And then there was Thaksin’s conspicuous, even brazen use of his political position to further enrich himself and his family. In 2006, after his landslide election victory, his family sold its holding company, the Shin (for Shinawatra) Corporation, to a Singaporean sovereign fund, making a profit of nearly $2 billion, on which Thaksin managed to pay no capital gains taxes. The courts found no criminal wrongdoing in this transaction. Still, the sale showed how Thaksin could manipulate the law for his own benefit, and it gave new ammunition to a former supporter, a media tycoon named Sondhi Limthongkul, to win over mass support for an anti-Thaksin campaign.
Sondhi in 2006 founded the People’s Alliance for Democracy, which adopted yellow, the color of the monarchy, as its symbol, and soon the Yellow Shirts embarked on a series of demonstrations demanding that Thaksin step down. This is what led, after a few months of turmoil, to the 2006 coup, when Thaksin was in New York for a meeting of the United Nations General Assembly. Two years later, he was convicted of abuse of power in a transaction involving a land deal in Bangkok. He was sentenced to two years in prison, which caused him to leave Thailand in 2008.
Still, he remains a dominating presence in Thailand, making decisions for his Thai Rak Thai party or, since that party was banned after the 2006 coup, its differently named successors. In 2010, after the military oversaw the installation of an unelected Democratic Party government, 300,000 members of a group formally known as the United Front for Democracy Against Dictatorship—aka the Red Shirts—occupied the commercial center of Bangkok, a district of expensive shopping malls and hotels adjacent to the expansive greenery of the Royal Bangkok Sports Club—all symbolic of the social and economic gulf between the rural insurgents, with their weathered skin and unrefined accents, and the paler, more refined establishment that was keeping Thaksin out of power. After three months, the army, using guns and live ammunition, cracked down on the Red Shirt occupation, clearing the commercial center and killing roughly eighty demonstrators. Twelve soldiers were also reported killed.
The military attack of 2010 remains a vivid memory for the Red Shirts, and a deep grievance. There has been no comparable effort by the police or the army to control the Yellow Shirts, even when their actions were clearly not just disruptive but illegal. In 2008, the Yellow Shirts commandeered hundreds of buses and occupied Bangkok’s airports for over a week, basically sealing off Thailand from much of the outside world. Among other things, they surrounded the parliament building with razor wire to prevent a newly named prime minister from running the government. Such actions were used by the army to justify installing a new, anti-Thaksin civilian government in 2008, but in 2011, elections were held and, as usual, the Thaksin party won a clear majority of votes. Thaksin’s sister, Yingluck Shinawatra, who had been named by Thaksin himself as the leader of his party, now called Pheu Thai (For Thais), became prime minister.
In November 2013, the Red Shirt–controlled lower house of parliament passed a general amnesty. It would have forgiven Yellow Shirt leaders for their part in the 2010 anti–Red Shirt crackdown, but it would also have enabled Thaksin to return to Thailand. This set off a new round of furious protests. Yellow Shirt militants forced their way into several government ministries, which they occupied for months. The police, in a rare official attempt to keep the Yellow Shirts under control, attempted to block them from seizing Government House, the office of the prime minister; nonetheless the building was surrounded and Yingluck had to be taken to an undisclosed location for her protection.
She called for new elections, but the Democrats refused to take part in them, instead sending their party workers to block polling stations. This led the Election Commission to invalidate the election results on the grounds that not enough votes had been cast. During their protests, Yellow Shirts seized several television stations in Bangkok and forced them to broadcast a speech by Suthep Thaugsuban, a ferociously anti-Thaksin former deputy prime minister who had emerged as the Yellow Shirts leader. Suthep demanded that Yingluck resign and “return power to the people” within two days. He also called for the abolition of Thailand’s system of democratic elections and for the government to consist of a council appointed by the king. That is essentially what Thailand got after the army took power: a council of ministers appointed by General Prayuth whose members, wearing identical white uniforms with gold braid, presented themselves to the king, who approved them, early in September.
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.