Now I’m seeing close to 50% turnout overall, but again I don’t know how official that is.
Meanwhile, a Japanese reporter is melting Thai girls’ hearts.
Now Suthep is threatening a real total shutdown of Bangkok. This time for real! Really real. So real it will make your head spin. Or at least all the government offices they’ve not managed to close yet.
The Foreign Ministry is one of the ones that has been closed and occupied. I know a Malaysian lady who’s been waiting to start work at a news agency in Bangkok, but they can’t get her visa arranged because of this closure. (All foreign staff of any news agency in Thailand, be it foreign or domestic, must have Foreign Ministry approval.) I’d heard the ministry was going to reopen this week, but now I’m not so sure.
The popular Stickman, a long-term Kiwi resident, has some good photos and commentary in his weekly column this week. It comes out every Sunday. The column as a whole is slightly NSFW, so I’ll break the link:
Yes it definitely seems like support for the protests is diminishing. But also, they’ve achieved their goal in a way. The government was forced to call early elections and dissolve parliament. The elections have been sabotaged and will most likely be declared invalid by the courts.
I’m not really sure what the point of the continuing protests is right now, I’d think he’d tell everyone “well done, go home”, since the real battle is now in the courts.
Thanks. Are the courts generally respected in Thailand? Is there a nonpoliticized, independent judiciary? Or does it depend on the court?
The judiciary is like the monarchy. Criticize a judge or even a court verdict, and it’s a prison offense.
That said, they generally are independent. And while I feel all squicky about even mentioning the monarchy lest I screw up and say something wrong, I’m okay with mentioning the judiciary. Good thing they never make any verdicts I would criticize. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it!
To expand on that a little, my understanding for why they’re so strict about judicial criticism is because judges are formally appointed by the king, so criticism of a judge indirectly criticizes the king and or his judgment.
This passage from Wikipedia is rather enlightening:
“The Asian Human Rights Commission called the Thai legal system a ‘mess’ and called for a drastic overhaul of Thailand’s criminal procedures. It cited the rampant use of forced confessions, and the fact that even a senior justice ministry official admitted that 30% of cases went to court with no evidence. There are no stenographic records kept by the trial court and the record is composed of what the judges decide. It also criticized the judiciary for failing to ensure that trials are conducted speedily.”
So it really has settled down now into a low-level, ongoing event. Intersections remain shut. Today (Sunday) the wife and I were at one of them, the Pathum Wan intersection, as we watched movies in Siam Square (The Wolf of Wall Street and Dallas Buyers Club), then went shopping in MBK Center, both of which are at that intersection. It may be difficult to drive there now, but it’s still accessible by Skytrain. And the affected streets are just one big marketplace. There may very well be some credence to the notion that certain mercantile interests are keeping the protests going to benefit the street vendors and to hell with the regular shopowners who are being inconvenienced. (I don’t really believe that, at least not quite, but there is an impressive number of market stalls operating in the streets now, that’s for sure.) When we left, Suthep himself was preaching to the faithful from the stage in the middle of the intersection.
There’s more talk of a separate red-shirt state comprised of the North and Northeast, but that’s just bullshit fantasy. I would dearly love to see those upcountry yahoos try to make a go of it without support from the Bangkok government. That would be highly entertaining indeed.
Thanks for the update, and for the info on the Thai judiciary.
The police are finally pushing back. Early this morning (Friday morning), they moved in and retook the area around the Makkhawan Rangsan Bridge. That’s over by Democracy Monument and Khao San Road. More areas will be next in the coming days, they say. This comes a couple of days after a top protest leader was arrested without incident while eating lunch alone in a northern-Bangkok shopping mall. But I think all of this may just be stirring up a hornet’s nest, as I watched Suthep and others screeching away on TV today. More here. Could get ugly.
Probably has nothing to do with the above – this was army and not police – but last night at about 10pm, as I was leaving the main Villa Market branch on Sukhumvit Road, near The Emporium shopping center, I observed two military vehicles crammed with soldiers cruising by. This was not far from the Asok intersection, which is one of the occupied junctions, but the vehicles were driving away from it, not toward it.
And here is an example of why you don’t have to be Captain Cook to know it’s not a good idea for foreigners to get involved in local politics over here: Indian businessman to be deported. Sathit Segal. He’s 70 years old and has lived here for 65 years. Very influential in the local Indian business community. He’s served as an adviser to the commerce minister (under Democrat governments, of course.) But he’s run afoul of this government by taking a prominent role in the protests.
Thanks, Sam. Keep your eyes open and yourself safe!
If he’s been in Thailand since he was five that will be like being sent to a foreign country, even though he’s probably visited his “home” country before.
That’s one thing I’ve never quite understood. There are many Indians similar to Sathit. Some Indians are born here and are Thai citizens because their parents had become citizens, although they still heavily identify as Indians. Dress like them etc. But there are many who have moved here as adults and choose to live here despite being treated like second-class citizens. Sure, it’s okay if you’re like Sathit and have money and can rise up. Thais worship money, and if you’re successful in business, any “fault” such as “improper ethnicity” can be overlooked. But most are just your Average Joe as far as Indians go, and Thais are notorious for their hatred of all South Asians. I knew one Indian here who regaled me with some rather horrific tales of police harassment endured by his Indian wife, who was obviously targeted just because she was Indian. He does okay but is not wealthy by any stretch and would do just as well back in India. Even he can’t really say why he stays.
Perhaps it is a cast thing.
Thais don’t have castes the same as Indians do. But basically it is a skin-color thing. Dark skin means you’ve been bad in your past lives, a real rotten bastard, and you don’t deserve any slack in this life. Lighter-skinned people such as farangs and East Asians are light-skinned because they were good people in their past life. The Thais themselves consider the epitome of beauty to be the light-skinned northern women, and Thai-oriented brothels will feature ladies from that region. Farangs enjoy a bit of a tan and tend go for the dark-skinned Northeasterners, who are in general the poorest in Thailand – their poverty being proof of the bad nature of dark skin – and so the Western-oriented bars, brothels and massage parlors will hire girls from that region, and Thais take this as further evidence of how addle-brained foreigners can be. (Really.)
As far as what the caste was back in India of that one Indian I mentioned, I don’t know, but he seems educated enough and erudite enough that I doubt it is a very low caste back home. The same with several other Indians of my acquaintance. They don’t appear to be “caste refugees” from back home.
Just to add: No matter how light or dark a Thai’s skin is, he or she will cover up while outdoors no matter how strenuous the job, to keep from getting darker. This is why you see farm hands, construction workers and city street sweepers all bundled up like it’s winter – they’re keeping out the sun.
See, it’s threads like this that keep me here. I learn something new every day. down to earth stuff like Sam has been telling us in his last few posts.
Here’s an interesting related development: Thaksin’s Former Wife Visits Burmese Astrologer, to see how to get the fugitive back into Thailand. This would have been at the same time Thaksin himself was spotted in Burma recently. The speculation has always been that their divorce a few years ago was simply to split up their property into separate ownerships and thus make it more difficult for all of it to be seized.
Thaksin has always been more than superstitious. A known dabbler in black magic, he’s known to have consulted frequently with practitioners in Burma and Cambodia. There is one particularly renowned witch doctor in upcountry Burma – not the one his ex-wife just visited in Rangoon but a different one – whom at the height of unrest during his premiership he took his entire cabinet along with him to consult about how to stay in power. The witch doctor prescribed several practices that everyone in the cabinet had to adhere to, and if they did, then Thaksin was sure to stay in power. The only one I remember offhand is no one’s feet could touch earth, they always had to walk on concrete of flooring, anything except dirt or grass. Unfortunately, some of his cabinet members must have been less than diligent, because he was overthrown not too long after by the military.
The Irrawaddy has always been an interesting newspaper. Besides long having insightful articles, it’s always been an open secret that they’re largely CIA-funded.
An astrologer, eh? Well, if it worked for the Reagans, it might work for them.