Thai election body urges vote delay

A mourner reacts next to the body of killed anti-government protest leader Suthin Tharatin during his funeral ceremony at a Buddhist temple in Bangkok January 27, 2014. [Photo/Agencies]

BANGKOK - Thailand's Election Commission urged a delay in next week's planned national vote, warning on Monday of more bloodshed after violent clashes at the weekend.

That would drag out a festering crisis that risks splitting the country. The military, which has often stepped in to take control in the past, is resolutely staying out of the fray this time, despite appeals from anti-government protesters.

"As election officials, it is our job to make sure elections are successful, but we also need to make sure the country is peaceful enough to hold the election," Somchai Srisutthiyakorn, an Election Commission member, said.

"We don't want it to be bloody."

The commission will meet embattled Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra on Tuesday to discuss the vote date.

With protests aimed at toppling Yingluck now in their third month, there has been repeated speculation that the armed forces might try a repeat of the 18 actual and attempted coups they have mounted in 80 years of on-off democracy in Southeast Asia's second biggest economy.

But in comments to reporters, armed forces supreme commander, Thanasak Patimapakorn, refused to be drawn on whether elections should be postponed.

"The Election Commission and the government will meet to discuss this tomorrow. Soldiers will not be able to say much more than this," he said.

However, the military in recent weeks has also refused to rule out intervention.

The Election Commission says the months of protests render the country too unstable to go to the polls on Feb 2.

That argument was bolstered by the shooting on Sunday in Bangkok of a protest leader, taking to 10 the death toll since the protests started in November.

The protests, centred on the capital, have broad support among Bangkok's middle class and the traditional elite.

They are pitted against the mostly rural, and much larger, voting block in the country's north made up of so-called "red shirt" supporters of Yingluck and her ex-premier brother Thaksin Shinawatra, forced out of office by a military coup in 2006.

Thaksin lives in self-imposed exile to escape a 2008 jail sentence for corruption.

Red shirt leaders have threatened to descend on the capital again if the military steps in. At least 90 people were killed in street fighting in Bangkok in 2010 between troops and the red shirts.