Thai government spurns deal on elections

Independent on Sunday:

Bangkok was a city in a state of high anxiety last night after Thailand's Prime Minister rejected a peace offer from the red shirt protesters whose siege of parts of the city – and armed efforts to lift it – has led to 26 deaths, major disruption, and considerable damage to the country's economy. The red shirts immediately announced they would pull out of any negotiations with the authorities.

The protesters, who are supporters of former prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra, had said on Friday they would end a three-week occupation of Bangkok's smartest shopping and hotel district if the government dissolved parliament and announced elections in 30 days. This was a softening of their previous call for immediate dissolution, and would have given the government another 60 days to hold the election. But, after the Thai leadership met yesterday in emergency session at a Bangkok airbase, the offer was spurned. The Prime Minister, Abhisit Vejjajiva, and the country's army chief, will address the nation on television today.

Now, with tens of thousands of red shirts showing no sign of budging from their makeshift city-centre camps, rival protesters threatening to reclaim the capital, and the actions of the army an unknowable quantity, tensions are palpably rising. Few observers are optimistic of a swift, comprehensive solution. Even before the government's uncompromising response to the red shirts was announced, Pitch Pongsawat, a political scientist at Chulalongkorn University, said: "The government might have to agree to a three-month timeframe, but this doesn't mean this will ease the tensions. There doesn't seem to be any real control about what's been happening on the streets."

The streets are indeed where this protracted game of bluff and counter-bluff – interspersed with sudden eruptions of violence – has been played out, and looks increasingly like it will be concluded. Tens of thousands of red shirts remain in a fortified encampment at a district of upmarket department stores in central Bangkok, sleeping on the pavement, vowing to stay until parliament is dissolved and defying a state of emergency that bans large gatherings of protesters.

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The government must think it will lose elections if they are held in the near future. The governing elites of Thailand look down their noses at the rural people who have the votes to win an election. They need to learn to work with them, but they keep backing themselves into a corner as well as the opposition.

I don't think the Thai army has the stomach for the kind of action it would take to dislodge the red shirt protesters at this time. If they do, they certainly have not shown it so far.