State of Emergency Lifted

Today the Thai government announced an end to the 12-day ban on large gatherings, and to the detention of people suspected of inciting last week’s protests. The opposition had compared the prime minister’s tactics to those of Thailand’s nastier neighbors. The country’s former standing as a rising star in Asia has been tarnished more than ever.

In the past week several people have e-mailed me to ask what’s really going on with all the red and yellow shirts. Or as Jip says, why can’t people just start wearing orange and move on? I came across an analysis of the situation, written several weeks ago by a Thai academic. The writer oversimplifies the many-layered problems here, and below I’ve condensed his words further because some of what he wrote is already dated. But at least he offers a foundation for understanding the current stalemate:

We are faced with at least two major conflicts:

Conflict of goals: One side (Red shirt) wants a strong government that can deliver on policy promises; the other side (Yellow shirt) wants a weak government, because they think government is corrupt.

Conflict of means: One side (Red) believes that political conflict should be decided by election. The other side (Yellow) believes that the elections themselves are corrupted by money and by local influence.

… The Red is made up of rural-lower class, peasants and others who have benefited from the populist policies of the governments. The Yellow is urban-middle class who dislikes government corruption and doesn’t need the populist policies, but wants fairer deals in business and economics.

… The most recent election resulted in roughly 14-16 million for the Thaksin/Red side, 10-12 million for the Democrat Party/Yellow side. Red is popular in the North (Thaksin's area) and Northeast (poor and in need of development), while Yellow is popular in Bangkok and the South (high political awareness and the traditional Democrat's stronghold).

His sobering conclusion:

What these conditions imply is that violence could spread and civil war is not out of the question. Normally what evolves is either conflict between two groups of people and then the state machine intervenes, or conflict between two sides of the military and the people intervene. This time, however, people are divided and the state apparatus is also divided, therefore the prognosis is potentially quite dangerous.