Military Career
Khattiya made national news on October 18, 2008, when he announced "he would mobilise government supporters against any military attempt to seize political power." Khattiya said members of the pro-government Democratic Alliance against Dictatorship (DAAD) would use petrol bombs against any tanks and military vehicles taking part in a coup attempt.
Because of his comments, Khattiya was reassigned as an aerobics teacher by Gen. Anupong Paochinda, the Thai Army commander. An irritated Khattiya responded by saying, "The army chief wants me to be a presenter leading aerobics dancers. I have prepared one dance. It's called the 'throwing-a-hand-grenade' dance."
On 14 January 2010, Army Commander Anupong Paochinda ordered a suspension of Khattiya Sawasdipol after an inquiry committee found that Khattiya had openly supported the DAAD, a political pressure group that called for new elections, which breached the principle that military officers do not take sides in politics. The following day, Anupong's office in the Royal Thai Army Headquarters was attacked by grenades fired from a M79 grenade launcher, leaving the office demolished but no one injured. In the news of the attack, Khattiya was described by BBC as a "renegade Thai general who backs anti-government protesters." A member of the protesters' radical wing, he accused the red-shirt leaders - many who then distanced themselves from him - of not being hardline enough.
Read more about this topic: Khattiya Sawasdipol
Famous quotes containing the words military career, military and/or career:
“The domestic career is no more natural to all women than the military career is natural to all men.”
—George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)
“Nothing changes my twenty-six years in the military. I continue to love it and everything it stands for and everything I was able to accomplish in it. To put up a wall against the military because of one regulation would be doing the same thing that the regulation does in terms of negating people.”
—Margarethe Cammermeyer (b. 1942)
“Whether lawyer, politician or executive, the American who knows what’s good for his career seeks an institutional rather than an individual identity. He becomes the man from NBC or IBM. The institutional imprint furnishes him with pension, meaning, proofs of existence. A man without a company name is a man without a country.”
—Lewis H. Lapham (b. 1935)