andreasbader hat geschrieben:Gut, lassen wir das so stehen. Aber die Flughafenbesetzungen 2008 waren so etwas wie die franz. Revolution rückwärts, oder ?
Nun ja, die AsiaNews nennt es "infamous".
Ich stelle hier mal Auszuege aus einem Artikel aus der AsiaNews vom June 4-17, 2010 ein, den ich gestern las.
Da es sich hier um einen offensichtlich unzensierten Artikel handelt nehme ich die Anmerkungen nicht nur zur Kenntnis sondern auch noch ernst.
Selbst wenn dieser sich nicht in allem mit Euren Aussagen, Vermutungen und Behauptungen deckt.
Und gar nicht soweit weg von der Berichterstattung und Analyse der deutschen Medien ist - um die es ja hier in diesem Thread geht.
Special Report
The Battle for Thailand
Walden Bello in Manila
Philippine Daily Inquirer
Publication Date : 04-06-2010
The surrender of the red-shirt leadership and repatriation of thousands of rural folk to their provinces will not end the red-shirt challenge. There will be a next phase of the struggle. But the main push will come from the people themselves
Nearly a week after the event, Thailand is still stunned by the military assault on the red-shirt encampment in the tourist centre of the capital city of Bangkok on May 19. Captured red-shirt leaders and militants were treated like POWs and the lower class red-shirt mass base like an occupied country. No doubt about it, a state of civil war exists in this country, and civil wars are never pretty.
The last few weeks have hardened the Bangkok middle class in their view that the red shirts are ‘terrorists’ in the pocket of ousted prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra, at the same time convincing the lower classes that their electoral majority counts for nothing. ‘Pro-Thaksin’ versus ‘Anti-Thaksin’: this simplified discourse actually veils what is—to borrow Mao’s words—a class war with Thai characteristics.
Epic tragedy
No doubt there will be stories told about the eight weeks of the ‘Bangkok Commune.’ As in all epic tragedies, truth will be entangled with myth. But of one thing there will be no doubt: that the government’s decision to order the Thai military against civilian protesters can never be justified.
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Class war
The local and domestic media have portrayed the red shirts as a lower class peasant rabble from the country’s impoverished northeast invading Bangkok. This is a distortion, claim many red shirts. Some estimate that the masses that made up the red- shirt demonstrators and sympathisers during the two-month long mobilisation were 70 per cent from Bangkok and its surrounding provinces, and 30 per cent from the northeast, north, and other rural areas. Those who resisted the armed assaults at the key red-shirt fortifications and refused the red-shirt leadership’s advice to disperse peacefully before the military operation were mainly young people from Bangkok’s lower class districts such as Klong Toey. One cannot deny that while it may not be the classic class war that is probably only found in Marxist theoretical writings, there is a strong class element in the struggle between the red shirts and the yellow shirts that are the government’s mass base.
Taxi drivers are mainly a red-shirt lot, and in the aftermath of May 19, they are eager to blast the government and the Bangkok rich and middle classes to anyone willing to listen. Given the way that the red shirts and hundreds of their lower-class sympathisers not only in Bangkok but throughout Thailand have been attacked, arrested and imprisoned in the last week, there is no reason to doubt the words of one driver that, “When the curfew is lifted, Thailand will witness deeds that have not been seen before in this country.”
Who ordered whom?
Thai PM Abhisit Vejjajiva ordered the assault, but the question for many is who gave Abhisit, who they see as responding to powerful figures within the Thai elite, the green light? The army command apparently did not favour an assault on civilians, and neither did the police, who largely favoured the red shirts.
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Democracy and its discontents
Perhaps a good starting point is May 1992, when the dictatorship of Gen. Suchinda Kraprayoon gave way to a new era of democratic governance. Between 1992 and 1997, elections produced three coalitions, but these were parliamentary formations dominated by traditional party bosses and elites who delivered command votes, particularly in the rural areas, owing to their control of economic and bureaucratic sources of wealth. Little was done to address the social grievances of the urban and rural poor.
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The two faces of Thaksin
It was in these circumstances that Thaksin Shinawatra, a talented manager, adept political entrepreneur and an extremely effective communicator, achieved ascendancy. Though Thaksin as a businessman had benefited from globalisation owing to his firm’s monopolistic position in private telecommunications, one of the economy’s most globalised sectors, he sensed that the financial crisis catalysed popular fears about free-market globalisation, smoldering resentment at the urban and rural elites that seemed to be cornering the country’s wealth, and anger at the international financial institutions. Upon becoming prime minister in 2001, Thaksin made a number of dazzling moves. He paid off the country’s IMF loan and kicked the Fund out of Thailand, initiated a universal health care system that allowed people to be treated for the equivalent of a dollar, imposed a moratorium on the payment of farmers’ debts, and created a one-million- baht fund for each village that villagers could invest in whichever way they wanted.
That was the side of Thaksin that won him a mass following among the country’s poor, marginalised and economically precarious sectors. But there was another side to Thaksin, the side that most of his urban and rural poor followers chose to ignore. A billionaire, Thaksin literally bought his political allies, constructing in the process a potent but subservient parliamentary coalition. He used his office to enhance his wealth and that of his cronies, seeming to lack an ability to distinguish the public interest from private gain.
Just as Thaksin appeared to have created the formula for a long stay in power supported by an electoral majority, he overreached. In January 2006, his family sold their controlling stake in telecoms conglomerate Shin Corp. for $1.87 billion to a Singapore government front called Temasek Holdings. Before the sale, Thaksin had made sure the revenue department would interpret or modify the rules to exempt him from paying taxes. This brought the enraged Bangkok middle class to the streets to demand his ouster. Feeling mortally threatened by Thaksin’s effort to redraw the landscape of Thai politics, the Thai establishment jumped onto the anti-corruption bandwagon. Unable to break Thaksin’s parliamentary majority or to achieve a critical mass on the streets to sweep him from power, the establishment pushed the military to oust Thaksin in September 2006.
Coup and continuing crisis
Thaksin’s recalcitrant mass base, along with its own mistakes, prevented the military from restabilising the country, causing it to sour on direct rule. When the post-coup military-sponsored regime exited, elections brought two pro-Thaksin parliamentary coalitions to power.
Frustrated at the polls, the elite-middle class alliance resorted to direct action, the most infamous of which was the anti-Thaksin yellow shirts’ seizure of the new Suvarnabhumi international airport in December 2008. At the same time, judicial measures were used to dissolve the dominant pro-Thaksin party and coercion was used to detach some of its members and get them to join a new coalition centered around the minority Democrats headed by Abhisit.
At that point Thaksin’s followers realised that only by mounting a show of force on the streets like the yellow shirts did could they restore their political position as the country’s majority force.
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The government says hardliners among the reds sabotaged the agreement by demanding new conditions aimed at making key government leaders accountable for 20 plus deaths in an earlier clash that took place on April 10. The red-shirt leadership, on the other hand, claimed that the haste with which the government took back its offer and ended negotiations showed it had been merely using the negotiations to buy time for the military crackdown, which came on May 19.
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But the main push will come from the people themselves. Thailand, it is clear, will never be the same. A taxi driver summed up where things stand at this point: “The Bangkok rich think we are stupid people, who can’t be trusted with democratic choice. We know what we’re doing.
So yes, they say Thaksin is corrupt. But he’s for us and he’s proven it. The Bangkok rich and middle classes see us as their enemy. If they think we’re finished, they should think again. This is not the end but the end of the beginning.”
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