Why M’sians should be fans of ‘Red Shirts’

By Keruah Usit

“We have no excuse for our present state of economic and social stagnation. It is because we have allowed [...] our institutional and political framework to be eroded, that all our advantages are not better realised,” Tengku Razaleigh Hamzah said on March 23.

Razaleigh’s words of reason come from a lone voice in Umno’s wilderness. His reflections are invariably drowned out by more strident howls on the servile Utusan Melayu and RTM. Yet they ring true.

Malaysia has fallen behind neighbours Thailand and Indonesia in our share of foreign direct investment, the standards of our universities, press freedom and, as Razaleigh pointed out, the quality of our thoughts, words and deeds.

Many Malaysians are incapable of engaging in responsible, thoughtful political debate. A dip into the ‘comments’ section of news portals or blogs reveals the subterranean depths plumbed by most political observers, caked in bigotry and vitriol.

In contrast, in neighbouring Bangkok, open political debate is a daily reality. Massive public rallies have gone on peacefully for the past fortnight, without the paranoid police brutality we have become accustomed to in Malaysia.

The ‘Red Shirt’ protests sprang up over the Supreme Court’s ‘Judgment Day’ decision to confiscate 46 billion baht (RM4.7 billion) out of a mind-boggling total of 76 billion baht (RM7.8 billion) of frozen assets from deposed prime minister and telecommunications tycoon Thaksin Shinawatra.

Thaksin was ousted by a coup d’état in September 2006. In 2008, he was convicted of corruption in abstentia and sentenced to two years’ imprisonment. He has denied the charges, saying his family had earned its fortune with “hard work, brains and sweat”.

Thaksin responded to the seizure of his assets by mobilising 100,000 Red Shirt supporters, mostly provincial peasants and urban working class Thais, to demonstrate in Bangkok, pressing for immediate elections. Thaksin uses video conferencing – beaming down from giant screens on the Reds like a disembodied Cheshire Cat – and posts on Facebookand Twitter, to drum up support.

Thaksin has divided Thai society. The Red Shirts, mainly farmers from northern Thailand, resent the income disparities with the more affluent south, and clamour for a lower political profile for Thailand’s revered monarchy.

They admire the wealthy tycoon’s economic reforms and disregard for the traditional Bangkok elite. ‘Thaksinomics’ allowed universal health care for 30 baht (RM3), free medical treatment for HIV, improved access to education, debt relief and Keynesian poverty alleviation policies.

Thaksin’s policies were so popular with poorer Thai people that his allies were voted into power in December 2007, even after he was exiled.

‘Yellow Shirts’

However, his political enemies say Thaksin’s 2003 ‘war on drugs’ left 2,500 people dead, many by extrajudicial executions. They condemn his brutal suppression of the violent Muslim uprising in the south.

They also point out that Thaksin has been convicted of corruption. In particular, Thaksin has drawn fire for his family’s fabulous 73 billion baht (RM7.5 billion) windfall from a 2006 sale of national asset Shin Corp, Thailand’s largest telecommunications group, to Singapore’s Temasek Holdings.

Thaksin’s opponents wear yellow as a symbol of fierce loyalty to the monarchy. The ‘Yellow Shirts’ support the conservative aristocracy, bureaucracy and military. They agitated for the military intervention that removed Thaksin in 2006. They paralysed Bangkok’s airports and government offices with mass blockades again in November 2008, when Thaksin’s allies were voted in.

The Yellow Shirts succeeded in removing the elected government with the aid of a controversial Constitutional Court ruling in December 2008. Abhisit Vejjajiva, the articulate and well-scrubbed Democrat Party leader, took over the premiership without winning an election. He is aligned to the royalists, the military and the wealthy elite who run Thailand and control its mass media.

The Nation, a prominent Thai newspaper, has poured scorn on Thaksin’s depiction of the conflict as a ‘class war’ between phrai (slaves or poor, lowly peasants) and ammart (aristocrats or royal court advisers). The paper questioned whether Thaksin’s campaign is “no better than a political fugitive causing social rifts through a hate campaign for his own benefit”.

In truth, the answer probably lies somewhere in between these two polarised narratives. There is little doubt that Thaksin has pushed for public protests in a desperate effort to save his enormous assets. But not all Red Shirts support Thaksin’s return to power: some are motivated by social injustice, others by the deprivation of their democratic voting rights. Their protests have coalesced around the popular Thaksin.

It is equally clear that Thailand’s lopsided economic growth has spawned shocking income disparities. Urban slums, homeless beggars, rural women trafficked for the sex industry, and impoverished farmers turning to coca and opium farming in the north, all attest to this.

Learning from the Thais

Malaysia’s income discrepancies have also contributed to our street protests: the widening chasm between rich and poor Malays, in particular, has provided fuel for the reformasi movement, ignited by Anwar Ibrahim’s persecution.

The grinding poverty of Indian plantation workers and urban pioneers, as well as dispossessed Orang Asli, has also fed the Hindraf and Orang Asli mass protests we have witnessed in recent years. Malaysians should emulate the pacifism shown by the impressive Red Shirt rallies.

The mass media has played up the gruesome daubing of human blood, harvested from willing Red Shirt donors, outside government buildings. This bloody spectacle followed Abhisit’s reported remark that he would not step on protestors’ blood to stay in office. But Bangkok life goes on as normal, albeit with traffic jams that are even worse than usual.

Protests over the past four years have seen grenade explosions, airlifts of Asean leaders from an abandoned summit last April, and blows rained down on Abhisit’s car, but the vast majority of the protests have been peaceful.

The Thai police and military have also demonstrated restraint. They have eschewed the strong-arm threats, brutal beatings, tear gas and water cannon employed by the Malaysian police during our own, smaller, street protests.

“If demonstrators follow the rules, the government sees no problem in talking,” Abhisit told the press.

In fact, Red Shirts even paraded through the streets of Bangkok on March 20, in a scarlet convoy of tuk-tuks, motorcycles and cars, bearing between 65,000 and 100,000 protestors in festive mood. They gave out flowers and smiles and tried to win the hearts and minds of Bangkok residents, most of whom are tired of the seemingly endless political impasse.

In response, many residents lining the procession route wore red wristbands or bandanas. They danced, waved and handed out bottled water to the passing Red Shirts. The Red Shirts enjoyed a huge groundswell of support among cooks, waitresses, security guards, taxi drivers and other working people.

There are, of course, the usual complaints in local newspapers. “Why don’t they shut their own province down? People are fed up,” one online contributor wrote.

Other Thais, such as Somchart Poonlak, 30, have been quoted byThe Nation as saying that holding a rally is the right of people living in a democracy: “I can accept their procession, as they announced their intention to us before they marched across Bangkok and I was able to avoid the traffic,” she said.

The public rallies have had little impact on economic confidence. Investors in the Thai baht and stock market appear unperturbed: values of the currency and shares even rose slightly over recent days.

Ban rallies?

In our own country, many Malaysians argue that rallies should be banned because they create fear, inconvenience and traffic jams. Some write livid letters complaining about traffic snarls, or businesses being affected, their little bourgeois voices dripping with bad faith.

They overlook the fact that fear and disruptions are caused predominantly by the police, blocking off roads leading into the capital, when rallies are planned. They also display ignorance that these public rallies are an expression of our political voice, and hence of our humanity.

Malaysian cabinet ministers oppose public demonstrations out of arrogance and self-interest. They insist that political rallies are against ‘Asian values’. Malaysians’ peaceful rallies, and growing reclamation of our public space since 1999, have demonstrated this to be a lie.

Asians have embraced non-violent protests on a far larger scale – in Thailand; during the ‘Saffron Revolution’ in Burma; during ‘People Power’ in the Philippines; in Taiwan; in Kwangju in South Korea; at Tiananmen Square in China; and in India, led by Mahatma Gandhi. All these demonstrations have led to some degree of political reform.

Any clampdown on peaceful political protests, and our ability to gather, stand together and express our views, is an attempt to deprive us of our common humanity. Malaysians – civil society and police alike – should be fans of the Red Shirts.

All Malaysians should treasure our shared humanity, instead of attempting to crush it.

Thailand’s way out of its current predicament remains unclear, but one thing is certain: the degree of its citizens’ awareness and participation in political debate augurs well for future political progress.

Advertisement