As Thailand picks up the pieces after Bangkok's worst-ever protests and street riots, the country is further away from peace and reconciliation than it was two months ago, when the redshirts under the United Front for Democracy Against Dictatorship took to the streets.
The way out of this will require a return to parliamentary and constitutional processes, with revised rules and eligible political players acceptable to all sides. This difficult way forward, towards reconciliation, will require mutual recognition and accommodation between the two main sides.
The riots and shocking arson attacks in Bangkok's central business district provide an intensified and more violent déjà vu of the redshirts' rage and rampage in April 2009, when their street demonstrations degenerated into riots, forcefully dispersed by the same army units in operation this week. While the recent torching of central Bangkok has set back the capital's capitalist boom by a decade, damages to tourism and investment will be even more costly.
For the reds, nothing has changed. They have rioted twice in as many years but their grievances remain unaddressed. For them, there is injustice in their systematic disenfranchisement through judicial dissolutions of their poll-winning parties – not once, but twice – and the banning of elected politicians. The anger towards the street-based ousting of their elected governments in 2008 by the pro-establishment yellowshirts and the army's brokerage of the government now in power still prevails.
The redshirts are unlikely to go home quietly. Yet, without their leaders – who are in custody – they may resort to underground activities, including an overtly armed insurgency to establish their own Thailand away from Bangkok in the north and north-eastern enclaves, with their own media and social networks. While they are seen as disgraced by most Bangkokians, the redshirts will increasingly transcend Bangkok-centric Thailand without caring. They no longer accept the Thai state and the political system it upholds, because the system is seen as rigged, the odds stacked against them.
What happens to them now will depend on Abhisit Vejjajiva's government, which is directly accountable for the 70-odd death toll – all civilian except for six soldiers. He pledged reconciliation and reform after the riots last year, but the consequent recommendations by parliamentary committees for constitutional amendments came to nothing. Further antagonism and alienation directed towards the redshirts have partly brought on these recent protests. Abhisit and his government had an entire year to bridge the divide and to bring them on side, but the result has been the opposite. It is difficult for the reconciliation process to make headway with a compromised and tainted prime minister presiding over it.
Setting reconciliation efforts on a sound footing is the critical first step. Beyond that, a new electoral mandate will have to be established, which will need amendments to the army-supported constitution from the military coup of 2006-07, to balance electoral representation. It may also necessitate the expansion of the playing field to include some of the banned politicians. Many of them are unsavoury, but some are capable and moderate enough to work with the pro-Abhisit coalition. They could also provide alternative and more pragmatic leadership to the reds away and beyond former prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra.
The onus rests squarely on the pro-Abhisit powers-that-be and the oncoming government arrangement to bring the redshirts back into the fold. Lumping all of them under Thaksin's long and manipulative tentacles is and has been a mistake all along. Accommodating the rank-and-file redshirts and seeking and working with their more moderate leaders, including some of the banned politicians, may offer a way to bypass this association.
Thailand's ultimate reconciliation centres on the redshirts beyond Thaksin, under a different leadership, and the pro-Abhisit establishment's willingness to accept the reds' grievances and work to alleviate them with revised rules. A mutually agreed upon compromise would create an electoral environment whose results would have a greater chance of acceptance by the main stakeholders involved.
Thitinan Pongsudhirak, a professor of political science on leave from Chulalongkorn University, currently FSI-Humanities Center International Scholar at Stanford University.