Nick Paton Walsh blogs on the increasingly violent red-shirts protests in Thailand.
It seems to get more volatile each day, but always with a twinge of surrealism that makes you think this standoff owes a little more to CS Lewis than CS Gas.
For seven weeks an area that’s more or less equivalent to Oxford and Regent Street has been taken over by thousands of red-shirted protestors.
They’ve erected huge barriers of tyres and spiky bamboo poles, which they aim to set fire to if the army advances. They’ve torn up the pavements, aiming to use rocks to defend themselves.
They’ve made a lot of flip-flops with the prime minster’s face on them (so you can, with ease, walk on his face – a big time insult); they’ve had a tombola with his face on mugs; their leaders have texted journalists pledging the massed armies of the Thai government are on the way in their hundreds, and then shrugged as nothing happens; the government have released a flow chart that would make NATO’s backroom strategists in Afghanistan proud, which seems to loosely link an alleged plot against the monarchy here to a Thai restaurateur in San Francisco.
It would be funny, were a lot of people not armed and rather desperate for something to give.
The red-shirts have braved army threats, rain, and mounting unpleasant levels of hygiene.
And now, after all this time, and all the talks between the two sides, it’s even less clear what can actually end this standoff.
The red-shirts seemed to begin as a force led by a coterie of former Thai Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, demanding his return to power through new elections, but now their cause appears to have become broader.
You get the feeling many of the angry and tired red-shirts on the streets below us don’t want to go home until they see some more fundamental change: a real shift in the power structure of this country – something almost like revolution.
Today’s violence bore out what many have feared: that the increasingly bold red-shirts decided to extend their protests to another part of the city, and met with police resistance.
A clash was sparked, rubber bullets fired at the protests and live ammunition in the air. Many were injured, and one soldier was killed it seems by his own side.
It’s the second time in a week that violence has suddenly flared and then evaporated.
Today, it was because the heavy Asian rains came down. It’s hard to do anything in that much water.
But it is only a matter of time, many fear, until one of these flare-ups results in something more sustained and tragic.