BANGKOK: Anti-government protesters vowed yesterday to maintain their campaign to unseat Thai Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra despite dwindling numbers on the streets and a first tentative move by police against sites they are occupying in Bangkok.
Riot police reclaimed a thoroughfare in the capital’s government district on Friday without resistance, but backed off from confrontation elsewhere in the city and made no move against the largest protest sites at intersections in the main shopping and business areas. “Our mission is still going on, which is to reform the country,” Ekkanat Promphan, the protesters’ spokesman, told reporters. “All protest sites are still occupied by us and we will still continue our activity during the weekend.”
The protesters view Yingluck as a proxy for her elder brother, Thaksin Shinawatra, a self-exiled former prime minister who clashed with the establishment before he was overthrown by the army in 2006.
They are demanding that Yingluck makes way for an appointed “people’s council” to overhaul the political system and rid it of the influence of Thaksin, a telecoms billionaire accused of using taxpayer money to buy votes with populist giveaways.
Riot police lined up yesterday near a protest site at a government complex in north Bangkok, scene of a tense stand-off on Friday morning, but made no attempt to move in. National Security Council Chief Paradorn Pattanathabutr said later that the authorities had called off the operation and were hoping to hold talks with the local protest leader at the site, a Buddhist monk, today.
“We have already called off the plan to reclaim the site since there were several factors that could disrupt the operation,” Paradorn told reporters. “Moreover, police who were working at the...site told me that they are trying to persuade the monk to sit down and talk again tomorrow.”
Tarit Pengdith, chief of the Department of Special Investigation, Thailand’s equivalent of the FBI, told a news conference that protesters would not be dispersed by force.
Reuters
