Notes from an urban warzone

I arrived in Bangkok yesterday (19th May), amidst the bloodiest and most violent clashes between the protesting ‘Red Shirts’, camped out in the middle of the city in a makeshift tent village, blocked off with barricades made from crude defences that would not have been out of place on a battle field a thousand years ago and burning tyres, and the Thai army, whose tactics are similarly barbarian. Kill the head and the body will die. They chose their moment to strike when the protesters were running low on supplies and reeling form the death of their guerilla leader at the hands of a suspected government sniper. The details of why the protest happened and the events after the diplomatic centre was overrun are widely know, I won’t go into them here. (the Guardian website has the best coverage of all the ones I’ve been following)

But my story starts a bit earlier than when the tanks rolled in. Picture yourself in a bar, a bar with a wide selection of free drinks, punctuated with meals and hot towels handed to you by beautiful Asian women, where the only entertainment is second rate romantic comedies, and your only choice is to drink heavily. Now imagine the bar is locked for twelve hours and you have no choice but to stay there…now imagine the bar is floating, moving at over 500kmph over some of the most dangerous locations on the planet; the Balkans, Turkey, Iran, Southern Afghanistan, Pakistan, India and Burma before finally landing in Bangkok. Twelve hours, two entire news cycles, when the previous news coverage had warned of the possible outbreak of civil war, people dying in the streets, widespread looking, foreign journalists being targeted by sharpshooters. Anything could have happened while you were in the air, hanging out in the bar. There might not even be an airport to land in, in 2006, the protesters (this time sporting Yellow Shirts) overran the airport, it’s not entirely beyond the realms of possibility that I was about to land in a full blown urban revolution, while being very, very drunk and not having slept in two days.

I had ignored warnings from the foreign affairs department, my travel agent, the more nervous of my friends and of course my mother telling me not to go anywhere near Bangkok, I booked the two day stopover months ago, just when the violence had started to flare up. I had beaten the ash-cloud to get here, I wasn’t about to let a bunch of noisy hooligans, trigger happy soldiers and jumped up socialists make me divert my flight, besides, it might be interesting, a little danger can spice up even the most exciting of lives.

The airport was practically deserted when we landed, nervous police circled us as we collected our luggage and eyed us suspiciously as they inspected our passports, but this is normal in a country where even the harshest sentences in the world don’t deter drug trafficking. The real fun began when, after waiting for over an hour for my lift to the hotel that never showed, I had to get a taxi, something I had been expressly warned against by every website I visited before coming. The bright pink, souped up Hondas that seem to be de-riguer of the illegal taxi trade in Bangkok, each one coming with seat belts that don’t work and a driver that doesn’t speak English. I was too drunk and tired to argue, so I went for the first one who grabbed my hand, he promised he knew where my hotel was and that it was close by, I didn’t believe him, and was proved right when, after twenty minutes, he stopped to ring the hotel for directions in the middle of a busy highway lined with golden statues of Buddha and pictures of the Thai king looking down on us.

As we passed over the crest of the hill between the city and the airport, the skyscrapers came into view in the pale, dawn light. The driver started to speak loudly to me in Thai and pointing out various skyscrapers. There was one in particular that he kept pointing to and laughing manically, it was a big black one, much taller than the others. As we drew closer, my animal instincts realised what it took the rest of my weary mind a moment to figure out, it wasn’t a skyscraper, it was a towering plume of thick, black smoke. He pointed out the other window, and there was another….and another smaller one, but equally menacing. Three or four of them, dotted around the city. Anyone who had seen the news that morning would have know it was one of the many buildings set on fire that day; the stock exchange, the third largest shopping mall in Asia, the English newspapers and TV stations’ headquarters, not to mention the several thousand tires doused in kerosene or burning armoured vehicles and ambulances…but I wasn’t to know, as far as my chemical addled brain knew, there had been an airstrike, or some sort of apocalyptic ending (or even worse, a beginning) was about to befall me. I began to sweat profusely, we were heading straight for the largest plume, and the driver was still laughing manically and speaking at a mile a minute, pointing at the black monster in the heart of the city, I imagined every possible scenario, chief among which was that he was bringing me to be sacrificed at some sort of cleansing ceremony, thrown into an artificial volcano of burning garbage along with all the rest of the capitalist scum. I was wet with perspiration, I could feel the salt in my eyes. I opened the window and stuck my head out a little, breathing deeply…but that was worse, all I could smell was burning rubber. This was only 6a.m, surely they were only getting started.

Then, the noise came, gunshots, it was absolutely unmistakable. In those cop movies where a car backfires or a balloon pops and the hero hits the deck because he mistakes it for a gun, I always laugh because real gunfire doesn’t bang, it cracks, and snaps. And there it was- ‘crackcrackcrackcrackcrack’, a long burst of automatic rifle fire nearby, and it was getting louder.

He began to laugh even more crazily, taking his hands off the wheel to mimic a rifle and shouting “Rat-a-tat-tat, Rat-a-tat-tat!!!”, sweeping an imaginary hail of bullets across the highway.

“Is it safe?” I asked meekly.

“Yas, yas, berry good” said the driver, giving me a thumbs-up “no danger this early.”

The gunfire said otherwise, but I believed him, and we arrived through the security road-block near the hotel, I had flashes of the fall of Saigon and Robert Capa in the Spanish civil war, drunk on Thai whiskey and sleep deprivation I asked, “Can we go look?”, fingering the digital camera in my bag. He stopped laughing and turned around with a look of surprise.

“No, no, sir, very sorry, it’s no good.” he proclaimed, miming a handgun to his head and pulling the trigger, the message was clear enough. I gave him a handful of multicoloured notes, with my knowledge of the currency it could have been enough to buy the taxi for all that he smiled at me, tripping over himself and the doorman to get my small suitcase from the boot.

The woman behind the hotel desk was absolutely amazed to see me, they had not had a European visitor in two days, they had taken the liberty of cancelling my booking, hence the lack of car pickup at the airport. Saving face is very important in Thailand, so this was a very embarrassing situation for her, she upgraded my room and promised all sorts of free goodies, I told her there wasn’t a problem, using my ‘smile and bow’ for the first time, she, along with the entire lobby staff bowed back and I was shown to my room.

The phone rang several times over the next few hours, I threw it under the bed. When I awoke, it was 7 o’clock, I didn’t know if it was am or pm, Bangkok time or London time, there was total silence, no gunfire or shouting outside, no sirens or traffic. It took me ten minutes of fumbling in the dark to figure out that a control panel next to the bed opened the curtains and turned on the tv. Bangkok was the top story on all the news stations, the tower of black smoke I could see from my window a few blocks away was repeated on all the 24 hour stations in ten different languages. There were pictures of bodies in the streets and soldiers firing indiscriminately. Some stations reported a curfew, others said one was coming, nobody really knew what was going on, it was happening a couple of hundred meters from where I was standing and I was as clueless as them.

I had ten messages on my hotel phone, six of them from various branches of hotel management apologising for the airport pickup mix-up, the other four warned that I was not to leave the hotel between certain hours as there were troops outside the hotel looking for looters.

There were a stack of letters that had been slipped under the door, half of them were to offer free walking tours to make up for the trouble, the other half were to inform me that the tours had been cancelled due to the protests. I looked out the window, trying to get my mind around the situation and what my next move should be. The view was amazing, skyscrapers in all directions, that had seemingly shot up out of the ground level slums and filthy streets overnight. Unlike the other large cities I had known, Bangkok was not immediately definable. Amsterdam always seems to me to have been carved out of the water; squat, yet modern buildings crowd right up to the canals and hug together around old world austerity, London seems to have sprouted up organically out of an ancient settlement, while New York has an immediately recognisable arrogance and iconic skyline. Bangkok seems thrown together, loud and yet polite at the same time, modern and ancient, like a dystopian planetary outpost that was abandoned by its previous residents, where bankers exist in the top layer of skyline while poor people sell unidentifiable meat on the side of the road at street level and wear masks to protect themselves from the traffic fumes.

I managed to get out for a few hours in the middle of the day, the heat baking my body like nothing I had ever experienced, not sweltering like southern European heat, or powerful and stinging like the southern Mediterranean, it’s grey and hot at the same time, like being underwater close to a volcanic vent, there’s no escape from it. Even at three a.m, the mercury still touches the mid twenties sometimes.

It didn’t matter that I was able to get outside the hotel though, nothing was open, people would stop you every few hundred yards, telling you not to go any further, that it was too dangerous, everyone had mixed information about what parts of the city to avoid and what could be done while the city was in lock-down.

I simply went back to the hotel, read all the local papers, all carrying the same shocking pictures and quoting the same sources. I was hoping to get a better sense of the situation while I was here, but heroes and clear cut sides are thin on the ground, both sides seem to have acted badly, the violence simply seemed like a logical next step, like an outlet for a pressurised faucet. I can’t claim to know enough about the gripes of the Red Shirt protesters, democracy is always a good thing to protest for, but the leaders seemed to have mixed aims and their demands seemed to constantly change, the long term goal of installing the exiled former President seems like one of the worst moves possible for the country. The army/government side were indeed heavy handed, surely the numbers of deaths never had to be as high as they are, but when half the city is burning, force is surely a natural reaction. Public sympathy for either side seems non-existent, people just want to get on with their lives.

Imagine yourself in a bar, a bar with the largest selection of flavoured vodka in the world (like the one that can be found in my hotel), and you are served meals at regular intervals by beautiful Asian women, now imagine the bar is a giant building made of glass surrounded by smoke, fire and the sound of gunfire and you cannot leave or you’ll be put in the most deadly prison in the world. The only entertainment available is Japanese MTV and Indian soap operas, you do the only thing you can do, you drink heavily while eyeing the digital camera in the corner and having dreams of Saigon.

By Kevin O’Connor, 20th May 2010