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BANGKOK: Thai premier Samak Sundaravej said Sunday he
will not yield to protesters demanding he quit and will answer his
critics in parliament, in a bid to quell the crisis threatening his
government.
Samak, a combative self-styled
“man of the people,” comfortably won elections in December but
is under attack both from the streets and in parliament, where he
faces a no-confidence vote this week.
Speaking in his weekly Sunday
television address, Samak vowed to go to work Monday despite
protesters from the so-called People’s Alliance for Democracy
camping out at his office calling on him to step down.
“I will return to Government
House on Monday. . . I come from legitimate elections,” he said in
his address.
Up to 25,000 protesters led by
the People’s Alliance for Democracy—a coalition of mostly urban
middleclass royalists—defied police and marched to Government
House on Friday after blockading a key Bangkok intersection for
nearly four weeks.
A police spokesman told Agence
France-Presse on Sunday that several thousand demonstrators remained
outside the seat of government.
Samak said he would let the
People’s Alliance rallies run out of steam, rather than unleash
the police or military.
“I am patient, because I
don’t want riots to happen,” Samak told viewers.
“I will avoid confrontation
with the People’s Alliance,” he added. “The country will
function as usual. Whoever wants to show their powers, I will let
them do it for the appropriate reasons and time.”
Protests by the People’s
Alliance in early 2006 foreshadowed a coup later that year removing
twice-elected Thaksin Shinawatra from power. The current rallies
have stoked rumors of another putsch, sending the stock market
falling.
In a bid to defuse the current
crisis, House Speaker Chai Chidchob has set a censure debate to
begin on Tuesday.
Samak, whose Thaksin-backed
People Power Party formed a coalition government in February, will
face a grilling by senators and opposition party members followed by
a no-confidence vote on Thursday.
“Whatever the topic… we can
debate on Tuesday,” Samak said.
The opposition Democrat Party
filed a censure motion against Samak and seven cabinet ministers on
Wednesday, saying that the premier had mishandled soaring inflation
in the country.
Their key complaint,
however—shared by the People’s Alliance protesters—is that
Samak is running Thailand in behalf of Thaksin, who was banned from
politics for five years by a constitutional tribunal in mid-2007.
Analysts said Samak’s
government should comfortably survive the vote as long as the
six-party coalition—which between them have 316 of the 480 seats
in the lower house—stick together.
Giles Ji Ungpakorn, a politics
professor at Chulalongkorn University, said the People’s Alliance
were lacking a decisive goal that would bring more people onto the
streets, while recent gestures should appease the opposition.
“I think allowing the debate is
one of the gestures. Another was to let the protesters go through
police lines [on Friday],” he said.
Sombat Thamrongthanyawong, rector
of Bangkok University’s National Institute of Development
Administration, said that Samak’s performance in the no-confidence
debate will also be crucial.
“If the government does well,
the tensions outside parliament will ease, but if not, the tensions
will just increase,” he said.
The People’s Alliance on
Saturday vowed to continue their rallies, saying that the
no-confidence vote was not enough.
Their demonstrations have had an
outsized impact because the People’s Alliance captures the
sentiment of Bangkok’s elite.
Samak still retains the support
of most of the electorate, however, particularly in Thaksin’s
heartland in the northeast, where Thailand’s poor, rural
population had largely been ignored by politicians before Thaksin.
--AFP
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