View from Bangkok

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Anchor Marco Werman speaks about today’s unrest in Bangkok with Michael McAuliffe, a Canadian journalist in Bangkok who’s covered Thai politics for years.

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MARCO WERMAN:  Michael McAuliffe is a Canadian journalist in Bangkok who has covered Thai politics for years.  Michael, describe what you saw in the streets of Bangkok today.

MICHAEL MCAULIFFE:  Really an entire city in violent crisis.  This isn’t anymore just a case of isolated clashes happening here and there on different days as we’ve seen over the past six or eight weeks as these political protests have been going on.  Today, really the violence began to spread to areas all around this massive protest camp in the heart of the city.  So at any given time today, there were two, three different battles going on around different access points, different barricades on the perimeter of this protest camp and it was really almost every weapon imaginable being used at one point or another.  Late this evening we had a lot of big grenade explosions around one of the barricades.  Over the course of the day things as primitive as spears and burning tires and Molotov cocktails matched up against the Army’s tear gas, water cannons and a lot of shooting which involved both rubber bullets and live ammunition on the part of the Thai Army.

WERMAN: Yeah, I mean it sounds like there was, essentially, a war going on in downtown Bangkok.  Have things calmed down and are there still protestors at this protest camp?

MCAULIFFE: Yes, what happened last night as the Army began this big operation to begin surround the protest camp in the hopes that by choking it off, maybe people would begin to give up and go home if the Army was able to limit access to things like food, water, power.  But it’s really just triggered a lot of street violence around the perimeter.  Inside the camp, we estimate there are probably somewhere between 10,000 and 20,000 red shirt protestors that are still in this central shopping core surrounded by these enormous barricades.  And then they have their own security brigade, if I could put it that way.  They’re referred to here as the men in black because they’re known by wearing black shirts.  They’re the ones who were on the outside of all of the access points in and out of the camp and are largely the ones who have been doing battle with the military over the course of the day.  So you have the people who came out, I think promoting democracy, but then as passions get inflamed, as they’ve been sitting there in the 100 degree heat, day after day after day, waiting for some kind of solution, that tempers have been rising.  I think that’s the passage of time that’s probably radicalized some people within this group that might not have been so radical at the beginning, although it certainly had a radical faction all along.

WERMAN: Michael, where did all these 10,000 to 20,000 protestors come from?  Did they get brought in from the country side or do they live in Bangkok?

MCAULIFFE: They do get brought in and I would say the make up of the protestors within the camp, the vast majority of them were from the north and northeast part of the country.  This is Thaksin Shinawat’s big stomping ground where he drew a lot of hi electoral support from.  They’re mostly peasant farmers and lower income Thais.

WERMAN: For Americans looking at this, it’s going to seem weird.  There’s this government that’s kind of a Parliamentary, military monarchy, do you think that Thais at some point in the near future are going to have to figure out what kind of government they really need and want and stick with it?

MCAULIFFE: Well I think what we’re beginning to see really with this growth in violence on the streets today and perhaps the beginning of a notion here that we could be in for a period, some kind of period of prolonged violent tension on the streets here.  This is really shaping down to possibly the showdown in this class war between the urban elites and Thailand’s rural poor.  The rural poor are refusing to give up their push to be recognized with political power in this country.

WERMAN: It’s a complicated story; thanks for helping us make sense of it Michael.  Michael McAuliffe, the Canadian journalist based in Bangkok, greatly appreciate your time.

MCAULIFFE: Thank you.

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