THAILAND'S MOMENT OF TRUTH - ZENJOURNALIST

“A PERIOD OF CONFUSION AND WILD INTRIGUE”
The most momentous event in the history of the Chakri dynasty since the 1932 revolution that
stripped the monarchy of absolute power unfolded quite unexpectedly shortly before dusk
on Sunday, September 19, 2010, in the middle of a Bangkok traffic intersection surrounded
by luxury malls and five star hotels and haunted by restless spirits. It was over within a few
minutes, and many Thais remain unaware that it ever happened at all.
It was four years to the day since royalist generals had seized power in a coup that snuffed out
the precious embers of political progress so many Thais had risked their lives for in the Black
May battles of 1992, and four months to the day since the military had crushed another mass
pro-democracy rally in downtown Bangkok, storming the fortified encampment occupied
by thousands of Red Shirt protesters who had blockaded the Ratchaprasong intersection for
weeks to demand new elections.
If Ratchadamnoen represents the heart of old Bangkok, Ratchaprasong is the symbolic centre
of the modern capital. As Benedict Anderson wrote in Withdrawal Symptoms:
As late as 1960, Bangkok could still be described as the “Venice of the East”, a
somnolent old-style royal harbour-city dominated by canals, temples and palaces.
Fifteen years later, many of the canals had been filled in to form roads and many
of the temples had fallen into decay. The whole centre of gravity of the capital had
moved eastwards, away from the royal compounds and Chinese ghettoes by the Chao
Phraya river to a new cosmopolitan zone dominated visually and politically by vast
office buildings, banks, hotels and shopping plazas.
Ratchaprasong is a hectic traffic junction about two and a half miles east of the old royal
quarter. On the northwest corner is the vast Central World Plaza shopping, cinema and tenpin
bowling megaplex, which boasts of being among the biggest malls in the world. On
the northeast side are two more giant malls: Gaysorn Plaza, which lays claim to the title of
Bangkok’s most upscale designer shopping destination, and the strangely shaped hulk of
the Big C superstore. Just to the north of this consumer paradise is the Klong Saen Saab, the
canal of ten thousand mosquito stings, one of Bangkok’s remaining working waterways that
cuts a fetid path through the city all the way from the Chao Phraya river in the west to the
eastern suburbs and beyond; it is the fastest way to get from the old Bangkok to the new. Two
more huge buildings dominate the south side of the Ratchaprasong intersection: the police
hospital on the southwest corner, and on the southeast the 380 room Grand Hyatt Erawan
hotel, a 22-storey tower rising from greying faux-neoclassical columns. In its shadow, on
the corner of the junction, is the Erawan shrine, dedicated to the Hindu creation god Brahma
and built in 1956 to appease the bad karma unleashed by construction work in the area.
At the centre of the shrine, a four-faced gilded statue of Brahma sits inside a spirit house;
the enclosure is draped with hundreds of flower garlands left as offerings. Peddlers on the
sidewalk hawk small birds in wooden cages, offering visitors to the shrine a conveniently
easy way to do a good deed and gain some merit by paying to release them. Overhead, the
two lines of the mass transit Skytrain system converge in a brutalist concrete thicket, blocking
out the sun.
The violent struggle that convulsed the Thai capital in April and May 2010 began in the old
quarter, already haunted by the uncounted ghosts of the dead from past political violence.
The killing started on the evening of April 10 after Thai soldiers launched an operation to
clear Red Shirt protesters occupying the Phan Fa bridge, scene of so many past battles in
Thailand’s bloody political history. The commander of the operation was assassinated in
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