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THAILAND: Community Radio Stirs Political Passions in Villages

Marwaan Macan-Markar

UDON THANI, Thailand, Feb 23 2010 (IPS) - In an age when television continues to dominate national media, including Thailand’s, and gives birth to new celebrities, Kwanchai Praipana is a bit of an anomaly. His rise as a local star in this north-eastern city has been through community radio, the poor cousin of the local media.

But the portly, thickset Kwanchai is not complaining. He sees his growing following, both in listeners and the large crowds that attend the public rallies he addresses, as a confirmation of the expanding political power of community radio stations in the rural rice-growing belt of this South-east Asian country.

In over a year, Kwanchai has seen his listeners grow to over 300,000 people, most of who live in villages and small towns in at least three provinces in north-eastern Thailand. The garrulous 57-year-old has membership cards for each of those listeners to prove it.

His listeners get doses of Kwanchai’s fiery rhetoric during his regular morning talk show on FM 97.5, the community radio station he runs from the outskirts of this city. Some farmers listen to him while working in the fields. What they get is a barrage of criticism against the government of Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva and the unelected elite that shape this kingdom’s national agenda.

“The local people don’t trust this government,” the talk show host declared during a busy afternoon in his station’s premises, which has a single building for a studio and two open-air run-down structures where a steady stream of locals show up to cook meals, eat and talk politics, or to listen to Kwanchai’s diatribes.

The listeners who call in and ask for more information during Kwanchai’s daily broadcasts seem to confirm this sentiment of mistrust as well. Their response also reveals the relationship he has cemented through his station as a channel to engage with the rural communities disillusioned by the Bangkok-based trinity of power, from the military and conservative bureaucrats to the political aristocracy.

Yet there are broader implications in Kwanchai’s stardom and the network that he has built. He and his followers are all members of the United Front for Democracy against Dictatorship (UDD), a protest movement with strong links to the ousted former prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra.

So successful has Kwanchai been in Udon Thani been that he and his supporters – all of whom wear red shirts, the uniform of the UDD – have inspired others in neighbouring provinces to follow in his footsteps. Some are reshaping existing community radio stations while others are setting up new ones to tap into the anti-government sentiment that has taken root among the farming communities here.

Part of the local political sentiment is in support of Thaksin, currently living in exile to avoid a two-year jail term for corruption. Rural voters also see injustice and disenfranchisement at the way grassroots votes and voices have been stepped on by Bangkok’s ruling political machine.

One new station to hit the airwaves is Red Station Radio in the neighbouring province of Khon Kaen. Set up three months ago in a small room in a building in the centre of Khon Kaen city, FM 98.5 follows the same programming format as Kwanchai’s, where hourly programmes feature a mix of talk shows, news and music that caters to local village tastes.

“We set up this station when we realised that people from the villages were not happy with the news they were getting from the mainstream media,” Ittichai Sriwonchai, the station’s manager, said in a room next to the station’s only studio. “Now we supply news and have talk shows with information that they cannot get from the national television stations and newspapers.”

But as with Kwanchai’s station and the four other community radio stations in Khon Kaen, Ittichai’s medium is also playing a pivotal role for the pro-Thaksin UDD. It broadcasts angry messages of the anti-government movement and serves as the most potent voice for recruiting more ‘red shirts’, as the UUD supporters are called.

Such reach and power, in fact, surprised the Khon Kaen broadcaster and UDD leaders in late January. For a month before a planned UDD rally, Ittichai’s team of 20 had begun a steady drumbeat of announcements, summoning red shirt supporters for the political event held near the racecourse on the outskirts of Khon Kaen.

“We were expecting about 50,000 people,” Ittichai said. “But we were surprised when many more red shirt supporters came in response to the radio announcements.”

UDD leaders boast that a crowd of close to 200,000 packed the field on the night of their anti-government rally on Jan. 31. But military intelligence operatives who monitored the event offer a far more reduced though significant crowd estimate of some 100,000 attendees.

There was no dispute, however, about the role of the five community radio stations in Khon Kaen in galvanising such a large crowd. “That was the biggest red shirt rally we have had in Khon Kaen and it was possible because of the messages broadcast on our community radio stations,” explained Yongyuth Kongpatimakon, a UDD leader in Khon Kaen. ” They are very important for us. If we have more radio stations, we will be able to draw larger crowds.”

This explains why an increasingly worried Abhisit administration has placed under close surveillance the wide network of community radio stations in the 38 provinces in the north and north-east of the country.

The provincial community broadcasters and their red shirt counterparts in the city, including stations that cater to the army of Bangkok’s taxi drivers, have been identified as key players by UDD leaders in a possible showdown between the red shirts and the government in the Thai capital in the coming days.

UDD leaders interviewed by IPS in Khon Kaen and Udon Thani are preparing for the days after Feb. 26, saying tens of thousands of red shirts could assemble in Bangkok to challenge the political life of the Abhisit administration, which came to power over a year ago thanks to backroom deals shaped by the country’s powerful military, rather than through a popular mandate.

On Feb. 26, the Supreme Court is due to rule on the fate of Thaksin’s 2.2 billion U.S. dollars worth of assets. These were frozen by the military regime that came to power by ousting the twice elected yet increasingly authoritarian Thaksin administration in a September 2006 coup, Thailand’s 18th putsch.

That coup, in fact, exposed how nervous the junta was of community radio stations in rural Thailand, where Thaksin, a billionaire telecommunications tycoon, enjoys deep support due to a host of pro-poor polices he implemented while in power.

Among the coup leaders’ first decrees after taking power on the night of Sep. 19, 2006 was a ban on some 300 community radio stations in the Thaksin strongholds of the north and north-east.

Kwanchai, who was a much less known community broadcaster at the time, was among the victims of this clampdown. He had to flee Udon Thani after the military shut down his station as part of a broad psychological operations drive that also saw intelligence operatives infiltrate hundreds of villages to monitor anti-junta sentiments.