Of Barricades and Madness

From a distance the barricades, bristling with bamboo pikes, resemble tousled oversized porcupines ambling across a street.

Close up they look more like urban art installations: chaotic yet carefully arranged sculptures assembled from rags, bamboo, razor wire and old rubber tires. A revolutionary art project of sorts and a direct, almost poetic, expression of the differences splitting Thailand down the middle.

In reality, of course, the barricades are more than poetry. They are battle lines, frontiers even, separating ‘Red Bangkok’ from the rest of the city. The rags and tires aren’t there for art; they are to be burned. The ‘porcupine’ barricades will then become a wall of fire.

“You go Iraq?” joke Bangkok taxi drivers if you give a destination near the barricades - where soldiers are now entrenched behind sandbags. The drivers, like me, have never actually been to Iraq. But they’ve seen the pictures on TV and can’t help but make the comparison.

Like Iraq there are bombs. Seventy attacks, mainly with M-79 grenades, have been reported in or around the city this year. In April alone 27 people were killed as a result of political violence and more than 900 were injured.

Unlike Iraq Bangkok’s camouflaged combat troops, clad in heavy flak jackets, full metal helmets and laden with weapons, patrol in opulent, skyscraper-lined business districts. They share their war zone with polite-looking office workers in white shirts and with elegant women mincing along in thigh hugging miniskirts.

It’s more surreal than real.

On Patpong, one of Bangkok’s red light districts, a squad of soldiers, surly and bored, stands guard. A few meters away a bar offers S and M. Girls touting for custom hover at the entrance. They smack passers-by with bamboo rods, enticingly. Two different kinds of menace side-by-side: one playful, the other less so.

Scenes as twisted and as quirky as the barricades themselves; barricades that seem to grow more and more tangled by the day, reflecting the growing chaos as this crisis deepens.

One senses a loss of innocence in this city once defined by its smiles, its sense of fun and its penchant for a party.

In spite of the traffic jams, the hassles, the corruption and the pollution Bangkok, for all its less-than-innocent naughtiness, retained a certain ‘lightness’, a refusal to be serious. A French friend and longtime resident compares Bangkok to a ‘jardin des enfants’. He is right. There has always been a youthful playfulness.

In the shadow of violent street battles now raging in the city, however, the glint in Bangkok’s eye has dulled. The city no longer sparkles. It is the dark side that shines now.

Has Bangkok gone mad? Or was the madness always there, waiting to burst free?

Photo by Athit Perawongmetha/Getty Images

Behind the calm smiles, the well-ordered queues, the gleaming shopping malls, amidst the chaos one has long sensed a lurking, sometimes menacing, schizophrenia - a duality fed by the many contradictions which, till now, passed for normal.

Today the schizophrenia no longer lurks. It rages wild. The contradictions, once tamed by tolerance, have broken off their uneasy marriage and are fighting openly in the streets.

The stifling heat might have something to do with the madness. For those sleeping at the protest sites ‘cool’ is a distant concept. Boiling is the reality – both emotionally and physically.

In the air conditioned towers of logic, Western analysts who dare to enter the maze of Thai politics soon find themselves disorientated by endless blind alleys. Understanding is the mirage. Just when it starts to make sense, just when you think you’ve pinned it down something strange happens and it slips away from you, again.

Hidden beneath so many layers of propaganda, with so much deception and shadow play it is hard to filter fact from fiction. Tragedy, betrayal, suspense, murder and even farce are the ingredients of this ever twisting drama.

While one senses a desire on all sides to reach for something better, a desire to see the country somehow survive the terrible shock of the King’s eventual passing, an unseemly and bloody power struggle is poisoning what should be a great opportunity: to usher in a new era of reform.

The most worrying barricades I now see around me are those being erected in people’s hearts. We are witnessing the dark side of Thailand’s mysterious, captivating, sometimes terrifying, passion.