Reading Bangkok

Prologue

xix Prologue Masking the City The provinces elect the government and Bangkok brings it down.1 At about . am on Wednesday 19 May 2010, after several hours of early morning fighting, Royal Thai Army tanks and armoured personnel carriers crashed through barricades that had closed down the commercial heart of Bangkok for more than six weeks. They initially advanced into the Silom and Sala Daeng area, Bangkok’s “Wall Street”. The redshirted protesters and their black-shirted paramilitaries were defeated; by 4 pm most of their leaders had surrendered and their numbers were swept from the city but not before, in retaliation, they set fire to the city centre. The Central World shopping mall, the second largest in Asia and Bangkok’s largest building, burnt for eight hours before it collapsed. Some 33 other buildings were torched, including the Thailand Stock Exchange, Siam Square Cinema, Channel 3 News, Khlong Toei electricity building, and more than ten branches of the Bangkok Bank. At Udon Thani and Khoen Kaen, in the red-shirts’ heartland of northeast Thailand, two town halls were set on fire. At 4.10pm, a curfew was announced. Red-shirts fled, some to the Police Hospital on Rama I road, within the area that they had held during the uprising, others to the royallylinked Wat Pathumwanaram where a military counter-attack left six dead.2 At the barricades, scores were killed. Arson and looting spread through the inner city. Bangkok had seen previous uprisings and massacres in 1973, 1976 and 1992. These, however, had been mostly student-led, as one elite and essentially urban fraction challenged another and its military backers. 2010 was different: there had already been an insurrection in 2008 by the urban middle class and a quiescently approving military, to depose a popularly elected, provincially supported government; now it was the rural poor and other marginalised groups invading the domain of a resented bourgeoisie. Where previous rifts were commonly between an urban middle class and the military, now it was in large measure between social classes — the provincial majority versus an urban hegemony. The very idea of the Nation was now at risk. Like revolutions elsewhere and in different eras, the rift was colour coded. Significantly, it played out in urban space. Antecedents The story prefacing these events of 2008, 2009 and 2010 and the fundamental rifts they reveal need to be traced back to Siam of the late 18th century. Upon the establishment of the Bangkok kingdom in 1782, King Yotfa (Rama I, r.1782–1809) undertook a massive military expansion and suppression of peripheral and vassal states to the south, north and northeast. Subsequent reigns consolidated these acquisitions. By the late 1820s, Bangkok was progressively deposing local rulers, installing Thai governors, as the vassal and tributary states became, in effect, colonies. There was always, however, a “reverse” colonisation complicating the process: the Thai did not so much settle the appropriated states as siphon off their populations to Bangkok for constructing defences, building palaces or digging canals, whereupon the removed populations would be permitted to settle on the city’s outskirts — the periphery, in effect, colonising the centre. Then, in the reign of King Chulalongkorn (Rama V, r.1868–1910), the northeast kingdom of Chiang Mai was colonised; additionally, government was progressively modernised and centralised, while there were concerted efforts, never completely successful , to impose a Siamese (Thai) identity that would suppress those of the old annexed states. The Thai nationalist hegemony over the old states was finally proclaimed in 1939, with the name of the country being changed from the geographical “Siam” to the ethnically signified “Thailand” — “controversial because of the ethnic chauvinism it re- flected and fostered” (Reynolds, 2006: 245).3 Thaksin Shinawatra (1950–) was born in Bangkok’s former colony of Chiang Mai, into a leading Chinese business family. His first career was in the Royal Thai Police; his second was in winning government concessions in telecommunications and subsequently in media from whence he emerged with an estimated net worth of some 60 billion baht by the mid-1990s; his third was in politics representing Chiang Mai. In 1998, he formed the Thai Rak Thai (“Thais Love Thais”) Party. In 2001, Thaksin secured electoral victory to become Prime Minister; in 2005, his xx Prologue government was re-elected and Thaksin became the first elected leader in Thai history to have completed a parliamentary...