The mass protest intended to paralyse Bangkok and topple the Thai Government began at exactly 12.12 pm today with a huge round of applause followed by the sound of gongs and Buddhist chanting.
Anti-government protesters from the United Front for Democracy against Dictatorship gathered in their thousands at strategic locations around the country ready to start streaming toward central Bangkok.
At Lak Si, on the edge of Bangkok, about 2,000 UPD protesters, known as Redshirts, stood in the sun, waving their plastic handclappers as they waited to start the protest, which has been organised to protest the ruling by the Thai Supreme Court last month to freeze most of the assets - valued at 76 billion baht (£1.52 billion) - of Thaksin Shinawatra, the ousted prime minister.
Mam Angkana, a self-employed health food saleswoman said the huge rally planned for cenral Bangkok on Sunday would show the world exactly how much the current Thai Government is despised by ordinary Thais.
"I don't love this Government," Ms Angkana said, adding that it had done nothing for Thailand's poor. "I don't love this Prime Minister."
Ms Mam said she expected violence to erupt in Bangkok over the next few days. "The Redshirts only have handclappers but the Government has troops," she said. "Abhisit wants to kill people," she added, referring to Thai Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva. "He wants to kill Redshirts."
As the protesters, uniformly dressed in red and bearing placards with the words: "No justice, no peace," and "We need true democracy," dispersed to carry their message through the capital in a convoy of pickup trucks and vans, tens of thousands of soldiers and police officers were deployed to maintain calm.
The Thai Government warned of unrest as 50,000 security personnel, including 30,000 from the army, 10,000 police officers and 10,000 civil defence volunteers lined streets and highways armed with water cannon, “sound wave” machines, tear gas, and batons to deter "unruly protesters", according to government spokesman Panitan Wattanayagom.
Government insiders have warned of gun and mortar attacks, and senior government leaders will be based at a temporary military command centre during the protest.
The Government has invoked the Internal Security Act, giving security forces wide-ranging powers to institute curfews, ban gatherings, and deploy troops. “The sheer number of people planning to come makes the imposition of the ISA almost automatic,” Mr Panitan said.
The Redshirts say they expect “hundreds of thousands” of the rural poor to join the sit-in from Thailand’s north and northeast.
But with crowd estimates ranging wildly from 300,000 to one million, UDD spokesman Sean Boonpracong conceded that a turn-out of fewer than 100,000 protestors would be deemed a failure. He said the protest could last for as long as five days from Monday, and that there were undisclosed plans for each day’s actions.
The Government, he said, was doing everything it could to deter protesters from coming to Bangkok, including setting up huge military check-points on the highways, threatening to shut down petrol stations, banning farm vehicles and out-of-state taxis, invoking the “draconian” ISA, and demonising the Redshirt movement.
The UDD Redshirts, their leaders say, simply want to change an age-old system of privilege that is still in force in Thailand, entrenching the wealth of the elite, urban, few.
“Reds are Thai people,” said Sean Boonpracong. “Inequality in Thai society – that’s a fact. We’ve lived it.”
Major roads in the city are expected to be closed, and boat traffic down the Chao Phraya river disrupted. Bangkok’s Suvarnabhumi airport is on high alert with authorities determined to avoid a reprise of the occupation in 2008, when “Yellow Shirt” supporters, aligned with Thailand’s current government, seized the airport to force political change.
Thailand has been periodically shaken by political unrest since Mr Thaksin was ousted from power in 2006. His Redshirt supporters insist the current Thai Government, led by Mr Abhisit, is illegitimate, and they demand its dissolution and fresh elections.
“Our goal is dissolution. If dissolution was announced tomorrow, there would be no movement,” Sean Boonpracong said.
Now living in exile in Dubai after jumping bail and fleeing Thailand in 2008, Mr Thaksin has been urging his supporters to join the protest. His wife and children have reportedly already left Thailand, but Mr Thaksin is expected to address his supporters rallying in central Bangkok via video-link.
Redshirt protests in Bangkok a year ago saw public buses commandeered, standoffs between protesters and the Thai military, and riots that ended with scores injured and two dead.
Mr Abhisit yesterday said that fresh elections, and his resignation, were possible options to quell dissent – but not at gunpoint.
“I will not hold on to power,” he told a sitting of Parliament. “If the House dissolution or my departure will make things better, I have no problem at all. But a coup is totally unacceptable to me.”
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