BANGKOK IS LITERALLY UP IN FLAMES?and Filipinos must take note. It could?ve been us. It could still be us.
We have not witnessed such open recourse to violence in urban centers in our recent history. Neither Edsa I nor Edsa II entailed the firing of live ammunition against civilians, and indeed we celebrate both events precisely for their non-violence. If at all, the bloodiest was Edsa III on May 1, 2001, which cost the lives of several Erap followers who protested Erap?s arrest at an agitated rally in Mendiola.
The most recent armed confrontation we?ve seen in Manila was the November 2008 assault on the Manila Peninsula when Brig. Gen. Danny Lim and now Sen. Antonio Trillanes walked out of the courtroom, where they were being tried, onto the streets of Makati. That was shocking enough for us?the TV video of an armored personnel carrier ramming through the lobby of a five-star hotel and of snipers and troops positioning themselves along Ayala Avenue. Yet that would?ve been a minor skirmish compared to the ?mini-civil war? that Bangkok witnessed the past weeks.
Pro-Thaksin Shinawatra ?red shirt? protesters sealed off the heart of the city in barricades made of wood, bamboo poles and tires that they would strategically set on fire. Armed mainly with makeshift bombs and slingshots, they built fortified camps on major roads, in front of hotels, and under their own MRT. In response to dispersal operations, they torched the stock exchange building and Central World shopping center, one of the largest in Asia, took over a TV station and forced it off the air.
Last week, the government cut off all water and electricity from the war zones. On Wednesday this week, after the protesters ignored the government?s ultimatum, the army sent tanks to overrun the barricades, and placed the city under an 8-p.m.-to-6-a.m. curfew. Some 72 civilians have lost their lives, most of them protesters and one of them an Italian journalist. The most prominent victim was renegade general Khattiya Sawasdipol, better known as Commander Red, who was shot in the head while being interviewed by the New York Times.
At the height of the showdown, luxury hotels became like high-class refugee camps for wealthy residents evacuating their homes in the conflict zones, and even they had to be evacuated from these hotels when the fighting moved closer.
Yet Filipinos have paid scant attention to this crisis in what is virtually a next-door neighbor, given Southeast Asia?s geography, and next-of-kin given our parallel political dilemmas. This is easily understandable. We have been so preoccupied with the fate of our own democracy, which barely survived its most recent test in our experiment with automated elections.
It could?ve been us. The Comelec gave us all a scare one-week before Election Day when it recalled 76,000 compact flash cards containing the program that would count the ballots because the programs couldn?t count right. Worse, it replaced and installed the cards without the requisite testing. Apparently this was only the most public of several near-misses in the computerization process. Had the national election results deviated dramatically from the poll surveys, all hell would have broken loose.
And even today, it could still be us. It is easy to say that the worst is over, e.g., all that talk of failure of elections, the chain of succession to the presidency, and the prospects of a junta to fill a constitutional vacuum. But in Thailand, the latest fighting wasn?t the first nor it seems would it be the last. And, for us, the May 2010 presidential elections ain?t over till the congressional canvass is over.
What had changed in Thailand are the social alignments of the ?reds,? and the ideological position of the ?yellows.? Before, the reds were typically poor or provincial folk who had benefited from Thaksin?s populist programs for health, education and welfare. This time around, they have styled themselves as the United Front for Democracy Against Dictatorship (UDD), and include anti-military students and activists who oppose the traditional elites and who reject the judicial subversion of the popular will. Thaksin?s electoral triumphs had been thwarted several times by the courts: by setting aside the vote for technical violations; by firing an elected prime minister for appearing on a TV cooking show; and by dissolving Thaksin?s party altogether. The poor and the activists make a lethal combination. They fuse the raw sense of grievance over the past with inspiring visions for the future.
In turn, the yellow shirts have carried the banner of anti-corruption and transparency, and accused Thaksin of inadequate respect for their monarch, but those claims have begun to lose their sheen. The aging King Bhumipol is beloved still, but in the twilight of his years, there are moves to repeal the lčse majesté laws that have insulated him from critics. The middle-class yellow shirts have also shown that they confuse activism with noblesse oblige. They invoke democracy and the rule of law but can?t seem to accept the results of democratic elections.
Bangkok can teach us many lessons, and the resemblances are uncanny. Both Bangkok and Manila have nominally democratic governments veneered thinly over weak institutions. For Thailand, electoral politics has not worked. This they tried to remedy through the courts, which in turn were perverted to political uses. For the Filipino nations? yellow shirts, it has worked mercifully well that this time around, the candidate worthy of winning its trust was also capable of winning its votes.
But we cannot build a democracy based simply on good luck. We need to build strong institutions for when fortune doesn?t smile and we are thrown to the mercy of our fates.
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