October 6, 1976 in Thai History

October 5, 2016

The death toll was somewhere between the official 46 and 100+ according to those who were there.

I won't link the Wiki article for good reason.

Oct. 6 Massacre: The Photographer Who Was There

Associated Press Photographer Neal Ulevich won the Pulitzer Prize for his photos of the suppression of a left-wing student protest at Bangkok’s Thammasat University on Oct. 6, 1976, and the brutal lynchings in its wake. Ulevich, then 30, arrived as a night of tension at the campus broke into a full-scale assault by paramilitary police on thousands of trapped and defenseless students.

What follows was his first-person account as it was published.

A member of a Thai political faction strikes at the lifeless body of a hanged student outside Thammasat University in Bangkok on Oct. 6, 1976. Photo: Neal Ulevich / Associated Press

BANGKOK — In a real riot no one knows you’re there. So as gunfire crackled over the campus of Bangkok’s Thammasat University Wednesday morning, I pushed my way through an angry sea of rightists and found a hole in the high metal fence surrounding the campus......

.....The police were on the attack and the rightists were cheering their support. Troops armed with M-16 rifles were spraying wild fire across a quadrangle, shattering classroom windows and nicking holes in the walls.....

.....Some of the troopers tossed hand grenades through the windows. The “garrumph” of a grenade going off was followed by a puff of smoke and the tinkle of showering glass. Then the recoilless rifle crew moved up.....

......The students threw themselves to the ground – I did, too – as the Thai police emptied more thousands of rounds into the classrooms. The fire slackened and the students got up.

I reached the nearest classroom building.

At the door, students were running out, diving to their hands and knees and crawling past soldiers who told them to take off their shirts, and coeds their blouses. Slow performance earned a kick.....

.........I was joined by a German reporter who speaks Thai, and we walked out through the gate.

Then we were out on the street – close by the pleasant green trees that surround the Pramaine Ground site of Bangkok’s colorful weekend fair. But then we saw the angry swarm of Thais around two of those trees and their anger was white hot. I saw the body of a dead student hanging from one tree. The scene was being repeated just a few feet away.

I don’t know how much earlier the students had been lynched – probably just a few minutes – but enraged rightists felt robbed by death and continued to batter the bodies.

Other Thais who witnessed the 1973 student riots here said the earlier uprising, which left 70 dead, never evoked the brutality or hatred of Wednesday’s attack on the students.

No one had seen me. I had wandered throughout and taken pictures unmolested. But I had seen enough, and left."

http://www.khaosodenglish.com/politics/2016/10/05/oct-6-massacre-photographer/