The Beast Let Loose

Photo by Paula Bronstein /Getty Images

The sun shines on Bangkok this morning. Yet the 'beast' ranges free. Mobs looting, burning, fighting, killing. The frightening force of hatred, frustration and revenge let loose.

Though we are bathed in beautiful light, our city is cloaked in the darkness of violence. We are witnessing Thailand's blackest hours.

At dawn armoured personnel carriers rumbled towards the red barricades - a tangle of bamboo, razor wire and tires laid along the edge of Rama IV road, in the heart of Bangkok.

Columns of troops huddled nervously behind the hulking, clumsy vehicles as the army began its long anticipated, and much feared, crackdown.

Photo by Paula Bronstein /Getty Images

Soon the air was crackling with the sound of gunfire and explosions. Within minutes reports of the first victims came in. Limp bodies, eyes staring blankly into eternity, began appearing on our screens. Thais killing Thais.

Against a backdrop of spiraling violence government spokesmen, surly and expressionless, almost apologetic-sounding, told an apprehensive nation - without the slightest hint of irony - that they were bringing the situation under control.

They sat before a blank white backdrop strangely unadorned of the Thai flag or the habitual emblems of royal authority. That blank backdrop seemed ominous; hinting at an empty-seeming future.

Shortly after, leaders of the Red Shirt protest, jittery and grim, announced they were surrendering. They asked their supporters, who had stood with them for over 60 days, to go home. Their original demand - for the government to dissolve parliament and hold fresh elections - went unmentioned. They surely understood, as did all those who watched them, that Thailand was beyond talk of politics.

Was this a victory for the government? I suppose it was, of sorts. The Red leaders had been arrested. The protest at Rajprasong had been dispersed. Mission accomplished.

As the Red Shirt protesters fled Rajprasong and their leaders were hustled into the nearby Police headquarters, the words of a journalist friend came back to me. "If they end it with an attack on the protesters at Rajprasong," he said, "it will be just the beginning."

And now Thailand burns. Mobs have attacked and set fire to municipal buildings in the northeastern provinces of Khon Kaen, Ubol Ratchathani, Mukdaharn, Nakorn Ratchasima and Udon Thani. In the northern capital of Chiang Mai there are reports that soldiers have fired live rounds at red shirt demonstrators.

In the capital the air is thick with the acrid black smoke of burning tires. It hangs like the dark clouds of a gathering storm. The scenes are apocalyptic. Many of Bangkok's glitzy malls, temples of the joyful consumerism that became a hallmark of life in this city, are aflame. Banks are being torched. The media itself is under attack.

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How is it that so many Thais should yield to such wanton destruction of their own capital, once a gleaming emblem of this nation's success?

Perhaps those burning the banks have little need for them. They are among the legions who live in debt. Perhaps those destroying Bangkok's swanky department stores do so because they never had the means to shop there. Those venting their fury against various symbols of State authority feel, perhaps, that successive governments have paid only passing attention to their needs.

While it would be reassuring to believe that the Red Shirts were merely a rent-a-mob acting at the behest of former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra and his cronies, the roots of this crisis reach beyond the elite benefactors of the Red Shirts' protests.

In order to build a political constituency, Thaksin and his proxies shone a spotlight on huge economic disparities, stoking latent frustrations among a majority of Thais who have enjoyed only a tiny share of the spectacular wealth created here in recent decades. They peeled away a thin veneer of national unity to reveal gaping inequalities that have now divided the Thai nation in two.

As darkness falls on this tragic day, the fires that have been lit will burn and multiply through the night. Tomorrow we will awake to a new dawn. The sun will shine again but I have a feeling that Thailand and its capital will never be the same.

Photo by Paula Bronstein /Getty Images

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