Aug 26

Make Or Break Day

Posted in Thai Politics

It’s been a politically massive day for a awful lot of people in Bangkok and Thailand in general. Thousands of hardcore and not too hardcore protesters led by the People’s Alliance for Democracy descended onto the streets of central Bangkok, demanding the immediate resignation of the government.

pad protesters

huge protest

crowd

They occupied the premises of the new state broadcaster NBT, forcing it off the air, and also stormed the main government offices, effectively forcing the already lazy civil servants to stop working. And they say they will not leave until their demand is met. Nobody can quite believe we’re now back where we were almost two years ago again. And whether there’s going to be another coup is debatable and beyond anyone’s guess.

Rant over. Wait…. No it ain’t. Despite its name, the PAD is not doing democracy any favour if I must be honest. While I believe it is perfectly acceptable to stage a peaceful protest in public, any attempt to provoke a crackdown by the government in order to gain public sympathy and perhaps compel the army to intervene (again) is just wrong.

gatecrashers

gatecrash

To make matters worse, I’ve heard that a government MP has planned to organise counter crowds should the government fail to disperse the PAD-led mass rally. The Interior Minister Kowit Wattana has also ordered the police to evict the protesters from the government house compound.

pad protest

pad government compound

sondhi

So in a way this is complete madness and it might not be too happy an ending for everyone. I hope there won’t be any bloodshed but can’t honestly rule it out either. Need a beer mate! :D

3 Responses

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 26th, 2008 at 7:54 pm and is filed under Thai Politics. Follow the comments through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can post a comment, or leave a trackback.

3 Responses to “Make Or Break Day”

  1. chris
    August 26th, 2008 at 9:00 pm

    Don’t publish this comment (unless you want to) : but cut out some of the ads in your side bar mate. It takes far to long to load… I wait cos I’m ur mate, but otherwise i wouldn’t comment due to waiting a long time for the page to load :) (personally I’d remove the traffic feeds - who gives a fuck where the last man come from and you don’t generate any money for adding it!)

  2. chris
    August 26th, 2008 at 9:01 pm

    What I want to know is how do all these people get time off work? :)

  3. Tom
    August 27th, 2008 at 12:04 pm

    i do give a fuck about all my readers and where and how they get here mate.
    and the site loading slowly has nothing to do with the ads - its slow because there’s far too many visitors i.e. it’s a quality site :P

    as for the protests, well some people just have too much time to spare innit! :D

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