Mennonite Weekly Review

When protests in Thailand began receiving media coverage in March, my husband and I were at first bemused by the lack of content in the reports.

Kathleen Kern, of Rochester, N.Y., serves with Christian Peacemaker Teams.

News sources reported that Red Shirts protesters were calling for new elections but said little about why.

Then I recognized the paradigm: a system of domination comprising military, aristocratic and corporate elites tramples on the poor, consigning them to poverty and robbing them of human rights. After decades or even centuries of this treatment, the poor begin organized resistance, some violent, some nonviolent.

Students, teachers, religious leaders and other sectors of society who disagree with the government’s policies join their cause. The media, controlled by the elites, highlight the violence of the poor and their supporters, discredit their leaders, falsely claim that a certain leader (in the case of Thailand, ousted Prime Minister Thaksin) represents the entire movement. The media give no context regarding the acts of violence committed by those in power that prompted the rise of the movement.

Western media outlets are puzzled, because they do not regard the country as important, but eventually they begin circulating the propaganda of the domination system. I’ve seen this happen in Haiti, Venezuela and Chiapas, Mexico.

Christian Peacemaker Teams worker Rey Lopez, with support from other members of the CPT-Philippines regional group, traveled to Thailand in April to document what was happening. While he was with the Red Shirts, undertaking this documentation and helping in the communal kitch­ens, he was teargassed three times and hit with metal pellets from the guns of Thai soldiers. From his letters I have learned the following:

Under Prime Minister Thaksin (elected in 2001 and deposed in a 2006 coup) the poor had universal health care; an increase in real wages; microloans for starting their own businesses; extension of all outstanding loans and the lowering of the interest rate to 1 percent; a million-baht budget for every village in Thailand; government marketing of one product for every village; and other “pro-people” government programs.

Like Thai governments before, and likely since, his administration also committed human rights abuses and was corrupt.

The Red Shirts represent a broad swath of Thai society, rural and urban, not all of whom support Thaksin. Most of their dem­onstrations have been nonviolent.

In an April 8 “open letter for the brave military acting on the emergency law of the government,” which Lopez sent me, Buddhist monks implored Thai soldiers “not to suppress the Thai people, who come in peace, with nonviolence, without any weap­ons.” They asked the soldiers not to obey immoral and illegal orders.

“But if you want to kill the people,” the monks concluded, “you should turn your guns to kill the monks instead. We are willing to sacrifice our lives for our people, and if the government of [current Prime Minister] Abhisit wants it, so be it.”

While I do not have a deep understanding of what is happening in Thailand, here is what I do know: Human beings, poor and rich, are tempted by power. Both sometimes use violence to accomplish their goals, but the exponentially greater violence of the powerful usually triumphs. Thais with economic and political power control the media in their country, which influences Western media coverage of the protests. The Red Shirts do not.

Kathleen Kern, of Rochester, N.Y., serves with Christian Peacemaker Teams.