Two sides to every story, no winners

Still, the video clips shown by the Opposition during the two-day debate in Parliament on the Songkran riots are as worthy as one can believe.

The same goes for video clips shown by the govern-ment, which highlighted mobs of unruly red shirts, while the security forces appeared well disciplined. In other words, the government's version showed the most merciful and the best organised crackdown the world has seen, whereas the other side tried to depict something akin to holocaust.

You can be certain about one thing: The idea to use these Parliament as a reconciliatory forum bombed from the word "go". The session underlined the deep divide in Thailand that has given us all the ability to tell stories like in the film "Rashomon" - we talk about the same thing, but each ver-sion is different.

Nobody emerged a winner from this debate. But if you had the patience to sit through it, you might have been able to piece things together and get a complete story from both sides about what really happened.

For instance, yes, a man was horribly beaten, but whether he was an innocent bystander in the wrong place at the wrong time or a dare-devil protester who tried to drive a taxi into the troops and thus deserved to be manhandled is up to you.

You can also choose to either believe Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva, when he keeps reiterating that nobody died in the crackdowns, or you could listen to Pheu Thai MP Voravaj Ue-apinyakul, who claimed that a man was unconscious for a whole day and woke up in a military truck full of dead bodies. Voravaj said the man jumped from the truck and escaped when the it reached a bridge on its way to an unknown destination in Lop Buri.

Despite persistent charges of killings and bodies being hauled away in military trucks, the opposition had to settle for showing a video clip that featured a woman complaining that a man pulled her hair in a fierce manner, while soldiers only stood and watched. She reportedly spat at the man before he grabbed her locks.

All in all, the parliamentary debate produced no earth-shattering evidence of brutali-ty that could rattle the Abhisit administration. But again, an adamant Abhisit cannot be said to have benefited much from the opposition's lack-lustre showing. After all, the apparent political advantage derived from his firm denial of protesters' death will only last as long as the opposition can prove otherwise.