With the long-awaited military crackdown of May 19, the Abhisit Vejjajiva government has won the latest battle of Bangkok. Well, only for now and at the cost of whatever little credibility it ever had.
As soon as the ultimate crackdown began, most protest leaders, who had been negotiating with the authorities since the agitation began in March, surrendered and appealed to supporters to go home. This move was instantaneously endorsed from abroad by former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, who had been overthrown in a coup in September 2006. But the militant protesters were in no mood to listen. They went on a rampage, setting fire to the stock exchange, South Asia's second biggest shopping mall, banks, high-rise office buildings all targets of the wrath of the dispossessed and deprived working classes, who comprised the main body of the movement.
By common consent, modern Thailand has never seen such a protracted period of mass militancy teetering close to a full-fledged civil war. Agitations had already spread across at least three provinces in the country's populous northern and northeastern provinces, forcing the authorities to impose dusk-to-dawn curfew in 23 out of the country's 76 districts until 23 May. The same "precautionary measure" has been taken in the capital city too.
The immediate demand of the powerful movement organized by the UDD -- the United Front for Democracy against Dictatorship, commonly called the Red Shirts because of their signature protest colour -- was the ouster of a hated, illegitimate government and the holding of early elections. As usual, bourgeois politicians at the helm, most of whom are believed to be working for Thaksin, wished to use the mass awakening for their narrow partisan interests. Not so the poor toilers, victims of the neoliberal growth model, who laid the long siege in Bangkok braving sun, rain and intermittent gunfire. Remarkably, a large chunk of the masses assembled in Bangkok were from the rural hinterland. Even as the stand-off was going on, protesters were heard shouting at the troops: “You are sons of the people; we will not fight you and you should not fight us.” Also there have been many reports of actual fraternization.
The true significance of the recent developments was not lost on the intelligent sections of ruling classes and their international patrons. Past disturbances were more a clash of political personalities than a class division, CNN quoted Paul Quaglia -- a former CIA officer and currently head of a Bangkok-based security firm -- as saying. He blamed the disturbances on a skewed distribution of incomes and wealth. Echoing him, the governor of Bangkok said class barriers and class differences are now at the heart of the conflict.
Indeed, the masses were fighting not just for replacing Abhisit by Thaksin. They were expressing deep- seated grievances, not just against the present government but against the ruling elite comprising big business, the military brass, the monarchy and the governments doing their biddings. For it is this elite, they now know from experience, which worked behind the endless military coups and judicial manipulations that the polity has been routinely subjected to over the past 10 years or so, denying the popular masses both free democratic choice and a decent livelihood. Definitely they are not going to rest. Bangkok may be limping back to business as usual, but the simmering anger and spirit of resistance will live on. And explode again, probably sooner than later.
