Thailand’s anti-Democracy movement is now hoping for the military to step in and help them depose Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra and install an unelected ruling council made up of “good people”.  Maybe it’s a warning shot, but a former prime minister has been arrested and indicted for murder in the crackdown three years ago on supporters of the current government.

Former Thai prime minister Abhisit Vejjajiva of the conservative Democrat Party is charged with ordering troops to put down the Red Shirt uprising in 2010 in which 90 people were killed and hundreds more were injured.  The Red Shirts backed democratically elected PM Thaksin Shinawatra, brother of today’s PM.  Thaksin and Yingluck Shinawatra are siblings.

The dispute pits classes against each other.  The Populist Shinawatras are popular in the heavily populated but poor north, winning over voters with a public health program and subsidies for rice farmers. The opposition is made up of royalists, and middle and upper classes, often foreign educated and urban.  They resent the fast rise of the Shinawatras and electoral might of the lower classes in the north.

The Red Shirts now say they are ready to take to the streets to protect Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra’s embattled government from the elite-backed protesters.  The military has intervened in the past, but has indicated it will stay out of this conflict.