BANGKOK - Media tycoon Sondhi Limthongkul and the massive anti-government street protests he orchestrated set the stage for last year's military ouster of Thai prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra. Six months later, the outspoken Sondhi finds himself in the news again.
Last month he was sentenced by a Bangkok court to two years in prison on criminal defamation charges related to critical remarks he made on his popular television talk show before last year's coup about a high-ranking Thai Rak Thai party official. Sondhi has appealed the decision and is currently on bail.
Meanwhile, the Thai Rak Thai-linked new satellite television station PTV is threatening to file libel charges against Sondhi for comments he made suggesting the new station's leader was involved with a petition aimed at ousting Privy Council President Prem Tinsulanonda, King Bhumibol Adulyadej's chief adviser. PTV organizers have recently tried to take a page from Sondhi's own rally playbook, but so far have been able to muster no more than 5,000 anti-government protesters.
Sondhi said during the interview that he has no immediate plans to return to the streets - neither to challenge PTV's Thai Rak Thai party representatives, nor to censure the interim government's sagging performance. Contrary to many pundits' predictions, Sondhi was not offered a position in the military-appointed administration after last year's coup. In an exclusive interview with Asia Times Online before his recent defamation conviction, he claims that as a "media man" he has no political ambitions.
He has recently locked horns with the country's new military leaders through programs aired over his satellite ASTV television station - similar, though not yet as fiery, to the programs that exposed and exploited Thaksin's political soft spots. In a wide-ranging 90-minute interview with ATol's Southeast Asia editor Shawn W Crispin, Sondhi reflected on his year of living dangerously and the country's perilous political road ahead.
Full Interview : Asia Times Online
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Recollections, revelations of a protest leader
Recollections, revelations of a protest leader
Who is the happier man, he who has braved the storm of life and lived or he who has stayed securely on shore and merely existed? - Hunter S Thompson