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The specter of civil war is routinely discussed as a possible outcome to Thailand’s now-systemic political and social crisis. This is an improbable outcome given the widely differing and frequently opposed expectations, grievances and fears that underpin the issues driving the country’s protracted political instability.

Thailand is not simply experiencing a binary struggle between pro- and antigovernment forces but is in the midst of a complex series of revolts that involve much of the population and most institutions. The depth and force of commitment may vary, but the divisions between classes and regions and within key organizations cannot be dealt with through a superficial compromise between discredited political leaders.

The crisis, which began for the more perceptive members of the country’s traditional elite in January 2001 with Thaksin Shinawatra’s first election victory, now defines Thailand’s political and social system.

Thaksin’s massive popular reaffirmation in the February 2005 polls, an existential threat to Thailand’s established order, ignited a series of revolts that now engulf the country. These mostly passive rebellions are largely concealed by the noisier narrative that the crisis is a simple struggle between the impoverished, neglected and marginalized countryside seeking redress from the wealthy, distant and disdainful capital city.

The now familiar color-coded revolt gives an impression of order and symmetry. In reality, the crisis more closely represents the “million mutiny” phase of social and political upheaval than the coherent coalescence and radicalization required to move general disorder into nation-breaking anarchy.

Rather than presenting unified ideological or structural fronts, the organic components of the Thai drama often have conflicted beliefs and sentiments toward the other players and within their own groups.

Competing tensions within the military are regarded as responsible for the army’s reluctance to support successive governments in restoring order — either against the pro-establishment yellow-shirted People’s Alliance for Democracy when it occupied Bangkok for months in 2008 or now against the red version of this similar strategy. The much-reviled police are, by contrast, seen as supporting the Red Shirts.

Even the monkhood is riven by what many junior clergy appear to view as the contradiction between Buddhism’s high status at the apogee of Thailand’s elite pantheon and its mission to bring succor to country’s most disadvantaged. This raises the possibility that some of the clergy may take to the streets with the reds, much as Buddhist monks did in Burma during the 2007 antigovernment protests.

The Red Shirts’ appeal to the rural population of the northern and northeastern provinces reflects economic, class, social and even ethnic divisions between them and those in distant Bangkok. The Yellow Shirts — created, funded and protected by the military, the aristocracy, the bureaucracy and the largely ethnic-Chinese urban professional and commercial classes — reflect an unwillingness to share status and wealth with the masses.

The “royal institution” is at the heart of the present national melee. King Bhumibol Adulyadej’s failure to deliver even a runic phrase or comment that could be directly linked to the present crisis can be added to the numberless revolts that now characterize Thai society.

This maze of passive and active revolts complicates any resolution to the crisis. Millions of Thais have incrementally abandoned or ignored the bonds — or shackles — that had traditionally defined relations between classes and within the country’s key institutions.

In the absence of any new charismatic leader emerging who can complete either the red agenda of mass democracy or enforce the yellow intent to reserve political power for a small elite, Thailand risks slipping into an era of sullen apathy that leaves grievances to fester and petty ambitions to flourish. The response to such a period, which may well combine Burma’s ruthless authoritarianism with Cambodia’s past displays of hysterical nativism, may serve as the precursor for a coherent populist revolt that could violently shatter Thailand’s mythic national consensus for generations.

 

GM Greenwood is an associate with Allan & Associates, a Hong Kong-based political and security risk consultancy.

Asia Sentinel