BANGKOK — The pro-government “yellow shirt” movement added to Thailand’s tensions on Sunday with a threat to challenge the red-shirt protesters with a counterdemonstration if the government did not move quickly to crush them.
“We give the government seven days to return peace to the country or we, every member of the P.A.D., will perform our duty under the Constitution,” said Chamlong Srimaung, a leader of the yellow shirts, whose formal name is the People’s Alliance for Democracy.
“Prepare yourselves for the biggest rally when we will eat and sleep on the street again,” he said, referring to months of crippling protests by the yellow shirts in 2008 that culminated in a weeklong takeover of Bangkok’s airports.
Red-shirt demonstrators have paralyzed parts of Bangkok for more than a month, demanding that the government step down and call a new election. A clash between rival demonstrations could lead to the kind of widespread violence that analysts say would be difficult to control.
The yellow-shirt statement, during a gathering of about 3,000 supporters, came as the red shirts and the military exchanged their own warnings about a possible confrontation this week.
The red shirts, who have built a tent city in Bangkok’s commercial center, said they would rally Tuesday in the nearby financial district. Their mood has become increasingly militant and angry since a clash with security forces a week ago in which 24 people died.
An army spokesman said that the soldiers would be ready for them.
“We won’t let them go anywhere further,” the spokesman, Col. Sansern Kaewkamnerd, said on television. “Whatever will be, will be. If we have to clash, we will. We can’t just think we don’t want casualties.”
He said soldiers would be stationed in high-rise buildings at the main rally site, which is surrounded by shopping malls and five-star hotels.
Many Thais have become frustrated with the government’s inability to control the red shirts after its failed attempt to disperse them a week ago and a bungled operation that failed to arrest some of their leaders. All the leaders escaped — one of them lowered by rope from a hotel window — while two high-ranking police officers were briefly taken hostage.
A new faction in Thailand’s color-coded protests, the “no colors,” emerged on the streets of Bangkok during the past week, mostly middle-class demonstrators who are demanding that the government take action to restore order.
“We want our normal lives back,” said Tun Sittisomwong, an obstetrician and university lecturer who is leading the protests. “We want peace again for Bangkok and the country.”
The group, calling itself Civilians Protecting the Country, said that it supported the government and the military, but that the time had come to take strong action against the red shirts.
“The problem facing the country now cannot be solely solved by politics,” it said in a statement. “It has become terrorism, and only military strategy and strict law enforcement can tackle such acts.”
The tone at the no-color rallies this weekend was oddly upbeat, like a pep rally, as demonstrators vigorously waved tiny Thai flags, sang patriotic songs and called out to passing commuters, “Join us!”
“I am yellow,” said Maneerat Wimonprasarn, 43, an accountant, “yellow and pink and everything. In Thailand we are all Thai people, no color.”
But it may be that the no-colors, though they may represent a silent majority, offer only a fading, forlorn hope for a nonviolent resolution to the country’s crisis.
The reds and the yellows embody what seem to be irreconcilable sides in the country’s deep-running social and political divisions. While the red shirts are mostly drawn from the country’s rural and urban poor, the yellow shirts support a royalist bureaucratic and business elite that has held sway for generations.
At a no-color rally this weekend, Chris Puranasamriddhi, 34, manager of a construction company, lamented the harsh new mood in a country that values gentleness and nonconfrontation.
“Thailand is the land of smiles, easygoing, and I want it back,” he said. “The red shirts, they are quite aggressive, and we are not an aggressive country, as everyone knows. For the first time, I am embarrassed for Thailand in front of the world.”
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