Thai protesters vow to continue with campaign

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BANGKOK-

Anti-government protesters vowed on Saturday to maintain their campaign to unseat Thai Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra despite dwindling numbers on the streets and a first tentative move by police against sites they are occupying in Bangkok.

Riot police reclaimed a thoroughfare in the capital’s government district on Friday without resistance, but backed off from confrontation elsewhere in the city and made no move against the largest protest sites at intersections in the main shopping and business areas.

“Our mission is still going on, which is to reform the country,” Ekkanat Promphan, the protesters’ spokesman, told reporters. “All protest site are still occupied by us and we will still continue our activity during the weekend.”

The protesters view Yingluck as a proxy for her elder brother, Thaksin Shinawatra, a self-exiled former prime minister who clashed with the establishment before he was overthrown by the army in 2006.

They are demanding that Yingluck makes way for an appointed “people’s council” to overhaul the political system and rid it of the influence of Thaksin, a telecoms billionaire they accused of using taxpayer money to buy votes with populist giveaways.

The protests, which began in November, are the latest round in a bitter eight-year conflict broadly pitting the Bangkok-based middle-class and royalist establishment against the mostly rural supporters of the Shinawatras in the north and northeast.

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