Anti-government protesters listened to one of their leaders yesterday at Government House in Bangkok. (wason wanichakorn/Associated Press)
And it looks like they are having FUN -- something that I find so RARE at AmeriKan protests!!!
"Thailand drops treason charges against nine" by Thomas Fuller, International Herald Tribune | October 10, 2008
BANGKOK - In a victory for antigovernment demonstrators, a Thai appeals court yesterday dropped charges of treason against nine protest leaders, calling evidence against them too "vague."
The court upheld a charge of inciting unrest relating to the thousands of demonstrators who have barricaded themselves into the compound of the prime minister's office for the past six weeks. In a separate ruling, a criminal court yesterday allowed bail for the top leader of the protest, Chamlong Srimuang, 73, a former army general who was arrested Sunday. He arrived at the protest site yesterday to loud cheers.
In a bizarre twist to the standoff with the government, which is showing no signs of abating, the other protest leaders said they would turn themselves in to the police, but, like Chamlong, would request bail and continue their protests once, and if, they are released.
"We will still fight on," said Sondhi Limthongkul, one of the leaders sought by the police. "We have the right to protest and we will not leave Government House," he said, referring to the prime minister's office. "We will wait for the crackdown."
Prime Minister Somchai Wongsawat is temporarily operating out of the VIP lounge of Bangkok's old international airport. The well-provisioned protesters, many of them from Thailand's middle class, have largely retreated to the prime minister's compound after having surrounded Parliament on Tuesday, trapping hundreds of government lawmakers inside.
Yeah, the PM had to escape over a fence!!!
Police cleared a path for the members of Parliament to escape but during skirmishes with protesters at least one person was killed and 469 people wounded, 86 of whom were still hospitalized yesterday. Among the wounded are 20 police officers.
The police have traded recriminations with protesters over the cause of the death and several serious injuries. Thai media reported that two people had lost their eyesight and one person remains in a coma. The police say they used only tear gas to disperse the crowds. The protesters have accused them of wielding other weapons. Many of the protesters themselves were armed with knives and clubs and two police officers were shot.
Reaction to the violence Tuesday has underlined the extent of political polarization in Thailand. Doctors at a leading hospital in Bangkok initially said they would refuse to treat wounded police officers as a show of their displeasure toward what they said was an overly violent confrontation with the protesters.
(Clap, clap, clap, clap, clap)
The doctors were overruled by their superiors, but yesterday hundreds of doctors and nurses, dressed in black, marched to the national police headquarters demanding that the government step down.
Where ARE YOU, AmeriKa?
On Wednesday, a pilot for the national airline, Thai Airways, refused to let three members of Parliament board a flight because they belong to the governing party. The airline suspended the pilot. --more--"
To gain a better understanding than the obfuscating Zionist MSM, please read this:
"Former Left-Right Alliance against Globalization and America
28 July 2008
Article
Almost all Thai rightists I interviewed for my recent research perceived that the threats to Thailand today are capitalism and America. Even lifelong anti-communist ‘Phor’, an alias used for this research, who has tenaciously held the idea of national security being under threat from two strands of communism, sees that Thailand has to be cautious of the CIA interfering and agitating groups of Thai people to the point of being a threat to security. Of course, they were well aware that the threats from capitalism and America are not one and the same as the communist threat.
The rightists’ discourse of capitalist threat obviously differs from the leftists’ Maoist anti-capitalist discourse of 30 years ago. These rightists speak pretty much the same anti-neo-liberalism and anti-globalization language which Thai intellectuals and activists have adopted since after Oct 6, 1976.
Although all the interviews were done years after the 1997 economic crisis, the pain caused by the capitalist crisis was still alive in their memories. Their discourse on the cause of the crisis turned out to be nationalist and against ‘farang’ or western capitalism, pointing to western capitalist giants led by the US bullying emergent smaller capitalist nations. For the ease of digestion and propagation, it was made a story of conspiracy among a handful of global political and financial figures, often including George Soros in particular. The ‘Washington Consensus’ was understood simply as a plot by western capitalist neo-conservatives to destroy smaller states. With the calamity besetting Thai nationalist capital which had eagerly embraced globalization over a decade earlier, globalization has become undesirable. Their discourse against western capitalism was therefore not of a socialist bent, but was outright nationalist, against those ugly farangs abusing decent Thais.
Most of the interviews were done during the years of Thaksin administration which was seen as representing the evil western capitalism, subsequently labelled as ‘vicious or immoral capital’. The exasperation against Thaksin and globalization and the global anti-American sentiment fed into one another. Among the rightists I interviewed then, only one person liked the Thaksin government, and the rest were suspicious of Thaksin because he was pushing the agenda of globalization.
--MORE--"So WTF is with the GLOBALIST, AGENDA-PUSHING account of the situation, AmeriKan MSM?
