For the past month, Bangkok’s Din Daeng intersection has been a battleground between police and protesters, angry at economic, health and rights crisis
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Every few days, after finishing his online college classes, Chai* prepares to join protests in Bangkok. He takes a bandana to cover his face, material to obscure his motorbike licence plate, a helmet, and often a ping pong bomb.
The home made device, in which stones are wrapped up with firework powder will either be thrown at police as a provocation or used as a distraction when he and his friends are being chased by officers.
“We don’t have a choice, we have to come out; my family is suffering,” says Chai, who is 19. As he speaks, the banging of fireworks and ping pong bombs echoes from a nearby underpass. Clouds of black smoke rise from burning tyres further along the roadside.
He is at Din Daeng intersection, the site of a leaderless uprising by teenagers calling for action on a host of issues ranging from democratic reforms to coronavirus. For more than one month, the area has turned into a battleground with nightly clashes taking place between young protesters, mostly students from vocational colleges and poorer neighbourhoods, and the police, who routinely fire rubber bullets and teargas.
Chai’s mother and father, a food seller and an electrician respectively, have both lost work because of the pandemic. Chai says he has also been forced to give up his part-time job because his college course has been moved online and now doesn’t finish until later in the day. He is training to be an electrician, but is on the brink of dropping out. One of his friends, who leans in to talk, has already done so. They are struggling to learn from home, and say there has been no support to cover the internet costs.
“Everything has culminated, everything has exploded now during Covid,” Chai says. The economic situation and the government’s management of public funding cannot be tolerated any longer.
Last year tens of thousands of young people took to the streets across Thailand to call for democratic reforms aimed at making the establishment more accountable and society more equal. The protests, led mostly by university students, argued that the power and wealth of the monarchy should be curbed, that prime minister Prayuth Chan-ocha, a former army general who first came to power in a coup should resign, and that the constitution, drafted by army appointees, should be reformed.
The message was serious, but the rallies were peaceful, and often had a festive atmosphere, with playful protest art and even satirical dress.
None of the protesters’ demands have been met.
Instead, more than 1,000 people face legal charges for political activities, including at least 132 for lese-majesty, which can lead to 15 years in prison. Key protest leaders have been repeatedly denied bail.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/sep/25/everything-has-exploded-now-on-the-streets-with-thailands-protesters