Thailand: Red v. Yellow

[muriel_volestrangler]

"We had to stop democracy to save democracy"

From the perspective of the elites in Bangkok, the breakdown began early in 2001, with the election as prime minister of Thaksin Shinawatra, a tycoon and a politician unlike any who had come to power before in Thailand. With promises of huge amounts of aid to the poor and a sophisticated advertising campaign that presented him as a Michael Bloomberg figure, a billionaire businessman who knew how to get things done, Thaksin’s party won the election by one of the largest margins in the country’s history. In office, he fulfilled some of his promises to the rural poor, who are concentrated in the north and north-east, comprise a majority of the population, and voted overwhelmingly for his Thai Rak Thai (Thais Love Thais) party. He delivered inexpensive healthcare and oversaw a programme to distribute micro-loans to every village, designed to help the poor start up small businesses. These policies were significant: the rural poor had barely benefited from the economic boom of the 1980s and early 1990s, which had transformed Bangkok from a city of canals and floating markets into a high-rise capital of megamalls, office towers and latte bars. According to Michael Montesano, one of the most astute observers of Thailand, by 2007 household income in Bangkok was roughly three times that of households in the rural north-east. Indeed, while the urban middle classes have benefited from trade and globalisation, the rural poor have seen the agricultural sector collapse in the face of competition from China and giant Western agribusinesses.

Thaksin’s populist policies made much of this urban/rural, rich/poor divide. He has a demotic charm that enables him to communicate effectively with the poor and on the campaign trail farmers treated him like a god. In contrast to traditional Thai politicians, who expect people to grovel to them, Thaksin, despite his massive ego and equally massive fortune (Forbes estimated him to be worth $2.2 billion in 2006), managed to pretend to be the people’s servant. Arriving in villages in the north, his home region, he would make a humble wai, the Thai version of a bow, then listen to the most trivial complaints. It worked. In 2005, voters gave his party an even larger majority than in 2001; he and his allies now controlled 374 of the 500 seats in parliament.

By his second year in office, Thaksin had more than tripled government expenditure on anti-poverty programmes, and over his time in office the percentage of the population living in poverty fell by nearly half. But his policies also had a darker side. As Montesano notes, in many ways Thaksin resembled a Latin American caudillo more than a bland and consensus-building Thai leader. Not long after his election in 2001, he began dismantling the country’s democratic institutions. His allies bought stakes in many of the largest publishing groups and television stations. Many newspapers became slavishly pro-Thaksin, and the few journalists willing to pursue stories that didn’t reflect so well on him often found themselves frozen out. When, in 2004 and 2005, I visited the Bangkok Post, a leading English-language daily, I found that many investigative reporters had been assigned to interview local celebrities or encouraged to write stories that did not impugn the prime minister and his allies. Thaksin’s administration forced long-serving civil servants to retire, replacing them with cronies, and some of his relatives were appointed to key positions in the armed forces – his cousin became supreme commander of the military. Facing charges of illegally concealing his assets, Thaksin was narrowly acquitted by the constitutional court; afterwards several judges alleged that intense political pressure had swung the decision. With his encouragement, a cult of personality was built up around him: billboards of his grinning face adorned highways and buildings across the country, angering the monarchists by taking up space usually reserved for portraits of the beloved monarch, Bhumibol Adulyadej.

Worst of all were Thaksin’s policies in the south of the country. In Tearing Apart the Land, Duncan McCargo gives a thorough explanation of why unrest began in the region, and why it has spread. The southern provinces essentially formed an independent state until the turn of the 20th century, and have chafed at Bangkok’s rule ever since. In the 1960s and 1970s, separatists launched a spate of violent attacks, but by the 1980s and 1990s Bangkok seemed largely to have pacified the region, by directing more state money there and responding better to southerners’ complaints.
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http://www.lrb.co.uk/v32/n06/joshua-kurlantzick/red-v-yellow

No-one comes out of this article looking very good. And the king, who holds together the conservative city-dwellers, is 83 and in poor health. His heir is not well thought of, and seems to support Thaksin. So if the present king dies before this is resolved, you get another split, between those who follow the monarch whatever that monarch's views, or those who are following the present king because they like what he says.