In Bangkok, the police crack down on a demonstration against the regime



Even if the protest has weakened in recent months due to the legal response from the authorities and the pandemic, sporadic demonstrations continue to be organized in Thailand. The police fired tear gas and rubber bullets on Saturday at several hundred people demonstrating in Bangkok to demand political reform and better management of the Covid-19 epidemic.

“Murderous government”, “resignation”, could we read on the posters, while nearly 22,000 new cases of Covid-19 and 212 additional deaths were identified on Saturday in Thailand, a record. The demonstrators, numbering around 500, faced much more police.

A reform of the monarchy requested

Protesters criticize the slowness of the vaccination campaign: less than 4.5 million of the 70 million Thais received two injections. They are asking authorities to use messenger RNA vaccines such as those from Pfizer and Moderna, rather than the Chinese Sinovac, which is deemed less effective against the Delta variant. In the southern province of Narathiwat, dozens of people also took to the streets.

The democracy movement calls for the resignation of the head of government, Prayut Chan-O-Cha, who emerged from a coup in 2014 and legitimized by controversial elections five years later, as well as an in-depth reform of the monarchy. At the top of their demands, the abolition of the dreaded article on lese majesty which punishes defamation, criticism and insults against the king and his family with up to 15 years in prison. At the height of the democracy movement last year, tens of thousands of protesters marched through the streets of the Thai capital.



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