Nearly a week after the event, Thailand is still stunned by the military assault on the Red Shirt encampment in the tourist center of the capital city of Bangkok on May 19. The Thai government is treating captured Red Shirt leaders and militants like they’re from an occupied country. No doubt about it: A state of civil war exists in this country, and civil wars are never pretty.
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.
On May 19, the Thai military used bullets, water cannons, and tear gas when it stormed the makeshift barricades manned by the “Red Shirts.” Since protests began in mid-March, over 70 people have been killed, the great majority of them civilians. The Red Shirts are demanding social justice, an end to the rule of notorious Thai elite, and new elections. They are saying that Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva lacks a proper mandate after coming to power with military support in a controversial parliamentary vote in 2006. The UK-born and Oxford-educated prime minister is often accused of being an unapologetic supporter of the Thai throne and the elites. Just a few days before the deadly crackdown, Abhisit withdrew an offer of fresh elections.
Thailand’s Red Shirt leaders surrendered to authorities, leaving their followers to fend for themselves.
As an individual concerned with events in Thailand, I am not sure if a plague-on-both-your-houses stance toward the Red Shirts (who support ousted prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra) and the Yellow Shirts (who oppose him) is enough.
Former Thai Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra received his verdict on February 26. The Supreme Court stripped Thaksin of $1.4 billion dollars in assets from his telecommunications firm. One day later, several members of the ruling coalition declared that Thaksin Shinawatra should leave politics forever. The present government came to power in semi-democratic elections following the military coup that toppled Thaksin in 2006.
Three prime ministers in three months. Two airports in the Thai capital blockaded for a week. Protesters twice booting out of office an elected government.
In mid-September 2006, a bloodless “democratic coup” swept through Thailand, the region’s darling of democracy. Military leaders justified their actions as a purely temporary means to wrest the country back from a power-hungry tycoon and restore the functions of government.
Even before the military ousted Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra on September 19, Thai democracy was in severe crisis. The country had suffered a succession of elected but do-nothing or exceedingly corrupt regimes. The International Monetary Fund (IMF), which for all intents and purposes ran the country with no accountability from 1997 to 2001, further eroded the legitimacy of Thai democracy by imposing a program that brought great hardship to the majority. Thaksin stoked this disaffection with the IMF and the political system to create a majority coalition that allowed him to violate constitutional constraints, infringe on democratic freedoms, and using the state as a mechanism of private capital accumulation.
The military coup in Thailand is the second high-profile collapse of a democracy in the developing world in the last seven years. The first was the coup in Pakistan in October 1999 that brought General Pervez Musharraf to power. There are some disturbing parallels between the two events. Both coups have been popular with the […]