Million Man March?

Things have been pretty quiet politically in Thailand, at least on the surface. No big protests, no elections to serve as flash points, no sign that the king’s health is any better or worse (he’s been in the hospital for nearly six months straight, suffering from what are always referred to in the press as respiratory ailments).

A couple weeks back the high court handed down a long-awaited decision on the seizure of Thaksin’s assets, many of which have been frozen in Thai banks ever since the coup that ousted him as prime minister. We’re not talking about chump change here—the sum under consideration was in the neighborhood of $2.3 billion.

The court’s judgment was very Thai. It split the difference. In essence the verdict was to let Thaksin keep his pre-prime-minister money and let Thailand keep his post-prime-minister money. What this does is make the country a tiny bit richer and Thaksin a tiny bit poorer. What it doesn’t do is heal the political divide in Thailand. No matter which side you fell on before the decision, you still have basically the same complaints after the decision.

Hence this weekend’s latest in a series of “final showdowns,” attempts to rally wearers of one shirt color or another in support of a new government. One such showdown by the yellow shirts, at the airport 15 months ago, achieved the desired result. Now it’s the opposition red shirts’ turn. They threatened to tie up traffic at several points around the city. People took them seriously: everyone worried enough on Friday about clogged roads that many offices, including mine, urged everyone to go home at noon.

The next day, the streets and sky train seemed eerily empty, as if people thought they might get caught in some kind of crossfire if they went out. At the restaurants where I ate lunch and dinner, the staff were delighted to finally see customers. The rallies, which were held far from where we live, reportedly attracted nowhere near the million people that organizers hoped for. Maybe a million people were scared into staying home and off the streets?