Thailand: Red Shirts enjoying the fight

The difference between Bangkok's Red Shirt arsonists and army troops in fatigues was that the militants were enjoying the fight.

Acrid black smoke from burning tires masked a high velocity round as a Commander Toei decided to widen the field of battle.

A pick-up truck was loaded with tires and plastic bottles containing an orange mixture of oil and petrol.

Minutes later a part of Bangkok hitherto safe was enveloped in the same black smoke. Events moved quickly as two buses were hijacked and burned at the corners of the intersection.

A gathering crowd roared its approval as fighters threw more oil on the flames.

Cdr Toei's lieutenants considered the potency of their position. "We rule here now. The army is nowhere," said one of his men. "We cannot be denied democracy."

Even as Thailand's army concentrated its firepower on the centre of the capital on Wednesday, a grassroots insurgency had proliferated.

Cdr Toei used a pseudonym based on the Klong Toei slum, just south of central Bangkok, where the opposition Red Shirts had staged mass anti-government rallies in since March. The slum dwellers view battle as enlivening but the conscripts of the Thai army dread the confrontation with fellow Thai.

Army platoons walked in orderly file into the rubbish strewn rally site but not a shot was fired.

Only Kuesadee Narukan, an elderly nurse, stood holding a red flag in a deserted landscape.

Monks living on the railway line overhead were dragged away.

"Too late," a soldier had barked at a British man who remonstrated with the soldiers over the rough handling of one monk.

Colour matters in Thailand's political convulsions. Two years a prime minister was brought down by yellow shirted protestors occupying Bangkok's airport. This year the man installed by that outburst, Old Etonian Abhisit Vejjajiva, has been pushed to the brink by Red Shirts.

The soldiers tied lime green scarves over the Khaki combat uniform. In this kaleidoscope of colour it was anyone's guess where the allegiance of the people now rests.

Cpl Suthichai Wuthaisaeng, a footsoldier who had been pulled from a tour on the Malaysia border fighting Muslim separatists, was filled with trepidation.

The slightest movement on the sidelines prompted him to finger the trigger of his Austrian Steyr assault rifle. He froze completely when a soldier at the front poked at an abandoned bag.

"The Red Shirts will not give up easily. I know there are dangers even if our commanders say the camp has been abandoned," he said. "It is not easy to fight fellow Thais."

The words were prophetic. The vast Central World shopping centre that ran alongside the protest site was set on fire.

Thailand's symbolic commercial heart fell into ruins, like its politics.