Rebecca Ratcliffe - 'We want a true democracy': students lead Thailand's protest movement

By Dilip -
Every morning when the national anthem plays out in Thai schools, students are expected to stand still in deference as the country’s flag is raised. But last week some sent a defiant message, raising their hands in a three-fingered salute – a gesture borrowed from The Hunger Games that is used widely by Thailand’s growing pro-democracy movement. Others gathered on school grounds to hold up sheets of blank paper. For more than a month there have been almost daily student-led rallies spreading across the country, including a demonstration in Bangkok last weekend attended by more than 10,000 people. 

Observers are astonished by how rapidly the protests have spread, by how young people are challenging traditional hierarchies, and by the boldness of their demands, some of which relate to the powerful royal family. “Everybody in Thai society has been very surprised by what is happening right now,” said Kanokrat Lertchoosakul, a lecturer at Chulalongkorn University’s faculty of political science: “We have never ever seen a phenomenon like this.” 

As well as university students, children as young as 13 or 14 were organising flash mobs, she said. The protest movement is not centrally organised. Instead, different groups have used social media to coordinate rallies across the country, driven by anger at a military-backed government they accuse of eroding democracy and holding their country back…
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/aug/24/we-want-a-true-democracy-students-lead-thailands-protest-movement
Popular uprising against Thailand's God-like monarchy

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