LONDON — "The government does not want to negotiate, so I think many more people will die," said "red-shirt" leader Sean Boonpracong in Bangkok on Monday. "This will end as our Tiananmen Square." Or more precisely, it may end up as Thailand's "8888": the massacre by the Burmese army of thousands of civilians demanding democracy on Aug. 8, 1988.
The army still rules Burma today and commits further massacres whenever the citizens show resistance (most recently in 2007). The Burmese army's successful resort to violence in 1988, after so many Asian dictatorships had been overthrown by nonviolent demonstrations, might even have emboldened the Chinese Communists to use extreme violence on Tiananmen Square in 1989. But I would never have put Thailand in the same category.
Even two months ago, I would have said Thailand is a flawed but genuine democracy, and I would have pointed to the nonviolent behavior of the prodemocracy red shirts who took over central Bangkok in mid-March as evidence that the Thais would sort it out peacefully in the end. But a lot of people have been killed by the Thai army since then, and now I'm not so sure there will be a happy ending in Thailand.