With leaders rounded up and soldiers deployed in their rural heartlands, Thailand’s Red Shirts have gone to ground, but experts say they will regroup against the military’s toppling of the government they helped elect.
The red-clad street protest movement, established in the wake of a 2006 coup to rally support for ousted Thai prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra, has warned that the kingdom’s long-running political conflict could descend into civil war.
The Red Shirts say they have been hit hard by a crackdown since Royal Thai Army Commander-in-Chief Prayut Chan-ocha deposed the Thaksin-allied government on Thursday last week and seized wide-ranging powers.
Several Thai activists said they have been hemmed in by a big army presence, detentions and closures of influential local radio stations used to spread their pro-Thaksin message.
“There are no leaders,” said Aporn Sarakham, a former Thai senator and the wife of Kwanchai Pripana, a hardline Red Shirt from northeastern Thailand detained by the army on Friday.
The movement’s hierarchy — from the firebrand protest leaders to local village heads — are being held or harassed or have gone to ground to avoid detention.
“The Red Shirts do not know what to do... We have to wait and see what the army does and what our leaders in other provinces and districts say,” Amnuay Boontee, a Red Shirt coordinator in Buriram Province, said by telephone.
Telephone lines have also been cut, the activists said. Calls to several other leading Red Shirts could not be connected.
“In our hearts, we are against the coup, but people are scared. All of our leaders are detained,” a Red Shirt leader requesting anonymity said. “People are sitting and talking about it, but things are quiet.”
Thaksin still draws strong support in northern Thailand for his populist policies, such as nearly free healthcare, micro-loans and generous rice subsidies that satisfied the Red Shirts’ burgeoning political and economic aspirations.
Parties led or aligned with Thaksin have won every completed election since 2001, most recently in 2011 under his younger sister, former Thai prime minister Yingluck Shinawatra.
While the Red Shirts may for now be cramped by martial law, observers say they are likely to regroup in coming months. They foresee protests, road blocks and moves to cripple Thai provincial governments.
Attacks by armed militant cells and a crescendo of calls for a parallel government — a direct challenge to the army’s writ over the country — could also be on the cards.
“The chance of violence is very strong,” said Kan Yuenyong, executive director of the Siam Intelligence Unit think tank. “I don’t expect we will have a kind of civil war yet, but we will see a kind of insurgency or random violence in different areas.”
An analysis by IHS Country Risk said there was a “real risk” of Red Shirt paramilitaries attacking opposition-linked commercial assets in central Bangkok.
They were also likely to block road access to various districts of the capital.
“The Red Shirts’ strategy could center around supporting a retreat by leaders of the deposed ... government to their strongholds to effectively control swathes of the north and northeast, with the military controlling Bangkok and the south,” according to the analysis.
Soldiers were deployed over the weekend at anti-coup rallies in Chiang Mai — the northern home town of the Shinawatra family.
A local police source said more than 10 people had been arrested there.
Elsewhere, the army said it had arrested more than 20 people allegedly intent on a “large-scale attack” in Khon Kaen, one of the largest northeastern cities.
An army spokesman said the suspects were arrested with bombs and hundreds of bullets.
Over the weekend small, sporadic, but vociferous anti-coup rallies took place across Bangkok, although the army chief on Monday threatened to take action against protesters and even their families under martial law.
Antipathy toward the establishment-backed army runs deep among the Red Shirts.
Scores of people died in 2010 in a military crackdown on a Red Shirt rally in Bangkok, held to protest the earlier ousting of a Thaksin-linked government by a judicial coup.
Prayut is widely seen as having played a big role in that crackdown.
Thaksin’s opponents, who occupied parts of Bangkok for nearly seven months before last week’s coup, want to expunge the country of the influence of the billionaire tycoon-turned-politician, whom they accuse of corruption.
Prayut has imposed sweeping curbs on freedom of expression and political gatherings.
Senior Red Shirts were believed to remain in detention on Monday, while the leader of the anti-Thaksin protest movement was released on bail.
Despite the heavy-handed tactics and history of bloodshed, the Red Shirts said they would not be cowed by the military.
“We are not scared. We stopped being scared of the army a long time ago,” said Bird Pripana, Kwanchai’s son.
Two sets of economic data released last week by the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) have drawn mixed reactions from the public: One on the nation’s economic performance in the first quarter of the year and the other on Taiwan’s household wealth distribution in 2021. GDP growth for the first quarter was faster than expected, at 6.51 percent year-on-year, an acceleration from the previous quarter’s 4.93 percent and higher than the agency’s February estimate of 5.92 percent. It was also the highest growth since the second quarter of 2021, when the economy expanded 8.07 percent, DGBAS data showed. The growth
In the intricate ballet of geopolitics, names signify more than mere identification: They embody history, culture and sovereignty. The recent decision by China to refer to Arunachal Pradesh as “Tsang Nan” or South Tibet, and to rename Tibet as “Xizang,” is a strategic move that extends beyond cartography into the realm of diplomatic signaling. This op-ed explores the implications of these actions and India’s potential response. Names are potent symbols in international relations, encapsulating the essence of a nation’s stance on territorial disputes. China’s choice to rename regions within Indian territory is not merely a linguistic exercise, but a symbolic assertion
More than seven months into the armed conflict in Gaza, the International Court of Justice ordered Israel to take “immediate and effective measures” to protect Palestinians in Gaza from the risk of genocide following a case brought by South Africa regarding Israel’s breaches of the 1948 Genocide Convention. The international community, including Amnesty International, called for an immediate ceasefire by all parties to prevent further loss of civilian lives and to ensure access to life-saving aid. Several protests have been organized around the world, including at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) and many other universities in the US.
Every day since Oct. 7 last year, the world has watched an unprecedented wave of violence rain down on Israel and the occupied Palestinian Territories — more than 200 days of constant suffering and death in Gaza with just a seven-day pause. Many of us in the American expatriate community in Taiwan have been watching this tragedy unfold in horror. We know we are implicated with every US-made “dumb” bomb dropped on a civilian target and by the diplomatic cover our government gives to the Israeli government, which has only gotten more extreme with such impunity. Meantime, multicultural coalitions of US