“Give us back our city,” was the plaintive slogan written on a ‘multi-coloured’ pro-government protestor’s placard, epitomising  sentiments of an increasing number of Bangkok citizens, alienated by the Red-Shirt’s near seven week paralysis of the city. During this time, and especially in the past fortnight, events have been changing with quicksilver rapidity, with 26 killed and 920 plus injured as the scenario turned violent; yet no breakthrough is apparent, despite the offers of intervention of the United Nations. And yet this application of the Hegelian dialectic, namely the intervention of a third agency to resolve two intractable foes, may well be the only way out of the impasse. An impasse that was strengthened by Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva’s recent refusal to capitulate to the Reds’ demands for House dissolution and early elections, when he was reported by The Nation as saying “Negotiations must be done to find a solution for most of the country, not just the Red Shirts, who are just part of society,” and also that “We have to be responsible for the people of the entire country, for the country’s future and for democracy”; although he has committed to a December election.

A new deadline also draws inexorably closer, that of the rival People’s Alliance for Democracy (PAD) Yellow Shirts, whose leader, Chamlong Srimuang, maintained that the government must quell the Red-Shirt protest in  “a speedy and effective manner via law enforcement, otherwise the situation will degenerate into a civil war”. Yet the spectre of a civil war was one of the reasons Gen Anupong gave against using force, maintaining that it would inflame the situation and cause the Reds to spread the conflict nationwide, as they have already started to do by hijacking troop-transports in Khon Kaen and Udon Thani.

The PAD has threatened to intervene if the government is unsuccessful in its attempt to finally dislodge the Reds from their Rajprasong Intersection stronghold and disperse them to whence they came. If it comes to a PAD intervention, they are likely to have the support of the ‘multi-coloureds’ and once again of the “Patriotic People”. This group, led by Chulalongkorn University academic, Tul Sithisomwong, has already staged various counter demos against the Reds at Silom, Chatuchak Park, King Rama VI statute, Royal Plaza, King Taksin Statute, the 11th Infantry Regiment, and Victory Monument.

And yet, lest we forget, it’s not the rank and file Red protestors that we have to worry about, but their UDD leaders and allied militant elements, who Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva has labelled ‘terrorists’, as well as the puppet-master, the fugitive Scarlet Pimpernel, Thaksin Shinawatra, who in his turn has been labelled a “bloody terrorist” by Foreign Minister Kasit Piromya, comparing him to Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin. It was asserted, recently, by a Bangkok Post deputy editor that the majority of the Red protestors are not intent on violence, per se, or are even at the rallies of their own volition, but at the insistence of the ‘nai’, the village headmen who are the real authority wielders in the provinces. However, if we are to believe the copious works of Pira Sudham, an articulate spokesman of the rural poor, they have received a particularly raw deal at the hands of unscrupulous Bangkok businessmen, particularly in ‘People of Esarn’; one instance of which was when they bought up huge tracts of Esarn, dispossessed the inhabitants and planted extensive eucalyptus plantations, which meant because of the consequent acidification of the soil, no other crops could grow.

One wonders just how representative Jatuporn Promphan, Red leader and Pheu Thai MP’s recent ominous statement that “We are ready to fight till death” is. Some time next week, no longer prepared to tolerate ‘armed terrorists’ (supposed foreign mercenaries, Southern insurgents and paramilitaries), harboured by the Reds, the armed forces, at the government’s insistence, will crack down at an unannounced time so as not to make the same mistakes as happened with the foiled attempt to arrest the Red leaders.

The Reds will be facing special forces, such as Task Force 90, the 31 Infantry Regiment and red-bereted Army special operations forces, US-trained SEAL commandos, Marine Force Recon strike force, Air Force special operations commandos and police SWAT teams. Jatuporn apparently maintains, according to a tip-off, that it’s the army’s intention to infiltrate 80 plain-clothed crack soldiers into the Red throng to shoot at the Red leaders when the crackdown order is given. If so, they will also have to contend with the ‘men in black’ (now dressed in white), asserted to be the main ‘terrorist element’, ‘the armed third force’, allied to the Red Shirts, and the group Red leader, Arisman Pongruengrong, said would be coming to help them just prior to the recent Sala Daeng Skytrian station M79 grenade attacks. It’s rumoured they were also responsible for the more audacious acts of sabotage conducted recently, like the RPG attack on the Pathum Thani fuel storage depot. Others suggest they are both renegade Border Rangers and Puea Thai Party president and staunch Thaksin supporter, Gen Chavalit’s  People’s Army of ‘thahan phran’, described as “thugs and murderers” by Australian Professor Ball, author of ‘The Boys In Black’, who also said they are “trained hunter-killers. Many are from poor rural villages, but they’ve always been prepared to be ’strong armed men’ for the establishment or particular generals.” If so, one dreads to think of the outcome of the next few days.