Aftermath

Joe is back from India and all's right with the world. He is going through his Burma pictures and will try to get some onto the blog today or tomorrow. He is not happy that he was not in Bangkok with his camera during the red shirt rampage. I said, oh, I thought you might have wanted to play it safe and stay away from the confrontations. He had a good laugh over that.

A Thai friend said this morning, "Two days ago everybody hated them [the red shirts]. Today all is forgotten. We are good actors." I said I thought a people could do worse than be good actors. Also, the Thai government showed an admirable restraint unusual in this region. The Vietnamese and Cambodian governments would have shot everyone within a two-mile radius. The Burmese generals would have run over everybody with tanks. (Of course, none of this would have happened in Laos. The Laos are too polite.)

As it happened, only two people died in the streets of Bangkok this past week. Both were shot not by the army, but by red shirts who objected when some neighborhood men tried to move a bus being used as a red barricade away from an apartment block. The BBC reports, by the way, of troops firing into the demonstrators at Victory Monument, did turn out to be misleading. Soldiers aiming at the crowd were firing blanks, the government says. Soldiers with live ammo fired into the air.

What sticks in my own mind about that confrontation was the lack of noise and then---quite unexpectedly---lots and lots of noise. When the reds sent a bus careening toward a group of about forty soldiers at the top of an expressway ramp, those of us two blocks away heard nothing when the troops scattered and the bus climbed up a guardrail and then just hung there. There was no Dolby sound to amplify the bus smash-up, just the cheers that went up from the red shirts down below us spectators on the skytrain walkway.

But then somebody in the army gave an order, apparently, and there weren't just forty troops on the ramp but hundreds of armed soldiers pouring out of side streets and advancing steadily toward the red shirts---and then suddenly running our way and shooting. I don't know which was louder and more frightening, the bursts from hundreds of M-16s firing or the roar that went up from the now-retreating red shirts and their supporters up on the walkway all around me. The roar was like some thrilling combination of the opening kickoff cheers at a championship football game and the wails at a huge Muslim funeral, as well as the yells of "Let's get out of here!" from many of the mere curiosity-seekers, including me. The student who earlier had said to me, "Isn't this exciting?" was dashing toward the safety of the Victory Monument skytrain station now, not so much excited as scared, and I was close on his heels. Though as soon as the firing let up, we both joined a few dozen others and went back to where we had been standing earlier to see what would happen next. That's when a second round of gunfire broke out, and also four soldiers came tearing up the steps to the skytrain platform, chasing somebody---we never saw who---with a TV camera guy close on their tails. More soldiers then bounded our way ordering everybody out of the area, so we went over to the skytrain station where the floor-to-ceiling mesh gates had been shut, but a guard opened one to let us in.

Ten minutes later I was over at the merry water festival on Silom, and then stopped at Starbucks for lunch and had a nice ham and cheese puff pastry.

Here's the aftermath: although Bangkok is calm, the state of emergency is still in effect, and the red shirt leaders are under arrest or in hiding; Thaksin Shinawatra, the self-exiled former prime minister who instigated the uprising, has had his passport revoked, making it harder for him to move around the world plotting more trouble; the Songkran holiday has been extended for two days, Thursday and Friday, so people directly affected by the turmoil can have some fun, and those not directly affected can have even more fun, drinking heavily in many cases and throwing more water on people, etc.

All of these bad and good events have included some nice Thai touches. Today's Bangkok Post listed people who came out of this month's mess looking better or worse. The prime minister redeemed himself in the end, as did the military. Thaksin appears done for.

On the upswing, according to the Post, is "Boonlert Pairin, former senator and astrologer. Mr. Boonlert predicted the prime minister's fortunes would remain positive and after April 25 Mr. Abhisit would see political tensions ease. Meanwhile, Thaksin's efforts to topple the Abhisit government through the red shirt protests would fail."

On the other hand, there is far less astute "Luck Lekhanethet, popular astrologer. Mr. Luck said on the UDD [red shirts] rally stage that, based on charts, Mr. Abhisit and his government no longer had fortune on their side so the administration's term would come to an end and Mr. Abhisit would have to dissolve the House before April 20."

The Post naturally reported the astrological developments with a straight face. Thailand is the country where, during the Asian financial collapse in the mid-'90s, the finance minister tried to get his birth date legally changed so his astrologer might produce a chart with a more favorable outlook for the Thai economy. It didn't work, but it shows why, when Joe and I head home next week, we sure are going to miss this place.