Yesterday at ONEP, Mahakan Fort Community leader Thawatchai Voramahakun and community representatives tried to deliver a petition to ONEP secretary-general and Rattanakosin committee secretary Raweewon Bhuridej but failed.

Their intention is to delay the forced eviction of the community, and have the Rattanakosin panel add this issue to its agenda for the next meeting so it can reconsider a plan to remove the ancient community and replace it with a park for tourists to learn the history of the city.

However, the event ended in failure and the petition was not delivered as the community said Rattanakosin committee representatives had a bad attitude and did not try to understand its stance and offers.

“It was not successful. A state officer is a state officer. They do not understand the people and do not try to. All they talked about was that we were living here [at Mahakan Fort] illegally, so we decided it was useless to hand in the petition today,” Thawatchai said.

He said people in the community would not give up and will gather once again at ONEP on April 20 and send the petition directly to the committee’s secretary.

“We will march to ONEP to show we are not giving up on the effort to save our homes and our identity,” he proclaimed.

He said the community still had to discuss the next step.

Meanwhile, Environmental Monitoring and Evaluation Bureau director Sukho Ubolthip, as representative of Rattanakosin commit-|tee, was due to receive the petition yesterday.

He said the committee was ready to consider the community’s demands, but as they had decided not to hand in the petition because it would not achieve anything.

Mahakan Fort Community is an ancient residential group behind Mahakan Fort, and can trace its history back for more than 200 years. Within the community are many historical buildings and the cultural heritage of Bangkok, which local people pledge to save and develop as a living museum.

However, Bangkok Metropolitan Administration (BMA) plans to use the community area to build a park and has had an unsettled forced eviction issue with the community since 1992.

Recently, BMA threatened to evict everybody by the end of this month.