Unhappiness and political intrigue?

Thomas Fuller at the New York Times reports that:

shielded by hundreds of thousands of sandbags piled shoulder high along the city’s outskirts, most of Bangkok remained dry on Sunday, allaying fears for the time being that the massive metropolis would be swamped by monsoon floodwaters. But along the flood walls, which ring the city and were being patrolled by soldiers and police officers around the clock, there was a mixture of relief and resentment.

He reports on a factory worker who says:

“I am just hoping this flood wall will break… [L]ike several million other people in Thailand, had found himself on the wrong side of the wall.

By sparing Bangkok, Fuller says, “officials have sacrificed the provinces that lie to the north of Bangkok.” Of course, this has been the pattern for a decade now. Farmers in Ayutthaya are used to yearly and deep floods so that the dainty elite in Bangkok keeps dry.

While the quoted worker sees himself in a minority, he’s wrong. The elite has long been willing to sacrifice the rural “buffaloes” for their own comfort and wealth. As Fuller observes: “The minority in a country of 65 million is a large group. The flooding, the worst in at least half a century, has affected two million people and left close to 400 dead, many by drowning and electrocution.” Those figures on the number impacted are way too low, leaving out millions more.

More worrying for many of them, “large swaths of provinces north of Bangkok are likely to remain inundated for several weeks, the government said. And bitterness is likely to persist long after the water has receded and the mud has dried.”

AFP photo by Pornchai Kittiwongsakul

Fuller makes this interesting observation:

Some flood barriers had been destroyed under mysterious circumstances in recent days, despite the deployment of what the military said were 50,000 troops to guard and maintain them. A nighttime breach near the city’s domestic airport, Don Mueang, last week contributed to waters’ pouring onto the tarmac of the airport and inundating thousands of nearby homes and businesses…. The surge of water also forced the government on Saturday to move its crisis-management unit, Flood Relief Operations Center, which had been based at Don Mueang.

Interesting indeed. Military guards at one of the major sites to be protected and still it floods. No doubt the military won’t have to explain…. Political actions or something else?

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