In what might appear to be déjà vu except for the color of their shirts, thousands of red-shirted anti-government protesters descended on Government House in Bangkok today, signaling the beginning of yet another round of destabilizing protests that threaten to again bring government and commerce to a halt again.
The protesters declared that Wednesday was D-Day for their cause, claiming that they will draw up to 3000,000 people from the eastern and northern parts of Thailand, the traditional stronghold of former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra.
The red shirts, formally known as the National United Front of Democracy Against Dictatorship, aim to topple current Prime Minster Abhisit Vejjajiva. According to Bangkok police, about 30,000 protesters gathered outside the main government offices in the capital, where demonstrators have been staging a sit-in for the past two weeks. The Bangkok Post reports that the protests come a day after the red shirts attacked Abhisit’s motorcade following a cabinet meeting in Pattaya.
The prime minister warned that crowd dispersal could be used if the protests spiraled out of control. “’If it [the protests] develops into mayhem, we may have to do that,” he said on Wednesday morning.
Thaksin, who lost power in a bloodless coup in 2006 while traveling abroad and is currently living in exile to avoid a Thai jail term for corruption, said that the protests would be a “historic day for Thailand.”
“We will come peacefully but we need as many people as possible to show that the Thai people will not tolerate these politics anymore,” he said in a video that was played for supported outside Government House on Tuesday night.
Thailand has seen wave after wave of protests following the 2006 coup as the country is now deeply divided between the red shirts, Thaksin’s supporters among the urban and rural poor, and the yellow shirts, the traditional power cliques of the palace, military and bureaucracy.
Following elections in 2007 that saw the populist People’s Power Party elected to power, the yellow shirts began a series of protests led to the closure of Bangkok’s international airport last year and brought the government to a halt. Following the occupation of government headquarters by the protesters, the Thai Supreme Court ruled that the People’s Power Party was guilty of electoral fraud, paving the way for Abhisit to assume power in December.
The transition of power did little to quell the growing divisions in Thai society, which have helped fuel the ongoing protests and led to an exodus of foreign investment and tourist dollars as investors and holidaymakers increasingly steer clear of the troubled nation.
