There are two rival narratives about what is happening in Thailand. According to the first story, a privileged elite has decided to hold onto power by gunning down unarmed demonstrators, drawn from the rural poor, on the streets of Bangkok. This makes Thailand today sound like a replay of the French Revolution – only with the royalist reactionaries winning.
But according to the rival narrative, a sinister and thuggish protest movement – manipulated by an exiled billionaire with a criminal record – has been holding Thailand to ransom by occupying the capital city and making normal business and government impossible. The constitutional government has offered to hold early elections to defuse the protests, but was spurned. It had no option but to act.
The strange thing is, that there are elements of truth to both of these rival narratives. There was something dodgy about the way that administrations favourable to the red-shirted protesters were levered out of power. And in the current crackdown, the Thai army has shot and killed unarmed protesters. But the protest movement is very closely linked to Thaksin Shinawatra, whose opponents accuse him of corruption and human-rights abuses during his period in office.
As the academic, Duncan McCargo, writes in this excellent analysis - “This is not a classic ‘pro-democracy’ struggle between good guys and bad guys. It is a savage and dispiriting civil conflict from which nobody emerges with much credit.” As McCargo sees it, it is misleading to portray the “red” and “yellow” shirts as representing, respectively, the downtrodden and the elites. Rather they are “competing patronage networks”.
The next question, of course, is whether Thailand is in danger of slipping into a full-scale civil war? Given the looming problems over the succession to the monarchy that scenario cannot, alas, be ruled out.
For views and opinions on the European Union from Peter Spiegel, Joshua Chaffin, Alex Barker and Stanley Pignal, follow the 