The Rough Road to Reconciliation

Credit: Kerek Wongsa/Reuteurs

The protesters have returned home and the streets have been scrubbed clean. The malls bustle anew and the traffic is jammed again.

It’s business as usual.

As painful memories of the blood spilled on Bangkok’s streets begin to ebb, Thailand’s suave Prime Minister, Abhisit Vejajiva, looks calm and confident. After two miserable months, the tide seems finally to have turned in his favour.

His Ministers are telling the world that the situation in Thailand has been restored to ‘normal’. His coalition government is busily setting about the task of post conflict reconciliation.

As if reconciliation were merely a navigational challenge, the government has revealed a road map. Reconciliation in five easy steps, says Prime Minister Abhisit; making a gargantuan challenge sound as easy as a drive in the country.

But has Thailand returned to ‘normal’? Will reconciliation really be that simple?

Or are we mistaking calm for normalcy, a lack of fighting for real peace, the appearances of an open democracy led by an urbane Eton-educated technocrat for the reality of a military-backed regime that is riding roughshod over basic freedoms; chasing down its opponents and muzzling its critics in the media?

While 20 or so provinces remain under emergency rule and while the government continues to be shadowed by the all-powerful Committee for the Resolution for Emergency Situation (CRES), it requires a considerable stretch of the imagination to believe that Thailand has returned to ‘normal’.

In the aftermath of the worst civil unrest in Thailand’s modern history, which saw 99 killed and 1,900 injured, the battle for Thailand’s future has, for the moment, shifted from the street and into the realm of media.

Information and spin constitute the new front line.

Having berated international correspondents for inaccurate reporting and failing to grasp the complexities of Thailand’s crisis, the Thai government is now driving home its own conveniently simplified storyline.

It goes like this.

The Thai nation is under threat from a ruthless former dictator, Thaksin Shinawatra, and must be protected. The Red Shirts have morphed from protesters with legitimate grievances into terrorists and anti-monarchists who must be stopped before they transform Thailand into a republic.

Many thousands of good folk, the ‘poo burisut’ or ‘pure people’ as the government calls them, have been subverted by unscrupulous power-hungry elites who are using the media to mobilize the masses, inciting hatred and social divisions.

The ‘pure people’, who face real problems in the countryside, may have gone home but the dangers are still there. The government must be vigilant – hence the continued State of Emergency in many areas.

Elections will be held, but not until the situation has returned to normal, whatever ‘normal’ is and whenever that may be.

As the government seeks to reconcile and reassure with one hand, it is repressing with the other.

In the north and northeast of the country, Red Shirt strongholds, police and military units are reportedly hunting down and arresting suspected Red Shirts.

Several Red Shirt guards have been mysteriously assassinated, raising concerns that extrajudicial killings now may be part of a shadowy unofficial campaign to stymie the movement.

Media and free speech have taken a hit too.

Thailand’s democracy is starting to resemble Indonesia under Suharto, when citizens were told to exercise their democratic freedoms ‘with responsibility’, a veiled warning that criticism of the government would not be tolerated.

The screws seem to tighten with each passing week.

Citing draconian lese majeste laws officials have already shut down tens of thousands of websites and silenced scores of pro Red Shirt community radio stations.

More than 100 prominent people have been publicly blacklisted for supporting the Red Shirts and their assets have been frozen. 417 people have been detained under emergency laws, which allow for imprisonment without evidence or a fair trial. Human rights organisations say as many as 50 people are still missing in the aftermath of the crackdown.

While the government’s tough line may play well to some sections of the population, it is profoundly antagonistic to others; most notably among those already sympathetic to the Red Shirt cause.

In an already polarized, partially traumatized, society such policies are hardly a recipe for advancing the cause of reconciliation. Instead of including its foes in the reconciliation process, the government seems bent not only on excluding them but on silencing and arresting them too.

In using the State to suppress and repress it is creating a climate not of trust, the only ground from which reconciliation can grow, but of fear and resentment. If the government continues down this path, the very divisions it seeks to heal will likely widen.

Reconciliation must be more than a public relations campaign. It must reach down to the roots of Thai society, to those areas where a sense of exclusion and discrimination have fostered deep anger and frustration. It must involve sacrifices and concessions that will be politically counter intuitive for a government that was, in May, literally at war with the Red Shirts.

Most important of all, the government must apply the law with justice and impartiality.

To do so would be evidence of courage and an significant step towards dealing with one of the most powerful issues fueling recent unrest - that of double standards.

To do so Abhisit's government must bring to justice those responsible for occupying Government House and the country’s two international airports in 2008, actions no less worthy of the label ‘terrorism’ than the Red Shirt protests in Bangkok’s commercial district of Rajaprasong.

Unless it acts against lawbreakers on both sides of the political divide, the government will be unable to generate the trust and moral authority it needs to transform sensible talk of reconciliation into a process capable of healing the still deepening rifts that threaten the peace and stability of Thailand.