There's Rioting in Our Streets, Part 2

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

Following on my original thread of a couple of years ago.

Well, the wife and I had hoped to return to an improved situation after our sojourn in Vietnam, but it seems to be going tits up. Tonight (Thursday night), Sala Daeng Skytrain Station on Silom Road was bombed. A total of five (5) grenades launched from the red-shirt mob exploded in and near the station. Three dead and 75 injured at last count. A local story is here.

The Vietnamese immigration official who stamped me out of the country at Ho Chi Minh City’s Tan Son Nhat Airport on Tuesday evening snickered when he saw from my boarding pass that I was flying to Bangkok. I was not wearing a yellow shirt – I try not to wear yellow OR red these days – but it did have a few patches of yellow mixed in with the predominant blue theme, so he helpfully warned me about the possibility of getting shot. Just to make sure I understood, he made machine-gun sounds with his mouth and shooting motions with both hands. Really! Ask the wife; she saw the whole thing. I thanked him for his concern and promised to be careful.

For those of you who have not heard, there were violent clashes between the protesters and the army on Saturday the 10th, leaving 25 dead and hundreds injured. The army shamefully ran away in the end, but one of the dead was a colonel, and the army always takes its revenge, so expect something from that. We met a group of young Thais in Hue, central Vietnam, who had traveled there overland from northeastern Thailand, passing through Laos. They said the Lao immigration officials at the Vietnamese border had the fighting tuned in on the TV set and were laughing gleefully at the prospect of Thais killing Thais.

Ten major hotels so far have shut down temporarily for lack of guests – or any way to get new ones in the door, since the red shirts have complete control of the area around the Ratchaprasong intersection. The hotels include the Holiday Inn, the Intercontinental and the Grand Hyatt Erawan. All of the major shopping centers along Rama I Road have been closed for a while now, including Siam Discovery Center, Siam Center, Siam Paragon and Central World. The businesses in Siam Square fronting the road we hear are also closed, but deeper into the square the ones there are open.

The yellow shirts are finally starting to threaten to take to the streets themselves, and the Thai-language Thai Post recently ran an editorial warning the army that if it can’t do its job, then the local citizenry will be more than happy to oblige. It would be quite okay with me if the red-shirt filth and the yellow-shirt filth did run into each other head-on, as that might help solve more than one problem.

The red shirts had promised to march down Silom Road on Tuesday and take control of the financial district, but the soldiers were issued with live rounds, and it was announced they would use them if necessary, so the reds finally backed off a bit. The army now seems entrenched on Silom, facing off the red shirts about 100 meters away at the entrance to Lumpini Park. The wife’s colleagues said it felt like something definitive was about to happen.

Now these latest bombings. I’m somewhat familiar with that Skytrain station too, it being right by the Patpong red-light bar area. And I pass through that station almost every day even when I don’t disembark there. It sounds like one of the grenades may have bounced off the roof of a Skytrain car, or exploded on top of it, but that’s just a rumor at this point. But three people are dead and scores injured. A deputy prime minister was just on the air and asked the Silom Road residents to stand about 400 meters back. !!! The merchants and residents along Silom Road have been confronting the red shirts in an increasingly angry manner in recent days, with a small but serious clash occurring between them last night (Wednesday night). Again, and now this.

But it was just announced that the Civil Court, who had earlier today prohibited the government from cracking down on the red shirts, because the constitution allows protests, to crack down on them. We’ll see what happens next, but it feels as if civil war is really beginning this time, due largely to the authorities’ seeming impotence to act. And this is a direct consequence of not cracking down on the yellow-shirt filth a couple of years ago, especially after they took over Bangkok’s airports. Now the red-shirt filth can say they get to do whatever they want this time.

I tell ya: It is never, ever boring here.

2

I forgot to mention that yesterday, the red shirts seized some trains carrying soldiers and held hundreds of the troops hostage upcountry in the Northeast, in Khon Kaen province. Jesus, but Thailand has the most useless sacks of shit for soldiers in the history of mankind! They’ve since been released, I think.

One aspect of these protests, both red and yellow, that I don’t see reported much is the financial remuneration. These people are paid to come out. We know lots of people who have been offered money to protest but told them what to do with their cash. One lady in Chiang Mai province, married to an Aussie friend of mine, was offered 500 baht (US$15.50) a day to come down to Bangkok to protest, and she told them to get stuffed. Then she read the news reports that people from provinces close to Bangkok were getting a cool 1000 baht a day and got angry all over again! She was told Northerners received only 500 baht because the rest had to go to providing transporttaion and such. Uh-huh, sure.

The wife has a friend from Phayao province, also in the North, who hates the red shirts but several of whose relatives accepted the 500-baht offer. The deal was 500 baht a day for each of the three, payable every five days. That was early this month, and now they’re stuck in Bangkok and can’t go home, because they’ve never been paid at all to date! Haha! :smiley: I hope they fry in our godawful heat. (This is THE hottest part of the year.)

If you’re a dirt-poor farmer scratching out maybe 100 or 200 baht a day on your worthless farm, and you get an offer to come down to Bangkok and have a party and get paid 500 baht for it, sure you’re going to come to Bangkok.

3

Where have you been? I started a thread on this last week, and there was an IMHO on what do foreigners think/know about what’s going on. I just assumed you were one of the ring leaders since you hadn’t popped in.

ETA: nvm, I see you did pop in over there… how was Viet Nam? Also, see what happens when you leave the country, you’d best stay put from now on.

4

Pretty freaky that they hit the Sala Daeng Skytrain station. I used to have language courses right across Silom road from there and used that train/exit all of the time. Never much cared for Patpong, though.

5

I can’t leave without this place falling to shit. Next thing you know, there’ll be double-pricing for tourists!

Vietnam was great. A nice, peaceful, (semi-)orderly police state was just what the doctor ordered. Hanoi (1000th anniversary this year), Halong Bay (like Krabi, only more intense, with all of the hundreds if not thousands of limestone formations sticking up out of the sea), Hue, Hoi An and Ho Chi Minh City. We were both actually surprised how much better we liked Hanoi than HCMC, as the latter is largely just another big city, while the former has a very attractive Old Quarter, which we stayed in.

6

Well, you just didn’t know where to go. For instance, Madrid Bar to this day has arguably some of the best pizza in town. One of the original bars there, it was an old CIA hangout back in the day when Air America had its offices in Patpong and was co-owned at one point by the legendary Tony Poe, the real-life inspiration for Colonel Kurtz in Apocalypse Now.

7

At the risk of sounding a bit dim - what the hell happened to Thai democracy? My understanding was that from the mid-nineties to the 2006 coup, Thailand’s democratic institutions more or less worked. Sure, Thaksin was unpleasant, but you can have a scumbag at the top and still have a functioning democracy - the US survived Nixon and Bush the Younger, after all. Why’d the wheels come off?

8

There has never EVER been true democracy in Thailand. It’s all been a smokescreen. Really. The military controls everything and has ever since the 1932 coup that overthrew the absolute monarchy. The military allows JUST enough democracy to satisfy the public and, possibly more important, world opinion, but if they’re not happy, they launch a coup. That’s not real democracy, IMHO.

A case in point. In the US, if the government needs certain military land, the government takes it, and the military says: “How fast do you need it, sir?” There was one telling incident here in the mid-1990s when the prime minister – I believe it was Chavalit Yongchaiyudh, himself a former supreme comander of the armed forces – said the government would have to reallocate some military land along our Eastern Seaboard. The army promptly and very publicly announced: “Oh no you’re not!” Just as promptly, Chavalit publicly announced: “Oh, don’t misunderstand. I didn’t mean right away. In fact, it was just an idea, a thought. Possibly it won’t even happen.” And I’d bet money it never did.

I personally recall the general election of July 1988, the first true election after the dictatorships up to the 1970s and the riots and massacres of the mid-1970s. Much to-do was made over that, but just a smokescreen.

9

Classy.

Do the leaders of the reds and yellows differ in any substantive way in regards to foreign policy - either regionally, or with regard to the US?

10

Foreign policy? Ah, HAHAHAHAHAHA!!!

That would entail some thought on their part.

11

Glad I could give you a laugh. :slight_smile: So, barring any real policy differences between the two factions, how do you see this thing playing out? Who do you think is going to come out on top, and is there going to be any real-world significance for anyone beyond those injured and killed in the protests?

12

Sorry. I had to stop laughing over that foreign-policy question. Chuckle Whoo! Dear me.

Well. If there ARE any differences – and they would only be superficial – the yellow shirts like to tout themselves as protectors of the monarchy, fearing that Thaksin had ambitions to become president of a kingless republic or even – and there is enough circumstantial evidence for this that I sometimes believe it while trying to remain skeptical – that he wanted to become king himself and found a new dynasty. Circumstantial evidence includes a documentary that featured his home, in which was found a portrait featuring himself in the same pose as one of the king, laying hands on and taming the gentle creatures of the forest. It’s a rather well-known painting of the king, and the fact that Thaksin put himself in a similar painting is chockful of symbolism to the average Thai. It was enough to make my Western-educated Thai wife finally believe he had royal ambitions!

The red shirts claim they want true democracy – as long as they keep getting paid to protest or even vote, although they conveniently leave that part out. While I cannot stand the yellow shirts, the red shirts do remind me of the Nazi Party in old Germany. Various programs and purges of his – such as his much-vaunted War on Drugs that basically allowed the local police to settle old scores and shoot any “drug suspects” they happened to come across – did make me think he was something of a Hitler wannabe while he was in power. Good riddance to him and his kind, is all I can say!

Now, I am going to tell you something I doubt you have ever heard or read anywhere else. I do not necessarily believe this, but it is food for thought, because honestly, it would be just so very Thai. A Thai newspaper editor told me that years ago, Sondhi Limtongthongkul, who is the leader of the yellow shirts, and Thaksin shared the same mistress, although not at the same time. She was an executive secretary of one of them and thus his mistress, and then of the other. This whole feud is thus a monumental Helen of Troy scenario! This person would not name the woman, but said she has since married a third person and settled down happily. But the feud continues. Again, I take that with a giant grain of salt, and no one else I’ve asked has ever confirmed this, but it would explain a lot, and again, it would be very Thai.

13

How do I see this playing out? It’s being financed by Thaksin – and rumors are he is receiving cancer treatment, and he does look quite peaked these days in his TV broadcasts into Thailand – and if he were to die, the red shirts would break up.

For reasons unfathomable to me, the stock market continues to do well, and as long as it does, then the worthless military may not have much incentive to do anything. Hell, even the currency, the baht, is strengthening, and I can’t imagine why! But once the rich start becoming really affected, the military will possibly launch another coup if they are not ordered by the present prime minister to do anything. The top brass of the military is reportedly greatly divided – some pro-yellow, some pro-red. It could explain why Abhisit, the present PM, has not been able to clamp down yet.

Tonight’s bombings and deaths on Silom Road and the Skytrain may finally prompt the military to clamp down and obey Abhisit. This is getting bad now. I expect tonight’s bombings to be a real turning point.

If there is no military action, expect to see huge fighting between the yellow shirts and the red shirts soon, as the former have threatened to come out finally.

I personally support a military coup at this point. The military runs the show anyway. The present PM is a wet dishrag. Thaksin is a fascist. Hell, let the military run the show openly. It did for most of the 1980s without much problem.

14

Sorry, that should have been spelled Sondhi Limthongkul. It’s almost 4am, and I’m bleary-eyed. I shall get some sleep, then venture out tomorrow and try not to get blown up.

15

You’re the man on the ground, Siam Sam, and I’m largely unfamiliar with the country, so take this for the little it’s worth - but I’m a bit suprised by your position. I mean, I’d be reluctant to wish a military dictatorship on anyone. And didn’t the military engage in rather a lot of human rights abuses in the 1980s? Military juntas usually do.

I’m not saying the politicians are any great shakes, but I don’t see how a coup would be better.

16

Good luck - stay safe, dude!

17

They engaged in a lot of abuses from the 1950s to 1970s but were fairly benevolent in the 1980s under Prem Tinsulanonda, who remains a close adviser to the king today. Prem, about 90 now, remains popular.

I fully supported the military coup of September 19, 2006 and still do, because it got that rat bastard Thaksin out of the way. It received popular support at the time. The general who was then appointed prime minister by the military, Surayud Chulalnont, was popular. He allowed elections, and the red shirts were voted in. Two administrations of red shirts we had, each one protested by the yellow shirts, who are filth of a different color. Now we have a government acceptable to the yellow shirts, and now the red shirts come out. It’s never going to end without serious intervention.

Not all military coups are bad. Some are good, some are bad. The 2006 coup was very good; the 1991 one was very bad. This is something many Westerners have difficulty understanding. It all depends on the circumstances, and again, the military runs the show anyway and always has.

18

Late Friday morning now, and the situation is tense. And confused. Now no one seems to be able to tell if it was one or three that was killed. Or if it was four bombs/grenades or five. And I can’t seem to find out if Siam Station, where I transfer to the other line, is still closed. Guess I’ll be doing the taxi bit today.

The red shirts deny they bombed anything. They’ve agreed to pull their line back about 100 meters to make more room in the street but won’t dismantle their spiked barricades. Close to 1000 riot police are facing them. I feel something is about to happen, possibly over the weekend.

19

Odd sort of question, but exactly what do you do for a living?

is it really worth living in a country that is so messed up periodically? It seems that rioting is sort of a national hobby there …

20

Oh, that would be telling, hehehe. :wink:

But besides myself, the wife works for the government and has her own career. We’re very well settled here, come what may. Keeps life interesting.

Now Australia and the US are advising its citizens not to travel to Thailand at all. I think Britain may have issued an earlier statement to that effect. I would certainly advise giving Bangkok a miss, but I think the rest of the country is okay for the time being. Russia even recently told its citizens just to bypass Bangkok and head straight for upcountry.

And I received the following notice from the US Embassy here in Bangkok this afternoon. It would be interesting to attend, but I won’t be available for it on Monday:

**Message to the Americans in Thailand

Town Hall meeting: Monday, April 26, 2010 at 2:00 p.m. at the J.W. Marriott, 4 Sukhumvit Road, Soi 2, Bangkok, in the large ballroom.

You are invited to attend a Town Hall meeting on Monday. Ambassador Eric G. John, along with other officials from the Embassy, will be present to discuss the current situation in Bangkok.

The Town Hall meeting for American citizens only will be held on Monday, April 26, 2010 at 2:00 p.m. at the J.W. Marriott, 4 Sukhumvit Road, Soi 2, Bangkok, in the large ballroom. The J.W. Marriott can be reached at 66-2-656-7700.

Bring your passport or other form of U.S. citizenship! You must present proof of U.S. citizenship at the door in order to be allowed in to the Town Hall meeting. You will not be admitted without proof of U.S. citizenship.

Acceptable forms of U.S. citizenship are:
–U.S. passport,
–U.S. birth certificate plus photo identification,
–Consular Report of Birth Abroad plus photo identification, or
–Naturalization Certificate.

This is opportunity is intended for American citizens and is an off-the-record meeting intended to inform American citizens about the latest developments in Bangkok.

The American Citizen Services Unit of the U.S. Embassy can be reached by phone at 66-2-205-4049 and by e-mail at ACSBKK@State.gov. **