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Wednesday, April 15, 2009

Khi Kwai's Analysis

Khi Kwai:


When the military did step in, following Sunday’s emergency decree, even the incipient crackdown appeared to bolster the red shirts. The reaction of the authorities, in particular, clearly evidenced the “double standard” their leaders had lamented all along. Reactionaries can shoot their opponents, run police officers over with their trucks, riot in front of Parliament, trash Government House, and occupy the airports for a week with the impunity characteristically accorded in Thailand to the champions of the establishment. But if you are against the bureaucrats, the aristocrats, and the generals who have run the country for the last 75 years, shattering the glass doors of a five-star hotel is all it takes to be branded an “enemy of the state.”


The luck of the red shirts turned in a mere matter of hours. By Monday afternoon, the movement’s once-buoyant leadership had effectively lost control of the situation. Supporters scattered all over Bangkok resorted to desperate measures to halt the army’s methodical advance through the capital. The height of irresponsibility was reached as red shirts commandeered LPG tankers and drove them into highly populated areas such as the Din Daeng triangle and Soi Rangnam, as if to threaten the annihilation of entire neighborhoods should the army dare to move in. To protect themselves, the red shirts had proven willing to endanger the lives of regular people — those whose interests and aspirations they ostensibly advance, those whose support is indispensable to the success of their movement. In the process, the red shirts squandered any good will the local population might have harbored towards them — reducing, for the time being, the prospects of a popular uprising to mere fancy.


As they increasingly lost control of their own supporters, the red shirts quickly succumbed to the mediatic onslaught that accompanied the regime’s crackdown. Given the military’s shameful history of repression and mass murder, it is hard to think anyone would believe a word that comes out of a Thai general’s mouth. But the government successfully disseminated its self-serving narrative nonetheless, portraying its actions as deliberate, orderly, and restrained in the face of an unwieldy terrorist mob. The servile local media eagerly obliged; the facile foreign press swallowed it hook, line, and sinker. Of course, the official version of the events was the usual pack of lies and half-truths. Photographs and video already contradict the preposterous notion that soldiers merely fired warning shots in the air, or that the weapons seen firing directly into the crowds had only been loaded with blank rounds. In the next days and weeks, we will find out just how many red shirts those blank rounds injured or killed.


Good stuff, as always.

You got to wonder where the military will bury the bodies or what they will do with those arrested, not the leaders mind, but the average Somchais who were being hauled off.

If Thai history is anything to go by, their futures have about as much hope as a terrorist being secretly sent off to a CIA jail and questioned. Actually, they probably have less rights than a terrorist. The Red Cross won't be going to interview them. We know who controls the Red Cross in Thailand.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

well, as Khi Kwai, I do hope that the REAL evidences will come up. penkair apparently must have some. Weng was quotd by Nation saying that he'll sue Abhisit for killing people.

at this moment I don't want to be branded as "conspirancy theorist" (or even worse - with latest Sansern's warning to public not to believe lies) and better I keep quite. only perhaps to allow that there are people apparently who were there who tell about over a hundred killed, at least. but of course - nobody is gonna take it as credible facts without solid evidences. which might be hard to present - if it is true that soldiers were taking out corpses almost instantly.

let's hope the truth will prevail sooner or later.

Anonymous said...

Fonzi and others,

here is at least 1 video where woman crying and saying that "bodies were taken out by garbage trucks from Din-Daeng on Mon early morning. my husband dissapeared - he never came back home !"

I am sure this video very soon will be either blocked or removed from youtube. anybody who uses youtube perhaps should try to download it and upload on their own youtube accounts. this is NOT some D-station, this is now well recognised media Al-Jazeera network presents this footage !

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g93RBZsw0H0


(at 0:45 )

"a woman approached us in obvious distress. she told us bodies has been taken away in garbage trucks from the Din Daeng intersection on Sunday night .... (she afraid) her husband was shot and never been seen again"


hopefully sooner or later more evidences would come out from reliable sources.