The government is coming under increasing pressure to stop the spread of red shirt support in rural areas. Ever since a major social contract was fractured two months ago, the country has seen a seemingly unstoppable spillage of red-shirt sympathy.

Despite the government’s best efforts to control the spillage, the amount of dissent in the country appears to be twice as bad as first thought. ‘Thousands and thousands of new red shirts are being recruited every day’, said a source inside the Committee for the Restriction of the Expansion of Spillage, or CRES, ‘and the government appears helpless to prevent it. They are blaming Thaksin as the real cause of the problem but behind the scenes there is also a lot of criticism of the botched attempts to solve the problem.’

Miles and miles of censorship booms have been deployed to prevent information that the government brands as ‘incorrect’ from getting into the media and reaching the shores of consciousness of the urban middle classes. But this has not prevented tell-tale signs of contamination staining the pristine yellow sand on the beaches of the well-to-do. It is feared that if the fetid stinking gobs of rural discontent are not quickly controlled and cleaned up, local businesses will start their own protests and the tourist industry will be doomed.

The use of dispersal agents by the government has also raised concerns, with some experts arguing that the cure may be worse than the disease. Designed to neutralize red sympathies before they can surface and threaten the social environment, these dispersal agents have been sent out into the countryside to ‘question’ suspected red shirt supporters. However, rather than neutralizing the problem, there are signs that this attempt at intimidation is in fact fermenting more social problems in the future.

When its first ‘top-cap’ effort on May 19 had some effect in slowing the apparent pollution of the body politic, it seems that the claims of success were overblown. ‘The cost in lives, injuries and property destruction may look acceptable to the government,’ said an informed source, ‘at least as long as they can keep the real figures secret. But it now seems that the success was quite limited.’

A surface layer of red organization was skimmed off and sent to military camps for processing, but it is thought that this will soon be replaced and it is not known how long the government can keep locking people up without charge or trial before its human rights image is irretrievably damaged.

Since then the government has attempted to use 2 ‘junk shots’ to slow the spread of the ideological poison. One took the form of a flow diagram purporting to show how different individuals and organizations are interlinked in the red short movement. Although the government stands by its chart, it has been widely discredited among well-informed observers as little more than wishful thinking. ‘It really was rubbish’, said one government insider who wished to distance himself from the exercise.

The second attempt to inject garbage into the political rift was the publication of incomplete but suggestive financial data on a number of individuals and companies accused of supporting the disaster. The eye-catching headline figures were startling enough for the mainstream media to repeat them without question. But as time went on, more and more reasons emerged for questioning what the numbers meant and if indeed they meant anything at all.

Despite the government’s desire for a quick return to normalcy, experienced political engineers are warning that the blowout cannot properly be contained until relief measures can be sunk, a process that could take months.

‘If they can jimmy up an election by, say, September or October,’ said one analyst, ‘they might get a handle on the situation. But the problem with working in politics at this depth of division is that any new election could also blow up in their faces and they’d be back to square one.’

What no one believes is the government’s claim that everything can go back to where it was. ‘Even if you clean up all the reds out there,’ said one commentator, ‘things can never be the same again.’

About author: Bangkokians with long memories may remember his irreverent column in The Nation in the 1980's. During his period of enforced silence since then, he was variously reported as participating in a 999-day meditation retreat in a hill-top monastery in Mae Hong Son (he gave up after 998 days), as the Special Rapporteur for Satire of the UN High Commission for Human Rights, and as understudy for the male lead in the long-running ‘Pussies -not the Musical' at the Neasden International Palladium (formerly Park Lane Empire).