Protesters Turn Up Heat in Thailand

[CrazyExpat]

BANGKOK — Dancing jubilantly in the streets to the beats of blaring pop and country music, anti-government demonstrators on Sunday defied calls by the government to disperse from Bangkok’s affluent commercial hub in a major escalation of three weeks of mass demonstrations.

Supporters of ousted premier Thaksin Shinawatra shouted slogans during anti-government protests at a tourist hub in Bangkok on Sunday.

“There’s not a jail big enough to fit us all,” said Nitipong, a protester who stood beside one of hundreds of pickup trucks blocking one of the country’s busiest intersections.

On Saturday, the protesters surrounded the national police headquarters, the Four Seasons, Hyatt, Intercontinental and other hotels and six major shopping malls, which are connected by an elevated “skywalk” and together have five times the floor space of the Mall of America, the famed shopping center outside of Minneapolis.

The provocative move to shut down the area infuriated many Bangkok residents and elevated what was major annoyance for the Thai government to a full-blown national crisis.

The protesters, known as the red shirts, are demanding that the government of Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva call new elections.

But some of the protesters, who are largely from Thailand’s rural hinterland, also said they were trying to prove a point by blocking such an economically important part of Bangkok: 15 months ago, their archrivals, the generally more well-heeled protesters known as the yellow shirts, blockaded Bangkok’s two international airports for a week, stranding hundreds of thousands of travelers. None of the yellow shirts have been convicted for shutting down the airport, including Kasit Piromya, the current foreign minister who took part and reportedly said the protest was “a lot of fun.”

After four years of political turmoil in Thailand, including a military coup and three other changes of government, political movements are engaging in a kind of street-protest brinkmanship, each staging their own variations of publicity-seeking mass demonstration.

Analysts say the demonstrations are a reflection of the failure of the parliamentary system to repair the fractures in Thai society since the administration of Thaksin Shinawatra, the former prime minister removed in the 2006 military coup.

Red-shirted protesters on Sunday said they were on the street because their voices had been squelched by the coup and two court decisions that removed prime ministers that represented their interests. One former prime minister, the late Samak Sundaravej, an ally of Mr. Thaksin, was removed from office two years ago because he received income from a cooking show, which judges ruled violated the Constitution.

Among the protesters Sunday was Samai Suporn, a 50-year-old rice farmer from northeastern Thailand, who said she had come to Bangkok for the protest because she remained upset at the coup.

“We’re here for a long time,” she said of the protest. “Until they dissolve Parliament.”

She came with 10 other people in a pickup truck still caked with the red dirt of rural Thailand and has never been inside the shopping malls that surrounded her.

Protest leaders have portrayed the current political troubles in Thailand as rich versus poor, but Mrs. Samai, who clears the equivalent of only $300 a year from her small rice farm and fruit orchard, said she had nothing against the rich.

“There are good and bad people among the rich and the poor,” she said. “I’m not jealous of the rich.”

She says she is upset at the government, especially because news reports on government television stations play down the strength of the red-shirt movement.

Although many people at the rally appeared to be from rural areas, there was also a sizable contingent of Bangkok residents.

Mr. Nitipong sells computer equipment and is a graduate of Thammasat, a prestigious university in Bangkok. Another woman, Nan, is a chemist who has a master’s degree from Chulalongkorn, another prestigious university. Both declined to give their full names, underlining the fear by some protesters, despite their defiant words, that the government could follow through with its threat to arrest them.

Mr. Abhisit, who is under pressure to end the protests, said Sunday that he would proceed cautiously. “I want to tell those people who suggest that the government deal with the demonstrators decisively that, supposing we do, a riot could take place, and there would be losses.”

Mr. Abhisit vowed “legal proceedings and prosecution” for anyone who broke the law. The government over the weekend said that anyone who did not leave the area would be subject to a year’s imprisonment, but it did not detail how it would force the protesters to leave.

Protesters Turn Up Heat in Thailand - NYTimes.com