A Report From Thailand

I have heard from my blog buddy Agam in Thailand; he is safe. There has been no violence at all so far.He has just posted about the events over there.

t may be too early to know whether tonight's coup d'etat has been successful, but it's looking that way. No violence has been reported so far, and BBC reports of an impending clash between factions seems to have been premature. That was my main worry after the announcement of the new regime last night at about 10:30. What we don't need is fighting in the streets tonight, and it seems that Taksin doesn't have the necessary support for that to happen.

So the city is calm (the heavy rain over the last few hours probably helped), and not "in chaos" as CNN put it with their website headline. All national networks have been running the same tv-pool feed — music and pictures relating to His Majesty the King, with occasional brief announcements from the "Council for Administrative Reform." The broadcasts of CNN and BBC were yanked off the cable provider around midnight. But not before BBC ran a screen flash that "President of Thailand declares emergency" (!), and the reporter on the phone with CNN was just making up things on the fly. Not impressed with that at all.

Go read the whole thing. It looks like it is a bloodless coup. This situation has been building up for a while.

UPDATE: Enormous roundup of news at Pajamas Media.