Red shirt villages

There has been considerable media attention to so-called red shirt villages in the North and Northeast in recent weeks. Last week the governor of Mahasarakham province complained that declaring a village a “red shirt village” was illegal. He vowed to have his administrators stamp it out. The yellow-shirt media sees these declarations as an attack on the monarchy.

Red shirt leaders claim that these declarations of red shirt villages are “a symbolic action of villagers that have the same political ideology and it is not in violation of the law…”.

Readers might be interested in a recent article that reports on “Nong Bua, a small village of less than a hundred families on the outskirts of Udonthani city in north-east Thailand, has declared itself ‘red’.”

The declaration ceremony is briefly described: “inaugurated by Buddhist monks and followed by lectures on democracy and a peppy performance by the local school band, Nong Bua became the 217th ‘Red Shirt Village’ in Udonthani province…. About 40 villagers, mostly elderly, had gathered in the town’s communal hall for the ceremony, many of them sporting red T-shirts with the words ‘We love Thaksin’ emblazoned on the back. They sat in front of a large billboard that reads ‘Red Shirt Village for Democracy,’ with a picture of a smiling Thaksin Shinawatra, Thailand’s former prime minister who was ousted by a coup in September 2006.

 

Advertisement