Asia correspondent Nick PAton Walsh writes that the Thai protests have been “the most sporadic, volatile and unpredictable of protests, but it appears to be coming to an endgame”.
It’s been the most sporadic, volatile and unpredictable of protests, but it appears to be coming to an endgame.
Troops lining Lumpini Park, where tourists normally mill. Silomo, the road that heads towards Bangkok’s seediest dens and bars, echoing with gunfire. Buses on fire. It is chaos.
Today’s violence has a particular resonance for many journalists in Bangkok as it’s happening where we work, and where many of us live. The offices of many big media corporations are inside the protest zone. My trip to work used to involve a walk through makeshift barricades. Now it would requires negotiating police lines.
Chaos is the only real word for it: reports of police firing on troops (they’re thought to be pro-protest, the troops often angered by their clashes with the protesters); reports of bullets whizzing trough office block glass windows; the press being shot at. It is clearly in collapse.
In the past, periods of violence have given way to calm and the desire to talk again. But now negotiation has proven almost pointless: the Red Shirt protest leaders unable to wholly accept the PM’s last – hardly generous – offer of a settlement; the protesters themselves out there so long, so angry, they perhaps don’t want to go home without having their emotions felt, however that may be.
What next? It’s impossible to predict. But the army is now genuinely in play. There had been fears its leaders were unwilling to perform the PM’s orders. The bloodshed could continue. It could cause the PM to step back and a pause in the current standoff.
Or the army, as is historically almost the norm in Thai politics, might step in politically and try to bring calm.
But there are also fears about whether another coup – the 19th in 80 years – could really quieten the outpouring of anger on Bangkok’s streets now.