Sidewalk Democracy
How I understood Thailand's political divide.
If you’re new here, start with the first story in this series: Red Shirts And Barbed Wire
Banners reading United Front for Democracy Against Dictatorship hung above the crowd, though everyone called them Red Shirts. Most of them wore sandals and torn jeans. They came from farms and factories and spoke in the Isaan dialect of northeastern Thailand, one of the most impoverished regions of the country. But not all of the protesters were poor.
One day, in March, while I wandered the crowd in search of food, the red mass began to part for a convertible sports car rolling so slowly you could hear the tires kissing the blacktop. A sharp-dressed man and his even sharper-dressed companion waved and smiled at the crowd from their leather seats.
From my vantage point, I couldn’t make out which was whiter – their teeth or their skin. The Red Shirts cheered as the car passed us. My friend leaned toward me. “Famous actor,” he said. The couple in their drop-top were an anomaly. Fact was, most of the Red Shirts and their children slept in tents on the sidewalk of Ratchadamnoen Avenue.
One morning after a run, I watched a lady stand on that road, hair dripping wet, wrapped in nothing more than a towel. She had just emerged from behind a tarp that was hung over some rope. I didn’t want to stare, but how could I not? Just steps away, government officials were walking into their offices at the Ministry of Transport like it was just another Wednesday morning.
At that moment I realized how impoverished the majority of Red Shirts must’ve been. They drove across the country to hunker down on sidewalks to fight a fight they might not win in a city most of them had never been in.
But a fortunate few stayed at the Green Hotel. One night I met a Red Shirt in the hallway. She explained to me that they believed Abhisit Vejjajiva wasn’t fairly voted into power by the people. “We want democracy too,” she said, “just like America.”
I later learned that Abhisit came to power after the previous two prime ministers were removed from office by the constitutional courts. He was named prime minister by the same courts with help of the elite and the Thai military.
The lady continued to explain to me that the Red Shirts desperately wanted Abhisit to resign and the government to hold new parliamentary elections. They favored someone a bit more supportive of the poor, a business tycoon named Thaksin Shinawatra.
You wouldn’t suspect Thaksin to be the Red Shirt’s lifeline. After all, he was Thailand’s richest person. But years earlier, when he was prime minister, he did for the poor what no one had ever done.
Thaksin improved the healthcare system, alleviated poverty, waged war on drugs. He also helped build what would become one of the most traveled airports in the world. But like all heroes, Thaksin had his kryptonite – his reputation was marred by corruption.
The elites, who weren’t in favor of his policies to improve inequality and strengthen democracy, launched a bloodless military coup in 2006 to remove Thaksin from office. At the time, he was in New York City attending a United Nations assembly.
Four years later, as I stood in the midst of different kind of assembly, I realized the Red Shirts wouldn’t forfeit their power as easily. In fact, tens of thousands more were about to pour into the capital that very same week.
Read the next post in this story: The Other Side Of The Bridge
Image courtesy of Nate Robert.