In Bangkok

PHOTOGRAPHER Nick Nostitz launched his book "Red vs Yellow" (White Lotus Press) at the Foreign Correspondents Club of Thailand (FCCT) yesterday. Speaking with him was Chris Baker, co-author of among others, the excellent book "Thaksin: The Business of Politics in Thailand" (Silkworm Books, 2004). 

Nick has been at ground zero with the yellows and the reds doggedly covering all the action since before the September 2006 coup d’etat. I remember being one of the very few foreign or even Thai journalists who hung out with Nick at Sanam Luang in Bangkok after the coup as the first few pro-democracy, anti-dictatorship groups sprang up like struggling wild flowers.

The original photo of the book cover.
SOURCE: Nick Nostitz

Speakers would stand on plastic chairs with loudhailers and talk to groups as small as 20 to 30, and sometimes, as Nick said yesterday, there were more spies than protestors. I did a couple of reports on the protests, which was more than many other mainstream journalists did, because at the time they were a long way from making an impact. But even if I didn’t write very much on them for the same reason, it was useful to be there and see the nascent signs of things to come.

I also spent hours with Nick in the middle of the night in Government House when the yellow-shirted People's Alliance for Democracy (PAD) occupied it last year. We sat and talked among scores of policemen trapped inside, sleeping out in the open with their shields and batons next to them. Marwaan Macan-Markar of Inter Press Service joined us on one particularly memorable night.

Nick and I (and Dan Ten Kate of Bloomberg Business News) were later on the scene of the first serious clash between the reds and the yellows, when the red shirts attacked the PAD entrenched at Government House on the night of September 2, 2008. It was a frightening episode, and an ominous harbinger of things to come. One red shirt was killed in that clash which turned Makhawan bridge at the top of Rajadamnoen Avenue right in front of the UN building, into a medieval battleground. 

As the battle raged I saw a PAD protestor caught by the reds, being dragged down the street. Some red guards were trying to protect him from other red shirts out to lynch him. He was in a daze, being jerked around like a rag doll. It was clear his life was in danger.

In the middle of the melee I spotted Nick, darting around taking pictures; then I saw him give up and help the red guards protect the man, and yell for help from nearby medics. The man was eventually safely bundled into an ambulance. 

Red vs Yellow (subtitled "Volume 1: Thailand’s crisis of identity") is the first non-academic book on what most analysts agree is a seminal political struggle in Thailand. In an atmosphere fraught with propaganda and disinformation, it is an essential record of things as they occurred, on the streets where terms were dictated by the yellows and the reds, with the government of the day often reduced to a helpless bystander as rule of law all but collapsed. 

Nick has been accused of being a red sympathizer. He addressed this on Wednesday, saying: "I do not feel that I am biased. I work the story on the ground, and go to both camps. Of course I have sympathies.. But I do not let my sympathies interfere in factual and fair reporting. I have never whitewashed anything I have seen.

"My sympathies are, and have always been with poor people, with people who do not have a voice in the mainstream, when they demand a better life for themselves, and important ideals such as equal opportunities. And here it happens that most of these underprivileged sectors are with the red shirts.

"I do not accept the reasoning that these people are too uneducated to make a choice for themselves. This is a highly patronizing and elitist view. Much sophistry and polemics are used to explain this position, which for me is untenable, counter to the humanistic ideals I try to follow."

Nick also covered the red shirt rampages at Pattaya and in Bangkok in April this year. He has promised a Volume 2 on that phase of the conflict.

Nirmal Ghosh was SPH's Journalist of the Year for his coverage of the Bangkok protests in 2008.