by SHAWN W. CRISPIN
BANGKOK – Across the street from Thailand’s main financial district, anti-government protesters gathered sharpened bamboo poles while a speaker dressed in black threatened to castrate soldiers deployed nearby if they moved to disperse their protest site. A renegade army soldier who has accurately predicted a bombing campaign across the national capital, Major General Khattiya Sawsdipol, alias Seh Daeng, looked on in full uniform while the red shirt-wearing crowd cheered his presence.
Now symbolically situated in Bangkok’s contiguous luxury shopping and hotel district, the United Front for Democracy Against Dictatorship’s (UDD) five-week protest has through shock and awe tactics aimed to inflict economic damage to gain political capital over the Democrat Party-led ruling coalition. An economic recovery was taking hold in Thailand, with the government forecasting 5% gross domestic product
(GDP) growth after suffering from negative growth last year.
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