Bangkok Burning: Thai Solution Providers Hunker Down

Thailand’s worst outburst of street violence in decades has set the Thai capital of Bangkok afire and forced IT solution providers and other local businesses to close down and seek safety where they can.

’Basically, we are closed. At the moment, some of our staff who live a bit out of town have been able to visit customer sites, some factories we service which are still operating as normal,’ said Alexander Hutton-Potts, managing director of Bangkok-based solution provider Simplicity.

Hutton-Potts, a British expatriate, said Simplicity employees were holed up at their homes Wednesday and Thursday as a government-imposed curfew went into effect following the surrender of anti-government leaders and the outbreak of mob violence in the streets of Bangkok.

But even if Simplicity staffers were able to get to the company’s home office, he said, their ability to remotely service client sites was compromised by destruction caused by rioters.

’Our Internet at the main office was fine until just after the Red Shirt leaders surrendered,’ Hutton-Potts said. ’After that there were fires set at the Asoke junction just outside our office and the Internet and power went down. I assume the flames from the tire fires might have burned down some of the phone lines which carry the ADSL signal to our office.’

Thai government troops on Wednesday burst through makeshift barricades made of automobile tires, bamboo and other materials to end a two-month-long protest by anti-government protesters known as Red Shirts. The protesters, who occupied a walled-off corridor snaking through central Bangkok, had effectively crippled local commerce in recent weeks.

The protests, which began peacefully but grew increasingly violent in April, hampered the ability of people to move freely throughout Bangkok and had begun to seriously hurt Thailand’s lucrative tourism industry as other countries began warning their citizens to avoid travel to the Southeast Asian nation.

’The situation is very bad for business,’ said Tanes Sriviroolchai, who runs another local IT solution company, SiamScan.

’Most of our customers and our customers' workers cannot work in this situation. And yesterday was the worst since everyone felt unsafe. There was a curfew but there were no officers in the street. Anything can happen,’ he said.

Unlike the centrally located Simplicity, SiamScan is based in the eastern outskirts of Bangkok, Tanes said, so basic infrastructure needed to run the business was undamaged by Wednesday’s wave of destruction that left tire barricades and more than 40 downtown buildings burning into the night, filling the skies of a city already known for its poor air quality with plumes of black smoke.

’We can still support urgent cases remotely. And actually our upcountry customers have felt no effect or little effect and they are still calling us for support,’ Tanes said.

The Thai government declared Thursday that order had been restored in Bangkok. But with violence spreading to outlying provinces, local sources told CRN.com that they feared Wednesday’s military crackdown might not be the end of Thailand’s troubles.

NEXT: The Road To Chaos

Thailand enjoyed more than a decade of political stability following a military coup in the early 1990s that also led to a military crackdown on protesting citizens. But now some in Thailand are wondering if that period of peaceful government transition was more an aberration than the norm in the country’s checkered history of military takeovers and violent politics.

Meanwhile, Thailand's King Bhumibol Adulyadej has been uncharacteristically silent during the current political crisis. The world's longest-reining monarch has leveraged his massive popularity with the Thai people to successfully broker peace between battling Thai factions on several occasions during his 63-year rule.

But Bhumibol recently spent five months in the hospital with an undisclosed illness, and it is widely believed that his poor health could be preventing him from interceding in the current situation.

With no solution likely to come from the king, that leaves a resolution to Thailand's present troubles much more uncertain, said one source who asked to remain anonymous because public criticism of the monarch is a crime in Thailand. It could also help explain why the anti-government protests spiraled so far out of control, the source said.

The Red Shirts, largely hard-core supporters of ousted Thai leader Thaksin Shinawatra, emerged from peaceful demonstrations that began in mid-March against the government of Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva and military leaders who deposed then-PM Thaksin in a 2006 military coup. The protesters’ demands included the dissolution of Parliament and new general elections.

In April, the demonstrations grew increasingly violent as the Thai military attempted and failed to take control of the main protest site near Bangkok’s Phan Fah bridge. Some protestors managed to seize an arsenal of assault weapons, ammunition and body armor left behind by government troops in their failed April 10 assault.

With the Red Shirts now entrenched behind their barricades, a stand-off between the protestors and government led to sporadic bouts of violence over the past month, followed by the complete breakdown of negotiations between protest leaders and the Thai government by mid-May. In the week preceding Wednesday’s final government assault on the protest zone, 36 people were killed in Bangkok clashes, according to media reports.

The Abhisit government made its final move Wednesday, sending troops in armored personnel carriers crashing through the protestors’ barriers. More than a dozen people were killed in the assault, according to reports, culminating in the surrender of the main Red Shirt leaders and the dispersal of the other protestors.

That’s when the trouble really began, said Chris Sanderson, a British expat who manages Amwso.com, a Bangkok-based online marketing services firm.

’Without leadership, without leaders to say, ’It’s time to go home,’ you have leaderless clans out there spreading chaos,’ he said.

After the arrest of the Red Shirt leaders, gangs of protestors first set fire to their tire barricades then moved throughout Bangkok to attack buildings such as the CentralWorld shopping center -- the second largest shopping complex in Southeast Asia before being burned down Wednesday night.

As non-protestors began joining in the destruction Wednesday to collect loot rather than make a political statement, Sanderson, whose company is located in Bangkok’s eastern Bangna district, said he nearly saw just how badly the night might go.

NEXT: A Brush With Fire

On the outskirts of Bangkok, a mob had gathered Wednesday evening at the Bangna-based Nation Multimedia building, where the pro-Abhisit Nation English-language newspaper and other media is produced.

Thankfully, they were turned away, Sanderson said.

’A gang came around to torch the Nation. It was a bunch of kids on motorbikes with petrol bombs, out for a laugh and a chance to grab some loot,’ he said. ’These were opportunists, not protestors, and ultimately nothing happened. Just a little chaos in the road.’

Sanderson said that throughout the Thai crisis, Amwso.com has been able to conduct business as usual for the most part. But one challenge has been to convince the company’s largely out-of-country customer base that operations are running as smooth as ever.

’The business we do is all Internet-based and 90 percent of our customers are U.S.-based. The government hasn't shut down the Internet, so my staff has just worked from home, working nights and early evenings. In terms of doing the work, it's been entirely unaffected,’ he said.

’But our clients in the U.S. keep asking, ’You're in Bangkok, can you do the work?’ So the biggest deal has been reassuring clients that, yes, we're able to do the work and we're unaffected.’

For Sanderson, the main fear has been that either the Thai government or the protestors would put Amwso.com’s lifeblood -- the Internet -- out of commission.

’There's always been the threat that the government is going to turn off the Internet. During the early protests, they did do that for a day or something. But there are so many banks here that do millions of transactions a day, they couldn't do it,’ he said.

Rumors that the Thai government had shut down some Internet sites like Facebook in the aftermath of the final military assault on the Red Shirts were untrue, he added.

Nor did the protestors manage to destroy much of the country’s communications infrastructure despite apparently damaging service capabilities in pockets of central Bangkok, such as the area where Simplicity is located.

’My biggest concern has been, will the Red Shirts burn down the communications grid? But it didn't happen,’ Sanderson said.

"Basically, the common person on the street just wants it all to go away. The only sort of nice thing about all this is that regular people are really being more polite to each other than they've ever been," he said.