Redshirts or Yellowshirts

[katoeylover]

Take care - socrates, seriously..

[Guest]

I am not a Thail person so that I don't know what system good fit Thailand. But in my opinion, I perfer democracy because my country is a democratic nation.^^ Anyway, hope two sides people can negotiate with each other. Protestation is not the best action while you deal with politic issue.

[thaibound]

(Socrates999 @ Apr. 13 2009,03:41) Lotta shit happening in my area. Buses burning, soldiers shooting, Reds and soldiers facing off against each other.

Anybody know if Guess is open tonight?

either your wit is even dryer than i recall, or that river in egypt is running through bangkok.

would i'd *like* to believe is that nana is an island apart from all the confused insurrection surrounding it and if i can just get there...

but 'buses burning' and 'soldiers shooting'? should i be postponing my imminent visit? or will i arrive to find you safe and sound at your usual spot at guess?

[rxpharm]

No need to postpone, things seem to be settling down now, but keep an eye on the news in case of flareups.

You can check the two Thai English Language papers: The Nation and The Bangkok Post

[Snick]

Things are back to 'Normal' , however you want to define Normal in Thailand.
But safety wise there was never an issue anywhere in the tourist areas of Sukhemvit. I never saw a single red shirt or soldier near Nana or Soi Sowboy. But I saw a whole bunch of 'em when I went to Siam Paragon on Saturday.
I think you should be fine now.

[PigDogg]

Sondhi, the yellowshirt founder, was shot this morning.
So was everyone else in his car.

[rxpharm]

It was reported he is ok, but lightly wounded. His driver is in serious condition. Police are reported to have found shell casings from an AK16 at the attack site.

[Road Runner]

In fact at the moment both papers are reporting that Sondhi is in a serious condition.

One reports he has a bullet in the left side of his skull and the other says a metal piece of the car in the right side.

Either way they are operating on him and will finish around noon - 0600 GMT.

His driver who was also shot is said to be stable.

I regard this latest incident as a particularly bad sign.

RR.

[manarak]

Police are reported to have found shell casings from an AK16 at the attack site.

I didn't even know that this panasonic CD player used shells?

Maybe 16 Shells of AK47? or shells of M16 ?


Newest reports say that Sondhi is only lightly wounded, which has me think that there is something fishy about this attack.

I know I wouldn't miss a guy in a motionless car if I had an AK47 or an M16.

So... were they paid to miss?

[manarak]

Considering the AK47 is a 7.62 rifle, I think the holes on Sondhi's car in the attached picture are too small.

Or are those impacts holes?
Was the car bullet-proof?

[manarak]

ok, they look big enough from that side

[manarak]

I now read that apparently there was a second car involved, which sped to the scene. Its occupants then opened fire on the attackers.

Maybe this prevented the attackers from having a clear shot on Sondhi and finishing the job.

[thegame925]

Bangkok Protests End; Thais Mull a Divided Nation

By Hannah Beech / Bangkok Tuesday, Apr. 14, 2009

Striding into the hastily abandoned headquarters of Thailand's Red Shirt movement in central Bangkok, Colonel Apirat Kongsompong glanced at the detritus of demonstration: stacks of Styrofoam cups, half-empty bottles of fish sauce and whisky, remote controls for televisions once tuned to news channels documenting the street battles between antigovernment forces and the army.

On Tuesday, Red Shirt leaders ended the protesters' three-week occupation of central Bangkok, which left at least two dead and more than 100 injured. On a mission to secure the area less than an hour after the Red Shirts had decamped, the commander of the élite 11th Infantry Regiment of the Royal Guards walked over to a pile of picture frames cast aside in a corner of the makeshift room. Picking up one photograph, he gazed at the image of Thailand's King Bhumibol Adulyadej, dapper in a pink blazer and pink shirt.


The rest of the discarded pictures were also of the world's longest-serving monarch, some capturing him in ceremonial regalia, one showing him playing a jazz saxophone.

Apirat shook his head as water dripped on the images, which were left behind when the Red Shirts abandoned their post and started the trip back to their homes across the nation.

An unspoken question hovered in the air: What were pictures of Thailand's King, beloved by millions, doing forsaken in the middle of what hours before had been a potential battle zone?

For more than six decades, Thailand's Buddhist majority has been remarkably unified under the country's King. Considered above politics, the 81-year-old monarch rarely comments on political matters and instead stands as a suprasymbol of Thai cohesion. His picture graces most every restaurant and business in the land, and a giant billboard of his visage with the words "Long Live the King" greets visitors at Bangkok's airport. For years, millions of Thais wore yellow every Monday in a voluntary show of support for the King, who was born on the first day of the week and is represented by the golden hue. As the country has cycled through a seemingly endless parade of coups and governments, one constant has remained: each new leader has pledged allegiance to the King €” and, presumably with it, the vast apparatus that supports the royal family.

But in recent months, the Thai political landscape has seemingly shifted. While opposition Red Shirt politicians still publicly pledge loyalty to the monarch, their figurehead, former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, has openly alleged that one of the King's closest advisers was behind the 2006 army coup that unseated him. That adviser, General Prem Tinsulanonda, has dismissed the charge. Thaksin and his Red Shirt cohorts have been at pains to underline that they don't think the King himself had anything to do with the putsch that overthrew one of Thailand's most popular €” but also most divisive €” Prime Ministers. Yet any implication of political maneuvering within the royal circle is incendiary in a nation where many practically deify the throne. One of Thaksin's lieutenants has already been charged with lèse-majesté, punishable in Thailand by up to 15 years in jail. The ruling Democrat Party has vowed to root out antimonarchy material on the Internet and has banned thousands of Web pages deemed offensive to the royal family.

Notably, when the Red Shirts thronged central Bangkok by the thousands, few held aloft pictures of the Thai monarch. The absence was marked, especially compared with the omnipresent images of the King clutched by Yellow Shirt protesters last year, when they besieged Bangkok's airports for a week in an effort to unseat the government, which was then essentially a Thaksin proxy party.

(Late last year, a Thai court dissolved that ruling party. The opposition Democrats €” led by current Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva €” took over, prompting the Red Shirts to initiate their protest movement.) Indeed, the Yellow Shirts' very choice of sartorial color was a not-so-subtle reminder of their loyalty to the monarch. The King has never publicly weighed in on the Yellow Shirt/Red Shirt divide. Nor has he made any statement in support of the Yellow Shirts. But royal watchers noted that his wife, Queen Sirikit, attended the cremation ceremony of a Yellow Shirt protester who died in political violence last year.


In some ways, the fact that Abhisit's government and troops were able to disperse the entrenched Red Shirts from central Bangkok on Tuesday without further bloodshed suggests that Thais may finally be moving toward solving their political problems without relying on a royal arbiter. But the Red Shirts have vowed to rekindle their protest movement €” and the divide that has cleaved the country is so wide that no one seems to have any idea how to bridge it.

"I hope from now on we don't have Yellow Shirts, Red Shirts, Blue Shirts, whatever color shirts," said Apirat as he watched flames rise from a public bus torched by the antigovernment protesters. "Why can't we all just live peacefully and wear the same color shirt?"

But Apirat knows that merging political hues €” and disentangling the complex web of shifting relationships between Thai politicians, military officers and those who serve the King €” is an all but impossible task.

After all, Apirat's own father, General Sunthorn Kongsompong, was a key architect of the 1991 army coup that culminated in a bloody crackdown against demonstrators in May 1992. Thailand's version of Tiananmen ended when the King brought together the country's two main political antagonists, who were pictured on television kneeling in front of the stern-faced monarch. In a surprising move on Monday, a group of Thai senators filed a petition to the King pleading for him to intervene to end the bloody political standoff on Bangkok's streets.

Luckily, this clash was resolved. But what happens next time?

€” With reporting by Robert Horn / Bangkok

Direct Link to Time Magazine Article

[manarak]

so... where do your sympathies lie, playful one?

[rxpharm]

An interesting blog from Bangkok Post

Friday, April 17, 2009
The lie is out, now see truth for what it is
Posted by Sanitsuda Ekachai , Reader : 4332 , 06:37:25

Nukid used to be fervent fan of Thaksin Shinawatra. Not any longer.

"I used to like him because his policies helped us rural folk," explained my household helper, referring to the 30-baht medical scheme and the one-million-baht village fund which are dismissed by his critics as handouts and systematic vote-buying.

"But what he has been doing with the red shirts shows he doesn't care for the country's good, only for himself," she said, explaining why she dumped him. "By supporting the riots, he is hurting the country and the economy while he continues to enjoy the good life overseas. His selfishness ends up hurting us people on the ground," said the mother of one from Surin.

Many of her friends at the neighbourhood mom and pop store, their favourite hangout, shared the same view, she added.

If Nukid's pragmatism is anything to go by, it is quite possible that the senseless violence that put the nation on the brink during Songkran could seriously erode Thaksin's former political stronghold.

Interestingly, democracy and the effort to free the country from the mandarins - the claimed ideological pursuit of the red shirts - never entered their discussions. Nor royal nationalism and accusations from the yellow shirts that Thaksin is out to undermine the monarchy.

"We are just fed up with seemingly endless protests. We want our normal life back. And we feel sorry for the King, who must be deeply saddened by all this," she said.

Meanwhile, my father-in-law, an honest, retired official who has dreams of grandeur for Thailand, remains fiercely loyal to Thaksin.

Their different reactions to the Songkran anarchy blow away the standard explanation of the international media and so-called experts on Thailand, that our political mess is a reflection of a deep rural/urban divide, by lumping the rural folk as pro-Thaksin and the urban middle-class as the yellow shirt supporters.

This over-simplification has been shrewdly abused by the media-savvy Thaksin, who has made himself out to be the champion of the poor and democracy to the rest of the world.

The shutting down of the Asean summit by mob violence and the Songkran riots instigated by Thaksin and his cohorts finally shattered this false image and exposed Thaksin's lies, which many international media outlets helped spread for far too long.

Now that the riots are over, we must ask why a corrupt and autocratic politician succeeded in creating such deep political divisiveness.

That a decent man like my father-in-law is still fiercely loyal to Thaksin defies the stereotype that the reds are mere hired hands. It shows how powerfully Thaksin has tapped into real popular frustrations with the status quo. They are fed up with the patron-client and the phuyai system and they want to have freedom of expression in order to make the establishment more transparent and accountable.

These are valid demands in any democratic society.

Since there is no platform for them to express themselves openly and safely, they are forced to turn to the fugitive Thaksin whom they adopt as a symbol of challenge against authority.

The Songkran riots showed how destructive things can get if their perceived injustice is ignored and whipped up by a powerful demagogue like Thaksin.

Like it or not, the 2006 coup and the ensuing battles between the yellow and red shirts have opened a floodgate of dissatisfaction against old taboos. Since we cannot turn the tide, the only way forward is to provide a political safety-valve for change.

This requires fixing structural inequalities and providing safety for political expression of all shades. It also entails a rethinking of the lese majeste law to strike a balance between cultural reverence and freedom of expression.

An open society which allows dissenting views is not only an indicator of political maturity, it is also key to long-term peace. If and when that is the case, Thaksin Shinawatra's political trantrums will become meaningless.

Hopefully Thaksin's sway over the Red Shirts will fade away, but the issue of changing Thai society will remain. For those who said Thaksin was the best thing that ever happened to Thailand - he may have started with good intentions, but as the famous saying goes, "the road to hell is paved with good intentions". His recent actions really reveal his true nature - to get his money back at any cost - including civil war.