ASH BARKER, Bangkok-based international director of Urban Neighbours Of Hope, reflects on the recent turmoil in the Thai capital…
On 19th May, I looked up from where I was at the Klong Toey Community Centre and saw plumes of smoke rising up into sky from not too distant business buildings. Along with the adults and children gathered there, I was transfixed as army helicopters started to land on the very top of one of the closest, the burning ‘Channel 3’ sky scraper, rescuing TV execs and staff from the fires, looting and rioting going on below.
The Red Shirt leaders had just surrendered after the army crashed through their protest areas in downtown Bangkok with tanks. Now their supporters, some armed with M-16s and grenade launchers, were moving across the city exacting revenge. Banks who had held on to former Prime Minister Shinawatra Thaksin’s assets, media outlets that had not fully supported their cause (including Channel 3), and some of the largest shopping malls were set alight and turned to rubble.
CITY IN TURMOIL: A helicopter evacuates people from the Channel 3 building in Bangkok. PICTURE: Rod Sheard
“Perhaps these apocalyptic images of social conflict exemplify why the transformation of slums should be so important for all people today, including Christians.”
Urban Neighbours Of Hope (UNOH) workers, including myself, quickly gathered together with our children at the community centre, trying to work out what was next for us and our neighbours. Even getting in and out of Klong Toey was difficult now and there was a rumour Red Shirts were coming to burn our slum down. The young men who I normally coach football with had grabbed baseball bats and machetes and even a golf club to guard the two main entrances to Klong Toey.
Since early March tensions had been rising. Bangkok’s main commercial hub had been blockaded by Red Shirt protesters after exiled and former PM Shinawatra’s assets had only been partially released. There had been over 40 deaths and thousands injured in Red Shirt grenade attacks and clashes with army and police.
We had some close calls ourselves. Ben Rowse (a brother of UNOH Melbourne worker, Hannah Rowse) was about to step onto a train at Saladeng BTS station when four grenades went off. He was rushed to hospital and after a night there, returned to Klong Toey with just cuts and bruises. I was due to pick up the computer I am writing on now from a computer repair shop just near this station at the time the grenades went off. My computer wasn’t ready in time and I was spared the trip and danger. Chris McCartney, another UNOH worker, heard shots fired and saw people fall to the ground, while he kept riding his motorbike. The same day my mum was with my son Aiden at a local shopping centre when suddenly shots rang out and bombs went off nearby. They eventually found a person to help them across the road and found a tuk-tuk to take them to my office. This was all was happening about five minutes motorbike ride from our home and getting closer.
At a neighbourhood level there had been a deep divide. Even our house church had strong supporters of both Red Shirts (pro-Thaksin) and Yellow Shirts (anti-Thaksin). The Red Shirt barricades of tyres, sharpened bamboo poles and barbed wire had been in place in central Bangkok for more than two months, with battle-ready soldiers on the streets, even near our kid’s schools. Skirmishes and explosions on the edge of the protest barricades had been common, but an atmosphere of quiet, anticipatory dread fell across the rest of the city until all hell broke loose on 19th May.
Perhaps these apocalyptic images of social conflict exemplify why the transformation of slums should be so important for all people today, including Christians. That the world’s poor live so close to the rich and famous – and are nurtured and informed by the same media marketing bombardment – yet remain without the wherewithal to access these lifestyles is a toxic cocktail of guilt and resentment. Guilt that they and their children have not been smart or able enough to have what ‘everybody else has’, and a deep, burning resentment of ‘everybody’ who can. From this perspective, the looting and destruction taken out on Bangkok’s plush shopping malls only a few kilometres from slums should not be a surprise.
How and why the rural and urban poor became radicalised as Red Shirts is also a warning. At first glance, it makes no sense for so many poor to leave what they are doing and put their lives on the line for Thaksin, one of the richest people on the planet. For this is not an ‘uprising of the poor’, but an acting-out on behalf of a billionaire. Even while in exile and with his official assets seized, Thaksin bought Manchester City football club and a Greek island.
Some of this can be explained by Thailand’s patron-client relationships where a benefactor is sought to look after them. Thaksin offered to be a kind of mega-benefactor for the poor. Not only did he provide 500 baht a day plus food for each Red Shirt protester that signed on each day and 1500 baht a day for those on front line ‘security’, if they won the cause against the government there would be homes and cars for everyone who wanted them. This was part of Thaksin’s appeal while in office too, though very few of his populist schemes actually worked for many people and he certainly made more money in office than as a private citizen. The sheer amounts of money on offer and the idea of such a benefactor was hard for some of my Klong Toey neighbours to reject, but it was almost impossible for many of those in rural areas like the north-east to reject. What other options are there to find the ‘good life’? Messianic figures able to manipulate the masses for their own benefit should be expected as the rise of poverty and urban slums increases.
“Messianic figures able to manipulate the masses for their own benefit should be expected as the rise of poverty and urban slums increases.”
Christian faith and mission is challenged in all kinds of ways by the specific scenes of 19th May and rise of urban poverty in general. Not least is the serious challenge to Christian relevancy. Jon Sobrino, a Jesuit serving in El Salvador, makes the case in his book Mercy that any real Christian theology cannot avoid engaging with such suffering no matter where they are located: “The task of theology today, either in the First or Third World, cannot be carried out if the massive, cruel and mounting suffering that pervades our world is ignored. If a theology closes its eyes to suffering because such suffering is not occurring massively in ‘its’ world, that theology would dissociate itself from the real historical humanity in which we all live and which, theologically, is God’s own creation. In a world of suffering, therefore, what is at stake is the humanity of human beings and the faith of believers. For these two foundational reasons, the relevance and credibility of theology is also at stake.”
These are high stakes indeed. The ability to be truly human and have a credible faith requires a Christian commitment to be relevant to the needs of those suffering in places like slums. Without such commitment to act, any credibility Christianity has is lost. Slums matter to Christianity therefore, because without a relevant response, this faith looses credibility, a universal truth claim and something real to offer humanity.
Relevancy is especially important for Christian faith because it is a test of the universality of its truth claims. If, in the case of the rise of slums, Christianity fails to respond creatively, sacrificially and effectively to the rise of slums, then the failure of relevance calls into questions the universal truth claims of Christianity. If Christianity has nothing truly transformative to offer slums, does it have anything to offer the wider humanity and planet?
This serious challenge of relevancy can be especially maintained about slums toward Christianity. According to some estimates, the majority of humanity could well be living in slums by 2050. To fail a few of God’s children might be considered to lack some relevancy, but when most people are failed then irrelevancy must be considered an understatement. The increasing numbers of urban poor will increasingly demand the attention of all people, including Christians. As Sobrino writes, liberation theology discourses the majority world being poor and suffering is understood as every Christian’s concern: “For liberation theology, the major form of suffering in today’s world is historic suffering – suffering unjustly inflicted on some by others. Historic suffering is massive, affecting the majority of humanity, making it practically impossible for people to direct their own lives, causing poverty that brings death slowly and violently.”
Of course, there has always been a connection between rich and poor, but the rise of a new globalisation where increased connections and inter-dependencies are growing via commerce, education, media and technology has heightened this connection. A serious breakdown anywhere in today’s world affects everybody, everywhere. Think of a world where the majority of people are trying to survive the challenges of slums and no person is immune from the chaos. There are only so many places a helicopter can take the few who can catch them.
Not only can civil unrest catch on, but the mutation and passing on of infectious diseases are highly like from the crowded conditions in places like urban slums. In an age when infectious disease can be spread globally in the matter of days, such conditions cannot be ignored. The loss of millions of lives because of the Spanish flu in the early part of the twentieth century when there were so few slums should be a warning to us that far worse is possible for all of us today. The so called ‘Mexican-flu’ in 2009 is but one example of this possibility already happening. Slums therefore are everybody’s challenge and especially so for Christians if they are to true to their faith and be relevant to what is happening in the world.
“Slums…are everybody’s challenge and especially so for Christians if they are to true to their faith and be relevant to what is happening in the world.”
The rise of slums also raise questions of Christian fidelity. This idea of the need for fidelity is seen throughout the New Testament and can especially be seen in contrast to the Roman Empire. At the time of the writing of Revelations, for example, the myth of fides (Greek pistis) was a foundational one in the Roman Empire. As Wes Howard Brook and Anthony Gwyther explain in their 1999 book Unveiling Empire: Reading Revelation Then And Now: “In the ancient world, fides/pistis was a synonym for reciprocal loyalty. Caesar embodied fides in his faithfulness to treaty obligations, his justice, and his concerns for the welfare of the people. Naturally, it was a social expectation that faith was reciprocated by the people in the form of loyalty to Caesar. In the ancient world this bond of reciprocal loyalty contained a certain exclusivity. It also involved the submission of the weaker party to the stronger in accordance with patron-client relations. Conquered peoples would offer their fides to Rome, where it involved a total surrender to the discretion of the emperor. Faith could not be divided. It was either given to Caesar or not. Not to give to Caesar was an act of gross insolence. It might even amount to a declaration of war.”
Faith/fides/pistis in Jesus, then, is a radical alternative to faith in Caesar. It is at once both ultimately relevant to what is really happening in the world and also shows a loyalty to Jesus and His priorities. The English word ‘faith’ has often been domesticated to mean a mere private idea between God and individuals. But, the writer of Revelations goes to great lengths to explode the myth of faith in Caesar being real as compared with Jesus and that calls for both relevance and faithfulness to Christ. An example of this can be seen in Revelation 2: 13 when the author addresses the church in Pergamum: “I know where you are living, where Satan’s throne is. Yet you are holding fast to my name, and you did not deny your faith in me even in the days of Antipas my witness, my faithful one, who was killed among you, where Satan lives.”
Therefore, compared to the practical difficulties to Christian strategy that slums pose, these ‘below the surface’ challenges are ones that go to deep into the motivational and definitional nature of Christian faith.
The real costs of ‘doing justice’ is a serious barrier to involvement in the rise of slums for many Christians today. By 19th May, many missionaries and Christian NGO’s had evacuated their people from Bangkok. Certainly we were criticised for staying if we didn’t have to. Yet Christian faith has a rich tradition of those who have put their lives on the line in being faithful to God in the face of oppressive and chaotic contexts. Liberation theologians point to those who have and are still standing for justice and life in the midst of oppression and death as quintessential Christian witnesses. The Greek word for ‘witness’ can actually be translated ‘martyr’.
This is not just a historical view, but often lived and seen up close by revolutionary theologians. Archbishop Romero of El Salvado, is such an example. He challenged all Christians to faithfulness in seeking to do justice despite the costs, when, just moments before he was assassinated, he said:
“Christ invites us not to be afraid of persecution because, believe me, brothers and sisters, anyone who commits themselves to the poor must suffer the same fate as the poor.”
– Archbishop Romero of El Salvador
“Christ invites us not to be afraid of persecution because, believe me, brothers and sisters, anyone who commits themselves to the poor must suffer the same fate as the poor. And in El Salvador we know what the fate of the poor is: to be disappeared, tortured, arrested, to appear as corpses…I am glad, brothers and sisters, that our church is persecuted, precisely because of its preferential option for the poor and because it tries to become incarnate in the interest of the poor. It would be a sad if in a country where there are so many horrible murders, we did not also find priests and among the victims. They are witnesses to a church incarnate in the problems of the poor…The only thing that consoles me is that Christ, who tried to convey this great truth, was also misunderstood, called a rebel, and sentenced to death, as they have threatened me today…I want to assure you, and beg your prayers to remain faithful to this promise, that I will not abandon my people, but I will run with them all the risks demanded by my ministry…I have frequently been threatened with death. I must tell you that, as a Christian, I do not believe in death, but resurrection. If they kill me I will rise again in the Salvadorian people. I tell you this without boasting, with the greatest humility…As a pastor I am obliged to give my life for those I love, who are all Salvadorians, even those who are going to murder me. If they fulfill their threats, as of now I offer God my blood for the redemption and resurrection of El Salvador…Martyrdom is a grace I do not think I deserve. But if God accepts the sacrifice of my life, let my blood be a seed of freedom and the sign that hope will soon become a reality. (Cited by Javier Jimenez Limon, ‘Suffering, death, cross and martyrdom’ in Ignacio Ellacuria and Jon Sobrino (eds), Mysterium Liberationis: Fundamental concepts of liberation theology, (Maryknoll; Orbis, 1993), p 715.)
We need to acknowledge the debt of gratitude Christianity owes these activist-scholars in raising the importance of justice to Christian fidelity and see the need to heed their call. We also need to acknowledge that this challenge of seeking justice is raised even further as the numbers of those living in urban poverty rises each day. The personal cost rises too and that can be a real barrier for taking up authentic Christian discipleship today in relation to slums.
As the UNOH team sat around our regular communion table in classrooms of the Klong Toey Community Centre on 19th May we were deeply aware of two primal impulses. Fight or flight. The impulse to flee that was being echoed from the Australian government and some of the parents of our team. As a parent with two of my children, I was also deeply aware of the potential trauma staying could have on them. But there was also the impulse to overstretch our role and act in reckless ways unhelpful to the cause. Would we join our footballers for example with the baseball bats? In the end while all workers were given the freedom to leave, we all decided to stay together that night at the centre. Some of us also went to give moral support to our friends on the front line at different points during the night. As the sun rose on the 20th May I did have a baseball bat in my hands at an entrance of the slums, but it was for fun, playing around with some of the footballers who had stayed awake all night. The Red Shirts had not come further. All fires had been put out in time. We lived to stand with our community another day.
Bangkok-based Ash Barker is the international director of Urban Neighbours of Hope.
