Occupy Bangkok

I wonder which goddess, nymph or mortal woman is represented by the bare-breasted marble statues flanking the staircase at the side entrance to Thaikufah, the Bangkok government building. It was built by two Italian architects early last century. A jubilant crowd stands on the lawn in front of the gothic style facade.
Sitting on a blue plastic chair beneath the statues, next to a soldier with a white carnation in his belt, I think how absurd it is to dwell on architectural details at a time like this. But this whole story is absurd in itself.
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"Today everyone is happy," says a man who calls himself a Bangkok police officer. He observes the scene with a smile that seems more ironic than happy.
Just a few minutes earlier, the concrete blocks surrounding the government building and the police headquarters were removed. A river of protesters flowed in between two lines of police officers. Everyone is smiling, they make the sign of the wai, palms pressed together, they take photos on their mobiles.
"What about tomorrow?"
"Tomorrow…'mai pen rai'," he replies with the same smile, accentuating the meaning of the expression, which is somewhere between optimistic, fatalistic and resigned, ultimately used to say don't worry, don't think about it.
"What do I hope for? Peace," says a young Bangkok police officer.
"It won't be easy."
"Well exactly, it's a hope."

***

Only the previous evening there was little hope. A woman points to the Bangkok sky and says salvation can only come from there. The young man translating for the woman says not to take any notice. "We have to do something to create a new country. This may be a dangerous way of doing it, but we have no choice." He is denouncing corruption and inefficiency. "My family is poor. I got an education and found a job. But I can't see beyond that," he says in perfect English.
The woman hoping for a solution from the sky – and it should be pointed out that Thais often use the sky to indicate the royal palace – and the young man working as a programmer in a software firm are two faces of the protest which began at the end of November and escalated into violence and danger in early December.
While the woman and the young man try to demonstrate in different ways that democracy is an opinion, the Bangkok sky is streaked with tear gas and rubber bullets used by the police and with cobbles, ball bearings and Molotov cocktails thrown by the demonstrators facing off on the two banks of a canal, or khlong, alongside the government building.
While the clashes continue, I look for a quieter spot inside a monastery, the Wat Somanas Rajavaravihara. As I write under a bodhi tree, I hear shots that don't sound like tear gas.

***

I arrived at the government building in the company of a kind man who claimed to be a university professor of political science. I ask him to explain how this crisis might pan out. He says that we can talk as we walk towards the area that has just been “liberated”. But first he wants to stop in front of the statue of Rama V, the king worshipped by the Thais for the role he had in keeping the country independent at a time when all other Asian states were becoming European colonies and for the contribution he made to the modernisation of Siam. He kneels and prays for a moment. "He will protect us. And he'll protect you too," he tells me later. The professor claims we are at a turning point. If the prime minister steps down, a group of sages will ask the king (Rama IX, Bhumipol Adulyadej) to name some unallied person to form a new government. This person would remain in power for a few years. Then elections would be called, once the country is ready. When we part, the professor invites me to visit him at his traditional furniture shop.

***

In reality, the day of hope is for some just a good tactical move on the part of the government. For everyone, it is just a brief respite on the eve of the king's birthday, 5th December. The cause of the uprising was the government's proposed amnesty for all those involved in the series of uprisings since 2006. The amnesty would also have quashed the prison terms (after an extremely politicised trial) for corruption, abuse of power and lese majesty of the former premier Thaksin Shinawatra, deposed in a 2006 coup d'état and now exiled abroad. Since then, Thailand has been literally split in two: Thaksin's supporters, the so-called red shirts, made up of the phrai, the people, the poorer classes, and his opponents, the yellows (after the colour of the royal palace), representing the ammart, the elite. In 2010 the reds occupied central Bangkok, triggering an uprising that ended with 90 dead and a thousand injured. In the 2011 elections, the red party won and the sister of the former premier, Yingluck Shinawatra, was made prime minister. It seemed that Thailand was finally on the way to normalisation. But it was just another hope.

***

"Kanom, kanom," calls a woman in the middle of the road, inviting the protesters to help themselves to the Thais' favourite sweet snack. The woman also hands out bottles of water and face cloths – like the damp perfumed ones normally used to freshen up – to bathe eyes smarting from tear gas. The series of demonstrations are reminiscent of the scenes in 2010, during the red uprising. There are the same street sellers hawking T-shirts, hooters, whistles, food stalls, massage stations, and first aid volunteers. Even the soundtrack is the same: a mixture of propaganda speeches backed by roars from the crowd and interspersed with Thai pop music. Everything is extremely loud (so much so that, this time, earplugs have also been handed out). And there are the same surreal differences between one side of the city and the other. Just outside where the clashes are taking place, life goes on as normal. One evening, on my way home, I suddenly heard some violent shots. I think they must have moved on to heavy arms. Then I see fireworks going off in the sky.

***

But the differences are there. In the slogans, in the faces on the T-shirts or in the caricatures. This time round, the bad guy, which in 2010 was the then conservative prime minister Abhisit Vejjajiva, is Thaksin, in all of his incarnations. Public opinion has also changed about Berlusconi, who, after certain footballers, is the Italian best-known around here. In 2010 the reds told me proudly that Thaksin was like Berlusconi - wealthy, loved and witty. Today's demonstrators tell me that they want to get rid of Thaksin's sister just like we have got rid of Berlusconi. "Thailand could be a wealthy, happy country, if it abandoned this drive towards self-destructive politics," says a Thai friend of mine. "As an Italian, you should understand that."
The greatest difference, however, is hope. In 2010 hope was placed in the elections. Today, things are not so clear. Suthep Thaugsuban, former deputy prime minister in the Abhisit government and leader of the opposition movement, wants to dissolve parliament and form a council of sages who can then form a “parliament of the people”. "I don't understand what that means," declared political writer Pavin Chachavalpongpun. The military probably don't understand it either, as they don't seem prepared to launch another coup d'état (there have already been 18 of them since 1932). At least not in support of Suthep's plans. If they intervene, they will do it when they can appear as the saviours of the Kingdom, rather than over-throwers.

***

"You see any yellows around here?" a demonstrator asks me. Actually there aren't that many yellow shirts. Almost everyone, including the guy asking the question, is wearing a black one. It's officially a sign of mourning for the recent passing of the supreme Buddhist patriarch. But it's probably also the expression of a desire to split from the “yellows”, as they represent an aristocracy that is seen to sympathise with the very system they want to bring down. This black makes no reference to the Western extreme right-wing associations. It seems to be more in tune with the international protest movement Occupy. Many of the T-shirts feature a Guy Fawkes mask (as seen in V for Vendetta) alongside Suthep's face. There are undoubtedly some yellows around, but they are only one of the opposition groups. The majority are students, kids that have tweeted every instant of the demonstrations, who want to do away with a corrupt, inefficient system (there are many similarities with Italy in this too). Supporters of an anti-capitalist, anti-consumerist ideology, of that sustainable economy extolled by His Majesty Rama IX. The burgeoning groups of the so-called “civil society” largely agree with them. Then there are the supporters of the Democratic Party (resembling the Italian one only in its inability to win elections), representing the Thai middle classes. All prepared to swap democracy for a regime of honest men. Other groups include the ultraconservative realists and the fundamentalist Buddhists, who call for national-religious purity and oppose the animistic contaminations of the peasants in Isan, Thailand's poorest region, who are often of Laos or Cambodian descent.
In one way or another, Thailand, which was the first Asian country to try modernisation (during the reign of Rama V), seemed to have become a battle ground between the so-called universal values of Western political philosophy and Asian values submitted by Lee Kuan Yew, the demiurge of the city-state of Singapore. It's a conflict that could easily spread into nearby countries such as Myanmar, Cambodia or Laos, dissuading them from the path to political reform.
"Many of them are scum," says an expat of the protesters of any colour, who he claims are damaging business with their protests.

***

"I'm afraid this situation could allow Thailand to descend into a low intensity civil war," declared Paul Chambers, a researcher at the Institute of Studies on Southeast Asia at the Chiang Mai university. The danger is real precisely because cultural and social divisions are deepening in Thailand. Some have called it a “philosophical conflict”. In the meantime, the reds, who have kept a low profile in recent days, are ready to mobilise, mustering all the new supporters recruited from many of the villages in the north and north-east.
Benedict Anderson, an expert on Southeast Asia at Cornell University, has quoted Antonio Gramsci: “When the old refuses to die and the new fights to be born, monsters appear”.

***

I have spent time sorting out my ideas and notes beneath the government building. Many demonstrators have started to drift off. I leave too. A young woman picks up plastic bottles off the street that just yesterday evening was a battle ground. Thousands of them were used for drinking and for washing tear gas away. She will sell them for a few cents a kilo.

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If on a winter's night a traveller...

“Relax. Concentrate. Dispel every other thought. Let the world around you fade.” These are the opening lines of the first of the part-novels in Italo Calvino's book. It is a book about chance, coincidence, mental connections…
I have been talking about it in Singapore with Yeng Pway Ngon, a writer, poet, painter, bookseller, intellectual and free thinker with a difficult life. His latest book, L’Atelier, has just been released in Italy. The English-language translation (The Studio) by Singaporeans Loh Guan Liang and Goh Beng Choo is expected to hit the market in January 2014.
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It's a novel of overlapping stories “on love, on art. On life,” says Yeng. The book is not similar to Calvino, yet, like him, Yeng also seems to want to go back in time to cancel out the consequences of certain events and restore an initial condition.
So Yeng's story and his life become metaphors for Singapore, on the very fine line separating Utopia from Dystopia. This was one of the central themes at the recently held Writers Festival.
"The system has stabilised," says Yeng. Which means that control can be loosened, even culturally. The problem, according to this author who calls himself an “existentialist”, is that if that has happened it is because the system has achieved its goal, i.e. mental assimilation to a preset model of thought. Singaporeans, by now, are definitively “kiasu”: “afraid of loss”. And it is not freedom that is at stake. "Once Mao's books were forbidden. Now you can sell them, but no one will buy them," he says.
He gets worked up as we talk, switching from hesitant English to Cantonese (immediately translated by the ever-smiling Goh Beng Choo, his wife of 36 years). What irritates him is cultural conformism caused by loss of culture. Beginning with one's language. Chinese, his Chinese (he writes in Mandarin interspersed with various dialects), has become an “economic” language. People speak it but don't know how to write it; they don't know the characters. We agree that illiteracy is a global problem, even the real consequence of a globalisation of values and ideas. We are all becoming a bit kiasu.
"It takes courage. Moral courage," says Yeng.
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If on a winter's night – and, let's remember, it is winter now in Singapore – the world changed, other visions appear that seem to contradict what Yeng has to say. They can be seen at “If The World Changed”, the title of the Singapore Biennale. The city-state's museums, universities and galleries are exhibiting collective and solo shows by Southeast Asian artists. The idea is to mark out the region as a corridor of ideas. Personally, it's a chance for me to discover some artists I did not know, such as Wu Guanzhong, one of the greatest contemporary Chinese painters, or Hong Zhu An.
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The comparison with some young experimenters is pitiless. As always, on occasions like these, Plato's Cave comes to mind. In the allegory, many cannot distinguish shadows from reality, the opinion self-induced by knowledge. But this idea of the Cave, of fluid, shady knowledge, has generated some of the most interesting installations at the event. Such as the interactive digital installation by the Japanese teamLab or the digital images by Vietnamese Nguyen Trinh Thi, who presents “living” tableaus of women and men from Hanoi.








If on a winter's night - and it's winter in Thailand too - you take a look at Bangkok, “the best you can expect is that you avoid the worst”. Because the traveller has gone from the utopia-dystopia of Singapore to the chaos of a metropolis whose charm lies in its very chaos.
As in Calvino's book, its stories are intertwined. What is happening in Bangkok, yet more anti-government demonstrations - even though the party now in power are former protesters and the current protesters used to be in power – which may lead to yet another coup d'état, leads back to my conversation with Yeng Pway Ngon about control and democracy. Only, here, the system has not stabilised; it has become dysfunctional: control without democracy or uncontrollable democracy.
In this intersecting plot of paradoxes and oxymorons, the opposition, which condemns the “tyranny of the majority”, inferring a political philosophy of limited or unlimited democracy (a little like that in Singapore) and seeming to augur a military coup, has chosen the V for Vendetta mask as its symbol, epitomising the anti-establishment hero.

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I am tempted to make that mask my own. V for Voyager.
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