Thailand with massive marches? Give me a break, these people are just a collection of malcontents with nothing better to do. They lost the election last year and are now doing everything possible to discredit the new Prime Minister and his Cabinet. I was in Bangkok - China Town, during the last part of June. The so called massive marches took place a little over 4 blocks from where my hotel was. These malcontents were causing traffic jams all over the center part of Bangkok, but little else. Starting at the Democracy Monument and then moving to the Government House after 30+ days of demonstrations. Originally they were calling for a confidence vote and trying to prevent changes being voted on to the Thailand's Consitution. The Peoples Democratic Party was using the press to sway public opion and to gain international attention. Guess it worked with the international press but the Thai's I talked to were ready for the whinners to go back home. .
The standing Prime Minister Samak Sundaravej and his cabinet gave the PDP what they originally wanted. This only empowered the PDP and they continued the protest adding additional issues. The PDP have called for resigination of the Prime Minister, Interior Minister, and many others. They were also trying to make a issue of a pending World Heratige Site in Cambodia. Concerning a Temple site and boarder area that the World Court ruled on forty years ago. What this has to do with the present ruling government, who knows. But it makes good press. Ha! Ha!
In the USA what the PDP is doing would have been labelled as actively trying to overthrow the standing government. They would have been met at the Government House by armed troops and hauled off to the closest prison. Yea we support free speach in the USA.
The week I left Bangkok, the feeling of the majority of the Thai's I talked to. Was summed up by the PM saying, "Nothing was going to be done to the protesters as long as they are having fun." IMO the PM is giving these people just enough rope to hang themselves. Though according to the Interior Minister, "These protesters were in voilation of Thai Law and were looking at 6 year prison terms." I'm sure something is going to happen. But to give the PDP any credibility is just sad.
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On the surface, none of these crises had much to do with profound questions of democracy. The Korean blowup started with a food fight. Protests first broke out in April after President Lee decided to resume U.S. beef imports after a four-year ban. Exaggerated media accounts of mad-cow disease drove ordinary citizens, including many high-school students, onto the streets for orderly candlelight protest vigils. But the students were soon overshadowed by agitators from a variety of left-wing civic groups, including aggressive trade unions, who jumped on the cause as an excuse to protest the rest of Lee's agenda, which stresses improved ties with Washington and spending cuts.
A similar escalation occurred in Thailand. The protests started in May over economic concerns and expanded to include nationalist complaints over a border dispute with Cambodia. But these issues were proxies for a deeper struggle between supporters of Thaksin Shinawatra, the ousted populist prime minister, and his opponents, who include monarchists, the military and others who see Thaksin's emphasis on rural and working-class empowerment as destabilizing. Thaksin's opponents are now trying to force his ally Samak out of office, and calling for less democracy: they've even pushed plans to lower the number of elected seats in Parliament and have hinted darkly that another coup, like the one that forced Thaksin from power in September 2006, may be needed. "The campaign is much wider than the street protests," says Chris Baker, a Bangkok-based author of numerous books on Thai politics. "The point is to push Thaksin and his supporters to the back burner." Sunai Phasuk, a consultant with Human Rights Watch, says that the opposition "have a right to demonstrate, but calling for military intervention [and] inciting violence is irresponsible."
The Thai and South Korean protests started out responsibly—that is, within the political process. Korea held presidential elections in December and a parliamentary vote in April, both of which Lee swept by huge margins. Thaksin's proxy party won the Thai election in December. Since then, however, the losers have refused to take no for an answer, turning to spoiler tactics to get their way.
Even in India, often touted as the world's largest and one of its more stable democracies, vicious illegal tactics remain common. Parliament is so chaotic that the well-respected speaker of the lower house, Somnath Chatterjee, recently threatened to quit, screaming on camera that the opposition was "working overtime to finish democracy in the country." Disgruntled activists regularly stage crippling national strikes—often enforced by club-wielding thugs. They attack government property like buses and trains, and, in the case of Singh's coalition partners, the Communist Party of India (Marxist), do all they can to slow the working of government in order to press their own narrow agendas.
These campaigns expose the extent to which Asian democracies are still twisted by authoritarian traditions. Larry Diamond, a foremost democracy expert at Stanford University, traces the protest ringleaders in Korea to "a radical anti-American, left-wing generation that grew up during the 1980s in the resistance to military rule … and has now reached positions of leadership in civil society, the media and elsewhere." Today they use the same hardball tactics they honed against dictators to undermine democratic leaders. In Taiwan, the impulse to follow "an undemocratic path to pull someone down" comes naturally to a society with "a long tradition of rule by humans, rather than rule of law," says Prof. Liao Da-chi of National Sun Yat-sen University in Kaohsiung. In Thailand, everyone is familiar with military coups, and behaves accordingly. Even Thaksin's supporters show what Diamond calls a "willingness to violate the spirit of democracy."
Asian leaders also fear retribution if they lose elections, which can inspire desperate measures. Prof. Kim Hyong Joon of Seoul's Myongji University calls this "the politics of the vortex." Two of South Korea's last five presidents were criminally prosecuted by their successors, and President Roh Moo Hyun was impeached just a year after winning office in 2003. In February, when Lee became the first conservative president in a decade, he moved quickly to overturn many liberal accomplishments. The same basic pattern also holds in Thailand and in Taiwan, where prosecutors launched a corruption probe of ex-president Chen Shui-bian just hours after he stepped down in May.
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