BANGKOK — Nearly three days after the event, the country is still stunned by the military assault on the Redshirt encampment in the tourist center of this city.
Captured Redshirt leaders and militants are treated like POWs and the lower class Redshirt mass-base like an occupied country. No doubt about it, a state of civil war exists in this country, and civil wars are never pretty.
The last few weeks have hardened the Bangkok middle class in their view that the Redshirts are ‘terrorists’ in the pocket of ousted Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, at the same time convincing the lower classes that their electoral majority counts for nothing.
Pro-Thaksin versus anti-Thaksin: this discourse actually veils what is–to borrow Mao’s words–a class war with Thai characteristics.
No doubt there will be stories told about the eight weeks of the ‘Bangkok Commune.’ As in all epic tragedies, truth will be entangled with myth. But of one thing there will be no doubt; that Prime Minister Abhisit’s decision to order the Thai military against civilian protesters can never be justified.