RED VERSUS YELLOW In broad terms, Thailand's crisis is a battle between the "yellow shirts" -- royalists, the military and urban Thais, who back Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva -- and the "red shirts" -- supporters of former premier Thaksin Shinawatra whose power base was mainly drawn from the country's millions of rural poor. Bureaucratic and military elites have run Thailand for decades, with the poor excluded except during elections when competing parties would try to buy their votes. When Thaksin swept to power in 2000, promising a raft of policies aimed at the poor, things changed.