PAD ends airport siege

[Mark]

The PAD has announced an end to its protests and its siege of both airports and Government House, effective 10:00am Wednesday, December 3rd. It has said that protesters can go home now.

This announcement came a few hours after the Constitution Court dissolved the People Power Party and banned its top executives from politics for 5 years.

The PAD had initially announced, immediately after the court ruling, amid all the celebrations, that it would stay at the airport to put pressure on the interim government. They changed their minds soon after that, thank goodness. Why, I don't know. Maybe they realized that the public backlash to that was too strong. Maybe their own supporters on-site were starting to desert them. Maybe they were afraid of the red shirt army coming. Maybe some of them actually cared about all the damages to innocent people and businesses and the country from airport closure. Maybe some combination of these. There was also talk of a negotiation to reopen the airport and put the PAD into a designated space at the airport where they would not interfere, but would be there in case the government did anything crazy.

In any case, they simply ended it all.

The PAD's speakers claimed to have "won", but the fact of the matter is the PAD had nothing to do with the court case.

It looks like scaled up street battles between the red shirt army and the yellow shirt PAD mob won't happen. They will be scaled down or go away entirely.

It's possible that the red shirt army didn't mobilize nearly as many supporters as it had hoped, and the vast majority of them probably weren't willing to actually fight after all, just peacefully try to block the courts. They did try to block the courts, but not in great numbers as feared or hoped, and they were unsucessful. In fact, the red shirts were fairly civil about it all. It wasn't nearly as bad as many people feared.

There was also a very large startup third party protest march on Silom which by photos looked like a maybe few thousand people, by a new group which is against both the red shirts and the yellow shirts, and called for a nonviolent resolution to the current situation in Thailand, with a leading sign saying "No Civil War", which reflects the outlook of most Thais by nature. That was pretty good sized crowd for a first day startup! Thank goodness there is an alternative third party group with a respectable stand.