BANGKOK – A Thai court Thursday jailed 84 supporters of the “Yellow Shirt” royalist movement for storming a television station in 2008 in protest at a government allied with former premier Thaksin Shinawatra.
They were handed prison sentences of between six months and two-and-a-half years by Bangkok’s Criminal Court, mostly for illegal assembly and trespassing. The August 2008 incident at the National Broadcasting Service of Thailand state television station was one in series that year involving the Yellow Shirts, formally known as the People’s Alliance for Democracy (PAD).
The demonstrations peaked with the seizure of two Bangkok airports in late November and early December 2008, leaving more than 300,000 travellers stranded in Thailand for a week or more and causing crippling economic damage.
The Yellows, who claim allegiance to the throne, are powerful players in Thailand’s colour-coded politics. They are backed by the Bangkok-based elite and are the arch-rivals of the mostly poor and working class “Red Shirts”, who have held their own series of mass protests, notably in April and May this year in the heart of the capital.
