Identifying the Anti-Thaksin protest attacker Part 1

You can read about detective work or even watch programs on TV that show how it works. You can apply logic, or look for repeating patterns to narrow the list of suspects. So after roughly 8 plus years of attacks on peaceful protesters and innocent Thai people, it is time to connect the dots and see where it leads.

We could probably say the starting point of this is the second half of 2005 in general. But actually the pattern starts a bit before that, but it did not necessarily use violence. But to not make this too broad in scope, we will start connecting the dots with the start of Anti-Thaksin protests that first appeared at Lumphini park.

The first group of protests were lead by Sondhi Limthongkul at Lumphini park in the third quarter of 2005. This was the true beginning of Thailand’s political crisis. The first gathering was about 5000 people, and on the side lines there were people that worked for Thaksin monitoring how the crowd was responding. Needless to say Thaksin did not like the reports he got back.

The following week (as this was to be a weekly event) the crowd had grown in size by about 1000 people, and would continue to grow at that rate for a few months. By about the third week thugs were sent in to cause fighting inside the gathering. They were later identified as being Pro-Thaksin. This was the very first attack that involved physical violence on innocent people who had gathered at a rally. The attacks started to become more regular and more violent. In each and every case Thaksin was far away and denied any involvement.

After a while Sondhi Limthongkul ran out of fuel and the protests waned. However at the start of 2006, Thaksin’s greed got the best of him and Sondhi Limthongkul suddenly had more fuel than he needed. Protests restarted and Thaksin’s response was to dissolve parliament and call snap elections to reassert himself as the people’s choice. Needless to say that did not go well as even the election process was corrupted. The court eventually threw out that election, and the protests continued.

Thaksin’s next move was to pretend he was quitting in order to turn down the heat. That worked until he came back about a month later saying he had just taken a holiday. That caused things to backfire on him and the size of the protest rallies exploded. From that point on Anti-Thaksin protester’s blood started to spill on a regular basis. Once again Thaksin denied any involvement setting the first dot to be identified as being Thaksin’s denial and being away from the site of violence.

For the next few months violence against Anti-Thaksin protesters was growing and had advanced to the use of sticks and clubs as weapons. That all stopped when a Coup was launched in September 2006 that removed Thaksin. The two big underlying reasons for the Coup was Thaksin had removed all the checks and balances needed in a democracy and was about to take full control of the military, and it was strongly rumored that he had a private armed army (Forestry service) that was planning to attack the Anti-Thaksin protesters and the chance of major injury or death was a very real possibility. The Coup happened just hours before all of that was to take place.

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