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Resistance, then surrender, in a doomed last stand
Sydney Morning Herald - May 20, 2010
Ben Doherty – Troops began massing in the pre-dawn darkness. The armoured personnel carriers rumbled onto Bangkok's deserted streets and hundreds of balaclava-wearing soldiers fanned out in a giant cordon.
The city slept. Rumours of an early morning "final crackdown" by the military had swept Bangkok the night before, but there had been rumours before, and nothing had happened.
This time it was real. Shortly after the sun came up, the "operation" – in government parlance – began.
No signal marked its beginning, just the stealthy march of soldiers into Lumpini Park – central Bangkok's biggest – in the grey early morning light. Firing began almost as soon as the soldiers entered the park.
Simultaneously, the troop carriers were driven at the monstrous barricades of tyres and sharpened bamboo staves, the fortifications that had protected the Red Shirts, and marked their territory, for more than a month.
The Red Shirts were ready. Many of the hardcore element within had vowed to fight to the death. Yesterday, many did.
Sensing their stand was doomed, and prepared to burn their city if they could not hold it, they set fire to the barriers.
The fire quickly consumed the structures, symbolic of the Reds' long-maintained but crumbling resistance.
Massive plumes of acrid black smoke filled the air.
As soldiers drew closer, and the battle grew more and more fierce, the Herald saw several Red Shirts carrying handguns and assault rifles, putting the lie to the claims from protest leaders that their people were unarmed. Some tried to maintain the ruse, running with rifles wrapped in mats, but they were soon revealed as fighting intensified and the weapons were put into use.
But for the most part, the protesters were hopelessly outgunned, and overwhelmingly outnumbered.
The soldiers moved steadily closer and the gunfire grew steadily heavier. Flash grenades pushed resistance back. Snipers on an elevated railway took careful shots at unknowing protesters below.
The Reds, under irresistible attack, retreated.
The Herald saw a man shot as he crouched behind a phone box. He rolled in the gutter, unable to stand, and cried out for help. Fellow protesters ran out, under a hail of bullets, to drag him to safety.
But help was unable to reach other victims. Another man shot in Ratchadamri Road lay stricken, alone and unmoving.
An ambulance that drove to him was fired upon and, ultimately, forced to abandon him. He would lie in no man's land for another hour at least before being reached by soldiers.
Retreating to the north-western corner of Lumpini Park, furious protesters hastily constructed another barrier out of wood, rubbish, chairs, whatever they could find lying around. But the detritus of months of protesting and a week of violent fighting would hold back the troops barely minutes.
"The Thai army bad. Shoot people. Shoot Thai people. They should not. Army bad," one Thai man yelled to the Herald as he threw wooden pallets into a pile, a pathetic resistance to the oncoming onslaught. The soldiers, in charge now, fired indiscriminately.
Bullets flew past, slamming into buildings and cars behind.
The windows on an ambulance shattered as it came under heavy fire. Protesters and journalists fled to the relative safety of the centre of the protest site, as yet unreached by the troops.
They would soon come.
As soldiers swarmed the streets below and gun battles raged all around, the Herald spent the afternoon bunkered in a room on the top floor of a building in the middle of the Red Zone. A Red Shirt leader, Sean Boonpracong, sought refuge there, watching a train station burn below.
He vowed there would be no surrender.
"They [the Red Shirts] are not resigned, they are enraged that they are being shot without having any defence. Those people who have come to help us are no match for the firepower of the military."
Across Thailand, Red Shirt supporters and sympathisers staged their own rallies. The Khon Kaen town hall was captured by protesters; in Udon Thani, they torched theirs.
But in the afternoon in central Bangkok, as soldiers drew ever closer, the Red Shirt leaders realised the fight could not be won.
Jatuporn Prompan stood on the main stage, smoke billowing from the crumbling ruins of his resistance. After 68 days of protest he begged the demonstrators to leave peacefully.
"Though the fight didn't reach our goal, we tried our best. Go home. We are sorry for not sending you home earlier. Go home safe."
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