THAILAND - POLITICS

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I live in Thailand. Have done so on and off for 20 years. It's one of the best places on the planet to be from so many points of view. When I first arrived Bangkok was a pretty horrible city and went through a huge construction phase during the mid-1990s when the air was full of dust and the traffic was so bad I used to abandon my car and walk.

But the Thais are a pragmatic set of folk and from about 1998 things in Bangkok got much better with the development of the overhead Bangkok Transport System (BTS) and then the "rod fai dai din", the underground rail system. Nowadays you can get around Bangkok at least as easily as in London, New York or any major world city and better than some. Combine this with world-class shopping (I reckon it beats Singapore or Hong Kong any day), great restaurants - you can eat any kind of food and drink good wine - and a superb private medical system and you have as close to perfection as you can get in a mega-city.

And then there's the politics. First the Yellow Shirts close the new international airport (which, by the way, is another, not so successful story) and now the Red Shirts have closed down the main shopping streets and the big hotels. What are they thinking about? Tourism is 6%!o(MISSING)f the GDP of Thailand and this idiocy hits Thais in a place they think about a lot after their stomachs, their wallets.

It's hard to say. I'm not political scientist, but I lived through a number of coups including the very violent one of 1992. This time around it's more complicated. One has to be careful commenting on Thai politics because the laws of lese majeste are stringent and any adverse comment on the Royal Family can lead to an immediate gaol sentence. That said, His Majesty the King has been the primary stabilizing force; I remember in '92 when he made the protagonists crawl in front of him on national TV, the streets cleared in less than an hour. But the King is elderly and not as well as he could be. Forces behind him wish to defend the status quo of the elite. But former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra unleashed the genie of social equality from the bottle, and now others, using his name and money, have taken up what increasingly looks like a national socialist banner.

Where will it end? One hates to think of civil war. The Thai are basically a happy-go-lucky people who will avoid violence if they can. Remember that they address each other as Pi, Nong or Lung - Older Brother (or Sister), Younger (Brother/Sister), Uncle - as if they were members of a large family. I find it hard to think of a full blown division in society that leads to the kind of awfulness that the Khmer Rouge and Pol Pot brought about in Cambodia. But that said, there is a violent streak in the Thai character that tourists don't see and the situation in Bangkok could get out of hand.

It brings tears to my eyes to think so. Such a wonderful country and such delightful people. My images of Thailand are not Yellow or Red shirted protesters but country-side Buddhist wats, the slow buffalo tilling the paddy fields in Ysarn and my own house (see photo). Let's hope that the politicians don't continue to exploit the credulity of the ordinary Thai person to further their nefarious quest for power.

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Photos

The family home upcountry
This is what I think about when I think of Thailand

Wat near Chainat
A much better image of Thailand than Red Shirt protesters, and a genuine picture of Thailand's reality