Extract
Red democracy, yellow democracy: political conflict in Thailand: Jim Ockey backgrounds the recent crisis in Thailand and warns that the current calm may not persist.
In the past, popular demonstrations were aimed at bringing about democracy. This time it is about the nature of democracy.
(A Yellow Shirt leader) (1) Over the last five years, there have been frequent political struggles in Thailand, led, on the one side, by Yellow Shirt demonstrators and, on the other, by Red Shirt demonstrators. Most of the analyses of the recent political conflict in have focused on social divides, with many Yellow Shirts coming from urban areas and Red Shirts from rural areas. Others have focused on class differences, noting that many Yellow Shirts are middle class, while many Red Shirts are poor. While these characterisations are certainly accurate, to think of the conflict in only these terms is to overlook one of the most troubling aspects of the conflict: it has also divided many communities, and even many families. These types of divides are more personal, and thus in some ways more worrying, and yet cannot be explained by class or geography. To explain this aspect of the conflict, we have to examine the concerns each side has with the political process. We can trace the origins of the current political crisis back at least as far as the Asian Financial Crisis, which began in Thailand in 1997. The financial crisis hit when the Bank of Thailand was unable to defend a weakening ba...See the full content of this document
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