BANGKOK: Thailand’s pro-government “Red Shirt” supporters rallied for a second day yesterday, vowing to protect Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra, who is facing a slew of legal challenges that could see her toppled within weeks.
Tens of thousands of Red Shirts descended on a wide road in a Bangkok suburb in a colourful and boisterous show of support for the crisis-mired premier, who has faced months of anti-government demonstrations in the Thai capital.
Drawn mostly from the poor but populous north and northeast, the Red Shirts say they will not accept the removal of another democratically elected government by a Bangkok-based royalist establishment backed by the judiciary and the military.
“This will be the final fight,” Red Shirt chairman Jatuporn Prompan told the rally, which is due to end today. “We are here to settle the bill with the elite,” he said, adding the Red Shirts were would not be deterred by any crackdown on their movement. “It is better to die than to be slaves,” he said
By yesterday afternoon “there were an estimated 30,000 Red Shirts,” said Paradorn Pattanatabut, a security adviser to the premier, told AFP. He said the rally drew around 100,000 people at its peak on Saturday evening, several times larger than a figure given by the rival anti-government movement. Opposition protesters in Bangkok want to oust Yingluck and install an unelected premier to oversee reforms aimed at curbing corruption and money politics, which they blame on the rise of billionaire Thaksin Shinawatra.
Thaksin, Yingluck’s elder brother, became premier in 2001 before being ousted in a military coup five years later and lives overseas to avoid jail for a corruption conviction he says was politically motivated.
Yingluck could face indictment over negligence charges linked to a controversial and costly rice subsidy scheme.
AFP
