THE DRAMATIC escalation of violence, which left 37 dead in five days of fighting, and new crackdown threats by the government do not bode well for a resolution of Thailand’s bitter two-month stand-off. There is a sense that the crisis may be at a tipping point amid fears that a military-enforced denouement will be bloody.
Despite reports of secret back-channel negotiations, offers of talks on both sides have been hedged with ultimatums that both troops and demonstrators withdraw from the streets and have gone nowhere. Talk of United Nations mediation has been ruled out. Gunfire and explosions punctuate the night and the government appears close to moving in on Bangkok’s “liberated zone” held by 5,000 Red Shirt militants largely drawn from the country’s rural and urban poor. Soldiers yesterday tightened a security cordon around the area.
Tensions have also been ratcheted up by the death of Maj Gen Khatiya Sawasdipol, a defector to the Red Shirt rebels’ who was shot by a sniper as he spoke to a journalist on Thursday. Khatiya reflected a hardline current in the Red Shirt movement determined to turn the protests into an uprising against Thailand’s political order.
In truth the clashes have never just been about the rebels demands for immediate elections and the return of exiled ex-PM Thaksin Shinawatra to whom the Red Shirts are aligned. (Thaksin was overthrown in a military coup in 2006). They reflect a much deeper malaise in a society that is riven by deep divisions of class and in which the essential binding of democracy, a consent to be governed, appears to have disappeared.
But elections remain the only way in which some kind of legitimacy and order can be restored, and prime minister Abhisit Vejjajiva, who has vowed no retreat, must yet stay the hand of his more hardline supporters who insist the Red Shirts be put down by force. They will not go quietly and that could mean a bloodbath with huge damage both to the country’s reputation and its economy, south-east Asia’s second largest.
Many also still hope that the old, ailing, but widely admired King Bhumibol Adulyadej will yet intervene. But his silence perhaps suggests a consciousness of a waning influence. Few believe that his likely successor, Crown Prince Maha Vajiralongkorn, will inherit his father’s popular affection or authority, and an unsuccessful intervention now by the king could also expose his own waning star and add to talk of a new type of monarchy or even a republic.