Thailand Riots

Thailand riots: Ten die as troops clash with protesters in Bangkok | Mail Online

Anti-government protesters rejected talk of negotiations today after a month-long stand-off escalated into clashes that killed 20 people in Thailand's worst political violence in nearly two decades.

Tourists in the Khao San Road area of the city – a favourite with foreign backpackers – fled as Thai soldiers and police clashed with protesters during two hours of fierce fighting.

Reports last night said that three ‘Red Shirt’ demonstrators, two soldiers and a Japanese journalist from the Thomson Reuters news agency were among the dead.

Anti-government protesters

Aftermath: Anti-government protesters gather by an overturned armoured vehicle which was abandoned by soldiers during clashes on Saturday at Democracy Monument in Bangkok

Bangkok Anti-government protesters

Defiant: Red Shirts gesture as they stand on top of a tank at Democracy Monument as they vowed to keep up their bid to topple the government

Quiet returned to the city today after fierce fighting on is being dubbed 'Black Saturday'.

But parts of the city continued to look like a war zone as bullet casings, pools of blood and shattered army vehicles littered the streets near a main tourist area where soldiers had tried to clear the protesters.

Today Red Shirts showed off a pile of weapons they had captured from army troops during yesterday's fighting, including rifles and heavy caliber machine-gun rounds.

Some wore confiscated army riot gear as they posed for photographs on the ruined military vehicles that lay abandoned.

As British tourists tried to flee the city today, the Foreign Office continued to warn Britons to exercise extreme caution throughout the country and to stay indoors if violence breaks out again.

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A Thai soldier lies on the ground after a clash with anti-government 'Red Shirt' protesters during a rally in Bangkok yesterday
bangkok

Thai troops fired rubber bullets at demonstrators as they moved in to clear a protest site in the biggest confrontation in the month-long campaign for new elections

Backpackers reported being barricaded in their rooms by security guards at their hotels and hostels and staff warning them to stay indoors during the fighting.

Violence erupted yesterday when troops tried to clear one of the protest sites and ended when they retreated.

At least 874 people were injured in what some are calling the 'Battle for Bangkok'.

But protesters continued to occupy their two main bases today - one in the capital's historic district and another on its main upscale shopping boulevard.

Today protesters held a held a procession for the dead near their rally site in historic Bangkok.

Marching with Buddhist monks, they held aloft red coffins and carried photos of the victims. One mother called her son 'a hero' before breaking down in tears.

Protesters also broke into a satellite communications complex in a northern Bangkok suburb, forcing the operators to restore their People Channel television station, which the government has twice shut down.

Government spokesman Panithan Wattanayakorn said the government's objective was to avoid more violence and 'to return the city to normal', but indicated there was no clear solution.
But red shirt leader Weng Tokirakarn said: 'The time for negotiation is up. We don't negotiate with murderers.

'We have to keep fighting,' he said, adding the protesters were not planning any action in Bangkok today 'out of respect for the dead'.

Four soldiers and 17 civilians were killed, according to theThai government's emergency centre.

Among the dead was Japanese cameraman father-of-two Hiro Muramoto, 43, who worked for the Thomson Reuters news agency.

Reuters said he was shot in the chest after Thai soldiers fired rubber bullets into crowds and live ammunition in the air to dislodge protesters from encampments in the capital.

During last night's violence, two demonstrators and a Buddhist monk were badly beaten while a Japanese tourist wearing a red shirt was also clubbed by soldiers until he was rescued by bystanders.

Khao San Road resembled a war zone, a Reuters photographer said.

Shop windows were shattered. Cars were smashed. Many people lay wounded on the street.



Barricaded shopping district
Tens of thousands also remained in Bangkok's main shopping district, a stretch of upscale department stores and five-star hotels held for a week by the mostly rural and working-class red shirts who say they have been marginalised in a country with one of Asia's widest disparities between rich and poor.

The red shirts used taxis and pick-up trucks to barricade themselves in that area, and expanded their control to include several more blocks. Hundreds of riot police who massed at one end retreated after being surrounding by red shirts.
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Protesters sleep outside a shopping mall in Bangkok after the government blocked an opposition TV station and dozens of websites as they tried to control the rallies

Into evening, many people lined the main street cheering as protesters waving red flags packed pick-up trucks which streamed into the area. Some climbed up electricity poles to cover closed-circuit cameras with flags to stop police surveillance.

The violence comes exactly a year after about 10,000 of the supporters of former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra brought traffic in Bangkok to a standstill for several days, occupying major intersections and sparking Thailand's worst political violence in 18 years.

In those protests, red shirts hijacked petrol tankers, torched dozens of public buses and hurled petrol bombs at troops until the army imposed order. Two people were killed and 123 wounded. The latest protests, however, involve more than five times as many protesters spread across several areas of the city.


The red shirts are violent anarchist thugs who have launched over thirty grenades and yesterday a lit gas canister to try and get back into power a corrupt and rotten PM who stole tens of billions of baht from the economy. It needs the present PM to make concessions to poor rural people to get this mess finished with but it will get a lot worse before it gets better and will seriously damage the tourism that Thailand gets a lot of it's foreign currency from

- Jim Diamond, Cambridge UK, 11/4/2010 05:57