Reuters, Bangkok :A few hundred Thai anti-government protesters marched on the headquarters of the ruling party on Wednesday, while rice farmers remained camped in another part of the capital demanding money owed by the state.The political movement aimed at overthrowing Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra is in its fifth month, but leader Suthep Thaugsuban closed several big protest sites at the weekend as his number of supporters dwindled.The government is also grappling with action by farmers, normally its staunchest supporters, in protest at a rice subsidy scheme that has gone badly wrong, leaving hundreds of thousands of them unpaid and causing huge losses to the budget.On Wednesday the state bank managing the scheme said it expected to start paying some arrears next week but the sum announced failed to impress farmers who have been demonstrating at the Commerce Ministry for weeks.”That 30 billion baht is very small compared to the total 130 billion baht the government should have paid us since October,” said Kittisak Waraha, one of the farmers’ leaders, referring to a sum cited by officials earlier this year.Suthep’s anti-government protesters have largely kept to Lumpini Park in central Bangkok since the weekend.But about 300 members of an allied student-led group went to the headquarters of Yingluck’s Puea Thai Party on Wednesday, having latched on to vague separatist talk by some of her supporters, including a suggestion the government could move from Bangkok to her northern stronghold of Chiang Mai.They attached a banner to the building saying “Stop the campaign to split Thailand” but left soon afterwards and there was no confrontation.They moved on briefly to the excise department as part of a campaign to stop ministries and state agencies from functioning, which Suthep said would be stepped up even though his supporters ended a blockade of main roads from the weekend.The government imposed a 60-day state of emergency on January 21 to contain the latest unrest in an eight-year conflict that broadly pits Bangkok’s middle class, the royalist establishment and southern Thais against the mostly rural supporters of Yingluck and her brother, former premier Thaksin Shinawatra.On Tuesday it said the emergency could be extended until the protests ended completely and there was no more violence.
