Pacific Rim Gets.... Interesting

[Silent Disapproval Robot]

Glad to hear you're okay, SDR!

So... just business as usual for Thai?

No, I wouldn't say it's business as usual but it's not anywhere near as dangerous as the media would like one to believe.  Here's my poorly organized, type-things-as-I-think-of-them take on what I saw.

I was supposed to be in Thailand and Indonesia for a 3 week diving holiday but I ended up leaving after only 5 days.  I arrived in Bangkok at 3am on the 22nd.  I spent the morning carting around, buying and setting up a cheap cell phone, and planning to meet a Chinese friend and former co-worker who still lives and works in Thailand.  She called me at about 5pm to cancel our dinner plans because the military had announced a coup and imposed a 10pm-5am curfew.  Local TV and radio went off air but the internet and foreign TV stayed on.

I spent a few hours watching coverage of the coup on News Asia out of Singapore and it appeared that the coup caught everyone by surprise.  Most of the leaders of the Red Shirts, the Yellow Shirts, and the interim caretaker government cabinet were at a meeting held by General Prayuth aimed at ending the deadlock and stopping the escalation of tensions, rising protests, and street violence.  The Reds and Yellows were only given a few hours to hammer out a deal and when they couldn't, the general informed them that he was taking over and then he had them all detained.

Not surprisingly, recently ousted PM Yingluck Shinawatra (sister of the deposed former PM Thaksin Shinawatra),  didn't attend the meeting and everyone assumed she'd be fleeing the country to join her billionaire brother in Dubai or Cambodia.  The military called for her to turn herself in and everyone was shocked when she did so a day later.
Some background based on my limited understanding.  Thailand's very polarized right now divided into two main camps. 

The Yellow Shirts are mainly made up of the Bangkok elite, monarchists, the military officers, and much of the newly wealthy middle class.  They've traditionally held power and have always been quite a corrupt lot.  They tended to funnel money from the provinces into Bangkok and siphoned a fair amount off and into their pockets. 

The Red Shirts are comprised mainly of the poor and working classes, chiefly from the farming areas of the northeastern provinces.

The Yellow Shirt group had traditionally held power until Thaksin came along.  He made himself rich while running one of the country's first mobile phone providers.  He then got into politics by forming the Thai Rak Thai (Thai's love Thailand) party in the late 90's.  As he was a former cop from one of the rural provinces, Chang Mai, the Bangkok elite snubbed him even though he was from a very wealthy family.  He took a page out of Julius Caesar's playbook and decided to get the poor on his side and use their numbers to crush the Yellows in an election.

He brought in universal healthcare, micro-credit loans, agricultural loans, rural infrastructure improvements, and tried to curb the drug trade.  The poor loved him for it and voted for him in droves. 

He won a landslide in 2001.  Thing is though, even though he was helping the poor in the short term, he was gutting Thailand in the long-term by signing on to "free" trade deals that heavily favoured private equity groups such as the Carlyle Group, who view Thaksin as their boy.  The way in which the energy sector was privatized and sold off and how the rice market was opened to outside competition did a lot of damage to the economy as oil prices skyrocketed as did the price of foodstuffs.  His government was also seen as being very corrupt with a lot of sweetheart deals going to Thaksin owned companies and many of Thaksin's family members and friends getting cushy appointments and land deals. 

The Yellows had enough and when the TRT won a landslide election in 2005, they staged a coup while Thaksin was out of the country, made the TRT party illegal, and charged Thaksin with various crimes from corruption to lese mageste.     He was found guilty in absentia in 2008 and has been exile ever since.  The Yellows took back power and began trying to rescind some of Thaksin's reforms.

Thaksin wasn't taking this lying down though.  He started using his vast wealth and connections with the Carlyle Group and the IMF to stir up trouble from his bases in Dubai and Cambodia.  His cronies formed a new party, The Peoples' Alliance for Democracy (PAD) and they began protesting and staging demonstrations in 2008 or so.  From 2008-2010, things got pretty ugly with agitators taking over media centres, government buildings, and blockading airports.  The government security forces were pretty heavy handed and there were quite a few deaths and disappearances.  It all culminated in a big shoot out in Bangkok in 2010 when something like 90 Red Shirt protesters were gunned down.  (Thaksin may have precipitated this as a false flag with his black shirt snipers.  See Michael Yon's facebook page for info on this.)  An Italian reporter was also killed.

The leader of the security forces who lead the crack down was a Mr. Suthep Thaugsuban.  He was an especially corrupt politician in the Yellow Shirt camp who had been accused of engaging in a lot of shady land deals.  Between the land deals, the deaths of the Red Shirts, and the Italian, even the Yellows felt they had to act and Suthep was ousted from office and indicted on murder charges.  Never went to prison though due to his connections. 

Anyway, after the bloodbath, the Reds swept to power again and Thaksin's sister Yingluck took the reigns.  This really pissed off the Yellows and they immediately started screaming about rigged elections (some of which appears to be true), and anti-democratic processes (bit of a hypocritical stance based on the 2006 coup).  One of the new champions of democracy was none other than Mr. Suthep who began staging protests and demanding that the PAD government under Yingluck leave office. 

Yingluck was as corrupt as her brother and was soon caught in shady land deals, misappropriated flood prevention funds, and nepotism.  The courts forced her out and installed a caretaker government.  This pleased nobody and both the Red and Yellows were out in the street protesting, blockading, and occasionally grenading things.

Things were reaching a boiling point with mass Red Shirt protesters camped 40 km out of Bangkok threatening to march in if the PAD caretaker parliament was dissolved.  The Yellows were camped out in parks and squares within Bangkok demanding that the parliament be dissolved  and new elections held.  A fair number of people were getting bumped off and things really got ugly a few days before martial law was declared when someone fired an M79 grenade into a crowd of protesters at Victory Monument in Bangkok.  I think 3 were killed and 30 maimed or wounded. 

The military had had enough and imposed martial law.  This was the day before I arrived.  Two days later, after saying this wasn't a coup, the general came out and said, "you know what?  It is a coup after all."

That first night was fairly chaotic as it seemed many people weren't aware that a coup had taken place or a curfew been imposed fro 10pm-5am..  Mass traffic jams on the streets, lots of cops barking orders at every street corner, and lots of worried looking faces on the western tourists.  Local TV went off air around 5:30pm but I was able to watch live feed from Bangkok on News Asia out of Singapore.  It appeared that the army had things well in hand and no violence was being reported, so I ventured out to have a gander.  Didn't see much apart from a few 2.5 tonne trucks driving by with some troops in the back. 

The next morning, I called the airline to see about getting a flight to Indonesia as was my original plan.  I was told flights were booked solid for the next 10 days.  I asked about other destinations such as the Philippines, Cambodia, Singapore, and Malaysia.  All flights were booked and the land crossings to Laos, Cambodia, and Malaysia were closed.  I spent a few hours cruising around Bangkok and saw a lot of Western, Korean, Chinese, and Japanese tourists piling into cabs, luggage in tow as they were bugging out.  By contrast, the Russians and Middle Easterners didn't seem fussed at all.  I guess growing up in non-democratic regimes inures one to things like martial law and coups.  Most Thais I talked to didn't seem too concerned about the bigger picture.  They were just annoyed at the curfew cutting into business.  (and a lot of Thai women were really pissed that the TV was off and that they were missing their night time soap operas.  Good thing the army put local TV back on or they would've faced worse riots than the Red Shirts)

I looked at going to a beach resort area in Thailand but due to the night time curfew and the roadblocks, the day busses were packed and what was normally a 2 -2.5 hour trip was taking 5-6 hours.  I thought that the curfew would be relaxed in the tourist meccas but after reading some forums and emailing some friends, it appeared that the curfew was being very stringently enforced in these areas.

Most of the Thais I spoke with in Bangkok were cautiously optimistic about the coup taking place.  Granted Bangkok is mostly Yellow territory but the prevailing thought seemed to be that something needed to be done to clean up the corruption.  People were pretty happy when most senior police chiefs around the country were shown the door and even happier when the farmers were repaid money long owed to them in a failed rice farming scheme. 

The main concerns are that the Army might not relinquish power anytime soon and that Thaksin and his followers might start launching terrorist attacks to destabilize the region and force the military to start gunning down Red Shirts which would score Thaksin a win in the world press. 

Most Thais are baffled as to why the US was so quick to condemn the coup and impose sanctions when they bent over backward to avoid calling what happened in Egypt a coup.  I don't think they know about Thaksin's ties to the Carlyle Group and his support from Wall Street.  The US Ambassador in Bangkok is a blithering idiot who is more interested in posting daily selfies of herself and twittering inane #IheartObama tweets than responding to the crisis. 

The US seems to have shot themselves in the foot with this one.  By condemning the coup, they've pissed off one of the few remaining allies in the region and pushed Thailand closer to the China-Russia block.

If you're interested in some first hand reporting on what's going on, these are good:

Michael Yon is an American freelance photo journalist living in Thailand.  He's quite biassed in favour of the Yellows and the coup but he's got some good contacts on both sides and seems to be able to get access to people that others can't.

https://www.facebook.com/MichaelYonFanPage

Tony Cartalucci is another reporter on the ground in Bangkok.  He has some great info on the geopolitics going on around the coup and explains why the West is acting the way they are.

http://altthainews.blogspot.ca/


Finally, the news forum on Thaivisa.com is a good source of breaking news and it's interesting to read the comments of the expats still in Thailand to get their views on each article.

http://www.thaivisa.com/forum/forum/18-thailand-news/

[Silent Disapproval Robot]

Anti-US sentiment seems to be growing.



Here's Michael Yon's latest editorial.

Thailand: anti-American sentiment growing

This is remarkable because Thailand and the US have been natural friends for a very long time. About 180 years of relations, arguably with a short bad stretch during World War II. A King of Thailand even offered a US President war elephants during the Civil War. Our cooperation has been tight for many years.

What went wrong? In a nutshell, a tyrannical government under Thaksin Shinawatra began to pillage the country and murder thousands of people. Eventually he was ousted in a military coup and has been operating a government in exile for some of the years since that time. His supporters have orchestrated a serious terror campaign leaving thousands of casualties. (Killed and wounded.) The US has openly sided with Thaksin, even granting him a visa to enter the USA after he became a convicted criminal on the run.

Today, our Ambassador to Thailand, Kristie Kenney, is a lunatic. This word is not used lightly. Check her Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube videos, made by the US Embassy at our expense under her reign. Ambassador Kenney is painfully narcissistic.

Yet her narcissism and immaturity is not what is causing normal Thai to hate her. Thai are disgusted with her narcissism, but that does not bring anger towards Kenney.

Anger from millions of Thai derives from her openly supporting the criminal enterprise that serves US interests, but not Thai interests.

The formula for creating hatred is simple: Disgust + Anger = Hatred.

Hatred is a compound emotion derived from mixing the basic emotions of disgust and anger. Among millions of Thai, Kenney has reached the level of creating extreme disgust and extreme anger. There have been only limited, peaceful demonstrations at our Embassy to date.

The growing hatred towards Kenney and now John Kerry openly supporting a criminal enterprise, could cause a landslide. This provides a start to what is going wrong with US-Thai relations.

Do not take my word for it. These things can be rediscovered by anyone with enough due diligence.

Our relations are not gone or destroyed...yet. There is high friction but there is still time to turn this around. For starters, we need a new Ambassador. At this time, the hatred is mainly towards Kenney as an Ambassador, and our policies, not towards Americans in general, who are still very welcome and safe here.

[BanzaiCat]

Wow, thanks for that, SDR. Interesting stuff, especially hearing it firsthand from someone.

I imagine the US's bending over backwards to not call the Egypt coup a coup is because of the growing fear of upsetting Muslims, whom seem to have an untouchable status now on par with trannys.

Does religion enter much into what's going on, there? Is Islam a mainstream religion there? I imagine there were no Muslim egos to bruise so they decided to go with the condemnation route and the hell with common sense.

Side note: Oh sweet Jesus lord, Kristie Kenney is indeed a blithering idiot. Check out her Twitter page, full of Maya Angelou weeping and other non-related personal BS: https://twitter.com/KristieKenney

[Silent Disapproval Robot]

Thailand is mainly Buddhist but with a rather violent group of Muslim separatists in the south.  I think the main reason the US doesn't want to label Egypt as a coup is that by law, they have to suspend military contracts and Egypt gets a lot more money than Thailand does.

[Gusington]

Thailand does get some direct cash support from the US?

[Silent Disapproval Robot]

It was $10.5 million but they cut $3.5m after the coup.

http://www.nst.com.my/latest/font-color-red-thai-crisis-font-us-suspends-aid-as-thailand-coup-criticism-grows-1.603997

[Gusington]

Interesting, with Thailand's very long history of independence...

[Silent Disapproval Robot]

Thailand fought alongside the US during the Vietnam war and the US Airforce flew out of Thailand during that time.

I worked in a town called Lopburi in 2007-2008.  They have a big special forces army base there and a lot of nations send their SF troops there for jungle warfare training.  I believe the US was one of those nations.  I rarely saw the foreign troops there as I suspect they were under orders to keep a low profile and not be seen/photographed.  I did meet a couple of Aussies at the train station heading into Bangkok.  We shared a compartment on the ride down and it was pretty obvious they were military but they really didn't want to talk about it. 

[Gusington]

Hmm I wonder what convinced Thailand to fight with the US during the Vietnam War.

[Silent Disapproval Robot]

Fear of Communism and the Domino effect.  The royals were very, very worried that Communism would creep in to Thailand via Laos and Cambodia.

[Gusington]

That is very logical, cap'n.

[Silent Disapproval Robot]

Yeah, the region where the communists would've most likely set up is in Isaan in the northeast of the country.  Not surprisingly this is the area where most of the poor, rural farmers are who support Thaksin and the Red Shirts.  I think the reason that they're so looked down upon by the Yellows is that they weren't part of the old Siamese empire.  They were part of the Lanna kingdom which wasn't brought into the Thai fold until the late 1700s.

[Gusington]

Lanna kingdom was independent?

[Silent Disapproval Robot]

It was for a while after the Khmer empire collapsed.  Then it was taken over by the Burmese in the 1500s.  They overthrew the Burmese in the late 1700s and then agreed to become a vassal of Siam to protect themselves against more Burmese incursions.

[Gusington]

Really interesting. How do you know so much about the area? Are you from there?