BANGKOK - Thailand's nine-week-old standoff between anti-government protesters and troops came to a dramatic head on Wednesday when armored military vehicles and rifle-firing troops converged on the protester's command center, forcing a handful of the group's main leaders to surrender to authorities and call off their protest.
At least three people, including a foreign journalist, were killed in the military operation that aimed to restore order after days of armed chaos across the national capital that resulted in over 60 deaths.
The crackdown appeared to have triggered more widespread unrest, including in the north and northeastern provinces where the United Front for Democracy against Dictatorship (UDD) holds
sway. Protesters stormed a town hall complex in the city of Udon Thani, setting a building ablaze, and torched a second town hall in Khon Kaen.
In the capital, protesters ran amok, starting fires in government and private properties including the Central World and Siam Paragon shopping malls and a library in the building of Thailand's stock exchange. The offices of Channel 3 news station were set alight, while the staff of English-language newspapers the Bangkok Post and the Nation were evacuated. The extent of the damage to the buildings has yet to be ascertained.
By late Wednesday afternoon, Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva had imposed a curfew in Bangkok from 8 pm until 6 am, with details read out on national television. The order said city residents were banned from leaving their homes to allow security authorities to perform their duty.
Former premier Thaksin Shinawatra, the UDD's self-exiled chief patron, had warned before the first arson attack in the northeast that government suppression of the protest could spark guerilla-style attacks by the group's supporters.
It's unclear if the UDD will be able to mount a coherent and sustained response to the crackdown. UDD co-leaders had frequently threatened to launch a civil war if their supporters were suppressed by force. But the group's top leaders were badly split during the late phases of the protest, witnessed in divergent views between moderates and hardliners on whether to accept a reconciliation plan proposed by Abhisit that included a November 14 timeframe for new elections.
While UDD moderates favored the plan, a hardline faction aligned with the group's militant wing rejected it and later scrabbled to get a grip on anti-government riots that seemed to spiral out of their control. Before Wednesday's crackdown, some believed that certain senior UDD organizers had privately conceded that they had lost this round of the conflict and were preparing to stand down.
As the crisis evolved, the bottom line for the UDD was that they never gained the huge numbers of protesters that would have indicated a genuine popular uprising. At the same time, the few thousand who remained now seem sufficiently radicalized by the military's killing of fellow protesters to take vengeance through arson attacks on prominent private businesses and government buildings.
Combined with the widely criticized intrusion by red shirt protesters into a local hospital next to the main protest site on April 29, which caused several hundred patients to be evacuated, including the ailing Supreme Patriarch of the Buddhist clergy, the UDD's refusal of Abhisit's conciliatory offer weakened its initiative in the eyes of many outside observers.
As of Tuesday, the total number of protesters in the mid-city protest site had fallen to around 600, not including women and children who took shelter in a nearby Buddhist temple and hospital, according to this correspondent's estimate. The bulk of the UDD's black-shirted guards also appeared to have withdrawn from the area, with the perimeter barricades of tires and bamboo manned mainly by volunteers with sling-shots and staves.
Thai military sources had earlier estimated that there were around 500 UDD black-shirt fighters, whom officials referred to as terrorists, in the sprawling encampment. This correspondent, however, found no more than 100 black-shirted guards, perhaps fewer, at the site on Tuesday. There is no confirmation that the black shirts scattered around the city are now orchestrating the mushrooming arson attacks.
The earlier skirmishes around the city between several clearly disorganized street opposition groups and government troops seemed to consist mostly of men fired up by a handful of red shirt community leaders, some enraged over the loss of friends or fellow citizens hit by soldiers' live fire, and for a surprising number the thrill of flirting with extreme danger.
The army's long delay in entering the protest site could have given the UDD's militant wing valuable time to regroup and prepare to cause chaos outside of the main protest site, aimed at undermining the credibility of and confidence in the government.
Tactical schism
Before Wednesday's crackdown, the UDD's remaining core leaders insisted that Veera Musikapong, until recently one of the movement's star stage performers and the group's secretary general, was still aligned with the protest even while admitting there was rancor when he left the site after a tentative truce last week devolved into new rounds of armed violence.
The decision of hardline leaders, notably Jatuporn Promphan, Nattawut Saikua (now in police detention) and the former singing star Arisman Pongruangrong (who fled the protest site before troops arrived), to decline Abhisit's offer caused Veera and a group of second-rank leaders to quit the protest. A Thai military intelligence report claims that Veera later sought government help after UDD members made physical threats towards him and his family. (Veera could not be reached for this article.)
The decision to carry on with the protests and reject Abhisit's reconciliation offer was a "mistake", said UDD core leader Jaran Dittapichai in a Monday evening interview inside an air-conditioned cargo container behind the main protest stage. The cooler, group insiders say, had been the scene of many heated discussions between the UDD's increasingly fragmented leadership.
"Basically speaking, we won," he said. "Abhisit said he would dissolve parliament and declared a conciliation roadmap. We got something, but some of our leaders - and some of our supporters - wanted more. They asked how we could return home when so many protesters had been killed with only the promise of an election. It is not easy to convince them."
Arisman, carefully donning a necklace of a dozen Buddhist amulet charms, hinted at a deeper divide when he characterized Veera, who earlier in his career sought to lead the Democrat Party, as an "ineffective" negotiator and that "the atmosphere at the protest site did not seem to agree with him. He catches cold easily." Arisman said that Abhisit's offer of an early election date ("even if we trust them to hold it") didn't achieve the permanent and dramatic transformation of Thai society.
"Why would we do this at tremendous cost in blood and fear if we cannot change society. We want to end rule by people who are above the law, and this would be a very significant signal that we can do that," he said. "This is not about winning immunity for ourselves. That is government propaganda."
Yet the UDD's inability to attract the massive popular support that they initially predicted limited the efficacy and credibility of their self-proclaimed "peaceful" protests, even when they involved the occupation of the symbolic center of Thai capitalism and high-society materialism.
The "million-strong" protest that Thaksin predicted would bring down Abhisit's coalition government, which Thaksin supporters claim came to power in 2008 through military machinations, failed to materialize and cast doubts on UDD leader claims that they were engaged in a broad-based class struggle for democracy. Critics have noted that the protests were initiated a fortnight after a Thai court ruled to seize US$1.4 billion of Thaksin's assets on corruption charges.
The lack of numbers, however, should not be seen as a lack of support in the north and northeastern rural heartland, where the killing of UDD protesters will no doubt be used by local leaders aligned with the movement to mobilize masses.
With the government's suppression of the UDD's Bangkok-based protest site, the focus now turns to the countryside and the potential for a more broad-based anti-government rebellion.
William Barnes is a veteran Bangkok-based journalist. Additional reporting by Shawn W Crispin, ATol's Southeast Asia
Editor.
