Reports from the ground in Thailand

Thailand’s prime minister, Somchai Wongsawat, will resign today after a constitutional court banned him from office and found his party and two others guilty of electoral fraud. Hopefully international flights will now be able to reach Bangkok—see previous post for background here.

I have some friends who either live in Bangkok or are traveling Thailand. Considering the current situation what with protestors occupying airports, sporadic violence, and threats of another coup, I queried them both on the reality on the ground. Here are the e-mails I received.

First from a friend who lives in Bangkok:

I’m doing fine. In fact, believe it or not, although these protests have been going on for the last few months, I’ve seen very little of them in the Bangkok city center. Daily life is pretty much the same as its been, except you have to be selective about what color you decide to wear (red and yellow represent the two sides). Wearing one color probably won’t result in you being attacked, but it could result in people picking verbal fights with you to defend the position of that particular protest group. That being said, either color is likely to excite the ire of those on the streets of Bangkok—public support for either side is pretty scarce, especially after the protestors closed the airports.

The situation goes back to former PM Thaksin Shinawatra, who was the first elected leader to really pay attention to the poor masses and improve their standard of living, but he was also corrupt, abusing power, benefiting financially from his government connections, and abusing human rights abuses including extrajudicial killings. He was ousted in 2006 and convicted this year of corruption, although he was a fugitive in Britain.

So, the red shirts love Thaksim, while the yellow shirts hate him, and most people are stuck in between not knowing what to do. Apparently many troops were moved to Bangkok at the end of last week, so a coup was widely expected, but fortunately nothing happened. Anyway, I’ve stayed clear of the protest sites, as there has been sporadic violence, so I can’t tell you what it’s like there, and I really only know what gets reported.

Then from a friend traveling Thailand:

I’m in Pattaya, Thailand, and everything is peachy. The airports outside of Bangkok are working just fine, including international flights, so the country isn’t exactly cut off from the rest of the globe.

Chiang Mai flies not just internationally but also intercontinentally, although I’m avoiding Chiang Mai since the Prime Minister is there and security is tight with the protests going ape.

My next stop from Pattaya is Angkor Wat in Cambodia and I fly out tonight from Utapao. Utapao is actually a military airfield about 140 km from Bangkok, but due to the closure of the international airports it has opened up for some commercial traffic. All part of the adventure!

Unrelated to today’s court order is the fact that Bangkok’s Suvarnabhumi international airport has reopened to cargo flights despite an ongoing siege of the facility by protestors. The first cargo flights were authorized to land at the airport as of 9 a.m. Tuesday and the first flights arrived during the afternoon.