In military terms, the Thai government’s victory over the rag-tag collection of protesters known as the Red Shirts was utter. The medieval-looking Red fortress in Bangkok’s commercial centre was smashed, the thousands of protesters camping inside were dispersed, their leaders arrested.
Though the violence was ferocious at times, there were far fewer casualties than had been feared, in large part because key Red leaders either fled or surrendered as the fighting escalated.
But winning over the half of the Thai population that still believes in the Red Shirt rallying cry that this country is deeply unequal will take something far subtler than the soldiers and armoured personnel carriers that cleared the streets of Bangkok this week.
In the hours after thousands of Thai troops smashed through tire-and-bamboo barricades and used live ammunition to force an end to the nine-week anti-government protest, a shaky sense of order returned to the Thai capital, even as smoke continued to rise from burning shopping malls and banks and Red Shirt remnants exchanged occasional fire with troops pursuing them around the city.
Fearing more unrest, the government has imposed a dusk-till-dawn curfew on Bangkok and much of the rest of the country that will remain in place into the weekend. Military checkpoints remain around the capital.
While the heavily outgunned fighters who made up the informal armed wing of the Red Shirts proved no match for the military during Wednesday’s street battles, the grievances that motivated tens of thousands of people – many of them poor villagers from the north and northeast of the country – to spend nine weeks sleeping in the streets of Bangkok will prove far harder to conquer.
“Sweeping people off the streets is the easy part. The fundamental divide, the rift, doesn’t go away… a significant section of the population isn’t going to just disappear because of this,” said Duncan McCargo, a professor of Southeast Asian politics at the University of Leeds. “There’s a very intense social discord.”
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The Red rank-and-file still believes that this country’s system is tilted against them and in favour of the Bangkok elites. They still detest Abhisit Vejjajiva and the backroom deal making that brought him to power. They still resent the 2006 coup that overthrew the populist Thaksin Shinawatra, and want to see him or his allies return via a new election – and it remains likely they’d win such a vote.
Thailand’s Blackest Day was how the Thai newspaper The Nation referred to the violence Wednesday that left at least 15 people dead and nearly 100 others injured. Eighty people are known to have died in sporadic violence since the Red Shirts first took to the streets on March 12 in what was supposed to be a peaceful campaign to bring down the government. Hundreds more have been injured, including two Canadian journalists.
Mr. Abhisit seems to realize that he has a very narrow opportunity to calm the situation if he wants to avert more chaos and possibly the civil war that many have been predicting. Government officials said Thursday that the Prime Minister planned to go ahead and implement the five-point reconciliation plan that had been narrowly rejected by the Red Shirt leadership just before the crackdown.
The government is anxious to bring an end to the instability that had already cost the country billions of dollars in lost revenue – as tourists fled and businesses in the Red Shirt protest area were forced to close – even before some 40 buildings were torched in Wednesday’s fighting.
