Back From Bangkok, Despite Red Shirts and Red Faces
While there, I found that I understood very little about Thai politics, but clearly not enough to understand who the Red Shirts were or why they had been demonstrating in Bangkok. Being within a state when something from the ordinary is occurring will concentrate one’s attention on such nation not only throughout the trip but also following it.
Red Shirts
For me personally, I appear to obtain a vested interest in a location when I had been there during a significant event Supreme shirt. Because of this, my understanding of Thai politics started changing during my trip there. Back home, I stay interested in after the news of this anti-government protests of the Red Shirts at Bangkok.

Back in January 2010, I started planning a yearlong visit to India. In precisely the exact same time I was able to convince a fantastic friend living in Sydney to meet me in Bangkok following my journeys in India.
Our strategies consisted of staying four nights in Bangkok before traveling to a beach resort south of Pattaya for a further four nights. Our last two weeks will be invested in Bangkok before flying home. Unsurprisingly, our plans did not always comply with the line we anticipated them to because of the political unrest in Bangkok.
My buddy was already conscious of the Australian press which the Thai government anticipated protests and potential clashes with a band known as the Red Shirts round the time we had been still meeting in Bangkok. Coming from London, I do not recall hearing or reading anything about the politics in Thailand that could have alerted me to some future trouble.
My friend wrote me a worried email around three months before we were to meet in Bangkok. She read of those mounting uneasiness of the Thai government and other Asian countries regarding the projected anti-government demonstrations. It was only when we had been in Bangkok I realized things were much more severe than I thought and she had been correct in being worried!
I arrived in Bangkok from Delhi on Tuesday afternoon, 9 March 2010, along with my buddy arriving several hours afterward from Sydney. We had been staying in the Davis Hotel in the eastern portion of Bangkok for four nights. I heard nothing regarding any demonstrations in the global airport, by the cab driver or by the hotel staff once I arrived.
It was just late Thursday we began to find the information that these Shirts’ expected to have a million demonstrators to their weekend protests. Our resort staff recommended we stay around the resort on Friday since they did not understand what to anticipate.
We took their advice and listened carefully to the information to find out if we’d have difficulty leaving the town the next morning to the beachfront. At precisely the exact same period, the reports suggested that the amounts coming to protest were considerably smaller than anticipated.
The following day we left behind Jomtien Beach just south of Pattaya Beach. We saw no sign of difficulty. There weren’t any hurdles or police-blocks on the street as we left the town as we drove the motorway down to Pattaya. Throughout the weekend, we started hearing about presentations, how big the audiences as well as the rhetoric of the leaders of the Red Shirts.
It had been reported that rather than a million demonstrators just about 100,000 Red Shirt demonstrators had flipped up in Bangkok by Sunday. We heard that the reduced numbers were expected, in part, to the authorities blockades of access roads to Bangkok in the northern rural regions.
It can be that you’re now wondering,”Do you know these colored tops in Thailand? Who would be the Red Shirts? Allow Me to clarify:
As a generality, the Red-shirts are encouraged by the rural inhabitants as well as the urban poor. Even with PM Thaksin’s billions of dollars in prosperity, he’s regarded as a hero to the downtrodden Thais.
Unsurprisingly, the Red Shirts affirmed the subsequent two prime ministers selected by precisely the exact same authorities: Samak Sundaravej and Somchai Wongsawat. Additionally, there are pro-democracy activists engaging in the present demonstrations that disagree with all the legal basis of the 2006 military coup which ousted PM Thaksin.
The Red Shirts basic belief is that the current government of Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva is illegitimate since it came into power after contested court rulings dissolved two chosen pro-Thaksin authorities, after the 2006 military coup. They need the present parliament dissolved and fresh elections held.
The Yellow Shirts are largely middle-class and urban elites that support the present government of PM Abhisit. They are occasionally combined by an anti-Red Shirt group that brings office workers, middle-class households, professors, and a few low-wage employees. In previous demonstrations from the Yellow Shirts’, there’s been more confrontation and violence.
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