bangkok in mid-March an ugly confrontation became inevitable, Therdpoum said.

 

The Thais have always tended to admire leaders who are tough enough to get results and cut through the webs of social networks and patron-client circles and the inertia of life in what has, until a couple of generations ago, been predominantly a rural, rice-growing nation.

 

It was noticeable that Thaksin's style mutated from being a dynamic but relatively conciliatory leader into a tough guy persona within a couple of years of becoming prime minister at the beginning of 2001. Many Thais, and certainly not just the red shirts, particularly admired his orders for police death squads to kill an estimated 2,200 small-time drug dealers in a war on narcotics campaign.

 

Words that many Western observers take for symbolic gestures or colorful metaphor are taken much more literally - or at least as a possibility - by many Thais. In the run-up to this year's protest both UDD co-leaders Nattawut Saikua and Arisman Pongreungrong warned that they would join in the burning down of the capital if their protest was suppressed.

 

The violence before Wednesday's crackdown remains unexplained. On April 22, five M-79 grenades were fired into the Silom Road business district opposite the UDD's citadel, two hitting a vociferous anti-red demonstration of perhaps 200 people that included many female office workers. One woman died on Silom and scores were injured.

 

Later that same night behind the red barricade of bamboo and tires opposite Silom Road a couple of hundred red shirts danced and admired the fireworks their comrades fired into the muggy night air. Two kilometers away on the UDD's main stage a cheer went up when the crowd was told how their opponents had been vanquished.

 

UDD posters sometimes included one or more guns, usually the totemic M-97 grenade launcher, although these were kept to a minimum in the capital and away from the eyes of foreign observers. A day or so after the grenade attack on Silom a small boy appeared on the barricade opposite that road carrying a wooden M-79 complete with accurate serial and model markings, but - interestingly - fashioned as a ritualistic penis known as a linga.

 

Pornthip Rojanasunand, a forensic pathologist, reckoned that the M-79 was popular precisely because it carries a nasty sting and can be fired from behind shelter: "It can be fired from a distance ... it has a kind of 'To hell with you quality'."

 

Earlier at the April 10 confrontation at the other side of the city, the red shirts' armed wing used M-79 grenades against the army's tactical commanders that evening, killing a respected colonel and maiming other senior officers. Twenty-five people were killed in the ensuing chaos as heavily armed black-clad warriors flitted through the red crowd unchallenged.

 

On Wednesday, by the Ratchadamri Skytrain station within the UDD's encampment, a cheer went up every time an M-79 grenade exploded with its tell-tale boom among the slowly advancing soldiers. Several soldiers were injured and an Italian journalist apparently killed by the grenades.

 

The Thai police, many of whom had seemed uninterested in interfering in the UDD's operations (one backdoor into the red citadel ran around or possibly through the Lumpini police station), did uncover several shops manufacturing launchers for the Vietnam-era weapon. (See this footage, for example, from Thai television.)

 

It should be emphasized that the more violent of the red shirts are not the only ones in Thailand with such a capacity. It should also be noted that the army showed itself to be less than adept at crowd control and that most of the dead seem to be protesters who were mostly unarmed.

 

Civil engineers contacted by Asia Times Online say that to burn down a giant shopping mall like Central World with state-of-the-art water sprinkler system required planning and incendiary materials sufficient to produce a fire fierce enough to melt steel and crack concrete.

 

"We’ll continue to move swiftly to restore normalcy,'' Abhisit said in a television address to the nation on May 21. ''The government will overcome the difficulties through the five-point reconciliation plan that I've previously announced ... that plan will include an independent investigation of all the events that have taken place during the protests."

 

Thailand is in a state of shock over the physical damage, political pain and psychological hurt that appears to have been, in its essentials, planned in advance, said one intelligence official in a Western embassy.

 

"This is bad. Thailand has had bad times before but this is the worst," said Pornthip as she examined the bodies of six killed protesters lying on straw matting in a temple behind the burnt shell of Thailand's former World Trade Center.

 

William Barnes is a veteran Bangkok-based journalist.

 

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