Fortune doesn’t smile on the Land of Smiles.
Eighteen years ago, almost to the day, hundreds of Thais were killed when Army troops opened fire on pro-democracy protesters in downtown Bangkok. Officially, 52 people died, but there were numerous eyewitness accounts of bodies being loaded onto trucks in the dead of night and driven away to the countryside. Lists of the names of people who never returned to their loved ones after the protest ran to well over 300.
Even in 1992, it would have been unthinkable in the Western world for soldiers to fire on their fellow nationals. Almost 20 years later, in another century, it is happening again in Thailand. Why?
The Thai Prime Minister, Abhisit Vejjajiva – an urbane, well-educated man who is well aware of the image Thailand is currently projecting to the rest of the world and the nation’s biggest source of income, tourists – said this week that the soldiers were only using live ammunition in self-defence. How then does he explain the shooting of a protest leader and former army general as he was being interviewed for a foreign television report? It is difficult to imagine how he was posing a threat to the safety of soldiers at the time.
The reality is that poorly educated soldiers are currently shooting down poorly educated protesters, most of them from the country, because they have been ordered to do so, because the violent and inflammatory actions of a minority among the protesters has convinced them that they are in some kind of a battle and – possibly – because they simply want to end the impasse and go home.
The protesters want the government turned out and, ostensibly, the return of a former prime minister, Thaksin Shinawatra, who multiplied the billions of dollars he was making in the telecoms industry many times over while in government. Largely they support him because he doled out the most money to buy votes in rural areas in order to get into power, and spent vast amounts of money on those same constituents when he was in power. The irony is not necessarily lost on these political pawns that dozens of them – the country’s poorest people – are now dying in the streets in support of one of its richest, a corrupt politician.
Tragically, most Thais accept a corrupt polity and a politically powerful military as part of the country’s landscape. Until that part of the culture changes dramatically and the people are given the democracy they crave, they are condemned to seeing history repeat itself.
And the ripples of grief that resonate throughout the community from every death will torment another generation of smiling Thais.
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