Page 2 of 2 AN ATOL INVESTIGATION Color-coded contest for Thailand's north
By Shawn Kelley
family's former groundskeepers now lives at the red shirts' main headquarters
in Chiang Mai, at the Grand Worowot Palace hotel, a small, derelict building
best known for its 24-hour snooker hall.
The snooker club's owner is the now daring but previously obscure Pechawat
Wattanapongsirikul, the top leader of the red-garbed Rak Chiang Mai 51. The
Lamphun native previously owned a small construction company and reportedly has
close links to the locally influential Phuttapuan family. The Phuttapuans are
political chameleons and have fielded candidates for elections under several
party banners, including Thaksin's former Thai Rak Thai
party, the Democrats and the former Chart Thai.
After the 2006 coup that ousted Thaksin, Petchawat initially formed the Thaksin
Loving People group, before changing its name to Rak Chiang Mai 51 in August
last year, or 2551 in the Thai Buddhist calendar. In the by-elections held in
January, he was defeated by a Democrat-supported candidate, Khayan Vipromchai.
Some here attributed the red shirt loss to his group's violent killing of radio
commentator Terdsak's father last November and to a broader rejection of the
red shirts' violent tactics.
DJ Aom claims the mob killing was an "accident" and blames a few unruly
individuals for escalating the situation. She insists that her red shirt group
remains popular, claiming at least 50,000 card-carrying members and at least
twice that many unofficial members - although Rak Chiang Mai 51 events are
seldom attended by more than several hundred supporters.
Besides staging demonstrations against government officials, the group also
holds regular gatherings at the Worawot hotel, where leaders take to a stage
set up in the street sometimes to launch tirades against their opponents or
clamor for Thaksin's return. They also deliver more cogent talks on democracy
and the need to bridge inequalities in Thai society.
The group has also organized boycotts of big businesses believed to be linked
to Thaksin's rivals. In May, about 500 red shirts in Chiang Mai closed their
personal accounts at Bangkok Bank, which they claim financially supported
Thaksin's overthrow.
According to DJ Aom, red shirt supporters withdrew millions of baht and then
ceremoniously burned their Bangkok Bank bankbooks. Similar campaigns are
planned by Rak Chiang Mai 51 against local branches of Kasikorn Bank, Bank of
Ayudhaya and the agribusiness conglomerate Charoen Pokphand, all considered by
the group as part of a broad royalist elite.
Not-so-mellow yellows
At the same time, many in Chiang Mai profess allegiance to the yellow-garbed
People's Alliance for Democracy (PAD) movement, the reactionary royalist street
protest movement that paved the way for Thaksin's 2006 ouster and crippled the
workings of two Thaksin-aligned governments last year, including by seizing
Bangkok's domestic and international airports.
The PAD was previously associated with the Democrats, due to the fact one of
the protest group's co-leaders was an elected MP with the party. That link is
now less obvious as PAD leaders criticize Abhisit and the Democrats for not
getting to the bottom of an April assassination attempt against PAD leader
Sondhi Limthongkul.
Radio host Terdsak, a PAD supporter, claims that the yellow-shirt network
numbers at least 100,000 "official" members across northern provinces. He says
their core consists of teachers, state enterprise workers, farmers who opposed
free trade agreements and other liberalizing policies during Thaksin's
governments, royalist military forces, non-governmental groups, and people who
suffered from Thaksin's 2003 war on drugs campaign, which saw the
indiscriminate killings of many innocent victims in the north, particularly
among ethnic hill tribes.
It also includes a broad swath of the middle class that once supported Thaksin
as a son of the north and his bold economic initiatives, but later turned
against him for the various large-scale development projects, including cable
cars, highway overpasses, and a heavy-handed land grab for a new zoo, that many
believed directly benefited his family's or political cronies' business
interests.
Among those who switched sides is northern Thai folk singer Suntaree Veychanon,
who previously supported Thaksin's tough stand against narcotic drugs. Later,
however, she joined mass efforts to drive Thaksin from power and is now a
member of a loose network of yellow shirt sympathizers that goes by the name
Paa Kee Hak Chiang Mai, or Love Chiang Mai Party.
She understands first hand the rough and tumble tactics of some of Thaksin's
local supporters: days after she first appeared on the PAD protest stage in
Bangkok in 2006, an unexploded grenade was found in front of her popular
riverside restaurant where she performs nightly.
Suryian Tongknukiat, the PAD's chief organizer in Chiang Mai, is a veteran NGO
worker from the southern province of Pattalung who married a woman from Chiang
Mai and has worked for several years with farmers and hill tribe groups in the
north. Handpicked by the PAD leadership in Bangkok, he has been tasked with
building the PAD's northern network.
His mission, he says, is to empower common folk, keep the government in check
and to spread word about its contentious "New Politics" policies, a
conservative platform that once called for a reduction in the number of elected
representatives to the Upper House, based on the premise that common voters are
too naive to make their own political decisions.
The PAD's decision to advance these vague policies as a proper political party
has divided its national network, with one camp feeling their interests are
better served as a street movement than by a formal institution, and another
that believes a party vehicle will give their ideas more legitimacy. PAD party
organizers in the northern province of Chiang Rai recognize the transitional
challenge, conceding that they would be lucky to win 20 seats - out of a total
of 480 - at the next general elections.
The military, in its campaign for northern Thais' hearts and minds, has by most
indications fared poorly in getting its message across. In late April, the
Internal Security Operations Command, or ISOC, held seminars across the north
to brief local village leaders about its side of their handling of the April
UDD-led riots. The military has claimed no protestors were killed in the melee,
while UDD supporters have claimed some were killed.
At one such seminar held in Chiang Mai, attended by some 2,000 village heads,
district chiefs and other community officials, nearly half of the room walked
out in protest, claiming the meeting was a waste of time. Leaders from Chiang
Rai and Phayao reportedly interrupted similar meetings by shouting pro-Thaksin
slogans and ridiculing the event's military organizers before leaving the
seminar early.
Whether the Democrats fiscal efforts, which will be heavily marketed in the
north under their Thai Khem Kaeng, or Thai strength, campaign will sway rural
support from Thaksin is still unclear. Yet it will likely hold the key to the
next general elections with its more mixed political loyalties than other
regions. The former Thaksin-aligned PPP won 47 of the region's 75 seats at the
2007 polls, with the Democrats notching just 16.
Already some of the Democrat party's populist ploys, including a 2,000 baht
(US$60) handout scheme for over 11 million low-income earners and a new pension
plan for senior citizens, have been coolly received in the north, say some
locals.
That local skepticism deepened when the Democrat-led government later announced
a series of tax hikes on cigarettes, alcohol and gasoline. A middle-ranking
police officer in Chiang Mai, requesting anonymity, jokingly accused the
government of handing out money with one hand and then snatching it back with
the other. Like many people in his village, he sometimes joins red shirt
gatherings, but considers himself only a casual supporter.
In April, the village headman where he lives in Mae Hia district organized a
group to join the red shirt rallies in Bangkok. He said that he and his
neighbors were offered 500 baht (US $15), a free red shirt and transportation
for the four-day trip, which included only a one-day commitment at the
demonstrations.
The expenses-paid trip, he says, doubled as an opportunity for some to visit
their children or relations working around Bangkok, or to visit nearby beaches
with family and friends. The police official, wary of spending that long away
from home but under pressure to support his red shirt-aligned village chief,
instead joined a smaller red shirt caravan on an overnight shopping trip to a
nearby border market.
To be sure, not all support for red or yellow shirt groups in the north is
purchased by powerful Bangkok-based patrons. Plenty have come out on their own
accord, with the reds' rhetoric against the skewed concentration of power and
wealth, and the yellow's rants against corruption in government, ringing true
with a growing number of northerners.
Many share across the color-coded divide a perennial sense of neglect from the
central government. Protest groups' broad pleas for democracy and social
justice have perhaps unintentionally sparked new calls for stronger local
government and other decentralizing reforms. They are calls for political
change that, judging by their histories and actions, neither Thaksin and his
reds, nor the Democrats and their more loosely aligned yellows, appear to
represent.
Shawn Kelley is an independent political risk consultant and Visiting
Fellow at Chulalongkorn University's Social Research Institute in Bangkok. He
may be reached at sjkelley88@gmail.com.
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