One of the most common questions I have been asked is something along the lines of "what in the heck was going on with the protesters?" I am going to do my best to answer that question based on the conversations I had with local Thais, the news, and the TAT (Tourism Association of Thailand).
In a nutshell:
Thailand has a King who is mostly non-active in government and is also very old, sick, and not quite with it these days. There is a Prime Minister who runs the show in Thailand. The previous PM was very corrupt and the military and people had a coup and got him out. The current PM is the old PM's brother-in-law and apparently is equally as corrupt - go figure.
There are 2 main groups of people in Bangkok. The red shirts (pro-government) and the yellow shirts (for the King). The yellow shirts are primarily the doctors and lawyers in Bangkok, the educated professionals. They decided they needed to oust the current PM and for the last few months have been protesting outside of the Government House to no avail. They took it upon themselves to raid the 2 main international airports in Thailand and shut them down. They took over the control towers, terminals, etc and lived in them for 8 days. In those 8 days they created blockades on the highways and collected weapons to fight off the military, police, red shirts, or whomever was going to try and stop them. They went as far as to say that "they would fight to the death". Fortunately for them, the military and the police are for the people and not the government so they had no intention of pulling them out of the airport, which was apparent when they ignored the PM's call for them to stop the protest. The only person that could have called this off earlier was the King, but as I said before he is too sick/old to know what is really going on and could not do so. The only saving grace was that his birthday is today, December 5th. The people love the King so much they throw a huge celebration every year on his birthday. The yellow shirts had a lot of work to do to get ready for his birthday so they had to retreat from the airport and go home but not without making a deal first.
What ended up happening was a negotiation between the government and the yellow shirts leader. They decided to oust the PM and 11 other cabinet members, whom are all banned from government for the next 5 years. What this amounts to is that the yellow shirts win. They single-handedly shut down major international airports, cost Thailand billions of dollars, and stranded somewhere in the neighborhood of 300,000 tourists. There was absolutely no repercussion for them whatsoever other than a victory.
This bothers me. I seriously cannot believe they allow their people to breach the security and finances of their country without any repercussion. This means the people of Thailand can do pretty much whatever they want if they can organize a large enough group and are very adamant about what they want. I find that disturbing. It defeats the purpose of having a democratic process, which they technically do. I now know that Thailand is on the list of places I could never live but love to visit!
The one neat thing I got out of this was that I was able to witness a piece of history firsthand and a bit of understanding as to how the Thai government/people work.
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1 comment:
These kinds of populist advances are difficult to control. It is an anti-democratic process waiting to trigger violence. I am not sure there is a victory here. The PAD followers of Thaksin Shinawatra are likely to get the same kind of government that have the last two times.
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