Bangkok, May 2010: Perspectives on a Divided Thailand

10. Thailand’s Classless Conflict

Shawn฀W.฀Crispin 108 10 THAILAND’S฀CLASSLESS฀฀ CONFLICT Shawn W. Crispin On 26 February 2010, Thailand’s Supreme Court handed down a landmark decision against former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra. It ruled that the businessman-cum-politician had abused his power by enacting policies during his six-year tenure of office (2001–06) that directly benefited his family-owned communications companies at the state’s expense. The verdict called for the seizure of US$1.4 billion of the US$2.3 billion worth of Thaksin’s and his family’s assets frozen after the military toppled his government in a 2006 coup. Thaksin reacted to the decision by calling it “unfair”;1 he later claimed that it was a reflection of the “double standards” in Thai society that favour the rich over the poor. Two weeks later, Thaksin’s affiliated pressure group, the red-shirtgarbed National United Front for Democracy against Dictatorship (UDD), mobilized over 100,000 protestors, mainly from the country’s northern and northeastern provinces, in Bangkok to protest the court decision and call upon Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva to dissolve parliament and hold new elections. Within four days, the numbers at the UDD’s protest site had fallen off significantly, dipping on March 16 to around 20,000, 10฀BangkokIT.indd฀฀฀108 12/6/11฀฀฀11:20:56฀AM Thailand’s฀Classless฀Conflict 109 including hundreds of red-shirt-wearing street vendors.2 Thaksin was quoted in the local media imploring politicians in the Thaksinite Phuea Thai Party to boost protestor numbers. He claimed that the government had “bribed”3 UDD demonstrators to quit the rally. Protestor numbers, first at the UDD’s original Phan Fa bridge site and later at the heart of the Ratchaprasong luxury shopping district, waxed and waned dramatically, depending on the time of day and on planned protest activities. By late April, there were frequently fewer than 2,000 people milling around the largely vacant protest site in the mornings and early afternoons.4 That ebb and flow raised important questions about whether the protest was populated in the main by politically awakened poor rural farmers, who in their economic plight often slept on the streets of the protest site, or instead by the middle classes, who had the means to stay in hotels or the option of returning home after attending rallies after work on weekdays or on the weekends. The fluctuating and often low numbers also gave the lie to the notion that the UDD was an organic social movement rooted in rural Thailand, as popularly portrayed in the mass media and by the UDD itself. It is more likely that the UDD was in the main a manipulated mass, mobilized from above and bank-rolled at the grass-roots level by Thaksin and his elite supporters for their own narrow and opportunistic political purposes. Thailand’s escalating political conflict has often been crudely reduced to a good-versus-evil battle for democracy. It has been represented as a morality play pitting an entrenched urban and bureaucratic elite that favours an inequitable status quo against a marginalized rural countryside awakened by the September 2006 coup that ousted Thaksin to demand true democracy, more social justice, and a larger slice of the national economic pie. A more complex interpretation is that Thailand’s power struggle is at its core one between two competing elites, each capable of mobilizing disruptive crowds of their colour-coded supporters, and neither particularly democratic in its history or outlook. Each camp is vigorously, and sometimes violently, jockeying for position ahead of an uncertain royal succession. The two camps hold competing views on the appropriate role of the monarchy and monarchical institutions in Thai society after the ailing King Bhumibol Adulyadej passes from the scene. There is potentially much at stake: the royally affiliated Crown Property Bureau controls more than 40 per cent of all property in 10฀BangkokIT.indd฀฀฀109 12/6/11฀฀฀11:20:56฀AM Shawn฀W.฀Crispin 110 Bangkok’s central business district, and a faction of the UDD has called privately for those lands to be confiscated and redistributed. Forbes magazine recently estimated King Bhumibol’s personal fortune, including Crown Property Bureau lands, at US$30 billion. It has consistently ranked him as the world’s wealthiest royal. The old elite’s power derives largely from its extensive land...