Picking up the pieces will be hard in the shocked aftermath of Thailand’s lethal political violence: the damage could cost €1 billion, and wounds from the social fissures won’t heal easily
‘AH, THAILAND, Thailand!” The polo-shirted Bangkok taxi driver, who has a heavy ring on each finger and intricate tattoo work on his arms, shakes his head in exasperation as we pass piles of smouldering tyres, not far from the scorched ruins of the city’s stock exchange. “Thai people do this to Thai people. I don’t understand why they do this.”
Thailand is picking up the pieces after the most violent day in its modern history, when red-shirted opposition protesters, armed with slingshots and home-made rockets, fought pitched battles with heavily armed troops, and then hardliners torched large swathes of the city everyone knows as Asia’s most vibrant.
Most taxi drivers you meet in Bangkok support the opposition, because they feel that the working class did better under ousted former prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra, and they backed efforts to stage elections that would almost certainly have led to the current premier, Abhisit Vejjajiva, losing office.
Orange-suited city workers are scratching their heads about where to begin with reconstruction. The 2004 tsunami brought destruction to the south of the country, but recovering from a political tsunami such as this is a different kind of challenge, because the underlying cause of the violence has not been resolved. There were warnings about this political deluge five years ago, when Thaksin was ousted by a military coup. But those warnings were ignored.
Smiling broadly on Thai TV yesterday as he announced that order had been restored, Abhisit said he was taking the country on a path of national reconciliation. “We are living in the same house,” he said. “I invite all of you to join the reconciliation process.”
“Time to Rebuild” was the stirring headline on the front page of the Nation newspaper yesterday, but it may be coming too early for the still-reeling citizens of Bangkok. Paying for the damage is expected to cost 40 billion baht (€990 million). The country is still deeply conflicted, despite noble efforts at reconciliation.
Regardless of where you stand on the rights and wrongs of the Red Shirt protests, the fact remains that the Thai military intervened against its own people. At least 15 people died on the day, and 85 have been killed and 1,900 injured since mid-March. There were 10 journalists among the injured.
When the military takes this kind of action, the political wounds can be desperately hard to heal. The Tiananmen Square crackdown in 1989 has left deep fissures at the heart of Chinese society. And civil war politics still echo in contemporary Irish politics.
“No one knows how long it will take to close the deep divisions that have been opened within Thai families and society,” the Bangkok Post stated in its front-page editorial.
Abhisit’s positive tone will do much to calm jittery nerves, but his message was low on detail and did not mention an election date, a key demand of the Red Shirts. You wonder how this will go down with ordinary people, many of whom backed the Red Shirts because they feel their voices are not being heard by Abhisit’s government, which is backed by the army and the Bangkok elite.
After the coup in 2006 ejected Thaksin, his friends and family were elected in subsequent votes. Thaksin’s elected allies were then removed by a controversial court ruling, paving the way for Abhisit’s administration to be appointed in an army-backed parliamentary vote in 2008.
So when the leadership of the Red Shirts stepped down on Wednesday, there were wails of frustration. The occupation of downtown Bangkok had achieved so much – this just wasn’t fair. Then the hooligans stepped in and there was widespread shock in Bangkok, in all of Thailand, all over the world.
Wednesday was hell on earth, a frightening day for everyone living within a few kilometres of the protest site, and blankly terrifying for anyone trapped inside the army blockade. Every couple of minutes a pick-up truck or an over-burdened scooter bearing the injured and the dead would zip down Ratchadamri Road, heading to makeshift emergency tents erected in the shadow of some of Asia’s most elegant shopping centres.
Serious questions arise about how this civil unrest was handled. Where were the water cannons? Why were snipers using live ammunition, instead of rubber bullets and baton charges? How did food and water supplies and electricity keep flowing in the three-square-kilometre zone occupied by the Red Shirts?
Red-shirted protesters were pinned down by sniper fire at the Sala Daeng intersection at the top of the road, where black-shirted hardliners fired home-made rockets at the Thai army.
Journalists were being shot at a horrible rate, with Italian photojournalist Fabio Polenghi taking a chest wound before being whisked away by two Red Shirts on a scooter. He died of his wounds. Two journalists have been killed so far, and many have been injured.
An American journalist watched as his Dutch colleague went down beside him while they were seeking cover. He survived. The American was hit by a ricochet bullet, but he was able to walk. He needed to, because once the violence escalated, everyone had to run.
There was confusion, and lots of bangs, but it was hard to tell whether they were caused by shooting or firecrackers, army or Red Shirts. We ran in a group past the CentreWorld mall. These were to be the last few hours for the shopping centre – black-shirted hardliners were setting fire to it, and now all that remains is a twisted shell of a building.
The battle was raging a short walk from boutique hotels, choice restaurants, street shopping and the Pat Pong night market and red-light district, while much of the killing took place across the road from one of the icons of Thailand’s tourism industry, the elegant Dusit Thani hotel.
The tension had been building all week; in fact, you could say it had been building for the nine weeks of the Red Shirt occupation. I was due to stay at the Dusit Thani, but the Irish general manager, Danny McCafferty, a suave and unflappable professional who has seen crisis before, during the Bali bombings in Indonesia, called me en route from the airport and advised me to find somewhere else to stay. Rockets hit the hotel, which had many police and soldiers camped out in the grounds, and the guests and staff of the hotel spent Sunday night in the basement, and had to be evacuated the next day.
Things built up to a climax on Wednesday, after troops moved on the barricades, eerily medieval structures composed of tyres, bamboo sticks, tarpaulin and concrete blocks. As soon as the violence started, these were set on fire and the sky turned black.
We ran to Pathumwanaram Temple, where we felt safe, and were looked after by amiable Thai women who gave us water, face masks, electrolyte against dehydration, and smelling salts. Then word went around that the black-shirted hardliners had decided to target the media, blaming them for their plight.
One of the most surreal aspects about more than two months of civil unrest in Bangkok has been the way that terrible scenes of violence took place in one of the world’s top tourist destinations, the third most visited city in the world.
Bangkok and 23 other provinces in the rural north and northeast – the Reds’ heartland – have been put under a curfew until tomorrow, to try to contain the conflict and prevent it from spreading across the nation.
Many foreign governments still have travel warnings, and the images of horror on the streets of Bangkok will linger beyond the news cycle, particularly when people are trying to decide where to take their next exotic holiday. There is fear among hotel workers, taxi drivers and others reliant on tourist money in the city that this could be a difficult one to recover from. The Land of Smiles has lost a lot of goodwill during the past few months of protracted unrest. People don’t want to gamble the success of their honeymoon on whether or not the airport in Bangkok is open.
A statue of the revered king, Bhumibol Adulyadej, watched proceedings from Lumpini Park. The 82-year-old, who in previous conflicts has unified all colours in this rainbow country, has remained silent since the crisis began.
Thais are bewildered about what happened to their Land of Smiles. But with typical pragmatism, they take their bulldozers and remove the hulking, scorched barricades surrounding Bangkok’s heart.
