APEC security brings rare silence to Bangkok

APEC security brings rare silence to Bangkok

Ed Cropley, Reuters, Bangkok

Silence, so rare on a weekday Bangkok morning, descended on the Thai capital on Monday as an unprecedented security clampdown for U.S. President George W. Bush kept shoppers and workers at home.

Officials said 30,000 police and soldiers had been deployed across the normally teeming city of 10 million people to ensure the safety of the 21 leaders attending the two-day Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit.

At the heart of the security operation, scores of brown- uniformed police ringed Bush's towering, white concrete hotel, closing several major downtown roads in the area.

Pedestrians were prevented from walking near the building, and, prepared for every eventuality, four fire trucks were stationed at the hotel's corners.

But despite the road closures, Bangkok's notoriously static traffic flowed with unexpected ease as many workers chose to heed the government's request that everybody take an impromptu national holiday.

"We are normally so busy at this time," said Ying, one of the handful of employees twiddling their thumbs at a coffee shop behind Bush's hotel.

Across the road, the vast World Trade Center shopping complex, a warren-like temple to Asian consumerism, sat silent and empty behind steel barricades erected to deter expected but absent antiglobalization campaigners.

Skeleton staff in the few malls which opened were busy only with stock-taking or cleaning. On the streets, not a noodle or satay vendor stirred.

"I've never seen it like this," said Manley Waddell, a Canadian living near Bush's hotel. "It seems more like a Sunday evening than Monday morning.

The Thai government launched one of the largest security operations in the country's history for the summit barely two months after Southeast Asia's most wanted man was arrested just north of Bangkok.

Indonesian-born Hambali, believed to be the operations chief of Jamaah Islamiah and al-Qaeda's point man in the region, is accused of being behind last year's bombs which killed 202 people on the Indonesian island of Bali.