Singing Songs and Carrying Signs

(First published in Bali Advertiser, April 12, 2006)

“Thaksin Get Out!” – Protester’s sign at a Bangkok rally

Until the day we left for Bangkok, I didn’t stop to think that I might be taking my family into an unpleasant situation. Only a couple of days before, a large protest march against caretaker Thai Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra had stopped traffic on Sukhumvit Road. The day after we arrived, three of the main shopping centers along the same road said they were closing for two days in anticipation of further protests. It’s always fun to be in a country when the international media is warning of crisis and collapse … except when they’ve actually got it right.

The second evening we were there I went out to have a look at an anti-Thaksin rally, leaving the family at the hotel on the slim chance of Year-of-Living-Dangerously violence. I needn’t have worried. Protesters sitting on mats along a couple of hundred meters of the street had indeed closed off Sukhumvit Road again. Political chants and cheers greeted me as I stepped out of the train at Siam Interchange, and it was near impossible to exit from the station. But the biggest threat was dehydration from the heat of the bodies massed together in the tropical night.

The few police I saw were lethargic and disinterested, or maybe just taking a studied pose of non-confrontation. People crowded at the railings of the Skytrain station to get a glimpse of doings below were polite and didn’t shove or elbow. The flow of people up and down the stairways to the station was less pressing and slow than it appeared. I wouldn’t get back up for hours, I thought, but it turned out to be relatively easy. The sweat-soaked Thai cameraman hauling his 30-pound rig up from below had a much more difficult time of it.

Other than remarking that ‘rioting’ and protesting Thais remain polite, I’ll try to avoid jumping to the same mistake of the international commentators that parachute in weekly to different places to bring the ‘inside story.’ I had enough trouble in Bangkok the first two days just finding the best places for good, inexpensive food. I don’t feel confident that a week of reading The Nation and the Bangkok Post makes me an expert on Thai political developments, especially when almost every analyst and commentator has described the situation as confusing.

Martin Petty, writing in the April 4 edition of Thai Day of the international perception of Thailand’s political situation, noted the New York Times had called the April 2 poll the most unusual election in recent Southeast Asian history, Australia’s The Age said it a “bizarre parody of the democratic process,” and London’s Daily Telegraph declared it a political gamble that would backfire and send Thailand into “a constitutional crisis.” In Asia, Petty wrote, the Straits Times declared the election had ended “with a mood of despair and unease.”

I saw none of it. Thailand just never seemed a country on the brink of political collapse, whatever that’s worth from a person who can barely name the main players in the political drama of the past two months. Admittedly, too, I never made it far out of the central shopping areas on this trip. Still, all the breathless rhetoric about the disaster Thailand is headed for has seemed overdone, perhaps borne out by Thaksin’s announcement that he will not accept the premiership for a third term and handing over caretaking duties to a deputy.

That apparently doesn’t clear things up, though. The anti-Thaksin contingent is worried he might be pulling a Nixonesque, you-won’t-have-me-to-kick-around-anymore exit. And it is hard to imagine Thaksin disappearing entirely. He sold his primary business assets to Singapore for US$2 billion in the tax-free deal that sparked the two-month campaign to oust him; anybody with that much money and any political aspirations at all is hard to discount. Also, he will remain the leader of the Thai Rak Thai party, which won most of the votes in the April 2 election.

Even so, with the risk that I’ve got it all wrong and that a day after I finish this column Thailand’s ‘bizarre parody’ of a confusing political democracy will descend into farce, I’ll declare that Thailand will survive this most recent ‘crisis.’ And just maybe, with its ‘no vote’ option, it provides an example for other democracies to follow. I’ve certainly wanted to register my non-votes as an active political decision in a few American elections. Maybe there is some lesson, too, in the retention of a monarch to referee the bickering, stunted personalities that usually go in for politics.

Because, in the end, it may have been the Thai King, Bhumibol Adulyadej, that prompted Thaksin’s withdrawal. Thaksin has said in the past that only the king could force his ouster, and he announced his resignation shortly after a meeting with the revered royal. It’s enough for this American to long for the good old days of King George, instead of just George.

Copyright © 2006 Lee Roy LeRoi