Red Shirt Blues, Part II

I spent the first two days of the Red Shirt March wandering among the crowds at the main stage or traveling out to the Victory Monument to catch the tail end of a protest convoy. While the city seemed packed with demonstrators early on, after the first few days the numbers of Red Shirts began to drop noticeably. By day four, things really seemed to be waning. After two full weeks in Bangkok, I was finally done with the heat and the noise. I headed to the islands.

I have spoken with a few expats who live in Bangkok and they all encouraged me to be very careful about what I said regarding Thai politics, especially recent history. With that in mind, this is what I’ve been able to cobble together, as thin as it may be:

The Red Shirts are calling for the dissolution of the current Parliament and for general elections to be held. Drawing most of their support from the rural and poorer north, they are protesting the removal of the former prime minister, Thaksin Shinawatra.

Enormously popular in the north, he was deposed in a bloodless coup d’etat back in 2006 — accused of corruption and looting money from the national treasury. While I did see Red Shirts carrying signs with his photo or yelling his name, the majority seemed to be more of the “Democracy! No violence” ilk. They believe that Thaksin was removed from power illegally and that the country is now in the hands of a military junta, with a puppet prime minister. What they really want is elections, which the current administration is delaying — citing the current unrest (and wary of the Red Shirts’ numbers in an open election).

One of the big reasons for Thaksin’s popularity was his reforms of health care, which greatly helped the rural poor. And by that, I don’t mean American-style reform, where insurances rates or co-pays decrease. I mean that people who had no access or hope of ever receiving medical care, finally did. Knowing that your loved family member would not be alive today if not for these reforms tends to foster a pretty strong sense of loyalty. The Red Shirt party also supports the protesters financially while they are marching — leading to charges that they are all just Thaksin’s puppets, enjoying a paid holiday in the Big City.

I know all of this now, from reading and talking to people much more knowledgeable than I on the subject. But what I saw at the protests was much less complicated: I saw honest, open, and forthright people peaceably calling for change and for their voices to be heard.

The protest never really had a chance, in my mind — number estimates range from 50,000 to as high as 200,000 but they never came close to the ‘million man march’ they were hoping for. Within days, people began leaving for home and the likelihood of protests ‘shutting down the city’ became increasingly thin. They seem to enjoy a lot of support from the locale populace in Bangkok and from the police as well. They’ve also been careful not to disrupt anything tourism-related, not wanting to diminish that support with people whose livelihoods depend on it. But this is a numbers game…

As I write this from Ko Chang, they’re still at it. They have staged mass gatherings where thousands of people drew blood to be spilled in protest at symbolic spots, carried there in large multi-liter jugs. They are still rallying large numbers of protesters into targeted protest areas, though they are not as densely spread across the city as before. No one really knows when they’ll hang it up and go home or even what they hope to accomplish at this point. I’ll be damned if I know. And in that, I’m not alone.

For more information, I’d recommend you head over to Legal Nomads — Jodi is still covering the protest and has been right in the middle of events the entire time. I’d also highly recommend this story from the Economist — it was considered too critical of the Thai government and, as a result, the issue never reached the stands here in Thailand.

Tagged as: Bangkok, protests, red shirts, Thailand