Word: bangkok
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Thai Lunar New Year is usually a time when guns line the streets of Bangkok. Water guns, that is, manned by revelers who spray passersby to summon plenty of rain for the coming year's harvest. But today, as this Thai New Year began, the usual neon-hued water guns were supplanted by submachine guns held by soldiers who were trying to disperse the agitated antigovernment protesters who have blockaded part of central Bangkok for days...
...government claimed that 23 soldiers were wounded by the protesters; for their part, the antigovernment forces countered that the soldiers had fired at them and that six of their own had been killed by army bullets - a charge the military denies. (See pictures of the 2008 protests in Bangkok...
...another unhappy chapter in Thailand's seemingly endless crisis between two political forces, which each claim the mantle of democratic fervor and populist sentiment as their own. Last year, yellow-shirted antigovernment protesters drawn heavily from the middle classes occupied Thailand's seat of power for months and besieged Bangkok's international airport for a week. The Yellow Shirts' aim? To force the then government to step down because they considered the ruling party to be a proxy for former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, who was ousted in a 2006 army coup. In December, the courts dissolved that ruling party...
...Shirts, who draw much of their support from the rural heartland and tend to still pledge allegiance to Thaksin, are occupying the streets around Bangkok's Government House calling for Abhisit's ouster. Roads normally clogged with traffic are eerily empty, with commandeered public buses and rows of smoldering tires serving as impromptu demarcations of Red Shirt territory. Over the weekend, red-hued crowds managed to deluge an Association of Southeast Asian Nations summit held at a beach resort near Bangkok, forcing some world leaders to evacuate the premises by helicopter. The conference was hastily canceled. "Even if [the government...
...Bangkok Protests, Again After just a few months of relative calm following an extended period of political turmoil, as many as 100,000 protested on April 8 to demand that Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva step down. Supporters of exiled former PM Thaksin Shinawatra rallied outside the home of the privy councilor to Thailand's revered monarch. Thaksin blames the adviser for organizing the 2006 coup that ousted...