BBC News - Profile: Thailand's reds and yellows

BBC News - Profile: Thailand's reds and yellows

Thailand's increasingly tense political stand-off between the red-shirted United Front for Democracy Against Dictatorship (UDD) and their yellow-clad Peoples' Alliance for Democracy (PAD) has overtones of some the European political upheavals of a former era.

The two constituencies - the reds primarily a coalition of students, farmers and urban radicals, and the yellows a collective of monarchists and the urban middle classes - resonates with numerous phases of European political history in the C17 and C18.

I'm reminded even of the origins of the English Civil War with its two increasingly polarised camps. In a sense, even the American War of Independence had elements of these traditional class-based and rural-urban divisions, with the added complexity of a long-standing traditional monarchy thrown into the mix.

The BBC's photo essay on the current stand-off is illuminating.

Some Good News from Pakistan

"April 2010 shall go down in Pakistan’s history as an epoch-making month," according to Prof. I Ahmad of Quaid-i-Azam University in Islamabad.

The reason for this optimistic observation is the passing of the 18th amendment to the constitution of Pakistan, which seeks to strengthen parliamentary democracy, give more power to the provinces in the country's federal system of government, and support the independence of the judiciary.

Most striking to many western eyes of the proposals bundled together in this reform package is the reduction in the powers of the President:

"The removal of Article 58-2/b ends the arbitrary power of the President to dismiss an elected government. With this, Mr Zardari becomes the first president in the country’s history to surrender his powers vested in the Constitution."

Other measures include:

• the re-naming of the North-West Frontier province to the less colonial Khyber Pakhtunkhwa
• the creation of a Judicial Commission for appointment of judges to the Supreme Court
• the removal of the name of Gen. Zia-ul-Haq from the Constitution - a symbolic act aimed at making a statement against military intervention in the democratic process
• the extending of compulsory education to all 16-year olds
  

The news, meanwhile, is less encouraging from Thailand where a virtual media blackout is now in force.








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