Vengeful redshirts threaten tourism!!!!!!

The Thai protest has spawned an underground militant wing


“Redshirt” protesters vanished into a warren of backstreets as their camp was overrun by the army
last week on a day that many Thais have called the worst in their country’s modern history.

BANGKOK: -- THE spectre of a violent underground movement that could wreck Thailand’s tourism industry has risen from the ashes of Bangkok’s city centre.  An armed wing of the movement vowed to carry on the fight and melted back into communities of workers and farmers, some of whom have openly applauded them for taking up the gun. Black-clad figures whose bodies were patterned with mystical tattoos, they sported magic golden amulets to ward off bullets — but also wore flak jackets as extra insurance.

“Nobody is in control of our so-called armed wing,” said Sean Boonprasong, a redshirt spokesman, shortly before he was detained. “Now many will go underground. Now they have no leaders. Whoever they are, we admire them.”  A survey of violent incidents, most of them unreported abroad, shows that trouble has already occurred in Thailand’s tourist centres of Phuket, Pattaya and Chiang Mai during the last weeks of crisis.

More than 800,000 Britons visited Thailand last year, but thousands of bookings have been cancelled and some hotels in Bangkok are empty after Wednesday’s army crackdown.  Threats, muggings, robberies and random shootings all over the centre of town that day showed that criminals had woven their way among the peaceful crowds of red-clad men, women and children camped out in what they called a bid for “democracy”.

The militants were acclaimed as heroes in the slums of Klong Toey, a crime-ridden district that saw some of the heaviest fighting but attracted the least media attention. Huge, reeking pyres and echoing gunshots traced a path of anarchy from the slum to the fringes of Sukhumvit, an area full of expatriate families, foreign businesses and international schools.  It was from Klong Toey that black-clad men on motorbikes sped out to set fire to the gleaming stock exchange building, which looks down on it from the other side of a road junction. Later there were numerous accounts from frightened residents of vengeful redshirts huddled in councils of war in drinking dens and tenements.  “They say we should do what the Muslims do in the south,” reported several locals, referring to a shadowy insurgency that has cost more than 3,000 lives in Thailand’s southernmost provinces since 2004. It is a murderous campaign without known leaders, which the army has been unable to stop.