Thailand’s junta stokes stifled anger of ‘red shirts’

May 30, 2014 2:49 pm

Thailand’s junta stokes stifled anger of ‘red shirts’

By Michael Peel in Ubon Ratchathani

Phangsri still wears her blood-red top with pride to signal her disgust at Thailand’s coup and her opposition to a junta that has forbidden criticism during an ever-tightening crackdown.

The shop owner and her allies in the popular “red shirt” political movement are lying low for now, but say they are ready to rise – peacefully – if the generals fail to deliver on a promise to return the country to parliamentary rule.

“We are frustrated, very frustrated,” she said, sitting under a thatched bamboo platform, where a breeze offered relief from the oppressive late dry-season heat. “We can’t fight the army with guns. But we can fight them with elections.”

The stifled anger in the rice-growing plains of Isaan in northeast Thailand is just one snapshot from a divided nation, but it raises questions about the junta’s strategy of shutting down the country’s ideological conflict.

Red shirt leaders have been raided, rounded up and “re-educated” by the military, sparking dismay among supporters who believe Thailand’s elite is once again trampling over their wishes as expressed through the ballot box.

“It looks like they don’t consider us as humans,” said Ting, an Isaan local government official and former red shirt organiser. “They don’t care about us at all.”

The junta has moved fast to consolidate control after its May 22 seizure of power, the 12th coup in 82 years by an institution that is an integral part of Thailand’s conservative establishment.

General Prayuth Chan-ocha’s National Council for Peace and Order has censored the media, appointed an advisory committee including two prominent generals and detained 200 people – including some opposition “yellow shirts” – with many released after giving undertakings not to talk about politics. Proposed steps include military-run camps for reconciliation between members of opposing political groups, part of a political reform process that Gen Prayuth on Friday said would take about a year before elections could be held.

While Bangkok has seen small if sometimes tense anti-coup protests, many in the capital’s urban establishment and middle classes have embraced a military takeover they cast as a means of ending a political conflict that has killed almost 30 people during six months of street demonstrations.

“Our country is for a long time in pain from separation [and] we really need reunion,” said Mod, a travel agency owner. “Forget democracy for the time being.”

But, hundreds of kilometres away from the capital, red shirt supporters in the paddy fields and burning stubble of Isaan take a more cynical view of the military’s ousting of the Puea Thai party-led government.

While the junta’s public presence is restricted in many areas to occasional checkpoints on main roads and at airports, people say red shirt radio presenters have been silenced – and one combative movement leader known as “Rambo Isaan” has publicly renounced politics after being released from detention.

The clampdown adds to a sense that the junta’s mission is to tilt the country’s political system even more forcefully in the elite’s favour than after a 2006 coup that hardline conservatives think did not go far enough, because red-backed parties continued to win elections once civilian rule returned.

That military takeover first gave birth to the red shirt protest against the toppling of Thaksin Shinawatra, the new-money plutocrat turned prime minister whose governments were tarred by corruption and human rights abuses but also won wild popularity in country areas such as Isaan through policies such as rice subsidies, microcredit and 30 baht (just under $1) a treatment flat-rate healthcare.

Toy, an unemployed Isaan woman in her early fifties, said the medical scheme was the only way she was able to afford operations costing thousands of dollars to treat melioidosis, a potentially deadly bacterial infection that blights the area and is spread through soil and water. “The 30 baht healthcare saved my life,” Toy said. “In fact, it saved a lot of lives.”

Yet the emergence of what one Isaan mobile phone shop owner described with a clenched fist salute as “Puea Thai country” is a reflection of mood as well as money. It is a rebellion against traditions of paternalism and deference with echoes of the global wave of public anger with elites.

Several Isaanis said they felt patronised rather than grateful over what they see as a crude effort at bribery by the junta, which has pledged to pay almost $3bn of unpaid rice subsidies owed to farmers in the region and elsewhere.

“I know very well that the government tried to pay the money before, but the opposition blocked it,” said Sai, a farmer. “So I don’t feel great about this.”

The military may have stifled the red shirt leaders – and the group’s violent minority factions – for now. But the junta’s battle with the ambitions of a movement that has rocked Thai society may yet prove as dangerous as any fight the country has seen during this tumultuous past decade.

As Santi, an Isaan civil servant, put it: “If they keep on squeezing us like this, it will cause an explosion one day.”