First you see some cops in riot gear, eating ice-cream in the shade. Then you see more, lined up along the pavement beside haphazard rolls of razor wire. Then you start to hear amplified voices. Then you come to the barricades, ugly piles of tires, sharpened bamboo and red flags:
You don't grasp the size of the encampment from the pictures on the news, or from the glimpses you get of the barricades as you pass through the city. It's vast. You can walk for hours under the skytrain overpass, where thousands of protesters are sleeping through the heat of the day on their colourful woven mats, and thousands of stalls are selling red t-shirts (I bought 2), pho, fried chicken, DVDs, sunglasses, ice-cream, and the red foot-shaped novelty clappers that have been repurposed as one of the symbols of the movement:
Signage:
Grim Thais gather around the TVs set up on tables along the way showing grainy cell-phone footage of last week's clashes:
Elsewhere, stalls display pictures of red-shirts with their heads blown apart, or their shirts lifted to show angry welts on their torsos, beside a picture of the rubber bullet that inflicted it:
The epicentre of the protest is the intersection in front of the Louis Vutton store. Speakers harangue the government non-stop from a makeshift stage, their words broadcast throughout the entire protest area on truck-mounted loudspeakers:
Thaksin might claim to have no hand in these protests, but someone is paying for the ranks of portaloos, the acres of electrical cable, the sunshades, the hundreds of speakers, and the generators needed to power them, and it's not the barefoot peasants sleeping under the overpass.
Clearing these miles of streets would be a nightmare, and the government knows it. The redshirts are daring them to try it; the government will do almost anything to avoid it. The question is whose patience and whose money will give out first.
Thanks!
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