Date – February 8, 2010

Panitharn Wattanayakorn, deputy secretary-general to the Prime Minister, acting as the PM’s Office spokesman, disclosed the monitoring of the suspicious movement in 38 provinces, saying that the state officers have focused on only some areas where chaos will probably occur because the armed groups have been formed there.

In particular, the main focus is on Bangkok and its surrounding provinces where it is found that the red-shirt National United Front for Democracy against Dictatorship (UDD) can mobilize up to tens of thousand or even a hundred thousand protestors.

Mr. Panitharn said now the UDD core leaders are facing more serious internal conflict; however, their similar goal is still to cause changes in the government.  Importantly, the movement of all UDD minor groups are attempted to be in the form of network under control of senior heads.

It is quite clear that the UDD has a problem of supervising framework which will affect the strategy of the upcoming massive rally certainly, said Mr. Panitharn.

He added that now the UDD could be divided into 3 main groups:

1)      The hard-core or the aggressive group that is still powerful

2)      The group of stars who can still have influence on ideas and can mobilize people

3)      The ideological group who always conducts movement for changes.

After the internal conflict, the mobilization has been adversely affected; it could be seen that in the later period there were only a few protestors joining the UDD distributing events.