ABSTRACT
About two o'clock in the morning of 6 October 1976, police and raging paramilitary groups co-operatively surrounded Thammasat University, where four to five thousand people had gathered peacefully all night to protest the return of one of the former dictators ousted three years earlier by a popular uprising in 1973. Shortly afterward, gunfire from personal handguns was heard from time to time, and self-made explosive devices were thrown into campus buildings occasionally throughout the night. It was a tense morning, two weeks after two activists had been hanged while putting up protest posters, and only hours after a student theatrical skit reenacting the hanging had been accused by the military, in a public broadcast, of staging a satire of the hanging of the Crown Prince in effigy. Students were never given an opportunity to rebut this charge by exposing the flaws in the accusation.
