Vi. “One of the Unresolved Mysteries of History” 1
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VI. “ONE OF THE UNRESOLVED MYSTERIES OF HISTORY” The most momentous event in the history of the Chakri dynasty since the 1932 revolution that stripped the monarchy of absolute power unfolded quite unexpectedly shortly before dusk on Sunday, September 19, 2010, in the middle of a Bangkok traffic intersection surrounded by luxury malls and five star hotels and haunted by restless spirits. It was over within a few minutes, and many Thais remain unaware that it ever happened at all. It was four years to the day since royalist generals had seized power in a coup that snuffed out the precious embers of political progress so many Thais had risked their lives for in the Black May battles of 1992, and four months to the day since the military had crushed another mass pro-democracy rally in downtown Bangkok, storming the fortified encampment occupied by thousands of Red Shirt protesters who had blockaded the Ratchaprasong intersection for weeks to demand new elections. If Ratchadamnoen represents the heart of old Bangkok, Ratchaprasong is the symbolic centre of the modern capital. As Benedict Anderson wrote in Withdrawal Symptoms: As late as 1960, Bangkok could still be described as the “Venice of the East”, a somnolent old-style royal harbour-city dominated by canals, temples and palaces. Fifteen years later, many of the canals had been filled in to form roads and many of the temples had fallen into decay. The whole centre of gravity of the capital had moved eastwards, away from the royal compounds and Chinese ghettoes by the Chao Phraya river to a new cosmopolitan zone dominated visually and politically by vast office buildings, banks, hotels and shopping plazas. Ratchaprasong is a hectic traffic junction about two and a half miles east of the old royal quarter. On the northwest corner is the vast Central World Plaza shopping, cinema and ten- pin bowling megaplex, which boasts of being among the biggest malls in the world. On the northeast side are two more giant malls: Gaysorn Plaza, which lays claim to the title of Bangkok’s most upscale designer shopping destination, and the strangely shaped hulk of the Big C superstore. Just to the north of this consumer paradise is the Klong Saen Saab, the canal of ten thousand mosquito stings, one of Bangkok’s remaining working waterways that cuts a fetid path through the city all the way from the Chao Phraya river in the west to the eastern suburbs and beyond; it is the fastest way to get from the old Bangkok to the new. Two more huge buildings dominate the south side of the Ratchaprasong intersection: the police hospital on the southwest corner, and on the southeast the 380 room Grand Hyatt Erawan hotel, a 22-storey tower rising from greying faux-neoclassical columns. In its shadow, on the corner of the junction, is the Erawan shrine, dedicated to the Hindu creation god Brahma and built in 1956 to appease the bad karma unleashed by construction work in the area. At the centre of the shrine, a four-faced gilded statue of Brahma sits inside a spirit house; the enclosure is draped with hundreds of flower garlands left as offerings. Peddlers on the sidewalk hawk small birds in wooden cages, offering visitors to the shrine a conveniently easy way to do a good deed and gain some merit by paying to release them. Overhead, the two lines of the mass transit Skytrain system converge in a brutalist concrete thicket, blocking out the sun. The violent struggle that convulsed the Thai capital in April and May 2010 began in the old quarter, already haunted by the uncounted ghosts of the dead from past political violence. The killing started on the evening of April 10 after Thai soldiers launched an operation to 1 clear Red Shirt protesters occupying the Phan Fa bridge, scene of so many past battles in Thailand’s bloody political history. The commander of the operation was assassinated in a targeted grenade attack at the Khok Wua intersection. Shocked soldiers beat a panicked retreat, firing live ammunition indiscriminately at mostly unarmed protesters and bystanders. At least 20 civilians and five soldiers were killed that evening, and afterwards the focal point of the protests shifted eastwards, to the commercial heart of new Bangkok. The Red Shirts abandoned the Phan Fa bridge but consolidated their grip on the Ratchaprasong intersection, which they occupied for 46 days, turning it into a sprawling urban village of makeshift tents housing food stalls, dormitories, shops and clinics, surrounded by barricades made from tyres and sharpened bamboo poles. Bangkok has long had a massive Lao population from Thailand’s impoverished northeastern Isaan region: they are the underclass who work in the suburban factories and sweatshops, drive the buses and tuktuks and motorbikes and taxicabs, clean corporate offices and affluent homes, and service the sexual appetite of tens of thousands of customers in the massage parlours and sex bars of the capital’s industrialized prostitution industry. Bangkok’s more affluent residents used their services every day, but never paid them much attention, until suddenly they took control of two square miles of prime real estate in the middle of the modern city. For Bangkok’s old establishment and increasingly prosperous and influential middle classes, it was an outrageous inversion of hierarchy, a violation of the fundamental rules that held their whole universe together. Ratchaprasong had become a zone of dangerous disorder, like the mass gathering of students in the grounds of Thammasat University in 1976, a very public challenge not only to the traditional ascendancy of the elite but also to the caste system in which the middle classes had carved out a privileged position. It provoked enormous anger among those who felt their elevated place in society was under threat. It was an assault on the very foundations of order and harmony, and it had to be crushed. The commercial districts around Ratchaprasong and Lumphini Park became a battleground, as Thai troops tightened the noose around the Red Shirt encampment, skirmishing with “black shirt” gunmen among the protesters. On the corner of Silom and Rama IV roads, the Dusit Thani hotel, one of the bastions of the establishment’s social scene, was raked with gunfire and had two gaping craters blown in its facade by M79 grenades. More grenade attacks killed and wounded office workers waiting for the Skytrain to take them home. Violent political struggle was no longer just being fought on the old royalist establishment’s home turf – it had invaded the heart of modern, white-collar, consumerist Bangkok. Dozens of people were shot dead in the streets radiating out from Ratchaprasong during the harrowing days of mid- May, as the army tightened the noose around the Red Shirt encampment. After the military broke through the barricades of the Red Shirt encampment at dawn on May 19, arsonists set dozens of buildings ablaze around the city, and an inferno consumed much of the Central World megaplex, sending a thick column of smoke into the sky above Ratchaprasong. Shortly afterwards, as night was falling, special forces troops positioned on the elevated Skytrain tracks fired volleys of high velocity bullets into the adjacent temple grounds of Wat Pathum Wanaram, which had been designated as a safe haven and where around 2,000 unarmed civilians were sheltering. Six people were killed, three of them volunteer medics working in a medical tent in the temple compound. By the time it was all over, 91 people had been killed in the battles of April and May 2010, most of them unarmed civilians, new casualties of the long struggle over how Thailand should be governed, joining the toll of the dead from 1973, 1976, and 1992. The spirits of the dead from Thailand’s decades of political conflict had captured new territory, no longer confined to the old battlegrounds of the royal quarter. Now Ratchaprasong was haunted too, and the ghosts were harder to ignore. In Revolution Interrupted, Tyrell Haberkorn writes about the efforts made by the Thai state throughout modern history to rob the dispossessed of their voices: 2 Since the transformation from absolute to constitutional monarchy on 24 June 1932, governance in Thailand has depended on the silence of marginalized people… It is not simply that those with power have not listened to the voices of marginalized people, but rather that political life in Thailand has often required and sustained their exclusion. But as Thais are very well aware, the dead can be more powerful than the living. Those ignored when alive can sometimes find a voice in death, and force their way into the historical narrative. As Alan Klima wrote in The Funeral Casino, victims of past massacres have influenced the course of Thailand’s political struggle long after their deaths: The struggle over the representation of these deaths in various forms of public media has been crucial to the outcome of each of those incidents, which occurred in 1973, 1976 and again in 1992. The dead have no power if they are not remembered. Thailand’s long political conflict has been accompanied by a parallel struggle between those trying to honour and commemorate the sacrifice of those who died fighting for democracy, and those seeking to scrub them from history and erase their place in collective memory. Rituals of remembrance have long been central to Thai political resistance, with the photographs of the dead displayed in public places, at shrines and monuments, along with offerings of candles, incense, fruit and flowers. They are remembered too through art, music and drama: the pretext for the 1976 massacre at Thammasat was a mock-hanging staged by students inside the university grounds, which rightists claimed was intended to represent the execution of the unpopular crown prince; in fact, it was a re-enactment of the lynching of two trade unionists by police in Nakhon Pathom a week earlier.