Political un-rest and rally

[STEVE G]

Right from the start the Red-shirt leadership stated that the protest would only last for a few days and I think the authorities have wisely allowed it to run it's course by avoiding provoking any trouble.
They probably couldn't afford to keep paying 2000bt a day for a couple of weeks like the PAD managed with their influential backers!

[PeteC]

Ok Nereus since you're on-line. What's the update, throngs of red shirts going by your window yet? This is the day of the big city wide march to garner support from local Bangkok populace. Perhaps they'll garner shoes being thrown at them from the windows instead. Pete

[Nereus]

Ok Nereus since you're on-line. What's the update, throngs of red shirts going by your window yet? This is the day of the big city wide march to garner support from local Bangkok populace. Perhaps they'll garner shoes being thrown at them from the windows instead. Pete

About an hour ago a group went past along Sukhumvit towards Rama 4. Could hear their PA system for a couple of minutes. Took about 10 minutes to pass by my view point, and typical ignorant drivers, some of them in the left hand lane and some in the centre, so making more of a nuisance of themselves than necessary.

Sukhumvit and the Chalong Expressway is now virtually deserted. But I am not going to venture out to check on the rest of them!

[PeteC]

I think most of Bangkok is indoors and on-line. I haven't seen internet speeds this slow on a weekend for a long time. Pete

[Nereus]

Well, it is now 3-00pm and Sukhumvit is at a standstill East of Rama 4. I think Rama 4 was part of their planned route back to their liar, so maybe that is the reason.

[Big Boy]

I think Rama 4 was part of their planned route back to their liar

I would have thought he'd have gone with them to spread his lies

[Nereus]

I think Rama 4 was part of their planned route back to their liar

I would have thought he'd have gone with them to spread his lies

Sorry Big Boy, who? Or is it me? Should have been "lair".

It is now 4-30 pm and Sukhumvit is still at a standstill.

[Nereus]

It is now just after 7-00 pm and Sukhumvit Rd. is still at a standstill. I guess it is the rally coming into Sukhumvit via Soi 71, as that is where the planned route was shown.

[komfortablynumb]

give us a job

[sandman67]

The Reasonable face of Thai politics

http://www.nationmultimedia.com/special ... &cateid=13

and the flipside

http://www.reuters.com/news/video?video ... d=57640045

you go figure

[PeteC]

Reports from both the Bangkok Post and The Nation newspapers this early Saturday morning are saying that today's march by the Red Shirts has been cancelled. Instead they will rally at their camp site at Phan Fa Bridge, Pete

[Spitfire]

It appears tonight from the TV debate tonight, involving the PM etc and the red shirt leaders, that it appears that the PM Abhisit has called their bluff and said "If you want to dissolve the parliment and have a new election the we should have a nationwide referendum on it, whether it should happen or not (an early election), and then I'll abide by the result."

Clever chap!

Seems to have been a muted response from the red shirt leaders, as they know they can't win a national referendum at the moment as many are getting P-ed off with what they are doing or they cannot speak without high-tailing it back to Thaksin to report and then be given "orders". They are simply minions.

They, in diplomatic speech, "Did a runner to ask the CEO what to do."

[PeteC]

Latest report on last night's meeting. Pete

http://www.bangkokpost.com/news/politic ... in-failure (photos)


News » Politics
Govt, UDD talks again end in failure

* Published: 29/03/2010 at 09:10 PM
* Online news: Politics Bangkok Post

The second round of talks between the government and the United Front for Democracy against Dictatorship (UDD) on Monday evening again ended inconclusively.

The talks at King Prajadhipok's Institute on Chaeng Wattana road ended after two hours of heated point-scoring with each side advising the other to spend the next two days thinking their position over carefully while Prime Minister Abhsit Vejjajiva is away on an official trip to Bahrain.

Whether the two sides would meet again, and when, would be worked out later.

On the government side, Mr Abhisit was accompanied by his secretary-general Korbsak Sabhavasu and Democrat

Party deputy secretary-general Chamni Sakdiset; the UDD was represented by Veera Musikhapong, Jatuporn Prompan and Weng Tojirakan.

The condition for further talks set by Mr Abhisit was that the government would be ready to dissolve the House of Representatives by the end of this year, or about nine months from now.

According to the prime minister, some of nine months would be used for a public referendum to let the people decide where the constitution should be amended.

Articles for amendent might be based on the six points proposed by a parliament committee on political reform, reconciliation and constitution amendments chaired by Senator Direk Thuengfang.

The remaining time would be for the amendment process in parliament. All should be completed in the nine months, or by the end of this year, so that elections could be held under new rules agreed to by the people, Mr Abhisit said.

The prime minister said if this could not be completed in nine months, then he would accept responsibility.

The UDD representatives were persistent in their demand that the House of Representatives be dissolved in 15 days. They said they did not believe the government would be able to do as promised and accused it of trying to buy time.

Mr Jatuporn said the UDD's 15-day deadline would give the government a total of 60 days to prepare for the general election, which must be held in 45 days after a House dissolution.

The two sides agreed to end the talks with each side leaving their conditions onthe table for the other side to consider. No date was set for another round of talks.

In the early stage of the talks Mr Abhisit and Mr Jatuporn engaged in a lengthy, heated argument in which both sides exchanged accusations concerning past incidents -- including the Songkran riots in April last year. At many points both sides turned emotional and lost self-control.

Mr Weng produced a number of enlarged photographs which he said showed soldiers opening fire at the red shirted protesters.

It was Mr Veera who brought them out of the heated argument back to the matter of a House dissolution.

[PeteC]

The below article is a few days old but still holds true IMO. This is their last chance before breaking up and going home for Songkran. Coupled with that, a few anti-red shirt demonstrations are planned in areas directly adjacent to where the Red Shirts will be. This weekend could be difficult there. Pete


Unrest predicted during Saturday rally

* Published: 31/03/2010 at 04:30 PM
* Online news: Breakingnews Bangkok Post

There is a strong possibility of violence during the red-shirt mass rally against the Democrat-led government on Saturday, Democrat Party deputy spokesman Warong Dejkijvikrom said on Wednesday afternoon.

Mr Warong said he based in prediction on a report that key members of the pro-Thaksin United front for Democracy against Dictatorship in several provinces, especially in the North and Northeast, were encouraging their supporters to take to the streets in the capital to rally against the government.

“The key members claim that police and troops dare not harm the people, so the red-shirts can safely express extreme political views,” he said.

The deputy spokesman of the Democrats called on core leaders of the United front for Democracy against Dictatorship to control their supporters and ensure the demonstration will be peaceful.

Mr Warong said he had consulted with cabinet ministers, asking they double check the report and come up with measures to prevent the possible violence.

[tarakandi]

Interesting article in the New York Times

Thai Protesters Shed Culture of Restraint
THOMAS FULLER
March 31, 2010


Protesters wearing trademark red shirts gathered in Bangkok last Saturday.
Thomas Fuller/International Herald Tribune

BANGKOK — Thailand is a country of 145,000 Mercedes Benz sedans and about 75,000 villages, many of them hamlets afflicted by poverty.

During nearly three weeks of mass anti-government demonstrations here, luxury cars have had to share the streets of Bangkok with the blaring megaphones of rural discontent.

Standing in the back of a pickup truck and shaded by a wide-brimmed hat was Thanida Paveen, a 43-year-old mother of two who explained the epiphany that brought her to the demonstration.

“I used to think we were born poor and that was that,” said Ms. Thanida, who grew up in the provinces but now lives in Bangkok and rents out rooms to factory workers in the city’s industrial outskirts. “I have opened my mind to a new way of thinking: We need to change from the rule of the aristocracy to a real democracy.”

The Thailand of today is not quite the France of 1789 — there is no history of major tensions between rich and poor here, and most of the country is peaceful despite the noisy protests. But more than ever Thailand’s underprivileged are less inclined to quietly accept their station in life as past generations did and are voicing anger about wide disparities in wealth, about shakedowns by the police and what they see as the longstanding condescension in Bangkok toward people who speak provincial dialects, especially from the northeast.

The deference, gentility and graciousness that have helped anchor the social hierarchy in Thailand for centuries are fraying, analysts say, as poorer Thais become more assertive, discarding long-held taboos that discouraged confrontation.

The haves in Thailand have a lot — the country has one of the most inequitable income distributions in Asia, a wider gap between rich and poor than in China, Malaysia, the Philippines or Vietnam, according to a World Bank report.

Four years of political turmoil have brought clearer divisions between wealthy families and their domestic staff, between the patrons of expensive restaurants and the waiters who serve them, between golfing businessmen and the legions of caddies who carry their bags.

“This is a newfound consciousness of a previously neglected part of Thai society,” said Thitinan Pongsudhirak, one of the country’s leading political scientists and a visiting scholar at Stanford University’s FSI-Humanities Center. “In the past they were upset, but they weren’t cohesive as a force and coherent in their agenda. New technologies have enabled them to unify their disparate voices of dissatisfaction.”

The role of technology in bringing together the protesters has been crucial. The leaders of the protest movement have used community radio stations, mobile-phone messaging and the Internet to forge an identity for lower-income Thais and connect a vast constellation of people in villages and towns.

At times the protests in Bangkok could be described as flash mobs of the disaffected. Protesters, who wear trademark red shirts, have converged on government buildings, banks and military bases across the city guided by text messages.

“This would not have been possible 10 years ago,” said Ms. Thanida, who was returning from military barracks in Bangkok where protesters had demanded that soldiers leave the area. The military acquiesced. Like many protesters, she subscribes to D Station, a “red shirt” news service that gives updates and instructions to protesters.

The leaders of the red-shirted protesters have advertised the current round of protests as class warfare and describe themselves as defenders of the “prai,” a feudal word meaning commoner or lower-class citizen. “The blood of the prai is worth nothing” is a phrase now affixed on bumper stickers and T-shirts.

That may be overblown rhetoric. There are many stories of upward mobility in Thailand and, despite the presence of tens of thousands of protesters, the anger has not translated into personal attacks on the wealthy.

The main target of the protesters’ ire seems to be the system: the perception that bureaucrats and the military serve the elite at the expense of the poor. The protesters bewail the 2006 military coup that removed Thaksin Shinawatra, the tycoon turned prime minister who focused his policies on rural areas. And they question the fairness of a judicial system that removed two subsequent prime ministers who were allied with Mr. Thaksin.

To many outsiders, Mr. Thaksin’s role is puzzling: The notion that a billionaire is leading Thailand’s disaffected to rebellion verges on the absurd. It also infuriates the Bangkok elite, who see Mr. Thaksin’s role as largely self-serving. Mr. Thaksin, most analysts agree, was hardly a paragon of democratic values during his five years in power. He intimidated the media, stripped institutions like the anti-corruption commission of their independence and mixed his business interests with those of the government.

Many protesters, as well as associates of Mr. Thaksin, say the protest movement has taken on much larger dimensions than just a battle between Mr. Thaksin and his political rivals.

“This goes well beyond Thaksin,” said Pansak Vinyaratn, one of the main architects of policies during the Thaksin administration. “The question is, will the Thai state be able to harness this negative energy to something positive.”

It is significant that Mr. Thaksin made his fortunes in the telecommunications business. Even his critics concede that he was able to communicate with the rural poor and deliver results in ways that none of his predecessors had achieved. As prime minister, he gave lower-income Thais a taste of a better life, including cheap loans that allowed people to buy pickups and mobile phones, which inadvertently or not laid the groundwork for the current political movement.

In 2005, after four years of Mr. Thaksin as prime minister, the number of people using mobile phones in the vast, rice-growing northeast had more than doubled to 5.3 million.

Incomes in the northeast rose nearly 50 percent during the Thaksin government and even more in the provinces east and south of Bangkok.

The protesters today are not the country’s desperately poor, says Ammar Siamwalla, a prominent economist in Thailand who specializes in development issues. They are more likely to be people whose expectations were raised and then dashed: they started small businesses like hair salons in the Thaksin years when more money started circulating in rural areas, Mr. Ammar said. “It jump-started a lot of things.”

After the coup in 2006, these small-time entrepreneurs were stuck. “They were suddenly caught short by the lack of access to credit,” said Mr. Ammar, who is otherwise critical of Mr. Thaksin’s rule.

Debt levels in the northeast doubled to an average of about 100,000 baht, or just over $3,000, per family. Today rural families still carry this debt, but their incomes are relatively stagnant, in part because crop prices were deflated by last year’s economic crisis.

Beyond the economics, there is an intangible side to Thailand’s political crisis that may be even more significant for the country in the long run.

The once deeply ingrained cultural mores that discouraged displays of anger, that prized politeness and justified the entitlements of the royalty and the elite have been eroded by technology and mobility. The prime minister, Abhisit Vejjajiva, rarely visits the northeastern part of the country because his aides fear a hostile reception. (Mr. Abhisit has been ensconced in a military barracks in Bangkok for much of the past two weeks.) Another group of protesters, the “yellow shirts,” who helped precipitate Mr. Thaksin’s ouster with their own demonstrations, held the country hostage by shutting down the airport for a week in late 2008, a protest that stranded hundreds of thousands of travelers.

The traditional restraints on aggressive and argumentative behavior — the Buddhist clergy and a once deeply held fear of bad karma, among other factors — have been weakened, says William J. Klausner, an expert on Thai culture and Buddhism who has studied village life since he moved to Thailand in the 1950s.

“Villagers today feel far less inclined to accord deference and respect to those in authority simply because of their privileged position and perceived sense of entitlement,” Mr. Klausner wrote in an essay.

Many Thais say they are shocked by the coarse language used by political activists of all stripes today. Insults that were once rarely heard in public have become common.

Thailand appears to be losing a small part of what has long attracted millions of tourists to its shores: a culture of unflappable, bend-over-backwards politeness.

Pakawan Malayavech, a 55-year-old native of a northeastern province, reflected on these changes as she walked through a crowd of tens of thousands of red-shirted protesters recently. She left Thailand as a young woman for the United States, where she drove a Good Humor ice cream truck in Fairfax, Virginia, and did other odd jobs. Then, in 1999, she returned to retire, and now she sees the country like frames in time-lapse photography.

“People used to forgive and forget easily,” she said. “Now the new generation are more like Americans — they talk back.”

nytimes.com