Memorial of May 1992 People's Uprising
Thailand in 1992: The black days of May
Remembering Bangkok's bloody turmoil 25 years on
DOMINIC FAULDER, Associate Editor, Nikkei Asian Review
May 20, 2017
Troops rested on Rachadamnoen Avenue on Tuesday morning as the fire brigade hosed down smoldering government buildings including the public relations department where valuable historical documents had been burned overnight. (Photo by Dominic Faulder)
BANGKOK -- Just after 5:30 a.m. on Tuesday May 19, 1992, soldiers waving automatic rifles were clearing protesters against Suchinda Kraprayoon's government from Bangkok's Royal Hotel. The place had become a tourist's nightmare: 400% occupancy and a compulsory dawn checkout.
A couple of dozen disheveled journalists formed a captive audience. They had been rounded up and forced to sit on the first-floor landing. Hundreds of terrified people were being roughly herded down into what was by then the world's most infamous hotel lobby. Most had sought sanctuary in the old building from mounting violence outside.
Men were stripped to the waist and clutching shirts over their heads with both hands. Many were kicked as they crawled and cringed across the floor. They disappeared from the journalists' view down the sweeping staircase, and as often as not the oddly plastic rattle of a rifle butt banging a head could be heard. A sickly, middle-aged man was kicked in the chest as he was expressed from a room bursting with panic-stricken people. More sinisterly, intermittent shots came from behind the hotel for at least 10 minutes after the great roar of the military onslaught subsided.
The soldiers were for the most part older, seasoned men. The crude brutality of some disguised their grim discipline and purposefulness as they set about the task of flushing out the hotel floor by floor, instilling maximum fear in their cowering, unarmed quarry. People were walked and stamped on, punched, kicked, struck with rifles and pulled by the hair.
Doors were smashed, but no shots were fired inside the building. The soldiers were angry, cursing and ugly, but not out of control. There was no bayoneting, raping, hanging, or people falling out of windows. These may not have been the police and rightists who ran amok at nearby Thammasat University in October 1976, when students were hanged from trees and immolated, but the spectacle was appalling enough. The same sort of military discipline had been discernible at about 2 a.m. on Tuesday as a sustained barrage of gunfire suddenly subsided when officers in the darkness blew whistles.
Back on Sunday afternoon at a peaceful mass rally organized by opposition leader Chamlong Srimuang at Sanam Luang, the large public field in front of the Grand Palace, violence had been unthinkable. How quickly things had changed. The hours before dawn that Tuesday had been regularly fractured by bursts of light automatic fire, occasionally punctuated by the more ponderous thumping of a heavy machine gun. The thunder of gunfire heralding the storming of the hotel rolled implacably along Ratchadamnoen Avenue from Democracy Monument, an awesome concert of sheer menace. Defy it and die.
In the hotel, the women demonstrators fared a little better than the men, and remained fully clothed. A couple were in tears and two others sensibly fainted. By the time the journalists were finally allowed downstairs, the women were all gone and the men had been herded outside. Over 1,000 were down on their haunches in the cold dawn light, heads bowed and hands securely bound behind their backs with shirts. The fearless souls of the night before seemed to have been reduced to so much plucked poultry awaiting a giant oven.
The defeated scenes outside the Royal that morning contrasted sharply with the drama and heroism of the night before. Outside along Ratchadamnoen, an overwhelmingly peaceable crowd had sat its ground, drumming empty water bottles and chanting to a steady beat. At about 10:30 p.m. on Monday, a heavy barrage apparently fired in the air failed to intimidate them. Jubilation erupted as the guns fell silent, but then it became apparent that some bullets had found marks. Wounded and dying were ferried into the hotel in a scene of macabre chaos. Young doctors struggled to provide first aid in the lobby on the marble floor, until valiant ambulance teams arrived to wild applause.
By 2 a.m. on Tuesday morning, an exhausted young doctor from Bangkok's Siriraj Hospital estimated that five people had been dead in the lobby for some time, at least five more would not have made it alive to hospital, and some 100 others had been wounded. The latter included three tourists shot within yards of the hotel. Two had made the mistake of coming to hear Chamlong speak, unaware that he had been arrested that afternoon.
As Monday night wore on, the crowd of protestors outside the hotel began to thin, leaving a militant core whose increasingly anarchic tactics were of the kind that give pro-democracy movements a bad name. Elsewhere in the city, traffic lights and police booths were being smashed in the rioting. Hijacked buses used to ram the military barricades were shot to a standstill.
A petrol tanker hijacked by militant protestors was pushed past the hotel -- the great equalizer to throw in against overwhelming military armor. Anticipation of a devastating blast sent people scurrying for the furthest reaches of the hotel, but the big bang never came. There had been other scenes of panic just before midnight on Monday when smoke from the streets filtered in and set off the alarms. Fear was stoked by a rumor that all power to the hotel would be cut.
Deep in the night, the public relations department, the tax and lottery offices, and other government buildings finally went up in blazes kindled by diligent firebugs around midnight. The excesses of a militant few left some witnesses disturbed, not least because their actions played into the hands of military hardliners who would claim they were suppressing anarchy. But that may well have been the objective of the militant factions. The most extreme acts of violence were not the work of peaceful pro-democracy demonstrators drawn from the ranks of students and an emerging politically-conscious class, but something organized from far darker strands. The same dichotomy had clearly emerged on the Sunday night before during the first bloody confrontation nearby on Paan Faa (Heaven's Gate) Bridge.
Ratchadamnoen on that morning of May 19 was a stilled battlefield as the fire brigade hosed down scorched buildings. So many vehicle windows had been smashed that the surface of the street crunched underfoot. Packed with a layer of shattered glass, it looked like bloodstained snow in parts. Among the debris and razor wire, lottery tickets were littered like confetti from a crazy wedding. An overturned BMW was recognizable only by its alloy wheels. Aluminum panels on gutted Land Rovers had melted. Bullet holes flecked the windscreen of a burned red and cream public bus, and wisps of smoke slipped from its wheels. The dreaded fuel tanker had come to rest against a lamp post. Another was sitting across the road looking wrecked but relatively benign in the quiet of day.
In the shadow of the hotel, scores of exhausted soldiers lolled on the pavement, helmets off. An officer and half a dozen men suddenly rounded on photographers. Films not safely squirrelled away were pulled from cameras and out of pockets. Argument was quite futile. By 7 a.m. it was time to slip away through a battered city waking to learn of fresh horrors on its killing streets.
