Thai troops cleared the gutted remains of armored carriers yesterday after anti-government protesters vacated the site of last week’s bloody clashes and shifted to an upscale shopping district to intensify their campaign to oust the prime minister.
The “red shirt” protesters vow their new encampment in the Rajprasong shopping area, several kilometers from the old camp in Phan Fa, will be the final battlefront in their bid to have parliament dissolved and new elections held.
A failed attempt by security forces to flush the red shirts from Phan Fa on Saturday ended with deadly street battles that left 24 people dead in Thailand’s worst political violence in nearly two decades. The government’s disaster management center said a 24th person died of injuries yesterday.
PHOTO: AFP
The crisis has deeply divided this Southeast Asian nation into color-coded factions, threatening to sink an economy that had recently started to revive. The red shirts are bitterly opposed by the “yellow shirts” who support the government but have over the past few months stayed on the sidelines. Another group, the “pink shirts, emerged recently through an Internet campaign by mainly urban professionals, who say they just want peace.
Thai Prime Minister “Abhisit Vejjajiva is the one who must make an immediate decision now [to dissolve parliament], and if he doesn’t we will escalate our pressure,” said Weng Tojirakarn, a red shirt leader. “We will keep on demonstrating ... Abhisit must go into exile.”
Tensions were likely to build up after the four-day Lunar New Year festival of Songkran ends today.
The red shirts — mainly rural poor who accuse Abhisit of coming to power illegally — arrived in Bangkok from the provinces in droves a month ago and occupied the Democracy Monument in the Phan Fa neighborhood in the old part of the capital.
Thousands more took over the posh Rajprasong area, lined with shopping malls and five-star hotels, on April 5.
“We moved out of Phan Fa for the safety of our protesters,” protest leader Nattawut Saikua said. “And more importantly, the army would not be able to have any more excuse for clamping down on us. We’ve already cleared the area for them.”
“Rajprasong will be the last battlefront between us and Abhisit,” Saikua said.
“Logistically we’d be more efficient. We’d better organize ourselves,” he said.
“Our troops would then be much more stronger,” he said.
After the red shirts moved out of Phan Fa, soldiers arrived with cranes to lift the burned out hulls of armored personnel carriers and trucks that were set on fire by protesters on Saturday. The remains were placed on trailer trucks, draped with tarpaulins and driven away.
Municipal workers removed red banners that had been wrapped around the Democracy Monument, a gigantic dome-shaped structure.
They used high-pressure water hoses to rid the sidewalks of cooking oil stains, sprayed disinfectant and replanted flowers and hedges.
Volunteers cleaned graffiti from the monument, including vulgar abuses against the prime minister.
Sewage trucks lined up along the main road to drain the foul-smelling overflow, particularly in the stretches where the red shirts had set up makeshift bathrooms.
In a reflection of growing divisions in the country, about 700 pink shirts, who oppose the dissolution of parliament gathered at a war memorial in the middle of a traffic roundabout in Bangkok on Wednesday.
The pink shirts planned another demonstration yesterday.
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