At the Foreign Correspondents Club of Thailand on Thursday evening 10 June 2010 a large audience turned out to watch a series of videos shot during the May 14th to 19th period when violence erupted in parts of Bangkok. The panelists were photographers and cameramen (no women on the panel) who had, often at great personal risk, shot compelling images. After watching almost one hour of the events unfold through these images, I had the question as to what to make of what I saw on the TV monitors.
I suspect that I wasn’t alone in feeling the powerful emotions that images of being dead bodies, the wounded, soldiers firing M16s and armed demonstrators throwing firecrackers, Molotov cocktails. There were also images of the Men In Black (MiB), the name given to a group of men who wore (mostly) black and were armed with handguns or M16s or other weapons. Those on the panel contradicted the government’s claim that there were 500 hundred such MiB. It is likely to be exceedingly difficult to find out the exact number, who these mystery were, their affiliations with outsiders, their connection to the Red Shirt demonstrators, and who financed, organized and led these men. Or if indeed there were multiple groups of MiB. These MiB moved like particles in a quantum system. Everyone sought to collapse the quantum state and measure what was inside the war zone.
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