There's Rioting in Our Streets

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
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Jetstar have cancelled recovery flights up to December 2. They’re now organising transfers to and flights from Phuket. I can’t imagine the situation will improve within a couple of days, so it’s looking like my husband and I will have to head down south. I’m glad they’re providing a transfer because I’ve heard that that currently, first class buses out of Bangkok are booked days in advance.

In other news, we’re not eligible for the 2000THB food allowance and free hotel stay because we’re not staying with a member of the Thai Hotels Association. We didn’t find this out until today, which I’m kind of annoyed about. Insurance will cover it, but the government had a lot of time to get the information out and we had to get it bit by bit and piece it together ourselves. If we had known this information earlier we would have stayed at one of the eligible hotels and saved ourselves the insurance hassle.

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The people I was talking about are flying into an AFB in Khorat, most likely on military transport.

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I have tickets to Phucket on the 27th, for the holiday trip I had to cancel four times already. If I have to cancel that again I’m going postal.

Talking about going postal… I have a little hobby/business at home selling electronic widgets I make for model airplane use, not much but it helps to make the hobby somewhat self sustaining. I have several people asking me to send some widgets to them but since the international parcel service is dead (or at least I think so) I had to say sorry but can’t do.

Besides my minuscule and inconsequential operation there are some full time business that employ lots of people getting rammed by this, flower exporters, some types of high value vegetables, medicines and other small but valuable things that depend on air transport are effectively shut down for the moment.

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Kayeby, thanks for the tip on the 2000 baht thing, but I doubt we’re eligible (as foreign nationals stuck outside of Bangkok) and frankly at this point we’re probably not going to worry about it. I hope you can get out from Phuket!

The husband and I have officially decided to go on to the US from here, a day early (December 3rd). The most annoying thing is that our US driver’s licenses are stuck in Bangkok (and with no mail getting out, our friends can only send us copies, not originals) so we can’t rent a car to take the California road trip we had planned. Frankly at this point that’s not so bad-- instead, we’ll enjoy hanging around with my husband’s extended family for a few more days, and taking it easy.

Speaking of mail, as Ale mentioned, this is a huge blow for Thailand in terms of tourism and services. No foreign company is going to want to do business here for quite a while, not to mention the blow to tourist dollars. I feel most sorry for the Thai people who have just been trying to keep their heads down in all of this.

A friend told me that today (Monday) she saw almost no one wearing yellow shirts, which you would normally see up to now (Monday is the King’s day, and yellow is his color). The Thai people LOVE their King, but yellow is the color the PAD has adopted…to me, this (the situation with the shirts, I mean) is very telling.

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My husband called Jetstar and our December 4 flight has been moved to Phuket. Jetstar are providing a 5am bus to Phuket on December 2.

I’m fed up with the TAT. There has been no formal information about how to collect the travel refund, everyone (the TAT, the Australian Embassy, the hotels) seems to have a different idea of how it works - it’s like they tried to make it as difficult as possible to collect compensation.

Of the three hotels that the TAT said were providing subsidised accomodation, one was booked out, the other had no idea what we were talking about, and the third had some complicated explanation for how we should claim the money. So we’re just bypassing the TAT entirely and booking a hotel that’s under the rough $200 AUD limit we were given by our insurance providers.

Looking at online forums, a lot of the posters living in Thailand seem to think that it’s unlikely the TAT will actually pay out. It’s too much of a hassle to go chasing them for the money, especially since it’s likely the chasing will happen once we’re back in Australia.

I’m really not looking forward to the Phuket vultures. One poster who escaped to Penang via the Phuket bus station had this to say:

Anywhere but Phuket would have been better - Chiang Mai or even the makeshift airport in Pattaya. I’m so fed up with the whole situation. Sitting in our lovely hotel in Bangkok is one thing, but taking a 13 hour bus ride to Phuket, dealing with the bloody touts, then (if we’re lucky) taking a 10 hour flight home a couple of days later, is quite another. If the PAD decide to take over the Phuket airport too, I might have to kill some bitches.

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Some progress it would seem:

PAD ends Government House occupation

I guess they got fragged one time too many in those premises. And since nobody seems to give a blip about the GH after months of occupation it’s better to reinforce the airports with the protesters and guards that where there.

So perhaps it’s not progress at all. :dubious:

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Yes, progress of sorts. Now all of the protesters are going to move out to the airports, where the rally will continue. That means the airport occupation is not going to stand down anytime soon. :frowning:

An Asian Human Rights Commission statement is here. Excerpt: “Some commentators and opponents of the [PAD] have described its agenda as fascist. This is not an exaggeration.”

Conflict resolution has never been part of Thai culture. If you piss off a Thai, you’ve pretty much made an enemy for life. There’s simply almost no going back. I don’t see how this situation can ultimately have anything other than a violent resolution and am a bit surprised it’s not come to such a head already. But I don’t doubt that sooner or later, the shit is really, really going to hit the proverbial fan.

I have to sign off for a few days. My arm started swelling up and bruising and my incision seeping. Went to the doctor today, and he said I’m simply using my arm too much. I have to give it a major rest for a few days. If anything really earthshaking occurs, I’ll log in, but I think the general news will cover anything like that rather well.

See you in a few days!

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Poof!, no government.

The Constitutional Court dissolved the three parties of the governing coalition.
The PM stepped down.

Let’s see if now that the protesters got what they wanted they vacate the airports.

You know, it ain’t nice to live in a mobocracy. :frowning:

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Cargo flights can resume from Bangkok

Or at least that’s the situation up to now, let’s see what happens in the next, say, 5 minutes. :dubious:

Now for the tourists trapped in Thailand, perhaps they should look for large cardboard boxes, plenty of bubble wrap and stamps and ship themselves out of here.

Meanwhile the newly dissolved PM party has already amalgamated into a new name. Literally, greet the new boss, same as the old boss. They are sorting out who to elect to the PM position from the lower chamber of parliament, but there’s rumors that the sister of the ex PM Thaksin could take the position. Note that the ousted PM was Mr. T sister husband… if there’s something worse than living in a mobocracy is living in a bad soap opera.

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Finally, the Suvarnabhumi airport will start working on the 15th of December.

Suvarnabhumi International Airport will remain closed to passenger flights until at least Dec 15 due to the disruption caused by anti-government protesters.

They have to recertify the facilities, check that these idiots didn’t play with any of the airport systems, that nobody and nothing is where it shouldn’t be.
Other sources say that it will be open as soon as next Thursday, but I would expect that to be more or less a theorical construction.

And just to show that the PAD really go out of the way to be complete dicks, they want to set up checkpoints to screen the passengers. :mad:

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Maybe PAD weren’t so wrong after all.

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The outcome of that case was a given well before the PAD occupied the airport, so for the purposes of reaching that veredict it was useless.
And not to whitewash anything, but ALL political parties here are corrupt, some more, some a lot more than others. But all buy votes and other shanenigans.
Really, the choice is between corrupt bozos that line their pockets and do some token amount of proper governing and corrupt bozos that line their pockets and do nothing for the country.

As it’s said, pick your posion.

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Please take care of yourself. I have eagerly read your updates from your part of the world (this, the Burma thread, etc) and consider you an important contributor on the boards. I’ll miss your messages during your break but your health obviously comes first. :slight_smile:

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Fortunately that never happens in our country cough HALLIBURTON! cough!

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As far as riots and revolutions go I have never seen one so polite. I have seen in the news stranded tourists being interviewed and they all said that, while it was an inconvenience, the never feared for their own well-being and safety. Would it be that all revolutions were like that.

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Well, I’m popping back in. Yes, the PAD says it will end it’s airport occupations at 10am today (Wednesday), which is less than 90 minutes from now. I’m sure they’ll do it, as I’ve heard the leaders were starting to look for a face-saving way of exiting, and the court verdict is it.

But anyone who thinks the PAD had anything to do with bringing about that verdict is sadly mistaken. As Ale pointed out, like with Samak’s verdict before, this one was a foregone conclusion. Yes, the rulling PPP expected the verdict to such an extent that they’d already renamed their now-banned party, and the new logo was even being put in place in many offices before the verdict. The Constitution Court (as it insists on being called in English, not Constitutional Court), is actually pretty much graft-free, so the PPP and the other coalition parties dissolved knew their number was up.

Ideally, the Democrat Party, the only true good guys in Thai politics despite many of the lower-level minions being personally as corrupt as the people in President Grant’s administration, should lead a new coalition party. But I doubt it will happen. Last night, they were discussing in all seriousness making Chalerm Yubamrung prime minister. I cannot think of a worse person besides Thaksin to be prime minister. Even Thaksin himself would be preferable. Chalerm is the brutish oaf with the three brat sons who go around beating up and shooting anyone who so much as steps on their feet, and that is not the slightest exaggeration. One of them shot and killed an undercover police officer in a nightclub in cold blood seven years ago and finally got off scot-free.

No matter how bad governments have been in the past, not one has damaged the local economy to the extent the PAD has these past few months. Tourism will be shattered; they’re already talking about a million lay-offs in the short term in the tourism industry alone. Investors have already started fleeing to friendlier investment climates like Vietnam, which is really starting to open up. The economy was already on the rocks, but now… Thailand is going to be paying a very high price for the PAD’s action all throughout 2009 and maybe longer.

And the protests could start up again at any time, especially if the new prime minister is not to the PAD’s liking. Plus now the red shirts – the pro-government supporters – are threatening to start similar actions if the new PM is not to their liking. I have to say this may not be a good time to plan that Thai vacation. Best wait awhile and see what’s going to develop.

BTW: There have been persistent rumors since the weekend that Thaksin is in Cambodia, in Koh Kong, just across the border on the coast. I know he’s got some sort of property development there.

Will drop off again for a couple of days.

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Trust me, this wasn’t a revolution. It was a kick on the democratic board to topple and scatter any pieces that may be in a threatening position to the powers that be.
It’s no accident that this country has gone through 18 (19 now) coups in the last 70 or so years.
The other day it finally dawned on me that the current situtation of this country is quite similar to the societal and political situation of 15th and 16th century Europe, an old, entrenched power clinging against a new nascent, secular power.

I’ll try to find cites, but the PAD is little more than a front, or at least an useful idiot of something else. If you see their “New Style” of government it would make your skin crawl. Behind a name like People’s Alliance for Democracy you have a througly undemocratic movement. 70% of parliamente appointed not elected, the need to, actual quote, “reeducate” the rural people, xenophobia and down right facism.

To top it all the leaders are completely deranged.

Still, I repeat that the other guys are not nice at all, but at least they did something for the majority (read: dirt poor) of the people, if only to woo votes from them.

Anyway, here’s an interesting and pretty accurate article about the political framework: A briefing in the continuing crisis in Thailand

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Amen to all of that. I would liken both the the PAD and the pro-government DAAD (the red shirts) or whatever they call themselves now – the red shirts have changed their name once or twice – to the old Brown Shirts of the 1930s, just less violent in general … for now. Just give them a proper chance, though, and we’ll see how peaceful they really are. There has been no revolution, just a small leadership of charismatic thugs fooling people into following them. Listening to the leaders shrieking to the crowd at their rallies, one is reminded of Hitler’s speeches; they sound so ominously similar that I and other farangs have jokingly snapped out a spontaneous “Sieg Heil” upon occasion when hearing them on TV.

Earlier, I likened the two sides to the old US/USSR proxy wars, with their followers in the streets taking the role of the small regional countries battling it out. It’s just a battle for ultimate power among a small elite.

I thought the number of coups was in the 20s? Maybe it just feels that way. This was not really a “coup,” though. Our last military one was on September 19, 2006. I’m not sure you can count court dissolutions. Either way, there has been a ridiculous number of coups since the one that overthrew the absolute monarchy on June 24, 1932; that one was a real revolution. The problem is that it’s never really been about democracy. “Democracy” was a catchphrase of the 1932 revolution, but many of the military officers literally had no understanding whatsoever of the word “democracy.” They thought “democracy” meant improved train service and having nice cars and a general material modernization, so they were all for it. The lay people thought “democracy” simply meant disobeying authority, and so there was an epidemic of, for example, students walking out of the classroom, because not doing lessons was considered “democratic.” It’s always been about power here.

And make no mistake. Underneath it all, the military controls everything. They always have since that day in 1932, and they always will. They simply let the people come out and play politics because it looks good to the world.

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Sam, don’t make me call the nurse on you… :wink:

Take a rest and get better.

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Been Jonesin’ for the Board. :frowning: