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A Kingdom in Crisis
Thailand's Struggle for Democracy in the Twenty-First Century
By Andrew MacGregor Marshall Zed Books Ltd
Copyright © 2015 Andrew MacGregor Marshall
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-78360-685-6
CHAPTER 1
'When the legends die, all collapses' Thailand's political awakening
The most momentous event in the history of Thailand's reigning Chakri dynasty since the 1932 revolution that stripped the monarchy of absolute power unfolded quite unexpectedly shortly before dusk on a Sunday evening in September 2010. It occurred in the middle of a Bangkok traffic intersection surrounded by luxury malls and five-star hotels and haunted by restless spirits. It was over within a few minutes, and many Thais remain unaware that it ever happened at all.
The date was 19 September. It was exactly four years since royalist generals had seized power in a coup that snuffed out the precious embers of political progress so many Thais had fought and died for in bloody confrontations in past decades. It was just four months since the military had crushed another mass pro-democracy rally in May, storming the fortified encampment occupied by thousands of 'Red Shirt' protesters who had blockaded the Ratchaprasong intersection in the commercial heart of the capital to demand new elections. After armoured vehicles smashed through the barricades of the protest camp at dawn, scattering the Red Shirts, arsonists set dozens of buildings ablaze around the city, and an inferno consumed much of the Zen department store, part of the Central World mega-mall at Ratchaprasong, sending a thick column of smoke into the sky. By the time it was all over, ninety-one people had been killed in the battles of 2010, most of them unarmed civilians, new casualties of the long struggle over how Thailand should be governed.
In the months that followed, the military-backed government banned political gatherings and did its best to rewrite the narrative of what happened. The deaths were de-emphasized, with official propaganda focusing instead on the arson attacks – the Red Shirts were widely accused of having 'burned Bangkok'. Army chief General Prayuth Chan-ocha made the extraordinary claim that the military had not killed or even wounded a single person during two months of clashes, despite official statistics that showed soldiers had used 117,923 bullets, including 2,500 sniper rounds. Meanwhile, Thais were told to work together to build a better future, not dwell on the divisive quarrels of the past. The gutted shell of the Zen store was concealed behind corrugated metal screens painted with slogans reflecting the official mood of forced optimism and forgetfulness. One repeated, over and over, a single phrase:
EVERYTHING WILL BE OK.
EVERYTHING WILL BE OK.
EVERYTHING WILL BE OK.
Another giant banner proclaimed:
REBUILDING ZEN, LOVING THAILAND
May this Rebuilding Bring Peace and Prosperity to Thailand.
We Must Reconcile as We Are One Country,
One Family and One People.
There was little scope for any organized challenge to this narrative. A state of emergency was enforced in Bangkok and across the Red Shirt heartlands in Thailand's north and north-east. Almost all of the movement's leaders were in jail or on the run. Dissenting voices were being systematically silenced.
Throughout Thailand's modern history, the state has tried to suppress and deny the sacrifice of those who died fighting for equal rights and democracy. One of the worst massacres in living memory was on 6 October 1976, when thousands of ultraroyalist militiamen and police armed with guns, knives, sticks, rocket-propelled grenades and anti-tank weapons attacked student protesters in the grounds of Thammasat University. An accurate official death toll was never released, but reliable estimates suggest more than 100 students were killed. According to an eyewitness report in Time magazine,
Several were beaten close to death, then hanged, or doused with gasoline and set afire. One was decapitated. The bodies of the lynched victims strung up on trees were mutilated by rioters, who gouged out their eyes, slit their throats and lashed at them with clubs and chains. (Aikman, 1976)
The episode has been virtually erased from history. As Thongchai Winichakul, a student leader in 1976 who spent nearly two years in jail after the massacre, wrote: 'It's as if it never happened, or as if its only value was to teach people how to forget' (Thongchai, 1995). Now one of Thailand's most respected historians, Thongchai warned after the violence of 2010 that the state would again seek to bury the memory of those who died. 'Again, reconciliation without justice is expected', he wrote. 'Soon the lost lives and souls will become faceless names, then eventually statistics. Then their stories will be silenced too' (Thongchai, 2011).
In response to state censorship and suppression, rituals of remembrance have long been central to Thai political resistance, with the photographs of the dead displayed at shrines and monuments, along with offerings of candles, incense, fruit and flowers. As Alan Klima observed in a study of the role of the dead in Thai political ritual: 'Such funeral protest culture has become common for suppressed and hunted people around the world' (Klima, 2002). In the months after the killings of April and May 2010, protesters led by human rights activist Sombat Boonngamanong repeatedly returned to Ratchaprasong to commemorate those who died. The first protest was by Sombat alone – on 26 June he tied red ribbons around a large street sign at the Ratchaprasong intersection. He was arrested, and detained for two weeks. Two days after his release, Sombat went back to Ratchaprasong, with around 30 other protesters who swept through the crowds of Sunday afternoon shoppers and converged on the street sign. Some began fixing red tape and ribbons around the sign; others held up placards printed with the words: 'People died here.' Three protesters daubed in red paint lay on the sidewalk in a symbolic piece of street theatre. Several police were present, but kept their distance, even though political gatherings of more than five people were banned under the state of emergency. The authorities were unsure how to react to protests so deliberately small and non-confrontational. On 25 July there was a 'Red aerobics' event. Some of those who took part in the exercise session were smeared with fake blood or had painted their faces into grotesque death masks. On 1 August, scores of Red Shirts lay on the ground at the Democracy Monument in memory of the dead. Another aerobics event on 8 August drew more than 500 people; a week later it was 600. On 12 September, Sombat organized a Red bicycle rally in the area around Ratchaprasong, pausing at places where people had been killed during the May violence. Cyclists yelled 'soldiers shot the people' and 'we do not forget' as they pedalled along the streets. Meanwhile, a group of students with ghoulish make-up and torn, bloodied clothes held a procession on foot.
Many dismissed these events as irrelevant, and Sombat was often portrayed in the media as a clown. But they were part of a strategy to expand the possibilities for protest and help potential supporters overcome their fear, ahead of a large rally planned for 19 September 2010. As Sombat told Peter Boyle of the Green Left Weekly: 'We organised a process to break down this fear. The build-up events were symbolic appearances that were not big enough to provoke the full force of government' (Boyle, 2010). Having begun less than three months before by going alone to Ratchaprasong and tying a red ribbon, he was now planning a mass gathering of protesters who would release 10,000 red balloons into the sky and tie 100,000 strips of red cloth all around the area.
Sombat was as stunned as everybody else by the massive crowd that gathered on 19 September. The Red Shirt movement was effectively leaderless and was assumed to be disorganized and adrift. But well over 10,000 protesters converged at Ratchaprasong despite bad weather and the risk of arrest. Anger had long been simmering in rural Red Shirt strongholds, and thousands had travelled to Bangkok in buses and cars to join the protest. Thai journalist Pravit Rojanaphruk described the scene in The Nation newspaper:
A 35-year-old woman, Sangwan Suktisen, whose 31–year-old husband Paison Tiplom died on April 10 at Khok Wua intersection, came with her eight-year-old son and three-year-old daughter to join the event.
She held a picture of her husband, who was shot in the head, to show other red-shirt protesters walking around the intersection. She said she called for the government to bring to justice the persons who killed her husband.
'Even though the government gave me compensation for the death of my husband, no one apologised', she said. Her three-year-old Saiphan Tiplom held a red balloon with writing: 'Bring my father back and get the government out.'
Sarawut Sathan, 45, who came from Bang Kapi district, said he joined the protest because he wanted the government to dissolve the House and hold fresh elections as a way to resolve the crisis in society. Another woman wrote on the road with chalk that she still remembered the time when her friend was killed four months ago.
Sombat said [the] symbolic activity at Rajprasong had succeeded in getting the government's attention. He said he did not expect that over 10,000 would join the rally. 'We just came here to tell the government that we will never forget', he said. (Pravit, 2010)
Towards the end of the protest, it became clear that everything had changed for Thailand's monarchy. A slogan began to be shouted among one group of protesters and spread through the crowd until hundreds were chanting it over and over again. It was a denunciation, using a colloquial insult that literally means 'monitor lizard', a particularly reviled animal in Thailand; the closest English-language equivalent is probably 'The bastard ordered the killing.' It was a stunning moment, an event most Thais never dreamed would happen. Hundreds of people in the heart of the capital were shouting a crude insult and inflammatory accusation at an unthinkable target. The 'bastard' was King Bhumibol Adulyadej.
Protesters also began scrawling anti-royal graffiti on the enclosure around the ruins of Zen. Serhat Ünaldi describes it as 'a watershed moment in recent Thai history that has remained almost unnoticed in analyses of the country's political crisis':
Writing graffiti on a wall which had been plastered with feel-good messages of unity, harmony and peace after the bloody crackdown of May 19, 2010 was a means of countering the Bangkok elite's escapist attempt of return to 'normal'. The symbols of delusion were overwritten. (Ünaldi, 2013)
The graffiti included multiple references to the sky – a common euphemism for the out-of-reach realm of royalty. Numerous slogans also referenced the king's blindness, and one drawing even caricatured Bhumibol as Adolf Hitler, wearing an eyepatch. The king lost an eye in a car crash in 1948, but the messages were also symbolic, inverting the traditional assumption that the king's lofty position and immense Buddhist merit gave him special insight into the sacred essence of reality, beyond the realm of appearances that the vision of ordinary mortals could never penetrate (Gray, 1986; Ünaldi, 2013). In several messages, the Red Shirts declared they were the ones who really saw things clearly. References to sight and blindness were part of a coded semisecret language that had developed among opponents of the monarchy, who called themselves taa sawang – meaning their eyes had been opened. 'Before I used to love you ... but now I hate you – go to ruin! Today Thais everywhere in the country have their eyes open', wrote one protester. Another scrawled: 'Bad people were taken to rule the land because heaven has no eyes, because the eyes are blind ... I ask for real, you damn blind man, when will you die?' (Ünaldi, 2013).
The collapse in support for Thailand's monarchy was stun-ningly swift. When Bhumibol celebrated his Diamond Jubilee in June 2006, the elderly monarch was revered by most Thais and admired around the globe as a visionary leader who had fused ancient tradition and modern statecraft to forge a stable democratic nation. Five days of royal pageantry marked the occasion, amid an outpouring of adoration from Thailand's people and an impressive show of respect from world leaders. All over the country, Thais dressed in yellow to honour Bhumibol, and wore rubber wrist-bands with the slogan 'Long Live the King'. On 9 June, a million people crowded into Bangkok's Royal Plaza to see Bhumibol give a public address – only his third in six decades – from a palace balcony. Later that day, at the auspicious time of 19:19, hundreds of thousands of Thais who had gathered around the brightly illuminated buildings of the Grand Palace lit candles in his honour. On 12 June, the assembled international heads of state were treated to the unforgettable sight of a royal barge procession – 2,082 liveried oarsmen rowed fifty-two sleek vessels up the Chao Phraya river to Wat Arun, the temple of the dawn. Bhumibol sat aboard his personal swan-headed vessel Suphannahongse, representing the mythical bird ridden by the Hindu god Brahma. In a confidential cable describing the sixtieth anniversary celebrations, US ambassador Ralph 'Skip' Boyce seemed awed by the occasion:
The multi-day gala offered dramatic and often times moving evidence of the nation's respect and adoration for its monarch ...
Bangkok's sidewalks and public transportation became a sea of yellow, as citizens donned the color of the King's birthday (a Monday, thus a yellow day.) The rush to conform even found expression on the local markets, where the price of yellow 'we love the King' shirts skyrocketed. In response, the government announced that it would produce extra shipments of such clothing, to force down the price. Bangkok's normally snarled traffic reached new heights of obstruction, with motorcades and security details turning local roads into parking lots. While government offices and schools were closed, the malls and markets remained open; the sound of radio and television broadcasts of the gala filling the air.
The local press focused exclusively on the celebration. Newspapers carried full-page sections on the King's life and works. Interviews with Thai of all ages and backgrounds conveyed the same joyous appreciation for the monarch, with individual stories of how royal assistance had improved their lives. All local television stations carried the same live feed of each event, which featured crowd shots of attendees alternately crying and smiling. Late night television shifted to cover the opening of the World Cup, but even this event was colored by the King's celebration: a newspaper cartoon explained that most Thai people were cheering for Brazil because the Brazilians wear yellow uniforms.
Bhumibol's reputation was at its zenith. But behind the pageantry, the Father of the Nation was struggling with family problems. Bhumibol had been estranged from Queen Sirikit for two decades, and his son and heir, Crown Prince Vajiralongkorn, was regarded as a cruel and corrupt womanizer, reviled by most Thais. The king's second daughter, Princess Sirindhorn, was the overwhelming favourite of the Thai people to succeed her father, even though her gender and royal tradition seemed to render this impossible. As Boyce wrote:
In a shot heavy with unintentional meaning on Friday, the television broadcast showed the unpopular Crown Prince reading a message of congratulations to the King, who was seated on the royal balcony above the Prince. Just visible behind the King, however, was the smiling face of Princess Sirindhorn – the widely respected 'intellectual heir' of the monarch – chatting with her sisters and trying to take a picture of the adoring crowd below. The physical distance between the King and his legal heir far below, and his beloved daughter just behind him, captured the internal family dynamic – and the future of the monarchy – quite nicely. (06BANGKOK3538)
(Continues...)
Excerpted from A Kingdom in Crisis by Andrew MacGregor Marshall. Copyright © 2015 Andrew MacGregor Marshall. Excerpted by permission of Zed Books Ltd.
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