1989 Phuket siege (Napoleon's World)

The 1989 Phuket siege was an international incident in which members of the Siamese People's Army seized multiple hotels on Phuket frequented by Western visitors on December 26, 1989, in response to the French Foreign Legion dispatching 50,000 troops to airbases in Bangkok the previous month. The siege lasted until New Year's Eve, when late in the evening Royal Siamese Army special forces, with the assistance of French and Danubian commandos, attempted to overrun three of the hotels where hostages were being kept.

The siege resulted in the deaths of 871 civilians, the majority of whom were tourists from Europe, and all 246 captors, along with 89 Phuket police and security officers, 16 Siamese soldiers and one Danubian operator. It is regarded as the catalyst for the Escalation of 1990, which truly hardened France's participation in the Siamese War.

International Reaction and Aftermath
While Siamese state media censored images of the massacres initially, RSA soldiers sold photographs to Western journalists for side money and Communist sympathizers released images publicly as a show of force, including a video of tourists being stabbed, garroted or having their throats slit and their bodies filling up a hotel pool, as well as various images of captors torturing hostages or desecrating corpses. The normally deferential French media republished images of the atrocity on January 5, 1990 under the headline ''Qu'ont fait ces barbares? ''(What have these barbarians done?), and demands for an escalation in combat activities emerged shortly thereafter. Within days, 45,000 soldiers from Saigon and Cambodia were transferred to Siam.

International reactions were almost universally horrified. Despite Europeans being the targets of the SPA, 14 Chinese nationals were killed at the Resort Royale, and Chinese officials withdrew support from the SPA for the next 18 months of conflict. US President Robert Redford similarly condemned the attacks.