THAILAND'S MOMENT OF TRUTH - ZENJOURNALIST

writing: “Bring my father back and get the government out.”
Sarawut Sathan, 45, who came from Bang Kapi district, said he joined the protest
because he wanted the government to dissolve the House and hold fresh elections as
a way to resolve the crisis in society. Another woman wrote on the road with chalk
that she still remembered the time when her friend was killed four months ago.
Sombat said yesterday's symbolic activity at Rajprasong had succeeded in getting
the government's attention. He said he did not expect that over 10,000 would join the
rally. "We just came here to tell the government that we will never forget," he said.
It was towards the end of the protest that it became clear that everything had changed
for Thailand’s monarchy. The crowd had become so large that it blocked traffic at the
intersection, something Sombat had been anxious to avoid. Because the use of loudspeakers
was banned under the state of emergency, he had difficulty controlling the sea of Red Shirt
protesters, and eventually used borrowed police speakers to implore the crowd to disperse
ahead of schedule, and head towards Wat Pathum for a ceremony there:
If you shut the road, we won’t win. Please think it through… Our fight must go
on. We must end today’s activity. We fight a political fight and we must win it
politically.
But most people refused to listen. A chant rose up among the crowd: “I came by myself.”
They were shouting that they had not come to follow leaders, but under their own volition, to
protest as they chose.
And then, the chant changed. A slogan began to be shouted among one group of protesters
at the intersection and spread through the crowd until hundreds were shouting it over and
over again. It was a denunciation, using a Thai insult that literally means “monitor lizard”, a
particularly reviled animal; the closest English-language equivalent is probably “bastard”:
The bastard ordered the killing. The bastard ordered the killing.
It was a stunning moment, an event most Thais never dreamed would come to pass. Hundreds
of people gathered in the heart of Thailand’s capital, defiant and angry, were shouting a
deliberately crude insult and inflammatory accusation aimed at an unthinkable target.
“The bastard” was King Rama IX.
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Bhumibol was four miles away when it happened, marking his own unhappy anniversary.
As the anger and grief of the crowds at Ratchaprasong over the coup four years before and
the crackdown four months before exploded into an unprecedented public challenge to his
moral authority, Rama IX was at Siriraj on the west bank of the Chao Phraya river. Exactly
a year ago, he had been admitted to the hospital, and he had been resident there ever since,
unwilling or unable to leave even when doctors pronounced him fit to be discharged. In a
radio broadcast in August to mark her birthday, Queen Sirikit insisted her husband was doing
fine:
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Now his health has substantially improved but doctors still ask him to continue doing
physical therapy so that he can move around with strength first before leaving the
hospital.