NOV 30 - I'm stuck here in Bangkok with both city airports closed for over two days. This is a dej? vu moment. I was stuck in Phuket when that airport closed a few months ago due to demonstrators, and it took me 13 hours to return to Singapore - a three-hour drive to the port of Surat Thani, a ferry ride to Koh Samui, then a flight to Bangkok and then Singapore.
In May, I was trapped for over 12 hours inside an aircraft at Chengdu airport when the earthquake hit Sichuan province.
So as a veteran of airport closures I'm rather sanguine about eventually getting out of Bangkok, and several contingency plans are already in play. But I am less sanguine about the present political crisis, and I suspect the people of Thailand will be trapped much longer in an intractable deadlock which is slowly spiralling into class conflict.
As is always the case with Thai culture, what you see on the surface is not necessarily the reality. Behind the gentle wais, or traditional Thai greeting, and friendly smiles has always lurked deep-rooted social contradictions. A dynamic, burgeoning urban middle class looks down on a huge, poor rural class which has been awakened by Thaksin Shinawatra's Peronist-style populism.
One of Asia's most vibrant intelligentsia and unfettered media co-exists with probably the world's most conservative and powerful monarchy. A fractious, corrupted political elite manipulating elections for its own
gains co-exists with a military elite which has staged more coups than elections.
There is a game going on with the "last stand" of the anti-Thaksin forces holed up in the airport. The People's Alliance for Democracy (PAD) - once hugely popular with the rabidly anti-Thaksin urban class - has steadily
lost support with its increasingly illegal and thuggish tactics which have badly affected the economy. The PAD wants to force the hand of the players - the military to launch a coup, or the government to resign.
The fact that the well-financed and organised PAD - a shadowy, loose group of improbable allies ranging from a maverick, austerely Buddhist and celibate army general to an opportunistic media baron once closely allied
with Thaksin - is even able to occupy airports and government offices with impunity is solely due to its patronage by what Thais euphemistically call "the highest powers".
The agenda of the PAD, however, is so audaciously anachronistic that one can only surmise which other 21st century anachronism will benefit from the PAD's demands: that universal suffrage via an elected parliament be
replaced by appointed representatives of interest groups.
This new distrust of universal suffrage - one person, one vote - is because the rural class, once reverent of only the monarchy, has responded to Thaksin's populism with an almost frightening loyalty.
When Thaksin's party, Thai Rak Thai, was banned, the rural class resoundingly voted in a new proxy party. If elections were held again with the same rules, Thaksin's proxies will probably win again - such is his popularity in the villages.
The issue of the rural class' loyalty has fundamentally changed Thai politics, which had always been an almost ritualistic charade of revolving-door politics between the military and the politicians.
Politicians would play their games, buy their votes and endlessly form ineffectual coalitions; at some point the military would step in to stage a coup with such regularity that people would hardly blink an eye.
I remember as a schoolboy in Bangkok going to school on various coup days, with the only difference being the solitary World War II vintage tank sitting on some street corner to signal that a coup was in effect.
But the unspoken rule was that these games would be played largely in Bangkok, and the rest of the country would be stable in its steadfast allegiance to only the monarchy.
Therefore, one fundamental change is the awakening of the rural class to Latin American-style populism, and the emergence of Thailand's first Juan Peron.
This is a fundamental threat to the monarchal institutions which gradually and carefully grew from powerlessness since the 1932 abolition of absolute monarchy to the pre-eminent role in Thai culture and society today.
The second fundamental change is the antipathy of the Thai urban class to military coups. Once a ho-hum event, coups are now not acceptable to the younger middle class which clearly prefers even a corrupted and imperfect parliamentary democracy to the effective authoritarianism of martial law. The military also knows that in the complex, modern Thailand of today, it cannot rule without the consent of the Bangkok urban class.
And that is the dilemma unfolding today. The military and the PAD both swear allegiance to the forces which are threatened by Thaksin's populism, and therefore the military will not take action against the demonstrators, regardless of the illegality of their actions. But it also does not want to declare a coup.
The elected government is pushing the military to take action against the PAD. The military is asking the government to resign and call new elections, which is an odd thing for an arm of a government to do. All
the while, the emboldened PAD is fast becoming reminiscent of the proto-fascists in Germany and Italy before World War II.
How will all this play out? Thoughtful Thais who do not take sides are very worried. On the one hand, the genie of Peronist populism, let out of the bottle by Thaksin, can quite possibly lead a once-stable Thai society rooted in reverence for the monarchy down the road to Latin American-style politics - especially since the monarchy itself is facing an impending succession transition.
On the other hand, the solutions provided by the anti-Thaksin forces - rule by the military, or an effectively appointed parliament - are seen by many younger, modernised Thais as a throwback to the past, and
anathema to their vision of a democratic Thailand.
For many decades, Thailand was one of South-east Asia's most stable and cohesive societies. There was always a final arbiter, a source of moral authority which stood high above any politics and which could intervene at pivotal times of peril.
If that authority ever became politicised and a player in the game, rather than a referee, the fundamental nature of Thai society would change irrevocably.
Whether this might occur is the biggest question my thoughtful Thai friends are asking themselves today, even as the rest of the game is played out on the streets and in the airports of the country.
# The writer is executive chairman of Banyan Tree Holdings, the chairman of Singapore Management University, and chairman of MediaCorp.
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He was one of the pro-democracy protesters who fled Thailand for the United States after the brutal crackdown in the 1970s and he said that after he returned, he found another element within the political configuration and that was a rising capitalist class or more accurately a new segment of the capitalist class which was rising independently of the traditional power configuration.
Now Thaksin and his Thai Rak Thai party certainly are populists, who buy the loyalty of their rural and lower-income urban voters with social programmes such as very affordable medical insurance schemes, farming projects and so on but the question is whether they are doing that sincerely for the benefit of such people or was it ultimately to serve their own very much larger benefit.
Such populism is not confined to Thaksin, Thai Rak Thai, Somchai, the Peoples Power Party, Peron and so on but has and is in fact being practiced by Malaysia's Barisan Nasional Government, Singapore's Peoples Action Party, Soeharto's Golkar and so on, which is why, despite accusation of authoritarianism, undemocratic practices, corruption, nepotism, etc by their opponents, these government have managed to remain in power until -- as in the case of Soeharto -- they were unable (thanks to the IMF in Indonesia's case) to continue dispensing the crumbs from their banquet table to their mass support base.
The policies of providing assistance and opportunities to the poor rural and lower income in the urban areas are good and they should be continued under whichever government is in power. In the western social democracies, these have been formalised as social security and social welfare benefits and nothing wrong with them in principle.
However, under Thaksin, his loyalists were appointed as provincial governors and so on and these new governors were felt to threaten the established configuration and that is one of the reasons my Thai friends in Bangkok dislike Thaksin.
On the question of democracic practice. I once used to support following the practices of Westminster-style parliamentary democracy transplanted lock, stock and barrel into another soil but after observing political practice and outcomes in Asia over the last decade, especially after the Mahathir-Anwar conflict in 1998, I've come to realise that the Malaysian -- and for that matter Asian political environments, including culture, tradition and priorities of the electorate, is not quite the same as in the west, which is why the majority of votes keep going to candidates, whom, middle-class, western and English educated
elites, such as myself find objectionable and repugnant.
I've finally concluded that it's because economic survival and wellbeing are top priority among the majority of voters, especially among the poor and lower-income group and there's nothing wrong with that.
On the other hand, issues such as transparency, free-speech, free-press, nepotism, corruption, justice, fairness, etc are top priority among us educated middle-class, who are in the minority who are fortunate enough to be above pure economic concerns but if the economy worsens and our security is lost, that could well change.
That's why I find the antics of your Neo-liberal Singapore Democratic Party rather amusing, as they've completely missed this point and try to sell themselves on issues of concern mostly to the comfortable, English-literate, middle class, without offering a convincing economic policy which would satisfy the masses.
Back to Thailand. My interpretaion of what's happening is that it could be described as a coup-by-proxy.
The military won't stage a coup but lets the PAD continue with their occupation, while the military farts in the prime minister's face whenever he asks it to act by telling the PM to step down instead -- IE. the PAD demand, while the police does not know how to get 50,000 protestors out of Suwarnaphum Airport and 88 airliners from different countries are stranded there. The PM asks the navy and air force to act but they've done nothing, even though Don Mueng also is an air force base, so Somchai is much more of a lame duck PM than Pak Lah.
Check out this comentary by The Nation's columnist Thanong at http://blog.nationmultimedia.c...29/entry-1 where he speaks of a case where Thai protestors burned what seems like the equivalent of water cannon or an FRU truck in Malaysia back in the 70s.
What would the Singapore government do if 50,000 protestors occupied and closed down Changi Airport -- massacre them all?