Red scare

It's now nearly a week since the red shirts marched on Bangkok. A confrontation that many feared would turn violent has instead descended into farce. Yesterday and the day before, the United Front for Democracy against Dictatorship demonstrators---mostly poor rice farmers from the North and East---hurled human blood on the gates at Eleventh Infantry army headquarters, on the front steps of the opposition Democrat Party offices, and on Prime Minister Abhisit's doorstep. This bit of 1960's-style street theater was meant to "curse" the amataya, the political establishment, which refuses to dissolve the House and call for a new election---an election, by the way, that the reds would likely win. The blood had been drawn in a medically approved manner from the red shirts themselves. The Red Cross, however, was disgusted, as were many Bangkokians, and the letters column in The Bangkok Post is bristling with outrage over waste and the possible spread of disease. The Ministry of Public Health says not to worry, they have cleaned up the mess.

The Abhisit government has been calm and sensible throughout the crisis, guarding its ground but avoiding provocations, and even having its psy-ops department josh the protesters over loudspeakers in the Isaan dialect most of them speak. A hundred thousand reds showed up at the big rally on Sunday, but the heat---99 today---and family and work responsibilities have taken their toll. Only about 15,000 are still marching around. UDD leaders say they will remain non-violent but will become increasingly disruptive---no specifics mentioned---until the government resigns.

I have to admit, I enjoy this stuff. I went to the big rally on Sunday and was just sick that Joe wasn't there with his camera. The crowd was militant, but it didn't feel dangerous. It felt like one of those big gay-rights marches on Washington in the '80s or '90s. One difference was, those folks were largely well-fed and well-turned out. The red shirts had the sun-scorched, sweat-stained look of the Thai rural poor. And they are people who believe that their survival is at stake, not just their dignity. There were few farangs in the crowd on Sunday, and the looks I got were friendly. A man asked me, "Are you scare?" [sic], and I could honestly answer that I was not. I think he wondered about this because the foreign embassies had frightened the bejesus out of tourists with advisories to remain alert and if necessary stay indoors. The man took my picture shaking hands with his two small, red-shirted sons.

A lot of picture-taking was going on, in fact, maybe because a sizeable portion of this crowd were seeing Bangkok for the first time. At Democracy Monument, the elegant art deco sculpture that celebrates Thailand's switch from an absolute to a constitutional monarchy in 1932, smiling red shirts posed for group pictures. Some of the smiles were weary; the heat was fierce, and many of these people had traveled long distances in the backs of trucks and had been sleeping in the streets. But they perked up whenever one of the speakers on the main stage said something awful about the power elite. And a huge roar went up when a tower of balloons carried a banner aloft with the number 40 on it. I tried to find out what 40 meant. I asked several people, but---these were not educated people, by and large---nobody I asked spoke English. In what I thought was flawless, well-accented Thai, I asked one man, "What is forty?" Trying to be helpful, he looked at his watch.

All the Bangkok Thais and farangs I have talked to in the last few days dismiss the red shirts as rabble. The reds are naive yokels being exploited and paid off by Thaksin. They are making Thailand look foolish and backward in the eyes of the world. They are ruining the country! There's truth in all of this---exiled former PM Thaksin, a crook of staggering proportions, is funding much of the protest---but the red shirts' grievances are legitimate. Tax laws are written by and for the rich. Land ownership laws are stacked against the rural poor, and the judiciary looks out for its wealthy friends. Politicians are bought and sold, and so are police positions. One of the saddest stories to run in the Post recently was about the death of Police Colonel Sompien Eksomya. Due to retire in a year, Sompien had asked for a transfer out of the southern region where a Muslim insurgency has taken hundreds of lives in recent years. Sompien died last week when his car was bombed. It was known that he was a marked man, but his transfer had been denied. He didn't have "tea money" to pay off department higher-ups. The government will erect a statue in his memory.