BANGKOK
A maverick leader of Thailand's anti-junta protest movement who defied a military summons with the Facebook message “Catch me if you can” was arrested east of Bangkok late Thursday.
The Junta's National Council for Peace and Order told the country's Bangkok Post newspaper Friday that Sombat Boonngamanong - who has adopted the nickname “Nuling” since the May 22 coup - was caught in a joint operation by the National Intelligence Agency, the military and the police.
Moments before his arrest, he signed off from his Facebook account with the message: “I have been arrested already.”
Post-arrest pictures of Boonngamanong in the Thai language daily Khao Sod showed him looking dejected and sitting on a sofa.
He has been sent to a military camp for questioning, from where he will transferred to a Bangkok detention facility.
Boonngamanong is the founder of the "Red Sunday" group, created in 2006 to oppose the September coup, which ousted Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra - sister of recently deposed Premier Yingluck. The symbolic red color of the movement was picked up in 2007 by the new larger "Red Shirts," who also use the name the United Front for Democracy against Dictatorship (UDD).
After the military's repression of Red Shirt demonstrators in May 2010 - during which over 90 people were killed - Sombat organized meetings with activists in different cities around the kingdom every Sunday, despite constant fear of arrest.
Since the May 22 coup, he had become the main leader of the anti-coup protests, through his postings on Facebook and Twitter. A May 24 posting of fast food mascot Ronald McDonald provoked hundreds of anti-coup protesters to gather outside a central Bangkok McDonalds, who surrounded and booed soldiers.
On May 28, a hint on his Facebook page triggered another protest by 200 people, who met outside a Bangkok department store to flash the three-fingered sign of resistance from the French Revolution which has since been more representative of the “The Hunger Games” series of films. The action provoked immediate action, the military sending troops scrambling to the complex housing the store.
In his last interview before his arrest, Boonngamanong told blog-site "Andrew Spooner" that the army was harassing his daughter to put pressure on him – a method he qualified as “disgusting.”
“You don’t perform your duty to protect us, but you rob the people of their basic rights. You are not heroes but political thieves,” he wrote of the army.
It remains to be seen if the arrest of Boonngamanong will be enough to stop the small, sporadic anti-coup demonstrations of the last two weeks. Following a May 28 military clampdown, only isolated protests have occurred, those taking part immediately arrested by police or military.
After seizing power May 22, the military abrogated the constitution and the senate, banned all opposition to the coup and criticism of the junta’s orders.
Hundreds of politicians, activists, academics and journalists have since been summoned and detained in military camps; most of them released after the seven-day detention period allowed by martial law.
Western countries have condemned the coup, and Thailand’s neighboring Southeast Asian countries have called for a rapid return to “normalcy.”
www.aa.com.tr/en
