Thai anti-government protests spread to utilities and transportation

Ronald Reagan fired 11,345 air-traffic controllers in August 1981 because they went on strike. It will be interesting to see what they do in Thailand as anti-government protesters broadened their agitation Monday with the announcement of an array of job actions that would affect utilities and transportation. Labor unions representing 200,000 workers at 43 state enterprises said they would cut off water, electricity, and telephone service to government offices beginning yesterday. Thai Airways workers also said they would delay flights beginning Tuesday, and public bus workers said they would halt service on 80 percent of Bangkok’s 3,800 buses.

In the face of this escalation, Prime Minister Samak Sundaravej canceled a planned trip to Japan. Because of a sit-in at his office compound, which had reached its sixth day, he has been forced to work elsewhere since last week.

Hundreds of railway employees continued on Monday a strike that had cut off service between Bangkok and the far northern and southern parts of the country. The strike had idled more than half the cargo trains scheduled to run Monday. The announced job actions came on the 100th day of street protests demanding the resignation of Samak, whom protesters accuse of corruption and incompetence and of being a front man for former prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra. Thaksin was forced from power in a coup two years ago and fled to London last month, where he asked for political asylum in the hope of avoiding court cases in Thailand accusing him of corruption and abuse of power.

International Herald Tribune’s Seth Mydans writes that the protest movement in Thailand is not a popular uprising like those in the Philippines that have ousted repressive governments, but rather a relatively small group that unites several agendas. The protests are also a battleground for a rift between the mostly rural poor and the middle-class establishment that has deepened since Thaksin courted a poor constituency as a base of power. The possibility of violence hovers over the standoff. Some members of the protest group have armed themselves. A small bomb exploded early Tuesday not far from the protest site. No one was hurt, but the bomb was seen as a warning of possible future actions.

Samak is constrained in his responses by the role he played in ordering a massacre of student demonstrators in 1976. He has taken pains to say he would handle the protesters gently. The role of the military is also a question, but although there has been talk of a coup — which would be the 18th in Thailand’s history — most analysts say it seems unlikely for now.

After its ouster of Thaksin two years ago, the military installed a civilian government that was widely accused of being incompetent and ineffectual. Last December the generals gave up the power they had seized and held a parliamentary election. To the military’s chagrin, backers of Thaksin won the election and Samak was named prime minister. Despite its name, the People’s Alliance for Democracy, which is leading the anti-government protests, is explicitly calling for a less democratic structure. “We used to chant the mantra of elections all the time,” said Sondhi Limthongkul, one of the protest leaders, in an interview Thursday. “Now elections in Thailand lead to a very shabby democracy.”

The People’s Alliance has proposed the idea of a Parliament that is dominated by appointed rather than elected representatives. “There is always an investment of money to seize power using democracy as a front,” Sonthi said. “Once a party is in Parliament, without proper checks and balances, without a transparent news media, you cannot call it democracy.”

For its part, the government is quick to point out that it was democratically elected just seven months ago and that it has not committed any gross errors. It is, however, the reincarnation of a government, under Thaksin, that was systematically dismantling democratic institutions to clear away checks on the power of the executive.