Thailand’s Growing Pains

On may 19, I watched my adopted city burn. Plumes of thick black smoke rose amid deserted office buildings about 1.5 km from my Bangkok home as troops stormed the Red Shirt camp. There, chaos reigned: protesters set buildings ablaze, soldiers exchanged fire with black-clad gunmen, ambulances raced off with the dead and wounded. But farther south, near my home, there was no bloodshed, just shuttered shops and deserted roads. This unsettled me almost as much. I have lived in Bangkok for 15 years. What terrible force could empty the streets of this once vibrant city?

Fear, of course. The fighting and standoff of the past two months have claimed the lives of at least 70 people — mostly civilians, including foreigners — and injured hundreds. Thais pride themselves on unity. Now they are at one another’s throats, and the institutions that have always claimed to represent their best interests are too outdated and mired in crises to pull them apart. All countries weave myths about themselves, and here is Thailand’s: its people live in harmony, regardless of class, creed or ethnicity, their stability and prosperity assured by unblinking loyalty to King, country and religion — the so-called three pillars of Thai-ness.

(See a TIME video on the violence in Thailand.)

The battle of Bangkok has shattered the myth of national harmony. Many Thais welcomed the crackdown. They regarded moderate Reds as dupes and militant Reds as terrorists and both as funded by fugitive former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, who was overthrown in a 2006 military coup. But others, including those who were sick of the protests, shuddered to see soldiers firing live rounds at people armed with rocks and slingshots, if armed at all. The last time that happened was a generation ago, in 1992, when at least 48 people were killed. Now Thais watch with horror as their fast-modernizing nation slips back into a darker era.

In 1992 it was Bhumibol Adulyadej, Thailand’s widely revered King, who intervened to halt the violence. But this time the ailing monarch, now 82, has remained silent. Other key institutions that might play a mitigating role are too busy wrestling with their own dysfunctions. The parliament barely functions; mobs have twice burst through its gates in recent years. The judiciary, which in 2008 toppled a government that Red Shirts helped elect, is widely viewed as partisan and unreliable. So are the media: free-to-air television channels effectively skew to the official line. The police are corrupt and incompetent, and in recent days they were conspicuously absent on Bangkok’s lawless streets. Thailand even has a crisis of faith: Buddhism is reeling from repeated scandals that Pope Benedict XVI might recognize.

(See pictures of the showdown in Bangkok.)

These institutions need reform. But they are shielded from scrutiny and even well-meaning criticism by custom, taboo and — in the monarchy’s case — draconian lèse majesté laws. How can a country progress when its people cannot safely debate the very institutions that are central to their lives?

This is especially true of the military, the main player in Thailand’s new lock-and-load democracy. Even in less turbulent times, its murky role as political power broker has gone largely unchallenged. Since the country’s last coup, in 2006, the military has clearly been a law unto itself, only tenuously answerable to the government. With war in the south and trouble in Bangkok, perhaps a third to half of the military’s personnel are now deployed against the citizenry. No wonder unflattering comparisons to neighboring Burma abound.

(See pictures of Thailand’s Red Shirt protests.)

Others reserve their anger for Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva. Not only did he seem to underestimate the passion and stamina of ordinary Red Shirts, who say they are rebelling against a Bangkok elite that has left them disenfranchised and in poverty; he was also unprepared for the ruthlessness of militant Reds, whose actions and armory — some had guns — made a mockery of their movement’s claim to be nonviolent. There have also been protests, bomb blasts and arson attacks in towns in the north and northeast. A third of Thailand’s provinces are under emergency rule, ostensibly to counter Red Shirts outside the capital, but this has only heightened the sense that the situation is spinning out of the government’s control.

More violence seems inevitable. It is hard to see how a government that has presided over so many deaths can ever heal such a deeply fractured society. Until the bloodshed, it was possible to view this political turbulence as a symptom of a still maturing democracy. Not anymore. Thailand is not growing up. It is falling apart.

Read “Bangkok Siege Ends, but Thailand Chaos Continues.”

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