BANGKOK -Thai "red shirt" protesters said on Sunday they would not give up their fight for early elections after clashes with security forces in Bangkok the previous day killed 20 people. The red shirts, mostly rural and working-class supporters of former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra who was ousted in a coup in 2006, are demanding that Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva dissolve parliament immediately and leave the country. The fighting, the worst political violence in the country in 18 years, some of it in well-known tourist areas, ended after security forces pulled back late on Saturday. The city of 15 million was quiet on Sunday and the overground Skytrain, halted as violence intensified, reopened with a restricted service, avoiding the central shopping district occupied for over a week by the protesters. Thai media reported that around 500 red shirts had again forced their way into the grounds of a Thaicom satellite earth station north of Bangkok, a flashpoint on Friday when the authorities blocked an opposition TV station. The government said it had appointed a senior prime ministerial aide to make contact with the red shirts to try to find a way to halt the confrontations, but having seen off the attempt to disperse them, they seemed in no mood to compromise. "The time for negotiation is up. We don't negotiate with murderers," Weng Tojirakarn, a red shirt leader, told Reuters. "We have to keep fighting. We can't give up. The military will come out again," he said, although he said they would simply hold their ground on Sunday "out of respect for the dead".
