By Marwaan Macan-Markar
BANGKOK, Mar 21 2006 (IPS)

A popular local expression that reveals Thailand’s laid-back and non-confrontational character – mai pen rai(it is okay) – has been turned on its head over these past weeks as an opposition campaign to get Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra to resign, picks up.

With hardly a hint of compromise surfacing from the main contenders locked in this tussle, it is becoming increasingly clear that this South-east Asian nation could be heading towards a state of political paralysis.

Even seasoned conflict-resolution experts are offering such a prognosis as the crisis between the caretaker government led by Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, the anti-government protesters led by the People’s Alliance for Democracy (PAD) and the parliamentary opposition groups, headed by the Democrat Party, worsens.

”It is difficult to reach a compromise at this stage,” Gotham Arya, director at the Research Centre on Peace Building at Bangkok’s Mahidol University, said in an interview. ”There is not enough trust; each party is holding firm to their positions; all of them think the time is working in their favour.”

The prospect of a snap parliamentary election on Apr. 2 – or even a poll postponed to a later date, as some are suggesting – will do little to reduce the political heat against Thaksin, he added. ”If Mr. Thaksin continues as the prime minister, you can expect more agitation and the act of governing will become more difficult.”

The likelihood of violence erupting is also possible if the government, under pressure, wants to regain control, says a former Thai military supreme commander, Gen. Saiyud Kerdphol, who currently heads the independent polls watchdog People’s Network for Elections in Thailand (P-NET).

”We face a bad scenario if there are no negotiations to end this crisis,” he told IPS. ”The elections will create bigger problems.”

For the past week, in fact, the PAD offered a likely scenario that could unfold if Thaksin refuses to resign, as the anti-government demonstrators are demanding. It attracted tens of thousands of its supporters to barricade the roads leading to the prime minister’s office and his official residence, forcing Thaksin to take refuge at the foreign ministry’s premises when he was in Bangkok.

What has placed the governing Thai Rak Thai (Thais Love Thai – TRT) under siege is anger at a string of allegations directed at Thaksin by leaders of PAD, their supporters among the public and their backers in the Thai media. They include corruption, nepotism and a blatant interference by the premier to undermine the independent institutions created to check the government’s powers.

The protesters who have been turning out at different points across Bangkok, including the financial district, are largely urban middle-class voters. What brought most of them out in their thousands were the revelations in January that Thaksin’s family had profited from a 1.88 billion U.S. dollar sale of Shin Corp, the telecommunications company owned by the Shinawatras, to Temasek, the investment arm of the Singapore government.

The anti-government anger, however, has also meant open support for the undemocratic mechanisms suggested by PAD and its sympathisers to get rid of Thaksin. When the government announced a snap parliamentary election in early April to resolve the crisis, the champions of democracy on the streets called for a boycott to undermine its legitimacy. It was a message that was swiftly embraced by the opposition parties

At the same time, the government’s critics have openly lobbied for the country’s revered monarch, King Bhumibol Adulyadej, to step in and replace Thaksin with an appointed prime minister. They cite a provision in the country’s constitution and two political upheavals from the past, in 1992 and 1973, where Bhumibol stepped in to end the political deadlock, in arguing their case.

Thaksin, however, represents a different political ethos than the two leaders who had to step down after Bhumibol’s intervention. They were military dictators who chose to rule by the gun. Thaksin, on the other hand, leads a party that was elected to power with thumping parliamentary majorities in January 2001 and February 2005.

”This is a new, unprecedented dilemma. Getting rid of the prime minister this way will create a precedent and it may not be good for our democracy,” Prapat Thepchatree, a political scientist at Bangkok’s Thammasat University, told IPS. ”But if we end up playing by the rules, we end up with leaders like Thaksin.”

For his part, Thaksin has been appealing to the country’s majority, the rural poor, who are among his strongest backers, to help him protect Thailand’s young democracy from Bangkok’s protesting thousands. With the facts on his side – such as the election boycott and the appeal for a non-democratic measure to get rid of him – Thaksin has even sounded convincing as a latter-day saviour of Thai democracy.

”April 2 will be judgement day when it will be decided whether Thai people help keep democracy or not,” he was quoted by the local media as having said this week during a speech in the northern province of Chiang Rai.

”I wish that was true,” says Prapat. ”The crisis will continue. It will be long and drawn out and Thailand will be more fragmented and more polarised.”

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