Thai prime minister’s residence is latest target of blood-dousing protest

Reporting from Bangkok, Thailand — 

Protesters seeking to drive the ruling party from power doused the grounds of the Thai prime minister’s residence with plastic bags of their own blood Wednesday as they continued their attempt to draw attention to their cause.

At the same time, the number of red-shirted protesters camping out across Bangkok dropped by about half, to roughly 50,000, and the Thai stock market hit a two-year high when it became evident the disturbances had been contained.

On Sunday, more than 100,000 demonstrators opposed to Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva had gathered in Bangkok and pledged to remain until he dissolved parliament and called new elections. The protesters poured gallons of their blood from plastic jugs on Tuesday at the gate of the prime minister’s office.

Abhisit has not responded to the blood-dousing protests at his office and his residence. He has stayed away from his home since Friday, taking refuge at a military base and otherwise maintaining a low profile.

Many of the protesters hope that former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, who was ousted in a 2006 coup amid corruption charges and is now in self-imposed exile, will return to power.

Riot police protected their eyes with their shields as blood-filled plastic bags arced onto the prime minister’s driveway Wednesday along with buckets dumped onto his front gate, leaving coagulated gobs sticking to police boots. The protesters argue that Thailand’s traditional centers of power, including the army, wealthy businesspeople and those aligned with the monarchy, aren’t representing their interests.

“We will curse them, the aristocrats, the powerful people!” Nattawut Saikua, a “Red Shirt” leader, yelled into a megaphone to a throng outside Abhisit’s compound Wednesday. “We will curse them with our own blood!”

The government has derided the blood curse as a photo-op, and the Thai Red Cross Society has deemed the move wasteful and unhygienic.

From an organizational perspective, however, it has rallied Red Shirt supporters, according to Pitch Pongsawat, a political scientist with Bangkok’s Chulalongkorn University.

“They’ve shown their audience that they’re fighting the government by hurting themselves instead of shedding others’ blood,” he said.

Many poor upcountry Thais support Thaksin, who earned a fortune in the telecommunications industry, for his social policies.

After the coup, some of his allies were voted into office, but most were subsequently forced out by court rulings for bribery and fraud.

Thaksin, who was stripped by the Supreme Court last month of nearly $1.4 billion of his $2.3-billion-plus fortune on the grounds it was amassed through abuse of power, was in touch this week with his supporters by phone and video from Montenegro, where he has business interests.

Protest leaders blame an inner circle from the pro-establishment “Yellow Shirt” camp of engineering the rise of Abhisit’s coalition government, which remains weak.

“We’re just poor people, with no weapons, coming to fight for new elections,” said Tunyaluk Chancharoen, 48, a saleswoman, who arrived in Bangkok on a passenger ship chartered by the Red Shirts. “We’re not going home until it’s over.”

The protest originally aimed to draw a million followers. By midweek, most of those still in the capital were encamped at a traffic circle. Though the protests have remained largely peaceful, soldiers and police have remained on alert, and experts warned that the movement’s lack of leadership could still allow violence to flare.

More than 30 countries have cautioned their citizens to avoid parts of Bangkok, and Thai officials say the country has lost $31 million in travel cancellations.

Despite the protesters’ waning numbers over the course of this week, leaders have promised to keep up the pressure by rotating in more demonstrators from the provinces.

Winn is a special correspondent.