The speculation in Thailand these days has mostly to do with General Prayuth and how he will manage the Thai crisis in the coming months. So far he has kept the country quiet, announcing a great many new measures in weekly broadcasts and promising a return to civilian rule, eventually. But perhaps the more important question is what the Red Shirts will do, and whether they will return to mass protest. The Red Shirts are not practitioners of nonviolence; many people felt threatened by them when they took to the streets in Bangkok in 2010. And yet it is hard not to sympathize with them. The leaders they voted for in free and fair elections have been removed from power as a result, essentially, of mob rule, encouraged by the elite and, in the end, validated by the army.
As for Thaksin, he is in many ways a compromised figure, ready to use his vast fortune to gain power. But was he the kind of strongman whose actions justified his overthrow by the military? What is clear is that the opposition party refused to participate in elections because it knew it would lose to him. “The solution would have been to enforce the law,” a prominent business consultant, Apirux Wanasathop, told me in July. He was speaking of the refusal of the police and army to restore order in Thailand by stopping the rampages by the Yellow Shirts. While Thaksin was in power, he said, he “still had to be accountable” to voters and the courts. “He would have been checked, but there is no check on the military.”
The junta has sought to eliminate Thaksin’s long-distance influence by banning Red Shirt activity, closing down the Red Shirt radio stations, and keeping watch on former Red Shirt leaders, who risk going to prison if they speak out. In an especially Orwellian touch, the regime has deleted Thaksin’s name from school history textbooks.6 Meanwhile, the Thai economy has slowed to an estimated 1.5 percent growth per year; rural indebtedness is rising, and the rice farmers who owe the money have been unable in places to plant crops because of a threat of severe drought.7 In other words, as that Washington think tank put it, the junta remains saddled with Thailand’s “core problems,” and chief among these is the anger and alienation of the rural majority whose awakening is what brought about the Thai political crisis in the first place. Don’t be surprised if the Red Shirts try once again to take power.