Red Shirts-vs-Yellow Shirts

03/13/10

The title sounds like a ball game, but unfortunately instead it is, and has been since 2006, the color of shirts Thai people decide to wear based on their differing political opinions. When I was teaching English in Chiang Mai in 2006 there was a military coups to oust the Prime Minister, Thaksin Shinawatra, due to corruption charges. When he was not in the country the military took over Thailand removing him from his PM position and placing him in exile. He hasn’t returned since, because he faces a 2 year jail term if he does, but before he was removed from office he did manage to spark an ideology among many of the poor, rural Thai people that they deserve more visibility and support. There is a lot more history that goes into this, but ultimately what the coups and removal of the PM did was help to wedge the Thai people into two groups, the red shirts-those who support the old PM and the old form of government, and tend to be more rural, poorer people and the yellow shirts-those who removed this PM and supported the Coups, and tend to be more urban elite. The government hasn’t been very stable since the 2006 coups dissolved the constitution and parliament and attempted to rebuild it. The main problem now is that the red shirts believe when the new government was established it wasn’t done completely democratically and instead of the voice of the people being heard through elections, the government was established by mostly military supporters. This all leads now to the current huge demonstration under way in Bangkok at this exact moment.

Yesterday, Friday March 12th, the Red Shirts started to roll into Bangkok and strategically place themselves all over the city to get ready for the larger mass of people to flow in over the weekend preparing for the huge demonstration on Sunday with the full intention of overthrowing the Thai Government. The timing for this protest lands less than two weeks after a trial was completed where about ¾ of Thaksin’s wealth, which was frozen since 2006, was seized by the government. It is now Saturday at 12:30pm and as I continue to look up news articles and news reports they all are consistently saying currently there are approximately 10,000 demonstrators rolling into Bangkok with groups of red shirts entering the city as big as 4 miles long. There are military stops on the way into the city which the government states is to double check that there are no weapons coming into Bangkok, but the red shirts argue the checks are to prevent as many of them from entering the city as possible. The red shirts said they anticipate hundreds of thousands of demonstrators to be in Bangkok by Sunday and that they will not leave until change is made.

Unlike the military coups in 2006, labeled as a peaceful “bloodless” coups, I am much more worried about this one since there seems to be much more unrest among the Thai people. In my opinion, when the last coups happened it felt like it came out of nowhere with very little Thai population involved. Since the government was willing to do anything to get the PM out of office they kept the plan for the coups quiet until the PM was out of country. In 2006, although tankers did fill the streets in Bangkok and Chiang Mai, the King told the military to make it as peaceful as possible by smiling at people (especially foreigners..it felt very creepy to have a man in a tank holding a loaded rifle smile at you) as they passed since they didn’t want to damage their, very lucrative, tourism industry. Ribbons were tied onto the tanks, yellow and pink, of which the yellow was to symbolize the Kings color and peace (thanks for reminding me of this Mika). This time the story is a bit different because now, if a coups were to happen, it’s because the Thai people are dissatisfied with the current government and want a major change and are willing to go to extremities to get it. This time the Thai population is much more involved and if a coups does happen it will be to control the population of protestors and hold ground with the current government, which I believe is going to make it much more dangerous. I’m sure more to follow soon.