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Red Shirts on Silom Road
Front-page headlines from the past few days in the Bangkok Post which are in no way an exaggeration.
The anti-government protests by the United Front for Democracy Against Dictatorship (UDD), or “Red Shirts”, have been going on for two months now, and friends and family back home who’ve seen dramatic news footage have enquired about my safety, to which I had always replied that “it looks much worse than it is”, and that I was completely safe so long as I stayed away from the demonstration zones.
Not anymore. Continue reading
Filed under: News, politics, Thai news | Tags: Abhisit Vejjajiva, anti-government protests, Bangkok, civil unrest, democracy, Democrat Party, Don Mueang airport, elections, PAD, People Power Party, People's Alliance for Democracy, politics, red shoirts, Samak Sundaravej, Somchai Wongsawat, Suvarnabhumi airport, Thai army, Thai Democrat Party, Thai politics, Thaksin Shinawatra, UDD, United Front of Democracy Against Dictatorship, yellow shirts
Yellow shirts rise up
The first item on the agenda is to fill in the gaps between September 2008 and September 2009, before I will start writing about more timely stuff, as and when it happens. I will be concise, because 12 months is a long time to chronicle, and will perhaps return to certain points in more detail at a later date.
There have been two major anti-government protests during my time here. The first, aforementioned one culminated in the “yellow shirts”, or People’s Alliance for Democracy (PAD) closing down Bangkok’s two airports for a week in November. This essentially forced out the then-government led by Prime Minister Somchai Wongsawat, to be replaced by the unelected then-opposition Democrat Party Abhisit Vejjajiva.
