Bangkok Airport

Protesters girded themselves for clashes with the police on Friday as the government vowed to end their siege of the Thai capital’s two commercial airports.

Some 30 police vehicles lined a road leading to Suvarnabhumi Airport, Thailand’s main international gateway, and more than a dozen ambulances were parked beside the massive terminal.

“If the police come to crack down, let them do it,” Chamlong Srimuang, a 73-year-old former army general and protest leader, told cheering supporters.

Protesters carried a large yellow banner that read “Final Battle!!!” and stood behind razor wire and other obstacles placed in front of the main entrance to the airport.

The government abruptly removed the country’s national police chief, General Patcharawat Wongsuwan, from his post Friday, amid reports that both police and military units were reluctant to move against the protesters.

But the head of Bangkok’s metropolitan police force, Lieutenant General Suchart Muankeaw, said he would follow the prime minister’s directives.

“The prime minister firmly ordered to take measures that would maintain a maximum of order and avoid clashes and damage,” Suchart said. “The country is already hurt enough.”

The police said they had begun negotiations with protesters in an attempt to end the standoff peacefully. But there also appeared to be back- channel negotiations. Chamlong said he received a call Friday from an “important person” who pleaded unsuccessfully with him to end the protest.

At Don Muang, the city’s domestic airport, which has been shut down since Thursday, protesters stood on the sidewalk outside the terminal building, some wielding sticks.

Among them was Nattawan Taweechaipaisarnkul, a 60-year-old gas station owner who carried with her crushed pepper kernels that she said she was ready to throw at police and swimming goggles as a defense against tear gas.

“My daughter and son in the U.S. called me many times and told me not to go,” Nattawan said. She said she slipped out of the house and told her family that she was going to the flea market.

After six months of uninterrupted protests, the followers of the People’s Alliance for Democracy, as the protest group calls itself, have had plenty of time preparing a climactic clash with police. The group is well disciplined and enormously dedicated. But for the most part they are not gritty street fighters. At least half of the protesters gathered at the airports Friday were middle-aged women. There were many seniors and a smattering of children and students.

For all the damage that the seizure of the airports has done to Thailand’s international image, the protesters do not cut a portrait of revolutionaries. They were deeply apologetic to the foreign tourists they inconvenienced after seizing the airports and went out of their way to offer them food. (The government announced Friday that it would fly the stranded foreigners out of the country over the next four days.)

In Thailand’s deeply fractured society it is difficult to gauge who still supports the protesters. The Bangkok Post, the English-language daily read by the establishment, called the seizure of the airports an “act of terrorism” but was equally scathing about the government’s handling of the crisis.

The protesters wear yellow shirts to symbolize their allegiance to King Bhumibol Adulyadej, the ailing 80-year-old monarch who has ruled over the country for the past six decades. But Bhumibol, whose family controls vast business interests in the country including large tracts of land in Bangkok, has until now been publicly silent about the airport seizure. Some analysts suggest that the protests must end by Dec. 5, the king’s birthday, to spare him embarrassment.

Queen Sirikit, the monarch’s outspoken spouse, has been more public in airing her views. She expressed sympathy for the protesters by offering financial assistance to those injured during clashes in October with the police. And in what was seen as an extraordinary move, she attended the funeral of a protester who died from wounds apparently inflicted by the explosion of an unusually powerful tear-gas canister.

Protesters saw her attendance as a “green light” for their activities, said Thitinan Pongsudhirak, director of the Institute of Security and International Studies.

The conflict, Thitinan said, is rooted in a struggle for influence in the king’s waning years.

“It takes place in the twilight of the king’s reign,” Thitinan said. “This is what this is all about. Who gets to rule Thailand?”

One of the leading complaints of protesters is that the crown prince, Maha Vajiralongkorn, was reportedly courted by Thaksin Shinawatra, the prime minister ousted in the September 2006 coup. Thaksin, a billionaire who still retains a loyal following in rural areas and among the poor, was seeking to subvert the monarchy, the protesters say.

Thaksin is now in exile abroad and has been sentenced in absentia to two years in prison for abuse of power. But protesters say he still wields influence over the government of Prime Minister Somchai Wongsawat, who also happens to be his brother-in-law. The protesters want him to step down and would like to purge the political system of Thaksin’s allies.

Even after three years of on-again, off-again protests, passions remain high.

A woman in a black shirt and yellow scarf who gave only her nickname, “Oom,” because she is a civil servant and afraid to be disciplined, stood outside Don Muang Airport on Friday and said she was prepared to fight.

“I told my sister that I have come out to die,” she said. “I am ready to die.”