“They think differently from the people here in Isaan,” he said, referring to the rural heartland of Thailand’s northeast. “In Bangkok it’s all work and pressure, work and pressure. Not like here, where life is slower. Fish in the river, rice in the field.”
PDF
1 comment:
In the Thai heartland, anger over protests in Bangkok
By Seth Mydans
13 October 2008
BAN HUAY CHAN, Thailand: When he was a young man, Damneun Pangsopha worked for a while in a doll factory in the big city, Bangkok, and he didn’t like it.
“They think differently from the people here in Isaan,” he said, referring to the rural heartland of Thailand’s northeast. “In Bangkok it’s all work and pressure, work and pressure. Not like here, where life is slower. Fish in the river, rice in the field.”
The rice is ripening now in this village 400 kilometers, or 250 miles, northeast of Bangkok. As the farmers wait for the harvest, they gather in the mornings to pass the time, and they are angry.
“The people of Isaan are people, too,” said Damneun, 48, who is now a farmer, like most people in this small village. “We also eat rice, and we also have an education, and they can’t insult us like this.”
The insult comes from the leaders of an anti-government protest in Bangkok who say that rural voters are misguided and ignorant. In the hope of changing the balance of political power, the protesters have put forward a new plan that would weaken those rural voices.
Huge crowds have barricaded the prime minister’s office in Bangkok for nearly seven weeks in what has become Thailand’s most severe crisis in years, splitting the country along social, economic and political lines.
More than 400 people were left injured and at least two were killed after tear-gas-filled clashes between the police and demonstrators last Tuesday.
As the protesters see it, Damneun and rural people like him are the root of the country’s problems. It is largely their vote - making them the biggest constituency in Thailand - that has kept the political opposition from power.
The proposed solution is to dilute the influence of rural voters by creating a mostly appointed Parliament that might better represent the aspirations and needs of a traditional urban, middle-class elite.
“That’s not democracy,” said Sawai Marongrit, 56, another farmer. “They can’t win, so they try to find another way to fight. Because if we have an election, they’ll lose again.”
The farmers gathered in the shade here in Khon Kaen Province swagger a bit when they talk of their political clout. In the last election, in December, the party that won the rural vote, the People Power Party, took 233 of 480 parliamentary seats. It formed a six-party government coalition that makes up two-thirds of the legislature.
“If the Isaan people don’t vote for them, the Democrats will never have a chance to win,” said Sawai, referring to the main opposition party.
To put it another way, said Damneun, “The only way they’ll ever win is if all the people of Isaan drop dead.”
Thailand is sometimes described as two nations - Bangkok, and everything else. About 10 percent of the country’s population of 65 million lives in the capital, and that number expands by several million when migrant workers, mostly from the north and northeast, are counted. Nearly a third of the Thai population lives in Isaan.
On election days, the city’s taxi drivers and laborers and housekeepers and street vendors and factory workers head home to Isaan to vote, draining the streets of much of their life.
Wooed by populist programs like low-cost health care and cheap loans, the rural poor came together in support of Thaksin Shinawatra, who transformed Thai politics during six years as prime minister.
Thaksin was ousted in a coup in 2006 and is now in London, where he has fled to evade corruption lawsuits. But the rural base he created remains solid, and his supporters control the government.
“The people of Isaan and the poor people everywhere all like Thaksin,” said Prasart Pangsopa, 54, who breeds cows and grows long beans, red chilies and rice.
The farmers here are one element in the destabilizing divisions that have become sharper and more emotional as the Bangkok protests continue.
The protesters, calling themselves the People’s Alliance for Democracy, are a diverse mix of royalists, military officers, business owners, social activists, students and middle-class homemakers whose common ground is a passionate discontent with the state of the nation.
These passions showed themselves last week when doctors at a Bangkok hospital said they would refuse to treat police officers wounded in the clash with protesters.
Separately, the pilot of a Thai Airways plane refused to fly three members of Parliament from the ruling party last week, calling one of them a threat to national security.
The anger runs the other way here in Ban Huay Chan, where the farmers spin spin violent fantasies of mayhem against the protesters.
“If those people come here I’ll beat them to death and throw them into the river!” cried Noochen Sinkham, 67, as he squatted on the ground with a cleaver, chopping strips of bamboo.
Everybody laughed, and the farmer named Marongrit upped the ante. “I want the police to throw a bomb into that demonstration,” he declared. “Let them die.”
The rural-urban divide plays itself out here in Isaan, where many people in Khon Kaen city support the PAD and disparage people like the farmers in Ban Huay Chan, 12 kilometers to the north.
“Khon Kaen University and Khon Kaen city look more like Bangkok,” said Suthipun Jitpimolmard, a professor of neurology at the university. “Most people around here don’t support Thaksin. Only rural people who don’t get the correct information.”
Suthipun was among a small crowd of people who gathered the other night in the city’s central square to watch a live broadcast of angry, nonstop speakers at the Bangkok demonstration.
“It is impossible to change the way rural people vote,” said Achara Chantasuwan, 53, a librarian, who sat on a red plastic chair in front of the big-screen outdoor broadcast.
“That’s why the PAD wants to introduce the New Politics,” she said, referring to a plan in which 70 percent of the parliamentary seats would be appointed by professional groups, while just 30 percent would be elected by voters.
“They’ll have the right to vote, but it will not allow their vote to dominate our country,” she said. “If we let people be like that, we cannot develop our country.”
But the ruptures run far deeper than a clash between city and countryside, she said. They are dividing friends, colleagues and even family members, who have sometimes stopped talking to each other.
Sompap Bunnag, 62, a social worker, stopped at the screening for a few minutes on his way to Bangkok to take part in the PAD demonstration. He said social activists here were also split into opposing camps and were struggling to save their friendships.
“When we meet, we agree that we won’t talk about politics,” he said. “Just, ‘How are you, how’s your family?’ Things like that.”
He said he would catch an overnight bus to Bangkok and join the protest in the morning. In his hand he held a set of newly bought plastic swimming goggles to protect his eyes in case of a tear gas attack by the police.
“I don’t know what’s going to happen,” he said, speaking of the violence that threatens to break out again. “I hope nothing happens.”
Police used powerful tear gas
An investigator said that the Thai riot police, while trying to disperse crowds of anti-government demonstrators last week, used a cheap Chinese tear gas that contained an explosive powerful enough to rip craters in the ground, The Associated Press reported from Bangkok on Monday.
The investigation by forensics experts and a human rights commission could explain why several protesters had limbs and feet blown off and at least two people died in clashes with the police.
Police officials insist they only fired tear gas into the crowd. Investigators found that the police used three types of tear gas - from China, the United States and Spain - but “relied heavily on tear gas made in China,” said Pornthip Rojanasunand, director of the Central Institute of Forensic Science.
Pornthip said an experiment showed that the Chinese gas contained high levels of RDX - a chemical commonly used to make bombs and not a standard component of tear gas intended for crowd control. Pornthip’s institute conducted the investigation as part of an inquiry into the clashes by the National Human Rights Commission.
One of the people killed in the clashes was a 28-year-old woman who had a wound on her chest that was “roughly the same size” as a Chinese-made tear gas canister, Pornthip said. She said it was too soon to tell whether the Chinese tear gas caused the woman’s death. Queen Sirikit presided on Monday over a cremation ceremony for the woman, which was also attended by thousands of supporters of the anti-government movement.
Post a Comment